An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  All that perfect summer young men who had been for years in hiding drove about the country in commandeered cars, drinking, dancing, brandishing their guns. In the evening the local Volunteers, their numbers vastly increased by careful young men who were now beginning to think that after all there might be something in this for them, drilled openly and learned how to use rifles and machine guns.

  And then, in the depth of winter, came the Treaty with England, which granted us everything we had ever sought except an independent republican government and control of the loyalist province of Ulster. The withholding of these precipitated a Civil War, which, in the light of what we know now, might have been anticipated by anyone with sense, for it was merely an extension into the fourth dimension of the improvisation that had begun after the crushing of the insurrection in 1916. The Nationalist movement had split up into the Free State Party, who accepted the treaty with England, and the Republicans who opposed it by force of arms, as the Irgun was to do much later in Israel. Ireland had improvised a government, and clearly no government that claimed even a fraction less than the imaginary government had claimed could attract the loyalty of young men and women with imagination. They were like a theatre audience that, having learned to dispense with fortuitous properties, lighting and scenery and begun to appreciate theatre in the raw, were being asked to content themselves with cardboard and canvas. Where there is nothing, there is reality.

  But meanwhile the improvisation had cracked: the English could have cracked it much sooner merely by yielding a little to it. When, after election results had shown that a majority of the people wanted the compromise – and when would they not have accepted a compromise? – our side continued to maintain that the only real government was the imaginary one, or the few shadowy figures that remained of it, we were acting on the unimpeachable logic of the imagination, that only what exists in the mind is real. What we ignored was that a whole section of the improvisation had cut itself adrift and become a new and more menacing reality. The explosion of the dialectic, the sudden violent emergence of thesis and antithesis from the old synthesis, had occurred under our very noses and we could not see it or control it. Rory O’Connor and Melowes in seizing the Four Courts were merely echoing Patrick Pearse and the seizure of the Post Office, and Michael Collins, who could so easily have starved them out with a few pickets, imitated the English pattern by blasting the Four Courts with borrowed artillery. And what neither group saw was that every word we said, every act we committed, was a destruction of the improvisation and what we were bringing about was a new Establishment of Church and State in which imagination would play no part, and young men and women would emigrate to the ends of the earth, not because the country was poor, but because it was mediocre.

  To say that I took the wrong side would promote me to a degree of intelligence I had not reached. I took the Republican side because it was Corkery’s. Breen was going round in a fury, saying we were all ‘bleddy eejits’, as though we were no better than Catholic priests or German musicians, and O’Faolain shared his views. I still saw life through a veil of literature – the only sort of detachment available to me – though the passion for poetry was merging into a passion for the nineteenth-century novel, and I was tending to see the Bad Girl of the neighbourhood not as ‘one more unfortunate’ but as Madame Bovary or Nastasya Filipovna, and the Western Road – the evening promenade of clerks and shopgirls – as the Nevsky Prospekt.

  In such a set-up it was only natural that Hendrick and I should be installed as censors of the local newspaper and, as we had no real news, compelled to fill it with bad patriotic verse by our superiors, who had a passion for writing about the woes of dear old Ireland. It was a great triumph when O’Faolain walked in one night and gave us a good poem, for it seemed as if the right people were coming round. It was also only natural that I, on the basis of an intimate acquaintance with Tolstoy’s Sebastopol, should be cast for the part of war correspondent. It was a shock for us both when one day one of the Dublin publicity people walked into the office and took an agency message we were printing, describing a raid on the house of Mrs Pearse, and re-wrote it under our eyes as: ‘Great indignation has been expressed in Dublin at the raiding of the house of Mrs Pearse, the widowed mother of the martyred Irish leader, P. H. Pearse.’ It was clear to us that in some ways the Dublin group were much cleverer than we.

  This was how we came to meet Erskine Childers, one of the great romantic figures of the period – a distinguished British officer with Irish family connexions who had written a remarkably prophetic thriller that anticipated the First World War and, after it ended, returned to Ireland to serve the Irish cause. Our first glimpse of him was disappointing. He came down the stairs of the Victoria Hotel, limping and frowning; a small, slight, grey-haired man in tweeds with a tweed cap pulled over his eyes, wearing a light mackintosh stuffed with papers and carrying another coat over his arm. Apart from his accent, which would have identified him anywhere, there was something peculiarly English about him; something that nowadays reminds me of some old parson or public-school teacher I have known, conscientious to a fault and overburdened with minor cares. His thin, grey face, shrunk almost to its mould of bone, had a coldness as though life had contracted behind it to its narrowest span; the brows were puckered in a triangle of obsessive thought like pain, and the eyes were clear, pale and tragic. ‘All sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’, Corkery quoted after he met him. Later, Childers’s friend, George Russell, asked me if I thought he was taking drugs. I was certain he wasn’t, but I knew what Russell meant, for I have seen a look exactly like that on the faces of drug addicts.

  We went down Patrick Street towards our headquarters on the Grand Parade, and halfway there Childers paused and frowned. He had been instructed to register under a false name at the hotel, but had he remembered to do so or given his own name by mistake? I returned to the hotel to check and, sure enough, he had registered as Mr Smith – Mr John Smith, I feel sure. Later, in our headquarters, we showed him the local political paper that O’Faolain was producing at his own expense, and he passed indifferently over my poem and Hendrick’s sketch, and lit with what seemed an inspired lack of taste on O’Faolain’s article, ‘Khaki or Green?’ which, for him, put the whole political situation into a slogan. It was a trick I was to notice in him again and again, and it left me disillusioned. This was a sort of mind I had never met before.

  A day or two later Hendrick and I, coming back to work, noticed him drifting aimlessly along King Street, his hands deep in the pockets of his mackintosh. It amused us to watch the way he stopped and started again. Once he stopped to stare in a shop-window that, when we reached it, turned out to be full of women’s underclothes. He had a sort of doddering, drooping absent-mindedness that at times resembled that of a person in a comedy. We had been following him for a few minutes when we noticed that someone else was doing the same. This was a shabbily dressed man who seemed to have little experience of following anybody. When Childers stopped and looked in a shop-window he did so too. When Childers went on he went on, following step by step.

  Knowing Cork as we did, we had no difficulty in getting ahead of them both, and as Childers passed the laneway into the English Market, we pulled him in, told him what was happening, and asked for his gun. He was very alarmed at our manner, but with old-fashioned politeness he turned aside, unbuttoned one mackintosh, then another, then a jacket and finally a waistcoat. Just over his heart and fixed to his braces by a safety pin was a tiny delicately made gun such as a middle-aged lady of timid disposition might carry in her handbag.

  We waited to let the shadow pick him up again, and then we picked up the shadow and took him up another lane off the South Mall. As a spy he was not much good, but as interrogators we were worse, and we let him go when we had taken his name and address and given him a talking-to. Besides, we didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t until weeks later we found out that Childers – ‘the damned Englishman’, as Griffith had
called him – was the one man the Provisional Government was bent on killing.

  When we returned the toy gun to Childers he looked happy for the first time since we had met him. He had not worried himself about being shadowed but was concerned for the loss of his gun and drove the other people in the office distracted inquiring whether Hendrick and I were responsible enough to be entrusted with it. He pinned it back on his braces as if it was a flower he was pinning to his buttonhole and told us in the dry tone that Englishmen reserve for intimate revelations that it was a present from a friend. Someone told me later that the friend was Michael Collins, the enemy Commander-in-Chief. True or not, that was certainly in character.

  I accompanied him soon after to General Headquarters in Fermoy. It was a bright summer morning, and I still remember how I first saw the mountains over Mitchelstown in a frame of wayside trees and felt that at last I was going to see something of Ireland. We stood in the barrack square at Fermoy and saw the generals emerge from a staff meeting, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes with bandoleers and belts. One carried a Lewis gun over his shoulder – a general cannot be too careful. Afterwards we had lunch in the Officers’ Mess. Liam Lynch presided in uniform, looking like the superior of an enclosed order in disguise. The meal was a strange mixture of awkwardness and heartiness such as went on in officers’ messes on the enemy side when local tradesmen and clerks sat down to dinner in quarters they had once approached by the servants’ entrance. That night Childers fixed a bedside lamp for himself so that it would not interfere with the pair of us who shared his room, and when I woke during the night he was still reading and trying to smother a persistent cough so as not to wake us. He was reading Twenty Years After. I was reading The Idiot and felt sorry that he did not read more improving books. Though I had cast myself for the part of Tolstoy at Sebastopol, I was going through a phase that favoured Dostoevsky and Whitman.

  Next night I found myself in Ashill Towers near Kilmallock, a pseudo-Gothic castle that we had taken over as headquarters for our front line. If only I had realized it, it was here that the genius of improvisation had taken complete charge. In Buttevant and Fermoy we had real military barracks, complete with officers’ messes; we had an armoured car – a most improbable-looking vehicle, like the plywood tank that captured a Chinese town where a friend was living, flying a large streamer that read ‘Particularly Fierce Tank’. We even had a Big Gun that had been made by a Dubliner who had brought it with him to Buttevant along with the nine shells he had made for it and the tenth that was still in process of construction. But the front line was our pride and joy. We had improvised almost everything else but never a front line. The enemy were reported to be on the point of attacking it, and in the library the local officers were hard at work over their maps deciding which bridges to blow up in the track of their advance.

  In the long Gothic hall there were fifty or sixty men at either side of the long trestle tables in the candle-light, their rifles slung over their shoulders. The hall seemed to tremble with the flickering of the candles, and tusked and antlered heads peered down from the half-darkness as though even they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Suddenly a young man sprang on a table with a rifle in his hand and sang Canon Sheehan’s romantic version of the old outlaw song of Sean O’Dwyer of the Valley. He had a fine untrained Irish tenor, with the vibrant, almost exasperating emotional quality of the pure head voice.

  After Aughrim’s great disaster,

  When the foe in sooth was master,

  It was you who first plunged in and swam

  The Shannon’s boiling flood….

  In the early morning, with the news of enemy movements all along the front, I was sent with a char-à-banc to bring reinforcements from Croom. That, too, thrilled me, because I knew that Croom was an old fortress of the O’Donovans from which we had been expelled in the twelfth century by Donal O’Brien. There was a red glow in the sky as I went from house to house in the little town, hammering on the doors with the butt of a carbine which somebody had given me to keep me happy. When I had brought back the reinforcements I was sent to Divisional Headquarters in Buttevant with despatches for the Divisional Commander Liam Deasy, but he disappointed all my expectations by ignoring the despatches, telling me I looked very tired, and putting me to bed in his own room. He was the kindest man I’d met in my short military experience, and to be put to bed by the General was as much as any young Cherubino could ask, but I wasn’t satisfied. It struck me that the General wasn’t taking the despatches seriously enough, and after a couple of sleepless hours, I went out into the barrack square to look for him. I wasn’t the only one who was doing it. There was a column of men lined up there – the angriest-looking men I’d ever seen – and their officers asked me where General Deasy was. I didn’t know, I said; I was just looking for him myself. ‘Well, when you find him, tell him we’re the Limerick column,’ the officer said. ‘We’re after fighting our way down from Patrickswell, and when we got here the Corkmen had meat for their breakfast and we had none. Tell him if the Limerick men don’t get meat there’ll be mutiny.’

  I found Deasy on his way from Mass and he took the news of the possible mutiny as calmly as he’d taken the news of the expected assault on the front line. He gave me despatches for Kilmallock, and warned me urgently to check with the officer in charge of Charleville to make sure there were no enemy troops between me and the front. I took this as a rather fussy precaution dictated by the importance of the despatches, but afterwards I wondered if the General had quite as much faith in our front line as everyone else seemed to have.

  It was a sunny summer morning, and on my way I picked up a little hunchback wearing a Red Cross armlet who was making his way to the front on foot, apparently on the off-chance that there might be scope there for an enterprising one-man medical service. At the time that struck me as the most natural thing in the world, whereas nowadays I merely wonder what revelation had been given that little hunchback in whatever back lane he came from to send him trudging off by himself on the roads of Ireland, looking for a battlefield where he might come in useful.

  At Charleville I checked with the local commandant. He was still in bed but he assured me that there wasn’t an enemy soldier within miles. What he failed to remember was that it was Sunday, and on Sunday the whole Irish race is unanimously moved to go to Mass, so that at that very moment our whole nine-mile front, pickets, machine-gun posts, fortresses and all, had simply melted away, and there wasn’t as much as a fallen tree between me and the enemy. In itself that mightn’t have been too bad because it might also be assumed that there wouldn’t be any enemy pickets either; but a considerable number of the enemy facing us were from the neighbourhood of Charleville, and after his longing for Mass, an Irishman’s strongest characteristic is his longing for home and Mother, and anyone who knew his Ireland would have guessed that on that fine summer morning our whole front was being pierced in a dozen places by nostalgic enemy soldiers, alone or in force, all pining to embrace their mothers and discover if the cow had calved.

  Just before the real trouble began I saw the people coming from Mass in a small wayside church. They looked curiously at the car, and I thought how peaceful it all was, the flat, green country and the tall sunshot hedges and the people coming from Mass in their Sunday clothes. And then men in half-uniform emerged from the hedges, levelling their rifles at us and signalling us on. I wasn’t worried; I knew they must be our own men, but my driver hissed ‘Eat them!’, obviously referring to the despatches, and I guessed I must be wrong. He had probably seen despatches eaten in the movies, because even a horse couldn’t have got down Deasy’s despatches in the minute or two that remained to me, so I tore them up and scattered them. In the high wind they blew across the field beyond retrieving. Then we reached a road block manned by an officer and half a dozen men and were stopped. I had left my carbine in Ashill Towers and had nothing but my camera and The Idiot. The camera was taken though the book was returned. The offic
er was stupid, truculent and argumentative, and my temper was in a shocking state. It had just dawned on me that on my first day in action I had allowed myself to be made prisoner, that a brilliant career as war correspondent had been closed to me, and that the front line might sway to and fro for years in great battles like those of the First World War but that someone else would be its Tolstoy. When he said something nasty I called him and his men a gang of traitors. It was typical of things at the time that I could say it and get away with it. Six months later, it would have been very different. Just then everyone had a slightly bewildered air as though he were wondering how on earth such things could happen to him. After all, it is not every day that the dialectic blows up in your face and you, who have always regarded yourself as the victim, wake up to find yourself a tyrant.

  The enemy headquarters was in a farmhouse a few hundred yards down a by-road that ran close to the railway, and as I was the bearer of the despatches and obviously a ring-leader of some sort, I was packed off with a soldier at either side and a third man with a drawn revolver behind. He was still smarting under my abuse and he fired at my heel. The little soldier on my left dropped his rifle, threw up his hands, and fell. When I knelt beside him he was unconscious, and the man with the revolver went into hysterics, rushed to the other side of the road, and clutched his head and wept. The third soldier went to console him, so, as it was obvious that no one else would do anything practical for the unconscious man, I opened his tunic to look for a wound. What I would do with it if I found it was more than I had thought of, but at least I was better qualified as a hospital orderly than my one-man medical service, for he only shouted into the prostrate man’s ear what he thought was an Act of Contrition but was really the Creed. I had my hand on the soldier’s heart when he opened his eyes and said: ‘—ye all!’ It was simple and final. Then he rose with great dignity, dusted himself, buttoned his tunic, shouldered his rifle and resumed his march. Like myself he wasn’t much of a soldier, but he had savoir faire.