She’d married at fifteen and her husband went to sea. He sailed to South America and to South Africa and the last that was heard of him was that he’d married a black woman on an island.
Eileen had had one child by him. The child died in the winter of 1902 on a bog-road outside Ballinasloe. It had been buried in a field under the mocking voices of jackdaws and she swore she’d become a nun like the Sisters of Mercy in their shaded gardens in Ballinasloe.
But Joe Ward took her fancy—he’d become a Tinker king in a fight in Aughrim—beating the previous king of the Tinkers, who was twenty-five years older than him, in a fist-fight. He’d been handsome and swarthy and had a moustache like British Army officers, well designed and falling like a fountain.
They’d wedded in St Michael’s Church on St Stephen’s Day, 1906. Her father had told the bishop in Loughrea her previous husband had been eaten by sharks and the marriage had taken place without bother. She’d worn a Victorian dress, long and white, which the lady of the local manor had given her, a woman who’d performed on the London stage once with bouquets of paper roses about her breasts.
The priest had proclaimed them man and wife as celebrations followed on the Aughrim road, whiskey and poteen downed where a month before two children had died from the winter chill.
There had been dancing through the night and more than one young girl lay down with an older heftier man, and Eileen slept with a warm-legged man, forgetting about the odd clinging piece of snow and the geese fretting in the fields.
She became pregnant that cold, cold winter, holding her tummy as March winds howled and their caravans went west, trundling along Connemara roads to the gaps where the sea waited like a table. They camped near Leenane Head. Fires blazed on June nights as wails rose, dancing ensuing and wood blazing and crackling with a fury of bacon. They were good days. They’d sold a troop of white horses to the Gypsies of France and many men went to bed with their women, stout in their mouths and on their whiskers.
They saw ships sail up the fjord at dawn and they bought crabs and lobster from local fishing men. When her belly had pushed out like a pram she found Joe on the lithe body of a young cousin.
Her child perished at birth. She had thirteen children by Joe. They grew up as guns sounded and Tinker caravans were caught in ambushes in East Galway. Joe was in Dublin for 1916. He saw the city blaze and he was bitterly disappointed as he’d come to Dublin to sell a mare and eat a peach melba in an illustrious ice-cream house in Sackville Street. He returned to Galway without having eaten his ice cream.
Michael Pat, her oldest, found a dead parish priest lying in the bushes like a crow in 1921; the Tans had smitten him on the head. The Tinkers had covered his body and fallen on their knees in prayer. The police came and a long stalwart ambulance.
The body was borne away and Eileen and her children attended his funeral, bringing bouquets of daffodils stolen from the garden of a solicitor and banners of furze which were breaking to gold.
He was the last victim Eileen knew of, for Britain gave the men with their long moustaches and grey lichen-like hair their demands and as they arrived in Ballinasloe for the fair there was more anger, more shots, and buildings in flame in Dublin.
Irishmen were fighting Irishmen. A young man was led blindfolded to a hill above the Suck and shot at dawn and the fair ceased for a day because of him and then went on with a girl who had a fruity Cork accent bellowing ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ across the fair green where lank and dark-haired Gypsies from France smoked long pipes like Indians.
Eileen opened her eyes.
Her daughter Mary, sixty-two, looked like Our Lady of the Sorrows.
‘O Mother dear you’re leaving me alone with a pack of ungrateful children and their unfortunate and ill-behaved children.’
Mary was referring to her drunken sons and daughters who hugged large bottles of Jameson in Dublin with money supplied by social security or American tourists.
‘Sure they have picnics of whiskey outside the Shelbourne,’ Mary had once told her mother.
As for their children they were Teddyboys and thieves and drunkards and swindlers or successful merchants of material stolen from bomb sites in Belfast. There was a group who went North in vans and waited like Apaches swooping upon bomb-sites after the IRA had blown a store or a factory.
It was whispered that the IRA and the Irish Tinkers were in league, blowing the Unionist kingdom to pieces for the betterment of the Travelling people and for the ultimate ruinous joy of a dishevelled and broken province. Middle-aged men sat in parlours in Belfast thanking God for each exquisite joy of destruction, a bomb, a bullet, while they drank to the day there’d be a picture of Patrick Pearse in Stormont and a shoal of shamrocks on the head of Queen Victoria’s statue. ‘It’s a bad picture of the Travelling people folk have,’ Mary had told her. And yet more and more were becoming peaceable and settling in council houses in Swinford or Castlerea. These were the ones you didn’t hear of. These children who attended school and were educated and those parents who worked and who tidied a new house of slate grey. ‘They say Tommy Joe is in the IRA,’ Mary had said. Tommy Joe was Eileen’s fifth great-grandson. Apparently he wore roses in his lapel and turned up in distant places, meeting agents or big-breasted young women, negotiating deals of arms. He ran off to Libya at the age of seventeen with an Irish melodion player who was a secret agent for a Belfast regiment.
That started him. ‘It’s been gin and tonic and sub-machine-guns since,’ Mary had complained to Eileen before illness had confined her to Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe.
As Eileen lay in bed surrounded by bustling seagull-like sisters from South America news filtered through of violence in the fair green.
It was the first year there’d been trouble at the fair other than brawls and fights and lusts. Men had been beaten with bottles. A caravan had been set alight and an old man in the country had been tied in his bed and robbed by two seventeen-year-old Tinkers.
Eileen grabbed her beads.
It was the North, the North of Ireland was finally sending its seeds of ill-content among the Travelling people. Young men who’d been to Belfast had caught a disease. This disease had shaped greed, had shaped violence like a way of grabbing, a way of distrusting, a way of relinquishing all Eileen had borne with her through her life.
Talking to Mary now, she said, ‘England brought me great luck.’
She and Joe had travelled the length and breadth of Ireland as mares grew thin and men looked like mummers. They’d settled outside Belfast, dwelling on a site beside a graveyard while Joe, being a man of intelligence and strength, found work in the shipping yard. She’d had eleven grandchildren then and they hung their clothes like decorations on the bushes as her sons sauntered about Antrim on white horses repairing tin objects. One of her granddaughters fell in love with a minister’s son. Eileen like her grandmother. She followed him about and when he ignored her she tore off her blouse, laying her breasts naked and her nipples like wounds, and threatened to throw herself into the Lagan.
Peader her grandson led her away. The girl cracked up, became babbling and mad and ever after that went off with an old Tinker called Finnerty, telling fortunes from palms, staring into people’s eyes in Ballinasloe or Loughrea, foretelling people of death or scaldings or bankruptcy.
In the winter of 1935 Joe was beaten up and a young child seized by an Antrim lady who wouldn’t let him go for two days, saying he was a heathen.
The sky dropped snow like penance and the Wards moved off, wandering through Donegal, past the mass rocks and the hungry bays and the small cottages closed to them and the hills teeming with the shadow of snow. There was no work for them and Brigid her youngest died of tuberculosis and four grandchildren died and Peader and Liam took boats to America and were not heard of till they got to Boston and were not heard of again until 1955 when both were dead.
‘It’s like the Famine again,’ said Eileen, recalling days close to her birth when the banshe
e howled and young men and old men crawled to the poorhouse in Ballinasloe like cripples, seeking goat’s milk.
Wirelesses blared jazz music as doors closed on them and Eileen cursed the living and the dead as she passed bishops’ residences and crucified Christs hanging like bunting outside towns.
Her mother and father had survived the Famine but they lived to report the dead bodies lying over the length and breadth of Ireland like rotten turnips. They’d reported how men had hanged their children in order to save them and how at the Giant’s Causeway Furies had eaten a McDonagh as though he was a chicken. ‘We’ll leave this land,’ she said to Joe. They tried to sell their mangy mares, succeeded in Athenry in selling them to an Englishman as thin as the mares and they took off.
‘Our people have been Travelling people since the time of St Patrick,’ said Joe. ‘We should have been treated better than this.’
Sister woke her.
‘Wake up, Mrs McDonagh. It’s time for breakfast.’ She was not Mrs McDonagh but the nun presumed all Tinkers were McDonaghs.
Breakfast was porridge thin and chill as the statue of Mary standing somewhere near.
Eileen ate as a young nurse came and assisted her as though shovelling earth into a grave.
‘The tea is putrid,’ complained Eileen.
‘Whist,’ said the nurse. ‘You’re only imagining it.’
Outside mists clung like a momentary hush. Winter was stealing in but first there was this October imminence, standing above sweetshops and council houses.
She took one more sup of the tea.
‘This is not good enough.’ She called the nurse. A country girl made off to get her stronger tea as Eileen bemoaned the passing of tea thick and black as bog-water.
They’d set up camp in Croydon in 1937, and from that spot moved across England, repairing tin, selling horses, rambling north along ill-chosen seaside paths, paths too narrow for jaunty caravans. They surmounted this island, rearing right to its northmost edge, the Kyle of Lochalsh, John o’ Groat’s.
They camped in winter in mild spots where men shook herring from their nets as Eileen’s daughters shook daughters and sons from their bodies, as the Wards germinated and begot and filled England with Tinkers.
During the War they craved their little spot in Croydon, venturing north but once, shoeing horses in Northumberland, taking coast roads, watched by ancient island monasteries. They settled in Edinburgh winter of’42 but Eileen got lonesome for talk of Hitler and the air-raid shelters squeezing with people and she left a city of black fronts and blue doors and went south with Joe and her daughter Mary, widowed by a man who jumped into the sea to save a bullock from drowning.
They camped in Croydon. Mary married a cockney tramp and they broke Guinness into an old bath and feasted on it. Mary had three children and more people of their clan joined them.
At Christmas they had the previous year’s trees fished from rubbish dumps and they sang of the roads of Ireland and ancient days, bombs falling as they caroused without milk or honey.
He didn’t come back one day and she searched London three days and three nights, passing rubble and mothers bemoaning their dead children until his body was found in a mortuary. She didn’t curse Hitler or his land. She fell on her knees and splayed prayers and lamentation over his dead body as further sirens warned of bombs, and, as her body shaking with grief became young and hallucinatory, imagining itself to be that of a girl in Connaught without problems.
They buried him in London. The McDonaghs and the Wards and the McLoughlins came and as it was winter there were only weeds to leave on his grave but the women shook with crying and the men pounded their breasts.
Above Eileen saw geese fly north.
She woke with tears in her eyes and she wiped them with hospital linen. Joe, Joe. My darling lover. Joe, Joe, where did you go, times when bombs were falling like bricks and little girls were lying in the rubble like china dolls.
She was leading woman of her tribe then. Her family gathering, hanging their washings like decorations.
At Christmas 1944 a duchess drove up with presents for the children. She had on a big hat of ermine grey and Eileen refused her gifts, knowing her kinsmen to have fought this aristocracy for nine hundred years and realizing she was being made a charity of. Once in Ballinasloe she’d known a lady who’d been a music hall artiste in London and who married the local lord. That lady had addressed her as her equal.
Eileen had had hair of purple and red then and she’d had no wish of charity. The lady of the house had found companionship in a girl living in a tent on the edge of her estate.
‘We’ll go back to Ireland,’ her son Seamus said at the end of the War.
Eileen hesitated. She was not sure. The last memories had been mangy. She and her family were English-dwelling now and they received sustenance for work done and they abided with the contrasts of this country.
She led her family north before deciding. Up by Northumberland and seeing a fleet of British planes flying over she decided on embarking.
The customs man glared at her as though she was an Indian.
‘Are you Irish, ma’am?’ he said.
‘Irish like yourself,’ she said.
He looked at her retinue.
‘Where were ye?’ he said. ‘In a concentration camp?’
They travelled straight to Galway. Its meadows still were sweet but on the way men had looked crossly at them and women suspiciously. This was the land her parents had travelled. It had not even a hint of the country beset by famine. Cars were roaming like hefty bullocks and in Athenry as they moved off from Ballinasloe little Josephine Shields was killed.
A guard came to look at the crash.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told Eileen. ‘But you can’t be hogging these roads. Something like this has been bound to happen.’
They buried the little girl in Galway. There was a field of daisies nearby and Eileen’s eyes rose from the ceremony to the sea spray and a hill where small men with banana bellies were playing golf.
I’m leaving this land, she told herself.
They journeyed back to Liverpool, erupting again on the face of England, germinating children like gulls. They moved north, they moved south and in Croydon, standing still, Eileen met Joseph Finnerty, half-Irish Tinker, half-French Gypsy by his mother’s origin. They married within two months. He was thirty-nine. She was sixty-two. She was a good-looking woman still and welcomed his loins. Their marriage was celebrated by a priest from Swaziland and performed in Croydon. Tinkers came from Ireland, more to ‘gawp’, said Eileen, and Gypsies, wild and lovely from France.
‘My family has broken from me like a bough,’ said Eileen. ‘Now it’s my turn for the crack.’
Men of ninety found themselves drunk as hogs in hedges about Croydon. A black priest ran among the crowd like a hunted hare and a young girl from Galway sang songs in Irish about deaths and snakes and nuns who fell in love with sailors.
Eileen looked at the London suburb as though at the sea.
‘I can return to Ireland now,’ she said.
She brought him back and they travelled widely, just the two of them for a while.
She brought him back to old spots, Galway and the Georgian house where the gentry lived and the girl from the London music hall of the last century. They went to the sea and marvelled at the wayside contrasts of furze and rhododendrons in May.
Joseph played a tin whistle and there was dancing along the way and singing and nights by high flames when a girl stepped out of Eileen like a ballerina.
‘The years have slipped off your face,’ people told her. They went to a dance one night in Athenry where there was jazz music and they danced like the couples with the big bellies and the bouncing hair.
‘I’ll take you to my mother’s country now,’ said Joseph, so off they went in a van that wheezed like a dying octogenarian through France.
They passed houses where they heard music the like Eileen could not understand, thrilling m
usic, music of youth, music of a cosmos that had changed.
They passed war ruins and posters showing brazen women. They weaved through towns where summer lingered in February and rode hills where spring came like an onlooker, gazing at them with eyes of cherry blossom. They lingered on a mound of earth as they caught sight of a blue, blue sea.
They got out.
‘This is my real home,’ Joseph said. ‘The Camargue. My mother’s people came from here. This is the heart of the Tinkers’ world. I was born here, of a father from Kerry and a mother from Saintes Maries de la Mer. I was gifted with second sight and feet that moved so I spent my first days in Ireland and saw the fighting and the flags and the falling houses and then I came back here and danced the wild dances and loved the strong women. From Marseilles I went south.’ He pointed. ‘Over there is Egypt. I arrived there when I was twenty-six and from there my life flows. I recall the palm trees and the camels as though it was yesterday. I went there and understood, understood our people the world over, the Travelling people, men who moved before gods were spoken of, men who—who understood.’
‘We are of an ancient stock, my father used to say,’ said Eileen. ‘We were here before St Patrick and will be when he’s forgotten.’
‘Our secrets are the secrets of the universe,’ said Joseph, ‘a child, a woman with child, a casual donkey. We are the sort that Joseph was when he fled with Mary.’
Sand blew into Eileen’s eyes as she drank wine for the first time. In March she watched young men with long legs from Hungary ride into the sea with red flags. It was the feast of St Sarah, patron saint of Gypsies.
They carried her statue like a bride betrothed to the sea and praised her with lecherous and lusty tongues.
The sea was already taking the shape of summer, a blue, blue sea.
‘In October they come again to celebrate,’ Joseph explained. ‘They are faithful to their saints.’
She sat on sands where she drank bottles of wine and bottles of Coca-Cola and walked by the sea, which asked of her, ‘Is this folly?’
Lark's Eggs Page 4
