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    Crossing the Lagan
    Crossing the Lagan
    Crossing the Lagan
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Crossing the Lagan

    By Frederick Anthony Wilkinson

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    About this ebook

    This collection of short stories and vignettes is at once sad, humorous, and inspiring, set against the backdrop of the Diaspora. Woven from the recollections and experiences of childhood in a society divided by religion, expectations, despair, and hope, it tells the tales of those who crossed the Lagan in search of a better life. This canvas captures the fleeting nature of the Church’s influence and control, and the contempt for its hypocrisy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAustin Macauley Publishers
    Release dateMar 1, 2024
    ISBN9781035841424
    Crossing the Lagan
    Author

    Frederick Anthony Wilkinson

    Born in Belfast, educated in St. Marys Grammar School until aged 14 when the family left for a new life in Coventry where Frederick attended Ullathorne and Bablake Grammar Schools. On leaving University he travelled around the world, employed in a variety of jobs from teaching to working in mines, and Telecoms in Australia, Africa, Asia and America. On returning to UK, Frederick became sales director in Africa, Europe and Middle East. He was recruited by HRM to work in Poland, Ukraine and Russia.

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      Book preview

      Crossing the Lagan - Frederick Anthony Wilkinson

      About the Author

      Born in Belfast, educated in St. Marys Grammar School until aged 14 when the family left for a new life in Coventry where Frederick attended Ullathorne and Bablake Grammar Schools. On leaving University he travelled around the world, employed in a variety of jobs from teaching to working in mines, and Telecoms in Australia, Africa, Asia and America. On returning to UK, Frederick became sales director in Africa, Europe and Middle East. He was recruited by HRM to work in Poland, Ukraine and Russia.

      Copyright Information ©

      Frederick Anthony Wilkinson 2024

      The right of Frederick Anthony Wilkinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

      Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

      A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

      ISBN 9781035841417 (Paperback)

      ISBN 9781035841424 (ePub e-book)

      www.austinmacauley.com

      First Published 2024

      Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

      1 Canada Square

      Canary Wharf

      London

      E14 5AA

      1. The Writer

      Fitzpatrick O’Hagen lived alone in a courtyard at the back of St. Malachy’s Church and across from the Joy Arms at the corner of Joy and Henrietta Streets. The terraced house had been inherited from his widowed mother, together with a sizeable monthly allowance to keep him in a manner to which he had not expected to be accustomed. This financial largesse afforded him the freedom to release to paper the books still imprisoned in his head. This gestative magnum opus would be his valedictory gesture to a world of mundanity and greyness. He would put his English Degree from Queens to the use he had always intended.

      Fitz had sipped at the fountain of Bohemia in Paris and indulged in the sublime decadence of Berlin and fought in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Idealism fired his cerebral discharges. His faith had been abandoned because of the Church’s support of the Nationalists and the massacres of Badajoz and Guernica. Irony of ironies, he could hear the church bells and occasionally ad deums, reminding him of his apostasy. Maybe they all invented God to perpetuate their hopes of immortality, he often thought.

      He manufactured absinthe using a stil named Oscar and consumed the greenish grey nectar in warm remembrance of those yellow days. He amused himself, singing In the Still of the Night as the nectar dripped into the basin. On his wall hung a copy of Degas’ Absinthe and he considered himself to have a resemblance to the pipe smoker, though better looking and more sartorially elegant. His only companion was a budgie named Onan in reference to its penchant for scattering seed. His liquor intake had ravaged his looks and he presented a bloated, mottled countenance sat underneath a prodigious mane of grey flecked ginger hair. His bulbous nose had a life of its own and had spread, in homage to his manufacturing endeavours, across his face; a rotund, portly figure sculptured from devotion to minimum physical acquaintance. When venturing outdoors, he sported a green velvet tuxedo suit, red fedora hat, highly polished brown brogues and an ivory handled walking stick. He had grown a goatee beard and moustache but had shaved it off when people would call ‘Buffalo Bill’ after him. He liked to be noticed and his sartorial apparel stroked his narcissism. He would drink in the Joy Arms mostly and only ventured further abroad, on the odd occasion, to the fallen girls in Amelia Street when the need beckoned him and, with the thrusting and twisting body movements, he saw face of his love, lost in the devastation of the Spanish Civil War, to momentarily satisfy his wants. Sometimes after leaving he would wander down to his Alma Mater and sit in the gardens reflecting on the vicissitudes of life and revel in any comments passer-by’s would make apropos his attire, doffing his hat in mock appreciation.

      His dietary needs were met by Annie Coyle, a spinster in her mid-forties, a childhood friend who carried an unrequited torch for Fitz, ran the family grocery shop and would leave daily provisions at his door and rarely solicited payment. Thus he was fed on wheaten bread, bacon, tea, milk and the occasional packet of Ardglass herrings. It never altered as did Annie’s solicitations and fanciful expectations.

      Ah, divinity! My earthly chains are unfettered and I fly on winged sandals to fields that are Elysium. He showered on the blushing and twittering Annie as he gathered up his provisions. A roguish wink and a blown kiss sent her floating back across the street, fluttering with an infantile like delight.

      Thus were the life, times and dreams of the would-be scribe enacted on a stage whose audience and players diminished his expectations. I am a colossus fallen to rubble, he mused through his glass greenly.

      Fitz’s social life, apart from the aforementioned peregrinations, revolved around the Joy Arms where, almost on a daily basis, he held court, revelling in his own erudition.

      It was St. Patrick’s Day and the pub was festooned in the tricolour and plates of shamrock free to customers for buttonholing. Fitz always made a commanding, majestic entrance to the Joy Arms, effecting and projecting a stentorian benediction to all you chevaliers de debris. What am I having on this glorious day, stout person?

      Whatever you won’t pay for, Hemmingway!

      Drop a wee bit of shamrock in the nectar, there’s a good man.

      Won’t a slice of lemon do, you bloody eegit!

      Have you no sense of occasion or patriotism? Hail Gloria St. Patrick, dear saint of our Isle and I’ll drink any bile. Raising his glass, swallowing the drink and shamrock and winking to the patrons.

      How’s the great work coming along? Voice from the far end of the bar.

      Famously, a little bit of polishing here and there and she’ll be ready for public digestion.

      Are ye going to use your own name or remain unanimous?

      He means ominous.

      Whatever I choose, dear philistines, replied Fitz, straight faced.

      What about yee, Tolstoy, when are we goin’ to have a wee peek at this masterpiece?

      Sure there’s a peaceful war raging in the auld head and the great day is at hand. Never fear, offered Fitz.

      Has the fascist father been in? said Fitz nimbly changing tact. Father Dixie was the writer’s theological opponent and they sparred regularly on the creation, how did Caine and Abel manage to procreate, the infallibility of the Pope, the Medici, Pope Pius XII’s collaboration with the Nazis, the corruption of the Church, the Magdalene Homes and why didn’t any priests die in the Famine and a litany of other contentious topics. They actually liked each other but put on performance for the pub regulars and were known as Pastor and Bollocks the heavenly sins. A sobriquet bestowed on them by Doctor Wilson who had a surgery above the Arms and nipped in for the occasional draught prescription.

      Not yet, Dixie’s doing his pastoral visitations, pubwise, and will be in later to get his liquid donation.

      I presume the old bugger is granting you a biretta full of plenary indulgences for each free glass. You must be a thousand years in credit. He’s as bad as Leo X.

      Now now, your writership. He’s good man at heart but the auld drink’s got him.

      The Joy Arms was the watering hole for an

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