We all have to start somewhere

One evening, as I was strolling towards the Munster lines, I met one of them, slightly intoxicated, making for our barracks. He had the fixed eye and smiling mouth of an Irishman with a purpose. I stopped him. ‘What cheer, Dirty Shirt. Where are you going?’

   If you want to know the rest of the story you can find it in John Lucey’s There’s A Devil In The Drum. I’d recommend it, and not just because it’s the only memoir I can think of that was written by an Irish front-line infantryman in an Irish regiment.

   But anyway.

‘What cheer, Dirty Shirt?’

   That was where it started.

   First, I now knew the origin of the ‘wotcher’ that had occasionally appeared alongside the blimeys and the strewths of my youthful reading. Second, I had a title for my book.

   My near-obsession with the First World War had started a long, long time before – and I’ll get around to telling that – but this was where the book began. The book was supposed to get it all out of my system.

   There was only supposed to be one book, by the way. The fourth (and last) of the series comes out right about now.

   These posts will be what didn’t go into any of my books. There will be meditations, clarifications, confessions, and maybe even stories.

   For the moment I’ll just start with where it all came from.

   It was years ago. Because I’d always wanted to, I’d written a book. Now I wanted to write a proper book. It was going to be a war story, because inside me there still dwells the small boy who delights in things that go ka-boom. And now, all of a sudden, I knew it was going to be about the Royal Munster Fusiliers – the Dirty Shirts.

   They’d been the local regiment back when Ireland had been part of the UK. Ireland’s British military past isn’t exactly forgotten, but it is one of those rather embarrassing things we prefer not to talk about – a bit like the regrettable ideas we espoused and the distasteful company we kept in our teenage years. So if you didn’t know about the Munsters then you wouldn’t know about the Munsters. They’re like some long-ago team from a sport you don’t care about. I never cared for sports myself, but I have to say that Irish regimental history fascinated me. Maybe there’s a connection there. Maybe because I was never any sort of team player I was curious about those for whom the team wasn’t just their identity, but a life-and-death matter. I don’t know.

   But anyway.

   A hundred and more years ago, the town in which my grandparents were growing up – indeed the whole country – was bestrode by men who dressed in scarlet and blue. They were men who belonged to monastic brotherhoods dedicated to organised violence: the regiments.

   And the Irish regiments were the oddest of them.

   I go into enough of this in my books, so I’ll just leave these two anecdotes here:

   In the summer of 1914 the Royal Dublin Fusiliers marched through town with the band playing that famous rebel tune, ‘A Nation Once Again’.

   In the same summer the Irish Guards – you know, those forbidding figures with bearskins on their heads who stand outside Buckingham Palace; those lads who are famous for not cracking a smile for even the sunniest tourists – the Irish Guards raised a cheer for the politicians who came to the palace to negotiate Irish independence.

   These were the Irish regiments, who could be loyalist and nationalist all at once, and where even the Englishmen in the ranks were proud to be Irish.

   And it was all normal, more or less.

   This was what grabbed me: all these splendidly dressed oddballs strutting around playing soldiers, and it was just part of the scenery.

   And that’s what brought me to my main character. I needed someone who could look at this state of affairs and ask, ‘What the hell?’ I needed an outsider with a perspective closer to the modern one. I needed someone from the twentieth century, from a world powered by electricity.

   So we begin with an American in Ireland, expecting the sort of thing American tourists come for and getting something else entirely. He wants the stories and songs of old Ireland and he gets the traditions and mythologies of the regiment instead. 

   And where would this take place? Why, in Tralee, of course.

   The Munsters had been based in Tralee, which was a place I didn’t know at all. All I had was an old family prejudice, handed down from my mother’s father who died before I was born and who’d worked for the distillery. The way my mother told it, his low opinion of the town came from his whiskey-selling days. He considered it a place roughened by Munster Fusiliers who opened pubs there following their discharge. I have no idea if Tralee had really been rough in the early twentieth century, or if the story had been distorted down the years in my mother’s memory. It was good enough for me to be getting on with.

   An American tourist walks into the wrong pub in Tralee.

   Thank you, Grandad O’Mahony.

   And we’re away.

The infantry, all dolled up, marches to church. Just another Sunday in Tralee.