The House of Mourning and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan

Author:Desmond Hogan [Hogan, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781564789808
Published: 2013-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Life’s a single pilgrim

Fighting, unarmed among a thousand soldiers.

For his holidays Éanna Geraghty would go to Bachelor’s Walk in Dalkey. There was a swimming hole nearby where, before the War, he met a man from Plymouth whose only sport, because of spinal trouble, was swimming, who would swim out to Sorrento Point. When he was a boy Irish time and English time were different and when he got back to England from Irish visits, he told Éanna, he’d set his watch to Irish time because he loved swimming in the swimming hole in Dalkey so much.

In the evenings of his holidays, when V-2 rockets were falling on England, Éanna Geraghty would go to a hotel with mouldings of dolphins outside where a man in a grasshopper-green dickie bow, by a grand piano, incessantly played and crooned Jessie Matthews’ ‘Over My Shoulder Goes One Care, Over My Shoulder Goes Two Cares.’

At the end of the War he got a senior post in Aer Teoranta at Shannon Airport and when that closed in 1949 he went to Paris where he lived in an apartment block smelling of ammonia in the Faubourg outskirts and he’d attend rugby matches when the Irish team was playing and some of the Irish rugby players, young men with forelocks, came to his flat with a picture of Theobald Wolfe Tone’s wife, Martha Witherington, in a sugarloaf cap on the wall and, on a bamboo-motif chair, by a Bauhaus lamp, he’d offer them Disque Bleu cigarettes and tell them how in Corfe Castle, Dorset, during the Middle Ages a football was accepted instead of a marriage shilling, by the local lord, from the most recently married young man, carried ceremoniously to him with a pound of pepper; how rugby was started at Rugby School in 1823 when a pupil, William Webb Ellis, picked up a ball and ran with it and in 1839 the Dowager Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV, visited the school to see the new game; how the Connaught Rangers marched through Alexandria at the beginning of the Dardanelles Campaign in July 1915 in khaki drill, playing ‘Brian Boru,’ ‘Killaloe’ and ‘Brian O’Lynn,’ led by the tallest of the company, an international rugby player who carried the Jingling Johnny with its red and black horse-hair plumes; of the scrummage in the winter of 1934 when there was yellow jelly algae on fallen logs in the mental hospital grounds, the ram’s head push between other men’s buttocks.

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