I loved everything else about that family – the warmth of the farmer, the cynicism of his wife, the wit and malice of the younger daughter and the grave humour of the elder. Above all, I loved their perfect manners. They worked about three times as hard as anybody I had ever met, and Hendrick and I must have been pests, but they never showed it, and only afterwards when I learned to speak Irish properly did I realize what it must have cost them to listen to me speaking it.
But neither Tolstoy nor phonetics was in Childers’ line at all. He asked petulantly why I went round as a walking arsenal (any fool could have told him I only did it to impress the girl I was in love with) and when his landlady would have her annual bath. He settled down with the printing press we had commandeered and went on with his articles and memoranda, and in his leisure hours sat under the apple tree in the schoolhouse garden and read Deerslayer. As I say, his literary standards were not high. One evening a couple of men burst in with the news that Michael Collins had been killed in an ambush near Bandon. I think they had the evening paper with them. Anyhow, they were rejoicing, and Hendrick and I rejoiced as well, and it was only later I remembered how Childers slunk away to his table silently, lit a cigarette, and wrote a leading article in praise of Collins. At the same time the newspapers continued to appear with bloodier stories of the fights and ambushes Childers himself was supposed to have led, and Hendrick and I only laughed at them. We, who didn’t even know how to redraft and slant an agency message, couldn’t be expected to understand how clever men prepare the way for someone’s execution. Now, when I think of all the leads we got, I can only wonder all over again at our innocence.
At the same time, I fancy that Childers would have been very happy with a column to lead. I never for an instant saw under the weary, abstract superficies of a sick and unhappy man, but I could read, and I knew that Dumas and Fenimore Cooper meant a lot to him. One night when a raid was supposed to take place, Childers got leave to join it – purely as an observer, of course – and worked himself into something that in an Englishman almost constituted a ‘state’. There was a dance at the village hall, and the men stacked their rifles and danced ‘The Walls of Limerick’ and ‘The Waves of Tory’ before leaving for the battle. I couldn’t dance, and the daughter of the house looked as though she might be busy for another hour, so I accompanied him back to the schoolhouse where the car was to pick him up. An American journalist went with us.
‘Doesn’t it remind you of Waterloo?’ the American asked gently, referring to the noise of the dance hall behind us. ‘“There was a sound of revelry by night” – you remember Byron?’ Hendrick and I were not the only ones who worked at improving Childers’ taste. Americans did it too, quite a lot, but it never seemed to have much effect on Childers.
‘And you will remember the article on “Women in the War”, won’t you?’ he asked anxiously. It wasn’t a rebuke, but after all the years it comes back to me as a rebuke, to me rather than the American.
We left Childers at the schoolhouse, and he fell asleep over his trestle table. Nobody bothered to pick him up. After all, he was only a damned Englishman, elderly, sick and absent-minded. Next time he got news of a raid, he took care to be on the spot, and as he unpinned his precious .22 from his braces, he gave Hendrick instructions about what to do with all his papers if he was killed. Next afternoon, Hendrick and I were sitting on the grass in the schoolhouse garden when he stepped out of a car, shrugging his shoulders disconsolately. ‘I’ll never understand this country,’ he muttered. ‘I thought I was going off to a bloody combat, and instead, I found myself in Mick Sullivan’s feather bed in Kilnamartyr.’ The truth is that soldiering as Childers and Robinson understood it was too professional for our lads, who were amateurs to a man. It wasn’t that they were less brave; it was simply that they had other things to attend to. Robinson decided to form a column and came to the schoolhouse one day to ask myself and Hendrick to join it, but once again we were blocked, and that was a great loss to literature, because during its brief existence, the column became a legend. Robinson was supposed to have planned one attack on the village of Inchigeela, in which, disguised as a tinker and carrying a baby, he would drive on a ass-cart to the barrack door, shoot the sentry, and hold the way open for his men. It was reported that before the engagement he addressed his troops, warning them that this would probably be the last time some of them would meet, and put such terror into them that they made at once for the hills, while Robinson, going from door to door, trying to borrow a baby, complained of the lack of patriotism in Irish mothers.
I find that difficult to believe, unless Robinson, with his dotty English sense of humour, was doing it as a joke, but there is certainly some truth in another story, for his column did capture the town of Kenmare, and then enemy reinforcements arrived and his troops took to their heels. Someone told me that the last he saw of Robinson was as he knelt in the middle of the Main Street, firing at the advancing troops and shouting over his shoulder in his English public-school drawl: ‘Come back, you Irish cowards!’ All he would admit to me about the day in Kenmare was that, as a true British cavalry officer, he had made a boatload of men return under fire to pick up the last refugee from the battle. This turned out to be an Austrian Jew, who could barely speak English but, finding himself unexpectedly in the middle of a battle, decided to make off with the silver. I need hardly say that Robinson was delighted with him and that the two became friends.
It was at this time Corkery, deciding that I had seen enough of active service, ordered me home with him. Somebody had told him I was drinking, which was typical of Ireland, where a man can’t have a private life and anyway, quite untrue, because drinking, like lovemaking and fighting, was something I still saw through a heavy veil of literature, and all the money Hendrick and I had was the remains of ten shillings we had borrowed from O’Faolain. Now if he had said I was going to hell with phonetics, I should have understood him at once. It was all no good. Corkery was convinced I was disgracing myself and Ireland, and home I must go. I remembered it later as the one occasion when I didn’t want to go home, when I might almost have said like Faust to the flying moment:‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön!’
Because of blown-up bridges, we had a long and wearisome ride home, getting out to let our car go across muddy fields, and we were finally dumped in a village miles from Cork. It was then I saw the Napoleon who was lost in Corkery, for he went straight to the house of a rich farmer and, keeping his hand in his trouser pocket as though he had a gun, commandeered a pony and trap to take us the rest of the way to town.
After this, there was less fighting and less laughter. I slept away from home whenever I could find a bed, as much to escape Father as the enemy. News from the dear country I had left was bad. A whole edition of Childers’ papers was thrown into a ditch because it had become too dangerous to transport. His printing press went over a mountain slope into a bog-hole and could not be rescued. Finally, he set off with Hendrick to headquarters and, since there was no further use for him, offered to remain and address envelopes. He was told – rather tactlessly, I thought – that he was a much-wanted man, and his presence was a danger to others.
So he and Robinson set out on a fantastic journey across Ireland, sleeping by day and travelling by night. I hope there is some record of it among his papers, for as Robinson told it to me years later in his light, mocking English way it was like a long section from one of the nineteenth-century adventure stories that Childers loved. One night in North Cork, Robinson, who was cycling beside Childers, skidded into a ditch and broke his shoulder bone. Whe he came to his senses he was in a country cottage and a crowd of people were shouting: ‘Take him away! Take him away!’ for by this time the two damned Englishmen had become the most unwelcome guests in Ireland. They found shelter in the home of Liam Lynch and, when Robinson’s shoulder had healed, resumed their night journeys. Tipperary was so crammed with troops searching for them that they had to cross Slievenamon mountain by night, and in th
e darkness they tramped up a dry watercourse where a single slip meant death. Dawn was breaking as they got near the top, and there, in the doorway of a cottage, stood a local gallant armed to the teeth, while on the plain beneath them three columns of infantry converged on the mountain. ‘Ah, don’t be afraid,’ the local hero told them. ‘’Tis me they’re after. I went into three towns, and in every town I left a message to tell them where they’d find me.’
Thinking this cottage unsafe, the two hunted men plunged down through a mountain mist to a second cottage, and there they discovered a second national hero in full uniform lying on a sofa while two pretty girls fed him chocolate creams. They finally reached the house of their cousin, Robert Barton – another British officer – in County Wicklow, and were captured there through the treachery of one of Barton’s servants. They were given adjoining cells, between which some earlier prisoner had dug a tiny hole. They were both passionate chess-players, so they chalked chessboards on the floor, made chessmen out of newspapers, and played until the morning when Childers went out to die before an Irish firing squad. Robinson’s premonitions that afternoon in front of Macroom Castle had been finally justified. The only charge against Childers was the possession of arms – the little toy pistol I had taken from him that day outside the English Market and which he was trying to unpin from his braces when the soldiers grabbed him.
I was in a house on the Wellington Road the morning I read of his execution, and I wrote the date over Whitman’s lines on the death of Lincoln in the copy of Leaves of Grass that I always carried with me at the time – ‘Hushed Be the Camps Today.’ Like everything else I did at the time, it reeked of literature, and yet when I recite the lines to myself today, all the emotion comes back and I know it was not all literature. As I say, I am a collaborationist, and Childers was one of the very few people I have met with whom I had no communication of any sort: if, as I hope, his papers of the time have survived, I know that I must appear in them as a sort of Handy Andy, described completely from outside, for there is nothing in nature more removed from the imaginative boy than the grown man who has cut himself apart from life, seems to move entirely by his own inner light, and to face his doom almost with equanimity. And yet again and again in my own imagination, I have had to go through those last few terrible moments with him almost as though I were there: see the slight figure of the little grey-haired Englishman emerge for the last time into the Irish daylight, apparently cheerful and confident but incapable of grandiose gestures, concerned only lest inadvertently he might do or say something that would distress some poor fool of an Irish boy who was about to level an English rifle at his heart.
18
The period from the end of 1922 to the spring of 1923 was one that I found almost unbearably painful. I still had no money nor any way of earning it. Sometimes I slept in the house of Sean French, who was in prison; sometimes I went off with a friend, whom I shall call Joe Clery, and his friend, and the three of us spent the night in a hay-barn or commandeered beds for ourselves in a big house on Montenotte. Clery and his friend fascinated me. Both were swift, cool and resourceful, and seemed to enjoy the atmosphere of danger as much as I dreaded it. Corkery, with whom I discussed them, suggested that the Russian Revolution had shown that, after a certain stage, control of a revolutionary movement passes from the original dreamers to men who are professional revolutionaries.
I am afraid that Corkery saw historical prototypes as I saw literary ones, and that there was more than that to it. The romantic improvisation was tearing right down the middle, and on both sides the real killers were emerging. One morning Clery told me that we were needed for a ‘job’ that evening. The ‘job’ was to shoot unarmed soldiers courting their girls in deserted laneways, and the girls as well if there was any danger of our being recognized. I lost my head, and said I would put a stop to the ‘job’ in one way if I couldn’t do it in another. Clery felt as I did and agreed that I should consult Corkery, who was my authority for everything. It was hard luck on Corkery, but he accepted this as he accepted every other responsibility, and advised me to see Mary MacSwiney, Terence’s sister and our local representative in Parliament. I went to her house and she received me very coldly. She thought me an indiscreet young man, which, indeed, I was. ‘You seem to have some moral objection to killing women’, she said disapprovingly, and when I admitted that I had, she added complacently; ‘I see no moral objection, though there may be a political one.’ I stayed in her house till a messenger returned from the local commandant to say that the operation had been called off.
It was clear to me that we were all going mad, and yet I could see no way out. The imagination seems to paralyse not only the critical faculty but the ability to act upon the most ordinary instinct of self-preservation. I could be obstinate enough when it came to the killing of unarmed soldiers and girls because this was a basic violation of the imaginative concept of life, whether in the boys’ weeklies or the Irish sagas, but I could not detach myself from the political attitudes that gave rise to it. I was too completely identified with them, and to have abandoned them would have meant abandoning faith in myself.
Any moments of relaxation and sanity that came to me were in the few houses I visited, like the Barrys’ in Windsor Cottages, the O’Learys’ on Gardiner’s Hill or the Frenches’ on the Wellington Road. The French household consisted of his mother and four sisters. Kitty O’Leary, Hendrick’s girl, was a great friend of the family, and when she called, the four sisters mustered about her at the piano and sang all the music-hall songs of the time – ‘Oh, It’s a Windy Night Tonight, Sally, Sally!’ and ‘I Left My Love in Avalon’ while I listened with the emotions of a seminarist at a ribald party. As a reward, at the end of the evening Kitty played a Schubert Fantasia and sang a couple of seventeenth-century bergerettes – Maman, dites-moi and Non, je n’irai plus au bois. At ten precisely, Mrs French, who looked and talked like someone out of a Jane Austen novel, asked what I should like to drink, and the ‘girls’ ranged themselves behind her and laid one finger flat on the top of another to indicate that I must ask for tea. Otherwise they would have to drink hot milk! All these homes were matriarchies. It is an Ireland that is disappearing, an Ireland arranged for the convenience of some particular man, where women – some of whom were more brilliant than any man in the household and risked their lives just as much – worked harder than servant girls and will probably never realize why it is that when I look back on the period, it is of them rather than of their brothers that I think. In those days, when the French girls had drunk their hard-earned cup of tea and gone to bed, and lorries of soldiers tore up the city hills on their sinister errands, I merely read Whitman or hummed:
Je connais trop le danger
Ou l’amour pourrait m’engager.
That was a danger that wouldn’t really engage me for a good many years, and meanwhile I had other dangers to think of. I was captured effortlessly one spring morning by two Free State soldiers. Fortunately for myself I didn’t have a gun. They marched me to their headquarters in the Courthouse.
Imprisonment came as a relief because it took all responsibility out of my hands, and, as active fighting died down and the possibility of being shot in some reprisal execution diminished, it became – what else sums up the period so well? – a real blessing. Not, God knows, that the Women’s Gaol in Sunday’s Well was anything but a nightmare. The first night I spent there after being taken from the Courthouse I was wakened by the officer of the watch going his round. As he flashed his torch about the cell he told us joyously that there had been a raid on the house of Michael Collins’ sister in Blarney Lane and one of the attackers had been captured with a revolver and would be executed. (How was I to know that the irony of circumstances would make me the guest of Michael Collins’ sister in that very house before many years had passed?) I fell asleep again, thinking merely that I was very fortunate to be out of the Courthouse where the soldiers would probably have taken it out on me. Towards dawn I was waken
ed by the tall, bitter-tongued man I knew as ‘Mac’, and I followed him down the corridor. A Free State officer was standing by the door of one cell, and we went in. Under the window in the gas-light that leaked in from the corridor what seemed to be a bundle of rags was trying to raise itself from the floor. I reached out my hand and shuddered because the hand that took mine was like a lump of dough. When I saw the face of the man whose hand I had taken, I felt sick, because that was also like a lump of dough. ‘So that’s how you treat your prisoners?’ Mac snarled at the officer. Mac, like my father, was an ex-British soldier, and had the old-fashioned attitude that you did not strike a defenceless man. The officer, who in private life was probably a milkman, began some muttered rigmarole about the prisoner’s having tried to burn a widow’s home and poured petrol over the sleeping children. ‘Look at that!’ Mac snarled at me, paying no attention to him. ‘Skewered through the ass with bayonets!’ I waited and walked with the boy to the head of the iron stairs where the suicide net had been stretched to catch any poor soul who found life too hard, and I watched him stagger painfully down in the gas-light. There were only a half-dozen of us there, and we stood and watched the dawn break over the city through the high unglazed windows. A few days later the boy was shot. That scene haunted me for years – partly, I suppose, because it was still uncertain whether or not I should be next, a matter that gives one a personal interest in any execution; partly because of the over-developed sense of pity that had made me always take the part of kids younger or weaker than myself; mainly because I was beginning to think that this was all our romanticism came to – a miserable attempt to burn a widow’s house, the rifle butts and bayonets of hysterical soldiers, a poor woman of the lanes kneeling in some city church and appealing to a God who could not listen, and then – a barrack wall with some smug humbug of a priest muttering prayers. (I heard him the following Sunday give a sermon on the dangers of company-keeping.) I had been able to think of the Kilmallock skirmish as though it was something I had read of in a book, but the battered face of that boy was something that wasn’t in any book, and even ten years later, when I was sitting reading in my flat in Dublin, the door would suddenly open and he would walk in and the book would fall from my hands. Certainly, that night changed something for ever in me.
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