Читать книгу Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? - Tim Bradford - Страница 19

This was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine, Yeats’ lost love. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. In those days she was into karate and was a rumbustous hard-drinking wild woman with mad long hair. Now she had slimmed down to become a slinky hard-drinking wild woman with fashionable long hair, pierced bellybutton and celtic tattoo on the small of her back. She was a Gaelic footballer and also well-versed in ancient Irish history and modern Irish politics. Her grandmother’s family had been old republicans – the grandfather had been De Valera’s driver for a while and had also worked for John McBride, husband of Maud Gonne. I’d talked to her grandmother about all this just after Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins had been released. Being an old anti-Treatyist, Granny Mac wasn’t quite so rosy and sentimental about the likes of Boland and Collins as Jordan’s film. She had also met Maud Gonne. I won’t tell you exactly what she said, but you won’t read about it in the history books.