I do not in all truth and sincerity know how much of it I can present to her. Somehow I doubt, by her reaction the other day, if she will be open to its revelations, which may or may not be revelations to her. If it represents the truth, it is a dreadful and burdening truth. In a place like this we must not concern ourselves too much with moral judgement or even legal judgement. We are like prison chaplains in here, dealing with the remnant human person after the civic powers have had their say. We are trying to ready, to steady the person for what? The axe, the guillotine of sanity? For the long watches of the sentence of living death that being here really is?

The document I was interested if not a little horrified to see was signed by a Fr Aloysius Mary Gaunt, which was a name that rang a bell. I puzzled it over until I suddenly realised who that was, the man who became auxiliary bishop of Dublin in the fifties and sixties, taking from the hemming and hawing of the Irish constitution a clear statement of his powers of moral domination over the city, as did most of his brother clerics. A man who in his every utterance seemed to long for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess. There is something humorous about it now, there was nothing humorous about it then.

This Fr Gaunt as a young curate in Sligo seemed to be very intimate with Roseanne Clear's circumstances. She was it seems the child of a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary (which I already knew from the damaged section I had found here). De Valera, as a young leader during the war of independence, had declared that any member of the police could be shot if they in any way obstructed the aims of the revolutionary movement. So such individuals, though Irish and for the most part Catholic (Roseanne's father was Presbyterian), and their families lived under constant threat and in real danger. It is all very understandable in a revolutionary period, but I wonder if Roseanne at the age of twelve or so could have seen that. In her eyes what happened must have been genuinely tragic, genuinely bewildering and awful.

I have just looked at my watch and it is seven fifty, the very latest moment I can leave it, to make my rounds at ten past eight. I must flee.

A note to myself: the builders say six weeks and the new building will be completed. This is from the horse's mouth, because I was on site myself, asking them, like a veritable spy, the other day. But enough

chapter thirteen

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Curious to relate, it was not in the Cafe Cairo that I 'met' Tom, but in quite another place. It was the sea itself.

It is along the strands of the world that the privilege of possessing children is most blatantly seen. What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line. Like some species of migratory animal. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.

I am not an entirely childless person.

That story also belongs to the sea, or the strand anyway.

My child. My child went to Nazareth, that's what they told me. Or, that is what I heard them say. But I was not hearing anything very well, very properly, in that time. They might as well have said Wyoming.

Strandhill's beach is narrow, heaped, endangered, and the hill of sand itself seems to have drawn up its enormous knees to escape the goings on below. There is a long rough promenade where gigs, carts, sidecars, high traps and motorcars used to be parked, the occupants spilling out I am sure always with the same level of human anticipation, the kids barrelling away ahead, the fathers laughing, cursing, the mothers admonishing, panicking – all the to-do and turmoil of normal happiness. Kneelength bathing suits vying in eternity with those wondrous bikinis I have only seen in stray magazines. How I would like to have sported one of them.

And at first no doubt just a few brave houses built on the marsh and acres of blown sand, scotch grass, the land rising and rising until eventually touching on the realm of Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve sleeps in her stony grave. From the top of Knocknarea you can see the beach at Strandhill, but the people are only pins, and anything the size of a child is just a dust mote in your eye.

I have looked down from there, despairing and weeping.

All that country was 'my' country later. Strandhill, Strandhill, the mad woman of Strandhill.

At first, a few houses risked on that uncertain ground, then the old hotel, and then huts and more houses, and then, some time in the vanished twenties, Tom McNulty built the Plaza ballroom. A glorified corrugated-iron warehouse with a round roof, a square concrete front to the hall with an oddly modest door and a ticket window, the brightness of both beckoning, promising, oh, and a tumultuous whirlwind of dreams rising from the approaching crowd every Friday night, reaching no doubt as far as heaven, to comfort God in the doubts of his creation.

That was Tom McNulty's work, father and son, to put a ticket on those dreams. And I felt that dream in me with passionate completeness.

To sit here, writing this, my hands as old as Methuselah's. Look at these hands. No, no, you cannot. But the skin is thin as – did you ever see the shell of a razor fish? They are strewn all about Rosses Strand. Well, there is a filament of transparent stuff that covers those shells, like a drying varnish. It is strange stuff. That is my skin now. I fancy I can count my bones. The truth is my hands look like they have been buried a while and then dug up. They would give you a fright. I have not looked in a mirror for about fifteen years.

The first few feet of water at Strandhill were safe enough. In summer they were like a bath. The sea there made only the slightest effort at going in and out, it always seemed to me. Maybe the children peeing in the water had something to do with it, with the heat I mean. It was lovely though. Myself and Chrissie and the other girls from the Cafe Cairo… Mrs Prunty always tried to employ good girls for the cafe, but good girls that looked good, which is a different thing. I think we looked like young goddesses. Mary Thompson could have been a picture in a magazine, Winnie Jackson was a picture once, in the Sligo Champion. 'Miss Winnie Jackson Enjoys the Fine Weather at Strandhill'. Her in her beautiful one-piece bathing suit sent down to her in a box from Arnott's in Dublin, on the Dublin-to-Sligo train. There was style for you. She had a lovely plump bust and I think the lads felt only despair looking at her, that they would never even get talking to her.

Our skins going all African in the steaming heat of August. Our faces bright red sometimes in the evenings, going home across the strand, burnt off of us, and lying in bed then in the town, hardly daring to let our shoulders touch the sheets. Happy. And then the skin calmed down the next morning, and longing to get away out to the beach again, and then again, and then again. Happy. Just straightforward ordinary girls we were. We liked to bring as much despair as we could to the lads.

Who watched on the sidelines of our happiness like sharks, devouring our attributes with their eyes. Sometimes I'd get talking to a lad at the dance, lads didn't say much, and when they did talk they didn't say much worth hearing. But that was all right. There were all sorts at the dance, toffs from the town, and lads with trousers too short for them, showing their socks, or bare legs stuck into battered shoes. There were always a few donkeys tied up outside, and nags of one sort and another, and carts heeled up. The mountain spilled out its sons and daughters like a queer avalanche. Lovely humanity.