The Guns of Easter

The Guns of Easter

‘An impressive first novel’

The Sunday Independent

‘A fine, humane anti-war novel which young people will relish’

Books Ireland

‘A sensitive portrayal of a boy’s forced and traumatic emergence into adolescence’

Books Ireland

‘Excellent. It makes you feel like you are there’

Wicklow People

‘A striking first novel endowed with a strong sense of the conflicting passions of the time. Some of the scenes are as searing as anything in O’Casey’s trilogy’

Children’s Books in Ireland

IT WAS STILL ONLY TWILIGHT
in the streets outside, but in the high hallway of the tenement house night had fallen long ago. There were no lights in the hall, and it was pitch black.

Jimmy Conway had often made this journey in the dark. In some ways he preferred it, because you couldn’t see the shabbiness and dirt. He moved quickly and quietly now up the dangerous stairs, avoiding the missing treads and the loose banisters. Sometimes drunken people slept on the stairs, and you’d have to step over them; but tonight Jimmy heard no snores, and was glad of it. He kept going until he stood outside the door of his own home. Then he stopped and stood silently, looking and listening.

There was no sound from inside, and no light showed around the ill-fitting door. That was good. Ma was due to go and see Mrs Doyle tonight about getting some work. Sometimes the nuns in the convent gave Mrs Doyle a bit of washing to do. It was the only money the Doyles had, but if there was a big batch of laundry Mrs Doyle would let Jimmy’s Ma do some of it. The work wasn’t regular, and the
money wasn’t good, but every penny was welcome.

It was more than a matter of money. ‘You can’t trust just anybody with the holy nuns’ washing,’ Mrs Doyle would say. ‘But you could trust Lily Conway with your own life, because there’s no more respectable nor decent woman going.’

Hearing her say this was worth gold to Jimmy’s Ma. It helped her keep her head up, she said, when her heart was dragging.

Ma’s heart seemed to be dragging a lot lately. It was the reason Jimmy was glad she wasn’t home. He wouldn’t put it past some of the local gossips to come and tell her lies about him just for the sake of passing scandal. Some of them had nothing better to do.

Obviously no gossips had come. If Ma had heard about the old man, and thought that Jimmy was involved, it would have broken her heart. She’d have stayed home to wait for him, and he’d have heard her crying before he even went in. She wouldn’t beat him, but the crying would be worse. When she cried he felt like begging her to hit him instead: it would hurt less.

There was no lock on the door. Jimmy opened it silently and stepped inside. The single big window was a pale rectangle in the darkness. It was a handsome window, a relic of the times when these houses had been the homes of the gentry. One of the windowpanes was cracked, but at least it wasn’t broken, and there were heavy curtains that
kept out the worst of the cold in winter. Many of the neighbours had windows that were full of holes, with maybe bits of paper stuck over them; and some had no curtains at all.

Jimmy heard the breathing of his sleeping sisters. He crept towards the mattress in the corner where Sarah was already lying. From the big bed in the opposite corner Josie made a noise in her sleep. Jimmy stopped, but Josie was only dreaming. When she was quiet again he went on.

He knew exactly where to put his feet, and sidestepped the hole in the rotten board by the corner of the mattress. Then he eased off his boots, crept in beside Sarah and pulled the old coats that were his bedcovers over him. He relaxed a bit then, safe for now at least, and lay on his back in the dark, thinking.

By the standards of many of his friends, Jimmy’s home was more than comfortable. True, it was only a single room, and there were those places on the floor where adults shouldn’t walk because the rotting boards might cave in under their weight. But there were only a few spots like that, and in some homes the whole floor was dangerous. Still his Ma was always going on at the three children, warning them about the holes.

‘Mind your feet!’ she’d say. ‘Watch where you’re walking! You don’t want to end up like Cissy Kavanagh!’

This was the whole point, of course. Last winter Cissy Kavanagh, one of his friend’s sisters, had fallen through
the floor of her home into the stairwell and been killed. Kavanaghs’ floor must have been very rotten, though, because Cissy hadn’t weighed much at all. She’d been seven years old, and very thin.

Jimmy’s Ma was always worrying about how awful their home was, even when Jimmy pointed out to her that they were very lucky compared to plenty of the people they knew. Even the cracks that showed in the plaster in one corner of their ceiling weren’t too bad; the Twomeys, who lived on the floor above, had one big piece of their ceiling fall in on them during a storm last January. Rain seeping in through the holes in the roof had rotted the plaster. No-one had been hurt that time, but now you could look out through the Twomeys’ ceiling and see patches of sky.

There were a lot of very poor people in their part of Dublin. At a political meeting Jimmy had heard a man say that the city had the worst slums in Europe. There were rich people living in the city too, of course, but Jimmy didn’t know any of them. You’d see them every day in Sackville Street, shopping and going about their business, but certainly none of them lived around here. Jimmy wasn’t even sure how rich people lived, except that they always had enough to eat: you could tell by looking at them.

The whole area where Jimmy lived was crowded with large families living in small spaces. Before Jimmy’s Da joined the army they themselves had been much worse off, but even then there’d only been the five of them living
in the room. Nowadays there were only four, and three were children – Jimmy, the eldest, was twelve, while Josie was ten and Sarah just six.

When Da came home from the war it would be a tighter fit, but some families had ten or more people living in one room. There had been twelve of the Kavanaghs before Cissie died.

Thinking of his Da always made Jimmy confused. He missed him very much, but he knew that they needed his wages from the army to survive. Da had known that too, but even so he’d hesitated a long time after the war started before joining up.

‘Why should I fight their damned wars?’ he’d always say. ‘Irish and English working men standing in trenches shooting at German working men, while all the time their generals are probably drinking together and laughing at them!’

He’d usually say this when he was discussing politics with Ma’s brother Mick. Da was an old trade union man, and blamed the bosses for all of Ireland’s troubles. Mick was more of a nationalist; he agreed that the bosses were trouble, but said that the English were the real problem.

‘But even if we do get rid of the English the bosses are still there,’ Da would say.

‘No,’ Mick would argue, ‘it’s the English class system. We could make the bosses change if the English were out of our way.’

‘You make it all sound too simple,’ Da would tell Mick. ‘Come back when you know what you’re talking about.’

In the end Da had gone into the army, like many other men. The war had put prices up, and Da hadn’t any money to begin with. He’d had no real job for three years, not since taking part in the great strike of 1913 when half the city starved. Finally, one day, he came home looking heartbroken and announced that he’d joined the British army.

‘I’ve enlisted,’ he said simply. ‘I start training next week.’

Ma was horrified. ‘What have you done?’ she asked, almost in tears. ‘James, what have you gone and done?’

But Da answered her firmly. ‘Them childer’s faces are thinner every time I look at them, Lily,’ he said. ‘There’s not one employer in town that will give me a job. I’m a marked man since the strike.’ Da looked really angry and upset. ‘This way, Lil, you’ll get a weekly payment from the government. Damn it, woman, can’t you understand? You’ll be able to eat.’

Ma said it wasn’t worth it, that she’d rather they all starved and Da, not wanting to argue with her, just walked out. Afterwards they didn’t discuss it again, at least not that Jimmy heard. Anyway, as Da pointed out, it was too late to change anything now. He couldn’t back out. A week later he was gone for training, and they began to get the separation allowance. ‘Ring money’
people called it, referring to a wedding ring. The wedding ring was all that Lily Conway had of her husband James now. He’d been away now for more than a year, in France, fighting the Germans.

Things were a bit easier with the ring money, though it hardly seemed worth losing your Da for. Still, at least there was something to eat most days, and that made a change. Even if the money ran out before the end of the week and you had a hungry weekend, you knew that on Monday there would be money again. It kept you from giving up hope. Lately they’d started to have some hungry weekends, for reasons Jimmy couldn’t really understand as Ma was usually very good with money. He felt it had something to do with his aunt Ella.

Jimmy wished more than ever that Da could be here now. The fact that he wasn’t made Jimmy the man of the house, and at twelve years of age Jimmy found that hard. The man of the house was supposed to know right from wrong, but Jimmy didn’t always find this so simple. And then again even adults couldn’t seem to agree on what was right and what wasn’t. Uncle Mick, for instance, had been furious with Da for joining the army.

‘How can he fight for the British?’ Mick asked Ma when he heard the news. ‘And for what? For their money.’

This was just after Da went away. A week before, Ma herself had been giving out to Da for signing up, but now she turned on Mick.

‘There’s food for the children now,’ she said. ‘That’s what that money means to James. That’s all that war means to him. He was never out playing soldiers like you and your Citizen Army friends.’

Mick looked insulted but Ma continued, anger in her voice now. ‘It’s all very well for you, Mick. You’re single, and you have no-one to look after, barring yourself. You can afford dreams and high ideas. How long would your dreams last if they were all you had to bring home to a house full of hungry children? Dreams make bad dinners, Mick.’

Suddenly there was a noise in the hall outside and Jimmy recognised the sound of Ma’s footsteps. He must let on to be asleep. Would Tommy Doyle have said anything to her? He’d know soon enough.

The door opened and Ma came in. Jimmy heard her cross to the table, then the sound of a match being lit. He opened his eyes a little bit and saw the light of a candle blossoming in the middle of the room. In its glow he saw her standing there, a small woman looking older than her age. He was glad to see she looked no sadder than usual. In fact, she was almost smiling.

He shut his eyes as she looked over towards him, and kept perfectly still. Through lowered eyelids he saw her pick up the candle and come towards himself and Sarah, and he closed his eyes completely. But he had misjudged how exhausted he was by the day’s events. He’d hardly
closed his eyes before he was suddenly asleep. The last thing he saw in his mind’s eye was the sight that he’d been trying not to picture all evening, the terrible purple face of the dead man in the street.