The Truth About Love

by Josephine Hart

  The object of Na Fianna Éireann is to train the boys of Ireland to fight Ireland’s battle when they are men. In the past the Irish, heroically though they have struggled, have always lost, for want of discipline, for want of military knowledge, for want of plans, for want of leaders. The brave Irish who rose in ’98, in ’48 and in ’67, went down because they were not soldiers: we hope to train Irish boys from their earliest years to be soldiers, not only to know the trade of a soldier—drilling, marching, camping, signalling, scouting and (when they are old enough) shooting—but also, what is far more important, to understand and prize military discipline and to have a military spirit. Centuries of oppression and of unsuccessful effort have almost extinguished the military spirit of Ireland: if that were once gone—if Ireland were to become a land of contented slaves—it would be very hard, perhaps impossible, ever to arouse her again.

  … Our programme includes every element of military training. We are not mere “Boy Scouts,” although we teach and practise the art of scouting. Physical culture, infantry drill, marching, the routine of camp life, semaphore and Morse signalling, scouting in all its branches, elementary tactics, ambulance and first aid, swimming, hurling and football, all are included in our scheme of training; and opportunity is given to the older boys for bayonet and rifle practice. This does not exhaust our programme, for we believe that mental culture should go hand in hand with physical culture, and we provide instruction in Irish and in Irish history, lectures on historical and literary subjects, and musical and social entertainments as opportunities permit.

  … Is it too much to hope that after so many centuries the old ideals are still quick in the heart of Irish youth, and that this year we shall get many hundred Irish boys to come forward and help us to build up a brotherhood of young Irishmen strong of limb, true and pure in tongue and heart, chivalrous, cultured in a really Irish sense, and ready to spend themselves in the service of their country? Sinne, Na Fianna Éireann.

  Like he said, a masterpiece.

  When I finished the book I thought, language—that’s his real subject, not history. Still, he’d come to the right country, the one that daily sounds out to an ancient beat the oft half-hidden intersection. His grandfather had evidently been a revered lexicographer. He let that slip in. Was anyone impressed? I doubt it. The Irish are born lexicographers. But definitions need to be examined carefully. Thomas Middlehoff gave his “categoric support” to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community pre dispose certain choices of interpretation.” I read the sentence a few times in the hope of understanding it and I thought, my God, if this theory is right it’s terrifying. Language—his own—had after all given the world the speeches from which it still recoils in horror. Is language the key to everything? In the chapter “The Irish, Language and Memory” he certainly emphasised his belief that English was key to the story of Ireland, a language that had been forced upon us and then effectively stolen by us, a sound-boomerang, which the English never caught. In the end he was too clever for me and I gave up when it came to Kant. Though I liked Kant’s line about the crooked timber of humanity from which no straight thing comes—something like that. I liked it. But I disagreed with it. Strongly.

  In fact, since much of the writing was not obscure exactly, but overly elliptical, he might not have alienated his minuscule readership had he not published his chapter on anti-Semitism. Our anti-Semitism—in a book by a German! We were outraged. Oh the bit about Maud Gonne’s mad anti-Semitism wasn’t a surprise. She was built for passionate hatred, that woman, and not for love, as Yeats found out. Not that it made any difference. He was going to love on, come what may. “Heart! O heart! If she’d but turn her head,/ You’d know the folly of being comforted.” “Mmm,” as May Garvey said to me once when I’d declaimed it passionately, “Olivia, that girl’s head was turned from day one.” Yes, the reprinting of an anti-Semitic poster which had been pasted around in Dublin that was “unforgivable.” Which for a country that believes in confession and absolution is a pretty powerful statement. It was hard to believe the rubbish-leaflet had been written by an Irishman. The language lacks rhythm, though the repetition of questions has its own pseudo-Socratic power, the power of insistence:

  Who is your enemy? Who has for centuries trampled you in the dust?

  Who engineered the artificial famine of 1846–48 when two million of our people famished amidst plenty and which forced millions of our people into exile?

  Who let loose the scum of England—the Jew Greenwood’s Black and Tans—to murder, burn and loot our country?

  Who is maintaining the inhuman partition of our country?

  Who unceasingly endeavoured to represent us to all nations as a race of clowns and half-wits?

  Who are the self-chosen “protectors and patrons of Christianity”?

  Who organised the priest hunts, despoiled our churches and even excluded His Holiness the Pope from the Peace Conference at Versailles?

  Who is flooding Ireland with Jewish masonic drivel and filth, insulting our national aspirations and the Christian religion, paralysing your mind and warping your judgement?

  The answer is England—Ireland’s only enemy.

  England’s foes are Ireland’s friends—may they increase and multiply!

  Moladh go deo leo!

  Who is persecuting and victimising our fellow countrymen in the enemy occupied area of our country?

  Who has never concealed its sympathy with the German nation?

  Success to Ireland’s friends.

  Where do you stand in the war?

  Well we didn’t stand anywhere, actually. We were neutral. A neutral, passionate society. That’s rare. Luckily for us, others weren’t—neutral, I mean. And now that it was all over we didn’t want to be called in on the wrong side of that awful horror, and by a German! Not when we’d been on no one’s side at all. Just our own. Because we believed, and who can blame us, that our centuries of suffering, which we knew by heart, in the literal meaning of that phrase, had absolved us of responsibility. Suffering has moral power. Carrying one’s cross is a well-known mark of identification. So we didn’t want to have our pathetic poster that had been written and disseminated by idiots in the thirties and forties reprinted for us. We were not anti-Semitic. We were anti-anyone who wasn’t Catholic. We weren’t going to persecute them. God, no. We were going to convert them, particularly in Africa. We were going to save their immortal souls for God, the Redeemer. Long tradition there. “Anti-Semitic, Tom?” as Bogus Brogan said to my father when the book came out. “He’s a perfectly nice man, Tom, but under stands nothing about this country. How could he? He’s a German! And remember, Tom, even a visit to a Protest ant church can lose us our immortal soul. Anti-Semitic? Protestants, Methodists, Anglicans, all inferior! What do you think, Tom? Am I being unfair here? Are we not the chosen people? Everyone else is headed for limbo. At best. So anti-Semitism? Par for the course, Tom! Catholicism, that’s the only religion.” And my father and I agreed that Bogus was a mite more subversive than we’d thought.

  If my father believed the book unwise, the bishop considered it more than unwise. He considered it “dangerous” and the chess games ceased for quite some time. Anyway, the book came and went. Perhaps, since Thomas Middlehoff wanted to stay in the country with which “he’d fallen in love,” in Bridget’s triumphant phrase, the book was luckily unsuccessful. There was a short interview on Radio Éireann, not a huge audience as he went out just before midnight, according to my father. No, Thomas Middlehoff wasn’t headed for the Late Late Show. In the end it all settled down as it always does. And, as they always do, in time people forgot, though forgetting is an elective process.

  Mr. Middlehoff “did a bit of travelling”—not a concept we understood then, when our “travelling” was mostly limited to emigration leavened by visits home. He returned after some time but was little seen in the town. He was, according
to Bridget, who told Sally, who told my mother, “in hibernation out in Lake House. That woman comes. That Mrs. Calder. Just arrives, not very often, just a day’s notice, here and gone so to say. He’s like a Trappist monk after she leaves. Walking round in contemplation no doubt, but not of God I think. And Mrs. Calder, she’s very abrupt. No charm at all. None. And not that good-looking either. Married I’d say.” As to where “that woman” slept when she stayed, which was rarely, no one wanted to be witness to mortal sin. Which Mr. Middlehoff seemed to understand because Bridget always had the day off when Mrs. Calder came and “only saw her for a few minutes, usually accidentally.” Though it was my opinion that Bridget engineered these accidents, fascinated as we all are by those who break the rules. And seem to survive. And, of course, he was German, “they do things differently there.” And she was? English? “Sounds English, anyway,” according to Bridget.

  Yes, his book was forgotten or ignored, which is how we get on in time, how we get over things—nations and individuals—by forgetting to remember. Even when I first read it, all those years ago, I remember wondering, was he trying to warn us? Or is that just what I wonder now? Yes, now I wonder, was he trying to warn us? Or give us absolution? Then I remembered that he probably didn’t believe in absolution. We did, and absolution would become more and more essential. Though as time went on “te absolvo” had to be almost choked out of us.

  SIXTEEN

  Although I’d left Ireland, Ireland hadn’t left me. For three decades you couldn’t get away from us: decades that came rushing at us in their violent reality, tumbling out of centuries of dreams. Rage grew at the savage injustice of an administration in Northern Ireland of such adamantine stupidity they knocked themselves out with it. And the rage mingled with that low mist of frustrated nationalism that, even after the riot and the arrival of the British soldiers, we’d all believed would drift into some new arrangement. What had become a lazy-hazy love dream of a United Ireland, surely it would not trap us again in the prison of conviction, in the icy palace of obsession? No, the dream would come to us. It would all come true. Over the rainbow. Over the border. Someday. We couldn’t wait. We didn’t.

  So in those decades I came from a famous country, and when you achieve fame it’s hard to give it up. The narrative was too compelling. The story of Ireland had everything. History and heroism, spectacular violence and violent spectaculars, an ever-growing cast and a chorus, as classical tragedy demands. It was a chorus of victims. We could name them, for about a week, or at least number the dead. But there were so many, so many, that eventually they all just rolled themselves up into one word, plural, “victims,” of bombs and bullets. But it was the bombs, I believe, that tore into our soul and most certainly into mine as each bomb left me feeling ill for days.

  Sometimes I felt I’d turn to stone as the litany for the dead continued … “Let us pray,” or not, for the three men and a bomb in Creggan in 1970, which went off too early and took the two daughters of one of them to oblivion or heaven, depending on your point of view, and for the two boys, suspects, shot dead shortly afterwards by the British Army. Suspected wrongly, as it turned out. And “let us remember in our prayers” the three young soldiers from Ayr in Scotland—two of them brothers, seventeen and eighteen, hopelessly young, possibly drunk—who were stolen out of their bar-room trap and shot in the head on a beautiful mountain road outside Belfast, the lights of which maybe glimmered that night as they grasped in one surprised second that life, for them, was over. Amen. Was there a moon? Was there some light before they joined “the wronged ones in the darkness,” a line from Oedipus at Colonus that made me weep with recognition when I first heard it. Someone must know. Maybe one of the thousands of Protestants who marched to the memorial service led by the Reverend Ian Paisley, enraged and frightened and calling for internment. “Now! Now! Before these men can commit any more atrocities.” No one had much patience with the idea of building a case. “Wasn’t it as clear as ditch-water,” a fascinating phrase, “that only internment would work?” And the Provos, newly created in the dawn of the seventies, the Provisional IRA, “a nomenclature of almost oriental obfuscation,” as Bogus said, sensing that they had a very short time indeed before evidence in a real court of law might rob them of their leaders, bombed on, provocatively. Banking on the oft-proved stupidity of their enemy, the cast-iron stupidity that did indeed sleep-walk a government into the trap of internment as the number of bombings and casualties increased. April 1971, thirty-seven dead; May, forty-seven; July, ninety-one. It worked! On 9 August 1971 internment was introduced. And we watched in despair as the great recruiting officer as they call him, whose image alone as he tore a man from his family and locked him up without trial, concentrated hearts and minds all right. But whose? “How could they be so stupid?” Bogus, in a fury when I was back for a few days. And he was right. Even moderates walked out of assemblies. “A moderate after all is not always entitled to moderation, Olivia.” And within a month the number of bombings rose to nearly two hundred. We would, in a sense, “make Northern Ireland ungovernable as a first step to achieving a United Ireland.” It’s a technique. One which we would teach the world. After all, we’re natural teachers.

  And a man who for a time had only ever come out at night, and even then, bearded, would soon become our headmaster—a long tenure.

  I was with English friends in Chichester in Sussex, in rehearsals for Six Characters in Search of an Author, when, in truth, our thirty-year war began, at a peace march. Sunday 30 January 1972, that Bloody Sunday when thirteen men were massacred, seventeen wounded—one, it turned out later, fatally—by the British Army. And the image of a priest tending the dying and the dead and whispering to them last-minute hopes of forgiveness and eternal salvation wrapped its way around the world and around hearts that had perhaps grown a trifle weary of the weight of that long-awaited dream, United Ireland. Now the world wept with us and that priest’s handkerchief waving in the wind became as fierce a symbol as Delacroix’s torch. It seemed that the cause came to triumphant life as sympathy and outrage at our suffering swept over us and “the captive voice,” an glon gafa, soared and would never be drowned again. Stormont, that “Protestant parliament for a Protestant state,” fell. And quickly. In March 1972. The dream was within our grasp. It was ours for the taking. How could we lose it now? Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, when the Provisional detonated twenty car bombs in Belfast, killing nine and injuring 130. Bodies and parts of bodies were gathered up sometimes in the hope of identification and, sometimes, in the hope of resurrection.

  Is there resurrection without identification? It’s a question of faith. Which itself became shaky as the horrors continued. “Oh God, Olivia … twenty-one killed in Birmingham, bombs in bars!” “The Miami Showband! A band, for God’s sake. A band!” Bayardo Bar on the Shankhill Road, five dead. La Mon restaurant—twelve burned alive. “We need no sermons any more on the flames of hell.” I was in a bar with Bogus on 27 August 1979 when Lord Mountbatten, his teenage grandson and a local boy were murdered in their boat, which was “blown to smithereens.” We said nothing. No one said anything. We were about to go home when news of Warrenpoint came in. Eighteen soldiers killed in a double bombing. The ones who escaped the first got the second. “The sheer expertise of it,” said Bogus. Expertise? Well up to a point. Because it was accidentally that the IRA discovered the car bomb, though it lost its Quartermaster General, accidentally. “Since ‘the black stuff,’ an essential, is based on fertiliser, of which you could say we have plenty, Olivia, the stuff could travel anywhere. We were further rewarded by the land mine.”

  So we hauled ourselves in agony through the eighties: Hyde Park. Cavalry, bandsmen and horses, and the mangling and mingling of bodies; the Droppin’ Well Bar in Ballykelly where seventeen dropped into oblivion. Two children included in the list of the dead, “Shouldn’t have been there, I suppose.” Bogus, bitter again. Then Brighton, followed by the IRA statement of disappointment that only five died and that
the Prime Minister survived. Remembrance Sunday, eleven civilians buried in rubble in the Poppy Day Massacre. “Wrong memory, clearly, Olivia.” The next year, 1988, six soldiers killed by a bomb on a minibus, Lisburn, and eight killed in Ballygawley. To bring the decade to a close, eleven soldiers killed in Deal in Kent. And the nineties? Warrington, 1993, when three-year-old Johnathan Ball and twelve-year-old Tim Parry “took the blast, as they say, Olivia—a Saturday afternoon shopping trip!” Then, Omagh, 1998. Saturday again, twenty-nine killed by the Real IRA, which, as Bogus said, was “a reality check for us all.” As indeed it was.

  And I began to wonder, were we breeding aristocrats of terror and teaching the world that the age of deference is not dead? Though fear is a great leveller of the populace a noble cause raises the perpetrator above the common fray. And we had a noble cause. We had that lovely history dripping in heroes. But “our boys” were now giving a hideous twist to that story. The UVF and the British Army, of course their atrocities shocked us but they were capable, “that tribe,” of anything. Oh yes, you could expect anything, any horror from them. But our saintly ghosts, were their names now called out in benediction for deeds they’d never dreamed of? Named as heroic precursors of this? Of bombing civilians? Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, precursors of this? Patrick Pearse, who when he marched out of the GPO in order to spare civilians must have known what awaited him. Was he also a precursor? My first love? The way you love purity and sacrifice in a hero, when you’re about twelve, when being a nun and being a soldier for Ireland got somehow mixed up with being a religious martyr, preserving purity of body and purity of soul for love of God and for love of country, dreaming once of being laid out in my confirmation dress and veil in my coffin, the whole town in awe of my heroism. And I began to ask myself why that lovely country of mine, which had preached such reverence for the body, such passionate belief that it should be sent back whole, such determination that its sexual power be used for procreation, not just for pleasure; how could such a country have found the destruction of the body in such a savage way, not exactly acceptable, perhaps, but a way of understanding it? Is there, I began to wonder, a connection? That those who see in the body the source of all sin might find it more acceptable to blow it to kingdom come? Which of course never comes. Or does it?