1916

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Questions stripped away the platitudes and undermined the verities that provided a sheltered, nursery existence for people who did not want to think. Questions were the obligation of the intellect. Pádraic Pearse said that, too.

  Sometime before dawn, Ned slept.

  THE following week Ned had his new Volunteer uniform. He could not afford a professional tailor, but had bought gray-green serge from which Margaret Pearse sewed a single-breasted tunic and matching trousers, cut like breeches.5 In lieu of high-topped riding boots, cloth puttees in the same heathery green would wrap snugly around his legs from ankle to knee. In addition he bought a Sam Browne belt, a flat-topped military hat with a smart brim, brass buttons embossed with a harp, and one of the bronze Volunteer badges Eoin MacNeill had designed. These purchases left Ned with empty pockets, but he did not care.

  He donned the uniform for Mrs. Pearse’s inspection. By now she knew about the plans for insurrection. Pádraic had assured his mother that no violence was intended, merely a show of armed force like that which had been so successful in the north in influencing British policy. But there was a lurking anxiety at the back of her eyes as she surveyed Ned in his new gear. “It’s a wee bit tight across the shoulders,” she pronounced. “Take off that tunic and I’ll ease the back seam.”

  Mama would have done the same, thought Ned. Mama had never been happy with any garment until she made her own adjustments.

  “But how do I look?” he insisted.

  Mrs. Pearse forced a smile. “Splendid, lad. Just splendid.”

  Mama would have said “Splendid,” too.

  Ned wore his new uniform for the first time when the Volunteers went on training maneuvers in the Dublin mountains. The Fianna, who had drilled many times in the same area, served as their guides. The discipline and dependability of “Madame’s army” were invaluable. “And a little child shall lead them,” Thomas MacDonagh joked as they marched along.

  Ned remarked, “When I was in the Fianna I thought I was a man, but now I see I was only a child. Yet I still don’t feel like a grown-up man, not completely. How soon does that happen?”

  “You never get there, bedad. It’s the great lesson of maturity. The longing and impatience of boyhood give way to the longing and discontent of manhood, and the future you anticipate is still just around the corner. Yet no matter how far you run or how fast, you never quite turn that corner.” MacDonagh gave Ned an affectionate dig in the ribs with his elbow. “Don’t you know we’re all boys at heart?”

  Ned’s duties as a courier were multiplying. The war seemed to make everything more urgent. While pedaling his bicycle at top speed along South King Street one afternoon, he almost ran into a couple outside McDowell’s Oyster Bar.

  “Whoa there!” cried Joe Plunkett as he put a protective arm around the slender young woman beside him. “Oh, it’s you, Ned.”

  “I apologize, I was in such a hurry…”

  “All is forgiven friends,” Plunkett replied. His voice was very hoarse. “But no matter how much of a hurry you’re in, do stop a moment and meet Miss Gifford. Grace, this is one of Pádraic Pearse’s star pupils, Ned Halloran.”

  As Ned and Grace Gifford shook hands, he observed that she had a short upper lip and a round, pretty chin. Smartly dressed in a fitted dove-gray jacket and narrow skirt, her broad-brimmed hat set at a becoming angle, she held her own against the drama of Joe Plunkett’s mulberry-colored cape.

  “Miss Gifford’s an artist,” Plunkett explained. “She’s just done some illustrations for the Irish Review. Since it sells for sixpence and we can’t afford to pay our contributors, I took her to lunch as a way of saying thank-you. It turns out her sister is married to our friend Tom MacDonagh, though I didn’t realize that when I bought her drawings.”

  The trio chatted for a few moments while traffic flowed around them. Plunkett was obviously impressed with Miss Gifford. “Her paintings will hang in a gallery someday,” he predicted.

  Ned replied, “And we’ll all go to see them and say, ‘I knew her when.’”

  Before Plunkett could agree he bent over with a fit of coughing. When he straightened up again his eyes met Ned’s. “Promise me you will,” he said, “if I can’t be there.”

  “Of course you’ll be there! Don’t talk rubbish.”

  But as Ned rode away he found himself pondering the brevity of life. With great nations going to war, any future was uncertain.

  Ned’s last message of the day was for Seán MacDermott, who lived in a boardinghouse in the North Circular Road.6 He looked forward to seeing MacDermott. His love of fun and laughter could be counted upon to lift any dark mood. In addition, he and Ned shared a dependence on the bicycle, and he often asked, jokingly, after the health of Ned’s machine.

  “Is your push-bike feeling well today?” he inquired.

  “Well enough. Bit of the collywobbles in the steering column, though.”

  “Take it around to the back and let me look at it.” In a lean-to shed behind the house, MacDermott tinkered with the bicycle for a while, then pronounced it cured. “You need to put a bit of grease there every so often. Men like us who have to rely on their machines must keep them working.”

  “You travel farther on yours than I ever do on mine,” Ned replied.

  “Ah, well, that’s my job. Ever since ’08 I’ve been on the road at thirty shillings a week, organizing desperadoes.”

  When he threw back his head and laughed, Ned laughed, too. “That’s us, desperadoes!”

  A shadow stirred in MacDermott’s eyes. “It’s better than being a part-time barman in a poor village in Leitrim,7 or cleaning Dublin trams for starvation wages. For an Irishman with a bad leg there aren’t a lot of jobs on offer. The Brotherhood’s been good to me, almost like family. A fellow needs a family, Ned; everyone does.”

  SINCE he was already in the North Circular Road, when Ned left MacDermott he went to the Orphan House for Destitute Females. The place reeked of carbolic and bewilderment and loneliness. A matron who rustled with starch assured him that no one there was called “Precious.”

  Almost too late, Ned remembered the name the nuns had given the child. “What about Ursula Jervis? Is she here?”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “Just a friend.”

  She looked as if she did not believe him; orphans had no friends. But she directed him to an antechamber to wait. The room was equipped with hard benches and curtainless windows. The only decoration was a lurid picture of the Sacred Heart spouting blood. Ned paced the bare floor and listened to the echo of his footsteps. Eventually the matron half dragged a child to the doorway. “Stop being stubborn, Ursula,” she hissed.

  The name of a medieval saint was too pretentious for the tiny girl who stood staring at Ned.

  “Precious!”

  Pulling away from the matron, she ran to him, and he folded her into his arms. She hugged his neck with all her small strength.

  “Are you going to take me home?”

  “Do you remember where you live?”

  Precious began to tremble. “Can’t remember.” She was on the verge of tears.

  “It’s all right, little one,” he assured her. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”

  They allowed Ned half an hour with her in that bare and cheerless room. He entertained her with stories about the boyhood of Cuchulain in which he played all the parts, and he combed her hair with his pocket comb.

  When the matron returned to take Precious away the child clung to his hand and cried.

  “I’ll be back soon, I promise,” he told her.

  The matron looked unconvinced.

  INSTEAD of taking the most straightforward way back to Rathfarnham, Ned followed the route by which Mary Cosgrave would return home from Brown Thomas. Vague plans, little more than daydreams, had begun swirling through his head.

  When he saw her walking toward him he had a strong sense of inevitability. “Miss Cosgrave!” he called. “May I escort you home?”
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  She stopped on the footpath and folded her arms. “Are you sober now?”

  He could not tell if she was teasing. “I am sober, I haven’t had a drink since you last saw me.”

  “In that case you may escort me,” she replied like a queen conferring a favor on a courtier. Then she gave Ned one of her lovely smiles and he knew he was forgiven.

  They made their way toward the Cosgrave house slowly, with many pauses. When Mary admired some roses in a garden Ned hopped over the low brick wall to pick them for her, daring thorns and the householder’s wrath. Farther on he leaned his machine against a lamppost so he could adjust the chain, and she waited beside him, chatting idly about her friend Eliza and her work at the shop and her mother’s migraine headaches.

  They had almost reached Mary’s house before the war in Europe entered the conversation. The latest recruiting poster for the British army was prominently displayed in the window of a corner shop. “Join the Fight on Behalf of Small Nations!” it trumpeted. “Free Belgium and Serbia from the Hun!”

  Mary said, “Just think of those brave soldiers going off to fight for the oppressed. Aren’t they wonderful? I’m sure my brothers in England will enlist.”

  “Perhaps they’ll have better luck over there, though I doubt it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The British authorities are doing everything they can to persuade Irishmen to enlist, but it’s a different matter once your name is signed on the line. It’s the same old discrimination, Mary. Our lads are being sent straight to the front lines, where the bullets will find them first. It’s almost impossible for a Catholic to get a commission. All the cadets in the officer training corps at Trinity are Protestants, of course.

  “Irish regiments are permitted to march only under the Union Jack—although Carson’s been given special privileges for his Ulster Volunteers. They’re enrolled as a separate unit with their own colors and their choice of officers.”

  “I’m sure the government knows what’s best,” Mary said complacently. “And when my brothers join up I shall be very proud of them.”

  “I thought you disapproved of the military.”

  “I disapprove of grown men strutting around like little boys, criticizing the king and wanting to throw out the government. That’s just playacting, Ned. But a man who is willing to lay down his life for his country is a hero.”

  “Our country has not declared war against Germany,” he reminded her.

  “England has. It’s the same thing.”

  He did not want to argue with her. Their reestablished friendship was too important to him. But as he pedaled home in the twilight he was thinking, It isn’t the same. It isn’t the same at all.

  As he turned in at the gate of Saint Enda’s, Ned was pondering his own military future. The IRB was planning a Rising, but Ireland’s independence was still a dream. For the present her fate was inextricably linked to Britain’s.

  Of all the major European powers, only Britain depended upon a volunteer army. Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, had undertaken a vigorous recruiting campaign. From Irish pulpits and sporting fields alike voices urged men to join the British army. Many Irish farm lads, bored with cattle and pigs and plowing, bored with local girls and bottled coffee essence and limited horizons, enlisted because it gave them the opportunity of Going Somewhere Else. They neither knew nor cared who they would have to fight, nor what the issues were.

  On the ninth of September, the British prime minister visited the Mansion House in Dublin to make a formal appeal to Dublin men to “take the king’s shilling” and sign up. He made it plain that he was asking for recruits in return for Home Rule, the “free gift of a free people.”

  Asquith’s offer did not fall on deaf ears. Times were hard and prices were high. For men out of work any wages were better than none, and the British War Department was a reliable paymaster. Their wives could not be blamed for encouraging them. The dependents’ allowance granted to the families of soldiers away at the front would give many of them the first real income they had ever known.

  The Irish National Volunteer Corps, on the other hand, was unpaid. Each man must support himself. Frank was doing his best to help, but it had been a bad year on the farm. “It rains eight days out of seven and the fields are drowned,” Norah had recently written, cataloging woes. “And that ungrateful Janey Devlin has run off with a tinker. The wet weather has made my arthritis worse and we need to find someone else to help in the house but cannot afford to pay her. It is the will of God, Ned, but sometimes it’s hard to accept so many troubles in one lifetime.”

  Money. If Ned was to stay in Dublin he had to make his own living. Personal independence had a price. He could not in good conscience continue to take a share of the Halloran farm income when he was not helping on the farm. Work as a groundsman at Saint Enda’s provided him with bed and board but put no money in his pocket.

  Becoming an apprentice teacher was not the answer, either. The staff had been reduced recently due to the loss of Mary Brigid, whose behavior had become increasingly erratic until at last it had been decided that in everyone’s interest she should live away from the school. But Ned did not have the skills to replace her. Besides, the Pearse family was valiantly struggling to keep Saint Enda’s afloat. Even the small stipend due an apprentice teacher was a burden, one Ned would not place upon them.

  He must find a different source of income. That night he lay on his bed and stared up at the crucifix on the wall above the iron headboard. Christ gazed back from an upside-down face.

  Did You ever worry about money? You were fed and sheltered by people who often didn’t have enough for themselves, and in the end You paid with Your blood.

  Shuddering, Ned turned over and buried his face in his pillow. But sleep was a long time coming.

  The next day he called at the Independent to invite Henry Mooney to lunch.

  “Have you seen this?” Henry asked angrily, fumbling in a stack of papers and pulling out a yellow sheet with the Dublin Castle emblem at the top. “Of course not, how could you? This notice was issued on the fifteenth of August and delivered to every newspaper in the country, but we weren’t allowed to publish it. The Castle says press censorship is to be enforced ‘for the duration of the war.’”

  Ned scanned the announcement. “How will this affect you?”

  “Fortunately I, ah, knew about it in advance, so I’ve proceeded accordingly and tamed my rhetoric a little. We shall all have to clear every article we write from now on. And republican papers like Sinn Féin and Irish Freedom may be closed down altogether if they keep on urging Irishmen not to enlist in the British army. Since war has been declared that amounts to sedition.”

  Ned ran his thumb along the cleft in his chin. “I suppose it does,” he said thoughtfully, “if we accept that we are British subjects. On the other hand, if we refuse to acknowledge British sovereignty why should we fight in their army?”

  “Did Patrick Pearse teach you to think like that?”

  “Pádraic Pearse taught me to think,” Ned corrected. “The rest is up to me. Come on, I’ll buy you lunch to cheer you up, provided it’s a cheap lunch.”

  “I’m a newspaperman. That’s the only sort of lunch we eat.”

  Over pints of stout and hot meat pies in the Grand Central Bar on D’Olier Street, Ned began working his way around to the subject of a job. “Remember what you said about newspapers making history? That remark stuck in my mind, Henry. I’m constantly surprised at how many people outside the Gaelic League know nothing about Irish history.”

  Henry’s eyes smoldered in their deep sockets. “The reason is obvious. Interest in it has been actively discouraged. ‘Forget,’ we are told. ‘Don’t be haunted by your history,’ we are urged. And by whom? There lies the answer.

  “Those who encourage the Irish to forget their history are the very ones who made it a nightmare, Ned. They urge amnesia on us so we’ll be ripe for the plucking again. Look at this censor
ship business. What is that but an attempt to control history?”

  “That’s a bleak view.”

  “I have bleak days.” Henry stared down into his pint.

  Ned waited while the silence lengthened. At last he said, “Do you think…I mean, could I be a newspaperman?”

  His friend looked up. “It’s as good a job as any other, I suppose. And you’re ideally qualified; you’re curious and articulate and have no extra mouths to feed. Mind you, since your family doesn’t own a newspaper you would have to start at the bottom and work your way up. It’s damned hard work. I began as a ‘printer’s devil,’ doing the odd jobs no one else would do. I had to collect the used lead type—slugs, we call them—for remelting, and after the first day my hands were so black no amount of soap would clean them.” His glum expression melted into a chuckle. “That’s how to get printer’s ink in your veins.”

  “I’m used to dirty hands; I was raised on a farm. How do I apply for a job?”

  “I’ll be happy to give you an introduction at the Independent. From there you’re on your own, though.”

  “I’m in your debt, Henry.”

  “Not at all. But if you’d like to show your gratitude, how about a little inside information? Something that would make a good story—provided I can get it past the censors?”

  “I don’t have any information,” Ned replied as he probed the greasy golden crust of his steak-and-kidney pie with the tip of his knife. A cloud of fragrant steam emerged.

  “Are you sure? It seems to me you’re ideally placed to know a lot. For example, there’s a rumor that James Connolly and the IRB jointly considered seizing the Mansion House to keep Asquith from appearing there. Could you confirm that? Or give me any details about that recent top secret meeting of the IRB Supreme Council?”

  Ned speared a gobbet of meat with his fork. “You’re talking to the wrong man. I’m just an assistant groundsman at Saint Enda’s.”

  “Come on, you can’t cod me. You’re in it head-neck-and-heels.”

  Putting down his fork, Ned met the journalist’s eyes and held them. His gaze was dead level; his green eyes fathomless. “I’m telling you the truth when I say I’m not a member of the IRB and I have no plans to join. But even if I did know anything, it would not be for sale. Not at any price.”