Strumpet City

by James Plunkett

  Rashers set out with the determination to try everything he knew. He was hungry. He had been hungry for weeks. It was a miserable kip of a city at the best of times. It had gone to hell altogether now. Day in and day out he stood in the gutter and played his whistle. Nobody minded him. Occasionally, when he had made certain there were no police to see him, he begged. They turned aside from him. He knocked at door after door for odd jobs. There were none, or some locked-out unfortunate had got there before him. Once he met Hennessy. He was aggrieved at the perversity of fate, the obduracy of the employers, the supineness of the Government, the stubbornness of the strikers, the deadlock that looked like paralysing the city for ever.

  ‘Is there any moves at all—or what?’ he asked irritably.

  ‘Not a damn thing,’ Hennessy answered. He too was gloomy.

  ‘Jaysus,’ Rashers exploded, ‘are they going to let the whole bloody population starve!’

  ‘That seems to be the programme,’ Hennessy confirmed.

  ‘You’re not working yourself—I suppose?’

  ‘No. I’m living on the expectations.’

  ‘Sit down a minute,’ Rashers said.

  There were two abandoned buckets on the piece of waste ground. They upended them for seats. Grass and nettles surrounded them and in front of them, against the gable of a warehouse, a hoarding displayed its advertisements. One had been put there by some religious-minded body. It read:

  ‘Ask—and you shall receive.

  Knock—and it shall be opened unto you.’

  ‘Me arse,’ Rashers said, when he had read aloud this message of hope.

  ‘Some Protestant crowd puts them up,’ Hennessy explained.

  ‘Yes, telling a pack of bloody lies. They shouldn’t be let,’ Rashers said.

  Hennessy, prepared as always to be reasonable, said: ‘I suppose it gives employment.’

  Then, in an effort to be cheerful he asked: ‘What do you think of the one beside it?’

  Rashers studied the picture of a man with a ruddy, smiling face, dressed in blue striped pyjamas, straddling a Bovril bottle, that tossed on the waves of a blue ocean. It said: ‘Bovril—prevents that sinking feeling.’

  He spat elaborately and glared fiercely at Hennessy.

  ‘Ah, now,’ Hennessy protested, ‘it makes you laugh.’

  ‘It makes me hungry,’ Rashers said.

  It was no use trying to humour him. So Hennessy said: ‘The Government inquiry might bring this lock-out to an end sooner than we think.’

  But it did nothing of the kind. When the inquiry pronounced and said the Federation form should be withdrawn, the employers refused, so the only result was a further spread of the lock-out. It set more and more pacing the streets, and there were fewer still in a position to give anything to Rashers. He walked through streets that were empty of any promise of help. The collecting boxes rattled, the pickets paced up and down, long convoys of carts and wagons moved through the city, always under escorts of police and military; the trams and the power stations were similarly guarded. Sometimes he went down to the monster meetings at Beresford Place, mingling with thousands of the out-of-works and listening, as the great orange sunsets of early October stained the waters of the nearby Liffey with colours of green and red and gold, to the speeches that thundered from the lighted windows of Liberty Hall. He heard the wild cheering and now and then the great outpouring of thousands of voices in song. He watched the startled gulls rising from grimy parapets and hovering with loud cries about the iridescent river. And as he did so he became conscious of belonging to nothing in particular. The thought increased his desperation. There was a time when he could have put a brick through a window and earned a few days in gaol, where there would be shelter and food of a sort. Now they would treat him as a rioter and beat him until he was half dead. He watched hungry faces that looked up at the speechmakers from under the peaks of caps. He saw the light of hope in thousands of eyes. But he was not one of them. The respectable and the good-living in neatly kept clothes passed him on their way home. They glanced at him quickly and turned away and wanted nothing to do with him. When the well-to-do looked at him they did not see him at all. That was in early October, when the days were drawing in and the evenings were coming early, making the pavements damp and the streets cold. His spirits sank lower. He was constantly hungry. He was always cold. Then, for the first time in many months, his luck changed.

  He was looking into a shop window in which he saw nothing but his own reflection, his long, ragged coat, the grey beard, the hat that had lost all semblance of shape and fitted over head and ears like a bowl. He was thinking of food. He had thought of little else for days. A hand tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Using the head?’ said the voice.

  When he turned around it was Pat Bannister. A generous skin, Rashers knew, but unlikely to have anything to give away.

  ‘I’m thinking about hard times,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a general complaint,’ Pat said.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have anything you could spare?’

  Pat shook his head.

  ‘Why aren’t you playing the whistle?’ he asked.

  ‘Because no one has the inclination to listen,’ Rashers said.

  ‘Some is too stingy and the rest is just too bloody hungry. Music is out of fashion.’

  ‘Did you ever try advertising?’

  ‘It isn’t one of my accomplishments,’ Rashers confessed.

  ‘There’s nothing to it,’ Pat said. ‘Come on for a walk with me and I’ll show you.’

  They went through back streets that both of them had known since childhood. They now looked different. There were too many men moving about and there was too little traffic. Nothing was happening. Rashers thought it was like Sunday without the bells. As they walked Pat said there was little hope of the strike finishing soon. It would go on through the winter. They were setting up food kitchens for the women and children in Liberty Hall. The Countess Markiewicz was going to serve the meals with her own hands. He asked Rashers if he had ever heard of her. Rashers grunted. She was one of them high class oul wans that were sticking their noses into a hundred and one things nowadays. Trouble-makers. Like Madame Despard and Maud Gonne. Acting the hooligan about votes for women when they should be at home looking after their husbands and their unfortunate children. Mad Gonne and Mrs. Desperate, the people were calling them. No wonder the city was starving.

  The distant ringing of a handbell interrupted his thoughts and Pat said: ‘Now you’ll see what I mean.’

  They turned the corner. The gleam on the three brass balls outside Mr. Donegan’s shop caught his eyes first, then the long queue of women, each laden with ornaments or bundles of clothes, then the figure of the bellringer. He was a man of Rashers’ age, but more hale. His body was hidden beneath two sandwich boards which were suspended by straps from his shoulders. The boards announced:

  ‘Donegan’s for Value

  Best Prices

  All Welcome’

  ‘There you are now,’ Pat said. Rashers stared, puzzled.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘The advertising business. A job like that would suit you down to the ground.’

  ‘What the hell use is that when this fella here has nabbed it already.’

  ‘If Donegan finds it worth while to take on a man, so will somebody else,’ Pat explained. ‘The thing for you to do is to persuade one of the other pawnbrokers. What about Silverwater in Macken Street?’

  ‘The Erin’s Isle?’ Rashers said. ‘I’d have a hope.’

  ‘Give me a minute,’ Pat said.

  He went across to the man with the bell. They talked for a while. Then he rejoined Rashers.

  ‘Now we’ll make our way to The Erin’s Isle,’ Pat announced.

  It took them about ten minutes to reach Mr. Silverwater’s establishment. It was an unusual building. Beneath the three brass balls the figure of Ireland, with golden tresses reaching down the green mantle about
her shoulders, wept over her stringless harp. The scroll at her feet spelled out in white letters: ‘The Erin’s Isle’. A queue of patient women had formed outside.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ Rashers asked.

  ‘We wait,’ Pat said firmly.

  Rashers wondered why. But it did not matter. There was nothing else to do.

  ‘That’s an occupation you get used to,’ he said.

  The pawnshop had once been a public house. Rashers remembered having a drink in it as a young man. About forty years ago, he thought. In those days it had not been so hard to find a crust to eat. Or so it seemed now.

  ‘Do you remember Jeremiah Brady?’ he asked Pat.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He owned The Erin’s Isle when it was a public house.’

  ‘I don’t remember it as a public house,’ Pat confessed.

  ‘Jeremiah had three faults that make a bad publican,’ Rashers said. ‘He stocked only the best, he kept too easy a slate and his best customer was himself.’

  ‘A good man’s failing,’ Pat said.

  ‘It put Jeremiah in Stubbs,’ Rashers finished, ‘and in the heel of the hunt it put him in Glasnevin.’

  The sound of a handbell attracted the attention of the waiting women as the man from Donegan’s turned the corner into the street. He nodded over at Pat. Then he began to parade up and down. The noise brought one of The Erin’s Isle clerks to the door. Eventually Mr. Silverwater himself appeared. He found the bellringer parading up and down, bawling out the claims of Mr. Donegan to the patronage of his own customers. Mr. Silverwater was astounded.

  ‘Hey, you,’ he shouted, ‘get to hell out of my street.’

  The bellringer ignored him. Mr. Silverwater read the board in front and when the bellringer turned he suffered the shock of reading the same message on the back.

  ‘Donegan’s for Value

  Best Prices

  All Welcome’

  ‘My customers,’ Mr. Silverwater yelled at Pat, who had crossed over to sympathise with him. ‘He wants my customers.’

  ‘That’s shocking,’ Pat said.

  ‘What’s the matter with Donegan?’ Mr. Silverwater asked. ‘We’re good friends. We often play poker together.’

  ‘Maybe you beat him too often,’ Pat suggested.

  ‘We’ve been playing for maybe fifteen years,’ Silverwater said, ‘it couldn’t be that.’

  ‘He’s taking advantage of the times to extend his trade,’ Pat suggested. ‘Business is business.’

  ‘Business be damned,’ Mr. Silverwater said.

  Then he yelled again.

  ‘Hey, get back to your own streets.’

  ‘You won’t shift him that way,’ Pat said, ‘let me talk to him.’

  He went over to the bellringer. They held an animated discussion out of earshot of Mr. Silverwater. Pat returned. The bellringer went off.

  ‘How did you do it?’ Mr. Silverwater asked.

  ‘I told him you’re a friend of Mr. Donegan, and it wasn’t very nice to cause trouble between you. I said you played poker together.’

  ‘That was it. That was exactly my very strong emotions,’ Mr. Silverwater approved. ‘We are poker friends for years.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Pat continued, ‘he’ll keep away from your shop all right—but will that stop him from parading the streets your customers live in?’

  The villainy of it made Mr. Silverwater speechless. He nodded his head several times, unable to find words.

  ‘I could tell you what to do,’ Pat added. Mr. Silverwater clutched his arm.

  ‘You speak,’ he invited. ‘I like you. You tell me.’

  ‘Get a bellringer of your own. Send him around the neighbourhood every day.’ Pat pointed to Rashers. ‘There’s a man over there that’s popular and well known.’

  He called to Rashers, who shuffled over. Mr. Silverwater looked him up and down.

  ‘Can you ring a bell?’ he asked Rashers.

  ‘Everything from a door bell to a church bell,’ Rashers confirmed.

  ‘And you know the neighbourhood?’

  ‘Born and reared in it—man and boy.’

  ‘Do you want a job?’

  ‘Lead the way,’ Rashers said.

  Mr. Silverwater did not hesitate.

  ‘Come to me in the morning. I’ll give you a start.’

  Rashers said he would consider it an honour.

  ‘I’ll fix Donegan,’ Mr. Silverwater swore.

  They parted.

  ‘You’re a decent man,’ Rashers said to Pat as they walked back towards Chandlers Court.

  ‘It worked like a charm,’ Pat agreed.

  ‘If I’d the price of it I’d stand you a drink.’

  ‘We’ll take the wish for the deed,’ Pat said. He went off smiling. Rashers made his bargain with Mr. Silverwater. The job was worth ten shillings a week to him. He was furnished with sandwich boards which had the advantage of keeping out some of the cold. He was given a handbell and instructed to parade the neighbourhood during mornings and afternoons. One of his perquisites was a glass of milk and a bun on Saturdays when the shop closed and he had helped to put up the shutters. Life was a little better, but he was not happy. He found it hard to get about. Sometimes, especially on wet days, his bad leg ached and made him hobble. Sometimes his chest pained abominably and dizziness made the streets spin and spin about him. He began for the first time to be troubled by the hunger of others. The men who joked as he passed were gaunt and dispirited, the women he rang his bell at were hollow-eyed and worn. Little children pressed their faces to the glass on Saturdays to watch him eat and made the bun stick in his throat. He trudged through the streets and rang his bell and made up cheerful jingles to cry beneath the windows. But his heart was full of anxiety and his spirit was beginning to bow in defeat.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  For two months Father O’Connor ministered in his stricken city. It had become a world of picket lines, thundering speeches, convoys that moved under police protection, bitter outbreaks of street fighting that were followed by day after day of apathy and misery. They were reaping now the fruits of their disobedience. They shook collection boxes at him: ‘Help the locked-out workers.’ God helped those who helped themselves. If they signed the undertaking to obey the lawful instructions of their employers there would be an immediate end to collection boxes and violence. But no. They listened only to Larkin. Pride it was.

  Hunger was in the sky. Rashers, limping on his rounds, read it above him in large letters. As the weeks of the lock-out passed it continued to surprise him that a condition he had grown to regard as exclusively his should have become so general. Even the Fitzpatricks were selling their sticks of furniture. He had spotted the wife a couple of times already in the queue at The Erin’s Isle and that yellow-faced bitch of a Hennessy one with her. Giving her a helping hand with the bargaining, moryah—in return never doubt it for a cut out of what was coming.

  Yearling, walking the city too, found it all as he had predicted. The challenge of the employers’ ultimatum had been taken up, as he had known it would be. Now there was deadlock. They would fight it out through the autumn; perhaps into winter. By banding together to break Larkinism the employers had turned an industrial struggle into a crusade. That, of course, was what William Martin Murphy had wanted. He heard the revolution call from the lips of the little children as he walked to the foundry. They had new songs about it and they sang one of them for him to the air of the latest ragtime thing about Alexander’s Band.

  ‘Come on along, come on along

  And join Jim Larkin’s Union

  Come on along, come on along

  And join Jim Larkin’s Union

  You’ll get a loaf of bread and a pound of tea

  And a belt of a baton from the D.M.P.’

  They knew him well now and were no longer in any way afraid of him, and when he shared his loose change with them they gathered about him and they all talked at once. They told him their mammies got f
ood packs from Liberty Hall where a countess and other ladies were making up parcels of bread and cocoa and giving them out to them and they said there were ships full of food belonging to Jim Larkin and they were coming from England today, all the people had marched down to meet them. He asked them if they knew where England was and one of them said yes it was over the sea in Liverpool and the rest said yes that’s where it was. So he said he would go down to see the food ships too if they would tell him the way and they led him along. But at the outskirts of the crowd he stopped them and said they must all go back now so as not to get hurt among all the people and he pushed his way through on his own.

  The crowd was tightly packed. But his height gave him the advantage over most of the others and because he was well dressed and carried a cane under his arm and said excuse me with a voice of authority they made way for him.

  The ship was covered from bow to stern with slogans and coloured bunting. Along the rails, smoking and talking and watching the activity, leaned several men whom Yearling recognised. They were members of the British Trade Union Congress. Jim Larkin was among them. He was a fine-looking man, full of confidence. There had been the usual speeches, you could feel it in the air. And whenever the men guided the laden trolleys down the gangplanks and pushed them through laneways of people to the waiting floats great cheers broke out. All this could be related with excellent effect to Ralph Bradshaw. Better, in a way, than that horse tram. The crowd cheered again and the bowler-hatted figure immediately in front of him joined in wildly. When it died away he tapped his shoulder. The head turned slightly. He had a glimpse of a thin excited face. Under the bowler a bandage showed bloodstains that were being gradually effaced by time and weather.

  ‘Has Mr. Larkin spoken?’

  ‘He has, sir.’

  ‘Pity . . .’

  A conversational opening occurred to him and he said: ‘You’ve been injured recently, I see.’

  Hennessy stiffened. He turned around as fully as the crowd permitted. The broad shoulders, the light cane tucked firmly under the well-tailored armpit, convinced him. He hedged.