An Only Child AND My Father's Son by Frank O'Connor

Author:Frank O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

19

All the same, that summer was exceedingly happy. When the weather was fine, I held my classes on the grass outside some hut. In fact, since Father had gone to the War in 1914 I had never been so well off. I was still only nineteen; thanks to the American plumbing, I lived a healthier life than I could have lived at home; I had regular and pleasant work to do – I was now teaching German as well as Advanced Irish – and I knew I was doing it well. For me, who had lived all my life by faith, it was an exhilarating experience to know that I was doing something well by objective standards. Above all, I had friends I liked and admired. Apart from Walsh, there was Cathal Buckley, the youngest of us, who had a fat, pale, schoolboy face and a quiet clerical manner, and Ned Moriarty from Tralee, a British ex-soldier, who was tall, thin and Spanish-looking and whose hands were more expressive than other people’s faces. Apart from these, my immediate friends, there were others from whom I learned a lot like Gallagher, Cogley, Sean T. O’Kelly (later President), who lent me Anatole France in French, and Sean MacEntee (later Minister for Finance), who gave me the Heine I had coveted so long and proved that Corkery was right and that Heine was the proper poet for a man in prison.

But there was no lack of interesting people. There was the quartermaster, for instance. He was a North Corkman, small and thin, with a thin, desperate face, burning blue eyes, and a tiny moustache which he tugged as though the tugging provided all the energy he needed. He needed plenty, because he seemed to go by clockwork, swinging his arms wider than anyone else, and he had a capacity for swearing and bad language that beat anything I ever heard. All the North Corkmen swore well, but he swore artistically, so that you immediately forgot whatever he was swearing about and merely admired the skill with which he did it. And after he had cursed you through every byway of his fancy, he would grab you by the collar and mutter: ‘That suit is in rags! Bloody fellow that can’t even look after himself! Come over to the store till I make you look decent!’ I think he had a sneaking regard for me too, for he once told me I might become a great man myself if only I imitated a certain politician in the camp who practised oratory before the mirror every day. ‘And I once heard him give a lecture on Robert Emmett before a thousand people and there wasn’t one that wasn’t sobbing. That’s what you should do!’

In fact, it was the nearest thing I could have found to life on a college campus, the only one I was really fitted for, and I should have been perfectly happy except that I was still doing it at my mother’s expense.

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