Tipperary (66 page)

Everything in Ireland quickened that spring and summer. As a boy I heard the old-timers talk of the glorious weather in 1921. Its curiosity value paled beside the pace of events.

In December 1920, the Government of Ireland Act was made law in London. It divided Ireland into two electoral districts. The elections that Charles mentioned were held on 13 May 1921, to try to determine the Parliament of Southern Ireland. Of the available 128 seats, Sinn Fein took 124.

The election took place against a backdrop of daily violence. Michael Collins had cranked up the guerrilla war to a high pitch. On the one hand, his men were killing soldiers and policemen in significant numbers. And on the other hand, the forces of the Crown, frustrated and lacking battle plans, were committing worse and worse atrocities.

They shot in cold blood IRA Volunteers they captured, declaring that these men had been “trying to escape”—the phrase became a national jibe. They breached orders and agreements and burned down houses, villages, town and city centers. They opened fire on innocent people at random—and any soldier caught at it was declared by the authorities to be “insane.”

The pressure on the government began to mount. No juries could be found to sit in the courts. Policemen began to retire or resign. The paid government officials began to tell their masters in London that not only was the country fast becoming ungovernable, their methods were exacerbating matters. On 11 July 1921, a truce was called.

We had to be careful. After all, those of us with guns, the Volunteers— we were still outlaws. The orders came through a few days later. Go home, but go carefully. Disarm, but hide your gun in a safe place. Stand down, but be ready to spring back into action.

The boys left the cellars at night. Charles knew when they were leaving, and he came down, to the very point of exit, and wished each man well.

Naturally, I stayed on. I wasn't in good form at all. The Dundrum thing still hung over me—I hadn't even been able to go to the funerals. But at least now I'd be able to visit the families. Seven men dead, seven families—I thought I'd never recover from it. In truth, it took me years, and I think I managed only by the expedient of becoming friendly with those families—fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters.

Next day, when all the boys were gone out of the cellars, Charles and I set about cleaning up. No small task, I tell you. We'd had a long run and a good run, we'd saved at least one life there, and mourned many others. We had to leave it clean as a whistle—you never knew in those days what was going to happen next. You had to be ready for anything.

And then we went back upstairs, and I began to get myself back into the life of the castle. Charles, without telling why, took me all over the place, and I knew that he was saying, “Welcome back.”

It all looked splendid. How he brought it off I don't know, given how troubled he must have been by the events with April, and her baby that didn't get born, and her marriage that didn't get made.

I mean—if you looked up and saw those plaster cornices, and those birds with the berries in their beaks, and those great medallions with Zeus and Aphrodite and Neptune and Lord knows what else, and all of them restored and gleaming—oh, God, it was tremendous.

That very day, they were just beginning the last big job—the painting of the walls and ceilings. Charles took me down to the stables where Mr. Mulberry's workbenches used to be, and Mr. Higgins's stone sets, and he showed me where the painters—from London—had set up what almost looked like a laboratory. There was this long bench, and there were test-tubes, and boards with daubs of color on them, raspberry, and turquoise, and yellow like the sun itself.

“It's going to be as authentic as we can make it,” said Charles. “What else have we left,” said he, “but authenticity?”

I seized my moment.

“Speaking of authenticity,” said I, “how is April and what are you going to do about her?”

I said it in a low voice, but he turned away from me. We walked out in the open air, where nobody could hear us.

“I don't know how she is,” said he. “I haven't asked. She is safe physically—I know that. I've supervised the food that Helen brings her—but Helen is sworn not to tell her that.”

He didn't continue.

Said I, “And the second half of my question—what are you going to do about her?”

His answer was very much like his spirit. “Today, I don't know—but maybe one day I'll know what to do. And if that day comes—I'll test things.”

And, of course, as I and my family have ever known since—a day came and he did test things.

Harney's fighting days were over. So were Tipperary's—and Cork's and Kerry's and Dublin's and Limerick's and Clare's and everybody else's. The truce of July became the treaty of December. A deal was struck to divide the island. Six of the thirty-two counties remained loyal to the king, and the remaining twenty-six became independent, with our own government and official institutions.

The ink on the signatures still shone wet when the arguments broke out. De Valera, who had refused to take part in the negotiations, declared the treaty unsatisfactory because it left a British political and military presence in part of Ireland. Collins, one of the negotiators, said they had done their best to get a good solution. Civil war, vicious and incestuous, came in like a thug.

In most Irish history books, the name Michael Collins never appeared during my time as a teacher. When all the dust of the twenties and thirties settled, Collins's great rival de Valera became the ruler of the twenty-six counties and banned Collins's name from the histories. Thus are new nations born. And in England, no school that I know of has ever taught the full story of the British in Ireland.

Before the internecine upheavals broke out, the British troops began to leave. Here, Charles O'Brien outdoes all the history books, because once again he becomes the witness. It was just before Christmas 1921, and Joseph Harney was with him.

From afar, we followed avidly the Treaty negotiations in London. I thrilled to think that I had met two of the Irish delegates—Mr. Griffith, who never fired a shot except in print, but to great effect; and Mr. Collins. The countryside talked of nothing else; I think that Ireland could not believe its own eyes and ears that peace of a kind—of any kind—might come.

For those weeks, April became a sort of politician. She wrote to all her English and Anglo-Irish friends, including Miss Beresford, and told them not to feel so betrayed. To her Irish friends, who had supported the Volunteers, she spoke of the responsibilities of a new nation. Her intent, she said, was to bring both sides of her circle to terms with what had come about and with the future as she saw it.

A fresh zeal seemed to have seized her; she wrote long letters full of reasons why she had restored the house; and she invited her correspondents to consider that now Tipperary must be looked at in a different way— that it was a part of the past, unpleasant for some, but still full of meaning, and it would now make a great contribution to the new state's future.

Her energy had returned. But she did not feel sufficiently well, she said, to join Harney and myself on a journey to Dublin—a journey that had a specific meaning. We had heard the tales, we had read the reports— and at six o'clock one morning Harney and I left the house to drive to the North Wall of Dublin's port and see the British Army leaving Ireland.

Scarcely a word passed between us on the road. The car was new—a Singer—and even though we could have pulled down the top, we chose not to, and we wrapped ourselves like Eskimos. As we drove into the city, we saw no police, no military—just ordinary people going about their ordinary business.

We drove along Sackville Street, still in ruins after the Easter Rising shells—scarcely a building had not been destroyed. As we turned down toward the Custom House, we saw the sight that we had come for. Lines of soldiers marched in the street, line after line of them, laden with kit bags and with rifles shouldered. Along the pavements, a few people waved, and in many instances, men, women, and children walked purposefully along beside the regiment, talking to this soldier and that sergeant or corporal. I quickly understood what I was seeing—many of the men in British uniforms were Irish boys who had been sent here after France, and they were talking to their families about when they would next be home.

Harney said to me, “Turn back,” and on the wide street I turned the car around; he directed me back across the bridge to the quays on the other side of the river Liffey. I saw what he intended—that we should get a distant view of the marching troops rather than find ourselves among them. First, however, we saw the ruins of Liberty Hall; as James Connolly's headquarters, where he and his Irish Citizen Army planned their strategies, it had been the first target of the British gunboats that sailed into Dublin Bay to quell the uprising Easter Week.

Now, as we stood on Butt Bridge, we saw the soldiers perfectly. They marched six abreast—at no great pace, because they carried so much. I had often contemplated what a retreating army looks like. The Romans ran south through Britain to their galleys at Dover, so great had been their urgency. Napoleon sulked in his carriage as he led what was left of his army while they lurched and staggered back from the ice of Moscow. The British Army leaving Ireland had no bands, no swagger, just men marching. They were cheerful; they waved to the bystanders.

Harney said to me, “What do you think of this?”

I said, “It can be nothing but good.”

Harney then said, “Oh, it's much better than that,” and his voice had fervor in it thick as butter.

Two British ships stood at the dock—one of the Royal Navy and one of the Merchant Navy, and they had begun to march men aboard. Like Noah's Ark, the soldiers went in two by two.

Sometimes when historic matters are taking place, we do not necessarily make ourselves aware of that fact. That morning, by the river Liffey, watching those troops marching out of the land of my birth, I knew what I was seeing. Eight hundred years of domination and suppression, often unjust and frequently brutal, had come to an end in much of Ireland.