At a booth table in a bar in Iowa, a nearby field of early Quaker graves, stones with no name on them, under snow, an exile from Clare, in an Eskimo parka, who teaches students, some of them as tall as Arthur Rimbaud, over a rainbow-rayed cocktail, told me, during a brief stopover on a Greyhound bus journey, about the colossus of a garda sergeant with earthed barley-sugar hair and eyes that were the grey-blue of his uniform—a goalkeeper who’d won six gold medals—who used to cycle a Darley Peterson of army green to a remote rocky swimming place in Clare during the Second World War and seduce the boys among the white thrift, the bird’s-foot trefoil, the kidney vetch, the white rock roses, the buachalán—ragwort—the scarlet pimpernel, a brief Dionysian dispensation about this place—boys with lobster-coloured body hair holding broadcloth shorts or knit briefs or olive-drab briefs with V-notches to themselves in a moirdered way, while a harem of lamenting seals looked on.
The man returned one winter from his university in Iowa, where he had a girlfriend, who wore glitter jodhpur boots, who’d lived in a monkey colony in the mountains before fleeing the Chinese Revolution, with whom he went to look at the Colombian sharp-tailed grouse and the whooping cranes, and revisited the swimming place—the boys in the nearby town in their laurel-green school jackets like the boys from Plato’s Symposium now—a few cubicles newly built with a lifebuoy alongside them, a porpoise thrashing in the mica of sleet in the winter rain.
In a local speakeasy he’d been told the story of how the paediatrician widow of a Royal Irish Constabulary inspector, murdered in County Wexford in 1920, after his death presented a painting she’d purchased in Edinburgh to the Jesuit community in Dublin and that recently the painting was discovered to have been by Caravaggio who loved painting boys.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, took photographs of naked Italian boys.
But the garda sergeant took photographs of naked Irish boys and had them developed by an accomplice in Ennis, where the Code of the Irish Constabulary had been printed in 1820.
Boys with rousse-auburn hair and cranberry pubic hair. Walnut hirsute. Heron’s features or faces like young kangaroos. Some with hair the orange of the pheasant in ascent. Others with Creole curls. Many with identical passion-fruit lips.
Frequently a Woodbine cigarette in the mouth of a nude. A few of them reclining like lizards. One or two in yachting caps like the man on the Player’s cigarette packet and nothing else.
There were nudes in sunglasses. Nudes with Lucania bicycles. Nudes with hurleys.
It was hurling in east Clare and football in west Clare and it was mainly footballers he photographed.
Very occasionally there were Falstaffian interlopers from Garryowen and St Mary’s rugby teams in Limerick.
A man who teaches in the Gothic St Flannan’s College in Ennis still has a photograph taken by the garda sergeant.
Boy with pompadour quiff, in belted scoutmaster shorts, standing against the rocks where frogs live in abundance, hands on the rocks, his chest thrown forward, Lana Turner-style.
It was not forgotten in County Clare that during the War of Independence, in Dublin, some boys shot British agents in their beds, some beside their wives.
Then, as they were being searched for in the city, they played a football match. A few of those boys later went mad and ended up in mental homes.
Michael Cusack himself, who’d founded the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884, was from Carron in County Clare.
It had never been forgotten that shortly after the Irish defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in County Meath, where Gaelic football was particularly popular and used to be followed by wrestling, some Wexford men crossed to Cornwall, tied yellow ribbons around their waists to distinguish themselves, and trounced the Cornish men at hurling.
Nor was it forgotten that after the Battle of the Boyne the victors had sung ‘The Protestant Boys,’ composed by the Marquis of Wharton, frequently sung by Lord Byron’s friend, the County Clare poet Thomas Dermody, as ‘Lillibulero.’
The Gaelic Athletic Association spread like prairie fire in the years just after its foundation, Michael Cusack said.
One of the first football teams used flour bags as jerseys.
The Gaelic Athletic Association turned up en masse to Parnell’s funeral in 1891, to which his widow in Brighton, Kitty O’Shea, was afraid to go.
On the day the Second World War broke out Kilkenny was playing Cork in hurling in Dublin, a day of thunder and lightning and rain, Kilkenny winning with a decisive point from a man from Castleshock.
Roscommon won the All-Ireland football final that month.
Often the Clare boys went to Ballinasloe to play games, where the football star Michael Knacker Walsh was from, staying in the workhouse, singing ‘The West Clare Express’ in the showers: ‘It spends most of its time off the track.’
Connaught finals were played in St Coman’s Park in Roscommon and these were a treat because the people of Roscommon town opened their houses as guesthouses for the occasions and served spice cake and butterfly buns at their hall doors.
People converged on the town in thousands on bicycles for these occasions.
At the end of September some of the Clare boys journeyed to Dublin, staying in the Grand Hotel, Malahide, to see the All-Ireland football final for a cup modelled on the Ardagh Chalice.
On these visits to Dublin it was mandatory, in suits with long jackets and padded chests, to call in on the all-day cartoon show in the rich-crimson, basement Grafton Cinema, which sold claret, port, rum and champagne gums in the foyer, and to admire the interlaced roundels and the floriated scrollwork of the Book of Kells in Trinity College.
A few of them went to a production of The Duchess of Malfi at the Gate Theatre in which all the actors wore hearse-cloth costumes.
O, this gloomy world.
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
The garda sergeant was a great fan of John McCormack and in the barracks at night on a gramophone he’d play John McCormack singing Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Rachmaninoff’s ‘When Night Descends,’ Handel’s ‘Tell Fair Irene,’ Earl Bristol’s ‘Farewell,’ ‘The Short Cut to the Rosses,’ ‘The Snowy Breasted Pearl,’ ‘Green Grows the Laurel,’ Villiers Stanford’s ‘Lament for Owen Roe O’Neill.’
He himself was known to sing the renowned ballad, ‘The Peeler and the Goat,’ about a drunken goat who was impounded by an Irish Constabulary officer in County Tipperary.
In the nineteen-thirties and -forties, while the rest of Ireland suffered, it was common to have garda sergeants who were libertine or even bohemian.
Garda Sergeant Clohessy was from Galway city and, in the extreme viridian of Galway before it changed to maroon and white and in snowflake-white calf stockings, used to play football with the Kilconierin team.
In the years just after independence, his hair Rudolph Valentino-style, he went to train as a guard in the Phoenix Park Depot, where sick members of the Royal Irish Constabulary used to wear bottle blue to distinguish themselves from the rifle green of their healthy colleagues, sleeping on a triple bedboard.
He began taking photographs of other garda recruits in woollen-bib swimming costumes with striped trim on the trousers of the trunks on Jameson’s Beach in Howth with a Wollensak camera.
He was among two hundred and fifty pilgrim gardaí, whose organization had been founded in the Gresham Hotel, Dublin, shortly after the Treaty, who travelled to Rome in the autumn of 1928, met at the umber Rome Central by the staff and students of the Irish College, parading to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, wearing medals with the cradle-blue ribbons of pilgrimage on their uniforms with buckram-stiffened high necks, addressed and lauded by Pius XI whose predecessor Pius X, on the occasion of his jubilee, had been entertained with bagpipes by the son of a County Galway Royal Irish Constabulary Officer, in full kilted uniform, shown the paintings of the Vatican Gallery by a priest from the Irish College; the carmines, the damasks, the loganberries, the coral reds, the cyclamen red, the rose reds of the St Jerome of Francesco Mola, the St Jerome of Girolamo Muziano, the Deposition of Christ by Caravaggio, The Vision of St Helena by Veronese, the Martyrdom of St Erasmus by Poussin.
But it was the statue of Caesar Augustus with his double forelock and parade armour, which attracted the most attention, who, the priest told them, put a serpent nearly ninety feet long in front of the Domitium and decreed crossroad gods should be crowned twice a year, with spring and summer flowers.
Back in Galway, stationed in Eglinton Street Barracks, he won his medals, playing in places like Parkmore, Tuam and Cusack Park, Mullingar, wearing a Basque beret on the field.
The Galway team had a trainer then, who used to cut pictures of Greek gods out of books and frame them, who’d take them to Tuam where they’d stay in Canavan’s Hotel and eat lashings of boiled potatoes.
He’d have them run for miles as far as Greenfield where they’d jump into Lough Corrib.
In 1934 Garda Clohessy travelled with the Galway team on the Manhattan to the United States, sighted the petrel known to sailors as Mother Carey’s chicken in the eastern Atlantic, heard Guido Ciccolini who’d sung at Rudolph Valentino’s funeral.
The former commissioner of the guards, who’d been received by Benito Mussolini and a goose-stepping cohort during the pilgrimage of 1928, relieved of his post earlier that year by Mr de Valera, had become leader of the Irish Fascist Movement in 1933,
In November 1936 five hundred of the Irish fascists turned up in Galway to sail for Spain and fight for Franco.
Thirty-four of them had a last-minute change of mind and turned back.
Two of the Irish fascists were shot on their arrival in Spain by Franco’s men because of their strange uniform.
When a French actor in a greatcoat, known in Galway for his performance as a French revolutionary murdered in a bath, was giving street performances in Eyre Square in September 1937, Garda Clohessy was promoted to sergeant, given a uniform with chevrons of silver braid on the sleeve, and transferred to Clare.
Ned Hannaford’s circus was playing on his arrival; an entrée act of a giraffe-necked woman in gold-leaf brassiere and trunks on a Suffolk Punch horse followed by United States cavalrymen; Poodles Hannaford in a leopard-skin loincloth driving six Rosinback horses of flea-bitten hue tandem, standing astride; a brief scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream accompanied by Catherine wheels . . .‘kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle’; pigmy African elephants waited upon by baboons in frock coats.
In Rome Garda Sergeant Clohessy had been told by the priest from the Irish College how Lucius Aemilius Paullus had deserters in the war against Perseus trampled to death by elephants in the Circus Flaminius.
An English fair used to come to the town, where some of the houses were painted Wallis Warfield Simpson blue, each year before the war and the gaff boys, many with the common features of Venetian-blonde hair—dark mottled with blonde—and dead-white lips, and wearing costume rings, used to swim in the swimming hole.
It was these that Garda Sergeant Clohessy started his nude photography on, with a Voigtlander Prominent.
Some of the local boys left with the fair and themselves stood around the dodgems and gondolas and ghost trains as gaff boys in places like St Briavels in Gloucestershire.
The Clare Champion featured one of the garda sergeant’s earliest efforts, that of a football star from Fedamore in County Limerick, with auburn cockscomb, eyes the blue of the gentians that grew in places where wintering cattle had curtailed the hazel trees, after some triumph.
What The Clare Champion didn’t know was that at the football game at Killarn the garda sergeant photographed the football star, with the chest of an Eros the Spartans used to sacrifice to before going to war, in shorts with gripper fasteners on Dunbeg beach, the youth’s hands on his crotch, against the sea, which was the colour of shillings that magpies would steal, on a day the Irish leaders de Valera, Cosgrave and Norton took their seats at a pro-neutrality rally in Dublin, and afterwards, without his shorts, lying face down, among the purple saxifrage of the dunes.
To ease his reservations Garda Sergeant Clohessy cited the mature Apollo Belvedere, naked but with a paludamentum—cloak—the Belvedere Torso on panther skin that had inspired Michelangelo, the boy who combats naked with a goose, Bernini’s near-naked Daniel with sideswept, cricket-boy hair, all in the Vatican Gallery.
A youth from South Hill in Limerick, ash-blond hair and barley-coloured freckles, his left nostril murdered, cut away in a pub brawl, was among those photographed.
Hands in the black bog rush, legs provocatively apart, head thrown back in abandon.
As the Allies were landing in Sicily and there were riots in Hollywood, some girls with braids like Pippi Longstocking arrived in the swimming hole but they were chased away with a stick by the garda sergeant.
People came to the sea on donkeys and carts then; crubeens—pigs’ feet—were proffered for a penny. There was a café near the main beach run by an immense Italian man, which sold sea bass, soft cod’s roe.
An American film about Charles Stewart Parnell starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy was brought from Limerick in cans and shown in the parochial hall, where there were photographs of Pope Pius XII and of Cardinal Franz von Galen von Löwe of Münster, and afterwards the garda sergeant’s boys mingled with the holiday-making girls from Limerick, many of them wearing flared linen trousers, and led some of them to the fields, which were a festival of orchids.
Tramming the hay, building cocks of hay it was called then, and Christian Brothers, on leave from schools around Ireland, were employed to tram the hay.
Garda Sergeant Clohessy even convinced a Christian Brother with cowslip-coloured hair and eyes the blue of the Peloponnesos where the two seas meet, to pose in the nude.
A boy with a sea-cow belly took a photograph of Garda Sergeant Clohessy and in it he looks like Caesar Augustus: Roman nose; accentuated, slightly feminine lips; pennon neck; cauliflower ears.
The previous June he’d been photographed leading the Corpus Christi procession through the town, women in coats with large collar-revers and boxy shoulders immediately behind him.
Someone had put a bunch of cornflowers in front of a nearby shrine that told: ‘My name is Jeremiah Marriman. I built this shrine in thanksgiving for being cured. Also for my son Loughlin. Thanks be to God and Our Blessed Lady’—red, orange and white plastic flowers in front of a picture of Thérèse of Lisieux, a little statue of Christ beside a black snail with citron rings.
The Spanish Armada ship San Esteban had floundered in the vicinity and its crew did not suffer the fate of the Spanish Armada ship whose crew had been massacred by Dowdarra Roe O’Malley in County Mayo, but had married in the neighbourhood and sometimes when Garda Sergeant Clohessy took a photograph he was confronted by an ebony-haired boy from the land of El Greco who, if he wasn’t painting portraits, was conducting lawsuits.
Cromwellian soldiers had chopped off the head of a monk in the uplands where the hen harrier preyed on young rabbits and young hares.
Sometimes when he photographed he was photographing boys with burnt-orange hair and Wedgwood-blue eyes who were descended from soldiers from the English midlands.
Goats came down the slope and looked as he was photographing some boys from Limerick city with Marlovian grins and lamp-black hair who would hang about the truck stop at Harvey’s Quay in blanket trousers and seersucker shirts and stand under the trees in Arthur’s Quay Park at night or sit late at night in the Treaty Café.
In deference to the goats who were present the garda sergeant sang a bit of his song about the goat:
‘“Oh, Mercy Sir,” the goat replied, “and let me tell my story-o.”’
The Emperor Heliogabalus had been a teenager, he told them, wearing long purple Phoenician garments, embroidered in gold; linen shoes, necklaces, jewels, rouging his cheeks and painting his eyes, appointing actors to the most important posts in the Empire, murdered with his mother Soaemias, by his own soldiers and their bodies thrown into a sewer that ran into the Tiber.
But it was generally agreed that the garda sergeant’s most beautiful model was a Jewish refugee from Prague with doe-like limbs who lived in the town for a few years during the war.
‘This is what we fought and died for,’ the naked garda sergeant greeted the boy on his first arrival at the swimming hole in riding breeches, golf stockings and a thistle dicky bow—a bow with flaps that opened out at both ends—when the comfrey was in white bloom on the sea slopes, before it turned blue.
Father Coughlin’s broadcasts in the USA against the Jews were famous in Ireland.
The boy could talk to the garda sergeant about Boccherini, and about Mozart who’d sojourned in a Naples-yellow house in Prague.
The boy’s family had brought a reproduction of a painting with them from Prague, which they put in the hall of their house where his mother, who wore culottes as she partook in table quizzes with the local women, made plaited challah bread; a little boy in grey and he had the same polo-pony features as the Jewish boy.
Black bow tie with white polka dots, Eton collar, double-breasted grey suit, straw hat in right hand, toy Pomeranian biting hat, a little greenery behind the boy, left hand in pocket, straw-blond Eton crop, forget-me-not-blue eyes, prince’s apricot smirk.
The boy’s hand accidentally touched a gull’s egg, light olive with spots of umber, as he was being photographed.
A boy who had been used to a bathing establishment on the Elbe in an Irish summer; a towel slung over one shoulder like a Roman exomis.
The chough lived here—the crow with red legs—a raven lived near here, the natterjack toad—yellow stripe down his back—roamed here. Gannets frequently made passage by the swimming hole.
A light bib-top, which is usually joined with a zip to dark trunks but the trunks removed—fire-red body hair.
At night the boy would go to the garda station with cherry-and-sultana sponge cakes his mother had made and tea would be served on a tray with the Guinness pelican in the penetralia of the garda station, which was dominated by a framed picture of Venus with Adonis’s naked leg wrapped around her and he and Garda Sergeant Clohessy would listen to ‘Song of the Seats,’ ‘Farewell and Adieu to You,’ ‘Sweet Spanish Ladies,’ ‘So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.’
As a trainee guard in Dublin, Garda Sergeant Clohessy had heard how a lock of Byron’s hair in a locket had been lost in Kildare Street and he cut off a curl of the Czech boy’s hair as a keepsake.
Lord Byron had loved John Edleston more than any human being.
The boy left with his family to live in a house with Virginia creeper on it, which was the red of splodges on a baby’s bottom, in the autumn, when de Gaulle entered Paris, but not before he told a Jewish story to the gathering at the swimming hole, a torch of monbretia on the slope above, about a migratory bird with feathers so beautiful they were never seen before, who came for the winter and built his nest at the top of the tallest cedar, how the king ordered a human ladder to be built to the top of the tree so that the bird and his nest could be brought to him, but the people at the bottom of the ladder grew impatient because it was taking so long and broke away so that the ladder collapsed and the bird was never inspected.
On his arrival in Dublin the boy sent the garda sergeant a postcard of an Eros with flashing forget-me-not-blue eyes, in a wolfskin surcoat, playing a flute.
The parenthesis lasted until the end of the war when two nuns picking burnet roses for the Feast of St Colmcille saw a naked man with naked boys washing themselves with Pears’ and Lifebuoy soap.
A stamp featuring Douglas Hyde, the first Protestant president of Ireland, was omnipresent at the time and Des Fretwell and his Twelve Piece Orchestra played at the Queens Hotel in Ennis.
The nuns were stronger than the garda sergeant and swiftly got word to a superior and the garda sergeant was transferred to a border county, where the football team wore ox-blood red, when Lord Haw Haw who was from the Lough Corrib country of north Galway, who’d disparaged the naval vessel Muirchu on German radio in a nasal voice the result of a broken nose at school, was executed in Wandsworth Prison, and more or less never heard of again except for a sighting by some Claremen who’d accompanied Canon Hamilton of Clare at the Polo Grounds, home of a baseball team, when on the only occasion ever, for the centenary of the Great Famine of 1847, the All-Ireland football final was played outside Ireland.
He was also fleetingly seen at the Commodore Hotel afterwards among the swing dancers, in a hat with the crown flattened into pork-pie shape, with a young man who had a butch cut.
Others said he was sighted on Jones Beach, Long Island, where Walt Whitman used to go with an eighteen-year-old Irish boy, Peter Doyle, to look at the sea fowl, in 1949, which would lead one to believe he decided to settle in the United States.
A garda sergeant in Ennis, a vigilant agent for the Censorship of Publications Board, ambushed Garda Sergeant Clohessy’s friend in Ennis, leaping out of hens’ and chickens’ shrubbery at him, and seized a major part of Garda Sergeant Clohessy’s archives, which also included a picture of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane, a golden-haired boy-child and an ape seated on the branch of a tree, and they were never seen again.
From the end of the war people dared only swim in the swimming hole in full regalia, except for an English painter with a Vandyke beard, who’d sit on the rocks in nothing but a rag hat and who referred to the sea by the Greek word thalassa.
Young married Traveller boys, many with hair dyed sow-thistle yellow, meet in the town now the first week of August each year, parking their caravans by a football field or on a cliff head, swimming together last thing each evening in the swimming hole in mini-bikini briefs, or boxer shorts with Fiorentina players, or cerulean moons, or in cowboy-faded denim shorts, joining the elderly men who come here in safari shorts, ankle socks, baseball caps, before they move their English-registered caravans to the Killorglin Puck Fair.