War Children

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘I’ve tried everything,’ my mother would confess in despair. ‘Even beating him does no good.’

  ‘I suppose at their age, now, it’s mostly harmless enough,’ Phil Murphy would say. ‘But it will be very different in a couple of years. What’s play in a child isn’t always so playful in a young man. What’s play for a child can land a young man in the law-courts. And it wouldn’t be a nice thing for his father to have to write about his own son in the court reports in your own paper. And then, of course, you’d wonder even now what some people would be thinking, seeing such a respectable child running wild with the dregs of the town.’

  He had, I knew, put his finger on the core of my mother’s problem. In the end her worries had nothing to do with me at all. What really worried her was how my doings might reflect on her, and on her social standing: what would the other ‘decent’ people think of her, letting me loose in the streets with the despised ones? By ‘decent’ people my mother meant the merchant and professional classes of the town – the sort of people she came from. Most of them, like herself, were the descendants of people who’d run the same businesses before them, a little clutch of families who’d controlled the town since the last century. Such people viewed the residents of Irishtown with an open hostility made up of suspicion, dislike and contempt. In their hearts I suspected they viewed everyone like that, but in the case of Irishtowners they took no trouble to hide it. I knew that these merchants – all pillars of society, pillars of the Church, pillars of the local councils and societies for the improvement of this and that, and notorious, some of them, for their slyness and penny-pinching, their deceit and their greed, some even owning the rundown hovels where my friends were forced to live – viewed my friends and all belonging to them as the scum of the earth. I got angry whenever I thought about that, so I thought of it as little as I could. My loyalty to my friends got me in enough trouble; I dreaded to think how my mother might react if she ever found out what I really felt about the ‘decent’ people whose good opinion she so fretted over.

  Phil Murphy would linger on these occasions of tea and cake. In theory he had duties to perform, but they could always wait. He had a good life as the police sergeant in our town. The police had it easy there. Even the cattle-driving that still plagued some other parts of the Midlands was uncommon. Nothing much happened by way of great excitement. On fairdays there’d be fights as the pubs closed, and now and again someone would thieve something or be caught poaching, or there’d be some dispute over land or cattle, or various sorts of petty theft; but these things happened everywhere. They were so ordinary that it would have been far stranger if they hadn’t happened at all.

  Much of such crime as there was in the town was – quite rightly – put down to the Irishtowners. They fought among themselves, the Irishtowners, and of course they thieved, though they were often caught. And they poached, though they were less often caught there. With both the theft and poaching, it was pretty much a case of steal or go hungry: none of them had much money, and hunger was an everyday thing in most of their houses. Many of the men had joined the British army for the wages, and more than a few of them had died in the war. The sons of the local gentry too had enlisted in the army during the war – those that hadn’t army careers already – but I’d noticed that very few from the more respectable classes of the town had joined up. Loudly law-abiding and respectable though they all were, these had supported the anti-conscription movement when the British had threatened to extend army conscription to Ireland. In some places, earlier that year, anti-conscription protesters had clashed with the police, but naturally this hadn’t happened in our town. There the anti-conscription campaign had been very civilised – very respectable. There’d been big public meetings where stirring speeches were made about how Irishmen could not be forced to go and fight for a foreign power. Often these speeches were made by some of the prominent merchants who were thriving on the high wartime prices but who didn’t want their own sons and heirs going off to fight. Shocking treasons were preached at these meetings sometimes, in the heat of the moment. I remember Tom D’Arcy, the publican and town councillor, saying how Irishmen would fight conscription with their bare hands if they had to; how they’d fight for the right not to fight, and die for the right not to die. I’d been at that meeting with some of the Irishtown lads, and we tried to puzzle out Tom D’Arcy’s meaning.

  ‘Sure it’s only ould tosh,’ Mickey Farrell said. ‘It’s his own sons he’s worried about. He begrudges the money he’d have to pay someone to help in the shop if they died.’

  Mickey was only eleven, but a cynical attitude came naturally to Irishtowners. If they weren’t born with it, the world soon taught it to them. But what he said started me thinking.

  * * *

  The other incident that started me thinking about the way our whole town was run, was the homecoming of Mickey Farrell’s big brother, Tom. That summer, unnoticed by any but his Irishtown neighbours and his family, Tom Farrell came home from jail in England. He’d been working in Dublin for years, and he’d been out fighting with the rebels there in the Rising. He’d survived the fighting, and after the surrender he’d been sent to prison. The whole of Irish-town was keen to see him when he came back, and I was as keen as any of them. There were plenty of people in Irish-town who’d been arrested for one little thing or another, but I’d never seen anyone who’d been in jail for armed rebellion and treason before. My own small rebellions seemed puny when put against his.

  Tom Farrell was a small, wiry, handsome man, and I suppose he’d have been about twenty-one the first time I saw him. I was disappointed in him at first, to tell you the truth. I’d expected someone more dangerous-looking, more bitter – someone altogether more exciting. But Tom just seemed a friendly young man – a gas character, full of jokes and songs and funny stories about his time in jail. I quickly got over my disappointment, and hung on his every word. It isn’t every day you meet a man who’s taken up arms against a whole empire, and it was a far rarer thing in 1918 than it would be even a couple of years later.

  I first saw Tom on the afternoon of his return. His family and neighbours had gathered some money somewhere and laid in jugs of ale and porter and a little keg of whiskey they’d got from one of the Irishtown shebeens. They’d bought and cooked dozens of pigs’ feet and cheeks and what looked like half a hundredweight of ribs. They’d boiled a barrowload of potatoes, and there were rounds of brown bread the size of the wheels on a dogcart, and a big yellow brick of butter. There was more money spent on food and drink that day than the family would normally spend in several months, and no doubt some of the stuff was robbed somewhere (tasting, as Tom himself said, all the better for it). But it wasn’t every day, as old Granny Farrell commented, that you got a young fellow home that was after dying for Ireland. The neighbours crowded the already-crowded house, and there was music and dancing and singing and laughing. Dogs and children rolled on the floor, and as the day progressed and the drink did its work they were joined, sometimes unintentionally, by a few of the revellers. It was a great day entirely, and when it was time for me to go home for my tea I left late, grudgingly, dragging myself away, hating the fact that I had to go at all. I had no interest in eating. I was stuffed with fatty bacon and brown bread anyway, and stuffed in a different way with the talk and the laughter and the singing. I walked home to my silent, respectable house, hating every step.

  I heard afterwards that later that night Tom went out with a few of his friends to continue the celebration. On his way home alone, merry if not downright drunk, he discovered that someone outside of Irishtown had noticed his return after all: Phil Murphy and two of his constables waylaid him, and while the constables held Tom’s arms the King of Irishtown gave him a good hiding – ‘just in case,’ as Murphy told him, ‘you’ve any fancy ideas about bringing your dirty little rebel ways home with you.’ When I saw Tom again his face was still swollen. Several of his teeth were gone, and he took off his shirt to show us his
bruised ribs. Three of the fingers on his left hand were broken, the legacy of a final deliberate stamp from Phil Murphy’s big policeman’s boots as Tom lay bleeding and half-senseless in the gutter. I felt horrified and angry at this crime, but the Farrells seemed to take it as a natural thing.

  ‘Sure, they’re police,’ Tom and Mickey’s father, Andy, explained. He’d spent a few years in jail himself, though for less noble causes than Tom. ‘That’s what police does to the likes of us,’ Andy said. ‘It’s the way of the world. I’m only surprised that they didn’t do worse. That Phil Murphy is losing his touch.’

  I’d known that the polite, upright figure who ate lardy cake in our parlour was regarded as a very dangerous man in Irishtown. I hadn’t known, though, that the fear in which he was held there had such direct, physical cause. The reason that I hadn’t heard about it before was simply that no-one had thought it worth commenting on: like Andy Farrell, the rest of Irishtown simply took Phil Murphy’s violence as part of the natural order. Like all the best tyrants, the King of Irishtown struck by night. In the interests of local peace and justice he had a habit of taking the law into his own hands, of administering beatings with fist and boot in the dirty alleys where respectable people didn’t care to go. Not all of the constables took part in these special actions, and some of them – for there were many decent men in the RIC, no matter what anyone says – certainly disapproved. But Murphy was the boss, and he was a bully with it.

  My mother was furious when I mentioned the incident at home – an unwise thing to do, but my anger got the better of me – and she threatened to wash my mouth out with soap.

  ‘That’s pure Irishtown lies,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you repeating them here. Sergeant Murphy would never do anything like that. It was probably a drunken fight Farrell was in, with some of his own low companions. A jailbird like that slandering good policemen! He should be put back in jail where he belongs!’

  When I said to my father that he should report the assault in the newspaper, he smiled at me sadly.

  ‘It’s not news, son,’ he said.

  ‘Not news? But he’d done nothing. The police attacked him! It’s an injustice!’

  My father sighed.

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘it’s not the business of the police to enforce justice. It’s the business of the police to enforce the law and to keep order. Phil Murphy was keeping order in his own way. I may think it’s unjust, but who am I?’

  ‘You’re the newspaper owner – people should be told about this!’

  My father sighed again. He looked at me as though wondering whether I’d come down in the last shower.

  ‘And who in this town,’ he asked me, ‘do you think will want to read about police handing out a beating to a rebel from Irishtown?’

  * * *

  The British army’s need for fresh troops faded as 1918 wore on. The German war effort collapsed, and in November we had the Armistice and the Great War finally ended. There was little sense of victory in our town. People had got used to war, as they get used to anything. But there was more to it than that. People grew uneasy. Farmers and merchants – the very merchants who’d played a big part in the campaign against conscription – grumbled as they foresaw the end of their profits from high wartime prices. Even those Irishtowners depending on army wages wondered what would become of them when their husbands or fathers or sons were demobilised. These would no longer be brave soldiers fighting the enemy; instead they’d be unemployed men, used to violence, wandering the streets of a town that had no use for them.

  ‘This is when we need our politicians in parliament, to work for us,’ Phil Murphy said to my father. ‘And there they are off sulking.’

  The Irish Parliamentary Party had withdrawn in protest from the London Parliament in April, when the Conscription Bill was forced through.

  ‘It will all be different after the election,’ my father said to Phil Murphy. ‘We’ll know where we are then.’

  The general election called for December that year marked the point where politics finally came to our town in a big way. It was the first election held under new rules which let far more people vote. To the astonishment and disgust of many, even Irishtowners would have votes, and the novelty alone caused much excitement there. The town was even to have a candidate from the rebel party, Sinn Féin, the ones who’d been involved in the Dublin rebellion. Nothing like this had happened in our town before. The area had returned the same Member of Parliament for over twenty years, a prosperous farmer called Jonty Lehane who supported the Parliamentary Party and was an old friend of the party leader, John Redmond. He was a popular speaker with a great fondness for port, good brandy and the sound of his own voice. My father, who’d seen him speak in public many times, said Mr Lehane was a true moderate, for he’d never seen him either altogether sober or altogether drunk. My mother told my father he should be ashamed of himself – Mister Lehane’s cousin, she said, was a bishop. Mister Lehane himself had a speech impediment, she said, and it sometimes made him slur his words. But even my father, mild man though he was, couldn’t brook such nonsense.

  ‘A speech impediment?’ he said almost bitterly. ‘Aye – a cork from a brandy bottle got stuck in his gullet, maybe.’

  My mother just sniffed, in the way that she had, as though what he said wasn’t worth responding to.

  I’d noticed a growing tendency in my father that summer to contradict my mother, in small things at least. It was always hard to know my father’s true feelings about serious things, because he always liked to be agreeable where possible. But I thought I could feel a difference in him, an impatience with the people my mother so admired, and whose meaningless respect and approval she craved.

  Naturally, my Irishtown friends and I were all mad supporters of Sinn Féin. None of us was certain what the party stood for, except that it stood for change. But that was more than enough. We saw how the Sinn Féiners – the Shinners, people called them – made the respectable people nervous, and for me that alone seemed proof of their worth. Still, when the first posters for the Sinn Féin candidate appeared – in Irishtown, of course – I was genuinely astonished, because the candidate named on the posters was none other than Tom Farrell. I hadn’t heard a word about this beforehand. When I asked Mickey, he said he was as surprised as I was.

  ‘We had a few strangers called to the house, all right,’ he said. ‘And they’d go into corners and whisper about stuff with Tom. But I thought it was just about ordinary stuff – thieving things and that.’

  Phil Murphy was keen to know where the Sinn Féin election posters had been printed, but they bore no printer’s name. Seemingly that was illegal in itself. Glad of the excuse this gave him, the sergeant had his men tear down any Sinn Féin posters they saw. Whether this was political, or just because of who Tom Farrell was, I don’t know: probably it was both. In any case it did Phil Murphy little good: as fast as the old posters fell, new ones went up. This went on for several weeks, and finding the bill-stickers became an obsession with the big red sergeant. He had no success. The posters were put up by night, and each morning – in spite of extra police patrols – a fresh crop of Sinn Féin posters greeted the dawn from walls all over town. One morning the whole gable wall of the police barracks was covered with them, and the King of Irishtown nearly had a fit. Even some of the respectable classes laughed at this jape. To the inhabitants of Irishtown, who were suddenly Sinn Féin supporters to a man, it was hilarious. They, of course, kept their pleasure to themselves when any policemen were about. Their king didn’t like being laughed at.

  * * *

  It was announced that Sinn Féin would have a public election meeting in the square, and our excitement grew. A week or so before the meeting strange men began to appear in town, cocky young citified men who brought with them the air of city glamour, of city crowds and of wide, well-lit streets I’d never visited. We’d never seen anything like them. They were Sinn Féiners, of course, there for the meeting. My friends hung ar
ound them, plying them with excited questions about the future. But I didn’t need to hear any election promises from these young men: to a boy like me, used to nothing but the dullness of this stuffy town, the very sight of them was a promise of bigger, brighter things in other places. The young men hung around together in groups, smoking ready-rolled cigarettes, and they seemed to spend a lot of their time in Irishtown. There was a challenge in the way they walked, the way they dressed, even in the way they stood. To our provincial eyes they were glamour itself, but once my eyes had grown used to the glamour I noticed another thing about the way these men walked and stood and held themselves: I noticed that they were tough-looking men under their city ways, and though they often smiled, their eyes – especially when they saw a policeman – could get narrow and cold. And the police, though they kept a wary eye on the strange young men, never interfered with them on the streets, even on the streets of Irishtown. It struck me that these strangers were quite ready to have a go at the police if they were interfered with. That was such an odd idea for me that it took me some time to believe it; but the police obviously felt it too. These young strangers walked cockily around the town with the air of ownership, and no policeman interfered with them. That impressed me very much. So there was, after all, something besides respectability itself that the Royal Irish Constabulary respected. Or so I thought. But it wasn’t respect, it was something else: wariness. And under the wariness, when the gloves came off, it was fear.

  This was shown to me on the day before the big election meeting. I was playing cowboys with a few of the lads on the fairgreen at the far end of town that day – the far end, that is to say, from any place I was likely to be seen by my mother. I was playing, as ever, with my Irishtown friends. We had old bits of sticks for guns. I had broken my own stick into two short, curved pieces, and stuck them as pistols in my belt. I was Two-gun Tex Doherty, king of the wild prairies, except that I’d just been ambushed and shot down by Mickey Farrell as a whooping Indian brave.