The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘There he is! The Antichrist! Don’t just stand there, men, do your duty, arrest him.’

  The words were addressed to two young Civic Guards whom the parish priest had collared en route to the meeting. One garda swallowed. ‘For what?’

  The priest turned. ‘Suffering heart of Jesus, are you making fun of me? For what? For what?’ he screeched, impersonating the garda’s accent. ‘Is it that you want me to be doing your job as well as my own? You’re supposed to be a guardian of the law or do you live in a communist country now? Use your initiative, for God’s sake. Can you not see the disturbance of the peace here?’ He thumped his stick against the corrugated iron and advanced menacingly on the crowd. Only Stephen Behan held his ground, leaning against a girder. The priest eyeballed him.

  ‘I should have known you’d be here, you old gunman. You were a failed clerical student and you’ve failed at everything else.’

  ‘I didn’t fail, Father. They threw me out of the seminary for adultery around the same time as they kept you in for stupidity.’

  ‘Why don’t you go off to Russia?’

  ‘To tell the truth, Father, the Corporation built this kip so far from Dublin that I thought I was there.’

  Local people were trying to surreptitiously slip away. The priest turned. ‘Where do you Reds think you’re going? Stay still till I get your names to read out at Mass.’ Summoning the Civic Guards he pointed to Art. ‘Get his name into your book. We drove out Jim Gralton and in the spirit of St Patrick we’ll drive this communist snake back into the sea.’

  One garda advanced on Art. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I don’t need to give you my name.’

  ‘Listen here, Goold. I said, what’s your name?’

  ‘You know my name already.’

  ‘You needn’t come the smart boy with me just because you’re a swanky Protestant. That doesn’t work around here any more.’

  ‘I’m not a Protestant.’

  ‘He’s a saint,’ Mrs Behan said, ‘if you all only had eyes to see it.’

  ‘What is your address?’ the garda demanded, ignoring this interruption.

  ‘I live in the Sokolniki District.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Moscow.’

  ‘Art Goold, I’m arresting you with refusing to give your name to a member of the Garda Síochána, with breach of the peace, trespass onto private property and provoking a riot. I’ll ask you to come quietly now, like a good man.’

  ‘I’m not your good man!’ The words exploded with venom. ‘These trumped-up charges are a mockery of free speech. You are the fascist hireling of this priest who is the most reactionary unit of the class enemy in the camp of the proletariat, sanctifying the abominations of this capitalist regime with holy water and terrorising his flock with the spectre of eternal punishment.’

  ‘I’m what?’ the garda asked, baffled.

  ‘If you want a show trial you’ll need to work harder. If you want a scapegoat at least charge me with something you can stand over in court. I come here to fight for a Workers’ Communist Republic and if this is the first blow struck for it then it won’t be the last. Long live Comrade Stalin!’

  The punch caught the policeman off guard, sending him to the ground. Art had taken care to hold back, lest he broke the man’s jaw. But he knew that the garda would feel no such compassion as the man rose and his companion pulled a truncheon. Art would have been able for the two of them, but the car’s headlights had attracted more locals and, at the prompting of the priest, several pushed forward to drag Art to the ground where the Civic Guards kicked him in the ribs and stomach. Art felt a sudden déjà vu about this beating, an uneasy familiarity which so perplexed him that he almost didn’t feel the kicks. Mrs Behan screamed, with Stephen trying to intervene, shouting at them to ‘Go easy, lads.’

  ‘There’s the communist bitch and her Protestant fancy man,’ he heard a woman shout. ‘As if two husbands wasn’t already enough for her.’ Art was lifted up roughly and handcuffed, with a policeman pushing Stephen Behan away.

  ‘It’s my one consolation in life, Goold –’ Stephen declared, ‘– at least my boys can never become coppers – their parents were married.’

  As the policemen pushed Art towards the car where newcomers were starting to spit and jeer at him, Mrs Behan raised her voice in defiant song:

  ‘Come workers sing a rebel song,

  A song of love and hate,

  Of love unto the lowly

  And of hatred of the great,

  The great who trod our fathers down,

  Who steal our children’s bread,

  Whose greedy hands are outstretched

  To rob the living and the dead.’

  Art knew that there was no chance of a Tenants’ Rights Committee being formed. The city had cast its poor out to the edge of the mountains. It wasn’t even a fodder farm for capitalist factories because there was no work to be had. This was just a breeding ground for the emigrant boat. But at least he had tried. He had sat in small kitchens to explain how society was organised in Moscow and seen genuine interest in the hungry faces gathered there.

  Punching the policeman would ensure that he had his day in court. If he made a strong speech from the dock, the Daily Worker in London might pick up the story. The Daily Worker was scrutinised carefully in Moscow, and surely the NKVD officers in charge of his appeal would notice, with the press cutting filed away as an affirmation of his fidelity, proof that he remained a loyal servant. Such actions had to be recognised. Letters to his wife might still go unanswered, pleas to the Soviet embassy in London to rejoin his family were ignored because the time was not right. But when conditions were right for his case to be reviewed, Art would have the scars and prison terms to show his unceasing work for the cause. They would know that he remained steadfast, working for a future where his son would grow up with Irish cheekbones and a Russian accent, the citizen of a new world, cleansed of the sins of his ancestors.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Journey

  16–17 November 1939

  At dawn Freddie accompanied Eva from their small flat above the Culpeper Herbal Shop on Jewry Street in Winchester, past the Buttercross and the great cathedral and down to the bus station opposite the Guildhall. The station was as dark as the streets outside. It felt eerie, with intending passengers being mere shadows in the gloom and the sole light coming from a two-inch hole in the cardboard covering a single lit headlight of the bus. After purchasing her ticket they went back outside to be alone, walking down to King Alfred’s statue on the corner. The fringes of thickly curtained windowpanes along Broadway were coated in black paint in case the faintest chink of light escaped, though Eva suspected that for now householders were more fearful of bullying wardens than of bombers in the sky. The immediate blitzkrieg that Chamberlain warned of had not yet occurred, but panic still ensued whenever the town tested its recently installed air raid sirens.

  ‘What will you do?’ Eva asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Naturally, I shall work out my notice in full,’ Freddie replied. ‘Thereafter I shall be unavailable to pack herbs into little boxes because I will enlist in the Royal Artillery Territorial Army.’

  Three days ago Eva had decided to return to Mayo, after hearing two customers discuss Chamberlain’s prediction of a hundred thousand deaths before Christmas. Factories were working through the night to stockpile cardboard coffins, with lime pits already dug in expectation of stacked corpses. The only deaths so far were from collisions between blacked-out vehicles with drivers unable to see each other approach. But the scent of war pervaded everything in England, from the gas masks people carried to the stirrup pump and long-handled shovel to deal with incendiary bombs delivered to the herbal shop which Eva and Freddie had run for the past eighteen months.

  It seemed impossible to Eva that any pilot could bomb Wolvesey Castle, visible from their window, but Freddie got angry when she made such remarks and lectured her about com
ing out of the ether to live in the real world. In the real world children were being evacuated from the cities and, as a mother, Eva was determined that her children’s safety came first, even though their boarding schools seemed remote and unlikely targets. In her heart however she knew that this war was the perfect cover to rescue Francis whom she sensed was suffering terrible homesickness. Freddie was stoic when she announced her intention, but the general manager of Culpepers proved less sympathetic – possibly because the woman came from Coventry, where a bomb had recently killed five people, planted not by Germans but by Irish Republicans. When Freddie phoned to say that his wife was leaving and he would need to employ a girl part-time, he refused afterwards to discuss what the general manager said. But her voice grew so shrill that Eva had overheard her declare how no English public school man would permit his wife to flee dishonourably in time of war. She had hired them as a responsible couple. If Freddie was the kind of man who allowed his wife to wear the trousers, then he could have a month’s notice and also flee to his cowardly isle while she found a true married couple to manage her shop. Next morning when the weekly sales figures reached head office and the general manager discovered that Freddie had sold most of shop’s stock to a party of visiting Americans, she hastily phoned back to say that he was welcome to stay. But Eva knew that the proud Fitzgerald had been hurt by her inference of cowardice and the reference to not having attended a good school. It was a cut Freddie could neither forget nor forgive.

  The bus from Winchester was slow and it was noon before Eva reached Hazel’s boarding school. School life was changing Hazel. Her headmistress remarked upon it during the brief conversation in which she made plain her disapproval at Eva running away to Ireland.

  ‘You must be careful with the child, Mrs Fitzgerald. She takes on the local colour. Allow her to consort with Billingsgate fishwives and she will become one. Allow her to consort with the worst sort of snobs and she will become one of those.’

  They were standing in the corridor watching Hazel emerge from class amid a pack of chattering girls. Seeing her like this, for a perturbing moment Eva felt that she did not know her daughter. Hazel seemed not to recognise Eva either, until her features softened and she ran past the headmistress to embrace her mother. Eva had feared that Hazel might not want to leave school, because she disliked holidays in the Winchester flat. But once Glanmire Wood was mentioned the girl had only one question before her classmates were forgotten: ‘Will I be able to keep a horse?’

  Eva nodded, with no idea how to keep her promise, and they travelled together to Oxford to meet up with Francis who was being collected by his grandfather from his school. They spent the afternoon with Eva’s parents, whom she tried to persuade to return to the safety of Donegal. But since boarding up the Manor House, Ireland was like a closed book to them, especially with the news that Maud and her children were now stranded in South Africa after being trapped by the war’s outbreak while visiting Thomas.

  Brendan’s continuing disappearance left a raw wound cutting into their hearts. Father was unable to mention his youngest son, while, when alone with Eva in her bedroom, Mother could talk of nothing else. Brendan’s silence since his solitary card from Barcelona left Eva’s parents paralysed. The hope remained that he might still be in touch with his eldest brother, but Art refused to have contact with any of them. Eva did not even know his whereabouts until Mother produced a recent press cutting received from Dublin.

  Mr Art Goold, of Mountjoy Square in Dublin, was yesterday brought before the Special Criminal Court pursuant to the Offences against the State Act, 1939, after being arrested during a public disturbance. Goold was only released from jail seven weeks ago, having served a sentence for public order offences. When the date of his latest trial was being fixed, he insisted upon interrupting and insulting the court by shouting in a violent and unseemly fashion. Although called upon to stop he continued shouting in such a manner that no member of the court was able to speak. Goold was sentenced to suffer imprisonment for three calendar months for contempt of court, with the original charges to follow upon completion of this sentence.

  Eva sat in silence with Mother after reading this, while Father took Hazel to see some horses in a nearby paddock. It was Francis who tried to cheer them up by donning silk scarves from Mother’s wardrobe and dancing about. The boy loved his grandmother and seemed punch-drunk at his unexpected release from school. Mother appeared to momentarily forget the ache of Brendan’s absence while laughing at Francis’s madcap agility in waltzing around. But after a time Eva noticed Mother’s smile being replaced by a wary look and suspected that her grandson brought back too many memories of her own lost boy.

  Father took them to the station for the evening train to Liverpool, insisting on giving Eva money to obtain a cabin for the night crossing on the MV Munster. When they boarded, the noise of singing from the bars still reached them and each time she closed her eyes Eva kept visualising the empty pens on the lower deck from which she had seen cattle unloaded on the dockside before they were allowed to board. Terrified beasts shoving against each other and slipping on the wet cobbles while a white-bearded man calmly waited with a gun to summarily execute any beast injured in the crossing from Dublin. The cattle became juxtaposed in her mind with the Irish faces she had also seen disembarking – the more experienced emigrants encouraging the unbearably young-looking ones, all seeking jobs offered by the war that she was fleeing.

  The children only slept fretfully and were cranky when they docked at dawn in Dublin, urging her to get the first train to Mayo. Eva was exhausted, but determined to confront Art. For her parents’ sake she needed to discover if he knew anything about Brendan’s whereabouts. If Brendan had died then surely some comrade would have contacted the family. If he managed to flee Spain, he would have made contact himself, unless his wounds left him suffering from amnesia in an overcrowded ward with nobody to watch over him. If he had been held in one of Franco’s jails, the victorious General had nothing to gain by keeping him when newspapers reported that almost all foreign prisoners were now released. Father’s appeals to the Foreign Office had yielded no record of Brendan being captured by fascists, unless they had simply shot him and dumped his body. Another alternative was that Brendan could be staying with Art’s wife in Russia or, even better, had gone to live in Dublin with Art. This idea was so alluring that Eva had made herself half believe it.

  Her arrival in Mountjoy Square caused a stir along the row of Georgian houses now subdivided into tenement dwellings. Francis and Hazel shied away from the dirty children gawking at them while Eva asked a shawled woman if she knew where Art Goold lived. Hearing his name, the woman blessed herself and hurried on. Several others claimed not to have heard of him until a man detached himself from a pitch and toss school to direct her past a door off its hinges and up a long flight of stairs. Shouting children raced down past her, one almost shoving Francis through a gap where the banisters were missing.

  A woman half opened her door on the first landing and eyed Eva suspiciously. ‘What are yiz after?’

  ‘I’m looking for Art Goold’s flat?’

  ‘And why would that be, Missus?’

  ‘I’m his sister.’

  ‘So you say.’ She impersonated a snooty voice. ‘Well, he’s not currently residing in his residence.’

  ‘He’s in jail. I wondered if anyone was sharing his flat?’

  ‘You mean a trollop? Goold wasn’t like that, so go to hell. You’re not the first interfering biddy sent by the Legion of Mary to save us.’

  The women went to slam her door. Eva pleaded with her. ‘Please. I really am his sister.’

  ‘How do I know that?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, the Legion of Mary is Catholic!’ Hazel interjected, her exasperated voice, which had picked up a tinge of an English accent, further antagonising the woman. ‘If he wasn’t my brother why else would we visit a place like this?’

  It was Francis who prevented the woman from clo
sing her door. ‘Please, we’ve travelled a long way and have a long journey ahead. Mr Goold Verschoyle is my uncle.’

  The woman relented, opening her door fully. ‘Come in,’ she said gruffly. ‘If you’re Goold’s kin you’re welcome. Since he last got out of jail we’ve had a hundred clawthumpers sprinkling the stairs with holy water.’

  Eva gazed around the immaculately clean but cramped room. Two small children watched from the bed and she sensed another child hiding beneath it.

  ‘Art asked me to mind the back attic for him, but the landlord will burn everything and rent it out again,’ the woman said. ‘He’s lived in different rooms here on and off for years. I thought he was a tramp till I heard his accent. Never knew a lonelier man or one so badly dressed. Any few pence he had seemed to go on books. For a while he taught a sort of hedge-school in the park, but the priests put a halt to it. You’d see him selling the Daily Worker outside the GPO with people spitting as they passed. His own kind don’t really want him and he’ll never be one of us. But he was good to me when my husband was out of work and loan sharks were trying to get their claws on my few sticks of furniture. Will you take tea and some bread for your chislers?’

  Eva noticed a half-finished loaf on the square of wood that served as a table when put on top of the bathtub. From the bed, hungry eyes followed her gaze. ‘We’ve just eaten,’ she lied. ‘Did Art ever mention his brother?’