Friend or Foe (20 page)

Mr Madigan continued serving as a policeman after the DMP was absorbed into An Garda Síochána, the police force of the new Irish Free State. He always played down his captivity during the Rising, however, and never revealed Emer’s role in his rescue.

Mrs Madigan worked on as a milliner, and the family lived on Ellesmere Avenue for many years.

Jack’s boyhood dream of being a detective never came to pass. Instead he changed plans and moved to London, where he had a long and successful career with the BBC, in the new medium of radio.

Gerry left school at thirteen and worked on the horse and cart with his uncle, then emigrated to New Zealand, where he made a new life as a horse breeder.

Joan worked in an office before meeting an American naval officer. She married him and raised a family in San Diego, in a house she nostalgically named ‘Tolka Fields’.

Ben didn’t become a professional cricketer but followed his father into the family’s successful electrical business. Gladys surprised no-one by continuing to be a model student; she eventually became vice principal of her old school.

Phelim O’Connell remained an ardent nationalist and was killed at the age of eighteen, as a gunman during the Irish Civil War.

Brother McGill was devastated by Phelim’s untimely death. Thereafter he avoided discussing politics with his pupils.

Miss Clarke resigned after a row with Sister Assumpta. She returned to her native Hoylake, where she continued working as a teacher.

Mrs Davey and Emer kept the family grocery business going during Mr Davey’s year-long imprisonment following the Rising; the business would eventually expand to five shops. Mr Davey recovered from his injury, but he was left with a limp in his wounded leg. He played no further active role in the War of Independence but stayed interested in politics, and in later years he served for a time on Dublin Corporation.

Emer studied commerce and helped to run, and eventually manage, the family’s grocery shops. She married a classmate of Ben’s, exchanged Christmas cards every year with Jack, and remained friends with Gladys for the rest of her life. She never told anyone of her role in Mr Madigan’s rescue, and until they died, she and Jack remembered it with pride – but kept it as their own private secret.

The Easter Rising of 1916 took place primarily in Dublin and lasted for six days. Heavily outnumbered, and with defeat inevitable, Padraig Pearse signed a general surrender to prevent further bloodshed. By that stage huge damage had been done to central Dublin by artillery fire, and over two thousand civilians had been wounded. Total casualties on all sides came to more than four hundred people dead, and over half of those were civilians.

Because of the loss of life and the damage to the city – and also because many Dubliners had family members serving with the British Army in the First World War – the mood of the citizens of Dublin was generally unsympathetic to the rebels.

That hostility changed, however, after the British Army Commander, General John Maxwell, oversaw the execution of rebel leaders – including Eamonn Ceannt, the Commander at the South Dublin Union, and the seriously wounded James Connolly, who had to be carried in on a stretcher for his execution by firing squad. This mood shift led to the rise of the Sinn Féin political party, and following a bloody guerrilla campaign, twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland gained independence as the Irish Free State in January 1922.

The First World War raged from 1914 to 1918 and was fought
by the British Empire, the French Empire and their allies, against Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Turkey. Conscription for the war was successfully resisted in Ireland, but over 200,000 Irishmen are thought to have fought on the Allied side. The First World War marked the beginning of highly mechanised warfare, and casualty rates were appalling, with more than sixteen million people estimated to have died due to the conflict.

Friend or Foe
is a work of fiction, and the families of Jack, Emer, Gladys and Ben, Joan and Gerry are figments of my imagination. The historical events described are real, however, and the skirmish with the Lancers, the city-centre looting, the shelling by the gunboat
Helga
and the recapturing of City Hall were all actual events.

Gerry’s cottage is fictitious, but the River Tolka was a popular swimming spot, and the area described in the book is now part of the Tolka Valley Park.

Monasterevin is still a magical interconnection of waterways. Although cargo hasn’t been transported on the canal there for many years, the warehouses that Jack saw remain standing today.

The workhouse complex of the South Dublin Union, where Jack and Emer carry out the rescue of Mr Madigan, is now the site of St James’s Hospital. Other locations such as the city cattle market and Tara Street Baths have been built upon since 1916, but Ellesmere Avenue is a real place, and the streets where Emer and her friends lived are little changed.

Brian Gallagher,

Dublin, 2015.