Tipperary (56 page)

That August day in 1917, when we returned from our tour of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the Lemms had arrived and begun work. They had raised a high platform all along the Ballroom wall (with great care they had covered the floor with layers of burlap), and they had also hung two great sets of sheets. The inner sheet, of strong muslin, protected the mural itself, and they would take it down carefully every night, carry it like a corpse to the exterior of the castle, and, far from everything, shake it gently, to release any powder that had adhered to it. The outer sheet, of heavy coarse linen, hid them and their platform from prying eyes.

I exulted that they had begun, and every Saturday I climbed their platform (the only one permitted) to examine the postage-stamp-sized area they had uncovered and refreshed that week. They worked in silence, but no oppressiveness hung about them. Each time they saw me, they smiled and continued working—good, shy people who went on to achieve an outstanding result.

For the remainder of 1917 there is little to report. The war grew more dreadful every day; we had now lost sixteen men from our small parish. When the two sons of one of our carpenters perished, April rendered a touching requiem. She had been working in the theater; by now all the doors had been returned—with no great effort—to their full function; and she had opened everything wide. As I had done for the general works, she had opened a ledger for the theater alone, and had listed all that she conceived of doing or that needed attention. In this, Harney helped her particularly; I could see that they had become friends, and I much enjoyed observing their closeness.

When the news came through that the Nealon brothers had perished (with the British Tank Corps, at the battle of Cambrai, in the north of France), April came to me. She suggested that we “gather all the men when they stop to lunch, herd them to the theater, and remember, with some poems, Mr. Nealon's two sons.”

The occasion moved all present. Mr. Nealon, usually a talkative and fidgety man, had been silent and hunched since his dreadful bereavement. Now he thanked us as we showed him in advance the words that we would read: a passage from Tennyson's great requiem, “In Memoriam”; Harney would recite, in Irish, “Kilcash,” a poem about a great Irish house not far from Tipperary; and I would speak a short verse that Mother had read at Euclid's funeral; “How shall we mourn the ones we love? / With banners, praise and singing; / And in the skies, far up above, / We'll hear their voices ringing.”

The stage had been swept of all dust and the musty curtains rolled far back to each side, out of sight. All these workmen sat on the faded turquoise-and-gold chairs of the auditorium, afraid of embarrassment at their rough clothes, and stiff with bewilderment at such emotion.

But they changed; Mr. Nealon, of whom I knew little, had been sitting with us on the stage, out of honor and respect. When Harney had finished speaking, Mr. Nealon stood up and, by prior arrangement with us, sang a song which has recently become very popular around here, by name of “Danny Boy.” I feared mawkishness, but Harney quelled me, by telling me that the song portrays a father mourning a son. The audience of my workers soon joined in—and thus did we put on the first performance in the theater of Tipperary castle.

A couple of months later, two rockets would crash into Charles O'Brien's life. Of one he writes openly, and he goes on to devote a sizable chunk of his “History” to it. The War of Independence began, and it affected the life of Tipperary Castle. But he never wrote a word about the second—at least not in the text. In 1918, April fell in love with Dermot Noonan. He had been calling often to the castle, on republican business with Harney.

It began in secret—but Ireland's a fish tank. In September 1918, Amelia began to mention it in her journal: “What is going on? Why does Charles have to suffer so?” In December, April confessed it to Katherine Moore and asked advice: “Tell me I'm not mad, Kitty.”

And in December too, Charles himself wrote one heart-searing letter about it to Harney. With no preamble, no pleasantries—Harney had gone home for Christmas—Charles launched into the subject with a howl of pain.

Dear Harney,

Help me. I am destroyed. All my secret dreams—of which you alone are the keeper—are broken into bits. Yesterday, at ten o'clock in the morning, I saw April coming out of the Narrow Wood. As she climbed the field by the edge of the trees, she looked behind often, and she also had a task to adjust her skirts and other clothing. Indeed, she stopped for some time until respectable again. I was about to ride down to where she walked when, emerging from the wood on the other side, came your friend Noonan.

By the first days of February 1919, I knew in my heart—and remarked as much to Harney—that war had broken out in Ireland. It began simply enough when, a few miles from Tipperary, members of a Flying Column ambushed some policemen in order to grasp the explosives that they were escorting to a stone quarry. Two policemen died, the explosives were seized, carted away, and hidden, to be used in making bombs—and the authorities declared reprisals. From that moment Ireland was at war; and I knew it from the changed pattern of events, the drama of which came to rest in Tipperary Castle on many quickened nights.

To begin with, Michael Collins visited. He came to meet Harney, and when I first saw him again, I extended to him the facilities of the castle and offered to have him stay. He refused.

“That won't be good for you or for the great work you're doing here,” he said. “The less that's known about me coming here, the better.”

Harney, standing beside him, agreed.

As time wore on, I understood what he meant. Mr. Collins's visits to us had been, in essence, for planning operations; strange, rawboned young men often arrived in his wake, and went into quiet meetings with him, walking the fields in the distance. (Indeed, when the strangers began to appear before he did, I knew that Mr. Collins would not be far behind.) Harney told me that this pattern was being repeated all over Ireland, and I soon came to know that for the years 1917 and 1918, Michael Collins had toured the land, preparing and putting into shape a guerrilla army for a fearsome war.

At their mutual insistence, I introduced him to April. I had not wished to do so in case she became implicated in any way. He displayed exemplary courtesy to her, complimented her upon the style and magnitude of the enterprise that she had undertaken, and apologized for distracting some of her colleagues from the castle works. I had expected him to give a speech on the perfidy of the English—especially when he heard her accent—but he did not. Early in 1918, for example, he commiserated on the dreadfulness of the German war; and he spoke to her with great interest and passion of France, and Paris, the glories of European continental life.

“All our future lies there,” he said. He quoted from the Reverend John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”—and April told him that she had read it aloud at her father's funeral.

To which Michael Collins replied quietly, “This is in general a time of funerals.”

One day late in 1918, an encounter took place that changed our lives at the castle for some time. Harney approached me and asked if he could speak to me privately. When I went outside with Harney I saw that Mr. Collins had arrived, and with him a squat, black-eyed, powerful-looking man. His name was Dan Breen, and in time he would become one of the most feared republican guerrillas in the country. It was said that if the soldiers came to search for him and his mother put out his boots by the door—indicating that he had come home for the night—the troops retreated, prepared to say back at the barracks that they had not found him. He never went anywhere without two revolvers.

We walked a long way from the castle without speaking; I could always trust Harney to know when silence should be observed. Soon, Mr. Collins spoke to me:

“There will be operations starting around here. Violent events. Men will be looking for shelter.”

Harney and Mr. Breen said nothing; I waited.

“I'd bet that the castle has bolt-holes of all kinds,” said Collins. “It'd be very easy for men to hide here.”

Still I listened.

“But if the British Army came to know that you were hiding men on the run—the consequences could be severe.”

I said, “How severe?”

By now we had halted, out in the high fields to the south; far away, I could see the thin ribbons of silver water flowing down the sides of the mountains.

“You could be shot. And Mrs. Somerville could be shot—although I'd doubt it; she's English. But you'd be blamed.”

“I'd be shot?”

Mr. Collins said, “I think so.”

I said to Harney, “What do you think?”

“They'd shoot you, Charles. Or put you on trial, and then hang you.”

Mr. Collins added, “And they might even set fire to this place—although I doubt that too. This is the kind of building they think they're here to protect.”

“Well,” I said, “this needs mulling over. And I have to put it to Mrs. Somerville.”

Mr. Collins said, “We have reason to believe she'll agree.”

Dan Breen said, very roughly to Mr. Collins and Harney, “How do you know he'll not hand us over? He's not exactly what you'd call a patriotic Irishman, is he?”

I said to him, “I can't let that remark influence my decision.”

Mr. Breen, angry, said, “Which means you're not going to do it.”

“I have only one worry—and that's for my workers.”

Mr. Collins said, “That's understandable.”

“But,” I said, “if there's a way in which people can be smuggled in and out with me almost the only one knowing it—”

Harney said, “All the operations around here will be carried out at night.” And he looked first at Mr. Breen, next at Mr. Collins and said, “I told you he'd do it.”

Then began a strange time. That afternoon, Harney and I donned the roughest old clothes that we could find and explored the castle's basements and foundations. We discovered that provision had been made in the original building for more extensive cellaring and storage than had been finally constructed. Long crude rooms stretched underground, with strong if rudimentary stone columns supporting ceilings that had held up well over time.

Though filthy, and in some places damp, and altogether dark as a mine, these long honeycombs felt safe—and not a sound of the outside world could be heard. As we had reached them by a steep staircase of almost twenty steps, we knew that we must have come a long way underground.

We returned to the surface—the subterranean cloister was reached by a door at the rear of the butler's pantry—and began to pore over such original plans as we had found. On one drawing of the house and grounds, Harney saw a little pennant, which seemed to have no relevance to anything. It stood out in the countryside, halfway to the lake; according to the drawing, it formed part of a sunken fence.

Immediately we set off; we already thought that we knew what we had found—and our delight was confirmed. Almost concealed in the ha-ha, and artfully so, was an entrance to a passage. We wagered that it would lead to the underground apartments we had recently explored, and we were right.

Harney hand-picked two men from among the castle laborers, and they worked for some weeks making the door even more obscure, and the underground rooms safer and drier. We installed tables, chairs, sleeping-bags, and rations; and we told nobody, and we never discussed it except when the two of us were alone. Inside a month we had built a refuge that would have housed fifty men.

Although I made it Harney's responsibility, I checked the progress, usually by myself. One day, I found that some of the chairs now had pleasant cushions, and that books and old periodicals had been placed beside the chairs and sleeping-bags, and that canvas sheets or burlap had been laid on the tables, where men might eat.

When next I spoke to Harney, I said to him, “A nice touch, the reading matter. And the cushions.”

He looked at me, puzzled. “I was going to compliment you,” he said.

I said, “I didn't do it”—and he knew that I told the truth.