|
Read Ireland Book Reviews, July 2001
Tans, Terror
and Troubles: Kerry’s Real Fighting Story 1913-23 by T. Ryle Dwyer
What happened in Kerry during the War of Independence and the Civil War
has been the subject of controversy. Although Eoin O’Duffy - the chief
of staff of the Free State Army - said that ‘Kerry’s entire record is
the Black and Tan struggle consisted in shooting an unfortunate soldier
the day of the Truce’, some of the earliest operations of the War of Independence
took place there or involved Kerrymen. The guns for the planned national
uprising of 1916 were supposed to be landed in Kerry, and Roger Casement
was arrested there on Good Friday 1916. Moreover, although Eamon de Valera
is usually described as the last commandant to have surrendered during
the Easter Rising and the only one not to have been executed afterwards,
a Kerryman, Thomas Ashe, also survived as was, in fact, the last commandant
to lay down his arms - and the only one to achieve his military objective.
Since ‘Kerry’s Fighting Story’ was published in 1947, no attempt has been
made to cover the period of the War of Independence and the subsequent
Troubles in the county. Unfortunately, that book was a rushed production
and did not touch on the events of the Civil War. This book gives the
full story of events in Kerry during those dark days.
[ top ]
Patriot Traitors:
Roger Casement, John Amery and the Real Meaning of Treason by Adrian Weal
In the twentieth century, only four British citizens were convicted of the ancient crime of high treason and
only two of these - Roger Casement and John Amery - suffered what was,
until 1998, the only penalty allowed by law: execution. During the First
World War, Casement, a retired British consular official knighted by King
Edward VII for his humanitarian work in Africa and South America, attempted
to recruit a brigade of Irish prisoners of war to liberate Ireland after
the German victory on the Western front. In the Second World War, Amery,
the son of Churchill’s Secretary of State for India, tried to recruit
a legion of British soldiers into the Waffen-SS to fight against Bolshevism
on the Eastern Front. But even a cursory examination of their crimes reveals
both men to have been inept and ineffectual traitors, more of a burden
to their German sponsors than an asset. And the full weight of state power,
legitimate and illegitimate, was brought to bear to ensure that they were
hanged - even though the government knew that Casement was a confused,
naEFve idealist and a barely controlled compulsive pederast, and that
Amery was a psychopathic, sexually bizarre ‘moral imbecile’, incapable
of understanding the concepts of right and wrong. This book is the first
serious historical study to use the newly released MI5 personal files
on the two men, and the author illuminates one of the darkest corners
of recent history.
[ top ]
The Decline
of the Big House in Ireland by Terence Dooley
As late as the 1860s, Irish landlords
were still the wealthy elite of the country. During the relative affluence
of the post-Famine years, they continued to spend lavishly on the upkeep
of their estates. However, for a variety of reasons, by the late nineteenth
century, landlords had begun to find their disposable income greatly diminished.
With the advent of the Land League, they faced increasing pressure to
overturn the old ways of land management. The First World War proved an
important watershed, and had a huge psychological effect. Big-house social
life was thrown into disarray, and the fabric of a way of life began to
disintegrate. The revolutionary years 1919-1923 proved to be a further
catalyst in the decline of the big house, and the foundation of the Irish
Free State finally spelt the end for landlordism in Ireland. This book
in unique in its examination of the reasons for the economic, social and
political demise of the Irish landlord class. The author’s fascinating
investigation provides an insight into the lives, attitudes and outlooks
of the landed class, and examines the motivation behind the financial,
social and political decisions that an ever-changing world forced them
to make.
[ top ]
Fenian Diary:
Denis B. Cashman on board the Hougoumont 1867-1868 edited by C.W. Sullivan
III
In 1867, Fenianism in Ireland was at its peak. The English, desperate to
stem the tide of rebellion, banished convicted Fenians, along with thousands
of common criminals, to exile in Australia. ‘The Hougoumont’ was the last
official convict ship to Australia. In the Autumn of 1867, she sailed from
England. Among the Fenians on board was young Denis B. Cashman of Waterford,
convicted of felony treason and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.
On the long journey, Cashman kept a diary. Now, almost 150 years later,
this diary is available in all its rich, poignant detail.
[ top ]
The Way That
I Went by Robert Lloyd Praeger
First published in 1937, this book
represented a lifetime’s exploration of the countryside - walking hills
and bogs, swimming through flooded caverns, staying out all night on islands,
sifting fossil bones and exploring cattle-tramped tombs. This was a time
when conservation was still in the future, farmers welcomed rambling strangers
and the countryside was largely tourist-free. The book crackles with the
excitement and perplexity aroused by our then heritage of tombs and ring
forts. This book offers an escape to the contemplation of nature in ‘a
time of rush and clatter, of fuss and noise and glare.’ Michael Viney,
who has written an introduction to this edition, puts the book in context
and relates it to contemporary issues such as conservation, ecology and
farming practices.
[ top ]
The Shape of
Irish History by A.T.Q. Stewart
Distilling a lifetime’s distinguished scholarships, this meditation on the
nature of history challenges hitherto sacrosanct assumptions about Ireland’s
past. In an exploration of the essential structure of what is called ‘Irish
history’, Stewart looks at some unlighted areas and asks provocative questions
about popular misconceptions. Even where such misconceptions have been refuted
by academic research, he argues, the information has not been percolated
into the general domain because modern historians, writing mainly for one
another, have lost the wider audience. Criticising his own profession for
purporting to be scientific while largely ignoring the implications of,
for example, scientific archaeology, Stewart issues a characteristically
bold challenge to received views. The result is a landmark book - elegant,
stylish and effortlessly erudite - that lets some much-needed light and
air into the closed-shop of Irish history.
[ top ]
On the Verge
of Want compiled and edited by James Morrissey
This book is a unique insight into
living conditions along Ireland’s western seaboard in the late 19th century.
In the later part of the 19th century, most of the inhabitants of the
West of Ireland eked out a meagre existence in conditions proximate to
pathetic. Homes were akin to hovels as parents and offspring shared cramped
accommodation with farm animals. Incomes were paltry - ranging from less
than 10 pounds per year to just under 50 pounds for families. In many
cases, receipts shaded expenditure by a few shillings. This book is filled
with original documents which record the often appalling conditions which
prevailed in the West of Ireland just over a century ago.
[ top ]
Anatomy of a
Siege: King John’s Castle, Limerick, 1642 by Kenneth Wiggins
King John’s Castle survives today
as a impressively well-preserved Anglo-Norman fortress in a commanding
position along the eastern edge of the River Shannon. In the early months
of 1642, when the Munster army of the Irish rebellion was admitted to
Limerick, the Protestant and Anglo-Irish citizenry fled to the king’s
castle for protection, and were immediately besieged. To breach the masonry
the besiegers used miners to make tunnels for the placing of timber props,
ready for firing, underneath the foundations. The castle’s defenders reacted
by opening countermines to intercept the encroaching miners, hoping to
save the wall from ruin. The use of specialised ‘military mining’ techniques
of this type was exceedingly rare in Ireland, and fundamental to the exceptional
events of this siege. This book brings together detailed documentary sources
and unique archaeological discoveries in an expert assessment of this
siege. It is the first book entirely devoted to King John’s Castle, Limerick,
and also the first on the siege of an Irish castle. The book incorporates
plans, photographs, and reproductions to provide a well-illustrated and
thorough analysis. It embraces the drama central to the story, while highlighting
methods and skills seldom witnessed in Irish siege warfare.
[ top ]
Medieval Dublin
II edited by Sean Duffy
This book contains the proceedings
of a second public symposium held by the Friends of Medievel Dublin in
2000 and it would be difficult to overemphasise their importance. Margaret
Gowen’s paper on archaeological excavations at the church of St. Michael
le Pole reveals the earliest known evidence from the Christian era for
human activity in the environs of the later town. Ann Lynch and Conleth
Manning’s findings from their extensive excavations at Dublin Castle in
the mid-1980s are given a detailed airing here for the first time. We
now know a good deal more about the town’s earliest earthen defences,
the Norse and later Norman town walls and mural towers, thanks to Clare
Walsh’s excavations at Ross Road, also here discussed. The ups and downs
of the career of Geoffrey Morton, the colourful mayor of Dublin in 1303-4,
are meticulously pieced together by Philomena Connolly. Bernadette Williams
demonstrates the contribution to chronicle-writing in medieval Dublin
made by its Dominican friars. J.F. Lydon discusses the extent to which
Anglo-Norman Dublin adapted the town’s earlier Norse structures and administration.
The classification of the ethnic background of the latter community is
the pioneering project upon which Benedikt Hallgrimsson and Barra O Donnabhain
have embarked, and they present some of their remarkable data in this
volume; the latter also examines some intriguing evidence for the practice
of cranial surgery in medieval Dublin.
[ top ]
The Great Irish
Potato Famine by James S. Donnelly, Jr.
This book provides an accessible, comprehensive account of the Irish famine,
combining narrative, analysis, historiography, and scores of contemporary
illustrations. It furnishes vivid insights into the misery of the famine
and the additional nightmare of the mass evictions that followed. Professor
Donnelly aims to answer the numerous vexed questions which have surrounded
the subject ever since. Was Britain guilty of genocide against the Irish
people, or was British culpability more complex? Could the disaster have
been considerably reduced in its dimensions, even if not averted altogether?
Scholarly and up-to-date, this book is required reading for anyone with
an interest in Ireland or in the way natural disasters and government responses
to them can lead to the destiny of nations.
[ top ]
7 Reece Mews:
Francis Bacon’s Studio, with foreword by John Edwards and photographs
by Perry Ogden
Francis Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews
in London’s South Kensington in 1961. It was to remain his principal home
and studio until his death in 1992. Prior to the removal of the studio
to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in 1998, access
was granted to photographer Perry Ogden to produce this record of the
house and its contents. He captured every part of the small building’s
hidden and untouched interior. In the studio itself, thirty years of artistic
endeavour had accumulated unchecked: the slashed, discarded canvases scattered
across the floor; the brushes, rags and tins encrusted with paint; the
doors and walls used as impromptu palettes; the piles of photographs of
friends and models; the crumpled and torn pages of magazines and books
that served as visual stimulus for his work; the notes, sketches and ideas
jotted down and then cast aside; the last unfinished painting on the easel.
For some of those close to Bacon in his lifetime, the studio was an heroic
statement, a work of art in its own right, created over many years to
distil and give form to his aesthetic intentions. Now in this astonishing
book we are invited to take a privileged look around his private space,
to become intimate witnesses to the amazing conditions in which he lived
and worked, to gain unrivalled insights into how, why and what he painted.
[ top ]
Dublin Made
Me by C.S. Andrews
This book is the first of two celebrated
volumes of autobiography, originally published in 1979, and describes
in loving detail the pre-independence Dublin in which the author grew
up and provides a vivid participant’s account of the War of Independence
and the Civil War. Born in 1901, Andrews lived with his family in Summerhill
until 1910, when they moved to the distant suburb of Terenure. Andrews’
account of the two Dublins of his youth is an unsentimental urban pastoral,
sensuous and immediate. He describes his schooling with the nuns in Dominick
Street, with Patrick Pearse for an unhappy year in St. Enda’s, and then
with the Christian Brothers in Synge Street. And he gives a rich, detailed
account of his apprenticeship in Irish republicanism, from his pre-1916
experiences as a youthful ‘camp-follower of the Volunteers’ to his active
service in Dublin in the War of Independence and his dangerous days as
adjutant to Liam Lynch, chief of staff of the anti-Treaty forces during
the Civil War. Andrews writes dispassionately of internment and hunger-strikes,
and of the bitter divide between the pro- and anti-Treaty sides, once
comrades-in-arms. This book is a unique account of an ordinary childhood
transformed by war and revolution.
[ top ]
Man of No Property
by C.S. Andrews
This is an extraordinary memoir, originally published in 1982, in which
Andrews gives a personal history of his varied and distinguished career
in public service to the Irish state. The early chapters cover what were,
for Andrews and his fellow republicans, difficult years under the government
of Cumann na nGaedheal. Andrews describes the ambience of University College
Dublin, where he resumed his studies after the end of the Troubles, and
writes with insight and sensitivity of the founding of Fianna Fail, which
forced anti-Treaty republicans to decide whether to accept the established
political order. Andrews chose the constitutional path, and after Fianna
Fail came to power in 1932 his working life, which had begun modestly in
the Irish Tourist Association and the ESB, was transformed by his appointment
as managing director of the Turf Development Board, later Bord na Mona.
This visionary enterprise, undertaken in the face of ridicule from those
who saw the bogs as an irremediable symbol of backwardness, was immensely
successful, and Andrews gave to it nearly three decades in the prime of
his life. This book is the plain-spoken, often controversial testament of
a singular figure in twentieth-century Irish life, and is necessary reading
for anyone who wishes to understand the evolution of the Irish state in
its first half-century.
[ top ]
An Irish Journal
by Gerry Adams
This book contains a unique insight
into recent Irish politics, covering the crucial period between September
1997 and the end of 2000. Consisting of selected articles written during
that period, mostly for his regular column in the New York newspaper,
The Irish Voice, these writings provide not only a revealing chronicle
of public events but also an insight into his private life, and some surprisingly
light and humorous moments. His reports posses a remarkable immediacy,
written as they were in the midst of momentous events. From the long Unionist
refusal to talk to republicans, through the tortuous negotiations of the
Good Friday Agreement, to the suspension of the Executive and other crises,
Gerry Adams gives an absorbing first-hand account.
[ top ]
Shame MacGowan:
London Irish Punk by Joe Merrick
As lead singer of The Pogues and as a solo artist, Shane MacGowan is a defining
figure of modern Irish music. Among the greatest songwriters of his generation,
he has infused traditional Irish folk with the spirit of punk and a bleary-eyed
romanticism to create a compelling and unique musical brew. In this comprehensive
study, the author traces the life of this complex figure from his childhood
in Tipperary and England, through The Pogues’ success and subsequent painful
break-up, before bringing the story up to date with an evaluation of MacGowan’s
solo career. It is an incredible story, sometimes sad, sometimes wonderful,
and often soaked in a mixture of alcohol and genius.
[ top ]
Two Acres of
Irish History: A Study Through Time of Friar’s Bush and Belfast 1570-1918
by Eamon Phoenix
Friar’s Bush is Belfast’s oldest Christian
Site. The quality of ancient mystery surrounding this old walled graveyard
at Stranmillis has long fascinated historians. There is a tradition of
a link with St. Patrick and strong evidence of a medieval friary on the
site. It also served as a ‘penal refuge’ for the local Catholic community
up to 1769. This book traces the exciting story of Friar’s Bush and Belfast
from the rich store of available evidence - artefacts, maps, letters,
newspaper reports, ballads and paintings.
[ top ]
The Methodists
in Ireland: A Short History by Dudley Levistone
Cooney This is the story of one of the smaller Christian churches in Ireland
from its introduction in the middle of the eighteenth century to the present
time. Never numbering much more than 60,000 people, it has made a contribution
to the life of the country greater than its numbers would have suggested.
[ top ]
Chronology
of Irish History compiled by David Pritchard
This book is a concisely written overview of Ireland’s major political,
cultural and religious trends, presented in an easy-to-use format. This
reference work provides essential historical facts, from the arrival of
St. Patrick to the present day.
[ top ]
See Dublin
on Foot: An Architectural Walking Tour compiled by Julie Craig
This book is an extensive walking
guide to the city of Dublin with selected area maps, descriptions and
a unique guide to the best deals in that area. This comprehensive contemporary
manual is a must for anyone touring the city on foot.
[ top ]
To Hell or
Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O’Callaghan
Between 1652 and 1659, over 50,000 Irish men, women and children were transported
to Barbados and Virginia. Until now there has been no account of what became
of them. The motivation for the initial transportation of the Irish was
expressed by King James I of England: ‘Root out the Papists and fill it
(Ireland) with Protestants.’ The author’s search began in the library of
the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and its files on Irish slaves.
The author’s search began in the library of the Barbados Museum and Historical
Society and its files on Irish slaves. This book documents in the history
of these people, their transportation, the conditions in which they lived
on the plantations as slaves or servants, and their rebellions in Barbados.
[ top ]
Faraway Home
by Marilyn Taylor
This book is based on true events, describing the real experiences of young
refugees who came to Northern Ireland during World War II.
[ top ]
Breaking the
Wishbone by Siobhan Parkinson
Cut off from their families, five
teenagers scrape together a makeshift home for a squat. This is a story
of the over-whelming difficulties facing young homeless people today.
[ top ]
Collected Stories
by Benedict Kiely
Benedict Kiely is a writer of national and international status. His writing
is at once quintessentially Irish and marvellously universal, and a generation
of younger writers owes him an enduring debt of inspiration. This celebratory
collection brings together for the first time Kiely’s short fiction written
between 1963 and 1987. The stories in this volume are rich in imagination
and invention, their characters unforgettable, their humour at once affectionate
and incisive. Written with apparently effortless style and craft, they amply
demonstrate how Kiely’s stories have become classics of the genre while
at the same time expanding that genre’s horizons.
[ top ]
Drumcree: The
Orange Order’s Last Stand by Chris Ryder and Vincent Kearney
Years of confrontation have made the
word ‘Drumcree’ internationally synonymous with the worst aspects of the
Northern Ireland conflict. The crisis was sparked in the summer of 1995
as the small market town of Portadown became the scene of a violent stand-off
between the local lodges of the Protestant Orange Order and the Catholic
residents of the Garvaghy Road - route of the Orange marchers’ traditional
parade after their church service at Drumcree. This first showdown set
the pattern for the confrontations that have followed every year since
in the town that has been described as the ‘Vatical of Orangeism’, and
the repercussions have spread beyond. In this book, two of Northern Ireland’s
foremost journalists investigate how this repeated deadlock evolved into
an annual crisis convulsing the whole of Northern Ireland and threatening
even the nation-wide peace process itself.
[ top ]
The Complete
Guide to the Quite Man by Des MacHale
This book is a celebration of every aspect of the world famous film, based
on a short story by Maurice Walsh, and set and filmed in the west of Ireland.
It discusses the background to the film, the stars, the shooting, the screenplay,
the influences, and the many legends and stories that have grown up around
it. It also lists the shooting locations with dozens of detailed maps; a
very comprehensive cast and crew list; hundreds of previously unseen photographs
take by both amateur and professionals; a detailed analysis of every word
of the dialogue; video timings of all the scenes; and above all the inside
story and a thorough discussion of the whole ‘Quiet Man’ phenomenon, which
have all led to one of the greatest cult movies of all time. This book is
certainly ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Quiet Man.’
[ top ]
Wherever Green
is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora by Tim Pat Coogan
The total population of the island
of Ireland is only five million - some 800,000 of whom describe themselves
as British! - yet there are seventy million people on the planet entitled
to call themselves Irish! This ground-breaking book tells their story.
It is based on first-hand research in both North and South American, Africa,
the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Apart from contemporary
interviews with significant figures from today’s diaspora, it also explores
how the Great Scattering occurred, through war, famine and dispossession.
How a stricken people produced the movers and shakers, the dreamers of
dreams who climbed to the world’s highest pinnacles of politics and the
arts. It does full justice to the horrors which lay behind some of the
emigration, but concentrates also on the extraordinary and positive experience
of Irish people throughout the world. Along with the brawlers and battlers,
the heroic soldiers, the passionate labour leaders, the American presidents,
the Australian Prime Ministers, the founders of Latin American nations
and the creators of Riverdance and U2, the Irish gave the world a caring
tradition, the missionaries and the teachers who spread a message of a
‘dream born in a herdsman’s shed and the secret scriptures of the poor.’
Some died by the wayside, some successfully pitched their tents near the
stars. All come to live in this vivid historical and contemporary portrait
by Ireland’s most readable and most trenchant contemporary historian.
[ top ]
Inside the
Maze: The Untold Story of the Northern Ireland Prison Service by Chris
Ryder
With the historic closure of the
Maze Prison this year, this book reveals the story of one of the most
turbulent battlegrounds of the Ulster troubles, and examines how Northern
Ireland’s prison service - the third arm of the security forces after
the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army - has survived the
years of conflict and made its mark on the province’s future. This book
records how the Northern Ireland Prison Service struggled to cope with
the volatile forces it had to contain. After the outbreak of the Troubles
in 1968, the hastily built Maze Prison became a university of terrorism,
where the confrontation and violence it was intended to control continued
to rage behind bars. Ten inmates died in the hunger strike of 1981, and
two years later thirty-eight prisoners broke out in the largest ever prison
escape. Yet against all odds, and despite the continual terrorist threat,
the prison that was one of the most notorious symbols of the Troubles
at last became a powerhouse for peace, with former and present terrorist
inmates playing leading roles in the search for a lasting political settlement.
The book is the definitive history on this controversial subject, casting
new light on the sources of conflict and the origins of the peace process
in Northern Ireland which culminated in the Belfast Agreement on 1998.
[ top ]
Eclipse by
John Banville
Alexander Cleave has never been able
to rid himself of the feeling that he is in ‘a perpetual state of being
watched’ - even when alone. So he become an actor, and successfully performed
his way through life until suddenly, at the peak of his career, he corpsed
in the middle of the last act and staggered off stage, never to return.
Self-banished to his childhood home and cut off from his wife, Cleave
begins to unravel the past and disinter his own identity. But his attempt
to retire, to sift and discard the accumulated clutter of half a century
of existence, is undermined by the house itself, brimming with lives,
both ghostly and undeniably, robustly human. Memory constantly displaces
Cleave’s attention to the small, delicate details of the present. So too
does his anxiety about the future, and the thought of his beloved but
troubled daughter, Cass, tugging away at him like an undertow. This humane
and beautifully written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent,
preposterous and vulnerable, who in attempting to bring the performance
to a close, finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating
denouement.
[ top ]
The Gingerbread
Woman by Jennifer Johnston
On a rainy afternoon on Killiney Hill, a young man walking, without his
overcoat, happens upon a woman gazing out over Dublin bay, humming Shubert,
standing perilously close to the edge. From their rather testy encounter
develops a remarkable friendship which will enable each to face afresh their
very different damaged pasts, and to look, however tentatively, towards
the future. Clara speaks often to, and worries about, her mother, the jam
maker, who irritates, yet also deeply affects her. Equally preoccupying
are her emotional entanglements - perhaps rather foolish at her age. Lar,
who has left the North, but cannot put his huge grief behind him, speaks
only reluctantly to his parents: his pain is too great for words, for family.
Jennifer Johnston, one of Ireland’s finest and most distinguished novelists,
has written a wonderful portrait of two uncompromising individuals, of the
loves they have lost, and of the troubled bond between parents and children.
[ top ]
The Photograph
by Eamonn Sweeney
From a moment frozen in time, this
novel sets out to retrace the stories of four men: Henry Caslin, former
dancehall owner and later Taoiseach of the Irish Republic; Jimmy Mimnagh,
ruthless businessman, failed politician, hopeless drunkard; Seamus McKeon,
a successful journalist and TV personality; and finally Father Gerry Lee,
a priest with a predilection for very young children and strong links
to the IRA. The author draws his masterful portraits convincingly and
with great poignancy, tracing the four men from their humble beginnings
through four decades of public and private life. An extraordinarily rich
narrative emerges, in which the personal stories of the central characters
and the larger issues of Irish National politics and identity are woven
together to show the brutality and the tenderness, the ambiguities and
the certainties, the comedy and the tragedy of half a century of Irish
life.
[ top ]
The Hill Bachelors
by William Trevor
This collection contains twelve new stories from one of Ireland’s master
storytellers. Set mostly in Ireland, they show the author to be writing
at the height of his powers. In ‘Three People’, an ageing father waits for
the proposal for his daughter that will never some from the man who once
told a lie to save her; in ‘Against the Odds’, a con-woman who has plied
her trade across the entire Six Counties fixes this time on a widower in
a small inland town; and in the poignant title-story, the youngest son returns
for his father’s funeral to the family hill farm to find it has become his
unwelcome inheritance. Trevor writes with understatement and precision about
the lonely and the sad, about those who have something to hide and those
who barely have control over their lives.
[ top ]
The Largest
Baby in Ireland After the Famine by Anne Barnett
This novel is set in mid-Ulster, during World War I. Every Sunday the men
meet at the bridge. Felix Campbell was there with a couple dozen others.
Farmers all, some creating the impression that they lived a more urgent
and passionate existence in the fighting fields of France than in the potato
fields of reality. Felix was smoking and talking when the bridge-gatherers
spotted a figure moving over the brae. The walker was a woman, most certainly,
but who? And where could a stranger be heading when there was nowhere she
could go that the men wouldn’t have known about? Then she appeared. She
was all colour and sway, and as far away as imaginable from the local women.
Pale, pale skin and strong dark auburn hair falling free to large wide hips.
She wore a purple shawl. That night, Felix, a bachelor, aged 43, living
in the house he was born in, dreamt of purple.
[ top ]
|