Danny Boy (11 page)

‘Aye, it is,’ Rosie replied, sighing with relief that the tracks had finally levelled out and they were now travelling at a more sedate pace.

‘My children love it whenever I have them with me,’ the woman went on. ‘But then children don’t see danger, do they? I have three and they have my hair near white at times, the mischief and pranks they get up to.’

‘Are they in Dublin, your children?’ Rosie asked, thankful to have some distracting conversation.

‘No, with their daddy in Terenure, that’s where I live,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve been up to visit my mother in Poulaphuca. She hasn’t been at all well, which is why I didn’t want to take any of the children with me this time. In fact, she was so poorly I ended up staying the night. I wouldn’t go to Dublin at the moment for a pension.’

‘Nor me, by choice,’ Rosie said, and then, despite the fact the woman was a stranger, or maybe because of it, she found herself telling her everything. The woman listened without saying a word, but her eyes spoke her sympathy and finally she said, ‘it might not be as bad as you fear, my dear.’

‘Aye, and it may be far worse,’ Rosie said. ‘But however bad the news is, it is a hundred times better than knowing nothing day after day.’

The conductor, coming up the tram jiggling his money bag and punching tickets, put an end to anything further the woman would have said, informing them the tram was approaching Embankment Halt.

‘This is where we take on water,’ the conductor told Rosie, ‘and where the mail for Staggart and Rathcoole villages is taken off the tram to be delivered by a fine fellow, by the name of John Kelly, who collects it in his pony and trap.’

‘It’s fascinating, isn’t it?’ Rosie said to the woman beside
her. ‘All the things the tram carries, besides people I mean.’

The woman smiled. ‘Maybe the first few times you make the trip’, she said. ‘I’m well used to it now. When we come to the next halt, Jobstown, the carters will be waiting to load stone from the De Selby quarries.

‘Tallaght and Killinarden have quarries too,’ the conductor commented, ‘but we don’t get much there. Most of the large boulders are sent to Kilmainham Jail for the prisoners to break into smaller pieces.’

He went silent for a minute, remembering what Matt Walsh had told him about the young woman’s husband. According to what he’d heard, all those who’d survived the insurrection had been sent to Kilmainham Jail so her man could well be in that prison. Him and his big mouth!

But Rosie wasn’t offended or upset. She knew Danny in jail was the best outcome she could possibly hope for.

As the tram pulled away from Tallagh Halt she had her first sight of the Dublin Hills. She felt her stomach turn over and again doubted the wisdom of what she was doing.

A few minutes later, the woman nudged her and pointed out of the window. ‘See that branch line? It goes to the aerodrome, and belongs to the British Government.’

‘Aerodrome!’ Rosie repeated incredulously.

‘Aye, the British and Germans are flying planes now. They’re fighting each other in the air as well, or so people tell me.’

‘Dear God!’ Rosie remarked. ‘You’d never get me up in one of those things.’

‘Oh I agree,’ the woman said. ‘If God wanted a man to fly he’d have given him wings, that’s what I say.’

Suddenly, there was another sharp dip in the road, and again Rosie had to grip the seats hard to prevent herself falling forward, and then to stop herself being thrown into her fellow passenger as the tram passed so close to the gable end of a set of cottages that she gasped, certain they were going to crash into them.

‘It has been known, I believe,’ the woman said, when Rosie shared her fears. ‘Did you notice the sign?’

‘Aye,’ Rosie said. ‘“Beware of the trams.”’

‘That’s because so many people have been knocked down and injured there,’ the woman told her. ‘One man even said his thatch was set on fire by a spark from the tram’s chimney. He couldn’t prove it, of course, but still, if I lived there I’d feel in constant danger.’

‘And me,’ Rosie said with feeling.

Then the tram was running into Templeogue, which the woman told Rosie had been the old depot. She saw it still had the engine and carriage sheds and a smithy further into the village opposite a pub called Floods. But the tram didn’t stop and carried on and the woman beside Rosie said, ‘Terenure is the next stop and the terminus,’ and she began collecting her things together and Rosie did the same.

Rosie said goodbye to the woman as they both left the tram, thanking her for her company and saying she hoped her mother would soon be on the mend.

The woman grasped her hands warmly. ‘Best of luck to you,’ she said. ‘I hope you find news of your man soon, and that the news is good.’

Rosie was unable to speak for the sudden lump that rose in her throat. She was sorry to see the woman go – she had provided comfort as well as distraction – and so was grateful for the conductor coming up at that moment. ‘Just make your way down there by that whitewashed wall,’ he said, pointing. ‘You’ll pass the booking office and just after it an iron gate is set into a wall that leads onto Rathfarnham Road. You go through that and to the right you will see Terenure Road East. The halt is there, though there won’t be a tram there yet awhile. The tram you’ll want has a triangle on it and it’s the number fifteen. Have you got that?’

‘Aye,’ Rosie replied, ‘and thank you so much for your kindness.’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ the conductor said and Rosie waved to him. Carrying her bag over her shoulder and Danny’s basket in the other hand, she followed the conductor’s directions to the tram stop where she would begin the last leg of her journey to Dublin and to whatever the city might hold.

As the conductor had predicted, Rosie had a little wait for the Dublin tram and when she was settled into it, she realised she had no idea what to ask for when the conductor came abreast of her for her fare. ‘Well, where are you going?’ The conductor asked. ‘We won’t be going the whole hog to Nelson’s Pillar, that I do know, for Sackville Street is impossible to cross with rubble and fallen masonry.’

‘I need to get to Baggot Street,’ Rosie replied.

‘Oh, then you wouldn’t have gone up so far anyway, it would be taking you out of your way,’ the conductor told her. ‘You need to get off at the corner of St Stephen’s Green North and Dawson Road. Baggot Street is only a stone’s throw from there, so to speak. Don’t you worry about it now, I’ll tell you when we get there and point you in the right direction.’

Rosie sank back in her seat and didn’t worry about it, not about getting off a tram at the right stop anyway. She had far more pressing worries pounding her brain. She read the signs as they passed through Rathgar and then Rathmines, noting the area became more built up as they drew closer to Dublin.

There were more people on the streets here, more cars and
carts and bicycles and the odd omnibus too. She saw whole streets of houses and a few shops here and there. The tram began to fill up and, with all the seats taken, people stood holding onto the straps fastened to the roof as the tram swayed and clanked its way forward.

As the tram suddenly turned sharply, Rosie couldn’t prevent herself sliding into a fellow passenger on the hard wooden seats. ‘Sorry,’ she said, but the woman she’d collided with just smiled.

‘It’s hard not to crash into one another the way they throw you about in these things,’ the woman said. ‘Still, not much further now. We’re nearly at St Stephen’s Green.’

Rosie looked back, but the conductor was talking to someone animatedly and Rosie hoped she didn’t go sailing past where she should got off. There was little she could see now through the throng of people. She wished she was on the other side of the tram as they passed the Green, for knowing it had been the scene of action in the rebellion, she would have liked to have studied it, but she could barely see.

Then, the tram suddenly swung right and Rosie saw the conductor making his way through the crush towards her. ‘Next stop’s yours,’ he said.

Rosie picked up her bags and wondered if she should find somewhere to have a hot drink and compose herself before landing on the convent doorstep. But the conductor shook his head regretfully when Rosie asked if there was a café nearby. ‘You’d struggle to find a café open,’ he said. ‘There’s been no food in the shops for days, and those restaurants and cafés not looted or burned to the ground will be boarded up.’

Rosie suddenly felt a little frightened and nervous. The tram drew to a halt and Rosie stepped down, as the conductor stood talking to a man passing, the Angelus Bell pealing out telling her it was twelve o’clock, and she knew she had no option but to make straight for the convent.

‘Baggot Street you were making for, wasn’t it?’ the conductor asked, giving a wave to the man as he carried on up the street. ‘Have you anyone belonging you? Anyone in this place you know at all?’

‘Aye,’ Rosie said. ‘I have a relative in the convent, at a place called the ‘House of Mercy’.

The conductor sighed in relief. ‘Angels of Mercy, no less,’ he said. ‘That’s what those nuns are. They help everyone and anyone in need. No-one is ever turned away from their door. You’ll get a welcome there all right.’ He looked Rosie up and down and then went on, ‘You new to Dublin?’

‘Aye.’

‘Well, you chose a fine time to visit,’ the conductor commented. ‘If you want to go out and look at the city centre and particularly if you want to cross the Liffey, you’ll need a pass. Various barracks and police stations have them, so I hear, or sometimes the sentries guarding the Liffey will be able to issue one.’

‘A pass!’ Rosie repeated incredulously. ‘For going about Dublin?’

‘Aye,’ the conductor said. ‘But remember it’s a Dublin that’s been at war. People have been killed, houses and shops destroyed. I tell you, if they don’t like the look of you, you’ll get no pass at all, people say. Only the religious orders can move freely.’

‘I see.’

‘The nuns will put you right,’ the conductor said. ‘And you’ll have no trouble reaching Baggot Street.’ He pointed the way down the road and said, ‘Now you go along there now, just straight on and you’ll come to Baggot Street in no time at all. Don’t look left or right, nor turn down any other road – that man I was just talking to was telling me some of the rebels have occupied a house in Mount Street Crescent. The army have installed a field gun in Merrion Square and are blasting them to Kingdom Come.’

Now that the Angelus bell had died away, Rosie was suddenly all too aware of the sound of rifle fire. There was a sudden loud boom and she shivered. ‘I thought there was a surrender?’

‘Aye, there is,’ the conductor said. ‘These are just pockets of resistance. But don’t you worry about that. You just get yourself to Baggot Street.’

Rosie nodded and the tram moved away and swung up Dawson Street. She began to walk down the north side of St Stephen’s Green, passing people with grim, serious faces. On the corner of the road she came upon the Shelbourne Hotel, now a barricaded and sandbagged structure with not a window in place, its stucco frontage pockmarked with bullet holes. It bore so little resemblance to any hotel she’d ever seen that if it hadn’t been for the sign still on the wall above the shuttered entrance, she would never have believed it.

She remembered in the newspaper reports she’d read about the insurrection that the army had installed field guns in the hotel and on the roof to clear the rebels out of the park. It seemed too awful for words to her to destroy buildings, not to mention lives, for an ideal that burned with a bright flame for only six short days.

Opposite the hotel was a barricade blocking the way into St Stephen’s Green and Rosie remembered reading that the rebels had commandeered every vehicle passing to add to it. She saw for herself what the papers had reported – carts, traps, cars and vans, together with the odd bicycle, piled haphazardly one on top of another, pockmarked as the hotel had been and with big holes blasted into the sides of them. Much of the barricade had been dismantled now and she knew it would be easy to climb over and into the park if anyone had the desire to do so.

Despite the conductor’s words she decided to have a look for herself. It wasn’t as if she was walking into danger: the firing was from the other side and there had been nothing
since that volley and the field gun’s blast when she’d left the tram. Maybe the mini rebellion was already over and done.

But even though she thought this, she approached the barricade hesitantly, expecting someone to stop her any minute. No-one did, however. Any who passed seemed intent on their own business and there were no soldiers to be seen, so Rosie lifted up her skirts and began to climb, glad of her stout boots as the stack slithered and slid beneath her feet and she heard the sound of glass splintering.

Beyond the barricade, huge trenches had been dug, deep swathes cutting through the lush lawns. But worse by far were the limbs she saw sticking up from the trenches she’d thought to be empty, the bodies of rebels killed there: only half-hearted efforts had been made to cover them with earth.

There was a smell about the place, blood and cordite and something more, the putrefying stink of the decaying flesh of limbs exposed to the fine spring weather for days. Rosie felt nausea in her throat and she put her hand to her mouth as she turned away.

The sudden crash of a shell exploding made Rosie almost jump out of her skin, but she refused to allow herself to be frightened and continued to follow the path round until she came upon the fountain. No water gushed out of the metallic structure now nor trickled over the red bulrushes at its base. Rosie saw that once the stone wall around the fountain had been encircled by beautiful beds of flowers but every one had been ground into the earth.

She looked about her and saw that though the trenches might have ruined the lawns, the tops of them and any grass left were sprinkled with blossom of pink and white which had fluttered from the trees. The sight brought tears to her eyes.

She brushed them away impatiently. This was not the time for crying and she forced herself forward across that blackened grass to where she had seen the glint of water in the distance and then suddenly the lake was before her.

It lacked the grandeur of the lake in Blessington but for all that she could see it had once been a pretty place. A bridge spanned its narrowest point and the whole lake was overhung with bushes heavy with blossom and trees with young, bright green leaves and there were a fair few islands cut into the lake, obviously nesting places for the water birds. Not that there were ducks, swans or anything else on the lake that day and little wonder because despite the sun shimmering on the surface of the lake, it was a place of deep sorrow.

It was no place to linger at either, Rosie decided, so she climbed back over the barricade to continue her journey, aware that as she reached Baggot Street the rifle shots and occasional blast from the guns had become louder.

The houses on Baggot Street were large and had been built in the stately Georgian style with steps leading up to them and doors of different colours. Rosie knew they belonged to moneyed people, the professional classes.

Then, as she crossed Fitzwilliam Street, she saw the army field gun and the soldiers around it released a shell just as she passed. There was an earth-shattering boom. Surely no mere house could withstand such a pounding?

She had the urge to run. Her hands felt clammy and her heart thumped in her chest but she told herself to keep calm. She’d come here on a mission to find news of Danny and she couldn’t take flight now so she concentrated on putting one foot before the other and looked neither right nor left.

When Rosie eventually came to the ‘House of Mercy’ she just stood in the road and stared.

The huge building, on the corner of Baggot Street and Herbert Road, was of honey-coloured brick and stood three storeys high. The main entrance had a white stone portico in front of it and a garden before that, which was entered by a small wrought-iron gate. There were two single-storey buildings on either side of the main one, each with doors that opened on to the street, so that the whole structure on the
ground floor looked like the letter E. Rosie saw that above the building to her left there was a stained-glass window and she supposed that was the chapel.

She was so awed by the size and splendour, the whole magnificence of it, that it took all her reserves of courage to open that small gate, walk up the path between the welltended garden, where tulips and daffodils waved in the spring sunshine, go up the wide steps between the pillars and ring the bell set in the wall beside the bright, red door.

She remembered Connie telling her about how the founder of the order, Catherine McAuley, had built the house with money that had been left to her before she’d actually become a nun herself. When it had first opened it had housed a school for the daughters of the gentry. However, it was soon apparent that the needs of the area meant that a school for poorer children should be set up instead. Catherine McAuley’s aims, so Connie had said, had been to identify the needs of the people and try to address them in a positive way. Rosie thought they must be considered successful, or they wouldn’t be known as the Angels of Mercy.

So, despite the size and grandeur of the convent, she had no doubt that the sisters would welcome her and this was apparent as soon as a nun opened the door. Her face was lined and wrinkled, but her eyes were bright and kindly looking, and she drew Rosie inside before enquiring of her business, saying as she did so, ‘Come in, my dear, the streets are not safe just now.’

Rosie found herself in a large, bright hall, the sun shining through the windows, patterning the black and white tiled floor. The walls were half-panelled timber, the top half painted and lined with holy pictures. A blue lamp burned before the statue of the Blessed Virgin at the bottom of the sweeping staircase and the smell of the candles mixed with the smell of food from somewhere. Rosie felt saliva in her mouth at the thought of it.

‘My name is Sister Amelia,’ the nun said. ‘Are you in trouble, my dear?’

Never had Rosie been spoken to so gently by a nun and she began her story of Danny and what had brought her to Dublin. ‘My mother-in-law told me to come to you,’ she finished. ‘Her name is Connie Walsh and she says she has an aunt in the order, a Sister Cuthbert.’

‘Oh yes,’ Sister Amelia said. ‘Not long back from our sister convent in Handsworth. I’ll fetch her. She’d want to see you, welcome you.’

As the nun scurried away, Rosie studied the pictures. There was one of Catherine McAuley and, beside that, a picture of ‘The Mercy Tree’ and a little further along the wall a list of the order’s aims behind glass and decorated with holy scrolls. There were fourteen altogether and the first few were as anyone would expect: ‘To Feed the Hungry’ and ‘To Give Drink to the Thirsty’, but further down Rosie read, ‘To Visit Those in Prison’, To Comfort the Afflicted’, and ‘To Forgive Offences’. Rosie was suddenly immeasurably glad she was here with these very special women who she knew would help her find news of Danny and sustain her whatever that news was.

Sister Amelia was soon back accompanied by another nun about the same age, as far as Rosie could ascertain, but her face was not as lined. She had the same warm brown eyes as Connie and Rosie felt herself relaxing as she related her story once again.

‘Well,’ Sister Cuthbert said as Rosie fell silent. ‘First things first. I think a meal is in order. We were about to dish up for lunch when you rang the bell.’

But Rosie knew of the severe food situation in Dublin and protested. ‘Oh no. I mean, I know there’s little to be had in the shops. I have food with me, my mother-in-law insisted and she packed a similar basket for Danny, if he should be…if he’s…’ She couldn’t continue, not without breaking down and making a holy show of herself. But Sister Cuthbert
saw her distress and interjected. ‘Keep your food, Rosie. You may have need of it yet and your husband will be grateful for decent food if you should find him alive and well, please God you will.