Blood-Dark Track (38 page)

My grandfather’s coffin was swathed in the customary pall of the patriot, the green, white and gold flag of Ireland. It was a sunny day, and people threw crisp shadows. An IRA guard of honour marched in step alongside the coffin; they wore berets, tricolour armbands, jackets and ties. Behind them walked my grandmother in a blue dress and a hat. She led a procession of many hundreds of people. There was a great turn-out for the funeral of James O’Neill.

Among the mourners was Dr Barker, who was attending a
patient’s funeral for the first time. ‘I was very disappointed,’ she said afterwards to my grandmother, ‘to see that nice man was implicated in the IRA.’ The security services, by contrast, knew all about Jim O’Neill’s republican connections. Expecting IRA men to make an appearance, they were present in offensive numbers, taking photographs and hanging from the trees bordering the cemetery. Somebody made a joke about the Special Branch in the branches.

My grandfather was buried in a plot he had acquired – a double plot. From the grave, the view is of the sky, the water of the estuary of the Lee, and green Cork hills. The headstone carries the statement, IN PROUD AND LOVING MEMORY OF JAMES O’NEILL, DUN ARD.… 1ST BATTALION, 1ST CORK BRIGADE. IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY D. SEPT 1973 AGED 63.

An obituary of my grandfather appeared in a republican publication:

In the month of September another Veteran Soldier of Oglaigh na-Eireann passed to his Eternal Reward without seeing freedom coming to Ireland for whom he sacrificed so much. He was Jim O’Neill of Briogaid A h-Aoin Corcaigh.

To his Wife and Family Cumann Briann O’Diolluin tender their Deepest Sympathy in this their Hour of Sorrow. Their loss is Ireland’s loss also because few of her sons have served her better than Jim O’Neill.

I first met Jim O as he was known to us, in the early Nineteen Thirties when I was a young lad in Fianna Eireann. He was even then a Veteran in Ireland’s Fight for Freedom. When I joined Oglaigh na h-Eireann in 1937 I served with him in No 3 Company Briogaid A h-Aoin Corcaigh. I served in this Company until I left the Cork area, but I was to meet him again in the Hell Hole of Tintown in 1940. Who can ever really understand what he and his Wife and young Family suffered during those years or the years following his Release while he fought to Re-Build their lives.

In the years that followed he was ever willing to play his part in Re-Building the Republican Movement. When Ireland called her sons to Arms for the present and final fight for Freedom Jim O was one of the first to answer her call. Although now in Failing Health no task was too great for him. He was to the fore in organizing Collections for Northern Aid and An Cumann Cabrac. His car was available at any time it was required. One of his last acts before entering Hospital for the last time was to help Cumann na mBann in Cork to Organize and Run a Bazaar.

His one regret in his final years was that Age and Ill-Health did not allow him to join in a more active way with the young fighting Volunteers in Occupied Ireland, it was with them that his Heart always lay.

Unfortunately the time has not yet come when the full story of the part he played in Ireland’s Fight can be written, but please God the day is not far off when it can.

Go ndeanfaid Dia Trocaire ar Do Ainnaim A Seamus.

I was moved by this obituary and by the esteem in which my grandfather was held by his comrades, and saddened for him that even they regarded his life as essentially tragic. But I soon realized that the obituary did not really operate as a sorrowful assessment of
Jim O’Neill’s life: by casting him in a tragedy, a dramatic mode in which the individual’s catastrophic fate is typically the work of an irresistible and often divine force, my grandfather was being granted a form of absolution. His tragic fate was, moreover, provisional, because his full story could only be told once we, the living, had completed his life’s unfinished business: and I was reminded of Robert Emmet’s patriotic cry from the dock, in 1803, that his epitaph should only be written when Ireland took her place among the nations. Thus suspended in a narrative limbo, my grandfather became a soul whose redemption lay in our hands, a ghost.

But did the full story of Jim O’Neill involve the killing of Admiral Somerville? I had a clue to go on. In the course of our trip together, Brendan had told me that I should speak to Peig Lynch, the widow of my grandmother’s brother Jack Lynch.

7

It is quite natural that we should adopt a defensive and negative attitude towards every new opinion concerning something on which we have already an opinion of our own. For it forces its way as an enemy into the previously closed system of our own convictions, shatters the calm of mind we have attained through this system, demands renewed efforts of us and declares our former efforts to have been in vain.

– Arthur Schopenhauer,
Essays and Aphorisms

A
few months after my return to London from Israel, I fixed another appointment with Sir Denis Wright to discuss the Gandour file. Wright had no opinion on Gandour, whom he hadn’t known, but he was able to speak about Norman Mayers, his predecessor as consul in Mersin. ‘Mayers was a good chap,’ Wright said, ‘and I admire his guts in the Gandour business. But he was an isolated fellow – a bachelor in his forties, somewhat wet and fussy in his habits – and it may be that loneliness led to his over-friendliness with the Syrians, who were always throwing lavish parties. The Turks became very unhappy about it and in the end Mayers had to be pulled out. I was a vice-consul in Trebizond at the time, and my assignment was to take over from Mayers and clean up the mess.’
When Wright arrived at his new post, he saw immediately that he had to be extremely careful. ‘Mersin was a nest of intrigue and gossip. All sorts of strings were being pulled – by the Turks, by our people, by the Syrians, by others – and one was in the middle of it all, which was somewhat exhausting. I decided from the beginning to keep the Syrians at arm’s length,’ Wright said. ‘I created quite a stir by not turning up at a garden party held by one of them on Empire Day, and as a result my stock with the Turks rose sharply. It helped a lot, I think, that Iona and I spoke some Turkish.’ He glanced out at his large and beautiful and sunlit garden, where his wife was working on the vegetable patch in which she and her husband grew rhubarb, parsley, potatoes, lettuce, beans and gooseberries. ‘Iona,’ he added, ‘couldn’t really bear it in Mersin. She didn’t make any chums, and after a few months she returned to Britain. I think she got fed up with the endless tea parties and bridge parties and the silly chatter of the Syrian women.’

So the Turks didn’t like the Syrians? I said. I could not get used to this tag.

‘They greatly disliked them,’ Wright said. ‘The feeling was probably mutual, particularly after the
Varlik Vergisi
.’ Seeing that I needed further explanation, Wright continued: ‘The
Varlik Vergisi
was a wealth tax which came into force in late 1942 or early 1943, and, quite frankly, was used to destroy the minorities. The Turkish authorities assessed the wealth of Jews and Christians in sums that were often many times greater than their actual wealth; and if they reckoned you were dodging payment, you were liable to be sent to break rocks on roads in eastern Turkey. It was a disgraceful episode.’ Wright reached over and pulled out some papers from the pile of documentation that he’d prepared for my visit. ‘Here, I think you’d better have a look at this.’

It was a report he’d written in January 1944 on the minorities in Içel, the province in which Mersin and Tarsus are situated. Sir Denis Wright stood up energetically (‘Right-ho, I’ll leave you to it’) and wandered out into the garden in his slippers, corduroys, and checked cotton shirt with cuff-links. He exchanged a few words with Iona – the niece of the first Prime Minister of Northern
Ireland, the ultra-unionist Lord Craigavon – then headed off to the hut in a distant corner of the garden where he liked to retreat on a summer’s afternoon to rest and work.

Wright’s report identified three categories of minorities: Muslim, Other Non-Christian, and Christian. The Muslims consisted of a large Arabic-speaking population of around 25,000 Syrian or Arab Alaouites who lived in their own quarter in Mersin; about 400 families of Sunnite Syrians, including the Gandour family; and an assortment of Greek-speaking Cretan Turks, Kurds and Circassians, each of whose numbers were limited to no more than a few hundred. The Other Non-Christians were Jews (sixty-four families in Mersin, of which thirty-seven spoke Ladino and twenty-seven Arabic) and Gypsies. The Christians consisted mainly of Greeks, Armenians and Syrians, nearly all of whom spoke Arabic and French and Turkish. The Syrians, Wright wrote,

are disliked, mistrusted and envied by the Turks because of their origin, their religion and their wealth. With a shiny veneer of European manners, if not culture, acquired in Beirut, their way of life is more European than Turkish, they have no feelings of loyalty to Turkey and do little to conceal their contempt for the Turk. The flashiness of their behaviour in public and their group instinct (no doubt the result of persecution in the past) irritate the Turks, with whom they make no attempt to mix or, it seems to the outsider, to understand. They generally send their children to school at Beirut or to Robert College, Istanbul.

They are very conscious of the precariousness of their position here, and, given the chance, most of them would choose to return to Syria. Their present-day claim to be house-to-house, if anti-French, is probably not very deep, and their gushing friendliness for the British in Mersin is primarily because they see in the British Consulate their only protection and hope against their Turkish ‘oppressors’, though it is true that they do genuinely find the British more sympathetic than the Turks.

Allegations that many of these people were pro-Axis in the early days of the war should not be taken too seriously, and it should be borne in mind that any reports about their activities emanating from Turkish sources are likely to be coloured. They are not interested in politics, though some of them shewed a passing interest in the recent Lebanon crisis, and their only political concern at the moment is that Turkey shall remain out of the war. Self-interest and financial profit are their only gods. The Turks refer to them as ‘Hristian’ or ‘Arap’ with a contemptuous ring in their voices.

My first reaction on reading this was dismay at its portrayal of the ‘Syrian’ community – to which, after all, my family belonged. Had we really been (and might we still be) such a dreadful, flashy, self-involved crowd? I thought guiltily that in all the summers I’d spent in Turkey I’d only stepped into a Muslim house on maybe three or four occasions, and then only fleetingly; I thought about my grandmother shouting at the servants, about the motorboats and the private beaches and our tiny social circle. No, I could not deny our clannishness or snobbery, or that in the old days my grandparents’ few good Muslim friends were drawn mainly from the families of mayors, state governors, university chancellors and landowners (that said,
employés
of any religion were beyond the pale). I did not doubt that, as a group, we could be gratingly materialistic and lacking in the sophistication to which we pretended; but if the Syrians’ position was as precarious and marginal as Wright described, then surely for them the financial was political, and making money and spending it with a certain degree of ostentation was a vital form of cultural assertion? Besides, I had no problem with business culture; I knew something from my work as a lawyer about the dreams and exertions that may attach to bills of lading and letters of credit and exportation permits and finance facilities, about the necessity to deal and exploit and broke, to extract, by hook or by crook, a return from the rough world. The so-called Syrians, my mother’s people, worked in a very rough world indeed; a terrible climate, lethal diseases, an undeveloped economy, an alien host society: all had to be
overcome. Everything was difficult, and everything – the houses they lived in, the port they operated, the churches they attended, Mersin itself – had to be wrought from nothing. Perhaps Freya Stark had sensed this when she wrote from the Toros Hotel, in April 1954, ‘There is something very touching in these little hotels, trying to be modern with such difficulties. The traveller is apt to feel cross and tired and wants things different, but when one thinks what a huge effort it is to get as far as they do, one feels very gentle towards them.’ Then again, even Stark was sufficiently anti-Levantine to eventually describe Mersin as a ‘squalidly rich little town’.

A political curiosity of the report – which, knowing Wright as I did, I took to be fundamentally reliable – was that I had never myself heard the Christians in Mersin talk of themselves or, for that matter, of the Kurds, as an oppressed minority. The Kurdish situation very rarely came up in discussion, even though the war in south-east Turkey had caused around 30,000 deaths since 1984; certainly, there was little sign of sympathy for the insurgent Kurds or for the cause of an autonomous Kurdistan. The fact was that, aside from the odd reference by those in my grandmother’s generation to
les Turques
, I had barely heard any talk of the ethnic majority as a group distinct from ourselves; and indeed my cousins, the first generation to have been educated at Turkish schools and to speak Turkish as a first language, would have found bizarre and hurtful the notion that they were not Turkish. What else could they be? No native Mersiner, as far as I was aware, thought of himself as Syrian or Lebanese; Aleppo and Beirut and Tripoli and Damascus simply did not figure as homelands in our communal imagination. Go back to Syria and Lebanon? And do what?