Authors: Anne Bennett
‘Well, they did do wrong, pet. They’ll have to be punished.’
Dermot shot a look at Phelan. ‘Did you know it was wrong?’
Phelan shrugged. ‘I didn’t think that when I marched off with the Brotherhood. I know now all right.’
Dermot digested this. He remembered Phelan telling him how he was fighting for Home Rule and independence for Ireland and it had sounded a fine thing to do. Dermot had wished fervently he could be part of it. And now, here was Phelan looking downhearted and defeated, saying he knew the whole uprising had been wrong. And Danny was in jail.
It was confusing, but then a lot of things confused him, and he remembered the promise he’d made Geraldine. ‘Will you come down to the house? Geraldine wanted to come with me to see if you were back, but Mammy wouldn’t let her.’
‘Did she let you out?’
Dermot shook his head. ‘No, but I got away. She keeps Geraldine hard at it.’
Rosie could guess that. She knew exactly what Geraldine’s life was like under her mother’s thumb, but she was surprised Dermot not only saw that but was ready to give voice to it. She shook her head. ‘I can’t just up and come like that, Dermot,’ she said. ‘There’s dishes to be washed and Bernadette is asleep in the bedroom and…’
‘Go with the child and see your parents and your sister,’ Connie urged. ‘I’ll soon see to these few things and I’m here if Bernadette should wake.’
‘Ah, Mam, I hate to ask you after you’ve been seeing to her while I was in Dublin.’
‘It’s a pleasure to me, Rosie. Go on now.’
‘Aye, Connie’s right,’ Matt said. ‘They’ll be concerned for you. It’s only right you should see them, let them know you’re all right.’
So Rosie allowed herself to be persuaded and later, as she sat in her parents’ house with a cup of tea and a slice of cake Geraldine pressed upon her, she knew if it hadn’t been for her brother and sisters, she’d never have gone over the threshold of the place.
Minnie and Seamus had been scathing and scornful about the rebellion from the start, but they were worse now. They wouldn’t stop going on about it and had no sympathy about Danny going off to Dublin in search of his young brother. ‘The boy shouldn’t have been allowed to get involved in the first place,’ Minnie said. ‘I’d soon put a stop to Dermot doing such a thing.’
Rosie said nothing. She’d have valued a measure of sympathy, a comforting arm around her shoulders, but knew she’d get nothing like that from the cold pair before her. But even as she thought this, she knew from the lift of Dermot’s chin and the look in his eyes at Minnie’s words that Dermot would go his own way when the time came.
She didn’t stay long. She couldn’t, even for her sisters’ sake, and using Bernadette as an excuse was soon on her way back home, glad to leave the depressing house where she had been born and reared for seventeen years, but which had never ever felt like home.
Later that same day, as Connie laid the table for dinner and Rosie attempted to feed egg yolk and bread and butter to
Bernadette, Sarah and Elizabeth came in waving the
Dublin Express.
Pleased though they were to see Rosie back safe and sound, they had news of their own. The fifteen leaders of the Easter Uprising had been condemned to death. The leader of the rebels, Padraic Pearce, was one of the ones to be executed the following day, while his brother Willie and Joseph Plunkett were amongst those to be killed later that week.
Rosie, remembering the name, wondered if Joseph Plunkett had married his sweetheart and if he had what earthly good it had done either him or her.
‘The two Pearce men,’ Matt said. ‘They only have the two. God, wouldn’t that just tear the heart out of you, losing two sons?’
‘Listen to yourself,’ Connie said scornfully, as she tipped a pan of potatoes into a dish on the table. ‘Sure, just one son killed would tear the heart out of you. But at least they’ll have the benefit of the last rites and will have died cleanly and respectably.’
But privately she wondered to herself whether it would matter that much how and where a mother lost her son. True, a person might have a grave to tend to show him that he would never be forgotten but, if Danny were to be shot because of his part in the uprising, the sadness and horror of it would stay with her for ever and so would the guilt that she had sent him to his death by charging him to find Phelan and bring him home. God Almighty! No wonder Rosie could barely look at the lad, never mind speak to him. It was a wonder that she didn’t lay some of the blame on her shoulders as well, for Rosie’s loss and Bernadette’s were as great as Connie’s own.
Rosie thought the same way as Connie, but she was even more sorrow-laden, for she was positive that Danny would suffer the same fate as the leaders in time and she also faced the terrible realisation that they might never know. The rebel leaders had made history so their names would be published
in the press. They were newsworthy. If they reported on the execution of the others at all, they’d hardly bother printing the names and so her husband could be shot at any time and tipped into a pauper’s grave, along with other prison inmates, and she might never even find out where he’d been buried.
The pain of these thoughts never left her as the executions in the stone-breaker’s yard of the jail went on and it was a pain she could share with no one, for she hadn’t told Connie what Father Joe and Danny thought would happen and couldn’t load it on her now.
Only one of the leaders had been pardoned and that was Eamon de Valera. Matt read the news out of the
Express
one evening after the meal. ‘It’s been reduced to a life sentence,’ he said.
‘How come?’ Phelan asked. ‘He was as involved as any other.’
‘He has an American passport – he was born in New York, it says here,’ Matt said.
Rosie shivered. The thought of spending her life in a tiny cell and only being let out to break big stones into smaller ones every day of her natural life didn’t bear thinking about. She thought she’d rather be dead.
Rosie knew Danny wouldn’t be able to stand being shut up for life like de Valera, and she also knew he would have no choice in the matter, and neither would she.
Rosie mourned the loss of Danny as if he were dead, as indeed he might well be. Every week she wrote to him as Connie did, but he didn’t write back and this upset both women. ‘Sure, what would he have to say?’ Matt said when they mentioned it to him. ‘In there, I should imagine one day slides into the next, each day the same.’
‘I ask him questions,’ Rosie protested. ‘Surely he could answer those? And I tell him about Bernadette. You’d think he’d make some comment.’
But Matt could understand why Danny didn’t write. As for telling him about the child he was likely never to see, it must have been like a knife in his heart to read those words.
After a month of silence, Connie was all for making the journey to Dublin with clothes and food for Danny, but Rosie stopped her. ‘I think he has to wear prison uniform now,’ she said. She hesitated over the next bit, for she’d never told Connie what had really happened to the basket of food she’d given her, but she did so now, unwilling to give the governor another good feed at their expense.
‘You mean he got none of it?’ Connie exclaimed. ‘But the shirt and jumper, what happened to them?’
Rosie shrugged. ‘I had to leave the whole thing with the
Governor. I doubt Danny ever got a sniff of the food in the basket and the clothes would certainly have graced someone else’s back. You must remember the meagre fare to be had in Dublin at that time, but even now, with things possibly different, I think good farm food would not get past first post and that’s the Governor’s office.
‘Added to that, Danny will not want to see you there. Write to your aunt, Sister Cuthbert. Maybe the Franciscan friars are still visiting the prison. You might get news that way.’
It wasn’t what Connie wanted to hear but she knew Rosie spoke the truth and so she did as she suggested. Sister Cuthbert wrote a lovely letter back, saying Father Joe, who’d accompanied Rosie to the prison, was just one of the friars visiting. But because he knew Danny was related to her and he remembered Rosie, he popped in now and then to see how he was.
Here, Sister Cuthbert hesitated. She hadn’t known Danny before, but Father Joe had told her of the silent, morose man, his prison clothes hanging off his sparse frame. His face had lost its ruddy glow he said, and his pale cheeks were sunken in his face, for the paltry prison fare was barely enough to keep a man alive, especially as they worked from dawn to dusk at back-breaking work like smashing large stones day after day.
In Danny’s eyes, the friar read the sorrow, exhaustion and sheer hopelessness that was lodged in his heart, but the man himself never spoke of it. Not that he was alone in these feelings, he told Sister Cuthbert, for most men incarcerated there were the same. So Sister Cuthbert told Connie that Danny was as well as could be expected in the circumstances and to keep writing even though he didn’t answer. Let him know he’s not been forgotten, she advised.
He hadn’t, and the loss of him was like a leaden weight Rosie carried constantly with her, but in the end she had to push it to the back of her mind for life had to go on. There was still a dairy to see to, a house to clean, food to be cooked,
clothes to wash and a baby to rear. It saddened her that Bernadette might know nothing of the father who had walked away that day but, surrounded by Danny’s family and visited plenty by Rosie’s sisters and Dermot, she barely missed him either.
In England, conscription had been introduced in January 1916 for, as the casualty lists rose, there were, perhaps understandably, fewer volunteers. In May of that year, this was extended to married men if conscription fell below fifty thousand a month. It was never introduced in Ireland, though it was proposed, for the authorities were fearful of the reaction, especially as such a move had been slammed by the Catholic Church.
This caused some resentment in England where men were given no such choice and when Ireland announced that German ships could dock there without fear of attack, this resentment was increased, causing riots and demonstrations against the Irish Catholics in many English towns and cities.
In Ireland, Catholic fervour was at its height and the papers going on about all the Irish boys killed on some foreign field, fighting in some other country’s war, were intensifying people’s anti-war feelings.
They recounted tragic tales like that of the five Furey brothers from Wexford, who’d all been killed in the first ten months of the war, or the death of John Conlon, the young drummer boy, who was only fourteen. Could a boy have done much damage to the German armies armed with just drumsticks, the papers asked.
That was just the tip of the iceberg and there were many, many more instances. Most Catholics had read the poignant pleas for prayer and stories in the
The Messenger of the Sacred Heart
, the magazine sold in the churches. Each issue was similar since the war had begun. An officer might thank the Sacred
Heart for his escape during bombardment. while a mother might thank the Sacred Heart for her son’s recovery from severe wounds or an infantryman would thank the Sacred Heart for protection during his twenty-two months at the front.
These were typical of many requests. And then they were the obituaries for those who had died or who were missing.
There were also reports on the courage and bravery of the Catholic priests of the front who refused to stay behind lines and shared the trenches and conditions with the men they ministered to.
Many were killed alongside the soldiers they served, and mothers and wives commented to
The Messenger
the things their surviving menfolk wrote of the priests and how comforted they were to have them there. Many said even the non-Catholics had nothing but praise for them.
Each Mass now had a full congregation and when Dermot, along with other boys and girls his age at the National School, made their First Holy Communion on 19th June, the church was so full that there were people standing three-deep at the back.
Dermot, with his mop of golden curls that no macasser oil could tame, clutching his white missal and playing the ivory rosary beads through his fingers, looked angelic.
Like all the boys, his shirt was pristine white and so was the satin sash he had draped over one shoulder, but Chrissie told Rosie their mother had been all for going to Dublin to get him a silk shirt for the occasion. ‘Daddy said she wasn’t to go. Dublin was a place of unrest still and he could have a cotton shirt like any other boy,’ Geraldine put in.
‘Thank God!’ Rosie said fervently. ‘Why does she always want to make Dermot different? I’m sure he must hate it.’
‘There’s more than Dermot has to do things they hate,’ Geraldine said with feeling. ‘And they have to put up with it. He gets his way in most things, as you well know. Maybe it’s a small price to pay.’
Rosie knew what Geraldine was talking about and she knew she had a point, for Dermot was thwarted in so very little, and so she said nothing more.
The Battle of the Somme began on 1st July 1916, almost a fortnight after the First Communions. So confident were the British of victory, they let the newsreels onto the battlefield for the first time.
There was no way the army could lie about the casualties now, or whitewash anything because the cameras continued to record it and it was shown on
Pathé News
at the cinemas. For the first time, British and Irish people saw what was happening to their menfolk. Blessington had no cinema, but the outrage of those who’d seen the films was reported by the papers, which carried many pictures of the dead and injured.
There had been so much bad feeling against Britain as the lists of the Irish boys and men killed in action rose. Requiem Masses were said throughout the land, though there were precious few bodies to bury. Many thought if their men were to die at all, let them at least die for their own country and serve under the flag of green, white and gold, struggling for Home Rule and Irish independence.
Conscious of this feeling in Ireland, and the open disapproval from America over the handling of the uprising and speed of the executions, the Government released many of the men from Kilmainham Jail before Christmas 1916.
After the execution of the leaders, Danny and the other men waited to be summoned to a court where the verdict would be decided before they had a chance to open their mouths. This would be followed fairly speedily by a trip to the stone-breaking yard to stand before a firing squad.
As day followed day and slid into weeks and months, the fear didn’t lessen, it intensified. Danny thought they were
playing cat and mouse games with them all, and he, like many more, became increasingly jittery and nervous.
None of the rebel prisoners were told they were to be released. After their sparse breakfast one mid-December morning, Danny was led back to his cell instead of into the yard. He didn’t ask why, knowing that in that place it was better to ask few questions and keep one’s head down.
They’d been led back to their cells once before when the rebel leaders were taken out to be executed, and Danny wondered if it was now their turn. There had been no trial, but when did that matter? The Franciscan friar, Father Joe, continued to visit and told him the wave of public opinion had swung in their favour – people were now more sympathetic to the reason they’d been fighting – but Danny had thought, so what? People’s sympathy, however sincere and heartfelt, could not breach the walls of a prison, and so he’d taken little heed of Father Joe’s words.
He lay on his bed and waited. He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, but it seemed an age. He closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep. You had to be alert in these places.
He heard the tramp of boots on the stone corridors, opening some of the doors, and was on his feet and beside his bed before the key had turned in his lock. If this was it and he was to be led out to die, then he’d go with his head held high.
‘You’re for out, Walsh,’ the guard snapped.
‘Out?’
‘Out. Home. Are you deaf?’
‘Home?’
‘Here,’ the guard said, putting his hand into the big bag beside him that a colleague was holding and flinging clothes at him. ‘Get changed.’
When the door clanked shut behind them, Danny stared at it for a moment or two. Was this some sort of sick joke? He fingered the civilian clothes thoughtfully, wondering who they’d first belonged to. They weren’t his, certainly, but then
his had been so tattered and worn he doubted they’d have been good for anything but the incinerator.
Suddenly he was seized with a desire to be free of the coarse prison garb and he tugged the stained, soiled clothes off in haste and pulled the shirt over his head. The trousers he’d been given hung loose on him and he wished he had a belt or braces to hold them up. There were no underclothes of any kind, nor a jumper over the shirt that might have kept him warm on that raw December day. But that was it, and he knew he should be grateful he had at least been given a coat, and he put that on and then sat on the bed again and waited.
He couldn’t totally believe he was to be allowed to go free until he was in the road outside the prison with the door firmly slammed shut behind him. There were other men with him, chatting and laughing with one another, slapping each other on the back, light-headed with relief, filled with exhilaration. ‘God, how I could sink a good few pints of Guinness now, Walsh,’ said a man beside him. ‘That’s if I had a penny-piece on me, of course. How about you?’
‘Oh aye,’ Danny said. ‘That would be grand.’
In fact, Danny hadn’t a thought of Guinness or anything else either. His one desire was to go home, to hold his dear wife in his arms and cuddle his baby daughter and give his mother a kiss.
He had a sudden, urgent desire to be away from Dublin, knowing if he ever came back to it again it would be too soon. He knew he should go and see Father Joe and tell him about his release, but almost as soon as the thought was in his head, he rejected it and turned for home.
He had no idea of the time, and the thick steel-grey clouds in the sky gave him little clue, but he knew the winter days were short and all too soon it would be dark. At first he strode out briskly, anxious to reach home as quickly as possible. However, he’d walked for little more than an hour
when he was forced to rest, shocked he’d tired so easily. He was hungry too, but that mattered little: he’d not been full since before he’d entered the prison and the feeling of yawning emptiness was a familiar one.
He sat for a moment at the side of a stream, after taking a long drink of it, knowing if he was to get to the farmhouse before black night descended on him he had to get on. He couldn’t rest every hour. In his inadequate clothes he didn’t give himself much of a chance of survival if he had to spend a night in the open. He knew he’d be found stiff in a ditch, nicely gilded with frost, and the months of waiting would have been a cruel waste.
The ringing tramp of boots on the road made him suddenly alert, wondering even now if he was to be hauled back to jail. There was nowhere to hide and it would be of little use anyway. If they wanted you back, they’d hunt you down without a doubt.
But, unbelievably, Shay and Sam came into view. ‘Dan,’ Shay cried when he saw Danny. ‘Why didn’t you wait for us?’
Why hadn’t he? The thought of freedom and going home had driven everything else from his head.
‘I didn’t know if you were getting out too,’ he said. ‘And I couldn’t bear to hang around Dublin to find out.’
‘I can understand that well enough,’ Shay said. ‘But we knew you were out, we asked people, but no-one knew where you’d gone.’
‘Why have they let us lot go?’ Danny asked,
‘I don’t know and nor do I care,’ Sam said. ‘We’re out, we’re free, and that’s what matters. I’m glad you decided to take a rest or we’d never have caught up with you.’
‘Aye, maybe,’ Danny said. ‘But I was just thinking, I can’t keep resting every hour if I want to reach home today. The cold eats into you when you sit for any time.’
‘Aye. That wouldn’t be hard either,’ Sam said in agreement. ‘For it’s a bleak and icy day, right enough.’
‘Shall we go on, then?’ Danny asked, and the three set off together.