‘Daddy,’ I called out. ‘What about poor Hannah?’
‘Poor Hannah be damned,’ said my father. ‘We’ve worse things nor Hannah to worry about.’
He pulled at the reins, fighting the big horse to a halt. She shivered like a mad thing as she stood, and snorted her disgust. Now in the quiet night I heard again, off behind us, dulled by distance, the sound of the guns. At least I suppose that’s what it was: it sounded like someone breaking bundles of sticks. Mixed in with it were louder noises, hollow bangs that echoed in the night. They’d be Mills bombs, I told myself: grenades. They’d be grenades getting thrown at Sinnotts’ fine house, and their fine Dutch barn, and their stables. And at the people in them. And at our poor Hannah. I still cried, silently.
‘Daddy,’ I said. ‘What happened today?’
My teeth chattered as I spoke, so that I could hardly get the question out at all. Even so I could hear the whinge in my own voice, but I was too tired and terrified to care.
My father didn’t answer. ‘Get on out of that,’ he said to the big horse, and we set off at a walk. I had no idea where we were, but my father knew. After another while he dismounted and opened a gate, and led the horse out into a lane that I knew must be our own. He closed the gate behind him and got back up on the horse’s back.
‘You’ll help your mother pack up when we get home,’ he said. ‘You’ll say nothing about the Sinnotts, do you hear?’
‘But she’ll ask me, Daddy. She’ll ask me what happened.’
‘She won’t ask you,’ my father said. ‘She knows already, God help us.’
‘But why are we packing? Will the Tans come after us? Where are we going?’
My father didn’t answer, but set the horse to walking up the lane.
‘I don’t know where we’re going,’ he said after a while. ‘But we have to go. It’s not Tans we have to fear now. You just help your Mam. I’ll tend to the horse and get the trap ready.’
‘Can’t we go in the morning?’
‘No. No we can’t. We should be gone already.’
I knew from the way he spoke that I’d get no more out of him. My mind was afire with terrible ideas. I was in a kind of dream – a nightmare, but a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. Things didn’t seem real. We came to our house and there was only one small light showing through the kitchen window. When we went in my mother was there, sitting at the table, her head collapsed in her arms. She looked like she was asleep, and didn’t even look up when we came in.
‘Get up, woman,’ my father said angrily. ‘Are you sitting like that since I went? Have you nothing packed?’
I nearly cried out in terror when my mother raised her head and faced us. This woman did not look like my Mam at all. Her hair was dishevelled, and her cheeks scratched where she’d torn at them, and the smeared blood from the scratches was the only colour there. Her whole face was wracked and misshapen with pain and stress and grief, and it was so pale that I wouldn’t even call it white. Her eyes looked plain mad, and at first they didn’t even seem to see me standing there in front of her.
‘Did you get him?’ she asked my father. ‘Did you get our poor Larry? Oh Johnny, what will we do if anything happens to him?
My father spoke to her in strong, stern tones, the way you might speak to a panicked animal, to master it.
‘Don’t you see Larry standing in front of you, woman?’ he said. ‘Are you gone blind as well as mad? Now get up out of that and get some things together. Bring what we’ll need. The rest can stay here. I’ll be in when the cart is got ready.’
And he stalked out. My mother’s eyes fixed on me and she gave a little cry. She gathered me up off my feet and kissed my hair and stroked me and called me pet names till I could stand it no more. This woman seemed a stranger to me. I wriggled free and stood away from her.
‘Larry, my dearest, my sweetheart, my lamb,’ she said.
‘Mam!’ I said, understanding now why my father had spoken so sternly: it was the only way to get through to her.
She stopped and looked at me, blinking her wild eyes.
‘We have to pack up,’ I said. ‘Take what we can carry.’
I hoped she wouldn’t ask me why, because even though I didn’t know it, I was beginning to suspect the reason. If it wasn’t Tans we had to fear, then it was other gunmen. But there was only one lot of other gunmen, and I could think of only one reason that they’d take an interest in us. But I put it out of my mind.
The urgency seemed to get through to my mother at last. She took the big old battered trunk from under the bed and started throwing things into it. I tried to think what we might want. I put a blanket on the floor and loaded it with pots and pans, crockery – a mad mix of things useful and useless, whatever caught my eye. The hurry seemed to make its own momentum. When the blanket was loaded I pulled up the edges and secured them with an old belt of my father’s. Then I started loading another blanket. After a while my father came in. He told us that we had enough.
‘We can’t wait,’ he said.
‘But where are we going, Daddy?’ I asked him.
‘Anywhere that’s not here, Lar,’ he said.
He’d been so strong and sure since I’d seen him first this evening. Now the strain showed in his voice. He sounded like an empty man.
‘I don’t know where we’re going,’ he said. ‘We just have to go, now, and keep on going till we’re well out of this.’
‘When can we come back?’
My father stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked around him at this room that his father and his grandfather had known.
‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We can’t come back.’ And he sounded like he too was going to cry.
The cart was in the yard, and my father and myself loaded it up. The big horse was still sweaty and tense from her crazy gallop; but she was a game beast, and didn’t protest even now at the prospect of more work.
‘Will Mam be all right?’ I asked my father in the yard. ‘She’s acting very odd.’
My father looked at me with his grim face.
‘She’s off her head entirely tonight with the shock,’ he said. ‘I suppose she’ll be all right after, but I don’t know. I don’t know if any of us will be all right, Lar.’
We set off soon after with my Mam in the back of the cart with our belongings, and myself and my father up front in the high seat. The sky by now was overcast with low clouds, and the night was pitch black, but the horse knew the way. For a while my Mam sang softly to herself, all the old songs that I remembered her singing from when I was small. I hadn’t heard her singing in a long time, but I got no joy from hearing it now.
As we went down the lane I noticed a glow in the clouds away over in the direction of Sinnotts’ farm. I pointed it out to my father. He looked back to see if my mother had noticed, but she was off in a world of her own.
‘That’s Sinnotts’ burning,’ my father said.
I hadn’t thought that my heart could sink any further. The urgency of the packing had driven all else to the back of my mind. Now it came back again, all of a slap, and I said nothing. After a while we reached the road and turned towards the town where my father worked. We met nobody as we drove along through the dark. At the outskirts of the town my father turned up a boreen that would take us around the houses, so that we didn’t have to go through the streets and risk meeting patrols. In the darkness I hadn’t a clue where we were. We might as well not have been in Ireland at all. We were just a family trekking away from trouble, with our belongings bound up in old blankets in the back of the cart and my mother sitting half-mad among them.
By now she’d stopped singing, and seemed to have sunk into an exhausted sleep. My father told me to see if she was awake, and I groped in the darkness till I found her shoulder. I nudged her gently.
‘Mam?’ I called softly. There was no reply except that her breathing changed a bit. I told my father.
‘You should have told her you were going after Hannah,’ he
said. I waited for him to say more, but he was waiting for me to reply.
‘It was a foolish thing to do,’ I said. ‘But I was trying to be useful.’
I felt his big hand on my sleeve.
‘I know, son,’ he said. ‘I know you were.’
Neither of us said anything else for a long time, and the night was still except for the clop of the big horse’s hooves and the rattle of the cartwheels on the road. Far off in the blackness a dog howled, and its call was taken up by others. The hairs on my neck prickled and I thought of the banshee Mrs Mahon had heard three nights running. Banshees were often attached to families. They came to keen over them when their time had come. Maybe the banshee Mrs Mahon had heard was attached to the Sinnotts. Maybe she’d combed her long hair and keened her keen for them, knowing what was coming to that snug old house among the trees.
‘I was coming home from work and I met Biddy Wall on the road,’ my father said from beside me. He spoke very quietly.
‘She told me Hannah was strayed, and that you’d gone after her. “He’ll have to drive her in the dark,” she said, and I thought how foolish you were, knowing how contrary Hannah could be. So I said I’d ride out after my supper and maybe meet you on the road. But when I got home your mother was distracted.
‘“Oh Johnny, Johnny,” says she to me, “I’m after destroying us.” I could see she was half-mad with worry, but I couldn’t get the story of it out of her for a time. She thought the Tans were after taking you off, do you see. She saw you go out, then she saw another lot of them come through the yard, and you never came back. She thought she’d find you lying dead in the field – you wouldn’t be the first.’
I felt a cold and greasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted him to shut up and I wanted him to go on. Because I knew now for sure what was coming.
‘She was afraid for a long time to go and look,’ my father said. ‘And when she did go out there was no sign of Hannah and no sign of you. So she thought they’d taken you for a hostage, the way they’ve done in other places. She said she fell down in the field and lost her senses altogether. She was picturing you dead in a ditch somewhere, or finding out that the Tans were going to kill you if no-one informed on them who ambushed that patrol.
‘She came to herself and she went back inside and she prayed. She prayed all day. Then she saw the Tans come back through the yard again. She ran out and pleaded with their officer to let you go. And he – may God rot him – was smart. He never let on that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He said he could promise nothing, but he’d do what he could – if she told him something about the men they were looking for.’
I pictured the scene in the yard, my Mam on her knees there in the dirt among the scrawny, useless chickens that we kept, with them black devils laughing at her. I felt the tears in my eyes again. How could she have known where the ambushers were? And yet she had, or she’d guessed. Everybody knew everything, I supposed, in a place like ours. Real news wasn’t in newspaper headlines; real news travelled in whispers.
‘She informed,’ I said, in a voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘My Mam informed.’
‘She was stone mad with grief and fear,’ my father said. ‘The Tan officer played her like you’d play a fish. And when he heard what she knew then he sent runners to collect the other patrols. They were to meet him at Moore’s Cross, where he’d have reinforcements. At least she could tell me that much.
‘I grabbed your mother by the shoulders and I shook her. I was rough. It was the only way to get any sense out of her. “How long ago?” I shouted at her. “How long ago was this?” Because I’d met Biddy, do you see, and I knew that you’d be in Sinnotts’.’
I tried to picture that scene in our kitchen, but I didn’t want to. I imagined the thoughts that must have gone through my father’s head on the frantic ride across the fields to Sinnotts’, with his ears straining to hear the first gunfire over the thunder of the big mare’s hooves.
And all I’d wanted was to get Hannah. All I’d wanted to do was to help. My mother had informed, and that was a terrible thing. But it was I who’d been the cause of everything. Only her love of me had driven her.
‘They’ll find out who told,’ my father said. ‘Even if every man-jack of them in Sinnotts’ dies tonight, others will find out. And one night they’ll come for your mother. I don’t know if they’d shoot her as a spy – they don’t like shooting women, it looks bad in the papers. But our family is finished there for good. Nobody would so much as say hello to us. They’d cross the road when they saw us coming, and spit when they passed us. Nobody would buy from us or sell to us. I’d be an informer’s man. You’d be an informer’s child. And, then again, maybe they would shoot her. Maybe she’d be found by the road with sign hung round her neck warning others. And you and me would still be finished.’
Even in the pitch dark, even though it was miles away by now, I was tempted to look back in the direction of my home. Because I knew now that I’d never see it again.
‘What will happen to the farm, Daddy?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. We can sell it, maybe. Or maybe we can leave it there to rot. It’s rotting anyhow.’
I didn’t know what to say or think or even feel. It struck me that the very last ordinary thing I’d known had been simply myself and my Mam in the kitchen, with me dawdling and her dusting: a very ordinary thing. If I hadn’t been in the kitchen then we might never have noticed the Tans. All these terrible events might never have happened. When I’d walked out our kitchen door today to look for Hannah I had walked into a different world. It had looked just like the world I knew, but it had been populated by devils. I thought of the handsome Tan who’d grinned at me through the window and pointed his rifle at me. Suddenly I wished very hard that he’d pulled the trigger.
I found myself picturing the scene in Sinnotts’ house earlier. All of the Sinnotts would have been around somewhere – the seven sons and old Adam. I hadn’t counted the strangers I’d seen, but there’d been about a dozen anyway. That made maybe twenty men as well as the poor old woman, with her boiled eggs and bread and her big pots of tea. I remembered the attacking fire from the open country to the east: the Tans had had the place surrounded. They’d raked it with gunfire and bombed it with grenades, and it was burning now. How many had died because I’d gone looking for Hannah so thoughtlessly? How many had escaped through the dark killing fields? How many of those fine strong Sinnott sons were stretched cold now and dead, or burning with their home?
There are times when your mind can’t afford to dwell on things. Instead of the Sinnotts, I started to think about Hannah. It might be that she’d survived the attack, though the Tans would blast anything that moved – what else could they do in the dark, where any shadow might be an enemy? Was Hannah even now browsing, unharmed, by the light of the burning farmhouse? Was she running panicked with the other stock, lost in unknown fields, a terrified refugee just as much as ourselves?
My foolish thoughts were interrupted suddenly by terror. Behind me, so close that I nearly screamed, a voice was raised in a high, sobbing keen that didn’t sound like any human sound. It went on and on, rising and rising, a wild, piercing, wordless howl with all the pain and anguish in it of the whole round world. The banshee! It was the banshee come to get us! I was so frightened that I nearly jumped off the cart into the road, but my father, feeling me starting to move, pushed me down. And then I realised that it wasn’t the banshee. The sorrowful woman keening was my own mother, who’d given me birth, awake now in the back of our bockety cart and keening for a whole lost world of family and friends, and house and home, and maybe – for all I could tell – for our own lost poor Hannah, the poor cow.
A Note from the Author
Dear Reader,
These stories were part of a big project that I began a few years ago. The idea was to write stories on aspects of the War of Independence period that I didn’t think I’d be able to fit into novels.
The
original plan was completely unrealistic – to write between twenty and thirty stories covering country, town and city, and dealing with kids whose families were active in the fight as well as those for whom the entire struggle was simply a calamity. The fact that just six of the finished stories fill a whole book will tell you exactly how foolish a notion this was – I’d need to be writing till Tibbs’ Eve to finish thirty such stories … especially if I wanted to have a life as well.
The stories here are set at various times throughout the period between the end of World War I and the Truce, as follows: ‘The Empty Steps’ (1920); ‘Mulligan’s Drop’ (summer 1920); ‘The King of Irish-town’ (1917–18); ‘Dead Man’s Music’ (1920); ‘Services Rendered’ (1921); ‘The Poor Cow’ (1921).
None of the stories is based on any particular real-life incident – ‘The Empty Steps’, for instance, came from nothing more than a morning spent looking at guns in the National Museum. The germ of ‘Services Rendered’ was a wildly exaggerated family story told to me years ago by my Aunt Kathleen, to whom this book is dedicated. Although she came from a family of tailors, Kathleen was no great shakes with a needle and thread; but in telling supposedly true stories her skills at embroidery were incredible. According to my mother, the story as I heard it was basically a pack of lies, but I thought it was far too good a story not to rip off at some stage, so I’ve done it here.
If you would like to send comments to Gerard Whelan
you may do so at: [email protected]
He would love to hear from you.
WAR CHILDREN
Varied experiences in town and country of the War of Independence seen through the eyes of young people. Whelan’s deep knowledge of this period in Irish history, together with his sharp and accurate dialogue and his strong sense of humanity and humour, provide us with exceptional insights and an authentic feeling for the plight of children in wartime.
War Children Page 14
