The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  At Carney each of the older children has their own desk on which every morning the monitor places a clean chalk and clean slate. The smooth slate is a call to perfection which Agnes finds irresistible. There are no more spelling mistakes. No more sums that look as if they were calculated during a fit of convulsions. But perfection takes patience. Agnes works slowly, and in doubt she freezes, unable to make a mark without being certain it’s the right one. On their second day at the new school the Kavanagh girls were asked if they had a favourite subject, and which of the shared chores they would prefer. Agnes neither contributed nor asked anything. Mrs Keane noticed this. She noticed the child’s clean neat dress and anxious expression, and she didn’t comment or reprimand her in any way. Then one day, without being asked, Agnes stands and from her austere mouth there falls, without pause or error, the poem she’d learned by heart at Puckaun but refused to deliver up to Mrs Griffin.

  Although my mother never mentioned it, the day she chose to come out with Tennyson’s poem was soon after the start of Ireland’s War of Independence. This ‘little war’, as Lloyd George called it, began in 1919 when six IRA men ambushed a party of police at Soloheadbeg, Tipperary. Two of the policemen were shot dead. Soon after, Sinn Fein was suppressed in Tipperary. In open defiance, Nenagh’s Sinn Fein Court sat for the first time in the summer of 1920. Rody Cleary, the Kavanaghs’ neighbour and a prominent Sinn Fein councillor, served as a judge alongside a young priest named Father Fogarty. Before long these courts and the Dáil Éireann – the elected parliament of Ireland – were declared illegal. Martial law was imposed.

  This is the time when the Black and Tans 2. first began to be seen in Puckaun. The irony is that it was to the Black and Tans my mother owed her happier and better education.

  The Black and Tans had – still have – a deservedly repulsive reputation. At the height of the Troubles there were seven thousand of them. Most were Englishmen 3: some were crooks, ex-prisoners, unskilled labourers, men on the run, but most were ex-First World War veterans brutalised by years in the trenches and, as auxiliary RIC, being paid ten shillings a day when they could get nothing at home. They terrified even those they had been recruited to help (the RIC). One of their habits was to drive about the place in open-top lorries firing at random, sometimes into the air, sometimes at poultry, occasionally and sometimes fatally, they fired for no other reason than sport at human beings. These were the men whose sour breath and cruel teasing my mother recalled, the men she feared and hated and whom she’d heard described as ‘scum’ even by the people who took their money.

  In Puckaun, the Black and Tans found themselves perforce rubbing shoulders with Sinn Feinners as much as with the Royal Constabulary, with the Gaelic League as often as with Catholic priests, with ambitious new tenant farmers as much as with covert members of the IRA. My mother recalled that it was Rody Cleary who intervened when the teasing of Kavanagh girls in Kennedys’ had gone far enough. Cleary’s deadly smile and air of authority, the silver watch chain glinting on his chest, daunted before it provoked. With some easy throwaway remarks he led the girls off homeward, and it was only Nancy who ever looked back over her shoulder, regretting the lost sweets.

  My grandmother decided to move her girls to the school at Carney.

  When the winter term begins, the Kavanagh sisters go via the O’Brien house to pick up Annie and give her a lift in the cart. Every morning she’s there at the gate, her mother beside her, her fair skin – which flushes easily – shining with gratitude and the cold-water scrubbing it’s been given. Already in awe of the sisters, Annie can only widen her eyes in wonder when they tell her Mary Rose is courting. She stares even harder at the donkey’s ears which, familiar as she is with donkeys, tell her everything about his state of mind: cheerful – rarely; irritable – often; and sometimes keenly interested in things no human can pick up on: a sound, a scent in the air, a fleeting glimpse of a she-donkey standing amongst stones in a distant field. Then, almost halfway on their journey, they come upon something unexpected. A tree, a huge old ash, has fallen across the lane and blocks their way. Should they turn back and go home? Or tie the donkey to the tree and continue to school on foot? If they go home Nancy – having wised up on such matters – predicts they’ll ‘get an eating’ for having missed their lessons. And Agnes refuses to desert the donkey. Besides, wouldn’t someone take a fancy to him and steal him? ‘Someone would take a fancy to the cart more likely,’ says Cathleen. ‘But,’ says Annie, speaking for the first time, ‘a cart’s no good without a donkey.’

  Afterwards, Agnes reluctantly accepts responsibility for a decision which in her memory – even seventy years later – was arrived at by some kind of shared inspiration denied by the others. They turn the donkey’s head around and set off for school by a different route, one they recall quite clearly from the days before they detoured to pick up Annie. It’s downhill under the trees. Yes, yes, they remember. In a spirit of high adventure they set off, the donkey’s feet pattering and a sun-warmed breeze idling over their faces.

  When they’ve turned left at the crossroads and the sun is at their backs again, even Agnes knows they’re pointing in the right direction. But the road is unfamiliar and becomes more so. It’s straight and treeless and flat. Not a cottage nor a human figure to be seen, only a few cows in the distance and partridge scurrying like mice through the gorse. When this has been going on for much too long Cathleen lets the reins go loose and Annie begins to cry. The donkey slows to a halt and puts his grey muzzle down to the grass that forms a soft spine down the centre of the road.

  A faint sound – a sort of thin whine – takes the girls’ attention. They twist on the seat of the cart to look back. On the horizon there appear, as if rising out of the bog itself, three people on foot, one behind the other. Agnes remembers stories of ‘the hungry grass’ that swallows anyone who dares set foot on it. Within a few moments the children can see the figures are a man and two women. Moments after that they can see it’s an old woman in the company of a middle-aged couple. All are dressed in black, or an approximation of black, dark brown in the case of the man’s coat. And they’re wearing new hats which, to Agnes’s mind, give them an untrustworthy look. The man raises an arm as if to detain them, but the children aren’t going anywhere anyway. Nailed to their seat, they watch apprehensively as the strangers leave the faint track they’ve followed across the bog and step up on to the road.

  Only now does the old woman stop complaining. Close up they look quite ordinary, really, and the women lift weathered faces full of quite ordinary curiosity. The girls all find their voices at the same time. They explain that they were on their way to school in Carney when they got lost. Upon which, without waiting for an invitation, the three climb nimbly aboard. There follows much shifting of broad bums and little bums on the seat, a good deal of muted blasphemy, and a liberal sprinkling of blessings on the girls’ heads. The adults argue like crows over the best route through the web of lanes but soon they’re trawling slowly past familiar fields. When the children drop their passengers on the edge of the village they’ve still not been told their business. But there’s no need. With a nod from the man and a fidget of gloved hands from the women, the strangers join a stream of mourners filing slowly past the priest and into the graveyard: they have come to a funeral.

  The Kavanaghs aren’t the only ones to arrive late at school. In fact, four of the boys don’t turn up at all. When the girls have been at their desks for half an hour a twelve-gun salute from the graveside detonates the quiet air. Mrs Keane’s reaction is muted. Unsurprised. Instructing the children to stay seated, she tells them that a young man is being buried today, a young man who ‘had dreams of fighting for his country’. That’s why there are soldiers, Irish soldiers, by his grave, firing into the air to honour him, to remind the authorities there are more young men like him. One of the boys holds up his hand:

  ‘Was he an IRA man?’ the boy asks in a voice squeaky with excitement.

  There is
a brief silence.

  ‘He was,’ says Mrs Keane in a tone that forbids more questions.

  Then she claps her hands together to indicate it’s work as usual. At the same time she doesn’t entirely succeed in disguising her unease which is underlined by the monitor’s state of agitation. He keeps going to the door and looking out into the road, his eyes shining vacantly with what’s not yet out there for him to see. Eventually, however, he’s rewarded by the sight of a group of men with rifles over their shoulders going along the road to Dwan’s Bar, followed by four grinning, strutting boys: Mrs Keane’s missing pupils. But what makes Agnes start up in a panic is the sight of her brother Tom following along behind. Tom, of course, has no rifle. No black beret. He should be at Clashnevin, working alongside his father on the Crosses’ farm. Instead, he’s here, and his sixteen-year-old face is lit up with an alien thrill.

  Then an argument breaks out amongst a group of male mourners in Dwan’s yard. The girls recognise the bellowing voice of their passenger. Fists are raised and oaths exchanged before an older, heavier man gets his hand on the fellow’s collar and shakes him like a dog. Mrs Keane closes the schoolroom door.

  The priest might have stepped in and put a stop to the altercation but, having blessed the mourners, Father Fogarty didn’t choose to go with them to the pub. This wasn’t because he disapproved of the politics of the man he’d just buried. Not at all. When Father Fogarty stood in the pulpit he spoke in a soft voice but with open republican fervour. His sermons were disliked by Canon O’Meara, but the Canon accepted that, in a man forty years his junior, ‘modern’ opinions were only to be expected. The women of his congregation were great admirers of John Fogarty and, having seen his photograph, I suspect this was as much for his looks and gallantry as for his political conviction. Something about this mild-mannered yet authoritative young man, with his gentle features and dark curls, suggested romance, idealism. Danger.

  Some months earlier, the IRA had attempted to blow up the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in Borrisokane. No lives were lost but bloody mayhem was created and in its aftermath the volunteers, some wounded, scattered away into the surrounding countryside. One of these, Michael Kennedy, was carried to Puckaun where he was left with Father Fogarty. The priest hid the man in the chapel until the roar of police and army vehicles fell silent. Then, under cover of summer darkness, but still at risk of his own life, Father Fogarty drove the wounded man to his own home in Nenagh, seven miles away. (Michael Kennedy later died of his wounds.) Though the two men passed silently along the lanes, anonymous as a dim stack of shadows, the sound of the trap’s wheels, the clip of Father Fogarty’s pony – she had a little swing out to the left with her foreleg, creating a distinctive music with her hooves – were well-known sounds and no one, ally or informer, would have been in any doubt as to who it was. That night there were no informers. ‘Oh we all liked Father Fogarty,’ my mother told me.

  It was because of Father Fogarty that Tom – to his mother’s disgust – became a regular churchgoer again. It was in Puckaun chapel one evening in November that he noticed a smattering of strangers in the congregation, amongst them two young men, one of whom Tom especially envied for his smart haircut. When the offering plate came around, Agnes had dropped her penny coin and it had rolled into the aisle. The young man with the smart hair had picked it up and handed it back to the little girl who bobbed her thank you. When Mass was over Tom heard talk of another IRA ambush. Earlier that afternoon a British intelligence officer, motorcycling back to his barracks in Nenagh, had been ambushed and killed.

  Tom, who’d grown into a nice-looking boy with an easy air about him, had taken to hanging out at Knigh crossroads, even in winter, especially at twilight and after dark. This may have had something to do with a girl, but at this time in his life Tom was no doubt as vulnerable to his heroic impulses as to his sexual ones. On this particular November night, having a great admiration for Rody Cleary, he went down there to the Cross when he shouldn’t have done, that is to say, not only at dead of night but with an idea got from somewhere that something was about to happen, something that would endanger Cleary. Pat knew what his brother was up to and thought him a fool. My grandfather, sitting up by the fire, also knew something was afoot.

  The Graces’ little cottage, already darkened, stood at one corner of the crossroads. The Clearys’ whitewashed farmhouse, some yards further on towards Nenagh, was on the other side, facing the graveyard. A light still showed in one of the farmhouse’s upper windows. As Tom stood shivering in the November dark a distant sound, starting like a pulse inside his ears, swelled steadily into a dull roar as, accompanied by a double beam of light, it came towards him along the road from Nenagh. Tom shrank back into the dark under the trees.

  * * *

  2. In their bicoloured uniforms, they were named after the black and tan dogs of the famous Tipperary hunt, whose purpose – and pleasure – was to chase foxes from their coverts and rip them to pieces.

  3. More recently it’s been calculated that 20 per cent were Irish Catholics..

  2

  Tucked in out of sight of the road, a pair of bicycles were leaning up against the white wall of the Cleary farmhouse. They belonged to two young men who had cycled out from Nenagh to ‘Devotions’ at Puckaun, then on here, hoping to sleep the night at Knigh. They were twenty-four-year-old Thomas O’Brien from Nenagh, and his cousin, John O’Brien, aged twenty-one, an American citizen – it was John’s smart haircut Tom had noticed in the chapel earlier. They came to the Clearys’ because Thomas O’Brien was sweet on a young woman living there named Josie McGrath.

  It is also true that both boys were members of the IRA. They had taken the oath of secrecy but had not yet seen action. However, from the usual pattern of events they knew the military could be expected to exact reprisals for the killing of the British intelligence officer in Nenagh, and the O’Briens were among a number of people who had quietly left town for the safety of the countryside. But the safety of the Cleary house was questionable. Rody, himself a known target for the Crown forces, had already slipped away to spend the night elsewhere.

  Shortly after midnight, watched by Tom from the shadows, a touring car, a Garford car, and a heavy lorry draw up outside the Clearys’ farmhouse. With the metallic drumbeat of hobnails on tarmac, twenty or so men jump down into the road. Inside the house, Mrs Cleary – surprised to find she’d fallen asleep at all – immediately awakes, fearing the worst; the worst being that these men come looking for her husband are Black and Tans. Going to her bedroom window, at first she can make out only that a band of armed men stands at her door, but she quickly recognises them as men of the regular British Army (they were, in fact, men of the North Hants Regiment).

  ‘We liked the army lads,’ Joan remembers her mother-in-law telling her. ‘But not the Black and Tans.’

  With the army lads tonight was a man in civvies whose identity was disguised by a home-made mask. When the two women – Mrs Cleary and Josie McGrath – went down and opened the door, the young officer’s face was expressionless. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said, perfectly at ease. ‘We’re looking for Mr Rody Cleary.’

  He pronounced both names in the English way – ‘Roddy’ and ‘Cleery’. Mrs Cleary told him that her husband was away in Dublin, on business. Rody was in fact sleeping soundly a few fields away at Loughourna. Josie McGrath meanwhile had kept her eyes fixed on the man in civvies. Now she sprang forward and tore the mask off his face. With an exclamation of disgust she recognised him as a local policeman. The man flinched, but he said nothing.

  A quick search of the farmhouse uncovered the O’Briens, in bed asleep. The English officer suggested it was strange that they, not part of the Cleary family, should be here on this of all nights, the night one of his colleagues had been brutally murdered on the Nenagh road (open attacks on British soldiers had at that time been authorised by the IRA HQ, and reprisals, authorised or not, were certainly carried out by the Brits). The O’Briens
protested their innocence, but admitted they had left Nenagh because they were afraid of trouble. They were ordered to dress. They were then hustled out of the house. Mrs Cleary was later to say that, yes, the English soldiers had behaved ‘most courteously’ throughout the raid.

  Tom had understood immediately what was going on. What he didn’t know was that Rody Cleary wasn’t there. When two unknown youngsters, backlit by the hall lamp, tumbled out of the front door, he was for a moment both relieved and confused. Then he recognised them. He watched in impotent horror as the O’Brien cousins – without handcuffs so far as he could tell – were shoved down, side by side, into the well of the lorry. Quickly, silently but for the clip of boots on tarmac, the soldiers dispersed between the three vehicles. Twenty soldiers, two of them with fixed bayonets, accompanied the O’Briens. One of the officers climbed into the cab of the lorry with the driver.

  There was a long pause, an incomprehensible yell, and then the silence was shattered by the simultaneous starting up of three powerful engines. A cold stream of light bathed the bare trees. At the crossroads, the touring car hesitated, then, through an opening fan of its own headlights, swung left and headed off down the Ballyartella road towards the lough. The other vehicles followed. Tom stepped out of hiding.

  It was an exceptionally dark night, with neither moon nor stars. The headlights of the convoy created an eerie corridor. Above the pounding of his own heartbeat, Tom fancied he could hear voices. There was a diminution in the roar of engines and a curious stretching out of the corridor of light, as if a distance was opening up between the vehicles. There was no doubt now about the voices, raised, staccato, like the barking of dogs. Was it dogs? No, the barking turned into all too human screams. Tom’s veins ran with ice. The screams were grotesque, screams of terror, of agony. Then came a volley of shots. It seemed to go on forever, but probably only lasted forty-five seconds. And then the lights went out.