To the Sea Page 26

  In October the following year, our baby son Dermot was born. Getha’s pregnancy had delayed our sailing but when Dermot was three months old and strong enough for the journey, we finally set sail. It was an interminable journey and Getha was sick for most of the sixty days it took for us to sail to Dublin.

  I arrived home in 1920. Four years I had been gone, and Ireland had changed again. It was in a state of war and this war wouldn’t end until we were free.

  I had only enough time to settle Getha and baby Dermot at Kindea with my mother and sisters before I had a gun in my hand and was heading to Dublin to join friends who were fighting there. My baby brother, Dan, was safe at school in Dublin and our father was close by for him.

  My other brother, Liam, was in a local group based in Cork. He was still the laughing boy I’d known my whole life but he’d grown into manhood. He was a soldier. He came to see me briefly in Dublin before heading back south to his unit.

  1920 was the Year of Terror. A thousand years of bloody history and this year is remembered by such a name. And so it was. That was the year Michael Collins became the great leader we so needed.

  He taught me how to be a soldier. A killer. They are the same thing. And the most important lesson I learned was how to be invisible. Mick could go anywhere any time of the day or in breach of curfew at night and simply not be seen by the thousands of soldiers, spies and Tans looking for him. In every job that I did, my target only saw me at the last. When I was closer than his shadow. When it was too late to run or draw a gun or call for help or beg for mercy. Too late altogether.

  My loyalty to Ireland and to Mick Collins was total. I had never truly questioned either but I remember the day I knew I had become Mick’s man and that no one would ever force me to flee my homeland again. I was sent on a job. Not my first or last but the one that defined me to myself forever after.

  My target was a Major in the British army and a senior officer in the intelligence service. My partner, Joe, and I were to find him at the Gresham Hotel at a small function in a private dining room.

  Mick briefed us himself. Part of Mick’s success was the planning. He and one other person close to him, probably Dick, would’ve been planning this job for days or weeks. But we would hear of it just as it needed to be done. There could be no leaks when it was fast. On the day of the job, I was with Mick as we waited for the clock to slowly tick round to the appointed time. Joe had gone ahead so we didn’t arrive together. I sat looking down at my feet, going over every step of it in my mind. Mick was pacing up and down the small room.

  ‘Are ye scared, Tom?’

  ‘I am. When you go to kill a man, you can’t be certain who will die.’

  ‘Right so,’ he said quietly more to himself than to me. ‘We’re all going to die before this is over.’ He looked over at me. ‘For myself, I pray it’s a bullet and not a noose.’

  We didn’t say anything for a long while. I stood up and put my hat on. I checked my guns for the hundredth time. My old Mauser C96 was my weapon of choice and its smooth wooden grip felt comfortable and familiar in my hand. My standard issue Colt .45 semi-automatic was ready in my left pocket. I looked over at Mick as I opened the door. He grinned sadly at me.

  ‘But it’s a fight we wouldn’t miss for quids, eh Tom?’

  He was right. I hadn’t known this would be my life but there was nowhere else I would have rather been than in that room with him at that moment.

  At the Gresham, the doorman gave me the merest of nods as he held the door open for us. He would control the entrance. The two staff at the tall mahogany reception counter didn’t look up as we entered. If they saw nothing, they could say nothing when questioned.

  Joe and I walked under the vaulted archway from the entrance foyer into the first reception room between two massive Roman urns filled with flowers and cascading ferns. Some dangling lilac brushed against my face and its perfume hung upon me for the rest of the evening. I cannot smell the fragrance of lilac without being back in the Gresham foyer on that day. We walked across the ornately tiled foyer onto the plush green and gold carpet of the hallway and headed towards the private rooms. There were no staff at the bottom of the stairs or outside the door of the dining room. People had been clearing our way from the moment we left the safe house.

  I pushed the heavy oak doors of the dining room open and scanned the room, locating the Major. There were two waiting staff, both of them ours and, Mick had assured us, both experienced and armed. I looked at them and knew they were ready.

  I walked up to the Major. He was in uniform and I was grateful. He would understand his death better in his uniform. I stopped beside him and he looked up at the very last moment. He understood immediately.

  I knew from the briefing that he was forty-one but he looked younger. He had a ruddy face. He was slim and looked like a soldier. He’d been pointed out to me the day before as he played a game of hide and seek with his children in the Phoenix Park. I felt no uncertainty or compassion. I knew what he’d done to Thomas and Seamus while they were in custody in the Castle. Their own mothers wouldn’t have recognised their bodies. I knew the counter intelligence he was involved in, raids he had overseen and the killings he’d ordered.

  ‘Stand up,’ I said quietly.

  Like a good soldier, he followed the command.

  ‘You are to die now. You know what you’ve done.’

  He was afraid. He was still holding his napkin in his right hand and I could see it quivering against his khaki trouser leg. His wife, who was seated next to him, looked up at me and quietly begged me to spare him.

  I cocked my gun and held it to his face. The room was silent. Even the children had quieted. Joe was in charge of the room and I could feel his cold control of it.

  I was looking at the Major. Our faces were one foot apart. His dark green eyes twitched as they looked back at me.

  I stepped back and straightened my arm. The gun was in his face. I pulled the trigger and he fell back and down hard on the white tablecloth. A silver vegetable dish clattered loudly to the floor. I heard a faint cry from a woman on the other side of the room. I still didn’t take my eyes off the Major. His face was gone and there was a bright puddle of blood on the tablecloth where the roast vegetables had been. Someone sucked in their breath. The Major’s wife was sobbing and gulping for air.

  I stepped aside and Joe moved into the space I’d been filling. He aimed his pistol and shot the already dead Major in the chest.

  In just one terrible year, Collins had done what no Irishman had ever been able to achieve. He had united the Irish people behind him, created an impenetrable intelligence network of spies, created a guerrilla army and a professional hit squad and forced the British to call for a truce. Freedom was so close we could taste it and I couldn’t believe that I’d lived to see it.

  In December of ’21, during that tense lull in the fighting, I went home to Kindea for Christmas. It was a cold winter and the deep snow and roaring Mayo winds made the fire-lit warmth and pleasure of being with my family so much more precious. It was such a joy to be with Getha again and our little son. My parents were happy to have the house filled with family and even my father took a break from his work in Dublin to be with us all. Liam and Dan had chopped down a huge spruce and its colourful decorations and candles in the entrance hall were the first signs of brightness I had seen since I had returned to Ireland nearly two years earlier.

  Being with Getha, Dermot and my family I felt a peace and contentment that had been missing from my life for many years. I could be a soldier but I realised I was a man of hearth and home. I wondered when I would ever get to live that life with all these people I loved. It was our last family Christmas together although none of us could have known it then.

  By June, war had arrived. Our war of independence had been hellish, like all such wars but that war was clean and bright in comparison with the Civil War that followed.

  Dan was only seventeen when he was blown apart by a grenade in
a narrow country lane leading into the pretty little port town of Tralee in County Kerry. His body never came home. We were told that there was so little of him left and none of it was really Dan anymore. His tattered bloodied uniform was all my mother had to hold and weep over.

  My brother Liam was shot not far from Dan who he had promised our mother to protect with his life. Liam’s smooth boy’s chest was shredded by a Vickers machine gun and his shattered body was brought home to our mother so she could bury him at Kindea. I heard that his girl, Sinead, requested one of Liam’s long black curls which always fell across his eyes; one that his hand would have touched as he brushed it back. My parents would never recover. My father’s faith in everything, including God, had been killed with his sons. His body remained intact but his mind was altered. When my mother needed tenderness and the warmth of his kind heart the most, he had only coldness for her. Her back stooped into her misery and her soft brown hair faded to white. My sweet mother had been given more than she could bear. Two sons dead. An embittered husband. A fractured country.

  I got back to Kindea in July 1923. I’d been away fighting for almost two years. I’d come home only four times for a few days’ leave during that time and when I got back at the end of the war, Getha was pregnant. I was strangely saddened when I saw her bulging with new life. It seemed too cruel after all the death I had witnessed. But life continues even when surrounded by death.

  We called our new son Connell. A warrior’s name. Slowly the big house filled with the noise and happiness of children and we all began to recover from the war and all that we had endured.

  While Connell was still a baby finding his walking legs, Getha fell pregnant again. I wasn’t surprised. I adored my wife and to gaze at her and make love to her were the greatest pleasures in my life. And I gave myself freely to those pleasures. I feared we would have twenty children. After this baby was born, we both decided it was time for us to take precautions and try and space our babies. While such thinking was considered a mortal sin by the Church, Getha and I had no true faith in the priests or their grim religion.

  In spring of the following year, Branna was born. She was the dearest of babies with her blonde hair, sapphire blue cat eyes and wide smile, just like her mother. I teased Getha about the choice of name. Branna was such an odd choice for this little blonde angel but Getha had her heart set on it. She said it was a family tradition and so I accepted it. Getha was radiant after Branna’s birth. I had never seen her more content. I was twenty-six years old with three young children, a wife I loved and living in my family home in a free Ireland. All the fighting was done. I confess I was a happy man.

  I was ready to build on this new and unexpected life. I knew Getha had never expected to stay. She had made it clear that her home was in Tasmania and she could live nowhere else. I cannot accuse her of deceit or fickleness. I knew her views before we married and she continued to gently remind me after the war ended and we were settling into Kindea.

  Getha had been struggling while I had been away but I wasn’t to know of her struggles until years later. The long letters she received from her mother fortified her in the hardest times. But letters could not silence her tormentor.

  One morning as she sat in my mother’s old rocking chair with the sunshine coming through the open window in our bedroom and tiny Branna at her breast, she said, ‘Tom, now that this little one is here, we cannot stay so far away from Rosetta. We must go home soon.’

  Her words were discordant. I was home. I’d hoped that she was as happy as I was and that she would see that I couldn’t leave my mother and sisters. Her own family didn’t need her. Frank was in Hobart with her parents. He had married, and children would surely come. And her parents had each other. Two dozen tenant families depended on Kindea’s good management for their lives. With my brothers dead and my father absent in Dublin, my mother and sisters needed me. They had no one else.

  ‘It would be hard to go, Getha,’ I said. ‘Are you not happy here? Can this not be your home?’

  ‘I am happy here but I cannot live so far from my home. I do not belong here.’

  ‘You are my wife. Surely you belong with me and you said you are happy here. We can travel to Tasmania to visit your family.’

  ‘No Tom, I must live there. I cannot live my life in Mayo. It wearies me in ways I cannot explain.’

  ‘Wearies you? Tell me what I must do to make Mayo your home and I will do it.’

  ‘Rosetta is my home.’

  ‘So, if we both need to be in our homes and those homes are at opposite ends of the world, where are we to live?’ The baby squirmed as my voice rose in the quiet room. Getha stroked Branna’s blonde head and the baby nestled in again to her mother’s breast.

  ‘We must make a choice, Getha, and you are heartless to ask me to leave my family who need me at this time.’

  She looked at me and her delicate face was strained. I went to her and knelt on the floor in front of her. I held her and lay my head in her lap. Branna’s warm little body was pressed against the top of my head and I could feel her body gently pulse with her suckling. I could smell the sharp warmth of her damp nappy mingled with her milky baby freshness. Getha’s hand rested lightly on my head.

  ‘I love you, Tom,’ she said, ‘and I will do anything I can to make you happy. I’ve cried a lot of tears over the sorrow our leaving will cause your mother and sisters. In truth, I’ll miss them dreadfully. Especially the girls. I love them like my own. But I told you this about me when we met and it’s as true now as it was then. I cannot live away from Rosetta. I must raise Branna there. She will not survive so far away. I cannot let my daughter suffer to spare you and your family unhappiness.’

  I didn’t understand what she was saying. Branna was healthy and she would grow up and be happy here with her family. How could Branna feel homesickness for a home she’d never known? Dermot was thriving, already riding his little pony and growing into a sturdy boy. Connell was toddling after his brother and glowing with the strength and earnestness he would carry into manhood.

  I thought I could get Getha to change her mind, to make Kindea her home. I still thought I could have my wife and children, my parents and sisters, my ancestral home and my country. In time Getha would be delayed with another pregnancy. We were going to be careful, but not abstinent. It was a long and wearing journey back to Tasmania, even travelling first class. Getha did not endure sea travel well. She would never undertake it while pregnant nor would she do it again with a small baby. Time was on my side. I wouldn’t push Getha to stay but I could drag my heels and allow life to throw up obstacles until her life, like mine, was too deeply rooted in Ireland to be removed.

  The black fairy must have been hiding in a corner of our sunny bedroom on that morning. I would get my wish and not know it for the curse it was until it was too late.

  The year of Branna’s birth, 1925, and the five years after that were the happiest of my life. Even if I’d known then that they were to be the best years, I could not have enjoyed them any more than I did. Like many an Irishman who lived through those years of war, and stayed on in Ireland to enjoy the exhilaration of independence, nothing could have wiped the smile off my face.

  Kindea had always been a prosperous estate and I discovered the pleasure of living in accord with the seasons; watching crops grow and animals breed and people rebuilding their lives from the land. I worked hard learning all the aspects of rural life and farming which I’d never bothered to learn from my father and our managers. Kindea was the heart of a small community and, after so many years of death and killing, I enjoyed my role and that of my family in a community I had never fully been a part of before.

  However, Getha’s need to return to Tasmania became a tension between us. Getha wasn’t Irish. She couldn’t know how hard it had all been. I could not leave. I was determined we would not. But I feared Getha was just as determined that we would, especially as time went on and she did not become pregnant again. By the time Branna was
three years old, we had stopped being careful. We were both ready for more children and I expected that it would happen in no time. But it did not, and I began to worry that Getha would renew her efforts to return to Tasmania. I could see that Getha was unhappy. She had lost her boundless joy, her quick laugh. She was more subdued. Distant. I worried but I did nothing.

  But my life was to change again. As with all life-changing moments, this one came on me unawares, sneaking up on me out of a summer’s day. On that glorious summer day when Branna was five years old, our little family, with my sister Ida, headed down to the nearby beach for a picnic. The children took off ahead of us across the green hills separating Kindea from the sea. It had been raining for the previous week and they’d all been cooped up. Kindea is a big house with corridors and staircases and spare rooms galore, but children need to be outside. At least, our children did.

  I don’t think of Kindea as being by the sea. It faces the mountains with its back to the fury of the coast. You cannot see the ocean from the house as it is beyond the low hills, but on a wild night, we could lie in bed and hear the waves of the North Atlantic breaking on the long shore. Getha and Branna would go down to the beach often. Branna loved it. She would nag us to take her. She would cry, even as a tiny child, until Getha would walk her over the hills to the sea. There she was happy and the two of them would often spend a whole day there. The boys were happiest with their ponies and getting up to mischief closer to home. And closer to me.

  On the day of the picnic, Connell had taken down a football and we all of us fell into a barefoot game. We were running and screaming and some fairly unorthodox tackling was going on but the white sand was soft and we laughed as we fell. In no time our clothes were wet. Little Branna took her dress off and was running in and out of the water in her petticoats. Getha and I let the boys and Ida continue with a new ball game as we sat on the low dunes, keeping a watchful eye on them all.