I knew of course that the two men inside
the house were up to no good. I thought they were spies. That’s why our gang –
in other words me and Aidan Murphy – were spying on them. But we didn’t know
that the guards were spying on them too. So when the house was surrounded at
twilight one evening, before the shooting started, no-one knew we were in the
overgrown shrubbery not far from the back door.
When
we saw all the guards arriving Aidan made a run for it and got away, but I was
wearing the new raincoat I’d just got for my tenth birthday the week before,
and the belt got tangled in the branches when I tried to climb out over the
hedge. I pulled and pulled, but the more I did that, the more the buckle got
wedged in the thorny briars. I had to stop moving in case I’d be found out. I
was stuck half-hanging and half-perched precariously, high up in dense hawthorn
hedge, trying to ignore the thorns that were digging into my legs. Dust tickled
my nose, but I managed not to sneeze. I even tried to stop breathing.
That’s
how I heard the whole thing. Or did I imagine some of it? My mother and father
- and my older brother and sister - were always telling me I had a great
imagination. I thought my parents would never stop laughing one Christmas when
I told them that not only had I heard reindeer on the roof, but that I heard
Santa Claus talking at the end of my bed when I was pretending to be asleep,
and that he sounded terrible like my da. I kept insisting that he said in a
real grumpy voice “Who put the bloomin’ big holes in these stockings? This
fella’s very hard on his clothes.” They convinced me after a while that maybe I
did dream that. After all, how could Santa Claus from the North Pole sound just
like my da from Tipperary
But
I don’t think I could have imagined hearing one of the detectives, crouched
behind the henhouse just below where I was hiding, telling another detective
with a jeering kind of laugh, “Now’s your chance to get him, Joe.” The other
detective said “Keep quiet”, but the first one said “It’s now or never … put up
or shut up … sure they’ll think it was crossfire.”
It was the strange word “crossfire” that
caught my attention in the middle of everything else that was going on. Only a
week before that, we had been to see a film in our local picture house, and it
was about horrible people in America
The two men in the house started
shooting first, then the guards fired back. I got such a fright I nearly fell
out of my hiding place. The noise was louder than anything I’d ever heard –
much louder than the sound the cowboys’ guns made in the cinema. I began to
shake and I thought I was gone deaf for a second, but then something that
sounded like a very loud wasp went right past my ear. I could hear a lot of
cursing and roaring as well. It all seemed to go on for ages until at last
someone shouted, “Cease fire! Stop shooting, they’re coming out.”
The two men - who weren’t German spies
after all, just ordinary Dublin
There were nettles and thistles
everywhere in the long grass. Granny Gormley, who used to live there, had been
dead for a long time – nearly three years that summer. I was trying to avoid
getting stung on my bare knees – this was a few years before I got my first
long trousers – but I was afraid to stand up and walk in case anyone saw me.
Anyway my legs were still shaky.
I went sideways to avoid a big bunch of
nettles under the apple tree where we used to find the windfalls. That’s when I
nearly put my hand on the man lying in the long grass. His face was turned
sideways towards me, and his mouth was open as if he was surprised. His eyes
were open, too, and I thought for a split second he was staring at me. Then I
realised he couldn’t see me. It was a great relief. I stood up and ran like
hell.
People had started to come out of their
houses and were looking up and down the road to see what had made all the
noise, but by then there was nothing for them to see – except me running
towards them. I slowed down and walked past, trying to look normal, as though I
was just coming from Geraghty’s shop. But they were all too excited to notice
me. I heard one woman tell another that it was probably a car backfiring. A man
said “That wasn’t any car, I’m in the LDF and I tell you that was bloody guns.”
I told no-one, not even my best friend
Aidan, what I’d seen. I certainly wasn’t going to tell my family. If I
mentioned it to my big brother or sister – Brian and Kathleen were much older
than me – they’d be sure to tell my ma and da and then I’d be given out to. I’d
been warned several times for playing in Granny Gormley’s garden. My mother
thought it was disrespectful, which I couldn’t understand because the house had
been empty for years.
I could hardly remember Granny Gormley:
all I could think of when I tried to picture her was a little white-haired lady
in a long black coat and a black hat, a smaller version of my father’s mother
who used to come up from Tipperary every summer to visit us. Granny Gormley
used to keep hens in the back garden. Once when I was small I sneaked into the
henhouse with Aidan Murphy and we found four eggs. We brought them home, two
each to our families, and said Granny Gormley gave them to us. Of course she
didn’t, and she saw us sneaking out of the hen-run, so when she went there and
found no eggs, she called around to my house and told my mother.
My mother said she had been suspicious
anyway, because not only were my shoes covered in hens’ droppings but the eggs
were all dirty, and she knew Granny Gormley would never have given them to us
in that state. I got given-out to that time too. First by my mother and then by
my father when he came home from work. But it wasn’t too bad, because halfway
through giving out to me my father said “Could you not have got us a chicken while
you were at it?” and they both started to laugh. I always knew I was all right
if I could get them to laugh.
But there was no chance they’d laugh
about what I’d seen that night in the garden. So I bottled it up and kept it to
myself. I tried to forget all about it and pretend it never happened – or to
convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing – or bits of it anyway. But
sometimes when I was sitting in our big kitchen, which was also the living-room
(although we never called it that), and supposed to be doing my homework, I’d
really be listening to what the grown-ups were talking about. And for a good
while after that day, there was a lot of talk about the terrible accident that
happened to poor Detective Inspector Dunne and how he was found in the garden
only after the other detectives realised he hadn’t come back to the station
with any of them.
My mother and father were talking about
it again one Sunday night when my Uncle Jack was there. He used to visit our
house every second Sunday to play cards with my parents and listen to John
McCormack records on the big old gramophone in the corner. He called it his
“evening devotions”. Uncle Jack, my mother’s older brother, was a tall,
happy-looking man, and it always seemed to me that everyone cheered up whenever
he arrived. He was my favourite uncle – possibly because I hardly saw any of my
other relatives who either lived “down the country” or even further away – but
more likely because he never forgot to bring a bag of Scots Clan toffees for
“the children”. (Although my brother thought he was much too old to be called a
child anymore; it didn’t stop him eating most of the sweets all the same.)
They were in the middle of their card
game when the name of Inspector Dunne came up. There must have been something
about it in the paper that day. I wasn’t paying much attention until my father
suddenly said “Anyway it’s well-known he had it coming to him”. My mother
hushed him immediately. “Tom!” she said in her warning voice, “Little pictures
have big ears.” Whenever she said that she’d dart a sideways glance over at me;
to this day I still have a thing about ears – mine and other people’s.
My father lowered his voice, but I could
still hear him as he said, “I’m sorry, Mary, but sure we all know what your man
did in twenty-two. And one of them a brother of one of his own men.”
I was still trying to work out what “22”
meant – wondering was it the number of a house – when Uncle Jack put down his
cards and said, “Tom, would you not be bringing all that up again. Sure I
thought we agreed long ago we’d leave the past in the past.”
My father shrugged and said, “Still, you
have to admit there’s something very odd about it.” Then after a pause, he gave
Uncle Jack a sort of funny look and said, “Maybe you know more about it
yourself than you’re telling us, Jack? Sure we all know you still have
connections in high places.” It sounded like a question, but the way he said
it, I thought he was accusing Uncle Jack of something. They all went very
quiet. I was worried because I liked Uncle Jack a lot, but my mother said “Ah
now, Tom! Don’t start that oul’ carry-on!” Uncle Jack just lit a cigarette,
picked up his cards again and said, with a kind of grin, “Look! Are we playing
cards or not, Tom?”
My father picked up his cards, too and
said “Right ho, Jack, but you don’t have to keep them all so close to your
chest.”
Uncle Jack said, “Now what do you mean
by that, Tom? Sure don’t I always put mine on the table for everyone to see?”
My father said, “Indeed you do, Jack,
except for the ones you keep up your sleeve!”
Everyone laughed
then, which surprised me.
But somehow I got the feeling they
weren’t talking about their card game at all. Then my mother noticed me
listening and told me it was time I went to bed.
CHAPTER 2
I
had forgotten all about that night, and had even managed to stop thinking about
the things I’d seen and heard in the garden, until a thing that happened a few
months later, after the summer holidays when I was in the schoolyard. Some of
the boys were talking to a new boy.
“Is it true it was your da who got shot when they were
chasing the Leary brothers?” The boy asking the question was Keeley. Thin-faced
and buck-toothed, with a long nose and his hair always plastered straight back
with hair oil, he was a bit taller than the rest of us and liked to throw his
weight around in the playground. He was sneaky, too: when a game of chasing or
relievio was going on, he might suddenly stick out his leg and trip some boy
who was running past him, often sending him sprawling on the rough tar in the
yard. We all knew that his da had been in jail, but we never knew what for. I
didn’t like him and neither did most of the boys in my class, but he had his
own gang of hangers-on, and they were with him this morning, grinning and
waiting to see what would happen next.
The new boy, who looked very sad, tried to edge away.
“I don’t want to talk about that”, he said. I was afraid he might be going to
cry, but I was wrong.
Keeley caught hold of his sleeve and said. “My da says
your da deserved it”. The new boy stopped trying to pull away. Instead he
stared back at Keeley. “Say that again”, he said. He didn’t look sad anymore.
“Your da. He deserved to be shot”, Keeley began, but just as he got the last
word out, the new boy punched him in the face. Keeley went staggering
backwards, holding his nose. The blood began to flow from both nostrils.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, leaving
blood smeared all over his face. Then he shook his head and bunched his fists
and made a run at the new boy, who had backed away, but had his own fists ready
too. A crowd of boys quickly gathered from all over the yard. Boys who had been
playing ball came running over. We formed a human boxing ring as the fighters
began to circle each other. Nothing happened for a while and then suddenly the
two of them began to hit each other, but half of their punches missed. Then
they grabbed hold of each other’s clothes and went whirling around in a big
circle, so that all of us watching had to step back out of the way. One of
Keeley’s pals stuck his foot out and tripped the new boy up, but as the two of
them fell to the hard tarry ground it was Keeley who ended up underneath. He
was still trying to hit the new boy, who just kept trying to grab his fists and
stop him.
“What’s going on here?” The headmaster, Mister
O’Donoghue had arrived on the scene. He had a Cork
“Nothing, sir”, said a few voices. “It was an
accident”, said Keeley, getting to his feet. “I ran into him and we fell”.
“Is that what happened, Dunne”, Mister O’Donoghue
asked the new boy, who was already standing.
“Yes, sir”, he replied in a very quiet
voice.
“Hmm”, said the master, “I’m glad to hear it. You’re
sure no-one was talking about your father?”
“No, sir”, said Dunne, shaking his head.
The headmaster turned to Keeley, who had a
handkerchief up to his nose, which I was glad to see seemed to be still bleeding
from both nostrils. “You’d better go and clean yourself up, Keeley”, he said.
Keeley began to move away, but Mister O’Donoghue called after him, “And when
you go home make sure you tell that father of yours exactly what happened. I
wouldn’t want him getting the wrong idea. Or any of his friends either.” He
turned on his heel, “The rest of you get back to your classrooms”, he ordered,
walking away.
After school, Aidan Murphy was puzzling over the whole
thing. “What did Mister O’Donoghue mean about Keeley’s da not getting the wrong
idea?” he said. “Or his friends either?” I had to admit I hadn’t a clue what
that meant either, but it sounded very sarcastic.
“Who is Gearoid Dunne anyway?” Aidan asked as we both
walked home, taking turns at kicking a tin can we’d seen by the roadside.
“Do you not remember”, I said, “His da was the
detective that got shot.”
He stopped dead. “Gosh”, he said, “Really? Weren’t we
lucky we ran away before that all happened!”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said something like
that. I had to keep telling him not to mention it ever again. “No one must know
we were anywhere near that house”, I said again now.
“But why not?” sighed Aidan, who was two months
younger than me and used to wear glasses then, with a patch over one eye to
straighten it. “It was very exciting.
I’m still bursting to tell someone. Especially my big brother who thinks he’s
so great all the time.”
I don’t know why I knew it was important not to let
anyone know we’d been anywhere near the house. But of course, Aidan hadn’t
heard what I’d overheard, and I was never going to tell him. Especially if he
was going to start blabbing about it just to impress his big brother, Eamon,
who was always jeering him about his glasses. His big brother was always
jeering me too, because of my freckles. He jeered at everyone, even his own
friends.
“How’s Freddy Freckleface”, he’d say whenever I called
for Aidan. “My name isn’t Freddy, it’s Michael”, I’d protest, but he’d just
laugh. “Freckles and Speckles!” he’d say in a dramatic voice as we went out the
gate, “Off for another daring spying mission to save the nation!” He sounded
like the man who did the newsreels in the Acropolis – that was the name of our
local cinema, which had been opened just before the war began.
The war was still on. Or the Emergency I should say.
It had only a few weeks to go, but of course we didn’t know that. It had been
going on for as long as I could remember. We had gas masks for all the family
stored in our wardrobe, but we never got the chance to use them – except when
we played at being soldiers. And our heads were full of stories and rumours
we’d heard about German spies and secret agents.
Both Aidan and I were convinced that every second man
we saw in the street was behaving suspiciously. We’d follow them, hiding behind
lamp-posts and gate pillars until they arrived at their front doors. Invariably
we were disappointed. We’d sneak up to any window of the house that remained
uncurtained and peer in, only to see them sitting down to their tea, or just
reading the evening paper.
No matter how hard we tried to make these activities
seem sinister, we had to admit that, really, they weren’t spies at all. Yet the
schoolyard used to be abuzz every now and again with yarns about spies. Some
boy would say that his cousin down the country somewhere had personally seen a
spy landing in a parachute, and then another would swear his father had had his
bike stolen by one outside Mass.
So Aidan and I kept a permanent watch, always in vain,
until the day we saw the two men climbing over the back wall of Number 71,
Granny Gormley’s bungalow near the end of our road.
We knew the house had been empty ever since she died.
We played cowboys and Indians in the overgrown garden when we weren’t on active
anti-spy duty.
It was when we were in the middle of a game, hiding
and trying to ambush each other, that we first saw the men coming across the
back garden and looking around carefully before forcing open the back door and
going in. We waited for ages, but they didn’t come out again.
So it was perfectly obvious that they
must be spies. At last!
CHAPTER 3
For
the next few days after we’d seen them arrive, Aidan and I kept “our spies”
under surveillance as much as we could, except of course, that we had to go to
school and home to bed. But so far as we could make out at first, they didn’t
leave the house at all. Then, just as we were wondering if they were in there
at all anymore, one of them came out very furtively, wearing a coat and hat and
looking just like an ordinary Irish person. A very cunning disguise, we told each
other admiringly. Aidan and I shadowed him expertly, hoping to see where he
collected his secret messages. Was there some place where he linked up with all
the other spies? But all he did was stop at Geraghty’s corner shop and go in.
I took a deep breath and went in after him, acting
normal. I could see now that he needed a shave, but he looked a bit younger
than I had expected. He didn’t look very much older than my brother Brian. I’m
not sure what age I thought a spy should be, but I didn’t expect him to have
black curly hair – which is what I could see when he took off his hat going
into the shop. Very good manners, too, for a spy, but a bit stupid I thought,
since it ruined his disguise.
He didn’t even notice me listening as he asked for a
bottle of milk and some bread. Then he asked Mrs Geraghty, “I don’t suppose you
have any tea or cigarettes to spare?” I wondered if that was a secret password.
After all, she might even be a secret agent herself. Maybe that’s what she’d
meant that time when she’d asked Aidan and me were we good at keeping secrets.
She always wore nice clothes and lipstick and high heels, and she even smoked,
just like someone you’d see in a film about spies.
I couldn’t tell from looking at the man and Mrs
Geraghty whether they were making any secret signs at each other. He was just
smiling at her and she was looking him up and down. Then she laughed and said,
“Spare tea? Fags? Now where would I get the likes? And you with no ration book
or coupons? Are you spying on me by any chance?” She glanced over at me and
then turned back to him and said in a lower voice, “Maybe you’ll have better
luck if you come back later. I’m expecting some more supplies.” I thought I saw
her wink at him; then she looked over at me again.
The man half-laughed and paid for the milk and bread,
then turned to leave, nearly walking on me.
“Well, young man? What is it you want?” Mrs Geraghty
was smiling at me now, but I just backed out and turned to keep track of the
“spy”.
Outside, I told Aidan what Mrs Geraghty was after
calling him. “You mean she knows that he’s a spy and she still served him?” he
asked.
I must admit I was a bit puzzled by that myself at the
time. But we followed the man back to the house and looked in the window to see
if we could spot a transmitter or some other spying equipment. All we saw
through the thick net curtains was the two men tearing up the bread with their
bare hands and gobbling it up as fast as they could, and washing it down with
the bottle of milk. We were very disappointed with this performance; it didn’t
look like the kind of spy behaviour we’d expected to see. But they’d just have
to do: they were the only spies we knew.
We did our best to keep a close eye on them over the
next few days, in between going to school and doing homework and going on
messages for our mothers. But they had pulled over all the curtains in the
house, so we didn’t even know now whether they were in there or not. Aidan
thought they’d probably got away on us, and I was beginning to think the same
thing until early one Saturday morning. My mother had discovered she had no
butter in the house for the breakfast and had sent me down to Geraghty’s shop
to get some.
It was so early that the shop was only just opening.
As I walked into the porch that led to the door that opened sideways into the
shop, I was quite surprised when the other door at the back of the porch opened
suddenly. This was the door that led to the stairs to Geraghtys’ flat over the
shop. A man looked out and saw me, then
quickly closed the door again. It was so quick that I could almost have
imagined it, but I was pretty certain that he had black curly hair.
So Mrs Geraghty was in with the spies after all! Maybe
they kept their transmitter upstairs! I couldn’t wait to tell Aidan. I knew
he’d be raging that I had got ahead of him in the spy-catching competition, but
that was why I was the leader of our gang. I went into the shop and asked Mrs
Geraghty for the butter. “You’re up bright and early, young man”, she smiled. I
smiled back, not letting her know that I now knew she was a secret agent. But I
had to admit to myself that she was very good at it. She was the picture of
innocence, even humming to herself as she weighed and wrapped the butter before
handing it to me and taking the coupons.
Aidan didn’t believe me when I told him about it.
“Don’t be stupid”, he said, “That was only Mr Geraghty. He has black
hair.” When I reminded him that Mr
Geraghty was away, he said that maybe it was one of the lodgers. Everyone knew,
he said, that the Geraghtys kept lodgers, just like his Auntie Judy had to do
after his uncle had died. He said he heard his mother talking about them once.
But I wasn’t convinced; I thought he was just jealous of my discovery.
The very next day, on Sunday after Mass, Aidan came
rushing up to me outside the church. “Guess what!” he hissed.
My mother and father were only a few yards away.
“What?” I hissed back.
“You were right. She is a spy!”
“Who’s a spy?” my father said, overhearing us as he
came back from buying the paper from the man at the other church gate. I told
him Aidan was talking about some new film that was coming to our local picture
house.
“Fillums!” my father said, “Your heads are too full of
that oul’ nonsense!” He shook his head and messed up my hair, then took my
mother’s arm to walk home.
When they were safely out of earshot, Aidan proudly
told me that he had sneaked out of his house early that morning and gone down
to keep watch on Geraghty’s shop by himself. And sure enough, he had seen our
spy coming out the door with a bag of food and making his way down a back lane
that led to Granny Gormley’s house.
“Which door?” I asked him.
“The shop door, of course”, Aidan said, exasperated.
But I said that didn’t prove anything. The man I’d seen was peeping out of
their house door, the one that led upstairs to their flat. “You only saw him
coming from the shop”, I pointed out, “so he could just have been buying
groceries like before. The other man, the one I saw was probably a new lodger,
like you said.” I knew I was nearly arguing against myself now, but I didn’t
want Aidan to be one jump ahead of me.
We still hadn’t settled that argument when, about a
week later, the police surrounded Granny Gormley’s house – and us – or me anyway, Aidan having
had the good luck to get away before the shooting started.
It turned out that the two men were only bank robbers,
who had shot and wounded someone while they were trying to rob yet another
bank, and had then been chased by the guards until they lost them.
Some time after all the excitement had died down I was
in Mrs Geraghty’s shop getting some messages for my mother, but I had to wait
while she served another customer, Miss Foley from up the road. My father,
whenever she was mentioned, would say, “that oul’ busybody”, and my mother
would always tell him to shush.
I was pretending not to listen as they
talked.
“Wasn’t that dreadful, Mrs Geraghty, about poor
Inspector Dunne getting shot”, Miss Foley said. People always called each other
Mr and Mrs – or in some cases Miss – in those days, even though they bumped
into each other every day.
“Terrible”, said Mrs Geraghty, weighing
a few rashers on the scales.
“And is it true” Miss Foley said, “that they were
buying all their .food here?”
“Who”, asked Mrs Geraghty, taking one
rasher back off the scales.
“Those blackguards of course”.
“Who told you that?” Mrs Geraghty looked a bit cross.
I thought for a minute she was going to turn and accuse me.
“Oh”, Miss Foley said vaguely, “I think one of my
neighbours heard it from one of the guards.”
“Really?, said Mrs Geraghty, “Will there
be anything else?”
“Four sausages”, said Miss Foley, “So
they did come in here then?”
Mrs Geraghty frowned as she separated the sausages
from the big string of them that were hanging from a high hook behind the
counter. “Now that you mention it, when I saw their picture in the paper, I
thought it looked like one of them. A fellow did come in a few weeks ago, but
when I saw he had no ration book or coupons, I showed him the door.”
As she packed the rashers and sausages into Miss
Foley’s shopping bag, I wondered why she was looking so sad.
Miss Foley reached to take the bag and said, “I
suppose they’ll both be hung for it. Shooting Inspector Dunne I mean.”
“Both?” said Mrs Geraghty in a small voice. I thought
she was going to drop the bag; her hand had started to tremble so much.
Miss Foley nodded grimly, reaching for
the shopping bag. .
“But”, said Mrs Geraghty, “How could they do that? I
mean, they couldn’t both have shot him.”
Miss Foley said, “Well, that’s the law.” She looked as
though she might like to hang them herself, but then she paused, glanced
sideways at me, and lowered her voice before saying, “That’s of course if
either of them did it.”
Mrs Geraghty was puzzled by that, which seemed to please
Miss Foley. “I heard it might have been an accident”, she said.
“Really?” Mrs Geraghty’s eyebrows shot up; they always
reminded me of little black arrows. “But that wasn’t in the paper.”
Miss Foley said, “Ah, but sure we all know, don’t we,
that they can’t print everything they want in the papers these days. Because of
the war.”
“But sure what has that got to do with the war?” said
Mrs Geraghty. “It’s not as if they were German spies or something!”
Miss Foley shrugged. “No”, she said, then seeing me
looking as if I wasn’t listening, she lowered her voice again, “but they say
Inspector Dunne did something years ago in the Civil War, and that the brother
of someone who got killed then was one of the other guards.”
“What other guards?” asked Mrs Geraghty, frowning
again, as baffled as I was.
“The guards that raided the house”, said Miss Foley as
I edged closer, “They say it was one of them shot him.”
Mrs Geraghty put a hand to her mouth, looking worried
and surprised at the same time. “So you’re saying it wasn’t an accident then?”
she said
“Oh, I’m not saying that!” said Miss Foley “but you
know the way some people talk.”
“Oh yes,” Mrs Geraghty, with a sudden smile that
surprised me, ““I know all about that all right.”
She handed Miss Foley her shopping bag, adding, “It
doesn’t take much to set the tongues wagging around here, Miss Foley.”
I thought Miss Foley looked a bit red in the face as
she turned to go. Mrs Geraghty winked at me behind her back.
That made me go a bit red. She had lovely long
eyelashes.
CHAPTER 4
A
few months after he came to our school Gearoid Dunne was moved into my class
when the teachers decided he was so brainy that he was ahead of all the boys in
the lower class he had been put into when he first arrived. Before that, he had
been in a boarding school down the country somewhere, but, after his father was
killed, his mother sent him to our school instead. He was very tall, and he was
very quiet most of the time, I suppose because he was sad. But he was great at
sums, which I wasn’t. I was good at Irish because my father was very fond of
it, so I used to help Gearoid with his Irish and he helped me with my sums.
He never talked about what happened to his father, and
I never mentioned it, but then one day the case of the Leary Brothers was in
the papers. Our teacher mentioned it in front of the whole class and told us
all we should be proud to have the son of such a brave man as the late
Detective Inspector Dunne in our class. Then we all clapped and cheered Gearoid
Dunne.
But a short while later I found him out in the bicycle
shed. His nose and his eyes were red. I
thought at first that he’d been fighting, but that wasn’t it. He tried to
pretend he hadn’t been crying, and I didn’t know what to say at first.
“You must miss your da terrible”, I said at last, but
he shook his head and blew his nose.
“I don’t!” he said, “He used to hit me sometimes.” I
wondered why he’d hate his father for that; most fathers – and mothers, too –
would hit their children every now and then if they annoyed them too much. “A
clip in the ear” was what my father sometimes threatened, but rarely delivered.
“And he hit my mother once, too, when she tried to
stop him hitting me”, said Gearoid Dunne. That sounded very strange. I’d never
heard of anyone’s father hitting their mother before. My own mother and father
never even had a row – not in front of me anyway. The nearest thing you’d hear
to a row would be when my father did something that annoyed my mother – like
the time he tried to throw most of a full coal-bucket into the fire, but missed
and sent it all over the floor instead. When something like that happened my
exasperated mother would sigh loudly and say “For God’s sake Tom! I knew I
should have married Seán Murtagh”; my father, busy trying to shovel the coal up
off the lino would say “Maybe you should have, but he was a terrible dancer!”
This ritual exchange usually ended up with them both laughing. I sometimes
wondered who this mysterious Seán Murtagh was. I found out many years later,
and got quite a shock.
Gearoid Dunne blew his nose again and almost glared at
me, red-eyed. “Don’t tell anyone else I told you that”, he said.
I told him that of course I wouldn’t. He looked
embarrassed now. “I didn’t really hate my da”, he muttered, getting on his bike,
“I think he only did it when he drank whiskey. He’d start an argument about
nothing at all, and no matter what you answered, it was the wrong thing, and
he’d start telling me I was an impudent pup.
He’d shout that he wouldn’t stand for such insubordination and start
trying to hit me. The next day of course he’d be mortified and he’d promise my
mother he was going to give it up. Then he wouldn’t drink for ages. But at the
same time every year he’d forget his promise. Then he’d start to go on about the
past and ‘poor Mick Collins, what they did to him.’ ”
I wasn’t sure who ‘poor Mick Collins’ was, except that
he had something to do with the Civil War, and that was never really talked
about in my house. Or in the houses of any of the boys I knew. If it was
mentioned at all, this was usually in the grown-ups’ low voices, with glances
in our direction in case we might hear something we were not supposed to hear.
“Was your da in the Civil War?” I asked Gearoid Dunne
as we cycled home.
He didn’t say anything for a while, then slowed down
his bike and said “Yes, he was. But my ma said not to talk about it”. We
reached the crossroads and he went one way and I went another. I couldn’t help
thinking about what I’d heard the other detective saying in the garden. I
wondered whether I should mention it to Gearoid Dunne.
It was a few weeks after that that I arrived home from
school to find Aidan Murphy waiting for me at the gate with a big woolly scarf
around his neck. He’d been off sick that day.
(He was very good at getting off sick from school because he’d learned
how effective it was to say he had a streptococcal throat. This always worried
his mother; she used to bring him regularly to St Blaise’s Church in town for
the blessing of the throats, but it never seemed to do him any good).
“Did you hear the news?” he asked before I could get
off my bike. “About the Leary Brothers. One of them is going to be hung!”
I nearly fell off the bike. “Are you sure?” I asked
him. He was looking very excited. .
“Yes”, he said, “It’s in tonight’s
paper!”
I followed him into his house, a few doors away from
mine. We went into the kitchen, which was always much tidier than ours. The
paper-boy always delivered the Evening Mail to his house; we only got a morning
paper.
There was a big headline on top of the page, and
underneath it the court report that said one of the Leary Brothers had been in
possession of the type of gun that killed Inspector Dunne. Even though it was
also a type used by the gardai, the judge said he “wished to put an end to
conjecture” that there had been an accident involving crossfire.
I wasn’t quite sure what some of the big words were,
but I understood enough.
“But that can’t be!” I said.
Aidan looked at me, surprised. “What do
you mean?” he asked.
I nearly asked him did he not remember hearing the
detective saying “now’s your chance”, but remembered just in time that of
course he had been gone from Granny Gormley’s garden by then. I said nothing; I
just shook my head and stared at the paper instead.
“My da was right. He says they’ll be sending for
Pierrepoint!” Aidan breathed, avidly reading the whole thing again.
I knew Albert Pierrepoint was the British hangman. It
wasn’t all that long since he had hung Lord Haw Haw, and there had been a lot
of talk about it in our house because he used to be on the wireless with his
funny voice during the war. My Uncle Jack said at the time that it was just as
well the British hung Lord Haw Haw, that if they hadn’t he would have been got
by some old IRA men because he used to be an informer for the Black and Tans.
Uncle Jack knew a lot of things like that. And he could be very sarcastic
sometimes: he used to say that even though we were now an independent country,
we did not have a hangman of our own, so that whenever there was a murderer to
be hung, (or “hanged” as the grown-ups called it), the government always sent
to England for Pierrepoint “to do their dirty work for them.”
I looked at the paper again. The hanging date was set.
I didn’t know what to do.
I started to tell my older brother Brian about it one
night in the bedroom we shared, but he just sighed and told me to stop making
up more “stupid stories”. He told me to switch off the light and go to sleep,
and not to be reading either and keeping him awake, because he was doing an
important insurance exam the next day. He was very good at exams, much better
than I was, and he was very good at football too. He used to play for his
school team and everyone said he’d be picked some day for Dublin O’Connell
Street
I put out the light and tried to go to sleep, but I
couldn’t. It wasn’t even worth thinking about telling my sister, Kathleen. She
was still living at home with us then, before she went to live in England
I tossed and turned and tried to think of something
else instead, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking of
Pierrepoint.
____________
Hope you've enjoyed it so far:
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Éanna Brophy
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