After the Lockout

by Darran McCann

  Sleep doesn’t come easily and I wake frequently throughout the night, but neither my fitfulness nor my hangover prevents me from springing from the bed excitedly as morning breaks. Pius and I have tea and fried bread together, and when I thank him for putting up the cash, it seems to take him a moment to recall what I’m talking about. After breakfast he goes into his bedroom and comes back with a stack of notes, and we wait till Turlough, Sean and their convoy of carts stop by for the cash, as arranged. He gets up and goes out of the room, leaving me with the money. I count out twenty one-pound notes for the materials and a few more for Turlough and Sean’s wages and sundry expenses. He’ll never miss them. After the Moriartys have been and gone, Pius and I walk down to the village together. It’s a beautiful autumn morning; copper leaves still cling to the trees even this late in the year, and the very light is bronzed and dream-like. When we get to the Poor Ground wall Aidan Cavanagh salutes us from across the street. ‘One o’clock,’ he cries, naming the appointed time everyone is to meet up, provided Turlough, Sean and their convoy of corrugated iron and timber are back in time.

  ‘One o’clock.’

  Pius and I hop over the wall and make for the little pile of stones under which Ma is buried. Most of the graves are in this part of the Poor Ground, where the soil is slightly softer, a marshy oasis amid unwanted acres of stony, grey terrain. We’ll build our People’s Hall on this barren land. Spading down through it will be like digging through iron but there’ll be no subsidence, and we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission because nobody owns it. Pius manoeuvres himself onto his knees, blesses himself, bows his head and, I suppose, begins to pray. Obligation drags at me like cargo straps, so I drop to one knee and clasp my hands together. I don’t bless myself, hypocrisy must have some boundaries, but I do bow my head and close my eyes. Not for religion or priests or some imaginary friend called God, but for my da. It’ll mean a lot to him to think I’m praying for Ma, and for the money he’s given me, he deserves that much.

  ‘Da, why are you helping me?’ I say.

  ‘We’ve done a lot of work here, got the old place back to what it should be.’

  ‘You don’t owe me nothing for that.’

  ‘I know. But I suppose, you know, you might think you’ve done what you came to do, and you might be thinking of leaving again. But maybe you’ll stay a bit longer now.’ He pauses. ‘Sure I have nothing only money now anyway.’

  ‘That’s not true. Not entirely.’

  The clock strikes the eleven. You pull up the handbrake and leave the tram. ‘Excuse me, my good man, this simply won’t do. I must get to the horse show before half past,’ says some button-down bluenose over from England with a rose in his lapel. Top hat and silver-tipped cane. The tram is full of them. The RDS set. You don’t even answer. You get up and walk off the job. The Nelson Pillar is the meeting point and you’re not twenty yards from it. You rest up against the Pillar and enjoy the sunny July afternoon while you wait for the other lads to arrive. Your passengers stay on the tram for ages, gawping across the street at you as if it’s all a game and you’ll soon come back and drive their tram. By half-twelve, a hundred and twenty-five of your comrades are there, almost every tram driver in the city. You’re giddy as a blethering fool. Mr William Martin Murphy, your boss, is everything you hate about the country and the world. Conservative. Catholic. Capitalist. But he’s met his match in Big Jim Larkin. Big Jim has him terrified. That’s why Murphy has put together a vicious band of four hundred bosses and issued the ultimatum: quit Larkin’s union or be locked out of our jobs. But Larkin’s men have the courage, the dignity and the numbers to tell the bastard Murphy to go to hell. Murphy has his four hundred thieves but we have thirty thousand men with us. It’s the Belfast Dock Strike all over again. We reject his ultimatum. We strike. If there’s a lockout, we’ll bring the city to a standstill. We are going to crush him. This is it. Armageddon.

  Forty-six men, I count. Not a bad turn-out considering the short notice. I stand on the Poor Ground wall looking down at them while Turlough and Sean sit behind the crowd on their carts, loaded with timber and corrugated iron. The crowd looks at me dubiously.

  ‘I’m not building nothing on top of any graves,’ says Jerry McGrath.

  ‘There’s plenty of room, we’re not going to build anywhere near the graves.’

  ‘That ground is like iron, you can’t dig that up,’ says Colm McDermott.

  ‘The hard ground will make for a great natural floor. I have the plans all here,’ I tell them. Turlough hadn’t idled away his time on the road to Emyvale. He had sketched out plans and presented me with several sheaves of paper. I pass them round. Turlough reckons that with a bit of precise pick work we can erect a skeleton of load-bearing stanchions thick as mooring lines and build the hall around that skeleton, rather than dig foundations. His sketches are of a simple structure, a barn really, measuring about forty by twenty – far too small for the two hundred people we’re hoping will turn up, but he says if we make it any bigger we’ll need proper foundations. We will complete the basic structure with the standard timber two-by-four and dress it in corrugated iron. It’ll be draughty as hell but it’ll serve. Frank Vallely, who played full forward for the team, puts up his hand like some schoolboy. I nod to him.

  ‘Victor, I’m glad to help, you know yourself, but, well, a man has to make his own living. I’ve a lot of work on this week …’ He’s only saying what a lot of the men are thinking. Frank has three babies in the house and livestock in the fields depending on him, and of course every man’s first duty is to put food on his own table.

  ‘This is important work, Frank,’ I say.

  ‘I know, Victor, but like, you know, there’s only so many hours in the day …’

  ‘Damnit, Frank, your fucken sheep has had your full attention all their lives, they can do without you for a week. Victor Lennon fought at the GPO for the Irish Republic, so if he says it’s important work then the only question coming out of you should be how you can contribute,’ snaps Turlough with a surprising vehemence.

  ‘I know, Turlough, I’m only saying that …’

  ‘Let there be no more talk about it. We have a lot of work to do,’ says Sean.

  Turlough jumps down from his cart and strides through the crowd, leading them over the Poor Ground wall past where I’m standing like a rock in a stream. Sean stays back and shepherds the stragglers over the wall. When they’re all over, I turn to them and they hush down.

  ‘No man should see his livelihood suffer because of our efforts here. Any man who needs help in any aspect of his business should come to me. Help will be provided. Socialism is not about asking working men to sacrifice their material needs, quite the opposite. However, sometimes we must enter into struggle in order to secure our rights. Together, as a united class of workers, we can achieve exponentially more than we can as individuals. I ask just one week of you, one week in which you offer your services to the struggle.’

  Turlough and Sean direct the unloading of the carts and pile the timber and corrugated iron sheets neatly. No-one questions their assumption of authority, and I stand by, taking more of an overseeing role. Turlough gathers together all the tools that people have brought with them: tape measures, plumb lines, string, sticks, picks, loys, hammers, nails, spirit levels, saws, hatchets, plywood boards for mixing cement. He sorts them into distinct piles: hammers with hammers, picks with picks and so on. Frank Vallely grumbles that he’d better get his tape measure and spirit level back. I assure him that none of his comrades would steal from him, any more than he would steal from one of his comrades. We mark out dimensions, drive little stakes into the ground and tie string between them until the large rectangular shape is clearly laid out, running parallel with the street about five yards inside the Poor Ground wall. Sean marks out intervals in which the stanchions will stand and sets the men to work preparing the ground. Turlough organises twenty-five or more men in groups working on pre-fabricating large rectangular timber f
rames buttressed by vertical, diagonal and horizontal beams. ‘They’ll slot in between the stanchions and they’ll be solid as brick,’ Turlough says.

  ‘They look like Union Jacks,’ I say.

  I stand back and watch my community, my people. You can deliver lectures till kingdom come about the emancipating power of work, about the intimate relationship between the worker and the fruits of labour, but revolutionary consciousness is not an intellectual exercise. The irony of revolutionary consciousness is that there’s nothing conscious about it. Any socialist worth a damn is a socialist firstly in his marrow, not his mind. Nevertheless it’s important to provide the intellectual framework. Heads, as well as guts, have to be politically sound. I go over to a group of lads making a timber frame under Sean’s watchful eye. ‘I want to teach you lads a song,’ I say. Arise you workers from your slumbers. Arise you prisoners of want. I’m not much of a singer but they soon pick up the tune and after a while they’re singing along as they hammer nails into wood. They’re intrigued when I tell them it’s the new anthem they’re singing in Russia. Aidan Cavanagh has a question. I tell him he needn’t put up his hand. He asks if Russia is going to pull out of the war.

  ‘Without a doubt.’

  ‘But President Wilson said he was going to keep America out of the war and then after he was re-elected, within a few months …’

  ‘The Bolsheviki are different. Look, the American banks have lent billions of dollars to England and France. Not millions, mind you. Do you know what a billion is? It’s a thousand times a thousand times a thousand. If Germany wins, the American banks won’t get that money back, and if they don’t get their money, the banks will fail and the American economy will fail with them. So American workers have to die to protect the profits of American bankers.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s very cynical,’ says Jerry McGrath, hammering hard at a nail to punctuate his point.

  ‘It’s the warmongers are the cynical ones, sending working men and boys to their deaths to protect profits. They didn’t foresee how bloody this war would be, I grant you, but they won’t mind seeing the working class thinned out a bit. Imagine the trouble all those young men could cause if they were back home and unemployed. Better to have them fighting other working men than realise who their real enemies are.’

  ‘But if the Russians pull out there’ll be no eastern front. The kaiser will be in Paris by Easter and we’ll all be Huns this time next year,’ says Aidan.

  ‘You think the war is between England and Germany? The kaiser, the king, the tsar are all on the same side. But the Russian comrades are giving example to the rest of us. They’re seizing their own destiny. They think people should come before profit. Germany will be next, and if it can happen in Germany it will happen all over the world.’

  ‘The Germans killed my son,’ says Jerry McGrath sadly, ‘I won’t be looking to them for any example.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, Jerry. I’m sorry.’

  Turlough puts his hand on Jerry’s shoulder. ‘Brendan was my best friend and I loved him very dear, but he should never have been there in the first place. He died not for his country but his country’s enemy,’ he says. Jerry’s head drops.

  Poor Brendy McGrath. He never had much by way of brains. I can see how the army would appeal to a lad like that. A living, a pension. Those things matter to working-class lads with few other options. That’s the awful genius of the status quo. It offers short-term relief to those in need, but in doing so, it enlists into its frontline defences those with most to gain from change. ‘If we have revolution, real revolution, then the war will be over.’

  ‘Who’ll have won?’ says Aidan.

  ‘Us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘The workers.’

  TP McGahan approaches, well turned out in a decent brown suit and probably the only boater hat in Madden parish. He’s even sporting a white rose in his lapel, like he’s a real gentleman of the press, not the errand boy of a provincial unionist yellow-sheet. He whips a notebook and pen from his jacket pocket before he even reaches me and smiles a smile so patently insincere, he looks even more runtish than usual.

  ‘I must admit, I didn’t think you’d go through with it. Thought that was just the drink talking last night,’ he says.

  I don’t exactly ignore him but I keep watching the men working on the stanchions and timber frames, and mixing the cement. They don’t know it themselves, but with every swing of the pick and every nail driven in, these people, my people, are making a choice. I’ll be able to rely on them when the time comes. I light a cigarette.

  ‘What do you hope to achieve, Victor?’

  ‘Is it not obvious?’ I meet his eye with the greatest seriousness. ‘Comrade Lenin reckons this parish is the key to worldwide revolution. He sent me to organise Madden Soviet.’

  I leave TP standing with his pencil in his hand and a stupid look on his stupid face. He’s scribbling down what I said. ‘Madden Soviet? Victor, tell me more,’ he says. What an eejit. I go over to Turlough as he swings a pick mightily at a large rock bursting up through the surface of the soil. I ask him how we’re going. He says we’ve made a good start but we need ladders. As many as we can get our hands on. Erecting the stanchions will be five times harder without them.

  I cast my eyes up the street towards Charlie’s shop. It’s probably not fair to ask him, but fairness has nothing to do with it.

  The bell above the door rings as I enter. Charlie is alone in the shop, standing leaning across the counter. He stands upright and his eyes go to my feet; I have left muddy footprints all over his floor. He sighs. ‘What the hell are you all doing out there?’

  ‘We’re building a hall, a hall for all the people …’

  He rolls his eyes.

  ‘We are creating an emancipated proletariat that won’t cower before superstitionists like Benedict.’

  He shuffles backwards, puts his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets and looks at me blankly. ‘Victor, you have to stop blaming Bishop Benedict for the mess you’ve made of your life,’ he says.

  ‘This isn’t about me, Charlie, I’m just a messenger. This is about the people. Do you not read the papers? Do you not know what’s happening in the world?’

  He laughs in my face. This is a waste of time. There’s no sense trying to reason with such an entrenched reactionary consciousness. Only bitter experience will teach him his wrongness. Behind me the bell above the door rings and Sean and Turlough enter. Charlie doesn’t look so defiant now. ‘I didn’t come here to debate. I’ve come for the ladders,’ I say. ‘Madden Soviet is requisitioning the ones out in the back yard for the rest of the week.’

  Madden Soviet. Madden Soviet. It doesn’t sound quite as ridiculous as it did at first. Once you think about it. Madden Soviet. I am the leader of … no, I am the chairman of Madden Soviet.

  Charlie turns white. All he can say is: ‘No.’

  I nod to the Moriarty boys and they sweep past. Charlie is too stunned to shout out as they drag him to the back room and shove him down into his chair. On the desk are piles of coins and stacks of banknotes. He stares ahead sullenly and sits with his shoulders hunched. Sean spots a large bunch of keys hanging from a hook in the wall. He shows them to Turlough, who nods and, without a word, they let themselves out the back door into the yard. We hear the lads lifting the ladders and taking them down the street. Charlie looks at the ground, he won’t meet my eye.

  ‘This is vitally important work we’re doing here, Charlie. You shouldn’t be so selfish,’ I say, as collegially as I can.

  ‘Thief.’

  He doesn’t understand. ‘You think those ladders belong to you? What about the carters who brought them from the railway station to your shop? What about the railwaymen who brought them from the docks? The stevedores who took them off the ship? The sailors who brought them across the sea? The craftsmen who made them at the factory? The lumberjacks who chopped down the trees? The smiths who made the saw? The ironmongers who made the iron for
the smiths? The miners who took the metal from the earth? Do you not see, every item in this shop that you think belongs to you, wouldn’t be here at all without the labour of a thousand men? Do you not see how ridiculous it is to think these ladders are the exclusive property of such a small and insignificant link in the chain as yourself? The bloody shopkeeper? They belong to the workers, and we the workers require them for the duration of our great project.’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  Charlie wants me to feel guilty, but it won’t work. I’m not about to get squeamish. In life, sometimes you have to choose sides. That’s what the lockout was about. Murder Murphy must have seen the children starving on the streets, he must have seen them. But he was unmoved. That’s what the rising was about too. That distant, bobbing tam-o’-shanter that stopped bobbing after I fired at it; the man beneath it probably had a family, was probably a decent fellow. I’m sure they all are, at some level. But you make your choice, choose your side, and you live with it. Our People’s Hall is about making people choose sides. Property rights versus human rights. Bourgeois capitalist versus the workers. I’ve picked my side, Charlie has picked his. I inform him that he’ll have his ladders back by Saturday.

  Back at the Poor Ground, work can begin on erecting the stanchions. The ladders make it much easier to join together the beams. Having the right tools is half the job. Sean tells some of the lads that Charlie was in a bad emotional state when we went to speak to him, and all around are mutters of solemn agreement that Charlie was never the same man since he came back from France. Work progresses quickly and by the time Sean calls a halt to the day’s work in the fading light, all the stanchions stand erect at the correct points and wet cement is starting to harden around the bases. The comrades chatter with palpable excitement as they store away the ladders and frames neatly under a tarpaulin. We work hurriedly as the last of the light is fading and it’s starting to rain. It’s threatening a bit of a squall, in fact. As we finish, I spy Charlie through the dullness, standing by the Poor Ground wall and watching us.