Puckoon Read online

  It was dark when Constable Ah Pong had followed the poacher Rafferty to the vestry of the church. Peering slant-eyed through the window he saw five men donning ragged clothes and whispering. So! Rafferty was the leader of a poaching gang.

  Disgrace to Ireland! The men were putting pliers and knives down their socks, two were coiling ropes round their waists; their blackened faces made identification impossible. By removing his helmet, remaining still, silent and subservient, Ah Pong could hear the conspirators' conversation.

  ' It will take five of us to lift it.'

  Ah Pong was puzzled - even more difficult, he was puzzled in Chinese.

  'What is it poachers caught that took five men to lift?'

  He would wait and see. He ran to a tree as the vestry light went out and five shadowy figures came silently from the back door.

  Goldstein was tying a handkerchief over his face.

  ' I got to wear it,' he said. ' If anyone sees my nose Rabbi Brody will have me up fer helpin' Catholics.'

  Commando-like they tiptoed noisily towards the barbed wire and were swallowed up in the night. His boots round his neck, Ah Pong tiptoed after them.

  Chapter Ten

  How he'd got on to the wrong side of the border was beyond the comprehension of the idiot Foggerty. He'd been dancing happily alone at the Halloween Ball in the Corn Exchange. Everyone was dressed as a witch or a banshee. Him never having seen either was put to improvising. Foggerty had whitened his face, stuck three chickens' feathers in his hat and painted the sleeve of his overcoat yellow; as an after-thought he stuck little balls of cotton wool on his trousers and boots. He hadn't won a prize but people had pointed him out. He was well pleased. He had gone outside to relieve himself when the country gas supply had failed. In the dark he lost his direction and sprayed all over a man called Flood, who gave chase with a stick. For an hour now he had been stumbling oaf-like across unfamiliar territory.

  ' Hellooooooo!' he wailed. 'Helloooooooo! I'm getting the hang of this,' he chuckled.

  There was no moon; even with it, Foggerty would have been none the brighter. So, collecting evening dew in his hat and calling 'Hello!' he wandered into Northern Ireland, a strange and awesome sight. Even a hungry black panther skulked to the safety of the trees. In his flight Foggerty stumbled over two bodies on the ground. 'Opsss, sorry,' he said, disregarding the rock they threw at him. They waited till he had gone, then continued in their practice of the noble art of nudism, or sunbathing as some say. These two were coming to the end of a long hard day.

  On this dark night the sun tan oil glistened on their undulating skins. Locked in a passionate embrace they rolled hither and thither, backwards and forwards through the bushes, drenched with rain, their bodies adhered with passion and clay. They had travelled some thirteen miles like this, not ideal travel but economical.

  Watching from the safety of a tree was a man called D. H.

  Lawrence. He made a hurried note.' This will make a damned good novel,' he said and hurried off to his Queen's Counsel.

  The two sunbathers were now ecstatically groping each other and travelling up a slight incline. For several pubic hours they had fought to extricate all the animal pleasures that were locked in their heaving bodies. Mutual steam was rising from their loins, and the nearest fire brigade ten miles away! Oh, for a bucket of water! Her protruding breasts were pressed flat between his body and hers. He had felt them, he had fondled them; he lifted them, he pressed them, he weighed them, he valued them, he counted them, he massaged them, he stood back from them, he pulled them, he sat on them and picking up a banjo he played them. She clawed at the grass, she clawed at her hair, she clawed the air, she dug her nails into the earth, she dug them into his buttocks.' Ouch!' he said. Their two mouths were locked in the vacuum of a kiss taut with pulling tongues. Their buttocks tightened and relaxed in never-ending bursts of uncontrollable thrusts of hot coursing gyrations. Inside her, great earthquakes of seminal delight were coursing through her body. He took her nipples in his mouth and drew them into pulsating erection.

  'Naughty!' she said. How she loved him, how she worshipped him, this silly old soft-hearted one-eyed negro Lascar off a coaling ship at Belfast. Now the black piston of Africa was helping to cement black-white relationships. He could return to Kenyatta and say the white people love us, let's go back for more. It was over. They lay back gasping.

  Next day she took him to meet 'Daddy', the Marshal of the County, Lord Cecil Kasingbroke, v.c, d.s.o. It was the first intimation he had of his daughter's colour blindness. Umboko had run from the stately home, his yellow suit shattered by gun-fire and bull mastiffs, the tribal seat pulverized with buck-shot. For weeks he was unable to sit down, even worse, he couldn't stand up. It did, however, prevent white members of the crew having recourse to a certain unsavoury sailor habit.

  The heavy metal cutters minced through the barbed wire.

  O'Brien had cut close to the wooden posts. Father Rudden at his side gave the thumbs up sign. Through the gap, the five men crawled towards the grave of Dan Doonan, rapidly becoming the most travelled corpse in Ireland. Milligan, in the van, cast anxious eyes towards the sentry three hundred yards to their left. A light from the guard hut glinted on the soldier's bayonet. The five men moved to the temporary shelter of an ancient mulberry.

  Only one hour before two ragged-arsed men had hid in the self-same place. They too had felt for the grave with the loose earth. Soon they were digging up the coffin of Dan Doonan.

  'Strange dis t.n.t. doesn't feel so heavy now,' said Shamus.

  'No, it doesn't,' said Lenny struggling manfully alone under the weight of the coffin.

  Father Rudden led his men forward, his hand too felt for a grave with loose earth.

  'Funny, I could have sworn it was over there,' said the Milligan as the shovels set to work. Soon the coffin of 'Mrs Eileen Spoleen' with its 200 lb. of t.n.t. was rising.

  'Freeze!' said Goldstein.

  The party stood, knelt and lay transfixed as a soldier came suspiciously forward. He held his rifle at the ready, he came closer. He stopped, looked cautiously left and right, placed his rifle against a tree.. .. The dirty swine! No wonder the place was starting to smell. They heaved on ropes, sweat was pouring down Milligan's arms.

  'Freeze!'

  The bloody sentry was coming back; the diggers, gasping, lay flat and still, the ropes cutting their hands.

  'Anybody out there ?' called the soldier. ' If there's anyone out there say so and I'll fire.' He raised his rifle.

  Milligan looked imploringly out of the page. ' For God's sake don't let him shoot, Mister.' The soldier about-turned and marched away. Milligan grinned.

  'God, you got all the power in this book.'

  He stroked the stubble on his chin. 'You havin' the power of de author, can I have a request ?' 'Yes.'

  'Dat dirty soldier that nearly pissed on us, make him do something that will get him into trouble.'

  The soldier returned to his post, sloped arms, fired three rounds in the air, dropped his trousers and sang Ave Maria. The Sgt of the Guard came hurrying from his tent.

  'Private Worms?' he shouted, 'You're under arrest.'

  A powerhouse raspberry was the reply.

  'What's going on here?' said Lt Walker, arriving pyjama-clad on the scene.

  'I'll show you, sir,' said the sergeant, and inexplicably launched into a series of cartwheels, back somersaults and impressions of Al Jolson in Maltese.

  'Both under arrest for being drunk and disorderly. Turn out the guard.'

  At the command, the guard assembled and watched him, the Lieutenant, return to his tent with a series of animal noises and great backward leaps on one leg. What would his father Field Marshal Walker, m.c. and Bar, say? Nothing; at this self-same moment he was performing the same feats before his puzzled sovereign at the Passing Out Parade at Sandhurst.

  Milligan watched the Lieutenant's antics with a great piano-keyboard smile.

  ' By Gor, you got the p
ower all right. I wish I was a writer.'

  O'Mara put his great shoulders to the rope and pulled the coffin towards the church. 'God, he's heavier since he died, it must suit him.'

  They all headed for the church leaving Milligan to fill in the grave.

  Ah Pong lay lynx-like and silent in a tree of his own choosing. He was about to descend when two shadowy ragged-arsed figures carrying another box headed in the opposite direction. Shamus and Lenny heard a sneeze above them and were hit by a bare-footed falling Chinaman. Running with a coffin-cart they disappeared, firing their pistols in all directions. Ah Pong replied with a burst of whistle-blowing, took a pace backwards and disappeared into an empty grave.

  The guard turned out and opened fire.' The i.r.a. !' went up a cry.

  A bewildered bugler in underpants blew the lights out and put the whole camp in darkness. Webster leapt from his bed into the po.

  Barring-ton fainted in his sleep. Father Rudden and Co. dropped their coffin and ran like hares for cover. Incendiary bullets criss-crossed the night sky, verey fights burst in the darkness.

  Private Dawson saw a gamboge Chinese face arising from a grave and promptly did in his trousers what cascara takes 24 hours to do.

  ' Halt, who goes there ?' he said, hurriedly tearing up a newspaper.

  Quaking with fear the Chinese answered in Pekinese and was immediately fired at in Gaelic. The shot knocked the top off his truncheon. Hysterically he walked up the grave wall and ran chattering into the night. 'Sod that for a lark,' he said. He really was getting a grip on the language.

  It was 4.32. The firing had died away. There was an uneasy silence. The soldiers strained their ears. Then from the distance came the unmistakable sound of an unidentified noise.'

  Helloooooooo!' it went. The voice was strange to them, but not to Foggerty. The corporal made a signal to his men.

  ' This might be a trick, hold yer fire till I give three short blasts on me whistle.'

  'Hellooooo!' It was coming closer. Running. Ah Pong tripped over Milligan's shovel. Heroically he blew three blasts on his whistle, and Foggerty received the full ballistic weight of B Coy's fire power.

  The moon came out, its silver beams streaming through the bullet holes in Foggerty's trousers and hat. Life is a matter of majorities, either you have one or you haven't. Right now Foggerty was outvoted.

  The dawn came up like thunder out of China across the bay. It didn't do that in Ulster. Shivering and swearing, Lenny and Shamus scraped the hoar frost from their faces and pushed Dan Doonan's coffin into the bushes.

  'We can't hang around here, Lenny, they'll be looking for us on both sides now. What bloody bad luck. We'll leave this t.n.t. there till the hooha dies down.'

  Lenny nodded woefully as he arranged the bracken on top of the coffin. Sad yes, this little lot was supposed to blow up that police station at Durragh. The sound of a bugle being bugled broke the morning silence. Lenny hid behind Shamus.

  'Is that the Military?' he said.

  ' I don't know, it cummed from over there.'

  The two men climbed to the lip of a hill and peered cautiously over. A fine sight met their eyes; gleaming white in the morning sun were the tents of that knobbly-kneed society, the Scouts.

  It was the Ulster Annual Jamboree. For weeks past, hundreds of spotty-faced herberts, with yodelling voices and chin fuzz, had tied three million knots, started ten thousand twig fires, and completed six hundred leaf shelters; perfect training for round about 3,000 bc but bloody useless in the twentieth century.

  Where were their geiger counters? Their strontium detectors?

  Their books on how to bury ten million incinerated children ? Be prepared ? Ha! Ha!

  Shamus could just read the sign, 'Scout Store. Re-kitting Section.' Scouts of all sizes were lining up for a fine breakfast of burnt eggs and carbonized toast when two ragged-arsed men slipped unnoticed under the flaps of a marquee. Chief Scoutmaster Theobald Dring looked on approvingly. What a fine bunch of lads. He felt fine too. He examined himself. He was fine.

  He looked fine. Fifty-seven fine years old, tall, erect, clear skinned, fine broad shoulders, slender hips; fine muscular arms, short bow legs. He had overcome this latter handicap by stuffing newspapers down the inside of his hose, and thus managed to build up the calves sufficiently to match the extensive outward curve of the leg. It did however give him the unfortunate appearance of a man with 29-inch calves, and a man with 13-inch thighs can't do that sort of thing.

  He yawned and rose from his sapling and sheepshank bed.

  Strange, he thought as he searched for his shaving kit, it was there last night.

  Two cleanly shaved scouts in new but ill-fitting uniforms enjoyed the pleasure of an alfresco breakfast without payment.

  'Oh-ho,' said Lenny, 'dis is a stroke of luck, no one but Baden-Powell would tink of lookin' for us here.'

  Shamus nodded in agreement, his mouth moving relentlessly on a slice of dead pig recumbent on a sea of porridge.

  ' Pardon me, sir,' said a small scout sitting opposite, his face held together with pimples, 'what troop are you from ?'

  'The 3rd Puckoon Rangers,' said Shamus, licking his lips, plate, knife, fork, spoon, fingers and thumbs.

  Twelve miles north of Puckoon, set in rolling acres, rose the delicate Georgian facades of Brent Lodge, built in an age when craftsmen loved the excitement of creation, be it only brick upon brick. Now it lay open to its greatest enemy, the twentieth century. The proportions were for all to see, uncrowded, with an eternal grace culled from Ancient Greece. Soane had built it for the Dukes of Munster, who, falling short of money and an heir, willed it to the people of Ulster in perpetuity. In the hands of the local Council, it had been reduced to 'Units of Housing'. Aged gentlefolk, retired Colonels and widowed matrons now lived out their lives in the grim indifference of local government. The tall, beautiful, curved glass windows looked out on once toparied hedges, now long un-trimmed; lily ponds and choked fountains graced the lawns the local council had recently officially 'cut', with a bread knife it would appear.

  There it now stood, a masterpiece of yesterday, ignored by the bureaucratic barbarism of today. Soon, the Chairman of the Council Planning Committee would gather strength from statistics, revenue, and a chorus of 'Ayes' from his sycophantic minions, and order it to be 'pulled down'. To the press he would issue a well-thumbed paper ' - too expensive to maintain, etc., etc., etc., make way for etc., etc., etc., sentimentalism must not stop progress etc., etc., etc' Bureaucracy was the counterpart of cancer, it grew bigger and destroyed everything except itself.

  Before this monster stood Brent Lodge. The wind was blowing flakes of paint from its lintels and pediments. Occasionally a refined old face would part the heavy, long, faded velveteen curtains, then slowly recede into the oblivion of the great house.

  The two tall, double-fronted, mahogany wood doors with their unpolished brass handles were reached by twelve gently ascending marble steps, flanked by Venetian balustrades; on top, supported by two slender columns, was a portico surmounted by a Greek frieze. On the doorstep stood a half-pint bottle of grade 2 milk. A thick veiny but refined hand withdrew it into the hall.

  The youngest member of this ageing community was ex-variety artiste, Patrick L. Balls. Fifty-nine now, he spent out his remaining years pulling a rope lift and bottling fruit. He had once whistled Ave Maria for Queen Victoria. She wasn't present at the time, but nevertheless that's who he was whistling it for.

  Today would be very busy. No whistling for him. Today was the Concert. Once a year the scouts came and 'did a concert of talking'. Tonight they would perform in the Hydro Hall a drastically cut version of ' The Immortal Bard', Julius Caesar.

  The indoor plunge bath in the Hydro was boarded over, and the great French windows were folded back to make way for the temporary stage that backed on to the garden. Behind this, jacked up on its back axle was the 1909 de Dion, whose yellow wheels drove the power for the footlights. Slowly now, the hall was filling
with the spectre-like audience. The sisters, Agnes and Millicent Grope, walked mincingly down the aisle on Minny Mouse legs, fox furs around their long, thin white necks.

  ' It's Julius Caesar again then,' said Agnes, taking her seat.

  ' It was Julius Caesar last year, Agnes.'

  'Oh? I suppose this is an encore,' smiled Agnes, opening her programme. Preparing themselves in the orchestra pit were the Patrick Furg 'Refined' Trio. A doddering trinity of febrile musicians, led by a bent, thin violinist. The piano keyboard lay staring up at Mrs Auraulum Murphy, a short, tubby, middle-aged lady with amber beads and a dropped womb. She clipped her music to the stand with clothes pegs, a present from a musical laundry man. Behind her, supporting herself on a 'cello was Madame Elsie Mooney, who ran her resin listlessly across the hairs of her bow; her long stringy neck and pendulous jowls gave her the appearance of a plucked turkey. She was dressed carefully in a sea of brown Majorca lace; brittle white hair escaped in all directions from its prison of hairpins; she turned her lizard-like gaze at the stage. A small, hastily made-up, roseate face appeared from the wings. ' Psssstt, ready in two minutes,' it said and disappeared. Madame Mooney prodded Patrick's stern with her bow.

  'Don't do that Madame Mooney!' he said. 'It pleasures me not any more.'

  ' They'll be ready in two minutes, Patrick.'

  'Oh.' Patrick checked his music. 'Did you hear that, Miss Murphy?'

  She nodded her head.

  'A tuning A please.' He plucked the sagging strings to order, then in a jocular mood, drew the bow fiercely across the bridge with all the fire of decay. ' How's that!' he said.

  ' Out!' shouted an old cricket fan in the audience.

  Miss Murphy tittered at him. He had proposed to her thirty-seven times in ten years and been refused. Last week she had proposed to him, and he was now considering it.

  Both conversation and the house lights went down; a few exhibition coughers voiced their bronchial ego; the silence that followed was shattered by two loud thumps of Patrick Furg's boots, and the refined trio launched shakily into several bars of obscure music. ' Good God!' said a music lover finally, ' It's - it's William Tell.'