Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1

by Ian St. James

  So was the IRA. Mark approved of internment. How else could you deal with traitors while fighting a war? Lock them up and throw away the key was Mark's advice, and he was pleased to see it taken.

  He knew Matt Riordan was imprisoned on the Curragh. The RUC had told him. He was pleased and displeased at the same time. Pleased that Riordan had been caught, displeased that he had been caught south of the border. Riordan would not have been slammed in prison in Belfast, he would have been hanged by the neck for murder.

  January crept into February and then into March. In Europe, Dresden was bombed to ashes and the Allies captured Cologne. In the Far East, the Americans landed on Iwojima, and the Burma Road to China was reopened. And all the time Mark counted the days until Kate returned.

  Chapter Twelve

  No one was counting the days more keenly than Matt Riordan. By March 1945 he had been in the Curragh prison camp for four and a half years - ever since Dev had defused Mountjoy by shifting IRA men into other prisons. Poor Ferdy had been sent to Portaloise. Matt had been relieved at first to be sent to the Curragh - at least the camp was exclusively IRA, except for a few German internees in a separate compound. Besides, a Riordan on the Curragh was part of history. His father had been imprisoned there in the Civil War, twenty-five years before. Dev had been on their side then. Now Dev had locked them up and thrown away the key.

  It was the bleakest place on earth. Sometimes Matt imagined he would spend the rest of his life staring through the barbed wire at the flat plain stretching into the distance. The huts which housed the prisoners were falling apart. Sanitary and kitchen facilities were minimal. The food was slops. Privacy non-existent.

  But if the Curragh was bad, Portlaoise was worse. Portlaoise was living death. Matt was tormented by thoughts of Ferdy who had been there since 1940 with six other IRA men. They had been denied political status from the start - ordered to wear prison uniform and obey prison routine. All seven had refused, and the battle had been going on ever since.

  The men would not wear prison clothing, so they were left naked. They would not accept mail bearing prison numbers, so they received no letters at all. They were not presentable, so they were denied Mass.

  The men were locked in their cells, in solitary confinement, without newspapers, letters, books, without contact with each other, without a chance to talk to a priest or a living soul. They were treated like animals trapped in a burrow. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. For nearly five years!

  Reports smuggled to Matt said that Ferdy was going mad. He raved for hours, screaming about a white horse in his cell. Other prisoners were in a similar state. Matt prayed for their deaths. It was their only escape.

  Outside the prisons, the IRA was in tatters. Wives and children went hungry. Girls gave up waiting and married other men. Parents despaired of seeing their sons before they went to their graves.

  And inside the prisons, men were left to rot.

  On the Curragh, morale was rock bottom. Friction arose between the men from the IRA Northern Command and those from the south. Regional pride sparked off old feuds. Arguments raged about the future of Ireland. The camp was a mess:

  Matt tried to create unity, but it was hopeless. Men split into the Grogan faction, the Tadgh Lynch faction, the Pearse Kelly faction, even the Matt Riordan faction. The eight hundred prisoners spent more time fighting each other than trying to escape. News of British reverses in the war were greeted with cheers until, as the years passed and it became plain that "the auld enemy" was beating Germany, even that unifying factor withered and died.

  Matt almost broke in the first year. The prisoners rioted and Matt was identified as a leader. When the riot was quelled, the guards kicked him so badly that walking was impossible for a month. And after that came more beatings, solitary in the Glasshouse, more punishment...

  He survived. Somehow. After the first year he provoked the guards less often and life was a little less painful. But day after day was the same. Swollen clouds crept over the landscape. Rain splattered into the muddy potholes around the derelict huts. The barbed wire was impenetrable, the guards vigilant, the food abominable. Keeping warm was always a problem, especially for the men with dysentery - and Matt began every morning by picking the lice from his body.

  To preserve his sanity he devoted hours each day to remembering the outside world. He dreamed of his boyhood - seeing his mother happy in her drapery and himself in the butcher's shop, laughing and happy and full of plans for the future. All ruined when the Connors burned the shops down. He re-lived that day a thousand times. Just as he re-lived being kicked senseless by Averdale's thugs - and seeing his father shot down in the Killing at Keady. And Eamon de Valera was often on his mind de Valera who had convinced the people of Ireland that the Curragh was some kind of holiday camp - the same de Valera who was murdering Ferdy, an inch at a time.

  Connors, Averdale, de Valera - three men who had turned Matt's life into hell on earth. By the third year on the Curragh his thoughts were exclusively of them. He invented a game in which he brought them to trial. He gloried in the speeches he would deliver, the indictments he would bring, the executions he would carry out. Matt played that game every day of his life. His object was to survive, escape if he could, but if that proved impossible, then to serve out his time with his wits still intact. Then he would take his revenge. That was all that mattered. That was what Matt's life was about.

  He acquired a reputation. Hard men gravitated to his side, recognising a killer when they saw one. The Matt Riordan faction numbered only eight men - eight, out of eight hundred - but no group was more feared. Each of them had their hate list. Scores would be settled one day, they all knew that, and each would help the other. Meanwhile they watched each other's backs.

  Thus they lived out their grim existence until - in March, 1945 - a rumour spread through the camp. The defeat of Germany would bring about the end of the Emergency. Most of the men would be set free. Matt and other long-term prisoners would be transferred back to Mountjoy or Portlaoise - but the men interned for the duration would be given their freedom.

  Four men in the Matt Riordan faction were internees. If they were set free, if they were on the outside ...

  Matt began to plan. He discussed his ideas with the others. Clancy Ryan had a few suggestions of his own, so did Joe Costello. McNeela and Blayney went even one better. They had a secret arms dump on the outside ...

  Matt began to count the days until the end of the Emergency.

  If time was running out for the Nazi regime, it was also running out for some other people - and on 12 April, it ran out for the President of the United States. The death of Franklin D Roosevelt shocked everyone.

  Freddie Mallon broadcast an emotional tribute from a field hospital set amid the ruins of Cologne ... "I have seen men weep today. The very same men who withstood shell-fire with unflinching courage. Some of the toughest soldiers in the world broke down and cried. American soldiers. Our soldiers. They wept before straightening their backs, taking a deep breath, and marching on to the front. Let me say this to people back home. In this war your sons and husbands have made me proud to be an American, but never more than today. For it is the American way to show compassion, and Franklin Roosevelt was a compassionate man. History will decide whether he was our greatest President, perhaps even the greatest leader the Free World has known - meanwhile we have all lost a great friend. And not just Americans. One scene today stays in my memory. A British major, veteran of D Day and countless other battles, paused outside this hospital, where our flag flies at half mast. He saluted and stood there for so long that I couldn't help watching. Then he saw me and came across to shake my hand. He gave an embarrassed grunt. 'There are times,' he said, 'when words are not enough.' And, Ladies and Gentlemen across America, this is one of those times. Meanwhile, the mood here in Germany is 'Finish the war for F.D.R.' Goodnight, and God bless America."

  Two days later in a private letter to Sean Connors in Lo
ndon, Freddie wrote

  "... what else can be said about Roosevelt's death? It knocked the hell out of everyone here. People are quoting my remark 'Finish the war for F.D.R.', but really I only said what was in the hearts of so many men."

  Other men were dying, and other deaths were revealed. As the Allies swept on across Germany, the world learned with horror of the Nazi extermination camps. Dazed and sickened journalists, scarcely able to believe their own eyes, struggled to describe the most harrowing scenes in history. The whole world flinched at newsreel clips - and so vengeful was the mood, so outraged, that people felt cheated to learn that Hitler had killed himself.

  Hitler's death was announced in the Dublin newspapers on 2 May ... and within hours Eamon de Valera called at the German Embassy ... to express condolences on behalf of the people of Ireland.

  Dinny Macaffety was stunned. He buried his report on Dev's action on an inside page in the Gazette, but newspapers elsewhere blazoned the story. Around the globe Ireland was pilloried as a friend of Fascism.

  Dinny despaired of Dev's stiff-necked ways, just as he despaired of the censorship. All through the Emergency he had battled for press freedom. When a friend who had joined the Royal Navy was subsequently rescued from a ship sunk in action, Dinny published - "We are pleased to report that Seamus Cullen is safe and sound after his recent boating accident in the Mediterranean." The Dail fumed while Dublin laughed, but Dinny lost other battles to Frank Aiken the Censor. Notices of Irishmen killed in action were not allowed to include references to military rank, and once even the second half of the Biblical quotation "greater love than this no man hath that he lay down his life for his friends" was struck out, for fear that it implied the Irish were friends of the British. Although Dinny grumbled furiously, there was nothing he could do until the Emergency was over.

  Finally, miraculously, it was. On Tuesday 8 May 1945, the Allies announced that war with Nazi Germany was officially at an end.

  In Dublin, students celebrated by flying the British, American, Russian, French and Irish flags from the roof of Trinity College. Within an hour a crowd had gathered outside the gates, chanting for the removal of all flags except the Irish Tricolour. When the students refused, stones were thrown, and minutes later the mob stormed the University. College Green was a battle-ground. Eventually police baton-charges broke up the crowd - which then went on the rampage elsewhere, smashing windows at the American legation, the office of the British representative in Ireland, the Wicklow Hotel and Jammet's restaurant, the last because they were patronised by the British.

  "Ah now," Dinny chuckled, "things are getting back to normal fast enough."

  The joke brought no smile from Mrs Maeve Tully. Plumper than when Sean had known her, she was still a fine-looking woman. She lunched with Dinny once a month and was forever asking about "our friend over the water."

  "Will he come back on a visit maybe," she wondered hopefully, "now this dreadful war is over at last."

  But Dinny did not know the answer to that.

  Professionally the ending of the war in Europe made no immediate difference to Sean. He was as busy as ever. The momentum of work kept him going, Seven Days in London went out as usual, describing the scene in the capital. Little had changed in some ways - food was as scarce, rationing as strict, London was still a city of shortages.

  Seven years in London had changed Sean Connors. He was still youthfully good-looking, his hair was as black and his blue eyes as keen - but his manner was that of an older man - the inevitable consequence of his experiences and of having few friends his own age. Even Freddie was forty-two at the end of the war.

  VE Day was hugely emotional, sad and joyful at the same time. The mood lingered on throughout May. People laughed and wept, offered thanks to the Lord, got drunk, made love, kissed strangers and danced at street parties. Sean reported what he saw and participated to some extent. Yet he made no new friends. He continued to live alone and showed no interest in furthering relationships with any of the girls he met at parties.

  He often thought of Margaret. She wrote every month, breathless letters signed "Your loving sister-in-law". When he pointed out that she wasn't, she answered, "I would have been. Anyway, that's how I think of myself when it comes to you." Her last letter was from San Francisco, where she was staying with friends. She was pining for Freddie, who was now talking of staying in Germany to cover the trials of the Nazi war criminals. "If he does," Margaret wrote to Sean, "I shall try to get back to London and wait for him there."

  Margaret's was not the only mail from America. So many listeners to CBS wrote that Sean felt he knew America quite well. And Ambassador Kennedy wrote from time to time. People still called him "Ambassador" even though it was years since he had been replaced in London. Poor Joe had suffered a terrible war. Almost all of his fears had been realised. Joe Jnr had been killed in action. Kick had married Billy Cavendish, who had been killed in the Allied push across Belgium. Jack had been seriously wounded. Yet, although Joe's letters contained much sadness, there was always the invitation too ... "Don't forget, when you finally get over to our wonderful country, come and see us ..."

  Everyone was urging Sean to go to America. Freddie was quite determined. "Let me cover these War Crimes Trials and I'll have finished in Europe. The Japs can't last much longer. Soon it will be glorious peace ... then, Sean old buddy, we are going home."

  Home? Was home no longer Ireland? Sean supposed not. After all, why go back? There was nothing there but old scores to settle, and Dev had settled most of those for him. The IRA had been crushed. Matt Riordan was rotting in prison.

  Matt Riordan was not rotting in prison, even though he was still on the Curragh. The rumours had proved true. Hundreds of men were released at the end of the Emergency. There was even talk that long-term prisoners might be paroled on the promise of good behaviour. Not that Matt was waiting for that.

  For two months he had watched the coming and going on the Curragh - more activity in eight weeks than in the preceding five years. Speculation turned into fact. As internees were released, space became available in Mountjoy and Portlaoise for the long-term prisoners. Men were being transferred back, at the rate of about forty a week. The camp on the Curragh was to be closed.

  Clancy Ryan had been released on 1 June, and Costello a week later. Blayney and McNeela went out together, on 4 July, and seven days after that Matt had received a letter. It read "... when I got home the family were all well. Best wishes, Rory."

  The "family" were the oilskin-wrapped Lee Enfields which Rory McNeela and Blayney had buried the day before Dev's detectives had arrested them in 1940. The weapons had survived in good condition and were ready for use.

  Matt permitted himself a grin of satisfaction and settled down to wait.

  Clancy Ryan took longer to write, but then Clancy had a lot more to do. His letter, when it came, was from London, not that Clancy had signed it.

  "I thought you should know that your cousin died yesterday. He is to be buried in Lymington. He often spoke of you and has left you two hundred pounds in his will. All arrangements have been made. Love, Aunt Clare."

  When Matt collected his opened letter, the screw sneered, "Bit of luck today Riordan, but it will be years before you get your hands on that money."

  Matt read the letter in the hut. Interpreting was easy. Clancy had rented them a safe house in England, at a place called Lymington, wherever that was ... all Matt knew was that it must be near the coast because Clancy's cousin had agreed to take them over in his boat for two hundred pounds. And "all arrangements have been made" meant that Clancy and Costello had already identified which bank would be knocked over to provide the necessary funds.

  For the first time in five years, the sun shone down on the Curragh.

  Matt's biggest fear was that he might be separated from the rest of his men still in the camp - Flynn, Bowyer and Casey - or that they might be moved from the camp on different days. They tried to guard against both eventualities by
becoming inmates of the same hut, Hut 67. So far the authorities had closed down a hut at a time, moving the prisoners out in separate convoys, using two cars and a closed van. Ten prisoners went out in the van, escorted by the cars. After delivering men to Mountjoy or Portlaoise, the convoy collected the next ten men, and returned twice more to disperse all forty men in the hut. The procedure settled into a routine which Matt studied as if his life depended on it as in fact it did.

  Escape from the Curragh had proved impossible, and neither Mountjoy or Portlaoise would be easy. Matt's best chance, perhaps his only chance, would come during the journey, and on 1 September he knew when that would be.

  Costello's contacts in the motor-pool at Mountjoy had proved cooperative. He sent a brief note to Jack Flynn - "Did you hear Eileen is getting married this month, on the 14th at Clondalkin. She's the second cousin married this year. I know you'll wish her luck."

  Hut 67 was to be moved on 14 September.

  The Matt Riordan faction was to arrange to be in the second convoy.

  The ambush would take place at Clondalkin.

  Nobody was more relieved to see the end of the war than Mark Averdale, even if he was beginning to think it had been fought for all the wrong reasons. He blamed the new Labour Government. Every day some Cabinet Minister was on his feet talking about the egalitarian society. The very expression made Mark fume. What utter rubbish. Men were not equal. They had different talents, conflicting ambitions, unequal resources ... God Almighty, did nine generations of Averdales fight and die just to be counted as ordinary men? Rank has its privileges, as Mark pointed out. But London was hopeless. Bureaucrats were all over the place like little tin gods ... all babbling about permits and new regulations. The place had turned communist!