The Fox's Walk (27 page)

“I did it meself with a potato,” she said. I could see she must have painted the wall blue and then cut a cross on a potato and dipped it into red paint and applied it to the wall. I envied her the freedom to express herself in such a satisfying way.

I looked around the kitchen, trying to understand the O'Neill living arrangements. The kitchen was where they ate, sat, and spent their indoor waking hours. At one end was a wooden door, but I thought it led only to a cupboard. I knew it was not a bathroom; the privy was separate and lay behind their quarters. On the other side of the passage lay two bedrooms. There was a large stone sink against the wall under the window that overlooked the kitchen courtyard. I wondered how they washed and whether Mrs. O'Neill had to carry all the water she used for cooking from the pump in the yard. I wondered if she used the laundry on the other side of the kitchen, where our clothes and household linens were washed. I wondered if she had a tin tub to set in front of the cheerful fire to bathe in and where such a tub would be kept. I imagined for a moment Mrs. O'Neill sitting in a hip bath, her pale shoulders lit by the fire, her lovely hair pinned on top of her head. I wondered what the kitchen would look like at night lit by the oil lamp that now stood on the well-scrubbed wooden table, and whether it would make the oleograph of the Sacred Heart on the wall over the table seem even more disturbing.

“The Major will be over for his dinner,” Mrs. O'Neill said, glancing toward the window. There was no clock in the room, and I thought she was looking at the angle of the light in the courtyard to gauge how close it was to when O'Neill would be in for his dinner and Uncle William would arrive for the meal Grandmother would describe as luncheon. Then I remembered that my uncle had gone to Dublin.

“But———” I started.

“He was turned back. At Athy.”

I remembered the increased tempo and bad temper in our kitchen and wondered if the altered lunch menu was the result of an instruction from the drawing room or information passed from the stable yard. I thanked Mrs. O'Neill for her hospitality and, avoiding the kitchen, went back into the main house through the side door. As luck would have it, no sooner had I opened the door and stepped inside than I met Aunt Katie carrying Oonagh and about to put her outside.

“There you are. Where's your coat—and your shoes———” She shook her head. “Run upstairs and wash your hands. Uncle William is coming to lunch.”

I scurried past her, hurrying to avoid further discussion of my inadequate outdoor garb.

“And brush your hair,” Aunt Katie called after me, but I could tell she was thinking about something else.

Sonia was at lunch. She looked her best, with her hair becomingly done and a little color in her cheeks. After Grandmother had glanced once or twice in her direction, I began to understand there might be a little too much color in her face; it seemed possible that rouge had made its debut at Ballydavid. In anticipation of some subtle communication of disapproval, I sank an inch or two in my chair. In a different way, each of these adults held some influence over my life: I answered to Grandmother; but it was Aunt Katie who oversaw my well-being; Uncle William, a man whose every whim was deferred to, could and sometimes did intervene in any way he chose; Sonia was the weakest link, unless one was dealing with the supernatural, and since I was far from sure we might not be, I did not discount her.

Uncle William had been describing the frustrations of his aborted journey to Dublin. The train, as Mrs. O'Neill had told me, had been stopped at Athy.

“I told the station master I would spend the night at the hotel and travel on the next day. But he said it might be several days before the train was running again.”

“But why didn't they tell you at Waterford?” Aunt Katie asked. “Before you set off? Surely they must have known? Or had there been an accident?”

There was a moment of silence. Something about Aunt Katie's question did not ring true.

“When I got home I telephoned the Kildare Street Club, but the telephone was out of order.”

Grandmother's and Aunt Katie's expressions were expectant—a telephone that didn't work was not so unusual; Sonia seemed to be thinking about something else.

“On the way over I saw two telegraph poles cut down. I didn't get any post that wasn't local this morning. Did you?”

Grandmother paused a moment, thinking, then shook her head.

“Newspapers?”

“Sometimes the mail boat's late—submarines, they say. But that wouldn't affect anything from Dublin.”

“I think something may have happened,” Uncle William said.

 

S
OMETHING HAD HAPPENED
. But it took days before we found out what it was and longer still until the hysteria and rumor abated. Gradually the facts became known; and depending on the class, political affiliation, race, or religion of the speaker, they were interpreted. As time went on, views and opinions changed, almost all to a position of greater sympathy with the revolutionaries. Now they are patriots and heroes. Rightly, I think, although only a few saw them as such in the days and weeks following the revolt that became known as the Post Office Rising.

At the time the rising was not generally popular. 150,000 Irishmen had enlisted in the British Army, and their families were strongly opposed to the revolutionaries. The more conservative patriots who believed Home Rule would be granted at the end of the war thought this revolt could only hurt their cause; the Home Rule bill had twice been passed in the Commons, although it had been struck down in the House of Lords. Even those who shared the beliefs of the revolutionaries could see that the rising, first planned for Easter Sunday, officially cancelled, then reignited by a splinter group to take place a day later without the promised German arms and lacking public support, was another doomed sacrificial gesture. That the war had made Ireland more prosperous than usual meant the level of discontent was lower than it had been.

The reception Casement was given on his arrival in Ireland could be seen as a metaphor for the gap between the idealistic desires of the revolutionary leaders and the wishes of the greater part of the citizenry. On Good Friday, Casement, Monteith, and the solitary member of the Irish Brigade landed at Banna Strand. It was early morning, not yet light. Their dinghy had capsized in the cold, rough water and they had had to scramble ashore. Casement hid himself in the ruins of an old fort, and the other two left and tried to make contact with the local Volunteers. Within hours of his landing Casement was under arrest. He had not met with any practical sympathy since he landed in the country he wanted to liberate. Every one of the Irish country people—the farmer walking along Banna Strand who saw the sunken dinghy and informed the police, the servant girl who saw the strangers and reported them, the small boys who saw Casement surreptitiously drop the shredded piece of paper on which the code was written and who retrieved it and took it to the police station—had treated him as an enemy. The jail in which Casement spent the night was a small, far-from-secure room attached to a country police station; it would not have been difficult to rescue him, yet no one did.

By the night of Good Friday, the government in Dublin believed an edgy moment had safely passed. Casement was in jail; two of the men who were to meet him had, mistaking their whereabouts, driven off the end of a pier and drowned; an advertisement by the IRB calling off the parade scheduled for Easter Sunday had appeared in the newspapers. Since the parade was where the authorities assumed the rising would have begun, military leave cancelled in anticipation of a revolt was now reinstated and British officers stationed in Dublin were looking forward to a day's racing at Fairyhouse.

But on Easter Monday, the revolutionaries took over the General Post Office on Sackville Street and made it the center of operations. They also occupied the Royal College of Surgeons, the Four Courts, Jacob's biscuit factory, and Boland's Mills; and there were isolated local risings in the countryside.

The besieged Post Office held out for five days before the survivors surrendered and walked out onto Sackville Street with their hands above their heads. The crowd that watched as they were led away was not sympathetic. Similar surrenders took place at other strongholds. A small local rising in Ashbourne, in north County Dublin, was successful enough to hold out until the order to surrender came, but those at Enniscourty, Athenry, and Ferns had already been quelled. We had little reliable information, and these facts came to us in dribs and drabs and in the form of rumor. A week after the Rising, many telephone exchanges were still not operating, the trains were not running, and there were restrictions on where motorcars could be driven. But by then we knew that a not-popularly-supported revolt had taken place, that there had been blood spilled and buildings burned, and that the surviving ringleaders had been arrested. And we already feared that the authorities were going to make a bad situation worse.

The government forces prevailed: The rising was put down, the leaders imprisoned, the populace largely unsympathetic. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't.

Terrible damage to life and property had taken place. By the time of surrender 450 people had been killed and over 2,500 wounded. Sackville Street, a particularly good example of urban Irish architecture, had been looted and much of it burned. Liberty Hall was shelled by a gunboat; martial law was declared; and Sir John Maxwell, given absolute powers, arrived from England. Large-scale arrests, courts-martial, and imprisonments followed.

In my family there was no sympathy for the revolutionaries, either those executed or imprisoned, but there was also a feeling of disdain for the high-handedness of the government and the stupidity of its actions. Whatever the shortcomings of my family, naïveté was not one of them, and they knew well enough that although the power of the British Empire was great enough to absorb the consequences of most blunders and brutality, there would now be a changed relationship between the Anglo-Irish landowners and the government in Westminster. Over which lay the unresolved and shifting shadow of Home Rule.

And there was at least one death that sat very badly with the Anglo-Irish and that was not dismissed as an unfortunate occurrence of war. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a popular Dublin figure, had been shot. Sheehy-Skeffington would have been considered by my family and most of the Anglo-Irish we knew as, at best, an eccentric. He was a campaigner for all sorts of ideas whose time had not yet come, most of them unsympathetic to the stratum of society to which he belonged. He was a vegetarian and a teetotaler (eccentric), a socialist (unacceptable), an advocate for women's rights and a pacifist (beyond the pale). While he was alive he could be laughed at as an eccentric unwilling to exclude any bee from his ethical bonnet, but dead, he became an Anglo-Irish Protestant who had been shot by government forces. And not by a stray bullet. He had been randomly arrested on a Dublin street, used as a hostage, and had witnessed the shooting of an unarmed boy. He had then been, with two journalists, shot on the orders of Captain Bowen-Colthurst, an Anglo-Irish officer in the English army. Bowen-Colthurst eventually stood trial and was found guilty but insane. No one was placated.

The Countess Markievicz, from an old and distinguished Anglo-Irish family, had been one of the actual revolutionaries. She was another eccentric; but, when one included Casement, there were suddenly three of our own dramatically before us, in the news and their names on the tip of every tongue.

Every member of my family was distressed and uneasy, aware that the political situation was tenuous and inflammable. It did not occur to them that they were in any physical danger, and I think they were right in that assumption. Even later, when houses were burned, almost always the family was given a short period of time to remove itself and as many valuables as could be saved before the house was set alight. Grandmother and Uncle William were respected by the country people, and we all knew that if Ballydavid or Ballinamona went up in flames it was more likely to be caused by a chimney fire or one of the faulty paraffin lamps used to light the large, shadowy rooms.

 

EACH DAY THAT WEEK
Uncle William came to lunch. Each day he told Grandmother and Aunt Katie what he had learned since the day before, separating—fairly accurately as it turned out—hard fact from unpleasant fiction. The stories, too quickly disseminated to be genuine misunderstanding, reflected badly on those who told them and those who believed them; it was now evident what each religion, class, and faction thought the other capable of. The ugliest stories, owing more to imaginative fear and anger than to fact, pertained to Sir Roger Casement.

Uncle William, it seemed to me, was more embarrassed by than angry with Casement. He was dismissive of the stories of Casement offering to betray his fellow revolutionaries in return for his life, and outraged that these rumors could all be traced to the same source: the car that had come from Dublin to take a schoolmaster from Gort back to face charges of gunrunning. Uncle Williams outrage, embarrassment, and confusion after Casement had landed in Ireland and been arrested were a pale foreshadowing of things to come.

It is hard for me now to gauge how aware Uncle William, Grandmother, and Aunt Katie would have been of Casement prior to his arrest. I think that since Casement came from the north of Ireland and from a respectable Protestant family they would have known and been pleased that he had been given a knighthood for his humanitarian services in the Belgian Congo and the Putumayo. Their train of thought would almost immediately, I imagine, have taken them to condemnation of the Belgians, whose rapacious colonization was responsible for the atrocities in the Congo. The unspoken thought, by these children of the Empire, would have been that it was this kind of behavior that gave colonialism a bad name.