Granny Harbinson

From her seat at the window Granny Harbinson could see right up to the corner of Balaclava Street. She sat there always when Seamus was using the back room. “You can’t be too careful,” she’d tell him when the last of his friends had slipped in through the backyard.

“I don’t want Minnie Clarke calling in when youse are here. Minnie’s a terrible ould one for lettin’ everybody know your business. She’s nivver happy till she knows your whole history. She couldn’t houl’ her own water.”

Seamus didn’t use the house too often. Only when they were stuck for a place to meet. His granny embarrassed him with her conspiratorial ways when the boys were in, telling them to keep their voices down and turning the wireless up and then, sitting in the corner at the window, saying the rosary while they were in the back room. Her nerves were away with it, he thought, the way she carried on. Still, with all that, it was a good house, and he was glad to sleep in it when the Brits were raiding up the road. His granny was sound enough.

He stayed after the meeting while she made him a cup of tea.

“Houl’ on, son, and I’ll run down to the corner for a bap for you. You can wait for a wee cup of tea in your hand, can’t you?”

Seamus flung himself into the seat by the fire.

“Yes, Granny, I’m not going out till eight o’clock. I need the key,” he added, “I don’t want to keep you waiting up on me.”

“Aye, all right, son,” Granny Harbinson replied as she bustled out the door. “Mind that kettle doesn’t boil over.”

Seamus sighed resignedly to himself as he went into the scullery. The way she had replied, he knew his granny wasn’t going to pay any heed to him. When he returned that night he would find her keeping her usual vigil at the window; then she’d bolt the front door behind him and splash holy water everywhere. He returned to his seat by the fire when he heard her passing by the front window again. Might as well have a bit of a rest anyway before he went out, he thought; it wouldn’t be long till eight o’clock.

That night Granny Harbinson sat by the window, the house in darkness. As the fire flickered shadows around the front room, in the distance she could hear the rattle of gunfire and, closer at hand, the whine of armoured pigs as they squealed their way up the Falls Road.

Times hadn’t changed much, she reflected, from the years of the twenties when they had to use kidney pavers to force the cage-cars out of the area. Thon was a terrible time. Curfews and martial law, and the Specials arresting all the young men. British soldiers there as well, she recalled, at Paddy Lavery’s corner, and sniping coming down from Conway Street. No life for anybody to live, but sure, God was good and they’d come through it all.

She glanced down the street again. The way Minnie Clarke was ducking out her window she wasn’t intending to remain long in this world, she thought to herself, as she watched Minnie poking her head out the bedroom window. She remembered Minnie the time Joe Devlin’s crowd had attacked Donnelly’s house. Minnie hadn’t been so brave then as the Hibernians smashed windows and splashed paint over Donnelly’s door. Poor Missus Donnelly, with her two republican sons in jail and that mob wrecking the only bit of comfort she’d had.

Granny Harbinson—not a granny then, of course—had had to face them on her own. She had lost her job as a doffer over that. Her foreman, Ginty McStravick, had been a Hibernian. Ach, well, she sighed to herself, she’d outlasted the oul’ divil, God rest his soul.

An explosion jarred her thoughts back to Seamus. She wished he was home. Outside, the street fell again as quiet as a grave, the silence punctuated now only by the near-distant echo of pistol and rifle shots.

Forty years ago it had been the same during the Outdoor Relief riots. She smiled as she thought of the fix they’d been in. No money, and seven hungry children to feed. Only they had had unity then, of a sort, until the government had whipped up all the old bitterness and divided the working people.