1949 (42 page)

Looking her straight in the eye, Ned said blandly, “I don't remember.”

He took the key from her fingers and slipped the cord around his neck. She never again saw him without it.

But she knew Ned Halloran had come all the way back, as complex and maddening…and valiant…as ever.

In January the victorious Red Army sweeping through Poland discovered a German concentration camp at Auschwitz. By the time Russian tanks battered down the gates, most of the surviving inmates had been removed to Germany. The appalled Russians found five thousand living skeletons still within the camp, and huge mounds of corpses.

In February, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta to agree on the final plans for defeating Germany and carving up postwar Europe. Meanwhile Allied bombers devastated Dresden and pounded German supply lines to bits.

On March 26 David Lloyd George died. Winston Churchill said of the former British prime minister who had negotiated the Treaty with Ireland, “Lloyd George was the greatest Welshman since the Tudor kings.”

When Ned heard of Lloyd George's death, Ursula thought he would want to celebrate. But he seemed unmoved by the news. “Now he'll have to answer to his God,” was all he said.

 

Northern Ireland was preoccupied with the struggle against the Axis powers. Little energy was left over for fighting Catholics, though there were still some die-hard loyalists who could not resist the temptation to bully their neighbors. The situation was ignored by the government of Éire. Any action against British policy could threaten neutrality.

Beleaguered northern Catholics were not completely forgotten by their fellow Irishmen, however. As Ned had told Ursula, the IRA had been—almost—emasculated by de Valera's policies. But it had not gone away.

From time to time there would be a knock at the door, or a whistle under the window, and Ned would leave the house. Sometimes he met one or more men in the laneway, talked with them for a while well out of earshot, and then returned. On other occasions he took his bicycle and went away for a few hours. He never announced where he was going or when he would be back, but he always returned by nightfall.

Barry was desperately curious. “Is Granda a spy, Mammy?” he kept asking Ursula.

“Of course not, don't be foolish.”

“Then what is he? Is he still a soldier?”

She did not know how to answer that.

“I'm going to be a soldier like Granda when I grow up,” Barry announced one day.

Ursula surprised herself with the vehemence of her response. “Under no circumstances!”

Hers had been a militant heart, but that was before Adolf Hitler had strode across the world stage, wreaking havoc. She had seen what the impulse to war could do.

She went straight to Ned. “I don't want you telling any more of your war stories to Barry. Or to Eileen's boys either, for that matter. Instruct them in history but don't glorify the army to them.
Any
army.”

Ned raised a sardonic eyebrow. “This from a girl who used to carry a pistol under her clothes and talk about dying for the Republic?”

“That was then and this is now, Papa. No more war talk to Barry. I mean it!”

Hypocrisy is just one more item on my long list of sins
, Ursula thought.
But am I being hypocritical—or just a mother? Mothers don't want their sons to be killed in war
.

What about fathers, is it the same for them?

Barry's father…don't go down that road
, she warned herself.

 

If Ned was no longer allowed to tell his stories to Barry, he could still put them on paper. The book became his obsession. Instead of listening to the wireless in the evenings, he went to his room and crouched over the pages of the manuscript with the paraffin lamp at his elbow. He worked at almost feverish pitch, as if trying to meet some unstated deadline.

“You're exhausting yourself, Papa,” Ursula told him. “Surely the book will keep. Leave it be for a while. You can always work on it tomorrow.”

But he would not, could not, leave it. There might be no tomorrow.

For Ned Halloran, the lights were slowly going out.

The spells of blindness were coming more frequently and lasting longer. Between them was the gradual blurring of normal vision. He could no longer tell if the sun was shining. Every day looked overcast. He turned up the lamp in his room as high as it would go and still it could not drive the shadows back.

The lessons Ned taught at the kitchen table were almost all from memory now. He made his way about the house and yard in the same fashion. If he had to go down the lane to meet someone he walked slowly, with his head down as if absorbed in thought. Someone watching from the house would not realize he was feeling for the ruts in the road with careful feet.

He rarely rode the bicycle into Clarecastle anymore, and never as far as Ennis. One day the light went out completely when he was halfway home, and he had to dismount from the machine and walk it the rest of the way back. By the time he reached the farm his clothes were soaked through with sweat, though the day was cold.

It was only a matter of time until Ursula realized what was happening.

She did not know how to broach the subject. Ned would hate pity. At last she took Eileen aside and said, “I think Papa's on the verge of being totally blind.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm afraid so. He's good at concealing his condition, but if you watch him closely you can tell. The children know; look at the way Barry takes his hand when they go outside together. And Barry never takes anyone's hand.”

Eileen's lower lip began to tremble. “What can we do, Ursula?”

“Give him all the freedom he wants. He wouldn't have it any other way.”

“But what if he hurts himself?”

“That's the risk of freedom,” said Ursula.

 

When Franklin Roosevelt died on the twelfth of April, 1945, the shock was seismic. He had taken America from the depths of depression, and the Allies to the threshold of victory. After the news was broadcast on the wireless Ursula spent a sleepless night. Before dawn she dressed and went outside.

A rising wind was blowing out the candles of the stars.

The new president of the United States was Harry S. Truman, who had no connections with Ireland. He had only been in office for thirteen days when delegates gathered in San Francisco to make plans for the establishment of the United Nations.

No Irish representative was invited.

 

Benito Mussolini was captured and shot by Italian partisans near Como on the twenty-eighth of April. Il Duce and his mistress were strung up by their heels for the crowd to jeer at and spit upon.

The following day in Italy twenty-two German divisions and six Italian Fascist divisions surrendered to the Allies.

On the thirtieth of the month Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.

 

Ella Mooney greeted her husband with flashing eyes as he came in from work. “What does your Mr. de Valera think he's playing at?”

Henry took time to hang his hat on the hat rack. “What's he done now, Cap'n?”

“Just look at the evening paper!” She thrust forward a copy of the
Times Herald
folded to an inside page. “De Valera's fraternizing with the Germans!”

Taking his reading glasses from his waistcoat pocket, Henry read the offending item. “Following the announcement of Adolf Hitler's death, Eamon de Valera, prime minister of Ireland, reportedly paid a formal call of condolence on Edouard Hempel, German minister to Dublin.”

Henry turned to his wife. “You have the wrong end of the stick for once, Cap'n,” he said mildly. “In the first place, he isn't
my
Mr. de Valera, but he is the taoiseach. Secondly, he didn't dance arm in arm down Grafton Street with Hempel. He simply extended the courtesy one head of state extends on the death of another.”

“But how could he do such a thing!” she cried.

“Speaking personally,” Henry replied, “I had just as soon he hadn't. But speaking objectively, I understand why he did. Dev wanted to show the world that Ireland—far from being the land of pigs in the parlor as our enemies would have us—observes international protocol. Anything less would have established an unfortunate precedent.”

“At the very least,” Ella sniffed, “I think he acted in bad taste.”

Henry chuckled. “The ultimate condemnation, coming from you.” His eye fell on the silver letter tray on the table beside the front door. The envelope on top of the stack had been torn open. He picked it up. “This from the detectives?”

“That's why I opened it without waiting for you.”

“No good news, or you would have told me.”

“No good news. Just this month's bill.” Ella raised tragic eyes to Henry's. “Oh, my love, we're never going to see Bella again, are we?”

Her husband gathered her into his arms. “Sure we will, Cap'n,” he said huskily. “Sure we will.”

 

The eighth of May, 1945, was declared as VE Day. Victory in Europe.

 

Winston Churchill used his victory speech to launch a bitter personal attack on Eamon de Valera. Presumably referring to the Treaty Ports, he said, “Had it been necessary, we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr. de Valera. With a restraint and poise to which, I venture to say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty's government never laid a violent hand on them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera government to frolic with the German and later with the Japanese representatives to its heart's content.”
¹

Three days later Eamon de Valera entered the Dublin broadcasting station with the manuscript of his own victory speech carried firmly in his hand. The nation crowded around its radios, anxious to see how he would respond to Churchill.

As usual, the taoiseach spoke first in Irish then in English, thanking God for the end of the war and thanking all those who had worked so hard to preserve the nation during the difficult times just past. His listeners began to fear he would let Churchill's deliberate provocation go unchallenged.

They were wrong. “Certain newspapers have been very persistent in looking for my answer to Mr. Churchill's recent broadcast,” de Valera said toward the end of his speech. “I know the kind of answer I am expected to make. I know the answer that springs to the lips of every man of Irish blood who heard or read that speech, no matter in what circumstances or in what part of the world he found himself. I know the reply I would have given a quarter of a century ago. But I have deliberately decided that is not the reply I shall make tonight.

“Mr. Churchill makes it clear that, in certain circumstances, he would have violated our neutrality and that he would have justified his actions by Britain's necessity. It seems strange to me that Mr. Churchill does not see that this, if it be accepted, would mean that Britain's necessity would become a moral code and that, when this necessity became sufficiently great, other people's rights were not to count. It is quite true that other great powers believe in this same code in their own regard, and have behaved in accordance with it. That is precisely why we have the disastrous succession of wars—World War One and World War Two. And shall it be World War Three?

“It is indeed hard for the strong to be just to the weak. But acting justly always has its own rewards. By resisting his temptation in this instance, Mr. Churchill, instead of adding another horrid chapter to the already bloodstained record of the relations between England and this country, has advanced the cause of international morality an important step.”

The taoiseach sadly referred to the way that partition had poisoned Anglo-Irish relations. He also remarked on the great pride Mr. Churchill had expressed in Britain's solitary stand against the forces of Nazi tyranny.

Then he concluded, “Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning to consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?”

 

Eamon de Valera's overriding passion had been that Éire would still be independent at the end of the war. He had succeeded and his people knew it. He had scarcely finished speaking when a huge crowd flooded into O'Connell Street to greet him as he emerged from the radio station. The cheer they raised rang through the streets of Dublin.

As soon as a full transcript of the text was published in the newspapers, Ursula clipped it out and sent it to Henry.

“At last we have something to cheer about,” she wrote,