The Guns of Easter

by Gerard Whelan

  Jimmy looked at her, trying to keep his face as still as the clock’s was. To his surprise Ma was almost smiling.

  ‘I’m told,’ she said, ‘that you did something very responsible yesterday.’

  Jimmy gawked at her. What was she on about?

  ‘Kitty Doyle,’ Ma said, ‘tells me that you kept Tommy from getting involved in a terrible thing.’

  Jimmy blushed. Had Tommy Doyle been telling his own Ma the truth about something? It would be against the unwritten rules, but even so Jimmy might be glad of it now. While Jimmy’s mind was racing, his mother stood with her hands on her hips, looking at him. ‘Well?’ she said finally. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me about it?’

  Jimmy wondered where to start. He was still wondering when the door opened and Mick walked in with a scowl on his face.

  ‘Was that our dear sister I saw going down the steps?’ he demanded.

  ‘It was Ella, if that’s who you mean,’ Ma said.

  ‘And how much did she get this time?’ Mick said.

  Ma clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘Mick!’ she said. ‘Please!’

  Mick growled, but said no more. Like Jimmy, Mick tried to help Ma as much as he could. But there were times when Jimmy suspected that Mick, though he might look and sound like an adult, didn’t really know how to help any more than Jimmy himself did.

  At least twice a week now Mick would call around to ask if everything was all right. Ma would tell him that it was, and this would keep Mick happy. Jimmy suspected that the happiness was really relief, that Mick was glad because he was afraid to hear about problems that he didn’t know how to solve. This made Jimmy feel much closer to Mick. At such times Mick seemed less like an uncle than a big brother or a friend.

  Mick was only twenty-one, half way between Jimmy’s age and Ma’s. Jimmy had always been very fond of him. Sometimes when Ma talked about Mick there was something in her voice that made him sound like a child. But she never used that tone when he was there, though she did tend to tease him.

  ‘You came just in time,’ she said now. ‘Jimmy was just going to tell me about a heroic attack on the army.’

  Her voice was sarcastic. Mick looked embarrassed, though he couldn’t know what she was talking about. He stared at Jimmy.

  ‘Jimmy!’ Ma said. ‘Talk!’

  Jimmy stammered for a moment and then started. ‘It was the Gorgeous Wrecks …’ he began.

  ‘I never liked that name,’ Ma butted in. ‘Some of them poor old men saw a lot of hardship.’

  The Gorgeous Wrecks were officially the Home Defence Force. The Defence Force was made up of British army veterans, many of them very old. Dressed in their uniforms they went on marches around the city carrying their empty rifles. Their belts had big shiny buckles on which the king’s name was written in Latin: GEORGIUS REX. Dubliners, looking at these old, broken men strutting proudly along, had nicknamed them the Gorgeous Wrecks.

  The boys of Jimmy’s area loved to jeer at the old men. It was something to do. In the past Jimmy had always happily joined in, but since Da joined the army Jimmy had been having doubts about it. At least the Wrecks had once been real soldiers – not like the Irish Volunteers, who wanted Ireland to be a separate country, or like Mick’s crowd, the Citizen Army, who nowadays seemed to think the same. The Citizen Army was the so-called army of the trade union; a foolish idea, Jimmy thought – trade unions shouldn’t have armies.

  The Gorgeous Wrecks had at least seen real fighting when they were younger. Some of them had fought the Boers, in the African war that had ended a few years before Jimmy was born. Others had battled the savage Zulus, or the wild Dervish hordes of the Mahdi, who had killed the saintly General Gordon in Khartoum.

  ‘I was down in Abbey Street with some of the lads,’ Jimmy said, ‘and some of the Gorgeous Wrecks came along …’

  3

  THE GORGEOUS WRECKS

  THE LADS HAD BEEN STANDING ON THE CORNER of the street daydreaming about finding ways to go to Fairyhouse. The races there were on in a couple of weeks, and they were the biggest event of the season. Several boys boasted that they were going, but of course they were lying. Everybody knew it, too: poor boys like them simply didn’t get a chance to go to places like the Fairyhouse races.

  They’d grown bored with lying to each other all day and were starting to look around for some fresh devilment when the straggling little group of Home Defence Force veterans came around the corner from Amiens Street.

  ‘Hey!’ Billy Moran said. ‘It’s the Wrecks!’

  ‘Parade!’ shouted someone. ‘Parade! The army’s here!’

  Following army parades was great fun. Not that the Gorgeous Wrecks really counted as an army parade, but they were better than nothing. There was, of course, only one real army, and that was the army of His Royal Highness, King George V. Nothing could match the thrill of marching behind the real army. Once, Jimmy had heard, British soldiers had dressed in red and green and blue; but even now, in khaki, they were the most glamorous thing he knew.

  When the cavalry rode on parade, in their dress uniforms, the sheer glory of it was enough to make your heart skip a beat. You wanted nothing more than to be one of them, to ride along knowing that the people watching were saying to one another: ‘Oh look, look at the soldier on his fine horse. Isn’t he grand?’

  The army bands too still wore bright uniforms on parades and recruiting marches, and since the war began there seemed to be a parade or a recruiting march almost every day. When the bands marched, all the boys would fall in behind them and try to match their steps. The people would gather to watch the marching band, and if you were marching behind them then you could almost believe that it was you that the people were watching.

  The real soldiers never seemed to mind boys marching behind them, but all the other groups who marched were more sensitive about it. It was as though the boys’ presence reminded them that they weren’t real soldiers at all.

  Jimmy was standing with Tommy Doyle. Tommy had been quiet all week. His sister, Alice, was very sick, and he was worried about her. Now when he saw the Gorgeous Wrecks he seemed to cheer up.

  Jimmy himself had mixed feelings as he watched the old men coming closer. He found it strange to think that once these men had been young and proud and straight like his father. Once too, long before that, they had been young boys like himself. Even more strange, one day he himself would be old like them, with white hair or else no hair at all, and a face filled with blotches and wrinkles.

  As the old soldiers passed the boys started to fall in behind them, marching too. Billy Moran and Andy Moore had sticks that they let on were rifles, and the rest of the boys just swung their arms.

  Tommy Doyle grabbed Jimmy’s arm.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘You can be sergeant.’

  Jimmy hesitated. This was bound to end up with the old men annoyed. He knew Ma wouldn’t like him to jeer at them. Just the other day, too, he’d heard Tommy’s Ma say that her own da had been in the army, and that she’d hate to think of chiselers laughing at him if he’d been in the Home Defence. But he’d died in Africa, defending the Empire; an Irishman fighting for the other side had shot him.

  ‘Wait,’ Jimmy said, and held his friend back.

  Tommy wasn’t the type of boy to wait for anything, but he waited for Jimmy’s sake – after all it was only the Wrecks.

  As the old men marched past them, followed by the boys, the usual thing started to happen: a few of the veterans started to give out to the boys, who in turn began to taunt them. Then one old soldier got really upset. He stopped marching and turned on his tormentors, trying to clout them. But the man wasn’t very fast on his feet, and the boys were. They formed a jeering ring around him, staying just out of his reach, while Jimmy and Tommy looked on silently.

  The march itself was quickly in confusion. Some of the old soldiers in front, deaf or half-doting, kept on marching; others stopped and looked around at the uproar.

  The angry old man still
stood in the middle of the jeering ring. He’d started by talking about queen and country, but now he was cursing the boys wildly. He threw his rifle on the ground. His face got more and more red. There was something not right about the way he was going on, something extreme. The jeering boys seemed to notice nothing odd about their victim. Passersby were stopping now to watch the fun.

  ‘Jimmy!’ Tommy Doyle said. He was staring at the old man.

  Suddenly the old fellow stopped in mid-word. For a moment he was silent, then he started crying. A jeering cheer went up from the boys around him.

  ‘For shame!’ said a passerby, and Jimmy felt like agreeing with him. Watching the unfortunate old man, he did feel ashamed.

  With no warning, the old man fell down. He put his hands to his chest, looked wildly around him and then keeled over. As he fell he made a terrible sound, a sound that had no name that Jimmy knew.

  A woman screamed. The old man lay on the street, his face a terrible purple colour. Spittle ran out of his mouth. His eyes were wide open, staring, white. The pupils had rolled up into his head, like the eyes of the dead man Josie had found frozen one winter outside in the yard.

  People gathered around the fallen man. Through their legs Jimmy could see him lying there. He knew instantly that the old soldier had had some kind of attack, that he wouldn’t be getting up again, that the jeering had killed him.

  Jimmy stood and stared. The whole incident had taken less than five minutes, and here was a man dead in the street. Jimmy couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t thinking straight.

  The most sensible thought came to Tommy Doyle.

  ‘Jimmy!’ Tommy whispered urgently in his ear. ‘Let’s go. Now!’

  ‘But we did nothing!’ Jimmy said.

  ‘That never stopped us getting blamed before,’ Tommy said. ‘Come on!’

  The boys who’d actually done the jeering had vanished. People were starting to look around for the youngsters who’d caused the old man’s attack. Jimmy and Tommy took to their heels and within seconds they’d disappeared into the familiar streets around home, where no-one would notice them.

  Even now, the next day, Jimmy found it impossible to explain to Ma and Mick how he’d felt after the old man died. There was a feeling of guilt, even though he hadn’t taunted the old man. He kept telling himself that he hadn’t been involved, but it was no good.

  Still, Ma was looking at him with pride on her face. ‘The man’s name was O’Brien,’ she said quietly. ‘Mrs Doyle saw it in the paper. He had medals for bravery in some war or another, I don’t know which. When she asked Tommy if he’d been near Abbey Street yesterday he told her all about how you’d kept him out of trouble. “God bless that child,” says she to me. “God bless that child and the parents that raised him.”’

  Jimmy felt that Ma was making a fuss about something that was really quite small. He hadn’t really done anything much. Yet he loved her approval and he loved to see her happy. He knew from her smile just how happy she was, and when she turned to her brother Jimmy knew from the twinkle in her eye that she was going to tease him.

  ‘Well, Mick?’ Ma said.

  Mick looked at her. He never noticed the twinkle, and always reacted to her teasing.

  ‘Well what?’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’

  Mick’s jaw dropped open with surprise. ‘Ashamed of what?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the kind of rebel crowd you’re involved with that has the children acting like this,’ Ma said. ‘Jeering poor harmless old men and giving them fits.’

  Mick positively spluttered with indignation. He was not very good at expressing himself, and the unfairness of the accusation left him speechless. Safe now himself, Jimmy enjoyed watching the discomfort that washed across his uncle’s face.

  ‘Lily!’ Mick spluttered. ‘Them kids would follow a herd of cows to the docks if the cows were only marching! They follow the army bands and the Home Defence and everybody else! For God’s sake, they even follow the Volunteers!’

  Jimmy was surprised that Mick had managed to get so much out. Ma was looking at her brother with no expression on her face, but Jimmy saw the ghost of a smile around her mouth. Mick was so upset he was almost shaking.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ma said. ‘My Jimmy didn’t follow anyone. And he kept Tommy Doyle out of trouble too. Isn’t it a pity there’s not more like him, Mrs Doyle said, that might grow into men that would mind their own business and stop trying to right the wrongs of the whole world!’

  Jimmy knew that this was a dig at Mick’s involvement in the union and the Citizen Army. Mick was a great admirer of the union leader, James Connolly. Connolly was something called a socialist, and Mick often called himself a socialist too, although when you asked him he could never quite explain what a socialist was.

  This final dig was too much for Mick. He had a short temper, though his bad moods never lasted long and he always regretted them. Now he tried again to make some smart answer, but instead after a minute he gave up.

  ‘I’ll tell ya, Lil,’ he said, ‘I don’t know about righting the wrongs of the world, but I surely won’t answer for all the sins of the world!’

  And he turned on his heel and stamped out of the room, banging the door after him. They heard him clattering down the stairs, catch his foot on the loose step above the first landing and curse. Ma couldn’t keep a straight face any more. She burst out laughing and grabbed hold of Jimmy. He clung to her warmth, relief flooding through him. Ma’s laughter was the nicest sound in the world. When he heard her laughing he felt that he must be doing what Da had asked, and looking after her.

  ‘Oh Jimmy,’ she said to him, ‘you’re the grandest son that a mother could have!’

  ‘What about poor Mick?’ Jimmy asked her. He knew it was hard not to tease Mick sometimes, but he was fond of his uncle.

  Ma laughed again.

  ‘That big eejit!’ she said. ‘He’ll be back. Don’t you worry. And when he comes back maybe we’ll even find out why he came in the first place.’

  ‘He came to see if you were all right,’ Jimmy said. ‘The way he always does.’

  Ma swung him away from her but didn’t let go. Her face was happy.

  ‘But, sure, how would I not be all right,’ she said, ‘when I have the grandest son in Ireland looking after me?’

  4

  THE THINKING GAME

  AFTERWARDS JIMMY’S MA WENT OFF TO DOYLES’ to see whether the laundry had arrived yet from the nuns. Josie and Sarah were there already, visiting Tommy’s sister Alice. Alice was a pale girl who always seemed to be suffering from one illness or another. She’d been very sick with a fever for a week now.

  ‘Why don’t you stay at home and amuse yourself?’ Ma told Jimmy before she went out. ‘I won’t be back for a couple of hours, and the girls can wait for me. It’s not often that you have the place to yourself.’

  This suited Jimmy very well. He’d been spending more time at home lately though in his heart he really preferred to be out in the streets with his friends. With them he could do all the things that boys like to do. The problem was that sometimes the things the boys did got you in trouble. Jimmy, when he remembered, tried to avoid getting involved with things like that. But mostly he just forgot, and then Ma was hurt.

  Sometimes Jimmy managed to remember and stay out of trouble. That was really all that had happened yesterday, however much Ma and Kitty Doyle had made out of it. But avoiding involvement was hard sometimes too. If the other boys noticed, they might think you were afraid, and they would call you a sissy or a German. These were very bad things to be called, and so sometimes Jimmy ended up doing things he really didn’t want to do. So he tended to spend much more time at home now, avoiding temptation. It was the easiest way in the end.

  When Ma left, Jimmy sat in her rocking chair by the fire and again looked up at the old clock on the mantelpiece. The clock was part of a new game that he’d found lately. He called it the thinking game.

  The thinking
game wasn’t a game like football or chasing. It was a game that you played on your own. What you did was to sit and make up exciting stories for yourself. If you imagined hard enough, you could be anything in the thinking game. It was great fun, because when your adventures were all in your mind you could do things that you could never do in real life. As well as that, of course, the things you did couldn’t get you into trouble. That was a definite bonus.

  When Jimmy was playing the thinking game he didn’t like to be disturbed. This was difficult when there were other people in the room, but if he thought hard enough he could eventually ignore them. It was like having a little private room in your head where you could go and play. Once you were in the little room you could be anything and anywhere you liked. The problem was getting to that little room in the first place.

  Gradually Jimmy had found a way to help him reach the little room and start his game. The first thing he did was to concentrate on something in the big room that was his home. He’d stare at the thing and think about it until the noises of his sisters’ play faded, and even the noises from the street outside sounded as if they came from very far away.

  Sometimes people thought there was something wrong with him.

  ‘What’s he staring like that for?’ Ella would ask, forgetting her troubles for a moment. ‘Is he sick?’

  ‘He’s just thinking,’ Ma would say, with a note of pride in her voice.

  ‘Thinking!’ Ella would answer, as though thinking were some awful crime. ‘Why isn’t he out playing like a normal young fellow?’

  ‘He plays enough. Let him think. It’s a pity more men wouldn’t try it now and then.’

  And Ella, busy with her own problems, would soon go back to telling Ma about them in a choked whisper.

  It didn’t do to start your thinking by looking at just anything. Most of the things in the room were far too ordinary. The mattresses were old and sagging, the rest of the furniture chipped and scratched. If you looked closely at such things your daydreams would be scratched and sagging too, and that was no use: that was just like the world you saw around you every day.