Blood-Dark Track

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by Joseph O'Neill


  We drove to Bandon and from there headed south-west to Clonakilty. It was a June day of breezes and sunshine, and we travelled, as if through cathedrals, under brilliant and shadowy vaults of leaves. Nettles, ferns, brambles, furze, and flowers – fuchsia, blazing yellow dandelions, gigantic daisies – grew densely on the road borders. West of Clonakilty, the air became briny and the country open and rough and boggy. The road narrowed further. Blue bodies of water appeared in fields, and violet rhododendron blooms leaned out of gardens. In places the road revealed a rocky and peninsular shoreline, where the Atlantic showed in patches that were as blue as the Cilician Mediterranean. Eventually, after negotiating a succession of disorienting crossroads, we came to a remote village that adhered to a hillside at the mouth of a fjord. Its remoteness was not a question of absolute isolation. Skibbereen, where Jim O’Neill used to poach for autumn salmon, was only five and half miles away, and there were many places further to the west – Baltimore, Schull, Ahakista, for example – that were more distant from Cork city. The faraway quality of Castletownshend lay in the fact that, unlike these other places, it was not the terminus of any particular route or a point on the way to anywhere else. Of the net of lanes and alleys in which West Cork is caught, only a straggly, circuitous and otherwise fruitless loop makes it out to Castletownshend, with the result that only a purposeful traveller – a person with a specific reason for veering off the small main road that continues on to Bantry and, many miles later, Killarney – is likely to wind up there.

  Castletownshend was as pretty and prosperous as any village I’d seen in West Cork. At its entrance, on the crest of the hill down which the village neatly tumbled, was Drishane House, of which only high walls, huge gates and a drive that curved into a wooded distance could be seen. This was the home of Christopher Somerville, whom I’d phoned a couple of days earlier; he declined to meet me, but he did confirm, in a sonorous English voice, that the Admiral was a relation – his great-uncle, to be exact. Past Drishane House was the plunging main street, lined with unusually handsome houses and brick and stone cottages. About halfway down the hill, two sycamore trees stood in the middle of the road, surrounded by a retaining wall; and nearby was a pub. We stopped there for lunch. I asked a lady where we might find Point House, explaining that I was interested in Admiral Somerville. After giving us directions, the woman suggested that we call in at the Castle and speak, if we could, to Mrs Salter-Townshend; she was an elderly lady and would probably well remember the incident of sixty-one years ago. So Grandma and I walked down to the Castle, whose high walls and large open gate could be seen at the bottom of the hill. It was a short stroll from the gate to the Castle itself, a three-storey building of dark stone, crenellations and square towers overlooking the haven, where small fishing and sailing boats were moored. Immediately to the rear of the building was a thickly forested hill and the Protestant church of the village, St Barrahane, where Admiral Somerville was buried. At the front of the Castle were a level gravel forecourt, on which a few cars were parked, and a lawn where Germans were trying to play croquet; the place was evidently now in use as a guest house or hotel. The sea was held at bay by a stone wall, at the foot of which becalmed ocean water washed onto a tiny pebbled strand.

  We rang at the door of the Castle. A woman of around forty, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, greeted us. She told us that Mrs Salter-Townshend lived in the bungalow these days. She added, not unkindly, ‘Whether she’ll be prepared to speak to you or not will depend on the mood she’s in. I can’t say what she’ll be like.’ Passing two grazing white goats, we headed up to the bungalow, which was located, I later learned, on the site of the original house built by the Townshend family shortly after its arrival in Cork, in 1648, as part of the English Parliamentary army. It was Richard Townsend [sic] who personally delivered the keys of Cork to Oliver Cromwell.

  The bungalow was built in the eyesore style characteristic of many of the hacienda-like constructions that were materializing in rural West Cork. The door was answered by a woman dressed in a down-to-earth, utilitarian way who was, I guessed, in her late seventies. I explained that I was looking for Mrs Salter-Townshend and wished to discuss the shooting of Admiral Somerville with her. The lady answered, in that slightly mumbling voice used by the ascendancy class to take the edge off an English accent, ‘Well, I remember that; he was my cousin. It caused great pain to the family. I don’t think it would be right to go over it again, do you?’ As she looked at me, a man, red-faced, heroically dishevelled, whom for moment I took to be the gardener, poked his head around the door: Mr Salter-Townshend, I later learned. Mrs Salter-Townshend regarded me grimly. ‘We still don’t know who did it,’ she said.

  Speaking in my most English accent, I mentioned another former resident of Castletownshend, the Admiral’s nephew Sir Patrick Coghill – the SIME agent and subsequent captor of Joseph Dakak. Mrs Salter-Townshend said that, yes, she remembered him; he spoke Arabic and Turkish. The Coghill family still lived here, she added. Sir Toby Coghill, Patrick’s nephew, had two properties in the village and he spent part of the year here. She looked at us again, probably taking in for the first time the unlikely character of the couple standing before her. ‘Well, you can’t keep your grandmother outside. Please come in.’

  We sat down in the front room, which had an unsurpassable view of the bay and a carpet that featured the same furiously swirling colours I’d seen in the farmhouses at Graunriagh and Ardkitt. Modest heirlooms furnished the room, and a painting by Sir Patrick’s father, Sir Egerton Coghill, Bt., hung on a wall. We continued chatting about the Coghills. Mrs Salter-Townshend said that the Coghill family home, Glenbarrahane, had been destroyed, which led to Grandma to chip in about the shameful neglect of old homes generally, which led to a discussion of the Georgian Society and, finally, of the unfortunate disappearance of Bowen’s Court, the ancestral home of the writer Elizabeth Bowen. One would never have guessed Grandma’s close connection to those who had so assiduously burned down Big Houses during the Anglo-Irish War. When Mrs Salter-Townshend momentarily turned away to pour tea, my grandmother gave me a conspiratorial wink that said, ‘You see, we’ve got her talking now.’

  At this point it occurred to me that the conversation between the two old ladies – Mrs Salter-Townshend impatient, assertive and very kind, Grandma effusive and warm as ever – had a decidedly strange, even eerie, aspect: it was entirely possible that the cousin of the person serving the tea had been shot dead by the husband of the person drinking it. Feeling slightly compromised, I thought that the time had perhaps come to return to the subject of Admiral Somerville and disclose my interest in him. However, just as I was pondering precisely what the nature of that interest might be, our hostess rose and said that she’d an appointment and regrettably had to go. As we were accompanied to the door, Mrs Salter-Townshend handed me some brochures about properties in Castletownshend which she handled as agent for the owners. She said warmly to my grandmother, ‘Come by whenever you’re next here.’

  We left the grounds of the Castle and started to walk back to the car, Grandma stepping tirelessly up the hill with the slightly rolling gait that practically all her sons have inherited. We got into the car and moved off. As we reached the two trees about a third of the way up the hill, I turned left down a lane called the Mall, which headed down towards the ocean. Immediately to our right, as we slowly descended, was the sizeable lodge house which was all that remained of the Coghill family property, Glenbarrahane, and which, one of Mrs Salter-Townshend’s brochures informed me, hosted in its roof space the largest known nursery of bats in Europe.

  After the war, Sir Patrick Coghill, a little lost, spent a few years at this property with his elderly mother and aunt. In 1952, he left to set up the Special Branch of the Police of Jordan, from where he was expelled in 1956. He returned to Castletownshend and, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘to futility, to a bogus 18th century civilisation which was quite moribund, if not mummified, and what was worse, to boredom�
�. Furthermore, ‘having spent most of my life in England or serving the Crown, I intensely disliked living under the Irish Republican flag and government’. In the ’sixties, he finally decided to move across the water. Sir Patrick Somerville Coghill died in England in 1981, at the age of 84.

  We reached the bottom of the lane. To our right was the entrance to Point House or, to be precise, The Point, as the property had been renamed by Admiral Somerville when he retired there after the Great War. ‘Do Not Enter’ notices were plastered everywhere.

  Driving in, we found ourselves traversing an extraordinarily beautiful, tilted garden which ran down the landscaped contours of the hill by way of lawns, spectacular rock formations and exotic shrubbery; and looking out to the sunlit west, there was a dumb-foundingly beautiful view of a wild headland and the ocean. Then we came to the house. I recognized it from the newspaper photographs I’d seen. A late Victorian mansion of great simplicity, its charm was reduced only marginally by incongruous new window frames and a new entrance porch that stood in the place of the old porch where the Admiral’s corpse had lain for days pending the arrival of the pathologist. It was my intention to ring the bell and talk to whoever lived in the building – an Austrian countess, a villager had told me – about the terrible moment in the house’s past, and to try to find out if and how it still haunted the house. But I lost my nerve. It seemed a shame to mar the achieved quietness of this place with an old and unpleasant matter, and I allowed myself to conclude, without ringing the bell or even stopping the car, that no one was in. As we drove back to gate, gravel crunched under the car’s tyres just as, no doubt, it had crunched under the shoes of the men sprinting away from the house that night in March 1936. It was not a short driveway, a hundred yards or so, and the men, already breathless with terror and excitement, must have been gasping by the time they reached the car waiting at the gate. It wasn’t difficult, as we left Castletownshend, to imagine the country darkness into which the killers had sped, a shapeless obscurity of heaths and boglands and hills yielding only to the dull gaslight flare of an isolated cottage and the short track of light spewed out by the car.

  We took an especially roundabout route back to Cork, heading north to Dunmanway, which, though she has not lived there for nearly seventy years, is my grandmother’s everlasting home town. Dunmanway marks the western extremity of the fertile Bandon valley, which constitutes an exception to the relatively poor land of which most of West Cork is composed. We drove along Main Street and arrived at a picturesque octagonal square. Grandma pointed out the location of the first home she remembered, which was now a vacant lot just off the square. The next Lynch home, in Railway Street, was still intact. The nearest thing to trees on the street were the tall wooden poles that strung cables over the rooftops and the road. My grandmother pointed out her old home, where she’d lived in terror of the British forces, a grey, two-storey terraced house that was part of a long, sullenly unadorned terrace of houses that ran the length of Railway Street under black roofs and gave abruptly on to the pavement without so much as a doorstep.

  As we headed out of Dunmanway, Grandma pointed to a substantial townhouse. ‘That one,’ she said, ‘used to belong to Fitzmaurice, a solicitor, who fled Ireland after two men, Gray and Buttimer, were shot dead in Dunmanway square in 1921 during the Black and Tan War. After Fitzmaurice,’ Grandma said, ‘the house belonged to Henry Smith, a Protestant from the North with twenty-four children, who once gave shelter to your great-uncle Jack Lynch when he was on the run; and after the Smiths it was occupied by the Duffys, famous all over the country for their circus.’

  I made a note of Grandma’s story that evening and did not give it any further thought; I vaguely assumed that Gray and Buttimer, in common with the other dead from those times mentioned by my grandmother, were the victims of yet another British atrocity.

  We drove east along the Bandon valley and soon came to Ballineen and Enniskean, whose gradual physical merger over the years was acknowledged by a signboard announcing the Ballineen– Enniskean Development Area. We drove through Bandon town and then Inishannon, where the road, an unsightly and pot-holed strip of tarmac in my grandfather’s time, had been widened and smartened by EC money. Skimming along the new highway, we passed an ancient railway viaduct that hovered over a valley, and soon after crossed the boundary of Cork city, population 136,000, which declared itself a Nuclear Free Zone and a special friend of Cologne, Rennes, and Coventry. As we turned onto the new ring road that sped traffic efficiently into south-east Cork, I would not have been surprised to see, in this wave of up-beat redesignation, a sign announcing our presence in Emerald Tiger Country. Whereas uncle Brendan saw persistent poverty and social injustice and class struggle, it was possible to gain the impression from the mainstream media that the chief economic problem in Cork, in these unprecedented times of high growth and low inflation and net immigration and soaring property values, was finding sufficient numbers of takers for the vacancies (in high-technology work, especially) that were opening up in their hundreds. The old political and religious obsessions seemed further away than ever, and I asked my grandmother what she made of the changes taking place. It turned out that although she was proud of what had been achieved, Grandma was troubled by the emerging national character. She was worried, and a little amazed, by the sudden loss of authority of the Catholic church, which had become the source of a seemingly ever-flowing stream of sexual scandals and the butt of nihilistic TV comedies. ‘There is a God,’ Grandma said with an uncharacteristically anxious vehemence that made me glance over at her small, seat-belted figure, ‘as one day those that think there isn’t will find out to their cost.’ Grandma also didn’t understand the apathy amongst young people towards politics – ‘They say that they’re not “interested” in the elections. Sure, if you’re not interested in your country, what are you interested in?’ – and history: ‘A country is nothing without its history,’ my grandmother declared.

  We arrived home. While Grandma went upstairs, I waited in the kitchen, the hub of the house and its point of entry, through the back door, for family and friends. Small pictures hung on the wall: reproduction paintings of a basket of peaches and a basket of strawberries, a photograph of a sunset at sea seen through reeds, and two watercolours of birds. Pope John Paul II appeared in a white frame, and a porcelain wall-figurine of the Virgin Mary kissing the baby Jesus. Also displayed were postcards from children and grandchildren mailed from Aqaba, New York, Santander, Youghal, Lanzarote, Portugal, Bretagne, Majorca. The family horizons were expanding. Above the table hung the text of a house blessing:

  God bless the corners of this house,

  And be the lintel blest;

  And bless the hearth and bless the board

  And bless each door that opens wide

  To stranger as to kin;

  And bless each crystal window pane

  That lets the starlight in;

  And bless the roof tree overhead

  And every sturdy wall.

  The peace of man, the peace of God,

  The peace of love on all.

  This was what a republican safe house looked like: it was here that Grandma, on a couple of occasions after her husband’s death, gave refuge, without the family’s knowledge, to republicans – ‘proper gentlemen’, in her recollection – wanted by the authorities in connection with acts of extreme political violence.

  When Grandma returned to the kitchen, we drank a cup of tea and ate bread and butter and ham. We talked about various things, and gradually we came back to the topic of my grandfather. Grandma said that in the ’sixties, when they were living here, the two would go off to Bodenstown and other republican commemorations and marches together. In about 1970, they went to the North with a party from the south. Jim and Eileen and the others crossed the border at Monaghan on foot with a tricolour held before them and repaired a road that had been cratered in an attempt to close down the border crossing. A British army helicopter flew overhead as they worked
. It fell to Jim O’Neill, the senior republican present, to address some remarks to the volunteer road-gang; and he did so. The party headed back that evening on the bus, singing songs. When she got home, Grandma removed her boots and hung them in the shed with the Northern mud still sticking to them. The boots hung untouched for years, a monument to the unvanquishable urge for freedom and, it turned out, to the only time my grandfather set foot north of the border.

  Grandma told me this story and then, going into a declamatory trance, she looked me in the eye and said, without hesitation:

  Who is Ireland’s enemy?

  Not Germany nor Austria,

  Nor Russia, France nor Spain

  That robbed and reaved this land of ours,

  That forged her rusty chain

  But England of the wily words

  A crafty, treacherous foe.

  ’Twas England scourged our motherland,

  ’Twas England laid her low.

  I thought that she had finished, but there was more to come:

  And rouse her living men,

  The chance will come to us at last

  To win our own again;

  To sweep the English enemy

  From hill and glen and bay,

  And in your name, O holy dead

  Our secret debt to pay!

  There was a silence, and eventually I asked Grandma whether Jim, if he could have his time again, would do anything differently. ‘No,’ my grandmother said, ‘I don’t think so.’ She gave the question a moment’s further reflection and then, in a twist I hadn’t at all expected, added, ‘Like his father, he was a very intelligent man. If he were alive today, with all the education and opportunities that you now have.…’ My grandmother wrinkled her mouth pensively.

  I was slightly taken aback. For all of her political passion and her doubts about the country’s new money culture and her stories of the Black and Tans and her photographs of her husband’s IRA burial, for all of her investment in her husband’s configuration as an IRA hero, my grandmother, in what seemed to be the final analysis, was dwelling on Jim O’Neill’s life in economic terms and contemplating, somewhat wistfully, the affluent and fulfilling life that, in more opportune times, he might have led. Was she tacitly acknowledging that in different circumstances her husband might have left the business of revolution to others? After all, if Jim had stood to inherit Ardkitt, would he have risked years of imprisonment and separation from his farm? Or would he, like the vast majority of the Cork farming class, have been diverted from active service in the IRA by the demands and preoccupations of country life – a life of ploughing championships, carts and harnesses, colts, hens, heifers, horses, cows, potatoes, wheat seeds, whist drives, of dropping in on Enniskean Hall for a party thrown by the Newcestown, Ballineen and Enniskean Coursing Club (music by the Heatherbell Band, dancing 9 to 2) and attending the meetings and dances of the West Cork Branch of the Irish Creamery Managers’ Association, the Clonakilty Agricultural Society, and the Co. Cork Farmers’ Assocation (Ballineen Branch)? This was the lost world that Jim O’Neill dreamed of inhabiting, a world in which a rebel might in good conscience limit his involvement to the cause to making contributions to the Republican Prisoners’ Dependants Fund or turning a blind eye to the dumping of arms on his land.

 

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