The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, that unless you can pay what’s overdue this is no longer your property. We’ll not stop you removing personal items but there will have to be an auction of furniture and contents at which you’ll have the same right to bid as anyone present.’

  Freddie went to reply, then blinked as if trying to wake from a nightmare. He wearily sat down on the drum, his shotgun on his lap, reminding her of a sheriff, standing guard over a prisoner with a lynch mob outside. He stared at the bailiff as if trying to place him within the strict social hierarchy of Mayo. Eva suspected that the bailiff was probably the second son of a big farmer with sufficient clout to swing the job with the local politicians who awarded such positions as their gift. At one time her father could have organised good jobs for Thomas and Brendan, back in the different country where they were born. She knew that Freddie was contemplating these changes too. For him all history was directly personal. At this moment it would appear as if the IRA had fought their war with the sole intention of one day allowing a Catholic farmer’s son to order a Fitzgerald off his land. Hazel broke the silence.

  ‘If you took my pony would that pay off what we owe?’ she asked. ‘He’s frightfully clever and a great jumper.’

  The bailiff turned and spoke softly. ‘Take your pony for a ride in the woods, Missy. If I don’t see him I can’t put him down on my inventory.’

  Instead of retreating into the woods Hazel nudged the pony forward to where her father sat. She dismounted to stand beside him and stared defiantly at the bailiff. Freddie seemed unsure whether to scold her or be proud. He rose and took his daughter’s hand.

  ‘Do you know how long my family have lived here?’ he demanded. ‘Do you think that I would let every half-wit in Mayo bid for my possessions?’ He released Hazel’s hand. ‘Go back to your mother, child.’ He repeated the command with sudden fury when the girl refused to move. She stepped back, frightened, and he lowered his voice. ‘Be a good girl, Hazel. We don’t want the pony hurt.’

  This convinced Hazel to lead the pony back towards the small watching group. Francis trembled, not knowing if he should join his father. Eva took his hand, then placed it in Maureen’s palm and walked forward to stare into Freddie’s bloodshot eyes.

  ‘It’s over, Freddie,’ she urged softly. ‘I know how much we owe in Castlebar. Come inside. The men will let us pack some suitcases. You’ll be surprised how little we actually need. Maybe all this is for the best and we’ll only be free when we walk away from here.’

  Freddie stared at her so coldly that Eva knew he considered her insane.

  ‘It’s just a house,’ she continued. ‘What’s important is that we have each other and the children.’

  ‘You’re your mad brother’s sister,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘I am your wife.’

  ‘Then you should know that what’s important for a man is to have something to pass on to his son. Otherwise he is nothing.’

  A door opened down the hallway, startling them both. She had forgotten that Mr Clements would be anxious to remove his possessions before the house was seized. The elderly man walked towards them, holding an envelope.

  ‘Think it’s time I gave you my notice, Freddie, if it’s all the same with you. I never meant to stay half as long. Silly really. A man gets too comfortable, starts to hate change. Shall we say two weeks? That should allow me to find somewhere on the mainland. I expect it would be for the best if you went across the water yourself. You pair could make a wonderful fist of life there. I’ve been selfish expecting you to keep this place going just so that I’d have somewhere to lay my head.’ He lowered his voice, placing the envelope in Freddie’s hand. ‘See off that blither, will you. His sort give me the creeps.’

  Freddie examined the crisp English banknotes inside the envelope. He swallowed hard.

  ‘Are you sure? It’s a small fortune.’

  ‘Pay me back at your leisure.’

  ‘I will.’ Freddie rose. ‘Every penny.’

  Freddie put down the shotgun and crossed the lawn to the bailiff.

  ‘Look here, what’s your name?’

  ‘Mr Flaherty, sir.’

  ‘Remind me of the sum outstanding, Flaherty.’

  Freddie carefully counted out that figure, then reached into his own pocket to produce an Irish ten-shilling note. ‘That’s for you three men to have a drink with in the village. You’re doing your job and I respect that. However I must ask you to get the hell off my land.’

  ‘I’ll make sure they do, Daddy.’ Hazel mounted her pony.

  ‘They can find their own way.’ Freddie turned to Mr Durcan. ‘A financial oversight, Mr Durcan. I would not want this misconstrued in the village.’

  ‘Sure people have more to be talking about, Mr Fitzgerald,’ the publican lied smoothly. ‘Good day to you now, sir.’

  Freddie stood on the grass to watch the two cars drive off with Hazel silent on her pony and Francis still grasping Maureen’s hand. The Commander opened his cigarette case and offered Eva a cigarette. Eva said nothing because she knew that just now he wished to be left in silence. He was saying goodbye to the vista that had seduced him a decade ago, this day of shame marked the end of their struggle to life here. Mr Clements would need to find a new niche out in the real world and could ill afford the money he had just thrown away. But she knew that he had made his gesture out of love, so that even if he was cast into exile she and the children could have the possibility of returning here one day. Maybe in his mind he would harbour that dream too. Dying in a boarding house in Brighton or Bath he might close his eyes to imagine that he could still hear the wind in the trees at night and the creaking timbers that had become the sounds of home for a lonely man. She touched his arm lightly like a daughter. He nodded, then lit his cigarette and retreated to his room, leaving her to confront Freddie with their search for a future.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Crumlin Kremlin

  Dublin, Autumn 1938

  Locals had christened this rubbish dump ‘Siberia’, yet salt was possibly the only thing that the children of Crumlin didn’t forage for in the makeshift tunnels they dug under the weight of rubbish dumped from Corporation bin trucks. The dump was a long distance from the sea, hewn out of an old quarry on the up-slope of the Dublin Mountains, but this did not stop seagulls from wheeling overhead and swooping to pluck at the displaced earth. The gulls barely stopped short of snatching the diseased fruit and mouldy potatoes from the hands of boys who emerged triumphant after scavenging underground.

  Last week a tunnel had collapsed with a nine-year-old boy inside it. Art was among the first adults alerted by the shouts, careering down into the quarry to start digging with his bare hands. Within minutes a dozen men were digging alongside him, too focused on their work to curse or pray, while children cried or stood still with shock displacing their usual feeling of hunger. Art wasn’t sure how long they had dug before reaching the boy – but long enough to convince Art that he would have stopped breathing. However the child was lucky because a corrugated iron sheet had created a small dust-filled air pocket. Although his face was blue when Art pulled him out and gave him the kiss of life, within seconds the boy had retched up bile and started to breathe unaided. The circle of men had kept a respectful distance while Art administered first aid, and their faces when he lifted up the boy had radiated gratitude and a bond of comradeship which made Art feel accepted within their midst. All the same, two unemployed fathers had instinctively stepped forward to claim the crying boy and bear him back to his mother.

  From the changed reaction of local women since then, Art knew that he was recognised as having saved the boy’s life. This afternoon he had promised his friend Kathleen Behan – in whose Corporation house he was lodging – to watch over two of her sons at the dump. Her oldest boy, Brendan, had already left school and was serving his time to become a housepainter like his father, Stephen. But the younger brothers, Brian and Dominic, were experienced dump scavengers at eleven and nine who
recognised that most of the discarded food was inedible and the real treasure came from finding cinders and half-burnt coals thrown out from bourgeois households back in the city. Already they had filled a quarter-sack with Brian having found a perfectly good shoe that fitted him if he could only find the other.

  Art had a secondary motive for spending time at this dump. Since last week’s accident more adults were coming to watch over their children. When they questioned Art about the incident and complained of unfinished roads and the difficulty of getting back into the city, he would mention his plan to establish a Tenants’ Rights Committee. Tenement dwellers were being banished to these new estates, miles away from jobs or the labour exchange, without schools or doctors and at the mercy of a few gombeen shopkeepers.

  Stephen Behan had resisted previous attempts by his wife to move the family from their tenement in Russell Street. Indeed Mrs Behan had only effected this move to Crumlin by signing the papers herself and borrowing a neighbour’s horse and cart while Stephen was conversing over his evening pint. The housepainter had first discovered that his family was emigrating to the suburbs when he saw the cart, piled with children and furniture, pass the pub door and was forced to either starve or follow them into exile later that night. Stephen Behan still resented being cast into this wilderness where he claimed the locals ate their young. Crumlin was desolate but Art was excited by this raw world in which people must surely start to think for themselves. The next uprising would not start in the General Post Office like in 1916. It would be fermented in these new suburbs with uprooted people refusing to be exploited, rising to demand not just better conditions but a new communist order.

  Mrs Behan thought so too. Every evening after her family finished reciting the Angelus, she opened the front parlour window to play the Soviet National Anthem at full volume on the gramophone that Art had purchased for them. Art had never met anyone who possessed an equal devotion to the Blessed Virgin and Joseph Stalin. But the Behans’ tiny parlour was a cradle of revolution, with her sons doing their schoolwork amidst a nightly plethora of visiting communists, socialists and republicans who made the pilgrimage out to the house which the locals termed the Crumlin Kremlin. Art argued his stance fiercely in these nightly debates, stressing how the prime consideration of any political act was to mirror the line propagated by Stalin, so that Irish comrades did not strive in isolation but remained part of one broad international struggle. In this he possessed two motives – an absolute belief in the supremacy of the Communist Comintern and a fear that someone could be reporting these meetings back to Moscow. One attempt had already been made to denounce him. Now when his file was finally reviewed in light of his plea to be allowed to rejoin his wife and child, it was vital that no single word of evidence existed which might be misconstrued as being counter-revolutionary.

  A shout came from the rubbish dump and Brian and Dominic Behan emerged with blackened faces, having located the second shoe. They jumped about triumphantly, waving at him to come down. Art extinguished his one cigarette of the day, saving the butt to savour before he fell asleep on the parlour floor tonight. He insisted on carrying the sack of cinders as they set off through the maze of streets, with the boys’ exuberant happiness unlocking such memories that Art had to strive against this loneliness perpetually waiting to ambush him. Reaching into his jacket he sought comfort in the petition folded there. His dream of a Tenants’ Committee was taking hold. The first meeting tonight in a disused barn near the estate would hopefully be attended by the many locals who had visited the Behan house to affix their signatures to the list of demands which he and Mrs Behan had drawn up.

  Mrs Behan had the table set for tea when they reached the terraced house. Her husband read a Charles Dickens book by the fire while their five-year-old daughter played on the floor. Brendan was not home. Art suspected that he was drilling with Na Fianna because the boy had boasted about wanting to join the IRA on his sixteenth birthday. The gramophone was gone from under the window. Mrs Behan followed his gaze.

  ‘You can’t eat records, Art. Isn’t our own singing good enough? Still the pawnbroker thought we were coming up in the world. Did you play records as a boy?’

  Art smiled. ‘We played musical chairs for forfeits.’

  ‘That’s the difference, comrade,’ Stephen remarked from behind his book. ‘You had bloody chairs.’ The man’s tone was more sardonic than bitter.

  Stephen was rarely present in the house after tea. Only after the pubs closed would he join in whatever argument or singsong was ongoing upon his return. Still, he had served time for the causes he believed in – having first glimpsed his eldest son from a cell window when Kathleen stood outside Kilmainham Jail to hold up Brendan as a baby during the Civil War. More recently as a union leader, Stephen had spent last year’s building strike picketing outside sites owned by whoremasters like Patrick Belton – being the first man out and the last man back in – while his family endured starvation in their new house.

  Brian answered a knock at the door, proud of the noise of his new shoes. He returned with a baby-faced priest who surveyed the triptych of pictures on the wall, with the Sacred Heart framed by photographs of James Connolly and Lenin. This array of family icons briefly rendered him dumb until he drew a deep breath and demanded information about tonight’s meeting, warning the Behans about the danger to their souls in sheltering Art. Mrs Behan hushed Art who went to reply. Being a Catholic, this fell into her ambit. It was an unfair confrontation. The Behan children ate their meagre supper and watched the young priest being torn apart like it was a floor show. They looked disappointed when he fled after ten minutes. With his supper finished, Stephen rose to follow him out the door.

  ‘You may have me barred from heaven but at least I’m not barred from my local.’

  His wife admonished him. ‘Stephen Behan, you promised to attend the Tenants’ Rights meeting.’

  ‘Be fair, Kathleen, how can I? You’re the tenant, you signed the papers. If the cart hadn’t passed the pub I’d still be searching for yous in Russell Street.’ He wilted under her look. ‘All right, I’ll look in later, once you make sure the barn is cleared of dangerous farmyard animals.’

  Stephen departed and half an hour later Mrs Behan accompanied Art across the fields where white crosses marked out the sites of the next houses to be built. The barn would be demolished soon but until then it was the only local space where a crowd might gather. Art had brought a paraffin lamp and hoped that other people might do likewise. Mrs Behan was unusually quiet.

  ‘Are you upset about the priest?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all. Didn’t they try to excommunicate us during the Civil War? That clawthumper wouldn’t know Jesus if Our Saviour bit him. Something else has me troubled. Brendan got a letter.’ She took a ripped-open envelope from her bag. ‘For some reason I got a chill when the postman delivered it this morning. I’ve never opened another person’s letter in my life and please God I’ll never do it again.’

  ‘Is it from a girl?’ Art asked.

  Despite her anxiety, Mrs Behan smiled. ‘What chance has he of discovering girls out here? If we’d stayed in Russell Street he’d know everything about women by now just from being on the landings at dusk. I’d not mind him losing his heart, it’s losing his life I’m afeared of. It’s from the Communist Party. The child is after volunteering to fight the fascists in Spain. He’s only fifteen. It will break my heart if he goes and break his heart if I lie to him. Should I show it to him?’

  ‘It’s not for me to say.’ Art was uncomfortable, as always when people discussed Spain.

  ‘Why not? Somebody said you have a brother in Spain but you never mention him.’

  ‘You know how families are,’ Art said. ‘One day you are all playing games together, then before you know it the game is over and you’re not even speaking to each other.’

  ‘Did yous fall out?’

  Art could not remember a cross word during Brendan’s stays in Moscow. Maybe he had not
always treated Brendan as an equal, but it was hard to see him as more than a boy. Certainly not as the viper who denounced him to Georgi. The fact that Brendan had never contacted Art suggested that he was guilty. Art still could not understand what had possessed Brendan to utter such lies. The jealousy of the last born? Art recalled Brendan as a baby desperate to get Mother’s attention. At heart he could not believe that Brendan was a Trotskyite counter-revolutionary. Only by chance had Art discovered that Brendan went to Spain. Liam Hennessy who had been wounded out seemed to have briefly met him, but he always clammed up when Art was in his company. Art heard that Georgi Polevoy was there too, so at least Brendan was enjoying his protection. But Art suspected that going to Spain was just another way for Brendan to steal Art’s thunder, with Art stuck in Ireland, having been ordered to build the revolution here.

  ‘We grew apart,’ Art told Mrs Behan. ‘I don’t honestly know how it happened. He never writes. It’s his way of punishing me.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For being the heir.’

  There was a gap in the bushes leading into the field. Mrs Behan tore up the letter and scattered the pieces down into the ditch filled with hawthorns and brambles.

  ‘God forgive me and God help the poor people of Spain, but their race is run and they can’t have the body of my son.’ She looked at Art. ‘And God help your poor mother with the worry she must have waiting for news. Light that lamp and let’s hope we’re not sitting alone in this barn telling each other ghost stories.’

  They were not alone, but the crowd was small compared to what Art had hoped for. This was no mass rally. They could have all squeezed into Mrs Behan’s kitchen like she had suggested. Still, there was an old loading bay to stand on and at least tonight’s meagre attendance was a start. Stephen Behan arrived as Art began to speak amid the weak lantern light. He had a detailed agenda, a list of basic human demands, a campaign of protests, a blueprint to ensure that no Crumlin child foraged in a rubbish dump again. But he had barely begun when a car entered the field, blinding the small crowd who turned to stare into the headlights. The car stopped but the headlights remained on. Four figures emerged through the dazzling glare. The first was the baby-faced curate being pushed forward by an older wiry man whom Art recognised as the parish priest. He raised a walking stick and, shaking with fury, pointed it at Art.