Authors: James Lawless
Both he and my mother kept in regular communication.
***
In June 1936, Martha Woodburn and Patrick Foley were married in Dublin in the church of Whitefriar Street. My mother wore a cream-coloured dress with intricate designs and a lace-frilled hat, and carried a spray of white heather (for luck) and orange blossom (for fruitfulness) in her bouquet of flowers. On Patrick’s side there were some people from External Affairs in Dublin, and doctor José Beltrán from Madrid who acted as best man. Peg didn’t like the look of Beltrán. My mother recorded her calling him ‘a shifty-eyed oul fella’.
Muddy, now ailing and slow in movement, was there, and Peg acted as matron of honour. Some of Martha’s old friends from Jacob’s and
Cumann na mBan
were also present. Gearóid MacSuibhne did not appear.
Of the presents the couple received, perhaps my mother’s most treasured one was a woollen blanket sent by
Maud Gonne. The latter thanked my mother in a wedding card for her dedication in
Cumann na mBan
and for her charitable work in the tenements.
On the day of their wedding the IRA executed three people who were pro-Treaty. As there was no republic looming, the revolutionaries began to despair of de Valera. The latter invoked special powers and set up tribunals – methods which he had previously criticised the opposition for adopting. Many IRA members were arrested, sometimes by former colleagues now in the Special Branch.
Gearóid MacSuibhne was one of those arrested.
***
My mother and Patrick Foley were among the first to fly the new national airline –
Aer Lingus.
Patrick records: ‘It is better to entrust oneself to the air than have one’s stomach constantly churned by water.’ Martha was not nervous. She was making up for lost opportunities. Patrick Foley was a new opportunity. Her only complaint was a pain in her ears caused by the air pressure which the sucking of several hard sweets failed to allay. The crew informed them that they were the first honeymoon couple to travel on a
DeHavilland Dragon
. They wished them a long and fruitful marriage in a new and free Ireland. The captain greeted them and wore a grin from ear to ear. My mother wondered had he been
on
something, but Patrick told her that it was just the
Aer Lingus
smile, that it went with the job, just like in the diplomatic world, the good characteristics of Ireland had to be presented:
‘But you don’t smile that much; you look so serious at times,’ M said to me. ‘I present our case in words,’ I replied. ‘The smile is in the words.’
***
In Madrid, the embassy provided Patrick with a car – a model T Ford. They drove to Galicia. Patrick spoke a lot about the renaissance in the arts and culture in Spain during the time of the Second Republic. It was not unlike the Irish renaissance, he said. Madrid, like Dublin, was abuzz with artistic activity. He admired Lorca’s poetry and plays but was uncomfortable about the Spaniard’s homosexuality. (‘The body condemns the soul,’ he wrote, on hearing of Lorca’s murder later on). In spite of this, he records ‘secretly devouring Dalí’s nudes’.
***
Patrick Foley was not above arrogance:
‘Remember G,’ I said to M, ‘he is an example of one who would gain from a European influence, that is presuming he has a mind to broaden, and it could be done without jeopardising his own national viewpoints.’
‘G has a mind,’ she countered, ‘no matter where he is.’
***
They visited Santiago de Compostela where the remains of Saint James the Apostle are supposed to be interred, transported there on scallop shells according to the legend. They watched as the giant thurible in the Cathedral was raised on ropes by several men. It overpowered my mother and Patrick with its incense. People applauded as it was hoisted.
My mother was sceptical. ‘Why do they need it so big?’
Patrick confesses to being unable to avoid a smile. ‘To fumigate all the unclean,’ he said.
They went to a bullfight in La Coruña. My mother vomited:
‘Just think of it,’ she said afterwards, ‘six bulls tortured and killed like that in a drawnout rigmarole. And I used to
feel that putting the animals through all that roaring in the slaughterhouse in Camden Row was cruel. At least their suffering there was shortlived.’
Patrick adds:
I tried to explain the symbolism of it all. I told her that it was a duel between man and beast, and that sometimes the man lost. But all she said was, ‘It’s not man and beast, but the beast in man.’
***
In Vigo they met Leopold Kerney, Patrick’s superior, who was taking a holiday with his family. From there they took a boat to the island of
Cies
where the sun shone with great intensity. They bathed in the clear water, and my mother made love to Patrick Foley on the fine, silver sand. At least she thought she did:
Patrick records:
We were like gods on the island. The sea, the sky, the sun, the sand, the air, were so pure. ‘Can you hear the earth working?’ I said to M. ‘I’m more worried about something else working,’ she answered. I looked at her for a moment. She smiled impishly. She thinks it will all come right. There was no hurt intended. She doesn’t realise how easily such statements can wound. ‘In the beginning,’ I said, ‘the world was covered in ice. Ireland was joined to Europe until the ice broke.’
‘You’re making me shiver with all this talk about ice.’
‘Our earliest inhabitants…’ I said.
‘Do you like my hair?’ she said.
‘You aren’t listening.’
‘The sun is shining.’
She caught her hair up. ‘Do you like it like this?’
Once more I had to smile. ‘It looks like honey when the sun catches it,’ I said.
‘And why wouldn’t it?’ she said, ‘isn’t this our month of
honey?’ And she burst into a giggle.
She commented on a little jellyfish which was ruffled by the breeze. ‘It’s like the wobbly phlegm on the streets in the tenements.’ She did not speak with vulgarity but in a factual tone. I sometimes don’t know what way to take her. However, one thing is certain. She will always carry the Liberties around with her, no matter where she travels. They are entrenched deeply in her soul, and no amount of sun will ever burn them out. She says already that she misses the bakery smells from Jacobs and the smell of the hops from Guinness’s.
She swung me around, forcing me to dance. We laughed. A tickle and a chuckle.
‘Loosen up,’ she said, and I realised what a dull, cerebral fellow I must appear before her.
She fulfils me now that she is with me. There is no longer any need for that other business. Pudere. It’s just that hardness is difficult to sustain. But she doesn’t mind. She keeps saying that we have plenty of time. But she has more time than me.
***
At the same time the political atmosphere was growing more tense. When the left-wing Popular Front won the general election in 1936 there was an increase in violence against the Right. Churches were burned in Catalonia. Peasants revolted against their landlords. Many people felt that only the army could restore order.
On their return to their hotel in Vigo, a telegram awaited Patrick from the embassy informing him that Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist leader in the Cortes, had been murdered by government police. The army under generals Mola and Franco were advancing on Madrid. Patrick’s instructions were to head for the French border immediately.
***
Franco failed to take Madrid partly due to the intervention of the International Brigade.
One of the rifles aimed at Franco’s troops belonged to a Captain Gearóid MacSuibhne of the James Connolly Battalion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Gearóid had been released from prison in Ireland, as it could not be proved that he was responsible for the June executions. He had Basque comrades (something which came as a shock to Patrick when he found out about it later from diplomatic sources). Attempts were being made to link the IRA to an international body of freedom fighters.
In one of the letters I found in which Gearóid wrote to my mother, he told her of the strong communist strain which of necessity ran through the veins of Andalusian peasants who toiled as modern-day feudal serfs on vast estates (
latifundios)
owned by wealthy landlords. They in turn shared in a bond of common suffering with exploited Asturian mineworkers in the North. ‘They are our brothers,’ he wrote in Irish.
On his release, Gearóid immediately proceeded to assist in the organisation of a group of men – four hundred in all, including some writers and intellectuals. These men saw a global threat to the freedom of the individual being acted out on a Spanish stage, and were prepared to play a part for their beliefs.
Forty two Irish republicans were killed in Spain; over a hundred were wounded, and of the twelve who were captured, Gearóid MacSuibhne was one. He was put on Franco’s black list together with a number of other prisoners, mainly officers. They were taken to Burgos prison.
In 1938 Gearóid MacSuibhne was sentenced to death.
***
I dig up in the local library some stuff on O’Duffy and his Blueshirts in Spain. They were on a Catholic crusade against communism. They saw little action and the cruelties of the Nationalists and the frequency of peremptory executions began to diffuse an ideology which had been so clear in their heads when in Ireland. And, as Patrick points out, there was a tendency to heap all the blame for anti-Catholic atrocities on the communists, whereas most of them were committed by anarchists, ‘something which the Blueshirt battalion failed to see’.
When
Guernica
was bombed from the air by the German Condor Legion in 1937, they realised that, instead of being part of a great crusade, they too were merely bit-actors in a tragic farce. As Patrick later recorded:
Every hour more news of the devastation reaches our ears; I think of the howls and screeches of agony, of limbs flying in the air, of everything broken up; of all that was fertile rendered barren. No longer can it be claimed that the war is a Catholic crusade against communism as the clips from the Irish Independent, which M sends me, are so fond of reiterating: the bombing was sanctioned by F against the Basque people who are the most Catholic of all the Spaniards.
***
O’Duffy’s Brigade marched home, as Patrick records, ‘disunited and in disarray, their blue shirts soiled by Spanish mud’.
As regards the republicans, long days and nights spent in trenches, and cold and hunger, tended to diffuse some of their ideologies also. Divisions occurred between socialists and anarchists. There were squabbles and interpersonal differences. ‘Vision became blurred in the smokescreen of war.’
In the meantime, Patrick and my mother had only one vision, and that was the road ahead as they motored with all haste towards the Pyrenees. (‘Pristine worlds faded into dream as the hysteria of war gripped the country.’).
My mother, perhaps because of her training in
Cumann na mBan,
showed great courage and even found time to crack a joke about ‘a dwarf general with a toy gun coming out to play’.
There are two passes on the Pyrenees known to shepherds and resistance fighters. Patrick followed his map carefully – he had a good directional sense (unlike me), but even then there were queues before him in the frenzy to escape.
***
He worried about my mother:
M is so beautiful, I cannot help noticing other men eyeing her. At a garage in O, a guardia civil lifted up her dress with his rifle, while two of his companions circled around her, leering and laughing. They have no shame. I have this dreadful fear that something will happen, and that I will not be able to defend her. In a world such as ours, beauty is a handicap.
From France, my mother returned to Ireland where, as Patrick said, she would be safe ‘until the danger passed’.
***
Perched on the French side of the Pyrenees, ‘like an eagle on a high cliff,’ Patrick Foley observed the progress of the war: he smelled the plume of smoke rising from burnt-out cities; he counted shots fired; he observed the gaunt, frozen faces of the refugees crossing the mountains; he saw the black circles around their sunken eyes; he watched, as stooped and hungry, they embraced them
selves to keep out the cold; he saw people and animals struggling to move forward and upwards as mountain and snow allied together to oppose them; he saw them driving their beasts of burden, as if time or progress did not exist, as if there were no history, as if the world were returning to a nomadic state.
News of the burning of churches and convents distressed him. He wrote:
Such action is complicating ideology. It is having the effect of winning more converts back home for the fascist cause, as there are many Irish families with relations in religious orders here. And yet, that is what we want externally. I feel I am being rent in two.
Although republican at heart, Patrick campaigned for an early recognition of Franco. The victory of the latter was seen as inevitable with his professionally trained troops and German and Italian assistance. Patrick paraphrased de Valera’s own words, which were to the effect that in the world of diplomacy one does not have to agree with the politics of a regime in order to recognise it.