Tipperary (49 page)

“No chance, I'm afraid,” said the young officer. He looked apologetic and respectful; my attire was having the desired effect. “Where did you want to go?”

“Close to the Post Office,” I said.

He shook his head. “We have a siege there,” he said. “We've already had casualties.”

“I stayed with friends in the country last night. Shall I be able to get home?”

“Depends where home is.”

I said, “Northumberland Road.”

“No trams, I'm afraid. Wait here, Doctor.”

The young officer returned. “I can get you part of the way—one of our chaps is going to Merrion Square.”

As he escorted me to a nearby vehicle, he said to me, “My father's a doctor. I'm supposed to be in France.”

The first two days of the Easter Rising had about them an aura of stalemate, of action yet to happen. Nobody had accurate information. Rumor distorted everything. The British government, engrossed with the war in Europe, reacted slowly.

And at noon on the Monday, Patrick Pearse, a barrister, teacher, and poet, had the freedom to stand in the street outside the General Post Office, which his men had commandeered, and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

Those who saw this event—now an iconic moment in Irish history— recall chiefly the scattered cheers and jeers, and the strained, pale look on Pearse's face. He knew that he was taking hundreds, if not thousands, of men into a blood sacrifice.

Not all of the streets were closed. The official response was as sporadic and incomplete as the rebellion itself. Over wide areas of Dublin, life continued as normal. Children spent their holiday week as they always did, playing in the streets. On Tuesday morning, people returned to work as they found it possible. Newspapers appeared, and milk trucks and bread vans made their rounds. The city had not yet heard enough to make it feel threatened.

Reinforcements had been called up from other garrisons in Ireland— by train from Belfast, on foot from barracks nearer to Dublin. And in England, troops were scraped together. With scant munitions, they took the train that would carry them to the boat that would put them down on the Irish shore.

Charles O'Brien's ride in an army vehicle brought him to Merrion Square, childhood home of Oscar Wilde. From there, he had a walk of ten minutes or so to the address he had been given on Northumberland Road. Neither he nor anyone else knew, on that Tuesday morning, whether he would have safe passage.

Although I believed that I knew my way, I asked an old lady whether Northumberland Road lay straight ahead. All around me seemed peaceful.

She replied, “What are you goin' there for?”

I said, “I must meet a friend.”

“Well, there's fellas up there with guns. And the Shinners—aren't they after locking themselves into Boland's Mill, so they are. I hope they all get shot.”

“You don't sympathize?”

“Ah, what are they, only corner-boys? Louts, is what they are. Disturbin' the peace on us.” Her sweet face became harsh.

“But they see it as a fight for freedom?”

She said, “My daughter, she has a husband out in France; he's in a uniform, so he is, not some coward firing guns from behind a wall. He's fightin' for our freedom, so he is.”

And she went on her way.

From that corner of the square it is possible to look all along Lower Mount Street to the beginnings of the red brick and leafy peace of Northumberland Road. I stepped out into the roadway, and nothing did I see other than some boys playing with a ball. I walked on, without the hint of what was to come about in the next few days.

On Mount Street Bridge on that glorious morning I looked back to my left at the hulk of Boland's Mill. Nothing seemed untoward; I saw no activity—but nothing occurred on the streets either. Nor did I see any soldier, nor a gun of any kind; and Northumberland Road was as quiet as a smile; indeed, the loudest noise at that time came from my rapping on the door-knocker of No. 25.

Nobody answered. I did hear footsteps, however—and I knocked again. After a metallic scraping sound, the large brass flap of the letter box was pulled back from the inside, and a gun-barrel appeared.

A voice said, “What?”

“Is Mr. Harney here?”

“Who wants him?”

“His friend Charles O'Brien.”

Nothing happened; I had produced no response. The gun-barrel remained in place. I waited. After several moments I knocked again.

I must have waited thirty or forty minutes; then I knocked again, with particular force, and shook the door so hard that I obviously dislodged the gun wedged inside. (I had long concluded that the gun's owner had left it there as a threat.)

Footsteps came striding, and the door whipped open.

“In—quick.”

Two men stood in the hallway. The one at the rear held a gun; the other picked up his rifle from the floor.

“Joe's asleep—he was on watch all night.”

They led me upstairs and introduced themselves: “I'm Jimmy Grace, this is Michael Malone. Sit in there, and we have to ask you not to move.”

We had come to an upper-floor drawing-room, with two long windows overlooking Northumberland Road; a third window in the side of the room faced south. I believe that I immediately understood the objective—and it had probably been decided by Harney. Troops arriving might possibly come along this road, the main artery from the port of Kingstown, which continued broad and easy into the city center. This house would provide an excellent ambush point.

Lace curtains hung down over the windows; by moving them aside slightly I could see directly into the houses across the road. As far as I could ascertain, no other ambush was prepared; directly opposite, a girl in a maid's cap and apron walked here and there, restoring sheets to a bed. In another house, a gentleman sat in a chair, reading a newspaper.

Michael Malone said to me, “Here, for now, you have to do everything you are told. So—step back from the window.”

He said it pleasantly, and I found a chair deep inside the room.

“Who's in command here?” I was careful to voice the question in no pejorative way.

“Commandant Harney. Otherwise we'd have shot you.” Mr. Malone did not smile as he spoke; Mr. Grace remained silent.

I sat in that room for three hours; other than the two men, nobody came or went. At a quarter to three, they gave me bread and tea. And at three o'clock I heard the familiar footstep coming down a nearby staircase; after a whisper in the hallway outside, Harney entered, beaming.

“How did you get here?” he said, obviously delighted.

“I came to fetch you.”

“The girls?” He grimaced.

“Yes.”

“I thought they might,” he said. “They tried hard to stop me.”

“So they sent me”—and we both laughed. “What's going on?” I asked.

“But you must have heard?”

“Not about this place. There are guns in the city.”

Harney said, “We know that reinforcements will come in along this road. Our job is to stop them. Or delay them.”

I said, “Come on. Come out of here.”

He shook his head. “Can't do that.”

“Joseph—I promised your sisters I'd get you out of Dublin safely.”

He laughed. “But you didn't say when you'd do it, did you?”

“Come on.”

“No.” He held out his hands. “I can't. This is my command. Here— I'm a soldier.”

“All right. Where do I sit? What can I do to help?”

“You don't sit, you lie down, in the next room, under the bed.”

I said, “This is nonsense. If we leave now—”

Harney held up a finger. “Charles—I'm not leaving here. And I can't let you leave now. You could get shot.”

I abandoned my attempts to persuade him. Harney left the room and came back a short time later in uniform—a full military tunic in soft green, a soldier's breeches, and a hat with one side pinned up in a slouch. Diagonally across his body he wore an ammunition belt. Now he had become someone else.

“Volunteer Malone, secure all. Volunteer Grace, check again all windows and doors.” He beckoned to me, and I followed.

In the next room—smaller and toward the rear of the house—the shutters had been drawn tight and mattresses dragged against the windows. Other bedding covered the floor.

“Stay here. There's food and drink. Until I come for you,” he said and shook my hand.

Strangely, I did get a night's sleep, deep and sound. It is my impression that one or both of the other men slept in the room also, but my sleep was too deep to confirm this. I awoke at six o'clock to a silent house, and I drifted back to sleep in the room that would stay dark, no matter how high the sun. An hour or two later, I had bread, cheese, and milk, and then I sat there, not knowing what to do. The morning drifted on. I could hear men talking but saw nobody; the walls in these new brick houses had been densely built.

At eleven o'clock, activity in the front room seemed to intensify. I heard heavy boots pounding, objects being dragged across the floor, and dull metal clanging. Then, once again, the same grave silence fell. Somewhere in the far distance a child laughed.

This silence lasted for a long time; I know that it did—I could scarcely take my eyes from my watch.

At twenty minutes before noon I heard something new—a faint rhythmic sound that did not come from inside the house. I pressed my ear to the door of the room, trying to divine what I could. The sound increased, steady and firm—the sound of military boots in step. I had never heard troops on the march and was surprised at the even fullness of the sound, a dense, rhythmical tread, faster than I'd expected, and heavier. No sooner had I remarked upon this to myself than it was blotted out by a new and more savage sound: the men in the room at the front of the house had opened fire.

They fired in a specific routine—one: pause: two: pause: three: longer pause. I calculated that they fired through one window after another, systematically and regularly. One. Two. Three—I began to count: five seconds, I reckoned, between each gun. And when that sound had established itself, I became able to distinguish sounds from outside. First came shouts, barked orders. Intermingled with those, I heard screams, then more shouts.

And—why had I not been expecting it?—the gunfire increased fourfold as the soldiers on the street began to fire back. A new force hammered into my locked and darkened room—the sound of shattering glass from the windows near Harney and his men. This was followed by repeated thudding sounds, and I knew that these must come from bullets striking the adjoining wall. A hell of noise was born, full of cracking and splintering sounds, full of booming and tinkling, punctuated now and then by brief sharp whines, which I took to come from ricochets. I crawled away from the door, spreading myself as flat on the mattresses as I could, and reached the comparative calm of the wall farthest from the one adjoining Harney and his comrades.

There I lay, heart pounding, trying to divine the course of this pitched battle from the weight of fire. I cannot tell how long this activity went on; my concentration did not extend to looking at my watch repeatedly. Could it have been an hour? Perhaps—and more. At one point, all matters escalated and the firing from the next room reached an almost unendurable pitch of intensity. Downstairs I could hear a sudden great hammering on the door. Bullets pierced the woodwork, then whistled into the hallway and expired, and I reasoned (if that word may apply in such heat and fear) that the military must have tried to breach the door. But Harney and his comrades had fortified it the previous night with furniture, and now they seemed to change the angle of their fire to address this attack. Their heavy rifle shots (I could easily distinguish them from the army's gunfire) sounded closer to the front walls of the house, and I presumed that they had begun to aim downward, because the hammering on the door soon ceased. Later I discovered that the soldiers—from the Sherwood Foresters regiment—had indeed tried to storm the house.

Through the wall, I could also hear the bolts of the rifles clanging and clicking as the three men reloaded; they seemed to have plenty of ammunition. Upon the retreat from the front door, comparative calm returned. This was followed by a sudden burst of firing from inside the room, a shout, and a sudden bursting open of my door.