Free After the Wake by Brendan Behan Page B

Mairéad.
    Ciarán joined us then and from that out the five of us were together.
    María was well on, and after a while got out the fiddle and a fellow from their part of the country came out with an accordion and we danced and had a great céilí*.
    Most of the guests were students at the National University and friends of the Bolívars from the rich plains of the Midlands and had every look of solid comfort about them.
    They had two ways of looking at me. They liked me, because I had served a sentence of three years for possessing explosives, but they didn’t like the fact that I was a Dublin jackeen*. They applauded vociferously when I sang nationalist songs about the 1916 Rising, but when I sang songs about the 1913 General Strike, they were only polite.
    Hymie had it both ways, and every way. He sang songs about the Land War, and with these students the memory of shooting English landlords was a worthy thing to be well remembered, but to go on strike against an Irish capitalist was not the same thing.
    I did not blame them for that. Many of them were the sons of gombeen-men, credit shopkeepers and moneylenders getting the profits of a whole district each containing maybe a thousand families, and some of their ancestors, at any rate, had suffered a lot under the landlords.
    Hymie sang: ‘Oh, and sure if he spent it on mountainy dew
    I’d sooner he drank nor gave it to you.
    You’re a rent agent get* should be hung from a yew
         tree, says the wife of the Bould Tenant Farmer.’
    and the lament for Lord Waterford, a big landowner:
    ‘“Oh, Lord Watherford is dead”, says the Shan Van Vocht
    “Oh, Lord Watherford is dead”, says the Shan Van Vocht.
    “Lord Watherford is dead and the devil make his bed,
    With an oven for his head”, says the Shan Van Vocht.’
    ‘Go on, Hymie, you boy, you,’ they shouted.
    ‘“The first that he did see,” says the Shan Van Vocht,
    “Was his bailiff Black Magee,” says the Shan Van Vocht.
    “He was standing at the shelf, washing up the divil’s delf,”
    Says he, “Milord, is that yourself?” says the Shan Van Vocht,
    “Milord, is that yourself?” says the Shan Van Vocht.’
    ‘Me life on you, Hymie!’ they shouted, ‘your blood is worth bottling!’ Well, just at the moment it might be, for his old face was pink as a baby’s from passion and drink.
    ‘Glory-o! Glory-o! to her brave sons who died, in the cause of long down-trodden Man.
    Glory-o! to Mount Leinster’s own darling and pride
    Dauntless Kelly, the boy from Killann.’
    So we all got well oiled, and Ciarán, as I knew he would, began remembering when we were kids in the Fianna, and Frank Ryan and Eamonn McGrotty, our leaders, went out with the International Brigade, leaving us who were fourteen years of age with thewomen and children, and a humiliating place for tough chisellers* like us. We were left collecting tinned milk and packets of cocoa and bags of flour for the Foodship and were only consoled by street fights, stone-throwing, and one fatal (for them) shooting encounter with the Duffy gang.
    So, Ciarán starts crying about all the poor kids, some of them only a couple of years older than ourselves that were killed at University City, Albacete, Brunette, Guadalajara, and Ciarán is there crying like the rain over them.
    But I know that it’s not the dead Fianna boys he is thinking of mostly, but it’s his father he is crying for, blood being thicker than politics.
    ‘Go on, Brendan,’ he roars, ‘give us another one.’
    So, encouraged like that again, I start off with songs from the Spanish War-time, about Duffy, and his crusaders for France, and some of the fellows at the party did not like them, on account of being of the big farming class that the Blue Shirts* came out of, but they had to put up with it.
    ‘Sure, with money lent by Vickers,
    We can buy blue shirts and knickers,
    Let the Barcelona Bolshies, take a warning,
    Though his feet are full of bunions,
    Still he knows