9
April, Harney, and I never spoke about the men who hid in our cellars. We seem to have believed by unspoken agreement that the greatest security lay in keeping silence. They proved no small task to us, and we committed many hours of labor and concern to their concealment and their welfare. Usually, we housed approximately twenty or so of these youngsters, whom I saw grow into maturity before my eyes. Boys came in along that dank, secret passageway from the ha-ha at the fresh age of eighteen; six months later they spoke with the wary restraint of menaged forty.
I observed them closely, and soon I could begin to single out individuals and distinguish them among their comrades. Three kinds of men (if I may simplify for the purposes of clarity) composed the Flying Columns: the hearty, the easily conversational, and the quiet. In each case, I believed that I was witnessing men who were responding with their spirits and tempers to the unusual circumstances of their current existence.
The hearty men laughed off dangers and joked with each other about the circumstances from which they had just returned. Men who sat down, ate and drank, and lapsed into quiet conversation seemed to feel the difficulty more severely—or were prepared to let it be seen on their faces, in their demeanor. As to the quiet ones—in time I learned that from their number were drawn the greatest marksmen, the crack shots. In short, those men killed more than anybody else.
On account of mild wounds that they had received, I was given opportunities to make deeper acquaintance with two of the quieter men, and slowly I began to elicit from them, one at a time and never together, their views on the lives they now led.
The first lived several miles away, in one of the county's prettiest villages; the second came from nearby, and his aunt had once worked for my parents at Ardobreen. One night, attending to an eye with a splinter in it (I bathed it with cold tea), I asked the first if he knew when he had shot someone. He said nothing; so I asked him again, in a different way.
After a deep breath he said, in a kind of half-breath, “Ah, you do, sir.”
I waited, keeping my voice soft, bathing the red eye.
“Is it something you see? Or, maybe, hear?”
“Ah, you kinda know, sir.”
“Oh? Now don't move, I'm just going to dab this in here. You kind of know? How would that be?”
He never answered.
When I plied the second one with questions, he manifested similar reluctance.
“Do you ever see a face?”
“Sir, well, I'd see a head, sir.”
“But not a face that, say, you'd recognize if you met him?”
“I'd never want that, sir.”
“Why wouldn't you?”
“Sir, it wouldn't be right; I'm supposed to plug him.”
“You mean—you're there to shoot him, and you don't want to know him?”
“Sir, my job is to plug him.”
Even though I knew that my questions made them uncomfortable, they seemed warmer to me thereafter. When I went down to the cellars, one or other always had a cheery greeting for me—before he lapsed again into silence, sitting quietly by himself away from the others. Neither ever joined in the card games or the endless political discussions.
The postman brought a shock—from the DNA tests.
Without any question I, Michael Bernard Nugent, am descended directly from the person on whose head grew those locks of hair. I assume that the garments among which they lay belonged to the first April Burke. Now what do I do? Disbelief is my first ally.
For good reasons. I loved my mother, Margery Nugent. That quiet woman suppressed a great talent, because she became the wife of a railwayman she loved. Rock no boats. Shatter no glass. That is what she said to herself when she married. She told me so before she died. But I felt attached to her, and I still miss her. The spirit doesn't lie.
Then—doubt sauntered in, asking slyly, Shouldn't you have sent the DNA people something of hers?
My emotional metabolism has a kind of “time-delay” mechanism. If something awkward comes at me, I hold it at bay. And then, several hours later, usually the next day, I'm ready to take it on. That has been my main protection method over the years.
The DNA letter arrived at nine o'clock in the morning, I opened it, read it—and, finally, that night, I was strung out with agitation.
How can this be? Are they sure? I read and reread the little note that came with the printout: “Was it your grandmother?” The technician did add a caution: “I'm aware of the sample's age—but if this was in court, I'd have to swear to the highest probability of consanguinity.”
My thoughts, my scrambled thoughts, went like this: That fellow, Lisney, Henry Lisney—he saw a resemblance. And: What do I do now, what's to happen to all the information of my life? Followed by: No, this can't be the case. And: Supposing I exhumed my mother? Or my father?
Then I returned to Charles O'Brien's “History,” the cause of this difficulty. I was by now on my umpteenth reread and again coming close to the end.
Notwithstanding the mood of relaxation that pervaded the cellars in general, and sometimes the high degree of social ease—at times we had more than fifty men down there—I perceived one day a sharp evidence of their high training and alertness.
At ten o'clock in the morning, I heard the noise, and then I saw the lorries on the avenue. Five trucks of soldiers rumbled toward the castle, led and followed by staff cars. I ran to the cellars and told everyone; they scattered on their stomachs along the floors, hiding behind any object that they could use as shield or cover. As they crawled and squirmed, their little leader, who had once been our lunchtime visitor at Ardobreen, looked at me and said, in a loud voice, “Now who has betrayed us?”
I turned away and climbed the stairs back to the servants' quarters and with help moved the great food-safe back across the doorway. Helen the housekeeper brushed the floor in front of the butler's food-safe and moved a bench into a position nearby, lest the floor betray telltale signs.
Harney had disappeared; I later discovered that he had climbed into the highest part of the East Tower, which had long been prepared and armed for any such emergency. As the staff cars converged in front of the castle, the trucks halted too, and disgorged more than a hundred soldiers. All wore the uniforms of the appalling Black and Tans.
Two officers, one young, one senior, walked up the steps—and I walked down to meet them.
“Good morning, sir, dreadfully sorry for the trouble.”
“Not at all,” I said. “In fact, we're very glad to see you.”
“You are?” He looked disbelieving.
I said, “I mean—my God, after all that's been happening. We knew Summerhill very well; Colonel Rowley was an old friend of my mother's. We're still shocked.”
In February, a beautiful house in County Meath had been burned, to great dismay.
The young officer said, “Do you feel safe here, sir?”
“Who's safe anywhere?” I asked.
My greatest fear had almost paralyzed me—that April had become suspect in the eyes of the authorities.
“Where's the lady of the house, sir?” he asked.
I said, “I don't actually know; I think she may have gone to stay with Lady Bandon.”
The officer looked a little perplexed. “You see, we wouldn't like to search the place without her permission.”
I said, “Oh, I can give you permission—I'm her agent in all such matters. Here, let me help you—where do you want to search and for what?”
“We heard, sir”—the young officer did not quite know how to go forward—“we heard that gunmen hide here, sir.”
“Goodness—do you mean on the actual estate? Where?”
The other officer had been watching me closely, and now he spoke.
“Well, they could be anywhere, sir, couldn't they? It's a big place.”
I said, “Well, let's figure out where you and I would hide if we had to. Outside, there are the woods, and we also have three large groves. And insi
de, we have the cellars, and I can tell you all about them. In fact, I can do better than that.”
Not far away, Mr. Higgins, our Master Stonemason, stood watching. He held no sympathy for either side—but I knew that he would understand my drift.
“This man over here—” I beckoned. “He knows this building inside out; he's restored all the stonework.” I called him. “Mr. Higgins, these gentlemen want to search the cellars. Can you make it safe for them?”
“I can't, sir, and I won't.” Mr. Higgins, walking toward us, heated up a little. “And, sir, I told you before—I'm taking no responsibility for anyone going down there.”
To the officers I explained, “This place was closed for fifty years. There had been severe rain damage and a lot of collapsing. Mr. Higgins has had the task of securing all the underpinning.”
I asked him again: “Isn't there some way in which they can inspect the cellars?”
Mr. Higgins said, a touch impatiently, “Sir, you told me to secure the western door with stone, and we did that. We never moved the ceiling that fell, and if you open that door—I mean, I can open it for you—but more stones will fall.”
I sighed. “You're right. Was there ever an entrance from the stables? I'm most anxious to accommodate—”
The young officer cut in. “It's perfectly all right, sir. May we look inside?”
I led them, enthusiastically. They gasped.
I said, “I'm not about to let a bunch of IRA thugs with guns into this place.”
They agreed with my point of view. I went across to say something to one of the Paglalonis, and I saw the officers conferring—which was what I wanted to achieve. When I returned they said, “If you don't mind sir, we'll just turn the men loose in the woods.”
“Of course—and please stay for lunch?”
They smiled. “Can't, I'm afraid.”
Their search lasted not more than an hour, and all they did was frighten the crows. I stood with Mr. Higgins and watched their cars and trucks drive down the avenue. Within minutes Harney had come to my side.
“How did you do it?”
“I didn't. Mr. Higgins did.”
Mr. Higgins said, “No. He fooled them to the eyeballs.”
In school I always said “War of Independence.” And in English schools they say “Anglo-Irish War”—that is, if it even gets mentioned. My parents called it “the Troubles”—not to be confused with the more recent “Troubles” of the 1970s and onward.
By the spring of 1921, every city, town, and village in Ireland had been caught up in the first “Troubles.” Due to lack of arms, the campaign could not be timed to coincide with the Great War, “England's difficulty.” But the Irish republicans, including Collins and de Valera, believed—somewhat correctly—that they had nonetheless struck at a time when Britain was still emotionally as well as militarily depleted.
And once again, the British government became a valuable ally. If the executions of the 1916 leaders had swung public opinion behind the Rising, now the atrocities of the Black and Tans became a countrywide outrage. The men of the Flying Columns became folk heroes.
They proved impossible to fight. Any English regiment that came to Ireland had officers who understood artillery, and cavalry, and strategy, and the movement of supplies. How could they fight an enemy who might lurk behind the next hedge? Or who might not? Who might descend on them in a mountain pass or on a main road? Or who might not?
And how could they fight an enemy who, in some cases, was their employee? Michael Collins gained access to almost as many military secrets as he wished, because his supporters were the filing clerks and the secretaries and the errand boys of the men who drafted the British strategies.
The Flying Column volunteers passed into legend even while they were on the run. Ballads were made, poems were written, artists portrayed them. Most active in the south and the west—that is, in the best guerrilla terrain—they and their daring created problem after problem for the authorities, who had no experience of fighting like this.
Furthermore, the quality of the clashes when the IRA took on the army created a natural David-and-Goliath atmosphere. Twice in March 1921, the Irish public read of results that the army would rather not have released. In Millstreet, on the border of Cork and Kerry, the Flying Columns laid land mines that killed more than a dozen troops—and the Irish admitted to no casualties. Two weeks later, at Crossbarry, in Cork, over a thousand soldiers surrounded a Flying Column—and not only failed to capture them but lost over twenty soldiers.
Something new, and often disastrous, happened every day. Thus, the psychological war, too, was lost by the British. They first began to lose it themselves, when their policy of executions created Irish martyrs. Then each guerrilla incident became public, despite the official efforts at censorship.
To read the newspapers of the time, especially from an Irish point of view, is to ride a seesaw of brilliance and disaster. For every IRA victory in the fields, local villagers were almost certain to pay with their houses or their lives.
Nor did every one of Collins's units have unmitigated success. Joe Harney's archives contain a vivid account of an operation in which he was involved early in June 1921. Although it doesn't say so, it was to have a significant bearing on the life of Charles O'Brien, even though he was not involved. And on my own life.
We were told by one of our people in Dublin that a Very Important Personage would be on the train from Portarlington to Mallow on the first Tuesday in June. He was a general, a big prize. The orders were to capture him and hold on to him—a bargaining chip. I was given the job. We were told to keep him fiercely secure—and I thought, “The cellars.”
A good decision, I felt; we meant to treat him like a prisoner-of-war— a lot more than our men were getting. I said so to Charles, and he was kind of amused: “A general? We're coming up in the world.”
Dermot was away somewhere. I think that talks about a truce were beginning, and he was a very good negotiator. Since I can't separate out any of the things that I was thrown into at this time, I also have to tell you that he was getting married that same month to April Somerville, the Englishwoman who owned Tipperary Castle.
Dermot pulled all kinds of strings. Mrs. Somerville, she was taking instruction to convert to Catholicism—from what faith, I don't know, because I never heard that she had any religion. And the problem was— he was on the run, so where could they get married? It had to be in a church; I'll come to all that.
We set out in the morning to get the general, and everything went wrong. We knew the time of the train—but it was hours late. And they had taken a security precaution that none of us anticipated: they'd put on a long train that day and the general sat up in the front of it, so that when the train came in, his carriage always went beyond the station platform. That was to make it harder for anyone to get on board easily. And in the station we chose, Dundrum, his compartment was halfway into the woods before we could get near him.
There were eight of us, though we'd been promised some more Volunteers. We were to take the general down onto the tracks, through the engine sheds, and out the other side, where a car would be waiting. By the time the train came in, we were very nervous. No other men showed up, and there was no sign of a car. A few minutes before the train came in, the stationmaster tipped us the wink about the length of the carriages, and where the general would be sitting.
I told four of my men to get on the train at the platform, not to draw guns but to head for the front of the train. I took the remaining three Volunteers and we ran forward, crouched down below the windows so the soldiers couldn't see us. Although there didn't seem to be that many soldiers around.
When I figured which was the general's carriage, I sent two of my men in the door at the back of it, and the remaining two of us ran up ahead, and got on the train.
Straightaway, I saw him. He was sitting there not in uniform, and with two or three other men around who were also in plain clothes. There were two soldiers
in uniform at each door.
When dangerous things happen fast, you see them slowly. I saw one of my men die—he had come in at the back door of the carriage, gun in hand, and one of the sentries shot him. That was the first gunfire. I still had no gun out—but I drew it then. I got the first sentry, but I only wounded him and he got off two shots before I plugged him. But the man with me got shot.
At the same time, my second man at the back of the carriage got the sentries there, and he also plugged one of the plain-clothes men who had drawn a gun. I got a second plain-clothes fellow—and the third one almost got me. He let off one shot that missed—and I reached him and shoved my gun in his neck.
Somehow I guessed that the general wouldn't be armed. But—you never saw a calmer man.
“Don't shoot,” he said, very levelly. “That's my son-in-law”—and indeed it was, although I didn't find that out for certain until much later.
“Tell him to put down his gun,” I said.
“David—you heard the gentleman.”
The gun hit me on the foot when it dropped. My second man picked it up, and got the son-in-law out of the way.
“General Hogarth, I'm Commandant of the Third Tipperary Brigade, and you have to come with me.”
He stood up. “I rather thought that's what you had in mind, Commandant,” he said.
My other four men—they couldn't get through. The train had been locked behind the general's carriage. So there we were, on a train that might take off at any moment, two of us with a top-ranking British general and nowhere to go.
The other four boys were clever enough to get off the train, run ahead, and square off the driver, threatening him if he attempted to get the train moving again. I couldn't get the general safely down onto the tracks and cover him at the same time—so three of my fellows grabbed him and helped him down.