Читать книгу On an Alien Shore - John Tully - Страница 8
Оглавление3
THE NEXT TIME THAT Father Minahan visited, he found Michael in low spirits. He had received a letter from his sister Mary and his heart was sore over the news of their mother and father. The one, she said, was more poorly than the other. Their Da, Patrick, was never very strong after an accident in the dockyard, and last winter’s fever was after ravaging Bridget’s health. Mrs Reid from next door, bless her, was the best neighbour you could ever want; she was always bringing them things and would send her children on errands if there was anything Bridget needed. Without her help, the family could not have coped.
Michael feared that his arrest and imprisonment had set back any hope of recovery. Still, Mary was well and was bearing up, which was just as well, for there was nobody else there for them in this foreign land.
Mary was walking out with an Englishman called Barker – an iron founder at Armstrong’s heavy engineering and armaments works over at Elswick – and Michael prayed that he was treating her well. Still, the man had a decent trade and Mary claimed he was not overly fond of the drink, which was a blessing in these thirsty parts. Mary had grown up suddenly and Michael worried about the less than honourable attentions of men. He’d overheard them: “Eee, Billy, man! Look at the tits on that!” “Why aye man, she’s a reet bobby dazzler!” “Come roond to ma hoose, hinney!” Minahan made a mental note to see the family as soon as he could travel to Gateshead. He could understand Michael’s fears for them as it was some years since he had been able to visit his own parents in faraway Liverpool and his own mother was never in the best of health.
Their first meeting had not augured well. The priest had automatically assumed Michael was guilty of the crime of which he had been charged. He would confess his sins and be granted absolution in God’s eyes, if not those of the State. He would be yet another dumb or insolent fellow, a deviant warehoused here before his dispatch at the rope’s end or incarceration in some oubliette for thirty years.
It was not to be. The young man had fixed him squarely with his blue eyes and shook his head slowly. “Ach, I have all the regrets in the world, Father,” he had said, his voice low but firm. “But it is the victim of a miscarriage of justice I am – of English justice, for what fair play can there be for a poor Irish Catholic in this country in these hard times? I know that it is customary for felons to deny their guilt in the hope of exculpation. Ach, they’re all as innocent as babes, if you would listen to them! But Father, I despair that I am trapped on a conveyor. Once a man is after landing on it, there is no escape, and guilt or innocence doesn’t come into it.”
It is sometimes thought that the expression “his jaw dropped” is a mere figure of speech, but Father Minahan’s jaw did drop and his eyes opened wide at the conclusion of Michael’s peroration. It was a fine speech – and only partly reproduced here – for Michael had had the time and solitude to polish it and he was always one for the words. From then on, Minahan paid heed to Michael’s words. Once his suspicions of intelligent roguery had been stilled, he came to like and respect the young man. He pondered Daniel Defoe’s words, written here on Tyneside: “I hear much of people’s calling to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.”
Michael admitted to his sister that if Minahan had first misjudged him, then it was reciprocated, for he had assumed he would be cut from the same cloth as Father Breslin and all the rest of the black-clad regiment of God-botherers he had encountered. They always let the people down, those products of Maynooth and Allen Hall, he insisted. That, he admitted, was perhaps a trifle unfair, for there were good men in the priesthood, he was sure, and hadn’t his own mother wanted him to go for a priest? Nevertheless, weren’t the ones he had met personally, even the halfway decent ones among them, wilfully ignorant men with heads full of dogma and scorn for the world of books and learning, and contempt for the common people?
What in all fairness, he asked, could be said of Father Breslin courting the favour of the Grimshaws and neglecting the needs of his parishioners? “Father Minahan is not like that,” he told Mary in a letter. “He reads, Mary, he reads and thinks! And he is painfully aware of the sufferings of the poor, be they English or Irish!”
Devout Mary’s reply, painstakingly written in a large sloping hand, had stoutly defended the priesthood, for were they not the apples of God’s eye and who were we mere sinners to challenge them? But she welcomed Father Minahan’s intervention, for perhaps he would save her heathen brother in spite of himself! She added, as a postscript, that James McDowell was after sending money to cover the costs of the appeal; a truly sainted man, if a heretic.
As the time for the appeal drew close, Michael found himself increasingly dependent on Father Minahan’s visits. Time crawls in prison and he was always alone, save during the exercise period when he was taken into the exercise yard in company with other prisoners on appeal or remand. There they would pace up and down – up and down – up and down – from one high wall to another; a space scarcely twenty paces wide. It was crushing claustrophobia at the bottom of a deep well.
By a refinement of cruelty, talking was strictly forbidden and the turnkeys were vigilant, so save for the creaking of boots and the occasional cough, the men moved silently between the walls. Yet the prisoners had become adept ventriloquists, scarcely moving their lips and never turning their heads as they whispered to each other, enraging the screws who overheard the odd snatch of words.
The prisoners’ only sight of the world outside of the walls was a square of sky; blue at times, but more often grey and leaking with winter rain. Some days it snowed and the flakes spun down pure and white, only to be trodden underfoot into grey slush. Michael understood then what the poet had meant when he wrote: “Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage”, for he could see in his mind’s eye the snow settling in the woods and the ice forming on the River Wear which curled through Durham City. There was a purity and innocence in the world that could not be suppressed no matter how hard warders, bureaucrats, bible wallahs, policemen, politicians, poorhouse guardians, capitalists, gaffers, officers and NCOs tried to stamp it out. Every physical action in that tower of silence and suffering was remorselessly regulated but his mind, he exulted, was his own and they could not take it from him. Did not the wisdom of his ancestors teach that “Every man’s mind is his kingdom”!
Nevertheless, he admitted that since Minahan’s last visit he had been plagued with nightmares, often waking in the night soaked in sweat and, he feared, after calling out in his sleep. That, he worried, might result in him giving away something of his mind to the prison authorities, but then, they were not likely to understand the words, for he had been crying out in Irish. A screw would bash on the door and roar out for silence. One night, he dreamed he was back in Ballycoolish shaping a baulk of timber in Grimshaw’s yard. He swore he could smell the sharp, resinous smell of the fresh-sawn wood, feel the roughness of the grain, even hear the slap of the waves and feel the breath of the wind on his face. A lark, too, was climbing the heavens, far above the lough. Alas, when he awoke, he was suffocating in this great pile of bricks and iron, far from Ballycoolish on the Donegal shore.
“You say that your people, too, never wanted to leave Ireland,” he said to Minahan. “That they lived at Skibbereen, a place I have heard my friend James McDowell speak of with a shudder in his voice. They say it is the saddest place in Ireland on account of the horror of the famine years there.”
“One day, God willing, I shall go there,” Father Minahan sighed. “I must still have people there, uncles and aunts and cousins and the like; pray to God that they survived the famine. I have never been there, yet the evil knowledge of it has always crouched at the back of my mind.”
“Tell me, Father,” asked Michael, “how is it that you can believe in a just and true God when He allows such suffering? How can He allow little children to die with their stomachs crying out for food? How can He allow men to build prisons with the hypocrisy that’s in it, claiming that they are places of reform?”
“These things are sent to test our faith,” Minahan replied, primly orthodox. And yet, although he could not admit it to this man whose soul he was anxious to save, he too had asked the same questions. He was sorely troubled with doubts about transubstantiation and wondered at the doctrine of the Trinity – and even doubted the existence of God and wrestled with it just as John Donne did in his sonnets. Intellectually, it did not stack up. He had even taken a peek into Origin of Species, the book hidden where his nosy housekeeper could not find it and report him to the bishop. The argument of the First Cause he found deficient and Michael’s words about the sufferings of the poor hit home to his troubled heart.
Minahan had grown up a poor Irish working-class boy and although his father was one of the more skilled dock workers – a stevedore who rigged up tackle and was expert at stowing cargo in ships’ holds – his family had shared hard times with their neighbours in the teeming streets of Bootle. And had fled the horror of Skibbereen. One grim summer’s day, the father of his Protestant friend Charlie Wilson failed to come home from the docks. A sling had broken and a ton of mouldy Congo rubber had dropped on him where he stood in the bottom of a ship’s hold. His body had been flung aside into a corner until the end of the shift, the foreman threatening to sack anyone who tried to move him. The family was condemned to penury and eventually the workhouse. Indeed, if God were omniscient and omnipotent, how could He allow such things?
Minahan became aware that Michael was speaking again: “Ah Father, I envy you your faith. It makes sense of the world. My friend James McDowell was after telling me how he read in a German book that religion for the poor is ‘the sigh of an oppressed creature living in a heartless world’.”
“Again, all these are things sent to test us,” Minahan replied. “I wonder if you are familiar with the story of Job and how he was in the end rewarded for his faith?”
Michael did not know the Old Testament story, but in any case Minahan felt himself a wretched hypocrite for mentioning it. How could anyone be impressed with an ancient shepherd’s tale which considered it right and just that the lives of Job’s first ten children could be taken and exchanged for another twenty like items replaced after a burglary? And then there was his bishop who ranted against Home Rulers, Michael Davitt and the Land Leaguers, the New Unions and their Socialistic leaders and that infernal Marx woman – “an atheistic bluestocking and a Jewess to boot”! The man had even questioned how Cardinal Manning could have thrown his weight behind a negotiated settlement on the London docks when the dirty rabble should have been starved back to work and the Socialists gaoled for holding the country to ransom. The man even claimed the Irish Famine was God’s just punishment for our sins; an idea that, as a grandson of Skibbereen, Minahan could not stomach.