Return to Killybegs

2

When my father died, people turned away. Misery was contagious. It was bad luck to watch us walk by. We were no longer a family but a pale, straggly herd. My brothers, sisters and I made a pitiful troupe, led by a she-wolf on the brink of madness. We’d walk in single file, each of us holding on to the next by the end of a coat. For three months we lived on charity. In exchange for cabbages and potatoes, we helped out at the presbytery. Róisín and Mary used to scrub the floors of the corridors on their knees. Seánie, wee Kevin and myself used to wash windows by the dozen. Áine, Brian and Niall would help in the refectory and my mother would sit on a bench in the corridor, baby Sara nestled against her, hidden between shawl and breast. I wasn’t miserable, or even sad, or envious of anything. We lived off the little we got. In the evenings, my brothers and I used to fight the gang led by Timmy Gormley, the self-titled ‘king of the quays’. A dozen young lads, broken like us, pieced together. They were nasty, hot-tempered, and about as tough as toy soldiers, shocked when their noses would bleed. They called us ‘the Meehan gang’. Father Donoghue used to break us apart with a hazel rod. He had no time for our laughter and was even less tolerant of our after-dark shenanigans.

In the winter of 1940, I went to work on the bog with Seánie. Every day for two months. We used to help cut the turf with a spade and load the mules in spring and at Halloween, but this was the first time we had worked in the cold. The farmer needed extra hands for bringing in the harvest. The mud no longer sucked our shoes off but the cold water and ice turned them into cardboard. There were about twenty of us young lads in the ditches. The farmer called us his ‘hired hands’. It was nicer than calling us his orphans. We were frozen and shaking, our sods heaped up in our arms, heavy as a dead friend. In return for the work, the boss would give us some turf, bacon and milk. No money. He said that money was for men and we had no need to be drinking or smoking.

Joseph ‘Josh’ Byrne was the bravest of us all and the youngest, barely six years old. For nine hours a day, he carefully piled up his frozen sods and then ballasted the tarpaulin that protected them. And he sang, too. He gave us a little bit of heaven. With his singing we became sailors, our hands working with his voice, cutting the earth as we would have hoisted the sail. He sang in step with arms crossed, under the rain, in the wind, in Irish, in English. He sang while tapping the ground with his foot. He hadn’t yet learned how to read or write, so his words would stray at times. He’d invent rhymes and words and make us laugh.

His father had run off and his mother was dead. Josh had been raised by his sisters, the only boy amongst muddy skirts and greasy aprons. He wanted to be a soldier, or a priest, something that would be useful to men. He was frail and needed glasses: he’d be a priest.

When he wasn’t singing, he was praying for us. Out loud, at the edge of the ditch, as though standing beside a grave. In the morning, before taking up the shovels, we would listen to him on our knees. In the evening, when the Angelus rang at St Bridget’s, he used to say the Hail Mary, his eyes wide with shock if our lips remained closed. Father Donoghue was fond of him. He called him ‘the angel’. Josh was his altar boy and despite his age, unsightly face, lumpy chalk-coloured skin, horse hair, crossed eyes and enormous ears, he was respected. The women used to say that a spirit had taken over his body. Mother saw him as a leprechaun or an elf, a pixie from our forests. One day, Tim Gormley swore God had afflicted him so he’d be made a saint.

— What a pity! I hope not, Josh had quietly replied.

And Gormley was left with his nasty remark, not knowing quite what to do with it, surrounded by his hyenas of brothers.

We left Ireland because of the Gormleys. Their cruelty was the final straw for our family. One evening in February Timmy and Brian cornered wee Kevin on his way home. My brother was carrying milk from the farmer to the house. He swung his milk can about him, spitting at the same time. Wee Kevin had always done that. When he was frightened or angry, or when his silence was disturbed, he’d bristle like a cat. With his red hair in his eyes, his lip curled, his black teeth, he would slaver down his chin and spit. This time the Gormleys didn’t back off. Timmy whacked my brother’s legs with a hurley. Brian smacked his ear with a closed fist. Wee Kevin dented the aluminium milk can against the low wall as he spat on the shadows.

My brother was limping and in tears when he got home. He was gripping the handle of the can, which had fallen to the pavement. Nobody told him off. My mother looked out the window. She was afraid the gang might have followed him. Seánie and I tore out the door, the taste of blood and milk in our mouths. Wee Kevin was drenched in urine. Those dogs had pissed all over him. We scoured the village, roaring out Timmy Gormley’s cursed name. Seánie smashed a rock through the window of the grocery where his mother worked. We killed no one. We gave up. We went home.

My mother was waiting for us at the door, her shawl over her head. Her brother, Lawrence Finnegan, had made her an offer she’d accepted. We could no longer continue to live in Killybegs, between the humiliation, the damp and the fighting. She was leaving, we were following. We were going to leave our Ireland, the land of my father. We were going elsewhere, to the other side, we were going to cross the border towards war.

— As long as I’m alive, my children will never see a British flag, my father used to say when he was drunk.

He was dead. His word had died with him.

Mother had decided to sell my father’s house. For weeks the blue and yellow sign remained stuck in the gravel of our path. But that dreary pile of stones was of no interest to anyone. Too cramped, too far from everything. And then death was prowling around there, misery, the grief of that widow with her rosary beads who spoke to Jesus as though giving her husband a piece of her mind.

One morning, very early, Uncle Lawrence came with his chimney sweep’s truck. It was 15 April 1941, two days after Easter. My mother had said we would go to Mass in Belfast the following day.

Belfast. I was frightened by that big city, that other country. Lawrence was like Mother, but with a coarse voice. A harder expression, too. But what stood out most was how silently he lived. He rarely spoke, never swore, didn’t sing. Lips, for him, were the doorway to prayer.

He counted my brothers and sisters as though listing off sheep to the buyer at market. It was a beautiful day, it wasn’t raining, there wasn’t even a threat of rain. The sea breeze came gusting into the house. We barely took anything with us. Not the table, the bench or the dresser, but we had the soup tureen from Galway that my grandmother had given to my mother. The mattresses were piled under the tarpaulin. Seánie, my mother and baby Sara were sitting up beside Lawrence, and the rest of us were crammed in the back, squabbling. An unsettling moment stuck in my memory. Mother was crying. She had closed the door and given it a kick. Then she asked her brother to make a detour so she could say goodbye to her husband.

We drove through the village. A woman crossed herself when we passed. Many others just kept walking. No friends or enemies, there was nobody to mourn or curse us. We were leaving our homeland and the homeland didn’t give a damn.

At the cemetery, our uncle dropped the truck’s tailgate. We walked towards the grave together, except for Sara who was left sleeping and Lawrence who stayed behind the wheel. Mother made us kneel down in front of the cross. And then she told my father that everything was his fault. That we’d never again have a roof over our heads or bread on the table. That she’d get sick and we were going to die one after the other, under the German bombs or the English bayonets. That she was truly suffering, that our cheeks were hollow and the edges of our eyes nearly black. She called on a woman smoothing gravel over her husband’s grave to witness.

— Do you see this, do you? Have you counted them? Nine! There are nine of them and I’m alone with the nine and not a soul to help me!

The woman cast her eye over our rabble and then she nodded in silence. I remember that moment because a seagull screeched. It was balancing in the wind above our heads, and it laughed at us.

I’d never seen an English uniform other than through my father’s hateful descriptions. The number of those soldiers he claimed to have taken by the scruff of the neck! To hear him tell it, half the king’s army had returned home with the mud from my father’s boot sole on their arses.

On the border with Northern Ireland, the British made us get out of the truck. I still didn’t know how to tell the Ulster Defence Volunteers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the Ulster Special Constabulary, those ‘B-Specials’ so loathed by my people. Lawrence didn’t utter a word, nor did my mother, as though some secret order forbade a Meehan or a Finnegan from addressing them. They were helmeted, their bunched-up trousers over their war boots.

The one who searched us had his shirt buttoned right up to the collar, a flattened helmet, a pack on his chest, his gun slung on his back and the bayonet my mother feared. It was the second time in my life seeing a British flag.

The first was 12 June 1930 in the port at Killybegs. The Go Ahead, an English steam trawler, made a stopover to repair some damage to the engine. It had two masts, dark-red sails and its chimney was belching black fumes. In under an hour, half the village was on the pier. I was five years old. I was holding Seánie’s hand, and my father was there, too. While the sailors lowered the gangplank, my brother made me read the boat’s registration, painted in white on the stern. I recognized the figures and I was proud. For a long time afterwards I even remembered the number — LT 534 — which I wrote down with Mother when we got home. Two harbour police went aboard carrying an Irish flag. The courtesy flag the captain had raised was stained and torn. So Killybegs offered them a brand-new Irish flag. It was hoisted on the front mast of the starboard. The police saluted the tricolour’s ascent. The crowd applauded noisily. Leaning against the bulwark, the English sailors smoked in silence. Their flag hung huge and lifeless behind, wrapped around its mast by our wind.

A long time ago, my father and his friends had burnt a Union Jack in our village square to celebrate the 1916 Rising. They had gathered in front of Mullin’s one Easter in honour of James Connolly, Patrick Pearse and all those who were shot. It had stopped raining. My father had given a speech, standing on a beer barrel with the furrowed brow and raised arms of an orator. He recalled the sacrifice our patriots had made and asked for a moment’s silence. Afterwards, a guy emerged from the crowd. He pulled a British flag from his jacket and my father set it alight with his lighter. It wasn’t a real flag. Not a flag made in England by the English. Ours was badly painted on the back of a white coat. The colour was running and spreading over the cross, but you could see what it was all the same. When it caught fire, everyone applauded. I was there. I was proud. I hit my hands together, imitating the crowd’s clapping. There were about fifty of us, and two gardaí who were keeping an eye on the gathering.

— For Christ’s sake! Don’t do that, Pat Meehan! Not their fucking flag! shouted the oldest man when my father set the fire.

— We’ll have trouble over this! someone else implored.

Ireland had been a free state for fifteen years, but people still thought the British army could come back over the border seeking vengeance.

The two guards ran across the square. My father and his friends shouted, ‘Grab the traitors!’ They were prepared to fight to defend the flaming flag. The women yelled and grabbed their children. And then Cathy Malone had a great idea. She took off her shawl, raised her head with brow bared, closed her eyes and launched into ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’, her fists pressed against her dress. Da and the others took off their caps, old soldiers standing to attention. The guards were flabbergasted. Stopped in their tracks by the first notes, they pulled themselves together as though summoned by a whistle. Stationary, side by side, they adjusted their belts with a thumb and lifted their fingers to the peaks of their caps. Not a sound could be heard: just our national anthem, our crystal pride, and Cathy Malone bawling her eyes out. The enemy flag was burning where it had fallen on the damp street, defied by a handful of patriots, a few women wrapped in shawls, ten children with grazed knees, and two gardaí in uniform. In my entire life, with all the huge commemorations and grandiose celebrations, I’ve never really recaptured the crude beauty and joy of that moment.

At the border, their flag was very small and worn. It was at half-mast, like washing hung out to dry. But this time it was a real one. And real British men. I had the impression that they were more smartly dressed than our soldiers. That might have been because they frightened me. Mother had told us to lower our eyes when they spoke to us, but I looked directly at them.

— Have you come to fight the Jerries? asked the soldier searching me.

— The what?

The fellow gave me a strange look. He had a weird accent, the same as Lawrence’s. He was a Northern Irishman slipped inside a British uniform. There was an insignia on his jacket, a harp surmounted by a crown.

— The Jerries? You know… the Krauts, the Fritz, time to wake up, sonny!

— The Germans, my uncle whispered.

The soldier patted down my back, between my thighs and under my arms, which were stretched out on either side of me.

— Don’t you know we’re at war?

— Yes, I know that.

He opened my bag and stuck his hand inside as though it were his own.

— No, you don’t. You know nothing, you Irish. Not a bloody thing! spat the soldier who was searching the truck.

He was the real thing. An Englishman from England. My father often used to imitate their way of speaking, upper lip stuck to his teeth and the same ridiculous intonation as the men on the radio.

— Don’t look me in the eye, you cheeky Irish brat! Turn around. Turn around all of you, hands in the air and face against the tarpaulin!

My uncle forced me to turn around. We put our hands up.

— Your thing is shooting us in the back, isn’t that it?

I sensed him behind me.

— Bet you were delighted when those IRA bastards declared war last year?

I didn’t reply.

— You know they plant bombs in cinemas in London, in Manchester? In post offices? At train stations? Have you heard about that? What do you think of that, you Irish?

— He’s only sixteen, my mother let out.

— Shut up, you! I’m talking to the little snot here.

— Let it go, the other soldier murmured quietly.

He made me turn around again, lower my arms. He gave me back my messed-up bag.

— You’re coming to help us win the war, is that it, snot-nose?

I looked at his muddy shoes. I thought hard of my father.

— Because if not, there’s nothing to see over this side.

I met his eyes again.

— Traitors are hanged. We’ve enough to be doing with Hitler, got it?

He raised his voice.

— Right! Listen to me. You’re entering the United Kingdom. There’s no de Valera here, no neutrality, none of your papist bullshit. If you don’t agree you can just turn right around now!

I met Lawrence’s silent look. It warned me to keep my mouth shut, forehead still pressed against the tarp, arms still raised.

So I lowered my head, like him, like Mother, like my brothers and sisters. Like all the Irish waiting on the roadside.

My uncle lived close to Cliftonville in the north of Belfast city. It was a Catholic ghetto, a nationalist bastion surrounded by neighbourhoods full of Protestants loyal to the British monarch. He was a childless widower and owned two houses next door to each other with an adjoining yard. The first was his chimney-sweep workshop and he lived in the second. I’d never seen streets as narrow, or such bleak, straight, endless rows of brick. Each family had its shoebox, strictly identical. A front door, two windows at street level, two on the first floor, a slate roof and a tall chimney. There were none of the coloured facades you’d see at home in those striking greens, yellows or blues. Just dark Belfast brick, dirty red in colour, and the window curtains that were the only friendly feature. Even the Virgins praying against the panes were the same in every house, blue and white plaster and bought from Hanlon’s, the local grocery.

We lived at 19 Sandy Street. My mother settled in with Róisín, Mary, Áine and baby Sara in one of the upstairs rooms. Wee Kevin, Brian and Niall took the other one, with the window overlooking the yard. Seánie and I had placed our mattresses in the living room on the ground floor. We tore up and down the narrow stairway, laughing, we took over the space. The glass was missing from the kitchen window and had been replaced with a piece of wood. Everything was damp, the wallpaper was peeling, the chimney drew poorly, but we had a roof over our heads.

For our first evening in Belfast, Lawrence had made a mutton and cabbage stew. From now on he’d stay in his workshop but would keep our key. People locked their doors in Belfast. We sat down on the floor, on the mattresses, in the armchair and on the couch, our plates on our knees. I was hungry. My uncle said grace in his own way.

— My Lord, let our plates be always full, and our glasses always topped up. May the roof over our heads remain solid enough. And may we get to heaven a wee half-hour before the devil learns we’re dead. Amen.

Mother raised her eyes to heaven. She didn’t like anyone joking about hell. We blessed ourselves. I immediately liked this man. He cut the bread and shared it out fairly.

— Thank Uncle Lawrence, Mother said as she cleared away our plates.

— Thank you, Uncle Lawrence!

He didn’t reply. He rarely replied. Wee Kevin asked him one day if his lips were glued together. I think he smiled.

Seánie wanted to go out but Mother asked him to stay in front of the house. I went with him. It was almost a soft evening, only a light drizzle. Groups of men stood talking, dotted all over the street, leaning against the walls. Every time someone passed, the others would greet him. They all addressed one another by their first names. It was the same in our village.

I’d just turned sixteen. And that evening, the first of my new life, in an Ireland that still wasn’t mine, I met Sheila Costello. She was fourteen and lived in the house to the left of ours heading up the street. She was tall. She had short, black hair, liquid-green eyes and that smile. For a few bob my sister Mary would soon be minding her sister in the evenings when their parents went to the pub. I kissed Sheila a few days later, one Sunday, in the dark, just after the Angelus. She had bent her head slightly so our lips could meet. She told me that a kiss was nothing, that you shouldn’t do it again or go any further. And then she called me ‘wee man’. That’s how she became my wife.

— Don’t you know we’re at war? the Englishman had asked me.

That evening, 15 April 1941, we learned it.

We had just gone to bed. Sheila’s image was flashing behind my eyelids when I closed my eyes. She said I had a ‘country’ accent. I wanted to try my best to imitate hers. I was sinking into my night, Seánie’s back against mine, pushing away his cold leg. Suddenly everything shook. There was an unholy din, a crash of steel, of smashed metal, very low above the houses.

— Fuck, those are planes! my brother said.

He got up, looked at the ceiling. He switched on the light. We could hear the screech of sirens. Panic on the stairs. A terrified rabble. Mother was grey, baby Sara in tears, my sisters in their night faces. Wee Kevin’s mouth hung open, Niall had a crazed look. Uncle Lawrence came in and asked us to get dressed quickly. The first bomb knocked Brian to the floor, just the noise. My brother fell flat on his back, his eyes rolled back in his head. Lawrence gathered him up in his arms. He spoke loudly and rapidly. He said we had nothing to fear. That the German planes had already come but that they didn’t bomb our neighbourhoods, that they attacked the city centre, the port, the stations, the barracks, the rich but not the destitute.

— Not the poor! Don’t kill the poor! my mother prayed, going out to the street.

We had reformed our pathetic caterpillar, each of us clinging to the other by the corner of a garment. Lawrence was at the head of the line. Families were spilling out, leaving their doors open. Fear distorted their faces. It was almost midnight. The moon was full, the clear sky had stripped the city. The planes were above us, below us, overwhelming our senses, roaring right inside our bellies. We didn’t dare look at them. We lowered our heads for fear of being struck by their wings. The city was burning in the distance, but none of our houses was alight.

— Lord spare us! my mother cried, pressing her cheek against baby Sara’s.

At the end of the street there was a huge explosion, a white burst of flame flowered in the chapel where we were going to take shelter. The sound of war. Real, staggering. The storm of men. The crowd was in chaos, suddenly on the ground, thrown, knocked down, heaped in screaming disorder along the walls. Some of them died where they stood, open-mouthed. Others collapsed helplessly.

We formed a ring of fear, our backs to the danger. Lawrence knelt down, Mother and the wee ones in the centre. Seánie, Róisín, Mary, my uncle and I were protecting them. We were wrapped around one another, heads pressed together and eyes closed.

— Don’t look at the flashes, they’ll blind you! screamed a woman.

We repeated the Hail Mary, faster and faster, tearing through the words. We were repenting. Mother was no longer praying, she had abandoned that familiar peace. Rosary wrapped around her wrist, a bracelet of beads, she was screaming at Mary the way you howl at the moon. She was calling out for her to protect us in the middle of the inferno.

We were never able to reach the O’Neill factory with its enormous basement. We stayed where we were until the war grew weary. The planes went away, disappeared behind the black mountains. And we returned amid the rubble. Our street was intact. Houses were burning just behind it. The entire northern section of the city had been demolished.

— The Protestants got what they deserved, growled a guy as he looked at the red and black sky above York Street.

— You think the Jerries can tell the difference? a neighbour asked.

The guy looked at him angrily.

— What’s bad for the Brits is good for us!

It was four in the morning. Everything stank of acrid fire. With the help of the Blessed Virgin, Mother put her wee ones to bed. She was speaking to her, thanking her in a low voice. My mother’s face: dreadful tears, smeared with snot and foamy saliva, hair tumbling. She pleaded with her. She should no longer turn away from our family. She needed to be there, always. Okay? Promise? Promise me, Mary! Promise me!

Lawrence took his trembling sister by the shoulders and folded her into his chest.

In the morning, I walked with Seánie and my uncle through Belfast for the first time in my life. The silence was shattered, the city turned upside down. All around you could hear the sound of glass, of shifting steel, fallen rubble. We stumbled amongst the blocks, the piles of bricks, the wood ripped away from timber structures. Beams blocked off avenues, lying between electricity poles and tram cables. The post-catastrophe dust lay over everything. White and grey smoke, fire flickering beneath the ruins. At the centre of vacant lots, bombs had hollowed out craters that were now filled with muddy water. We came across a car engulfed by a fountain of street. Men were wandering around, hands black, sooty faces, trousers and coats covered in ash. Others were standing at crossroads, beyond alone, speechless, their gaze devastated. There were very few women about. We heard the occasional uneven clopping of a horse passing, or a wheelbarrow. The locals clattered along on bicycles, matching the rhythm of the surrounding cacophony. Some students were standing in front of a building whose facade was missing, shovels in their hands. Four of them in medical-faculty uniform were carrying a wounded person.

And then I saw my first casualty of war, a few feet away. One arm was sticking out from under a blanket on a stretcher that lay on the ground. A woman’s arm, her nightdress melted onto her flesh. Seánie put a hand over my eyes. I shook him off.

— Let him look, my uncle told him.

I looked. The arm of the woman, her hand with its painted nails, skin hanging from the elbow to the wrist like a torn sleeve. We passed very close to her. The shape of the head underneath the fabric, her chest and then nothing, the blanket sagged from around the level of her waist. No legs left. In the street a newspaper vendor was selling the Belfast Telegraph. He was yelling about the hundreds dead, the thousand wounded. As for me, I saw an arm. I didn’t cry. I did the same as everyone else who passed. I touched my index and middle fingers to my forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. In the name of the Father and all the others. I decided to no longer be a child.

On Jennymount Street there was a man playing the piano, sitting on a wooden chair. The instrument had been rescued from the blaze and pulled outside, with its film of ash and debris. A few children had drawn near, their mothers with them, and some soldiers, too. I knew that song. I’d often heard it on Irish radio. ‘Guilty’, a love song.

If it’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you…

The musician was making faces. Winking. He was imitating Al Bowlly, the Killybegs girls’ favourite singer.

— Pity he isn’t Irish, my mother had said one day.

— Good job he isn’t, my father had responded.

And he would turn the dial on the radio that sat on the counter of Mullin’s. It was a game they played. My father would have challenged Bowlly at singing if he could, him with his gravelly voice, Bowlly with his honey.

— The voice of a eunuch, Padraig Meehan used to say.

He was wrong, and he knew it. But nothing British was allowed to offend our ears. Neither order nor song.

London was bombed two days after Belfast, on 17 April. Al Bowlly died in his home, blown up by a parachute mine. His ballad was aired on the BBC as a funeral hymn.

In front of a gutted house on the Crumlin Road, a crowd was gathered around several firemen. They weren’t wearing firemen shoes and their coats were drenched by the fire hoses.

— Those are Irishmen from Ireland! a man shouted.

Their captain was giving curt orders. I immediately recognized an accent from my country. I saw the Dublin Fire Brigade truck. Irishmen. Thirteen fire brigades had crossed the border in the morning, from Dundalk and Drogheda, too. The residents were offering them coffee and bread. Irishmen. I went closer. I wanted everyone to know that they were from my country. Each time a passer-by joined the crowd I would tell them the good news. The Irish had come to help. I could see the border soldier with his blond moustache and his thin lips. I replayed the scene.

— Have you come to fight the Jerries?

— You bet!

An old woman arrived with her arms in the air like a prisoner. She had mistaken the Dublin accent for a German one. She was removing debris from her house. She was groggy, covered in soot and bits of plaster. When people pointed out the Irish fire engine she sat down on the pavement, shaking her head, convinced now that the blast of the bombs had thrown her to the other end of the country.

The crowd was spilling into the street. A few soldiers broke it up. They pushed a journalist from the Belfast Telegraph away and confiscated his camera. Ireland was neutral and its presence here, assisting a combatant country, even just fighting fires, could embarrass the Irish government. Our firemen went back across the border the same day.

Our sadness turned to anger. I listened to the crushed city, the fragmented discourse. ‘I never did like washing the windows. Now I’ve a good reason not to do it any more,’ a shopkeeper had written on his cracked shop window. At the corner of Victoria Street and Ann Street, perched on a breeze block, a man was shouting that Northern Ireland was unprotected. That even the least important English town had shelters, anti-aircraft defences, troops, real fire services.

— Do you know how many anti-aircraft guns we have here, do you? shouted the man.

He was waiting for a response, but most people continued on their way, ashamed to lend him an ear.

— Twenty-odd in the whole of Ulster! And anti-aircraft shelters? Four! Only four, counting the public toilets on Victoria Street! And spotlights? How many? Eh? How many beams for tracking the planes? A dozen! There were over two hundred bombers last night, Fritz’s best, eh? Junkers! Dorniers! And as for us, what did we have?

— Damned papist! a guy passing yelled without turning.

The speaker shook his fist at him.

— Imbecile! I’m a loyal Protestant! British like you! A member of Coleraine’s Orange Order, so spare me your lecture!

And then he got down from his breeze block. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and put his limp hat back on while muttering once more:

— Imbecile!

A Protestant. It was the first time in my life I’d seen one.