At the Edge of Ireland by David Yeadon Page B

and he furnished the house all fancylike and well…it kind of stayed that way!”
    For an hour or so we chatted in this Aladdin’s cave of a room. Then Adrienne’s mother came in, her hair done up in a kind of 1940s style (time-warp time again), with an ornate tray brimming with dainty sandwiches, scones, homemade sloe and apple jam, and tea in hand-painted porcelain cups. She was a delightful person, full of tales of family antics and obviously very proud of her homemade jams. “I’ll give you a pot to take with you. It’s the gin that really makes it special!”
    â€œGin in what—the jam?!”
    â€œOf course. Gives it a little kick, don’cha think?”
    â€œYes, I certainly do and”—I paused—“by the way, there’s something over there in the corner kicking too…”
    Adrienne laughed. “Oh, that’s just one of the pugs having a bit of a scratch…There’s two more around somewhere.”
    The dog seemed to realize it was now the focus of attention and ceased its flailing and turned its head toward me. I gasped, I think. Certainly I was shocked by the dog’s resemblance to an utterly time-worn, exhausted, and ferociously angry Winston Churchill. And then I remembered: “Isn’t that the dog on the cover of Pete’s book?! The one next to the boozing nun?”
    Adrienne laughed. “That’s the one. Isn’t he a darling!”
    Not my choice of adjective, but I chewed on a sandwich and made some kind of acknowledging grunt and we moved on to other matters.
    As we chatted, I noticed one corner of the room seemed a little like a shrine to a good-looking man and adorned with swords and medals and newspaper clippings.
    â€œOh, that’s my dad—Aidan,” said Adrienne with a grin of pride and affection. “He was a doctor and decided to join the Brits in World War II. Many round here didn’t, but he thought he should, and later—thirty-five years later—he finally wrote a short memoir about all the amazing and terrible things he’d seen. I showed it to Pete. He was utterly gob-smacked—so was I when I first read it. He’d never talked much about his experiences. He was a very gentle, modest man. So Pete helped get it republished and it’s been on the best-seller list now for quite a while. Look—just read one of the reviews. There were plenty, but I think this fellow—Philip Nolan—got it just about right.”
    Adrienne handed me a yellowing review clip and I read: “The shelves of the world’s libraries are not exactly littered with memoirs of World War II written by Irishmen. After all, the vast majority sat it out on the sidelines watching with a lazy eye as the markers were shuffled across the map like chips on a roulette baize. And what a tale it is. This is a stranglehold of a book…”
    The reviewer, aware of the gravity and horror of many of Aidan’s stories, seems relieved by its lighter moments. For example:
    Aidan’s wanderings around Europe in search of his elusive “senior medical officers’ group” in 1939 and the heady days of the “phony war” in France where he was called upon to examine the local prostitutes for infections. He described how ordinary servicemen had to be out of the brothels by 10:30 p.m. to leave the field clear for the officers, thus reinforcing the fact that, even when satisfying nature’s most basic urges, the ranks were not allowed to mingle! Then his efficiency as a health inspector was so respected that on one occasion he had over 200 completely naked females lined up for him at an RAF base in England. Following his initial surprise and embarrassment, he instructed that bras and panties be donned immediately. For the next few days, the incident took a good deal of living down and was the subject of endless ribaldry in the officers’ mess.
    But at the heart of the memoir is