I went to bed myself in a blind rage. Apparently the only proof one had of being alive was one’s readiness to die as soon as possible: dead was the great thing to be, and there was nothing to be said in favour of living except the innumerable possibilities it presented of dying in style. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live, to read, to hear music, and to bring my mother to all the places that neither of us had ever seen, and I felt these things were more important than any martyrdom. After that, whenever I saw a quotation from Shelley or one of his followers in an autograph album, I usually inserted a line or two of Goethe as near as possible to it. My favourite was: ‘One must be either the hammer or the anvil.’
And in spite of all the sentimental high-mindedness, I felt it went side by side with an extraordinary inhumanity. Or maybe angularity is the better word. It was really the lack of humour that seems to accompany every imaginative improvisation, and in other ways I must have been as humourless as everybody else.
The first incident that revealed to me what the situation was really like was funny enough. A man, whose name was, I think, Frank Murphy, had had a disagreement with his hut-leader about the amount of fatigues he had to do, so he refused to do any more. There was nothing unusual about this, of course. In an atmosphere where there was no such thing as privacy and people were always getting on one another’s nerves it was inevitable, and the sensible thing would have been to transfer Murphy to another hut. But this was against our principles. We had a complete military organization that duplicated and superseded that of our gaolers, and any slight on this was a slight on the whole fiction it was based on. Murphy was summoned before a court martial of three senior officers, found guilty and sentenced to more fatigues. Being a man of great character, he refused to do these as well. This might have seemed a complete stalemate, but not to imaginative men. The camp command took over from the enemy a small time-keeper’s hut with barred windows to use as a prison, and two prisoners, wearing tricolour armlets to show that they really were policemen and not prisoners like the rest of us, arrested Murphy and locked him up. That night Walsh and I, who both liked Murphy, visited him in his prison and talked to him through the bars of his window, while I looked round me at the tall sentry posts and beneath them the camp command taking its regular evening walk as prisoners of the men in the sentry posts, while their prisoner stared at them through the bars of his window and talked bitterly of justice and injustice. I felt the imaginative improvisation could not go farther than that, but it did. Murphy still had a shot in his locker, for he went on hunger strike, not against our gaolers but his own and – unlike them when they went on hunger strike soon after – he meant it.
This was too much even for men who affected to believe that the Irish Republic was still in existence and would remain so, no matter what its citizens might think, so a mass meeting was held in the dining hall, and the various officers addressed us on the wickedness of Murphy’s defiance of majority rule. From people who were in prison for refusing to recognize majority rule and who had even been excommunicated for it, this was pretty thick. When it was proposed to release Murphy and boycott him, and all those in favour were asked to raise their hands, nine hundred-odd hands were raised. When those against were called on, one hand went up, and that was mine. Later in life I realized that it was probably the first time I had ever taken an unpopular stand without allies.
19
All the same, that summer was exceedingly happy. When the weather was fine, I held my classes on the grass outside some hut. In fact, since Father had gone to the War in 1914 I had never been so well off. I was still only nineteen; thanks to the American plumbing, I lived a healthier life than I could have lived at home; I had regular and pleasant work to do – I was now teaching German as well as Advanced Irish – and I knew I was doing it well. For me, who had lived all my life by faith, it was an exhilarating experience to know that I was doing something well by objective standards. Above all, I had friends I liked and admired. Apart from Walsh, there was Cathal Buckley, the youngest of us, who had a fat, pale, schoolboy face and a quiet clerical manner, and Ned Moriarty from Tralee, a British ex-soldier, who was tall, thin and Spanish-looking and whose hands were more expressive than other people’s faces. Apart from these, my immediate friends, there were others from whom I learned a lot like Gallagher, Cogley, Sean T. O’Kelly (later President), who lent me Anatole France in French, and Sean MacEntee (later Minister for Finance), who gave me the Heine I had coveted so long and proved that Corkery was right and that Heine was the proper poet for a man in prison.
But there was no lack of interesting people. There was the quartermaster, for instance. He was a North Corkman, small and thin, with a thin, desperate face, burning blue eyes, and a tiny moustache which he tugged as though the tugging provided all the energy he needed. He needed plenty, because he seemed to go by clockwork, swinging his arms wider than anyone else, and he had a capacity for swearing and bad language that beat anything I ever heard. All the North Corkmen swore well, but he swore artistically, so that you immediately forgot whatever he was swearing about and merely admired the skill with which he did it. And after he had cursed you through every byway of his fancy, he would grab you by the collar and mutter: ‘That suit is in rags! Bloody fellow that can’t even look after himself! Come over to the store till I make you look decent!’ I think he had a sneaking regard for me too, for he once told me I might become a great man myself if only I imitated a certain politician in the camp who practised oratory before the mirror every day. ‘And I once heard him give a lecture on Robert Emmett before a thousand people and there wasn’t one that wasn’t sobbing. That’s what you should do!’
In fact, it was the nearest thing I could have found to life on a college campus, the only one I was really fitted for, and I should have been perfectly happy except that I was still doing it at my mother’s expense. It was all very well to be teaching German and Irish, but I still had no clothes and no boots except what I got from the quartermaster’s store, and the overcoat I used as an extra blanket was an old belted blue coat with a fur collar that somebody who was throwing it away gave to Mother. It looked absurd on me, but it was the only warm thing I had. I knew what those weekly parcels from her cost – the cake, the tin of cocoa, the tin of condensed milk and the box of cigarettes – and I felt sure that she was going out to daily work to earn them for me. That was true. One day one of the soldiers, who had served with Father in the old Munster Fusiliers, got himself transferred to the garbage collection and brought me a letter from her. She had got work in the house of a plumber on Summerhill who was supposed to have ‘influence’ and would try to get me released. In an emotional fit I replied that when I got out I would not be a burden to her for long, and she replied in a sentence that I knew did not apply particularly to me and was merely part of her attitude to life – ‘If there were no wild boys there would be no great men.’
But towards the end of the year things began to go to hell. Fighting outside had definitely ended; De Valera had issued a ceasefire order but had refused either to surrender or negotiate (the Government of the Irish Republic, being the only lawful one, could not possibly negotiate with impostors), and we were left to play football and study Irish behind barbed wire. The Free State Government was incapable of letting the prisoners go as a generous gesture. But all the same, people were being released, in ones and twos and on no basis that anybody could understand, so that it became harder to concentrate and plan. Classwork had suddenly become very difficult, and the certificates I signed for successful students had an air of finality about them.
Then one day a disciple of Gallagher’s called Joe Kennedy and myself heard that a group of prisoners who had made themselves objectionable had been evicted from their room in the Limerick hut. We were both studious and suffered greatly from the noise in the bigger huts. The Limerick men, when we went to interview them, turned out to be a splendid crowd, and they urged us to come in with them. We applied and got the room.
> Only after we had done so did we realize that we had committed the unforgivable sin. If we had not applied, no one else would have done it, and in a couple of days the original occupants would have crept quietly back. That is how things happen in Ireland. We were in the middle of a land war, and we were grabbers too proud to withdraw. I coveted that room almost to the point of insanity. I wanted a place to myself where I could go and read. I had written an essay on Turgenev which I had submitted to a national competition, and for some reason now known only to God, I was translating Lorna Doone into Irish. I had never seen the book before, and have never looked at it since, so I cannot even guess what attraction it had for me.
Walsh helped us to carry our beds and mattresses into the new hut under a fire of taunts and threats from the dispossessed and their friends, and Kennedy, a tall, handsome man, with a long, bony shaven skull and a squint, turned and denounced them in a cavernous voice that made me think of Savonarola. That should have been sufficient warning to me, because I am sure that Savonarola and I would never have got on under the one roof. The Limerick men dropped in to make us feel at home and they and I became fast friends. They were a curious lot, quite different from any other county group I had met in the camp, independent and apparently indifferent to what anybody thought of them. This was curious, for Limerick had always been a hot-bed of fanaticism, the only place in Ireland to tolerate anti-Semitic riots. I can only suppose that after the public opinion of Limerick, any other seemed a joke.
The arrangement worked excellently as far as they and I were concerned. They were the only group who sang in harmony, and I had a passion for part-singing though I didn’t know enough about music to join in it. Every night we met in their big room and brewed our tea and cocoa, and I got them to sing, and they dragged me into arguments. Here again, they were different from all the other groups, for though they shouted and gibed and laid down the law, they didn’t seem to resent my heresies in the least. But Kennedy did. He was chock-full of mystical nationalism which I found much more exasperating than mystical religion, though I often felt they were the same thing: the only difference was that along with an invisible God who was the fourth wall of our earthly stage the mystics wanted an invisible Ireland as well. Living in the presence of God was one thing; living in the presence of Ireland was more than I could tolerate, Kennedy began to sound more and more like Savonarola, and soon our cosy, quiet little room no longer attracted me. I know now that the fault was mine, because I was young and desperately trying to think things out for myself for the first time. Soon we were barely talking, and he made a public profession of faith by pinning over his bed a manuscript poem of Gallagher’s with the stock reference to martyrdom – ‘Death’s iron discipline’, if my memory of it is right. With youthful contentiousness I wrote over my own bed my favourite lines from Faust – Grau, teurer Freund… (‘Grey, my dear friend, is all your theory and green the golden tree of life’). The word ‘Life’ seemed to affect Kennedy as the word ‘Death’ affected me, and he accused me of ‘beastly, degrading cynicism’ and took off his coat to fight me. After that we didn’t speak again till the tragi-comedy ended in the national hunger strike, and he took up his bed and returned to a hut where he could endure ‘Death’s iron discipline’ among loyal comrades. Fortunately, he thought better of it and lived to be a distinguished parliamentarian of whom I could say complacently: ‘Yes, he and I were in gaol together,’ which is rather like the English ‘He and I were in Eton together’ but considerably more classy.
At the same time an incident occurred that probably made me more tolerant than I might otherwise have been. The Free State authorities gave parole as the Catholic Church gave the sacraments – in return for a signed declaration that one would behave oneself for the future, and opinion in the camp was dead against this, though in fact, there was no fighting and nothing was to be lost by signing. The mother of one of the Kerry boys in the hut where I visited Moriarty was ill, and the neighbours had written begging him to come home and see her before she died. His mother was a widow, and there was a large family to be looked after. Finally there came a wire that said: ‘Mother dying come at once,’ but he still refused to sign, and his decision was regarded as a proper one. It caught me in my most vulnerable spot. I knew if Mother were dying and that this were my only opportunity of seeing her, I would eat the damn declaration if necessary. I kept on asking everybody I met: ‘Would you do it?’ and found very few prepared to say they wouldn’t sign. I appealed to a friend in the camp command to get an order issued that the boy should sign, so as to clear him among his friends, but, like transferring Murphy from one hut to another, this was contrary to principle. I said bitterly that it was a great pity God hadn’t made mothers with the durability of principles.
The mother, being of softer material, died, and her younger children, left homeless, were taken in by the neighbours. Now, it was not the possible death of my own mother that I was thinking of so much as that other day when she and her little sister were thrown on to the roadside by bailiffs. I cursed the inhumanity of the two factions with their forms and scruples. At the same time the boy’s companions apparently began to realize that his refusal to sign the form and their encouragement was not altogether the grandiose gesture they had thought it, because they concealed from him what had happened. One day as he was wandering down beside his hut and the windows were open, he heard his name mentioned and stopped to listen. He waited until the conversation ended and then, without hesitation, walked straight across the compound towards the barbed wire. A sentry in one of the tall watch-towers had his rifle raised to fire when a military policeman ran up, shouting at him. The policeman put his arm about the boy and brought him back to his hut. When the policeman had gone the boy said: ‘They wouldn’t even shoot me,’ and began to drop into silence and melancholia; and still, no one had sense enough to make him sign the declaration and go home before it was too late. No wonder I hadn’t much patience with my room-mate.
And then the whole business turned sinister. It was announced that all prisoners in the country would take a pledge not to eat until they died or were released. I didn’t know whether the morality or the expediency of this scheme was the worse. We professed to be prisoners of war, but the government to which we gave allegiance would accept no responsibility for us, either by surrendering or coming to terms with the enemy. The idea that thousands of men would keep such a pledge to the point at which mass deaths would threaten the existence of the Free State Government seemed to me absurd. Mass martyrdom was only another example of the Shelleyan fantasy, though there were plenty on our side to whom it wasn’t even a fantasy but a vulgar political expedient to break the stalemate caused by De Valera’s Ceasefire Order.
Walsh, Buckley and myself let it be understood that we would not take part in the hunger strike. We did not like doing this, because we knew that our position among a thousand men who were hunger-striking for their freedom would be much worse than that of the average blackleg in a plant of the same size. Though we had the blessing of Moriarty and the Limerick men who were joining the strike, we knew it would not be much use to us if things got really dirty. A meeting of the men would have to be held to confirm the decision, and we announced that we should all speak at this, purely to put our purpose on record. This apparently caused some alarm, for at the last moment we were told that the resolution initiating the strike would not be put before a general meeting but before meetings of county groups, so that between us we would only be able to address the Cork, Clare and Kildare men, leaving ninety per cent of the prisoners unaware that there were objections to the strike. Then Buckley was served with an order exempting him from the strike because of his youth. I am sure it was done merely with the purpose of protecting him if we were attacked, but he thought otherwise, and replied that he did not propose to avail himself of it and would not join the strike for conscientious reasons. I was impressed by his presence of mind. If it had been I, I should not have seen the consequences of the order
until it was too late to clarify my position to anybody.
To make things worse, I was ill with bronchitis, and our own doctor – one of the prisoners – had advised me to go to the hospital. Before I went I attended the Cork meeting and made my speech. I was listened to in silence, and the resolution was passed with only my vote against it. The other two had the same experience. They took me to the main gate on my way to the hospital at the other side of the wire. I was sorry now that I had agreed to go, because I felt I was deserting them.
That night in the hospital a military policeman led in a tall country boy with a vacant expression who had to be undressed and put to bed. Even before the policeman said anything I knew it was the Kerry boy whose mother had died, and that already his mind had begun to give way. I did not sleep much. I would hear a heavy sigh and a stir of clothes and then the Kerryman would slip quietly out of bed and pad across the floor to a window. He climbed on the sill and stood there in his short shirt, his arms outstretched, his face crushed between the bars. He would remain like that for several minutes, and then give another deep sigh and return to his bed. A couple of times when I woke it was to see him there like that, caught in the blaze of the big searchlight, his arms outstretched, and I could not help thinking of the crucifixion.
I knew nothing about mental illness, but I understood that boy’s as though I had been responsible for it myself. I felt that if I had done to my mother what he had innocently done to his, I should be unable to think of anything else and be searching frantically for any dark corner of my mind where I could take refuge from the dreadful gramophone record that went on repeating itself as though it would never stop. For hours next day I sat by his bed, trying to talk to him. I found that with persistence I could get him to follow a simple conversation in a fairly lucid way, but the moment the conversation veered even for an instant towards his home and family he slumped into vacancy again, and each time it was harder to rouse him. Next day they took him away – to a mental hospital, I was told.
An Only Child AND My Father's Son Page 23