Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  A minuscule percentage of the population supported the republicans. The country had become so wedded to the promise of Home Rule that Irishmen equally passionate in that cause threatened to bear arms against the Volunteers.

  When it became clear that an armed rebellion was under way, the British authorities declared martial law. Then they used it to license atrocities. In the days and weeks after the Rising, soldiers shot people at sight in the streets of Dublin. Old and young civilians, totally innocent of all rebel connection, were simply mown down.

  In response to this barbarism, Irish opinion began to turn, especially in the rural counties. Then came the deaths of the fifteen leaders—and the tide turned completely. Trying to keep officially silent on the names and numbers of the executed had proven futile. There's no such thing as a secret in Ireland; the dam leaked fast, with all the details. James Connolly, shot in his pajamas, in a wheelchair, was the last straw. The country began to boil.

  Day after day, as a horrified people raced to the morning newspapers, Charles waited to hear whether the name of his friend had been included. By the middle of May, London knew, from Irish and international reaction, that it had made an error. It had given Ireland a bunch of martyrs. And Charles had not as yet found Joseph Harney's name among them.

  As to the arson at Tipperary Castle, it had no connection to Easter Week; that, presumably, was the cover for the operation. And it belonged in no republican policy of that time. But it still drove stakes of fear into the hearts of the Anglo-Irish. They assumed that the attack on April Somerville's estate would prove part of a nationwide movement against them.

  In the years just ahead, their apprehensions would turn out to be somewhat correct. A couple of hundred mansions were gutted by deliberate fires—reprisals to military outrages. By then, the arsonists were seen as freedom fighters, and their activities became the War of Independence.

  And that guerrilla campaign, fought in fields, on riverbanks and mountainsides, from behind ditches, on bicycles, along village streets— that was the fire that spread from the General Post Office in Dublin and the horrific execution yard in Kilmainham Jail to every county and parish on the island.

  Deliveries of any sort to the castle were a leisurely business—we had a long avenue, and for the driver or carrier there was much to see at the end of it. We received many callers every day but, in the days after I returned, I awaited nobody so eagerly as the bearer of mail. I watched all day—we could see visitors coming from afar; and the next best thing to seeing Harney would be the arrival of a letter telling me that he was safe. The newspapers had not included his name among those executed, but I refused to depend upon that. Despite Father's faith over the many years of my childhood, I did not believe that I should ever reliably uncover the most crucial personal information in the pages of any journal. (Thus did my attitude change after the incident with Mr. Parnell.)

  Therefore, when I'd left Dublin, I'd implored the young photographer whom I had met outside Boland's Mill to gather news of all those in Kilmainham Jail—the living and the dead—and send it to me in a letter. She gladly agreed to do so and refused all compensation that I offered, with a distinctive gesture at the memory of which I now smile: she turned her face away playfully, like a child being disobedient. True to her word, she faithfully gained access to all that I needed—and did so, I gathered, by the expedient of wishing to photograph the prison governor. As pretty as one of her own pictures, she soon teased from him the names of the executed men and wrote them to me.

  My eye, when I opened that letter, raced down the page, skipping from name to name: Eamonn Ceannt, Thomas Clarke, Con Colbert, James Connolly, Edward Daly, Sean Heuston, Thomas Kent, John MacBride, Sean MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Michael Mallin, Michael O'Hanrahan, Patrick Pearse, William Pearse, Joseph Plunkett. I never stopped to count; I knew when I had reached the number of fifteen, and—such joy!—no trace of Harney's name. The photographer told me in her letter that “there are to be no more executions; all others arrested are either being freed or taken to prison camps, mostly in England and Wales, where they will be held, it is said, in the interests of public safety.”

  Just before the letter arrived, I had been prizing away a charred piece of wood from a library shelf; now I blackened my own face as my hands wiped my tears: Harney must be alive! I sent Helen to Ardobreen with the good news, and she came back with a note from Mother: “He had too much life in him to die now.” That morning I knew that, sooner or later, he would come home; sooner or later I would see him again. Twice more that day I found myself close to tears—of relief, now, as I no longer had to imagine Harney, with that quick, restless mind, that endless curiosity, facing a firing squad.

  Charles described my mother as I knew her. Her blond curls went slowly white. And all her life she had that sweet, playful way of turning away her face like a child when she didn't wish to accept a gift or a compliment.

  Reading his description of her thrilled me. It also gave me pause. When she told me about the neighbor whose head she'd held up after he accidentally shot himself, she also said, “Don't mention this to your father.”

  I, of course, said, “Why?”—as small boys do.

  She said, “I'll tell you one day.”

  And she did. In my teenage years I asked her whether many boys had pursued her when she was young. She said there was only one that she had ever liked. From her description, it must have been Charles O'Brien. She said he was big and generous, with what she called “the manners of a gentleman”—always important to her.

  I said, “What happened to him?”

  My mother laughed a little and replied, “His heart wasn't available. But your father has never known that he existed. I've never talked about him.”

  As this must also be considered a History of what has impressed me, I shall add a brief account here of my Master Carpenter, an Englishman of Italian origins, Mr. Mulberry. He stands six feet tall, as lean as one of the planks he has planed. His brown eyes take in every knot and gnarl; he runs his hands over a piece of wood as a mother runs a hand over her child's face. “Measure twice, cut once,” he says; and he measures with more fuss than a seamstress, cuts with more care than a surgeon. No problem can defeat him; he surmounts and surpasses. His love for his work, his dedication to it, his zeal for the beauty that he can wrest from wood—these have as much importance to him as faith to a priest, beauty to a girl.

  Mr. Mulberry speaks little, has a liking for humor, protects his tools like a bear her cubs, thinks before he acts—and then acts splendidly. When we first met (I received an introduction to him through Lady Mollie Carew) and he journeyed to the castle (at my expense) for our interview, I thought we should not be friends. He sat in my “office” at the castle and asked penetrating questions: Did they originally use local timber and are there trees still standing in that wood? Who knows what glue was used? How far is the castle from the coast? (In other words, where is the nearest shipwright?)

  I answered as best I could, and Mr. Mulberry, with no expression on his face, wrote all my answers in his notebook. It was easy to divine his line of thought; this was restoration, and he wished to use original materials or those related to them, and he knew that shipwrights have the best resources of all who work with timber.

  When he had finished his rigorous examination, he put his notebook away and stood to his feet. He said, “I will take the job, but when it comes to the carpentry, everybody has to do what I tell them. Understood?”

  He said “Understood?” often, and I came to know that he used it when matters felt difficult to him.

  Of all the people who worked on the castle, I watched Mr. Mulberry and Mr. Higgins most closely, as I felt that they had most to teach me. Chalk and cheese though they seemed, they became the firmest of friends, and I believed that their closeness, which lasted all their lives thereafter, was born of the shared principle that work must always be superb. Those men had earned the title “Master”; they believed deeply in their own
work, they spoke a pride in the apprenticeship they had served—with much praise for the men who'd taught them—and, if a little impatiently at times, they willingly instructed those around them.

  Their merit became evident when I returned from seeing April at Knocklong. I debated with myself whether I should ride on past our gates to the village and find them. Instead, I decided to go to the castle first and seek them later. I need not have paused to think; both men awaited me. They had already ascertained through the drumbeat of village talk that I had returned from Dublin.

  I walked with them in and out of the damaged rooms, and through their eyes I saw the charred, blackened expanses with a new disgust. Their anger suffused their faces; both men flushed quite red, and their concern peaked their eyebrows, furrowed their foreheads. When we had completed our tour, I sought to reduce that anger and change it to energy; I asked them where we should begin. Sure enough, the inquiry set them to work, and by two o'clock we had a plan: cleansing, scraping, ordering new materials, and then reconstruction.

  Next, we addressed our greater difficulty; as we all agreed, it was the finding of workers who would return, or begin anew. This debate went on for some time, and we resolved it in this way: I would inquire of my father's farmhands, find names and nominations; they would reach out to such of their workmen as they could find. They had my permission to say that from now on the castle would be guarded with guns, day and night. Furthermore—and here I lied—I had taken the precaution, I told them, of speaking to republican connections in Dublin, where I had gone to seek Harney, and they had assured me of protection, should I ever need it.

  Soon, matters improved further. When it became known, through rumor and reluctant officialdom, that the activists who had been arrested after Easter Week had been taken to prison camps in England and Wales, it naturally followed that they must be allowed to receive letters. I established that Harney had been taken to the north of Wales, and I wrote him a long, conversational letter, telling him news of the castle and its troubles and how we were bringing everything under control again. As I prepared the envelope, Helen the housekeeper told me that her brother, Eddie, had also been taken there. I added a P.S. asking Harney to find him.

  By the end of the summer, we had all but cleansed the fire damage and were ready to repair it. No arsonist came back to trouble us, and I believe that I understand the reason. In my letter to Harney, I had described the burning, told him what the raiders had said, and worried for the safety of April—and for Helen. In not so many words, I wanted to give Harney as much emboldening as possible—not that he ever needed any—to help us from afar.

  And then, late in the year, under a December sky of milky primrose light, came a wonderful day—though, in truth, a day of mixed fortunes. Helen, not a creature who should contemplate a speed greater than a saunter, came puffing up the Long Terrace to me, almost running, almost shouting.

  “Oh, sir, oh, sir”—and she had not enough breath to finish.

  “Easy, Helen. Take your time”—but her force so shook the air around us that all the workers stopped to look.

  “Sir, they're here, they're here!” she cried and burst into tears. “Eddie's home, and Mr. Harney's with him, sir, they're here.”

  It became my turn to run—and I found Harney in the Ballroom, looking all around him.

  I said, as though to a stranger, “May I help you, sir?”

  He laughed and spun around.

  “The minute I turn my back,” he said, “everything falls apart.”

  We did not embrace, we did not shake hands; that was not our way. The tears in our eyes did not fall; as they evaporated, I began to show him what had been damaged. He shook his head over and over.

  “I don't understand it,” he said. “I simply don't understand it. But—it hasn't happened since?”

  His question contained more than a little severity; I had calculated accurately by writing to him.

  As we walked, we talked; he told me about the camp. It had contained Germans captured in the war, and when he'd heard that he and the other Irish republicans were being sent there, he'd felt great relief; he'd known then that they would have prisoner-of-war status.

  I asked, “Did you travel alone today?”

  “No. We came in at Cork, and now I have to go on home.”

  As he spoke, two other men appeared, and he added, “These were my traveling companions.”

  One, I deduced, must be the brother of Helen—he had the same barrel shape, round head, and pug nose; the other was our erstwhile visitor and my courtroom interrogator, Mr. Noonan, who, as he walked toward us, was deep in laughing conversation with April—which was how my fortunes grew mixed that day and afterward.

  Old IRA men in Tipperary often stated, “Frongoch freed us.” The saying had a double edge. First you were expected to understand that they had been released from the camp. But what they really meant was that Frongoch bred the guerrillas who took up where Easter Week left off. More than seventeen hundred men were sent there. Most had some connection to the idea of armed rebellion—and those who didn't soon caught on.

  Inside the camp—later nicknamed “Sinn Fein's University”—they created a regime. The teachers among them set up classes, with much history and politics. Their intense worship already had a zealous Catholic base. They spent hours every day exercising; they drilled like soldiers on a barracks square.

  Most crucially, they heard military theory. They acknowledged the central fact that had been driven home during Easter Week: they had no chance whatsoever against a standing army of the size and firepower available to Britain. But they did have assets that might prove invincible. They had a countryside in which thousands of men could hide, and an indigenous population now sympathetic enough to hide them.

  So, in Frongoch, they agreed upon a style of warfare that we Irish subsequently claimed to have invented—the rural guerrilla. With variations, they drew up a strategy that would be called “Flying Columns.” Small active units—perhaps no more than a dozen men in any one of them— would be drawn from as many parishes and villages across the country as they could muster. With basic arms, such as rifles, handguns, and, where it could be managed, a machine gun, they would attack local garrisons and ambush military transports.

  This strategy became famous as a means of empowering the powerless. Some historians claim that Chairman Mao emulated it, as well as the Vietcong. Many agree that it defined the French Resistance, a claim supported by the fact that the word “maquis,” which the French called themselves, means scrub or scrubland—from which the maquisards materialized to attack German convoys.

  Among the Irish, its chief proponent became the revolution's—and the country's—greatest hero of all time. He taught his guerrilla tactics in Frongoch, when he came out he began to organize it, and later he led it. His name was Michael Collins—and he was the next visitor to Tipperary Castle. Later that week, he came looking for Harney. Incidentally, Charles never describes whether Dermot Noonan stayed on, whether he ate a meal at the castle, or when he left.

  I walked with Harney to the main gate; he took my bicycle and would “report back for duty,” he told me, “next Monday, the first of January. It's a new week, a new year, and a new era.” I watched until he rode out of sight; few pleasures in life have been greater than seeing Harney safe and well after all he had been through. He did not look thinner or plumper, he did not require a haircut or a shave—he looked exactly the same.

  When I asked if the incarceration had affected him, he said, “There were people who made it good.” One of those people arrived at the castle on Friday the 29th of December.

  I did not know who he was—but I knew from the moment I saw him that he was remarkable. He alighted from a motor-car which stopped halfway up the avenue, at a place where it is wide enough for a large, wheeled vehicle to turn around. Wearing a gray homburg hat and a gabardine coat, he walked quickly. Work at the castle had eased down a little; I had given many of our workers some days of ho
liday, on account of inclement weather and so that they might enjoy Christmas—and thus I alone saw him arrive; I stood in the now splendid main doorway.

  He walked straight to me and held out his hand.

  “Mr. O'Brien”—a statement, not a question.

  I said, “Yes,” and he said, “My name is Mick Collins and I'm looking for Joe Harney.”

  “He went to see his family in Urlingford. He'll be back here on Monday.”

  Collins looked past me and all around. “So this is the castle?”

  “You know about it?”

  “Joe talked about it all the time. I teased him about it—keeping alive the imperial past.”

  He laughed, and I said, “Is that what you believe?”

  “May I see the place?”

  He stood about five feet ten inches, a very handsome fellow, quick of speech, a Cork accent. As we walked, he looked at the rooms minutely— and I surveyed him.

  Back in the hallway, he asked, “Is the woman who owns it here?”

  I shook my head. April had gone to visit my mother; they had become friends, and tried to meet frequently.

  “Well,” he said, looking around. “I have two thoughts, and they're both right. On the one hand, this place was built on the backs of abused tenants, whose unjust rents paid for it. On the other hand, it might be owned by foreigners, but we're the ones who built it. Irish skill, labor, and genius built this place.” He pointed to the stucco fruit clusters on the injured cornices. “See them? I bet they're Stapletons. Not an Italian name, nor a French one, but Stapleton. An Irishman.”

  I said, “I'm very aware of all that—it's one of the things I like about my job.”