by Eamon Kelly
THE HANDS OF WAR
My first faltering steps I heard about from my mother. I stood in the field, she often said, wavered a little and then stumbled three paces into her outstretched arms. She was sitting on the grass playing ‘gobs’. She hadn’t yet forgotten the games of her schooldays. To play you used five pebbles the size of a robin’s egg. You put four pebbles down, marking the four corners of a square with the fifth in the middle. You threw up the middle one and tried to pick up as many of the others before you caught the first one falling. The person who could pick up the four on the ground before the first one fell into her hand was very expert. My mother added a complication to the game by catching the falling pebbles on the back of her open hand.
I didn’t wear trousers at first. I walked around in petticoats, as did all the male children until they were three or four. The petticoat was a sensible enough form of attire as with little training I could perform the minor call of nature without wetting myself. I was able to carry out the natural functions in a manly fashion before I stuck my legs into a trousers. I remember the occasion: the little pants came to just above my knees. But the longest memory in my head is of sitting in my father’s lap – I can still smell the tobacco from his waistcoat – and fitting on a pair of shoes my aunt sent me from America. When my father put me standing I stamped and stamped my feet on the floor, fascinated by the noise I made.
When my brother was born about two and a half years after me I wasn’t the centre of attention any more, and I moved out of the kitchen and spent more time in the workshop. My father had his work cut out for him to keep me away from the sharp tools. He made a small wooden hammer for me and gave me pieces of wood to play with. I sat in the shavings and listened to the men who came with jobs for my father. They all spoke to me and those who knew my grandfather were surprised that I wasn’t called after him. The custom then was to call the first son after his father’s father and the second son after his mother’s father. The same rule applied to the first two girls. They were called after their grandmothers. If you walked into a house at that time and there were two boys and two girls in the family and you knew their grandparents, you could name the children. Both my male grandparents, who were inseparable friends, objected to my father’s and mother’s marriage. They claimed there was a blood relationship, though fairly far out, and the slightest trace of consanguinity had to be avoided. My mother was very upset by this attitude and called me after my father to annoy the old man. My father’s Christian name was Edmund, Ned to everybody, and so was I.
Years after, as a young carpenter’s apprentice, I worked with my father on the building of Clifford’s Hotel in town. Old John Clifford became confused because when he called me my father used to answer, and when he called my father I often replied, ‘Yes, John!’ He decided to call me Éamon but the name never stuck; at home and to my neighbours I was always Ned.
The house I came to as a child was a rural cottage with a slate roof. Slate roofs were rare then; all our neighbours’ houses were thatched with straw and had but two rooms and an enormous kitchen. By comparison our kitchen was small but we had three rooms. The kitchen had an open fireplace not as big as the fireplaces in the farmers’ houses but big enough to seat a large company around it when in winter our house became a visiting place, what was known in our district as a rambling house. The stairs went up from the kitchen to the two rooms overhead, and now that I had got over the crawling stage and was able to walk, climbing the stairs became my greatest ambition. My mother, dreading that I would fall, often rescued me from the third or fourth step. A chair was placed at the bottom to impede my passage but this created the danger that I could pull it down on top of me. This problem was solved by my father making a small door bolted on the inside to the newel post, and that door remained in position until the family, all eight of us, grew up.
The kitchen floor had 12”x12” fireclay tiles. Concrete hadn’t yet become a popular floor-making material. A big turf fire burned in the hearth, making the men who came at night push back their chairs. All the men smoked pipes and pipe smoking induced spitting, hence the spittoons and sawdust on public house floors. One of our visitors who had two lower front teeth missing could manipulate a spit, triggering it with his tongue and sending it soaring through the air in a flat parabolic curve to land on a burning coal on the hearth. His accuracy was amazing. The spit sizzled on the red coal for an instant, then the spot went black but in no time was red again until another spit landed on the same place.
When I was very small my mother put me to bed before the company came in at night. As I lay in my parents’ bed I could hear the men talking below me in the kitchen. The rise and fall of the voices had a soporific effect on me and gradually I fell asleep. When I got a little older I stayed up longer and as my bedtime came I went up the stairs, my mother walking behind me in case I fell, to a chorus of ‘goodnights’ and ‘codladh sámh’ (sound sleep) from a crowded kitchen. My mother stayed with me, telling me about ‘Jackie Dorey in his red cap who went to the wood’ until I fell asleep. Then she tiptoed down the stairs with a ‘ssh’ to the men; and all brought their voices down. Little by little the voices rose again but by this time I was far away in dreamland.
The men who rambled to our house were the married men of the locality. Some of them were old, there were a few bachelors who hadn’t yet embarked on the choppy sea of matrimony, and a teenager or two. The programme for the night was varied. It started with news, worldwide and local. Those who attended fairs or markets that day had their newsy contributions to make. Men who were at a funeral or at a wake the night before started to talk about the deceased and about those who attended his obsequies. During Shrovetime there was talk of matchmaking and weddings. In times of high emigration those who had been to the railway station to see young men and women bid a fond farewell to their native place talked about our neighbours’ children who had gone. They talked fondly of those who, for some time, had made their home on a foreign shore. They showed their pleasure at the news of local men who had made good and were saddened by the fact that men and women went away and were never heard of again.
War in foreign lands claimed the men’s attention and as I grew a little older the Great War raged in Europe. News came to us from New York that my mother’s brother, Eugene, had been drafted into the Fighting 69th contingent. Letters came from him while he was in the training camp in Albany, and one letter when he went overseas to France. It was Eugene’s last letter and it was kept in a small box with a sliding top which my father had made for my mother. The rent book was kept there and other small precious belongings of her own. When my brothers and I were a little older she would take Eugene’s letter out of the box and read to us as we sat on the floor around her. He described what it was like in the trenches: the sound of the big guns noising overhead, the mud and water and rats in search of little morsels of food. ‘Not far away from where I sit in this dug-out,’ he wrote, ‘a young German soldier is taking his long last sleep, reminding me, Hannah, that unless God is very fond of me …’ My mother, who had been holding back the tears, would cry openly and we would cry too, as much for the young German soldier as for our uncle Eugene. He never came back. He died of the great flu on 22 November 1918, eleven days after the Armistice. The American government offered to send his body home, and my grandfather spoke to his neighbours who had come to share his sorrow. One neighbour said, ‘How do you know, Tim, that it is your son will be in that box?’ He sowed the seeds of doubt in the old man’s mind and he declined the offer. My uncle lies in an American cemetery at Meuse, Argonne, north-west of Verdun. There are neat rows of graves with white crosses and his name and his rank are on his. ‘Cpl Eugene C. Cashman, 307 Infantry, 77 Division, State of New York.’
As well as the war many is the subject the men would discuss. Politics were ever high on the agenda, the work of the Board of Guardians and the goings-on in the British Parliament where our local MP sat. ‘Will I get in this time?’ the sitting MP sai
d once to one of our neighbours, coming up to polling day. ‘Of course you will,’ the neighbour told him. ‘Didn’t you say yourself that it was the poor put you in the last time and aren’t there twice as many poor there now!’ Sullivan and Murphy were the two contenders for the Westminster seat and their followers, the Sullivanites and the Murphyites, fought with ashplants on fair days or at sports meetings. The cries of ‘Up Sullivan!’ or ‘Up Murphy!’ echoed long into the night.
The 1918 election, with victory for Sinn Féin, put an end to that era. And on the heels of the 1918 election came the first rumblings of the War of Independence. There were echoes of the Somme and the Dardanelles nearer home now. Young Flor Donoghue, who worked at Dineens, and Mick Lynch came into our house and my mother gave them tea. Their rifles leaned against the newel post of the stairs and sitting on the floor I rubbed my hands along the polished stocks. At night when we heard the noise of the Crossley tenders coming up Mac’s Height we ducked under the table as my mother’s hand reached up to turn down the wick of the oil lamp. We crouched in the darkness as the Tan lorries came near the house and we held our breath until they had passed. Then as the sound died away by the Gap of the Two Sticks we gradually emerged and my mother turned up the wick of the oil lamp.
The men didn’t come rambling to our house during the Tan War. A list of the occupants of the household was nailed up inside the front door. I can still see it. Parents: Edmund Kelly, Hannah Kelly. Children: Edmund Kelly, Timothy Kelly, Laurence Kelly. If anybody else was found in the house when the Tans called we would have some explaining to do. My father was one day working in the open beside the workshop. He was sawing a board and I was blowing the sawdust off the pencil line. Two English soldiers came in asking questions about who was living in the neighbouring houses. The Daniels, the same day, were picking stones in the high field and when the horse butt was full they heeled it into a gripe. The loud noise of the falling stones made the soldiers spring to attention.
‘What was that?’ they said, as they backed my father against the wall. He explained what had happened and he showed them the young boys working in the field. They went and inspected it for themselves. If my father wasn’t telling the truth God only knows what would have happened to him. People said that the British Tommy was a civilised enough individual, but the Black and Tans were a murderous crew. Many were the stories told about the burnings throughout the country. A man well known to my father and mother – he came from where they were born – was tied to a Tan lorry and dragged live behind it until he died; and the day after Headford Ambush, in which twenty-three English soldiers and two IRA men died, the Black and Tans went through the countryside shooting anything that moved, even the animals in the fields.
But they weren’t alone in the cruelty of their ways. Two young English soldiers deserted from the ranks. They went into hiding and lived away from the towns until they came to a secluded place where they worked for farmers and lived a happy enough existence in that small community. Nothing would convince certain elements in the IRA but that they were spies. They were tried in their absence and sentence was passed on them. One night the two young soldiers were playing cards in a neighbour’s house when there was a knock at the door. Two armed men came in and despite the pleadings of the people that the soldiers were innocent their hands were tied behind their backs. They were blindfolded and taken to a cowshed. The armed men wanted someone to hold a candle in the cowhouse. The men listening made no move. ‘So much for spunk!’ a woman said. ‘I’ll hold it myself.’ Maybe the terrible story of that night expanded in the telling. By the time it reached us we were told that one young soldier asked for a priest. There was a delay in the pretence that one was being sent for, and when he arrived the blindfold was eased. The ‘priest’ was one of his executioners who had donned a black coat and placed a folded white handkerchief around his neck. Kneeling in the half-dark the frightened soldier confessed his mild transgressions that wouldn’t bring a blush to the cheeks of a saint. What an obscenity! When I heard that part of the story I thought of my uncle Eugene dying far from home. What did republics or empires mean to him or to these two young men cut off from life and the love and the opportunities the future could bring? ‘I must give you my address,’ the young man said to the ‘priest’. ‘You will write to my mother?’ he asked quietly. The other soldier kept his silence. He never groaned or cried out but went to his death without a word. They were buried, half-alive some claimed, in the bog.
I thought of the animals in that cowshed and I wondered did the cows jump with fright when the shots rang out, or did one cow give a low moan of agony as a cow often does when she is bringing her calf into the world.
The truce came. I was seven years old and helping the Daniels with the hay in the leaca field. It was a July day and the lorries of British soldiers drove up and down Boher Vass. They sang and cheered and waved to us and we small people waved back to them. The men came again and sat in our kitchen, and when the subject of the two young soldiers came down, one man said of the armed men who perpetrated that awful atrocity, ‘They will melt,’ he said, ‘like the froth in the river!’ Bloodstains remained on the walls of the cowshed. No water could wash them off.
FIGHTING AMONG OURSELVES
I was over seven years of age when I went to school in the autumn of 1921. I was always a delicate child and my mother thought she’d never rear me. She swore by beef tea and chicken broth as body builders, but the sustenance failed to fill out my spare shanks.
Molly and Nell Murphy called for me that first morning. They were a few years older than me. My mother held back the tears as I went out the front door in a navy suit, Eton collar and no shoes. All the scholars went barefoot until the winter months.
‘How old are you, Edmund?’ Mrs O’Leary, the schoolmistress, asked me. Jerry Mac, Jer Daniels and Con Dineen nearly burst out laughing when they heard her calling me Edmund. To them and everyone at home I was Ned, young Ned. ‘How old are you, Edmund?’ she said again.
‘I am seven years since last March,’ I replied.
‘And why did it take so long for you to come to school, Edmund?’
‘Well the way it was, Ma’am,’ I said, settling myself and talking like one of the men in my father’s rambling house. ‘The way it was, we were every day waiting for the Tan war to be over!’
‘Now that you are here, Edmund,’ she told me, ‘you’ll have to learn very fast to make up for lost time.’ And she gave me a new penny. My mother had taught me how to count up to twenty, and I knew most of the letters of the alphabet. Indeed I recognised words like ‘cat’ and three-lettered words in a sentence like, ‘Ned put his leg in the tub.’ I had a little head start and I made good progress.
As the autumn died and the winter came, a fire was lit in the school. The pupils supplied the fuel. Well-to-do farmers brought a creel of turf, heeled it out at the gate and boys in the big classes brought it in the armfuls and put it in the turf box in the hall. Those of us who couldn’t afford to bring fuel by the creel brought a sod of turf to school each morning. My mother went through the turf shed to find a small sod for me.
With my mother looking after me at home, the two Murphy girls taking me to school and Mrs O’Leary’s daughter teaching me, I began to feel that I was too much under petticoat rule. Having so many women around me was bad for my image. I made friends fast with boys of my own age and even though of a shy nature I managed to get into a few fights. In the playground one day I got a puck of a fist into the throat, sinking the big stud of the Eton collar into my Adam’s apple. I cried from pain but soon dried my tears. That belt of a fist hardened me. I left the house on my own every morning and sought the company of the boys going and coming from school. I never again sat down with the girls as they played the game of gobs on the grassy patch by Mac’s Well.
Older brothers of the boys going to school were out in the IRA. Not yet carrying arms, they acted as scouts, and one morning we saw Jimmy Williams with a spyglass scanning the countr
yside. He wasn’t on the lookout for English troops. It was 1922 and the Civil War was on. That war divided neighbours. In one case it divided a household as two brothers fought on opposite sides. And it divided us schoolchildren. In the playground and on the way home from school we fought the Republican and the Free State cause. I was on the Republican side. I didn’t know what it meant. All I knew was that my Uncle Larry, who worked in Dublin, was a prisoner of the Free State Government and was on hunger strike.
We fought with our fists. We squared out in front of an opponent and called, ‘Come on! Put up the dukes!’ and the boy who couldn’t keep his guard ended up with a bloodied nose. Boys whose fathers accepted the Treaty called us Republicans murderers and looters. And looting did go on. The men talked about it around my father’s fire. They told of a prominent citizen who took a cartload of furniture out of the Great Southern Hotel before it was taken over by the regular army. He unloaded his booty in a laneway off College Street and went back to the hotel for a second load. When he returned to College Street the first load was gone. Lifting his eyes to heaven he shouted to the clouds, ‘This town is nothing but the seed and breed of robbers! A man couldn’t leave anything out of his hand!’
Running battles took place along the road when we were freed from school. Opposing armies lined up and threw stones and clods of earth at each other. The Dineens and I soon found that our Republican allies deserted us, not through cowardice, but because of the fact that they had reached their homes. Now that we were greatly outnumbered by Free State forces, we had to leg it out of the firing line, and take the short-cut home through Mick Sullivan’s fields.
