A Long Long Way (2 page)

And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish - and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest - their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers’ milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death’s amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.

When Willie was six or seven the King of Ireland came from England to visit Ireland. The King was as big as a bed. There was a big review over at the barracks in the Phoenix Park. Willie stood there with his mam because the King as big as a bed, a brass bed mind, for two people, wanted to see the gathered men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. And why wouldn’t he? They were as grand and as black as an army, marching and drilling there. His father, though only an inspector at that time, was put up on a big white horse, so the King could see him all the better. His father on that horse looked much finer than any King, who after all had to stand on his polished shoes. Like God Himself, or the best man in God’s kingdom.

For years after, till he put away such childish ideas, he thought his father always went out to do his work on the white horse, but of course it wasn’t so.

Such a singing voice he had. His mother, who was a blunt woman enough, one of the Cullens herself, daughter of the coppicer on the Humewood estate in Wicklow, got only good from it. She set him on a chair to sing like any woman might, and he threw his small head back and sang some song of the Wicklow districts, as might be, and she saw in her mind a hundred things, of childhood, rivers, woods, and felt herself in those minutes to be a girl again, living, breathing, complete. And wondered in her private mind at the power of mere words, the mere things you rolled round in your mouth, the power of them strung together on the penny string of a song, how they seemed to call up a hundred vanished scenes, gone faces, lost instances of human love.

His father, right enough, was a dark policeman in dark clothes. Willie Dunne was washed every night of his life in an enamel bath set beside the big fire in the sitting-room. And six o‘clock every evening prompt, his father would come in and grip the wet little boy and lift him to his breast, where the silver buttons were, and Willie would lie up there like a scrap, like a featherless pigeon, still damp from the bath, his mother straining up with the towel to dry him, and his father perpetually frowning, all six foot six of him, and saying what a fine policeman he would make in time, a fine policeman.

And year by year his father measured him, standing him up against the wallpaper by the old marble fireplace, and putting a volume of operettas on his head, The Bohemian Girl and Other Popular Operas, and marking off his height with a stubby official police pencil.

And then Willie was twelve at last and a proper boy. And his youngest sister Dolly was born in the house in Dalkey and his mother was killed by that. And then it was his father only and the three girls and him, and at last into Dublin Castle with them in 1912, it was the winter of that year, and the memory of his mother was like a dark song that made him cry in his bed alone, strong though he was and all of sixteen, and the steam of his sisters’ cooking turned to tears on the chilly glass of the old windows.

And then there was another thing to make him secretly cry, which was his ‘damnable’ height, as his father began to call it.

For his growing slowed to a snail’s pace, and his father stopped putting him against the wallpaper, such was both their grief, for it was as clear as day that Willie Dunne would never reach six feet, the regulation height for a recruit.

Willie cursed his very bones, his very muscles, his very heart and soul, for useless frustrating things, and shortly after he was apprenticed to Dempsey the builder, which in the upshot was unexpectedly very pleasant, and gave Willie secret joy. Because it was a pleasure to work at building, to set stone upon stone by gravity’s rule.

Gretta was the secret he kept from his father, he loved her so much. It had happened by accident that he met her. During the terrible lock-out the year before in ‘13 his father had had the responsibility of keeping order in the streets of Dublin, as being high up in B Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He had led the baton charge against the crowd gathered in Sackville Street, that time the Labour leader James Larkin had spoken to them.

Many heads had been smacked with those batons. And indeed a few of the DMP men themselves, the batons wrenched out of their hands, had been thumped in turn with their own weapons. But it was considered generally by the government that the police had acted bravely and had won the day.

One of the thumped citizens was a man named Lawlor, who Willie’s father knew from around Dublin Castle, because he was a carter there. And Lawlor’s head was done in good and proper, and Willie’s father had tried to make it up to him, coming to visit in the evenings with apples and the like, but Lawlor was outraged and would scarcely speak to him, even though the policeman wore an ordinary suit to protect Lawlor’s feelings and was inconspicuous. But the fact was Mr Lawlor was passionately in Larkin’s court. The old policeman could never even countenance such a possibility, and for many months continued to court the man’s friendship. Why him among all the others Willie did not know, unless it was a question of neighbourliness, an important matter to a Wicklow man.

Now Willie was nearly seventeen by this time, and when his father’s conscience ached and yet he was too busy to go and see Lawlor, Willie was sent. The first time he was given two pheasants to take that had been shot on the Humewood estate, and sent up by the old steward, Willie’s father’s father, to his son in the castle. Now Mr Lawlor’s rooms were in a tenement under Christ Church Cathedral, so it wasn’t a long walk for Willie. Nevertheless, he carried the two birds with an inexplicable shame, though in the event not even the critical urchins in the streets mocked him.

When he got to the house Mr Lawlor was not in, but Willie went up to his room anyhow, just intending to leave the birds inside the door. They had beautiful feathers, those cock pheasants, like something you would see in the hat of the Viceroy’s wife - or mistress. Willie always enjoyed the scandalous stories told by Dempsey’s men, when they would be having their breakfast all together at some site or other at six, lovely sausages and hot tea and the scalding scandals of the day. He was as plagued as any other boy by desire, trying to put manners on the endless erection of his sixteen years, and the laughter and passionate disclosures of the men delighted him well enough.

Willie went in through a dirty, heavily scratched door into an old room with a high ceiling. All around the edge of the ceiling were musical instruments in plaster, violins and cellos and drums and flutes and fifes, because it had once been the music-room of a great Protestant bishop connected to the cathedral, long ago. There was an elaborate marble fireplace at the top of the room, as yellow as a hen’s leg from the damp and the soot. The room itself was divided here and there by long rags sewn together, so that the inhabitants of the place might have privacy. Indeed, there were four families in the room, so each division was a separate kingdom.

And in one of those kingdoms he saw for the first time his princess, Gretta Lawlor, who truly was one of the beauties of the city, there would be no lie in that. Dublin could show many beauties, skinny and destitute though they might seem. And she was among the finest, though of course she knew nothing of that.

She was sitting by a window writing on a piece of paper, though he never found out what she was writing. Her face made his stomach weak, and her arms and breasts made his legs of poor use to him. She had the strange look of an old painting, because the light was on her face. It was a neat, delectable face and she had long yellow hair like something caught in the act of falling. Maybe in her work, if she had work, she kept it tied and pinned. But here in her privacy it was glistening with the secret lights of the old room. Her eyes had the green of the writing on a tram ticket. Her breasts in a soft blue linen dress were small, thin, and fiercely pointed. It was almost a cause for fainting on his part, he had never witnessed the like. He held the pheasants up in the gloom and noticed for the first time that they had a curious smell, as if left hanging too long, and they were starting to decompose. She was just thirteen in that time.

As he stood there a man came in behind him and pushed past into the curtained space. He was wearing a long, black, threadbare raincoat. The man laid himself down on one of the rickety beds and swung his feet up wearily, and it seemed only then noticed Willie.

‘What you want, sonny?’ he said.

‘I was bringing these up to Mr Lawlor,’ said Willie.

‘Who are they from?’ said the man.

‘From my father, James Dunne.’

‘The chief super at the castle?’

Are you Mr Lawlor, then?‘

‘Do you want to see the scar on my noggin?’ said the man, laughing not entirely agreeably.

‘Can I put them down somewhere?’ said Willie, uneasily.

‘So you’re his son, are you?’ he said, maybe noting his height.

‘I am,’ said Willie, and then he knew the girl was looking at him. He raised his eyes towards her and she was smiling. But maybe it was a smile of mockery, or worse, pity. She’s thinking, he thought, I am small to be a policeman’s son. He was hoping still in those times he might make a last spurt of growth. But he couldn’t tell her that.

‘So what do you think, son, about Peelers rushing in on passers-by and knocking the bejaysus out of them?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Lawlor.’

‘You should know. You should have an opinion. I don’t care what a man thinks as long as he knows his own mind.’

‘That’s what my grandfather says,’ said Willie, expecting to be mocked for his words. But the answer wasn’t mocking.