War Children

by Gerard Whelan

  I was dying nobly in the grass, taking my time about it, when I noticed Tom Farrell and two of the young strangers rounding a corner from the direction of Irishtown. They made an odd little procession. One of the strangers was carrying what looked like a bundle of newspapers, another a big galvanised bucket with the handle of a whitewash brush sticking out of it. Tom Farrell himself – Tom who’d been almost alone among the young men of Irishtown in having no interest in Gaelic games – was carrying a hurley.

  It was one of the strangers who took my attention, though – the man who carried the bundle of papers. I’d already singled him out from seeing him around the town. He was a short little man. His cockiness made him stand out even among the company he kept. Alone among them, I’d never seen him give a policeman a dirty look – he only smiled at them, a bland, secret smile that was more insulting than any glower. All the other newcomers seemed to defer to him, and I’d taken it that he was some kind of leader among them.

  Mickey Farrell stopped short when he saw the men coming.

  ‘Begob,’ he said, ‘they must be very sure of themselves.’

  ‘What are they at?’ I asked him.

  ‘They’re putting up posters about the meeting,’ Mickey said. ‘That’s what it looks like, anyhow.’

  That explained the bundle of papers and the bucket. So here at last were at least some of the mysterious bill-stickers, whom Phil Murphy’s men had never been able to find – ‘the Scarlet Pimpernels of Irishtown,’ as my father called them.

  There was a block of old, half-derelict houses on the corner of the Green near where we boys were standing, their roofs broken and their doors and windows boarded up. The four young men made their way over towards these. Tom Farrell called out to us cheerfully.

  ‘There’s the hard men,’ he said. ‘Is it war, or is it a game of cowboys?’

  I remembered that question many times later, after the shooting war started. It was a question that a lot of very serious people in Ireland were asking themselves then, though I didn’t know it. When Tom asked it, of course, it was only a joking remark. We all laughed and ran over to Tom. It was a chance to have a closer look at his exotic friends.

  I couldn’t take Tom Farrell seriously as a political candidate. Politicians were old, and solid, and respectable (in my mother’s terms), and talked rubbish they obviously didn’t believe in. Tom was young, hardly more than a boy himself, and if he talked nonsense itself, he was passionate about it. He had a way of throwing back his head and laughing at the smallest funny thing. He seemed too lively for politics. It seemed like a game he was playing, the way we played cowboys.

  ‘It’s cowboys, Tom,’ I said to him. ‘And your brother is after shooting me.’

  Tom Farrell reached over and pulled one of my ‘guns’ from my belt. He held the stick up and pretended to sight down the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Bang!’ he said. Then he reversed it and let on to examine it critically. ‘I do believe there’s dirt in your barrel,’ he said to me. ‘It’s a good thing you were never in the Citizens’ Army. Poor ould Seán Connolly would have had your guts for garters if he saw you with a weapon in that state.’

  He turned to the short stranger and gestured at me with the stick.

  ‘This is Pat Doherty, Jamesy,’ he said. ‘His Da is Tim Doherty, the printer.’

  The man called Jamesy grinned at me. ‘How are you, Pat boy?’ he said. ‘Give us a look at your pistol.’

  He reached out and took the old bit of a stick from Tom Farrell’s hand, and he too pretended to examine it. He clicked his tongue.

  ‘Shocking,’ he said. ‘Absolutely shocking.’

  His speech had a singing quality to it, an accent alien to the local one. I knew it was a southern sound, but didn’t know enough to place it any better than that.

  ‘Put the chap on a charge, Jamesy,’ said the third young man, a rail-thin lamppost of a fellow with his cap pulled down over one eye. I grinned, happy to be accepted by these strangers from another world, thrilling fearfully at the thought of what my mother would say if she saw me, almost wishing that she could.

  Suddenly Mickey Farrell pushed past me and grabbed his brother’s sleeve, hissing a warning.

  ‘Peelers, Tom!’ he said.

  Everyone looked around. It was only one policeman, but not just any of them: it was Phil Murphy himself, advancing on us from the other end of the fairgreen, grim in his massive authority and staring straight at us where we stood. You could see him straighten even more as he came, making a bee-line for the group of us there – not that he noticed us boys, of course: his eyes were fastened on the three young men, and on the posters and paste-bucket they carried so openly.

  No-one said anything. I was terrified. For all their cockiness, I imagined the young men were in for the mother and father of all hidings at the very least. Giving sneering looks to ordinary policemen was one thing, but Phil Murphy was no ordinary policeman; sneering looks, to Phil Murphy, would be like a red rag to a bull. The whole business with the posters, and his failure to find the bill-stickers, had made him, for the first time ever, a bit of a laughing-stock in the town. And no-one made a laughing-stock out of Phil Murphy, least of all an Irishtowner like Tom Farrell.

  I half-expected the three young men to run, but there was no sign from them that they realised their danger. Even Tom, who had good cause to know the sergeant’s ways, seemed alarmingly unworried. Mickey Farrell grabbed his brother’s sleeve and shook it.

  ‘Go!’ Mickey hissed. ‘You can still get around the corner. He’ll never catch youse in the lanes.’

  Tom gave him the strangest look that, to this day, I’ve ever seen pass between one brother and another. It was a calm, half-smiling look, and though his eyes were on Mickey’s face there was absolutely no sign of recognition in them. I’ve often thought about that look since, and tried to put a name to it. I still couldn’t do that for certain, but I have my suspicions. I think it was the look of someone who’d been waiting for something for a long time, and who thought that the thing they were waiting for had finally arrived. Mickey told me one time, a few years later, that when he saw that look he realised he didn’t really know his brother at all.

  ‘Don’t worry, little fella,’ Tom said gently to his brother. ‘I’m sober this time.’

  The third man had been looking calmly at the advancing King.

  ‘Begod,’ he said, ‘but isn’t he the fine figure of a man all the same?’

  ‘He’ve a fine figure of a belly anyhow,’ the man called Jamesy said breezily. ‘Look at the bulge of it under that tunic.’

  ‘Bacon and cabbage,’ Tom Farrell murmured dreamily, and there was a strange, almost fond tone in his voice that, for no reason I knew, really frightened me. ‘Bacon and cabbage, and pints of good black porter got for free off of grateful publicans.’

  And lardy cake, he might have added, given by respectable women of the town.

  We boys, without thinking or talking about it, had drawn back a little bit from the three Sinn Féiners. It wasn’t that we were deserting them – God forbid! But for all that he made no threatening movements, there was something so nakedly dangerous in Phil Murphy’s purposeful advance that, with every step he took, a sort of fog of violence seemed to thicken in the air. That may sound daft, I don’t know. It didn’t seem daft then. Maybe you’ve heard people talk of an atmosphere that you could cut with a knife; well, there of the fairgreen that day, as Phil Murphy came up to the three young Sinn Féiners, there was an atmosphere you could have cut with a soupspoon. The sergeant never took his eyes off the group of young men the whole time he came on, and the eyes were fixed on Tom Farrell in particular. The three men, in their turn, just stood easily there, and watched him coming. When he reached them, Murphy stopped. He towered over Tom, who was the tallest of the three.

  ‘So it’s you that’s been defacing public property, Farrell,’ he said. ‘I suspected as much. Well, I caught you red-handed now.’ He looked contemptuously at the other
two men. ‘Who’s your go-boy pals?’ he asked.

  Tom said nothing at all, only smiled up at him with the same dreamy smile he’d given Mickey. There was silence for a time, and in the silence Phil Murphy’s red face grew redder and darker. His hanging hands balled themselves into fists, and he seemed about to clout Tom Farrell there and then.

  ‘Well?’ he barked after a while. ‘Are you deaf as well as stupid? I asked you a question – who’s your friends?’

  The small man called Jamesy slid between Tom and Murphy.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive poor Tom, sergeant,’ he said to Murphy. His voice was soft and almost ingratiating. ‘Truth to tell, you hit the nail on the head: Tom’s hearing is a bit damaged – ever since he was attacked up a lane by some cowardly ruffians one night a few months ago. He’s a game lad, but it was three against one, and they laid into him something terrible. Sure, the poor lad is hardly the better of it yet. He still has a ringing in his ears.’ He sighed. ‘There are some real desperadoes in these parts, sergeant,’ he said. ‘I blame the times that are in it. I don’t envy you the job of keeping the peace.’

  Phil Murphy stared at the small, slight man in front of him. Jamesy had spoken perfectly civilly, but somehow you could hear in his innocent words the most insolent of sneers. Certainly Phil Murphy had heard it.

  ‘Desperadoes?’ Murphy said. ‘We have no desperadoes here. Only a few jumped-up corner boys with big ideas of themselves. But we do try to teach them the error of their ways, so we do. And I still haven’t been told who you two are.’

  ‘You first,’ Jamesy said.

  Murphy stared at him. ‘What?’ he said. He sounded shocked.

  ‘You tell us your name first. It’s only politeness.’

  Murphy’s face was growing dark. This little stranger clearly wasn’t afraid of him. If anything, he seemed to find the big policeman amusing. That was not a thing that Phil Murphy liked. He’d lost face over the election posters matter; now here was one of the culprits, jeering him.

  ‘I’m the police sergeant!’ Murphy spat. ‘Isn’t that enough for you? Or don’t you have police sergeants in whatever Cork sewer you crawled out of?’

  The little smile never left Jamesy’s face. For all that their every exchange sounded laced with menace, he acted as though he and the sergeant were two friends bantering with each other on a street corner.

  ‘Oh we do,’ he said now. ‘We do have police sergeants in the Cork sewer I crawled out of. Only, do you see, they know their place.’

  Murphy flinched as though Jamesy had struck him. Beside me I heard Mickey Farrell draw in a startled breath. I doubted that anyone had ever spoken like that to Phil Murphy before, at least not since he put on a police uniform.

  ‘What?’ Phil Murphy said again. It was as though he hoped he’d misheard the little stranger.

  ‘They – know – their – place,’ Jamesy repeated, slowly and carefully. ‘They’re not so – impertinent.’

  The insult was there now, naked and unmistakable. Phil Murphy’s eyes flared with an ugly light. His face went a dark, dark red. I saw his hand reach up towards the long truncheon that he always wore on his belt.

  ‘By God!’ he said, almost to himself. ‘By God!’

  Jamesy kept smiling that same, friendly smile. He smiled it as he saw Murphy’s hand reach for the truncheon, and he smiled it as his own hand snaked up and, in a single slick movement, pulled a long-barrelled black revolver from inside his coat. We boys – all of us, independently – gasped. That was a real gun, there on our fairgreen: a real pistol, presumably with bullets in it. Jamesy put the muzzle of the revolver squarely against the bottle-green cloth of the tunic covering Phil Murphy’s chest. He had to reach up to do it. The sergeant’s big hand froze an inch from the handle of his truncheon. His eyes bulged, and he stared down at the pistol with a look of absolute astonishment on his face. His mouth opened under his ragged red moustache, but no sound came out of it.

  ‘Touch that truncheon,’ Jamesy said in the same mild, friendly voice, ‘and I’ll blow a hole in you that a pigeon could fly through – if it didn’t mind getting its wings wet.’

  Phil Murphy’s bulging eyes rose from the pistol to the still-smiling face of the man who held it. They went back down to the pistol, and then back up to the face. He simply didn’t seem to believe what he was seeing. His mouth worked, but still nothing came out. His face wasn’t dark red any more, nor even pale red: it was white.

  ‘Now,’ Jamesy said with mild satisfaction. ‘Now you look more like a police sergeant.’

  Tom Farrell moved to stand in front of Phil Murphy, who looked at him blankly. The sergeant was like a man who’d been in an accident and was still dazed. He was in shock. Tom Farrell smiled at him. He reached up with one hand and took Murphy’s helmet off his head. He had to stand on tiptoe to do it. He hefted the helmet in one hand, and in the other he hefted the hurley he held. He considered them both. Then he threw the sergeant’s helmet in the air and hit it a savage belt of the hurley. The helmet flew up through the air and bounced off the roadway a good twenty yards away. Murphy stared after it, blinking. Then he turned empty eyes to look at Tom Farrell.

  ‘That was my helmet,’ he said. There was a catch in his voice, almost like a little child that was going to cry.

  ‘Count yourself lucky,’ Jamesy said coolly, ‘that it wasn’t your head.’

  Murphy looked at him with that same blank look on his face. He seemed to have completely forgotten the gun stuck in his chest. Jamesy ground it into his tunic, to remind him it was there.

  ‘On your knees,’ he said.

  Phil Murphy stared at him. He didn’t seem to understand.

  ‘Get down on your knees!’ Jamesy said. ‘NOW!’

  His voice was suddenly cold.

  Phil Murphy looked like he was going to say something, but he changed his mind. Slowly, stiffly, almost humbly, he sank to his knees on the roadway.

  ‘Sure, you wouldn’t shoot me, boys,’ he said. ‘I never done anything to deserve that.’

  I was shocked by the humility in his voice. He looked up at the young men with a terrible, lost look in his eyes, like a man whose whole world had been taken away from him. Even if I did hate Phil Murphy, I hated it even more to see him like that. I hated the look on his face.

  ‘Will we shoot him, do you think, Tom?’ Jamesy asked Tom Farrell. His tone was conversational again.

  Tom Farrell stood looking down at Phil Murphy’s bare head, bent now, so that you could see a big spot of bald, naked skin gleaming white through the red hair. Tom hefted the hurley again, and for a terrible second I thought he was going to pull on Phil Murphy’s head with it, in the same savage way that he’d pulled on the helmet. There was a look of downright gloating on Tom Farrell’s face, a look I hated seeing as much as I hated seeing Murphy humbled, and with – it seemed to me then – as little reason. But something mean and cruel stood out plain on Tom’s face at that moment – the hatred, I suppose, bred in Irishtown blood by generations of being thought of as hardly more than vermin. But then Tom seemed to take possession of himself; the look faded, and his face became again the one I knew.

  ‘Look up at me, Phil Murphy,’ Tom said.

  Phil Murphy looked up, and I was disgusted and horrified to see that he was crying. There were tears running down his big face. His whole world had been turned upside down in the space of a couple of seconds. He thought he was going to die there in the dust of the street, and he didn’t want to. Beside me I heard Mickey Farrell and several of the other Irishtown boys snigger, but I saw nothing to snigger about. I didn’t like seeing men in this situation. It made all of them cheap, somehow, and I didn’t think any of them – even Phil Murphy – deserved it. But then, I suppose, I had the leisure to feel like that: I wasn’t from Irish-town, and the terror of Murphy I felt was of a different kind from the terror the Irishtowners knew. All other things being equal, it was unlikely, in the ordinary run of things, that he and his cronies would ever be
at me up in a dark alley: I was far too respectable for that to be an option, at least in the world we had known before now. Though it was obvious from the scene in front of me, even to my young eyes, that that world had suddenly changed.

  ‘What’s it to be, Tom?’ Jamesy said. His revolver was pointing at Phil Murphy’s head. He placed the muzzle of the gun now between Murphy’s bushy red eyebrows, and he pulled back the hammer. I jumped at the sound of the dry metal click. A shot itself couldn’t have been any louder. There seemed to be no other sound in the world.

  Phil Murphy started blubbering. There’s no other word for it. His face crumpled up, and under his ragged moustache his lips made strange, ugly shapes. He was sure, I knew, that he was going to die. I was sure of it myself.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t kill me!’ Phil Murphy said. He was begging. There was a whiney sound in his voice that I would never have imagined it could have. The three young men looked at him with no feeling in their eyes except, maybe, a sort of curiosity. They had the look almost of little kids playing with a new toy, trying it out to see what they could make it do.

  ‘I’ve a poor widowed mother,’ Phil Murphy pleaded, ‘and I’m her only support.’

  Jamesy raised his eyebrows.

  ‘She’d do better,’ he said, ‘to look for a steadier prospect, so. I don’t think your job is a secure one, sergeant.’ He looked at Tom Farrell. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  Tom Farrell leaned down until his face was right up against Phil Murphy’s. Murphy’s face, raddled with tears and with fear, looked suddenly old, fat and weak.

  ‘You’re looking at the next Member of Parliament for this constituency,’ Tom Farrell said. Then, like a teacher: ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘The next …’ Phil Murphy’s tongue stumbled over the words. He had trouble getting them out. ‘The next Member … of P-Parliament for … this constituency.’

  Tom Farrell nodded. ‘You’ll leave me alone,’ he said. ‘What will you do?’