Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

just want you to sweep the roads, to be squalid for them.

      ‘Take care, soldier,’ one boy said to another as they parted near the tombstone of Thomas Dermody in Lewisham.

      Thomas Dermody was a poet from County Clare who lived in Catford. He met a recruiting party in a pub in Great George’s Street on 17 September 1794. Went to England with the 108th Regiment of the Earl of Granard. Fought in the first Napoleonic wars. Journeyed through France, Holland, Germany as second lieutenant in the waggon corps. Saw the graves of Abelard and Heloise in Lombardy and was injured, his face disfigured and his left hand rendered useless. Returned to England. Published verse and drank. His clothes were found by the Ravensbourne river one night and the people of Catford went searching for the body, with candles. But he’d thrown them out of Catford manor, having been given new clothes within. His final friend was an Irish cobbler at Westminster. There were still cattle fields in Westminster at the time of their friendship. He drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven.

      ‘Degraded genius! o’er the untimely grave / In which the tumults of thy breast were stilled,’ Lady Byron wrote. This poem she sent to Lord Byron and it initiated their courtship.

      In a pub in Lewisham in July a young singer from Belfast in a red shirt, his hair the colour of sun on chestnuts, a pendant around his neck and a few fake poppies hanging by his thigh, sang:

       As he was marching the streets of Derry

       I hope he marched up right manfully

       Being much more like a commanding officer

       Than a man to die upon the gallows tree.

      A kind of rallying spirit, an unwillingness to lie down, an invocation of Ireland – a madonna with blue veil and saffron belt, country women with coil on top of their heads coming in for mass on Sundays – the ability, as if from a wayside Goddess, to immure yourself and look back, picking up the sequence of the last year.

      There was a strong morning light behind the bus in New Orleans and a black woman was standing beside it, engulfed in a striped blanket, as if she was in Africa.

      A card had come from Dublin a few weeks before, Jan de Cock, The Flight into Egypt; demons doing parabolas on mountain tops; Mary in a turquoise gold-fringed cloak; the donkey’s head bowed in meekness at his task; St Joseph’s flowing, rich red cloak forming a rosette under the donkey’s mouth.

      In Alabama a black man at the back of the bus described an execution he’d seen, on yellow mama, the electric chair. He had metal attached to his body. The boy cried, screamed. They put twenty-six pellets in him. He passed out. Then he woke, coughed, threw up. It took him a long time to die.

      We stopped at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery. The woman behind the restaurant counter was addressed as Miss Mary. There were pictures of missing children behind the counter. The queue for mash and peas included a woman in a lustrous pink trouser suit and a scarf over her bouffant hairstyle, a girl on crutches, a black boy in a fuchsine baseball cap, a woman with a bathing cap on her head.

      Two black women stood outside as the sun went down on a street in Montgomery. One with a straggly, Gibson-girl hairstyle under a straw hat with piping around it. The other in a wavy henna wig, holographic glasses which reflected the sunset, a snakeskin handbag in her left hand.

      I was travelling to Columbus, Georgia, because I loved the books of a writer born there. We arrived at ten at night. The small Greyhound bus station there was full of teenage soldiers, most of them sleeping, some looking drearily at you as you came in. They wore cocoa-coloured uniforms, a kind of East-man-colour glow to the edges of their uniforms at night, a carmine glow. Near the Greyhound station I passed a red-brick, spired church, the bricks delineated in white. There was a church house with the same style of brick beside it. The streets were etiolated.

      A snowman was held up by strings in a garden; the bird cages lighted with fairy lights; a lighted Santa Claus head up a tree.

      I called to a little hut of a bar where men played billiards on two tables.

      ‘A glass of white wine.’

      ‘We’ve none of the hard stuff,’ the woman shrieked at me.

      I stayed at the Heart of Columbus Hotel. It had a red neon heart graven on it.

      Next morning a black woman with a forties scarf on her head cut my hair in Sherald’s barber shop. There was an advertisement for their mortuary near the washbasin. ‘Burial with compassion, dignity, integrity.’ The sunshine coming through the door and the window was pure yellow.

      On a bridge over the Chattahooche which divides Columbus, Georgia, from Phoenix City, Alabama, a man was playing music on a Prince Albert tobacco tin, using it as a mouth organ, as a parade passed.

      Mrs Wives of America stood up, very straight and stern, on front of a Pontiac. Drill girls marched by and more disparate boys in magenta letterman jackets.

      A black epileptic woman was standing on the street beside a wig shop called Woman Tree, red kerchief on her head, her features protruding blade-like, her head rolling. She was quietly talking to herself.

      I’d once seen a documentary in the town I was from in which young American GIs lined up to go to war, getting into a silvery-blue Greyhound bus.

      The writer’s husband had distinguished himself with the Ranger Battalion in Anzio, Italy. Some years later he committed suicide. ‘Il est mort stoïquement,’ was his obsequy.

      On the bus out of Columbus a black man had his arms around a box which contained his belongings, the words ‘Milwaukee’s Best’ on the side of it, a string tied around the box, holding his belongings down. Someone in the front of the bus said the name ‘Raymond’ in conversation and a woman at the back started shouting: ‘Raymond. Raymond. My son is Raymond.’

      Georgia: the oak trees and poplars had turned gold, the sweet gums red, the maples electric scarlet; yellow ribbons around cypress trees and post oaks. Darkness in the bus, a last bit of the sunset reflected on a window and the headlights of cars lighting up faces. One black woman with a huge swollen eye in sudden illumination. At a filling station, just before we drove into North Carolina, the breeze fresher and even intoxicating, the radio played Willie Nelson’s ‘Always on My Mind’.

      In the Midwest I visited an old couple who’d once hosted me in the United States when I was there for a sojourn as one of a group. A Chinese woman, a melon-orange shawl around her, wheeled an old man with wispish, almost albino hair, where he wasn’t bald, over an iced lake. They’d once driven me in the fall to a Quaker graveyard, the earth organza gold, a myriad of little unnamed rocks for headstones. That trip had helped me come through much trouble with my family.

      In Wyoming the bus broke down in a snow storm. We were rescued by American Red Cross women in moon boots and brought to a hall where we were wrapped in blankets and given tea.

      Going down the mountains into California was a boy from Basel, in nefarious black, who was running away. His stepfather had beaten him up. A bit of delicate knee was exposed.

      A Cuban boy in damascened black sang ‘Silent Night’ in Spanish, cabaret-style.

      In San Francisco, Christmas evening, I attended a party in a room dominated by Piero della Francesca’s La Sacra Converzione. A coterie of professors. As they talked I browsed through a book on Tuscany.

      First weeks away from Dublin I took the train from London to Florence. It was November. I returned to the monastery with the broom hanging on the dormitory wall, pictures of St Gennaro, bishop, stuck to the wall of the street leading to it.

      From Florence I went on a slow, grey-green train with wooden compartments to Assisi. We stopped at barrack-like stations. There was a picture of St Francis appeasing the wolf of Gubbio in front of me. The women wore black. ‘Fa lo scrittore lei?’ one of them asked me. There were fields of winter barley in the hills around Assisi. On the way back I lost my ticket and hitched through the mountains, arriving in Florence as it was snowing, warming myself in a café by the Arno where there were men dressed as women, in fur