Katie's War

by Aubrey Flegg

  ‘Dafydd, take the candle,’ said Katie. ‘And miss out the second-last step before the landing; it creaks. The spring water is in the enamel bucket in the porch.’ Katie waited until he was gone. ‘Seamus, have you thought? Those rifles and bullets were made to kill people?’

  ‘I’m not a barbarian, Katie, I have been thinking of that. But if we don’t throw the English out now, and completely, there will be fighting in Ireland until they’re gone. Mark my words, there’s a passion out there that nothing will quench.’

  Katie could feel that passion in his voice and it frightened her. ‘But it’s not even the English you’re fighting now, it’s us. If there were no guns we could get on with living.’

  ‘The guns would just come from somewhere else.’

  ‘But still, one bullet less, one life more.’

  The stair creaked. Dafydd had forgotten the loose step on the way up. The wavering light approached, then they heard a door open.

  ‘Shhh!’ Katie hissed, and held her breath.

  ‘Is everything all right there?’ came Father’s voice. Katie’s tongue seemed stuck to her mouth.

  ‘Sorry, Mr O’Brien, I was getting a glass of water.’

  ‘Oh! all right, Dafydd, sleep well.’ They all breathed again.

  ‘Father must know nothing, Seamus!’ Katie whispered as Seamus drank.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you either.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ Katie was anxious that he shouldn’t stop.

  ‘For a while there was pandemonium, everyone blaming everyone else, then the commandant got us sorted out – you saw him, the man up at Uncle Mal’s. Josie was to take the horse and find a way around through the fields if he could. The rest of us were to unload the cart. You’ve never felt anything so heavy as an ammunition box, Katie. There was a big machine-gun too, a beauty, with shining ammunition in belts. When it was all over we got everyone pulling and lifting and pushing until somehow we got the empty cart over the tree.

  ‘Then we had to load it up again. I was staggering with exhaustion before we got the last box on board. Suddenly the commandant told us to shush. The government troops were coming; we could hear their boots like hail on the road, and we still had no horse. A couple of the lads got behind the tree with rifles to slow them down, then we all threw ourselves at the cart. But it was too late, they could see us and they started shooting.’

  ‘Did they get them, the guns I mean?’

  ‘No, but nearly. Stars give an awful lot of light when you don’t want them to. I heard one bullet hit the road behind us and go singing off into the trees. Next I got a crack across the shoulder like Satan’s whip. It didn’t hurt so much as burn. I wanted to stop, but the commandant was calling for me – we had to get off the main road and I was to show them the way, so I just had to put up with it.’

  ‘Did Josie get through?’ asked Katie.

  ‘Yes, we met him a few minutes later saying he had been holding back in case the horse was hit. The lads had a thing or two to say about that but the commandant said how he was right as we’d never pull the cart all the way by ourselves. We left the main road then.’

  ‘Where did you bring them?’ asked Katie.

  ‘I was told not to say.’

  ‘But you’ve got to. Where?’

  ‘I’m tired, Katie.’

  ‘Was it to Uncle Mal’s? They know he’s a Republican, they’ll be up there after him.’

  ‘Look, Katie, forget it.’

  ‘But, Seamus, we’ve got to destroy them! Think of all the lives we can save.’

  ‘Are you mad, Katie? I thought you were on our side. You wanted to join me, you said so. You came all the way up to Uncle Mal’s.’

  ‘I was fed up with Father then, but I think he’s right now. Guns have no place in Ireland. Did you know that he has the Military Medal for bravery, Seamus? But he wouldn’t boast about it because he hates guns and war. And he’s right, Seamus. Can’t you see? You’ve got the guns and ammunition away from the army – well done, but that’s enough. Let’s destroy them, throw them in the Shannon, then they can’t kill anybody.’

  Seamus looked stunned. ‘You wouldn’t … I mean … tell what I’ve told you? I … I thought …’

  Katie thought hard for a moment and then said. ‘No, Seamus, I’m not going to be an informer now, and neither is Dafydd. Who would we tell that wouldn’t use the guns if they had them anyway? But don’t ask me not to look. Lie back now, you need a rest.’

  As Katie turned to close the door of her room she looked back at Dafydd. He was sitting up in bed still holding the candle, his eyes like saucers. What did he make of all this?

  She did not go to sleep immediately but knelt on her window ledge looking out, breathing in the sharp night air. The moon had risen; under its light she noticed a mouse run out from the shed, work busily at the hen-feed that had lodged between the stones, and then dart back to safety. She wanted to worry about Seamus but the worry would not come. All she could think of was Father, how brave he had been and how wrong she had been about him. Perhaps she nodded off for a moment because she had a sudden vision of Dafydd and Father walking towards her. Father was laughing and holding back, but Dafydd was pulling him by his good arm. Dear Dafydd, she thought. She hesitated for a second before sliding gratefully into bed – would she wake him and thank him now? No … she’d leave that till the morning.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Royal Court

  Katie woke to world of magic. Father’s all right, she thought. Her whole room seemed to be suffused with a special light. She found herself looking in wonder at the wallpaper. It was just ordinary wallpaper with sprigs of tiny blue forget-me-nots and scarlet pimpernel clinging to a paper trellis, but today they looked real. She wanted to reach out and touch the delicate petals. ‘Father’s all right!’ she kept repeating to herself. She thought of the lapping waves of the Shannon at her feet and heard Dafydd’s lilting voice telling her Father’s story, the true story. She’d believed in Father before because she had loved him, not because he was a hero, a real live hero of her own. She got up carefully, so as not to shatter her mood, walked over to her wash-stand, poured water into the basin and watched the painted roses sway in the swirling water.

  When she had washed she sat on the edge of her bed with her face in her towel and let it all sink in. Life would begin for her again today. The quarry men would climb the hill, as she could remember them doing before the war, and Father’s dream of reopening the quarry would come true. She would be his right-hand – no, he still had his right hand – his left-hand person, his secretary, look after his books and learn to use a typewriter. One day, when they were alone, she would tell him that Dafydd had told her all about his medal and how brave he had been.

  She loved everybody this morning. Spreading out both arms she imagined that if she could just stretch out far enough she could gather them all in together: Mother, Marty, Seamus, Father, the soldier boy from Nenagh, Mr Parry, even Dafydd, no, specially Dafydd, and pull them all in to her. Then, just as she imagined drawing them all in, she remembered the guns. It came as a start. Where had Seamus hidden the guns? How could she pull everyone together when the guns bristled between them like a twig of thorns.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, ‘damn!’ A thrush which had been repeating its song with variations in the sycamore below the barn, flew away.

  * * *

  ‘You’re coming into the pew with us, Eamonn O’Brien, like a respectable citizen,’ said Mother, taking Father firmly by the arm. ‘No shuffling with the men at the back. If Father MacDonagh is going to make an announcement I want you in a pew.’ Father made a wry face which made him look absurdly like Marty. Katie slipped into the pew where she could sit beside him. She breathed the moth-ball smell off his Sunday suit and enjoyed his closeness.

  ‘In nómine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen,’ said the priest.

  ‘Introibo et altáre Dei. Ad Deum qui lætifica
t juventútem meam,’ came the piping response from the altar boys. Katie knew the responses by heart from helping Marty to learn them during his brief and undistinguished career as an altar boy. Katie always started Mass by trying to translate the Latin words. Today, however, she did not struggle to understand them, instead she let them take on shapes.

  ‘Gloria in excélsis Deo.

  Et in terra pax homínibus

  bonæ voluntátis.

  Laudámus …’

  Each shape slipped down inside her until it fitted into some special place for it within her soul.

  She emerged reluctantly from her trance when Fr MacDonagh began his sermon. He was old and thin and had an Adam’s apple that did surprising things as he talked. He had an old-fashioned way of speaking.

  ‘There are those who would turn the guns of our new-found freedom against the soldiers of our own country,’ he began. Katie wondered where Seamus was. Neither she nor Dafydd (bless him) had said anything about the night’s happenings at breakfast. Now, if she were Seamus, she wondered, where would she hide a cartload of arms?

  Marty was nudging her. She looked up. Fr MacDonagh was looking straight at Father.

  ‘But there is one who is trying to bring life back to our hills by providing gainful employment where, since the war in Europe, only goats and rough cattle have grazed.’ The priest looked a bit like a goat himself. Marty’s subdued bleat, ‘Mahahah,’ came out louder than he intended. Katie gave him a dig in the ribs.

  ‘If there are true patriots among you, take the slater’s hammer in preference to the gun and go today to O’Brien’s quarry where I am told there will be a meeting to discuss the reopening of the quarry and so to restart this ancient craft again in Ireland.’ Katie gave her father’s arm a squeeze and pressed her head against his shoulder. She wanted to stand up in church and shout out to everybody how her father was the best and bravest man in Ireland. She felt in her pocket; she still had a penny. She would light a candle for his quarry – no – for their quarry, on the way out.

  * * *

  Barney’s head bobbed into the hill and his hooves slipped where the bare rock emerged through the worn surface of the road. Katie could hear singing somewhere on the hillside above the farm. She turned to listen to Father. He had moved over in the trap to sit beside Mother; his arm was around her shoulders.

  ‘Mary … but to give us half his sermon!’ he was exclaiming. ‘I only expected a mention among the church notices. They’ll come flocking now. Griffith is adamant that the old quarry isn’t safe, but he has it all planned for me. You know how the previous owner dumped the waste slate in a huge pile above the quarry?’

  ‘They say he was too mean to put the waste on his good fields,’ said Mother. ‘I’ve always been worried that it might slip down on top of you.’

  ‘Well, Griffith says let it slip. The best of the slate is covered by that tip. Push the waste down into the old quarry and start again in fresh rock, he says.’

  ‘Won’t that cost the earth?’

  ‘Not what you think. It’s all downhill. Griff says that with a little money, or even free labour, we could have it down by autumn.’

  ‘Will the men do that? Work just for the promise of a job?’

  ‘It’s more than a promise. We’ll make it a co-operative. That means the men will have a share in the profits when it gets going. We could be producing by this time next year, just think!’

  ‘I hope you’re right, dear. People are slow to part with their money and they have other things on their minds just now.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wet blanket, Mother,’ laughed Katie, and the house came into view. High on the hill Dafydd was singing, then Mr Parry’s voice came in below him. She recognised the tune; it was one father whistled sometimes.

  ‘Will you listen to those two sing,’ said Mother. ‘Mr Parry says the boy wants to leave school to work in the quarries. I’d say that lad had more brain than brawn.’

  ‘Well, they’re at odds, so. Griff really wants Dafydd to stay on in school and bring his brains to the quarries if he wants to later.’

  Katie smiled to herself. She was pleased with her Frog. He was doing well. He’d said nothing about wanting to work in the quarries, but that wasn’t her business.

  * * *

  The men arrived at the quarry yard in ones and twos, still in their Sunday suits, pushing bicycles or walking over the fields, following paths not trodden since the quarries closed at the start of the Great War eight years before.

  Katie took up position on the spoil-heap which curved around one end of it, and from here she had a bird’s eye view of the gathering. Much further down, to her left, the quarry gaped like an open grave, dissolving into black shadow. Uphill, enclosing the quarry on three sides, was a horse-shoe shaped pile of broken slate which seemed to lean in and threaten the dark hole below. So this was the pile that Father and Mr Parry wanted to shovel down! It looked an impossible task. On the rim of the black hole was a broad ledge which was the quarry yard, a flat area where, in the old days, the rough blocks of slate which had been lifted out of the quarry, were trimmed and split to make slates for people to put on their roofs. In recent years Father had stacked hay there and used the derelict sheds to store potatoes, but it was empty now and the men were gathering there. The rusty cables, which had once been used to lift blocks of slate up out of the quarry floor to the yard still spanned the hole beside them.

  Beyond the yard was the cut, a steep-sided ravine sliced at right angles to the quarry in order to let the water out. It always gave Katie the shivers. Father had explained how, as the quarry got deeper and deeper, the men had had to make the cut deeper too. It let the water run out, but it also made it possible for them to walk into the quarry floor to work – if they didn’t want to swing down in a bucket. Katie could just see the top of it. There was a man standing there on the far side of it wearing a trench coat and, like her, watching the gathering. She wondered idly what he was doing there.

  She looked back to where Father, Mr Parry and Dafydd stood together. The rest of the men were hanging back, talking among themselves, picking up bits of slate and weighing them in their hands and then throwing them back on the spoil. Who were they waiting for?

  She turned to her right towards where the farm nestled in its sheltering belt of sycamore trees. The road to the quarry ran behind the farm. Along this an ancient gnome of a man was advancing, so bandy-legged that Katie thought he’d be more comfortable sitting on a barrel than on a chair. This was Paddy Scully. He was wearing his Sunday suit. As she looked, he stopped, mopped his head with a large blue handkerchief, and straightened his jacket and cap with care. Then, like an actor taking the stage, he walked on to the quarry yard. The men closed in behind him. Katie watched as Father came forward and shook hands, then she got up and clattered down the slate pile to join the gathering.

  She looked for Dafydd as she edged into the crowd, but could not see him. Then she found a block of stone to stand on and stretched to see over the heads of the men. Father had propped a line of slates of all sizes against the wall of the shed and old Paddy Scully was walking down the line.

  ‘There you are,’ Paddy said loudly, ‘the Royal Court.’ He tapped the largest of the slates. ‘You, boy, what’s that one called?’

  Katie saw Dafydd as he stepped forward. Would he pretend he didn’t understand? To her relief he said in English, ‘It’s a Queen, Sir. A heavy Queen.’ Katie knew how heavy those huge slates were.

  ‘Heavy, my foot! It’s a Queen, an Irish Queen, none of your Welsh wafers here. Look at them, all my pretty ladies: Princess, Duchess, Countess, Ladies, Doubles, Mosses, Quarters and Commons. You see, the old fool hasn’t forgotten his slates.’

  ‘Indeed, I know you haven’t,’ said Father. ‘Come here, Paddy, and show Mr Parry you can still split one too. I have it all set up here for you.’

  ‘Of course I can split a slate,’ snorted the old man, but he eyed the roughly-squared block of stone carefully. Then
he straddled the bench, took the flat-bladed chisel that Father had left handy, tested its edge and picked up the wooden mallet. Katie remembered Mick-the-Shilling’s demonstration. ‘This was a good mallet once,’ the old man said grudgingly, ‘cut from a crab tree, it was.’

  ‘Like yerself, you old grumbler – get on with it,’ murmured one of the men beside her. Katie smiled. Carefully the old quarry-man eyed the grain of the rock. Then he took the chisel and began to open up a split close to one face. The block was large so he took the split down its sides as well. Katie half-wished the slate would crack, but it didn’t. With a final tap, a perfect slate slipped off the face of the slab, and there was a murmur of approval from the watchers. But the old man was scowling.

  ‘What sort of a block is that, Eamonn O’Brien? Would you shame me? The sap’s gone out of it. I know what you’re at. You’re trying to trick me into making a good slate from bad stone! That block is rubbish. Quarrying up here at the surface of the hill is no good. No good at all. I’ll show you where the good slate is. Come with me.’

  Throwing down his tools he lurched towards the quarry edge. The men parted to let him through. Katie followed. When she got to the quarry rim she held on tightly to one of the rusty cables before peering down. Paddy Scully was pointing to the bottom of the quarry floor. It seemed miles down. ‘There she is! Down there at the very bottom, as sweet a vein of slate as you ever saw.’