by Seamus Deane
My Mary’s asleep
By yon murmuring stream,
Flow gently Sweet Afton,
Disturb not her dream.
‘Ah, dear,’ he sighed when I had done, ‘murder it as you may, young Caliban, it’s still a sweet song. Do you know “The Quiet Land of Erin”?’
I sang him that too, watching as I did for the approach of anyone, for that would have silenced me at once. But no one came near. Then he sang a couple of the lines to himself, his hands on the knees of his black priest-like trousers.
And ’tis I would let the Sunday go
In the cuckoo-glen above the bay.
I watched a rose petal fall and skid on the grass for a bit before it rested, uneasily.
‘Sundays,’ said Joe, ‘are terrible days. Everything terrible that I know happened on a Sunday. Isn’t that strange? You’d know that yourself, with your family history. Fire on a Saturday, execution on a Sunday. Or was the fire on a Friday? You’d not think I’d forget something like that now. Well I remember that day. Never heard so many shots in my life. But the Sunday, that I’m sure of. No, it started on a Sunday, that’s it.’
‘What started on a Sunday?’
He chanted, in a light, parodic voice:
Twas on a Sunday we asked him why,
Twas on a Monday he had to die…
I was silent for a moment.
‘Were you there, then? On the Sunday? Or the day of the shoot-out?’
He mused for a while, resting his hands on the stick, lowering his chin on his hands. He opened his mouth wide once or twice.
‘Sure who wasn’t there, wherever there was, that time. Everybody who mattered was there, all linked in, dancing to somebody else’s tune, if only they knew it. I was a young man, then. Not so mad then, I think, but on my way, on my way.’
He paused for a moment.
‘So young Maeve’s got married, I hear? And to a blackie as well! I’d have liked to see her father’s face when he heard that!’
He cackled in his indifferent way.
‘You could hardly see his face, since he’s in Chicago this long time,’ I replied.
‘Oh, I still see his face, never you fear. Four in the morning. The eighth of July 1926. Getting out of the police car, like a shadow. Two men in the back. And our dear old friend Burke at the wheel. McIlhenny stops to pull up his collar and I step out, so I do, from the wall where I’d been standing out of the rain and I look close and I see who it is and off I go, like a shadow up the street and leave him standing there in the rain.’
‘So what was he doing there?’
‘What the hell do you think he was doing? Informing. Informing. Selling his people for a few shillings. I’ll tell you this. He never saw me. But he got out in time. Never saw his wife or child again after that. But who tipped him off that he had been seen? Can’t work that one out for sure, though I have my notions. I’m surprised the police bothered to take care of him. He was of use to them once in his life and never again.’ Then he spread his arms and sang
Goodnight sweetheart, we’ll be waiting for you,
Goodnight sweetheart, you will soon be sorry…
He got up. I handed him his stick.
‘I’m off,’ he announced, ‘and when I see you again, you’ll be a lot older. But I’ll be the same age as ever I was.’
He tapped his forehead with his finger, beaming at me.
‘Eternal youth. The secret of the insane.’
He took a step away, turned round again.
‘That’s what punishment does; makes you remember everything.’
He moved off along the path, humming to himself, and I stayed for a moment to watch the rose petal lodged precariously in the grass, straining to catch the next whiff of the breeze. So that was the tip-off, Joe? Joe identified McIlhenny as the informer? It seemed unlikely, but there it was.
IN IRISH
October 1955
My mother knew no Irish, but she had dismembered bits and pieces of poems and songs that were from the Irish. When she had been ill, she had asked me once if I knew any of the old poems in Irish, if I had learned them at school. But I knew very little. There was one, she said, that was by a woman, and in it the woman lamented that she had done a terrible thing, she had forsaken the man she loved, but she could still remember how, before this had happened, the trees in the wood made wild music to her, and the sound of the sea was such that it hurt her breast with its rolling. Did I know that poem? The woman’s name was Líadan. She thought there might be a song about it. But I didn’t know. Why did she forsake him? I asked. She didn’t know, except that it had to do with gaining entry to Paradise.
I decided to tell her everything I knew. But every time I started, my courage failed. I thought if I could just get going, I’d get through it all. Anything might happen. Maybe she would put her hands over her ears and start crying. Or worse. But I had to say I knew. The truth was swollen inside me. I thought of telling Liam but that seemed wrong, unless I had told her first. Then I could tell him, if she allowed it. Several times I tried, but I couldn’t.
I decided to write it all out in an exercise book, partly to get it clear, partly to rehearse it and decide which details to include or leave out. But then the fear that someone would find it and read it overcame me. So, with the help of a dictionary, I translated it all into Irish, taking more than a week to do it. Then I destroyed the English version, burning it in front of my mother’s eyes, even though she told me I would clog up the fire with the paper.
I waited for a few days. Then, one evening, when my father was there, reading his way through Pear’s Encyclopaedia, his hand-held education, as he called it, and I was sitting at the table doing homework, I read it all outright in Irish to him. It was an essay we had been assigned in school, I told him, on local history. He just nodded and smiled and said it sounded wonderful. My mother had listened carefully. I knew she knew what I was doing. My father tapped me on the shoulder and said he liked to hear the language spoken in the house. When he went out to sweep the backyard, I could feel her looking at me, though my back was turned to her. She was quiet for a long time. I watched him through the window, sloshing water from a bucket on the concrete and then sweeping vigorously. She got up with a sigh and made to move towards the stairs. He had stopped brushing and was leaning on the handle, staring at the ground. She was looking at him too, I knew. Then she said something very brief, maybe something angry, that I couldn’t hear because I was crying.
We heard that Sergeant Burke’s two sons, his only children, had gone off to Maynooth to study for the priesthood. At least no more Burkes would be bred, said Uncle Tom. I wouldn’t bet on that, said his brother Dan. They just won’t carry the name, that’s all. My mother stirred from her torpor to ask God to forgive Dan for saying such a thing about the holy priests. Everybody laughed. Such a family for the black uniform, said someone else. Don’t, said my mother, don’t dare associate one with the other. They belong in different worlds, different worlds.
POLITICAL EDUCATION
November 1956
We stared at the speaker, a priest in British army uniform, a chaplain, a smooth and tall man, with a tall and smooth accent, a handsome face tinged a little with blood-pressure at the cheeks, a visitor to our school, introduced by the President, sent by the Ministry of Education. He seemed to me exquisite as he put on his peaked cap, shook hands with the teachers on the platform, folded his papers, smiled at the hesitant applause. He bowed slightly at us, brought his hands together in a prayerful gesture, and, after thanks and acknowledgements to the President and to the college, began his speech.
‘Were you to view the Foyle Basin from Binevenagh, almost twelve hundred feet above the sea, with the bird-haunted mud flats of the River Roe at its foot, you would begin to appreciate both the beauty and the strategic importance of the dramatic landscape and seascape in which your city rests. This was the city that, even today, still commands the eastern approaches of the North Atlantic, that is sti
ll a vital port for the great NATO fleets that regularly put in here during those exercises that are part of the Western world’s preparations for the defeat of the international Communist threat. That threat is as real now as once was the threat of those German submarines that surrendered here at the end of the war and now lie rusting on the ocean floor, their scuttling a symbol and reminder of our determination to defend the cause of democracy and freedom, of the might and resolve with which we shall always mobilise our resources to maintain that democratic system in which we all have the good fortune to live. As the Soviet submarines glide under the waters of the North Atlantic today, as the sailors of many lands arrive in Derry to add to the rich fabric of the city’s life, you will remember the signs of the war the city has seen – the scores of German prisoners, the gallant survivors of U-boat attacks, the lines of captured German submarines, the hundreds of American and British warships, the great American naval base of 1941 that still remains, those German warplanes in their bombing of the city that mercifully was to survive and remain thereafter beyond their reach – all of these dramatic sights that attest to the proud role your city played in that titanic struggle. And once more you are called to take part in a battle that is just as dramatic, although less visible: a struggle against a foe that is no less real for being less visible. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of men; a battle of faithlessness against faith; a battle of subtle wiles against manly freedom; a battle of cold atheism against the genial warmth of that Christian faith that has lit so many Irish hearts down the centuries. Not for them, not for such a people, the closed churches, the prison camps, the expropriated lands of a secular and military state, the fruit of a godless creed. Atheism is against not only our reason but our instincts. It cannot long prevail. Ireland has never elected such evil, for Ireland and the Irish people trust, and properly trust, their deepest instincts. With their co-habitants of these islands, they shall put away – as a distraction and a disablement – whatever there is of local dispute, of transient division between them, and look instead, in a higher and nobler view, to those sunlit uplands of human freedom that are the ribbed slopes of Binevenagh and the wide plateau that stretches beyond it from these contested waters to the security of our inland towns and villages. Our internal disputes are no more than family quarrels; faced with an external enemy, the solidarity of our Christian family must reassert itself, be galvanised to protect, as each part of the variegated Irish family has protected down through the centuries, its own essential freedoms. We have many memorials of the Irish urge to defend those freedoms – from the walls of this city itself to the ancient fortress of Grianan that surveys the ancient hinterland of Columba’s monastic settlement that brought Christianity to the neighbouring island. With such a history, with such a land, with such a people – famously generous as enemies, famously faithful as allies – we can face into the future with confidence, conscious that the wild rolling seas of the distant Atlantic are as vital a part of our domain as the very streets on which we walk, the monuments that we preserve, the affections that we nourish. I know that what your city has done in the war that is past, it shall do again in the war that has already arrived and has still to be won in the future. It is an onerous responsibility Yet it is a matter of personal pride and happiness that this responsibility is to be borne by the people of the city I first came to know during the war at the Combined Naval and Air Headquarters at Magee College and that I have visited regularly ever since. It is here, where fashion and fads are treated with amusement and contempt, here, in a society that is rooted in tradition and continuity that one can have a sense of the links between the human struggle and the eternal verities. Without that abiding sense of continuity, men would become little better than the flies of a summer. With that as a treasured element of our patrimony, we become actors in a great drama, a story that ends in a world beyond our own and for which our own is an immense and glorious preparation. God is the goal of our history; our history is the preserve of the God-fearing, the brave, the chivalric, the courteous, the humble. I salute you all.’
We filed away to our classes from the main hall. Everyone was curiously silent.
Next day, in history class, we discussed the speech. Father McAuley asked for initial reactions, but got .none. Had we not listened? he shouted. Did we not pay attention? Were we vegetable, animal or mineral? Did we not see any connection between this man’s visit and the recent bombing campaign?
To stop him flying off into one of his furies, Irwin intervened to ask what was all that stuff about Binevenagh? What had that to do with Communism? Slightly appeased, but still emanating that mildly contemptuous patience that marked all his addresses to us, McAuley explained that by mentioning Binevenagh the man had been able to give us an overall view both of the area and of the situation. He had started with something we knew, then went on to connect that with what we didn’t know. That was a pedagogic technique, he told us. We had to write those words down. Again there was silence. Exasperated, McAuley then told us that the lecture had been designed to lift our eyes from our own petty squabbles and let us see our place in the world at large. The man had vision. Well McAuley remembered those same U-boats lined up out at Lisahally; well he remembered the American ships in the lough; well he remembered this, that and the other. We roiled internally in boredom. McShane then asked if the man was a Catholic priest. Certainly not, answered McAuley, the man was an Anglican, or what was called an Anglo-Catholic priest, although as far as he was concerned – and us too – there was no kind of Catholic other than the Roman Catholic. He told us this every year. So we should never use the term ‘Anglo-Catholic’, for that was admitting that the Reformation had right on its side. This distinction left us awash. So which was worse, I asked, Communism or the Reformation? Both were bad, but the Reformation was history. Communism was the living threat. But are we not threatened by the Reformation here, even yet? Isn’t it held against you here to be a Catholic? That was just what the lecturer was telling us, he explained, with no sense of unease. Forget those old distinctions. That was a family quarrel within the Christian family. It would work itself out. When that had all been resolved, Communism would still be there, threatening anyone who believed in God. We were of the West and must throw our lot in with it. Locked into our little streets, he told us, we lacked that promontory view the man had described, but as long as we kept our faith we would, just by doing that, play our role in the world. We must recognise the irrelevance of our own internal differences in face of the demands of world history That’s where we should set our eyes – on the global horizon. And next day, we would continue with our regular European history. The Congress of Vienna. History was about trends, not about people. We had to learn to see the trends. Though God knows it was unlikely, for all his efforts and those of the lecturer, that we ever would. He rushed out as the bell rang to smoke his cigarette in the corridor outside before the next class came in.
‘Propaganda,’ said Irwin. ‘That’s all that is. First, it’s the Germans. Then it’s the Russians. Always, it’s the IRA. British propaganda. What have the Germans or Russians to do with us? It’s the British who are the problem for us. McAuley’s a moron.’
I remembered the teenage German my father had brought extra lunch to when he was in the prisoner-of-war compound down at the docks and who had, I had been told, given my father the German pistol as a thank you – the pistol that had disappeared into the police barracks years before and ignited so much since. But that was a petty squabble, perhaps. I was beginning to catch on at last. Global vision. I needed that.
SERGEANT BURKE
December 1957
Look now, Ma’am, Sergeant Burke had said to my mother (or something like that), I’m not bringing you any more trouble so rest easy. We’ve got a lot of things on file that I want to clear up and put away for good, and they date back before my time as sergeant here. Oh, she couldn’t tell me rightly how he had said it all, it just came out of him like the heat off someone with fever.
Every time he said no trouble, no more trouble, and he kept saying that, I could sense trouble, she said, I could feel my clothes tautening on me as if someone were pulling them tight from behind. I wanted to die and I wanted to face up to him, but I couldn’t do either, so I just sat there, God forgive me, nodding at what he said, thinking, sweet Jesus, is there a child moving inside me, was that a kick I felt in my belly the way I used to when one of you was starting to move and I would know if it was a boy or a girl from the kind of kick it was – I did – and I was always right, for I’d tell your father when he came home which it was going to be. He always laughed at that but he believed me. If I said it was a girl, his face would always brighten more, for he thought with a girl it was an even bigger miracle, though that doesn’t mean he didn’t want any of you boys. He was just like that.
Was I at school the day Burke came in to talk to her? Even long after she told me about it, I convinced myself that I had been home that day and had heard his voice. The velvety crooning of pigeons from Freddie Campbell’s shed, three doors up, used to bring sleep around me in the summer afternoons. We fancied we were experts on the pigeons, called them by their various names – fantails, ringers, homers, doves – and daily watched them flutter in circles above the roofs before they settled on the shed’s corrugated tin slope. The seed they fed on and their blue-and-white droppings, the white a dry flare, the blue like an eye in the flare’s head, were spattered all over the back yards in a harmless carnage. Was it on such an afternoon Burke had come in, while I lay there drowsing? It wasn’t so, but I wanted it to be so. It happened in December, 1957, when I was still at school; but it was four years later, when I was starting at university, before she told me. And then, I think, it was only because I was going away to France for the summer vacation and she had this notion that I might never come back, or get killed in an accident. It was the night before I left. My father had gone out to see his brother Phonsie, who was ill. I was beginning to believe that she didn’t mind so much my knowing what I did, was more assured of my silence, no matter what I knew.