*
The story behind the medals takes me from the Isle of Man to the west coast of Ireland, where a man named Peter had heard rumours when he was growing up about his grandfather’s past, but he says, as in many families, it wasn’t something that was spoken about often. If it was discussed, children were certainly never present.
He knew for example that his grandfather had lost half of one of his fingers when he was in an internment camp called Ballykinlar. He was also aware that his grandfather had remained an unapologetic Republican until his death in 1977, but apart from that, his grandfather never spoke directly to him about his early life. ‘From what I can gather, when families got together at Christmas or came home from England, the adults talked about the past,’ Peter tells me. ‘Most of my grandfather’s children moved to England to work and my father was the only one that stayed here in Ireland. My father came from a big family and he is 83 years old now, but most of his siblings are dead.’
Even when his aunts and uncles were alive, Peter doesn’t ever remember a big family discussion about their father and his past. The one inescapable link was the medals as well as an old diary which was locked in a press for the best part of 50 years. Through them, Peter came to know that his grandfather, Jack, from Tubbercurry, County Sligo, had been an active member of the IRA in the 1920s. He was interned at Ballykinlar Prison Camp in 1921 with about 1,000 others. He knows that his grandfather’s autograph book contains the signatures of some active IRA members. One of them, he says, was a well-known attempted escapee who was shot while trying to escape, and there’s some suggestion that Eamon de Valera signed the diary, though he hasn’t been able to locate his signature.
Peter doesn’t know how the family came to be on the Republican side in the War of Independence. He doesn’t know much about his great-grandparents either. Their surname, which he prefers to keep private, is from the Sligo area. He thinks maybe there are Hungarian connections somewhere along the line. He knows that many of the family were anti-treaty and their Republicanism has carried on to the present generation. Peter and his father attended the Easter Rising commemoration most years, and living quite close to the border, they remain steadfast in their belief that a united Ireland is possible.
‘A lot of my father’s friends would have been active,’ he says. ‘I remember cards being played in the house and a lot of well-known Republican Tubercurry names involved. As for my grandfather, he must have been very active, but what he was doing exactly, I don’t know. He was up to something and interned for it. I know his job outside of the IRA would have been as a lorry driver and working in transport. Maybe that’s a clue to what he did in the IRA at a time when there was a lot of guns being moved about.’
Peter’s grandfather received an IRA pension in later life, but he says he has found it difficult to find out much about his service. One of his medals is for active duty, but he thinks his grandfather, like a lot of men involved at the time, may have gone under an assumed name, so he has found it difficult to cross-reference records. He remembers small details about him – white hair, the missing part of his finger and that he always sat in the kitchen of his small terraced house.
There was a range in one corner and his grandmother seemed always to be baking and cooking. Although a little detached from the family history, Peter speaks with fondness for his grandfather – so much so that I can’t help but think the decision to sell the medals, this physical link to his past, and to the republic’s troubled birth, is all the more baffling. Why not preserve them for the next generation? Ultimately, the decision to sell wasn’t Peter’s, but his father’s.
‘Essentially, my father would have them and they came out every year since they were awarded to my grandfather, sometime in the 1950s, I think. It was only when I was preparing them for sale I began to do a bit of research. My father is in and out of hospital – he’s at that age. He said they could have been handed down to me, but he would prefer the money for them and to then give it out to the grandkids as a bonus for them.’
Along with the medals, Peter is also selling his grandfather’s diary, in which he collected signatures during his internment. He has offered it online for €1,700, but says it could be worth more if the buyer can find de Valera’s autograph in it.
Because he only saw them once in a while, Peter doesn’t have the attachment to his grandfather’s items that you might expect. There’s also a more practical reason he says his father wants them to be sold. ‘He doesn’t want any friction or tension or legacy of that era to carry on for the next generation. Aside from what they mean symbolically, he didn’t want to leave them to me and then for anyone else in the family to be bothered by that. So the cleanest thing to do was sell them and divide the money equally among the grandkids.’
While the medals are over 50 years old, the diary is close to a century, and would be more important to the family. But in selling them both and breaking that link with the past, Peter and his family have been careful to ensure that whoever buys them will appreciate and have regard for them.
‘To be honest, if they were mine I wouldn’t be selling them,’ Peter admits. ‘But they are my dad’s, and he has said to sell them and divide up the money. I think I would hold on to them.’
Peter heard talk that his grandfather did help break someone out of jail at one point, but he has spoken little to his own father about this whole aspect of the family history. That perhaps wouldn’t be unusual for families who had grandparents involved in the Civil War or the War of Independence.
I recently spent time with relatives of the ‘Men of the South’ depicted in Seán Keating’s painting. Many of their relatives fought in both the War of Independence and the Civil War, and what struck me was how little any of their sons, daughters, nieces and nephews had talked to their relatives about their time in the IRA. The Civil War in particular was almost too painful to acknowledge even for some of those who participated in it. And many grew bitter and disillusioned with the Ireland that emerged afterwards. And so it didn’t strike me as all that unusual for Peter to have spoken very little to his father or grandfather about the background to the medals he was now entrusted with selling.
‘Like a lot of families, it was sort of kept quiet,’ Peter says. ‘It wasn’t really referred to – only maybe after my grandfather died. Maybe they talked more to the women in the family about it, but the men didn’t really go into it. My father did say if I held on to the diary till 2021, around the time of the hundredth anniversary, I might get more for it. I was surprised how little interest there was in the medals in the end – maybe it’s a sign the country is changing.’
Peter remains unapologetically Republican in his outlook, and believes that Brexit may provide an opportunity for a united Ireland in his lifetime. Although he acknowledges that for the younger generation it may not be as big a deal any more. ‘They seem to be more interested in mobile phones and holidays than shooting each other over borders. In my grandfather’s time, it was a lot bigger deal. I think we got complacent about the Irish Question since. Brexit might shake things up again. The main reason why we are selling these now, though, is because we want a clean break with history really. Hopefully someone else will appreciate them.’
Part Five
SENTIMENTAL VALUE
Rekindling a One in a Million Chance
Trying to contact X who taught maths in the 1970s. I tried to teach you to drive in my mini!!! He will be about 66 now. Would love to hear from you. Online, January 2019
‘I really didn’t expect anyone to contact me. In fact, I’d almost forgotten about that ad,’ the 66-year-old retired teacher at the other end of the line tells me, after I reach out to her, having seen her ad in a lonely corner of the internet.
Once or twice before I’ve come across ads in which people are trying to find someone they knew in the past. In one case I remember, a son posted an ad in a local freesheet for several weeks looking for his fa
ther. There was no contact number or name provided with the ad, just a PO box. I wrote to it, asking if the person posting the ad would be interested in meeting me and explaining how I gathered the stories behind the ads. I never heard back.
Generally these ads are a shot in the dark after a lot of other avenues have been unsuccessfully explored. And to be fair, if I was going through the trauma of trying to make contact with someone I’d become distant from, for whatever reason, I’m not sure I’d want to share my story either.
What probably helps in this case is that the accent on the other end of the line is not Irish, and she later tells me she doesn’t live in Ireland so does not mind going into some detail about why she posted the above ad. She tells me she grew up in the UK and went on to study art at university, and then had a four-decade art teaching career. At the time we talked she had only recently retired. She has no family links to Ireland that she knows of, and has lived a largely happy, fulfilled life.
A few months previously, she and a friend were thinking back to their college days. Maybe it was because she was retiring and moving into a new phase of life, but they spent an afternoon casting their minds back. They got talking about a former good friend. He was an Irishman who had worked in the same school as them and they’d all hung around as a group. Last time they’d all been together was in the late 1970s, and having tried all the usual social media routes to track him down, they decided to put some ads online in Ireland.
‘His surname is very common, like Smith or Jones, and he would be 66 years old now,’ she tells me. ‘We presume he went back to Ireland, possibly Dublin, in and around 1981 or 1982. To be honest, he was a bit of a ladies’ man. He broke my heart. It was a strange relationship; a lot of them in the late seventies were! We were together a couple of years off and on, and we were good friends, but he liked to play the field. After a while, I met my husband and that was the end of it.’
She is a widow now, and over that coffee with her friend while they were reflecting on life on their own again, they’d thought about their former Irish friend and wondered what he could be up to. No one in their social circle has heard from him since he left. She knows he got engaged and that the engagement didn’t last, and she thinks he may have got a promotion, but apart from that she has little information. She doesn’t know anything about his family history or the area where he grew up, so has very few clues. Although she hasn’t seen him in over four decades, she never really got over him.
‘I really didn’t,’ she says. ‘My husband and I had a different relationship. I met this man I would like to reconnect with when I was in my twenties and you get obsessive. I think when you are with someone you want them more really. I think I have matured now though about him. He was a very religious man, but something of a womaniser. I guess you can say sorry at the cathedral every Sunday, and off you go again. He was a very pretty boy, very attractive and a really nice guy.’
She is hoping that someone might see the ad, and given that it was free to post, she took a punt on it. It’s been online so long though that she had genuinely forgotten she had posted it until I phoned her.
‘I wasn’t really expecting anything in terms of a response. It was a dare to put it online,’ she explains. ‘I tried all other ways of getting in touch so this was a last roll of the dice really. I was married when he left, and I did see him one last time at a party and that was about it really. He’d gone through another 20 women after he was with me before he disappeared.’
She says this man was typical of a lot of Irishmen at that time who came over to the UK, had several relationships, but ultimately were always going to return home. Their behaviour has to be seen in the context of the Ireland they were getting away from. It was a stifling society, where contraception was banned and the Church was still intent on meddling in what citizens did between the sheets.
‘He was fanatical about his church,’ she tells me. ‘And of course, he was fond of the ladies. I knew he was playing the field and floating around, and we did become friends after we broke up.’ Would she have married him? ‘Yes, I think I would have, but I didn’t think he would have married me, partly because I wasn’t Catholic.’
She thinks he could be in Canada or Australia and from time to time she imagines what he’s doing. He always loved maths so he could be teaching that subject, or he could be working in banking, or he could still be connected to art in some way.
She taught art for 40 years and loved it to the end. Retirement was an adjustment, and was made all the more challenging by the fact that her husband had had a long illness and died not long before she stopped working. ‘I’m enjoying my freedom now and my lovely pension,’ she says. ‘I’m conscious we’re one of the last generation to get out with a decent pension. I am quite an anti-social person. I joined a few groups and widows’ groups and they were very tame. They were full of nice sweet old ladies and it was a bit boring. I have my close friends and I see them and I have a few dogs. I haven’t ruled out meeting someone else. I’m not that fond of being alone, to be honest. But as for online dating? Oh, God no! I put my name up ages ago on a dating site and within five minutes I got a lot of creepy replies and took my name off immediately. If I ever did it again I wouldn’t put anything online any more in terms of dating, such as my name and age.’
I’m wondering what would happen if he turned up and was keen to meet her. Would it take much to rekindle their old romance? Would she forgive him? ‘I’d have a decision to make, wouldn’t I?’ she says, laughing. ‘It’s a one in a million chance though. I doubt I will ever see him again.’
She says he may not even be alive, although he was always pretty fit so she has no reason to believe he isn’t. He didn’t drink or smoke and she would be curious to know what he looks like now, to see how kind the years may or may not have been. ‘He actually looked like David Essex,’ she says. ‘He was a very pretty boy and had long mullet hair and I really was taken with him. That’s about all I remember; a lot of it is forgotten in a haze. It was the 1970s after all!’
Remains of a Detached Day
Wanted: DVD of The Remains of the Day – the 1993 movie starring Anthony Hopkins. Evening Echo
‘How will I know which house is yours?’ I ask the poster of the above advert, as he tried somewhat vaguely to give me directions. He’s clearly surprised to have received a phone call within a few days of the ad appearing. But having trawled the ads for close to a decade, sometimes I just know when there’s a story lying behind the few lines of text. Possibly it was the fact that The Remains of the Day wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a beautiful film, and one of my favourites, with the two main characters’ unfulfilled love for each other mirroring the social repression of the time.
There’s a sadness in the ad, as there has been with some other ads like this I’ve followed up. The placing of the ad is an admission in itself – that the person doesn’t have a large circle of people to help locate the item, and perhaps doesn’t have the resources or ability to order it online as many of us would. These are often the people on the fringes of technology, of society and ultimately of life.
‘I’ll place a used orange Calor gas cylinder outside the front wall of the house,’ he tells me. An hour later, I find myself brushing past the cylinder and knocking on his front door. The front garden is unkempt and bare, and there are three painted concrete blocks on one side of the garden – perhaps a feature started a long time before but never fully realised.
The man meeting me has a baseball cap half on and half off his forehead as he guides me to a dusted-down chair in the middle of a cluttered sitting room. Every available seat is piled high with old newspapers and ring-stained coffee mugs. The walls are adorned with crumbling newspaper cuttings, mainly about George Best and Pelé, while dotted around the floor are two-litre Diet Coke bottles, some full, many half or fully empty. Needless to say, Francis Brennan would be horrified.
When the
man speaks, he pauses for up to 30 seconds before saying something. Aside from the condition of their house, this is one of the first things I notice. It’s almost as though he has to remember how to converse, what the protocol is and how to connect his thoughts with his words. I wonder when he last had a visitor. If he had not pulled a seat into the sitting room for me, there would have been nowhere to sit. It’s not a room that is often shared.
He reaches for a pile of newspapers, pulls out a padded envelope and opens it. Inside is a well preserved second-hand copy of The Remains of the Day. It had arrived that morning. He already had it on VHS, and had worn it out because he watched it so often. The connection for him is with Anthony Hopkins and it was forged when he first saw the actor starring in The Elephant Man in a local cinema in 1980.
He tells me that he lives in this house with his brother, who is out, and that they grew up here and stayed on after their parents died. He doesn’t have any friends. Aside from his brother, there is no one he is close to. He had spent three days on a training course decades earlier and that was the extent of his attempt to engage with getting a job. It wasn’t for him. He has his obsessions: Hopkins, George Best, Pelé, New Order, Diet Coke.
He has never got beyond a cursory hello with a woman, and since his late teens he has constructed a world for himself which he has largely retreated into – a world he is both content with and trapped in.
We begin talking about the film. ‘Remains of the Day is one of my favourite films,’ he tells me. ‘Anthony Hopkins is my all-time favourite film actor and has been for a long number of years. My other favourite pastimes are music – listening to the popular music and the rock music. That film though I have watched many many times. Of the 35 films he was in from 1968 to 2005, made for cinema, I have learned the character names and lines of all of them. You see, Brian, I can have the way for retaining information all right.’
The Personals Page 10