Ireland

  So that was one of my earliest encounters with fear—both feeling it myself and observing someone else overcoming it. It has given me the greatest respect for people who find themselves in dangerous situations, even if they find themselves frightened. The people in the post office that Easter must have felt terrible fear. And they must have overcome it, and it is not possible to admire that achievement more than I do.

  Because they were ordinary people! Among my friends up and down the country have been many librarians. Being of no fixed abode, I have never been able to possess a library ticket. But I have been lent books by librarians who have broken the rules. In most towns I used to make a beeline for the local library, and I’d get into conversation with the librarian.

  I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn’t perceive my passion for books. And without exception, each one would lend me a book on a subject we had been discussing. No paperwork, no formalities of any kind, no rules or regulations.

  My unspoken side of the bargain was to protect them, in two ways; first, by keeping the book unharmed—not that easy, especially in bad weather, but when it rained, I carried the book next to my skin. I can tell you now that carrying Gulliver’s Travels or Lays of Ancient Rome or Mr. Oscar Wilde’s stories or Mr. William Yeats’s poems next to my heart gave me a kind of sweet pleasure.

  The second half of the bargain often nearly broke my heart, but I always kept it—and that was to return the book safe and sound to the library that had lent it. To part company with Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and his lovely name!—that was harder than saying good-bye to a dear flesh-and-blood companion. But I always did it—and I sent the book by registered post, no small consideration of cost given the peculiar economics of an itinerant storyteller.

  I’m straying too far—here’s my point concluded. Often I asked for books about revolutions and the men who led them, because I’d seen our country come of age, and the rebel process interested me mightily. After many years of reading about it, I was able to look back on what I saw in the Easter Rising and come to an important conclusion.

  When historians write that revolutions are made by the people—that is completely accurate. Something happens in people’s hearts and then in their stomachs, down there where they have had too much or have heard of their ancestors having had too much. Then, up they rise. It seems to me that it’s unstoppable, because people don’t give up—and that’s what happened in nineteen-sixteen.

  It wasn’t the first rebellion in Ireland, as we all know—there had been everything from skirmishes to out and out insurrections. From what I saw of the men fighting in the GPO, they knew they were in that tradition. But they also knew that they were ordinary men and women who wanted the right to own and run their own country. It was as simple as that, and of course it was as complicated as that. And to do so they had to overcome their fear. As I say, no small matter.

  The second bout of shelling stopped. Jerry Quinlan and little Ivy and Noreen stretched a little, and she said to him, “Now what’re we going to do, Jerry?”

  He said, “I doubt Mr. Connolly is going to let anyone out of here.”

  “I’ll ask him,” she said, and over she goes, Jerry following after, with little Ivy still in his arms. Naturally enough, I wasn’t far behind myself.

  James Connolly was standing by a high desk, reading what I discovered was an inventory list of supplies, weaponry, and ammunition. He was arguing with someone about what should be in their possession but which someone seemed to have mislaid; my goodness, he had a blunt manner.

  “Mr. Connolly,” said Noreen Quinlan. “Can I ask youse a question?”

  James Connolly looked at her, he the hardheaded working man’s hero, she the working man’s striving wife.

  “And I’ll ask you one—how did a woman and child get in here?”

  “Never mind that. Here’s my question. Which do youse think is the most important—a man’s country or his family?”

  “I can’t separate them,” said James Connolly.

  “I want my husband out of here,” said Noreen Quinlan.

  “Your husband is a soldier.”

  “He’s not. He’s a printer’s apprentice.”

  Jerry, meanwhile, looked like a man caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  “In the next lull of bombardment, ma’am, I’ll have you and your child escorted to safety.”

  Noreen Quinlan said, “I’m not leaving without my husband.”

  “You’ll have no choice, ma’am. I’m very sympathetic, but we’re fighting a war.”

  James Connolly called over two soldiers; they detached little Ivy from her father’s arms and hustled Noreen and the child to wait at a door. Jerry was dispatched to another part of the scene, and when next I looked, the woman and the child were gone.

  For an hour, things quietened down a fraction—maybe the British Army was at lunch. I roamed around a bit. The stronger men, by which I mean the leaders, like Mr. Connolly and Mr. Pearse and his brother—they talked to everyone. They checked for injuries, they looked at supplies, and they gave permission for some timbers to be loosened from walls for the windows to be boarded over again where shells had come through.

  My eye fell on a man sitting by himself, in at the back where the clerks’ desks were, hunched against the wall, all on his own. Something about him caught my attention, and I strolled over to him.

  His face was as gray as a grave. He was half sitting, half lying, as if he had been thrown there by a blast as strong as the one that blew in the windows.

  I said to him, “Are you all right?”

  He made no answer, just looked up at me, eyes as wide as an animal’s.

  “What’s your name?”

  He answered so quietly I couldn’t hear him, so I had to ask him again.

  “Tony Fallon,” he said.

  “How old are you, Tony?”

  “I’m twenty.” His breathing seemed hard and slow; he was wearing a suit with a shirt and a tie, and they were obviously his Sunday best clothes.

  “Are you all right, Tony?” I said to him.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Did you get hit—or shot or something?”

  And he said, “No, I don’t think so. Mr. Pearse asked me the same question.”

  “Have you a pain anywhere?” I said to him, and with his right hand he drew a line across his chest and down his left arm and up into his jaw.

  “Where are you from, Tony?”

  “Ringsend. I’m with Mr. Connolly.” He kind of propped himself up a little, got into a better sitting position, and I helped him. The rifle he’d been carrying lay over to one side, the muzzle pointing at us, so I turned it away a little in case of accidents—you never know with guns. He had those dark eyes that you never forget, like pools.

  I said to him, “How’re you feeling now?”

  “Sir,” said he, “I’m feeling a bit afraid.”

  “We’re all feeling that, Tony. How’re you feeling physically?”

  “In my body, like?”

  “Yes.”

  “This pain, it’s starting to hurt again.”

  “Can I get you a drink of water? Or a drink of milk?”

  “Sir, no, if you do that you’ll have to go away from me, and I don’t want that.”

  I said to him, “All right, I’ll stay here and I’ll wave to someone, and when they come over I’ll ask them to get you a drink of milk.”

  He leaned back against the wall.

  I said to him again, “Are you sure you weren’t hit by something? Glass or something like that?”

  “No, sir. I was hit by fright. That’s what hit me.”

  I sat down beside him, and he dozed off; he seemed restful enough.

  Somewhere, through a high window, the sun streamed in, and I stood and had a good look at Tony Fallon and didn’t like what I saw. A nurse walking nearby came over and looked at him too, and she went off to get a drink of milk. Tony Fallon
woke up, but he was worse than before. He couldn’t talk much by now, and when the nurse arrived with the milk I held the tin mug to his blue lips and helped him to drink it. I whispered to her, “Have we a doctor in the building at all?”

  “We’ve no doctor yet.”

  She went away, and I helped Tony Fallon to drink a little more. He had little control, and the milk was slobbering down his lips. I put the mug down, and he caught my hand.

  “Don’t go anywhere, sir,” he said to me. “Stay here.”

  “I will,” I said, and I sat down beside him; up to then I had been crouching.

  His eyes were falling closed, and I kept talking to him—I don’t know why, I think I must have heard somewhere that when people’s lives are in danger from natural causes, you must never let them fall asleep. When they’re awake, they can fight for life; when they sleep, they can’t. I said to him, “I’ll tell you a story about a man I knew up the country who was afraid the way you’re afraid now. A man with a runaway horse. And I’ll tell it to you just to prove there’s no shame in being afraid.”

  His grip tightened on my hand. “You won’t tell Mr. Connolly that I’m not able to fight, will you?”

  “Of course I won’t, Tony.”

  “Tell him I was wounded; he won’t find out because I’d say there’ll be many wounded.”

  I said, “Well, you are wounded—I mean, this wouldn’t have happened to you if you weren’t caught up in all that’s going on here.”

  He said, “But if I’m to be a soldier, don’t I have to have wounds with blood and everything?”

  “There’s all kinds of wounds,” I said. “The thing about wounds is that they can be healed.”

  He sat up a bit more, and his eyes brightened.

  “They can,” he said. “Wounds can be healed.” Then he paused and said, “But my uncle died last year fighting in France, and they told us there wasn’t a mark on his body.”

  By now I knew—as do you—the source of Tony’s wounds; he’d had a heart attack. His family had a history of weak hearts, just like my family has a history of weak chests. But his eyes continued to brighten, and he went on straightening himself up.

  He said to me, “D’you think you could help me to stand up?”

  “Tony, I’d say you should take a little rest, just for a minute or two, get your strength back.”

  “No, I want Mr. Connolly to see that I’m all right.”

  I rose to my feet and bent down to help him.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “My legs need a bit of a warning that they’ve to start working again.”

  From the street outside, a new fusillade hit the walls of the post office.

  “Where’s my gun?” said Tony Fallon. “Could you hand it to me, sir?”

  He leaned back against the wall, he rested his head against the wood paneling, and he died.

  For practical reasons, owing to time, I can’t describe every shell that hit us, every shot we fired back, every shot they fired at us in those two days. In any case, I wouldn’t be able to get through it without weeping. But that Easter, I became a man opposed to violence in any form—and committed to speech and its powers, in every form.

  I saw boys with their heads split open, I saw a man’s stomach open out like a red flower from shrapnel. One soldier I knelt beside asked me to tell his mother he believed in what he was doing, and then he died. Another said to me, “I’m supposed to be playing football next Sunday,” and he had lost a leg; he died of gangrene.

  The damage to the building was bad. By five o’clock we had many people suffering. I made myself useful in an odd way—I held the hands of men who feared they were going to die or who were badly wounded. Some of them wanted to pray, and God knows, I had enough prayers in my head after six years at the Irish College in Rome. And if I didn’t believe in those prayers anymore, I wasn’t going to let those people see that—especially if what I recited with them brought them any comfort.

  Then the thing happened that I feared most. English soldiers—the Sherwood Foresters, I think, or were they on Mount Street Bridge? I can’t remember—anyway, they were so close we could hear the officers’ commands; in fact we were able to duck when we heard them shout “Fire!”

  But poor Jerry Quinlan didn’t duck quickly enough. Out in the middle of the floor, the emptiest part of that hell’s half-acre, I saw him spin around as a bullet or a splinter of glass or shrapnel or something hit him on top of the head. Some flesh blew away from his cranium, and he was dead before his lanky body hit the floor.

  My stories often dwell on heroism. Heroes make powerful decisions, accomplish difficult tasks, explore new lands, defy kings, lead their people. What makes a hero? Oh, how often I have asked myself that question. Was Jerry Quinlan a hero? Perhaps—merely for being there. Likewise poor Tony Fallon. And the nineteen-sixteen leaders? Were they heroes? They were—but not for the reasons you think, and I’ll come to that in a moment.

  The tall young man with the shock of tawny hair—he was a hero; in fact he’s the one I think of as the bravest man in Easter week. I watched him a lot those two days, and he was everywhere at once. First he’d fire out one window, then he’d fire out through another. He seemed to answer to no particular commander. Some of the time he’d ask Mr. Pearse or James Connolly or Michael Collins regarding some exploit or other, but most of the time he acted on his own initiative. He propped up injured men, he distributed food, he cleared away debris from shell damage—he was a one-man natural force.

  The odd thing was—nobody except myself seemed to take any notice of him. He surged here, he surged there, he never seemed to stop for food; there was a kind of mysterious air about him, and he had a power I had ever only imagined. Now comes the moment at which he intervened directly in my life.

  On Tuesday evening, before the light faded, with Jerry Quinlan and Tony Fallon dead, the young man came striding over to me. I was looking into empty air, trying to steady myself after the deaths I had just seen, after meeting the men I had tried to console. The tawny young man grabbed my arm and said, “What are you?”

  I said “I’m a storyteller. That’s all I am.”

  “That’s all?” He mimicked my words and the way I said them. “How can you say, ‘That’s all’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You may be the most important man here,” he said.

  “No, I don’t think that’s the case.” I nearly laughed at the ridiculousness of this suggestion.

  “Who else is going to create our memory?” he said. He waved his hand to indicate all around us. “What would be the point of all this if nobody told our generations to come what we meant?”

  This was a man who would have no argument. Before I knew what he was doing, he steered me toward a side door and nodded to a young rebel to open it.

  “We need you to live. You know what to do,” he said to me. And I did.

  Outside, guns looked at us everywhere. The tawny young man burst out of the door and ran at the barricades, firing his rifle. When the gun jammed, he swung it like a club, jumping up on the sandbags, hammering the gun left and right at everyone he saw. Then he threw it away, drew the gun from the holster with the missing button, and fired it left, right, and center. That was the last I saw of him as he disappeared in all the smoke and dust.

  He attracted such attention that nobody looked at me, and I went in the opposite direction; through some miraculous circumstance I merged into the situation as a passing civilian—and left the city that night.

  We all know what happened next: the true heroism emerged. The center of Dublin was all but destroyed by British guns. Buildings all up and down Sackville Street burst into flames, and at last the post office had to be evacuated. James Connolly was badly wounded, and on Saturday morning he and Mr. Pearse and the other leaders decided to surrender; the terms they argued for—and won—meant they, the rebel leaders, would be shot, but their rank and file would be spared. That was the heroism of which I spoke.

&
nbsp; On Saturday afternoon Mr. Pearse handed over his sword to General Lowe, and the two men walked away together. Four young rebels carried James Connolly on a stretcher to the British lines, where he too surrendered. Some weeks later, he and the others were tried, and he was the last to be executed—by a firing squad who had to prop him up in a chair, so bad were his wounds.

  Around the country and around the world the sympathies went at last to the rebels. If the English commanders hadn’t been so foolish as to carry out those executions, who knows what would have happened to Ireland? But that’s an argument we’ve all heard often.

  I’ve never told my story of Easter nineteen-sixteen until tonight, because I felt it had too many real, true facts in it to let me reach the truth of it. But now memory has invested it a little, and I always feel safer when that happens—it brings me closer to the core. I went back to the roads of Ireland, telling stories, remembering the young man with the wild head of tawny hair that looked like a tree on fire. Over and over I pondered what he stood for, and from that I began to ask myself what he meant to me, what we mean to each other in this country, where we have such wonderful natural assets, and yet we have so often failed to feed our children. I have no solutions; my task, I think, is to go on discovering these people inside me and let them tell me—and you—what they mean. But these are thoughts I will go on thinking—and rightly so—until I die.

  In all those years since nineteen-sixteen, I have had many tribulations, but we’ll pass quickly over them. However, I have had one constant joy, and to tell you what it is, I need to see your faces.

  My grandfather was wonderful that night in Cork— wonderful. I had been worried at his facing an audience much larger than he was used to, and the fact that he couldn’t see his listeners—I had feared he might find it all too much.

  I had no need to worry; in fact I had private cause to rejoice, because his performance once again—as in my childhood—seemed also to have been directed specifically at me. How could I not recognize the figure of the Architect from Newgrange—to my grandfather he seemed to represent Life itself, a force of nature, as he said. And the two monks—one tall and thin, one short and buttery? Annan and Senan, of course! And, like the couple he mentioned so casually in the post office, did Aoife not gaze adoringly up at Strongbow as all the city around them fell into carnage?