by Maggie Wadey
Tom turned and ran away up Blind Man’s Lane. As he went in through his home gate, Pat lunged at him out of the shadows, whispering, ‘Not a word now!’ But Tom wrenched free and burst into the house still cursing and panting. His father was still sitting up waiting and Tom poured out some sort of version of the events he’d just been witness to, the sounds of which must surely have been audible up here at home. In the room above, my grandmother raised her head from the pillow, listening. Then she came down, barefoot, her hair in skinny little plaits. She took Tom by the shoulders and turned him round to face her.
‘I will not have this filth brought into my house!’ she hissed.
No doubt Tom was swearing a blue streak; maybe that’s what my grandmother meant by ‘filth’. On the other hand, lift your head above the parapet at such times and it’s liable to be shot off. The Kavanaghs wanted nothing to do with the business of liberation, of fighting oppression, of standing up for yourself; of falling into the abyss of dirt, terror and death.
My mother was nine years old at the time of this incident which she claimed not to remember. She did, however, remember the row. It was the first time she’d overheard such a bitter argument at home and she was shocked, disbelieving, that Tom would dare upset their mother so.
I was the same age, nine years and seven months, when, in 1951, swept up in the agitation of the Egyptian nationalist movement, my mother and I – along with the other women and children – were evacuated from Fayid (the British Army were at that time stationed in the Suez Canal Zone to protect Britain’s financial and strategic interests). In the warm dark at the airport she wept over this unexpected separation from my father, the first time I had ever seen her cry. It rather surprises me that, when we were safely home, my mother gave an interview to the West Sussex County Times, but she did:
‘In Fayid,’ she is quoted as saying, ‘the people were lucky, for they saw no signs of trouble or fighting, and although the withdrawal of Egyptian services and supplies made things difficult, they were in a well-protected position. It was only to make room for families evacuated from Ismailia that the Wadeys had to give up their £15-a-month private bungalow to W. D. authorities. However, Margaret and her schoolmates had armed soldiers travelling with them on the school bus –’ [actually, an army truck, which was, on occasion, stoned]‘— and a guard accompanied the mothers when they went to the NAAFI to shop. Neither were they allowed out after dark.’ And difficulties for the housewife mounted. Mrs Wadey told us: ‘The first thing that happened was that our “safragi” (their cook and general servant) left us. The local people,’ she said, ‘were terrified, having been told that if they did not clear out the British would kill them. The dhobi (the laundryman who called three times a week) disappeared, and then all the tailors and shoe-repairers. All the tradesmen piled up their belongings and left; the shopping centre was closed. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, disappeared, and all shopping had to be done at the NAAFI.’
In spite of it all, Mrs Wadey and almost every wife, wanted to stay with her home and husband. The social life had been wonderful, and they had many friends there. She is confident that conditions will settle down sufficiently for her to return soon. In the meantime, she and Margaret (with new hot water bottles bought here to combat the sudden change in climate) are settling down in Horsham and hoping for good news.’
In fact, only a few months later, King Farouk was overthrown and, by ’56, all British troops had been withdrawn from Egypt. Until, that is, in November of that same year they returned as part of an Anglo-French assault on Suez, its aim to secure the canal for European interests.
Violence and terror had been an undercurrent in my mother’s childhood: she was a child of the Troubles. But I was a child of troubles, too. My personal view of English history wasn’t so much gleaned from Our Island Story as from the experience of being kicked out of one country after another. In the atlases of my childhood, large parts of the world were coloured pink. But all through my youth, the pink bits were becoming hotspots that in due course changed colour as Britain’s dominance was overthrown. It was the death of the Empire, of which Ireland’s struggle for independence – all unknown to me – had been a part. Ironically, in Egypt, Cyprus and Malaya my mother and I stood together shoulder to shoulder on the side of Empire. Or did we?
In Cyprus one sweltering afternoon I got caught up in the fringe of a furious crowd being cleared with tear gas. Enosis had recently been banned, in speech and print. In July Britain had withdrawn from Suez. Self-determination for Cyprus was simply ‘not on’. The crowd, demonstrating against UN support for the British position, was mostly schoolboys with soft hair like a brush of charcoal on their upper lips, hurling stones and bottles. One I recognised as the son of our dressmaker. The force clearing them was of course the British Army: soldiers in khaki and steel helmets. Some of whom I knew.
I was twelve years old. Alongside my feral life on the streets was another life, one I was equally in love with. In this other life, wearing immaculate white knee socks and a circular green skirt with matching waistcoat, I danced the Gay Gordons with young national service men in the officers’ mess. I swam with Brigadier Manfrey off the rocks at Dekehlia and was allowed to do so wearing his cap. My pubescent passion for ‘Pretty Pridom’, a tall young captain from Surrey, was, happily, unrequited. When I recognised him amongst the soldiers clearing the rioters, my heart was set pounding with unwelcome emotions: fear, outrage and revulsion. I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to see, something primal and very ugly. Emboldened by my companions’ fury I hurled a few weak insults of my own. The crowd bumped shoulders, laughed and swore, then, eyes streaming, we turned and raced away. Whose side was I on?
One evening as we were leaving Annie O’Brien’s, Danny had asked me a surprising question: ‘But were you brought up entirely English?’ I was somewhat taken aback. I may have been christened Margaret – as many little girls in that decade were – after the English princess, but as a child I didn’t read Winnie-the-Pooh or Swallows and Amazons, and the beach where I spent my long summers wasn’t Bournemouth but Famagusta, and my friends were French, Greek, Cypriot-Greek, Turkish-Cypriot, Armenian-Jewish and just one English girl. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was, but my tribal loyalties were confused. I’d already lived in eight different homes in three different countries and was at my sixth school. Half-English, half-Irish, daughter of non-believers, I was happily attending the French Catholic convent in Larnaca where my five close friends were all of different nationalities. Little wonder that afternoon on a sweltering side street in Larnaca I recoiled instinctively from identifying with the colonialists. It could have been a passing emotion, and certainly it was something I didn’t theorise about at the time. But the instinct has never left me. I am not a pacifist, but Egypt, Cyprus and Ireland have made it impossible for me to believe that might is right and that the booted foot – of whatever nationality or persuasion – can go where it likes. The answer to Danny’s question – if there was one – is complicated.
In Egypt, Cyprus and, later, in Malaya, my parents and I – along with so many others – were caught up in the massive collapse of empire, a collapse which only peripherally affected the pleasant round of our lives. All I can remember being said on the subject took the form of rumours and jokes. King Farouk of Egypt was not only a libertine, forever ‘on the prowl for large blonde women’ – as Gore Vidal would have us believe – but his favourite recording was of a dog being run over, this last rumour being much loved by the children. His Beatitude Archbishop Makarios, a shrewdly brilliant man – leader of the Cypriot Greek Church (the most senior of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches) and, as such, entitled to sign his name in the scarlet ink of Byzantine emperors – and a powerful campaigner for Enosis, was humorously referred to as ‘that geezer from Scotland, MacArios, who’s causing all the trouble!’ And so on. These were the voiced orthodoxies of the day, as prevalent as the political correctness of our own.
Later, when demonstr
ations, riots, pipe bombs and killings had all made their mark, a state of emergency was declared. Perhaps inevitably, the army used torture to elicit information from suspected terrorists. But by then we had left Cyprus. My parents were in Malaya and I was far away learning to become a lady in an English boarding school.
What did my mother think of all this? I don’t know. Whenever reference was made to ‘murderous bloody imbeciles’ I remember only her silence, that way she had of becoming very still with a faraway look on her face, eyes downcast, or rather, a little to one side, an expression I associated with her reaction to anti-Irish jokes.
A few weeks after the killing of the O’Briens, Father Fogarty’s house at Puckaun was raided by – as it was reported in the Nenagh Guardian on Christmas Day – ‘men unknown’, a journalistic euphemism for the Black and Tans. The house was searched and documents were taken away. But Father Fogarty was not arrested, neither then nor on any other occasion. Rody Cleary, however, who’d spent the rest of 1920 on the run, was arrested shortly before Christmas and held in the military barracks at Nenagh for a fortnight before being released, unharmed. His family took his Christmas dinner in to him from Knigh. Two months after that, in February, in a field beside the Ballyartella road, a workman from the wool mill ‘stumbled across a body…the face blindfolded and the hands tied with cord behind the back. The victim had been shot at close range, twice in the head and twice in the chest.’ He was identified as John Carroll, a thirty-four-year-old policeman who had been visiting his sick father. When he set off to cycle back to Nenagh he was abducted and killed by local members of the IRA.
The results of the inquest into John Carroll’s murder were reported in the Nenagh Guardian. There was no inquest into the deaths of the O’Briens at Knigh. At the subsequent military inquiry the sentry admitted that he had bayonetted one of the prisoners. When asked why he did so when there were twenty armed men in the lorry, he lamely replied he didn’t know. His fellow soldiers had then fired thirty-five rounds of ammunition. The NCO jumped down to stand in the road by the cab of the lorry. He informed both his senior officers that the prisoners had tried to escape and had been shot. One prisoner had apparently struggled with a sentry whilst the other had got his leg over the side of the lorry. For some reason, the young captain did not go to the back of the lorry to inspect the bodies. Medical evidence showed the O’Briens had died from both bullet and bayonet wounds. Only a censored version of this inquiry was published in the local press.
Tom Kavanagh was left to play and replay that night over and over again in his mind. Could he have raised the alarm in time and averted the death of those two young men? If he had tried and failed, what might his own fate have been? In confession and conversation with Father Fogarty he received some comfort. But that comfort was to be short-lived. A glorious summer of ‘phoney peace’ ended when, in London, Michael Collins signed a treaty which brought peace with England at the price of splitting Ireland in two: the Free State and the six counties of Ulster. The Church, in general and in particular – including Father Fogarty – supported the treaty or, as many saw it, ‘chose to go with the winning side’. Tom’s sense of betrayal and disgust knew no bounds. ‘Aren’t they the same as the Garda, just part of the fecking establishment?’ he was heard to say. Somehow his views became known to his Anglo-Irish employers, the Crosses, and he was dismissed. This meant further trouble with his mother. More, Tom was shocked rigid by how close he’d come to causing his father’s loss of job and home. His parents placed him under a strict curfew. He was mentioned every evening in the family’s prayers until at last the agitation simmered down and Tom, whom everyone loved, was forgiven. Indeed, with that reward peculiar to repentant young sinners, he was loved more than ever.
In the weeks to come, I looked for an opportunity to ask Jim O’Brien what political views – Tom aside – did the Kavanaghs have? Jim slapped his knee.
‘Politics?’ he guffawed. ‘They had none! As we did neither. What difference did it make to the likes of us?
Tom’s dismissal turned out to be good luck in disguise – just a few weeks later he found a position working with horses – with whom, like his father, he had a natural affinity – in the employ of a man who kept his opinions about de Valera, the treaty and the Church discreetly to himself. Meanwhile, Ireland erupted into the horrors of the civil war which, in the way of such wars, was to produce more killing, cruelty and bitterness than the war with the enemy that had just ended. My mother, who never spoke of the war with England, never mentioned the civil war either.
It was one day during this turbulent and terrible time that Mick Gavin walked down the lane that was white with dust and, arriving at the Kavanaghs’ door, stooped to remove his boots before daring to enter my grandmother’s kitchen. Mary Rose’s courtship was played out against the backdrop of the Troubles and, writing this, I recognise it as a recurring theme in this story: ordinary life, youthful innocence and happiness, played out against a background of violence.
Still, whatever the three little Kavanagh girls may have known or not known about the civil war, it was the courtship they were mystified by. Where had this man come from? Why was he allowed to walk out proudly alone with their sister, arm in arm? And why, above all, why was the man so old? Now, all these years later, I have a chance to put the same question: ‘Why?’
3
And so, one evening at Annie’s, I ask, ‘Was Mary Rose’s marriage to Gavin an arranged match?’
‘Oh it was,’ says Annie, immediately. ‘That was the standard thing in those days and many of them turned out well enough. “Romance” was an unknown word. Sometimes of course a girl would let a fella catch her a few times too many but that’s another story. Most times the men got together over a whiskey and a deal was made.’ I try, and fail, to imagine my grandfather doing this. ‘Usually the girl had something, she didn’t come with her arms swinging. Mary Rose had nothing much, but she was young, and Gavin was old. I saw him once when I went with my brothers to turf and there was a bent old fellow there cutting the peat and someone said “there’s the man Mary Rose Kavanagh married.”’
‘Gavin knew a thing or two about peat,’ offers Jim.
But what I want to know is this: if my grandmother was so ambitious for her daughters, how come she accepted such a marriage for Mary Rose, who was perhaps the brightest of her children? With the sense that I’m stepping out on to the ice, I ask, ‘So why? Why Mick Gavin?’
‘It was Mud Foley,’ says Jim.
And the story, as they were told it, is this: late one warm afternoon Kate Buckley sat with her daughters in the sunshine by the open door. Mary Rose was reading to them from the Messenger of the Sacred Heart. Perhaps it was the time when she read that the Messenger’s intention for the month of April was to ‘convert China’. Whatever it was, Mary Rose had a lovely voice, calming as doves, and soon the girls had fallen into a dream. Even the mother paused in her sewing. Below them the trees stood very still. A sense of peace, completion, and fulfilment lapped over them. Innocent as the Garden of Eden. Then Kate, although she’d heard nothing, turned and saw Mud Foley coming up the hill towards the house. In her pocket, she had Mary Rose’s future.
Mud Foley’s sister had recently died, and straight after, her sister’s husband had gone, too. His name was Gavin, and their eldest son, Mick, now a man over fifty, had finally come into his inheritance. It was the day after the old man’s wake that Mud came up there to the house on Knigh Hill.
The two women went inside and, leaving the girls sitting outside like slit-eyed cats in the sunshine, closed the door. Mud Foley was all honeyed sweet talk about her nephew. The poor man, now so lonely and he ‘a dacent good-looking fella with land enough to raise an army on’. She rattled on for some time in this vein, drinking one good strong cup of tea after another, and only when she seemed on the point of leaving did she reach inside her jacket pocket. My grandmother expected to see that stinking old pipe of hers come out but what emerged was a spoon. It glitte
red in the old woman’s dirt-grained fist. Then, briefly, she allowed Kate to test the weight of the thing in her hand, to feel its silky gravity.
‘There’s plenty more where that one came from,’ said Mud as she slid it back into her pocket. ‘Along with the land that bought them.’ she added, as if this was a small matter they might have forgotten. She patted her pocket. ‘And isn’t it a mortal shame the dear man has no wife to shine them for him!’
As we ponder this image, Annie taps my arm.
‘’Twas a shame,’ she says, ‘that with six daughters your grandmother had only the one big occasion, because you can’t count your uncle Paddy’s wedding.’
I’m astonished.
‘Uncle Pat married?’
‘Oh he did! He married a girl from Nenagh and they had four children. But it’s Mary Rose’s wedding none of us will ever forget.’
It had taken the best part of a week to clear up after Mary Rose’s wedding. Then Mrs Kavanagh took to her bed. The thin curtains were drawn across her window and the children went around on tiptoe.
‘Your mother is tired,’ said their father.
Agnes sensed there was something else. She waited on her, taking up cups of tea and bowls of bread broken up roughly into warm milk and sugar – a remedy she went on believing in all her life. At the taste of sugar, a faint smile came on to her mother’s face. Agnes wondered if she might not be able to settle very carefully on the foot of the bed and talk to her. But she didn’t, and they didn’t speak. That July was the coldest, wettest July in living memory. Agnes’s birthday came and went without being remarked, even by the child herself. In spite of the weather, July is a grand month for weddings and Kate spent day after day out in the damp outhouse, standing on the bare concrete floor, preparing bouquets. Her strong hands were red and roughened from work, but the fingertips were permanently white: ‘dead fingers’, she called them. In spite of which she worked deftly and decisively, moved as much by the shapes she was making as by the colour and scent of the flowers, all from her own garden, supplemented with greenery from the hedges, touches no one else would have thought of: wild grasses, ferns, and ivy. Even from inside the house the others could hear their mother coughing.