Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  At their mutual insistence, I introduced him to April. I had not wished to do so in case she became implicated in any way. He displayed exemplary courtesy to her, complimented her upon the style and magnitude of the enterprise that she had undertaken, and apologized for distracting some of her colleagues from the castle works. I had expected him to give a speech on the perfidy of the English—especially when he heard her accent—but he did not. Early in 1918, for example, he commiserated on the dreadfulness of the German war; and he spoke to her with great interest and passion of France, and Paris, the glories of European continental life.

  “All our future lies there,” he said. He quoted from the Reverend John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”—and April told him that she had read it aloud at her father's funeral.

  To which Michael Collins replied quietly, “This is in general a time of funerals.”

  One day late in 1918, an encounter took place that changed our lives at the castle for some time. Harney approached me and asked if he could speak to me privately. When I went outside with Harney I saw that Mr. Collins had arrived, and with him a squat, black-eyed, powerful-looking man. His name was Dan Breen, and in time he would become one of the most feared republican guerrillas in the country. It was said that if the soldiers came to search for him and his mother put out his boots by the door—indicating that he had come home for the night—the troops retreated, prepared to say back at the barracks that they had not found him. He never went anywhere without two revolvers.

  We walked a long way from the castle without speaking; I could always trust Harney to know when silence should be observed. Soon, Mr. Collins spoke to me:

  “There will be operations starting around here. Violent events. Men will be looking for shelter.”

  Harney and Mr. Breen said nothing; I waited.

  “I'd bet that the castle has bolt-holes of all kinds,” said Collins. “It'd be very easy for men to hide here.”

  Still I listened.

  “But if the British Army came to know that you were hiding men on the run—the consequences could be severe.”

  I said, “How severe?”

  By now we had halted, out in the high fields to the south; far away, I could see the thin ribbons of silver water flowing down the sides of the mountains.

  “You could be shot. And Mrs. Somerville could be shot—although I'd doubt it; she's English. But you'd be blamed.”

  “I'd be shot?”

  Mr. Collins said, “I think so.”

  I said to Harney, “What do you think?”

  “They'd shoot you, Charles. Or put you on trial, and then hang you.”

  Mr. Collins added, “And they might even set fire to this place—although I doubt that too. This is the kind of building they think they're here to protect.”

  “Well,” I said, “this needs mulling over. And I have to put it to Mrs. Somerville.”

  Mr. Collins said, “We have reason to believe she'll agree.”

  Dan Breen said, very roughly to Mr. Collins and Harney, “How do you know he'll not hand us over? He's not exactly what you'd call a patriotic Irishman, is he?”

  I said to him, “I can't let that remark influence my decision.”

  Mr. Breen, angry, said, “Which means you're not going to do it.”

  “I have only one worry—and that's for my workers.”

  Mr. Collins said, “That's understandable.”

  “But,” I said, “if there's a way in which people can be smuggled in and out with me almost the only one knowing it—”

  Harney said, “All the operations around here will be carried out at night.” And he looked first at Mr. Breen, next at Mr. Collins and said, “I told you he'd do it.”

  Then began a strange time. That afternoon, Harney and I donned the roughest old clothes that we could find and explored the castle's basements and foundations. We discovered that provision had been made in the original building for more extensive cellaring and storage than had been finally constructed. Long crude rooms stretched underground, with strong if rudimentary stone columns supporting ceilings that had held up well over time.

  Though filthy, and in some places damp, and altogether dark as a mine, these long honeycombs felt safe—and not a sound of the outside world could be heard. As we had reached them by a steep staircase of almost twenty steps, we knew that we must have come a long way underground.

  We returned to the surface—the subterranean cloister was reached by a door at the rear of the butler's pantry—and began to pore over such original plans as we had found. On one drawing of the house and grounds, Harney saw a little pennant, which seemed to have no relevance to anything. It stood out in the countryside, halfway to the lake; according to the drawing, it formed part of a sunken fence.

  Immediately we set off; we already thought that we knew what we had found—and our delight was confirmed. Almost concealed in the ha-ha, and artfully so, was an entrance to a passage. We wagered that it would lead to the underground apartments we had recently explored, and we were right.

  Harney hand-picked two men from among the castle laborers, and they worked for some weeks making the door even more obscure, and the underground rooms safer and drier. We installed tables, chairs, sleeping-bags, and rations; and we told nobody, and we never discussed it except when the two of us were alone. Inside a month we had built a refuge that would have housed fifty men.

  Although I made it Harney's responsibility, I checked the progress, usually by myself. One day, I found that some of the chairs now had pleasant cushions, and that books and old periodicals had been placed beside the chairs and sleeping-bags, and that canvas sheets or burlap had been laid on the tables, where men might eat.

  When next I spoke to Harney, I said to him, “A nice touch, the reading matter. And the cushions.”

  He looked at me, puzzled. “I was going to compliment you,” he said.

  I said, “I didn't do it”—and he knew that I told the truth.

  Immediately we knew who had done it—but we resolved not to raise it with her.

  Again, we have the selective “historian.” April obviously contributed to the hide for the men on the run because Dermot Noonan—and his men—would be using it. And that's how Michael Collins knew that April would agree to the scheme. Charles must have known that, in the eyes of Collins and Harney, Noonan had the status of Dan Breen. Noonan led IRA units, and he planned attacks and raids. In 1919, as with Breen and Collins, he became one of Ireland's most wanted men.

  The poster issued by the army at the time carried a physical description of Noonan. More flattering than Breen's—whom the army writer described as looking “like a blacksmith coming home from work”— Noonan's called him “a clever fellow; carries himself like Napoleon, cocky as a sparrow, and speaks like an educated man, therefore doesn't sound at all Irish. Dresses like a gentleman.”

  They printed a grainy old photograph. With his thick black hair flopping down either side of a middle parting, he looked like a young professor.

  Noonan's mind had a razor's edge—quick, legal, and witty. In conversation or argument he matched and then outclassed most people. He won most of his cases, often quoting from ancient laws in their original Latin. Although some thought him cunning—Bernard O'Brien called him “too clever by three-quarters”—his passion for his country and its cause could not be doubted.

  When leading his guerrillas, he recited verse inspirationally: “There they laid to rest / The seven Kings of Tara,” he would intone and then say—either intimately or passionately, depending on the size of the group he was addressing—“We are the descendants of those seven kings. When Saint Patrick came to Ireland, every family was a kingship. That was taken from us—and we must take it back.”

  For all his shortness (five feet six), women flocked to him. He had given himself a past with some mystery. When he was a student in Spain, it was said, a wealthy duenna had killed herself for love of him.
And although we have no proof of it, it seems highly likely that he had approached April Somerville about using the castle as a hiding place for his men.

  Michael Collins himself inspected the castle's underground refuge. He came in one night by means of the hidden door in the sunken fence. When he stepped from the passageway into the darkest of the cellar rooms, Harney and Charles waited to greet him.

  According to one reminiscence that Harney gave, Collins asked, “Has Dermot seen this?”

  Harney replied, “Not yet”—and Charles turned away.

  “I could see,” said Harney, “that he hated the idea of Noonan hiding here. And I knew that although Charles had not declared himself to April, he viewed Noonan as his rival for her. And there's no doubt that Noonan saw Charles as his main obstacle to winning April. Did Noonan have a vested interest in winning April? Of course he did. If he won her—well, he'd be the master of Tipperary Castle, wouldn't he?”

  Once again we hear not a word of this from Charles. But, as seen through his “historian's” eye, we do get a rivetingly clear picture of a local guerrilla unit at work.

  In truth, I had not prepared myself for the complications inevitable to the business of sheltering fugitives. “On the run” became a famous and controversial condition in Ireland from early in 1919 to July 1921. Many young men all over the island lived on the run from the authorities, and I will take a moment here to discuss them.

  As I believe I have made clear, violence will never be a part of my life. I will never use it to make statements on behalf of my country or myself; killing and maiming my fellow-man seems futile and wrong. It may be said in this matter that I am splitting a hair—did I not do all but collaborate with the men on Northumberland Road and in Boland's Mill? And I will answer that I was attempting to save my friend's life by involving myself in his—and my country's—passion. Curiously, Harney did not seem caught up in violence; so matter-of-factly and yet proudly did he approach the task in hand that he seemed no more and no less than a committed man undertaking a solid day's work. Harney, in those circumstances, had a simplicity of purpose to him, a straightforwardness that brooked no discussion, let alone argument.

  Now, in the men of the Flying Columns, I was to find identical simplicity. They did not call themselves “revolutionaries” or “freedom fighters”—nothing like that; they said that they were soldiers, hoping to rid their country of a power that should not be ruling them, a foreign power that had no historical or geographical right to be there. That was their position, nothing more but certainly nothing less.

  Who were these men? As they would not wish their names known, or indeed any record effected of their identities, I shall speak of them in careful generality, and seek to give an overall impression of the unified nature of their company. And then I shall attempt to say even more about them by the simple expedient of describing in detail an action they undertook. I learned the account of it from them, in many hours of questioning and conversation; it is the story of an action taken not far from the demesne boundaries of the castle by a dozen of these youngsters one moonlit night. Which is what they were mainly, youngsters—no wonder they were referred to as “the boys.”

  First, who were they? A young, Irish rural Everyman, fresh-faced and awkward, that's who they were; some of them seemed barely to have commenced shaving. Most had the compelled shyness of the Irish country lad; if asked a question their cheeks reddened, and they looked to the floor and mumbled—until a friend spoke up, sometimes with a joshing word. Then they felt free to talk. Their coloring came from Ireland's national rainbow: many had freckles and red hair, some were blond, others dark as Spaniards; yet others had complexions of sunburn no matter what the time of the year.

  They wore boots—some had no hose, some wore homespun stockings—and jackets of tweed, with dungarees beneath. None had been schooled beyond fourteen years; a few had not even made it that far before quitting to work for some farmer somewhere; and the few wages they took home at the end of a week eased the family burden. One or two had the softer hands and faces of clerks, working in government positions at the post office or some other such institution; their clothes had something of the town in them.

  A fixedness of purpose united these young men. I saw them in our “underground,” often weary after an incident or on fire with apprehension before going out that night on active duty. Every man carried a gun; none allowed it to leave his personal vicinity. Some had learned the capacity to relax; others were strung as a coiled spring; still others responded to the “life or death: you choose” circumstances of their lives by sleeping during all the time that they spent in the castle bolt-hole. As to food—most ate ravenously, a few not at all, unable to guarantee that they would not soon afterward vomit it all up again.

  I see them now, in the gloom of the maps and candles—I see them lying about like figures in a painting or a blurred photograph. They look warily at the artist or the lens, and yet they have a firmness of gaze. Some wear tweed caps, sometimes with the peak turned backward. They seem both innocent and experienced, both eager and worldly-wise. Their faces have open expressions, as though they wish to be seen as staunch.

  A few smoked cigarettes or pipes, though we discouraged that when it was reported from the fields that some puzzling aroma of tobacco could be discerned above the ground between the ha-ha and the castle's stable-yard—in other words, on a line directly above the hiding-place. It took Harney to point out that there must be ventilation shafts everywhere—otherwise they should all have suffocated. Sure enough, we found the ventilations on the blueprint—tiny marks, almost indiscernible, as if meant only for the man who made the drawing.

  Once or twice in the early days of the cellar's operations, I happened to be there when men came back from an “action,” as they called it. They seemed extraordinarily heated and, walking among them, doling out mugs of hot tea and bacon sandwiches, I was the one who pointed out to them their good fortune to bear no wounds. That changed somewhat the night of the Tankardstown Ambush, as it came to be called. Here is the account that I pieced together from all the reports I was given by the men who took part. It has the value, I believe, of typifying an IRA Flying Column's action in the Irish War of Independence.

  All the towns of Ireland had garrisons from which British troops patrolled the countryside. After the IRA guerrilla campaign began, the army undertook search-and-arrest missions to “capture the gunmen,” as the official brief said. On any given day, truckloads of soldiers left these barracks and ranged through the surrounding parishes, stopping and interrogating people, sometimes making arrests, sometimes attacking a village in reprisal for some lethal action that had lately taken place.

  In truth the soldiers had a rough time of it; they sat hunched in trucks, riding along narrow, bumpy roads lined with hedges, from behind any one of which might come a deadly fusillade at any given moment, fired by an enemy they could not see. To add to their misery, the open trucks had to be covered with chicken wire; this had the dual purpose of allowing soldiers to poke out gun-barrels and return fire (or open fire, as they did—and often—on innocent passers-by) and at the same time protect them from any bombs thrown, which would merely bounce on the chicken wire and roll away.

  The soldiers, with a few exceptions, seemed no older than the IRA boys. They often came to the castle, and I was astonished by them; many were no more than loutish English, Scots, and Welsh who'd thought they were being sent to fight the war in France, and who did not know how to adjust to Ireland. One or two officers seemed to have a sense of decency—and then they divulged to me that the men under their command (as the entire country now suspected) had one thing in common.

  Owing to the war, and the consequent shortage of military personnel, the British Government had opened the jails. Provided he would put on a uniform and go to Ireland and fight the IRA, every rapist and robber, every murderer, thug, and villain in an English prison would be freed. They gave them uniforms of khaki trousers and surplus police tuni
cs, which were black—and they became known as the Black and Tans, or “Tans” for short. Officially they had the name of “Auxiliaries,” and troops of them augmented depleted regiments, such as the Northamptonshires, who occupied part of Tipperary.

  It became known through a local girl working as a cook in the Cashel barracks (Collins's tentacles ran everywhere) that trucks full of soldiers would travel at a particular time one night from Cashel to Kilshane. Harney laid his plans. One of his men, the son of a nearby farmer, had the ability to ride his bicycle very fast, whereas the poor condition of the roads forced army lorries to go slowly. Harney delegated his “scout” to wait in Cashel until he saw the trucks leaving the town.

  Earlier in the day, at a declivity, a dozen members of the Flying Column chose their positions behind the low wall that bordered the road. They elected to remain on one side only, because a hundred yards or so behind them, the fields became dense with trees and scrubland. Across from them, they had parked and propped a farm cart that they proposed to draw across the road on a rope when the trucks came within earshot— and after the scout had bicycled through. He had been briefed to raise his cap according to the number of trucks.

  Came the night, crisp and clear with a great, bright moon. At about seven o'clock, they heard the rumble of the lorries and soon came the scout, fast as the wind on his bicycle. As he passed the IRA positions, he raised his cap—once, twice, three times: three lorries full of soldiers. When the scout had cycled over the rope and passed safely on, the Flying Column men hauled the farm cart out from the gateway into the middle of the roadway, where it lurched to a halt and tipped down on its shafts.

  Over the rise came the first military truck and down into the hollow, but it did not see the cart until too late to warn the others. The driver dragged his wheels to a halt, as did the two drivers behind him—and the Flying Column opened fire. On “aim” and “fire” orders, three groups of four men simultaneously attacked the three trucks.