The Family on Paradise Pier. Dermot Bolger

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      Both laughed before Maureen picked up her shoes and went to join Hazel in the kitchen. Eva opened Freddie’s letter with trepidation because it was true that his weekly registered one, containing her allowance, had only arrived on Monday. As always his tone was candid, yet circumspect. The mantra that careless talk cost lives was instilled in him, though Eva doubted if his letters were being steamed open by German sympathisers in an Irish sorting office. The Irish preferred to receive news of the tightening Nazi noose by listening to Lord Haw-Haw’s bragging tones on German radio. Even then she suspected that most locals only listened because Haw-Haw was a fellow Connaught man and they took pride to see a local do well for himself in any walk of life.

      Typically the first page enquired after the children before Freddie imparted his news. Eva’s fears of him being dispatched to join the fighting were groundless – for now at least. With two million young men called up, the army needed experienced men to provide military training, and Freddie wrote that his time spent shooting on the Mayo bogs might not have been wasted after all. He kept his tone self-deprecating, as if baffled at having to relay the news of being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Educational Corps. But Eva knew he would have impressed his superiors by being the best shot in his reserve artillery company. Such promotion was a dream realised, especially with his disability. Eva knew that he would show each conscript the care he would have taken with Francis had his son betrayed the slightest interest in guns.

      Freddie had knuckled down to army life. The routine suited him. He would be popular once he controlled his drinking – his Irishness being a bonus for showing that he had deliberately chosen to be involved in the war. His tales about shooting on the bogs would be embellished for comic effect. He wrote about missing them but at heart Eva knew that he relished the freedom to succumb to a last drink with new acquaintances and ease himself into each day by waking up alone. Eva knew that he would feel guilty for enjoying this sense of freedom because she experienced the same guilt here in Mayo. Neither said it, but war was providing the camouflage for them to commence separate lives. Her brother Art had been right to proclaim that they should never have married.

      In the wooden dormitory hut of the Curragh Internment Camp for subversives, Art Goold rose after polishing his boots. The discipline of camp life suited him. It was the sole advantage gleaned from having attended Marlborough College. Last week yet another IRA boy had been rounded up and interned for the duration of the conflict in Europe – which de Valera and his puppet imperialist government euphemistically termed ‘The Emergency’. Listening to the boy cry when he thought the other internees were asleep, Art had remembered dormitories of boys abducted at an early age to be brainwashed and brutalised into managing an empire.

      The difference of course was that in this camp, guarded by the Irish army, every internee was equal. There were no prefects or fags, no casual bullying or ritualised beatings. At Marlborough you were force-fed lies, but here a chance existed for genuine discourse. Not that all IRA men had open minds: some made a hurried sign of the cross when spying him. Art was used to such superstition, but most internees had grown relaxed with him, especially as he knelt alongside them at night while they recited their rosary. They knew that Art did not pray, but he considered it essential to camp morale to show respect for their beliefs. It made them curious about his beliefs too. His description of Moscow streets socialising and how agricultural production was transformed by the visionary genius of Stalin fascinated men who had never previously travelled more than thirty miles from their birthplace. At heart they were kulaks who would need to be prised from their few boggy acres when the time came. But what could one expect when they were terrorised by priests with the spectre of eternal punishment. Besides, having emanated from the Byvshie Liudi, Art could look down on no one. Stalin had coined that term well: the former people – remnants of the despised tsarist class who refused to play their part in the revolution. Soviet re-education camps were full of them, with soft hands learning to handle a shovel and be given a chance to redeem themselves. The triumph of the White Sea Canal, carved from rock with primitive tools and honest sweat, proved how re-education worked. Art had been sent back to Ireland to spread the gospel and, if de Valera insisted in interning him as a communist, then this camp was an ideal environment to do that.

      The IRA and the communists were not natural allies but the persuasiveness of his argument was starting to gain converts. Art had previously agreed with the IRA leadership that Ireland stay neutral. However – since Hitler’s attack on Russia – Art had no option but to call on Ireland to join the fight against German fascism now that Comrade Stalin had strategically aligned himself with the imperialists. Blinded by misguided nationalist shibboleths and petty hatred of Britain, the camp leadership had grown scared of his speeches in recent weeks. But it was not about collaboration with Britain, it was about using the Allies as a vehicle to crush fascism before uniting behind Stalin to create a new world order. That was a greater prize than the steeples of Fermanagh.

      This was the moment for all revolutionaries to unite and, while the IRA might find it hard to adjust, Art had shown how radical change was possible. It had not been easy. Christ only endured forty nights in the desert, but Art had spent two decades working on the docks, kipping in tenements and police cells. He had been his own judge, serving every day of his sentence with hard labour and was strong and cleansed of his former class now. But the confusing thing was that last night he dreamt about his family bathing off Ffrench’s private pier and had felt no guilt in re-experiencing that life of idle privilege. Instead he had known a sense of belonging, a dangerous wave of love all the more disturbing for emanating from those he was forced to repudiate.

      Art left the hut, anxious to be on time for the few internees not intimidated away from his Russian language class. But soon he realised that two men were walking alongside him. He glanced at them as they pinned his arms. They belonged to the primitive Catholic element of Republican. He was strong enough to take them on but as they turned into a space between the huts he saw a deputation awaiting him. Taking a long knife from his pocket the camp IRA commander held it to Art’s throat.

      ‘You’ve been court-martialled, Goold, and sentenced in absentia.’

      ‘You can’t court-martial me. I’m not a member of any Republican organisation.’

      ‘You’re a Protestant crackpot.’

      ‘I’m an atheist.’

      ‘Either way you go to hell. You’re just going there sooner than expected. I’ve had enough. We told the governor that unless you were gone by today you’d be found with a hundred knife wounds tomorrow morning. You’re his responsibility now.’

      The men pinning back Art’s arms shoved him forward and he started walking. Then for some unknown reason, he remembered his brother Brendan in that dream last night, swimming alongside him, trying to keep up. Art stopped, not through fear but after being overcome by déjà vu and an inescapable guilt. He lifted his head, almost as if willing for retribution to finally come through a bullet or a knife.

      Mrs Ffrench crossed the lawn from Bruckless House, and reached the gravel path that led to the small pier. Years ago on a picnic there when the Goold Verschoyle family argued about whether they should call it Bruckless Pier or Mr Ffrench’s Pier, Eva had insisted that it should really be christened Paradise Pier because that was what it was. But with the Goold Verschoyles gone, nobody called it Paradise Pier any more. Indeed no one ever came here, though locals knew that she never objected to people swimming there. But superstition was strong, despite everyone in Bruckless and Dunkineely being kind to her in her grief. Perhaps nothing summed up her husband’s failure more than their affection for him. He had seen himself as a radical orator, a progressive torch of truth amidst their fog of ignorance. But she realised that locals had just considered him a colourful eccentric – not even regarding him as Irish. Local priests had frequently railed against the Red Menace without bothering to mention her husband, despite his years of standing СКАЧАТЬ