A Long Long Way Read online

  ‘From my father, James Dunne.’

  ‘The chief super at the castle?’

  Are you Mr Lawlor, then?‘

  ‘Do you want to see the scar on my noggin?’ said the man, laughing not entirely agreeably.

  ‘Can I put them down somewhere?’ said Willie, uneasily.

  ‘So you’re his son, are you?’ he said, maybe noting his height.

  ‘I am,’ said Willie, and then he knew the girl was looking at him. He raised his eyes towards her and she was smiling. But maybe it was a smile of mockery, or worse, pity. She’s thinking, he thought, I am small to be a policeman’s son. He was hoping still in those times he might make a last spurt of growth. But he couldn’t tell her that.

  ‘So what do you think, son, about Peelers rushing in on passers-by and knocking the bejaysus out of them?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Lawlor.’

  ‘You should know. You should have an opinion. I don’t care what a man thinks as long as he knows his own mind.’

  ‘That’s what my grandfather says,’ said Willie, expecting to be mocked for his words. But the answer wasn’t mocking.

  ‘The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts that are only thoughts which have been given to them. They’re not their own thoughts. They’re like cuckoos in their heads. Their own thoughts are tossed out and cuckoo thoughts put in instead. Don’t you agree? What’s your name?’

  ‘William.’

  ‘Well, William. Don’t you agree?’

  But Willie Dunne didn’t know what to say. He could feel the eyes of the girl on him.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘if Gretta here, my daughter Gretta, was to elope to Gretna Green tomorrow with some young fella, with you even say, I would ask her as she went out the door, “Gretta, do you know your own mind?” and if the answer was yes, I couldn’t stop her. I might want to stop her, but I could-n’ t. And I might beat you just for the sake of it. But if it was a thought put in her head by another, you for instance, why, I would bolt her leg to the floor.’

  This was peculiar, embarrassing talk for Willie and, he believed, for anyone in his position at that moment. And while he was reluctant truly to move away from the girl, he was longing to move away from Mr Lawlor.

  But Mr Lawlor had stopped talking and closed his eyes. He had a bushy black moustache but his face was long and thin.

  ‘Mother of Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the girl, and she had a low, deeply pleasing voice, Willie thought. ‘Leave the birds there. I’ll cook them for him.’

  ‘I don’t want the birds,’ said Mr Lawlor. ‘And I don’t want his jars of lamb stew and his jams and his - Do you know, William, your father sent me in a live chicken last week? I’m not going to be wringing the necks of hens at my time of life. I sold it to a lady for a shilling only because I couldn’t watch the creature starve to death, for the love of God.’

  ‘He’s only trying to make it up to you. You’re his neighbour,’ said Willie. ‘He didn’t like to see a neighbour hit on the head.’

  ‘But it was him hit me on the head. Well, not him, but one of his lads. Wild, big, feverish-looking fellas with big black sticks knocking sparks off of my skull. See, does he know his own mind? Now, does he? If he knew his own mind, he could give a man a belt and not think twice about it. And I suppose could be quite easy in that same mind about the four men killed that day.’

  Willie Dunne stood there marooned by these truths.

  ‘I’m being a miserable old so-and-so, hah?’ said Mr Lawlor. ‘Yes, Gretta? I expect so. Put down your birds, sonny, and thank you. But don’t thank your father. Tell him I threw them out the window into the street. Tell him I did that, William.’

  Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie’s head like a rat and made a nest for itself there.

  Although he protested, Mr Lawlor was brought further treats in the coming times and Willie ferried them for his father. Mr Lawlor had lost his work as a carter because of the blow to his head; it was thought by his employer that he was a dangerous man if he had been agitating in Sackville Street. But thousands had forfeited their jobs for the duration of the lock-out and when it was over many found it impossible to get them back. So Mr Lawlor was one of many. And like many another he joined the army so he could get food for himself and send his pay to Gretta. And so he was away for days on end, and although there were women in the other parts of the room that looked out for her, it was easier for Willie to come and talk to her. And they talked about everything that was in their heads to talk about.

  He kept it all a secret from his sisters on instinct and no doubt it was a good instinct, because the truth was that Gretta was a slum dweller and Willie knew what Maud and especially Annie thought about such things, and they would immediately tell his father. And he did not wish that to happen. And he confined himself to going when his father gave him a parcel or a little bit of beef, so it all seemed normal and straight. But he supposed it wasn’t normal and straight exactly. He was in love with Gretta like a poor swan was in love with the Liffey and cannot leave it, no matter how often the boys of Dublin stone her nest. Her voice to him was just music, and her face was light, and her body was a city of gold.

  One day he came and she was sleeping. He sat on a broken chair for two hours watching her breathing, the gappy coverlet rising and falling, her face dreaming. The coverlet fell away and he saw her soft breasts. There were angels on the O‘Connell Monument but she was not like them but he thought she looked like an angel, at least how an angel ought to look. It was as if he were being shown the heart of the world, such beauty in that shabby place. The weather was evil beyond the window, a harsh sleet pinning the darkness with a million pins. He loved her so much he wept. That was how it was for Willie Dunne, and maybe they were matters that could only be taken away from him.

  By the time he was seventeen and she was nearly fifteen, they had been almost a year dodging both the fathers. Gretta was an extremely straightforward person and she knew herself when she saw Willie that first time that he was for her, young though she was. Her world became things before Willie and things after meeting Willie, like the world designates things before and after Christ.

  Perhaps merely by some rough chance he never slighted her or grossly offended her, though they could have a row like the best. She wasn’t so wedded to the idea of his erection as perhaps he was.

  ‘Well, you boys are all the same,’ she said.

  Her father was going to put her to service in one of the Merrion Square houses if he could, or failing that, he thought he might send her down the country to a good family. And he might have done so already except he was fond of her, and his wife had died of a galloping consumption many years before, turning to a wet stick in the goosedown bed at his side. And he had no other companion in the world.

  Willie, for his part, was going to grow rich at the building with Dempsey, and marry her. He felt he could carry the day with her father when the time came.

  But then that other queer time of the war came suddenly and, much against Gretta’s desires, he wanted to go to the war.

  It was difficult for him to explain to her why it was so, because it was difficult to put it into words for himself. He told her it was because he loved her he had to go, that there were women like her being killed by the Germans in Belgium, and how could he let that happen? Gretta did not understand. He said he would go to please his father also and though she did understand that, she thought it a poor enough reason. He told her her own father would be in the fight now, and she pointed out that he was part of the garrison at the Curragh, and she didn’t think he would be sent to France.

  But he knew he must play his part, and when he came home he would not be remorseful, but content in his heart that he had followed his own mind.

  ‘Your Da said himself we have to know our own minds,’ he said.

  ‘That’s only a thing he got out of a little book he reads. St Thomas Aquinas, Willie. That’s all,’
she said.

  Chapter Two

  Willie Dunne was not the only one. Why, he read in the newspaper that men who spoke only Gallic came down to the lowlands of Scotland to enlist, men of the Aran Islands that spoke only their native Irish rowed over to Galway. Public schoolboys from Winchester and Marlborough, boys of the Catholic University School and Belvedere and Blackrock College in Dublin. High-toned critics of Home Rule from the rainy Ulster counties, and Catholic men of the South alarmed for Belgian nun and child. Recruiting sergeants of all the British world wrote down names in a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. Swahili, Urdu, Irish, Bantu, the click languages of the Bushmen, Cantonese, Australian, Arabic.

  He knew it was Lord Kitchener himself who had called for volunteers. And John Redmond the Irish leader had echoed the call, down at Woodenbridge in Wicklow. There was a long account of the matter in the Irish Times. A fierce little river flowed under him as he spoke, and a countryside all beautiful and thunderous with wood-pigeons and leaping waters flew up about his ears, for he spoke his speech in a ravine. The Parliament in London had said there would be Home Rule for Ireland at the end of the war, therefore, said John Redmond, Ireland was for the first time in seven hundred years in effect a country. So she could go to war as a nation at last - nearly - in the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule. The British would keep their promise and Ireland must shed her blood generously.

  Of course, the Ulsterman joined up in the selfsame army for an opposite reason, and an opposite end. Perhaps that was curious, but there it was. It was to prevent Home Rule they joined - so his father said, with fervent approval. And many to the south of them in those days felt the same. It was a deep, dark maze of intentions, anyhow.

  Willie read about these things in the company of his father, because it was their habit to read the paper together in the evening and comment on the various items, almost like a married couple.

  Willie Dunne’s father, in the privacy of his policeman’s quarters in Dublin Castle, was of the opinion that Redmond’s speech was the speech of a scoundrel. Willie’s father was in the Masons though he was a Catholic, and on top of that he was a member of the South Wicklow Lodge. It was King and Country and Empire he said a man should go and fight for, never thinking that his son Willie would go so soon as he did.

  Willie had never reached six feet. How proud he was now to go to the recruiting officer who was lodged just outside the castle yard in quite a handy way, and be signed up, his height never in question. For if he could not be a policeman, he could be a soldier.

  But when he came home that night and told his father, the big, blank, broad face of the policeman wept in the darkness.

  And then his three sisters, Maud, Annie and Dolly, lit the candles in the sitting-room and they all felt part of the tremendous enterprise because Willie was going to be in it, and they were proud and excited, though it might last a few weeks at most, because the Germans were known to be only murderous cowards. Dolly at that time was just a mite and she ran around the castle sitting-room shouting and singing, till her eldest sister Maud lost patience and screamed at her to stop. Then Dolly cried unrestrainedly and her brother Willie, like he had done a thousand times before, took her in his arms and comforted her, and kissed her nose, which she especially liked. She had no mother but she had Willie to mother her a little in those days.

  Royal Dublin Fusiliers,

  Training Depot,

  Fermoy,

  County Cork.

  December ‘14.

  Dear Papa,

  Please thank Maud for the under-drawers which she sent for my birthday. They are just the ticket for keeping out this dark weather. We were treated yesterday to a route march of twelve miles and we know the back lanes of Fermoy better than the postman now. Tell Dolly this army life is not as hard as the schooling though! I hope she is getting on fine now in High Babies. We are hoping we will be finished men by Christmas. And then I am sure we will be sent over to Belgium to the war. Lots of the men were fearful it would be over but our sergeant-major always laughs when he hears that. He said the Germans are not finished with us yet, not by a long chalk, and we better be careful to learn everything we can about soldiering. He has us going on like the poor lunatics above there in the Dublin Lunatic Asylum, flinging our arms about. There is stabbing of bags full of straw, with pretend bayonets because we have none of the real thing. My friend Clancy says we are lucky the food is not pretend too. My friend Williams says he is not so sure it is not. I keep thinking of that time in the singing competition a few years back in that hall at the back of Prussia Street and you were in the audience that time. And I was to sing the ‘Ave Maria’ by Schubert, but I learned the two verses separately, and I never heard the peculiar bit on the piano that comes between and joins them up until that very moment. I fell at that hurdle. I don’t know why I keep thinking of thatl I wonder how the other lads in Dempsey’s are doing and what are they building now? It is six o’clock now and I suppose Maud is beginning to get the tea. Annie will be helping, but Dolly will be at her tricks. Dolly, Dolly, you scamp, I will kill you. That is Maud shouting! I will sign off now, Papa. I wish that I could have a taste of those sausages that I am sure are sizzling on the pan. I miss my home right enough.

  Your loving son,

  Willie.

  The time came when the new recruits were changed into something they had despaired of, trim, polished soldiers, though they had never seen battle.

  It was past Christmas now and the new year had come and still the war was there. They had got used to the novelty of the number 1915 on their forms and chits and thrown the old number into the back of their minds with all the other years, in the manner of a young man’s easy way of thinking. They had all heard the stories of the lads on both sides at Christmas coming out of the trenches and singing together, and playing a bit of football, and exchanging black sausages and plum puddings, and singing, and now they all knew that ‘Silent Night’ was called ’Stille Nacht’ in German. So it didn’t sound all bad, though of their own regiment hundreds had died and many taken as prisoners by the vile Hun.

  The most difficult thing in barracks was to find some quiet spot to masturbate, because if he didn’t masturbate, Willie thought, he would explode worse than any bomb. That was the principal difficulty anyhow.

  Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht ... It didn’t sound so bad at all, really.

  Much to Willie’s delight, they were to head off from the North Wall in Dublin, so it was a chance to be waved off by his own people. They were carried up from Cork on the train and were to be marched from the station to the ship. And indeed faces lined the road to the North Wall like a thousand blowing flowers. Little scuts came out of the back streets and shouted God knew what at them.

  He looked everywhere in the crowds for his own Gretta. Gretta the secret he kept from his father, he loved her so much.

  He couldn’t see her anywhere. But girls in their dresses and nice coats waved at him, and the soldiers large, thin and small looked all puffed up with the excitement, and they were cheered from the station all along the Liffey and all the way through the docks. All those Dublin people loved to see them go, it seemed, they looked proud.

  Annie, Maud and Dolly had told him they would be standing at the O‘Connell Monument, up on the first plinth below the angels, and he was to look over that way when he crossed the bridge and not to forget.

  They marched like great experts of marching and indeed they had been well drilled and perfected in Fermoy after all. The boredom had become ability. They kept good time with their boots and kept themselves stiff, though they couldn’t help a little tincture of swagger. Soldiers after all, who had freely signed up for the duration.

  Not long now, of course. And they would be lucky if the war was still there when they got to France.

  Everyone hoped to see a bit before they were turned back victorious.

  The men marched with the knowledge that they had the bit of money now and the bellies of brothers
and sisters wouldn’t go empty. You could write it down in a special book, or have an officer write it down in a special book, who the pay was to be sent to, if you didn’t want it yourself. And any young wives now would have the allowance to fend off the evil days and keep that wolf from the door.

  But he didn’t see sight nor hear sound of his sisters. Maud wrote to him later to say that Dolly refused to go. In fact, she refused to be found, and hid herself in the labyrinths of their castle quarters. It was half-four before they found her in the great coal-cellar, weeping, weeping. And it was too late to set out then. Oh, they asked her what the matter was, and why she had been so bold as to run off. She couldn’t help it, she said. If she had to see her own lovely Willie go off to war, she would die.

  It was a strange England they moved through. Not the England of stories and legend, but the real, plain land herself. Willie had never seen those places in true fashion. Now he was required to see them as they were, through the bright glass of the troop train.

  In little villages and towns the people there also came out to cheer his train, his very train. They lifted their hats and smiled. Even at daybreak the sleepy inhabitants came out. The young soldiers were all weary so it was very cheering. Private Williams rather bitterly decreed that they were just people going on their own journeys, and would probably just feel embarrassed if they didn’t cheer when they saw soldiers. Williams was a tall, soft-looking man with hair as yellow as wall-flowers, all spiking up.

  ‘They certainly don’t know we’re Irish,’ he said.

  ‘Would they not cheer as loud if they knew?’ said Willie Dunne.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Private Williams. ‘They more than likely think we’re little lads from the collieries of Wales. Yeh, because they see you sitting there, Willie. They think we’re all midgets.’