The Young Wan (12 page)

On the far side of the wall, the mood was very different. The full moon hung over the foundry, and beneath it within the yard were many more men. These men stood in large groups. As orders were whispered from one group to another, there were nods of understanding.

As Bosco turned into the street leading down to the foundry’s main gates, he noticed two things. First, for the first time since they had started the picket, there were no police. None. Second, where there would usually be thirty to forty men on the night picket, this night there were at least five times that many.

Tommy Mangan met Bosco with the news and explanation of at least the second part.

“Scabs?” Bosco asked, a little puzzled. “Are you sure?” Mangan nodded his head. He was adamant. The early shift, he told Bosco, had seen over a hundred men being brought in by truck through the main gates. Bosco mulled this over.

“What’ll we do?” Mangan asked, breaking into Bosco’s thoughts.

“Nothing for the moment.” Bosco was uneasy. “Let me think.” Very uneasy. Something wasn’t right. He began barking out orders:

“Tommy, get all of the marshals together. I want to talk to them. Tell everybody to keep calm until I sort this out. All right?” Mangan nodded and was gone.

Something is so not right,
Bosco thought.
But . . . what is it? Something is missing?
It was not unusual for employers to bring in scab workers in an effort to break a strike. On the contrary, it was to be expected. But usually this was done in daylight, when there would be the greatest number of strikers about to see it. It was a tactic the employers used to intimidate the hard-line strikers and to scare the borderline workers into thinking they would lose their jobs. But why at night? And why
sneak
them in?

Bosco was truly puzzled, but in the meantime he had more pressing matters: controlling his own members. When Tommy Mangan and the twenty or so marshals gathered around him, Bosco spoke to them. They listened intently to his every word.

“I’m not quite sure what Parker-Willis is up to here. But, whatever happens, we’ve got to keep our side in order.” He looked at their faces. “Have any of you been drinking?” Three of the marshals slowly raised their hands. “Okay, you three go home now,” Bosco ordered.

“What?” came a protest.

“Look, if there is any trouble here, I don’t want the police to be describing us in the newspapers as a drunken rabble, okay? So go. Go now!” They left. “The rest of you, circulate among the men that are here and smell every breath. Anyone who has the slightest whiff of alcohol, send them home. Is that clear?” They nodded. They were not happy about it, but they nodded.

“Then what?” one man asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Bosco answered, the concern obvious in his voice. “We wait. We wait and see what happens.” The men dispersed. Bosco was still uneasy. Within half an hour, anybody with drink even a sip of taken was gone home. But it made little difference. The word was now spreading throughout the tenements that the scabs had arrived at the foundry, and by daybreak the picket had swelled to over three hundred men. The marshals had given up smelling breaths, and Bosco could see that they were having difficulty controlling the crowd. He ordered a couple of the marshals to build a makeshift husting. They cobbled a stage of sorts together with a couple of barrels and a plank. Bosco climbed onto it and began trying to speak to the men.

It was now 6:45 a.m.

After he shouted for some minutes for attention, whispers of “hush” began to spread through the crowd, and they went quiet. They looked to Bosco.

“Good morning, brothers,” Bosco began. “Well, now, if Mr. Parker-Willis wants to know for sure if we are united in this strike action, he need only look out of his window this morning!” This brought a huge cheer and a wave of shaking fists. Bosco raised his arms for quiet, and the crowd hushed again. He went on. “I would indeed like him to see this”—Bosco waved his arm across the crowd as he bellowed—“but I would like him also to see a group of workingmen that behaves with dignity and honor.” This got a few grumbles.

“They’re fucking scabs!” a voice from the back of the gathering roared, bringing an even louder cheer from the crowd.

Bosco waved his hands for quiet again.

It was now 6:58 a.m.

Eventually the crowd went quiet.

“Listen to me. Please, listen to me,” Bosco implored. Suddenly there was a
thud
sound. It came from the inside of the twenty-foot steel doors, the entrance to the foundry. All heads swiveled toward the doors. There was absolute quiet, except for the squeak of footsteps on a wooden ladder. All eyes were now on the steel gates. Suddenly a head popped up over the top of the gates. Seeing what they believed to be one of the scabs, the crowd now went wild, screaming at the peeking head. A brick was thrown at the gates. It hit nowhere near the man on the ladder, but the bang of it hitting the gates was enough to get him to disappear. Cheers and catcalls followed the head’s vanishing. It was then that it dawned on Bosco. He knew what it was that was missing. It was the squeaking of the ladder rungs that brought it home. Noise! There had been no noise. If those men were scabs, brought in to work, why could he not hear them working?

“Bully boys,” Bosco said aloud, but only he heard it. “Get back,” he screamed. Bosco now jumped from the husting and grabbed any marshals that were near him. “Clear the street,” he screamed at them. They looked back at him with blank, puzzled faces.

“For fuck’s sake, clear the street,” he screamed. His voice drowned in the whistles and cheers. It was too late. At 7:00 a.m. exactly, the huge steel gates opened wide, revealing two hundred bully boys armed to the teeth. At first the strikers began to roar abuse at them, still thinking they were scab workers. But when the charge of the thugs came, the strikers got the message and bolted. Now the men at the front were trying to get away from the gates, while the men at the back of the crowd were pushing forward. The bully boys had their fish in the barrel. With adrenaline pumping, they laid into the strikers. In the mayhem that ensued, the air was filled with screams and roars of pain, and the sound of crunching as bones gave way under the heavy blows. Bosco was lifting and dragging fallen men from the ground all around him and pushing them toward the other end of the street. He screamed at them,
“Run!”
In his own ears he could hear the sound of his dying father’s voice whispering, “Run, Bosco. Run, son.” But he ignored it. A young man scrambling caught Bosco’s eye. He looked no more than twenty years of age. The boy was doing all right at first. Terrified, he was dodging blows from a chasing bully boy wielding a pickax handle with a six-inch nail hammered through the end of it. The young man skipped and ducked as the chasing bully boy swung the club with ease. All of this time, the young man was putting a little more distance between himself and his pursuer. Then the young man tripped and fell, and as he did Bosco recognized him. It was young Mick O’Malley, the bell-ringer. He had tripped over the body of an elderly man who was lying bleeding on the road. The bully boy saw his chance. He advanced on the young Mick. With an angry roar, Bosco advanced on the bully boy. Bosco got there first. He shoulder-charged the big man and sent him sprawling and tumbling across the street. Bosco then knelt beside Michael. He helped him to his feet. The young man was terrified. Bosco looked into his face.

“Run, son. Go on, Michael lad, run,” Bosco roared. O’Malley’s eyes widened with fear as he saw the club come down on Bosco’s head. Two inches of the nail sank into Bosco’s skull. As Bosco slowly toppled forward, Michael O’Malley ran for his life.

The newspapers the following day reported the attack. They said the “incident” was the result of the actions of a drunken group of strikers attacking the legitimately hired labor force of the Parker-Willis Foundry. The eighteen men that died did so, the paper said, because of the trampling of the rabble. There were to be no post-mortems held.

Connie read this as she sat in the waiting room of the Richmond Hospital. She sat in silence and shock. The waiting-room door opened. Connie looked to the door in the hope that it was a doctor coming with news of her husband. It wasn’t. It was instead a pale-faced young boy. He introduced himself as Michael O’Malley; he was twenty years old, he said, and had been saved, he told Connie, by the intervention of her husband. He had been told that the man was taken here.

“How is he?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know, son, I don’t know,” Connie answered the boy. She was numb. The boy placed his hand upon hers and began to recite aloud the Lord’s Prayer. Connie neither felt his hand nor heard his words. When he finished the prayer, the boy removed a gold chain and crucifix from about his neck. He tried to put this into Connie’s hand. Her hand would not grasp it, just as her mind could not grasp the horror of the past twelve hours. So the boy wrapped the chain around her thumb.

“Missus, please tell your husband that if I can ever do anything for him he need just ask.” Connie did not respond. The boy stroked her hand and sat quietly beside Connie and waited. He saw the newspaper lying on the table and turned it toward himself. He read only the headline.

“Good God, eighteen dead.” The boy sighed. The waiting-room door opened. It was about to be nineteen. Connie collapsed.

Michael O’Malley left the hospital in a teary daze and walked and walked. And walked.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The year that followed her father’s death was a slow one for young Agnes. The first couple of weeks following the funeral were not too bad. There had been lots of callers to the flat, and the entire neighborhood had expressed its sympathy to the Reddin family. Then, one day, everybody just stopped calling. As is life, they all went back to what they had been doing, and within months the riot and, with it, the death of Bosco Reddin were virtually forgotten.

Things became decidedly uncomfortable for Geoffrey Parker-Willis, so within months of the “Misery Hill Massacre” the foundry had been sold to a Liverpool shipbuilding company, and the entire Parker-Willis family had immigrated to South Africa. Not until they were well gone did Constance tell Agnes who her grandparents had been. It was a dreadful shock for the young girl. She had always believed that she had no grandparents on her mother’s side. Killed in the Great War or something, her mother had said. Now, to be told that they had lived within miles of her was one shock; to discover not only that she did have a grandfather but that he had killed her father, left the child numbed and confused. Constance had taken it all dreadfully. She now sat for long periods in silence. She lost so much weight that her skin seemed just to hang from her bones. She also lost interest completely in her daughters. So Agnes became head of the house, a job she didn’t want. The last thing Constance did for either of her girls was to cut the train of her wedding dress for the final time to make Dolly’s Communion dress. Feeling the fabric of the dress she wore for the man she so deeply loved, broke her heart. She cried over every stitch, but, still, when she had finished it Dolly’s dress was beautiful. The only good thing for Agnes about this year was that it was her last one in school. She thought June 29 would never arrive, but it did.

As Agnes had expected, Marion was not in class for the final day of school. Sister Benedict was just as happy as Marion was that Marion wasn’t there. The nun had prepared her “into the big bad world” speech but unfortunately never got to deliver it. As it transpired, the final day of school for the rest of the girls in the sixth class was to end early when the school fire alarm went off. It was a young nun, Sister Loretta, that had seen the smoke billowing from the corner of the school shed. All of the children were evacuated from the building, and the fire truck was there within minutes. It turned out to be just a small fire, a bundle of books, the shed door, and the remains of a battered leather satchel. The children crowded around the shed to get a look, but Agnes instead scanned the streets surrounding the school until she saw her. Marion was standing half hidden in a doorway. Agnes waved to her and Marion waved back and with a huge smile Marion blew a kiss to the school and ran off up the street.

For most of the girls in that class of 1947, the last day of school that year was to be their last day of all schooling. Needless to say, this would be a sure thing for Marion Delany and Agnes Reddin. Also, for the first time Agnes would have no summer holidays for now it was time to get a job. Her mother was just barely scraping by on the seven-shilling pension she was getting from the State, so now Agnes could make a contribution. She looked forward to it. She spent her first couple of weeks knocking on the doors of every place of employment near the Jarro, but to no avail. Each afternoon she would finish her day in Moore Street, helping Marion pack away the Delany stall. Mrs. Delany would wrap up some potatoes or whatever vegetables were left over for Agnes to bring home to her mother and younger sister.

Each day Agnes helped out at the stall, she was being watched closely. Across from the Delany stall was the stall of Nellie Nugent. Nellie usually said nothing but watched everything. And she was watching Agnes Reddin.

It was about this time that Agnes began to see a change in her mother. Small things. Like calling Dolly Agnes or vice versa. One or two mornings, Agnes found a packed lunch for her father. This itself was strange enough to a thirteen-year-old girl, but even more strange and a little scary was that when she would bring it to her mother’s attention her mother denied knowing where it had come from or what it was. If this was not enough for Agnes to deal with, Dolly was beginning to get completely out of control. With no school for the next eleven weeks, Dolly had taken to vanishing each morning and not returning until dusk, which at this time of the year was later and later each evening. Another thing, Dolly never seemed to be hungry, unlike Agnes, who couldn’t wait to tuck into the shepherd’s pie or stew cooked up for the “tea,” as the evening meal is known to all Dubliners.