Ashes In the Wind (3 page)

‘What did Dad say?’ asked John.

‘Most of it none of your business,’ said Eileen. ‘But he did say we weren’t to worry, that he would come back.’

Years later John read the War Diary of the Royal Irish Dragoons, which described the morning of 1 July 1916 in a few lines.

The regiment advanced in good order at 0730 hours. When the Allied barrage lifted we were instantly fired on by the enemy’s machine guns and snipers. The fire was so intense that the advance was checked; A Squadron, under Major Burke, managed to make progress on the right flank, and by 1130 had reached the first line of German trenches, followed by B and C Squadrons. By noon our first objective had been secured. On our right the Queen’s Victoria Rifles had been held up, and on the left flank a determined attack by the Inniskilling Fusiliers was checked. As a result the German counter-attack on both flanks was intense, and after fierce fighting for two hours, and many casualties, including the commanding officer, the second in command, A and C squadron leaders and the adjutant, the regiment was ordered to withdraw. 360 out of 542 men were killed or wounded.

A contemporary German account said, ‘In the valley leading to Thiepval the bodies lay like a blanket.’ Henry’s corps commander General Congreve wrote in a letter to his wife, ‘I am proud of my splendid fighting troops. A perfect day.’

On Friday John walks the two miles into Drimnamore village to collect
The Kerryman
and the post. It is the last Friday in the month, market day, and Drimnamore is busy. Cattle, pigs and chickens are bought and sold, horses trotted up and down on the green, bargains are struck with a spit and a handshake, notes watchfully counted out, the luck-penny handed back. Women in shawls are selling yellow, salty butter in willow baskets. Small groups of men stand around smoking and holding glasses of stout. There is a fortune-teller in a little brown tent doing good business as long as Father Michael isn’t around. John catches a piebald with a dangling halter that canters past him and hands it back to its breathless owner, who at once tries to convince John, ‘This is the horse you’ve been wanting all your life. Didn’t he pick you out of the crowd?’

John laughs, shakes his head, moves on, nods to Tomas Sullivan, who is talking to several older men, strangers to John. Tomas nods back.

There are several Kerry cows for sale, the offspring of Eileen’s Kerry bull Cúchulain. Eileen is a crusader for the breed, threatened by bigger animals from lowland Scotland. The Kerry cow is a grand doer on the poor grazing of the South-West, good for beef and milk, hardy, doesn’t mind the rain.

There are more men about than usual, and more Cork accents. John has a glass of stout in O’Hara’s smoky bar where he recognizes less than half of the dozen men in the crowded room. He tells his mother on his return.

‘Maybe there’s something on,’ she says. ‘More than just searches and roadblocks. The Black and Tans are in Waterville now, and the Kerry Brigade may be pushed into doing something about them. The Cork boys are much harder and maybe that’s why they’re here. I’ll ask around. Someone will know.’

Lunch at Derriquin the next day is a sombre affair. Their near neighbours, the Butlers, have come over from Waterville, their distrust of Eileen’s Home Rule sympathies outweighed by the certainty of excellent Kerry beef and a dozen oysters each from the Derriquin oyster beds. After all, Arthur Butler reminds his wife, ‘She is Middleton’s daughter, and he’s sound all right on the Union.’

At lunch he wants vigorous action. ‘They’ve destroyed the police station in Tralee, ambushed and killed two policemen in Cahirciveen, burned Ardfert Abbey and Renvyle. We’ve been raided three times in the last month, our shotguns and cartridges taken. Kerry needs more troops, more Black and Tans.’

Eileen is scornful.

‘More Black and Tans? They’re the dregs of the British Army; they shot a woman in Kiltartan last week sitting on her lawn. Twenty-four years old, leaving three children without a mother.’

‘Of course that’s a tragedy. But Home Rule won’t ever work. Look at your people. They’re as feckless and as priest-ridden as ours. The Irish need a firm and fatherly hand if there is to be any future for this island. The Black and Tans will sort out the Shinners soon enough once we have enough of them.’

John looks out of the window at the rough November waves in the estuary, daydreaming of his rooms back at Trinity. It’s an odd father that needs the police and the army to control his children, he thinks, sees the surprised look on Arthur Butler’s face, and realizes he has spoken out loud. There is a long silence. John’s mother smiles and rings the bell for coffee.

That afternoon Eileen is driven into Drimnamore to see Josephine. Josephine Burke lives in the end cottage at the entrance to the village, where she teaches at the elementary school. Josephine and Eileen are close. It is Eileen who arranged for Josephine’s education by the nuns in Kenmare, who asks her regularly to the castle, who ensures that she sits in the Burke pew, who insists that Josephine calls herself Josephine Burke, not Josephine Doyle.

‘It’s not down to you that Henry’s Uncle Arthur was too cowardly to marry your mother,’ says Eileen. ‘It’s he was the bastard, not you.’ Josephine smiles at the frank language. Eileen is Josephine’s marriage broker, persistent in spite of Josephine’s diffidence.

‘Sure, who’d have me? I’m thirty-two, illegitimate, a Protestant into the bargain.’

‘A lucky man, that’s who. You know what they say – marry a teacher or a nurse and you’ve got a laying hen.’

Josephine laughs. She teaches Gaelic to Eileen, a good and eager pupil, who is fluent enough to say, when her younger sister Agnes elopes with John Fuller after a long and clandestine courtship, ‘
Sciob an fiolar togha mo schicini
’ – ‘The eagle has taken the pick of our chickens.’

Eileen and Josephine are together for an hour on Sunday evening in Josephine’s front room. On the way back to Derriquin, Eileen calls on Father Michael. It is her first visit to the parish priest’s house, a substantial brick building close to the Roman Catholic church. Father Michael has always been friendly enough, but guards his flock closely. He has been told how Henry’s father tried to convert the Derriquin tenants during the Famine years.

Eileen is shown in by the housekeeper and sits on a straight-backed chair in the austere parlour, bare but for a small table, a second chair and a large crucifix on one wall. A recently lit fire struggles to warm the room.

The housekeeper brings in a pot of tea and two cups on a tray; as she leaves the room Father Michael comes in and sits down. He is much younger than Eileen, not yet thirty, and the authority of his position sits a little uneasily on his shoulders.

‘I’m sorry we’ve no biscuits,’ he says. ‘I don’t do much entertaining. But you’ll have a cup of tea?’

‘I will, thank you. I’m sorry to arrive unexpectedly, but I’ve heard from Josephine that the IRA are planning to move men up to Staigue Fort to attack the army convoy from Kenmare. If it happens it’ll be more than a skirmish, it’ll be a real battle. You and I should warn both sides, get the IRA to call the ambush off.’

Father Michael looks uneasy. ‘I’m not sure what I can do, whether the Cork men will listen to me.’

‘They will if you tell them the army have been warned,’ says Eileen. ‘We both of us should try.’

‘It’s been quiet enough around Drimnamore so far,’ says Father Michael, getting up and poking the fire. ‘I suppose we should do our best to keep it that way.’

That evening Eileen talks to John. ‘Father Michael is going to warn the IRA, I’ll speak to the army this evening. The last thing we need is a battle.’

John makes no attempt to dissuade her. Later, watching from his room in the tower, he sees Eileen walking along the terrace that separates Derriquin from the sea, running her hand slowly across, down, across, up the waist-high battlemented wall.

Eileen telephones General Strickland in Kenmare; the army ignores her advice to delay their convoy and instead plans an ambush of its own.

Frank O’Gowan, the captain of the Cork detachment of the IRA, is determined to go ahead. He has been sent to galvanize the Kerry Brigade, still tainted by their failure to rescue Roger Casement from the Tralee barracks in 1916. He distrusts Father Michael’s warning; the Drimnamore parish priest makes no distinction from his pulpit between IRA and British killing.

‘They’ll be expecting two Kerrymen and a dog,’ Frank says later to Tomas Sullivan. ‘Not twenty of us.’

T
HE
ANCIENT
DRY
-
STONE
ring of Staigue Fort stands in an amphitheatre of hills open to the south half a mile above the coast road. On Wednesday evening, twenty IRA Volunteers move into the fort in ones and twos off the mountain. They shelter in the old guardroom built into the side of the wall, lighting a turf fire that offers more comfort than warmth. The men from Cork are quiet; the Kerrymen, who have never fired their rifles in anger, are full of nervous questions. They get short answers.

‘You’ll find out soon enough in the morning,’ says Frank O’Gowan, yawning. ‘Jesus, I could sleep on a harrow.’

‘Did you see the priest Sunday?’ says Patrick O’Mahony to Tomas Sullivan. He is moving a small rosary nervously between his fingers.

‘Indeed I did,’ says Tomas. ‘I had little enough to tell him. It’s hard to find an occasion of sin in Drimnamore.’

‘What got you in? The farm, was it?’ says Patrick.

‘Not land any more. My grandfather took the grazing of five cows from the Burkes for three lives, but my da bought it out in ’96.’

‘So?’

‘My grandfather was a member of the IRB, a proper Fenian – and his grandfather fought in 1798. It’s time this country was ours, high time we had a Republic. What got you here?’

‘A bit of excitement.’

‘You’ll have your fill of that in the morning,’ says Frank.

‘What about you, Captain?’ says Tomas.

‘The Christian Brothers and the Connaught Rangers.’ He doesn’t elaborate.

Frank O’Gowan was half English; he had been christened Francis Xavier Smith, reflecting his mother’s hope that she had borne a priest. Her English husband had a small draper’s shop on the Cork Quays. When it collapsed and her husband disappeared, she changed their name to O’Gowan and enrolled her hope in the Christian Brothers School, a grim building in Cork City as forbidding and uncomfortable as the County Jail. On his first day, standing uncertainly in a dank hall smelling of disinfectant and of boys, Frank was suddenly lifted off his feet by a massive hand that grabbed jacket, collar and vest in a single twisted bunch.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ said the unseen owner of the hand.

‘Frank – it’s Frank,’ said Francis Xavier O’Gowan, rechristening himself in an instant.

‘I’ve no Frank on my list. What’s your last name?’

‘O’Gowan.’

‘No, it isn’t. It’s O’Gowan, Brother Malachy. Hold out your hand.’

Frank turned around, held out his hand, was grabbed by the wrist and given three heavy welts from Brother Malachy’s leather tawse.

‘That will teach you your name. And mine.’

This was his introduction to the Christian Brothers. His contemporaries soon found out about his name change, teased him for his rudimentary Gaelic, and called him ‘The English’; Frank tolerated this until he became big enough to clout anyone who used the nickname. He developed a talent for the kick, gouge and butt of playground fighting; he began to enjoy the fierce scuffles and seek them out. The frequent and sanctioned violence from the Brothers and among the boys made Frank a convinced atheist.

The Connaught Rangers made him a soldier, taught him to strip, clean and assemble a rifle, familiarized him with the idiosyncrasies of the Mills bomb and promoted him to sergeant. A gas attack took him out of the trenches just before the Somme; he was convalescing in a Dublin hospital during the Easter Rising, and was still in bed when he heard the news of the execution of fifteen of the Rising’s leaders at the beginning of May. One of the fifteen, Michael O’Hanrahan, was his cousin. On his discharge from hospital he went home to Cork, overstayed his leave, was posted as a deserter and joined the Cork Brigade of the IRA.

Frank takes a particular pleasure in using his British Army skills against his former teachers.

‘Easy with the bombs, boys,’ he says as he hands them out. ‘They’re each to knock over three Black and Tans. And you, Patrick, stop fiddling with that ring or you’ll blow us all to kingdom come.’

They clean their rifles, British Army Lee-Enfields and long-barrelled single-shot Mausers, share out the ammunition, eat their bread and cheese. It is a long night. They wake, stiff and cold, to a wild spring morning, low grey clouds, violent rain squalls, almost no sun.

The road convoy never arrives. Instead, a column of the Manchester Regiment comes over the mountain from Kenmare and down on the fort from behind. A sentry spots the column, but the Volunteers have no time to withdraw. The soldiers have brought a Lewis gun and ammunition on the back of a mule. They lay down a heavy covering fire on the fort as Frank moves his men to the northern ramparts.

The machine-gunner is accurate; Seamus O’Connell, a forty-year-old farmer from Derrynane, tries to return the fire and is caught by a burst that tears his face apart and throws him down, spread-eagled, on the grass. A pool of blood makes a red halo around his head. Patrick and Tomas look down with horror, then Patrick starts to cry.

‘Get a hold of yourself, man,’ says Frank. ‘You’ll have a chance at a wake later. If you’re lucky.’

Terrified by the firing, the soldiers’ mule breaks loose and bolts, braying, towards the fort. It is shot by one of the Volunteers.

‘Any road, he’ll not carry the gun back to Kenmare,’ says Frank. ‘But we’re banjaxed, we’re all dead men unless we can stop the machine gun.’

‘We could get at them through the souterrain,’ says Tomas and, seeing the blank looks, says, ‘The souterrain, the tunnel. It starts from the north corner, goes up the hill on the slant.’

‘Show me the way,’ says Frank, and they crawl through the tunnel, dry in spite of the rain. They emerge in a small copse a hundred yards up the hill, move in a crouching run under the lee of a stone wall towards the machine gun and stop when they are twenty feet away. Frank and Tomas stand up and hurl four bombs. Two fail to explode, but the other two are enough to do the job. Three soldiers are killed outright and the gun destroyed. Frank shoots the fourth as he crawls away.