Tipperary (58 page)

Came the night, crisp and clear with a great, bright moon. At about seven o'clock, they heard the rumble of the lorries and soon came the scout, fast as the wind on his bicycle. As he passed the IRA positions, he raised his cap—once, twice, three times: three lorries full of soldiers. When the scout had cycled over the rope and passed safely on, the Flying Column men hauled the farm cart out from the gateway into the middle of the roadway, where it lurched to a halt and tipped down on its shafts.

Over the rise came the first military truck and down into the hollow, but it did not see the cart until too late to warn the others. The driver dragged his wheels to a halt, as did the two drivers behind him—and the Flying Column opened fire. On “aim” and “fire” orders, three groups of four men simultaneously attacked the three trucks.

The first soldiers who died were shot in that opening hail of bullets as they began to leap from the trucks. Those who lived had waited a moment, then jumped when the IRA took time to reload; some soldiers crawled under the trucks, and some died there; others then took cover in the ditch across the road from the IRA and returned fire. The military could not assess how many men were attacking them, so fierce was the IRA assault.

Flying Column members burned their fingers that night, as their guns grew hot. Of their twelve rifles, five jammed or locked in some way—and each of the IRA men to whom that happened resorted to handguns. Harney, I was told later, saw an officer on his feet in the middle of the road, revolver in hand, not taking shelter, blazing away in the direction of the IRA and shouting at his men to come and join him and advance across the road. None did; Harney jumped to his feet and with his own handgun shot the officer.

The gunfight went on for twenty minutes, and then, one by one, the IRA ceased firing. In each group the youngest men slipped away first and dissolved into the trees. Soon, the army noticed that the IRA firestorm had declined and, on shouted orders, began to hold their fire. When the firing ceased entirely, they presumed—mistakenly—that they had killed all their assailants. Cautiously the soldiers rose from their positions and, trying to see their officers' gestures in the moonlight, in the shadows of the trucks and the dead bodies, they began to advance. An officer led the way, and the twenty or so soldiers remaining charged with him, firing as they went.

But nobody returned fire. When they cleared the low wall, they found only open space; their attackers had melted into the night. The officers took a decision not to follow into the trees—for all they knew, a greater ambush awaited them there. It did not; Harney, ever mindful of his men's safety, knew when to be satisfied with a victory. He had given the order that everybody, once they left their positions, was to make for the castle; the distance to us, in a straight line across the fields, was just over a mile.

Harney had two casualties, one not serious, one more dangerous. A boy from Mooncoin who had come into Tipperary because his parents would not allow him to join the Kilkenny Flying Columns had taken a flesh wound to his face. Just below his left eye (his right eye, as he explained to me, had been sighting his gun), a bullet had ricocheted and caught a chip of stone from the wall, which had hit him. Very sore, and bleeding heavily, he endeavored not to be hysterical.

The other injury posed greater problems. One of the oldest men in the Tipperary IRA (in his early fifties), had taken, we believed, a bullet in a lung. Harney and one of the youngest members had carried him across the fields; he was, they said, “spraying blood every time he breathed.” We laid him on a table and stripped him to the waist. The bullet had almost passed through him; when we wiped the blood away, we saw the blackened, neat hole where it had entered, and at his back we could actually feel it beneath a bruise.

I had placed some of my healing stores in the cellar, and we decided to bathe his wound as much as possible with a eucalyptus mixture in hot water; but it was clear that he was bleeding heavily, and so I needed cloths of all kinds. When I went up to the castle, I found April in the kitchen, planning the meals for the next day. (We fed daily lunch to more than a hundred people, which enabled us to “hide” the food for the men in the cellars.) She asked no questions, and I saw her fetch a hat and coat. Presently, I heard the car engine, and the Dunhill left the castle grounds, its lamps like twin moons.

Within two hours, a doctor had arrived—a Dr. Costigan, unknown to me except by name and repute. In those days, we never knew who sympathized and who did not, and trying to find doctors so early in the guerrilla campaign gave us considerable pause. To my surprise, the doctor's coat and shirt were already covered in blood—and he told us (April did not come down to the cellars) that he'd been hit by flying glass as he'd left his home, that three truckloads of soldiers, said to contain many dead bodies, had arrived in Tipperary and were looting the town and attacking buildings.

Thus did the War of Independence reach deep into our lives in Tipperary. The doctor took out the bullet and stanched the flow of blood. He stayed all night; the man recovered—and the other casualty, the boy, said the doctor, would have “a wonderful scar” to talk about for the rest of his life. The boy did not look displeased. As to the other ten men who had been “out,” as they called it, they sat quietly, Harney their leader among them, some chattering lightly to each other, some silent and alone. All cleaned their guns. When asked to recount their individual experiences, it became clear that each man thought he had effected a number of serious “hits.” Yet when the newspapers reported the incident, they said that three soldiers had died, and none of the remaining fifty-seven had been wounded.

The Tankardstown Ambush became famous. It has been described as “a textbook IRA operation.” Time would tell that twelve soldiers had died on the spot, and two more died in the hospital—a huge success for the Volunteers of the Flying Column. Sixteen more ended up being invalided back to England, many with severe wounds.

However, the British army was not alone when it came to distorting facts; Charles O'Brien bent a few details too. To begin with, the operation was conducted by Dermot Noonan, with Joe Harney as second-in-command. And it was Noonan—according to Harney—who asked April to find a doctor for the wounded man.

She had the perfect cover. With her accent, classy bearing, and posh motorcar, the soldiers and police would never query her presence in Tipperary. Nor would they stop her from bringing a doctor to attend one of her staff out at the castle.

From the Irish Folkore Commission's extensive section on the War of Independence, here's a relevant extract in Harney's oral history account of Tankardstown:

We always knew when we could go no further. Ammo told us; each man fired about a hundred and twenty rounds that night, that's rifle fire. Small arms—well, I know that I reloaded my revolver four times. And more than ammo told us—if the enemy was still active at the site, and we hadn't put everybody away, there was always a moment when we knew we wouldn't get any more penetration. Tankardstown was like that—on both counts: ammo and penetration.

So, as previously briefed, we pulled back. The rule was always the same: youngest volunteers first, officers last, unless we had severe casualties. Whether fatal or wounded, one officer—usually the second-in-command—and the youngest volunteer took the fatality or the most seriously wounded. That night, we had to carry one man, Michael Fitzgerald; he took a bullet—it clipped the tip of his lung.

A bright night—in fact, a very bright night. The fight had been tremendous; we were all nearly deaf for a while afterward, and I had a burn on one finger. We pulled back and the cover was excellent. A thick, low mist hung over the ground to a height of about three feet, and then, as soon as we got in among those trees, we were as safe as houses. And by weaving across the countryside, we were able to stay more or less under cover until we got to the castle. You see, that's the great advantage of guerrilla warfare—the military wouldn't dare follow us. They wouldn't know where we were; they'd have been terrified.

Dermot Noonan was the last to leave—I knew the sound of his gun, he was still blasting away when we had been gone more than a quarter of a mile. Then, when his gun went silent—there was always that anxiety that he had been hit. I only relaxed when I saw him again. He was very amusing about his height—he used to say they could never hit him because the blades of grass came up over his head, or he could hide between the stones in the wall.

That night, he led like Collins himself, out in front, his eyes like lamps. And he knew, Dermot always knew—he said to me back at the castle—that we got at least eight of them and maybe more. And then, as if he hadn't enough adventure for one night, he climbed into the car with Mrs. Somerville, who owned the castle, and it was he who persuaded Dr. Costigan to come out and look after Michael Fitzgerald. And saved Michael's life. Dermot knew Dr. Costigan from some law case or other.

In his own text, Charles never discussed this, never mentioned Noonan, even though, in the cellars below the castle, Noonan was the one who held the debrief. Charles skated over that detail too—all he said is “When asked to recount their individual experiences . . .”

In short, Charles avoided any mention of Dermot Noonan, who had become one of the most significant figures in the drama that lay beneath the surface at Tipperary castle—the drama of Charles O'Brien, almost sixty years old, still passionately in love with this rich English widow, who now, in 1920, was thirty-eight.

That's one way of putting it. And when I began to read between the lines of this text, and began to find my researches augmented by such extra texts as Harney's reminiscences, and Mrs. Moore's letters to and from April, and the contradictions between what Charles did and did not report, I decided to research “Mrs. Somerville” some more.

I went back to Dublin to see the portrait that I had earlier described in my commentaries and sat in front of it for a long time.

The first time I saw it had been by accident. Long before I'd heard of Charles O'Brien, my librarian friend in Dublin, Marian Harney, had told me that the Scullys, a family of bad landlords in Golden, had given paintings, furniture, and books to Trinity College, which owned land in the north of the county. That is how Sir William Orpen's painting of April came to hang in Dublin.

Heredity fascinates me. From the moment our daughter, Elizabeth, was born, I scanned her day and night, face and feet, body and soul, for any resemblance to me. When Orpen painted “April Somerville, London 1912,” she was thirty. What could I learn from her face, from that dense, shiny fair hair? (Mine was never like that; dense, yes, but black, and as a boy I wore a heavy fringe, which at times almost came down into my eyes.)

Did April look fierce? Or unfair? Or spoiled? She had a shapely nose—retroussé, delicate. On I went, tracing one characteristic after another—mouth, jawline, hairline, ears, neck, as if searching for clues to her character.

I rose from the chair on which I had been sitting and walked forward to look more closely at the portrait. Then I stepped back and viewed it from another angle. From over there, back to here, forward a pace, back a yard or two—I looked and looked.

Unbeknownst to me, I was being watched. A man at the end of the corridor was taking books from a briefcase and putting them on a shelf. I heard him before I saw him.

“It's only an Orpen, for God's sake.”

I swung around. He spoke again.

“You're not looking for meaning, I hope?” He came forward, a touch irritated. “I have to see what you're looking at? Orpen was a stupid bugger.”

Right in front of me he stood, blocking my view of the portrait. He too put his head this way and that. Then he looked back at me—and the puzzled expression on his face died.

“Oh, I'm sorry, it never occurred to me that it'd be a relative. You a Tipperary man?”

“Yes.”

“This is a Tipperary picture.”

“I know.”

He introduced himself: “Henry Lisney. Not the auction people— they're the ones with the money. I'm an art lecturer here, nineteenth and early twentieth century.”

I introduced myself, as well, and asked, “How much do you know about this—I mean, about the woman, too?”

Henry Lisney looked at the portrait. “Not much to say,
truly.
Society commission, husband probably. Orpen never gave out much information; this for some reason came to Trinity in the nineteen
-thirties.
What was she, your
aunt
?” Henry Lisney had a speech habit of emphasizing the last word in every sentence.

I said, not a little astonished, “Why do you say that?”

“Oh, God, don't tell me it's your
mother
!”

“And why do you say that?”

“Well,” said Henry Lisney, “you're the dead spit and image, as they say.”

“What?”

“We never see where we resemble our family. Jesus, my dear man, I can't even recognize myself in
photographs.
”

“Where would I find out more?”

“If it was Lavery, it'd be easy.” (Sir John Lavery was the other famous Irish portrait artist of the period.)