Today I'm rounding up the Blog Tour for Dolly Considine's Hotel by Eamon Somers. It's a richly layered tale which makes for riveting reading. I am pleased to be able to share an extract with you today.
Julian
Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) is an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer
fleeing a life unlived. Dolly McClean (née Considine) is knee-deep
in running a hotel populated by family secrets and Irish republicans.
They seem to have little in common – until Julian rescues Dolly's
barmaid-cum-cleaner from a supposed IRA thug. It doesn’t take long
for him to embroil himself in the gossip of the bar and the
guests’ bedsheets. Dolly and her entourage quickly become fodder
for his literary ambitions and soon it becomes impossible to
extricate reality from fantasy...
Moving fluidly
between the 1950s of Dolly’s youth and Julian’s 1980s summer of
unrequited love, Irish recession and emigration, the hotel becomes a
stage for farce and tragedy. As statues give birth to fully grown men
while sword-wielding Irish dancers perform for party politicians,
Julian’s fictions, Dolly’s Political secrets and political
intrigue threaten to tear them and Ireland itself apart in the run up
to the Pro-life Constitutional Amendment of September 1983.
About the Author:
Eamon Somers
was born and grew up in inner city Dublin. He was a Historical fiction campaigner and spokesperson for Ireland’s fledgling lesbian
and gay rights movement in the early 1980s. During the economic
downturn he was made redundant and, having moved to London, spent two
years working in Haringey’s Lesbian and Gay Unit until Clause 28
and Council Tax cuts sent him into the charity housing sector where
he continues to work.
Eamon’s
story Spring in the Country won the Carmarthen short story
competition sponsored by BBC Wales. Other stories have been published
in Chroma, Tees Valley Writer and ABC Tales. Eamon is a graduate of
the certificate in creative writing at Birckbeck College London - the
forerunner of the current MA. He is the father of three wonderful
children. He and his Civil Partner (Tomás) are very proud of their
three-year-old grandson Daragh.
Extract:
Part 1
Dolly Considine’s
Hotel: April 1953
When her Aunt Ellen’s
will was read and the extent of the debts run up during the yearlong
closure were known, Dolly Considine’s father announced publicly
that the twelve-bedroom hotel up in Dublin would be sold at
auction. His daughter might have inherited the business, he said, but
she was only eighteen and her place was at home with her family in Co
Offaly. Everyone knew he had to look decisive in
public, but to his constituents, party managers, and the pro and
anti-Fianna Fail newspapers, it would be the outcome of the coroner’s
inquest that decided his political future, and not the
decisions he made about his underage daughter’s hotel.
Dolly had been
persuading her mother to take her Christmas shopping in Dublin for
years before the scandal. On her very first stay in the hotel,
towards the end of The Emergency, with war rationing still
affecting everyone else and while watching a couple of American
soldiers in mufti in the Visitors’ Lounge, she had made a promise
about her future. And as if to seal it, she let go of her mother’s hand,
brushed a fleck of glitter from the front of her long brown coat and
shook her head to make the two pink rose buds pinned to the front of
the hat her mother had bought her that afternoon in Brown
Thomas quiver with certainty. She smiled at the American soldiers to
let them know they were invited to come back to the bar to sip
celebratory drinks with her on the day she moved into the
hotel forever.
Mrs Burns, the manageress, had her own opinion about
the hotel owner’s sister and
favourite niece occupying beds that she could have filled twice over
in the days surrounding the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the
traditional opportunity for country people to come to
Dublin for their Christmas shopping. But it was December 1951 before
she said anything.
“Dolly is getting to
be such a grand lady, she might be more comfortable in the Hibernian
next year,” Mrs Burns said as the pair of them stood at reception
fretting over suitcases and Christmas wrapped parcels and waiting for
a taxi to take them to King’s Bridge station. Mrs Burns might have
said something similar the following year, but by the time Christmas
decorations went up in the shops,
Josie Geoghan was dead, the hotel was closed and Mrs Burns herself
was dismissed and living with her sister in Birmingham,
and the shame which would finish off Aunt Ellen two days before
Little Christmas had already begun its work.
Far from it being the
Hibernian Hotel, a week after the inquest into the death of the
chambermaid recorded a verdict of misadventure, Dolly and her mother
were sleeping in Mrs Burns’ old room, and despite Mrs Considine
speaking to auctioneers, Dolly was making plans for a grand
reopening; washing, scrubbing, dusting, making beds like a
professional. She even painted the hall ceiling when the man she’d
engaged to do it was scared away by Mrs Considine’s warning that he
would have to join the hotel’s creditors. But invitations to the
celebration were issued and her mother had no choice except to attend
and pretend it was an opportunity for the auctioneer to familiarise
himself with the business.
Mr and Mrs Hannafin,
(who had continued to live-in while the hotel was officially closed)
attended, and when Dolly gave them a welcoming sherry each, she also
issued them with a bill for their arrears. She introduced everyone to
her late Aunt’s solicitor, who confirmed that selling the hotel
without Dolly’s full agreement would be against the spirit of the
bequest.
The Porchester Theatre,
which occupied half the hotel’s basement, sent two representatives
who expressed their personal satisfaction at the
prospect of the bar (historically accessed for pre-show and interval
drinks) being open again. The event was boycotted by the rest of the
theatre’s trustees, claiming association with the scandalous hotel
was sullying their artistic integrity. Dolly also
presented them with an invoice for rent arrears. The other long-term
guest (Miss Guilfoyle) did not appear, so her bill was slipped under
her door.
Mrs Considine was in bed by midnight but was still awake
when Dolly joined her just
after two.
Pick your copy up HERE.
