The Guns of Easter (3 page)

AFTERWARDS JIMMY’S MA WENT OFF TO DOYLES
’ to see whether the laundry had arrived yet from the nuns. Josie and Sarah were there already, visiting Tommy’s sister Alice. Alice was a pale girl who always seemed to be suffering from one illness or another. She’d been very sick with a fever for a week now.

‘Why don’t you stay at home and amuse yourself?’ Ma told Jimmy before she went out. ‘I won’t be back for a couple of hours, and the girls can wait for me. It’s not often that you have the place to yourself.’

This suited Jimmy very well. He’d been spending more time at home lately though in his heart he really preferred to be out in the streets with his friends. With them he could do all the things that boys like to do. The problem was that sometimes the things the boys did got you in trouble. Jimmy, when he remembered, tried to avoid getting involved with things like that. But mostly he just forgot, and then Ma was hurt.

Sometimes Jimmy managed to remember and stay out of trouble. That was really all that had happened yesterday, however much Ma and Kitty Doyle had made
out of it. But avoiding involvement was hard sometimes too. If the other boys noticed, they might think you were afraid, and they would call you a sissy or a German. These were very bad things to be called, and so sometimes Jimmy ended up doing things he really didn’t want to do. So he tended to spend much more time at home now, avoiding temptation. It was the easiest way in the end.

When Ma left, Jimmy sat in her rocking chair by the fire and again looked up at the old clock on the mantelpiece. The clock was part of a new game that he’d found lately. He called it the thinking game.

The thinking game wasn’t a game like football or chasing. It was a game that you played on your own. What you did was to sit and make up exciting stories for yourself. If you imagined hard enough, you could be anything in the thinking game. It was great fun, because when your adventures were all in your mind you could do things that you could never do in real life. As well as that, of course, the things you did couldn’t get you into trouble. That was a definite bonus.

When Jimmy was playing the thinking game he didn’t like to be disturbed. This was difficult when there were other people in the room, but if he thought hard enough he could eventually ignore them. It was like having a little private room in your head where you could go and play. Once you were in the little room you could be anything and anywhere you liked. The problem was getting to that
little room in the first place.

Gradually Jimmy had found a way to help him reach the little room and start his game. The first thing he did was to concentrate on something in the big room that was his home. He’d stare at the thing and think about it until the noises of his sisters’ play faded, and even the noises from the street outside sounded as if they came from very far away.

Sometimes people thought there was something wrong with him.

‘What’s he staring like that for?’ Ella would ask, forgetting her troubles for a moment. ‘Is he sick?’

‘He’s just thinking,’ Ma would say, with a note of pride in her voice.

‘Thinking!’ Ella would answer, as though thinking were some awful crime. ‘Why isn’t he out playing like a normal young fellow?’

‘He plays enough. Let him think. It’s a pity more men wouldn’t try it now and then.’

And Ella, busy with her own problems, would soon go back to telling Ma about them in a choked whisper.

It didn’t do to start your thinking by looking at just anything. Most of the things in the room were far too ordinary. The mattresses were old and sagging, the rest of the furniture chipped and scratched. If you looked closely at such things your daydreams would be scratched and sagging too, and that was no use: that was just like the
world you saw around you every day.

The best thing in the room to start Jimmy thinking was what Ella called ‘that old clock’.

The numbers on the clock’s face were in the form of letters, like the letters after the king’s name that were really a number. That was how the Romans had written numbers, Da told Jimmy one time. The Romans were people who’d been around a long time ago. They’d never come to Ireland, but once they’d owned Britain just as Britain now owned Ireland.

Long ago, when the clock had stopped, its hands had been pointing at five to twelve – XI to XII, the Roman numerals on the face said. Five minutes to midnight, Ma would say when she was telling the girls the ghost stories they loved. It was a joke in the house, the fact that the clock always showed the same time. Jimmy could remember Da coming in at night and looking at the clock in mock surprise.

‘Janey mack!’ he’d say. ‘Is that the time? I’m late!’

And the children would laugh at his foolishness, while Da let on not to know what they were laughing at. Even when there was no money, Da could always make them laugh. In the old days they all missed the clock whenever it was pawned. The old pawnbroker, Mr Meyer, was an admirer of fine objects. He liked Ma, and he collected clocks. One time he offered Ma five pounds for it, to add it to his collection. But Ma explained to him that it was her
heirloom. She’d got it from her own mother, who’d got it from hers. It was a reminder of the time, long ago, when her family had money for such things. So Ma refused to sell the clock, though she’d been very tempted.

Mr Meyer always gave Ma a few shillings when she came to pawn the clock, even though she wouldn’t sell it. He liked to look at it, he said; and he could be sure that she’d always find money to redeem the pledge. Once, when she was late with the money, she’d gone to the pawnshop with Jimmy and she’d been almost in tears.

‘I suppose it’s yours now by law,’ she said to old Meyer. ‘I should have sold it to you when I had the chance.’

Mr Meyer was horrified. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, in his high voice with the heavy foreign accent. ‘How could you think me so cruel? I know how much you love that clock. How could I cheat you of it?’

Mr Meyer’s shop was gone now. It had closed shortly after the start of the war. A mob of people threatened him, and threw stones through his windows. They thought Mr Meyer was a German, and they didn’t like Germans because they were at war with Germany. They’d been told that Germans were cruel to defenceless people.

In fact Mr Meyer wasn’t a German at all. He was from Russia, but had lived in Austria. He was Jewish, and had left Austria because many people there didn’t like Jews. This was fine by him, he said, because he didn’t especially like Austrians himself. But he hadn’t tried to explain any
of this to the people in Dublin who threw stones through the windows of his shop.

‘You cannot explain things to a mob,’ he told Ma when she said how sorry she was about it all. ‘In any country, a mob is just a mob.’

Mr Meyer took his savings and retired to some place over in the west of Ireland, where he lived happily now by the sea. One day Ma had met him in Sackville Street, when he was up shopping in Dublin. He told her he was very happy in his new life. Around where he lived now, he said, the people were in favour of Irish freedom. They hated the British, and because the Germans were fighting the British they loved the Germans. They were very friendly to Mr Meyer because they too thought he was German.

Mr Meyer didn’t try to explain himself to these people either. He thought it was funny that whether he was loved or hated, it was always for being something that he really wasn’t.

‘I have lived now for sixty-five years,’ he told Ma, giving her sixpence for the children. ‘I have lived in six countries and I have learned only one great lesson in my life: people are crazy. Teach your children that lesson and you will save them a great deal of trouble.’

The clock that Mr Meyer liked to look at had fine crystal glass on its face. When you looked at it, with its glass and metal gleaming in the light, it held your attention. It seemed to belong to another time and place, somewhere
lighter and sunnier than the world Jimmy knew. It made you think of knights and dragons and big houses and princesses, such as Jimmy had seen once when his father took him to the Christmas pantomime in the days when they’d had money for such things.

Sometimes the stories that Jimmy told himself in his thinking game even included the clock itself. Then the clock became the priceless treasure that he – Sir Jimmy of Dublin – guarded with a flaming lance from evil knights and great winged dragons that breathed fire and smoke. What a dragon might want with a clock Jimmy didn’t know, but then that was one of the great things about the thinking game: you didn’t have to worry about awkward little questions. In the thinking game you were the boss, and things were simple.

Jimmy sat in the rocking chair and stared at the clock. He tried to think of nothing, either good or bad. Soon the noises from the street outside were fading and he was getting closer to the little room in his head. But then the door of the real room opened and Jimmy was suddenly back in the shabby world of reality. He blinked uncertainly. It was like waking up from a deep sleep. When he looked around he saw his uncle Mick standing in the doorway staring at him. He looked miserable.

MICK GLANCED AROUND THE ROOM
. ‘Where’s your Ma?’ he asked.

‘Gone up to Doyles’,’ Jimmy said.

Mick came in and closed the door behind him.

‘I lost my temper earlier on,’ he said. ‘Your Ma does that to me sometimes.’

‘Sure she does it on purpose,’ Jimmy said. ‘You know that. You’re worse to let her annoy you.’

Mick threw his cap on the table and sat down. He scratched his head and tried to smile his special big smile at Jimmy. Whenever Mick smiled his big smile Jimmy could feel his own lips smiling back even if he wasn’t in a very good mood. Mick had that effect on a lot of people. Nearly everyone liked him except, Jimmy sometimes thought, Ella; but then Ella didn’t seem to like anybody, so she didn’t really count.

Today there seemed to be something wrong with Mick’s big smile. It was forced and hollow.

‘If she’s up in Doyles’ then she’ll know my news already,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ Jimmy said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wrong?’ Mick looked upset. ‘I don’t know anymore what’s wrong or right, Jimmy. Paddy Doyle is after joining up.’

‘Tommy’s Da? You must be joking. He’s a mad rebel. He always says he’ll die before he takes the king’s shilling. That’s what he calls joining up, Tommy says.’

‘Oh I know what Paddy always says, Jimmy. He had rows with your Da after he enlisted and told him what he thought of him.’

‘Then how could he join the army?’

Mick shook his head. ‘It’s the daughter – though I suppose that was only the last straw.’

‘Alice? What about her? I know she was sick again.’

‘She very nearly died, Jimmy, and they hadn’t a halfpenny to get a proper doctor. Paddy said he hadn’t even the money to bury her. She’d be put in a paupers’ grave without even a headstone over her. He could stand the poverty himself, but he couldn’t stand the effect on the childer. That’s how they get you, he said.’

‘But there’s work to be had now, since the war started. You always get work.’

Mick was a casual labourer, which meant that he didn’t have a steady job; but he was young and strong, and so he could always get work. Sometimes he worked on the docks, loading or unloading ships. Sometimes too he worked in the stables in Guinness’s brewery, where Ella’s husband Charlie was a clerk. Mick helped to look after the
great horses that pulled the brewery carts. He had a natural talent with horses. Once he’d taken Jimmy along to see the carts being loaded. Being so close to the big animals made Jimmy a bit nervous, but Mick handled them with ease.

The war had been good for work because so much material had to be shipped to the army in France, and of course there were less workers around because so many men had joined the army in the first place. When Jimmy first heard this he thought that maybe now Da could leave the army and come home, because at last there would be work for him too. But Ma told him that this wasn’t possible – you didn’t just leave the army like a man might leave a job he didn’t like.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the bosses here still hate him. He was too much of a trade union man.’

Jimmy remembered that Paddy Doyle had been a union man as well – he’d been very involved in the 1913 strike, like Da. If Da was on an employer’s blacklist then Paddy Doyle would be on it too. It was awful to think that all these men were still paying for something that had happened years ago. All they’d ever wanted was a decent wage.

‘I met Paddy in the pub last night,’ Mick said. ‘He was very drunk. He was so miserable I thought Alice was after dying. When I asked him what was wrong he looked up at me and he said, “I’m a dead man, Mick Healy. Worse, I’m a hypocrite.” He’s convinced he’ll die in the war and
he even thinks he deserves to for joining the army at all.’

‘But if he’s sure he’ll be killed,’ Jimmy said, ‘what’s the use of joining up?’

‘While he’s alive the family will get the separation money,’ Mick said. ‘If he dies they’ll get a pension. He thinks it’s all he can do for them now – give his life. And he hates himself for the way he’s doing it.’

‘But …’ Suddenly Jimmy stopped talking. He’d been struck by a terrible thought. ‘Mick,’ he said, ‘is that what Da is doing? Is he gone out there expecting to die too?’

Mick looked completely miserable. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could well be. Your Ma was right, Jimmy. She said I didn’t understand. Listening to Paddy opened my eyes to some things. He talked about your Da last night. “James Conway is the bravest man I ever met,” Paddy said. “When he saw what he had to do, he just did it. And here am I driven to it in the end, and complaining about it.” It was terrible to listen to him, Jimmy.’

But Jimmy wasn’t listening to Mick any more. His mind was whirling. ‘Mick,’ he said, ‘do you think Ma knows this?’

‘I don’t know. Your Da would never say it to her, but she’s not a fool.’

In his mind Jimmy saw the dreams he’d had of himself as a soldier for England, dressed in khaki and dug into the trenches fighting for a good cause. He saw the dreams shatter and disappear, and there was nothing in their
place except the reality of hunger and poverty and dirty streets, and people doing terrible things because they had no choices.

‘Mick,’ he said, really wanting to know. ‘Are there any good causes? Ones worth dying for?’

Mick thought before answering. Jimmy knew that he was thinking of his own activities in the Citizen Army, of all his old talk about freeing Ireland and about justice for the poor workers. When he finally answered, he sounded every bit as uncertain as Jimmy felt.

‘I don’t know any more, Jimmy,’ Mick said. ‘I used to think so, but now I just don’t know.’