The Family on Paradise Pier. Dermot Bolger

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       SIX The Docks

      London, August 1922

      All night Art had been arguing with university friends about Italian politics in Fletcher’s rooms near Blackfriars. Fletcher was not of like mind to the others: he saw nothing wrong in truckloads of Il Duce’s fascists storming into Milan to end the communist-led strike there with the black-shirted thugs tearing down the Bolshevik flags hanging from the town hall. Fletcher could not understand why Art took such matters so seriously. To him, Mussolini was a clown who would never achieve power, just as Lenin would not hold onto it for long with famine in Russia. Fletcher would have been happier discussing Johnny Weissmuller’s new world swimming record or playing I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate on his gramophone, because, to him, university was merely a lark. Tragedy had set Fletcher’s future in stone, no matter what he studied. With the death of his eldest brother on the Somme, he was set to inherit the family estate. University was a chance to escape from home and discreetly make hay in this unburdened limbo before he came into his inheritance.

      Watching him, Art wondered would Thomas possess this same air of haunted gaiety if he had died in battle. So many chaps at the University of London carried a guilty look at having come into their inheritance not by birth but by an elder brother’s death, that Art had learnt to recognise them. The peculiar thing was that they often mistook him for one of their number as if he too was cursed with the stain of underserved wealth. Yet the more he studied politics the more he realised that he was like them. All that distinguished him from his siblings was a fluke of birth, a throw of the dice yielding him absolute access to wealth while the others were left to scramble for minor bequests. Past generations had ensured that this was a chalice he could not refuse. Short of dying, Art had no means of breaking that cycle of indenture.

      Yet Art argued now with his college chums that surely to God – if there was a God – the Great War’s slaughter had overturned all previous rules and conventions. Crippled beggars on the London streets were daily reminders that any pretence of innocence was gone. For the Great War to mean anything it had to herald the advent of a new era. Freedom was not about one Kaiser defeating another, it was about granting people the liberty to be truly themselves.

      Before the Bolshevik revolution the bulk of humanity had sleepwalked through life, unaware that they could possess total power if they merely looked up from their chains. Every day the imperialist press repeated lies about millions starving in Russia because they were afraid to report what was really occurring there. But once ordinary British workers understood this truth, they would emerge like risen Christs from the tomb, liberated from the inbred fear of their alleged betters. Last year the miners had suffered on strike without the country rising to back them and today it was the engineers’ turn to be locked out. But once the Communist Party was fully organised across Britain a day of reckoning would come.

      Fletcher laughed at Art’s intensity and rang the bell for his manservant to fetch more stout. The others agreed with Art’s assertion that the Labour Party had become lured away from its revolutionary roots and was now merely a cloak and dagger ally of imperialist expansion. But Art sensed the hollowness of their convictions. They were flirting with radicalism, like their fathers on Grand Tours of Europe once flirted with exotic dancers. Typically short-sighted, they regarded Lenin’s revolution as too foreign to impinge upon their world. These student discussions were not about genuine revolution, but simply a chance for the privileged idle to enjoy a brief frisson of danger by pretending to be different from their parents. After college they would drop such notions and take up golf and banking, fattening out into premature middle age. Art lost patience with their play-acting and was about to leave, when the manservant returned and sought him out with a sympathetic look.

      ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Goold Verschoyle, but I thought you should know the news from Ireland. I’m afraid your Michael Collins has been shot dead in an ambush.’

      The room went quiet, the others studying his face. They had no interest in the civil war raging in Ireland since the peace treaty was narrowly accepted and British troops had withdrawn. The treaty had divided the country, with the majority of people sick of war and anxious to accept the partitioned Free State which the treaty offered. But Art could not imagine any compromise on a full Republic being accepted by such men as the IRA commander who had once returned the family motor to Maud in the Donegal hills. In the ensuing split he surely sided with the diehards like de Valera and the Countess who were now fighting against Michael Collins and his fellow treaty negotiators whom they accused of betraying the dream of a Republic. Art had initially been excited by this civil war, seeing parallels with the power vacuum in Russia in which Lenin seized authority. But de Valera was no true revolutionary. Art still hoped that both factions might weaken each other sufficiently for a communist takeover, but – with the union leader Jim Larkin sidelined in an American jail – there was nobody of sufficient stature to lead such a coup d’état. Art’s enthusiasm for the IRA had never recovered from his encounter with that Cork commander. It left him feeling occluded from all sides in recent years, as the conflict grew increasingly bloody. The Troubles had taken a toll around Dunkineely, not just in occasional killings and reprisals, but in the way that people came to be judged purely as being on one side or the other. At times in Donegal he was made to feel a foreigner, whereas in London he was viewed as a totally Irish outsider.

      Having delivered his news, the manservant slavishly waited for a morsel of acknowledgement.

      ‘That is shocking,’ Art said. ‘Thank you for letting me know.’