Farewell to Prague Page 4

  I keep hearing the voices of ancestors which started up in Prague.

  ‘He’d never have become a priest but for your vigilance.’

  I see a clutter of young, newly ordained priests cycling into a town, bunting strung up and confetti being thrown at them, a middle-aged priest walking behind them, throwing bonbons from a biretta to children.

  My mother, deep down, had hoped I’d become a priest.

  After her marriage, as she walked out the Galway Road wheeling me, her boyfriend passed, the one she forsook because she had tuberculosis, on his way to the Galway races. He stopped his car, admired me and said: ‘He’ll have to do great things, this child.’ When I was three I got a gift of a river boat for Christmas. Ultramarine and white, with yellow wheels on it. A fat little fellow, I was standing at one end of the long dining-room, holding the river boat, my mother standing on the other side, crying.

  Last Christmas I went to the land of river boats, the Deep South. I’ll go back to Alabama I think, get a job hewing wood. Always, always, there is something keeping you apart in England. The ancient war. Always, always, there is something reducing you as an Irish person to thief, to criminal. They just want you to sweep the roads, to be squalid for them.

  ‘Take care, soldier,’ one boy said to another as they parted near the tombstone of Thomas Dermody in Lewisham.

  Thomas Dermody was a poet from County Clare who lived in Catford. He met a recruiting party in a pub in Great George’s Street on 17 September 1794. Went to England with the 108th Regiment of the Earl of Granard. Fought in the first Napoleonic wars. Journeyed through France, Holland, Germany as second lieutenant in the waggon corps. Saw the graves of Abelard and Heloise in Lombardy and was injured, his face disfigured and his left hand rendered useless. Returned to England. Published verse and drank. His clothes were found by the Ravensbourne river one night and the people of Catford went searching for the body, with candles. But he’d thrown them out of Catford manor, having been given new clothes within. His final friend was an Irish cobbler at Westminster. There were still cattle fields in Westminster at the time of their friendship. He drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven.

  ‘Degraded genius! o’er the untimely grave / In which the tumults of thy breast were stilled,’ Lady Byron wrote. This poem she sent to Lord Byron and it initiated their courtship.

  In a pub in Lewisham in July a young singer from Belfast in a red shirt, his hair the colour of sun on chestnuts, a pendant around his neck and a few fake poppies hanging by his thigh, sang:

  As he was marching the streets of Derry

  I hope he marched up right manfully

  Being much more like a commanding officer

  Than a man to die upon the gallows tree.

  A kind of rallying spirit, an unwillingness to lie down, an invocation of Ireland – a madonna with blue veil and saffron belt, country women with coil on top of their heads coming in for mass on Sundays – the ability, as if from a wayside Goddess, to immure yourself and look back, picking up the sequence of the last year.

  There was a strong morning light behind the bus in New Orleans and a black woman was standing beside it, engulfed in a striped blanket, as if she was in Africa.

  A card had come from Dublin a few weeks before, Jan de Cock, The Flight into Egypt; demons doing parabolas on mountain tops; Mary in a turquoise gold-fringed cloak; the donkey’s head bowed in meekness at his task; St Joseph’s flowing, rich red cloak forming a rosette under the donkey’s mouth.

  In Alabama a black man at the back of the bus described an execution he’d seen, on yellow mama, the electric chair. He had metal attached to his body. The boy cried, screamed. They put twenty-six pellets in him. He passed out. Then he woke, coughed, threw up. It took him a long time to die.

  We stopped at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery. The woman behind the restaurant counter was addressed as Miss Mary. There were pictures of missing children behind the counter. The queue for mash and peas included a woman in a lustrous pink trouser suit and a scarf over her bouffant hairstyle, a girl on crutches, a black boy in a fuchsine baseball cap, a woman with a bathing cap on her head.

  Two black women stood outside as the sun went down on a street in Montgomery. One with a straggly, Gibson-girl hairstyle under a straw hat with piping around it. The other in a wavy henna wig, holographic glasses which reflected the sunset, a snakeskin handbag in her left hand.

  I was travelling to Columbus, Georgia, because I loved the books of a writer born there. We arrived at ten at night. The small Greyhound bus station there was full of teenage soldiers, most of them sleeping, some looking drearily at you as you came in. They wore cocoa-coloured uniforms, a kind of East-man-colour glow to the edges of their uniforms at night, a carmine glow. Near the Greyhound station I passed a red-brick, spired church, the bricks delineated in white. There was a church house with the same style of brick beside it. The streets were etiolated.

  A snowman was held up by strings in a garden; the bird cages lighted with fairy lights; a lighted Santa Claus head up a tree.

  I called to a little hut of a bar where men played billiards on two tables.

  ‘A glass of white wine.’

  ‘We’ve none of the hard stuff,’ the woman shrieked at me.

  I stayed at the Heart of Columbus Hotel. It had a red neon heart graven on it.

  Next morning a black woman with a forties scarf on her head cut my hair in Sherald’s barber shop. There was an advertisement for their mortuary near the washbasin. ‘Burial with compassion, dignity, integrity.’ The sunshine coming through the door and the window was pure yellow.

  On a bridge over the Chattahooche which divides Columbus, Georgia, from Phoenix City, Alabama, a man was playing music on a Prince Albert tobacco tin, using it as a mouth organ, as a parade passed.

  Mrs Wives of America stood up, very straight and stern, on front of a Pontiac. Drill girls marched by and more disparate boys in magenta letterman jackets.

  A black epileptic woman was standing on the street beside a wig shop called Woman Tree, red kerchief on her head, her features protruding blade-like, her head rolling. She was quietly talking to herself.

  I’d once seen a documentary in the town I was from in which young American GIs lined up to go to war, getting into a silvery-blue Greyhound bus.

  The writer’s husband had distinguished himself with the Ranger Battalion in Anzio, Italy. Some years later he committed suicide. ‘Il est mort stoïquement,’ was his obsequy.

  On the bus out of Columbus a black man had his arms around a box which contained his belongings, the words ‘Milwaukee’s Best’ on the side of it, a string tied around the box, holding his belongings down. Someone in the front of the bus said the name ‘Raymond’ in conversation and a woman at the back started shouting: ‘Raymond. Raymond. My son is Raymond.’

  Georgia: the oak trees and poplars had turned gold, the sweet gums red, the maples electric scarlet; yellow ribbons around cypress trees and post oaks. Darkness in the bus, a last bit of the sunset reflected on a window and the headlights of cars lighting up faces. One black woman with a huge swollen eye in sudden illumination. At a filling station, just before we drove into North Carolina, the breeze fresher and even intoxicating, the radio played Willie Nelson’s ‘Always on My Mind’.

  In the Midwest I visited an old couple who’d once hosted me in the United States when I was there for a sojourn as one of a group. A Chinese woman, a melon-orange shawl around her, wheeled an old man with wispish, almost albino hair, where he wasn’t bald, over an iced lake. They’d once driven me in the fall to a Quaker graveyard, the earth organza gold, a myriad of little unnamed rocks for headstones. That trip had helped me come through much trouble with my family.

  In Wyoming the bus broke down in a snow storm. We were rescued by American Red Cross women in moon boots and brought to a hall where we were wrapped in blankets and given tea.

  Going down the mountains into California was a boy from Basel, in nefarious bla
ck, who was running away. His stepfather had beaten him up. A bit of delicate knee was exposed.

  A Cuban boy in damascened black sang ‘Silent Night’ in Spanish, cabaret-style.

  In San Francisco, Christmas evening, I attended a party in a room dominated by Piero della Francesca’s La Sacra Converzione. A coterie of professors. As they talked I browsed through a book on Tuscany.

  First weeks away from Dublin I took the train from London to Florence. It was November. I returned to the monastery with the broom hanging on the dormitory wall, pictures of St Gennaro, bishop, stuck to the wall of the street leading to it.

  From Florence I went on a slow, grey-green train with wooden compartments to Assisi. We stopped at barrack-like stations. There was a picture of St Francis appeasing the wolf of Gubbio in front of me. The women wore black. ‘Fa lo scrittore lei?’ one of them asked me. There were fields of winter barley in the hills around Assisi. On the way back I lost my ticket and hitched through the mountains, arriving in Florence as it was snowing, warming myself in a café by the Arno where there were men dressed as women, in fur coats, resplendent wigs, one in a dress of many-hued bugle-beads. Marilyn Monroe singing ‘River of No Return’ was playing on the juke-box.

  Perhaps it was beginning then, in a room in San Francisco, what had been overtaking me for years, a breakdown.

  On the day after Christmas I walked the hills and looked into the face of an old Chinese lady.

  When it came it put me with the ostracized of our town, the Mickos, the woman with the prematurely white hair and the apricot lipstick who used to shout out ‘Glorio, Glorio to the bold Fenian men’ on the street, and walk off with young men.

  Mental hospital patients used to visit her and feel her breasts. Sometimes the price was tobacco. She lived in a house with a doll outside in a jersey of the Galway colours, maroon and white, and in the kitchen a portrait of Michael Collins. Sweet currant bloomed around it in May, and in the meadows at the back there was a refuse of broken bottles. Next door to her lived a one-legged man who was a veteran of the First World War. He sat in a cap and coat beside a pile of Hotspurs, Beanos and Dandys. Her business was stopped by the guards and then she sold holy pictures in the cattle mart before going to England. In a mental hospital in South London, in my mind, she was walking away on a street with a porpoise of a National teacher.

  Other images of the fifties in Ireland came back in the mental hospital: boys marching to confession one side of the street, girls on the other; women queuing with Vincent de Paul coupons in a classroom on Fridays; turf mould disfiguring poor boys’ nails; emerald school buses, an armament of bicycles by their sides; Children of Mary stalking the town in blue and white carrying Virgin Marys with screw-in arms which they temporarily exhibited in the homes of prostitutes or the dying; barley being loaded on to barges on a canal; campanula in front of the convent statue of Mary, the stations of the cross in Indian-ink black on the white blocks of her rosary.

  And an emasculate voice whispered: ‘Do you need confession?’

  Years later I saw the prostitute on the tube in London. She was wearing high boots, transparent black stockings with black dabs on them, a crimson dress and a pearl necklace. She’d married a butcher and had two daughters. In a street which mixed nationalities and brands of exile the shop, which also sold Irish marshmallows, bore her husband’s name and the words ‘and daughters’.

  Beyond the station from which the prostitute and Guy ‘Micko’ Delaney departed there was the bog with its cormorants, its bogbean flowers, its bog pimpernels, its St John’s wort, its near-violet stacks of turf, its manic plastic covers, its pervasive rainbows. Daniel, a friend at school, who had brown eyes and a sturdily moulded face, used to cut turf there in June and turn it in July to allow it to crust. He put it out in stooks and brought it home in a horse and cart before the dew of August came.

  Another friend, an old Englishman, used to come every spring and fish in the bog river. He grew up in the Midlands of England and the bog reminded him of his childhood. He’d gone to university in Birmingham and afterwards taught in Chester. In his twenties he’d go to Norway every summer but then he found Ireland.

  ‘When I stand alone in this bog I can hear “Crimond” again.’

  In my childhood you’d see Teddy boys in red jackets on the station platform against the bog. One Teddy boy was drowned. It was a man who used to steal suits in town and then parade in them on the prom in Galway, past the Grand Hotel, Commercial House, Donnellan’s pub, who recovered the body.

  An Irish doctor pursued me in the hospital.

  ‘You’re clinically depressed.’

  He’d follow me past young male patients with shaven heads who looked like Mayakovski.

  ‘Do you remember Olive White?’ Olive White was Miss Ireland when we were very young. She used to turn the wheel of fortune on the Bunny Carr Show, and afterwards she married English nobility.

  ‘Be careful you don’t end up chasing chickens into boxes,’ he said nastily one day when I wouldn’t listen to him.

  He liked to summon up Brendan Behan’s last days, his companionship with a Dublin prostitute.

  ‘He always said moving from the tenements to a council house ruined his sex life.’

  The young doctor was sitting under a view of the Isle of Ischia.

  It was the dark side of the brain; walking through it was walking through Hell. It was the genetically mad side of me, the part that clawed at me. And the landscape I was walking through looked like the landscape around the high-rises in Prague. Or it may have been the landscape around high-rises on the suburbs of Paris. When I slept at night I saw people who were half-dead. They sat on benches, drooping. They looked like Czechs, women in floral dresses and bobby socks, men with eagle or turkey badges on their lapels. Sometimes the black woman from Columbus, Georgia, with the red scarf on her head, sat among them, nodding. There were marigolds at the feet of these people. Marigolds were one of the flowers of Prague. And sometimes, instead of the near-dead, there was a young soldier in sap-green uniform, with straw hair, at a café table, a girl on the other side of the table, the soldier looking out at the amber trams.

  A mental hospital with walkways between the top floors of buildings; gargoyles coming out of corners; a coat of arms with antelopes on it; disentangled tapes blowing on paths; groundsel and wild garlic in the grass.

  A woman in a scarlet flamenco dress, carrying Tesco bags in both hands, walked endlessly through the grounds, as did Rastafarians with floods of hair and girls with ecclesiastical purple hair.

  ‘Lesbian wants sperm. No commitments,’ a bit of paper said on a notice board at the entrance.

  There was Hyacinth Ward, Bluebell Ward, Narcissus Ward.

  ‘Are you one of us?’ a man said, doubtfully, to the sound of ‘Hotel California’.

  ‘Don’t mind where I’m buried as long as I get to Heaven,’ a salmon-faced Irishman said to me. He also told me about holidays with relatives in Rhyl, about the hereditary thatched cottage which had gone to ruin at home.

  ‘PG Tips always tastes better with you,’ a Polish lady informed me. She had many stories: how she’d hidden under the covers on the back of a truck and got to Berlin just after the war; how she’d stayed in a house in Berlin with some of the rooms missing; how she’d moved to a camp where the Germans, even in defeat, would only drink freshly ground coffee.

  ‘All I wanted was fish and chips,’ one silvery-haired old man in a suit smiled as he told me.

  There was a boy who, in his dreams at night, always walked in Catford, a lighted sign for the Catford Gold Cup in the background. I walked through a landscape after war. It was a bog.

  You feel sick inside. You feel very sick, but there is something there even if it’s all over. They did everything in their power to stop you.

  Just outside the mental hospital there is a drapery store with white lace roses on the suits.

  I went to Brighton that spring to throw myself in the sea, like the tinker man.
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  First I had a coffee in a café in Soho. ‘Oh, I knew Madame Valerie,’ a woman was saying, almost hysterically. ‘I first met her in 1924.’

  ‘Welcome to Brighton’, a sign said by the railway tracks, under purple lilac.

  Last time I’d come here was the January the Athina B was washed up on the beach. I was with a student from the Royal College of Art I was having an affair with. When I lost interest in him he wrote letters to friends of mine, asking if they were coming to his funeral.

  Schoolboys in moss-green jackets had gathered in a bus marked Hove outside the station. A girl with cat’s-eyes glasses and a sixties bouffant hair-style led a shepherd dog with a Lippizaner haircut past a brandy-and-wine shippers.

  There was a huge rubber reptile with green spots on him on the opposite side of the street to the beach. The sign said ‘Children under 14 only’.

  An Arab girl with henna hair was making a video of her family with a huge camera by the sea, a woman’s and some girls’ faces hidden behind Moslem veils.

  I went to the spot where the Athina B had been and instead of throwing myself in to drown I went for a swim. The water was already warm.

  The tinkers could tell you that Judas hung himself from an elder tree. They could tell you that a tinker called James McPherson was hanged in Banff on the Scottish border in 1700. They could tell you about beet-gathering in Scotland not too long ago. They’d pick up the thread of a family tale out of the beet fields of Scotland. How a man raised himself up in society with a successful plumbing business, then, on a whim, stole a Ford Orion, and ended up in a jail by the sea on the south-west coast.

  A girl, his sweetheart, described visits to him. The walk from the bus stop down a road by the sea. The lemon waiting-room inside. The warden with as many keys as beads on a rosary on a chain by his side. Red-brick buildings with turrets outside and cherry trees, like dirty Guinness when in blossom. Armies of prisoners coming out all of a sudden from the buildings opposite, in pale blue shirts and dark blue trousers, a kind of exhilaration about them, as if they were going on a pilgrimage.