THE NEXT THREE DAYS in Behan’s company became an odyssey. Automotively I had graduated up from my unreliable small red van, which one raged over, kicked and often had to abandon in a ditch with sparks jumping across wires hanging out from behind the dashboard and then proceed on foot. As I would tramp forward cross-country in the mud, often in darkness, I swore to never own an automobile again.
But from my automotive engineers in Greystones, I was suddenly able to acquire a sedate sedan once the property of the Protestant Bishop of Meath. This dignified vehicle with its blue leather coach work started merely by pressing a small ebony button and could then accelerate to roll along at a steady forty or even fifty miles an hour. The smudged, crumpled and stained manuscript of Borstal Boy sticking out of his jacket side pocket, Behan seemed to revel upon his enthronement on the front seat, issuing imperatives as to where we might go from the options presented. The first selected being to pay a visit to Ernest Gebler’s estate, Lake Park, an idyllic lodge nestled in its grove of pines above in the Wicklow Mountains.
From Kilcoole, we drove westward to Newtown Mount Kennedy, a village at the foot of a steep lane which rose to heights called Kilmurray. As happened on any journey with Behan, the need soon arose to visit a pub. Indeed, in open countryside, a good excuse was always required to pass one by without paying one’s respects. And it had to be admitted that once inside this frequently dimmer and darker austere world, one was often relieved and glad to escape into where beer would temporarily brighten the spirit. It was where too, Behan would give his best performance as not only a brilliant mimic but in his ability to quote ad lib British laws and legal statutes, reciting chapter and verse and declaiming the more famed decisions handed down by British judges in the English courts. He could similarly quote from the Bible and even reduce to astonished tears those poor Protestants who would attempt to match skills with him and who did not possess, as he did, a photographic, encyclopedic knowledge, which even the most fanatically erudite Presbyterian in the world would envy. Behan now making his desire known to visit a pub by mimicking and declaiming as a clergyman might in giving a sermon from his pulpit.
“Verily I say to thee my dear brethren in the name of Jesus, who was unfairly tacked up crooked on the cross, that it behooves us to partake of immediate liquid refreshment or be beaten within an inch of our lives with bound copies of that God-fearing newspaper The Catholic Herald.”
In walking and roaming the streets and his voice carrying near and far, Behan had the quality of a pied piper. And he took much pleasure in his biblical indulgence, especially as there was nothing quite as lonely and doleful as being a Protestant holding as they did their prayer meetings on a bleak Dublin evening and to which not a single passing pedestrian ever paid any attention. And Behan, at every opportunity, made references to religious convictions they espoused and sung out to Dublin’s unlistening ears, his most oft repeated favorite being,
“I know that my redeemer liveth.”
And these words now recited as we entered just inside the door of the pub in Newtown Mount Kennedy. Behan delivering his vowels in the most heartfelt of heartfelt manner, bending his knee in genuflection and striking it with his fist. And as he did so, an old man, clearly at the end of his life, emerged out of the shadows. It was as if he sensed Behan, who continued his religious declamation to the empty air, to be some strange oracle or faith healer who could cure the sick. And upon this early afternoon as we drank our pints of stout in the pub’s semidarkness, the old man described to Behan his recent operation, which produced his presently unpleasant smell from a bag he carried under his clothing. But the infirm gentleman did not offer to buy Behan a drink, as would be regarded as normal with any Irishman joining another at any bar the world over. In Behan’s eyes, to neglect to do such was heinous in the extreme, Behan turning his back to the old man, and as we left the pub he was scathing.
“The dirty, filthy, disgusting old eegit. Miserly salted away money all his life and now is afraid of dying and of leaving the money behind that’s clinking in his pocket that you couldn’t prize out of him with a crowbar. Wanting sympathy on the edge of the grave and wouldn’t offer to buy you a drink.”
Back in the car, we drove up the steep hill to the tableland a thousand or so feet higher, Behan referring to his professional calling as a house painter and that it was unhealthy work. We proceeded over the bridge crossing the Corporation of Dublin reservoir and into which Behan, for the sake, he said, of maintaining its beneficial properties, insisted we stop and he take a pee. Ceremonially describing, as he pissed, the minerals he was wholesomely adding to Dublin’s water supply. But I was, and am to this day, still taken aback by Behan’s vehemence concerning the sick old man. Although not that much later, I was soon to learn myself on another fateful occasion that the greatest sin any man could commit in Behan’s eyes was that of not buying a drink when his turn came while a man had the money in his pocket to do so. But on this day, we had reached Roundwood. From this village it was less than two miles along a winding narrow road to Ernest Gebler’s estate of Lake Park. This commodious once shooting lodge in its wooded setting stood hauntingly on the side of a hill sloping down to and overlooking the shiny black waters of Lough Dan.
Now, in any house with female staff, Behan’s first act as a guest was to make familiar, first in conversation and then in activities. Although at times extremely shy himself, he would always make an overture to embrace those he regarded as his working-class brethren. If they demurred, they were then immediately disdained and gently goosed with at least one of his noticeably stubby fingers. If this produced no appropriate reaction, a long discourse would follow as Behan would assume membership of the Salvation Army and pronounce his surname in a double-barreled manner:
“I Brendan Bee-Hawn stand against the devil’s evil traits. The Lord shall root out all deceitful lips and the tongue that speaketh proud things shall here and now cover you with licks and kisses.”
Behan achieving a momentary complacency in his victim with his oratory would then make an outright grab. Which he did for Gebler’s stoutly built cook, Bridget, who was about to marry Gebler’s gardener, Micko. Bridget tolerantly and good-naturedly giggling uproariously but then screaming as an encouraged Behan attempted familiarities beyond playfulness and chased her up and down the stairs and through the halls. Meanwhile, Gebler, a reticently serious gentleman, took a poor view of his help being interfered with and was anxious that Behan either behave or be gone.
Gebler, too, had been reared in the slums of Dublin and knew Behan as a little, bare-arsed, belligerent boy swimming in the city’s Grand Canal. But unlike most would-be writers in Ireland, Gebler had by dint of implacable application already become what any of them would term an international best-selling author. And was now exhibiting the fruits of what only an ambitious and dedicated writer could accomplish. His second book called The Plymouth Adventure, concerning the story of the Mayflower, was about to become a Hollywood movie, and money poured in from this best-selling work. Gebler too had recently become married to an American girl, Lea, also of Hollywood and who had been raised there, the daughter of Leatrice Joy of the Ziegfeld Follies and John Gilbert of the silent screen. This attractive lady took no such staid attitude as her husband did to Behan and was not at all alarmed by his antics. Indeed, with her stunning singing voice, she and Behan sang duets together. In fact, things, as they became musical, were going altogether well. However, although I was eagerly welcomed by Gebler, his wife maintaining I put him in a good mood, Behan in my company soon made the pair of us personae non gratae.
Behan, upon once seeing the lough below in the valley, was soon off in search of a swim. Taking with him as an entourage the entirety of the female staff of Lake Park to witness him undressing and jumping into the black ice-cold waters. And in Behan’s normal naturist manner, all this seemed innocuous enough. But what became soon more conspicuous was the reinforced echoing sound of Behan’s profane and obscene language which, shouted out, was now bouncing hillside to hillside from glen to glen and to the ears of Gebler’s devout neighbors. As Behan, standing naked up to his arse in the ice-cold water pounded his chest in the manner of Tarzan and declaiming the more mild of his blasphemies,
“Will you give me another sup now of the almighty fruit of the juice of Joseph and the eternal spit of the horn most high.”
Behan, now having well and truly worn out both our welcomes at Lake Park, huffily presented his own suggestion of another nearby destination. And so, motoring through the coconut-scented air of the golden gorse in bloom, we went on our way to the next port of call. While heading out the long Lake Park drive, Behan spoke in his sometimes shy, stammering and apologetic way.
“You know, Mike, I’d like to say a few things in respect of the bit I’ve now read of that writing you’ve got back below there in Kilcoole. I see you got me mentioned and I am proud to be there in your book, described as I am down in the Catacombs, where I often was when Dickie Wyman was the original proprietor of the place. I remember he once gave Valerie a bouquet of snowdrops with the words, Ah, my dear, I give these to you as they are scarcely suitable for me as a symbol of purity. Now in the same way I’d be paying you a compliment over your book. It’s altogether a great book and one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read and the words on those pages will go around the world. And I took the liberty of making a few suggestions in the margins. Now I’ll tell you one thing that you’re doing that’s very wise. Not a soul of them fucking jealous bastards in Dublin knows you’re writing it. Not that I’ve come across anyway. You’re a good man to keep a secret. And I remember when I came to buy the guns from your rooms in Trinity, that you never let on that the guns were stored there.”
Behan was recalling a time when he and another appeared one afternoon in my rooms at 38 Trinity College, where they came to examine and negotiate over the guns, which for some time had been kept in brown paper parcels on top of my bedroom wardrobe. Behan, however, was wrong in assuming I knew such packages held firearms, and for the weeks that they remained stacked in my bedroom I had no idea of the contents. Being then far too busy with wine, women and song. And if Noctor, my servant, knew, he chose not to make mention of it. But one day following a game of tennis, I returned to number 38 having lent my key to this charming Divinity student whose packages had now long-resided in my bedroom. And there is no doubt that I was apprehensive upon seeing laid out across my sitting-room table an array of lethal submachine guns, pistols, rifles and automatic weapons alongside their appropriate boxes of ammunition. Such having been brought south on the train from Belfast to Dublin by this undergraduate friend reading Divinity. A steely-nerved son of a minor baronet, who’d been much battle-hardened in the Second World War in the African desert and landing on beachheads and fighting across Europe. And at the end of hostilities, he had collected numerous weapons and memorabilia, which, upon being demobed, he shipped home to his father’s estate in the north of Ireland. Sounding out the possibilities of selling these, he discovered through Behan the interest of the IRA.
“Now, Mike, all those great guns you had there in your room. When did you know we were going to steal instead of pay for them.”
Now Behan also thought I was ultrashrewd as an arms dealer because he and his accomplice, having struck a bargain with the steely-nerved baronet’s son and having said they would come back in forty-eight hours with the money, planned instead to meanwhile steal the weapons. But they didn’t reckon with the prescience of my steely-eyed friend, who was far ahead of them and had the weapons that very afternoon the deal was agreed, taken away to another safe place, where they were later sold to a group of Orangemen who had their money ready and by the sound of them were not averse to being up to their knees in Catholic blood and up to their knees in slaughter.
“Now, Mike, I’ll say this about you, no one would ever guess you were an arms dealer and gunrunner. And clever enough at it too.”
My denial of being a gunrunner only encouraged Behan to believe it was true. But it was the steely-nerved baronet’s son in a series of trips from Belfast to Dublin who brought the guns to my rooms. Arriving each week and braving customs with brown paper parcels to put on top of my wardrobe. And often on the train having to sit with the muzzle end of a rifle barrel sticking up out of his shirt collar. And as the train conductor would invariably notice the gun barrel while taking my friend’s ticket, he would be met with the steeliest of stares, which indicated he’d best go quickly about his business. My friend would then proceed like a wooden-legged cripple, with guns down both trouser legs, to as nonchalantly as possible stiffly stagger through the ticket barrier into Dublin. And even did this once while lugging a valise full of Lugers.
With the heathery Wicklow hills passing, Behan and I had now proceeded southward a brief distance down the road to Glendalough, where lived one of Behan’s own longtime friends, Ralph Cusack. Although another case entirely from Ernest Gebler, this charmingly eccentric Anglo-Irish gentleman occupied a large Victorian mansion in its sylvan grounds, where he grew tulip bulbs for export. He was both a practicing artist and writer. As well as being of a romantic bent, Cusack exuded humanity and tolerated and perhaps even encouraged Behan’s transgressions of polite behavior. However, despite his forbearing charm, Cusack could equally be of a violent nature and especially in respect of his pictures he’d painted. And should you be crassly foolish enough to venture a disparaging word concerning them, Cusack would not hesitate to perforate such canvases over your head, where they might remain as a large garland around your neck. This usually being done unsuspectingly from behind at mealtimes in the dining room just as you were finishing your pudding and before the ladies withdrew to allow the port to be passed among the gentlemen. But as violently rude and unyielding as Cusack could be to those to whom he took exception, he was overwhelmingly welcoming and kind to old friends. And on this day with actual tears in his eyes, his arms were open to embrace a wet-haired, bedraggled Behan stepping from my dignified automobile.
“Ah, my dear, dear Brendan, how good it is to see you.”
“And, Ralph, I’m glad to be seen still alive and to be able to declare my patriotism in the battle to make this island into one indivisible nation. For according to Einstein’s law of relativity and the bending of light, won’t we one day soon, and before anybody else does, put a shamrock-branded, baptized mouse on the moon.”
“Dear boy, you are the true noble savage who was preordained to inhabit the Elysian Fields and the Garden of Eden. Come now and join me for wine in our arboretum in which tranquility reigns this sunshiny day.”
One felt sure these befrilled words were euphemistically spoken to soften the prospect of Behan having during his visit to be taken to task. For staying with Cusack were two maidenly and mildly lesbian English guests, Winifred and Lydia, who were notable authorities on the Pre-Raphaelite period. And these ladies had in their tweeds and stout brogues been for a long tramp on the heathery hills to sketch wild-flowers and were soon to have afternoon tea on a terrace which enjoyed a splendid view down a westerly vista across Cusack’s lawns while the playing of a madrigal from Cusack’s ancient gramophone with its great horn came through the open French doors. And the tea had not been that long served and cups refilled and the hot scones slathered with whipped cream and dolloped with damson jam when the ladies’ attentions were distracted from their auction house catalogues by a most odoriferous fume wafted to their nostrils.
“Oh dear, whatever wretched smell might that be, Winifred.”
As the ladies glanced westward in the direction of the gentle breeze, there suddenly at the end of the flower-bordered prospect, and beneath a white marble plinthed statue of Aphrodite, crouched a grunting, defecating, trouserless Behan. His buttocks gleamingly exposed to the ladies. Who at once rose to their feet and shrieked. Behan, his back facing the commotion and wondering at the disturbance on the terrace, stood up and turned and, seeing the ladies, waved his considerably tumesced organ at them. Whereupon both of these gentlewomen swooned in a dead faint. Behan, not meaning to have made such a strong impression, immediately sauntered up to the terrace and, while dipping a scone in the whipped cream, dolloping on the damson jam and chewing away, was peering down upon the unconscious faces when Ralph Cusack, who had been taking me on a tour of the tulips, came running to see what the matter be.
“Ah, Ralph, wasn’t I below there discreetly enough hidden by the shrubbery relieving myself to make room in my digestion for a massive bowl of food I had there earlier at Mike Donleavy’s when I heard screams and found the pair of these emotionable, well-bred ladies here fallen out of their chairs.”
However, upon this their day of departure, the ladies Winifred and Lydia upon their recovery told a different story to their host. Both bitterly complaining of the unsanitary and uncivilized nature of the event they’d had to witness and the disgustingly filthy penis-wagging habits of the Irish. When this news was related by Cusack to Behan in the privacy of the library, where Behan had gone to read, it met with a violent outcry, especially regarding the words describing the penis-wagging Irish. Behan raging and railing against the hypocrisy of British middle-class morals and values.
“The no-good pair of them tweedy, unctuous, fucking pharisees. Having the audacity to complain of an Irishman having an Irish crap on Irish soil. And what’s more, in the fresh air and within the territorial freedom of the present republic.”
Although, and usually at a discreet distance, having witnessed Behan’s culpability on many an occasion, Behan now sounded so convincing in condemning the primness of the ladies that I, with an irrepressible desire to always be fair, found it difficult to take up sides in the matter. Especially knowing the purgative nature of the concoction Behan had mixed at Kilcoole, and into which one forgot to mention had also been dumped a jar of sauerkraut and one of molasses. However, the ladies had had a goodly dose of smelling salts to revive them and now having packed to travel were recovered somewhat from their ordeal and in the drawing room they were now further calmed by Cusack’s administration of large snifters of brandy. And to whence Behan came with tears verging in his eyes. For he much admired Cusack and the last thing he wanted to do was to distress him. So Behan, shuffling forward with bowed head, proffered with his outstretched hand the most abject of abject apologies, to which the ladies replied,
“You beast, you worse-than-senseless thing.”
Behan stunned, retreated. Back out the drawing room door and into the hall. Sad at first, he was then overtaken with smoldering fury. Sarcastically repeating again and again in his best and astonishingly authentic English pukka accent, the words, You beast, you worse-than-senseless thing. Indeed so often did he say it, it appeared he liked the sound and then began to chant it to a musical tune. But had these poor ladies Winifred and Lydia known of the revenge they were inciting by rejecting Behan’s apology, they would have instead professed delight at the opportunity of witnessing his exercising his bowels on the lawn. And perhaps even put a small suitable monument there. For Behan gave them something unspeakable to take with them in their picnic basket back to London. To so commemorate and remember him by. And which upon its unsavory discovery caused both of these mildly lesbian ladies to faint again.
Right
In the
Middle of their flight
Back to
Civilization