One evening in the last December of the twentieth century, I pulled down an old, blood-red Cassell’s French–English dictionary from a bookcase in my mother’s house. It was a battered volume, and the hardback cover, which had come loose at some point, was raggedly taped together. I looked up the word I was after and then, as I was shutting the book, noticed the following written (in English) in Joseph’s handwriting on the inside of the back cover:
J. Dakak, Mersin, Turkey
No matter what we have suffered and what we have undergone, we must try to forgive those who injured us and only remember the lessons gained thereby.
Mrs Chiang Kay-Shek.
To my surprise, it was my father who was able to tell me something about this inscription: nearly forty years ago, in the course of a solemn discussion about Roger Casement and Terence MacSwiney, Joseph Dakak retrieved the Cassell’s dictionary and pointed out the quotation to him. He was, my father said, suggesting a connection between himself and Casement and MacSwiney.
This suggestion – incidentally, Joseph wasn’t aware that Kevin O’Neill’s father was also an ex-internee – was intriguing but unconvincing. I couldn’t see how his internment – the result of a misconceived business trip – bore comparison with the ideology-driven self-sacrifice of the two Irishmen except in the very broad sense of an undeserved personal calamity suffered at the hands of the British. That Joseph had constructed a heroic, blameless version of his past was not surprising, but it did leave me wondering about the lessons he claimed to have learned from his experiences. The fact was, neither Joseph nor Jim significantly changed their outlook and approach to life after the war. Joseph remained culturally assertive – assertive enough to complain to young Christians whom he overheard speaking Turkish that they were wasting their education at French-speaking schools – and socially conspicuous and entangled with the powers-that-be. He became the secretary of the Mersin Tourist Association, served as an honorary interpreter for two provincial governors, who were very good friends of his, and embarked on the ambitious modernization of the hotel. And he continued to keep silent on the subject of the Armenians. Back in Cork, meanwhile, Jim went back to his old life: providing for his family, poaching, working hard. His raging republican animus remained intact, and although he never rejoined or took part in active service, Jim regained his faith in the Irish Republican Army. Likewise, Joseph regained his faith in the possibilities of Turkish citizenship and, for that matter, life in Mersin – to which, I belatedly realized, he was as attached as Jim was to West Cork. In short, my grandfathers consigned their internments to the past and to silence.
Of course, pained taciturnity is typical of many survivors of the Second World War, but my grandfathers’ case is complicated by the fact that, unlike the prisoner of war or the wounded combatant or the displaced civilian or even the interned enemy alien, Jim and Joseph did not have the benefit of having suffered a universally creditable and understood misfortune of war; and the fall-out of the Curragh infighting meant that for a long time Jim was even deprived of recognition within republican circles. Denied conventional acknowledgement of what they’d been through, my grandfathers can only have been shaken in their faith in conventional explanations of the world. The effect of this disillusionment was not to radicalize them – Joseph remained a conservative bourgeois, Jim an orthodox republican – but, rather, to make them wary of unseen, undeclared forces of the State: paranoid, it might be said. This shared trait was one of the very few things the two men, who were opposites in almost every respect expect their authoritarianism, had in common.
But in one sense, their paranoia – evident from Joseph’s testimony and Jim’s perennial suspiciousness – was well-founded. I don’t mean that after their release from internment they continued to be under the surveillance of the Special Branch or the Turkish secret police, although for all I know this was in fact the case; I mean that historical dark matter surrounded and manoeuvred my grandfathers more than they ever knew or, perhaps, could have known.
This is one way of saying that they were, of course, unlucky. They lived in extraordinarily hateful and hazardous places and times, in which men with powerful egos were especially exposed. I don’t have any confidence that, in their shoes, I would have fared any better than they did, or indeed that a descendant of mine, looking back with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight and a comfortable chair, won’t be able to point to defects in my apprehension of the world and make a case that I culpably failed to notice, or act or speak about, something that is perfectly clear to him; and no doubt my ghost will exclaim, ‘No! You don’t understand! That’s not how it was at all!’
However scrupulous I have tried to be, I have unavoidably subjected my grandfathers, defenceless in their graves, to an unfair trial; and sometimes, thinking back to the hostility I felt towards them at the outset, I have even worried if I haven’t been driven by a desire to lock them up in words as a punishment for the hurt silence which, I rightly or wrongly sensed, they’d bequeathed my parents. In the end, though, I like to think differently. Joseph and Jim may well be my prisoners, interned in death behind the bars of these paragraphs, but they are also escapees from the hush in which they were held by my family. And, no longer absent, they are, in spite of everything, and a little miraculously, no longer in the wrong. I now understand something about them, and understanding, as everybody knows, is the better part of forgiveness.
Which brings me to a story my aunt Amy once told me. Walking down the street one day, years after the war, her father caught sight a man with whom, because of some disagreement in the past, he was no longer on speaking terms. Joseph crossed the road and said to the man, ‘Would you go to my funeral?’ ‘I would,’ said the other. ‘And I would go to your funeral, too,’ Joseph replied, ‘so why don’t we talk now, before it’s too late?’ In his lack of rancour, Amy said, Papa was like Mandela.
It was an extravagant comparison, but I caught Amy’s drift: for it was Nelson Mandela who pronounced that if he’d been bitter and angry about his imprisonment of 27 years, he would not have been a free man. It had been a puzzle to me how my grandfather was able to enjoy agreeable post-war relations with Olga Catton and William Rickards when he knew that they’d almost certainly informed on him to the British; but now I understand that Joseph knew, and by his notation in his dictionary sought to transmit, something important about the need to forgive and – here I am thinking of his death-bed request for absolution from his wife – to receive and stimulate forgiveness. Of course, a capacity for amnesty may be indistinguishable from a capacity for forgetfulness.
Amy’s story is connected in my mind to something that happened on the last Sunday of Jim O’Neill’s life. My grandfather was lying in his hospital bed when he was stunned to receive a visit from his brother Paddy. An All-Ireland hurling final was being played that day, and the two brothers, who had been bitterly estranged since their fight at Ardkitt all those years before, watched the game on television together in near-silence. However awkward, the fraternization was powerful. The following day, Jim rescinded his instruction to Terry that Paddy be barred from his funeral. ‘Forget about that thing I told you,’ he told his son. ‘I’m sure,’ Terry said, ‘that he waited for his brother before he died.’
I claim the privilege, as a grandson, to dwell on my grandfathers in a way of my choosing. I could think of their lives as tragedies, as others have done, noting with sadness that the Toros Hotel, Joseph Dakak’s monument, was finally sold on 30 December 1999 and as I write is being gutted to accommodate the town’s first major department store. I could linger on the continuing hatred and violence in Turkey and Ireland, and link my grandfathers’ shortcomings to the lethal infirmities in those countries’ political cultures. But I would rather release Jim and Joseph from such gloominess and think of them at ease and home free. I want to see Joseph dancing with my grandmother in the mountains, she with her rectangular forehead and deep-set eyes and good cheekbones and sturdy ankles, he with a flower i
n his lapel, holding her neatly, moving her sure-footedly to the tunes of the Club orchestra, giving her his exclusive attention. I want to see Jim in his hat and suit walking in the country on an early, preternaturally hot summer’s Sunday. The children are nowhere to be seen, Cora the greyhound is off chasing a bird, and my grandmother is holding her husband’s hand. The couple are walking by the river when, to Eileen’s horror and delight, Jim suddenly tears off his clothes and wades quickly into a freezing swimming pool and calls for her to join him. This is how I would like to think of my grandfathers, at liberty from mortal emotions.
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