Ashes In the Wind Read online

  As they get closer to Drimnamore they are stopped.

  ‘It’s a Shinners roadblock,’ says William. ‘You’d best do the talking – they’ll no care for my accent.’

  There are four Volunteers; after looking in the boot they wave the car on.

  As the castle comes into view in the fading evening light, John, in spite of his reluctant departure from Dublin, feels a returned affection for the rough grey stone, the absurd battlements, the long view down the mile-wide estuary of the Kenmare River stretching towards America. Three little islands, the Bull, the Cow and the Calf, punctuate with the smallest of dots the wide expanse of the Atlantic. The sky is grey, matching the stones of Derriquin, turning almost black out to sea where sheets of rain slant in towards the land.

  His mother rises as he comes into the library. Eileen Burke is a tall, handsome, fair-haired woman whose figure is concealed by several layers of sweaters to keep out the cold. A fire smoulders in the grate, the bitter-sweet smell of the turf smoke telling John that he is properly at home.

  The library, its four tall windows shuttered against the winter gales every evening, looks out on the terrace and the Kenmare River. The shelves are full of leather-bound Dublin editions collected by past Deans of Ardfert and Archdeacons of Aghadoe, the novels of Somerville and Ross the only concessions to the twentieth century. Eileen keeps her Irish dictionary and texts in the old schoolroom. John strokes the faded green leather on the round estate table with its six lettered drawers; twenty-seven people come here every Friday to be paid. The table is covered with papers and letters. Bills are stacked high on a single spike. On the end wall, unrolled from its long mahogany case, hangs a large map of the estate, holding by holding, townland by townland.

  Eileen gives John an affectionate embrace. He is a head taller than his mother, lean, with her fair hair and his father’s strong features.

  ‘You’re the image of Henry,’ she says, ‘I’m glad you’re back safe. Things have got a lot worse here since the summer. But it’s bad enough in Dublin.’

  ‘Not so bad. Exciting, dangerous only if you’re a soldier or a policeman. William and I were stopped on the way here by four Volunteers. One of them looked like Tomas Sullivan. I haven’t seen him for a while, he was at the back of the group, didn’t say anything.’

  ‘You recognized nobody,’ replies his mother sharply.

  John goes up via a winding staircase to his room at the top of the tower. There he can see the broad sweep of the estuary, over the trees to Drimnamore village and the Coomakista Pass, and back across the demesne to the wild bare heights of MacGillycuddy’s Reeks. In the summer he sometimes climbs the pull-down ladder to the trapdoor that takes him out to the roof. He has a battered telescope with which he has tried to look, guiltily but unsuccessfully, into the upstairs rooms of the Great Southern Hotel two miles away. The hotel’s summer dances are John’s meeting ground for girls, Dublin girls from substantial Catholic families living in Rathmines or Ballsbridge, intrigued by John but armoured against his inexperienced advances by impenetrable underclothes and fear of hell-fire.

  All his treasures are in his room – his shotgun, which has hung inside a pair of trousers in his wardrobe since The Troubles, his collection of birds’ eggs, an old paper kite that his father made on his tenth birthday, two fishing rods, his books, his matriculation photograph taken at Trinity. In a silver frame he has a picture of his parents on their wedding day on the steps of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork.

  The next day John wanders around the outbuildings and the farmyard. He goes down to the sea-water pool where whiting, bream and haddock are kept for the table. He has taken some bread to feed the tame mullet, now five or six pounds, that escaped selection for the kitchen and has earned a permanent reprieve. He walks on to Oysterbed Pier, where a consignment of spats from Arcachon has just arrived. The rest of the afternoon he is up to his waist in the cold water of the estuary with the two Doyle brothers, who give him a pair of chest waders from the oyster shed. The three of them lay the spats out in the ambulances, the wooden boxes on trestles that keep the young oysters clear of silt and starfish. Big spring tides, rising and falling fifteen feet, and the clean water of the Atlantic make the Kenmare River an ideal site for the oyster parc which John’s great-great-grandfather had established a hundred years earlier.

  ‘It’ll be a good year, this,’ says Jim Doyle. ‘As long as we’re spared the disease.’ He makes a sign with his right hand and spits over his left shoulder to ward off Haplosporidium nelsoni.

  ‘Here you are, Sean,’ he says, opening his clasp knife and shucking a mature oyster. ‘Taste the good on that one.’

  John takes it, feels the plump, firm, slippery texture, chews for a second and swallows, the taste of the sea on his lips. He spits and smiles. ‘All right, I’d say.’ The mother-of-pearl on the inside of the shell gleams in the spring sunshine.

  He goes for long walks around the Derriquin estate, sometimes with the keeper, Ambrose O’Halloran, more often on his own.

  ‘Don’t go to the north of the road,’ says Ambrose. ‘You never know who you’d meet up the mountain.’

  When Henry Burke came back from France for a week’s leave over Christmas 1915, John and Eileen met him at Kenmare, a tall, gaunt, exhausted figure in a khaki greatcoat, a major’s badges of rank on his sleeves. Henry spent forty-eight hours in bed, then took John shooting for the first time. John, who had been out several times with Ambrose, but always with an empty gun, was excited at this promotion, at doing something for the first time with Henry.

  Father, son and gamekeeper quartered the big bogs with a riot of spaniels on a typical Kerry winter’s day, overcast, scudding clouds, sharp bursts of rain, occasional redemptive sun. ‘A great man for the snipe, the major,’ said Ambrose to John as Henry strode thigh-deep in water and clinging peat to the far end of Reenaferrara before bringing it back with the dogs. Henry killed three snipe with seven shots on his way through; John missed everything, hurried, anxious, until instinct took over and he brought down a high, twisting bird with a shot that was over before he had time to think.

  ‘Good shot,’ said Henry, and John smiled with pleasure.

  ‘Mionnan aerach, the child of the air, we call the snipe,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Let’s pick the bird,’ said Henry. ‘They’re the devil to find unless you mark them to the inch.’

  They spent five minutes searching until John’s springer, the wildest of them all, found the snipe and laid it at John’s feet. On the way back the dogs flushed a woodcock out of the rhododendrons in the demesne, and John killed it cleanly.

  ‘Another good shot,’ said Henry as he picked up the bird, showing John the browns and dark greys of its feathers. He took out the pin feathers and stuck one in his own cap and one in John’s, ‘I don’t shoot woodcock any more. They’re too beautiful. Look at those eyes and the long beak.’

  Two days later they returned Henry to Kenmare and the long journey back to France. At the station four days earlier, Henry and John had shaken hands; now Henry held his son in a tight embrace before kissing Eileen goodbye. It was the only time his father hugged John. The rough cloth of the greatcoat scratched his cheek, his father’s chin rested on the top of his head; they were both afraid to let go. Henry kissed Eileen, murmured something in her ear and boarded the train.

  ‘What did Dad say?’ asked John.

  ‘Most of it none of your business,’ said Eileen. ‘But he did say we weren’t to worry, that he would come back.’

  Years later John read the War Diary of the Royal Irish Dragoons, which described the morning of 1 July 1916 in a few lines.

  The regiment advanced in good order at 0730 hours. When the Allied barrage lifted we were instantly fired on by the enemy’s machine guns and snipers. The fire was so intense that the advance was checked; A Squadron, under Major Burke, managed to make progress on the right flank, and by 1130 had reached the first line of German trenches, followed by B and C Squadrons. By noon o
ur first objective had been secured. On our right the Queen’s Victoria Rifles had been held up, and on the left flank a determined attack by the Inniskilling Fusiliers was checked. As a result the German counter-attack on both flanks was intense, and after fierce fighting for two hours, and many casualties, including the commanding officer, the second in command, A and C squadron leaders and the adjutant, the regiment was ordered to withdraw. 360 out of 542 men were killed or wounded.

  A contemporary German account said, ‘In the valley leading to Thiepval the bodies lay like a blanket.’ Henry’s corps commander General Congreve wrote in a letter to his wife, ‘I am proud of my splendid fighting troops. A perfect day.’

  On Friday John walks the two miles into Drimnamore village to collect The Kerryman and the post. It is the last Friday in the month, market day, and Drimnamore is busy. Cattle, pigs and chickens are bought and sold, horses trotted up and down on the green, bargains are struck with a spit and a handshake, notes watchfully counted out, the luck-penny handed back. Women in shawls are selling yellow, salty butter in willow baskets. Small groups of men stand around smoking and holding glasses of stout. There is a fortune-teller in a little brown tent doing good business as long as Father Michael isn’t around. John catches a piebald with a dangling halter that canters past him and hands it back to its breathless owner, who at once tries to convince John, ‘This is the horse you’ve been wanting all your life. Didn’t he pick you out of the crowd?’

  John laughs, shakes his head, moves on, nods to Tomas Sullivan, who is talking to several older men, strangers to John. Tomas nods back.

  There are several Kerry cows for sale, the offspring of Eileen’s Kerry bull Cúchulain. Eileen is a crusader for the breed, threatened by bigger animals from lowland Scotland. The Kerry cow is a grand doer on the poor grazing of the South-West, good for beef and milk, hardy, doesn’t mind the rain.

  There are more men about than usual, and more Cork accents. John has a glass of stout in O’Hara’s smoky bar where he recognizes less than half of the dozen men in the crowded room. He tells his mother on his return.

  ‘Maybe there’s something on,’ she says. ‘More than just searches and roadblocks. The Black and Tans are in Waterville now, and the Kerry Brigade may be pushed into doing something about them. The Cork boys are much harder and maybe that’s why they’re here. I’ll ask around. Someone will know.’

  Lunch at Derriquin the next day is a sombre affair. Their near neighbours, the Butlers, have come over from Waterville, their distrust of Eileen’s Home Rule sympathies outweighed by the certainty of excellent Kerry beef and a dozen oysters each from the Derriquin oyster beds. After all, Arthur Butler reminds his wife, ‘She is Middleton’s daughter, and he’s sound all right on the Union.’

  At lunch he wants vigorous action. ‘They’ve destroyed the police station in Tralee, ambushed and killed two policemen in Cahirciveen, burned Ardfert Abbey and Renvyle. We’ve been raided three times in the last month, our shotguns and cartridges taken. Kerry needs more troops, more Black and Tans.’

  Eileen is scornful.

  ‘More Black and Tans? They’re the dregs of the British Army; they shot a woman in Kiltartan last week sitting on her lawn. Twenty-four years old, leaving three children without a mother.’

  ‘Of course that’s a tragedy. But Home Rule won’t ever work. Look at your people. They’re as feckless and as priest-ridden as ours. The Irish need a firm and fatherly hand if there is to be any future for this island. The Black and Tans will sort out the Shinners soon enough once we have enough of them.’

  John looks out of the window at the rough November waves in the estuary, daydreaming of his rooms back at Trinity. It’s an odd father that needs the police and the army to control his children, he thinks, sees the surprised look on Arthur Butler’s face, and realizes he has spoken out loud. There is a long silence. John’s mother smiles and rings the bell for coffee.

  That afternoon Eileen is driven into Drimnamore to see Josephine. Josephine Burke lives in the end cottage at the entrance to the village, where she teaches at the elementary school. Josephine and Eileen are close. It is Eileen who arranged for Josephine’s education by the nuns in Kenmare, who asks her regularly to the castle, who ensures that she sits in the Burke pew, who insists that Josephine calls herself Josephine Burke, not Josephine Doyle.

  ‘It’s not down to you that Henry’s Uncle Arthur was too cowardly to marry your mother,’ says Eileen. ‘It’s he was the bastard, not you.’ Josephine smiles at the frank language. Eileen is Josephine’s marriage broker, persistent in spite of Josephine’s diffidence.

  ‘Sure, who’d have me? I’m thirty-two, illegitimate, a Protestant into the bargain.’

  ‘A lucky man, that’s who. You know what they say – marry a teacher or a nurse and you’ve got a laying hen.’

  Josephine laughs. She teaches Gaelic to Eileen, a good and eager pupil, who is fluent enough to say, when her younger sister Agnes elopes with John Fuller after a long and clandestine courtship, ‘Sciob an fiolar togha mo schicini’ – ‘The eagle has taken the pick of our chickens.’

  Eileen and Josephine are together for an hour on Sunday evening in Josephine’s front room. On the way back to Derriquin, Eileen calls on Father Michael. It is her first visit to the parish priest’s house, a substantial brick building close to the Roman Catholic church. Father Michael has always been friendly enough, but guards his flock closely. He has been told how Henry’s father tried to convert the Derriquin tenants during the Famine years.

  Eileen is shown in by the housekeeper and sits on a straight-backed chair in the austere parlour, bare but for a small table, a second chair and a large crucifix on one wall. A recently lit fire struggles to warm the room.

  The housekeeper brings in a pot of tea and two cups on a tray; as she leaves the room Father Michael comes in and sits down. He is much younger than Eileen, not yet thirty, and the authority of his position sits a little uneasily on his shoulders.

  ‘I’m sorry we’ve no biscuits,’ he says. ‘I don’t do much entertaining. But you’ll have a cup of tea?’

  ‘I will, thank you. I’m sorry to arrive unexpectedly, but I’ve heard from Josephine that the IRA are planning to move men up to Staigue Fort to attack the army convoy from Kenmare. If it happens it’ll be more than a skirmish, it’ll be a real battle. You and I should warn both sides, get the IRA to call the ambush off.’

  Father Michael looks uneasy. ‘I’m not sure what I can do, whether the Cork men will listen to me.’

  ‘They will if you tell them the army have been warned,’ says Eileen. ‘We both of us should try.’

  ‘It’s been quiet enough around Drimnamore so far,’ says Father Michael, getting up and poking the fire. ‘I suppose we should do our best to keep it that way.’

  That evening Eileen talks to John. ‘Father Michael is going to warn the IRA, I’ll speak to the army this evening. The last thing we need is a battle.’

  John makes no attempt to dissuade her. Later, watching from his room in the tower, he sees Eileen walking along the terrace that separates Derriquin from the sea, running her hand slowly across, down, across, up the waist-high battlemented wall.

  Eileen telephones General Strickland in Kenmare; the army ignores her advice to delay their convoy and instead plans an ambush of its own.

  Frank O’Gowan, the captain of the Cork detachment of the IRA, is determined to go ahead. He has been sent to galvanize the Kerry Brigade, still tainted by their failure to rescue Roger Casement from the Tralee barracks in 1916. He distrusts Father Michael’s warning; the Drimnamore parish priest makes no distinction from his pulpit between IRA and British killing.

  ‘They’ll be expecting two Kerrymen and a dog,’ Frank says later to Tomas Sullivan. ‘Not twenty of us.’

  3

  THE ANCIENT DRY-STONE ring of Staigue Fort stands in an amphitheatre of hills open to the south half a mile above the coast road. On Wednesday evening, twenty IRA Volunteers move into the fort in
ones and twos off the mountain. They shelter in the old guardroom built into the side of the wall, lighting a turf fire that offers more comfort than warmth. The men from Cork are quiet; the Kerrymen, who have never fired their rifles in anger, are full of nervous questions. They get short answers.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough in the morning,’ says Frank O’Gowan, yawning. ‘Jesus, I could sleep on a harrow.’

  ‘Did you see the priest Sunday?’ says Patrick O’Mahony to Tomas Sullivan. He is moving a small rosary nervously between his fingers.

  ‘Indeed I did,’ says Tomas. ‘I had little enough to tell him. It’s hard to find an occasion of sin in Drimnamore.’

  ‘What got you in? The farm, was it?’ says Patrick.

  ‘Not land any more. My grandfather took the grazing of five cows from the Burkes for three lives, but my da bought it out in ’96.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘My grandfather was a member of the IRB, a proper Fenian – and his grandfather fought in 1798. It’s time this country was ours, high time we had a Republic. What got you here?’

  ‘A bit of excitement.’

  ‘You’ll have your fill of that in the morning,’ says Frank.

  ‘What about you, Captain?’ says Tomas.

  ‘The Christian Brothers and the Connaught Rangers.’ He doesn’t elaborate.

  Frank O’Gowan was half English; he had been christened Francis Xavier Smith, reflecting his mother’s hope that she had borne a priest. Her English husband had a small draper’s shop on the Cork Quays. When it collapsed and her husband disappeared, she changed their name to O’Gowan and enrolled her hope in the Christian Brothers School, a grim building in Cork City as forbidding and uncomfortable as the County Jail. On his first day, standing uncertainly in a dank hall smelling of disinfectant and of boys, Frank was suddenly lifted off his feet by a massive hand that grabbed jacket, collar and vest in a single twisted bunch.