The Guns of Easter

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘Mother of mercy,’ said the stout woman beside him. ‘Those poor, poor boys.’

  Had this, then, been going on since morning? It made no difference to him that the soldiers would have shot the Volunteers in the same way if the positions had been reversed. The point was that nobody should do this to anybody at all.

  Beside him Jimmy heard a sudden gasp and a muffled cry. The stout woman in the apron crumpled and fell to the ground. At first Jimmy thought she’d fainted, but then he saw the spreading red stain on the white apron. Someone called for a doctor. The woman lay on the ground. She looked puzzled. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out.

  ‘The poor young boys,’ she said at last.

  Something inside Jimmy snapped. Too weak to run, he staggered away and up along the canal. After a minute he had to stop. He bent over and was violently sick. His body shook. His face was burning.

  If someone had asked Jimmy his name right then, he couldn’t have told them. He felt he was going mad. But it wasn’t madness. Nor was it the effect of Charlie’s punches, although they hadn’t helped. It wasn’t even the growing shock he’d been feeling all day, a shock that had reached its high point watching the insanity on the bridge.

  What was wrong with Jimmy now was simpler but much more dangerous than any of those things. It was what he’d feared but hadn’t wanted to believe or even really think about: he’d picked up Sarah’s fever, and now it had come to claim him. His body shook, and the fever burned in his brain.

  Behind him, in Northumberland Road, a whistle blew; but Jimmy Conway was no longer interested in the game.

  19

  THE MUSICAL TRAMP

  JIMMY WOULD NEVER KNOW FOR SURE just how he spent the next hour or so. His senses were too mixed up by the fever’s burning. When his mind cleared briefly he found himself in Pembroke Road. Long flights of steps led up to the front doors of the houses here. Jimmy found himself sitting at the bottom of one such flight, leaning against the railings. His whole body was burning and his clothes were soaked with sweat.

  In the distance he heard firing, and now explosions too. Also, the strains of fiddle music seemed to float down on the still air. A fiddle? Jimmy remembered something about a fiddle, but he couldn’t fix the memory in his mind. Then the music stopped suddenly, and it didn’t start again.

  Pembroke Road itself seemed to be deserted, at least around here. Jimmy clung desperately to the railings of the house. He had to think, he told himself.

  Footsteps came down the road. A man was coming from the direction of the bridge. He wore a ragged overcoat and had long, unkempt hair and a big bushy beard. Jimmy was certain he’d seen him before but he couldn’t think where.

  As the man came closer Jimmy heard him muttering to himself. Behind the thick beard his face looked miserable. He reached Jimmy and, seeing the boy’s blank stare, stopped beside him and stared back.

  ‘Well hello,’ the man said finally. ‘It’s the generous poor young man, ain’t it?’

  A memory struggled into Jimmy’s mind – this man had been playing music somewhere.

  ‘I …’ he began. It was hard to talk. His throat burned. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. He forced the words out. ‘I’m sick.’

  The tramp looked at him with some sympathy. ‘You don’t look well, right enough,’ he said. ‘The whole city is sick if you ask me.’

  He reached into the deep pockets of his ragged coat and pulled out two handfuls of little sticks. Mixed in with the sticks were what looked like pieces of wire.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ the man demanded.

  Jimmy tried to focus his eyes. Some of the sticks were hardly bigger than matches. ‘Is it kindling?’ he asked.

  The tramp snorted with scorn. Then, considering, he sighed. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is – now. But do you know what it was?’

  Jimmy shook his head. The tramp seemed to waver in front of his eyes.

  ‘That was my fiddle,’ the tramp said sadly. ‘A fine fiddle that I got in county Kerry nearly twenty years ago now. I’m after using it to earn me bread since, all over this country. And today I was using it for the same thing – if there is any bread left in this cursed city.’ The tramp spat on the ground. ‘Divil a ha’penny I got today, barring yer tanner.’ The tramp seemed angry now. ‘I played them patriotic British marching songs and good Irish rebel songs, but they were all far too busy watching men slaughtering each other to listen. Good loyal citizens all – bad cess to them! – and to the soldiers too.

  ‘So then this big ugly British sergeant,’ the tramp went on, unstoppable now he had an audience, ‘told me to move on. I’ll remember that cur for as long as I live. I let me temper get the better of me,’ he said. ‘You’d think I’d know better at my age. I asked the big bosthoon who he thought he was, an English lout, to be telling an Irishman to move on in his own country. And with that he snatched me poor darlin’ little fiddle and trampled it under his big clodhopping army boots. Trampled it into … into kindling, as you so cleverly put it.’

  Sighing again, he looked at the pathetic bundles of splinters in his hands. Then he put each bundle carefully back in his pockets.

  ‘All me own fault, of course,’ he said. ‘I can’t hould me tongue sometimes – I’m the first to admit it. But the gall of the man!’

  Jimmy forced himself to ask a question. ‘Why,’ he asked slowly, ‘are you keeping the pieces?’

  The tramp thought for a moment. ‘Why, to start a fire with,’ he said. ‘Waste not, want not! You know, boy, with me fiddle, I was an entertainer; without it I’m only a beggar here, and that’s no thing to be in this town. The wars of ould Empire’s glory are after leaving too many crippled soldiers in Dublin. What chance do I have against that kind of competition? The European war will ruin the trade entirely – and this local skirmish won’t help either.’

  Jimmy didn’t follow all that the tramp said, but he warmed to the man.

  ‘W … where do you live?’ he asked him.

  ‘I have a little tent – a sort of a tent, I should say. But it’s dry at least, or at least it’s sort of dry. A humble thing, but my own. It’s down there be the river Dodder, if the army aren’t after bombing it as a rebel stronghold. They seem to be shooting at anything they don’t understand, and soldiers don’t understand much. I should get back there now, too. It’ll be dark soon, and there’s a curfew. Losing me fiddle to the army is bad enough, but losing me life to them would be worse.’

  Jimmy tried to think clearly. He remembered suddenly why he himself must get off the streets. Would the tramp shelter him if he offered him some of the money that he still had? He ought to keep it for his family, but it would be no use to them anyway if the army shot him in the dark.

  But if the tramp found out he had the money there was nothing to stop him from just taking it and leaving Jimmy where he was. Nobody would care. Nobody would believe that a poor boy like Jimmy had money anyway, unless he’d robbed it himself.

  The boy struggled to decide what he should do, but he just couldn’t think. The fever and the dizziness came in waves and washed his thoughts away, like the waves washing things off a beach. The effort to hold on to them was painful. Jimmy groaned.

  Hearing the groan, the tramp leaned forward and peered into the boy’s face. ‘You really are sick, young fella,’ he announced. He reached out and touched Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Fever,’ he said. ‘You’re burning up with it! What are you doing out at all, at all?’

  Jimmy tried to explain, but the effort was too much. The tramp heard the words ‘no food’ and ‘Ma’. They were enough to tell him that the boy was in real trouble, but then you didn’t need much imagination to see that.

  ‘Can you play the mouth organ?’ asked Jimmy suddenly. The words came out in a rush.

  The tramp frowned, puzzled. The boy was raving; the fever had addled his brain. What should he do with him? It was probably some child’s condition that would be harmless to the tramp himself
– in his time he had had every fever going. The chances were that this one would be powerless against him. In any case the child couldn’t be left here: he’d get no help from anyone living in this area.

  ‘The mouth organ,’ Jimmy asked again, with an effort. ‘Can you play it?’

  The tramp decided to humour him. ‘Of course I can,’ he said. ‘A man that can play a fiddle can play a thing as simple as a mouth organ. The French fiddle, some calls it – though that’s an awful insult to fiddles, and an awful insult to French people too, for all I know.’

  ‘Shelter me till the morning,’ Jimmy said, ‘and I’ll give you a brand new mouth organ. Then you won’t be a beggar.’

  The tramp could hear the desperation in the boy’s voice, and his heart went out to the child. He was obviously raving about the mouth organ. But there’s a kind of brotherhood in misery – to abandon him here would be a crime.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Jimmy. ‘You have to get in someplace anyhow.’

  The boy pushed himself up from the steps and tried to stand up. He swayed from side to side. ‘Is it far?’ he managed to ask.

  The tramp looked at him with pity. ‘Here, lean on me,’ he offered. ‘You won’t get far on your own.’

  Jimmy did as he was told, glad of the adult support. With the tramp’s arm around him he felt safer. After a day of terrible danger he’d had to face alone, he was sick, lonely, hungry, tired and worried.

  Stumbling slowly down Pembroke Road Jimmy felt better. Even though the fever visions racked him, he felt that there might, after all, be some goodness left in the world.

  PART FOUR: THE LONG JOURNEY HOME

  20

  THE LOST DAY

  THE NEXT THING JIMMY REMEMBERED was waking briefly some time in the middle of the night, though what night it was he didn’t know. He was lying under a pile of ragged blankets and the tramp was leaning over him, calling softly to him.

  Jimmy tried to answer, but his mouth was too dry to speak. The tramp gave him some water, and told him that his fever had broken during the night.

  The man wiped the boy’s forehead with a cloth soaked in river water, and after that Jimmy passed out again. Later – it was light this time – he was woken again by the tramp shaking him gently.

  ‘I’m going out,’ the tramp said. ‘There’s a woman up the road who gives me food sometimes. I’m going to ask her for something now. There’s nothing left here.’

  Jimmy nodded weakly. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again the tramp was gone, but Jimmy had no way of knowing whether he had slept again or simply blinked. He sat up. He felt weak and helpless, but the fever seemed to be gone.

  Jimmy looked around at the tramp’s home. It was a rough structure made of canvas that was supported by a framework of sticks. Outside Jimmy could hear birds singing, and the sound of running water that must be the river Dodder. In the distance too there was some shooting.

  It was dark and shadowy inside the makeshift tent. Through a crack in the canvas Jimmy saw that it was sunny outside. He wondered how long he’d been asleep – it might be Thursday now for all that he knew. His mother would be half crazy with worry.

  His tiredness made him want to lie down again. It would be grand just to sleep – to sleep for days and days and wake up rested and recovered. But already worry was nagging at him. Fever or no fever, it amounted to the same thing: he had wasted more time.

  He made himself get up from under the blankets. He found the low entrance to the tent and crawled outside.

  He was on a grassy site by a bridge over the river. The tent had been set up in the shelter of some low trees. Looking at it from outside, Jimmy thought how ramshackle it looked. It must have been terrible to live here in winter – worse than any slum room.

  Jimmy waited for a while, hoping the tramp would come back. He wanted to thank him. But there was no sign of the musical tramp, and Jimmy could feel himself growing weaker even as he stood waiting. He would have to leave soon. He had to find out what was going on.

  He went briefly back inside the little tent. It seemed dank and bad-smelling now, after the sunlight and fresh air outside. Apart from the pile of ragged blankets it was empty. The tramp seemed to have no possessions at all. Jimmy thought for a moment, then searched in his pockets. The money and the mouth organ were still there. He counted the remaining coins: four shillings and twopence. Counting the sixpence that he’d given yesterday to the tramp, that meant he’d only lost a few pennies in his struggle with Charlie.

  Jimmy counted out two shillings in pennies and threepenny bits. He put the two shillings, with the mouth organ, under the pile of blankets. The tramp would find it later on, if nobody came and stole it first. Jimmy doubted that anyone would: nobody would think there was anything worth stealing in such a place.

  When he crawled back outside he felt weaker than ever. But he was able to think clearly again, and that seemed more important than physical strength. Jimmy had no idea of exactly where he was, and saw nobody that he might ask. The road beside him must lead back to somewhere in Ballsbridge. He would have to chance it. He started up the road in what seemed the most likely direction.

  He saw the two soldiers just as he crossed a railway line. They were standing by the side of the road. They had fixed bayonets on their rifles, but they didn’t seem to be very cautious. They watched him approach without any sign of interest.

  ‘Hello,’ said Jimmy, making himself smile. Just stay out of trouble, he told himself.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ one soldier said in an English accent.

  ‘How is the fighting going?’ Jimmy asked.

  The second soldier laughed. ‘Listen to that,’ he said. ‘Bloodthirsty little fellow, isn’t he?’

  ‘No,’ said Jimmy. ‘Just afraid.’ That was true enough, he thought.

  ‘Well, the fighting’s not over yet,’ the first soldier said. ‘But it soon will be. We’re in control of the city. We’ll soon have them out.’

  ‘They’d be out already,’ grumbled the other soldier, ‘if the officers weren’t so damned cautious. It’s a disgrace to let this thing go into a fifth day.’

  Jimmy thought he must have heard him wrongly. A fifth day? ‘Did you say a fifth day?’ he asked

  ‘Sure,’ said the soldier. ‘Started Monday, didn’t it? This is Friday – so: five days.’

  Jimmy was shocked. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Did you say this was Friday?’

  The soldiers looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘Hear that, Bob?’ asked the first one. ‘I told you the natives were stupid! This kid don’t even know what day of the week it is!’

  Jimmy ignored the mockery. He had more important things on his mind. Could it really be Friday?

  The second soldier noticed how miserable Jimmy looked, and took pity on him.

  ‘This is Friday, son,’ he said. ‘Friday the twenty-eighth of April.’

  Jimmy almost fainted. It was true, then. Things were even worse than he had supposed: he had lost a whole day!

  Without another thought he began to run. His mother would be more than just worried: by now she must be sure that she would never see her son again.

  He saw a street sign as he ran: ‘Lansdowne Road’, it said. That was very near Northumberland Road. He heard no shooting from there either. Something that might be hope began to grow in his heart. Perhaps, after all, he could rescue a little bit from this week of disaster.

  21

  NORTHUMBERLAND ROAD

  HALF WAY UP NORTHUMBERLAND ROAD signs of the battle started to show. One house was completely devastated. Its windows were gone and its door blown in by explosives. The walls were stippled by bulletmarks. It must have been one of the rebel strongholds. Now it was a ruin.

  Most of the other houses had smashed windows and bullet-holed doors. It seemed impossible that they’d all housed rebels. An air of fear and terror seemed to hang over the road, a silence in which no birds sang. Jimmy could feel it as he walked along.

  Ella�
��s house was several doors up from the bombed-in ruin. Jimmy walked through the open gate, hardly believing that he was finally here. This house too had taken its share of ill-treatment during the fighting. There didn’t seem to be a window left unbroken in the upper storeys. When Jimmy climbed the steps and reached the front door he found it was ajar. He knocked loudly, but there was no reply. Eventually he slipped into the dim hall.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Ella?’

  Only echoes answered him. He hesitated. The house seemed abandoned. Jimmy stopped in the hall for a few moments. Should he leave? Then his foolishness struck him. He’d left home three days ago to come to this house. Since then he’d been through terror, fever and danger. It would be stupid not to search for the food now that he was finally here.

  There were three families living in the house, Jimmy knew. Three couples, rather – where Jimmy came from, that wasn’t regarded as a family. Families had children.

  Ella and Charlie lived on the ground floor, where Jimmy was standing. On the top floor and in the basement lived two older couples. There was a stairs facing Jimmy in the hall where he stood, and at the top of the stairs was a closed door. One of the old couples must live behind it. To either side of him was another door, and the rooms behind these would belong to Charlie and Ella. So they had more than one room: Jimmy had suspected as much.

  He tried the door on his right. It opened into a parlour full of furniture. There was a big window with a table standing in front of it. The table and the floor around it were covered with broken glass from the bullet-shattered window. Bullets had knocked lumps of plaster from the wall and broken the glass on a picture of the king that hung there. A layer of dust from the smashed plaster lay over all of the furniture.