Читать книгу Blood-Dark Track: A Family History - Joseph O’Neill - Страница 11

Now never marry a soldier,

a sailor or a marine,

But keep your eye on the Sinn Féin boy

with his yellow, white and green.

– Anonymous, ‘Salonika’

In summer, around Inishannon, the Bandon could be a jungle river. Rank, swollen trees – beech, oak, willow, ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, various evergreens – gather heavily over the banks, the trunks enveloped by vines and dangling plants, the forked branches supporting huge thunderheads of foliage. Everything is overgrown: river boulders and sandbars sprout bushes and weeds, the water surface is clogged with pale yellow blooms, and elongated strands of green vegetation run underwater. Further west and upriver, the Bandon slips along through meadows and copses and is only patchily visible from the main road. At Bandon, the old British garrison town of which it used to be said that even its pigs were Protestant, the river passes under Bandon Bridge. It is still remembered that in 1641 English troops tied 88 Irishmen of the town back to back and threw them off the bridge into the water, where all were drowned. Upstream beyond Bandon town, the river meanders by such townlands as Coolfadda, Shinagh and Laragh on its northerly bank and Castlebernard and Killountain on its southerly. It is briefly reunited with the highway, at Baxter’s Bridge, before twisting off again on a path of its own. The road, meanwhile, has started to resemble the secretive river it shadows – narrow, sinuous, and hemmed in by thickets and dense, overarching trees that barely admit daylight. Black-feathered birds drift like ashes out of the way of cars. The surrounding hills are obscured and the highway is reduced to a succession of blind turns. It’s enough to lead you, kept in this leafy dark, to imagine a conspiracy to conceal the world through which you travel – West Cork.

Finally, a valley opens up ahead. A ruined mill appears on the right. You are coming to the village of Enniskean. If you take a left, towards the gentle uplands there, and follow certain hedged-in lanes, you will arrive upon the townland of Ardkitt, where my grandfather Jim O’Neill was born and the O’Neill farm, now occupied by my second cousin Pat O’Neill, may still be found. If you drive straight on, through Enniskean and the even smaller village of Ballineen, you will come to places where my grandfather, long after he had left the country to live in Cork city, returned on nights when neither the moon nor the floods were up, to steal salmon on the Bandon river.

Jim usually took with him a son or two; often, too, his regular poaching sidekick, Dan Cashman, whose ready compliance with my grandfather’s commands outweighed the fact that he could neither swim, nor drive, nor see beyond the palm of his hand. The fishing party pulled up in the twilight at Manch, where the Bandon twists close to the road and where the fishing rights and riparian lands were the property of the Conners of Manch House. (Manch was also where Tom Barry’s Flying Column, having marched in rain through Shanacashel, Coolnagow and Balteenbrack, crossed the river after the Kilmichael ambush.) Arrival at dusk, when a car with no lights shining would not attract attention, was vital; the car’s electrics were doctored so that the brake lights could be turned on and off by a special switch under the dashboard.

My grandfather, Dan Cashman and my uncle Brendan quickly jumped out. They took two nets – darkened with a product actually called Nigger-Brown Dye – from the boot and skipped over the stile. They passed through the hedge and crossed the single track of the Cork, Bandon & South Coast Railway. There was the water, only a few dozen paces away through furze and long grass. Meanwhile another uncle of mine, Jim Junior, drove on and parked the car in a spot he hoped was both innocuous and discreet. Only fourteen, he would wait there anxiously until the others returned later that night.

Night fell. Nevertheless, it was possible to see clearly, since a night sky is navy, never black, and eyes grow quickly accustomed to the dark. Rain fell intermittently, which was good. The last thing the poachers wanted was the moon hanging there like a button on a blazer and lighting up the river.

My grandfather pegged one end of a net into the ground. Then he took the net’s weighted line and threw it over the water on to the opposite bank, which was thirty or so feet away; he did the same with the jackline of the other (unpegged) net. He and Brendan forded the river by stepping on a gravel isle and wading knee-deep across the remaining stretch. Once they’d crossed, Brendan unspooled and worked the first net so that it stretched across the water like a submerged tennis net. (The net could drop ten to eleven feet underwater in meshes of seven and a quarter inches.) Meanwhile my grandfather picked up the second, unpegged, net and signalled to Dan Cashman to do the same on his side of the water. Then Dan Cashman and my grandfather dragged that net through the water towards the tennis net.

Ever since the time he was carried away by the current, Dan Cashman would only enter the water in an emergency. Dan was lucky, that time, to wash up on a fluvial island. My grandfather had to wade into the freezing water and swim over to him. He tied a rope around Dan’s waist, swam back to the bank, and hauled Dan through the water like a calf.

In between the two nets was the Key Hole. If the salmon were anywhere, they would be there, slowly twisting where the river was ten to twelve feet deep. These were the trade secrets that my grandfather knew from his childhood: the location of the pools where the salmon congregated – the Key Hole, the Forge Hole, the Rock Pool, the Flat of Kilcascan – and the fords and the dangerous currents. He learned from his father, who acquired the knowledge and the poaching knowhow from his own father.

The three poachers stealthily went about their work. The river was unquiet, haunted by sounds and movements that made everybody jumpy. The wind stirred a roar in the riverbank trees, somewhere waterhens chirped, downriver a startled heron flapped up; and, of course, the water itself, dark and restless shapes of trees reflected monstrously in its sheen, was always rustling. Rain snapped in the trees.

My grandfather was not out on the river at midnight, chilled and soaked and running the risk of catastrophe, for the fun of it. He was there because Jim and Brendan had their confirmations coming up and another son, Padraig, his communion, and the boys hadn’t a stitch to wear.

As the nets came together, salmon could be felt tugging in the meshes. Eventually the nets were dragged out. ‘Jesus, they’re heavy,’ my grandfather said. And they were, because they were crammed. A rogue shaft of moonlight shone on the netted fish. ‘Look at that,’ my grandfather said, ‘a rosary.’

On they went, to another pool further down the river, and then another. Each time the fishing was good. By the time the catch was totally landed, thirty-three salmon were tallied. It was a record-breaking haul.

My grandfather made a sack from his herringbone overcoat and filled it with fish. Afterwards, their smell would not leave his jacket. My grandmother would say that the cats of Cork followed him around for a month.

‘What happens if the bailiffs come?’ Brendan asked his father.

My grandfather pulled out a revolver. ‘’Twould be a poor night for any bailiff that walks here tonight.’

Although on this occasion two nets were being used, usually just the one sufficed: the poachers would suspend the net in the middle of the pool for about half an hour, waiting for the salmon to entangle themselves on the principle that salmon are never still. (It was not unknown for a dog to be thrown into the river to frighten the fish towards the net.) Sometimes a guest poacher would accompany the O’Neills and the outing would take on a social dimension. Tomás MacCurtain Junior, the IRA man and son of the Lord Mayor of Cork shot dead by the British, went poaching with my grandfather, as did Brendan’s brother-in-law, Seán O’Callaghan, after his release from seven years’ imprisonment.

Poaching was not restricted to the Bandon. In August and September my grandfather fished for blackberries, as the late season fish were called, at Skibbereen. There, the river Ilen is tidal and the channel forty-five yards across, and two nets had to be tied end to end to cover it. The channel could not be forded: my grandfather had to swim naked with the jackline in his hand. Still naked, he would pull the nets over with the jackline and remain on the far bank for half an hour of fishing; then he’d swim back.

The thirty-three salmon were taken to the fishmongers, who would pay anything from £2 to £5 for each fish. That was a lot of money.

A fishmonger once tried to cross Jim O’Neill. Jim sent Brendan to Mortell’s (‘If It Swims, We Have It’) with three salmon. Mortell only paid for two, asserting that the third was a slat – a dud fish. My grandfather took issue with this and returned to Mortell’s on two or three occasions, claiming payment or the return of the salmon. ‘It’ll cost you a lot more than one salmon,’ he finally warned Mortell. Mortell shrugged and continued serving his customers. After all, what remedy did Jim, as a thief of the fish, have? But Mortell miscalculated. There and then, in a full shop, my grandfather toppled a skyscraper of egg-crates and the shop was flooded in a lake of yolk. ‘Now,’ my grandfather said, ‘you can keep your salmon.’

But there was no problem selling the thirty-three salmon. The O’Neill boys made their sacraments dressed to kill.

Poaching was not always this lucrative or easy. The danger and awful thrill of it lay in the ongoing battle of wits with the fishing bailiffs who patrolled the river at night. To my uncles Jim and Brendan, these nocturnal escapades from the middle of the last century are as vivid as ever, and they are still able to give detailed and amazed accounts of their close shaves and run-ins with the forces of law and order, stories of flashlights and car-chases and gunshots fired in the air – stories that nearly always end with the bailiffs foiled and flat on their faces like cartoon goons.

Even the time uncle Jim was caught is retold as a triumph of sorts. One night in 1957, they were netting the river just west of Bandon, near the Welcome Inn – my grandfather and his sons Jim and Brendan, twenty and nineteen years old respectively. The river at that place turns like a horseshoe, with a gravel strand on the inward bank of the turn. Engines and other hitches had been thrown on to the bed of the pool to stop poaching, but my grandfather knew exactly how far down the hole the net could be dropped without snagging. Two fish were twitching on the gravel when suddenly the bailiffs’ torches were bearing down on them. Brendan, who was on the far bank, immediately bagged the fish and pulled the net out of the river. ‘Lie down or I’ll fire,’ he shouted, bluffing, and the two approaching bailiffs dived for cover.

My grandfather ran upriver and uncle Jim went downriver, splitting the patrol. When uncle Jim got some distance away, he turned round and shouted obscenities to attract attention to himself and give the others a chance of getting away. Sure enough, the bailiffs both turned on him and, joined by a third bailiff, soon had Jim cornered in a field. When asked who he was, Jim asked them who were they to ask. ‘We’re water keepers,’ they said. ‘Well, so am I,’ said Jim. They grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and marched him away. Jim stumbled and fell. ‘I can’t see a thing,’ he complained, ‘could you shine a light?’ The bailiffs complied, and the flashlights alerted Brendan and my grandfather to their pursuers’ whereabouts.

Uncle Jim was led past the hidden getaway car to the Welcome Inn. Phone-calls were made, and just as the bailiffs were about to take Jim back to the river for further questioning, four uniformed guards appeared. They asked Jim who he’d been poaching with. ‘Well,’ Jim (a teetotaller) said, ‘I was in the pub, addled – I was after drinking a few pints – and a fellow I knew to see asked me whether I wanted to make a few shillings. Jesus, I wouldn’t know his name at all. The third fellow,’ Jim informed the guards, ‘was a fellow we picked up in Bandon. John was his name, I believe.’

Two of the guards rolled up their sleeves. ‘Right, you’re going to tell us what happened.’

‘Lads, take it away,’ an older officer said, ‘he’s only a young fellow.’ He took Jim aside. ‘Listen, son, the judge will go easy on you if you help us out. You’re only carrying the can for the two others.’ But Jim stuck to his story, and after the interrogation ended, he asked whether there was any chance of a lift to Bandon. ‘Ah, sure why not,’ the guards said.

Once in Bandon, my uncle starting walking. Even though his feet were killing him – he wore oversized Wellingtons – he took an indirect route home, via Toureen, in case he was followed. (On the morning of 22 October 1920, five British soldiers were shot dead in Toureen.) It wasn’t until he’d tramped the eight miles to Toureen in the darkness that a car finally drove by. He stuck out a thumb and the car came to a halt. Who should be in it but the chief fisheries inspector and his assistant – Scanlon and Buckley. Even though they knew young Jim had been out poaching, they drove him into Cork and dropped him at the door of the house. If Jim was expecting a warm and relieved welcome when he got home, he was disappointed. His father and brother were in bed, fast asleep.

The next day, water bailiffs found the nets Brendan had stowed in a ditch two fields south of the river. Salmon scales in the net were sent for analysis to Dublin, where they were identified by Dr Wendt as the scales of two salmon. Uncle Jim was summoned to court and charged. He didn’t comply with the summons and on the day of the hearing was in West Cork, looking for guns for the IRA campaign in the North. He learned about his convictions on four charges – poaching, possessing a net, and possessing parts of two salmon – and his fine (£21 10s. 10d.) from a headline in the Evening Echo.

Uncle Jim, on his wages of £7 a week, was unable to pay the fine. He wrote to the Minister of Justice, explaining that he was the eldest of ten children and his earnings weren’t his to keep. The Minister replied that the best he could do was grant Jim an extra three months in which to pay the fine.

Three months was all Jim needed. Three months took him into the next fishing season. On the first night of the new season, they caught enough salmon to pay the fine and plenty more.

My uncle Jim’s decision to draw the bailiffs to himself was not a spontaneous self-sacrifice but the implementation of a plan that, whatever else happened, my grandfather was not to be caught: two years before, Jim O’Neill Senior had picked up a conviction and a large fine for poaching, and a second offence would have had very serious consequences. The irony was that his conviction arose from an entirely innocent visit to the river. My grandfather, at that time, was working at the ESB marina power station, where he befriended a man from Donegal, Jimmy McCloughlin. Jimmy was set on buying a car, even though he couldn’t drive. My grandfather said to him, ‘I know where there’s a nice little car for you; and I’ll teach you to drive.’ So Jimmy bought a 1946 Hillman Minx for £40 and my grandfather obtained full use of the vehicle for the duration of the driving lessons. In the course of one such lesson, they decided to go for a spin in West Cork. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and the two men were accompanied by their wives. The lure of the river was always with my grandfather and as usual he couldn’t resist casting an eye over it. The day-trippers were sitting on a bank of the Bandon, admiring the scenery, when bailiffs appeared and asked what they were doing. ‘I’m out showing these Donegal people West Cork,’ my grandfather truthfully answered. Nevertheless, the next day there was a raid on the O’Neill house. By chance they uncovered two coal bags with scales of two salmon in them. Jim O’Neill was convicted and fined £48. It was a massive penalty, but it was the first and last time they ever caught him.

The time my grandfather was arrested was the only time his son Kevin, my father, saw him drunk. My father (the third oldest son, after Jim and Brendan) said that he was occasionally taken poaching. ‘I hated it,’ he said. ‘It scared the hell out of me. For me, West Cork was about ambushes and murders and the Black and Tans. It was a bloodstained, haunted kind of place – spooky. The roads and fields were dark and isolated. Men were shot and buried there. I wasn’t like Brendan,’ my father said. ‘Brendan was fearless, as crazy as my dad.’

Jim O’Neill wasn’t frightened in West Cork. He was at home there day or night: at home in townlands around Enniskean like Curraghcrowley, Desertserges and Farranasheshery, and at home, too, in further-flung Clonakilty, Kilbrittain, Drimoleague, Skibbereen.

To my ears, these place-names continue to have the lyricism of the unfamiliar, even though I’ve now been to the villages and small towns they identify; and although I’ve seen the bunting that overhangs their streets and seen their houses sunlit in fresh coats of coral and mustard and avocado, and noted, furthermore, the signboards that designate them as Heritage Towns, Development Zones or West Cork Trail attractions, I continue to think of them, and places like them, as grey-brown, inward-looking, and vulnerable to flooding by a past that, like the local water-table, lies just beneath the surface.

It might be said that the persistence of these notions, and their romanticism, show me up for what I am: an outsider. I’m not sure about that. If mythic West Cork abides anywhere, it is in its own people, who, it can sometimes seem, are apt to ascribe some history to its every rut, puddle and tree. Some spots give voice to the past by their names, like the inlet in the Bandon known as the Punchbowl because centuries ago wines and spirits were poured into it by banqueters at Togher Castle and for two days after the locals drank freely while they swam; but most places are dumb. The uninformed visitor cannot know that Meehan was thrown from his horse at that gate and died, that the derelict cottage by the road is what splits the O’Herlihy family. Nor can the visitor guess that the petrol-station stands where there was once a British barracks; that twelve Thompson guns with rounds of ammunition were dumped for years beneath those rhododendron bushes; that the farmhouse in that copse was a training headquarters for the IRA; that a Big House stood among those diseased elms until it was burned to the ground; that in the square were deposited the three McCarthy girls, tarred and feathered for dancing with the enemy; that the stony furlongs of that mountainside were tramped by Tom Barry’s Flying Column; that in that bog were placed the bodies of three men executed as informers.

In some locales history is visible. For example, there is a little valley known as Beal na mBlath (the Mouth of Flowers), which you reach by driving along a deserted country road north of Dunmanway, turning right at a crossroads marked by an inn, and stopping a further hundred yards or so along the road. There is a grassy bank on one side of the road and a wooded bank on the other, and, as happens on so many West Cork lanes, there is the sound of a brook shivering in a thicket somewhere. It was here, a memorial stone reminds us, that, on 22 August 1922, Michael Collins met his death. A few miles north-west of Beal na mBlath is the road from Dunmanway to Macroom. At a remote point in the road, not far from a crossroads, you’ll see a monument shaped like an enormous tombstone. This commemorates the Kilmichael ambush: in November 1920, Tom Barry’s IRA Cork No. 3 Brigade, for the loss of three men, surprised and killed eighteen British Auxiliaries, burned two armoured lorries, and seized arms and ammunition. The whole fray can be re-imagined by reference to a relief model of the terrain that’s been placed on site, complete with electric lights of varying colours to illuminate the positions of the two lorries, the IRA command post, and the three points on the roadside rocks from which the IRA men fired; it is apparent, if you walk down the exposed road in question, just how well chosen was the ambush site and how little hope the Auxiliaries had of escape. The monument to the boys of Kilmichael was unveiled in around 1970. To mark the occasion, several hundred marchers paraded in a military formation. At the front walked Tom Barry and Jim O’Neill and, attached to his hand, Jim’s oldest grandson. At a certain point I broke free of my grandfather’s grip and ran on ahead, leading the column on my own; turning around, I saw the marchers salute as they passed the monument and so I saluted, too.

I have no memory of my grandfather at all, and the Kilmichael incident is known to me only through the chuckling recollection of my grandmother. She related the story as we stood together at the monument on a chilly, drizzling November day. As my sturdy, beloved grandmother described my younger self marching on this road, I was surprised by a surge of gratification which, had I not uneasily suppressed it, would have come close to euphoria. In however tiny a respect, my trajectory had intersected this rough land and its people, who had granted me uncomplicated admission into their ranks; and, for whatever reason, I was suddenly engulfed by a feeling of kindredness and racination that was unaccustomed and thrilling. This was something other than a simple wave of pleasure set off by an encounter with one’s cultural origins; it was, rather, an intense recognition – or what felt like recognition – of a primitive affiliation to a political and historical community, an affiliation so pure and overwhelming that for an instant it felt as though I had stumbled upon a solution to a riddle.

Then again, I’m open as anyone to the spells places can cast. When, in March 1995, I flew into Cork city for the first time in years and looked out of the aeroplane window to see the two channels of the river Lee dazzling among my birthplace’s low hills and the sun shining on one half of the city and the rain falling on the other, I was bewitched. My entrancement continued in the taxi from the airport, for as we descended into Cork a rainbow, the biggest and most fiercely striped I’d ever seen, made a miraculous half-circle from the valley down below to the highland on my right. I could not help associating this iridescent loop of vapour with the optimistic political atmosphere in the country. The ceasefire declared by the IRA and its paramilitary loyalist counterparts was over six months old. Daytime patrols by the British army in the North were waning, troop numbers were falling, and the talk was of exploratory talks between the British government and Sinn Féin. True, some issues looked troublesome, in particular the insistence by London and unionists that paramilitary organizations had to disarm prior to their participation in all-party talks; but the general view was that the benefits of peace had proved so substantial that, however tough and protracted the road ahead might be, a return to violence was out of the question. Things were looking up.

The taxi drove me to my grandmother’s house in Ballinlough, a district of Douglas in south Cork dominated by a large estate of tidy, pebble-dashed houses built forty or so years ago. I arrived to find a Sunday evening family gathering in full swing. Crowded into the living room were three uncles, Jim, Terry and Padraig, and their wives, Kitty, Mary and Joan; my aunt Angela, down from Dublin for the weekend; my aunt Marian and her husband Don; and, of course, my grandmother, who gripped my face as I stepped over threshold and gave me two fervent kisses. I was happy to say little as the family talked amongst itself. The chatter – incessant, cheerful, uncontentious – ranged from the terrible weather (for two golfless years it hadn’t stopped raining) to local politics to the question of whose looks were inherited from whom. As I observed the goodwill and talk flowing around the room, I wondered how my warm and open family could ever keep things from each other – things that might amount to secrets. As I found out, they did; and it was as though, by some trick of chiaroscuro, the very brightness of such talk served to plunge unspoken matters all the further into obscurity.

Sometimes it appears that political convictions may be genetically transmitted characteristics, like a certain crookedness of the nose or the ability to swing a stick at a ball. My grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, the story went, was each imprisoned in the cause of Irish freedom. There was a nuance: although his father Peter was a rebel, Jim O’Neill’s republicanism mainly descended from the family of his mother, Annie O’Driscoll. Her father, William O’Driscoll, was a famous Land Leaguer, and on his release from Cork Gaol a crowd carried him shoulder-high into Kilbrittain and named him William the Conqueror.

I discovered that stories circulated plentifully among the O’Neills. My grandmother was their collector and teller-in-chief. It was she who told them earliest and shaped them longest, and she who was invested with the authority of having been there. Born on 19 May 1912, she was, in a manner of speaking, there in 1916 for the Easter Rising; there when the Irish Republican Army came into being, there during the Anglo-Irish War – in which Tomás MacCurtain Senior was shot dead in front of his family, and Terence MacSwiney, MacCurtain’s successor as Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger-strike – and during the Civil War. My grandmother was party to these mythic episodes and they were part of her. She said – and she wasn’t joking – that her terror of thunderstorms and loud noises in the night stemmed from the times when she cowered indoors while the British forces ran wild in the deserted streets of Dunmanway, hammering down doors and drunkenly shooting and murdering and causing mayhem.

Grandmother’s view of the world was profoundly political, if not downright Manichaean. Everywhere she saw the forces of justice and good locked into an unending, many-faceted conflict with the forces of injustice and evil. Approaching her ninetieth birthday, she continued to follow current affairs, taking sides on a wide range of issues: Balkan warfare, Central American flood relief, local industrial disputes, the persecution of gay broadcasters, the treatment of Rumanian immigrants. She made a point of buying The Big Issue, the magazine for the homeless, and knew all about the life of her regular vendor, Christy. When she visited me in London at the age of eighty-three, she instinctively befriended the two tramps – immense, bearded, raucous drunks – who slept at the corner of the street I lived in, and for years asked how ‘those two lads’ were getting on. Her consumption patterns were shaped by a variety of boycotts (against governments and corporations) and sympathies (for Irish-made products), and the time I flew over to Cork on RyanAir she did not hesitate to criticize me for using an airline that was bad to its workers. The war between right and wrong was without limitation, and whenever I visited my grandmother I was treated to up-to-the-minute despatches from the front. Very often the bulletin concerned some showdown, skirmish or exchange of words in which Grandma had been personally involved: an encounter with Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Catholic arch-unionist ideologue who denounces Irish nationalism as ‘Catholic imperialism’, whom she once upbraided in the streets of Dublin; or some occurrence whose very banality revealed the boundlessness of her ethical concerns. For example: in 1996, when she was eighty-four, my grandmother went to the Aran Islands on her annual jaunt with ‘the girls’ (her sisters Nance and Enda). Whereas some might return from the Aran Islands with stories of their haunting beauty, what Grandma spoke of was, first, the rejection of a ham sandwich at the hotel (‘Ham? Ham my eye, it was all gristle’) and a further rejection of what purported to be a ‘salad’ sandwich; and, second, of some argy-bargy that took place on the ferry to the mainland. The boat was crowded and Grandma approached a German couple who were occupying a three-person seat for themselves. ‘“Excuse me,” says I, “could you and your wife move along so that I can sit down too?” “No,” the man said. I laughed, because I thought he was joking. Then I realized he wasn’t. “How dare you,” says I. “You’re on an Irish boat, sailing on Irish waters, and you’re on holiday – yet you won’t make room for me?” “No,” the man said, “you will not sit there.” “You are an arrogant German bastard. As long as you’re alive Hitler isn’t dead.” That did it. They moved along then.’

My grandmother also talked about the deep past. She told a story that, like a horror movie, started with a prelapsarian scene of innocence and domestic tranquillity: her father reading to her in bed at the family home in Dunmanway, West Cork. This was a rare treat. Although Timothy Lynch, a quiet man, doted on his children, he worked a six-day week as a foreman for a bread company in Bandon, coming home at around five on a Saturday and going out again Sunday evening. Every weekend he had to cycle twenty-one miles each way, rain or shine. (He was something of an athlete: he played on the Cork football team in 1911. My grandmother played camogie, the women’s version of hurling, with less success: a goalie, she once conceded fourteen goals to Macroom.)

As Timothy was reading his children a bed-time story, there was a hammering at the door. It was them – the Black and Tans. They were dragooning men to fill in the craters in the road. Timothy was pulled away and herded with others in the main square of the town. It was like Hitler, my grandmother said, all the able-bodied men were rounded up and forced to work for days at a time, and their terrified families might have no idea of their fate or whereabouts. As Timothy was led away, some of the children – there were eleven of them, seven girls and four boys – began to cry. This infuriated one of the Tans. ‘Shut up!’ he shouted. But the crying continued. The Tan became enraged. He drew out his pistol and shot the cat in the head.

My grandmother had another childhood recollection of the Black and Tans. One freezing December day, a local Catholic cleric, Canon Magner, took his dog out for its daily stroll. Some time later, the dog returned home without its master, whining and whining. The housekeeper sensed something was wrong and a search party went out. They found blood on the road. Then they found the canon’s body in a ditch; he had ice on his face. He’d been stopped on the road by an open lorry of British soldiers, questioned, and shot. A lad called Tadhg Crowley was also at the scene. The search party found his body, too.

‘That was my political education,’ my grandmother said. ‘My family and the Black and Tans.’

It wasn’t difficult to guess what education my grandmother received from her family. Her uncles Dan and Bob Lynch were interned in the North in 1921 during the Anglo-Irish War, and three of her brothers, Jack, Tadhg and Paddy, came to be interned during the Second World War. The only non-republican Lynch was Ellen Lynch, my great-grandmother. She was born a Kingston and there was Protestant blood in her; but even she had Fenian cousins, the two Quill brothers, who abandoned their nail factory in Dunmanway and disappeared – to America, in the family’s best guess.

More than one of my grandmother’s children observed that she rarely spoke about her husband, Jim O’Neill. For example, Grandma had no ready tale about her courting days with Jim, which is perhaps why, when I broached the subject, she spontaneously said, ‘What did I know about him? I knew that he was beautiful.’

She must have known that he was a republican, too, because she’d see him at the Gaelic League Hall, where you spoke Irish and danced Irish dances, and at Tomás Ashe Hall, the republican club in Father Matthew Quay, named after the Easter Rising veteran who died from forcible feeding during a hunger strike.

Eileen Lynch was eighteen when she met Jim O’Neill. She had just moved with her family from Dunmanway to Cork city, where she worked in a shop. She wasn’t entirely without metropolitan sophistication: Grandma said that the Black and Tans’ womenfolk had introduced West Cork to rouge, powder, lipstick and bobbed hair. (‘Don’t go looking like a Black and Tan’s wife!’ the nuns would say to schoolgirls who wore make-up.) But Eileen and Jim didn’t go with each other immediately; there were other liaisons first. It wasn’t until she was twenty-one and he twenty-three that romance, as they say, blossomed. On 8 July 1934, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the Lough, Eileen Lynch married her beautiful republican.

My grandmother quickly took to her parents-in-laws, Peter and Annie O’Neill, who lived up at Ardkitt. ‘Annie was a very kind woman who would bake cakes for the tinkers and happily put them up in the hay-shed,’ Grandma said. (‘In those days,’ she said, ‘itinerants were not like they are today: they’d come and be friendly with you and mend your pots and pans; tell you your fortune if they were women.’) But Grandma’s real admiration was reserved for Peter O’Neill. ‘What a man he was. What a man. He was a rebel; a lovely rebel. And he had the brains of – how many? – five professors.’ This was the Peter O’Neill story: that, in essence, my great grandfather was a scientist rather than a farmer. It had even filtered through to me growing up in The Hague: how he harnessed the stream that ran through Ardkitt and generated hydroelectricity for the farm; how he grew tobacco – tobacco, in West Cork! – and turned an enormous £300 profit for his first crop; how he cultivated tomatoes and mushrooms and kept honey-bees; how he was the only farmer for miles around who didn’t have a bush in the gap; and, most famously, how he invented and crafted a mahogany-framed egg incubator that hatched a hundred chicks and won first prize at the 1932 Cork science fair but, unhappily, could not be patented for want of money. ‘He was altogether unlucky with money,’ Grandma said.

But then I heard from my uncles that Peter O’Neill was an alcoholic who drank every penny he made. Every first Thursday of the month was creamery day and Peter would go off early in the morning to collect his money. The next time he’d be seen was in the evening, asleep between the milk churns as the unpiloted pony pulled the cart home.

My grandmother kept a framed photograph of Peter and Annie O’Neill and some of their ten children. Peter O’Neill, a ringer for my father, sits with patriarchal pride at the centre of a cluster of youngsters (Peig, Kitty, Nora, Paddy, Peter) and other relations. In the background, the ivy-clad frontage of Ardkitt farmhouse looms like an old college wall. There is no sign of young Jim, my grandfather, or his sister Mollie. By the time the photograph was taken, these two were living in Kilbrittain with their uncle and aunt, William and Mary-Ann O’Driscoll. My grandfather was farmed out when he was seven. Grandma explained, ‘There was such a lot of children at Ardkitt and his uncle in Kilbrittain had no children. So he was adopted – well, not adopted exactly, but he went to live at the Kilbrittain farm.’

A little surprisingly, nobody suggested to me that Jim’s early separation from his parents adversely affected him. The redistribution of offspring from overpopulated to underpopulated homes was not an unusual occurrence in the country in those days and it made economic sense for young Jim to be reared by his uncle and aunt, who were short of manpower and had nurturing energies to spare. Also, the arrangement gave young Jim the chance to acquire an interest in the Kilbrittain farm, eighty odd acres of dairy land known as Graunriagh: the O’Driscolls were childless and in need of an heir.

But Jim never did inherit Graunriagh. When he was twelve, his uncle William O’Driscoll died from peritonitis: it was the time of the Tan War, and the cratered state of the roads meant that William could not be transported to the hospital in Cork on time. The farm had to be sold. Mary-Ann O’Driscoll did not neglect her youngsters: provision was generously made that Mollie and Jim would each receive £500 at the age of twenty-one. The children never benefited from their inheritances. Mollie died, aged nineteen, of tuberculosis; and though Jim collected his bequest in Skibbereen, he immediately went to the office of a solicitor called Neville, in Cork, and transmitted the entire sum to his father, Peter, who needed to pay off farming debts and to stock Ardkitt with seven calves. The payment to Peter was made not as a gift but as a loan, and a promissory note in favour of Jim was executed by Paddy O’Neill, Jim’s eldest brother and, as the heir to Ardkitt, the ultimate beneficiary of the loan. The promissory note was entrusted to the custody of Neville. It was agreed that repayment would fall due when Paddy got married and came into a dowry. (In those days, many marriages amongst the farming class – which saw itself as a class apart – were fixed up by matchmakers, with the size of the dowry depending on the size of the bridegroom’s farm.)

However – there’s always a however in these stories – triple adversity struck. In October 1944, Peter O’Neill died intestate, with no provision made in respect of his debt to Jim. Second, in the late ’forties Paddy married Ellen Hennigan, universally known as Baybelle. Baybelle started trouble in the home from day one, according to Grandma, and Paddy, who had hitherto been a wonderfully friendly uncle to Jim and Eileen’s children and had invited them round to Ardkitt every summer, refused to pay back the loan, even though Baybelle’s dowry was £500, exactly the amount required. Third, Paddy was able to get away with non-payment because the office of Neville, the solicitor, had burned to the ground together with all documents stored there; and Neville himself was in a mental hospital and couldn’t remember a thing about any promissory note. The dispute came before the High Court in about 1949, but my grandfather’s claim was dismissed.

There was a further dispute with Paddy over property. Another uncle, Jim O’Driscoll, left my grandfather the deeds to a house in Bandon. However, the keys to the property were held by none other than the bugbear, Paddy. Even though he had neither the deeds nor good title, Paddy sold the house and pocketed the proceeds.

But it didn’t end there. The most bitter feud of all arose from Paddy’s treatment of his and Jim’s mother, Annie (who, incidentally, had brought a £500 dowry to her marriage with Peter O’Neill and was grandly wed by fifteen priests). The root of the problem lay in the ill-feeling between the mother-in-law and the new bride. Annie found a bottle of hair-dye under the staircase and immediately she guessed that Baybelle was not as young as she claimed to be: a serious matter in West Cork, where in the view of some it was a mortal sin for a wife to be older than her husband. Bad blood was also caused by Annie’s intrusions into the housekeeping. When Annie commented to Baybelle that she shouldn’t put red clothes into the pot with white ones, Baybelle told Annie to mind her own business.

It was around this time, my grandmother said, that ‘Baybelle hunted the itinerants from Ardkitt. The woman itinerant said, “All right so, we won’t come back – but there’ll be grass growing at your door and nobody’ll enter it.” And that came about.’

Then, in the ’fifties, came the egg money dispute. When Peter O’Neill died, it was understood by all that his widow Annie was to remain at Ardkitt and, in accordance with another country tradition, that the egg money was hers to keep; that is, the small proceeds derived from the farm’s sprinkling of chickens and turkeys. But Paddy (Grandma: ‘a skinny, nondescript person, God rest his soul, I couldn’t describe him’) demanded the egg money for himself. Annie tried furtively selling eggs on her own account, but when she returned from the market and lied about how many she’d sold, Paddy (who had counted the eggs) hit her.

Eventually, Annie fell ill. My grandfather cycled out to Ardkitt to see his mother, whom he loved dearly and would often bring a small bottle of whiskey as a gift. He stayed the night. In the morning he went out to the yard to chuck his shaving water; turning back, he found that the only door into the house had been locked by Baybelle. So he smashed the door down. Three days later, he received a letter from Bandon solicitors threatening him with an injunction if he set foot in Ardkitt again. Then, after a couple of months had passed, my grandparents received a telegram from Jim’s sister Peig, who lived near Ardkitt: Annie was very ill and my grandparents should travel out immediately. So the following morning they took the train on the West Cork railway to Desertserges Station. Peig told Jim that she was horrified by what she’d seen at Ardkitt: their sick mother locked away in her room like a prisoner and neglected by all except Paddy’s kids.

Ardkitt, when my grandparents arrived, was empty except for Annie in her bed, Baybelle having fled to a nearby cottage when she saw her in-laws approaching. ‘I decided to make a cup of tea,’ Grandma recounted. ‘As I waited for the kettle to boil, Paddy came in. “Who gave you the authority to make a cup of tea?” says he. “I’m making it for your mother,” says I. “You’re making it for that old bitch upstairs?” “Sit down, Paddy,” I said, “and we’ll have a chat. Your mother idolizes you.” But Paddy ranted and raved, roaring and screeching that she was an interfering old bitch who should be long dead. Jim came down the stairs and heard him. Paddy ran off, but Jim ran around the table and caught him, and gave him a few wallops. “Don’t, Jimmy, don’t, don’t,” Paddy whined. I shouted, “Kill him, Jim, he doesn’t deserve to live!”’ My grandmother laughed at herself.

A short while afterwards, Jim received a summons to appear in court on a charge of assault. After hearing the evidence, said Grandma, District Justice Crotty put his spectacles on his nose and turned to Paddy. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you came here and stood in that witness-box and all the while your mother suffered? How dare you come here. You should hang your head in shame. You must treat your mother in a humane way, and let her son visit her. A son has that right. But you’re not to assault your brother,’ he said, turning to Jim. ‘There’s no justification for that.’ Jim was acquitted, Grandma said, and it was Paddy, the complainant, who was bound over to hold the peace.

Uncle Brendan gave a slightly different version. ‘Of course he wasn’t acquitted,’ he said. ‘How could he have been, when he beat his brother unconscious? He would have received a suspended prison sentence.’ Brendan – a socialist with, I guessed, a political antipathy for the rural fetish of private property – also took a hard-nosed view of Ardkitt. In his view, there was a suspicion of grabbing about the way the O’Neills acquired an interest in Ardkitt in the first place. The original tenants of the farm, the Slyne family, were facing eviction, and Peter O’Neill’s father, seeing an opportunity, married the widow Slyne and moved in. In later years she, the widow Slyne, lived with a great-aunt of Brendan’s and was kept well away from the family.

Years after the Ardkitt incident, when he was dying, Jim O’Neill asked his son Terry if he could do him a favour. ‘Of course,’ Terry said. ‘Make sure,’ my grandfather said, ‘that Paddy is barred from my funeral. Will you promise me that?’ Terry was a little taken aback by the request – and surprised that he, and not Brendan, had been entrusted with the responsibility – but he resolved to carry out his father’s wishes.

Jim O’Neill’s children believed that he took an inestimably heavy blow when Graunriagh slipped away from him, a hurt aggravated by the loss of his O’Driscoll inheritance to Paddy. Decades later, he would drive past houses in Catwell, a district in South Cork, and say, ‘Now one of them should be mine; they were going for £300 in the ’thirties.’ Displaced to the city, my grandfather was left with an inextinguishable yearning for West Cork and a haunting sense that he had been unfairly thwarted in his vocation to farm his own land. He never really reconciled himself to the diminished horizons that the city held out for him as an unskilled labourer, educated to primary level, working in the three bleakest economic decades of the century.

Nevertheless, prior to his internment my grandfather was in amenable employment. He drove a lorry for the Roads Department of the Cork Corporation, transporting men and materials from place to place. Although not a patch on farming, it was a satisfactory job. He was popular with the men, the hours (eight to six, five and a half days a week) were tolerable and the pay was sound. He comfortably provided for his wife and his first three sons. In 1936, when young Jim was born, my grandparents moved from a flat in the Old Blackrock Road to Wellington Road, St Luke’s. Their next move was to a flat at Wesley Terrace, next door to the IRA man, Tomás MacCurtain Junior, and finally, in 1939, to Friars Road, Turner’s Cross. But on my grandfather’s return to Cork in November 1944, after nearly five years as a prisoner, things were very different. The Cork Corporation refused to give him his job back, and it took him six months to find work as a casual labourer in Distillery Field, in Cork – a fairly heroic feat, given his post-imprisonment depression and the widespread reluctance of employers to hire known political trouble-makers. (Phone calls would be placed by Special Branch officers to warn prospective employers against republican job applicants.) My grandfather mostly worked as a self-employed builder’s labourer, going from job to job with his spade and bicycle, desperately trying to minimize idle periods in between. Precisely whom he worked for, and when, was in retrospect unclear; it was thought that at one point he worked for Lingwood, a builder and decorator of shops, doing refurbishment work. About three years after his release, my grandfather was re-engaged by the Corporation as a driver of garbage trucks, works lorries and other vehicles. Jim became active in (possibly even the leader of) the Cork Corporation branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, and it may be that this fuelled the hostility of Philip Monaghan, the city manager. For whatever reason, Monaghan apparently had it in for my grandfather and fired him in about 1950 for accepting a bag of potatoes from a market gardener to whom Jim had delivered some goods as a favour. The hard times returned and Jim, by now in his forties, was forced back to intermittent labouring work. But during the course of the ’fifties, his technical flair, which ranged from knowing how to wire a house to understanding the workings of the combustion engine inside out, finally began to pay off. He worked for the South of Ireland Asphalt Company, maintaining plant and machinery on jobs that took him all over the country. He worked for McInerney’s, a company from Clare, and, doing a mechanical fitter’s job, in Foynes, Co. Limerick, for John Browne Engineering – the British company for whom, thirty years later, my father would work as the project manager of pharmaceutical construction projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In around 1958, he worked at Whitegate in East Cork, where a refinery had been built. It was around then that Jim, in his late forties, was paid to undergo a one-year apprenticeship as a pipefitter. A Dutch company, Verolme, was building ships at Rushbrook, near Cobh, and there was such a shortage of skilled labour that the government and the company invested in extensive training of the workforce. Not long afterwards came trade union recognition of single-year apprenticeships and my grandfather at last became an officially recognized skilled worker. From then on he easily found employment as a pipefitter on construction sites, and by the end of his working life, in the early seventies, his technical adeptness had led to work on weighbridge installation and calibration. In around 1968, Jim’s work took him abroad for the only time in his life. He went to Holland for Foster Wheeler – the company that had given my mother her first job in Mersin – and spent a few months in Rozenburg, near Rotterdam. In the only letter he ever sent to my father, my grandfather complained of the monotony of the experience, which was only broken, he wrote, when my grandmother visited him for a week.

Jim was born on 16 October 1909, ‘in Libra, the sign of balance,’ my aunt Ann said with a little laugh, because in fact her father was an agitated, moody man prone to explosions of temper. He was rarely at ease. Sitting about, relaxing, was out of the question: there was always a chore to finish, always something to be done. Punctual, he was intolerant of tardiness in others: if you were late for an appointment, he wouldn’t wait for you. He followed a strict morning routine: get up, turn the potatoes, eat breakfast, get to work early. When he returned home in the evening he went straight to the bathroom, washed, changed, and then came down for his dinner. He never ate in his work clothes and on Sundays he wore a three-piece suit and a hat. He sometimes smoked a pipe. He took great care of his appearance: he was a very handsome man with a fine physique – slim hips, broad shoulders – and not without vanity. He liked his children to look the part, too, insisting that they were always dressed well: he would tell Grandma (who made pretty skirts that the girls loved to wear) that they couldn’t afford to buy cheap clothes. He changed the soles of the children’s shoes himself: he’d buy the leather from O’Callaghan’s, cut it rough, let it soak overnight, and stitch it on the next day surrounded by the aromas of hemp and wax. Strips of bicycle tyres would be glued on to the soles for extra protection. Jim could fix just about anything, and his skills extended to woodwork and making furniture: my grandmother’s oak and glass china cabinet, still in use, was his handiwork. He was a disciplinarian, stern and domineering with his family, which (in Jim Junior’s phrase) he ran like an army. He was very authoritarian: his children said that fumes would come out of his ears if you tried to discuss something with him. ‘Don’t answer back!’ he’d snap, even though they might not be contradicting him. His daughters, growing up as teenagers in the ’sixties, sometimes felt he was anti-everything unless it was Irish. He’d yell if he caught them listening to Radio Luxembourg. If he heard a band playing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary