The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Jimmy rose slowly and pointed the way out to me with his flashlight. When we got downstairs we put on the bedroom light, and I saw on his face the virtuous and sophisticated air of a collector who has shown you all his treasures in the best possible light. Faced with that look, I could not bring myself to mention the woman at prayer, though I felt her image would be impressed on my memory till the day I died. I could not have explained to him how at that moment everything had changed for me, how, beyond us watching the young married couple from ambush, I had felt someone else watching us, so that at once we ceased to be the observers and became the observed. And the observed in such a humiliating position that nothing I could imagine our victims doing would have been so degrading.

  I wanted to pray myself but found I couldn’t. Instead, I lay in bed in the darkness, covering my eyes with my hand, and I think that even then I knew that I should never be sophisticated like Jimmy, never be able to put on a knowing smile, because always beyond the world of appearances I would see only eternity watching.

  ‘Sometimes, of course, it’s better than that,’ Jimmy’s drowsy voice said from the darkness. ‘You shouldn’t judge it by tonight.’

  From AN ONLY CHILD – THE BANDSMEN

  FATHER PLAYED the big drum in the Blackpool Brass and Reed Band, and as I was the only child, I had often to accompany him, much against my will, on his Sunday trips to the band room or on band promenades at holiday resorts. The Cork bands were divided into supporters of William O’Brien and supporters of John Redmond, two rival Irish politicians with little to distinguish them except their personalities – flamboyant in O’Brien and frigid in Redmond. The Blackpool Band was an O’Brienite group, and our policy was ‘Conciliation and Consent’, whatever that meant. The Redmond supporters we called Molly Maguires, and I have forgotten what their policy was – if they had one. Our national anthem was ‘God Save Ireland’ and theirs ‘A Nation Once Again’. I was often filled with pity for the poor degraded children of the Molly Maguires, who paraded the streets with tin cans, singing (to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’: ‘We’ll Hang William O’Brien on a Sour Apple Tree’. Sometimes passion overcame me till I got a tin can of my own and paraded up and down, singing: ‘We’ll Hang Johnny Redmond on a Sour Apple Tree’.

  The bandsmen shared our attitudes. There were frequent riots, and during election times Father came home with a drumstick up his sleeve – a useful weapon if he was attacked by Molly Maguires. There were even more serious incidents. Bandsmen raided a rival band room and smashed up the instruments, and one of Father’s most gloomy songs listed some of the men who had done this:

  Creedy, Reidy, Dessy, and Snell,

  Not judging their souls, they’re already in Hell.

  The night of the battle we’ll show them some fun;

  We’ll hang up the ruffian that stole our big drum.

  Almost all the bandsmen were ex-bandsmen of the British Army, as Father was; and I think it may have been something of a tragedy to them that when once they returned to Cork, music became less important than the political faction for whom they made it. Father was devoted to the policy and personality of William O’Brien, who had married the daughter of one of the great Franco-Jewish bankers. It was Sophie Raffalovitch’s mother who had started the romance by sending to O’Brien when he was in gaol a verse of Racine with an eagle’s feather enclosed, but I am glad that when Sophie O’Brien was old and poor in France during the German occupation, the Irish Government protected her and paid her an allowance. Once, when there were threats of a Molly Maguire attack, Father, an enormously powerful man, acted as bodyguard for William O’, and William O’ thanked him personally and handed him a pound note. All the same, for several years Father had been big drummer of a Molly Maguire band. It was a superb band, and Father liked music so well that he preferred it to politics. For the sake of the music he even endured the indignity of playing for Johnny Redmond. Naturally, whenever he attended a demonstration at which William O’ was criticized, he withdrew, like a good Catholic from a heretical service. What made him leave the Molly band and join the Blackpool Band I never knew. It was a period that for some reason he never liked to talk about, and I suspect that someone in the band must have impugned him by calling him a turncoat. That is the sort of thing that would have broken his spirit, for he was a proud man and a high-principled one, though what his principles were based on was more than I ever discovered. He was the one who insisted on the ‘O’Donovan’ form of the name, and it must have been his absence at the Boer War that explains my being described as ‘Donovan’ on my birth certificate. He would not permit a slighting reference to William O’Brien, and reading the Echo, the only evening paper in Cork, and a Molly one, was as much a torment as a pleasure to him. ‘There were about 130 people present, most of them women, with a sprinkling of children’ was how the Echo would describe any meeting of O’Brien’s, and Father would raise his eyes to Heaven, calling on God to witness that anything the Echo said was untrue. ‘Oh, listen to George Crosbie, the dirty little caffler!’ he would cry with mortification. In days when no one else that I knew seemed to worry about it, he was a passionate believer in buying Irish manufactures, and often sent me back to the shop with a box of English matches that had been passed off on me. He was a strong supporter of Jim Larkin, the Irish Labour leader; for months when he was out on strike we practically didn’t eat, but we always bought The Irish Worker, Larkin’s paper, and I was permitted to read it aloud because my dramatic style of reading suited Larkin’s dramatic style of journalism. According to Mother, there was a period in my infancy when Father didn’t drink for two years. He had drunk himself penniless, as he frequently did, and some old friend had refused him a loan. The slight had cut him so deep that he stopped drinking at once. The friend was wrong if he assumed that Father would not have repaid that or any other loan, but, still, it was a great pity that he hadn’t a few more friends of the sort.

  It was no joke to go with Father on one of his Sunday outings with the band, and I often kicked up hell about it, but Mother liked me to go, because she had some strange notion that I could restrain him from drinking too much. Not that I didn’t love music, nor that I wasn’t proud of Father as, with the drum slung high about his neck, he glanced left and right of it, waiting to give the three taps that brought the bandsmen in. He was a drummer of the classical type: he hated to see a man carry his drum on his belly instead of his chest, and he had nothing but scorn for the showy drummers who swung or crossed their sticks. He was almost disappointingly unpretentious.

  But when he was on the drink, I was so uncertain that I always had the feeling that one day he would lose me and forget I had been with him at all. Usually, the band would end its piece in front of a pub at the corner of Coburg Street. The pubs were always shut on Sunday until after last Mass, and when they opened, it was only for an hour or two. The last notes of ‘Brian Boru’s March’ would hardly have been played before Father unslung the drum, thrust it on the young fellows whose job it was to carry it, and dashed across the road to the pub, accompanied by John P., his great buddy. John P. – I never knew what his surname was – was a long string of misery, with an air of unutterable gravity, emphasized by the way he sucked in his cheeks. He was one of the people vaguely known as ‘followers of the band’ – a group of lonely souls who gave some significance to their simple lives by attaching themselves to the band. They discussed its policies and personalities, looked after the instruments, and knew every pub in Cork that would risk receiving its members after hours. John P., with a look of intense concentration, would give a secret knock on the side door of the pub and utter what seemed to be whispered endearments through the keyhole, and more and more bandsmen would join the group peppering outside, while messengers rushed up to them shouting: ‘Come on, can’t ye, come on! The bloomin’ train will be gone!’

  That would be the first of the boring and humiliating waits outside public houses that went on all day and were broken only when I made
a scene and Father gave me a penny to keep me quiet. Afterwards it would be the seaside at Aghada – which wasn’t so bad because my maternal grandmother’s people, the Kellys, still lived there and they would give me a cup of tea – or Crosshaven, or the grounds of Blarney Castle, and in the intervals of playing, the band would sit in various public houses with the doors barred, and if I was inside I couldn’t get out, and – what was worse for a shy small boy – if I was out I couldn’t get in. It was all very boring and alarming, and I remember once at Blarney, in my discouragement, staking my last penny on a dice game called the Harp, Crown, and Feather in the hope of retrieving a wasted day. Being a patriotic child, with something of Father’s high principle, I put my money on the national emblem and lost. This was prophetic, because since then I have lost a great many pennies on the national emblem, but at least it cured me of the more obvious forms of gambling for the rest of my days. […]

  So far keeping him off the drink, I never did it but once, when I drank his pint, became very drunk, smashed my head against a wall, and had to be steered home by himself and John P., both of them mad with frustration and panic, and be put to bed.

  THE CORNET PLAYER WHO BETRAYED IRELAND

  AT THIS hour of my life I don’t profess to remember what we inhabitants of Blarney Lane were patriotic about: all I remember is that we were very patriotic, that our main principles were something called ‘Conciliation and Consent’, and that our great national leader, William O’Brien, once referred to us as ‘The Old Guard’. Myself and other kids of the Old Guard used to parade the street with tin cans and toy trumpets, singing ‘We’ll hang Johnnie Redmond on a sour apple tree’. (John Redmond, I need hardly say, was the leader of the other side.)

  Unfortunately, our neighbourhood was bounded to the south by a long ugly street leading uphill to the cathedral, and the lanes off it were infested with the most wretched specimens of humanity who took the Redmondite side for whatever could be got from it in the way of drink. My personal view at the time was that the Redmondite faction was maintained by a conspiracy of publicans and brewers. It always saddened me, coming through this street on my way from school, and seeing the poor misguided children, barefoot and in rags, parading with tin cans and toy trumpets and singing ‘We’ll hang William O’Brien on a sour apple tree’. It left me with very little hope for Ireland.

  Of course, my father was a strong supporter of ‘Conciliation and Consent’. The parish priest who had come to solicit his vote for Redmond had told him he would go straight to Hell, but my father had replied quite respectfully that if Mr O’Brien was an agent of the devil, as Father Murphy said, he would go gladly.

  I admired my father as a rock of principle. As well as being a house-painter (a regrettable trade which left him for six months ‘under the ivy’, as we called it), he was a musician. He had been a bandsman in the British Army, played the cornet extremely well, and had been a member of the Irishtown Brass and Reed Band from its foundation. At home we had two big pictures of the band after each of its most famous contests, in Belfast and Dublin. It was after the Dublin contest when Irishtown emerged as the premier brass band that there occurred an unrecorded episode in operatic history. In those days the best band in the city was always invited to perform in the Soldiers’ Chorus scene in Gounod’s Faust. Of course, they were encored to the echo, and then, ignoring conductor and everything else, they burst into a selection from Moore’s Irish Melodies. I am glad my father didn’t live to see the day of pipers’ bands. Even fife and drum bands he looked on as primitive.

  As he had great hopes of turning me into a musician too he frequently brought me with him to practices and promenades. Irishtown was a very poor quarter of the city, a channel of mean houses between breweries and builders’ yards with the terraced hillsides high above it on either side, and nothing but the white Restoration spire of Shandon breaking the skyline. You came to a little footbridge over the narrow stream; on one side of it was a red-brick chapel, and when we arrived there were usually some of the bandsmen sitting on the bridge, spitting back over their shoulders into the stream. The bandroom was over an undertaker’s shop at the other side of the street. It was a long, dark, barn-like erection overlooking the bridge and decorated with group photos of the band. At this hour of a Sunday morning it was always full of groans, squeaks and bumps.

  Then at last came the moment I loved so much. Out in the sunlight, with the bridge filled with staring pedestrians, the band formed up. Dickie Ryan, the bandmaster’s son, and myself took our places at either side of the big drummer, Joe Shinkwin. Joe peered over his big drum to right and left to see if all were in place and ready; he raised his right arm and gave the drum three solemn flakes: then, after the third thump the whole narrow channel of the street filled with a roaring torrent of drums and brass, the mere physical impact of which hit me in the belly. Screaming girls in shawls tore along the pavements calling out to the bandsmen, but nothing shook the soldierly solemnity of the men with their eyes almost crossed on the music before them. I’ve heard Toscanini conduct Beethoven, but compared with Irishtown playing ‘Marching Through Georgia’ on a Sunday morning it was only like Mozart in a girls’ school. The mean little houses, quivering with the shock, gave it back to us: the terraced hillsides that shut out the sky gave it back to us; the interested faces of passers-by in their Sunday clothes from the pavements were like mirrors reflecting the glory of the music. When the band stopped and again you could hear the gapped sound of feet, and people running and chattering, it was like a parachute jump into commonplace.

  Sometimes we boarded the paddle-steamer and set up our music stands in some little field by the sea, which all day echoed of Moore’s Melodies, Rossini, and Gilbert and Sullivan: sometimes we took a train into the country to play at some sports meeting. Whatever it was, I loved it, though I never got a dinner: I was fed on lemonade, biscuits and sweets, and, as my father spent most of the intervals in the pub, I was sometimes half mad with boredom.

  One summer day we were playing at a fête in the grounds of Blarney Castle, and, as usual, the band departed to the pub and Dickie Ryan and myself were left behind, ostensibly to take care of the instruments. A certain hanger-on of the band, one John P., who to my knowledge was never called anything else, was lying on the grass, chewing a straw and shading his eyes from the light with the back of his hand. Dickie and I took a side drum each and began to march about with them. All at once Dickie began to sing to his own accompaniment, ‘We’ll hang William O’Brien on a sour apple tree’. I was so astonished that I stopped drumming and listened to him. For a moment or two I thought he must be mocking the poor uneducated children of the lanes round Shandon Street. Then I suddenly realized that he meant it. Without hesitation I began to rattle my side drum even louder and shouted ‘We’ll hang Johnnie Redmond on a sour apple tree’. John P. at once started up and gave me an angry glare. ‘Stop that now, little boy!’ he said threateningly. It was quite plain that he meant me, not Dickie Ryan.

  I was completely flabbergasted. It was bad enough hearing the bandmaster’s son singing a traitorous song, but then to be told to shut up by a fellow who wasn’t even a bandsman; merely a hanger-on who looked after the music stands and carried the big drum in return for free drinks! I realized that I was among enemies. I quietly put aside the drum and went to find my father. I knew that he could have no idea what was going on behind his back in the band.

  I found him at the back of the pub, sitting on a barrel and holding forth to a couple of young bandsmen.

  ‘Now, “Brian Boru’s March”,’ he was saying with one finger raised, ‘that’s a beautiful march. I heard the Irish Guards do that on Salisbury Plain, and they had the English fellows’ eyes popping out. “Paddy,” one of them says to me (they all call you Paddy), “wot’s the name of the shouting march?” But somehow we don’t get the same fire into it at all. Now, listen, and I’ll show you how that should go!’

  ‘Dadda,’ I said in a whisper, pulling him by the sleeve, �
�do you know what Dickie Ryan was singing?’

  ‘Hold on a minute now,’ he said, beaming at me affectionately. ‘I just want to illustrate a little point.’

  ‘But, Dadda,’ I went on determinedly, ‘he was singing “We’ll hang William O’Brien from a sour apple tree”.’

  ‘Hah, hah, hah,’ laughed my father, and it struck me that he hadn’t fully appreciated the implications of what I had said.

  ‘Frank,’ he added, ‘get a bottle of lemonade for the little fellow.’

  ‘But, Dadda,’ I said despairingly, ‘when I sang “We’ll hang Johnnie Redmond”, John P. told me to shut up.’

  ‘Now, now,’ said my father with sudden testiness, ‘that’s not a nice song to be singing.’

  This was a stunning blow. The anthem of ‘Conciliation and Consent’ – not a nice song to be singing!

  ‘But, Dadda,’ I wailed, ‘aren’t we for William O’Brien?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he replied, as if I were goading him, ‘but everyone to his own opinion. Now drink your lemonade and run out and play like a good boy.’

  I drank my lemonade all right, but I went out not to play but to brood. There was but one fit place for that. I went to the shell of the castle; climbed the stair to the tower and leaning over the battlements watching the landscape like bunting all round me I thought of the heroes who had stood here, defying the might of England. Everyone to his own opinion! What would they have thought of a statement like that? It was the first time that I realized the awful strain of weakness and the lack of strong principle in my father, and understood that the old bandroom by the bridge was in the heart of enemy country and that all round me were enemies of Ireland like Dickie Ryan and John P.