They had faces like priests, and they had faces like pikers—by which I mean they looked like everybody else and nobody else; simple faces, anxious or excited or resigned faces, some with little experience of life evident, some with eager attitudes, some afraid, some apprehensive, some grim.
Almost all carried guns, mostly bolt-action rifles; I saw one submachine gun and a number of double-barreled shotguns, more suited to shooting wildfowl. Most had Sam Brown belts or some other harness for carrying ammunition. But no matter how briskly they marched, how hard they tried, they looked anything but military; two lads in the middle of the ranks had no weapons, but oh, how they swung their marching arms.
They, like all the troop, had something about them. Was it determination? Or had they embraced the idea of blood sacrifice? I doubt it—these were lads who, in part, were caught up in the romance of a patriotic idea; it has happened across the world over and over again. I will say that what I think I saw in their faces was a genuine and modest nobility. Maybe they truly so loved their country they would have done anything for it, and that patriotic light was a fire inside them. Or is that memory again? Memory is the best tailor in the world.
I was immediately engaged with what I saw, with no idea of whether this was some isolated, crackpot, stupidly brave troop of rebels, or whether an insurrection was taking place. There had been talk of it for months—that one day men from each of the thirty-two counties of Ireland would march on Dublin and throw out the British. Somehow it didn’t matter to me if these men were the only ones rebelling—their bearing, the expressions on their faces, a mixture of strength and tranquillity, that all captured my spirit.
They marched right in front of my face; I stood two feet or so above them, owing to the height of the bridge. A number of them glanced up at me—nothing in their look other than serene friendliness. They were dressed mostly in working-men’s clothes—rough jackets, many in dungarees, corduroy pants, mostly boots, those big strong working boots with broad thick soles that I myself like.
The officer who led them—I saw him many more times that day and the next, and you will hear more of him—was a tall young man with a powerful presence; he had a rangy build, no flesh on him, and a head of tawny hair and a moody face. His sandy coloring suited the green uniform, and he had polished his brown shoes and gaiters to a bright shine. Somehow I expected him to have an officer’s sword, but he didn’t; he had a revolver at his waist, in a holster whose flap had lost its button; it’s strange the details you remember from such a moment.
I watched them out of sight—they disappeared into a side street, and I wondered where they were going. Then I decided to follow them and began to run. A man standing in a doorway grabbed my arm to halt me, so hard that I almost fell.
“What’n the hell are youse thinking of?” he said.
He had a cigarette and wore blue suspenders over a working shirt.
“What are they? Where are they going?”
“Leave ’em alone,” he said. “Buncha clowns. Uniforms! Guns! Jesus!” He hadn’t let go of my arm. “Leave ’em go, they’re going to jeopardize the whole bloody day.”
“Are they rebels?”
“They’re jackasses. Have youse a light on you?”
“No.”
“What kind of a man goes out without a box of matches?”
He let go of my arm, and off I went after the troop. After a few minutes of quick walking, I saw them again in the distance, on the wide boulevard then called Sackville Street. As I hurried to catch up, some members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who had evidently not been alarmed by the marchers, watched me too but did nothing and said nothing. At the next bridge I stopped and asked a lady what was happening; she and the people near her said gruff, unpleasant things.
“Oh, a bunch of loonatics has gone into the General Post Office with guns, and they’ve locked the doors. And that crowd”—indicating my marchers—“they’re going in there too.”
A man near her pointed vaguely. “And there’s more down at Liberty Hall. But the military’ll rout them out soon enough.”
“Disturbing us all,” said someone else. “D’ja ever hear anything like it?”
Then a peculiar thing happened; such few police as stood about went away. A man called after them, “Where are youse going?” and a policeman shouted back, “We’re leaving it to the soldiers.”
I hurried on and caught up with my band of marching men, who by now were hearing shouts of abuse from the passersby; “Ah, would youse go home outta tha’!” and, “Leave us alone, would’ja?”
In short, Dublin had little encouragement for these rebels. A woman in a shawl threw a cabbage at the back of one of the armed men, but it didn’t hit him; it fell in the street, and she retrieved it.
“I’m not one to waste my dinner on the likes of them,” she said. Those around her laughed and approved.
By now I was abreast of the troop, and we had reached the post office; it was past noon. The marchers halted, performed what seemed like a fairly correct military maneuver, and turned left into the building.
As I made to follow them, a man stopped me and said, “If I was youse I wouldn’t go into the GPO.”
“Why?” I said.
“There’s a bad crowd gone in there, guns ’n all. They went in about twenty minutes ago. And you know who they went in with—that fella, that bloody rabble-rouser, Connolly.”
“But—” I began to say, and he cut me off, very angry.
“Ah, that’s it, that’s it! That’s what the fault of the country is today, we don’t know when we’re well off—most of us are happy to be subjects of the king, but there’s always some smart few donkeys who think they’re better than that.”
I tried to speak again, but he went on berating me.
“Go ahead! Go on! On your own head be it!”
Bear in mind that I had never seen this man in my life, and I never expected to see him again.
“Well?” said he. “Are youse going in there? You’re not to, d’you hear? You’re just not to.”
He made my mind up for me. A life on the road, however lonely it may be at times, gives you certain gifts of independence, and I couldn’t see that it was any of his business what I did. But that’s Dublin for you, someone always on hand to tell you what they think you should be doing. I walked away from him and straight at the GPO.
The first door was locked tight, and I went along under that fine portico to the second door—but it was also locked. I could hear much commotion inside, but nobody would answer my knocking, so I decided to wait for a while and see if a door would open. Quite a few people were now gathering under the grand columns, wondering what was going on.
Well, I had to wait for about half an hour. In those days, I carried no watch; I took my time from the sun in the morning and the moon at night. But there was a clock across the street on a jeweler’s shop, and when it said a quarter to one, a door opened and a group of men came out of the post office. Some wore the uniforms I had already seen, and some wore their own clothes. A slightly built, pale man led them; he had a crossed eye and a gentle face.
“Who’s that?” I asked a man near me, and he said, “He’s a fellow called Patrick Pearse, he’s a bit of a poet, like.”
All of you here tonight know who I mean; no doubt you learned his poems in school. “The beauty of the world hath made me sad, This beauty that will pass; Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy To see a leaping squirrel in a tree Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk.” That was his last poem, and you’ll understand why it always mattered a lot to me; its name is “The Wayfarer.”
I edged closer to see and hear what was happening. This man Pearse stood there until his small group had assembled around him. Mr. Pearse had a piece of paper in his hand, and after looking around to see that his comrades were listening, he began to read out loud. The ordinary people around and about, who had been inclined to jeer, fell silent.
“Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of Go
d and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”
Every schoolchild in this country has long since heard those words. Without any fear that I’m exaggerating, I can tell you now that when I heard them, I knew I’d never forget it. This was momentous, and I, whose lot had been dusty roads and rainy fields—I knew I was privileged to be there. It was the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, and Mr. Pearse was the first president. He was an idealist, an educated man. In his writings and speeches, he had tried to fight England intellectually as the founding fathers of America had done, but he too was forced to take up arms. Now he had written this proclamation, which was signed by him and six others.
Someone gave a kind of cheer when he had finished, and the men with Mr. Pearse reached across and shook his hand—very solemnly and respectfully, I thought. One man, with a mustache, wearing a green uniform, said to him, “Pearse, thanks be to God that we lived to see this day.”
In the crowd someone said, “Look—up on the roof!” I still regret that I didn’t step out onto the street and look. They had taken down the Union Jack and raised the Irish flag. Incidentally, I suppose you all know the symbolism of the green, white, and gold tricolor? The way I’ve heard it, the white is the peace between the green factions of the Irish Catholics and the orange factions of the Ulster Protestants, who were followers of William of Orange, the victor at the Battle of the Boyne.
The little party with Mr. Pearse slipped back into the post office, and in I went too—I squeezed inside just as the man with the mustache was telling a soldier to close the door. He had a very direct way of dealing with people.
“What do you want?”
I said, “I don’t know, sir. To be here, I suppose.”
He looked at me very straight and said, “Are you a working man?”
And I said, “I tell stories, that’s my trade.”
“As long as you’ve a trade,” he said. “And there’ll be a story to be told here today. And tomorrow and the day after that, and forevermore if I get my way.”
A man in civilian clothes came up and addressed him with great deference as “Mr. Connolly.” And that’s how I found out that I had been talking to the great champion of the working man, James Connolly, one of the firebrands of the Easter Rising. He had been a union organizer in Dublin and had trained a little militia all of his own, the Irish Citizens’Army, which, under Mr. Connolly’s command, had just taken over the post office that morning.
So in the space of a few minutes I had met two of the people who would become cornerstones of our country’s history.
I mentioned earlier a tall young man with tawny hair, leading the men of the morning along the quays. Within the first hour of my arriving in the post office, I saw him again—he had become a force all unto himself. I watched him for several minutes; he had pushed the slouch hat back off his head so that it hung down his back by its lanyard. Everything about him mesmerized me—he had a natural power and superiority.
I said to someone near me, “You see the lanky man with the big head of tawny hair—where’s he from?”
“He’s from county Meath.”
In the past, in the ages after the ice pulverized us, had his ancestor been a great figure in the Boyne Valley, I wondered, where even now, as I speak, they’re opening up day by day the marvels in the great passage tomb of Newgrange?
Remember that I arrived in the post office shortly after the first soldiers who occupied it. They had scarcely had time to see what the building was like. None of these men had ever been to war, and none of them had ever taken over a building from which to launch a revolution.
To look at this young man, you’d never think that. He was striding the inside length of the building, inspecting every possible point of access—doors, windows, even skylights. So, by the way, was Mr. Connolly, on the other side of the building. Each of these two men pointed with his hands and spoke to himself, as though fixing each position in mind. When he had assessed the entire wall space, my tawny-haired young man walked over to Mr. Connolly, and he obviously asked permission to undertake some measure or other. James Connolly granted it; the young man saluted and immediately ordered two, four, six, eight—fifteen—young men to jump to it.
He directed them to shutter most of each window, but to poke holes in the glass for the riflemen’s muzzles. Then he told them to push furniture here, there, and everywhere. First of all they dragged a huge table over to the very door through which I had come. Then they tipped the table on its side, so that anyone who came through that door was faced with a large surface of wood. He and Mr. Connolly then got men to pile tall cabinets above and behind that table, and when the structure was finished, it looked like as good a high rampart as a man could fashion.
By the way, I should remember to tell you that many women formed part of the occupying force; bright, busy women they were, who even in the heat and nervousness of all that was going on—and what they knew was likely to come—still bantered with the boys and shirked no hard physical work.
The ramparting measure was repeated on all of the post office doors. Every major point of access from the street outside was so fortified that it would have been very difficult for anyone to force a way through.
After that, again in consultation with James Connolly, the young tawny-headed fellow got his men to drag other furniture into place—desks, more chests and cabinets, tables—and he placed these about fifteen feet back from the front wall of the building. He then directed three soldiers to the top of each of these furniture piles, and they had been constructed so that men could lie or crouch on them and have full cover.
By now I could see his plan; if a door was breached, the attackers would walk into a hail of fire from the soldiers on top of these vantage points. He had also arranged things so that a long passageway led from the darker front of the building through this furniture to the very rear, where the lights shone brighter than anywhere else.
When he had all of these settled, he inspected each one, both the barricades and the vantage points, reordering something here, giving a direction there until he was completely satisfied. He walked along the tight passageway to the lighted sector, approving what he saw—and then he looked around for something else to do.
What struck me was this; he was no more a trained soldier than myself, and about the same age. Watching that young man gave me a belief that some people are born with a destiny inside them, waiting to make itself manifest. All we have to do is quarry down into our souls until we find it. Such people are the stuff of my tales.
My grandfather paused, rose for a moment from his chair, straightened his back, sat again, and spread his coats around him like a skirt. Not a sound came from the audience—not a cough, a sigh, a rustle. Though he had made himself more theatrical than he ever did in a country kitchen, the performance was better than ever, and the old spell had fallen across his listeners like a magic blanket.
Kate whispered, “Should I get him some water?”
As the words left her lips, the stagehand in shirtsleeves emerged from the far wings, sauntered across the stage, and put a glass of water on the small table. My grandfather picked up the glass, held it to the light, and said thoughtfully, “It seems—regrettably—clear.”
Such a performer—he knew exactly when to release the high emotion, and the audience, as one voice, laughed.
With perfect timing, he worked the gag twice more. First, he sniffed the glass.
“No aroma either,” he said.
Loud laughter.
Then he sipped. “And now—no taste.”
The audience roared with delight and applauded. They applauded even louder when the man in the shirtsleeves reappeared, and this time placed a full glass of whiskey on the small table. With no trace of shame, my grandfather milked it again; he sat and looked at the glass for a long moment. As he picked it up he said, “They say the theater is where i
nspiration dwells. Perhaps…” and let it die.
The audience stamped its feet in delight.
“Was that rehearsed?” said Kate.
INSIDE THE GENERAL POST OFFICE THAT EASTER Monday morning, everybody meant business—the business of insurrection. I stood looking around me. The men I had first seen marching along the quays had stayed together. Some toiled to order, some helped with barricades, others had spread their ammunition on the ground beside them and held their rifles at the ready as sweetly as dancing partners.
In the middle of the floor, Mr. Pearse stood in deep conversation with two of the men who had been with him at the Proclamation. I wandered across toward him, making myself as unnoticeable as I could, expecting to hear some considerable discussion about war and strategy and patriotism.
Instead, they were discussing the races at Fairyhouse.
It seemed a letdown, but then I listened closer; they were debating the fact that all the leading British officers were known to have gone to the races, and therefore very few remained by way of commanders to pitch forces against the rebels. Mr. Pearse was agreeing with a man who said this gave them time to have a real chance of taking over all Dublin; this man, who had recently come back in off the street, said there was fighting in many parts of the city.
“Thanks be to God,” said Mr. Pearse.
The man who gave him the news seemed very intense, very urgent, insistent on what he was saying; he spoke quickly, and I looked at him closely.
Not tall, about five feet nine or ten, he had a sharp face, a Cork accent, and a pugnacious expression, though he seemed very deferential to Mr. Pearse. The man was unknown to me—as were all these people. When he became famous later, I recognized him from the photographs as Michael Collins, perhaps the most potent revolutionary we ever bred. I watched him as he walked around the place, giving orders, mock-wrestling with a comrade, checking a rebel’s gun; it was clear that the men who knew him loved him; all responded to his gift of leadership.
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