Dublin Folktales (22 page)

To make sure that any mad robbers did no damage to the till or the safe, Pauric had left both open wide. That way, he would not have to pay for repairs when they attacked them only to find there was no reward for their efforts to be had. While Petey and Liam wandered about the empty post office in the hope of finding a pot of gold, Maurice found his way into the kitchen where he sat at the big kitchen table to have a think beside the glowing range. The heat was nice; the range gave off a comfortable warmth. An intoxicating smell of Christmas baking, completed that very afternoon, wafted around Maurice’s disappointed head. As he came to terms with his disappointment, he found himself softly humming an almost-forgotten Christmas carol to himself.

At this point the others arrived in the kitchen on the hunt for something they could take with them. If they could not find cash, they would settle for anything they could steal and turn into ready money. They were pleasantly surprised to discover several unopened bottles of Christmas cheer in a press in a corner. No sooner had they come upon this treasure, than they began to cheer themselves up with copious glasses of amber liquid. They were soon on a roll and the first bottle was emptied quickly. Since a bird never flew on one wing, they opened another bottle, and then another for luck. Then, Petey who was afflicted all his life with a sweet tooth declared they should have a slice of homemade Christmas cake to go with the sup.

As it happened, the absent May was known across four parishes for the quality of her Christmas cakes and puddings. She had a nice sideline in providing the same to a select clientele. Her baking was so popular that to get onto her list, you had to wait until someone died. So, when Petey took a large carving knife and chopped out chunks from the Christmas cake that was reserved for May’s own table, he had inadvertently crossed the Rubicon. Petey made sure his two companions had the same size wedge of iced Christmas
cake as he did. So, it was natural, that with a lump of cake each to consume and drink to go with it, the three buddies would stay longer than normal at the scene of a crime. It was also a given that they would grow drowsy with warmth both inside and out.

Liam was the first to nod off. His heavy head lolled on his breast; his mouth lay open and a trickle of sweet saliva eventually fell from his mouth to his chest. The others toned down their singing out of respect for a tired and discouraged colleague. That was the way the house lay when May came into the kitchen with her full shopping bags bouncing against her tired legs. Another person arriving into their home to find three layabouts dozing before the fire would have made a fuss, might even have run away to safety, might have called for the gardaÌ, but May was cut from different cloth. She was the wife of a retired rebel and she decided to renew the armed struggle against the invaders. May had seen off more than a few mad robbers when an ill-considered raid was made on the front of house. Now they were in her kitchen.

She stood for a moment, in the middle of the floor, with her bags resting against her ankles. It was cold outside and she still had her heavy maroon top-coat buttoned up. She opened it a button at a time and took it off her before proceeding. May hauled a heavy wooden chair over to the side wall, as quietly as she could. She climbed up on the chair, balanced, and took the black gun down from its rusted nail, blowing the dust from it as she stepped back down again. Without disturbing the three sleeping cherubs, she removed a large saucepan from the press along with a number of lids of varying sizes. May stuck the gun in her belt and banged the saucepan and the lid together as hard as she could while shouting, ‘Wake up, wake up, she has a gun.’

Petey leaped up first and stared down the barrel of the gun that May was now waving at them. Maurice joined him in his terror and it was not long before Liam was quaking in his boots beside them. All three were instantly contrite and if not exactly shocked into sobriety, they had at least stopped drooling into the glowing fire.

May gestured towards the door with the gun. Petey, who was by now awake the longest, took the first tentative step to safety. An irate housewife was likely to do anything with a gun, even if it was by accident, he reasoned. Being shot on purpose or by accident was all the same; you were still wounded or dead as luck would have it.

He stepped away, a step at a time. When the others saw that he was still alive they also stepped along. They held onto one another until they resembled a shuffling jelly with six feet and three heads, each more terrified than the other. Once at the open doorway they paused. On one side was a very cross woman with a gun, and on the other was black darkness outside where it might be safe to make a run for it. The jelly split open and they ran out of the house bumping and banging into one another when May shouted, ‘Run, run, she has a gun. She’s going to fire it.’

From that day onwards, not a man of them could tell whether they were followed by shots or if the noises they heard in the cold night air was the sound of saucepan lids hitting the door behind them. What was certain was that there was never another attempt to break into that business or that home. For word went about the town that May was a crack shot with the loaded pistol that hung on the rusty nail in the kitchen and nobody was prepared to argue with an Irish mother with a gun. It would be an argument nobody would ever win. For a loaded mother is a sight to behold.

Most Christian cities had a religious statue placed on a high point above the city as a symbol of piety to the faithful, and as a warning to evil to stay away from the protected people below. Dublin, for its part, had a long building perched atop the Dublin Mountains to the south of the city that was associated with the devil and devil worship. Not that the devil was said to be protecting his own in the town below, more like a few people had risen up to worship the devil as an alternative belief system, after being barred from their usual drinking haunt near Christ Church Cathedral. They went up the top of the mountain at Killakee, above Rathfarnham, and they indulged in all sorts of shenanigans, that were reportedly of so debased a character that any mortal soul that wandered in was left dumbstruck from then on from the experience. The mountain is more of a hill really at something around 390 metres, but the hills are referred to by Dubliners as the Dublin mountains. These are the things Dubliners believe. The hills are mountains. Fair enough. Someone in the past decided that and no one will now disagree. While the shooting lodge was not built quite at the crest of the hill, it still commanded a view over Dublin City, from Rathfarnham and Tallaght below it, right across to Phoenix Park to the west and Ireland’s Eye and Howth Head on the far side of Dublin Bay to the north.

William Connolly who was Speaker of the Irish House of Commons had the house built on Mount Pelier Hill in 1725. Speaker Connolly as he was known, was one of the richest men in Ireland in his day. He built the club as a hunting lodge. All windows face north, perhaps for the view, perhaps for some other reason. A relic of a prehistoric passage tomb stood beside the site of the house. It was described as being made of large flat stones set edgewise. Inside were smaller stones collected into a heap. In the centre was a monolith nine feet high, six feet wide, and three feet thick. A similar stone about five or six feet high stood about sixty yards away. The cairn was destroyed without too much concern and the boulders were used in construction of the lodge. A slate roof was placed on top of the building, but was blown off in a great storm, shortly afterwards. Locals attributed this misfortune to bad luck accruing from the destruction of the cairn. In response Speaker Connolly built a massive arched roof of stones keyed together for greater interlocking strength, similar to what is seen in construction of an old stone bridge. This roof was so tough that it withstood the onslaught of wind or bad-luck from that day on. The flat stones from the ruined cairn were set edgewise in the roof and gaps were filled with gravel and mortar until a uniform surface was built up. Otherwise, the house was constructed of very rough and irregular materials, ill calculated to remain long in good repair, according to reports, which may offer a different explanation for why the roof took off in a mountain storm. Shoddy workmanship rarely stands before the forces of nature.

None of which did anything to quieten the unease of people in the neighbourhood who said no luck would ever return to the building or its users. After Connolly’s death in 1729, the lodge lay empty and unused for some years until it was acquired by Richard Parsons and the Hellfire Club, from which it took its name for ever more. At this point the
lodge attracted the interest of a number of Dublin rakes: moneyed and privileged layabouts.

The Hellfire clubs was started in England by Sir Francis Dashwood in Buckinghamshire. The club and its copy-cats became notorious for rumoured sexual orgies and occult activities. Richard Parsons, Earl of Rosse, established the Dublin Hellfire Club in 1735 where it became associated with excessive drinking of whiskey and bacchanalian pastimes. Club founder Parsons answered to the title of ‘The King of Hell’, what else. He is said to have dressed like Satan might very well do, with horns, wings and cloven hooves as part of his get-up. A chair was ritually left unoccupied for the devil or his emissary to sit upon. The first toast was always drunk in honour of the absent devil, who might join the assembly at any moment.

Perhaps it was the devil who masqueraded as a visitor to the house one dark night in Connolly’s time. The stranger asked for lodging for the night. As was the custom he was granted overnight lodgings and treated hospitably. A card game was suggested. Everything was going well until one of the players let a card fall to the floor. Bending down to pick it up, he was shocked at what he saw beneath the well-cut leggings of the house guest. Leaning back up, he cried that the visitor had a cloven hoof in place of a foot. Once challenged, the story goes, Satan conjured up a clap of thunder and smoke which, when it cleared, left a reek of brimstone behind it. And a vanished guest.

The devil must have formed an attachment to the house for he was reputed to be a regular presence once the orgies of the Hellfire Club got going. However, Weston St John Joyce, in his 1912
The Neighbourhood of Dublin
, wrote that while the Hellfire Club may have held some of its meetings in this house, it was tolerably certain that it was never one of the regular meeting places of that mysterious and iniquitous body, the ordinary rendezvous of which was the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, beside Dublin Castle and just
down the road from the Irish Commons on College Green. Someone else suggested that the boozers were asked not to patronise the Eagle Tavern any more and thus repaired to the top of the Dublin mountains to continue their hedonistic interests, or to skull a few more drinks in private, depending on who you believe.

The hunting lodge included two large rooms and a hall on the upper floor. A small loft sat over the parlour and entrance hall. The hall door was reached by a flight of steps. On the ground level was a large kitchen, servants’ quarters and a number of small rooms.

Scalteen was said to be their favourite drink. It was made from half a pint of whiskey, half a pound of butter and six eggs. It was taken red-hot for best result. It was said that scalteen would make a corpse walk as it was so powerful it would put the life back into anyone, man or beast, dead or alive. It was a great reviver to those who came in off a winter hill, with the cold wrapped around them like a mountain mist around a lone bush. The advice was that once it was swallowed by the drinker, he should go to bed while he was still able to do so. Such a powerful intoxicant swallowed freely and frequently could explain some of the reports of the devil himself appearing in the Hellfire Club.

Many are the stories of strong men seeing Nick himself smiling at them from the bottom of a bottle of strong spirits, never mind the addition of intoxicating eggs and butter to the mix. Given that most of those present in the building on these occasions were intoxicated in some way or another, either through over-imbibing in scalteen or by hereditary in-breeding causing delusions of the mind what credence can be put to the tale of a cleric who found himself on the grounds one dark night?

A large black cat was the centre of the devil-worshippers attention, noted the clergyman. The cleric was soon hauled into the circle by some of the devil’s men. But the cleric shook himself free from his mortal captors to turn
his attention to the hissing feline. He prayed and called for the demon to be cast out by a power far greater than his own. Whatever happened, it is said, the unfortunate cat was torn asunder and a demon appeared, striking fear into all present. Once more, having had the required effect of terrifying the living daylights out of everyone, the devil took himself off about his business. He left, this time through the roof, smashing down the ceiling as he went, causing even more discomfort to the assembled onlookers.