by Orna Ross
After the Rising
Centenary Edition
Orna Ross
Contents
Reviews
Preface to the Centenary Edition
Plash: Nora
Spill
Reflux
Swell
Surge
Crest
Break: Jo
Plash: Nora
THE END
Before the Fall
I’d love your feedback
Like to be a reader member?
Acknowledgments
Publication Note
Also by Orna Ross: Fiction
Also By Orna Ross: Poetry
My Podcast
Reviews
BIBLIOFEMME.COM: “An incredible debut that will have the reader absolutely enthralled.”
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SUNDAY INDEPENDENT: “The sort of book you could happily curl up with…A hauntingly captivating read.”
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IRISH INDEPENDENT: “An impressive canvas…
a captivating read…an achievement.”
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EVENING HERALD: “A haunting tale…a gripping story.”
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SUNDAY TRIBUNE: “Epic sweep…ambitious scope…
an intelligent book.”
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EMIGRANT ONLINE: “A riveting story…vividly brought to life.”
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AMAZON.CO.UK: “It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think. It’s beautifully written. I highly recommend it.”
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THEBOOKBAG.CO.UK: “I couldn’t put it down.”
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AMAZON.COM: “Ross has written a masterpiece and,
in this age of exaggeration and hyperbole, I hope I can convey
just how exceptional her book is.”
Preface to the Centenary Edition
Isabel Allende once said, ‘Write what should not be forgotten’. That’s my guiding principle as a writer.
I grew up in a village in the south-eastern corner of Ireland, called Murrintown. Back then it was tiny—no more than a handful of houses, a church, a post office, and our shop and pub—but small as it was, an unspoken divide separated its few families.
As children, we knew who was one of ‘us’. Nobody put into words who or what ‘we’ were, but we carried the divide within us. We were born it and we passed it on, all without knowing why. As I grew into my teens, I began to wonder why.
I discovered that the divide centered around whether a family voted for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, the two organizations have dominated party politics in the Republic of Ireland since the foundation of the state. Yet the more I learned about them, the more these opponents looked the same. Both patriarchal, both pietistically Roman Catholic, both right of centre. Both ignoring most of what I—a young, left-leaning, progressive woman—thought important.
Their division could be traced back to an event called the Irish Civil War that had happened fifty years before. I had heard whispers of this war but been taught nothing about it. Our school history books were full of our glorious Easter 1916 Rising against British rule, of the glorious War of Independence of 1918 to ’21, of our glorious admission into the League of Nations in 1924. But the Civil War of 1922/23? That was a blank page. And, as my father’s uncle had been killed in that war, murdered the whispers under the blank page alleged, that was the one I wanted to know more about.
Was it true that he’d been shot dead by his best friend, a ‘Free Stater’ who’d supported the (partial) independence treaty with Britain? That he’d been killed because he was what Staters called an ‘Irregular’, opposed to the treaty? That he and others in my family had fought on after the independence war was over, trying to destabilise the fledgling state?
His sister, my great-aunt Agnes, lived with us. Passionately republican and passionately Fianna Fáil—her proudest boast was that De Valera once slept in our house—she evaded all my questions but she did show me two pictures. One of her in uniform, holding up the badge that said she had been a member of Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary unit that had also fought against the British, and after the peace talks, against the treaty. And one of her dead brother. Yes, he’d been shot in the Civil War.
But why?
No answer. The pictures were silently returned, with a tragic air, into their yellowing envelope, and solemnly replaced in her dressing-table drawer.
I turned to my parents. How could this have happened? How could two men who'd been close friends growing up, comrades in the War of Independence of 1921, have become murderous enemies a year later? And what part had my Auntie Ag played in it all? My persistent questions went unanswered. Nobody knew anything. Least said, soonest mended. Whatever you say, say nothing.
Some day, I told my friend who sat beside me in school, I was going to write a book about all this. Then I grew up, and rejected it all—the public, nationalist politics and the private family history. I left home, went to university, found feminism and a different way of thinking about everything.
When you reject something, though, you're not indifferent—as I learned when, approaching middle-age, I set about fulfilling that long-ago vow to my friend, and beginning that long-promised book. By then I’d been working as a features journalist for a decade, so I began to interview people who’d been alive in that time (Auntie Ag was long dead).
I turned to old County Wexford newspapers, old documents in libraries and archives, old books written by those who’d been part of the conflicts of that time. I began to make notes. And somewhere along the line, research and memory gave way to imagination. I never did find out what really happened to my great-uncle but it ceased to matter. It turned out that I was writing a novel.
The story of another family, the Devereux-Parles, similar-but-different to mine. And another progressive young woman, Jo Devereux, similar-but-different to me, tracing her family history back to a similar-but-different event.
What happened to Jo, her ancestors and descendants, grew into a three-volume saga, After the Rising, Before the Fall and In the Hour, covering the lives of five generations of women, across two continents. Throughout, there are three time frames—ancestor time (1920s to 1950s), past time (1960s to 80s), and present time (1990s to 2020s)—and the story is told by moving backwards and forwards across this one hundred years of modern Irish life, at home and abroad.
Today, as I write this preface, Ireland is more than half-way through a ten-year program commemorating “the many significant centenaries” of the decade from 1913 to 1923”, including the suffrage movement, the trade union struggles, the Easter Rising of 1916, the foundation of the Irish Free State, and they promise, the Civil War. So it felt timely to re-release a centenary edition of the first two volumes of this Irish trilogy in advance of publishing the third and final book of this story.
As I look back over the writing of this trilogy, I see now why it had to be a novel. Only fiction could recreate those people who’d been wiped out of the history books. I hope they, and their way of life, will live again for you as you read.
And only the inventions of fiction could contain the truths of that time—and its ambivalent legacy. This love story, this family murder mystery, this belated-coming-of-age tale, explores intimate wars of all kinds—but especially the struggle between the urge for freedom and the longing for belonging.
It releases some of the secrets and lies that were interred by Ireland in its new, partitioned nation. But don’t expect it to “solve” everything, or to leave no loose ends. That isn’t how it happens after a rising.
Orna Ross, London, 2020.
Plash: Nora
1925
Here comes Useless John, skulking up Mucknamore’s main street. Ever
y evening the same time: twenty minutes past seven. You could set your clock by his leaving. Straight past this house he’ll go, walking another three full miles to Ryan’s of Rathmeelin for his nightly imbibement. Five bottles of stout and a couple of whiskies he’ll have – or more, if somebody else is buying.
And here comes young Cissie Cummins running up to have a go at him. “Hey, Useless!” she shouts up the road in his wake. “You’re useless!” She keeps a safe distance, mind, in case he might turn and give her some of his talk about Coolanagh.
Coolanagh. The word alone is enough to frighten Cissie out of her brazenness. I can hardly bring the ink out to write the name of it myself. “Do write it,” Peg says. “Write all the words. Get them all down onto paper.”
Like I used to before.
It was good, right enough, when I used to do that. But then I got afraid of where my mind went, when let on the loose. No need for fear, Peg says. Just write it. The best of it and the worst of it. Put it all into a secret book only for myself. It’s what she does and it always helps her.
And that woman has faced down enough, Lord knows, and come up only the better.
So. Coolanagh.
Coolanagh that night.
December 1923, two years ago already, if you can believe it. The December of the big fog. None of us had ever seen a fog like it, the way it clung, shrouding the sky and the water, pressing thick and white against our windows. People were shadows moving about in it. Everyone’s talk fixed on it. Where had it come from? Would it never pass off? And what were we to do about the herring?
The shoals, long awaited, were in. A bay swarming full of fish we had, but every fisherman in the village grounded.
Six dreary days of this, morning, noon and night, until, on the seventh day, it shifted. Within an hour of daylight, the air started to stir. Hopeful men got up and sat by their windows, watching the mist peel back and the sea reveal itself, inch by slow inch.
John Colfer was one. As he tells it today, from his high stool in Ryan’s public house, when he saw the island emerging, like a big battleship creeping into the bay, he knew it was over. He left his house, went down to the hut, and dragged his, as the fisherfolk do, across the sand and shingle into the water, then clambered in, trousers wet to the knee.
Off he set, boat slicing through the water and the patches of mist, small fallen clouds, that floated on it still. Just as he was about to pull right of Coolanagh, to steer his way out into the bay, one of those billows shifted, revealing a shape on the flat sands close by.
Colfer stared. Shreds of mist teased his eyes. Was it...? It couldn’t be...? Even as he was asking, he knew. By the hammering of his heart, he knew.
He steered his boat across, as close as he could go without danger, close enough to confirm. Yes, it was a person, jutting up out of the sands like a rock sculpted. Like a bust of himself. Face bulging blue and smeared with sand but unmistakeable. Dan O’Donovan. My brother.
It was his eyes that were the worst of it, Colfer says, when launching his horror tale to the audience. Wide open, apparently. Crusted with a grainy glaze of sand. “One look at them eyes and I knew I was dealing with a corpse,” he’d say. “No living person could stand it.”
Shameless, not Useless, is what John Colfer should be called, for that is what he is, flourishing his finding of my brother in exchange for drink. But for all his bar-stool blather, he has at least held his lip on the question everyone was always asking: what was Dan O’Donovan doing out on Coolanagh sands on that night, in that fog?
Colfer’s reply to that question is alway the same: three heavy-fingered taps to the side of his nose.
In the main it’s admired, this reluctance of his to put words on his thought. “Not so useless in that department, thank God,” Peg says. They know what he thinks all the same, with him footing it all the way up to Ryan’s each day. He hasn’t come here since it happened and we all know he never will again. Nothing is said of that. Even the nosiest has to admit that Mucknamore has had enough talk.
Wasn’t it talk that unhinged the country, words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘honour’ and ‘principles’? Principles, my eye. Wasn’t it talk that turned our young fella’s guns on each other? So if another young fella was dead, where was the use in asking why? Wouldn’t the answer only lead to another question? Wasn’t the country riddled with why?
Cruel it was, all the same, to see what John Colfer’s queer mix of story and silence has done to him, how the gap between what he said and what he could have said has grown so wide that he’s fallen right into it. His only pleasure now is turning on the children who jeer him, frightening them with his stories about Coolanagh, and the voices that can be heard calling from out there, on a quiet night, when the wind blows a certain way.
He’s never married and now he hardly will. The bit of a farm his mother left him lies neglected. His boat rots in the hut from lack of use while he walks the village drunk, or fixed on drink. Finding Dan the way he did, knowing what he knew, not being able to do anything with the knowledge: that’s what turned the man useless.
My brother did that to people.
Spill
1995
The thick double door beneath the sign – Parle’s Bar & Grocery – is shut. A For Sale board juts from the side wall, with a Sale Agreed banner across it. The blinds are down, as if the house, too, has closed its eyes and died.
That’s all I have time to notice as my taxi whips past. I can’t tell the driver to slow down, as I have already given him instructions to hurry. I look back as we pass. Nothing about it has changed, I don’t think, yet it looks different. Lesser.
Then the road swerves and it is gone, disappeared by the bend.
We fly past the post office, and Lambert’s farm, and the two-roomed schoolhouse where I learned to read. “That’s it!” I have to say, before we pass it. “That’s the church there.”
The car screeches to a stop, bidding goodbye to my hopes of a discreet arrival. Heads huddled around the door turn to look. I should have known the crowd would be spilling out of the church. My mother was the proprietor of Parle’s, the village shop and pub. The village hub. It was always going to be a big funeral. The years peel away and I’m instantly laid bare.
But the driver is out of the car, taking my suitcase from the trunk, opening my door saying, “Here we are, so,” in his strong Wexford accent.
I will do this well. The vow that seemed so potent yesterday in my apartment in San Francisco, feels puny now. Doing it well doesn’t necessarily mean going into that church, does it? I’m so late. Wouldn’t it be more discreet to shrink back into the seat and wait it out, catch Maeve later, on her way home? Or, even better, go back into Wexford town, lie low for today, return tomorrow, when all the fuss is over?
Catch yourself on! I admonish myself in the local lingo. You’re not an over-sensitive child now, you’re a 38-year-old woman. A magazine writer. An apartment-owner. A car-driver. Get in there! As I psyche myself, I’m putting on my sunglasses to protect me from the staring eyes. I’m taking out the clasp to let my hair fall forward, a veil of sorts. I’m taking a breath so deep it hurts.
And yes, I’m stepping out of the car onto Mucknamore soil for the first time in twenty years.
The heat is unseasonably sultry. Surely Ireland is never this hot? The air feels thick, hardly like air at all, and the nausea that’s been plaguing me all the way down here growls again. I walk through the open gates of the little church yard. Here I am, folks, the entertainment of the day, the happening that you’ll pass, one to the other, whenever Mrs D.’s funeral is recalled.
As I fix my stare beyond their curious eyes, it collides with the door of the black hearse, open like a mouth. It draws me towards it, inexorable.
I draw nearer. People begin to recognise that it’s me. One voice says, “Hello Jo. Welcome home.” Another, “Sorry for your trouble.” Then there is a general murmur of greeting and sympathy. I nod acknowledgement.
“Yes, Jo, welco
me home,” says another man, turning the greeting to a snigger. I know his face, one of the Kennedys, who always used to mock me from his high stool at our bar counter.
At the door, they part to let me through and I walk towards words I haven’t heard for a long, long time: “Giving thanks to you, His Almighty Father, He broke the bread…”
The priest is a bald as a Buddhist, a big man, a performer, wallowing in emphases and pauses. “…gave it to His disciples and said…”
Two other clerics in purple robes stand behind him and the congregation is on its knees, heads bowed. It is the Consecration, the holiest part of the Mass. The quietest part of the Mass. Which makes the click of my heels on the tiles sound louder than it should.
People turn and nudge each other, loosening the holy silence. As whispers begin to swirl in my wake, Father Performer senses the loss of his audience and looks up. Seeing me, his eyes narrow, two specks of stone. Again I’m gripped by the urge to flee, but the pull of my mother’s coffin sitting there on the trolley between us, all polished wood and burnished trimmings, is stronger. It is covered in glossy flowers. Funeral flowers, grown to be cut, already dying
I walk on.
