by Aubrey Flegg
The sergeant appeared in the doorway and stood there enjoying his moment of triumph. He started to walk slowly, menacingly, towards Seamus. Then, for some reason, he seemed to change his mind and walked towards where Katie and Mother were standing. He stopped, smiling a thin-lipped smile, and held out his clenched fist. Slowly he opened his fingers. There, to Katie’s horror, lay the metal clip which Seamus had so professionally flicked from the breach of his rifle as he had loaded it the day Kieran had arrived.
‘Well?’ the Sergeant demanded.
‘I … I don’t know. What is it?’ Mother was clearly perplexed.
Katie was thinking fast and said, ‘I think it’s something Dafydd picked up in the fields.’
It was as if the sergeant had been waiting for her to say this. He swung on her. ‘Your poor little innocent Welsh boy?’ he sneered. ‘I wonder will that oaf of an officer ever have the wit to look at that boy’s precious bundle? I doubt it. Hurleys … hurleys, my foot.’ He leaned towards Katie, so close that she could see his bad teeth. ‘This, girlie, is all the evidence I need. You dodged me under the cart but your precious Seamus O’Brien won’t. This is a real war, not some game played between so-called gentlemen. There is law, and there is order. But order comes first. You are now going to see how order works.’
He turned his back on her and rose on his toes like a cock on a dung heap and bellowed, ‘Squad! Form up.’ He strutted off, issuing orders as he went. ‘Prisoner in the middle. You … you … and you: firing squad! By the left, quick march.’
It all happened so quickly – Seamus’s pale, unseeing face in the centre of the squad of marching men, decent men, their faces questioning, dismayed but still marching. Katie gathered herself to run after them but Mother was swaying on her feet and needed her support. The soldiers were out of sight on the road. She eased Mother on to the block they used for chopping wood as further shouts and orders reached them. This couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t be real.
The three shots rang out almost as one. Rooks burst, cawing, from the trees. Katie abandoned Mother and dashed up towards the road. As she reached it a figure appeared, tottering above her. It was Seamus. She seized him and half-dragged, half-staggered with him down the slope into the yard, desperately inspecting him for wounds that were not there. He toppled against her.
‘Sorry, Katie … I must … sit down. They fired over my head.’
Then he was sick.
* * *
To begin with, Seamus talked and talked while Katie listened. It was like the old days with Father. First the firing squad, again and again, but now he wanted to talk about the night of the blast at the quarry.
‘It was dark as sin before the explosion, Katie. We were spread out over the top of the quarry. We had it all set up, to move down quietly and trap the Free Staters as they tried to enter the quarry.’
‘Why would they want to go in there?’ Katie asked, trying to sound innocent.
‘I’m not allowed to say,’ said Seamus. Then, ‘Oh what the hell, they’ll never be dug out now. The guns and ammunition taken in Nenagh were hidden in the old cave.’
‘But, Seamus, you knew it would kill Father if he found out!’ Katie flared despite herself, but Seamus’s face seemed to collapse and she regretted it at once. A furious nervous tick started below his right eye.
‘I had no choice. Believe me, Katie, I tried. They thought Father’s reputation was the best protection – the sparrow being safest under the hawk’s nest,’ he said ruefully. ‘The quarry was walled up, everyone could testify that the cave was empty. Who would think of the cables as a way of getting stuff in and out?’
You left a Welsh boy out of your reckoning, Katie thought.
‘Tell me about the explosion,’ she said.
‘I had just joined them from putting on my little act, moving lights about in the quarry yard. They had been hearing movements in the bushes above the quarry for some time. The Commandant was worried and said he would go down and have a look before we all moved down. It wasn’t anybody, I’m sure, just the goats, remember the goats? We think the Commandant may have found the little house – the one we discovered years ago among the bushes and couldn’t get into. It must have been the old powder store for the quarry.’
‘Magazine,’ corrected Katie, then bit her lip. But Seamus didn’t notice.
‘I don’t know how he opened it. Perhaps he struck a match. What a bang! We were sure he’d be in bits. We rushed down the slope, and as we ran it seemed like there was another explosion – but it can’t have been, it must just have been the moment when the rock gave way and slid into the pit. We met the goats charging away up the hill and thought they were the army! Thanks to the smell of the old Billy we didn’t shoot them, nor each other either. The only light was where the bushes were on fire. It was amazing – the blast had ripped the Commandant’s coat off him and thrown him into the bushes half-naked. The worst of his injuries came from where he got burned.’
‘He’s alive then?’
‘Oh yes, Auntie Nora’s looking after him, but he’ll be out of action for a while.’
‘What now? What about you?’
‘I suppose they’ll try to get him home, but I’m out of it, Katie.’
She looked up sharply. ‘Out of it?’
‘They don’t want me. I was to hand in my rifle today. I suppose the army got it when they searched the house and that’s why they pretended to execute me.’
‘And good riddance to it,’ said Katie, wondering what they might have done if they had found it. ‘Why don’t the Republicans want you?’ she asked.
‘They never found the informer – whoever it was gave the tip-off to the army: I think they suspect me. Uncle Mal stands up for me, and I think the Commandant would too but the others … they think maybe I set a trap for them.’
‘But the army nearly executed you!’
‘It’s no good, Katie. The Black and Tans used to do that just to protect their informers.’
‘You, of all people, Seamus! I’m sorry.’
‘You shouldn’t be, Katie. I’m finished. I saw murder in that sergeant’s eyes and I looked at death down the barrels of those three rifles. I’m not going to offer death to anyone again for any cause. We’ve got to find some other way.’
* * *
Weeks passed and Father was due home. His letters had been more and more cheerful as time went on and the notes Mr Parry had slipped in for Mother and Katie were reassuring. There were many things Katie wanted to keep to herself but, almost for the first time, she had begun to talk to Mother and was surprised at how easy it was. They worried about Seamus together and eventually, without saying anything to Seamus, Mother wrote to Mr Parry.
Katie was sitting in Dafydd’s place on the shaft of the farm cart as a thin rain drifted across the yard when Seamus came out of the harness room and sat beside her. He pulled out a letter from an inside pocket.
‘I got a letter from Mr Parry today. He could do with some help in the quarry over in Wales when Dad comes back. I think I might go over for a while, help him out.’
Katie managed to look surprised. ‘I’ll miss you.’
‘No you won’t. I’m not much company for anyone these days,’ he said, and he rubbed at the ticking muscle below his eye. ‘If you’ve any messages … a letter for Dafydd maybe, I’ll take it.’
That was a week ago and Katie had put off writing almost daily.
* * *
‘Aren’t you ready yet? You’ve had a week. It doesn’t take that long to write a letter,’ Seamus called up from the kitchen.
Katie put her head in her hands and groaned, then stared at the blank sheet in front of her. It was the last sheet in Mother’s writing pad. It was this attempt or nothing. Crumpled up pieces of paper were scattered about her room.
Her problem had started when she had found the journal Dafydd was writing for his sister Megan, torn and buckled, where the sergeant had flung it as he stripped Dafydd’s bed looking for guns. She
had been furious as she gathered up the torn pages, tucking them in, taking care not to even glance at them. She would send the journal to him with a nice letter as soon as the post was back working. The journal lay in her top drawer with her handkerchiefs and no socks. But he’d never said it was private, she told herself. Still, she closed the drawer firmly. But then, he’d talked about being a journalist; perhaps it was a sort of newspaper article? She took it out. One of the pages had a boot print on it. She took a rubber and carefully removed what she could of the mark, but the writing was in pencil. Then finally she took the torn pages and pieced them together, sticking them with stamp paper. Seamus would take it tomorrow. She got brown paper and string ready to wrap it up. In the morning she would write her letter.
Katie woke in the middle of the night to a dream which had no form or shape only the lilt of Dafydd’s Welsh accent. He had been talking to her; that’s how it felt. She sat up in bed then and knew that she was going to read his journal. She struck a match. The flame of the candle rose, sank, and then rose again to a steady arrowpoint of light in the dark of her room, and she began to read.
The first pages were about Dafydd’s journey through Dublin, and Katie was carried back to that first trip in the trap together. She stifled her chuckles at his description of the fleeing station master. Was she becoming jealous of Megan? It would be nice to have a brother to write to her like this. The next page caught her by surprise. ‘Oh, Megan I’m in love (again! you say). She’s like the rising sun, hair of spun gold. Driving her chariot …’ Katie blushed and half-closed the book. Ought she to be reading this? She hadn’t known he felt like that about her … but yet in a way she had. She was about to close the book virtuously when her eye caught an entry further down the page. ‘… my boots must come off too! My lovely quarry man’s boots … Oh Megan, the pain!’ Poor Dafydd, and she’d been so horrid to him. That was their walk up to Uncle Mal’s, what next? ‘… Risking life and limb, your reporter crept under the guns of the rebels,’ (Josie and his shotgun) ‘into the very heart of the rebel camp.’
As Katie read, the whole of that amazing week unfolded for her again, this time through Dafydd’s eyes. She remembered whipping Barney into a gallop, ‘Down from the mountain like a wolf on the fold she swept. Magnificent in war, hair flying, your hero rolling about on the floor of her chariot like a beetle on its back.’ Katie wondered how she had ever thought she could stop the war on her own that time. Then Dafydd’s writing changed, he was writing more slowly now, ‘Secrets, Megan, are terrible things,’ he wrote. ‘She had never heard the story of how her Dad had forgotten his matches,’ and Katie felt again the slap of Shannon waves against her feet.
The candle was burning low and Katie’s eyes were pricking as she turned the last pages. She had been dreading reading of Kieran’s arrival. ‘Megan, I fear our Dafydd’s time in the sun is over, a brighter light has come,’ and she realised that Dafydd must have written that at the very moment when she was waving at him out the window to call Kieran back. Poor, noble Dafydd, did it hurt so much? She skimmed through a detailed description of how to blow up a mountain until the moment of the explosion and they were slipping and sliding down the waste together. ‘At last my cup was full. There was I, clasped in her arms, her tears of gratitude wetting my cheek. The mountain of waste hurtling like the Gadarene swine into the abyss below when, all at once, sanity returned. All I wanted suddenly were Welsh hills, Welsh voices, our own valley and my black-eyed Megan.’
Katie let the copy-book slide to the floor and leant to blow out the candle. Relief and sadness mingled together but, as she closed her eyes, a voice within her murmured, ‘Yes, that is how it was,’ and she fell asleep.
* * *
‘Come on, Katie! Father’s train will be in in an hour, and I want to get my bags into the guard’s room before he arrives.’
Katie thought of her discarded attempts: ‘Dear Dafydd, I want to thank …’ crumple. ‘My Dear Dafydd …’ crumple. How could she write! Of course he hadn’t meant what he had written about her – those nice things – but suddenly he felt very close. He had been part of her life. She thought of him rolling about in the bottom of the trap. Or talking to her about Father beside the lake. Then there was the flash as the magazine blew up and she had thought him dead – then he was careering into her, all arms and legs, as the tip heaved under them. She thought of his fury when no-one would listen to him. She had loved him – not like Kieran – but as her Frog. He was a friend of all friends. She wanted to keep him, but not to hold him close because he didn’t like that. She pulled the pad towards her for one last try. Almost absent-mindedly she began. This time the words came in an easy flow. After a bit she stopped to read over what she had written and laughed out loud. She had made a mistake, or was it a mistake? She stared at the page, smiling. She had begun her letter, Dear Megan …
EPILOGUE
Oranmore stands at the head of Galway Bay, a few cottages and houses spreading out along the three roads which meet there: the road to Galway, the road to Dublin, and the road that runs down into County Clare. It was early summer, the civil war had petered out at last and too many young men had returned to too few farms. Two such young men stood now at the crossroads where the turf-smoke blew over them in scented wafts.
‘If you can’t make up your mind, toss for it. Heads, you come with me to Dublin and on to Liverpool where the streets are paved with gold. Tails, you take the road south to find hardship and poverty in the hills of Tipperary.’
‘Can you toss with a sovereign?’
‘It’s well for you. I don’t see why not.’
‘It’s all I’ve got,’ said Kieran. He balanced the small gold coin on his thumbnail. ‘Heads,’ he called as the coin spun glinting in the sunlight before it fell into the dust of the road.
‘Heads it is! Liverpool, here we come. Come on, Kieran, we’ll take it by storm.’
‘I think I’ll go down through Clare just the same.’
‘You can’t do that! Go against the toss – that’s the worst luck in the world.’
‘Didn’t it help me make up my mind? There’s a glint of gold I have in mind that you won’t find on the streets of Liverpool.’
‘You had your mind made up long ago. Come on, give me the coin – it’s bad luck to keep a coin once you go against the toss. You must give it away.’
‘My sovereign! I’m not going against it at all. Amn’t I just going to Liverpool the long way? I’ll cross the Shannon at Killaloe and if success eludes me, I’ll be off after you to Dublin and on the boat in no time.’ Kieran picked up his bag. ‘I’ll make you a promise, though. If I do strike lucky and decide to stay there, I’ll give the old sovereign away. How about that?’
‘Fat lot of good that’ll be to me.’
* * *
And that was how Mick-the-Shilling came to be known as Mick-the-Guinea, because he never spent the sovereign he’d been given, but carried it with him and showed it to everybody as the greatest treasure on earth.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF KATIE’S TIMES
When Katie would have been born in 1907, Ireland and England had been at loggerheads for over eight hundred years. Throughout this time, periods of peace had alternated with bloody rebellions during which the Irish tried to throw off English rule. These rebellions were followed by times of harsh repression. Irish lost their land to English and Scottish settlers, and penal laws denied Catholics their basic rights. By 1907, however, the earlier work of the great Irish peacemakers, Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, had begun to bear fruit, and it seemed to be only a matter of time before England would give Ireland Home Rule. There were, however, many in Ireland who did not believe that Britain would ever give up their power. Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Fenians, were dedicated to armed rebellion.
In 1914, when Katie would have been seven, the promised Home Rule bill was about to be passed. At that moment however, Germany attacked Belgium, the First World War began, and Home Rule was
, once again, put to one side. Many Irishmen felt that they should fight to defend Belgium, a small country like Ireland. During the war over 150,000 Irish volunteered, joining the British army. By the end of the war over 35,000 of these had been killed, and many more, like Father, had had their lives shattered.
While they were fighting, men such as Pádraic Pearse and James Connolly realised that England’s preoccupation with the war was an opportunity for another Irish rebellion. Even if this wasn’t successful, it would at least keep the flame of Irish nationalism alive. The Easter Rebellion of 1916, which took place when Katie would have been nine, was a military failure and might have done nothing for Irish nationalism had the English not executed fifteen of the Irish leaders. This set Irish nationalism ablaze.
In elections, which were held when the war was over in 1918, nationalist Sinn Féin swept to power. They effectively took over the government of the country and, for two and a half years, a guerrilla war (the War of Independence) was waged against the British. British troops in Ireland were augmented by specially tough recruits who came to be known as the Black and Tans because of the half-khaki, and half-black uniforms they wore. Even more hated were the Auxiliaries, ex-army officers who were not only ruthless but clever as well.
Irish successes, and the bad behaviour of their own troops, swung English public opinion against the war, and a truce was agreed. Negotiations between the British and Irish followed. At these, Michael Collins reluctantly signed a treaty which would make Ireland a Free State. But members of parliament would still have to swear an oath of allegiance to the king of England and the treaty did not extend to the six, mostly Protestant, counties of northern Ireland, so Ireland was partitioned.
The signing of the treaty split Irish nationalists. Eamon De Valera became the leader of the Republicans, who wished to go on fighting against England for a Republic which would include the six counties and which would require no oath to the king. Michael Collins knew that the Irish did not have the strength to defeat England, and became one of the leaders of the newly constituted Irish Free State. Matters came to a head when a group of Republicans took over the Four Courts in Dublin. The civil war started with the shelling of the Four Courts by Free State soldiers, the fighting which we have Dafydd hearing from Kingsbridge station.