The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War

by Tom Phelan

  Slowly, I let my hand slide down the outside of Kitty’s dress, down between her opening thighs, and as if she had been waiting for me to make that move, she slipped her hand down the inside of my trousers.

  As the lights were turned off in the Liffey, the wind got colder, and in small groups we drifted back to the barracks in silence. I imagine most of the lads were thinking about Christmas time at home. If they were lucky like me, they had memories of a girl holding them, of a girl leading them into spaces where only a girl could bring a man.

  I sent Kitty a drawing of the outside of Ali Baba’s Cave with snow on the ground and two pairs of footprints disappearing into the opening.

  Con Hatchel

  The delight we took in our bodies those first months in the army! We were young stallions driven out from the winter stables for the first day of spring ploughing. We were young bulls charging down sun-filled, buttercupped fields of fresh grass after a long, dark winter in a hungry shed, young rude bulls with their tails curled over their backs, exposing their parts to anyone who wanted to look and admire.

  Bulging with energy in every muscle, we were brimming with life, young as the sun, invincible, indestructible, immortal.

  We were willing and able to show the Imperial British Army that we could do much more than was demanded of us. We threw back our heads and threw out our chests and threw up our knees and did things they didn’t ask us to do. We stepped higher, we pushed harder, we shouted louder. At the end of long marches we were still kicking up our heels, still laughing out loud when the sun was setting.

  And the pure joy of it all—of being young, of being together, of trying to outdo each other. We were adventurers-in-the-making, with nothing in our future but foreign lands where we would trek across mountains so high that their tops were above the clouds. We would march across deserts to palm-treed oases. We would take long journeys across wide seas.

  There would be hurricanes, blizzards, glaciers, waterspouts, sandstorms, typhoons, monsoons, icebergs, monstrous rivers, waterfalls and desert windstorms, and we would be able for them all.

  “If only the English owned Alaska, we could live in igloos for a while, learn all the different names for snow,” I said to Matt, “and we could translate them to fit all the different kinds of rain in Ireland.”

  There would be black people who lived in reed huts and carried spears; Indian people burning corpses beside holy rivers; Australian farms so big that two Irish counties could get lost in them; flocks of sheep so vast you couldn’t see across them. There would be trees in deep forests with rubber dripping out of them into buckets; trees alive with oranges and dates and olives and lemons and pears and bananas; trees we had no names for dripping with sweet fruit that became juice in the mouth and made a man’s insides joyful.

  And the names! Madagascar, Bangalore, Darling. Music, music, music. I had always loved living in our school atlas. I loved poems about places far away. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. I loved the sound of the sounds. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan. I could taste the words. Xanadu.

  There would be crushing snakes and diseased flies and biting spiders and poisonous frogs, birds eating rotten meat in the sun, laughing dogs, bats hanging upside down in caves, birds that flew the oceans for months without going home, animals of shapes and sizes we couldn’t imagine. Anaconda, hyena, tsetse, albatross, platypus, Komodo dragon, alpaca.

  I told the lads about llamas when we were sitting on the crest of a Wicklow mountain. “They spit like horses kick, or bulls puck when they’re cross or frightened; spit right in your face.” And we all laughed and spat over the side of the mountain into the wind, and the wind blew our spit back onto us.

  With the good and regular food, and with the nonstop training, our bodies began to do things we ourselves never knew they could do. And when we would land in those foreign places our bodies would become tougher still; our skin would cook brown, our eyes get bluer, our hair turn yellow. The army was doing for us what nature does for caterpillars. We were country bumpkins changing into golden-skinned warriors; peasants turning into knights who could look any man anywhere in the eye; paupers we had been, but now we were men with a jingle in our pockets. We had new boots, we were wearing uniforms, we were walking straight-backed, and we had the confidence of soldiers who could shout “Sir” into the face of the fiercest sergeant.

  And the laughing we did at the names the sergeant called us when he didn’t mean to be funny, at the lads who fell at the worst times, at one of the lads from King’s County who fell on purpose at all the wrong times. The laughs he gave us! Losing his balance when saluting and ending up at the sergeant’s feet, the purple face of the sergeant shouting at him, “Get up, you fucking bogman”; falling in the mess hall with a tray full of food and not spilling a thing with the sergeant shouting, “Get up, you awkward shite”; falling in the washroom when he was naked, ending up with his hole pointing at the sergeant. “Get that arse out of my face, you ugly fucker!”

  Food, exercise, and sleep. And how we slept! When our heads touched the pillows we were still as railway sleepers until the sergeant bellowed in the doorway before the sun came back. There wasn’t a morning when I didn’t jump out of bed wanting to dive into the day ahead.

  In the morning mess hall we were hungry bullocks in wintertime, all jaws and drool, as we shovelled the food into mouths that were flaming doors in a ship’s furnace. Mugs of steaming sweet tea, cuts of bread an inch thick and butter as yellow as beastings. And then the sprint to the Twenty-Seater, where we sat side by side and grunted and groaned with our trousers at our ankles.

  A few months earlier we were cupping our mickeys in our hands when we made our water, afraid someone would see. And here we were sitting together in the Twenty-Seater, firing away.

  “A fellow can get used to anything, if he wants to or not,” Matt said.

  “There’s nothing to beat a bit of soft grass for your arse,” one of the lads said when he found out what he was supposed to do with the paper. The stink in the Twenty-Seater was terrible, and the jokes were always funnier in there than anywhere else.

  “Did you hear about the fellow shovelling out the five-seater in the Square in Marbra, and he afraid someone would come in and plop a shite down on top of him? He got one of them balloon things full of gas and floated it up tied to a piece of twine through the hole where he was working below. A woman came in and sat down, and the balloon came up beside her and she started screaming, thought it was the head of the headless horseman. Yer man stuck his head up through another hole and said, ‘Will you whist, woman? It’s only a fart with a skin on it.’ ”

  The first time in the washroom in the barracks was very tough for everyone, all of us shy about taking off our clothes. Even when the sergeant’s shouting got louder, no one moved any quicker. Then we were all standing naked with our fallen trousers at our ankles, trying to kick them away so we wouldn’t have to bend down. Everyone’s hands were casually dangling at their crotches—as if hands could casually dangle there. We didn’t know where to look.

  The sergeant brought us to attention. We stood there with our arses as tight as two potatoes squashed together, wondering what our arses looked like with nothing on them, and all we had to do to find out was to look at the arse in front of us.

  The sergeant shouted, “At ease”; then he made the two lines face each other. He ordered us to put our hands over our heads, to spread our legs, to move our hips so that our mickeys swung back between our legs and then slapped up against our bellies. Then he shouted at us to look at the swinging mickey in front of us. The laughing started, and that was the end of being shy. I was going to write all this to Kitty to make her laugh, but in the end I didn’t.

  On a long march one day with full gear I realized how proud I was of myself for deciding to join the army, even if it was Lionel’s talk that gave us the idea first. But it was me, me
myself, who had taken charge: For the first time I had stopped letting other people and events decide the twists and turns of my life. I had joined up because I wanted to go to places where the sun was shining, where there weren’t thirty-six different kinds of rain, where there wasn’t mud and muck for most of the year. I had made the decision, and as I trooped across the fields and hedges and hills of Wicklow in my strong boots and my new body, I felt like a man for the first time, an adult in charge of myself.

  To the people in Ballyrannel who told me not to join the English army, to the ones who told me I was a fool to leave my job at Enderly, to Johnjoe Lacy who had shouted Irish patriotism at us the day we left, to all those people who would have held me back, I wanted to shout out, “Stop hanging onto me while I’m climbing the ladder out of the place you want me to live in. You had your chance to make the most of your lives, now let me have a shot at it. I’m stepping away from the place where I landed when I was born, and I’m going to look around the world. Stop telling me to do what you think I should do.”

  They had not heard the names of distant lands calling them since the first time they opened a third-hand, tattered school atlas. But even though I had heard the names singing to me, beckoning, I had never believed I would one day be standing on the threshold of the world, ready to step forward.

  But here I was. If only Sarah could see me now.

  Con Hatchel

  As we sailed out of Dublin, everyone pushed for a place at the railings. Lads laughed goodbye to Ireland, cheered when we steamed out between the stony arms of Kingstown, cheered louder when the first waves of the Irish Sea sent the nose of the ship diving. After that it was all groans and green faces when the ship rose and fell for the next nine hours. It was only when we sailed back out of Portsmouth into the English Channel with Cherbourg on our left that we began to recover.

  Cherbourg! We could see France. Less than a year ago we were all boggers, and here we were, sailing south in a ship as big as one of Arthur J.’s sheds in Saint James’s Gate, Cherbourg within sight, the wind in our hair, the sun on our faces.

  “Cherbourg!” Matthias said, standing beside me. “Doesn’t it sound terrible foreign, not a bit like Ballyrannel or Ballyhuppahawn or Ballynafunshin? You have to be superior to say it—Cherbourg—like something is wrong with your nose. Can you believe it, Con? France on our left, and soon it’ll be Spain and Portugal. I just can’t believe it.”

  And we sailed down into the Bay of Biscay. Sweet Jesus tonight, as Mammy used to say. The Bay of Biscay! Until now it had only been a blue place shaped like a backward C in the atlas, and here I was leaning over the rail looking at the front of the ship slicing through the smooth water like the sharp coulter of a plough pulled through a field of lea by three strong horses.

  The Bay of Biscay, I repeated to myself, trying to engrave on my brain what I was seeing so that, at a later time, I could lie on my back under a leafy tree and remember every detail about the journey. Pirates had sailed here in galleons out onto the Spanish Main to rob the golden ships coming back from the Americas—doubloons and black beards and patched eyes and mouths full of evil teeth; gleaming swords shaped almost like sickles; slaughter and screams and murder; red blood and gold coins mixing together under the frantic feet of fighting men. Once upon a time, those were only imaginings in a young boy’s head, and here I was where it happened. I could almost hear the screams, see the sun reflected off the terrible swords, the thousand ropes of a sailing ship bending in the breeze, the sails bellying out in the wind.

  Matthias stamped his foot on the iron floor of the ship, pounding into his head that what he was seeing was real. “Spain. The Spaniards. Spanish. And Spanish ale shall give me hope, my dark Rosaleen, my own Rosaleen.”

  We stood up straight, held on to the railing and faced onward toward the setting sun. India, here we come. India, 4,500 miles away, here we are in the Bay of Biscay, sailing straight at your Bay of Bengal. Jesus! I tried to convince myself that everything was working out as we had daydreamed it would.

  The power of the monstrous ship throbbed through us. The vibrations of the engines went into our bones and livers and kidneys and testicles, and we became part of something that was far bigger than we could ever be. We were inside the pumping heart of the British Empire.

  And all the lads, all twelve hundred of us, even the English ones who’d joined us in Portsmouth, gawked and walked the decks, pointed and asked questions that showed how much we didn’t know.

  “Will there be whales?”

  “What happens when the tide comes in?”

  “How quick are we going?”

  “Did you think the water would be this level after the Irish Sea?”

  “Are we nearly there yet?”

  “What’s them yokes for?”

  The sailors were dressed in the same outfits that we’d seen all our lives on the John Player cigarette boxes—Navy Cut. In their strange hats and wide collars, they were costumed actors on a stage. Everything they did was performed as if it had been rehearsed a thousand times. All tasks were quickly done with such precision that it was obvious there was only one way to do every little job. They all walked at the same speed, coiled ropes in exactly the same way, climbed ladders with the same steady deliberation, returned everything to the place it had been taken from. If another crew suddenly appeared on the ship to relieve the present one, not even a tiny shiver of hesitation in the ship’s onward determination would have been noticed. If the ship ploughed through an invisible wall into a stormy sea with waves as high as churches, the sailors would surely carry on just as calmly as they did on a sea of glass.

  “What’s the Pillars of Hercules?”

  “Who’s Hercules?”

  “How far apart are the pillars?”

  “Pilar is a girl’s name in Spain.”

  “Spain’s over there to the left.”

  “We had a neighbour called Mick Spain, but he wasn’t from Spain.”

  “Where was he from?”

  “Who? Mick Spain?”

  “No, Hercules.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing—he wasn’t from Ballyhuppahawn.”

  The loudspeaker instructed us to move away from the back end of the ship. Six sailors appeared like trained ponies trotting into the circus ring when a whistle is blown. The three biggest worked a small crane. The shorter ones worked the hooks and ropes, and within minutes the ship had sprouted four thirty-foot wings, two out of each side. They hung high above the water, white and rushing from the passing of the ship. The six sailors disappeared.

  “They’re for fishing from.”

  “They’re for drying the wash.”

  “They keep the ship balanced in a big wind.”

  “There’s fifteen holes in each wing.”

  “Four times fifteen’s sixty.”

  “Sixty holes.”

  “They remind me of the Twenty-Seater in the barracks.”

  The loudspeaker said, “Now hear this. Now hear this. The heads on this ship are for the officers and sailors. All others will use the flying shite-holes mounted off the stern. The flying shite-holes are only for shitting and pissing. They are not to be used for the enjoyment of the scenery. Any man spending fifty seconds on a shite hole will be denied arse paper for his next shite. Two sheets of arse paper are available to each man. The sailor on arse-paper duty in the kiosk in the stern will dole out the arse paper. That is all.”

  Twelve hundred soldiers stood on the decks in silence. Everyone was looking at the flying shite-holes, and everyone was wondering the same thing: would it be better to sit in the back row and have to look at the fellow in front of you, or to sit in the front row and have the lad behind look at you? Out loud, someone said, “I’d hate to get a faceful of shite-and-piss from the chap in front of me.” And there was a stampede to the arse-paper kiosk.

  The front rows of flying shite-holes trembled as men clutching their paper ran out to claim a hole. Groups of hesitant men gathered at the entrances to the
second rows, and the loudspeaker said, “Now hear this. Now hear this. You men with your supply of arse paper, take your places on the second rows. On the double. That is all.”

  The instant the holes on the second rows were filled the ship’s hooter exploded into a scream of steam. We could feel the sound in the iron of the ship, like the ship was a huge tuning fork after getting smacked on the edge of the teacher’s desk. Then the sound was manipulated down until all the sea around us trembled under the vibrations of a gigantic farting noise. Everyone cheered and clapped and laughed, and the lads on the flying shite-holes did their business. There wasn’t a sailor in sight, but they were someplace, watching and laughing. That night in the dark in our bunks, a voice said, “Imagine you’re a fish and you’re looking up out of one of your beady eyes and you see sixty bare arses and sixty mickeys and a shower of shite and yellow water coming at you.”

  There was a big map hanging on the wall outside the mess hall. Four times a day, a sailor moved a red arrow to the position of the ship along the blue of the sea. On the second day out from Portsmouth we noticed the sun swinging slowly off to our right, and that evening the arrow was facing into the gap between Gibraltar and Cueta. We would be in the Mediterranean Sea in the morning.

  “Now hear this. Now hear this. Every man will wear his tropicals in the morning. That is all.”

  Tropicals! Tropicals for a tropical climate. Ireland, with its temperate climate, wasn’t temperate with its rain and clouds. Just the word “tropics” was enough to excite any Irish person and fill them with longing.

  Tropicals! Good God! In no time at all we’d be on the coast of Malabar, a few hundred miles north of the equator, all the lads wearing their whites, showing off their knobbedy knees.