by Jana Petken
Shock sat on Susan’s face. Her mouth opened, but no words came out.
“Don’t be a foolish boy. You don’t have to,” Minnie said, appearing to want to speak on Susan’s behalf. “You’re Irish. You’re exempt from the conscription law.”
“My decision to join up has nothing to do with the prime minister’s compulsory enlistment laws,” Patrick told her.
His mam wasn’t known for tactile displays of affection, Patrick thought, when she hurried to his side and wrapped her arms around him. “There, Mam, it’s all right.”
Sobbing, she said, “I can’t lose you, not after your father and my poor baby. My Danny – it’s too much. It’s all too much to bear …”
“Actually, this has a lot to do with Dad. I owe the college a lot of money. I don’t really see any other way out of my financial mess other than to join up. My debts will be frozen. You will get an allowance from the government, and that extra money will help Minnie with the household bills.”
“But you … in the army …”
“I’m not going into the army. I’ve enlisted in the Royal Navy,” Patrick said.
Chapter Twelve
June 1916
Frongoch Prison, comprised of two camps and connected by a road and field, was situated two miles to the west of Bala, in Gwynedd, North Wales. The south camp was located in old whiskey distillery buildings. The north camp was a collection of wooden huts sitting a little higher up the hillside, close to Capel Celyn. With its long rows of wooden barracks and the appearance of a parade ground, it had a feel of a traditional prison camp.
Together with thirty other men, Danny slept in one of the huts on a narrow bunk no wider than his hips. The barracks were rat infested, and his skin and hair were already crawling with fleas and lice, yet he found himself strangely accepting of his situation. Carrying heavy sacks filled with potatoes, he and Jimmy ambled along under the watchful eyes of a guard old enough to be their fathers. Three prisoners lagged behind carrying vegetables, teasing each other about a game of football that had been played the previous day, and behind them were others who were indulging in a casual morning stroll.
Danny was feeling more optimistic now than at any time since his sentencing. For weeks, he’d shared a stone floor and pigswill in an English prison, presuming that he’d be there for years. “The first five years will be the worst,” he recalled another prisoner telling him. Every day had seemed like a week, and his ailing spirits hit rock bottom after he convinced himself that his entire sentence would be spent behind those bars, lying on that ground, listening to twelve other men snoring and farting all night, every night.
Those three weeks had been even harder than he’d imagined they would be, when crossing on the boat from Dublin. Apart from the harsh conditions of incarceration, his conscience had weighed heavy. He’d let his family down at a time when they needed him. His mam, forced from her home, was in London, struggling to come to terms with her loss and his behaviour, which she had called unbelievably naive and self-seeking. And to make matters worse, news had spread about the execution of James Connolly. Unable to stand because of his shattered ankle, he’d been shoved in a chair and then shot. Three others had followed him into that yard – fifteen in all had gone to God for their martyrdom.
It was difficult getting accurate information about all the British punishments and killings of his comrades. He had heard that around seventy-five other prominent republican figures had been sentenced to either life imprisonment or ten years of penal servitude. But then there had also been a rumour that Countess Markievicz, who had been with Commandant Malin at the College of Surgeons, had been executed. Later he’d found out that she had been sentenced to life in prison. Not even the English had the heart to shoot a woman, he had thought at the time.
Being a prisoner at Frongoch was not at all what he’d expected, he thought, breathing in sweet fresh air. He wasn’t behind bars. He looked quite decent in a blue shirt, jacket, and trousers issued to him on his arrival. The camp was guarded by old soldiers not fit enough for front-line service, and there was no getting beaten up or insulted by them. Also, he’d noticed in a very short time that the prisoners were more or less allowed to wander about and do what they wanted within the confines of the barbwire fences. The guards didn’t interfere much at all except when they inspected the barracks and did their head count every day. Most every morning food was delivered or, as had happened this morning, some of them were ordered to the stores building to pick up and then carry victuals from the south camp to the north camp. Most of the time, men who liked to cook prepared the dinners. The food was all right, he admitted, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it. He was bloody starving half the time.
Waving to a local girl that he’d met in the camp’s canteen shop a few days earlier, he felt his mood lighten and an uncomfortable heat settle on his cheeks. Her name was Anna. She had hair the likes of which he’d never seen – so black that it had a bluish hue when the light hit it. She wore it tied loosely with a ribbon at the nape of her neck, and it tumbled down her back in glorious waves to her waist. Her eyes were as black as coal and as big as saucers, and they were fringed with long, thick lashes. She had dropped some boxes and he’d picked them up for her. They’d chatted for a while, and she hadn’t been the least bit afraid of him. She was not like any other girl he’d spoken to or courted in Ireland. She was as fine a female as a man could ever wish to meet. Anna, with her dark laughing eyes, marvellous national spirit, and love for her native tongue, had certainly captured his interest.
Casting his eyes over the landscape beyond the fences, he let out a long sigh. “This beats that hellish place in England. I like it here, Jimmy,” he said cheerfully. “The commandant is like a tyrannical old woman, but sure, we can put up with him. This Welsh countryside is grand. It reminds me of Ireland. What do you think of it?”
“It’s making me homesick just looking at those hills over there,” Jimmy responded in a melancholic tone. “It looks a bit like Conamara around here, except there’s nowhere in Conamara that’s as isolated as this.”
The old Welsh guard walking beside Danny and Jimmy smiled and pointed beyond the barbwire fences to one of the hills in the distance. “Boyos, there is no hill in Ireland like that beauty there. I used to climb it as a boy, before this camp ever existed.”
“When was this old place built?” Danny asked.
“In eighteen ninety-seven, so it’s not that old. I knew the man who founded it as a distillery. His name was R. Lloyd Price. Don’t ask me what the R in his name stood for. I don’t think anyone in the village ever dared to ask about that mystery. He owns the Rhiwlas Estate near Bala. He spent a fortune building this. Some say it cost him over one hundred pounds.”
“Bejesus, that’s a fortune, right enough,” Jimmy said, his mouth gaping open.
“He’s the man responsible for you being here. He leased the land to the British government when the war started. Anyway, by here’s a river with water so pure you could drink from it till the sheep come home, and you’d not get a bellyache once. That’s why they we’re so sure of the whiskey’s success.”
“I take it that it wasn’t a success?” Danny asked.
“No, it wasn’t. I don’t know the ins and outs of what went wrong, but I’m sure they meant to have a booming business. They built houses for the managers, and about thirty people were employed to keep it going. But then there was some trouble. I remember walking by here one day to see some of the villagers congregating outside – shouting their heads off, they were – demanding that the place be shut down. The distillery didn’t bother me but there was a temperance movement in the area at that time, and a lot of religious people didn’t want whiskey here. It was rumoured that the liquor was moved out at night to avoid the risk of attack by the local people. Not that I saw any violence, mind you – anyway, it went bankrupt in nineteen ten.”
“So did they open it again up just for us?” Danny asked.
“No, no one expect
ed you lot.” Pausing, he looked at Danny with a passive expression, displaying neither condemnation nor sympathy. “I thought it would lie empty, but then the war came and the local authority sent German prisoners here. That’s when I started working at the camps. I’m too old to go to war, but by God I would sign up in a bloody heartbeat if I thought they’d take me.”
“Where are they?” Danny asked, thinking about the Germans.
“Some of them died, and they were buried in Frongoch Church’s graveyard. The rest of them were moved out when you boyos turned up.”
“Oh well, better us than Germans, eh,” Jimmy said cheerfully.
“You should be away fighting them, not passing the time of day in this place!” the guard said, finally making his feelings known. “And I’ll tell you another thing. It wouldn’t have been my decision to give you prisoner of war status. You didn’t deserve it, and they were right to withdraw it from you.”
An uncomfortable silence ensued. Danny quickened his pace, leaving the guard trailing behind. His mood was soured.
Chapter Thirteen
London, June 1916
Standing at the entrance of the Woolwich Arsenal factory’s main floor, Jenny felt her body grow rigid with a bleak, awful feeling of being surrounded by death. The area was a mile long, or so it seemed to her. Looking like a field of wheat, rows upon rows of shells sat on the floor, glinting gold in the sunlight. There were thousands of them stretching the entire width of the area, which was bordered by iron pillars holding up the ceiling. It was as long as a football park, and she couldn’t even see where the shells ended and clear ground began. She looked down the length of perfect lines and gasped when she saw even bigger shells sitting as tall as grown men. Without thinking, she gripped her mother’s arm. Then feeling her eyes sting, she covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve and coughed. A dreadful stench of sulphur and a thick dust swimming in the air like a cloud assaulted her nostrils and eyes. She thought she might vomit or faint – or both.
Unable to speak, she stared at the women looking like pickers on a farm as they bent over the golden bombs. They seemed to be checking the small caps on the shells’ pointed ends, tightening them with spanners and dusting them down with rags. They were chatting with each other, and she wondered how they could even smile or talk when engulfed in such disgusting pungent odours. Seeing the women dressed in an assortment of hideous garments from baggy trousers to tattered skirts and blouses, and topped off with filthy scarves wrapped around their heads like turbans, she inadvertently shuddered in disgust. She wouldn’t be seen dead looking like that.
“I can’t work here. I just can’t, Mam!” she groaned to Susan.
“Most girls say that in the beginning,” the man showing Susan and Jenny around the factory said. “But they get used to it and so will you.”
Following the man, who had not introduced himself, Jenny felt her legs tremble under her skirts. She would like to ask him to show her the front door, she thought, but she had promised Minnie and her mam that she would at least look around the place before dismissing it. Dismiss it! She wanted to run a mile from it.
The first workshop was noisy and chaotic. Women and young boys stood at pressing machines, pulling heavy levers repeatedly until copper caps fell out one after the other like glittering coins. Mesmerised, she thought, All day doing this? She was sure her brain would turn to mush, and she’d probably break her arm at one of those lathes.
Moving on, they came to another workshop. Shaking her head, Susan pointed to the door. “I’ll wait outside the entrance gates for you, dear. I feel a little faint.”
Dismissing her mother with a disapproving nod, Jenny said to the manager, as though she were the employer and he her inferior, “Let’s continue, shall we?”
In the next workshop they came to, again Jenny was asked to watch what the women were doing. Horrified, she stared at their filthy faces and necks, but for the first time since she’d arrived there, she felt a surge of sympathy. Trying to sort through her feelings, which were a mixture of sadness and anger at the sight of war-weary women being treated like slaves, she felt she should ask two important questions, but then she decided that her questions should wait until they went back outside.
Paying more attention to what the women were doing, she now noticed the shells sitting on benches. Beside them were tins filled with what she presumed was gunpowder. Taking a little at a time, each woman poured the powder into a shell and then stemmed it down with the aid of a mallet or wooden broom handle. It looked like physically exhausting work on the arms, what with continually having to raise the mallet and bang it down on the wooden pole in order to compact the powder. And what did this work do to their minds? Knowing that they were making armaments capable of destroying buildings and ripping people’s limbs apart must lie heavy on their consciences. Of course, someone had to make the weapons of destruction, she then thought. It just wouldn’t be her.
“I would like to leave now,” she said, desperate for some fresh air. “Thank you for your tour.”
Outside, she stood beside the man and breathed in the same terrible stench of sulphur that had been present inside the factory. Strange, she hadn’t smelled it when she arrived. Lifting her arm, she sniffed her sleeve. It stank of the stuff. It was ingrained in her clothing and probably in her hair too.
“When we were looking around, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the woman had yellow faces and hands. Why was that?” she asked.
“That happens here,” the man said. “The colouring sticks to the skin like paint. It’s caused by the trinitrotoluene. We call it TNT. Prolonged exposure to the sulphuric acid turns the skin yellow.”
“Why don’t the women have adequate protection from it – special clothing or something? It’s not right what you’re doing to them,” Jenny rebuked him.
So far, she had found the man quite agreeable, but as she waited for an answer, she witnessed a completely different side to his character.
“Are you in the bloody union?” he shouted.
“No. I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you think we don’t want to protect our women labour force?”
“Of course I do. I mean, of course you do. You’re just not doing a very good job of it,” Jenny said, feeling her skin burn.
“Is that right?”
“Yes, and I’m probably not alone in thinking that working with those awful chemicals is detrimental to the health.”
“Keep your opinions to yourself,” he spat out, and saliva dribbled into his beard. “Christ, you women are never bleedin’ happy. The feminists wanted jobs, and now they have them. And stuck-up bitches like you think you’re too high and mighty to get your hands dirty. Make your bloody minds up, will you? We’ve taken those women on with decent pay and grateful we are to have every mother, daughter, and wife working here. But we only have so much money to spend from the government …”
“And how much do you pay?” she asked, becoming just as angry as the man. “I can’t imagine any amount of money compensating those …those yellow women in there. I bet you’re not paying them what they’re worth. The men I saw are probably getting higher wages. Am I right?”
The manager put his hands on his hips and glared at Jenny, from her head to her toes. “You needn’t worry your head about the wages here,” he told her. “You’re not getting a job.”
“Good. I wouldn’t work here anyway, not if you paid me double what the men are getting,” she said, tossing her head.
“Think you’re high and mighty and too good for the likes of us, do you? Well, you ain’t! Maybe you should go back to Ireland, where all the bloody traitors live! All over England, we have thousands of good British women working in factories like this one. They’re serving their country with honour. We can do without Irish Fenians like you.”
Having never been spoken to in this way, Jenny felt her eyes well up and her cheeks smoulder with humiliation. She wasn’t stuck-up, nor was she a Fenian, and
she didn’t mean to insult hard-working women. She pitied them.
“I’m not a Fenian, ya cheeky bugger!” she said, sounding very unladylike and not caring that she did. “And I can find something better than this.” Whimpering as she marched towards the gates, she felt even more mortified when she saw a group of women coming towards her. They smiled at her, and she lowered her eyes. She couldn’t look at their bright yellow faces again. She just couldn’t.
Jenny washed off the grime from the factory and then dressed herself in a suitable day gown for her outing to Central London. She was still upset about the heated discussion she’d had with the man at the factory, and as she brushed her hair, she wondered if it might be better to cancel her dinner plans with Kevin. She had nothing against the idea of a fancy meal in Piccadilly – or against Kevin. In fact, if she were to be honest with herself, the invitation had given her pleasure, and there was so little of that around. But she was in no mood to socialize.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she wondered how long she could delay going downstairs. Living with Mam and Minnie was not easy. They loved each other and seemed to enjoy each other’s company, but their bickering over the house’s financial management would wear down the most patient of people. And Minnie’s perpetual condemnation of Danny every time she read about the rebellion, the executions of its leaders, and incarcerations, was becoming even more monotonous than their daily routines, and that was saying something. Mother of God, she almost wished that she did have a job, just to get out of the house.
She had some colour on her cheeks at last, she thought, looking at her reflection in the mirror. Warm June days and a few good walks in the park had done her complexion a world of good. She was still grieving, and the sorrow she felt was evident in dark shadows under her eyes, but at least she didn’t have neighbours and friends in Dublin telling her every five minutes how much they understood her heartache, when they couldn’t possibly.