Tipperary (6 page)

Another memory: three years later, early in 1867, our house became a place of secrets and furtiveness. At night I would wake suddenly at the sound of hooves or a cart or carriage rattling and jingling. Once or twice, I went halfway downstairs and watched as big men with long beards came through the front door, hauled off their greatcoats, and greeted my father. I heard much talk of “ships” and “landing” and “rising”—which I took to be the motion of the ship on the crests of the sea.

Beyond my imaginings, I achieved no knowledge of what lay behind or beneath these visits, and my questions at breakfast next day accomplished nothing other than deflection and a caution from my mother: “Charles, we don't like people knowing our business.” Even if I didn't understand the words, she conveyed an unmistakable force of meaning.

Years later, I discovered the reason for this nocturnal activity, which lasted many months. The Fenians, an international assembly of zealous republicans dedicated to the independence of Ireland from England, had planned—and, indeed, carried through—an insurrection or uprising, hence “rising.” Much of it had been focused in our province of Munster and, in due course, with Tipperary as a crucial member, the other five Munster counties, Cork, Kerry, Clare, Limerick, and Waterford, intended to flame with rebellion, which would then spread to the rest of the country.

Unfortunately, as has so often been the case in Ireland, two constant facts of Irish life prevented the rebels from gaining wide ground: the weather and loose tongues. On the night of the rising an unprecedented snowstorm hit the country. In addition, everybody around us—the local priests, the local newspaper editor, the local washerwomen and shopkeepers, the police and the army—knew all the plans in advance. Wagging tongues saw to it that little blood would be shed for Ireland that night.

“All cloak and no dagger,” said my father when speaking of it to me years later. “Too many saddles, too few horses.”

I asked him what he meant.

“They were generally useless as rebels,” he said. “Great company, though. Great to argue with over a drink.”

Yet History has credited them with “the Rebellion of 1867,” even though handfuls of men here and there, with old muskets and some pitchforks, were merely rounded up by police, the more threatening ones lodged in the cells for a few days and the rest sent home.
The Cork Examiner
newspaper carried reports of numerous arrests, but the Fenians had, as yet, been mainly drilling and marching, and had not fired a shot. Such was the level of Irish uprising in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Then, when I was ten years old, the countryside resounded excitedly to a significant political development. Mr. Gladstone, the Prime Minister, saw his government pass a Land Act for Ireland that permitted tenant farmers some new rights. They now had to be compensated for any improvements to their farms, and eviction could occur only for non-payment of rents. However, since the landlord could raise the rent at a whim, the protection, when scrutinized, seemed infirm. My father's pronouncement seemed to echo the country's response: “Well, it'll give us something to talk about for a long while.”

To confirm:
The Limerick Reporter & Tipperary Vindicator
dated 29 January 1864 printed that “Mary Hurly, aged 23 years, a victim of leprosy, died in the County Infirmary Limerick, on Sunday last. This disease, it appears, she contracted by washing the clothes of some foreign sailors.”

Charles O'Brien was born into a theater of national events. Not since the heaving of the earth's plates beneath the North Atlantic Ocean finally split the island off from England and Europe has Ireland had a more dramatic, compressed passage of history than the period of Mr. O'Brien's lifetime.

Such a claim, in such a vivid land, requires justifying. True, she was a sophisticated country socially and politically—and even economically— around the time of Christ. A system of “kingships” governed the country. Chieftaincies in local structures observed and paid taxes to overlords in the south, the east, the north, and the west. These provincial kings of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connacht (or Connaught, in the anglicized version) paid homage and tribute to the high king at Tara.

True, too, that the stability of this structure resisted all invaders, and over time the country developed a social and artistic culture that continues to this day. Then, beginning in 1167, came the Norman barons, owing allegiance to the king of England. Soon, the long British shadow began to darken the country.

All of these movements took place over many centuries—but the most significant convulsions, the most conclusive politics, happened inside sixty years. They had begun in Ireland before Charles O'Brien was born. Events abroad had stirred the Irish and set an example. The Americans in 1776 had thrown out the English, and the French of 1789 had overthrown the upper classes.

The Irish sought to combine these influences. In 1801 the country had lost all sovereignty. An Act of Union bound it with vicious indissolubility to England. For two centuries before that, we had been steadily losing all human rights. We lost education, the right to our Catholic faith, and above all the ownership of our own land.

When the tide began to turn, it became a wave. The first crest was a law forced through the English Parliament in 1829—Catholic Emancipation. It restored freedom of religion to the massively larger Catholic population of Ireland. From it, everything else began to follow. Up rose the political agitators fighting to recover native acres from the English landlords. Revolution became a certainty.

In all of this, Charles O'Brien's family was unusual. They had some-how contrived to hold on to their lands down the centuries (and had expanded by buying adjoining fields and woods). As a consequence, they occupied one of the safest possible positions; they became witness to all that went on, yet party to none of it. And they did so through astute social politics, through vigilance during every successive political shift, and through care for each successive generation.

Just before the time of my birth, the teaching of children became a matter for everybody, not just the ruling classes of the Ascendancy. By law, village “national” schools opened all over Ireland. At last, after many generations of enforced ignorance, our Irish people were allowed once more to have learning. Reading was no longer banned; Catholics were no longer flogged, deported, jailed, or executed for owning books; their teachers were no longer outlaws, to be shot on sight. As the new schools opened, many of the illiterate parents almost carried their children in their arms to the school doors, so intent were they on bettering their families' future. Some refused to engage with this system; old suspicions died hard—and in any case the Irish language, spoken by the majority of the people, was banned in the schools.

My parents, for their own reasons, wished to have no part of this, and I believe that it caused some difficulties between them; such national matters often did. Mother desired that I should have the more formal and classical education of the English—perhaps go to a school in England, and thence to Oxford or Cambridge University. My father wished me never to be away from home as a child. He told my mother that he would suffer “unendurable lonesomeness” were I to be boarded away at school.

But Mother could not countenance one of her children mixing so intimately with so many Catholics every day. So they settled their differences by choosing four tutors for me, two from each parent. (They would later do the same for my brother.)

Rarely in life can a boy have been exposed so closely to four such different people. One of these tutors I never saw sober, though he was marvelously entertaining, and from him I learned what he called “Greek mythology, Latin scandal, and Catholic nonsense.” His name was Buckley; he had everyone call him that—no “Sir” or “Mister” or Christian name. Many years after he died (he fell under a military cart in Paris), I learned that he had been a priest unfrocked for persistent adventures “incompatible with the calling” (as they say), and that he had also elicited money from many women.

Buckley had wonderful sayings: “A bird never flew on one wing”— meaning that one drink would not suffice; “A woman with a hard heart is more dangerous than a runaway bull” (he seemed to have known some, because they came calling, grim-eyed and intent, to our house and my parents always concealed him); “Never trust a woman that wants you to guarantee tomorrow”—meaning that Buckley did not like ties of any kind.

My other three tutors offered more orthodoxy. Buckley had been Father's choice, as had the meek John Halloran. Mr. Halloran specialized in mathematics and drawing. His chief teaching later enabled me to calculate complicated odds for the placing of bets on horses and roulette (and I have sometimes won). He also left me with the ability to draw swift and reasonable likenesses of people's faces.

Mr. Halloran taught me French and Italian, and he excelled in what he called “General Subjects”—he would discourse for an hour or two on the business of Luck; or he would speculate about whether foretelling the future had any validity. In the course of such lessons, he dragged in extraneous facts from all sorts of sources.

“The smallest dwarf in history stood one foot four and weighed five pounds. Her feet measured two and one-quarter inches, and she was called the Fairy Queen.” And: “You can never fold a piece of cloth or a piece of paper double more than seven times.” And: “If you tie both ends of a cord and make a circle, you can then turn that circle into any other perfect geometric shape.” I never met a man with so much superfluous knowledge, except perhaps my own father.

Of women, however, Mr. Halloran (unlike Buckley) taught me nothing at all. He blushed when he encountered a female of any species, and when I once asked him had he ever been married, he murmured a throbbing and passionate “Oh, my Heavens, no!” As he did when Buckley called out to him each morning, “Did those bowels of yours move yet?”

The balance between the tutorial sexes was provided by Mother's choices, Miss Taylor and Mrs. Curry, who came from Dublin and London. Miss Taylor wept easily at the great tales she herself told, and Mrs. Curry walked like a turkey. Both schooled me excellently. Where Buckley regaled me with the indulgences of ancient Rome and Greece, and showed me engravings of naked statues, the women tutors held me to the memorizing of whole texts, be they history, geography, English literature, or French.

Although I liked neither woman, I excelled at their lessons. (Also, I much enjoyed the rough teasing they had to endure from Buckley. Judging from the ladies' faces, he whispered amazing questions and raw commentaries to them.) Each lady set out to make of me a man who would be suited to the company of women. In common with Mother (who probably instructed her to do so), Miss Taylor taught me what she called “appropriate demureness.” This had to do with standing in a special fashion, my upper body leaning slightly forward to cast my lower body into shadow and thereby eliminate what she called mysteriously “the wrong impression.”

At some point in this recurrent lesson she would emphasize once again the importance of “never having anything exaggerated in the male appearance.” And she counseled me against ever having my trousers made from any fabric of light gray.

Mrs. Curry's husband had died by misadventure in India. As a consequence and out of respect for her dead spouse, she would not eat any meat other than pork, ham, or bacon. (I believe that a wild pig attacked Mr. Curry and that she was filled with vague revenge.) She taught me how to kiss a lady's hand and began by kissing mine; she had rather dry lips and she disconcertingly licked them a little before swooping down on my young paw. Once fixed there, the kiss became almost a suction— which then she invited me to emulate. She specified the length of time that the kiss should linger: “Think of romantic interest, not cannibalism”; and “The teeth must never touch the lady's flesh.”

Also, she said, I should create “a compartment” in my mind which contained the knowledge of this kissing technique and “it should never, ever, not on any account, be used for anything other than the kissing of hands.” Buckley said, “That's multiple ways not true.”