I say I am convinced that this is my father; but, to be sure, I phone my brother Pat, who lives not far off; indeed, his presence is one of the reasons I came to live here in the first place. He arrives two or three minutes later. Looks at the photograph for a minute or two, pondering. He is 90 per cent certain; but he will check it out with my father, since he is going up to see him tomorrow (Sunday, January 1997) in Cushendun, some forty miles away, where he lives with my sister Caitlin.
If indeed it is my father, it is appropriate that he should be photographed in the company of trams, for he always loved trams, and his happiest early memories are of being taken on the tram by his father to the various termini of Ligoniel, Dundonald, Castlereagh, Greencastle … The trams had a romance and a magic unlike any other vehicle, and when he travelled on the last tram to Ardoyne Depot he felt exiled from his past. Yet he saw the trams again, in his dreams: shortly after this, his father died suddenly; he had woken my father up for work one morning, and when he got home that afternoon, my father’s father was dead; he had no time to say good-bye to him.
From that day, almost every night for twenty years, my father had the same dream: he is standing on the corner of Clonard Street and the Falls waiting for a trolleybus; but lo and behold, an old tram comes clattering down the road instead, and he is filled with joy. He is about to step on, but the tram will not stop for him, alas; it vanishes, city-bound into a smog. Wondering what this dream might mean, my father eventually plucked up courage to approach a doctor friend who had some acquaintance with psychology. ‘In your subconscious mind’, the doctor advised, ‘there is a connection between your father and the trams. The tram represents your dead father; and you will never board that tram as long as you live, no matter how many times you dream about it.’
In the 1952 photograph, the two trams have an indomitable, upright presence, like Mississippi steamboats sailing nobly past each other, or vehicles invented by Jules Verne. I visualize the dark blue of their livery, the blue of many fathoms deep; and get the leather perfume of upholstered seats which let out a small gasp as you sat on them; and I remember my father taking me on the tram, on one of its last routes, to Ligoniel, where we would climb Wolfhill,3 and gaze down like guardian angels across the city we had temporarily flown. Then we’d take the tram back home.
Eventually, my father did get to board the dream-tram. One St Patrick’s Day, egged on by my younger brothers Breandán and Liam, he fulfilled a long-standing promise to take them to the Transport Museum in Witham Street. When he entered, he had no time for the water-carts, the vintage cars and the steam locomotives: he had eyes only for the tram, and when he climbed on board and ventured on to the open upper deck and sat down, he closed his eyes; for a while he was a boy again, voyaging to Greencastle, not the father of a family, but a father’s son. When he opened his eyes they were filled with tears. And he never dreamt about the trams again.
Now, ‘tomorrow’ has become ‘today’, and my father’s verdict on the photograph has come via Pat. He feels the postman is not him: although the circumstances seem to fit, there is one flaw in the proof: he wore his bag on his left shoulder, not his right.
The more I peer into the reproduction of the photograph, the more it disappears, as it becomes all dots and chiaroscuro, as I read narratives where there are none, ignorant of all the teeming others, and their names and destinations.
1 DOGMA (Gr., ordinance) A truth directly proposed by the Church for our belief as an article of divine revelation. The vulgar notion of a dogma, as an arbitrary doctrine imposed nobody quite knows why, is thus seen to be at fault; the content of a dogma is truth revealed by God and thus must be believed: it is not assumed to be true because many believe it.
2 Perhaps this is no longer the correct expression for what used to be the official syndrome ‘educationally subnormal’, or ESN.
3 So-called because it was one of many places where the last wolf in Ireland had been killed.
THE GENERAL POST OFFICE
Being the son of a postman, I was perhaps naturally inclined to become a stamp-collector, later attaining the status of a philatelist of sorts. Philately (there is a muddled etymology to this word, which I do not propose to go into) implies study, the classification and taxonomy of minutiae, of variations in dies, fonts, paper, watermarks and perforations; in this Lilliputian world, flaws and errors are as eagerly sought after as genetic mutations by microbiologists, or quarks by physicists. It was my still-implicit interest in stamps that led me to buy the Benjamin volume mentioned in the last chapter, because I’d serendipitously opened it at this passage, as I browsed the book in the shop:
To someone looking through piles of old letters, a stamp that has long been out of circulation on a torn envelope often says more than a reading of dozens of pages … Stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes, They are graphic cellular tissue. All this swarms about and, like lower animals, lives on even when mutilated. This is why such powerful pictures can be made of pieces of stamps stuck together. But in them, life always bears a hint of corruption to signify that it is composed of dead matter. Their portraits and obscene groups are littered with bones and riddled with worms.
Of course, such acts of découpage would be anathema to the philatelist, though not that far removed from the practice of the tyro collector, who would glue stamps willy-nilly into school exercise-books, thus rendering them useless for exchange or study; but in time, those who persisted with their hobby would get to know the delicacy of hinges and protective mounts, the power of magnifying glasses, and the serried order of the perforation gauge.
In my early teens, having progressed thus far, I bought a spring-back loose-leaf album (the F.G. Kent, manufactured by Frank Godden Ltd., 111–112 The Strand, London WC2) with ‘leaves of heavy paper, cream-tinted, groove-fluted and printed with feint quadrille’; also, an Osmiroid fountain-pen with interchangeable nibs; and How to Arrange and Write-up a Stamp Collection, by Stanley Phillips & C.P. Rang,1 published by Stanley Gibbons Ltd., the Vatican of the philatelic world, who still maintain a premises at 391 The Strand. I practised for hours, and learned a passable block roundhand which still serves a purpose on occasions, as when I recently inscribed the date, and the names of the bride and groom in my sister in law’s wedding album. ‘Leo van Es, Oonagh Shannon, 23 August 1996’.
I was initially drawn to collect, sort, mount, and annotate the stamps of the British Empire, for I admired their sober, typographical designs and regal, defunct profiles, their inks of pale rose, carmine, lilac, slate, bistre, cobalt and vermilion; but this was a vast pandemic field, in which the minor Indian States alone – Chamba, Gwalior, Nabha, Faridkot, Sirmoor, Rajpipla, Travancore and Cochin, to name a few – took up some seventy pages of the Gibbons catalogue. Gradually, I began to specialize in Great Britain and Ireland; then, moved, perhaps, by a latent republicanism, I confined myself to Ireland alone.
Until the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921, Ireland had always used our British stamps, but then fresh arrangements had to be made. At first the British stamps were simply overprinted with the words ‘Saorstat Eireann’, but in 1922 a newly designed issue came into use. Some of these bore a map of the whole of Ireland – and that, of course, is hardly correct, since the six Northern counties are not in the Free State at all, but remain part of the United Kingdom. It is now many years since those stamps were issued, but the error has not yet been put right.
T. Todd, Stamps of the Empire, London, 1938
This is not entirely accurate: in fact, the first Irish stamps were the current GB issues, overprinted in ‘Gaelic’2 type with the words ‘Rialtas Sealadach na hÉireann’ (Provisional Government of Ireland). These appeared on 17 February 1922; the ‘Saorstát Éireann’ (Irish Free State) overprints came later, on 6 December. Their ephemeral and contingent nature is manifest in the plethora of minor varieties which exist: broken type, missing or reversed accents, a spectrum of inks, fine distinctions in alignments and sp
acings.
When the overprinted stamps first appeared they unfortunately received undue attention from speculators, which caused excessive inflation of prices, followed by the inevitable slump. Now that they are obtainable at reasonable prices, however, they offer very wide scope for philatelic study and should rank with other dominions in the regard of philatelists. The uncertain political tendencies also make surprises always possible.
The Regent Priced Catalogue of the Postage Stamps of the British Commonwealth of Nations, London, 1934
One could quite easily, I imagine, devote a lifetime’s study to these early cancellations of the Empire and their typographical minutiae: I was overawed by the immensity of the task, which could be almost infinitely extended if one also took into consideration what Benjamin calls ‘the occult part of the stamp: the postmark’, the sometimes indecipherable demography of hours, dates, and names of places. I collected a few nominal examples of the Provisionals before moving on to the Definitive Series.
The first Definitive Issue, of 6 December 1922, with twelve values, from the ½d bright green to the 1s bright blue, uses four designs: the Sword of Light, the Map of Ireland (including the Six Counties, and without a political border), the Arms of Ireland (all four provinces) and the Celtic Cross, another icon of completeness and eternal status. The Commemorative Issues, beginning in 1929 with Daniel O’Connell (Catholic Emancipation Centenary), are equally propagandist; they include the Shannon Barrage Completion of Shannon Hydro Electricity Scheme, 1930), the Adoration of the Cross (International Eucharistic Congress, 1932), a Hurler (Golden Jubilee of the Gaelic Athletic Association, 1934), and Ireland and the New Constitution (Constitution Day, 29 December 1937), which shows an art nouveau female figure resting her left hand on a harp, her right on a partly opened scroll which reads ‘In Ainm na Trionóide Ró-Naomhtha’ (In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity).
The commemoratives of 1941, the 25th anniversary of the Easter Rising, provide an interesting ideological detour.
Easter was very late that year. Monday, 24 April 1916, was a mild sunny day in Dublin, which was virtually deserted, huge crowds (including most of the officers and men from the British Garrison) making their way out of the city in the early morning to the Fairy House race-course for the first big meeting of the season. Apart from a few bystanders the only people to be seen in the city streets were members of the Irish Volunteer Force and the Irish Citizen Army, but, since Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson had founded the Ulster Volunteers in Belfast three years earlier, in a blatant attempt to resist any move by the British Government to grant Home Rule to Ireland, the spectacle of armed men drilling openly was quite commonplace.
James A. Mackay, Eire: The Story of Eire and her Stamps, London, 1968
The first Easter Rising commemoratives, which appeared on 12 April 1941, are defined by Gibbons’ British Empire catalogue as ‘provisional issues’: these were the standard 2d map of Ireland and the 3d Celtic Cross, in new colours, orange and blue, overprinted with ‘1941 I GCUIMHNE AISÉIRGHE 1916’ (in memory of the resurrection of 1916 – the Rising, after all, was conceived as a liturgical event) – an ironic reference, surely, to the first overprints, suggesting that the Republic is laying retrospective claim to its pre-1922 past, as well as to disputed territory. The definitive commemorative did not appear until 27 October. Why did it take so long? Was the committee split over the appropriateness of celebrating armed rebellion? Mackay continues
Shortly before noon on 24th April a body of about sixty irregulars … (now welded together to form the Army of the Irish Republic) passed down Sackville Street and halted outside the General Post Office. The man in command of them, James Connolly, Commandant-General of the IRA, gave the order to charge. Swiftly they entered the building, disarmed the constable of the Dublin Metropolitan Police on duty, and summarily ejected the counter clerks and their customers. The windows on the ground floor were smashed and hastily barricaded, and sentries posted. At the rear of the building the Telegraph Instrument Room contained its normal complement of girl telegraphists under the supervision of Miss Gordon, the Assistant Superintendent. A sergeant and three privates were also on duty. Troops had been posted to guard the Instrument Room since the outbreak of war but only a few weeks before Easter 1916 their ammunition was suddenly withdrawn, so that on the fateful morning they were virtually unarmed. When they heard shots being fired at the front of the building they barricaded the door in the corridor connecting the public office with the Instrument Room, but by this time the rebels had entered by the back door and sprung into the room. This party was led by The O’Rahilly, who shot the sergeant when he made to resist.
The 2½d blue-black definitive commemorative of 1941 is known as the Gunman: it depicts a Gulliver-sized Volunteer armed with a bayoneted rifle, poised at his post above a Lilliputian GPO; the stamp has a sombre border like a death notice. Although the GPO looks to be in pristine condition, and not the bombed shell it became after the Rising, it is interesting to note that the four main varieties of the Gunman stamp are known as ‘Broken Statue’, ‘Broken Pillar’, ‘Damaged Capital’ and ‘Broken Windows’; but these are minor flaws, detectable only to the magnifying-glass-armed keen-eyed philatelist comparative dimensions of Volunteer and GPO imply that the individual is more powerful than established authority, that his authority comes from the barrel of a gun, or is assumed by him in the name of those powerless to speak, for the stamp also bears the first words of Padraic Pearse’s Proclamation: ‘In ainm Dé agus in ainm na nglún d’imigh romhainn …’ (In the name of God and of the generations that have gone before us …)
Banal, pious, badly drawn, next to worthless in monetary terms, the Gunman is not a beautiful stamp, but it fascinates me. I love the blue-black ink that seems to have a tint of bottle-green in it, so that it summons up the dull enamelled frames of Royal Ulster Constabulary bicycles armed with upright handlebars, three-speed Sturmey-Archer thumbswitch gears, stirrup brakes and faltering hub-dynamo lamps; the colour of gunpowder, broken slates or magnets; the ooze-blue clay of the Lagan at low tide; coke-smoke from the Gasworks; livid, live-lobster blue; rubber bullets, purple cobblestones, a smear of rotting blackberries; cinder-paths at dusk, when no one walks on them; the black arm-band of the temporary postal worker.
The Gunman stamp is both post script and prescription. In its subversion of authority, it installs a new authority. The taking of the Post Office was a symbolic act, for nowhere was the Crown as near ubiquitous as on postage stamps, these little emblems of the temporal realm that drop daily through your letter-box, representing complicated fiscal arrangements and mechanisms for their delivery. Sheets of stamps, books of stamps, coils of stamps unscrolling from antiquated cast-iron slot machines: one could make an epic documentary of one day’s issue, salivated on by thousands of tongues, vast spectral demographies of deoxyribonucleic acid chromosomed into the sticky backs of stamps, thumbprinted on to envelopes, or impressed by one delicate trembling fingertip, the aura of gum still lingering like a retroactive kiss on the tongue. All of this takes place in boudoirs, public houses, studies, cafés, libraries, ports, railway stations, hotels, aerodromes, schools, surgeries, pleasure gardens, post offices, garages, on piers and esplanades, on board trains and boats and planes; correspondences seethe everywhere in steel and goldnibbed copperplate and roundhand, in the braille of manual typescripts, in violet indelible pencil scrawls, in purple carbon slips, and ransom demands made up from cut-up newspaper headlines; declarations, proposals, deferments, invitations, assignations, refusals, bills, threats, promises, applications, accounts, submissions. The President of the Provisional Government of Ireland understood that in these documents the spirit of a nation resides.
When Pearse summoned Cuchulainn to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect?
What calculation, number, measurement replied?
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Statues’
It was said that Pearse had a cast in his right eye, and
insisted on his photograph being taken in left profile: I remember one such black-and-white icon, hung on the kitchen wall of 100 Raglan Street, like a President Kennedy – the same upward-gazing, youthful aspiration – or the depiction of Edward VIII on the stamps of his short-lived British reign of 1936, all conferring in the ancient power of profile, like those on Roman coins, establishing their vast Caesarean dominions with obverse images of chariots, hooves of the Pegasus Express, streaming out like hyphened light from a Vatican radio beacon.
The cordon of steel gradually grew tighter and tighter around the Post Office, the heart of the rebel position. From all sides shells rained down on the once proud building and the end was inevitable. The Post Office, with its maze of basement corridors and stout walls, was well constructed to withstand bombardment and at one stage the military considered using poison gas to eliminate the rebel stronghold. Happily, this was not used, but a combination of high explosive and incendiary shells turned Sackville Street and Lower Abbey Street into a holocaust in which it seemed no one and nothing could survive. Under cover of the blaze the troops closed in, but it was not till Saturday morning that the final shelling and the capture of the Post Office took place. The majority of the rebels, in the meantime, succeeded in tunnelling their way out of the burning building. The rearguard, led by The O’Rahilly, was mown down by machine-guns in the closing encounter. Pearse, Connolly and a few others actually escaped through the main doorway under the noses of the besiegers and took refuge in a nearby grocer’s shop. At 3.30
The Star Factory Page 4
