by Therese Down
Sister Rosario nodded and smiled and stared covetously at the last slice of cake, only averting her eyes in the interests of good manners just before it disappeared whole into Mick Spillane’s mouth. Mick was animated, his colour high. He sat perched on the edge of his chair, listening to every word Callasanctious spoke and nodding vigorously. “Of course, of course!” he spluttered through fountains of crumbs.
Caitlin rose to her feet, trying not to be “dramatic”, as her father liked to describe her thoughts and actions. In as dignified a fashion as she could manage, though her voice faltered, she pronounced, “I believe that if a woman has as good a brain as a man she should be allowed to use it.” Maureen eyed her with amused contempt. The vainglorious Caitlin looked childish, ridiculous.
“Well, we think a lot of things when we’re young, my child,” said Callasanctious, bold with the support of the parents, “but modesty is a wonderful thing in a woman, dear. Humility is a godly thing, and if the lack of it makes a man proud and dangerous, in a woman…” She struggled for words which would belie the anger she now felt towards this brazen girl. She was not insensitive to the strength of family bonds and they had not yet discussed the dowry. She had registered the fine looks and the fire of this girl, and liked neither. She had seen it all before. God gave them pretty faces and they thought they owned the place. She continued, “In a woman, lack of humility is… destructive to the very fabric of society.” She looked to Mick for his agreement, and he readily gave it, and both turned to Caitlin for a sign she was chastened. Caitlin left the room.
“Caitlin! Caitlin!” Mick was on his feet, his voice raised in embarrassed fury.
Callasanctious was gracious. “Let her go, dear Mr Spillane,” she said soothingly, then added, “She will learn.”
Mick said he was sorry for her rudeness, and thanked the sisters for their understanding.
“No, no! Not at all, not at all.” They both waved away his discomfort. “Sure, don’t we teach young girls? What can you tell us about them?”
The family and both nuns laughed a little and there was more pouring and drinking of tea. At last, Callasanctious could wait no longer. “Now, I am sorry to seem indelicate, but Sister Rosario and I must be back at the convent for Vespers…”
“Of course, of course, sisters – don’t let us keep you, now. It was good of you to come,” interrupted Mrs Spillane, getting to her feet.
There was nothing for it, clearly, but the most direct approach.
“Now, Maureen’s dowry…”
Upstairs, Caitlin sobbed into the eiderdown and fought the urge to scream in a childish venting of frustration and embarrassment. When finally she was still, she lay on her back, and as her heart quietened, she stared at the ceiling, feeling nothing. She heard the clock ticking on the wall, was aware of the light slanting through the curtains at the usual angle for this room at this time of day. It was very cold but she knew rather than felt the dank chill which pervaded the bedroom. It was as if she had finally been subsumed by the ordinariness of things. Snatches of words, exchanges with her father, relations of her dreams to her mother replayed in her head and she understood at last her impotence and that her words and dreams were absurd to those who heard them. Downstairs, sonorous, punctuated by Callasanctious’s shrill interjections and Rosario’s occasional fluttering laughter, her father’s voice. Caitlin realized that if Mick said the word, she could emerge from this life like an imago from a cocoon. Maureen had his blessing and she would soon be gone. But without his permission and a considerable amount of his money, university may as well be Tir-na-nÓg.
Donal Kelly had achieved straight A grades in his Leaving Certificate and the Holy Ghost Fathers asked him to teach mathematics. He willingly complied, for the wages would be handy when he went up to university. Although he easily won a scholarship to study law at Cork University, Donal would need living expenses and his father was in no way able to help – which the Holy Ghost Fathers understood. It was in his first term as a maths teacher that Donal Kelly realized fully that, after years of schooling and farm work, he was free – free from the obligation to help his father with backbreaking labour and free of the heavy mantle of responsibility that came with primogeniture and his sex. In acceding to Donal’s preference for academia over rurality, Dan Kelly had liberated his son. Teaching mathematics to rows of pale, silent boys was comparatively easy and enjoyable for the most part. Donal metamorphosed from student to teacher with remarkable facility, assuming authority as if it were the natural corollary of the high spiritedness and not infrequent insolence for which Donal was well known at Blackwell.
He became popular with most of the boys he taught, for he was not averse to the odd joke at the Holy Ghost Fathers’ expense, or the sharing of an anecdote about his own experiences as a Blackwell scholar. But, if the laughter became raucous, Donal was quick to reassert order. He understood only too well how quickly his pupils would discredit him, given the opportunity. The uneasy, predatory tension between scholar and novice master was a sea necessarily captained with celerity, or disaster was certain. And as time went on, many came to fear Donal Kelly’s sarcasm or sudden displays of temper, as he experimented with the disciplinary tools at a teacher’s disposal. Donal wore his master’s gown with panache – straight shoulders and a deliberate flourish of cloth as he turned corners. Always, his shoes were shining and he had his wayward curls cut to a manageable crop. The Holy Ghost Fathers nodded to him and smiled as he passed them on the corridors, their influence on his transformation undetected by Donal. But the priests had little influence on what happened to this young man outside the college walls. Although Donal had to be in his room in the seminary by no later than ten o’clock each night, there was time for recreation between the end of prep supervision and the nine fifty-five curfew. A short walk and he was in the heart of Cashmel town. One night a week, he did not have to supervise the boys’ prep and was free to go into town straight after supper.
Tipperary County in the 1940s was a hotbed of IRA activity. In every bar, on every street corner, men with stony faces nodded and talked under their breath between pints of ale or pulls on cigarettes. Firm handshakes and prolonged eye contact confirmed clandestine arrangements or renewed fealties. Uniformed gardai patrolled the streets of Tipperary towns, banging truncheons against their leather boots with apparent nonchalance, smirking or pretending not to notice as the men they passed turned their backs or spat on the pavement.
When he assumed his teaching role in the autumn of 1941, after a summer’s hard labour on his father’s farm, it was as if Donal had emerged from a cocoon. Sometimes, as he sat alone in a Cashmel bar, or occasionally with a lay master from the college, someone would “casually” drop a back copy of The Wolfe Tone Weekly on his table. Banned in 1939 by de Valera’s Fianna Fail government, penned largely by men subsequently interned in the Curragh, The Wolfe Tone Weekly endeavoured in urgent, passionate prose to educate a new generation of Irish people regarding their Fenian history. The appearance of underground pamphlets entitled The Weekly War News and The Republican News would occasion huddles of animated men in every Cashmel bar. They raised their voices in rebel ballads, banging their ale tankards in time to the illicit music of their hearts. But wherever such fervour ignited, it would not be long before a garda sergeant in full uniform would appear, accompanied by several officers whose job it was to douse Republican passion with icy stares and the threat of immediate arrest and internment without trial.
The first thing that was material in Donal Kelly’s becoming a member of the IRA was the arrest of the landlord of O’Hallorahan’s bar one night in February 1941. Donal and a colleague from Blackwell, a geography teacher of middle age, were chatting over a pint. It was a Saturday evening and Donal was enjoying a rare night off from supervisory study duties. Suddenly, six gardai crashed into the bar, batons raised in anticipation of resistance. Hollering orders to everyone to stay calm and remain still, they formed a barricade before the bar. The most senior of them
was a huge and fierce sergeant. He had been relocated from County Clare to discover and destroy Tipperary’s insurgent safe houses and paramilitary leaders. He announced to all that the landlord, Sean O’Hallorahan, was under arrest for harbouring and encouraging the dissemination of treasonable and seditious documents, in direct contravention of the Offences Against the State Act 1939.
There was an immediate chorus of protestation from O’Hallorahan’s patrons. Several of them came towards the ring of gardai, fists clenched or wiping their mouths of the froth from hastily downed beer, squaring for a fight. Donal and his colleague got up uncertainly from their chairs and took cautious steps further into the bar room as men shouldered past them and towards the gardai. “Come out here, Sean O’Hallorahan,” commanded the sergeant. “Come out and there will be no trouble. It will be worse for you…” He paused, turning from the bar to face the punters, now standing side by side and staring with silent menace at the gardai. “It will be worse for all of ye, if you do not come quietly, O’Hallorahan.” There was no response from the landlord. He had disappeared, it seemed.
“Right, so!” announced the sergeant. “Don’t say you weren’t warned!” And with one swift movement he put a hand on the bar and levered himself onto and then over it. There was a sound of crashing and banging as bottles and glasses on the bar were sent flying. Then, the sergeant kicked in the door from the bar to the kitchen through which O’Hallorahan had absconded, locking it behind him.
This commotion was the signal for the men to attack. With a sound like a battle cry they launched themselves at the gardai. Donal watched with a mixture of terror and excitement as the men clashed with the officers. All was chaos. Blood and spit rose in sprays from the fray. Batons rained blows on bare heads, across faces, while fists and boots landed wherever there was an opportunity. Stools and chairs and tables smashed like toys as the combined weight of two or more grappling men landed on or crashed into them. The fight expanded to fill the bar. Donal and his friend were soon pressed against the furthest wall in a bid to remain uninvolved.
The geography teacher, slight of build and gentle of demeanour, raised his arms to cover his face, crouching as if to make himself even smaller. Others had joined the brawl – old men smashed bottles on the police officers’ heads whenever they saw a chance, and the floor was slippery with blood and beer and shattered glass.
At last, a whistle pierced the ruckus. Gardai reinforcements arrived and waded in to save their colleagues from further injury and to apprehend the men who fought them. They were merciless with their batons. Right before his very eyes, not three feet from where he stood, Donal saw the face of a burly gard contort in a hateful grimace as he brought his baton down with full force on a young man’s head. There was a sickening crack and then, like a marionette whose strings had suddenly been cut, the young man crumpled, blood flowing spontaneously from his nose and then his ears. As he fell, he half turned and hit the ground close to Donal, his pale blue eyes wide with incomprehension and then, in a second, they went blank, as if someone had switched off a light. As his head impacted the stone floor of O’Hallorahan’s bar, some of the blood on his face was displaced and landed on Donal’s black, shiny shoes.
Donal heard his own voice before he knew he would speak. “You’ve killed him!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “You’ve killed him!” The pitch of Donal’s voice as much as the words themselves was enough to distract gardai and patrons alike from their combat. Within a minute, all was silent, and, panting, bleeding, sweating, the men turned as one to determine the source and truth of the terrible, anguished words. The young man, Davey Nunan, just nineteen, was indeed dead. The gard who had dealt the fatal blow was standing above the body, chest heaving, blinking at the corpse as if its blood and twistedness were surprises he could not comprehend.
“I didn’t…” he began, his tone defensive, the words an effort through his laboured breathing. “I didn’t hit him that hard.” He looked wildly at the faces before him, searching each man’s eyes for understanding or sympathy, but he was met only with hatred and fury or the confused gazes and lowered heads of his colleagues. He began to panic. “Sure, weren’t we all at it, huh? Eh? Weren’t we all here to stop the fighting? I did what I was told, is all!” He ended by shouting, turning on his heel to look behind him. Someone must surely support him!
“I saw exactly what you did!” The voice was Donal’s. He was dimly aware of the timid tug on his jacket sleeve as the geography master pleaded mutely with him to keep quiet, but he could not stop himself. “He wasn’t even fighting you! You just came from behind him and you smashed his head with your stick with full force – he didn’t stand a chance!”
The gard was shaking his head, took a step towards Donal. Donal pushed away from the wall and came forward to meet him, eyes blazing into the policeman’s frightened face. “Yes, you did!” he continued, raising his voice. He was shaking with fury and disgust. He had to step over the dead boy’s head to get closer to the gard. “You murdered him!”
“No!” shouted back the officer. “No! I only did what I had to – I didn’t hit him that hard.” Someone pushed him roughly so he lurched forward and Donal was so close he could smell his breath. A gunshot split the terrible silence, which, in another second, would have re-erupted into calculatedly murderous violence. At gardai gunpoint, the crowd of grieving, angry drinkers fell back and the constabulary men regrouped.
“Move the body,” commanded the sergeant. “O’Reilly,” he addressed the gard who had killed Davey Nunan, “get out. Barracks. Now.” Looking as if he would cry, O’Reilly obeyed. A few gardai followed him. Then, loudly, eyes burning with anger but not without sadness, the sergeant addressed the bloody, tattered men of O’Hallorahan’s bar. “I warned you, time and again! You will not keep the law! Ye know full well that IRA activity is illegal and that it is our job – on the orders of the President of Ireland himself – to stop ye from plotting and rebel rousing and this…” He looked down as two gardai dragged Davey Nunan across the bar by his feet, leaving behind him a trail of blood, his pale blue eyes staring into the space above him. “This is what it leads to! Isn’t there enough blood spilt, but ye want more?”
“You killed him!” shouted a man, pushing others out of the way to a place before the sergeant. “We did not.”
“Is that right?” Unabashed, the sergeant returned the defiance but adjusted his tone a little. “Ye’re innocent of blood spilling, are ye? You and I both know that in here, this minute, are several men who have killed and are plotting to do so again.” He surveyed the men before him. “Don’t be kidding yourselves that this is a holy war or that ye’re justified in ambushing innocent men in the middle of the night or blowing up kids and women on the English mainland – aye! We know well what the IRA is planning and how ye shoot each other like dogs on the mere suspicion of treachery!”
He pulled from his back left pocket several rolled copies of The Weekly War News pamphlet, confiscated from O’Hallorahan’s kitchen press, and waved them as if they were evidence his words were true. “I’d bet a few shillings there’s men in here now who know well the whereabouts of George Plant – know fine well where Michael Devereux is, and his young wife breaking her heart over him. Honourable, are ye?” The sergeant raised his hand and wiped his face with it. The gesture was one of exhaustion. His shoulders seemed to drop. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. “If the likes of you boys have their way – with your ‘Sabotage Britain’ campaign…” he unfurled the pamphlets, raised them, and exhibited the headline which referenced the IRA Chief of Staff’s banner slogan for pursuing open aggression against England, “… there’ll be a British soldier on every street corner of Ireland! Is that what ye want, is it? We know full well ye’re colluding with Germany, dabbling in matters you are in no way able to handle – playing with fire! And until ye stop plotting and ambushing your own…” he became passionate again, raised his voice, and cast his eyes over the grim faces before him, “… ye’re asking he
ll in all its fury to consume us! One more bomb in England, one more escapade with the likes of Plant or Hayes – and de Valera will not be able to stop the English from coming here in force to wipe you out. Is that what ye want, is it?”
There was no answer. Just mute hatred. The sergeant shook his head. Several officers still vigilantly monitoring the crowd, hands on guns or gripping their baton handles in readiness, moved slowly towards the door of the bar. “Go home,” said the sergeant almost quietly. “Go home and mourn this boy’s death. This bar will be closed till further notice. O’Hallorahan is on his way to the Curragh. Ye know well why.”
Someone spat and the spittle hit the sergeant’s left arm. He sighed heavily then stood tall and squared his shoulders once more. “Out!” he shouted. “I want this bar cleared and boarded up in five minutes.” As Donal filed past him, the sergeant stopped him. “You,” he said. “You saw what happened there?”
“I saw all right!” Donal returned, glowering at the policeman.
“What’s your name and address?”
“Why?”
“Because you are a witness – why else? Don’t leave here without giving this officer,” and he paused to beckon over a gard, “your details.”
Once out of the bar and standing on the pavement beneath a clear and starry sky, Donal closed his eyes and breathed heavily, dissipating with oxygen the dizziness he felt, the tightness of his chest. The geography master was throwing up behind him, retching repeatedly into the gutter. When at last he had finished, he came trembling back to Donal.
“What now?”
“Well, it’s way past curfew,” retorted Donal. “Can I sleep at your house?” For answer, the little man nodded, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and began to walk home, shaking his head and muttering things Donal could not discern.