At this hour of my life I don’t profess to remember what we inhabitants of Blarney Lane were patriotic about: all I remember is that we were very patriotic, that our main principles were something called ‘Conciliation and Consent’, and that our great national leader, William O’Brien, once referred to us as ‘The Old Guard’. Myself and other kids of the Old Guard used to parade the street with tin cans and toy trumpets, singing ‘We’ll hang Johnnie Redmond on a sour apple tree.’ (John Redmond, I need hardly say, was the leader of the other side.)
Unfortunately, our neighbourhood was bounded to the south by a long ugly street leading uphill to the cathedral, and the lanes off it were infested with the most wretched specimens of humanity who took the Redmondite side for whatever could be got from it in the way of drink. My personal view at the time was that the Redmondite faction was maintained by a conspiracy of publicans and brewers. It always saddened me, coming through this street on my way from school, and seeing the poor misguided children, barefoot and in rags, parading with tin cans and toy trumpets and singing ‘We’ll hang William O’Brien on a sour apple tree.’ It left me with very little hope for Ireland.
Of course, my father was a strong supporter of ‘Conciliation and Consent’. The parish priest who had come to solicit his vote for Redmond had told him he would go straight to Hell, but my father had replied quite respectfully that if Mr O’Brien was an agent of the devil, as Father Murphy said, he would go gladly.
I admired my father as a rock of principle. As well as being a house-painter (a regrettable trade which left him for six months ‘under the ivy’, as we called it), he was a musician. He had been a bandsman in the British Army, played the cornet extremely well, and had been a member of the Irishtown Brass and Reed Band from its foundation. At home we had two big pictures of the band after each of its most famous contests, in Belfast and Dublin. It was after the Dublin contest when Irishtown emerged as the premier brass band that there occurred an unrecorded episode in operatic history. In those days the best band in the city was always invited to perform in the Soldiers’ Chorus scene in Gounod’s Faust. Of course, they were encored to the echo, and then, ignoring conductor and everything else, they burst into a selection from More’s Irish Melodies. I am glad my father didn’t live to see the day of pipers’ bands. Even fife and drum bands he looked on as primitive.
As he had great hopes of turning me into a musician too he frequently brought me with him to practices and promenades. Irishtown was a very poor quarter of the city, a channel of mean houses between breweries and builders’ yards with the terraced hillsides high above it on either side, and nothing but the white Restoration spire of Shandon breaking the skyline. You came to a little footbridge over the narrow stream; on one side of it was a red-brick chapel, and when we arrived there were usually some of the bandsmen sitting on the bridge, spitting back over their shoulders into the stream. The bandroom was over an undertaker’s shop at the other side of the street. It was a long, dark, barn-like erection overlooking the bridge and decorated with group photos of the band. At this hour of a Sunday morning it was always full of groans, squeaks and bumps.
Then at last came the moment I loved so much. Out in the sunlight, with the bridge filled with staring pedestrians, the band formed up. Dickie Ryan, the bandmaster’s son, and myself took our places at either side of the big drummer, Joe Shinkwin. Joe peered over his big drum to right and left to see if all were in place and ready; he raised his right arm and gave the drum three solemn flakes: then, after the third thump the whole narrow channel of the street filled with a roaring torrent of drums and brass, the mere physical impact of which hit me in the belly. Screaming girls in shawls tore along the pavements calling out to the bandsmen, but nothing shook the soldierly solemnity of the men with their eyes almost crossed on the music before them. I’ve heard Toscanini conduct Beethoven, but compared with Irishtown playing ‘Marching Through Georgia’ on a Sunday morning it was only like Mozart in a girls’ school. The mean little houses, quivering with the shock, gave it back to us: the terraced hillsides that shut out the sky gave it back to us; the interested faces of passers-by in their Sunday clothes from the pavements were like mirrors reflecting the glory of the music. When the band stopped and again you could hear the gapped sound of feet, and people running and chattering, it was like a parachute jump into commonplace.
Sometimes we boarded the paddle-steamer and set up our music stands in some little field by the sea, which all day echoed of Moore’s Melodies, Rossini and Gilbert and Sullivan: sometimes we took a train into the country to play at some sports meeting. Whatever it was, I loved it, though I never got a dinner: I was fed on lemonade, biscuits and sweets, and, as my father spent most of the intervals in the pub, I was sometimes half mad with boredom.
One summer day we were playing at a fête in the grounds of Blarney Castle, and, as usual, the band departed to the pub and Dickie Ryan and myself were left behind, ostensibly to take care of the instruments. A certain hanger-on of the band, one John P., who to my knowledge was never called anything else, was lying on the grass, chewing a straw and shading his eyes from the light with the back of his hand. Dickie and I took a side drum each and began to march about with them. All at once Dickie began to sing to his own accompaniment. ‘We’ll hang William O’Brien on a sour apple tree.’ I was so astonished that I stopped drumming and listened to him. For a moment or two I thought he must be mocking the poor uneducated children of the lanes round Shandon Street. Then I suddenly realized that he meant it. Without hesitation I began to rattle my side drum even louder and shouted ‘We’ll hang Johnnie Redmond on a sour apple tree.’ John P. at once started up and gave me an angry glare. ‘Stop that now, little boy!’ he said threateningly. It was quite plain that he meant me, not Dickie Ryan.
I was completely flabbergasted. It was bad enough hearing the bandmaster’s son singing a traitorous song, but then to be told to shut up by a fellow who wasn’t even a bandsman; merely a hanger-on who looked after the music stands and carried the big drum in return for free drinks! I realized that I was among enemies. I quietly put aside the drum and went to find my father. I knew that he could have no idea what was going on behind his back in the band.
I found him at the back of the pub, sitting on a barrel and holding forth to a couple of young bandsmen.
‘Now, “Brian Boru’s March”,’ he was saying with one finger raised, ‘that’s a beautiful march. I heard the Irish Guards do that on Salisbury Plain, and they had the English fellows’ eyes popping out. “Paddy,” one of them says to me (they all call you Paddy), “wot’s the name of the shouting march?” But somehow we don’t get the same fire into it at all. Now, listen, and I’ll show you how that should go!’
‘Dadda,’ I said in a whisper, pulling him by the sleeve, ‘do you know what Dickie Ryan was singing?’
‘Hold on a minute now,’ he said, beaming at me affectionately. ‘I just want to illustrate a little point.’
‘But, dadda,’ I went on determinedly, ‘he was singing “We’ll hang William O’Brien from a sour apple tree.”’
‘Hah, hah, hah,’ laughed my father, and it struck me that he hadn’t fully appreciated the implications of what I had said.
‘Frank,’ he added, ‘get a bottle of lemonade for the little fellow.’
‘But, dadda,’ I said despairingly, ‘when I sang “We’ll hang Johnnie Redmond”, John P. told me to shut up.’
‘Now, now,’ said my father with sudden testiness, ‘that’s not a nice song to be singing.’
This was a stunning blow. The anthem of ‘Conciliation and Consent’ – not a nice song to be singing!
‘But, dadda,’ I wailed, ‘aren’t we for William O’Brien?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he replied, as if I were goading him, ‘but everyone to his own opinion. Now drink your lemonade and run out and play like a good boy.’
I drank my lemonade all right, but I went out not to play but to brood. There was but one fit place for that. I went to the shell of the castle; climbed the stair to the tower and leaning over the battlements watching the landscape like bunting all round me I thought of the heroes who had stood here, defying the might of England. Everyone to his own opinion! What would they have thought of a statement like that? It was the first time that I realized the awful strain of weakness and the lack of strong principle in my father, and understood that the old bandroom by the bridge was in the heart of enemy country and that all round me were enemies of Ireland like Dickie Ryan and John P.
It wasn’t until months after that I realized how many these were. It was Sunday morning, but when we reached the bandroom there was no one on the bridge. Upstairs the room was almost full. A big man wearing a bowler hat and a flower in his buttonhole was standing before the fireplace. He had a red face with weak, red-rimmed eyes and a dark moustache. My father, who seemed as surprised as I was, slipped quietly into a seat behind the door and lifted me on to his knee.
‘Well, boys,’ the big man said in a deep husky voice, ‘I suppose ye have a good notion what I’m here for. Ye know that next Saturday night Mr Redmond is arriving in the city, and I have the honour of being Chairman of the Reception Committee.’
‘Well, Alderman Doyle,’ said the bandmaster doubtfully, ‘you know the way we feel about Mr Redmond, most of us anyway.’
‘I do, Tim, I do,’ said the Alderman evenly as it gradually dawned on me that the man I was listening to was the Arch-Traitor, locally known as Scabby Doyle, the builder whose vile orations my father always read aloud to my mother with chagrined comments on Doyle’s past history. ‘But feeling isn’t enough, Tim. Fair Lane Band will be there of course. Watergrasshill will be there. The Butter Exchange will be there. What will the backers of this band, the gentlemen who helped it through so many difficult days, say if we don’t put in an appearance?’
‘Well, ye see, Alderman,’ said Ryan nervously, ‘we have our own little difficulties.’
I know that, Tim,’ said Doyle. ‘We all have our difficulties in troubled times like these, but we have to face them like men in the interests of the country. What difficulties have you?’
‘Well, that’s hard to describe, Alderman,’ said the bandmaster.
‘No, Tim,’ said my father quietly, raising and putting me down from his knee, ‘’tis easy enough to describe. I’m the difficulty, and I know it.’
‘Now, Mick,’ protested the bandmaster, ‘there’s nothing personal about it. We’re all old friends in this band.’
‘We are, Tim,’ agreed my father. ‘And before ever it was heard of, you and me gave this bandroom its first coat of paint. But every man is entitled to his principles, and I don’t want to stand in your light.’
‘You see how it is, Mr Doyle,’ said the bandmaster appealingly. ‘We had others in the band that were of Mick Twomey’s persuasion, but they left us to join O’Brienite bands. Mick didn’t, nor we didn’t want him to leave us.’
‘Nor don’t,’ said a mournful voice, and I turned and saw a tall, gaunt, spectacled young man sitting on the window sill. ‘I had three men,’ said my father earnestly, holding up three fingers in illustration of the fact, ‘three men up at the house on different occasions to get me to join other bands. I’m not boasting. Tim Ryan knows who they were.’
‘I do, I do,’ said the bandmaster.
‘And I wouldn’t,’ said my father passionately. ‘I’m not boasting, but you can’t deny it: there isn’t another band in Ireland to touch ours.’
‘Nor a cornet-player in Ireland to touch Mick Twomey,’ chimed in the gaunt young man, rising to his feet. ‘And I’m not saying that to coddle or cock him up.’
‘You’re not, you’re not,’ said the bandmaster. ‘No one can deny he’s a musician.’
‘And listen here to me, boys,’ said the gaunt young man, with a wild wave of his arm, ‘don’t leave us be led astray by anyone. What were we before we had the old band? Nobody. We were no better than the poor devils that sit on that bridge outside all day, spitting into the river. Whatever we do, leave us be all agreed. What backers had we when we started, only what we could collect ourselves outside the chapel gates on Sunday, and hard enough to get permission for that itself? I’m as good a party man as anyone here, but what I say is, music is above politics … Alderman Doyle,’ he begged, ‘tell Mr Redmond whatever he’ll do not to break up our little band on us.’
‘Jim Ralegh,’ said the Alderman, with his red-rimmed eyes growing moist, ‘I’d sooner put my hand in the fire than injure this band. I know what ye are, a band of brothers … Mick,’ he boomed at my father, ‘will you desert it in its hour of trial?’
‘Ah,’ said my father testily, ‘is it the way you want me to play against William O’Brien?’
‘Play against William O’Brien,’ echoed the Alderman. ‘No one is asking you to play against anyone. As Jim Ralegh here says, music is above politics. What we’re asking you to do is to play for something: for the band, for the sake of unity. You know what’ll happen if the backers withdraw? Can’t you pocket your pride and make this sacrifice in the interest of the band?’
My father stood for a few moments, hesitating. I prayed that for once he might see the true light; that he might show this group of misguided men the faith that was in him. Instead he nodded curtly, said ‘Very well, I’ll play,’ and sat down again. The rascally Alderman said a few humbugging words in his praise which didn’t take me in. I don’t think they even took my father in, for all the way home he never addressed a word to me. I saw then that his conscience was at him. He knew that by supporting the band in the unprincipled step it was taking he was showing himself a traitor to Ireland and our great leader, William O’Brien.
Afterwards, whenever Irishtown played at Redmondite demonstrations, my father accompanied them, but the moment the speeches began he retreated to the edge of the crowd, rather like a pious Catholic compelled to attend a heretical religious service, and stood against the wall with his hands in his pockets, passing slighting and witty comments on the speakers to any O’Brienites he might meet. But he had lost all dignity in my eyes. Even his gibes at Scabby Doyle seemed to me false, and I longed to say to him, ‘If that’s what you believe, why don’t you show it?’ Even the seaside lost its attraction when at any moment the beautiful daughter of a decent O’Brienite family might point to me and say: ‘There is the son of the cornet-player who betrayed Ireland.’
Then one Sunday we went to play at some idolatrous function in a seaside town called Bantry. While the meeting was on my father and the rest of the band retired to the pub and I with them. Even by my presence in the Square I wasn’t prepared to countenance the proceedings. I was looking idly out of the window when I suddenly heard a roar of cheering and people began to scatter in all directions. I was mystified until someone outside started to shout, ‘Come on, boys! The O’Brienites are trying to break up the meeting.’ The bandsmen rushed for the door. I would have done the same but my father looked hastily over his shoulder and warned me to stay where I was. He was talking to a young clarinet-player of serious appearance.
‘Now,’ he went on, raising his voice to drown the uproar outside. ‘Teddy the Lamb was the finest clarinet-player in the whole British Army.’
There was a fresh storm of cheering, and wild with excitement I saw the patriots begin to drive a deep wedge of whirling sticks through the heart of the enemy, cutting them into two fighting camps.
‘Excuse me, Mick,’ said the clarinet-player, going white, ‘I’ll go and see what’s up.’
‘Now, whatever is up,’ my father said appealingly, ‘you can’t do anything about it.’
‘I’m not going to have it said I stopped behind while my friends were fighting for their lives,’ said the young fellow hotly.
‘There’s no one fighting for their lives at all,’ said my father irascibly, grabbing him by the arm. ‘You have something else to think about. Man alive, you’re a musician, not a bloody infantryman.’
‘I’d sooner be that than a bloody turncoat, anyway,’ said the young fellow, dragging himself off and making for the door.
‘Thanks, Phil,’ my father called after him in a voice of a man who had to speak before he has collected his wits. ‘I well deserved that from you. I well deserved that from all of ye.’ He took out his pipe and put it back into his pocket again. Then he joined me at the window and for a few moments he looked unseeingly at the milling crowd outside. ‘Come on,’ he said shortly.
Though the couples were wrestling in the very gutters no one accosted us on our way up the street; otherwise I feel murder might have been committed. We went to the house of some cousins and had tea, and when we reached the railway station my father led me to a compartment near the engine; not the carriage reserved for the band. Though we had ten minutes to wait it wasn’t until just before the whistle went that Tim Ryan, the bandmaster, spotted us through the window.
‘Mick!’ he shouted in astonishment. ‘Where the hell were you? I had men out all over the town looking for you? Is it anything wrong?’
‘Nothing, Tim,’ replied my father, leaning out of the window to him. ‘I wanted to be alone, that’s all.’
‘But we’ll see you at the other end?’ bawled Tim as the train began to move.
‘I don’t know will you,’ replied my father grimly. ‘I think ye saw too much of me.’
When the band formed up outside the station we stood on the pavement and watched them. He had a tight hold of my hand. First Tim Ryan and then Jim Ralegh came rushing over to him. With an intensity of hatred I watched those enemies of Ireland again bait their traps for my father, but now I knew they would bait them in vain.
‘No, no Tim,’ said my father, shaking his head, ‘I went too far before for the sake of the band, and I paid dear for it. None of my family was ever called a turncoat before today, Tim.’
‘Ah, it is a young fool like that?’ bawled Jim Ralegh with tears in his wild eyes. ‘What need a man like you care about him?’
‘A man have his pride, Jim,’ said my father gloomily.
‘He have,’ cried Ralegh despairingly, ‘and a fat lot any of us has to be proud of. The band was all we ever had, and if that goes the whole thing goes. For the love of the Almighty God, Mick Twomey, come back with us to the bandroom anyway.’
‘No, no, no,’ shouted my father angrily. ‘I tell you after today I’m finished with music.’
‘Music is finished with us you mean,’ bawled Jim. ‘The curse of God on the day we ever heard of Redmond or O’Brien! We were happy men before it … All right, lads,’ he cried, turning away with a wild and whirling motion of his arm. ‘Mick Twomey is done with us. Ye can go on without him.’
And again I heard the three solemn thumps on the big drum, and again the street was flooded with a roaring torrent of music, and though it no longer played for me, my heart rose to it and the tears came from my eyes. Still holding my hand, my father followed on the pavement. They were playing ‘Brian Boru’s March’, his old favourite. We followed them through the ill-lit town and as they turned down the side-street to the bridge, my father stood on the kerb and looked after them as though he wished to impress every detail on his memory. It was only when the music stopped and the silence returned to the narrow channel of the street that we resumed our lonely way homeward.