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.
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