All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ country in which they lived. My father grew up in a state ruled over by former guerrilla fighters, men who had fought the British and then fought each other. In war photographs they are dressed in peak caps and trench coats, country boys with expressions that are half eager, half desperate, men with a price on their heads, who would be shot out of hand if captured, wild rebels in the mountains. But in my father’s country they were transformed. Éamonn de Valera had helped spark the Civil War by rejecting the Treaty with the British and providing political leadership for the IRA; his successor, Seán Lemass, was a man who had shot dead an unarmed British agent at point-blank range. But now they wore grey suits and dark hats; their rebel years behind them, they said their prayers and listened carefully to the raging whispers of the bishops.

      When I was younger I judged them harshly, our spent revolutionaries. But after seeing war myself, especially the self-murdering insanity of civil war, I see them in a different light. I think they were tired men, trying as best they could to create a country after nearly a decade of conflict, battered by the economic depression that followed the Wall Street Crash, and then allowing themselves to be dragged into an economic war with Britain which they could not win. In the original shooting war against the British they had been hunted like wild animals; they had killed and been killed; in the Civil War men who had fought together, in some cases members of the same family, turned their guns on each other. The Civil War overshadowed everything in my father’s country. How could it not: that memory of ambush, executions, torture? It may be fanciful to believe, but I think some of them were more than tired; they were in a state of lingering shock, frightened by what they had discovered in themselves during those terrible years of war.

      My father said: ‘We hated each other more than we ever hated the British.’ I don’t know how true that was. But he did grow up listening to stories of atrocity: men shot dead as they surrendered, others tied to landmines and blown to pieces. By the time my father was politically aware, he would have known that two parties dominated the landscape: there was Cumann na nGaedheal, the party of Collins’s people, and Fianna Fáil, the party of de Valera. They barracked each other with bitter words. ‘Murderers’. ‘Free State traitors’. ‘IRA assassins’. The toxic rasp of hatred went on and on in the lives of the people. They fought about it at political meetings, football matches, anywhere crowds gathered.

      Yet both parties were profoundly similar. They were deeply conservative, both bended the knee to the Catholic Church and both would, in time, use fierce repression to protect the new Irish state from would-be revolutionaries. More than anything our new state suffered from a chronic failure of imagination. Having achieved freedom, our leaders were too tired or too blinkered – or a combination of both – to do much more than manage the shop. Innovation and inspiration were decades away.

      Though they were devout supporters of Collins, the Keanes were independent-minded enough to recognise the absurdity of the political situation. During one particularly bitter election campaign my Uncle John B and his friends decided to put up a mock candidate who went by the name of Tom Doodle. The idea was to inject laughter and reduce the bitterness of the hustings. Doodle was the pseudonym given to a local labourer. His slogan, depicted on posters all over the town, was: ‘Vote the Noodle and Give the Whole Caboodle To Doodle.’

      John B had organised a brass brand and a large crowd to accompany the candidate to his election meeting. He travelled to the square standing on the back of a donkey-drawn cart. It was a tumultuous affair. In a speech that satirised the clientelist, promise-all politics of the time, Doodle declared his fundamental principle: ‘Every man should have more than the next.’

      Some time in the 1940s, not long before he left the town, my father was wandering around Listowel square, thinking and dreaming. It happened that there was a mission under way in the Catholic Church. The visiting Redemptorists were well known peddlers of hellfire and damnation and would send scouts into the square to round up any locals who malingered outside the church. When one of the priests approached my father, warning him to get into the church fast or face an eternity roaring in the flames, Éamonn responded with a remark that would earn him the status of local legend.

      ‘My good man,’ he said to the raging priest ‘your fulminations have the same effect on me as does the fart of a blackbird on the water levels of the Grand Coulee dam.’

      With that he said goodnight and walked away. It was typically opaque, a very ‘Éamonn’ response.

      My father’s country was a place of paradox. It was full of poetry and music, there was laughter and satire, but also repression and darkness. For every story told there were a hundred suppressed. There was magic there, but madness too.

      Éamonn nurtured a dislike of the clergy all of his life. There were individual priests and nuns whom he liked but he loathed the organised Church. These gentlemen lived in fine palaces and generally behaved with all the humility and decorum you would expect of imperial pro-consuls. In 1937 de Valera framed and succeeded in having adopted a new Irish constitution. For the first time in Irish history the pre-eminent position of the Catholic Church ‘as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’ was guaranteed by law. This meant the Catholic hierarchy could exert influence on everything from football matches (it succeeded in banning a visit by a team from communist Yugoslavia) to the welfare of mothers and children (it stopped a state-sponsored scheme to provide free healthcare to new mothers and babies on the grounds that it was socialist). In my father’s home town the parish priest shut the gates of the local church against the coffin of an unmarried girl who had died after giving birth.

      There were more immediate personal issues at play too. At school my father and uncle witnessed and experienced terrible brutality. The local secondary school was run by priests, among them a notorious brute, Father Davy O’Connor. Under any normal state of affairs he would have been jailed but was instead treated with fawning respect by the cowed townspeople. It says much for the place that even a Catholic priest, writing in the still conservative early 1970s, described St Michael’s College as a place with ‘an unenviable reputation for strict discipline’.

      When my father remembered his worst story of Davy O’Connor his mouth tightened. He carried the shame of it like a hump on his back. I heard it, how many times? It was as if by telling he might talk away the pain. But he could not. Even in his last years, the memory of what happened in that classroom burned within him. O’Connor screamed and beat; he used his fists and his boots and a leather strap. My father said that one of his favourite punishments was to take a boy and place his head on the windowsill, facing out towards the fields. He would then lower the window so that the boy’s head was jammed outside. With his victim trapped O’Connor would then pull the boy’s trousers down and thrash him on the backside.

      So a boy like Éamonn would stand there facing the trees, hearing the noise of birds and the rush of the river only a field away, and be trapped as the leather slashed at his body, the class trapped too by the shame of it, the sheer terror that any wrong move or word could lead them to the same place.

      John B told of how O’Connor had once asked boys during English class to recite any poems they knew. My uncle was already writing his own poems, and he stood and recited from memory a poem called ‘The Street’:

       I love the flags that pave the walk

       I love the mud between

       The funny figures drawn in chalk.

      When he had finished Father O’Connor asked him who had written the poem. John B replied that it was his own work. The priest immediately lashed out, knocking him to the floor. Another boy who tried to intervene was also knocked over. O’Connor proceeded to punch and kick my uncle before throwing him out of the class. On that day John B vowed he would be a writer and that no man would shut him up again.

      Such incidents СКАЧАТЬ