by Martin Hand
Dedication
ETC Publishing
First published in 2020 by ETC Publishing
Dublin
Ireland
https://www.facebook.com/martin.hand.733
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All rights © 2020 Martin Hand
PaperbackISBN: 978 1 78846 155 9
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Chapter One
Christmas spirit in the middle of Halloween was ‘all my arse’ according to Joe, who was explaining his reasoning to his buddy Fionn. He went further: ‘You see, Fionn, all this Catholic stuff from the commandant is a leftover from the days when the Church added to an illusion – the illusion that it contributed to the backbone of command and leadership.’
On hearing no reply, Joe went on: ‘Ordering us to attend an early Christmas Mass on the first of November … I mean, come on now.’
‘Fall on your knees/ O hear the angels’ voices,’ rang out in the chapel, drowning out Joe’s mumblings.
Commandant O’Mahony was a leftover from the time when a good Catholic ethos was at the heart of the Irish Army establishment. The British military had tradition; the Irish had religion. So an early Christmas Mass was just the ticket, and mandatory, no less – an order.
‘O night divine/ O night when Christ was born.’
‘Jesus, that blonde one can hold a note, can’t she?’ Joe said.
Still not a peep out of Fionn. Joe wasn’t getting irked though. It was still sinking in, the happening, the event in Wicklow last week. It had been the last week of basic training, and it would leave a memory that wouldn’t fade. Not ever.
Soon the boys would be close enough to the Holy Land, albeit in the less fashionable Lebanon. UN peacekeeping, the Irish. Jesus, that was an anomaly if ever there was one. In fairness the boys in green were good at it, and a few of them had made the ultimate sacrifice. Dead, in other words. Blessed are the peacemakers, but how did the Irish get away with it? The bloody fighting Irish, drink-induced fighting, usually.
But when it came to foreigners, the Irish did have something. None of the enlisted men would look a Lebanese or Syrian in the eye and think, I’m better than you. That wasn’t a magical gift, more a freak of geography. This peripheral island on the edge of Europe would instil in you the sense that you’re small, insignificant, and that the only way is up. No need to be looking down on some poor bastard who had even less than you. Fionn and Joe, two soldiers from Dublin, had no delusions of grandeur.
Mass ground on. Joe didn’t know why, but whenever he saw choirs on the television they were always made up of old fellas and youngish women. The choir he saw before him was no exception.
‘Joy to the world/ the Lord has come.’
The lads appreciated one break with tradition. The women had broken into the citadel. The choir from Holy Faith Cabra had been recruited. Commandant O’Mahony probably told an underling to start with Christ Church or Saint Patrick’s and work his way down. You must have standards, and there was no way Christ Church’s choir would be singing carols in early November on the northside of Dublin.
The edifice of McKee Barracks on Blackhorse Ave, unaffectionately known as the Tsar’s Winter Palace, certainly benefited from the presence of a bit of female glamour, at least from the young soldiers’ point of view. Perhaps the girls didn’t look like they would make the cover of Vogue anytime soon, but still the boys were well pleased to see them. A bit of flesh – no harm on a black Saturday evening, Joe thought, while Fionn maintained his silence. Seven days until departure, and a once-off pass for the officers’ mess. Drinks and finger food after Mass. At least it was something to look forward to.
The platoon, including Joe and Fionn, sat together on the right-hand side of the barracks chapel, with the parents and the girlfriends of those who had them on the left. It was like an awkward wedding. Mary and Dermot, Joe’s ma and da, were there, as was Fionn’s mother, Margaret. There was no da, never had been.
There was a dynamic between Mary and Margaret. Mary was competitive, Margaret wasn’t. This was not the sole basis for their friendship, but it had at least laid a solid foundation for it. The other thing they had in common was that they had one child, a son, each. The two boys had grown up like brothers, which was a good thing because it choked the potential for selfishness out of the two only children.
The platoon was a mix of three mid-thirties career soldiers and the eight kids, eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds, the new recruits. The conversation between Joe’s parents, at the passing-out parade, centred on Dermot’s fears that mid-thirties men and spotty youngsters were usually a recipe for bullying. He remembered the primary-school days of forty years previously. Bullies in abundance.
Fionn’s mother expressed a different view. ‘Sure wouldn’t the older men look after the youngsters, show them the ropes and that?’ You never knew with Margaret if the force of her Christian spirit was winning in its battle over the corporeal world. Margaret was different, funny, but she was no eejit. Dermot wouldn’t put up with an eejit as a friend, in any case.
Dermot Brennan had grown up in the Finglas of the late seventies, where, by his own assessment, bullies in school outnumbered the decent guys by a ratio of two to one. A slight exaggeration, perhaps. Dermot was one of those quintessential Dubliners that everybody knows at least one example of, the type given to the belief that a bird might be known for its song but a man should be known for his conversation. Dermot liked to quote Brendan Behan-type phrases. For example, ‘The dead arose and appeared to many,’ might be a dig at Joe if he had slept late. But he was an intelligent and decent man nonetheless. He had come up the hard way and was the better for it, he thought. In childhood, he was too meek to deal with those schoolyard hard chaws. In adulthood he had become opinionated. He was better and had done better than them. There were a lot of gobshites about, and no better man than Dermot to bring this fact to their attention.
Margaret was a pleasant-looking woman with zero sex appeal. The platoon youngsters wouldn’t be sledging Fionn over his yummy mummy. The same might not be true for Joe, however. His ma, Mary, was a looker in her mid-forties. Dermot was always mildly put out that it was his wife who attracted male attention over
single Margaret when the three of them were out for the night. The world didn’t run according to Dermot’s parallel lines. If it did, Margaret would have given in to Mary’s teasing and got into this swipe right, swipe left thing. Things of the world of social media.
‘The work of the Devil,’ Margaret would call it in reply. She was recalling a phrase used by her own mother, years back, and not necessarily expressing her own piety.
The comb-over tenor boomed out, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem’ – not really a Christmas song but given where the boys were heading, it was kind of appropriate. To most of the platoon, the location of Jerusalem was a bit unclear. All they knew for certain was that the Lebanon was a four-and-a-half-hour flight away, somewhere deserty.
When the Mass was finally over, it was time for the lads to test their charms with the choir’s wans. The congregation made their way across the marching square. The smell of the previous day’s bonfires still hung in the air. The girls made themselves scarce, probably to touch up their make-up. Fair play to them for finding a private nook in an army barracks. But the female spirit can be indomitable when the game is afoot.
The lads were more interested in getting the first pint down in time to relax their own vocal cords. The curmudgeon Jimmy O’Rourke was behind his bar. What Jimmy understood about customer service could be written on the back of a stamp. O’Rourke was a civilian who would never have lasted in a public bar. In the officers’ mess, he was the commandant and he got away with dishing out insulting remarks from rank to rank. This suited his cantankerous nature.
Jimmy had maintained a bullying scowl all day. His bar was busy with privates, so many of them that he wouldn’t have the time, or the wit, to dish out insults to the young soldiers. He hadn’t had the sense to call in reinforcements to man the bar for the couple of hours that it would be busy. Instead in his head he would serve the civilians first, then the two sergeants and then the enlisted men.
Dermot managed to get his pint ordered and two of those small bottles of red wine for Mary and Margaret. He had started a conversation with O’Rourke about procuring a full bottle of red, value for money and all that.
‘This is an officers’ mess, my good man,’ O’Rourke scowled back, setting the tone for the hell he expected would exist for the next few hours. He rabbited on, to the point that his customers were given to choose the hard stuff, nonchalantly pointing behind him to the whiskey and brandy dispensers as he finished off the head of Dermot’s pint. He was making a point to the separate queues of sergeants and privates – or ‘grunts’, as Jimmy referred to them – that were forming at the bar. Jimmy was not to be rushed, not without a miracle anyway.
The girls arrived a little while after the initial melee at the bar. A ripple of excitement permeated the room. They looked good as they discreetly surveyed the mess to see where they should set up camp. The comb-overs had established themselves at a large bench near the fire, leaving room that they hoped would be filled by the girls. The single soldiers had made the strategic mistake of ganging together at the right end of the bar. This would have been a good ploy in a theatre of war but not so good on the battlefield of flirtation.
Margaret and Mary did their own clandestine surveying of the girls. A mother’s prerogative. Mary was observing a blonde who was wearing a tight black dress and matching tights. There was a dawning realisation that her boy was in competition and where he finished in the field was a reflection on her.
Margaret was a different fish. The normal ways of the world did not fit with her.
‘Would you let your daughter out like that blonde one over there?’ Mary asked.
‘Mary, that’s a twenty-ish-year-old woman. You were married at her age, or soon after, so I think we should just let the young girl make her own way,’ Margaret replied.
Joe took his courage in his hands and approached the bevy of beauties. No small feat.
‘Would you girls like a drink?’
It wasn’t clear if he had thought out the effect on his meagre pay packet that nine drinks, even subsidised ones, would have.
The hum of chat and banter in the bar was interrupted by O’Rourke’s raised voice. ‘No can do,’ he replied to Joe’s slightly unsteady order for the girls’ drinks. The barman then explained to the girls that their preferred choice of wine could not be delivered. ‘Sold the last of it. Maybe it’s Cumiskey’s or the Hole in the Wall you’re looking for.’
The lads, at the end of the bar, looked on haplessly, just glad not to be in Joe’s shoes. Joe had done the right thing, the thing they should or could or might have done. He had broken the ice for them, but this might be a case of who dares doesn’t win.
‘As I was telling the civilians already, we are not really a wine-selling establishment.’ O’Rourke had the attention of the room, and Joe was crimson red in the face at this point.
The girls were murmuring among themselves. The gist of it was that the Hole in the Wall was walking distance from the barracks.
Blondie intervened: ‘Girls, come on, we’re settled here now. Let’s stay.’ This was code for I already fancy one, or more, of the uniforms. But at least Joe had an ally to mitigate his blushes.
‘Come on, ladies, I haven’t got all day, you know,’ said Jimmy. No better man than O’Rourke to supervise a deteriorating atmosphere.
Fionn, having shaken off his trance-like state, now appeared among the girls. He was a much-needed ally for his embattled friend. ‘You have red wine,’ Fionn said calmly but assertively to O’Rourke.
It was Jimmy’s turn to turn red, except his redness signalled a pending explosion.
‘You have a case of Chateau Musar from the Bekaa Valley,’ said Fionn.
This wasn’t the Fionn that Joe knew. Joe had experienced some queer things, near misses and scrapes with him over their adolescent years, but this was a different Fionn.
The undivided attention of the packed mess now focused on the unholy tangle at the bar.
‘Bekaa Valley me arse,’ boomed O’Rourke. ‘Now order or move on.’
‘There is a case of Chateau Musar in the cold room,’ insisted Fionn.
‘Two things, sonny: one, how would you know what’s in my cold room, and two, I have no intention of lifting the hatch to find out.’ He was referring to the hatch door in the floor that led to the storage area for the beer kegs and bottles, cellars being another useful leftover from British military design of Irish Army barracks.
The leader of the girls’ exit campaign was pushing harder for a move. You could read in her a lack of interest in boys, or at least the boys in this company. The tinder was smouldering, and if Camp Commandant O’Mahony had been present, he might have been wondering how a platoon with a peacekeeping mission would get on with belligerent, tribal Arabs if they couldn’t handle Jimmy O’Rourke.
Margaret got up now and moved towards the action. ‘Mr O’Rourke, Mr O’Rourke, would you please do me a favour? Would you please just let one of the young lads go and look?’
Even O’Rourke struggled to find a smart way of saying no to her disarmingly simple request.
With Jimmy O’s jaw still hanging open, Margaret pushed home her advantage. ‘Just do what he asks. I’ve seen him in these queer moods before, but he wouldn’t put a fly wrong.’
O’Rourke bent down to grab the recessed metal handle of the hatch and raised it on its hinges. ‘Be my guest,’ was the best he could muster.
Fionn switched his attention to two of the young country lads from the platoon, Larry and Michael. The boys moved on whatever understanding Fionn’s gaze had conveyed. They were at the end of the bar that was open, and they quickly proceeded behind the counter and down the ladder to the cellar.
With the girls’ drinks on hold O’Rourke went back to dispensing pints while awaiting his vindication.
Margaret placed her hand on her son’s shoulder as she negotiated her way back to Mary and De
rmot. The heat she felt during the touch brought back a strange memory that reminded her of simpler days, rearing a young boy and recognising when you felt his brow that he was running a temperature. ‘Is it really my time now?’ she thought she heard her son say.
When she returned to the table, Margaret was greeted by Dermot trying to be humorous.
‘Only bar I’ve ever been in where a man could die of thirst. Fair play to the lads for standing up to that eejit. And you too, Maggie.’
‘There’ll be wine in that cellar if Fionn said there was,’ Margaret said.
‘Ah come on, Maggie, how would he know that? I liked to see the lads taking on Goliath, but I don’t think they’ll be knocking him down.’
‘I’m telling you, Dermot, I’ve seen my boy in that state before. It’s like he goes into a meditation, or something like that. He said the strangest thing to me there. He said something about his time has come.’
‘Ah for God’s sake, Maggie, who does he think he is, the bleedin’ Prophet Isaiah?’
Mary piped up to stop her husband getting hyper, ‘Your Fionn does look pale, all right, but you know him and Joe will always stand up for each other. They’ll be all right together abroad.’
The hum of conversation was rising in the room as normality returned. Then there was a burst of applause and a few ‘Well done, boys!’
Those closest to the bar were the first to see Michael step off the ladder, one hand firmly gripping the rope handle of an elegant wooden case. When Larry emerged, the two boys were able to present the case on the counter with a flourish. And there it was: a pristine, dust-covered case of Chateau Musar. O’Rourke’s jaw dropped even lower than it had when Margaret disarmed him.
Taylor Brunswick, the platoon messer, occasionally experienced a spark of inspiration. In a put-on deep baritone he started singing, ‘Oh happy day, Oh happy day, Oh happy day, Oh happy day.’ He was bluffing, of course, and only knew the chorus, but he’d guessed correctly that the songstresses would join in. They couldn’t help themselves. Not to be outdone and all that.