Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

Bridge nearby was scrawled: ‘Boo is a prick, but a cool one.’

      There was a new motorway outside Galway city with the ruin of a castle on a circle of exhibition verdure in the middle of a roundabout.

      You go back to the town you’re from. An ancient sign for Kincora Plug, on the gable of a town house where the town houses ascend in size, is a mirage of colour, mainly navy.

      The legend is that while a local Moslem lady customary veil on her head, was preparing dinner recently a billygoat who’d run away from some English convoy people had intruded upon her in the kitchen.

      ‘Elizabeth Maloney Don’t know her. But I know her aunt.’

      Now that I’m here, people who ran away are called up, an inventory. A woman who ran away with a circus artiste. The woman across the road who followed her example shortly afterwards: she’d always emulated her neighbour. If her neighbour bought a lampshade, she bought one. If her neighbour bought a carpet, she bought one. The second woman ran away on a country fair day. It could have been with any of four men.

      ‘Hope you get the weather you’re expecting,’ one of three men leaning against the bank corner tells me.

      Once there was a virtually unbudging, save for a rota in the pub, row of First World War veterans here. ‘Rue di Doo Boys’ they were called, after Rue de Deux Bois.

      A gargantuan one-legged man whose wife, a dress-maker, festooned him in right-fitting clothes.

      One of them had deserted in the Judean Hills. They thought he’d been killed and sent home a body they believed to be him and he’d stood at this bank corner, saffron-brick then as it is now, watching his own funeral.

      The smallest of them would shave his legs each year for about ten years after the First World War and box in the Con-naught Under 16.

      Another little fellow became an idiot, would wander about town after his mental collapse, in a cap and coat to his feet, singing rebel songs and ranting about opposing sides in the Civil War, joined the circus, was killed in a car accident.

      A fellow with pitch-black hair, face always charcoaled in stubble, called Joseph O’Meara after an illustrious Limerick opera singer, would sing arias – Puccini on verdant spring days – in his malodorous black coat on the side-line at GAA matches, arms outstretched.

      The gargantuan fellow, despite his one leg, had gone back to war, in October 1936, to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. He’d never got, for some reason, very far beyond the coast of Galicia. In his last years he was the town crier. Would clang a bell on the anniversaries of Ypres and Givenchy, shouting, ‘Hear ye. Hear ye.’

      Teddy bears having a tea-party in the window of a guesthouse; the news that a tinker who lived by himself in a caravan by the Ash Tree has died; a blonde-haired girl leaning against a wall asks me, ‘Are you Australian?’; a visit to the bog.

      You feel like a trespasser, a bit of fuschia just visible in the gable window of a country house distantly, the kind of house which has a family of unmangled country boys.

      He had a wife once, the tinker. She left him, ‘shipped herself out of Ireland’. He died of abandonment and a harsh life-style in the Regional Hospital in Galway, still in unresolved youth. There is a wake, and tinkers come from all over Galway, women in expansive head scarves like East European women, and Pakistani traders. He was a rag-and-bone man, used to collect scrap on a cart and pile it up beside his caravan.

      During the war, when cars were disused and wrecks of cars accumulated in the fields about town, tinkers had a glut of scrap and made rings and brooches from those cars and initialled them. When I was a child he showed me one of those rings, which a sparkle of spring sunshine had just indicated to him in a meadow, initialled by an uncle.

      He lived in a white, modern caravan full of Staffordshire and Chelsea china with a prominent picture of Our Lady, Comforter of the Afflicted. He had a mongrel dog, referred to as ‘a fool of a dog’, as companion.

      A tinker girl in a maroon summer dress with large white spots in it sings ‘Four Country Roads Leading to a Town in County Galway’ and ‘The Fields of Athenry’ at his wake.

      He was a Teddy boy in my youth, a little older than me, long locks, sculpted mouth, a pale, almost a madonna face.

      ‘I have no mind for happiness. Just for peace of mind.’

      There was a Polish woman who lived in this town once, the mother of a friend who had blonde, wavy hair and liked wearing black glasses with white frames. He had corn hair, loops of glasses, and I snatched at his corn hair outside the Boys’ National School one afternoon after school and pleaded with him to be my special friend. He would concede nothing.

      I was invited to their house once, for a children’s party. She wore a necklace of sea-shells and a white dress with large black spots for the party. In their drawing-room was a picture of an Edwardian lady and gentleman in a chamber pot patterned with shamrocks.

      The father died, and they headed to Durham in the north of England.

      Years later I saw my friend on The Late Late Show, playing a cello.

      The Polish woman came from a town near the site of a concentration camp. Recently, in Berlin, I saw a photograph of an entrance to that town, cobbled road, black lampposts, houses with dormer windows, where Jewish pedlars would gather daily before the war.

      Her neighbours in the fashionable avenue in town, with its double-flowering prunus trees in the front gardens, testified that they would hear her screaming in the middle of the night.

      Once a Polish film came to the town hall and she stood outside the cinema, in a black suit, for the best part of an hour, as if advertising the film, or as if in solidarity with people she would never meet again.

      It’s just a memory of the dead now. But no … something asks me to return another time, tells me that there’s room for me in as yet dark, misunderstood places.

      Just before Christmas I visit an old lady in Denmark Hill whose husband was Polish. She lives on the fourth floor of a mansion of flats. Beside it is a new apartment block in the shape of a lighthouse. She met her husband early in the war and had a son by him. His brother had been one of the officers killed at Katyn. After the war he deserted her, returning to Poland.

      Her son manages a gay bookshop in the Midlands and rarely visits her.

      Her husband lectured at an agricultural training college when he returned to Poland and in later years also worked as a courier for Polish tourists.

      She met him again, by accident, summer of 1986, in Prague. She was with a lady companion and he was leading a band of Polish tourists in Wenceslas Square. They’d gone to that café, the three of them. The band had been playing ‘A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You.’ Afterwards, they’d walked through back streets, women standing outside doors, lights above the doors. She’d seen an old Jewish man pass by a window with festoons in it, his back bent. Or was he a ghost?

      Her husband came to see her the following year in London and afterwards she sent him food packages and many gifts but then he ceased writing.

      Her legs are swollen and she goes to the window with difficulty, looks out on the winter sunset over a Georgian square in Denmark Hill and says, ‘£35 a week. We deserve better.’

      An old Russian emigré is dressed as Santa in Tesco’s in Cat-ford, enthroned on a platform. A little Malaysian man lies on the upstairs floor of the café in Soho. He holds up a crucifix with one hand, and with the other throws rose petals, which he fetches out of a small brown paper bag. Some of the rose petals hit a baby in a romper suit patterned with clowns, held by a young man whose head is barely sheathed with hair, whereupon a Greek jumps up and starts beating up the Malaysian. The Greek chases the Malaysian out on to the street.

      A little serving lady comes in with a bunch of Irish Catholics and for some reason starts spreading them on the spot where the Malaysian had lain.

      Many of the Christmases over the last