by Jana Petken
“Is there no reasoning with the Germans?” Patrick asked.
“If there were, we would already have reached a settlement. I have found in my long career that negotiations with an enemy begin only when defeat is imminent for one of the sides. I’m afraid this war has not yet reached that stage, and I fear that the conflict will end only when there are no more men available to fight.
“You will find that life on a ship differs greatly to the perils of battle in the trenches,” the admiral continued after a short pause. “In the navy, we rarely see our enemies’ faces or hear them advancing towards us. Our greatest foes are mines and torpedoes and, on the odd occasion, the sea herself.” Standing, he stretched out his arm to shake Patrick’s hand. “Goodbye, Patrick. Your father would be proud of you,” he said.
After leaving the Admiralty, Patrick drank a beer in a pub near Soho. Reading over his orders again, he planned his final day in the city. He needed to speak to Terrence, his father’s London lawyer. The family had no available money to pay legal fees, but Terrence was bound to be in possession of documents appertaining to his father’s business affairs. His dad was meticulous when it came to paperwork. Perhaps the lawyer could be persuaded to take the case gratis and accept a percentage of the settlement, should there be one. It was worth a try – it was worth every effort imaginable.
Chapter Seventeen
July 1916
Danny, standing next to his intended brother-in-law, John, in the crowded canteen shop, was not feeling particularly bothered about how long it would take to get to the front of the queue. Coming to the shop was the best part of his day. Seeing Anna Walters serving behind the counter, watching her sweet smile illuminate the dimly lit room, and listening to her musical Welsh lilt when she spoke was the reason many of the lads went there each morning.
She smiled at him. He grinned back and thought about the wonderful minutes they’d shared alone the previous day. Anna had been in the shop. Dai, her brother, usually went to pick up supplies in the afternoon, and when he did, he put the “closed” sign up and insisted that Anna lock the door. Danny had slipped away from the barracks and had waited until Dai turned the corner that led to the south camp’s main stores building. Then he’d tapped on the shop’s door.
“I prayed you’d come, Danny,” she’d said in that heavenly lilted voice when she unlocked the door for him.
Thinking about what happened after that, he was inflicted with a heat that singed his skin. His manhood hardened with desire. It was rarely soft nowadays. They had kissed passionately for quite some time. He had imagined her naked as the day she was born, with soft skin feeling like silk to the touch, and as though sensing his thoughts, she’d let him cup a breast. The reality had been better than his sweetest daydream. Sure, he’d happily stay in this rotten place for as long as it took to see and feel her body again and to love her completely.
He stared at her. She was chatting to another prisoner innocently enough, but it was torture to watch all the same. His manhood crumpled, leaving him bereft. He couldn’t stand the thought of her with another man, he thought anxiously, but he couldn’t be with her all the time. When she left her job for the day, she went out into the world that was denied him …
Startled by the noise of the shop’s door being flung open behind him, Danny spun around to see Michael Collins march into the canteen, looking as though he wanted to hit someone. Stomping his feet hard against the ground, he reached the centre of the room, halted, and then rested his clenched fists on his hips. There was going to be trouble, Danny thought, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Following the lead of the other men present, he took a cautionary step backwards, just in case Michael got carried away and decided to take a swing with his fist. Although known for his good humour, he was not always recognised as being a patient man.
Nudging John, who was looking shamefacedly at the floor for some undetermined reason, Danny whispered, “Get ready for an earbashing. Michael’s face looks like a bulldog lickin’ piss off a nettle. This won’t be pretty.”
“Shite,” John whispered back.
“Right, what’s going on here?” Collins finally shouted when he had the men’s full attention. “That poor lad behind the counter is nearly crying! He’ll have to pay for the stuff if you don’t cough up. Come on, all of you, turn out your pockets and let me see how many thieving buggers are in here!”
Danny shook his head in disgust. The lads were stealing again. Anna had told him a couple of days previously that cherrywood pipes, shoe polish, and sweeties in particular were being stolen from the shop on a daily basis. The men used trickery. One or two of them would ask Anna’s brother, Dai, for something. They’d wait until he brought out the item or items, and then another couple of men distracted him at the other end of the counter. The ensuing thievery took seconds, and normally the culprits were out of the door before Dai even noticed that the stuff from the counter was missing.
“My brother has to pay for what gets taken,” she’d cried on his shoulder. “The guards know about the stealing, but they won’t do anything about it.”
Danny looked at the faces of the other men, turning out their pockets without question. He’d been in two minds about whispering in Michael’s ear about the pilfering. It was a rotten thing to tell tales on fellow inmates, but thieving from the locals – his Anna – was not going to strengthen relationships between the Irish prisoners and their Welsh hosts. He had nearly spilled the beans earlier that morning, but in the end, he’d lost his nerve and hadn’t said a word. Eying the remaining men, he thought that someone obviously had, by the looks of it.
One by one, the men put the stolen items back on the counter, apologised, and left the canteen, under orders to muster in the barrack hut where daily lessons were usually held. Danny’s deep pockets hung down the sides of his trousers like a pair of ears. He stood waiting to be inspected and noticed that John had still not complied.
“John, you’d better get your pockets out before he gets over here,” Danny told him.
“I can’t. I’ve got a pocketful of cinnamon balls in them.”
“Ya feckin’ eejit,” Danny said, just as Michael approached them.
After being cleared of any wrongdoing, Danny waved goodbye to Anna and left the shop. When he got halfway down the road, he could still hear Michael’s booming voice threatening to make John clean the lavatories for a week.
“John, you’re as thick as shite at times,” Danny mumbled under his breath.
Looking forward to getting to the day’s lessons, he lengthened his stride and turned his thoughts to the lectures that Collins and the other leaders had organised since their arrival at Frongoch. Danny admired Collins. When those of them from the post office had been trapped in Moore Lane, Collins had occupied a white house a few doors down from where they had situated the cart as a barricade. He and a few others had held the British back just long enough for the bulk of the men to get into the row of terraced houses. And even though they’d all been caught, Collins had been a bloody hero!
Still a young man of twenty-six years old, he had already become one of the prisoners’ most prominent leaders. He had a way about him, Danny thought. When he spoke, everyone listened. He was also a great athlete and had insisted that all the men keep fit. They played Gaelic football in a field that they had nicknamed Croke Park, and Michael won most of the athletic events, including a recent one-hundred-yard sprint. He kept them all busy with one activity or another.
Danny had noticed a change in the way the camp was being run. A civilian-style authority had been replaced by a more military-style leadership, he reflected. Notices were drawn up with orders for the day. Lectures in subjects such as the Welsh language, French, Latin, and Spanish, as well as bookkeeping and shorthand, for those who had a liking for that sort of thing were organised daily. And the camp had no shortage of teachers. In fact, some of the men had called the rebellion the teachers’ rising, for so many of them had been involved in i
t. And at night, they stood in large groups and said the rosary in their Irish tongue and sang songs about home. Jimmy joked that it was like a boy’s summer camp, without the niceties.
Danny was particularly looking forward to this morning’s lectures. Sometimes he carried secret messages to and from the prisoners’ senior officers to their adjutant, who prepared a series of lessons in Irish terrain and on the general principles of strategy and military tactics that could be used against the British. One such lecture was taking place today, as soon as the guards and locals were out of earshot. He recalled the very first time he’d heard Michael speak at one. He’d been brutally honest, even though the words had been hard for the men to accept. “The actions of the leaders should not pass without comment. They have died nobly at the hands of the firing squads,” he’d begun. “But I do not think the rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of memoranda, couched in poetic phrases, nor of actions worked out in similar fashion. In my opinion, the rising was bungled terribly, costing many a good life.” Michael Collins was not going to make the same mistakes in the future, Danny had commented to Jimmy afterwards.
Still thinking about the secret lectures on warfare, he took his seat on the edge of a bunk and looked around him at the other men packed into the hut. He hated being incarcerated with rats that gnawed on his toes when he lay in his bunk – without covers, because it was too bleedin’ hot to put them over him. His head felt as though it was crawling with wee beasties, and his scratching had gotten so bad that he’d been forced to cut off most of his hair. And he felt hungry all the time, for there was not enough food in the day to feed even the slenderest of men. But, he admitted, for all the rotten discomforts he endured, he also loved being a part of something far greater than himself. The prisoners were becoming a powerful force – maybe not physically yet, but certainly in mental strength. They no longer called themselves volunteers or the civilian army but the Irish Republican Army, shortened, for the tongue’s comfort, to the IRA. His heart was swelling with pride.
“Sure, is this not a grand sight to see all of us here with such a yearning to study?” he said to Jimmy and Donal, sitting next to him.
“It is, Danny, my good man. It seems to me that the British have made a huge mistake putting us all together here,” Jimmy said. “If only the stupid bastards knew that they’ve inadvertently created a university for the very men who are going to kick them out of Ireland.”
Chapter Eighteen
London, August 1916
Since her arrival in London, Jenny had revelled in her newfound independence. Her mother no longer insisted upon a chaperone every time her daughter left the house. These were difficult times and such protocols had no place, Susan had explained.
Strolling along a busy London road in the August sunshine without having to rush to her destination was not a pleasure Jenny had been afforded lately. In fact, many self-indulgent routines that she had grown accustomed to over the years seemed to be well and truly behind her.
Her placid acceptance of the new life which had been forced upon her disturbed her. Her granny’s 6 a.m. wake-up calls and having to dress hastily in the dark without bathing first were not as vile as she’d first imagined incivility to be. She was even getting used to gulping down a quick cup of tea and then taking along a piece of bread and lard as she walked out the front door to begin the mile-long walk to the depot where she worked. She rarely pinned her hair in a fashionable or attractive style or wore accessories with her gowns, or went anywhere of note, for Minnie’s connections were lowbred working-class people and were even poorer than she was.
She couldn’t even remember the last time she had taken a long, luxurious bath without her mam or Minnie using the same water before her. With the fuel shortage, they could heat no more than one tub every couple of days. A quick body scrub with a cloth and hair washed and rinsed with cold water and hard soap was all she got at home nowadays. Becoming a working woman had been an altogether strange and enlightening experience, she thought, glancing sideways at Kevin, strolling along beside her. She couldn’t say she was enjoying her experience in the workplace, but shockingly, she could not say she hated it either. The truth was that she had never felt so liberated.
Getting that job had meant the world to Mam and Minnie. They were already seeing the benefits of the six shillings she got every Friday. She had insisted on keeping two shillings. After all, she couldn’t very well leave herself without the means to get to London for the odd outing with Kevin, she’d told her mam, who seemed delighted that she was spending time with him.
Walking into the depot on that first morning, she’d believed that her life was about to take an even greater turn for the worse. Packing absorbent wool shell dressings in bundles of ten and placing them on shelves was monotonous work. All day she stood at a long table in a workroom full of women buzzing like bees, folding double corners, lifting piles of dressings, laying them down, starting again, over and over, until she imagined her brain looking like a lump of coal. But as tedious as the work was, the women she worked with brought a ray of sunshine into her otherwise dull existence in ways she could never had envisaged. Their outlandish conversations made her hair curl. A woman had once talked about having a sexual experience, and she wasn’t married!
Glancing sideways again at Kevin’s profile, she smiled with fondness and found herself thinking, for the second time that day, how much she valued his company. Kevin had surprised her. He was a pleasure to be with. Warm-hearted, an attentive listener, and strangely addictive, he had managed to alter her perception of men. She felt as though she had only recently made his acquaintance. She had never before noticed his attractive face with captivating green eyes and strong masculine chin or his deep throaty laugh, which was infectious. If truth be told, she’d never given him a second thought or glance before coming to England. She’d known him for years. He had come for dinners at the Dublin house every so often, and on a couple of occasions, he had come to Greenwich and shared picnics with the family. Patrick was obviously very fond of him, yet she knew very little about him.
Of course, there could be nothing between them. She was going to marry John. He was the only man she had ever stepped out with. Mam had instilled in her the idea that no respectable woman could marry well if she had kissed or cuddled with various suitors, for only prostitutes and tenement girls did that sort of thing. So in her sheltered existence, she had saved her purity for a man deemed reasonably attractive and with good financial prospects. That man had been John, and she was not giving up him or marriage for anyone. She, Jenny Carmody, wanted to, no, had to get married. After all, the war could rage on for years. There might not be any men left by the time it was all over, and as Minnie so frigidly put it, nothing was as dire as a woman becoming an old maid, and whose only purpose in life was to drain her parent’s resources.
“That building in front of us is the ex–German Embassy,” Kevin said, halting Jenny’s thoughts in their tracks.
They had already passed St James’s Square, Westminster, and Big Ben. In a quirk of fate, the bells had solemnly rung out twice at the very moment they had stopped to look up at the clock face.
At the steps of the Duke of York Column, Jenny had an undisturbed view of Regent Street – sombre but always busy. There sat the dignified gentlemen’s clubs, restaurants, and shops that displayed very few items in their windows nowadays. Staring at the embassy’s facade, she felt a surge of emotion.
“It may be a strange thing to say, but I feel a sense of reverence towards Britain when I look at that place,” she said. “If anyone had asked me three months ago if I loved this country, I would not have been able to answer because I didn’t really know or care. But seeing where our enemy probably spied and plotted against us, whilst spouting their insincere chitchat and peaceful platitudes with our diplomats over endless dinners, makes me angry.”
“I feel the same way, although we have to presume that our embassy staff in Germany did the same.”
“True. Oh, Kevin, I do so love this part of London.”
“It’s the pulse of its broken heart, right enough,” Kevin said sadly. “It’s changed almost beyond recognition. Before the war, Green Park was wondrous.”
“We had picnics there when I was a child,” Jenny said wistfully.
“It’s designed beautifully, like walking through open countryside without having to leave the city centre. I would have enjoyed taking you sailing in its lake, but it’s been drained of all water.”
“Why?”
“Zeppelins. They are becoming quite a threat. I suppose the army thinks that the telltale glimmer of water at night could serve as a landmark for enemy aircraft.”
“That makes sense.”
“Every time I pass by this area, I see vast numbers of temporary government building springing up, being used for war work. I sometimes wonder how we managed to stem the German invasion in France at the beginning of the war. We were not as organised as we should have been.”
“The Germans probably were,” Jenny said grumpily as they walked on.
“You’ve changed,” Kevin said, smiling at her. “The spark that ignites your passion has finally returned to your eyes. Employment suits you.”
“No, I have not changed,” she rebuked him. For some reason, she felt strangely insulted that he did not see the same highbred woman from Dublin. “True, my circumstances have taken a turn for the worse, so I have to make the best of things. But that doesn’t mean I’ve become one of those feeble girls who feels she shouldn’t complain about her lot because it’s unpatriotic. I still have big ambitions, and I don’t like being poor.”
“Sure, I don’t suppose anyone likes having empty pockets,” Kevin said with a sardonic smile. “Tell me, do those ambitions of yours still include marrying John?”
Frowning at the intimacy of the question, Jenny answered, “You know they do. When he gets out of that prison camp, I’ll become his wife and he’ll take me back to Dublin, where I belong. Nothing has changed.” She looked at his unfathomable expression. They were standing so close together that their bodies were almost touching. Her eyes drifted to his mouth, and she felt her heart miss a beat. What would it be like to be kissed by his lips, to be pulled against his chest with his arms encircling her back? Shocked and feeling guilty by her base thoughts, she once again mentioned John.
