Blood-Dark Track (43 page)

We left the grounds of the Castle and started to walk back to the car, Grandma stepping tirelessly up the hill with the slightly rolling gait that practically all her sons have inherited. We got into the car and moved off. As we reached the two trees about a third of the way up the hill, I turned left down a lane called the Mall, which headed down towards the ocean. Immediately to our right, as we slowly descended, was the sizeable lodge house which was all that remained of the Coghill family property, Glenbarrahane, and which, one of Mrs Salter-Townshend’s brochures informed me, hosted in its roof space the largest known nursery of bats in Europe.

After the war, Sir Patrick Coghill, a little lost, spent a few years at this property with his elderly mother and aunt. In 1952, he left to set up the Special Branch of the Police of Jordan, from where he was expelled in 1956. He returned to Castletownshend and, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘to futility, to a bogus 18th century civilisation which was quite moribund, if not mummified, and what was worse, to boredom’. Furthermore, ‘having spent most of my life in England or serving the Crown, I intensely disliked living under the Irish Republican flag and government’. In the ’sixties, he finally decided to move across the water. Sir Patrick Somerville Coghill died in England in 1981, at the age of 84.

We reached the bottom of the lane. To our right was the entrance to Point House or, to be precise, The Point, as the property had been renamed by Admiral Somerville when he retired there after the Great War. ‘Do Not Enter’ notices were plastered everywhere.

Driving in, we found ourselves traversing an extraordinarily beautiful, tilted garden which ran down the landscaped contours of the hill by way of lawns, spectacular rock formations and exotic shrubbery; and looking out to the sunlit west, there was a dumb-foundingly beautiful view of a wild headland and the ocean. Then we came to the house. I recognized it from the newspaper photographs I’d seen. A late Victorian mansion of great simplicity, its
charm was reduced only marginally by incongruous new window frames and a new entrance porch that stood in the place of the old porch where the Admiral’s corpse had lain for days pending the arrival of the pathologist. It was my intention to ring the bell and talk to whoever lived in the building – an Austrian countess, a villager had told me – about the terrible moment in the house’s past, and to try to find out if and how it still haunted the house. But I lost my nerve. It seemed a shame to mar the achieved quietness of this place with an old and unpleasant matter, and I allowed myself to conclude, without ringing the bell or even stopping the car, that no one was in. As we drove back to gate, gravel crunched under the car’s tyres just as, no doubt, it had crunched under the shoes of the men sprinting away from the house that night in March 1936. It was not a short driveway, a hundred yards or so, and the men, already breathless with terror and excitement, must have been gasping by the time they reached the car waiting at the gate. It wasn’t difficult, as we left Castletownshend, to imagine the country darkness into which the killers had sped, a shapeless obscurity of heaths and boglands and hills yielding only to the dull gaslight flare of an isolated cottage and the short track of light spewed out by the car.

We took an especially roundabout route back to Cork, heading north to Dunmanway, which, though she has not lived there for nearly seventy years, is my grandmother’s everlasting home town. Dunmanway marks the western extremity of the fertile Bandon valley, which constitutes an exception to the relatively poor land of which most of West Cork is composed. We drove along Main Street and arrived at a picturesque octagonal square. Grandma pointed out the location of the first home she remembered, which was now a vacant lot just off the square. The next Lynch home, in Railway Street, was still intact. The nearest thing to trees on the street were the tall wooden poles that strung cables over the rooftops and the road. My grandmother pointed out her old home, where she’d lived in terror of the British forces, a grey, two-storey terraced house that was part of a long, sullenly unadorned terrace of houses that ran the length of Railway Street under black roofs and gave abruptly on to the pavement without so much as a doorstep.

As we headed out of Dunmanway, Grandma pointed to a substantial townhouse. ‘That one,’ she said, ‘used to belong to Fitzmaurice, a solicitor, who fled Ireland after two men, Gray and Buttimer, were shot dead in Dunmanway square in 1921 during the Black and Tan War. After Fitzmaurice,’ Grandma said, ‘the house belonged to Henry Smith, a Protestant from the North with twenty-four children, who once gave shelter to your great-uncle Jack Lynch when he was on the run; and after the Smiths it was occupied by the Duffys, famous all over the country for their circus.’

I made a note of Grandma’s story that evening and did not give it any further thought; I vaguely assumed that Gray and Buttimer, in common with the other dead from those times mentioned by my grandmother, were the victims of yet another British atrocity.

We drove east along the Bandon valley and soon came to Ballineen and Enniskean, whose gradual physical merger over the years was acknowledged by a signboard announcing the Ballineen– Enniskean Development Area. We drove through Bandon town and then Inishannon, where the road, an unsightly and pot-holed strip of tarmac in my grandfather’s time, had been widened and smartened by EC money. Skimming along the new highway, we passed an ancient railway viaduct that hovered over a valley, and soon after crossed the boundary of Cork city, population 136,000, which declared itself a Nuclear Free Zone and a special friend of Cologne, Rennes, and Coventry. As we turned onto the new ring road that sped traffic efficiently into south-east Cork, I would not have been surprised to see, in this wave of up-beat redesignation, a sign announcing our presence in Emerald Tiger Country. Whereas uncle Brendan saw persistent poverty and social injustice and class struggle, it was possible to gain the impression from the mainstream media that the chief economic problem in Cork, in these unprecedented times of high growth and low inflation and net immigration and soaring property values, was finding sufficient numbers of takers for the vacancies (in high-technology work, especially) that were opening up in their hundreds. The old political and religious obsessions seemed further away than ever, and I asked my grandmother what she made of the changes taking place.
It turned out that although she was proud of what had been achieved, Grandma was troubled by the emerging national character. She was worried, and a little amazed, by the sudden loss of authority of the Catholic church, which had become the source of a seemingly ever-flowing stream of sexual scandals and the butt of nihilistic TV comedies. ‘There
is
a God,’ Grandma said with an uncharacteristically anxious vehemence that made me glance over at her small, seat-belted figure, ‘as one day those that think there isn’t will find out to their cost.’ Grandma also didn’t understand the apathy amongst young people towards politics – ‘They say that they’re not “interested” in the elections. Sure, if you’re not interested in your country, what are you interested in?’ – and history: ‘A country is nothing without its history,’ my grandmother declared.

We arrived home. While Grandma went upstairs, I waited in the kitchen, the hub of the house and its point of entry, through the back door, for family and friends. Small pictures hung on the wall: reproduction paintings of a basket of peaches and a basket of strawberries, a photograph of a sunset at sea seen through reeds, and two watercolours of birds. Pope John Paul II appeared in a white frame, and a porcelain wall-figurine of the Virgin Mary kissing the baby Jesus. Also displayed were postcards from children and grandchildren mailed from Aqaba, New York, Santander, Youghal, Lanzarote, Portugal, Bretagne, Majorca. The family horizons were expanding. Above the table hung the text of a house blessing:

God bless the corners of this house,
And be the lintel blest;
And bless the hearth and bless the board
And bless each door that opens wide
To stranger as to kin;
And bless each crystal window pane
That lets the starlight in;
And bless the roof tree overhead
And every sturdy wall.

The peace of man, the peace of God,
The peace of love on all.

This was what a republican safe house looked like: it was here that Grandma, on a couple of occasions after her husband’s death, gave refuge, without the family’s knowledge, to republicans – ‘proper gentlemen’, in her recollection – wanted by the authorities in connection with acts of extreme political violence.

When Grandma returned to the kitchen, we drank a cup of tea and ate bread and butter and ham. We talked about various things, and gradually we came back to the topic of my grandfather. Grandma said that in the ’sixties, when they were living here, the two would go off to Bodenstown and other republican commemorations and marches together. In about 1970, they went to the North with a party from the south. Jim and Eileen and the others crossed the border at Monaghan on foot with a tricolour held before them and repaired a road that had been cratered in an attempt to close down the border crossing. A British army helicopter flew overhead as they worked. It fell to Jim O’Neill, the senior republican present, to address some remarks to the volunteer road-gang; and he did so. The party headed back that evening on the bus, singing songs. When she got home, Grandma removed her boots and hung them in the shed with the Northern mud still sticking to them. The boots hung untouched for years, a monument to the unvanquishable urge for freedom and, it turned out, to the only time my grandfather set foot north of the border.

Grandma told me this story and then, going into a declamatory trance, she looked me in the eye and said, without hesitation:

Who is Ireland’s enemy?
Not Germany nor Austria,
Nor Russia, France nor Spain
That robbed and reaved this land of ours,
That forged her rusty chain
But England of the wily words
A crafty, treacherous foe.
’Twas England scourged our motherland,
’Twas England laid her low.

I thought that she had finished, but there was more to come:

And rouse her living men,
The chance will come to us at last
To win our own again;
To sweep the English enemy
From hill and glen and bay,
And in your name, O holy dead
Our secret debt to pay!

There was a silence, and eventually I asked Grandma whether Jim, if he could have his time again, would do anything differently. ‘No,’ my grandmother said, ‘I don’t think so.’ She gave the question a moment’s further reflection and then, in a twist I hadn’t at all expected, added, ‘Like his father, he was a very intelligent man. If he were alive today, with all the education and opportunities that you now have.…’ My grandmother wrinkled her mouth pensively.

I was slightly taken aback. For all of her political passion and her doubts about the country’s new money culture and her stories of the Black and Tans and her photographs of her husband’s IRA
burial, for all of her investment in her husband’s configuration as an IRA hero, my grandmother, in what seemed to be the final analysis, was dwelling on Jim O’Neill’s life in economic terms and contemplating, somewhat wistfully, the affluent and fulfilling life that, in more opportune times, he might have led. Was she tacitly acknowledging that in different circumstances her husband might have left the business of revolution to others? After all, if Jim had stood to inherit Ardkitt, would he have risked years of imprisonment and separation from his farm? Or would he, like the vast majority of the Cork farming class, have been diverted from active service in the IRA by the demands and preoccupations of country life – a life of ploughing championships, carts and harnesses, colts, hens, heifers, horses, cows, potatoes, wheat seeds, whist drives, of dropping in on Enniskean Hall for a party thrown by the Newcestown, Ballineen and Enniskean Coursing Club (music by the Heatherbell Band, dancing 9 to 2) and attending the meetings and dances of the West Cork Branch of the Irish Creamery Managers’ Association, the Clonakilty Agricultural Society, and the Co. Cork Farmers’ Assocation (Ballineen Branch)? This was the lost world that Jim O’Neill dreamed of inhabiting, a world in which a rebel might in good conscience limit his involvement to the cause to making contributions to the Republican Prisoners’ Dependants Fund or turning a blind eye to the dumping of arms on his land.

Grandma

If Jim’s political involvement might have been contingent on his social and economic situation, the question arose as to the degree to which his internment at the Curragh, and perhaps even his convictions on the issue of national freedom, were manifestations of a deeper captivity. But what kind of captivity? Poverty was a cage of sorts, certainly; but it was not exclusive to Jim and did not affect him in his last years; and it didn’t fully account for an image of my grandfather that had crept into my mind and would not go away, that of a man who gripped life’s every stick and pole with the white-knuckled rage of a man gripping the bars of a cell.