Authors: Noël Browne
There had been a night like that long before. I was learning how to walk and was being helped by my father on our way up to Sweeney’s general shop a few hundred yards from our house. There
was a hurried scattering of frightened men and women, well used by then to the ominous whine of the Black and Tan Crossley lorries. It was the practice for these British auxiliaries, a force of
mercenaries who had fought in the 1914-18 war, to sweep through Irish towns and villages in their Crossley tenders, dressed in a motley of uniforms and armed with rifles and revolvers. They were
protected from attack by wire cages over the back of the lorry, and by hostages taken from the local community. The hostages sat back to back on their long wooden forms in the centre of the lorry.
Frightened, no doubt and often drunk, the Black and Tans shot at civilians out of a macabre sense of fun. My father on this occasion dragged me into his arms and ran up the few steps to reach the
safety of Sweeney’s shop. There I found myself sitting on a heap of copper and silver coins and paper money in the centre of the small safe.
One night we were awakened abruptly by my father. He was angry, which surprised me since he was a very even-tempered man, and was abusing those outside the house. I recall hearing him mutter
‘if only I had a gun myself’. He ordered us all to lie down flat on the floor. We were in the front line in an ambush: an assassination attempt was being carried out by the Irregulars
on a car full of Free State officers; these officers, based in Custume Barracks, used to visit Duffy’s house, directly opposite to ours. On this occasion, the senior officer and a young
lieutenant were ambushed just as they drove away. We were in the heart of the ambush in our first floor bedroom, listening to much shouting and then shooting. Whether I imagined it or not, I recall
hearing someone shout ‘don’t shoot’. This was followed by the sound of shooting, then the sound of men running up the lane beside our house. I heard the distinctive metallic
clanging sound of the heavy iron gates to Kane’s field at the top of the laneway, and they were away.
The attackers did not ‘get’ the senior officer for whom they had set the ambush, General Seán MacEoin, known and admired by the rest of us as the ‘Blacksmith of
Ballinalee’. Instead a young lieutenant lay dead in his own great pool of blood, which was still there on the following morning for us children to see, covered simply by a rough potato sack
— Pearse’s ‘rich red blood, which so enhances the soil’. I was neither frightened nor revolted, but exhilarated.
At school the following day, I went over the sequence of the night’s killing again and again for my interested fellow pupils, the centre of attention for having had the front seat at an
ambush and a killing, and with the bullet-scarred walls of our house to prove it. This awful example of man’s unique capacity to kill cruelly a fellow man, even the wrong man, simply appeared
to us like a cinema show. The bodily agony of the wounded and dying was transmuted by a crude potato sack and the faded black patch of blood. Is this all a merciful protection for the young who
must live out their lives among the ‘grown-up’ men and women in control of man’s destiny?
Twenty-five years later, an odd sequel was acted out in the Cabinet office in Merrion Street, after the formation of the first coalition government in 1948, when the members of the Cabinet met
to be introduced to each other. I introduced myself to Sean MacEoin, who was to be Minister for Justice. The last time I had heard his voice was under the window of our bedroom on the night of the
ambush outside Duffy’s nearly thirty years before. I told MacEoin that in my account to my schoolfriends I had attributed to him the shouted words, ‘don’t shoot’. It was
generally believed by the public that in spite of being a soldier, with the soldier’s awful job of daily learning how to kill other men more cleverly, MacEoin was a gentle peaceful man, who
greatly regretted the ‘split’. He neither wanted to kill, nor be killed. MacEoin replied that his instinct would have been to try to stop the shooting, but on both sides.
Possibly attempting to obliterate the unhappy memory, he then proceeded to show me how he had disarmed his British Army guard when he was a prisoner in Dublin Castle, during an abortive attempt
made by Michael Collins to rescue him. He grabbed my right hand, no doubt what he would have called my revolver hand, and pinned it helplessly behind my back. Even then, in middle age, he was an
extremely powerful blacksmith of a man.
I remember too seeing row after row of tricolour-covered coffins, side by side. To me they were just so many colourful outsize parcels, in a great room in some building. In these coffins were
the remains of men shot in Custume Barracks by the Free State government as part of massive reprisals for the killing of Dáil deputy Sean Hales; they could not lie before the altar in St
Mary’s, since the Republicans had been excommunicated. These grim white pine boxes, filled with the bodies of innocent youths who had been murdered, ‘the sow devouring her
farrow’, left no shocked memory on my child’s mind. Why not leave the bullet-shattered, terrified, open-eyed, naked corpse exposed for the young such as myself to see, and to learn from
it the folly of our ‘wiser and older’ leaders of church and state?
This flag which we looked at was the same national flag run up over the castle in Athlone, after the Union Jack was lowered, to signify our new freedom from the British Army. Standing with my
father on Custume Bridge, I had happily watched them tramp out of our lives, to be replaced by our new Free State army. But had this freedom not been won by these same young men, now boxed
carcases, shot by their own, not by the British? Incomprehensible grownups; a child must learn to accept without question or explanation the enigmatic contradictions of adult life.
Much later in a diary kept by Peadar Cowan, an officer in the Free State army in Custume Barracks, I read of the blindingly whimsical system whereby the victims were chosen for death: it was a
simple process of taking a group of prisoners from each county. Between November 1922 and May 1923, seventy-seven Republican prisoners in all were to be executed without trial. Since these men had
all been in custody at the time of the shooting of Hales and were known to be innocent of the assassination for which the reprisals were being carried out, their killing was indefensible. The most
stunning experience for me was to read how Peadar, a parliamentary colleague of mine in later life, recounted the incident of the mass executions without showing any sense of horror, shock, guilt
or concern whatever for the whole process or his own part in it. Yet Peadar was what is known in Ireland as ‘a devoutly religious man’.
During the British period of occupation there were many raids for arms and hostages were taken to clear the barricades or ambushed roads outside the town. Our houses were searched for men
‘on the run’. Armed soldiers took over total control. The fear was instant and freezing. ‘Please God, let them go away, and leave us alone.’ I’m afraid that there was
always the emphasis on that ‘us’; let them torment someone else. The awful selfish self-preservation of the hunger camps affects us all.
The child of a large family, such as ours was, is nearly inevitably deprived of the emotional nurturing found in the stable small family. In the large family neither the mother nor the father
can make the time needed to socialise with the children. Children are deprived of the personality moulding, formative process of intensive or casual intelligently-directed conversation with the
parents. It is not surprising that we understood little except the crude differences between pleasure and pain.
There was one comforting feature in our family’s life. This happened at near five o’clock on a summer’s evening when our tea, bread and butter was ready. It was my
mother’s practice, a strange one for the shy country girl she was, to stand outside at the front door of our house on the step. Then, no doubt to the neighbours’ surprise since no-one
else did it, she proceeded to whistle us all home. This distinctive slow rising and falling whistle was the ‘exclusive’ Browne sound. Wherever we were playing, in Begley’s or
Duffy’s yard, by the Shannon or in Kane’s field at the back of the house, playing hopscotch, rolling hoops, or smashing our champion chestnuts against our rivals’ we would all,
like the sunflower turning to the sun, wend our way towards home, and our waiting mother, and tea. She would remain at the door and continue to whistle until she could count all of us safely home
at last. Such was a child’s life in the town of Athlone in spite of the Civil War we played. We found that her fragmented love for us was sufficient.
I became a pupil at the Marist Brothers’ school. I served Mass at St Mary’s throughout my life there and could be depended on to turn up in time in all weathers. (My mother was
pleased to see me involved even at this remove in church services; she hoped that I would one day become a priest, like all Irish Catholic mothers of her time.) It was there that I was subjected to
the torment of copper-plate handwriting. We were compelled to copy the headline copy books with our right hands, and I was naturally left-handed, a ‘citeóg’. In those times a
person who wrote with their left hand was considered to be in some way in league with the devil. The Marist Brothers’ solution, of compelling me to write exclusively with my right hand, was
intended to solve the problem of my becoming the devil’s child. It left me unable to write legibly to this day, with either hand.
I have happy memories of a patient young lay teacher, Mr Handley, who spoke Irish and gave us plasticine to play with. There was also a harassed and unhappy-looking older man, Mr Roper, whose
appearance was somewhat intimidating. He lived in a pretty rose-covered cottage outside the town. Small in size and figure, he wore grey knickerbockers with long grey stockings and
brightly-polished black kid laced boots. He was nearly bald, with a few wisps of what had been red hair brushed carefully across his head, and had small eyes. His face was that of an impatient man
with a short temper yet I do not recall his being unduly angry at any time.
This was the time when the new native government, under Marcus O’Sullivan, the Minister for Education, was enthusiastically, and not very wisely, pressing forward with their insistence
that we should all speak Gaelic, irrespective of whether the language of the home was Gaelic or English. This was just one example of the non-Irish speaking enthusiast’s impractical and
bizarre belief that he could, irrespective of its results on others, achieve the impossible. Do what I say, but not what I do. I understood that Mr Roper, who appeared to be in his late forties,
was submitted to a brief ‘crash’ course in the Irish language. Understandably, it was impossible for him to learn the language, in such a short time, and consequently to teach it to us.
He himself neither knew nor spoke, and possibly did not even like the language. He certainly did not appear to share his Minister’s love of it.
In the infant’s class I had the sole unhappy experience of my childhood with either of my parents. It was the custom in the school, following the First Communion ceremony, for the brothers
to celebrate the day by giving the children a fine breakfast. Very few of us had any such breakfast at home. Somehow I happened to be at the school one morning on the boys’ return from their
First Communion. They were dressed as was the custom in shiny black boots, short pants, spotlessly washed white shirts, and grey socks, knees pink with the cold, and carried with pride their
red-ribboned Holy Communion medals. As they filed into the converted classroom for breakfast, Mr Handley told me to join the others at the breakfast table. I can still recall the large fried egg,
placed on the centre of a piece of fried bread, tea, bread and butter unlimited. On the completion of the meal I returned home, and was astonished to find my gentle mother very angry with me. Alas,
she was over-sensitive, and afraid that the breakfast I had been given by a kindly Mr Handley was intended as a charitable gesture to her ‘hungry poverty-stricken child’. She came from
a proud village family home in Co Mayo and was deeply hurt by the implications of charity, a common false pride in such Irish homes then.
Following release from infants’ class, I made my First Communion, and the now famous breakfast was rightly earned and eaten. I passed into Brother John’s class: he was known to his
colleagues as ‘Snowball’. He was a small, neatly-dressed man, with well cared-for white crinkly hair, and the most delicately-shaped hands and fingers I have ever seen on man or woman.
He had clever blue eyes and a finely-formed nose; his mouth was small, firm and mean. When his clever eyes became brighter, and his face cherry-coloured, we knew he was angry, and that we would
soon see the brisk swinging action of his springy yellow cane. He had only one serious interest in life, Gregorian chant. The miscellaneous nondescript room, full of boys poorly but cleanly
dressed, with no vestige of culture, inexplicably presented to Brother John a collection of potential songbirds. From these he found it possible, in time, to extract beautiful musical sounds. He
would simply persist and pray, and maybe cane a few of us if need be, in order to relieve his frustration and improve our singing. He appeared to me to look over us, to look through us, to look
around us, but never at us. Were we there at all for him? I cannot recall having any formal classes about academic subjects during his classes. The cane, with the traditional incongruous tiny
handle, protruded like a ‘shooter’ in a Western cowboy picture from his cassock pocket, always at the ready.
Because I was punctual, predictable, and never missed school, Brother John chose to rely on me to run messages. I was given the money needed to fetch jotters and school books from the shop
opposite the Prince of Wales Hotel in the centre of the town. I knew how to count and bring back the correct change. The most important message, for which I was dispatched early in the morning, was
a large roll of shiny black paper, about the size of a roll of wallpaper. On my return with this black roll and a large box of drawing pins, Brother John would tell us all to be silent. It was then
I would notice his thin, nimble, wax-like fingers. He would unroll the shiny black paper and attach it with fine precision to the left-hand side of the blackboard, then unroll the paper and pin it
to the board until it crossed to the outer edge, where he pinned it again. This transformed the school blackboard into a shiny rectangle, like black glass. We watched in silence, not a word from
anyone. Brother John had that effect on all of us: he rarely, if ever, spoke to us.