Sensible, reliable Margaret ran the preparatory school and taught Junior French. Her younger sister, the temperamental Mary Brigid, assisted Thomas MacDonnell, the resident music and dancing master. One of the Brady cousins also helped at the school, and other teachers were recruited through the Gaelic League. Even so, there was a perpetual shortage of staff, and senior boys were called upon to supervise the younger ones.
Discipline was no problem. As Ned wrote to Kathleen:
At Saint Enda’s we boys are on our honor. We are not spied upon. If a boy misbehaves he is called to the headmaster’s study and given to understand that he has done something shabby; he has let down Mr. Pearse as well as himself. A reproachful glance from the headmaster can hurt worse than a caning.
Until I came to Saint Enda’s I thought being beaten was a normal part of education. In the National School I had my share of the cane, the strap, and the ash plant. It seemed as if I was the one who always got caught.
But other boys have suffered worse. A couple of the lads in my dormitory here still have nightmares from treatment they endured in Christian Brothers’ schools. One will go to his grave with terrible scars across his back.
There is nothing like that at Saint Enda’s. Corporal punishment is very rare, and always mild.4 Mr. Pearse knows boys are full of mischief, but he has such faith in our inherent (I just learned that word) decency that we strive to live up to that ideal, and for the most part we do.
NED gave no details of his own first encounter with Saint Enda’s discipline. One of the “bold” Dublin boys had smuggled a dozen cigarettes into the school, and Ned and his friend Brian Joyce were among those who sneaked out into the woods to try them. The smuggler lit up and inhaled with ostentatious pleasure. The other boys watched enviously as he blew smoke rings. His eyes dared them to join him. Brian hesitated, but Ned lit a cigarette as if he had been smoking for years, and took a deep drag.
He thought he would die.
Someone was ripping out his lungs and setting them on fire. He could feel Brian pounding him on the back, but it did not help. He managed to get back to the house, only to have his half-digested breakfast come boiling up into his mouth and spew out right in front of Margaret Pearse.
I’m the one who always gets caught, he thought bitterly.
Soon he was facing Pádraic Pearse across the headmaster’s desk, trying to ignore the smell of vomit still clinging to his clothes. Pearse shook his head reproachfully. “Ned, Ned. I thought better of you than this.”
The embarrassment of that encounter would stay with him a lifetime. He had only to smell tobacco smoke to bring it all back.
LIKE his ideals, Pearse’s enthusiasms were infectious. When he lectured a class, speaking in either English or Irish and swaying gently from side to side as was his habit, he held his listeners transfixed.
“In this very room,” Pearse would say, gazing into the past with his visionary’s eyes, “young Robert Emmet often sat. Perhaps with his elbow propped on that windowsill. In our walled garden is a vine from which he plucked grapes. You boys eat grapes from the same still-living vine. Emmet and his sweetheart, Sarah Curran, walked together beneath our trees. Her favorite horse is buried in these very grounds.5 Here she and Emmet shared their joys and sorrows and pledged their troth. If you exercise your imaginations you might catch a glimpse of them still.”
Brian Joyce leaned toward Ned and whispered behind his hand, “Did you know the headmaster had a sweetheart once?6 She was a university student who drowned. Mary Brigid told me—she thought it was aw’fly romantic. The headmaster wrote a poem that goes: ‘In love I got but grief that withered my life.’7 When he talks about Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran I think he’s remembering his own—”
Pearse frowned at the whispering boy, and Brian slumped into his seat with a contrite expression. The lecture continued. “Emmet was hanged by the British as a rebel, but in truth he was a patriot who gave his life for his native land.”
As the months passed, Pearse and a variety of guest lecturers painted an increasingly alluring vision of an Ireland restored and invigorated by its heroes.8
A sovereign nation, dynamic and complete, offering everything a human might require.
On the last Sunday in August, Ned decided to explore Dublin. Like many Irish people, the Pearse family routinely used bicycles for transportation. Ned did not have a bicycle, so after early Mass he walked into Rathfarnham and caught a tram. The day was overcast, with a strange hard brightness behind the clouds. Since there was no rain Ned rode on the upper deck to enjoy the view.
He got off the tram at Nelson’s Pillar, a towering column surmounted by a statue of the British naval hero gazing imperiously down the broad, cobbled boulevard of Sackville Street. The Pillar shared the boulevard with the Parnell Monument at the top of the street and the O’Connell Monument at its foot, but it was Nelson who dominated. His pillar was the hub of Dublin’s tramway traffic. On this morning, however, there was only a line of horse-drawn cabs and one or two motor cabs waiting for fares.
Ned tilted his head back to look up at Lord Nelson. The admiral ignored him. From a sea of fruit stalls at the foot of the Pillar women shouted the praises of apples and oranges and greengage plums. One of the fruit stall women caught Ned’s eye and made a rude gesture in the direction of the statue.
With only the vaguest of ideas where he was going, Ned set out to find 16 Middle Gardiner Street. He ambled along, stealing glimpses of himself reflected in shop windows. Splintered images of a lanky figure in a tweed jacket and cap. A young man of the city? Or a country boy trying to look as if he belonged?
It was no good asking directions in a pub; none were open on Sunday morning. But eventually he found his way, more by chance than design, to the cross at Summerhill, then left into Middle Gardiner Street. There he narrowly avoided being knocked down by a Guinness dray pulled by a huge team of Clydesdale horses. The drayman in his bowler hat cursed Ned and the horses impartially.
Number 16 was a double-fronted Georgian house built of red brick, five bays wide but only one room deep. The front door was surmounted by an ornate plaster relief, with lights to either side patterned with oval and diamond panes. An abundantly fleshed woman with a Limerick accent replied to Ned’s knock, looked him up and down as if he were a chicken to be plucked, then led him to a reception room off the front hall. “Wait here while I see if Mr. Mooney is in.”
Ned surveyed the parlor with interest. Though the horsehair upholstery had seen better days, gaslight fixtures and coal in the scuttle by the hearth promised comfort.
Ned was standing with his head cocked to one side reading the spines of books on a row of shelves when Henry Mooney entered the room.
“My young friend! How good of you to remember me. I thought you’d go back to Clare for your holidays. What brings you here?”
Ned took him literally. “I came in on the Rathfarnham tram, sir. As for Clare, I’m stopping at Saint Enda’s this summer instead. Because of my farming experience Mr. Pearse asked me to stay on and help the head gardener. Michael MacRory’s a native speaker, so working with him will improve my Irish. I mow fields, mend walls, that sort of thing—but not on Sunday, of course. If it’s not too late, sir, I’d like to accept your offer of a tour of Dublin.”
He did not mention how his heart yearned for Atlantic sunsets and the hills of Clare. Yet after the decision to stay the summer was made, he had been strangely relieved. He could not imagine the farm without his parents; returning would have meant confronting ghosts.
Mooney grinned. “Say no more. I’m delighted you’re here; by a happy coincidence I had nothing planned for this afternoon. And forget about ‘sir,’ you’re to call me Henry from now on. Are we not fellow west-of-Ireland men?
“You were lucky to find a tram running, you know. Since Tuesday morning most of the drivers and conductors have been out on strike. There was a riot just yesterday and a police baton charge on Eden Quay. Of course, this is Horse Show Week, which is
the height of the Dublin social season, and that only makes matters worse. The union chose its time well.”
“Union?”
“I.T.G.W.U. The Irish Transport and General Workers Union, to you and me. But you didn’t come to Dublin to talk politics today, did you? Let’s go have a look at the city.”
Henry ushered him back toward the front door, pausing only to select a cap from the hat rack. As the two men set out through the streets Ned asked, “Do you not go home yourself in the summer, s—uh, Henry? Do you not visit your mother? I recall you said she’s a widow.”
Henry gave a mocking laugh. “Visit my mother? Not if I can avoid it. She has my younger brothers and sisters to keep her company; they all live within a hare’s leap of her—except for me. I’m the lucky fellow who got away.”
Ned smiled, uncertain if this was a joke. “You don’t mean that.”
“Indeed I do. My mother and I have no real feeling for one another, though she would never admit it. Mam’s a perfect example of the middle-class Irish, pinioned between English Victorian manners and Irish Catholic morality. She sends me weekly letters meant to make me feel guilty for my dereliction of duty to her saintly self. But duty’s not a substitute for love and my mother’s not the Virgin Mary. Women aren’t, you know. They’re just human beings.”
Ned was staring at him. Henry chuckled. “Surprised you, didn’t I? Well, it’s the truth. And I’ll tell you another. Holy Mother Church is not as perfect as she pretends to be, either. As a newspaper reporter, I’ve seen enough to convince me that this country of ours suffers no more from the British than from a repressive Catholic morality that owes little to Christian compassion.”
Ned was so shocked he could think of nothing to say.
They walked through a typical Dublin streetscape. In front of a handsome Georgian residence a little girl in a taffeta dress and starched petticoats was rolling a hoop. Her shining ringlets were held with a freshly ironed ribbon, and her face was rosy with health. A nanny in a starched cap glanced out the window, keeping a fond eye on her charge.
In a service laneway beyond the house two ragged boys were amusing themselves by slinging a dead pigeon in large circles on a bit of twine. They could not have been more than eight or ten years old, yet they had old men’s faces. Their clothes were an odd admixture of hand-me-down male and female clothing. Their filthy feet were bare, their ankles scarred with rat bites.
When they saw Ned and Henry watching, the larger one made a rude gesture and shouted, “Wot yiz gawpin’ at? Pick yer nose and eat boogers!” Both boys cackled with laughter.
Henry remarked, “They’re lucky they have a dead bird to play with; many children have less. I just wrote an article on Dublin’s poor for the Irish Independent. They published it without a byline, but it won’t make much difference. No one wants to know.”
“I’d like to know,” said Ned, as always an eager audience.
“To begin with—behind the homes of the gentry is another world entirely. Look down that alley, lad. What do you see? Smashed windows, a wall collapsing, part of a roof gone. Desperately overcrowded tenements in shocking disrepair. Dublin’s slums are the worst in Europe for a city of its size. Tuberculosis is endemic, not to mention typhus.
“A third of the population of Dublin is seriously malnourished. In the worst tenements two tiers of people share one bed. The first ones in lie on a filthy mattress if they’re lucky enough to have one, or on bare boards. Then a scrap of blanket is thrown over them and another layer of people sleeps on top. The first person awake in the morning throws his shoes ahead of him to frighten the rats away.
“The only water source is an outside pump. There may be a common toilet in the yard, though many families must rely on an overflowing cesspit. Dublin Corporation boasts of the city’s modern water-drainage system, but it’s not available to tenement dwellers. Meanwhile, the Irish poor are condemned as filthy by the very people who keep them in such conditions.
“These people are always cold; always hungry. They have no childhood—you saw those boys in the alley. They’ll be men at twelve and old at thirty. They will neither know nor care what is going on beyond their own miserable hovels. Everything is sacrificed in the struggle to live. Mind, heart, and soul become concentrated in the starving belly.
“Dublin’s working-class neighborhoods are literally ruins and rubble, Ned. I could show you places in Linenhall Street or Chancery Street that look like a war’s been fought there, and so it has. A war on poverty, long since lost.”
Henry’s words chilled Ned. Poverty was the most degrading sin. The worst victims of the Great Famine had been the poorest peasants, those already forced to bare subsistence before the potato blight struck. An inarticulated shame lingered among the people of Ireland from those terrible years, as if their holocaust were their own fault. Had not the English repeatedly characterized them as lazy and improvident?
Pauper had become a pejorative in Ireland. Ned recalled that the most dreaded place in Clare was not the cemetery but the poorhouse.
“Do the tenements belong to foreign landlords, Henry?”
The journalist snorted. “Many of them do, but not all by any means. A recent investigation showed that sixteen members of Dublin Corporation—that’s the body entrusted with the maintenance and improvement of the city—privately own eighty-nine tenements among them.9 They’re profiting from the very slums they’re supposed to clean up.”
“Who lives in the slums?”
“The working-class Irish; unskilled laborers, for the most part. What you might call the urban peasantry. Porters, dockers, tramway workers, street menders, men who shovel coal or sluice down abattoirs. Women who work at the Jacobs’ Biscuit factory. Deserted wives and children, widows who take in washing. Servants who work for the gentry but don’t ‘live in.’ There’s a sprinkling of struggling artisans as well, plus any number of drunks and rogues and layabouts. And prostitutes, of course.”
“Prostitutes?”
Henry Mooney gave Ned an amused glance. “Have you not heard of prostitutes in the rarefied climes of Saint Enda’s?”
Ned’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. “Of course I have,” he mumbled.
Senior boys occasionally whispered among themselves, but no one knew very much. The slightest reference to vulgarity or lasciviousness disgusted Pearse, to whom purity was a byword. Though a few of the bolder lads speculated as to whether the headmaster and his dead sweetheart had ever been intimate, the consensus was that they had not. Pádraic Pearse’s reverence for women was excessive.
Excessive but not unique. In rural Ireland, many a man went to his grave a virgin.
Secretly Ned prayed that would not be his fate.
“Monto lies that way,” Henry said with a nod of his head. “The brothel district. Not eight minutes’ walk from where we stand. It’s roughly a triangle called after Montgomery Street, once known as World’s End Lane.10 Dublin Corpo’s been trying to clear it out for years, even renaming some of the streets to improve their reputation. But they can’t erase Monto. The good people of Dublin prefer having their vice confined to one area, so they can pretend it doesn’t exist, rather than spread throughout the city. Monto’s said to be one of the most dissolute spots in Europe.
“At first customers were mostly British navvies coming in to Dublin port, but now businessmen and shopkeepers and even students go there. The higher-class kips—that’s the local name for brothels—are patronized by politicians and gentry who arrive after dark in curtained motorcars.”
Ned wanted to know more but was too embarrassed to ask. Henry understood. His own first visit to Monto was clearly etched in his memory.
“How old are you, Ned?”
“Sixteen…just.”
“Almost a man, then. You could fight in a war.”
“I could.” Ned’s eyes flashed as he recalled the headmaster telling his boys how they might one day fight for Ireland.
“When you’re seventeen I shall take you to
Monto myself. The girls who work there call it the Village.11 I know the best places, the flash houses.”
“You do?” Ned exclaimed, then reddened again.
Henry laughed. “It’s part of a man’s education in this city. But in the meantime there are other sights to see.”
He guided Ned back to Sackville Street. The boulevard was more crowded than when Ned had first arrived, with a number of Dublin Metropolitan Police in their dark blue uniforms. The policemen were invariably Irish and invariably large, being chosen for towering height and a muscular physique. Armed only with regulation wooden batons, the men of the DMP were a familiar part of the city scene.
Henry was saying, “This is the heart of Dublin. Sackville Street is, of course, an Ascendancy name. It’s been officially changed to O’Connell Street, but no one calls it that. See the monuments? Whose is tallest? Parnell and O’Connell were Irish; it’s the English Lord Nelson who gets the Pillar.”
A muscle tightened with indignation in Ned’s jaw.
“Or consider the General Post Office down there,” Henry went on, indicating a massive building beyond Nelson’s Pillar. “Classical Palladian design with Ionic columns; nothing remotely indigenous. The only concession to Ireland is the name of one of the statues over the portico: Hibernia. The other two are supposed to represent Fidelity and Mercury. Although I must say, Mercury with his wingéd heels is a bit aspirational for our postal service.”
Ned was showing more enthusiasm for the wares at a nearby street bookstall. Observing the object of his interest, Henry asked, “Do you like poetry, Ned?”
“I do like poetry, very much.” He lingered over, then regretfully put back, a slim volume. “I can’t afford this, though. Lord Inchiquin gives me a bit of pocket money, but he hasn’t sent my allowance for this quarter yet.”
Henry promptly purchased The Golden Joy by Thomas MacDonagh for himself. “This book is by one of the men who founded The Irish Review. I thought all copies of it had been destroyed, so finding one is like finding treasure.”
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