Wheels Within Wheels (15 page)

My parents were suitably impressed by my breaking out in print, but when I went on to win this competition five weeks running they became uneasy. Finally my father decreed that I must compete no more. I saw the point and reluctantly agreed to retire – but not before using the situation as a lever to raise my pocket-money from three to four (old) pence a week.  

As a precaution against what Mark called ‘swollen-headery’ my mother reminded me that despite having taken the
Cork Weekly Examiner
literary world by storm my apprenticeship was going to be a long one. She need not have worried. I was well able to assess for myself the quality of my rivals’ work.

The year 1944 was marked by some strange experiences. These I have already described elsewhere,
*
but their significance was such that they cannot be omitted from any account of my childhood.

One harsh, dark March afternoon a squealing hinge made me look through the kitchen window. A young man was entering the cobbled yard from the abandoned cinema, which meant that he had climbed our eight-foot garden wall. Yet I felt not at all alarmed, possibly because I was never prone to be made uneasy by the unconventional. Or it may simply have been because the young man looked so amiable and vulnerable. As he stood at the back door I noticed that he seemed rather apprehensive and very tired. He was tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, and I marked a Kerry brogue when he gave his name as Pat Carney and asked, diffidently, if he might see one or both of my parents.

In the living-room my mother’s bath chair was close to the sulky wartime fire of wet turf. She seemed oddly unsurprised by our visitor’s original approach route and my curiosity was further sharpened when she asked me to leave her alone with Pat. Ten minutes later Pat was back in the kitchen. He said that he had been invited to stay for a few days and that my mother would like to speak to me. Then, pausing inside the living-room door, I did begin to feel alarmed. Never before had I seen my mother looking so distraught. Mrs Mansfield and San Toy were coming to tea so there was no time to waste on euphemisms. In a couple of sentences I had been told that Pat was on the run, wanted for the murder of a Dublin detective-sergeant. He had come to us as a protégé of my father’s elder sister who, never having recognised the validity of the post-Treaty Irish government, was an active member of the illegal IRA. On no account must any caller be allowed to see our guest or any trace of his presence. As I continued to stand by the door, paralysed with astonishment, my mother made a gallant preliminary bid to sort out the ethics of the situation. ‘This young man is a criminal though he regards
himself as a patriot. No doubt his elders are chiefly to blame. They are using his muddled, foolish idealism. But we can talk about it later. Now please show him his room and give him a meal.’

I walked down the hall in a joyous daze. This was the stuff of which fantasies are made, yet now it had become part of the reality of my own life. I was to prepare a meal for a man on the run who would be hanged if caught. My mother might have saved her breath. Of course Pat was not a criminal, or muddled or foolish. He was a most glorious patriot, heroically dedicated to the reunification of Ireland. No one had ever suggested that my grandfather and father were criminals because they belonged to the Old IRA. One had to be logical. I was badly jolted when I discovered how strongly my father disapproved of Pat. But then I reflected that he (my father) was very old (forty-three). And I made allowances for the fact that at that age some people just can’t have the right reactions any more.

Listening to my parents, I gathered that for some days they had been half-expecting Pat without knowing exactly why he was on the run. Now they were disagreeing vigorously about how they should deal with him and it gave me a certain sardonic satisfaction to observe them both being inconsistent; at twelve, one likes the feet of clay to appear occasionally. My father should have been the one to welcome – or at least tolerate – Pat, while my mother (given her ancestry) should have been the one to reject him. Instead, my father coldly argued that it would be sinful to shelter someone who had deliberately killed an innocent man in the course of a seditious campaign against a lawfully established government. And my mother warmly argued that it was unthinkable, sinful or no, to betray someone whose coming to our home was an act of faith in our humanity. She insisted that allowances must be made for Pat’s sick idealism. To which my father, sprung from generations of rebels, replied austerely that it would prove impossible to govern the state if hectic emotionalism were to be accepted as an excuse for murder. My mother then suggested that he should go at once to the gardai barracks and report on Pat’s whereabouts. But he didn’t.

My parents seem never to have debated the ethics of capital
punishment
; presumably they accepted it, in theory, as the appropriate penalty for murder. Yet had it not been employed in Ireland during the Forties,
as part of the government’s anti-IRA campaign, they might well have refused to succour Pat. When such a decision can lead directly to a death sentence it requires more moral courage, or moral arrogance, than either of my parents possessed.

From their point of view an awkward situation was being
compounded
by the need to impress on me that giving refuge to Pat did not mean condoning his crime. In the end they gave up pretending to unravel this tangled skein for my benefit, which was sensible of them since I well knew that they were incapable of unravelling it for their own. I had in any case already come to my own conclusions and was only listening to their dutiful dissertations out of politeness. Yet I vaguely sympathised with their discomfiture; though they repudiated Pat as a violent man their consciences compelled them to allow for the fact that he saw himself as a soldier fighting a just war – a dilemma that in present-day Northern Ireland has again become familiar to many.

Pat stayed with us for a fortnight, but he and I never referred directly to his peculiar status and he made no attempt to influence me politically. We played round after round of rummy and he gave me lessons in map-reading and taught me how to whistle through my fingers so piercingly that I can be heard two miles away. To me this marvellous companion seemed a magic sort of person, an intelligent grown-up who had retained all the wondering enthusiasms of childhood. And my intuition was right. It was Pat’s tragedy that he had never outgrown either the innocence or the ruthlessness of youth.

My parents also became very fond of Pat and deeply concerned about him. Night after night they argued patiently in futile attempts to make him see the error of his ways. Soon he seemed a member of the family – quite an achievement, in view of the strains imposed on all the adults concerned by his presence in the house. Had he been detected under our roof, my father would not have perjured himself by denying any knowledge of his identity and so would certainly have been imprisoned – as his sister was soon to be, on Pat’s account.

Our guest was careful never to go too near a window and any knock at the door sent him rushing upstairs. Remembering how I relished all this melodrama, I wonder now if I fully understood that we were truly dicing with death. But my light-hearted approach may well have helped by
easing the tension generated between the three adults. Pat knew that I took the game seriously enough to keep all the rules, and I was made deliriously proud by his entrusting to me the addressing and posting of his letters. One morning I went into his room to leave fresh linen on the bed and saw an automatic by the pillow. For years this was to rank as the most thrilling moment in my life. I tingled all over at the romance of that weapon – symbol of Adventure! – gleaming black and lethal on the white sheet. It never occurred to me that in certain circumstances it could be used to kill the local gardai, the fathers of my playmates. But then it was impossible to associate the gentle, considerate Pat with any form of violence or cruelty.

One evening Pat said goodbye instead of good-night and when we got up next morning he was gone. We heard nothing of him for several months, but his luck did not hold. He was eventually captured in my aunt’s house, while asleep, and tried in Dublin before the Military Tribunal. Then he was hanged by the neck until he died, at eight o’clock in the morning on December 1, 1944. His real name was Charles Kerins.

In Waterford city, where I was by then at school, December 1, 1944, was a morning of violent wind and slashing rain. Just before eight o’clock I was queuing for my breakfast. I knew of Pat’s attitude towards his sentence and at the moment of his hanging, when the gong in the hall was signalling us to enter the refectory, I experienced an almost hysterical elation. Then, curiously enough, I ate my usual hearty meal. It was against the nationalist tradition in my blood to mourn such deaths, for that would have been to imply that the sacrifice was not worth while.

Our mail was distributed during the mid-morning break and two worlds met when I stood amongst my classmates and – while they chattered of hockey and drank their milk – read a letter from a friend who had been hanged three hours earlier. With his letter Pat had enclosed a silver ring made on the prison ship in Belfast by a comrade of his, ‘Rocky’ Burns, who was later shot dead in Belfast by the RUC – or perhaps the B specials. I wore the ring constantly from that moment until my fingers and my ideals outgrew it – developments which conveniently occurred at about the same time. But I have it still and I would not part with it.

A few days later I had a letter from the aunt in whose house Pat had been arrested. She wrote:

Had I lived in Dublin I might either have been much more deeply influenced by Murphy Republicanism or reacted earlier and more strongly against it. As it was, I followed exactly in my father’s political footsteps, during this period, and despite the emotionalism aroused by Charlie’s tragic career I reserved for de Valera (Charlie’s ‘murderer’, according to Aunt Kathleen) the sort of devotion expended on less orthodox heroes by my Dublin cousins. To me ‘Dev’ was one of the greatest Irishmen who had ever lived – indeed, one of the greatest
MEN
– yet like my mother I was apolitical by nature and I cannot recall ever arguing about this with the more extreme of my relatives. Dev was not, in my eyes, a politician. He was an heroic, almost godlike leader of the nation who had never belonged to the dreary world of party politics but ruled us from an immeasurably higher plane. This of course was fantasy on my part, an adolescent’s glorification of a sincere, romantic and very powerful personality. But behind the fantasy there was some truth. Now many of Dev’s ideals seem to me either absurd or distasteful. Yet he did have genuine ideals, he was no mere politician out for personal power, and looking around today one realises that neither in Britain nor in Ireland is there any individual with the leadership qualities of Churchill and de Valera.