The Guns of Easter (10 page)

THE NEXT THING JIMMY REMEMBE
RE
D
was waking briefly some time in the middle of the night, though what night it was he didn’t know. He was lying under a pile of ragged blankets and the tramp was leaning over him, calling softly to him.

Jimmy tried to answer, but his mouth was too dry to speak. The tramp gave him some water, and told him that his fever had broken during the night.

The man wiped the boy’s forehead with a cloth soaked in river water, and after that Jimmy passed out again. Later – it was light this time – he was woken again by the tramp shaking him gently.

‘I’m going out,’ the tramp said. ‘There’s a woman up the road who gives me food sometimes. I’m going to ask her for something now. There’s nothing left here.’

Jimmy nodded weakly. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again the tramp was gone, but Jimmy had no way of knowing whether he had slept again or simply blinked. He sat up. He felt weak and helpless, but the fever seemed to be gone.

Jimmy looked around at the tramp’s home. It was a rough structure made of canvas that was supported by a framework of sticks. Outside Jimmy could hear birds singing, and the sound of running water that must be the river Dodder. In the distance too there was some shooting.

It was dark and shadowy inside the makeshift tent. Through a crack in the canvas Jimmy saw that it was sunny outside. He wondered how long he’d been asleep – it might be Thursday now for all that he knew. His mother would be half crazy with worry.

His tiredness made him want to lie down again. It would be grand just to sleep – to sleep for days and days and wake up rested and recovered. But already worry was nagging at him. Fever or no fever, it amounted to the same thing: he had wasted more time.

He made himself get up from under the blankets. He found the low entrance to the tent and crawled outside.

He was on a grassy site by a bridge over the river. The tent had been set up in the shelter of some low trees. Looking at it from outside, Jimmy thought how ramshackle it looked. It must have been terrible to live here in winter – worse than any slum room.

Jimmy waited for a while, hoping the tramp would come back. He wanted to thank him. But there was no sign of the musical tramp, and Jimmy could feel himself growing weaker even as he stood waiting. He would have
to leave soon. He had to find out what was going on.

He went briefly back inside the little tent. It seemed dank and bad-smelling now, after the sunlight and fresh air outside. Apart from the pile of ragged blankets it was empty. The tramp seemed to have no possessions at all. Jimmy thought for a moment, then searched in his pockets. The money and the mouth organ were still there. He counted the remaining coins: four shillings and twopence. Counting the sixpence that he’d given yesterday to the tramp, that meant he’d only lost a few pennies in his struggle with Charlie.

Jimmy counted out two shillings in pennies and threepenny bits. He put the two shillings, with the mouth organ, under the pile of blankets. The tramp would find it later on, if nobody came and stole it first. Jimmy doubted that anyone would: nobody would think there was anything worth stealing in such a place.

When he crawled back outside he felt weaker than ever. But he was able to think clearly again, and that seemed more important than physical strength. Jimmy had no idea of exactly where he was, and saw nobody that he might ask. The road beside him must lead back to somewhere in Ballsbridge. He would have to chance it. He started up the road in what seemed the most likely direction.

He saw the two soldiers just as he crossed a railway line. They were standing by the side of the road. They had fixed bayonets on their rifles, but they didn’t seem to be
very cautious. They watched him approach without any sign of interest.

‘Hello,’ said Jimmy, making himself smile. Just stay out of trouble, he told himself.

‘Hello yourself,’ one soldier said in an English accent.

‘How is the fighting going?’ Jimmy asked.

The second soldier laughed. ‘Listen to that,’ he said. ‘Bloodthirsty little fellow, isn’t he?’

‘No,’ said Jimmy. ‘Just afraid.’ That was true enough, he thought.

‘Well, the fighting’s not over yet,’ the first soldier said. ‘But it soon will be. We’re in control of the city. We’ll soon have them out.’

‘They’d be out already,’ grumbled the other soldier, ‘if the officers weren’t so damned cautious. It’s a disgrace to let this thing go into a fifth day.’

Jimmy thought he must have heard him wrongly. A fifth day? ‘Did you say a fifth day?’ he asked

‘Sure,’ said the soldier. ‘Started Monday, didn’t it? This is Friday – so: five days.’

Jimmy was shocked. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Did you say this was
Friday
?’

The soldiers looked at each other and laughed.

‘Hear that, Bob?’ asked the first one. ‘I told you the natives were stupid! This kid don’t even know what day of the week it is!’

Jimmy ignored the mockery. He had more important
things on his mind. Could it really be Friday?

The second soldier noticed how miserable Jimmy looked, and took pity on him.

‘This is Friday, son,’ he said. ‘Friday the twenty-eighth of April.’

Jimmy almost fainted. It was true, then. Things were even worse than he had supposed: he had lost a whole day!

Without another thought he began to run. His mother would be more than just worried: by now she must be sure that she would never see her son again.

He saw a street sign as he ran: ‘Lansdowne Road’, it said. That was very near Northumberland Road. He heard no shooting from there either. Something that might be hope began to grow in his heart. Perhaps, after all, he could rescue a little bit from this week of disaster.

HALF WAY UP NORTHUMBERLAND ROAD
signs of the battle started to show. One house was completely devastated. Its windows were gone and its door blown in by explosives. The walls were stippled by bulletmarks. It must have been one of the rebel strongholds. Now it was a ruin.

Most of the other houses had smashed windows and bullet-holed doors. It seemed impossible that they’d all housed rebels. An air of fear and terror seemed to hang over the road, a silence in which no birds sang. Jimmy could feel it as he walked along.

Ella’s house was several doors up from the bombed-in ruin. Jimmy walked through the open gate, hardly believing that he was finally here. This house too had taken its share of ill-treatment during the fighting. There didn’t seem to be a window left unbroken in the upper storeys. When Jimmy climbed the steps and reached the front door he found it was ajar. He knocked loudly, but there was no reply. Eventually he slipped into the dim hall.

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Ella?’

Only echoes answered him. He hesitated. The house
seemed abandoned. Jimmy stopped in the hall for a few moments. Should he leave? Then his foolishness struck him. He’d left home three days ago to come to this house. Since then he’d been through terror, fever and danger. It would be stupid not to search for the food now that he was finally here.

There were three families living in the house, Jimmy knew. Three couples, rather – where Jimmy came from, that wasn’t regarded as a family. Families had children.

Ella and Charlie lived on the ground floor, where Jimmy was standing. On the top floor and in the basement lived two older couples. There was a stairs facing Jimmy in the hall where he stood, and at the top of the stairs was a closed door. One of the old couples must live behind it. To either side of him was another door, and the rooms behind these would belong to Charlie and Ella. So they had more than one room: Jimmy had suspected as much.

He tried the door on his right. It opened into a parlour full of furniture. There was a big window with a table standing in front of it. The table and the floor around it were covered with broken glass from the bullet-shattered window. Bullets had knocked lumps of plaster from the wall and broken the glass on a picture of the king that hung there. A layer of dust from the smashed plaster lay over all of the furniture.

Jimmy looked fearfully around the floor, half expecting to see a body lying there; but the floor was bare except for
bits of glass and plaster.

He closed the door and tried the one across the hall. This led into a dining room and kitchen. Here too the window was broken, the walls pitted and pockmarked with bullets. But it wasn’t the damage that caught Jimmy’s eye; it was the big cupboard standing open by the far wall.

The cupboard was obviously Ella’s larder. There were five shelves inside it, and all five of the shelves were simply stuffed with food. There were cans and packets and boxes and jars; there were parcels wrapped in brown paper. There was even a whole ham lying on a plate under a glass cover.

Jimmy’s stomach rumbled as he stood looking into the cupboard. He was spellbound. He’d never seen so much food in one place outside of a shop. He had to stop himself from falling on the food there and then. The last thing he recalled eating was the piece of chocolate on Wednesday afternoon. If the tramp had succeeded in feeding him anything since, Jimmy had forgotten it.

His mouth watered, but he controlled himself. First he must find out what was going on. He must, if he could, find Ella. He must at least find out where she was. Then he’d help himself to the food. In this new excitement, he’d almost forgotten his tiredness.

At the back of this room there was another door which led to a bedroom. This too was deserted. There were
clothes in the wardrobe: if Ella had left then she hadn’t taken much with her.

Jimmy went back out to the hall. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door there, but nobody answered. Next Jimmy went out the front door and down the steps to the basement. He knocked on the door there too. This time he was in luck: after the knock, he heard footsteps approaching from inside. The door opened, and an old woman looked out smiling.

‘Yes, dear?’ she said.

‘My name is Jimmy Conway,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’m …’

But the old woman interrupted him. ‘You’re Ella’s sister’s boy,’ she said. Her smile widened. Jimmy was surprised.

‘I … yes, I am,’ he said.

The old woman opened the door wide. ‘Come in, child,’ she said. ‘Come in, and welcome. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve just made some. My name is Mrs Breen.’

Jimmy didn’t really want to go in, but the mention of tea drew him like a magnet: where there was tea there might be more food. The old woman shut the door behind him. She led him into her kitchen and sat him at the table. Then she poured him a cup of tea and gave him a huge slice of cake on a plate. Jimmy’s mouth watered as he looked at the cake. He ate it as politely as he could, while the old woman smiled at him. When he had finished the cake she gave him a second slice that was even bigger.

‘It’s wonderful to see a boy with a good appetite,’ she said. ‘My husband and I don’t eat much. I’ve had no-one to cook for since my own boys left home, and that’s long ago now.’

This part of the building had, it seemed, escaped damage. It was below the level of the garden, and had been protected from the bullets. Jimmy ate the second piece of cake as he looked around. It went as quickly as the first. It was a rich cake, with currants and raisins in it. The old woman’s face glowed with pleasure as she watched him eat.

‘Did Ella send you to tell me that she’d got to your house safely?’ she asked him.

Jimmy could only stare at her. Ella had gone to his home? He could hardly believe it. Something about the old woman’s voice when she mentioned Ella made Jimmy think that she liked his aunt. The idea that anyone might like Ella hadn’t entered his head in years. Ma and Mick made excuses for her, of course, but that was different: she was their sister.

The old woman didn’t notice his confusion. ‘It was very nice of Ella if she did send you down,’ she said. ‘And very nice of you to take the trouble, I’m sure. I was worried about her, as I’m sure she knew I would be – Ella is so thoughtful.’

Again Jimmy was shocked. Ella thoughtful? Maybe the woman and he weren’t thinking of the same person at all?
Maybe he’d got the wrong address, and someone else called Ella lived here.

‘How did you know she was my aunt?’ he asked.

‘Why,’ said the woman, ‘she’s always talking about the three fine children that her sister Lily has. She always wanted to bring you on a visit, or to spend more time with you, but that husband of hers is an animal. He’ll hardly let her out of the house, except when he’s too drunk to notice.’

So they were talking about the same person after all. ‘Charlie is dead,’ Jimmy said. ‘He was shot.’

The old woman looked hard at him. She sighed. ‘God forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I can’t feel very sorry. I know I should, but he was a terrible man. He was a devil. Your poor aunt had no real life with him at all.’

In a way it cheered Jimmy to meet such an honest woman. If this old lady thought Ella had sent him back with a message, he thought, it might be wise to let her go on thinking that; then, looking at her open, smiling face, he found it hard to lie to her.

In the end he found himself telling her the truth about his adventures. After she’d told him how brave he was, Mrs Breen had her own story to tell, a story that was as big a surprise to Jimmy as any he’d had all week. It was a story whose main character was Ella, but it was an Ella Jimmy hardly recognised.

It turned out that Mrs Breen knew all about Mick’s
missing money. ‘Ella meant to take it to your mother first thing,’ she explained. ‘But then it struck her that the shops would be shut if there was fighting. The money would be useless. So she spent two pounds on food. She knew that food would be more useful.

‘But then Charlie came home. Ella hadn’t said anything to him about the money, because she knew he’d take it. He spent most of their money on drink. Poor Ella was always left penniless, and then he’d come in expecting food on the table. She used to borrow from your mother – that woman is a saint, from what Ella says.’

Ella had managed to hide from Charlie the fact that she had four pounds, but now she couldn’t conceal all the food she’d bought.

‘When Charlie saw the food,’ Mrs Breen went on, ‘he made her tell him everything. When he heard about the money he cursed her for wasting half of it and demanded that she give the rest to him.

‘Ella refused. She said the money wasn’t hers. She lived in terror of that brute, but this time she resisted. It did her no good. Charlie gave her a terrible beating and took the money anyway. Then he left.

‘Myself and my husband heard the sounds of fighting from upstairs. When Charlie left we went up and found Ella unconscious on the floor. We brought her downstairs and she stayed here on Monday night. Tuesday morning early she went back upstairs, expecting to find Charlie
there in a stupor like she often did. She meant to take whatever was left of the money then and go straight to your house. But Charlie wasn’t there.’

Ella hadn’t known what to do. By then all sorts of rumours were going around about the fighting in the city. Ella hesitated for a whole day, waiting for Charlie. Then on Wednesday she was trapped, and spent hours lying on her floor while the whole house was showered with bullets.

Mrs Carr, who lived on the top floor, was shot in the fighting. She’d gone to her window to look out when the shooting started, and the troops mistook her for a rebel sniper. Her husband cared for her as best he could till the firing ended at about ten on Wednesday night. Then ambulances came to ferry the wounded to the hospital.

‘Ella was helping to put Mrs Carr into an ambulance,’ Mrs Breen said, ‘when the driver told her that he’d be taking Mrs Carr to Hume Street or even some hospital nearer to the city centre.

‘Ella decided to take the chance. She went with the ambulance, meaning to stay in the hospital until the curfew was over next morning and then make her way to your mother’s if she could. There was no way that she could take anything with her, because the ambulance was so full there was hardly room for her. But she told me that if all went well she’d come back or else send someone for the food.

‘And when I heard who you were,’ the old woman
concluded, ‘then I was sure she’d sent you.’

So now Jimmy had food! All he had to do was get it home. ‘Do you know how things are in the city?’ he asked.

Mrs Breen shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I know things are terrible, but that’s all. There are so many rumours it’s hard to know what to believe. I know the army shelled Sackville Street, and half of it must be burning by now. A lot of people were shot who had neither hand, act nor part in the Rising. Even animals – they say there’s not a cat or a dog left alive in Camden Street.’

Jimmy tried to imagine Sackville Street burning, but even after these past five days he couldn’t picture it. It was hard to think of a city’s biggest street being simply destroyed.

‘The fires light up the sky at night,’ Mrs Breen said. ‘You can see it from here. I’m seventy-four years of age, and I never imagined I’d see anything so terrible. I cried to think of all the poor people who might be trapped in there.’

Including his family, Jimmy thought. He put that idea out of his head straight away: there was no point in worrying about that. Not yet, anyway.

They heard the front door open, and an old man came in who was obviously Mrs Breen’s husband. When Jimmy had told his story the three of them went up to Ella’s, Mr Breen bringing with him two big canvas sacks. They filled both sacks from the food cupboard.

The old man tied the sacks together using a thick
leather belt that he took from the bedroom. He held the big belt out and showed it to Jimmy.

‘Do you see this?’ he asked. ‘When Charlie was drunk he used to hit your aunt with that – with the buckle of it. She often came downstairs to us bleeding from it.’

Jimmy looked at the big metal buckle. He’d seen dockers fighting with belts like this. They’d wrap the ends of the belts around their hands and swing the heavy buckles at each other. The fights were terrible to see. It was even more terrible to think of a big man like Charlie swinging that terrible weapon at a small woman like Ella. If that was what her life at home was like then it was no wonder she’d cried so much. Almost reluctantly, Jimmy began to feel some sympathy for his aunt. It would take him a while to get used to the idea.

Mr Breen tied the ends of the belt around the necks of the filled sacks, turning the belt into a halter. He put it around Jimmy’s neck so that the two sacks hung down in front of him.

‘Can you carry that weight?’ he asked.

Jimmy felt the great weight of the food. He was still weak, and the weight made his legs tremble. But he knew he could manage – he’d have to. After the last few days of sickness and fear he’d manage to carry them somehow, even if they weighed ten times as much.

Mrs Breen wrote a note in her neat, ladylike handwriting for Jimmy to take with him. It said that this
boy was carrying food from her to her sister on the north side of the river. If Jimmy was stopped by soldiers, the note would help prove he hadn’t been looting.

‘I’ll go as far as the bridge with you,’ Mr Breen said. ‘Just to make sure you get past the soldiers there.’

At Mount Street Bridge, Mr Breen spoke briefly to the sergeant in charge. The sergeant seemed friendly enough and Mr Breen asked him for advice on the best route into the city. The sergeant wasn’t sure of how things stood, but he told them what he knew.

‘I don’t think you’ll have any trouble before the river anyway, sir,’ he said. ‘We have them on the run now. But I’m not sure if it’s all over in Sackville Street yet. You’ll have to ask again once you’re in the city centre.’

Mr Breen made Jimmy promise that he’d be careful and that he’d visit them when all this was over, a promise Jimmy gladly gave. Watching the old man go, Jimmy felt a twinge of regret. Now he was on his own again.