by Roddy Doyle
The city was quiet. None of the morning charging and madness that usually had us on our feet and ready before we’d time to remember where exactly we were. Us. We. I’d no more use for those words.
I walked.
There were some people out. I could hear a car off somewhere and a man shouting at a dog or child. I passed a woman who was waiting for a shop to open. She wanted to be the first, to have the shopkeeper to herself for a minute, to plead with him to extend her credit. I could tell by the way she hid in her shawl and by the aggression in her eyes as she looked out at me. I went on. I put my hands in the holes which had once been pockets. Could she tell that I’d just walked away from my dead brother? I took my hands back out.
The flags were out and flapping and there was brand new bunting hanging over Grafton Street. I remembered now: the new king was being crowned, over in London. It was a holiday. That was why the day hadn’t taken off yet. We were going to walk out to Kingstown, to work the crowds around the bandstand on the east pier; that had been the plan - Victor’s idea; he loved the boats and the music.
I walked all over the city. Away from the main streets and bridges there were no flags, no banners. George V’s coronation. And Dublin didn’t care. And my brother was dead on a cinder path behind the Grand Canal Dock and nobody cared about that either. Another dead child. We’d found dozens of them on our travels, me and Victor. There wasn’t even a reward for them.
I walked all day. The city filled. People came out and strolled. It was a warm day, with a nice breeze that made the flags snap. What had killed Victor? Consumption, probably; I didn’t know - I was only nine. It was the cough. I knew that now. It had got darker and deeper; it had brought blood with it in the last months. But we’d never said anything about it. It was just a cough. In the dead of night, when we walked alone through the streets, when the horses were stabled and the hawkers were at home, that was what we heard - the city coughing. That was all we heard at four in the morning, before the seagulls got up on the air and started their squawking, bullying the city into waking up. Dead, dead silence except for the thousands coughing, a steady, terrible beat coming from the rooms above us and the basement areas, children and adults being choked to death by poverty. They were too late; we could hear the pain in the noise, we could feel life desperately clinging. It was how night-time was measured in the slums, in blood coughs and death rattles. And Victor had been coughing along with them and I had refused to hear it. I was only nine. There was only me and Victor. We were all that mattered. He would never leave my side. His cough had been different. Just a cough. It was what you did when you breathed Dublin air. When you slept on the ground. When you didn’t have shoes. (Just a few years later, when I smashed the window in the G.P.O. and started shooting, it was at shoes that I was aiming, in the window display across the street in Tyler’s.) You coughed when you ate bad food or none. When you’d never worn a coat. When everyone else around you coughed. When you’d no mother to fix you and no father to run for the doctor. And no doctor who’d come, anyway. When you’d nothing except your big brother. Who was only nine. And scared.
The city killed Victor. And, today, the King was being crowned. In another city. In London. Did they cough till they died in London? Did kings and queens cough up blood? Did their children die under tarpaulins? I imagined myself on a street in London, and Victor was trotting beside me, chatting away and keeping the eye on everything. But someone knocked against me and I was back in Dublin and alone.
There was something happening. A crowd had gathered and others were running to join it. I was on College Green, beside the statue of King Billy. Some in the crowd cheered and I could see the shape of a fight push its way to the edge. I went over, out of the shadow of the Bank, and burrowed my way to the front.
Two men and a woman, their backs to the railings of Trinity College, watched by a tight crowd of maybe a hundred men and some women, riddled with creeping, quiet urchins like myself. The woman was holding a burning torch; the flames were black and raging, climbing over each other. The men held up a Union Jack.
—It’s a disgrace, said someone.
—On today of all days.
—It’s an absolute disgrace.
One red-faced man came out of the crowd with a walking stick raised but other men grabbed him and pulled him back in. And now the woman touched the flag with the torch. The flames caught the cloth and devoured it. Some of the crowd cheered, some booed, and by the time the two men dropped the flag there was very little of it left. The woman stood still and unimpressed. I heard police whistles but the woman didn’t budge. Others ran; still others cheered.
—You’re in right trouble now, yeh Fenian bastards.
The men and woman didn’t move as the rozzers filled the street and scattered the crowd. I stayed and watched. The wind picked up tiny flakes of charred cloth and scattered them over us. I grabbed a piece and expected to be burnt. But I felt no pain. I wondered had I missed it and I opened my fist. It was there. My fragment was red; a tiny island of red left in the middle of a burnt-black triangle.
The rozzers had arrived but there wasn’t much left for them.
—It’s the fuckin’ Countess again, said one of them.
—God, she’s a terrible woman. And Griffith, the hoor.
The rozzers surrounded the two men and the woman they’d called the Countess and led them away. They held her arms and pushed her forward but she said nothing and didn’t look back. And they were all gone. It was over. I was alone again.
I wanted my mother’s lap. Just for a little while. I wanted to feel her shawl against my neck. For a while, an hour or two - a minute. But she was gone, and all the children too. She wasn’t on the step and she wasn’t in the basement. There was no one down there, and nothing at all left. They’d been evicted again. I hoped; still in the city, still alive. I sat on the step for a while. For hours, perhaps; I didn’t know. I ignored the night above me; I never looked at it. Then I stood up and went looking for my mother.
Part 2
Six
I held my left arm across my eyes and smashed the window. I heard the glass breaking into smaller pieces on the pavement outside. Glass was breaking all around me and more glass from the two floors above was falling past the window, glass crashing onto glass. I hacked away at the remaining shards with the butt of my rifle. There was nothing outside, beyond the broken windows and the pillars, except the street and the usual noises that came with it - whining trams, the yells of children, shoe nails on cobbles and pavement, the women at the Pillar Stall shouting the prices and varieties of their flowers. Only the shock and curses of people dodging the falling glass outside stamped significance on the morning.
Inside, behind us, it was different. Commandant Connolly’s voice drove through the rest of the noise.
—Barricade the windows with mailbags, typewriters, anything that’s handy.
The main hall was being transformed. Men in the uniforms of the Volunteers and Citizen Army, and most in bits and pieces or no uniform at all, were carrying bags of sand on their shoulders, and tables, chairs, ledgers, mailbags, sacks of coal and piling them into defensive walls at the main and side doors and all the windows. The women of Cumann na mBan carried urns and cauldrons, trestle tables and baskets to the stairs and down to the basement. Other men humped provisions and guns, sledgehammers and laundry hampers in from the courtyard. Others had been sent down to the Metropole Hotel and across to the Imperial for bedding, supplies and anything else that might come in handy. Orders were barked, barked again and obeyed. There were younger ones running back and forth between the officers, delivering and bringing back messages. They moved frantically, riddled with excitement, while the older ones, the men and nearly men, were slowed by the knowledge that they were witnessing their own most important moments.
A shot sent us to the floor. Bits of the stuccoed ceiling fell on us; I felt a chunk of it hopping off my back.
—Who fired that shot?
—Me, said someone at the other side of the hall.—I only dropped my gun and it went off.
—Will yis all be careful. We don’t want to kill someone.
A huge man with an axe was demolishing one of the counters; he cut through the red teak like it was cake. He needed the wood for the big kettle that sat on the tiles near his feet; Commandant Clarke had called for tea. Another man, without a uniform, ran a coil of copper wire around table and chair legs and a pile of typewriters, strengthening his barricade. Post office workers were running to the main door and I could hear the thundering feet of the last of them coming down the stairs, escaping before it was locked and barricaded.
—You’re welcome to stay now, comrades, Paddy Swanzy told them as he knocked the white dust off his Citizen Army uniform.—Jesus, look it. I’m already filthy and we haven’t even started yet. My mother would kill me if she saw me.
—If you knew your mother, said Seán Knowles.
—Ah now, Paddy shouted after him.—If I die today at least I can say that I once knew your mother.
—Keep the voices down, boys, said an officer I didn’t know, a Volunteer.—And no mocking the mammies, for God’s sake. If Commandant Pearse hears you, you’ll be out on your ears before the fighting starts. And there’s few enough of us as it is.
Few enough of us.
Easter Monday, 1916.
One of the runners came up to the officer. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and reported.
—There’s tills full of money over behind the counter, sir.
—Good man, O’Toole. Good man. We’d better find a safe place for them.
Good man, O’Toole. The fuckin’ eejit. I looked at his trousers as he went off with the officer and there wasn’t the bulge of a wad or a pull on a leg that would have come from the weight of half-crowns or florins. The eejit. I could tell from the back of his head, he was one of the Christian Brothers’ boys, here to die for Ireland, dying to please his betters. With a little rifle that had once belonged to an American Boy Scout, tied to his back with a bit of string. I was ready to die myself - I was banking on it - but I’d still been hoping to get a few quid into my pocket in case the worst came to the worst and I lived. We were locked into the biggest post office in the country and, even though it was now the centre of the new republic, it was still a post office, a land of opportunity, a great big building full of money. And I wanted some of it. My conscience wouldn’t let me ignore it. I watched O’Toole carrying a pile of till drawers out to the stairs, the self-importance running out of him in his snot. His mammy had combed his hair that morning, before he’d gone off on his manoeuvres for Ireland. He was seventeen. Three years older than me. And lifetimes younger.
—Barricade those bloody windows. Quick!
—Less of that language!
—And someone go out and spread that broken glass over the street. It’ll stop the cavalry.
I was fourteen. None of the others knew, or would have believed it. I was six foot, two inches tall and had the shoulders of a boy built to carry the weight of the world. I was probably the best-looking man in the G.P.O. but there was nothing beautiful about me. My eyes were astonishing, blue daggers that warned the world to keep its distance. I was one of the few real soldiers there; I had nothing to fear and nothing to go home to.
Paddy Swanzy and some other men jumped over the counter and came back with books and more ledgers, everything and anything that could be built into barricades - a filing cabinet, half-filled mailbags, stools, empty tills, pads of money orders, more ledgers, desks and telegram pads.
—These things’ll be useless after we take over, said Charlie Murtagh.—We’ll put harps on everything.
—The starry plough on everything, you mean, said Paddy Swanzy.—Including the arses of newborn babbies.
I kept watch while the barricade began to climb up the window, and I pocketed some of the money order pads and a rubber date stamp.
Felix Harte was at the window next to me.
—How long will we last, Henry?
—They don’t even know we’re here, I said.
We waited for the Empire to wake up.
It was Monday, the 24th of April. Just after noon. A beautiful, windless holiday. And Henry Smart, stark and magnificent in the uniform of the Irish Citizen Army, was ready for war. In a uniform he’d bought bit by bit with money he’d robbed and squeezed. In the uniform of the workers’ army. I had the whole works - the bandolier with pockets full of bullets, a snake belt that rested nicely on my hips, riding britches that had never touched a horse. They were strictly for the officers but nobody had complained when I’d turned up in mine.
—That’s a grand pair of britches on a bugler, Michael Mallin, the second in command, had said.
—I’m not a bugler any more, I’d told him.
I’d played The Last Post at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa the year before. The history books will tell you that it was William Oman but don’t believe them: he was tucked up at home with the flu.
The left side of my slouch hat was held up by the Red Hand badge of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. I was a member of the union, although I’d never had a job. I was walking dynamite in that uniform.
Sackville Street was emptying. The city was beginning to notice. There was a crowd still clinging to the area in front of Nelson’s Pillar and out in front of the G.P.O., waiting to see what happened.
—Remember now. Shoot anything in a uniform.
—Wha’? said Paddy Swanzy.—Even the postmen?
—No lip.
The street and the whole city had been packed; strolling crowds on their way to the races in Fairyhouse and even to the beaches at Sandymount and Malahide, and the Spring Show at the R.D.S. Off-duty soldiers held up the corners. I saw people across the street, on the corner of North Earl Street, looking up at the men on the roof, the old boys from St Enda’s, Pearse’s school. I wished that I was up there with them. They could see everything, and when night came, if we were still here, they could point their rifles at the stars and shoot. And they’d know before the rest of us when the war had started. Better yet, I could have been outside, on top of Nelson’s Pillar. With the old one-armed bollocks protecting my head, I could have commanded the city; I could have watched the whole place topple.
Few enough of us.
I liked it that way. We Serve Neither King Nor Kaiser. So said the message on the banner that had hung across the front of Liberty Hall, headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. If I’d had my way, Or Anyone Else would have been added, instead of But Ireland. I didn’t give a shite about Ireland.
I could hear gunfire now. Probably from Boland’s Bakery, or the Four Courts. And a soft thud that might have been an explosion; the Magazine Fort up in the Park. Or maybe the Citizen Army lads had taken the Castle. It was hard to tell where exactly the firing was coming from. The revolution had started. But outside, it was still a holiday.
Connolly and Pearse, and Clarke with them, were about to go back outside.
Only four or five hours earlier I’d been sitting on the steps of Liberty Hall, letting the sun send me to sleep. The Hall had been my home for the last three years. I’d been up all night. The sun was warm and tolerant; its heat was already in the stone - I could feel it rising around me. I’d been sitting there since just after dawn. I’d seen Commandant Pearse arrive in full uniform, pistol, provisions, sword, the lot, all under his greatcoat, cycling over Butt Bridge, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Irish Republic and President-Elect, struggling across the bridge and sweating like a bastard. And his little brother and faithful hound, Willie, pedalling away behind him. The other officers had arrived after him. Some of them had gone straight off to the other battalion meeting points around the city, bringing some of the waiting men with them, and the rest were still inside the Hall. We’d be moving off soon. But now, the excitement of the day and days ahead was far away from me. My slouch hat seemed to be pressing my head to my chest. The gul
ls above were floating and silent and there was the hot-day smell of old drink coming off the river. I closed my eyes, and everything was gone.
Cheers woke me and the first shock was the numbers of men around me. They were suddenly there, right beside me, sitting, starting to stand, dozens of them, most of them Citizen Army, but strangers too I’d never seen before. I had wondered if anyone at all would turn up after Eoin MacNeill’s cancellation the day before - no parades, marches, or other movements of the Irish Volunteers will take place. Each individual Volunteer will obey this order strictly in every particular - but there was a fair gang now outside the Hall; not the thousands we needed to win but enough to be starting with. The thousands, the whole country would follow. That was the plan. The hope. The men were cheering the arrival of a car, a sparkling De Dion Bouton. I recognised the driver. It was The O’Rahilly, in the uniform of a Volunteer officer; the story had been doing the rounds that he wasn’t going to turn up. The back of his car and the front seat beside him were packed with guns. He climbed out of the car and saluted. His waxed moustache couldn’t hide his grin.
A crowd had gathered, across at the quay wall and in the shadow of the Loop Line bridge. They had no idea of what was about to happen, despite our guns and uniforms. And many of the men in uniform didn’t know, either; they thought they were going out on manoeuvres. There were more onlookers now than rebels. And the rebels, the new Irish Republican Army, made up of the Volunteers and Citizen Army - and, again, few were aware yet of its existence - were a sorry-looking gang. Some of them had just the hat. Others made do with a bandolier. Some had the trousers or a jacket but, except for the officers and commandants, Henry Smart was the only one with the lot. The most common gun was the single-shot Mauser, from the pile that had come off the Asgard, a good rifle when it was made fifty years before, but much too slow in a fight against an empire, and inclined to overheat. There were plenty who didn’t have guns at all.