FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘As I Please’

Published: 5 May, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

OUR oyal wedding day was a disaster. The O’Shea family claimed a regal past – a proposition based on the letter O which they claimed was their linkage with an Irish king. 

Many hundreds of families the – O’Sullivans,  the O’Gradys, the O’Gormans – all of the Os are of the blood royal Irish-style.

They were marrying off daughter number three – Maureen. 

The elaborate arrangements were the continuous topic among the hardened gossips and hovering vultures, namely Welsh widows.

It was 1947, the year of the Queen’s wedding and for the rest of us it was more famine than feast.

The O’Sheas daughters, six of them, were all in full employment and the matriarch Annie O’Shea sallied forth daily as frequently as Elizabeth Taylor to the jewellers, returning followed by a straining, red-faced errand boy loaded with a cornucopia of rare merchandise.

A small woman with an overflowing purse, Annie was greeted like the late Queen Mother at every black market outlet. 

The day dawned, heralding hours of high drama and lasting religious consequences. 

It was high noon. People came from streets around. 

Rumour had it that Maureen’s wedding dress was made of silk. 

As far as the other citizens knew there was not a silk farm or grub or weaver in our valley.

A gabby woman, Mrs Matabele Jones, skilled even by Welsh standards in exaggeration, claimed the silk had been obtained from a harsh mountain woman in Neath who had murdered some German parachutists who had mistaken her home for the Fishguard docks.

And, fortunately, such exaggerated forms of communication were common. It spiced life up.

Walters the undertaker stood with a pensive face. There were two imposing black limousines he had been asked to provide from another merchant of death in a nearby village where they seemed to practise the cult of morbidity. Walters, a man with a professional melancholic look which personified grief, strongly disapproved of the limousines being covered in flowers rather than wreaths.

Maureen remained, inside, tense. Not from pre-marital tension but from appearing before her neighbours, masculine women and effete men who had a reputation for instant aspersion and deadly asides. 

The most killing was: “Mutton dressed up as lamb.”

But an air of drama blew down the street. What caused Father Murray to drive through the scattering crowds? 

He was the parish enforcer and he fought his way into the bridal residence.

A crisis was about to break.

A scream pierced the tension. It was like Tosca, Puccini’s doomed opera singer when she hurled herself from the grim battlements of Castel Angelo in Rome.

A hush fell as the father of the bride Jim O’Shea emerged wearing his evergreen  greasy trilby hat, eyes yellow with rodent rage. He stunned his eager listeners: “There'll be no bloody wedding here today!” And he stormed back in.

 An aunt called Nelly Regan purveyed the bizarre news through the crowd.

Elwyn the popular bus driver and Maureen’s beloved had a fatal flaw. 

And the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff had applied his eagle eye to Elwyn’s application and found he had never been baptised. He was determined that no Welsh mountain pony would mix with young Irish virgins.

The registrar, Miss Cwnwin Pugh, fell into a rage and opened the town hall register office. A trip to Porthcawl with her ailing mother was postponed. Elwyn’s family forcibly entered the Church of England church and shocked the timid and reclusive vicar into blessing the marriage behind closed doors.

The archbishop is reported to have said: “the heretical spirit of Martin Luther is loose in the valleys” and worked his frustration off on the golf course. And perhaps when he saw His Holiness again suggested that perhaps it was time to bring back the Inquisition.

Indifferent to his strictures, the street broke into a pagan festival. 

Jim O’Shea, Jack Regan and Paddy Casey danced “the walls of Limerick”. They would have won Michael Flatley’s approval.

No one got up for mass the next morning  – a mortal sin. But no one expressed  repentance.

Elwyn had entered into holy deadlock with his awfully wedded wife Maureen.

Last Friday’s events had a mixed effect. 

TV commentators with a militant left-wing past went delirious in fits of sycophancy. 

The main commentator, a one-time student extremist, seemed to be transformed into a screaming Boy Band Fan.

The pièce de résistance was the emergence of a group of men called courtiers. 

They were posh with the manners of neutered cats. 

One Sir Egremont Fraser, rubicond with a pale purple nose, summed it all up very grandly. 

He had organised many a royal show. 

“Nothing to it my dear. It’s a bit like putting on a complicated musical in the West End or assembling Bertram Mills’ circus.”

The postscript to this occasion was the cleaners at Buckingham Palace; they were protesting that they were paid the minimum wage for cleaning royal residences. Perhaps they cleaned Sir Egremont’s grace-and-favour cottage in Hampton Court or somewhere.

The cleaners were rather dignified and regal and the sweat of honest labour was on their brows.