It was a day when the river was a smuggled indigo and the great, farthingale willow-herb was jutting out of the pier and the wintergreen was blossoming in the grass and three Traveller boys, two of them with their shirts off, were swimming a mare.
Connla, who had tangerine-henna hair, tadpole-brown eyes, a choker chain and a smaller chain with a starfish on it.
Felim who had turtle and hazel hair.
Small Taedy who had a platinum crest, dark sides, face and neck stabbed with hair.
‘Get on her back. Get on her back,’ Felim shouted at me when I was in the water.
I got on her back and she immediately threw me, giving me a good kick.
Connla thought I was drowning and jumped in after me. Three months later, a few weeks after I left to live on the coast, in a T-shirt with the words Live Intrusions on it he’d purchased on his American journey earlier that year, Connla was killed in an accident with his van on the way into Limerick.
Connla was brought up in an aluminium caravan on a Travellers’ site off the Holloway Road in London.
In their caravan, beside a picture of Blessed Margaret Clitheroe, was a photograph of his grandparents taken in a Weymouth photographer’s studio against a clock which had the face of Elizabeth 1 on it; his grandmother in a blouse with a sweetheart neckline, another blouse under that, Tara brooch on her bosom, with cuff ribbons, fur-rimmed ankle boots, her pigtails with bushends; his grandfather, who had seen the bonfires burn for the Silver Jubilee of George v on the Dorset Downs, in a suit with a long jacket with padded chest, black Mussolini shirt, aviator-hairstyle having used St John’s wort for hairdressing, hands clasping his chest.
Connla’s grandfather used drive to Ireland to buy holy statues in bulk in Monster House, Kilkenny and sell them to English Catholics. In Connla’s caravan was one of his statues—St Rita of Cascia with a red spot on her forehead.
Uncle Derry, with eyes the blue of the blue in a willow-pattern plate, who had a brindle greyhound in West Limerick and would wear shamrock in September in West Limerick, would sometimes stay on the site in his caravan. He told Connla and his brothers what George 1, who had Punchinello daubs on his cheeks, used do with his Turkish servants Mohamed and Mustapha.
Uncle Derry had served with Major-General Sean McKeown’s troops in the Congo, had been involved in the siege of Jadotville, used ride a grey Syrian stallion by the River Congo with its water hyacinths. Members of the army Cumann Luasclas used fend off bats in their sleeping quarters with hurleys. Beside the pale blue Congolese flag with a yellow star in his caravan was a photograph of a great grandfather who’d served with the Young Jocks in the Boer War; in a Sam Browne belt with a frog, leggings, centre-parted pompadour, frisé moustache. He’d come back from the Boer War and found his wife was having an affair with another man, shot him dead with a blunderbuss from which emerged the leg of an ancient pot and was not charged as he’d claimed he’d found the man raping his wife.
Connla made his First Holy Communion in the Church of Our Lady of Assumption and St Gregory, in a dove-grey suit with black velveteen cuffs, white shirt, white tie, hair cut in a glib—a fringe.
Each year after they saw the Gerry Cottle Circus on Crown Meadow in Bromley Connla’s family, the Dorans, used make a pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in County Mayo for July 27. Patterns they called pilgrimages.
On the way they stopped at the graves of three Traveller children killed in Walsall when squad cars forcibly evicted Travellers from a site, towing caravans away, and who had been buried in Bilston.
Afterwards they’d have bacon and bubble in Wendy’s Café in Walsall. They’d cross Ireland, stopping in Westport, where Connla’s mother said they always had good cakes, to buy French Fancies, iced cups, pink apple slices, walnut slices, cream slices, custard slices.
Then they’d go out past Rockfleet Castle in Clew Bay where Grace O’Malley had lived, who’d captained her own ship on her journey to meet Elizabeth 1 to entreat for her imprisoned son, past Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, through the straits of Dover, into the Thames estuary where boys used swim then, borne up by pigs’ udders; she was received in Greenwich Castle from which Elizabeth had expelled the friars, with its view of the Isle of Dogs, by Elizabeth—who wore cabochon earrings and a poisoned diamond ring—in a cloak of myrtle green, a crimson mantle on her head, in bare feet; Elizabeth held her hand high but Grace was the taller of the women and the Queen had to reach up; a cambric and lace handkerchief was handed to Grace and she flung it in the fire after use and when upbraided for this declared they had higher standards of cleanliness in the West of Ireland; when Elizabeth offered to make Grace a countess, Grace said that was impossible because she was already a queen.
Connla’s mother, who had flaxen and nasturtium hair, always wore a scarf with a pattern of kingfishers for the pilgrimage and cast-off kid pumps.
From Croagh Patrick they’d drive to visit a cousin from the Sperrin Mountains in the Northlands who was in the Magilligan Prison for republican involvement and afterwards the boys would have a swim on Benowen beach beside the prison.
After Connla’s mother had to start getting treatment in St Luke’s, Woodside Avenue, Muswell Hill, the Dorans came to live in West Limerick.
Early in the year he was killed Connla made an American pattern.
In the Famine days a group of Travellers from West Limerick were brought in a ship by a doctor to Québec from where those who survived dispersed to the United States. They used to make a pattern of thanksgiving—a pilgrimage—every year in the United States or Canada. The last pattern was to the Passion Play in Hollywood Bowl in 1949.
Over the decades people with names like Cash, Cade, Colleran, used make pilgrimages to places like the St Katharine Drexel Shrine, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania; the Motherhouse Mission bell used to ring out to say goodbye to sisters leaving in carriages to cross the United States to serve black Americans and Native Americans and sisters would gather near the mission bell and wave snowflake-white handkerchiefs.
The Jesuit Martyrs’ Shrine of Sainte Marie of the Hurons in Midland Ontario. The Jesuits were tortured to death in the 1640s after, having had to burn down their own mission station, their trek, with Huron Indians they’d converted, to Christian Island in Georgian Bay.
The Shrine of St Thérèse, Queen and Patroness of Alaska, a log church, overlooking Lynn Canal, on Crow Island—where a causeway was cut four hundred feet through wild tides from the coast where the great black-beaked gull feeds on dead calf whales. In Alaska Eskimo sleighs were decorated with the figure of St Thérèse of Lisieux.
The Shrine of Our Lady of Peace at Niagra Falls. In 1678 the Franciscan Father Louis Hennepin was the first European to sketch the Falls at Niagra. In gratitude for the beauty of this place Father Hennepin nailed a cross to a tree overlooking the Falls and offered mass to a congregation of Seneca Indians. The site was terminal for the railroad which aided the escape of slaves from the Southern States. During the American Civil War, when General Grant issued an order expelling all Jews from Tennessee, Pope Pius IX dedicated Father Hennepin’s site to Our Lady of Peace. It was consecrated during the Civil War by Archbishop Lynch who travelled by steamer from Toronto.
In New York Connla saw photographs of the pilgrims; women in Breton hats, astrakhan hats, dresses with pagoda shoulders, standing beside priests in priests’ homburg hats and black Ford Model T cars at St Philomena’s Shrine at Cherokee Village Arkansas, Shrine of the Sacré Coeur in Montreal, Shrine of St John Neumann in Philadelphia, Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Milwaukee Wisconsin, Dickeyville Grotto Wisconsin, Shrine of St Jude Thaddeus in Chicago, Church of the Seven Dolors in Minnesota.
Connla had driven south from New York in a Barracuda, stopping at Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, down through Georgia with its flag with the Cherokee Rose blowing, through Alabama with its flag with goldenrod, stopping at truck stops where he heard Erskine Hawkins sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ and Bob Willis and his Texas Cowboys, across to California where he visited the San Carlos Borromeo Mission in Carmel Valley. In Southern California he saw the blue heron and in Northern California the black albatross. Then he drove to St George Byzantine Church on the Northwest Pacific coast.
Before I left for the coast he gave me a postcard of an ikon of Our Lady of Tenderness he’d bought there and he told me a story about how his great grandfather had travelled from Weymouth once to see Joseph O’Mara, who’d been educated in The Crescent, Limerick, and had sung in St Michael’s Church Choir, in Lohengrin by Wagner—in a Prussian helmet with a spike and a demon-red cloak—sitting in the gods.