A Long Long Way (12 page)

The tea was long cold and forgotten in his stomach when the private disappeared on his stretcher around the corner of the traverse, the bearers cursing every inch of the way. This lad from Aughrim would be bumped down now to the Aid Post and then on to the Clearing Station if he lived that long. Then on to a hospital and if that bullet hadn’t done for him, he would be in Charing Cross Station before long, heading for an English hospital among all the thousands upon thousands of wounded and destroyed that passed through London. Men with half their faces gone and limbs lost and really and truly, ruined men, and then those more lightly wounded with their cherished Blighty, a wound that would take them out of the war for a little, maybe for good.

But Willie felt nothing but a cold despair as he watched the stretcher disappear. There were pains now and things now that no compassion could help. There needed now to be fellas brought up with guns, to shoot the most horribly wounded, like you might a horse. You’d never leave a fucking horse with an eye like that; you’d feel pity maybe, as much as you’d like, but you’d shoot it, to put it out of its misery. There needed to be a new sort of line officer like a veterinarian, he thought, because there was too much of this screaming and suffering. There was too much of it, too much of it, and it wasn’t love or anything close to it to leave a young fella screaming on the ground for three hours. It wasn’t love and it wasn’t even like being at a war and it wasn’t fucking right.

Christy Moran was strangely jubilant a few weeks later. They were back in the reserve lines, billeted on a right old so-and-so in a freezing and dilapidated farmhouse, not like their favourite old woman in Amiens.

‘I think they’re planning to give you a few days’ furlough, Willie. Proper leave, home leave,’ he said.

He said it with as much pleasure as he might about furlough of his own.

‘Jesus, when, sir?’

‘In a couple of weeks or so.’

‘Oh, that will be mighty.’

‘Try and stay alive till then, Willie.’

‘I will, I will, sir.’

Chapter Six

The sentry at the castle gate gave him a right look as he walked in, like the ghost of the war. The sentry, of course, was in the same uniform, but a hell of a lot cleaner.

Willie knocked at the familiar door of his father’s quarters. After a good wait the door was opened by Maud. She looked like she was in a dark mood; her face didn’t brighten to see him.

‘What is it, what do you want?’ she said, and he laughed at the fierceness of it.

Of course, she didn’t know him.

‘It’s me, Maud — Willie.’

‘Oh mercy me, poor little Willie, oh come in, come in.’

And it was with unusual joy that she pulled him into the rinsed room. It was all scrubbed floorboards, and there was a dresser of blue and white delph and really it was very shipshape, he thought, altogether shipshape.

After the long journey through the reserve lines, across England and over the Irish Sea, he would have been grubby even if he had started clean. But he had started in the state that ten days in trenches will leave you.

‘I think before you are kissing me and the like, Maud, you had better fill a tub for me, and maybe give these clothes an awful seeing to, and if you had something to disinfect them well and good, and me into the bargain.’

Maud drew back.

‘Annie, Annie!’ she called. ‘Annie will help us. Don’t you worry, Willie, we’ll get you clean all right.’

And she rolled up her black sleeves and went down the back stairs for the zinc tub that was stowed in its place under the lower landing. She nearly collided with Annie in the door.

‘Annie, dear, you will need to boil up some bathwater promptly and we will be washing Willie Dunne immediately.’

‘Willie, Willie,’ said Annie. She rushed forward and was about to put her arms around him.

‘Don’t touch me, Annie, I’m all lousy and God knows what.’

‘Well, we had better clean you off before Dolly gets back from school, because you won’t be able to hold her off!’

‘I’m sure that’s right,’ he said.

Annie had the polio as a little girl herself and was left with a bit of a hump, but it wasn’t anything too grievous and everyone hoped she would be able to get a husband.

‘To leave you standing there like that,’ said Annie, desperately. ‘Without a kiss. But I’ll warm the water in the scullery. Do you want a nice big lump of cheese in a bit of Maud’s bread?’

‘I do, I would heartily like that!’ he said, laughing.

‘Well, heavens, it is a nice thing to have you back, and that laughter, and you will sing tonight, won’t you, some of those wicked songs of the war?’

‘I will not, Annie,’ he said, ‘they are much too bad, and you wouldn’t understand them anyway. I hope not!’

And who will we have to wash you? My heavens, I will have to send for Papa, I don’t know if I won’t. You can’t get rid of all those creatures yourself. And he was always a great man for the nits.‘

‘He was always the king of the nits.’

‘He was!’ cried Annie.

Soon the water was warmed, and the bath dragged over to the big window that looked out on the blind wall of the chief secretary’s department, but that let in a wonderful stream of sunlight, as good as a fire. Dark, deep, rich Dublin sunlight, he thought, that would roast the back off you if you lingered. For the window-glass didn’t let in the April breeze; it admitted only the sun itself. The blind planet sat above the city and you must not stare into it, his father taught him that years ago, when he used to wonder what the sun might be. But his father was ordinary and rigorous in his own mind, he considered the sun in a scientific manner, what its light might do to his son’s young eyes.

And Willie stood there and thoughts he didn’t welcome began to unsettle him.

He couldn’t stop his mind going back to that year, ‘13 , when his father faced the crowd in Sackville Street.

His father went into a shop in Sackville Street. He had his men massed at the O‘Connell Monument, and he telephoned headquarters to see what should be done, because there were hundreds of fellas out from the back streets, milling about, and there were scores of respectable people, and children, trying to make their way through the strange crowds. And headquarters told him to clear the streets.

Oh, Willie knew all the details, and they were like embers now in his head, hurting him strangely. The darker details he had from Gretta’s father, of course, the dark, hard details that had seemed bad enough going into his head, but had grown and spread there since.

Four men left killed. It was odd that those four men meant so much, when he had seen now so many others killed. But they did.

Dempsey the builder of course would never employ a union man, and they had worked all through the General Strike, and so might be said to have the characteristics of scabs. That was a bother to Willie too now, looking back.

Willie remembered coming home that night to this very room and his father was sitting alone in the dark, in his uniform still. Willie went up to him and asked him how he was, and got no answer. That silence in the dark room puzzled him that time and it still puzzled him. It terrorized him.

And he wondered at himself that he couldn’t stand in his father’s quarters without rehearsing the story over again. He felt like a traitor really.

Now his father came up from the yards with little Dolly led by the hand.

And Dolly broke from her father’s grip and came running without a word to Willie and hugged his dirty legs. Willie stroked her head gingerly, adoringly. She was adding her happy tears to the soiled uniform.

‘There you are, Dolly,’ said Willie. ‘There you are at last.’

‘Ah, Willie, Willie,’ said his father, all the great height of him, and the wide waistband straining as ever. ‘The veritable hero returns.’

‘How are you, Papa, and I’ve missed you. I hope you got all my letters?’

‘And I hope you got all mine?’

‘I got many, and I suppose it was all of them, and you were very kind to think of writing to me.’

‘My God, Willie,’ he said. ‘It was my honour to write to you.’

‘Willie, Willie,’ said Dolly, ‘what are you after bringing me?’

‘He hasn’t had a chance to do anything, I’m sure,’ said his father. ‘Leave the lad be.’

‘We’ll go down to Duffy’s after, Dolly, and see what big gob-stoppers she has for us,’ said Willie, a little abashed.

‘You will of course,’ said his father.

Then he cleared out the bigger girls and Willie stripped out of his uniform and his long-johns and his father bagged them up and opened the rear door and flung them out to Maud and Annie for ginger boiling. Dolly sat on an old chair. It was a finely carved one but very spindly, that had been their mother’s special chair in the bedroom of old, a dress chair. Dolly watched the show gleefully, swinging her legs like a clock gone mad.

‘Can we not come in?’ Annie teased, and her father roared back at her, like she was a rascally hen advancing into the house against the wishes of the yard woman.

So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath, as indeed Willie’s mother had done a thousand times while Willie was a boy. And it was a strange enough thing, to see the policeman throwing on the accustomed moleskin apron kept for the purpose no doubt of washing Dolly still, and fetching in close the basin with the big sponge and the carbolic soap. And he lathered the sponge up mightily, and he started to lave his son from head to foot, cascading the water neatly over everything. And the lice must have been flying from Willie Dunne just like those poor men in Sackville Street from the batons, and soon the water was speckled with them, little writhing white creatures. He saw under the suds or through them that his skin was all blotched with red circles so he supposed he had the ringworm into the bargain. Certainly the nits must be in his head because it was terrible itchy now in the steaming heat. But his hair was only recently cut as short as the Viceroy’s lawn, so the nits had not much chance against his father’s nit comb, which he wielded now like a delicate surgeon, combing out the eggs.

Then he asked his son politely to step out and he fetched the big sheet from the range in the scullery and came back in and wound it round and round his son, till he sucked the wetness off him.

Then a pair of clean long-johns of his father’s was fetched and the legs had to be rolled up and the arms, and then Willie put on his old working suit from when he used to go out building. His uniform would be a while drying, what with the heavyish material in it.

Then, when he was all shipshape, his father put his big arms around him, and held him close to him for a few moments, like an actor on the stage.

It was not a thing you would see in real life anyway, and there was a faraway look on his father’s face, like it was all years ago and otherwise and maybe they were still in Dalkey and he was a little lad.

But he was a soldier now of some nineteen years and for all that he was glad of his father’s arms around him, strange as it was, strange and comforting as it was.

‘Come on and get a hat on, Willie, and we’ll go, and we’ll go!’ shouted Dolly Dunne.