Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to the crossroads at Ballyseedy. One man survived the events that followed.

      I listened avidly to the story Stephen Fuller told Robert Kee. He began by recalling the moment the prisoners were taken from jail in Tralee:

      He gave us a cigarette and said, ‘That is the last cigarette ye’ll ever smoke. We’re going to blow ye up with a mine.’ We were marched out to a lorry and made to lie flat down and taken out to Ballyseedy … the language, the bad language wasn’t too good. One fellah called us ‘Irish bastards’ … They tied our hands behind our back and left about a foot between the hands and the next fellah. They tied us in a circle around the mine. They tied our legs, and the knees as well, with a rope. And they took off our caps and said we could be praying away as long as we like. The next fellah to me said his prayers, and I said mine too … He said goodbye, and I said goodbye, and the next fellah picked it up and said, ‘Goodbye lads’, and up it went. And I went up with it of course.15

      The flesh of the butchered men was found in the trees overlooking the road. The interview with Fuller was for me a moment of revelation. He told his story without emotion or embellishment. I had grown up conscious of the bitterness that followed the Civil War. I knew that our main political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, had grown out of the conflict and that my own family were ‘black’ Fine Gael. Die-hard Collinsites. The side that blew up Fuller and the others at Ballyseedy. Now, in the words of Stephen Fuller, I could begin to glimpse the lived experience of the time rather than surmise the truth from the shreds of political rhetoric.

      Irish men killed Irish men in the war of 1922–23. They killed each other in the war that went before it: Irish killing Irish with a fury that shocks to read of decades later. Did it shock them, I wondered, when in the long years afterwards they sat and reflected on the war?

      The Fuller interview shook from my memory another of my father’s stories.

      ‘Watch the ceiling,’ he’d say. ‘Watch and you will see him.’ A man in green uniform would appear and float through the darkness, if I would only wait.

      ‘He is an English soldier and he was killed on the street outside. Wait and he will come.’

      The soldier never came. Another of my father’s yarns.

      But years later I find out that Eamonn was telling a version of a truth.

      A man had been killed on our street, shot dead close to the Keane family home. He was killed by an IRA unit that included a family friend with whom my grandmother and her brother had soldiered. The war had been sweeping across the hills and fields around my grandparents’ town of Listowel for nearly two years when District Inspector Tobias O’Sullivan, a thirty-eight-year-old married man, an Irish Catholic from County Galway, was shot dead. He was the son of a farmer, the same stock as my grandmother Hannah’s people, and he left a widow and three young children behind. Yet his name was never mentioned. There is no monument to his memory, even though at the time of the killing he was the most powerful man in the locality and it was one of the most talked about events in the area’s recent history.

      There are many other uncommemorated deaths and events in the journey that forms this book. It is the story of why my own people were willing to kill, and of how people and nations live with the blood that follows deeds – a story that, in one country or another, I have been trying to tell for the last thirty years but not, until now, in my own place. It has been a journey in search of unwilling ghosts. My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick left no diaries, letters or tape-recorded interviews. What I have are the few confidences shared with their family, some personal files from the military archives, the accounts of comrades in arms, the official histories and contemporary press reports, and my own memories of those rebels of my blood and of the place that made them.

      I have tried to avoid yielding to my own collection of biases; however, a story of family such as this cannot be free of the writer’s personal shading. When writing of the Civil War I am acutely conscious that I come from a family that took the pro-Treaty side and, later, became stalwarts of the political organization founded by Michael Collins and his comrades. But I have tried to describe the vicious cycle of violence in north Kerry as it happened at the time and as it was experienced by the people of my past, doing so, as much as possible, without the benefit of hindsight, and without acquiescing to the justifications offered by either side. This book does not set out to be an academic history of the period, or a forensic account of every military encounter or killing in north Kerry. Others have done this with great skill. This is a memoir written about everyday Irish people who found themselves caught up on both sides in the great national drama that followed the rebellion of 1916. It is not a narrative which all historians of the period are sure to agree with, or indeed which other members of my family will necessarily endorse: every one of them will see the past through their own experiences and memories. The one bias to which I will readily admit is a loathing of war and of all who celebrate the killing of their fellow men and women. The good soldier shows humility in the remembrance of horror.

      I have reached an age where I find myself constantly looking back in the direction of my forebears, seeking to understand myself, and my preoccupations, through the stories of their lives. It is only with the coming of peace on the island of Ireland that I have felt able to interrogate my family past with the sense of perspective that the dead deserve. It felt too close while blood was being daily spilled in the north. ‘We return to the lives of those who have gone before us,’ wrote the novelist Colum McCann. ‘Until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.’16 Home is where all my journeys of war begin and end.

* On 30 January 1972, soldiers from the Parachute Regiment opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry, killing thirteen unarmed people. On 2 February angry crowds marched on the British embassy in Dublin and set it alight. In the events that became known as ‘Bloody Friday’ the IRA carried out multiple bombings in central Belfast on 21 July 1972. The attacks claimed the lives of nine people and injured more than one hundred.

      1

       The Night Sweats with Terror

      ‘It is not,’ he urged, ‘by weak inaction that great empires are held together; there must be the struggle of brave men in arms; might is right with those who are at the summit of power.’

      Tacitus, The Annals, AD 109

      ‘The freedom of Ireland depends in the long run not upon the play of politics, nor international dealings, but upon the will of the Irish people to be free.’

      An t-Óglach, Dublin, 29 October 1918

      I

      It was a January morning of low grey skies. On Dublin’s Sackville Street crowds stood in fidgeting silence – street boys, daily paper hawkers, beggars and pickpockets, the old women from the Moore Street market, all gawking at the solemn faces marching up the left flank of the broad thoroughfare. With the cortège out of sight, they turned and went back to that other life of small trades and smaller change. They would have known that this policeman’s death was bigger than the usual run. Half the police and army top brass in Ireland seemed to be there: first came the bands with their sombre music, bands from the Army, the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Immediately behind them came General Tudor, the most senior British security official in Ireland, along with a phalanx of senior police and military officers. The coffin lay on a gun carriage and was flanked by СКАЧАТЬ