Tipperary (62 page)

Thursday, the 25th of March 1921.

My dearest Kitty,

Now I truly need your help. The “frights” of which we spoke in January have come home to roost! Be not alarmed—I am overjoyed. For double reasons—not only will I have the delight of a son or a daughter, but I shall be married to a man who loves me, and whom I love with all my heart. Nobody else knows but you and Dr. Costigan, who is quite, quite certain.

I believe that the matter must be handled very discreetly—it is so easy to get a bad name around here. But we have constraints owing to my dear man's current way of life and, shall we say, the unusual demands made upon him. Nevertheless, we shall make all haste.

My History, being also a personal matter, has permitted me much latitude. From time to time, a memory assails me so beautifully and so recurrently that I feel obliged to record it—as with my sojourns at Athassel Abbey (whose rushing waters I sometimes hear at night from here, if I walk out on the highest part of the gardens). In late March 1920, there was a morning in Tipperary that I shall never forget.

I rose before dawn. With spring promising to come early, I walked the immediate precincts of the walls, as I ever did, and watched for any unusual matters. That morning, I found one new cause for rejoicing: a great swan had come to the lake sometime since the previous night's dusk. We had wanted swans for some years now, and often talked about it; we made many inquiries as to where and how we might acquire swans; we had even corresponded with the Keeper of the King's Swans, who had not been helpful.

Now Tipperary Castle had its own swan, and I walked to the lake's edge, taking care to make no noise. The swan moved among the sedges some yards from me, as though seeking a resting-place; its serene gliding would calm the wildest heart. But I became anxious; swans require partners, I'd been told; if this swan did not find a partner, would he fly away? I have no explanation for the fact that I thought it male.

Up at the castle, I could scarcely wait to give the good news—but I breakfasted alone; no sign of Harney, which suggested some “activity” in the night; and for some weeks April had not been down to share breakfast. Indeed, I had scarcely seen her.

All day, I found myself walking over to the highest point of the terraces from where I could see the lake. I could not always glimpse the swan, but did see it often enough to ascertain its continuing presence. Of another swan I saw no sign—until near five o'clock.

The sun was beginning to set in a magnificent blaze, and long streaks of red cloud were setting the western skies on fire. I was in the gardens between the two pavilions, measuring with two of the gardeners how much ground we should need to break open for the planting of three hundred new rose-bushes. Suddenly a shadow darkened the air above our heads and there was a noise of wings. A huge swan, larger than the one I had seen, flew low over us in the direction of the lake.

I jumped back, in evident excitement.

“We're all right now,” said Jerry Kirby, the older of the two gardeners. “We've swans.”

All three of us made for a point from which we could see the lake below us. Sure enough, there on the waters, side by side, not touching but gliding close to each other, went two swans, white and calm as hope. My heart was filled with optimism.

Charles and I—we went through a fierce time. Think of what was going on. I was out every night with a gun in my hand, not knowing if I'd ever come back alive. By day I was helping to rebuild the beauty of the very empire we were hammering at. The man I depended on for my safety as a soldier, Dermot Noonan, was in the middle of a desperately passionate love affair.

And who was it with? With the woman who was the heart's desire of my dearest friend, Charles O'Brien.

And she was the owner of the estate that I had been working on for the past six or seven years and to which I was fiercely committed.

The war was raging across the country like a wildfire. Reprisals happened everywhere, and we hit back with counter-reprisals. What was typical was this: we'd hit a barracks or a troop convoy. In revenge, the Black and Tans or the regular army would attack the village or town, drag men and women out, and shoot them and burn their houses. And then we'd burn down a mansion where we thought the British were planning their campaign against us. Or where we thought—or often knew—the owners entertained the officers.

Now, through all of this, we hid men every night in the cellars at the castle. Charles O'Brien might not have carried a gun, or ever fired a shot in anger at a soldier—but he played his part. And he was one unhappy man. But he never pretended, he never changed his behavior from that civilized way he had. He had a good word for everybody. That work would have collapsed without him. And then, of course, in the spring of 1921—what beautiful weather we had that year—it was the worst time for Charles.

He knew—we all knew—without being told. I guessed very early, because I grew up in a houseful of women and by now my sisters were married and having their own babies. You can tell with a woman. The complexion changes. And she was old for having children. That's what my mother said—if she never had a child before, thirty-nine years old is no age to start.

Why do I dislike the word “melodrama”? Probably because there's nothing “mellow” about it—that's the joke I used to tell in class. I think I dislike it because whether you want to or not, it pulls you in. Now it was dragging me in.

I found myself telephoning a former pupil who works in the police forensics laboratories in Dublin. Could he test something from a century and longer ago for DNA? Of course he could. Feeling queasily melodramatic and more than a little foolish, I sent off some locks from the tresses of hair in the oak chest. And some hair from my own head. Why was I doing this? I had no idea. Instinct, again.

9

A
pril, Harney, and I never spoke about the men who hid in our cellars. We seem to have believed by unspoken agreement that the greatest security lay in keeping silence. They proved no small task to us, and we committed many hours of labor and concern to their concealment and their welfare. Usually, we housed approximately twenty or so of these youngsters, whom I saw grow into maturity before my eyes. Boys came in along that dank, secret passageway from the ha-ha at the fresh age of eighteen; six months later they spoke with the wary restraint of menaged forty.

I observed them closely, and soon I could begin to single out individuals and distinguish them among their comrades. Three kinds of men (if I may simplify for the purposes of clarity) composed the Flying Columns: the hearty, the easily conversational, and the quiet. In each case, I believed that I was witnessing men who were responding with their spirits and tempers to the unusual circumstances of their current existence.

The hearty men laughed off dangers and joked with each other about the circumstances from which they had just returned. Men who sat down, ate and drank, and lapsed into quiet conversation seemed to feel the difficulty more severely—or were prepared to let it be seen on their faces, in their demeanor. As to the quiet ones—in time I learned that from their number were drawn the greatest marksmen, the crack shots. In short, those men killed more than anybody else.

On account of mild wounds that they had received, I was given opportunities to make deeper acquaintance with two of the quieter men, and slowly I began to elicit from them, one at a time and never together, their views on the lives they now led.

The first lived several miles away, in one of the county's prettiest villages; the second came from nearby, and his aunt had once worked for my parents at Ardobreen. One night, attending to an eye with a splinter in it (I bathed it with cold tea), I asked the first if he knew when he had shot someone. He said nothing; so I asked him again, in a different way.

After a deep breath he said, in a kind of half-breath, “Ah, you do, sir.”

I waited, keeping my voice soft, bathing the red eye.

“Is it something you see? Or, maybe, hear?”

“Ah, you kinda know, sir.”

“Oh? Now don't move, I'm just going to dab this in here. You kind of know? How would that be?”

He never answered.

When I plied the second one with questions, he manifested similar reluctance.

“Do you ever see a face?”

“Sir, well, I'd see a head, sir.”

“But not a face that, say, you'd recognize if you met him?”

“I'd never want that, sir.”

“Why wouldn't you?”

“Sir, it wouldn't be right; I'm supposed to plug him.”

“You mean—you're there to shoot him, and you don't want to know him?”

“Sir, my job is to plug him.”

Even though I knew that my questions made them uncomfortable, they seemed warmer to me thereafter. When I went down to the cellars, one or other always had a cheery greeting for me—before he lapsed again into silence, sitting quietly by himself away from the others. Neither ever joined in the card games or the endless political discussions.

The postman brought a shock—from the DNA tests.

Without any question I, Michael Bernard Nugent, am descended directly from the person on whose head grew those locks of hair. I assume that the garments among which they lay belonged to the first April Burke. Now what do I do? Disbelief is my first ally.

For good reasons. I loved my mother, Margery Nugent. That quiet woman suppressed a great talent, because she became the wife of a railwayman she loved. Rock no boats. Shatter no glass. That is what she said to herself when she married. She told me so before she died. But I felt attached to her, and I still miss her. The spirit doesn't lie.

Then—doubt sauntered in, asking slyly, Shouldn't you have sent the DNA people something of hers?

My emotional metabolism has a kind of “time-delay” mechanism. If something awkward comes at me, I hold it at bay. And then, several hours later, usually the next day, I'm ready to take it on. That has been my main protection method over the years.

The DNA letter arrived at nine o'clock in the morning, I opened it, read it—and, finally, that night, I was strung out with agitation.

How can this be? Are they sure? I read and reread the little note that came with the printout: “Was it your grandmother?” The technician did add a caution: “I'm aware of the sample's age—but if this was in court, I'd have to swear to the highest probability of consanguinity.”

My thoughts, my scrambled thoughts, went like this: That fellow, Lisney, Henry Lisney—he saw a resemblance. And: What do I do now, what's to happen to all the information of my life? Followed by: No, this can't be the case. And: Supposing I exhumed my mother? Or my father?

Then I returned to Charles O'Brien's “History,” the cause of this difficulty. I was by now on my umpteenth reread and again coming close to the end.

Notwithstanding the mood of relaxation that pervaded the cellars in general, and sometimes the high degree of social ease—at times we had more than fifty men down there—I perceived one day a sharp evidence of their high training and alertness.

At ten o'clock in the morning, I heard the noise, and then I saw the lorries on the avenue. Five trucks of soldiers rumbled toward the castle, led and followed by staff cars. I ran to the cellars and told everyone; they scattered on their stomachs along the floors, hiding behind any object that they could use as shield or cover. As they crawled and squirmed, their little leader, who had once been our lunchtime visitor at Ardobreen, looked at me and said, in a loud voice, “Now who has betrayed us?”

I turned away and climbed the stairs back to the servants' quarters and with help moved the great food-safe back across the doorway. Helen the housekeeper brushed the floor in front of the butler's food-safe and moved a bench into a position nearby, lest the floor betray telltale signs.

Harney had disappeared; I later discovered that he had climbed into the highest part of the East Tower, which had long been prepared and armed for any such emergency. As the staff cars converged in front of the castle, the trucks halted too, and disgorged more than a hundred soldiers. All wore the uniforms of the appalling Black and Tans.

Two officers, one young, one senior, walked up the steps—and I walked down to meet them.

“Good morning, sir, dreadfully sorry for the trouble.”

“Not at all,” I said. “In fact, we're very glad to see you.”

“You are?” He looked disbelieving.

I said, “I mean—my God, after all that's been happening. We knew Summerhill very well; Colonel Rowley was an old friend of my mother's. We're still shocked.”

In February, a beautiful house in County Meath had been burned, to great dismay.

The young officer said, “Do you feel safe here, sir?”

“Who's safe anywhere?” I asked.

My greatest fear had almost paralyzed me—that April had become suspect in the eyes of the authorities.

“Where's the lady of the house, sir?” he asked.

I said, “I don't actually know; I think she may have gone to stay with Lady Bandon.”

The officer looked a little perplexed. “You see, we wouldn't like to search the place without her permission.”

I said, “Oh, I can give you permission—I'm her agent in all such matters. Here, let me help you—where do you want to search and for what?”

“We heard, sir”—the young officer did not quite know how to go forward—“we heard that gunmen hide here, sir.”

“Goodness—do you mean on the actual estate? Where?”

The other officer had been watching me closely, and now he spoke.

“Well, they could be anywhere, sir, couldn't they? It's a big place.”

I said, “Well, let's figure out where you and I would hide if we had to. Outside, there are the woods, and we also have three large groves. And inside, we have the cellars, and I can tell you all about them. In fact, I can do better than that.”

Not far away, Mr. Higgins, our Master Stonemason, stood watching. He held no sympathy for either side—but I knew that he would understand my drift.

“This man over here—” I beckoned. “He knows this building inside out; he's restored all the stonework.” I called him. “Mr. Higgins, these gentlemen want to search the cellars. Can you make it safe for them?”

“I can't, sir, and I won't.” Mr. Higgins, walking toward us, heated up a little. “And, sir, I told you before—I'm taking no responsibility for anyone going down there.”

To the officers I explained, “This place was closed for fifty years. There had been severe rain damage and a lot of collapsing. Mr. Higgins has had the task of securing all the underpinning.”

I asked him again: “Isn't there some way in which they can inspect the cellars?”

Mr. Higgins said, a touch impatiently, “Sir, you told me to secure the western door with stone, and we did that. We never moved the ceiling that fell, and if you open that door—I mean, I can open it for you—but more stones will fall.”

I sighed. “You're right. Was there ever an entrance from the stables? I'm most anxious to accommodate—”

The young officer cut in. “It's perfectly all right, sir. May we look inside?”

I led them, enthusiastically. They gasped.

I said, “I'm not about to let a bunch of IRA thugs with guns into this place.”

They agreed with my point of view. I went across to say something to one of the Paglalonis, and I saw the officers conferring—which was what I wanted to achieve. When I returned they said, “If you don't mind sir, we'll just turn the men loose in the woods.”

“Of course—and please stay for lunch?”

They smiled. “Can't, I'm afraid.”

Their search lasted not more than an hour, and all they did was frighten the crows. I stood with Mr. Higgins and watched their cars and trucks drive down the avenue. Within minutes Harney had come to my side.

“How did you do it?”

“I didn't. Mr. Higgins did.”

Mr. Higgins said, “No. He fooled them to the eyeballs.”

In school I always said “War of Independence.” And in English schools they say “Anglo-Irish War”—that is, if it even gets mentioned. My parents called it “the Troubles”—not to be confused with the more recent “Troubles” of the 1970s and onward.