The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  So the two brothers with their murdered man

  Rode past fair Florence …

  From AN ONLY CHILD – THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

  IT WAS a period of political unrest, and, in a way, this was a relief, because it acted as a safety valve for my own angry emotions. Indeed, it would be truer to say that the Irish nation and myself were both engaged in an elaborate process of improvisation. I was improvising an education I could not afford, and the country was improvising a revolution it could not afford. In 1916 it had risen to a small, real revolution with uniforms and rifles, but the English had brought up artillery that had blown the centre of Dublin flat, and shot down the men in uniform. It was all very like myself and the Christian Brothers. After that, the country had to content itself with a make-believe revolution, and I had to content myself with a make-believe education, and the curious thing is that it was the make-believe that succeeded.

  The elected representatives of the Irish people (those who managed to stay out of gaol) elected what they called a government, with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs that tried in vain to get Woodrow Wilson to see it, a Ministry of Finance that exacted five or ten pounds from small shop-keepers who could ill afford it, a Ministry of Defence that tried to buy old-fashioned weapons at outrageous prices from shady characters, and a Ministry of Home Affairs that established courts of justice with part-time Volunteer policemen and no gaols at all.

  It all began innocently enough. People took to attending Gaelic League concerts at which performers sang ‘She is Far from the Land’, recited ‘Let Me Carry Your Cross for Ireland, Lord’, or played ‘The Fox Chase’ on the elbow pipes, and armed police broke them up. I remember one that I attended in the town park. When I arrived, the park was already occupied by police, so after a while the crowd began to drift away towards the open country up the river. A mile or so up it reassembled on the river-bank, but by this time most of the artistes had disappeared. Somebody who knew me asked for a song. At fourteen or fifteen I was delighted by the honour and tried to sing in Irish a seventeenth-century outlaw song about ‘Sean O’Dwyer of the Valley’. I broke down after the first verse – I always did break down whenever I had to make any sort of public appearance because the contrast between what was going on in my head and what was going on in the real world was too much for me – but it didn’t matter much. […]

  Then the real world began to catch up with the fantasy. Curfew was imposed, first at ten, then at five in the afternoon. The bishop excommunicated everyone who supported the use of physical force, but it went on just the same. One night shots were fired on our road and a lorry halted at the top of the square. An English voice kept on screaming hysterically ‘Oh, my back! my back!’ but no one could go through the wild shooting of panic-stricken men. Soon afterwards the military came in force, and from our back door we saw a red glare mount over the valley of the city. For hours Father, Mother, and I took turns at standing on a chair in the attic, listening to the shooting and watching the whole heart of the city burn. Father was the most upset of us, for he was full of local pride, and ready to take on any misguided foreigner or Dublin jackeen who was not prepared to admit the superiority of Cork over all other cities. Next morning, when I wandered among the ruins, it was not the business district or the municipal buildings that I mourned for, but the handsome red-brick library that had been so much a part of my life from the time when as a small boy I brought back my first Western adventure story over the railway bridges. Later I stood at the corner by Dillon’s Cross where the ambush had been and saw a whole block of little houses demolished by a British tank. One had been the home of an old patriot whom my grandparents called ‘Brienie Dill’. A small, silent crowd was held back by soldiers as the tank lumbered across the pavement and thrust at the wall until at last it broke like pie crust and rubble and rafters tumbled. It made a deep impression on me. […]

  All the same I could not keep away from Ireland, and I was involved in most of the activities of that imaginative revolution – at a considerable distance, of course, because I was too young, and anyway, I had Father all the time breathing down my neck. In the absence of proper uniform our Army tended to wear riding-breeches, gaiters, a trench coat, and a soft hat usually pulled low over one eye, and I managed to scrape up most of the essential equipment, even when I had to beg it, as I begged the pair of broken gaiters from Tom MacKernan. I conducted a complicated deal for the Ministry of Defence and bought a French rifle from a man who lived close to Cork Barrack, though, when I had risked a heavy sentence by bringing it home down my trouser leg, all the time pretending I had just met with a serious accident, it turned out that there wasn’t a round of ammunition in Ireland to fit it. When the British burned and looted Cork and encouraged the slum-dwellers to join in the looting, I was transferred to the police and put to searching slums in Blarney Lane for jewellery and furs. In a back room in Blarney Lane we located a mink coat which the woman who lived there said had just been sent her by her sister in America. Being a polite and unworldly boy of seventeen, I was quite prepared to take her word for it, but my companion said she hadn’t a sister in America, and, shocked by her untruthfulness, I brought the coat back to its rightful owners. That she might have needed it more than they didn’t occur to me; I remembered only that I was now a real policeman, and acted as I felt a good policeman should act. […]

  My fight for Irish freedom was of the same order as my fight for other sorts of freedom. Still like Dolan’s ass, I went a bit of the way with everybody, and in those days everybody was moving in the same direction. Hendrick did not get me to join a debating society, but I got him to join the Volunteers. If it was nothing else, it was a brief escape from tedium and frustration to go out the country roads on summer evenings, slouching along in knee breeches and gaiters, hands in the pockets of one’s trench coat and hat pulled over one’s right eye. Usually it was only to a parade in some field with high fences off the Rathcooney Road, but sometimes it was a barrack that was being attacked, and we trenched roads and felled trees, and then went home through the wet fields over the hills, listening for distant explosions and scanning the horizon for fires. It was all too much for poor Father, who had already seen me waste my time making toy theatres when I should have been playing football, and drawing naked men when I should have been earning my living. And this time he did at least know what he was talking about. For all he knew I might have the makings of a painter or writer in me, but, as an old soldier himself, he knew that I would never draw even a disability pension. […]

  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 o
f 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 Mellowes 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. […]

  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’s 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’s 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 wakened 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 overdeveloped 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. […]

  One evening I sat in the hut and listened to a Corkman singing in a little group about some hero who had died for Ireland and the brave things he had said and the fine things he had done, and I listened because I liked these simple little local songs that continued to be written to the old beautiful ballad airs and that sometimes had charming verses, like:

  I met Pat Hanley’s mother and she to me did say,

  ‘God be with my son Pat, he was shot in the runaway;

  ‘If I could kiss his pale cold lips his wounded heart I’d cure

  ‘And I’d bring my darling safely home from the valley of Knockanure.’

  But half-way through this song I realized that it was about the boy whose hand I had taken in the Women’s Prison in Cork one morning that spring, and suddenly the whole nightmare came back. ‘It’s as well for you fellows that you didn’t see that lad’s face when the Free Staters had finished with it,’ I said angrily. I think it must have been that evening that the big row blew up, and I had half the hut shouting at me. I shouted as well that I was sick to death of the worship of martyrdom, that the only martyr I had come close to was a poor boy from the lanes like myself, and he hadn’t wanted to die any more than I did; that he had merely been trapped by his own ignorance and simplicity into a position from which he couldn’t escape, and I thought most martyrs were the same. ‘And Pearse?’ someone kept on crying. ‘What about Pearse? I suppose he didn’t want to die either?’ ‘Of course he didn’t want to die,’ I said. ‘He woke up too late, that was all.’ And that did really drive some of the men to fury.

  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 martyrdom.

  From THE BIG FELLOW: MICHAEL COLLINS AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION

  ALREADY THE Collins of the second phase was beginning to take shape: the humorous, vital, tense, impatient figure which shoots through the pages of contemporary history as it shot through the streets of Dublin with a cry of anguish for ‘all the hours we waste in sleep’. People were already growing accustomed to his ways; the warning thump of his feet on the stairs as he took them six at a time, the crash of the door and the searching look, and that magnetic power of revivifying the stalest air. People still describe the way in which one became aware of his presence, even when he was not visible, through that uncomfortable magnetism of the very air, a tingling of the nerves. First to wake, he sprang out of bed and stamped about the room as fresh as though he were leaving a cold bath instead of a warm bed. He was peculiarly sensitive to touch and drew away when people tried to paw him. He seemed to be always bundling people out of bed, and not only the long-suffering O’Hegarty and O’Sullivan, who had the doubtful pleasure of sharing a room with him, but all the others, the quiet, simple people who had never thought themselves of use to humanity. Each of his gestures had a purposeful monumental quality; and his face that strange lighting which evaded the photographers but which Doyle-Jones has caught in his bust. One had the impression of a temperament impatient of all restraint, even that imposed from within, exploding in jerky gestures, oaths, jests and laughter; so vital that, like his facial expression, it evades analysis. If I had recorded all the occasions when he wept I should have given the impression that he was hysterical. He wasn’t; he laughed and wept as a child does (and indeed, as people in earlier centuries seem to have done) quite without self-consciousness.

  Collins’ words and actions, considered separately, are commonplace enough; one would need a sort of cinema projector of prose
to capture the sense of abounding life they gave to his contemporaries. People who submitted to their influence became intoxicated; work seemed easier, danger slighter, the impossible receded. People who did not were exasperated. ‘What insolence!’ they cried. ‘He doesn’t even say good morning.’ He said neither good morning nor good night; avoided handshakes as he avoided anything in the least savouring of formality; and when ladies accustomed to good society received him he had time only to ask if anyone was inside, and then brushed past them without a glance.

  He knew he was a difficult man; he had no home, no constant refuge, passing from house to house and making demands upon its occupants as he did upon the men who worked for him; yet – though a week rarely passed when one of them, host or colleague, hadn’t occasion to complain – there were few who did not serve him cheerfully because of the occasions when a fine and sudden delicacy of feeling showed that he appreciated it. Outsiders, seeing how he worked his courier O’Reilly till the beads of sweat stood out on the lad’s face, grew indignant, but suddenly the natural good humour and kindness would break through and he would shout ‘Give us a couple of eggs for that melt!’ Or it would be someone else’s turn – his hostess’s, perhaps, whom he would bundle off to bed while he sent O’Reilly for champagne, merely because he thought she had a cold. He was a self-willed man – the consideration often came inopportunely and at random, like a misdirected kiss. […]

  Collins was naturally a great businessman, and he shouldered his responsibilities in a thoroughly businesslike way. This energetic man, who kept a file for every transaction, who insisted on supervising every detail and went nowhere without his secretary, bore very little resemblance to the Collins of legend and none at all to the revolutionary of fiction. Beside him, Lenin, with his theories, feuds and excommunications, seems a child, and not a particularly intelligent one. He ran the whole Revolution as though it were a great business concern, ignoring all the rules. In his files can be found receipts for the lodging of political refugees side by side with those for sweeping brushes and floor polish. He might be seen a dozen times a day in shops, offices, restaurants, pubs, with solicitors, clergymen, bankers, intellectuals. He permitted no restriction on his freedom and cycled unguarded about the city as though the British Empire had never existed. In the evenings he might be seen at the Abbey Theatre, tossing restlessly in his seat, or in the summer at a race meeting, rubbing shoulders with British officers and Secret-Service men.