Acts of Allegiance Read online

  When Bobby spoke, his decaying upper teeth were visible, despite his moustache.

  ‘That’s a good one coming from you,’ the Gent said.

  ‘You move with the times, you move with the times,’ Bobby said.

  ‘Ho-ho!’

  Uncle Ted, freshly washed, in a clean white shirt, appeared from the kitchen.

  ‘Bobby was just saying we’d have been better off if we’d been in the war,’ said the Gent and rolled his eyes. He operated a small abattoir at the bottom of the hill, where the wails of dying pigs could be heard three days a week.

  ‘All I said was, you move with the times,’ Bobby said.

  ‘A lot of money moving north of the border since the war,’ Uncle Ted said and settled into the armchair just inside the door. ‘A lot of money.’

  ‘And you would know what’s happening north of the border,’ said the Gent with mild sarcasm.

  ‘American money,’ Uncle Ted said, ‘American money. I’m listening to them talking about it up there every night.’

  ‘Put the doily under the pot, Angela,’ said Granny Kane.

  Granny’s terraced house was one room wide and two rooms deep, with a kitchen tacked on behind. The narrow hall, in which Bobby partly was standing, was floored with tiles; the staircase to the floors above was covered in a carpet that my aunts had laboured on for years, snagging little loops of red wool on to a cloth backing.

  ‘Pa bought pigs up there in the old days,’ said the Gent and became temporarily unfocused, his right knee bobbing with a life of its own. ‘Before any border.’

  ‘God give him peace,’ Granny Kane said.

  ‘Up there a lot of them still think there’s no border,’ said Uncle Ted with a quick smile and Bobby Gillece laughed.

  Wide-shouldered and tall, Uncle Ted owned a coal round that supplied that part of Waterford. When I first saw him hoisting a heavy bag of coal on each shoulder, I just knew he was the strongest man I had ever seen.

  Auntie Angela laid the cups, saucers, spoons, linen napkins, the teapot and a silver tea-strainer on the table, and went back out to the kitchen with her head down. Amplified radio static could suddenly be heard upstairs, like a series of small explosions.

  ‘Turn it down, Iggy!’ Uncle Ted shouted.

  ‘Jesus! If that young fellow blows the fuses again, I’ll brain him,’ said the Gent.

  ‘Boys will be boys,’ Granny Kane said. ‘Isn’t that right, Marty?’

  I began to blush. I was shy and hated it when people noticed me.

  ‘Where are Marty’s mammy and daddy?’ asked Bobby Gillece, all innocence.

  ‘In England. On business,’ said the Gent, closely examining his fingernails.

  ‘Where do they go to in England, son?’ Bobby asked and I could see the slyness in his look.

  ‘To London,’ I replied.

  ‘London,’ said Bobby gravely. ‘Hmmm. A big city.’

  ‘Pa went to White City once,’ Granny said. ‘To back a dog.’

  ‘My father has business interests in London,’ I said.

  ‘And what business interests might those be?’ asked Bobby and winked in the Gent’s direction.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll tell you himself the next time you meet him,’ said Granny with a thrust of her little chin.

  ‘Only enquiring, only enquiring,’ said Bobby.

  ‘Marty likes it here; he goes to school with Iggy,’ said Uncle Ted. ‘Two cousins sharing the same desk. Isn’t that right, Marty?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Ted.’

  ‘He’s got some build on him for a young fellow,’ said Bobby Gillece, and his gaze, curious and lingering, hung on me for an uncomfortable moment. ‘How old is he at all?’

  ‘I’ll be eleven at Christmas,’ I said, the way I knew my father would have.

  ‘Eleven,’ said Bobby in wonder, as if my age had now joined a list of matters that needed to be explained. ‘Some size for eleven.’

  Auntie Angela reappeared with the next instalment of the afternoon tea, just as Iggy ducked beneath her tray. Auntie Angela let out a tiny scream.

  ‘You little fairy!’ said Ted and playfully batted Iggy’s ears.

  My first cousin was small for his age, with straight fair hair, a noticeably square head and high cheekbones that stood out beneath restless blue eyes. He held out his hand to Granny.

  ‘Ah, will you look, another one,’ said Granny without enthusiasm and briefly inspected the tiny wooden cat that Iggy had made upstairs. ‘Thank you, Ignatius.’

  ‘He’s a very good boy,’ said his father, pulling Iggy to him. He caught his son’s face in his big hands and kissed him. ‘How are the babies at all?’

  ‘She’s feeding them,’ Iggy said, then turned and looked intently at me.

  ‘I don’t like them in the house,’ sniffed Granny, her little mouth crimped into a tight purse. ‘I hate the smell of them.’

  Iggy’s penetrating stare switched between me and Granny Kane. His mother, one of Uncle Ted’s customers, had fled to London after his birth, preferring the dangers of the Blitz to the scorn Waterford held for an unwed mother, I had heard it remarked.

  ‘Give out the napkins first, Angela,’ said Granny.

  The front door could be heard opening in a squelch of draught-proofing, and Bobby Gillece’s head snapped to the right.

  ‘Ho-ho!’ said Uncle Ted.

  ‘Is that Stanley?’ Granny asked.

  ‘Hel-lo!’ Auntie Kate was rubbing her hands. ‘It’s cold out there.’

  ‘Come into the fire, Kate,’ said Granny. ‘Where’s Stanley?’

  ‘How would I know, Mother?’

  ‘He said he’d be back in ten minutes an hour ago.’

  ‘He’ll be grand, Mam,’ Uncle Ted said with his quick, disarming smile.

  ‘He brought me in a bucket of coal an hour ago and I haven’t seen him since,’ Granny said.

  ‘Hello, Bobby,’ said Auntie Kate as if she’d just noticed him. ‘You mustn’t be very busy today.’

  ‘I am busy,’ Bobby Gillece said. ‘Very busy. I just called in to say hello.’

  ‘Start without me,’ Auntie Kate said as she went to the kitchen and I was presented with a brief glimpse of her nice legs.

  ‘We’ll come out of this one day,’ said the Gent, taking a cup of tea from Auntie Angela. ‘In the meantime, go for the Corporation. You’ll skate in.’

  Bobby Gillece’s longing gaze was fixed towards the kitchen.

  ‘No thanks,’ he said when Auntie Angela tried to hand him a cup and saucer, ‘I have to get back to work.’

  ‘Have a cup of tea, Bobby,’ said Granny.

  ‘No, thanks, honestly, Mrs Kane. I have to get back,’ said Bobby, although he did not seem to want to. ‘We have a contents auction on Monday.’

  Iggy and I, sitting on the floor beside Uncle Ted, shared a plate of cake and were served our tea in china mugs. Iggy looked over at me and smiled. Upstairs in the bedroom, where he slept with his father, was a workbench with assorted radio transceivers and a soldering iron. Above the bench was pinned a photograph of three youths, in their teens, their caps pulled low, standing beside the running boards of a Morris Oxford Saloon. Each of them had a pistol stuck into his belt. Someone had scrawled ‘The Flying Squad—1939’ on the bottom of the photograph. Iggy had told me that the youth on the left was his dad. On the other side of the car, in those days without a moustache, stood Bobby Gillece, who was Iggy’s godfather. The face of the third gunman was slightly blurred and Iggy did not know his name.

  ‘Marty might give me and Iggy a hand some days after school,’ Uncle Ted said, ‘coming up to Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure if that … ’ Granny Kane began.

  Auntie Kate came in and crouched beside us, her bare knees level with my chin. She had recently started work in the Munster & Leinster Bank. ‘So, how are my two boyfriends?’ she asked and ran her fingers through my hair and Iggy’s. Over her shoulder I could see Bobby Gillece’s Adam’s apple rise and fall. ‘Wh
at have you two been up to?’

  ‘My cat had eight kittens,’ Iggy said, and suddenly smiled, ‘but only three lived.’

  ‘Ah, dear,’ said Auntie Kate. ‘But sure, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it?’

  ‘Best kitten is a drowned kitten,’ said Granny.

  ‘I’m not drowning them,’ Iggy said.

  ‘Don’t speak like that to Granny,’ said Uncle Ted.

  Although Iggy was staring at the floor, I could see his eyes going at speed, back and forth.

  Bobby Gillece straightened himself. ‘I must be off.’

  ‘If you see Stanley, tell him to come home,’ said Granny, which seemed to make up Bobby’s mind for him.

  ‘I will, Mrs Kane, of course I will,’ he said and prepared to leave.

  ‘I worry about his chest when he’s out this long,’ Granny said.

  ‘He’s a grown man, Mother,’ said the Gent.

  ‘He’s got a weak chest,’ Granny said. ‘He picks up anything that’s going.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out for him, Mrs Kane,’ said Bobby. ‘I’ll bring him back here myself if I see him.’

  ‘Wrap up, Bobby,’ Auntie Kate said as she poured tea and sat on the arm of her mother’s chair.

  Bobby’s face flooded with gratitude and his teeth came into view. ‘I might drop in later,’ he said.

  ‘Tell your mother I was asking for her,’ said Granny.

  ‘Bobby’s a racing certainty if he runs for the Corporation,’ said the Gent as the front door closing confirmed Bobby’s departure. ‘I don’t know what’s stopping him.’

  ‘He never stops talking, that’s for sure,’ said Uncle Ted.

  ‘He’s very good to Stanley,’ said the Gent. ‘Buys him sweets, doesn’t let corner boys bully him.’

  ‘I just wish Stanley was home,’ Granny said.

  ‘Right.’ Auntie Kate put down her cup and saucer. ‘Marty and Iggy, put on your coats, go out and find Uncle Stanley and tell him he is to come home immediately.’

  4

  WATERFORD

  November 1951

  The tang of salt and bottom mud rode the east-blown river air. By the wall in Jail Street, a chew-eared tabby cat oozed away.

  ‘Here, puss, puss!’ Iggy called.

  In the Christian Brothers, where I sat beside him, Iggy was beaten on the hands with a thick leather strap. These almost daily punishments arose from him failing to read aloud properly, or at all, in either English or Irish, or failing, or refusing, to write in those languages. Iggy’s seeming indifference to being flogged drove our celibate teacher to new heights of venom. My cousin’s expression of watchful awareness changed little during these beatings, although when the brother hoisted him off the floor by the hair, Iggy did cry out.

  We ambled into the yard on Jail Street, with its lean-to, where Uncle Ted kept coal for bagging and his piebald mare. The smell of horse dung was strangely comforting and reminded me of the yard in Waterloo. Inside the shed, a square chimney breast soared to a shelf on which a blacksmith’s rusting anvil had been placed, presumably to make room for coal. Iggy scampered up the black escarpment and edged out along the shelf. From behind the anvil he lifted a jam jar half-full of toffees.

  ‘I steal them from Uncle Stanley,’ he said as we sat, legs dangling. Through a gap in the slates, I could make out the spire of the Dominicans.

  ‘What if he comes in here and finds them?’ I asked.

  Iggy gave me one of his looks. ‘He can’t climb, stupid. When he follows me, I come up here and eat his sweets so he can see me. When he starts to shout, I throw coal at him.’

  I could not understand why Iggy would not want to learn to read and write, but the fact that he did not, and was prepared to suffer for it, made him a hero to me. And if I said, ‘Why don’t you read it when the brother asks you?’ Iggy would look at me pityingly, as he had just done.

  ‘Maybe he’s fallen into the river and drowned,’ Iggy said and unwrapped a toffee. ‘Or maybe he’s swallowed his tongue. My da says Uncle Stanley sometimes swallows his tongue. My da says we might soon be moving to south Armagh.’

  ‘My father says we may move to London,’ I said, recalling late-night discussions in Waterloo. ‘He does business there.’

  Iggy scoffed. ‘In Armagh we’ll have our own house and a farm with chickens and pigs,’ he said, as if the life that awaited him would always be better than anything I could come up with.

  It would be years before I learned that Iggy Kane, who had nearly died from measles as an infant, was severely dyslexic, an affliction unrecognised in 1950s’ Ireland. Uncle Ted ignored the complaints from the school: he had seen his son at the workbench upstairs, making tiny cat sculptures from lumps of wood, or helping him to rebuild the RAF Bomber Command receiver that Uncle Ted had bought from someone in Omagh.

  ‘D’you know Granny Kane has to wipe Uncle Stanley’s arse?’

  ‘What?’ I cried.

  Iggy laughed. ‘I seen her. Auntie Kate is nice, though, isn’t she?’

  The mention of Auntie Kate raised in me sudden new yearnings.

  ‘Bobby Gillece likes her, I think.’

  ‘Of course he likes her, stupid,’ Iggy said, and climbed to his feet. ‘She gives me money and I let her hug me.’

  I caught the anvil to pull myself up and it teetered alarmingly.

  ‘Bobby Gillece gives me money too,’ Iggy remarked as we clambered down the hill of coal and the mare let out a blast of alarm, ‘but I don’t let him hug me, although he wants to.’

  ‘I’d hate it if he hugged me,’ I said.

  ‘He kissed me once, in the kitchen, and then gave me sixpence,’ Iggy said. ‘His breath smells like shit.’

  I was never given money, I reflected; in fact, accepting money from anyone was strictly forbidden at home and, on one occasion, when a visitor to Waterloo had given me a half-crown as thanks for my giving up my bed, and I had proudly shown what I had been given when he was gone, the Captain had grabbed the coin, rushed outside like a crazy man, and thrown it in the lake.

  Although I was much bigger and broader than him, and could hold my own easily in playground fights, I longed for Iggy’s acceptance. Unlike me, he lived in a world free of instructions, except at school, and there he ignored them. Where other boys used their fists to protect themselves, or their voices to protest, all Iggy’s armour lay in his penetrating light blue eyes. Those eyes, which saw only jumbles of incoherent symbols on a page, and which could make no sense of the shapes he was required to make with a pen, comprehended instantly how to strip a transformer out of an old radio and use the insulated copper wiring as a receiving antenna.

  5

  WATERLOO FARM

  1951

  Our home had begun as a stone cottage, but over the course of a century a number of additions had been made, in some cases on two levels. Outside, a stable yard and sheds had gone up, one by one. The result was a straggling collection of buildings tacked on to the side of a mountain. The farm had been purchased by my mother’s great-grandfather, Hubert Ransom from Dover, a government land surveyor, who had mapped the land around our mountain for the first time on the day of the Battle of Waterloo. He decided there and then to become a farmer, and bought the holding for the price of a first-class railway ticket from London to Liverpool, the story went.

  My grandfather Ransom had commanded respect in the area, despite his eccentricities, which included making his own clothes and always walking into Waterford, despite the fact that he could have ridden. Nancy, my mother, was the last of that line; Paddy, my father, was Paddy Kane from Fowler Street, Waterford, but in deference to the looming extinction of the Ransom name in those parts, when he married he changed his name to Ransom. Soon afterwards, when I was born, he joined the British Army, took part in the liberation of Europe and reached the rank of Captain. My mother told me in later years that the war had changed my father, turned him inside out. It was to his great credit that he had survived it, she said, but in order to do so, h
e had had to change. He returned to Waterloo as Captain Ransom, and became known as the Captain, an entirely different person to Paddy Kane who had left Waterford a few years earlier.

  Apparently the Captain had wanted to have me baptised in the Church of Ireland, like the Ransoms, but my grandfather, Pa Kane, had got wind of the plan. A delegation sent out from Waterford told my father that he had a week to bring me into the Catholic cathedral or Waterloo would be burned to the ground.

  It was all gloriously disorganised. Bantam hens thronged the haylofts, lambs and pigs wandered the yard and in summer store cattle were left, more or less, to their own devices. Two staff were employed: Danny, who groomed the horses and fed cattle in winter, and Eileen, from Glenmore, who cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed. Danny lived nearby and was paid erratically; Eileen, who lived with us, came from very poor circumstances, and was seldom paid, on the basis that she was being housed and fed, and that her position was more of a privilege than a job. She had pushed me in my pram, and fed and changed me, and had been the one who saw me take my first steps. As I grew older, she hovered around the fringes of my presence with an anxiety that greatly annoyed the Captain.

  ‘Christ, that bloody woman drives me mad!’

  Danny occasionally took off after tea and returned in the dark with a horny mountain ewe, whose throat he’d slit and, having saved its blood in buckets, hung from a beam, and skinned. The sheep’s vividly naked body steamed gently. Later, Danny laid it out in the kitchen where Eileen butchered it. Danny then packed the meat in a barrel of salt.

  Danny encouraged me to steal my parents’ cigarettes, which we smoked together in the orchard, or behind the wall of the pigsty. My dog, Oscar, a collie mongrel that Danny had found in Mullinavat, curled at my feet as I learned to inhale. Danny was easily moved to discuss women at such moments, all of whom he described, even those he admired, as cunts.

  It was sometimes hard for me to grasp that the Captain’s mother was Granny Kane and that the people who lived in Fowler Street were his brothers and sisters. Although once or twice in Waterford, when I had been with him, he had met Uncle Ted for a drink and told me later that Ted was his favourite brother, in general he preferred not to talk about his family, even when I came home from Fowler Street with enough sausages and bacon to keep Waterloo fed for a month. I once remarked that I liked his sister, Auntie Kate.