MY FIGHT WITH THE ROLLING STONES

I’ve told this story once or twice before but never imagined I’d be telling it again so many years after the stirring events described below – and that the Stones would still be rolling. 

In 1965 they visited Ireland for the second time, to play the Adelphi cinema in Middle Abbey Street, Dublin. It was then a big auditorium seating some 2,000 people. These touring shows would have several other artists on the bill, with the headline act coming on at the end for a mere thirty minutes or so. “Pop” tours, as they were called then, invariably used the cinema chains in Britain and Ireland, as these were the biggest indoor venues available, and things had not reached the stage of having huge outdoor concerts. For one thing, the technology was not there: even in the cinema gigs, the performers used the venue’s public address system for the vocals, and quite puny (by today’s standards) amplifiers for the guitars. 

So you had to have good ears to hear the songs above the audience screams, especially if the headliners were of the stature of the Stones or the Beatles. Mention of the Liverpudlians brings us to a crucial element of this tale. (Elderly raconteur pauses for coughing fit and takes sip of  reviving barley water before resuming). In those far off days, children, one was either a Stones fan or a Beatles fan: you could not be both. I was definitely of the Beatle persuasion; I simply liked their clever way with words. Also, they wrote their own songs, while the arriviste Londoners were still doing “cover versions” (their first two singles after all were written by the Beatles, while their third, “Not Fade Away” had been a ‘fifties hit by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. (You see? I’m getting partisan all over again).  

Shortly before the Stones’ second coming I had begun work with Hugh McLaughlin’s “Creation” magazine group. It was a small operation then, based in Grafton Street (where Creation arcade still stands). I was Editorial Assistant (and tea-maker). “Creation” magazine was a glossy fashion publication edited by the proprietor’s wife, Nuala. They had also recently launched the more downmarket  Woman’s Way magazine with some success, and then decided it was time to target the teen market. Someone thought it was a brilliant idea to call this new magazine Miss (this was long before the sisterhood invented “Ms”, which used to be short for manuscript). As the youngest member of the staff, I pointed out that “Miss” was the opposite of “Hit”. Nobody listened, and the magazine all too soon lived up to its title. 

But while it was still alive, the Stones revisited Dublin. Before their arrival I wrote a piece about them for Miss magazine, strongly making out the case that the Beatles were of an entirely superior order to these upstarts. The Stones had quite successfully managed their early publicity to portray them as the “bad boys” of the music business. They were not quite the anti-Christ, but they were definitely the anti-Beatles (who, paradoxically had been quite a rough lot before Brian Epstein put them in suits and mop-top hairstyles). The British tabloids loved to seize any opportunity to show the Rolling Stones in a bad light. The group (not a band) under the influence of their then manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, were happy to oblige: it kept them on the front pages, upset the adults and endeared them to the rebellious teenagers of both sexes. My article naturally recycled most of these stories (I think one accused two of them of urinating on a wall at the back of a motorway petrol station: really shocking stuff). 

On the day of the Adelphi concert, the Rolling Stones were ensconced in the Intercontinental Hotel (later Jurys) in Ballsbridge. They were not available for interviews, and in any event, Irish papers had little interest in the doings of rock groups, either on or off stage. But we gung-ho journos  in Miss Magazine (photographer Val Sheehan and the present writer) decided to breach the citadel.  

Our secret weapon was a chap who had recently returned from London where he had made the acquaintance of  Andrew Loog Oldham. Our friend joined us in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel and persuaded the receptionist to make a phone call to the Stones’ manager on the top floor. At first the response was “no interviews”, but our friend had earlier sent a copy of  Miss Magazine (with my anti-Stone diatribe) to Oldham, and when he heard that the author was downstairs we were invited up. 

Okay, I didn’t quite have a “fight” with the Rolling Stones, but it came close at one stage. I grinned manfully as they launched sarcastic barbs at my journalistic effort. Among other things, I had opined that Mick Jagger could not sing, and I stuck to that in his presence. Brian Jones (that’s how long ago this was) came into the room looking quite dapper. He grinned and agreed with me, but perhaps he was just stirring things (or could this have been the very beginnings of the rift between Brian and the other boys). I did tell Mick that on their records his voice was virtually inaudible behind the guitars and drums. He jested that this was to make people buy the records so they could learn the words. Charlie Watts merely looked hurt; Bill Wyman said little that I recall, but Keith Richard was another matter.

Part of my article claimed that their previous show in the Adelphi had been a very tame affair compared to the Beatles show there in November 1963. This seemed to particularly provoke the great guitar man. I had impugned their reputation by suggesting that the girls had screamed and wept louder for the Liverpudlian outfit. He advanced towards me with the words (engraved on my memory): “I’ve a good mind to give you a bust in the snot”. But the others restrained him. Instead of busting my snot, he then said, “I suppose you think the Beatles are saints.” Before I could demur he launched into an impersonation of John Lennon. Pressing a finger to the tip of his nose to make it resemble the lattter’s acquiline proboscis, he lurched, stiff-legged around the room, demanding in pure scouse: “Have you got a joint? If you haven’t, you can fuck off.”

I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. I remember being vaguely puzzled as to why he thought John Lennon would get so worked up about a rib roast or any cut of meat for that matter. Shortly thereafter I made my excuses and left, unbowed and fortunately unbloodied, too.

I never did become a Stones fan, and I’ve never gone to another of their gigs. I’d be afraid Keith might spot me in the crowd.

Éanna Brophy (copyright)

CROSSFIRES - Opening Chapters

CHAPTER 1

I SHOULD never have been in that garden. My parents would have killed me if they knew I was there. And I was lucky I didn’t get myself killed when the bullets started flying.

I knew of course that the two men inside the house were up to no good. I thought they were spies. That’s why our gang – in other words me and Aidan Murphy – were spying on them. But we didn’t know that the guards were spying on them too. So when the house was surrounded at twilight one evening, before the shooting started, no-one knew we were in the overgrown shrubbery not far from the back door.

When we saw all the guards arriving Aidan made a run for it and got away, but I was wearing the new raincoat I’d just got for my tenth birthday the week before, and the belt got tangled in the branches when I tried to climb out over the hedge. I pulled and pulled, but the more I did that, the more the buckle got wedged in the thorny briars. I had to stop moving in case I’d be found out. I was stuck half-hanging and half-perched precariously, high up in dense hawthorn hedge, trying to ignore the thorns that were digging into my legs. Dust tickled my nose, but I managed not to sneeze. I even tried to stop breathing.

That’s how I heard the whole thing. Or did I imagine some of it? My mother and father - and my older brother and sister - were always telling me I had a great imagination. I thought my parents would never stop laughing one Christmas when I told them that not only had I heard reindeer on the roof, but that I heard Santa Claus talking at the end of my bed when I was pretending to be asleep, and that he sounded terrible like my da. I kept insisting that he said in a real grumpy voice “Who put the bloomin’ big holes in these stockings? This fella’s very hard on his clothes.” They convinced me after a while that maybe I did dream that. After all, how could Santa Claus from the North Pole sound just like my da from Tipperary?

But I don’t think I could have imagined hearing one of the detectives, crouched behind the henhouse just below where I was hiding, telling another detective with a jeering kind of laugh, “Now’s your chance to get him, Joe.” The other detective said “Keep quiet”, but the first one said “It’s now or never … put up or shut up … sure they’ll think it was crossfire.”

It was the strange word “crossfire” that caught my attention in the middle of everything else that was going on. Only a week before that, we had been to see a film in our local picture house, and it was about horrible people in America called the Ku Klux Klan, who used to set fire to big crosses outside black people’s houses to frighten them. That’s what I pictured when I heard the guard say “crossfire.”

The two men in the house started shooting first, then the guards fired back. I got such a fright I nearly fell out of my hiding place. The noise was louder than anything I’d ever heard – much louder than the sound the cowboys’ guns made in the cinema. I began to shake and I thought I was gone deaf for a second, but then something that sounded like a very loud wasp went right past my ear. I could hear a lot of cursing and roaring as well. It all seemed to go on for ages until at last someone shouted, “Cease fire! Stop shooting, they’re coming out.” 

The two men - who weren’t German spies after all, just ordinary Dublin robbers, I found out later - came out the back door with their hands up. They were grabbed and shoved into a big black car that drove off very quickly, and all the other guards drove off after it. When it was all gone quiet, except for the ringing in my ears and my heart thumping, I sneaked down out of the hedge and began to crawl across the overgrown lawn to head for the front gate, hoping I’d get there before everyone else on the road came to see what had happened.

There were nettles and thistles everywhere in the long grass. Granny Gormley, who used to live there, had been dead for a long time – nearly three years that summer. I was trying to avoid getting stung on my bare knees – this was a few years before I got my first long trousers – but I was afraid to stand up and walk in case anyone saw me. Anyway my legs were still shaky.

I went sideways to avoid a big bunch of nettles under the apple tree where we used to find the windfalls. That’s when I nearly put my hand on the man lying in the long grass. His face was turned sideways towards me, and his mouth was open as if he was surprised. His eyes were open, too, and I thought for a split second he was staring at me. Then I realised he couldn’t see me. It was a great relief. I stood up and ran like hell.

People had started to come out of their houses and were looking up and down the road to see what had made all the noise, but by then there was nothing for them to see – except me running towards them. I slowed down and walked past, trying to look normal, as though I was just coming from Geraghty’s shop. But they were all too excited to notice me. I heard one woman tell another that it was probably a car backfiring. A man said “That wasn’t any car, I’m in the LDF and I tell you that was bloody guns.”

I told no-one, not even my best friend Aidan, what I’d seen. I certainly wasn’t going to tell my family. If I mentioned it to my big brother or sister – Brian and Kathleen were much older than me – they’d be sure to tell my ma and da and then I’d be given out to. I’d been warned several times for playing in Granny Gormley’s garden. My mother thought it was disrespectful, which I couldn’t understand because the house had been empty for years.

I could hardly remember Granny Gormley: all I could think of when I tried to picture her was a little white-haired lady in a long black coat and a black hat, a smaller version of my father’s mother who used to come up from Tipperary every summer to visit us. Granny Gormley used to keep hens in the back garden. Once when I was small I sneaked into the henhouse with Aidan Murphy and we found four eggs. We brought them home, two each to our families, and said Granny Gormley gave them to us. Of course she didn’t, and she saw us sneaking out of the hen-run, so when she went there and found no eggs, she called around to my house and told my mother.

My mother said she had been suspicious anyway, because not only were my shoes covered in hens’ droppings but the eggs were all dirty, and she knew Granny Gormley would never have given them to us in that state. I got given-out to that time too. First by my mother and then by my father when he came home from work. But it wasn’t too bad, because halfway through giving out to me my father said “Could you not have got us a chicken while you were at it?” and they both started to laugh. I always knew I was all right if I could get them to laugh.

But there was no chance they’d laugh about what I’d seen that night in the garden. So I bottled it up and kept it to myself. I tried to forget all about it and pretend it never happened – or to convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing – or bits of it anyway. But sometimes when I was sitting in our big kitchen, which was also the living-room (although we never called it that), and supposed to be doing my homework, I’d really be listening to what the grown-ups were talking about. And for a good while after that day, there was a lot of talk about the terrible accident that happened to poor Detective Inspector Dunne and how he was found in the garden only after the other detectives realised he hadn’t come back to the station with any of them.

My mother and father were talking about it again one Sunday night when my Uncle Jack was there. He used to visit our house every second Sunday to play cards with my parents and listen to John McCormack records on the big old gramophone in the corner. He called it his “evening devotions”. Uncle Jack, my mother’s older brother, was a tall, happy-looking man, and it always seemed to me that everyone cheered up whenever he arrived. He was my favourite uncle – possibly because I hardly saw any of my other relatives who either lived “down the country” or even further away – but more likely because he never forgot to bring a bag of Scots Clan toffees for “the children”. (Although my brother thought he was much too old to be called a child anymore; it didn’t stop him eating most of the sweets all the same.)

They were in the middle of their card game when the name of Inspector Dunne came up. There must have been something about it in the paper that day. I wasn’t paying much attention until my father suddenly said “Anyway it’s well-known he had it coming to him”. My mother hushed him immediately. “Tom!” she said in her warning voice, “Little pictures have big ears.” Whenever she said that she’d dart a sideways glance over at me; to this day I still have a thing about ears – mine and other people’s.

My father lowered his voice, but I could still hear him as he said, “I’m sorry, Mary, but sure we all know what your man did in twenty-two. And one of them a brother of one of his own men.”

I was still trying to work out what “22” meant – wondering was it the number of a house – when Uncle Jack put down his cards and said, “Tom, would you not be bringing all that up again. Sure I thought we agreed long ago we’d leave the past in the past.” 

My father shrugged and said, “Still, you have to admit there’s something very odd about it.” Then after a pause, he gave Uncle Jack a sort of funny look and said, “Maybe you know more about it yourself than you’re telling us, Jack? Sure we all know you still have connections in high places.” It sounded like a question, but the way he said it, I thought he was accusing Uncle Jack of something. They all went very quiet. I was worried because I liked Uncle Jack a lot, but my mother said “Ah now, Tom! Don’t start that oul’ carry-on!” Uncle Jack just lit a cigarette, picked up his cards again and said, with a kind of grin, “Look! Are we playing cards or not, Tom?”

My father picked up his cards, too and said “Right ho, Jack, but you don’t have to keep them all so close to your chest.”

Uncle Jack said, “Now what do you mean by that, Tom? Sure don’t I always put mine on the table for everyone to see?”

My father said, “Indeed you do, Jack, except for the ones you keep up your sleeve!”

Everyone laughed then, which surprised me.

But somehow I got the feeling they weren’t talking about their card game at all. Then my mother noticed me listening and told me it was time I went to bed.

CHAPTER 2 

I had forgotten all about that night, and had even managed to stop thinking about the things I’d seen and heard in the garden, until a thing that happened a few months later, after the summer holidays when I was in the schoolyard. Some of the boys were talking to a new boy.

“Is it true it was your da who got shot when they were chasing the Leary brothers?” The boy asking the question was Keeley. Thin-faced and buck-toothed, with a long nose and his hair always plastered straight back with hair oil, he was a bit taller than the rest of us and liked to throw his weight around in the playground. He was sneaky, too: when a game of chasing or relievio was going on, he might suddenly stick out his leg and trip some boy who was running past him, often sending him sprawling on the rough tar in the yard. We all knew that his da had been in jail, but we never knew what for. I didn’t like him and neither did most of the boys in my class, but he had his own gang of hangers-on, and they were with him this morning, grinning and waiting to see what would happen next.

The new boy, who looked very sad, tried to edge away. “I don’t want to talk about that”, he said. I was afraid he might be going to cry, but I was wrong.

Keeley caught hold of his sleeve and said. “My da says your da deserved it”. The new boy stopped trying to pull away. Instead he stared back at Keeley. “Say that again”, he said. He didn’t look sad anymore. “Your da. He deserved to be shot”, Keeley began, but just as he got the last word out, the new boy punched him in the face. Keeley went staggering backwards, holding his nose. The blood began to flow from both nostrils.

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, leaving blood smeared all over his face. Then he shook his head and bunched his fists and made a run at the new boy, who had backed away, but had his own fists ready too. A crowd of boys quickly gathered from all over the yard. Boys who had been playing ball came running over. We formed a human boxing ring as the fighters began to circle each other. Nothing happened for a while and then suddenly the two of them began to hit each other, but half of their punches missed. Then they grabbed hold of each other’s clothes and went whirling around in a big circle, so that all of us watching had to step back out of the way. One of Keeley’s pals stuck his foot out and tripped the new boy up, but as the two of them fell to the hard tarry ground it was Keeley who ended up underneath. He was still trying to hit the new boy, who just kept trying to grab his fists and stop him.

“What’s going on here?” The headmaster, Mister O’Donoghue had arrived on the scene. He had a Cork accent that we were always imitating and laughing at behind his back, but the look on his face now would have wiped any grins off our faces.

“Nothing, sir”, said a few voices. “It was an accident”, said Keeley, getting to his feet. “I ran into him and we fell”.

“Is that what happened, Dunne”, Mister O’Donoghue asked the new boy, who was already standing.

“Yes, sir”, he replied in a very quiet voice.

“Hmm”, said the master, “I’m glad to hear it. You’re sure no-one was talking about your father?”

“No, sir”, said Dunne, shaking his head.

The headmaster turned to Keeley, who had a handkerchief up to his nose, which I was glad to see seemed to be still bleeding from both nostrils. “You’d better go and clean yourself up, Keeley”, he said. Keeley began to move away, but Mister O’Donoghue called after him, “And when you go home make sure you tell that father of yours exactly what happened. I wouldn’t want him getting the wrong idea. Or any of his friends either.” He turned on his heel, “The rest of you get back to your classrooms”, he ordered, walking away.

After school, Aidan Murphy was puzzling over the whole thing. “What did Mister O’Donoghue mean about Keeley’s da not getting the wrong idea?” he said. “Or his friends either?” I had to admit I hadn’t a clue what that meant either, but it sounded very sarcastic.

“Who is Gearoid Dunne anyway?” Aidan asked as we both walked home, taking turns at kicking a tin can we’d seen by the roadside.

“Do you not remember”, I said, “His da was the detective that got shot.”

He stopped dead. “Gosh”, he said, “Really? Weren’t we lucky we ran away before that all happened!” 

It wasn’t the first time he’d said something like that. I had to keep telling him not to mention it ever again. “No one must know we were anywhere near that house”, I said again now.

“But why not?” sighed Aidan, who was two months younger than me and used to wear glasses then, with a patch over one eye to straighten it.  “It was very exciting. I’m still bursting to tell someone. Especially my big brother who thinks he’s so great all the time.”

I don’t know why I knew it was important not to let anyone know we’d been anywhere near the house. But of course, Aidan hadn’t heard what I’d overheard, and I was never going to tell him. Especially if he was going to start blabbing about it just to impress his big brother, Eamon, who was always jeering him about his glasses. His big brother was always jeering me too, because of my freckles. He jeered at everyone, even his own friends.

“How’s Freddy Freckleface”, he’d say whenever I called for Aidan. “My name isn’t Freddy, it’s Michael”, I’d protest, but he’d just laugh. “Freckles and Speckles!” he’d say in a dramatic voice as we went out the gate, “Off for another daring spying mission to save the nation!” He sounded like the man who did the newsreels in the Acropolis – that was the name of our local cinema, which had been opened just before the war began.

The war was still on. Or the Emergency I should say. It had only a few weeks to go, but of course we didn’t know that. It had been going on for as long as I could remember. We had gas masks for all the family stored in our wardrobe, but we never got the chance to use them – except when we played at being soldiers. And our heads were full of stories and rumours we’d heard about German spies and secret agents.

Both Aidan and I were convinced that every second man we saw in the street was behaving suspiciously. We’d follow them, hiding behind lamp-posts and gate pillars until they arrived at their front doors. Invariably we were disappointed. We’d sneak up to any window of the house that remained uncurtained and peer in, only to see them sitting down to their tea, or just reading the evening paper.

No matter how hard we tried to make these activities seem sinister, we had to admit that, really, they weren’t spies at all. Yet the schoolyard used to be abuzz every now and again with yarns about spies. Some boy would say that his cousin down the country somewhere had personally seen a spy landing in a parachute, and then another would swear his father had had his bike stolen by one outside Mass. The spies in these stories were both British and German, but mainly German. We just knew they must be still landing all over the country by parachute or submarine and sending back secret messages to Hitler.

So Aidan and I kept a permanent watch, always in vain, until the day we saw the two men climbing over the back wall of Number 71, Granny Gormley’s bungalow near the end of our road.

We knew the house had been empty ever since she died. We played cowboys and Indians in the overgrown garden when we weren’t on active anti-spy duty.

It was when we were in the middle of a game, hiding and trying to ambush each other, that we first saw the men coming across the back garden and looking around carefully before forcing open the back door and going in. We waited for ages, but they didn’t come out again.

So it was perfectly obvious that they must be spies. At last!

CHAPTER 3

For the next few days after we’d seen them arrive, Aidan and I kept “our spies” under surveillance as much as we could, except of course, that we had to go to school and home to bed. But so far as we could make out at first, they didn’t leave the house at all. Then, just as we were wondering if they were in there at all anymore, one of them came out very furtively, wearing a coat and hat and looking just like an ordinary Irish person. A very cunning disguise, we told each other admiringly. Aidan and I shadowed him expertly, hoping to see where he collected his secret messages. Was there some place where he linked up with all the other spies? But all he did was stop at Geraghty’s corner shop and go in.

I took a deep breath and went in after him, acting normal. I could see now that he needed a shave, but he looked a bit younger than I had expected. He didn’t look very much older than my brother Brian. I’m not sure what age I thought a spy should be, but I didn’t expect him to have black curly hair – which is what I could see when he took off his hat going into the shop. Very good manners, too, for a spy, but a bit stupid I thought, since it ruined his disguise.

He didn’t even notice me listening as he asked for a bottle of milk and some bread. Then he asked Mrs Geraghty, “I don’t suppose you have any tea or cigarettes to spare?” I wondered if that was a secret password. After all, she might even be a secret agent herself. Maybe that’s what she’d meant that time when she’d asked Aidan and me were we good at keeping secrets. She always wore nice clothes and lipstick and high heels, and she even smoked, just like someone you’d see in a film about spies.

I couldn’t tell from looking at the man and Mrs Geraghty whether they were making any secret signs at each other. He was just smiling at her and she was looking him up and down. Then she laughed and said, “Spare tea? Fags? Now where would I get the likes? And you with no ration book or coupons? Are you spying on me by any chance?” She glanced over at me and then turned back to him and said in a lower voice, “Maybe you’ll have better luck if you come back later. I’m expecting some more supplies.” I thought I saw her wink at him; then she looked over at me again.

The man half-laughed and paid for the milk and bread, then turned to leave, nearly walking on me. 

“Well, young man? What is it you want?” Mrs Geraghty was smiling at me now, but I just backed out and turned to keep track of the “spy”.

Outside, I told Aidan what Mrs Geraghty was after calling him. “You mean she knows that he’s a spy and she still served him?” he asked.

I must admit I was a bit puzzled by that myself at the time. But we followed the man back to the house and looked in the window to see if we could spot a transmitter or some other spying equipment. All we saw through the thick net curtains was the two men tearing up the bread with their bare hands and gobbling it up as fast as they could, and washing it down with the bottle of milk. We were very disappointed with this performance; it didn’t look like the kind of spy behaviour we’d expected to see. But they’d just have to do: they were the only spies we knew.

We did our best to keep a close eye on them over the next few days, in between going to school and doing homework and going on messages for our mothers. But they had pulled over all the curtains in the house, so we didn’t even know now whether they were in there or not. Aidan thought they’d probably got away on us, and I was beginning to think the same thing until early one Saturday morning. My mother had discovered she had no butter in the house for the breakfast and had sent me down to Geraghty’s shop to get some.

It was so early that the shop was only just opening. As I walked into the porch that led to the door that opened sideways into the shop, I was quite surprised when the other door at the back of the porch opened suddenly. This was the door that led to the stairs to Geraghtys’ flat over the shop.  A man looked out and saw me, then quickly closed the door again. It was so quick that I could almost have imagined it, but I was pretty certain that he had black curly hair.

So Mrs Geraghty was in with the spies after all! Maybe they kept their transmitter upstairs! I couldn’t wait to tell Aidan. I knew he’d be raging that I had got ahead of him in the spy-catching competition, but that was why I was the leader of our gang. I went into the shop and asked Mrs Geraghty for the butter. “You’re up bright and early, young man”, she smiled. I smiled back, not letting her know that I now knew she was a secret agent. But I had to admit to myself that she was very good at it. She was the picture of innocence, even humming to herself as she weighed and wrapped the butter before handing it to me and taking the coupons.

Aidan didn’t believe me when I told him about it. “Don’t be stupid”, he said, “That was only Mr Geraghty. He has black hair.”  When I reminded him that Mr Geraghty was away, he said that maybe it was one of the lodgers. Everyone knew, he said, that the Geraghtys kept lodgers, just like his Auntie Judy had to do after his uncle had died. He said he heard his mother talking about them once. But I wasn’t convinced; I thought he was just jealous of my discovery. 

The very next day, on Sunday after Mass, Aidan came rushing up to me outside the church. “Guess what!” he hissed.

My mother and father were only a few yards away.

“What?” I hissed back.

“You were right. She is a spy!”

“Who’s a spy?” my father said, overhearing us as he came back from buying the paper from the man at the other church gate. I told him Aidan was talking about some new film that was coming to our local picture house.

“Fillums!” my father said, “Your heads are too full of that oul’ nonsense!” He shook his head and messed up my hair, then took my mother’s arm to walk home.

When they were safely out of earshot, Aidan proudly told me that he had sneaked out of his house early that morning and gone down to keep watch on Geraghty’s shop by himself. And sure enough, he had seen our spy coming out the door with a bag of food and making his way down a back lane that led to Granny Gormley’s house.

“Which door?” I asked him.

“The shop door, of course”, Aidan said, exasperated. But I said that didn’t prove anything. The man I’d seen was peeping out of their house door, the one that led upstairs to their flat. “You only saw him coming from the shop”, I pointed out, “so he could just have been buying groceries like before. The other man, the one I saw was probably a new lodger, like you said.” I knew I was nearly arguing against myself now, but I didn’t want Aidan to be one jump ahead of me.

We still hadn’t settled that argument when, about a week later, the police surrounded Granny Gormley’s  house – and us – or me anyway, Aidan having had the good luck to get away before the shooting started.

It turned out that the two men were only bank robbers, who had shot and wounded someone while they were trying to rob yet another bank, and had then been chased by the guards until they lost them.

Some time after all the excitement had died down I was in Mrs Geraghty’s shop getting some messages for my mother, but I had to wait while she served another customer, Miss Foley from up the road. My father, whenever she was mentioned, would say, “that oul’ busybody”, and my mother would always tell him to shush.

I was pretending not to listen as they talked.

“Wasn’t that dreadful, Mrs Geraghty, about poor Inspector Dunne getting shot”, Miss Foley said. People always called each other Mr and Mrs – or in some cases Miss – in those days, even though they bumped into each other every day.

“Terrible”, said Mrs Geraghty, weighing a few rashers on the scales. 

“And is it true” Miss Foley said, “that they were buying all their .food here?” 

“Who”, asked Mrs Geraghty, taking one rasher back off the scales.

“Those blackguards of course”.

“Who told you that?” Mrs Geraghty looked a bit cross. I thought for a minute she was going to turn and accuse me.

“Oh”, Miss Foley said vaguely, “I think one of my neighbours heard it from one of the guards.”

“Really?, said Mrs Geraghty, “Will there be anything else?”

“Four sausages”, said Miss Foley, “So they did come in here then?”

Mrs Geraghty frowned as she separated the sausages from the big string of them that were hanging from a high hook behind the counter. “Now that you mention it, when I saw their picture in the paper, I thought it looked like one of them. A fellow did come in a few weeks ago, but when I saw he had no ration book or coupons, I showed him the door.”

As she packed the rashers and sausages into Miss Foley’s shopping bag, I wondered why she was looking so sad.

Miss Foley reached to take the bag and said, “I suppose they’ll both be hung for it. Shooting Inspector Dunne I mean.”

“Both?” said Mrs Geraghty in a small voice. I thought she was going to drop the bag; her hand had started to tremble so much.

Miss Foley nodded grimly, reaching for the shopping bag. .

“But”, said Mrs Geraghty, “How could they do that? I mean, they couldn’t both have shot him.”

Miss Foley said, “Well, that’s the law.” She looked as though she might like to hang them herself, but then she paused, glanced sideways at me, and lowered her voice before saying, “That’s of course if either of them did it.”

Mrs Geraghty was puzzled by that, which seemed to please Miss Foley. “I heard it might have been an accident”, she said.

“Really?” Mrs Geraghty’s eyebrows shot up; they always reminded me of little black arrows. “But that wasn’t in the paper.”

Miss Foley said, “Ah, but sure we all know, don’t we, that they can’t print everything they want in the papers these days. Because of the war.”

“But sure what has that got to do with the war?” said Mrs Geraghty. “It’s not as if they were German spies or something!”

Miss Foley shrugged. “No”, she said, then seeing me looking as if I wasn’t listening, she lowered her voice again, “but they say Inspector Dunne did something years ago in the Civil War, and that the brother of someone who got killed then was one of the other guards.”

“What other guards?” asked Mrs Geraghty, frowning again, as baffled as I was.

“The guards that raided the house”, said Miss Foley as I edged closer, “They say it was one of them shot him.” 

Mrs Geraghty put a hand to her mouth, looking worried and surprised at the same time. “So you’re saying it wasn’t an accident then?” she said

“Oh, I’m not saying that!” said Miss Foley “but you know the way some people talk.”

“Oh yes,” Mrs Geraghty, with a sudden smile that surprised me, ““I know all about that all right.”

She handed Miss Foley her shopping bag, adding, “It doesn’t take much to set the tongues wagging around here, Miss Foley.”

I thought Miss Foley looked a bit red in the face as she turned to go. Mrs Geraghty winked at me behind her back.

That made me go a bit red. She had lovely long eyelashes.

CHAPTER 4

A few months after he came to our school Gearoid Dunne was moved into my class when the teachers decided he was so brainy that he was ahead of all the boys in the lower class he had been put into when he first arrived. Before that, he had been in a boarding school down the country somewhere, but, after his father was killed, his mother sent him to our school instead. He was very tall, and he was very quiet most of the time, I suppose because he was sad. But he was great at sums, which I wasn’t. I was good at Irish because my father was very fond of it, so I used to help Gearoid with his Irish and he helped me with my sums.

He never talked about what happened to his father, and I never mentioned it, but then one day the case of the Leary Brothers was in the papers. Our teacher mentioned it in front of the whole class and told us all we should be proud to have the son of such a brave man as the late Detective Inspector Dunne in our class. Then we all clapped and cheered Gearoid Dunne.

But a short while later I found him out in the bicycle shed.  His nose and his eyes were red. I thought at first that he’d been fighting, but that wasn’t it. He tried to pretend he hadn’t been crying, and I didn’t know what to say at first.

“You must miss your da terrible”, I said at last, but he shook his head and blew his nose.

“I don’t!” he said, “He used to hit me sometimes.” I wondered why he’d hate his father for that; most fathers – and mothers, too – would hit their children every now and then if they annoyed them too much. “A clip in the ear” was what my father sometimes threatened, but rarely delivered.

“And he hit my mother once, too, when she tried to stop him hitting me”, said Gearoid Dunne. That sounded very strange. I’d never heard of anyone’s father hitting their mother before. My own mother and father never even had a row – not in front of me anyway. The nearest thing you’d hear to a row would be when my father did something that annoyed my mother – like the time he tried to throw most of a full coal-bucket into the fire, but missed and sent it all over the floor instead. When something like that happened my exasperated mother would sigh loudly and say “For God’s sake Tom! I knew I should have married Seán Murtagh”; my father, busy trying to shovel the coal up off the lino would say “Maybe you should have, but he was a terrible dancer!” This ritual exchange usually ended up with them both laughing. I sometimes wondered who this mysterious Seán Murtagh was. I found out many years later, and got quite a shock.

Gearoid Dunne blew his nose again and almost glared at me, red-eyed. “Don’t tell anyone else I told you that”, he said.

I told him that of course I wouldn’t. He looked embarrassed now. “I didn’t really hate my da”, he muttered, getting on his bike, “I think he only did it when he drank whiskey. He’d start an argument about nothing at all, and no matter what you answered, it was the wrong thing, and he’d start telling me I was an impudent pup.  He’d shout that he wouldn’t stand for such insubordination and start trying to hit me. The next day of course he’d be mortified and he’d promise my mother he was going to give it up. Then he wouldn’t drink for ages. But at the same time every year he’d forget his promise. Then he’d start to go on about the past and ‘poor Mick Collins, what they did to him.’ ”

I wasn’t sure who ‘poor Mick Collins’ was, except that he had something to do with the Civil War, and that was never really talked about in my house. Or in the houses of any of the boys I knew. If it was mentioned at all, this was usually in the grown-ups’ low voices, with glances in our direction in case we might hear something we were not supposed to hear.

“Was your da in the Civil War?” I asked Gearoid Dunne as we cycled home.

He didn’t say anything for a while, then slowed down his bike and said “Yes, he was. But my ma said not to talk about it”. We reached the crossroads and he went one way and I went another. I couldn’t help thinking about what I’d heard the other detective saying in the garden. I wondered whether I should mention it to Gearoid Dunne.

It was a few weeks after that that I arrived home from school to find Aidan Murphy waiting for me at the gate with a big woolly scarf around his neck. He’d been off sick that day.  (He was very good at getting off sick from school because he’d learned how effective it was to say he had a streptococcal throat. This always worried his mother; she used to bring him regularly to St Blaise’s Church in town for the blessing of the throats, but it never seemed to do him any good).

“Did you hear the news?” he asked before I could get off my bike. “About the Leary Brothers. One of them is going to be hung!”

I nearly fell off the bike. “Are you sure?” I asked him. He was looking very excited. .

“Yes”, he said, “It’s in tonight’s paper!”

I followed him into his house, a few doors away from mine. We went into the kitchen, which was always much tidier than ours. The paper-boy always delivered the Evening Mail to his house; we only got a morning paper.

There was a big headline on top of the page, and underneath it the court report that said one of the Leary Brothers had been in possession of the type of gun that killed Inspector Dunne. Even though it was also a type used by the gardai, the judge said he “wished to put an end to conjecture” that there had been an accident involving crossfire.

I wasn’t quite sure what some of the big words were, but I understood enough.

“But that can’t be!” I said.

Aidan looked at me, surprised. “What do you mean?” he asked.

I nearly asked him did he not remember hearing the detective saying “now’s your chance”, but remembered just in time that of course he had been gone from Granny Gormley’s garden by then. I said nothing; I just shook my head and stared at the paper instead.

“My da was right. He says they’ll be sending for Pierrepoint!” Aidan breathed, avidly reading the whole thing again.

I knew Albert Pierrepoint was the British hangman. It wasn’t all that long since he had hung Lord Haw Haw, and there had been a lot of talk about it in our house because he used to be on the wireless with his funny voice during the war. My Uncle Jack said at the time that it was just as well the British hung Lord Haw Haw, that if they hadn’t he would have been got by some old IRA men because he used to be an informer for the Black and Tans. Uncle Jack knew a lot of things like that. And he could be very sarcastic sometimes: he used to say that even though we were now an independent country, we did not have a hangman of our own, so that whenever there was a murderer to be hung, (or “hanged” as the grown-ups called it), the government always sent to England for Pierrepoint “to do their dirty work for them.”

I looked at the paper again. The hanging date was set. I didn’t know what to do.

I started to tell my older brother Brian about it one night in the bedroom we shared, but he just sighed and told me to stop making up more “stupid stories”. He told me to switch off the light and go to sleep, and not to be reading either and keeping him awake, because he was doing an important insurance exam the next day. He was very good at exams, much better than I was, and he was very good at football too. He used to play for his school team and everyone said he’d be picked some day for Dublin. That was before he got the wheel of his bike caught in the tram-tracks in O’Connell Street and went over the handlebars. Luckily there was no tram coming, but he twisted his knee and had to give up the football.  

I put out the light and tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t even worth thinking about telling my sister, Kathleen. She was still living at home with us then, before she went to live in England. She was older than both of us, so I knew she wouldn’t understand. In fact she’d more than likely tell my ma on me. She could be a bit bossy sometimes, probably as part of her training to be a teacher. So I just lay there staring at the ceiling, worrying and listening to Brian starting to snore. I knew I couldn’t tell my ma or da, because they’d go mad if I told them I’d been snooping around in Granny Gormley’s garden. I’d been warned about that often enough.

I tossed and turned and tried to think of something else instead, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking of Pierrepoint.

____________

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Éanna Brophy

ULYSSES AND THE JOYCE OF GOOGLING

We've just had the first Bloomsday after the expiry of  European copyright on James Joyce’s work. June 16^th – as even non-Joyceans know – is the  day in which James Joyce set his Ulysses – and the date on which he and his wife Nora Barnacle had their first “date” in 1904.

    I’ve never been a Joycean. I’ve hardly ever got beyond a few pages of Ulysses before putting the book down and promising to give it another go some other time. But last year on Bloomsday I picked the book up yet again, and just one random passage – and the ramifications thereof –  brought it home to me in a flash … (and I use that word advisedly) … why so many people – not all of them academics – love delving ever deeper into Joyce’s masterpiece.

    Now, the erudite Joyceans amongst you will have to indulge me while I bring the other 99 per cent of the population the fruits of my amateur investigations. We start on Sandymount Strand, where Leopold Bloom meets a brazen strap who shows him her knickers. But enough of that sort of thing; during his more salacious mental meanderings on this occasion, Bloom briefly remembers a “poor Mr O’Connor” whose wife and four daughters died after eating polluted shellfish from that very strand.

    So who was this unfortunate gent? Was he a literary invention?  I put the book down and picked up my trusty laptop. And within minutes what had started as a brief aside soon brought onto the stage Michael Collins, Peter Pan and Micheal Ó Suilleabháin, author of the Blasket Islands classic “Fiche Bliain ag Fás”. And there are also cameo roles for W.B. Yeats and even Michael Jackson amongst many others.

    It turns out that Joyce’s “poor Mr O’Connor” was James O’Connor, an old Fenian, who was a journalist with the United Irishman when terrible tragedy befell his family in June 1890. His wife and four of his daughters died, despite the efforts of two doctors – in their home at Seapoint Avenue after eating shellfish they had collected from the seashore at Blackrock. Sewage pollution was blamed.
    But one daughter, Moya, survived, and at the age of 18, when her father remarried, she went to London and joined the civil service. While there, she met and married Crompton Llewellyn Davies, a successful barrister. Moya Llewellyn Davies had grown up an ardent republican, and her husband too supported Sinn Fein. They came to know Michael Collins in London, and when the War of Independence began, they were both well placed to give him useful intelligence from within the establishment.
    They moved to Ireland and bought Furry Park House in Killester (it’s now an apartment complex) – which became a safe house for the IRA. Collins himself stayed there – and it is rumoured by some that he and Moya had a “fling”. Other historians say that Moya was a fantasist in that regard, and a nuisance, too, in the eyes of some of Collins’s colleagues.
    But she did smuggle guns for the IRA in her car, for which she was imprisoned. She is mainly remembered today for translating, along with George Thompson, Fiche Bliain ag Fás into English. 
    But what of Yeats, I hear you cry? We go back to James O’Connor to bring him in: he was one of the pall-bearers who carried the coffin of the great Fenian John O’Leary in 1907. And what kind of Ireland, according to the poet, was buried in that same funeral? That’s right: romantic Ireland. It’s still dead and gone. More than ever now.
    Crompton Llewellyn Davies, meanwhile, was rumbled as a spy and lost his job – quite a comedown for someone who had once been a confidante of Lloyd George.
    Crompton, by the way, had several nephews, and it was these Llewellyn Davies boys – George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico –who inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. He used to stay with that branch of the family and took a keen interest in the boys, we’re told. He unofficially adopted them after their father’s death, and paid for their education from the proceeds of  Peter Pan, a huge stage hit in its day. Barrie’s biographers have argued as to whether his keen interest in the Llewellyn Davies boys was an unhealthy one. Some argue that it was indeed unnatural for an adult man to spend so much time playing with young boys; others say that he was an innocent in matters of sex generally – his own marriage to the actress Mary Ansell remained childless. One of the Llewellyn Davies boys was adamant in later life that nothing untoward ever took place.
    But aside from all that, there is also the theory of  “the curse of J.M. Barrie”: many of those who had dealings with him came to tragic ends, starting with the childhood death of his older brother David in a skating accident. And the writer Anthony Lane pointed out that Arthur Lewellyn Davies died from cancer in 1907, his wife Sylvia died three years later; their son George was killed in Flanders 1915, and Michael drowned while swimming at Oxford.
    Which brings us – one way and another – to Michael Jackson – who called his house Neverland.
    To uncover all these connections took mere minutes of browsing the internet. But I must go back to Ulysses now and read a few more lines. God knows what else I might find. Or should that be “Google knows”?
    One wonders what Joyce would have done with such a tool at his disposal. Maybe he’d never have written a line.

 ENDS 

 Éanna Brophy

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN PACKIE SAVED?

A MEMORY OF ITALIA 1990

It was the illustrious Con Houlihan who uttered the best line about the stirring events of 1990. “I missed the World Cup”, he wrote, “I was in Italy at the time.”

Anyone who was alive and in Ireland in those heady summer weeks knows exactly what Con meant: the fevered excitement was all happening at home, unbeknownst to those football fans and media folk who were following the boys in green through the sun-baked cities and stadia of Italy where the games were being played.

But where were you when Packie Bonner saved? Everyone of a certain age can remember where they were when the man from Donegal stopped the penalty kick from Romania’s Daniel Timofte.

Me? I was in France actually. Away from it all. But it was on the quayside at Le Havre (of all places) that I witnessed a scene that revealed the transformative effect on Ireland of  Packie’s momentous save.

The drama had been building slowly over the fortnight of our family camping holiday in France. As we toured with our trailer tent from one campsite to another, I was following – with a somewhat detached interest – the progress of our team, thinking that they would exit at an early stage, glorious in defeat as was the custom. Somehow, we  became aware that Kevin Sheedy had suffered a leg injury, and that this diminished our chances even further.

On an outdoor screen in one campsite, Ireland was playing Holland, and the only team colours being worn by those around the screen were orange. The Irish – ourselves and one other family – were keeping very quiet as the all-star Dutch team dominated the game from start to finish. Not quite the finish of course, because in the dying minutes, Packie lobbed a long ball all the way up to Niall Quinn who somehow scrambled it into the back of the net. Cue sudden loud Irish cheers and surprise on the faces of the Dutch who hadn't suspected we were amongst them.

On the homeward leg of our journey, we were still some miles from Le Havre when the car radio began to pick up RTE Radio’s coverage of the match against Romania. Tension mounted as the minutes passed  and it began to seem possible that it would go to penalties.

Listening intently as we drove, we somehow found the quayside in Le Havre. There was no ship yet in sight, and the place seemed remarkably quiet. In front of us there was a line of cars parked along the quay, some with Irish registrations and others with various continental plates. The ferry was late: we learned later that it had stayed out at sea so as not to lose the television signal carrying the match broadcast.

Ashore, on our crackly radio the shootout started. One all. Two all. Three all. Four all. Then Timofte let fly – and  Packie saved! Suppressed bedlam in our car. Still all was quiet outside. Dave O’Leary lined up. Kicked. And scored. What followed on that quayside was astonishing. Car horns sounded. Car doors burst open. Grown men and women jumped out and began to dance and hug each other. Small boys in green appeared as if from nowhere, waving large inflated shamrock balloons and kicking plastic footballs up in the air and against the warehouse walls.

Inside other cars, the foreigners cowered, puzzled no doubt at this sudden wild display.

And then the ferry arrived. Ramps crashed down and out poured a cavalcade of cars and trucks, all blowing their horns. People leaned out of the windows and waved to us waiting to board. Our lot waved back and blew our own horns.

The occupants of the other cars had by now got out and stood there scratching their heads. Perhaps they told each other this was a traditional ceremony every time the ferry arrived – the wild offshore islanders exchanging greetings with each other as they departed or arrived home.

The man who guided us into our parking place on the car deck was beaming with delight. “You’re going home to a very happy country”, he told us with a choke in his voice. “I’ve just been on the phone to the wife and she said the whole place is six feet up out of the water!”

I was working for The Sunday Press at the time. I turned up I in the office next morning to be greeted by the editor and told to pack my bags. I was to go to Rome. For the match against Italy. “But”, I whimpered, “I know nothing about soccer. I’ve never even been to Dollier.”

“Dalier”, said the editor patiently. My further protestations were brushed aside. “We don’t need expertise, we need colour. And all our other people over there are exhausted.” the editor explained, adding kindly “You’re all we have left.”

With this endorsement ringing in my ears I packed my bags again (adding the Boys’ Guide to the Rules of Association Football) and set off for Italy, where I was greeted by a tattered, sun-roasted, red-eyed bunch of barely recognisable colleagues who greeted me with an enthusiastic cry of “What the f… are you doing here?”

I tried hard to convey to them how things had changed back home. But it was a seasoned sports writer from another paper who told it best. He had been writing about football for 40 years to the complete indifference of his wife. “But I rang home the other night”, he exclaimed, “and the very first thing she asked was ‘How is Kevin Sheedy’s leg?’ ”

And so, just two nights after getting off the ferry in Rosslare, I found myself standing behind the Irish goal, where I had a perfect view of  our new national hero, Packie Bonner. And a view, too, of his nemesis, the man whose name would for years rank alongside that of Cromwell in the hearts of Irishmen everywhere.

Effin Scillachi.

ENDS

© Éanna Brophy