‘Not long, my friend. Only a few Spitfires stand between Germany and England. The Spitfires won’t stop it. The numbers are overwhelming.’
‘So I hear,’ said Ryan, finally turning away from the land.
‘Then you’ll have your country, all of it, a gift from us. If there are still people there you don’t like, we’ll give you the camps to put them in.’
‘Perhaps we won’t need those, Captain.’
‘No enemies, Herr Ryan? What would we all believe in then?’
The smile was wry enough, but there was no doubt about what Frank Ryan had to do. Von Stockhausen’s hand did not move closer to the pistol in the webbing holster at his side, but he had undone the clip that held it. The Irishman did not look back again. He climbed down into the hull of the U-boat. The captain followed him. The last hatch closed. U-65 dived. It slipped into the darkness of the Atlantic, and soon even its wake was gone.
Acknowledgements
The story of Larry Griffin, the real Missing Postman, from Stradbally, Co. Waterford, is told in Fachtna Ó Drisceoil’s The Missing Postman; not only a wonderful piece of historical detective work but a recreation of an Irish community in the 1920s, where life was far more complex than fiction. Many books have left the Spanish Civil War in my head, starting as a teenager with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, but the particular atmosphere of Burgos and its prison owes much to Ruiz Vilaplana’s Burgos Justice (1938). Vilaplana was a magistrate at the time of the Nationalist rebellion; he was a participant in the ‘cleansing’ of Republicans from Burgos; he was also a constant visitor to the prison. Vilaplana fled Nationalist Spain eventually, but his description of events has a rawness no historical retelling captures. There is an online account by Leopold Kerney of Frank Ryan’s release to German Military Intelligence, leopoldkerney.com; variant details (and they do vary) are available in Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1939–1941. The encyclopaedic Thom’s Directory provided precise information on Dublin and its streets in 1939 and 1940. The Irish Times archive offered its inspirational mix of the international, national and defiantly ‘parish pump’. Macmillan’s period guide to Spain and Portugal allowed me to travel through time between Lisbon and Pendueles, via Salamanca and Burgos. Most of Micheál Mac Liammóir’s words on the closure of Roly Poly at the Gate are his own, from the autobiographical All for Hecuba. Anyone who detects in Mrs Surtees a hint of Alfred Hitchcock’s Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes is quite right. Last but not least, thanks to Dermot Allen’s pigs, Molly and Sadie, who escaped to Kilranelagh Hill, and began the story . . .
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