Dublin, March 1928
At eight o’clock the four Trinity students gathered opposite the Catholic Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street where the Men’s Mission was taking place. Owen Sheehy-Skeffington had alerted Thomas to rumours of a march on Madame Despard’s home in Eccles Street, which housed the Friends of Soviet Russia Society. Following last week’s Mission, a Catholic mob had burnt out the Revolutionary Workers’ Group’s headquarters in Little Strand Street. Thomas was sick of public meetings being broken up by zealots from St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League and the Catholic Young Men’s Society. Within Trinity, most societies were dully conformist, with the Provost keen not to antagonise the Free State government who viewed the college as an enemy statelet. But a few radical minds still existed among the staunchly Unionist student body, chaps like Sheehy-Skeffington who argued for women’s rights and risked blows by refusing to stand whenever the college band played God Save the King.
Grimes from the rowing club had come along as a lark, relishing any chance of a skirmish with the new Catholic state. He intended following his father into the British army and was unable to take anything outside the college walls seriously, convinced that at the first bad harvest the Free State would lapse into famine, with the London government forced to step back in. The fourth student, Foster, was more serious, aware of the danger of assault and expulsion, but determined to make a stand.
‘Last week every policeman between here and Little Strand Street turned a blind eye,’ Sheehy-Skeffington said. ‘The mob knelt on the road saying the rosary to prevent the fire brigade saving the building whilst the Redemptorists were tucked up in their presbyteries disclaiming all knowledge of the attack.’
‘Surely they won’t actually attack Madame Despard,’ Grimes said. ‘I mean she stood shoulder to shoulder with Sinn Fein during their rebellion. Her own brother, as Viceroy, had to arrest her for treason.’
‘She was a suffragette long before she became a Shinner,’ Thomas reminded him. ‘And a Protestant before she turned communist. Those are sins the priests won’t forget.’
The mission ended and men began to descend the church steps, donning their hats. Most slipped away but the hard core who lingered glanced over at Thomas and his companions, sensing their foreignness. A priest emerged to address the men, with some bolder women in the shadows coming forward. A cheer arose and a bareheaded man shouted, God Bless our Pope. His words were taken up as a chant. A barefoot girl tugged at Thomas’s sleeve, begging for a few coppers. When he looked up, the priest was gone and the men had suddenly organised themselves into ranks moving towards Eccles Street.
Even Grimes looked cowed by the size of the mob. But Thomas knew that Grimes would not turn back because – despite Madame Despard having renounced her class and squandered her wealth on the Dublin poor – for him she remained an elderly English aristocrat who needed protection from the lower orders she was trying to befriend.
Initially the students walked behind the mob but as it stopped outside tenements to exhort others to join, they managed to slip up North Great George’s Street and reach the terrace of tall Georgian houses first. Eccles Street was crowded, with people anticipating trouble. Thomas spied James Connolly’s son, Roddy, push through the throng to enter Madame Despard’s home, protected from assault, at least for now, by his late father’s aura as an executed 1916 Rising martyr. The door closed as Thomas led the way up the steps. The marchers were approaching Dorset Street, their chants growing louder. Thomas knocked and the door opened a fraction as a young man eyed them.
‘Bloody students. Run away home to your mothers, this will turn nasty.’
‘Let me in.’ Sheehy-Skeffington stepped forward. ‘My mother is secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia.’
The young man extended a hand in welcome. ‘Sure, I have you now and your poor murdered father. Liam Hennessy is the name. Get inside quick and maybe you can persuade the old dame to escape out the back way. This is too dicey a conflagration for an eighty-five-year-old to sit around in taking her ease.’
A shout arose as Sheehy-Skeffington entered the hall. ‘Bastard! Enemy of Christ! Look at him step on the host!’
A stone caused Thomas to turn as the others entered amid outraged jeers. ‘Decide, comrade,’ Hennessy hissed. ‘Do you want to come in or not?’
Thomas stepped inside. ‘I want to come in, but I’m not your comrade. Why are they shouting?’
‘A priest said that we had put a consecrated host under the doormat so that everybody entering must step on the body of Christ. As if anything under a mat here would last two seconds. When the slum shawlies are not screeching for the old dame’s blood they’re queuing up to wheedle every penny from her. Head upstairs. There’s twenty of us now. She expected more support but cold feet is a contagious disease.’
A printing press occupied the front room, beside stacked copies of The Hammer and Plough. People at the windows surveyed the crowd. Outside, the chanting stopped as marchers knelt for the rosary. Sheehy-Skeffington leaned over Madame Despard, a tiny frail figure dressed in black who sat with ramrod-straight shoulders and milky half-blind eyes. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked. ‘Come closer, young man.’
‘I’m Thomas Goold Verschoyle.’
She nodded. ‘Donegal. Your mother and I used to correspond about Theosophy. Such an interesting woman.’
‘Might it not be wise, Madame,’ Thomas said, ‘to slip away and let us guard your house?’
‘It might be wiser for you to slip away, young man.’ Her voice was so weak that it was hard to catch each word, but the resolve, which made her one of Britain’s most famous suffragettes, remained evident. ‘It’s me those misguided souls want to burn as a witch. But I shall build this world for them, even if it means my having to leave it. I am not afraid of the last great adventure.’
Thomas joined Grimes and Hennessy at the window. Locals attracted from the nearby slums were swelling the crowd. The murmured prayers could not disguise an impending sense of trouble. The bareheaded man knelt on the pavement to face the mob, leading the rosary with beads entwined between his fingers. Thomas sensed that he was no natural leader. Without one, it was impossible to judge how far this mob would go. Then Thomas saw a black-clad figure push through the throng with purposeful strides. He lacked the aura of a priest, but seemed like some sort of Christian Brother. Hennessy watched the figure approach.
‘It wouldn’t be much of a circus without a ringmaster,’ he remarked.
‘Who is he?’ Thomas asked.
‘I can’t see his collar, mate.’ Hennessy called back, ‘Roddy, who’s this geezer coming to drown us in holy water?’
James Connolly’s son joined them, staring down as the crowd parted respectfully to let the cleric through. However one man who examined the cleric more closely rose to place a hand on his shoulder that was angrily shrugged off. Connolly laughed.
‘Mother of God,’ he said, ‘that’s Goold.’
‘Who?’ Thomas asked, with sudden foreboding.
‘He used to hang around some of our political meetings. My sister and I thought he was a tramp at first. I think he slept rough in Mountjoy Square. Only when he started to heckle the speakers did we spot his educated accent. He occasionally sold copies of The Hammer and Plough for us. He turned up at a meeting I addressed last week looking worse than ever. I told him if he wanted to join the party he’d have to clean himself up. But where did he buy that outfit? He’s from Sligo, I think.’
‘Donegal,’ Thomas said.
Connolly looked surprised. ‘You know him?’
‘He’s Thomas’s brother.’ Sheehy-Skeffington joined the company. ‘And that mob will lynch him if you don’t let him in.’
Several men were attempting to rip Art’s jacket. Thomas realised that it was an old postman’s uniform, too small for his brother. A combination of bad light and a black collarless shirt inadvertently lent him a religious appearance.
Hennessy ran down to open the front door and after a scuffle, Art was pulled inside. The incensed mob started a new chant: Burn the Communists! while several authoritative figures stepped forward, judging the situation sufficiently inflamed for them to seize control.
Hennessy led Art upstairs. He stopped upon entering the room, more shaken by Thomas’s presence than by the mob outside.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘You don’t get to inherit the franchise on civil rights too,’ Thomas retorted. ‘Some of us came to defend free speech. Can we not at least agree that freedom is being strangled in this city? I may not belong in here, but I will never belong out there.’ He glanced out of the window, with sudden anxiety. ‘Good grief! It couldn’t be?’
‘Who?’
Thomas pointed to a well-dressed figure pushing through the crowd. ‘Our big sister.’
‘Maud?’ Art looked out, like a disappointed child whose party was being gatecrashed. ‘Maud is a married woman.’
‘She has as much right to enter my house as you have.’ The voice was feeble, but when the brothers turned, the tiny figure confronting them looked resolute and fiery.
‘Forgive me, Madame Despard,’ Art apologised. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It just feels like I will never be free of my family following me.’
Thomas glared at him. ‘I assure you, if I’d suspected you were coming I’d have stayed in college.’
‘I know you,’ Madame Despard said. ‘I’ve seen you surrounded by children in Mountjoy Square only for a priest to scatter them with a stick and threaten you.’
‘I set up a hedge school,’ Art explained. ‘I’d sit on a park bench writing letters on behalf of people who can’t write themselves. I was teaching the three Rs and history and politics to anyone who’d sit with me but the priests put a halt to that.’
Maud’s manner was granting her a passage through the crowd, convinced that nobody so well dressed could be a subversive. She strode up the steps past the ringleaders to bang on the knocker, disconcerting the crowd who realised that she had not come to join them after all. Thomas shouted at Hennessy.
‘For God’s sake, man, let my sister in.’
When they opened the front door several black-clad shawlies were clawing at Maud who had lost her hat but stood her ground, hectoring them. Art and Thomas reeled her in. She spun around, defiant, a fleck of blood on her lip where a nail had scratched her.
‘Well, here we all are,’ she said, unflappable as ever. ‘One big happy family.’
‘You shouldn’t have come,’ Art complained. ‘You’re not a communist.’
‘A walk through these slums would make anyone consider becoming one. I never saw such squalor. Nobody should be forced to live like this, let alone attack an old woman trying to educate them. The conductor on the Kingstown tram boasted about the fire being planned by the Catholic Young Men’s Society. I gave him a piece of my mind, then got off and walked here.’ She inspected Art. ‘You look ridiculous. Still I steadfastly defend the right of people to make fools of themselves. If that mob have their way anyone different will be swept into the Irish Sea. Is Madame Despard still here?’
Several stones struck the front door, with one crashing through the fanlight overhead.
‘We can’t persuade her to leave.’ Hennessy made for the sanctuary of the stairs.
Maud followed Hennessy upstairs. ‘I’ll talk to her provided Art doesn’t introduce my husband to his tailor.’
Grimes and Foster were busy gathering buckets of sand with other volunteers. Connolly moved quietly about preparing for the onslaught, as commanding as his wounded father must have been when rallying Dublin workers amid flames in the GPO.
‘Stay back from the windows when the stones start to really fly,’ he said. ‘The important thing is to get fires under control quickly to try and save the building.’
The chanting was more frenzied outside: Bless the Pope! One man screamed himself hoarse trying to be heard over the noise: ‘Go back to Russia, you poxy atheist Protestant English bitch!’
Thomas joined his siblings around Madame Despard’s chair, as Maud pleaded with her to leave.
‘Leave?’ The old lady laughed. ‘Why, dear, I like being at the centre of things. Your brother is such a fine man. I’ve seen him in Mountjoy Square.’ She addressed Art. ‘Go to Russia while you have your youth. You will be appreciated there. I have seen it with my own eyes, factories run by elected committees, schools where punishment is taboo. It is not just the dream of Marx come true, but the words of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. Shaw went, but, being a man, never asked the hard questions. I made them show me the collective farms which the peasant proprietors are starting to embrace.’ Stones crashed through the downstairs windows without making her lose her flow. ‘And there is no crime nor punishment. Those unfit to be good citizens are briefly isolated on self-governing archipelagos. But no ideas are forced on them: they are gently encouraged to think for themselves. Go there and learn what it is like to live in a land ruled by love.’
There was a whooshing sound of flame. Volunteers with buckets rushed down the stairs. Hennessy and Connolly each took one leg of her chair, telling Grimes and Foster to lift the others. ‘We’re bringing you out the back way, Charlotte, whether you like it or not,’ Connolly said.
‘But I wanted to address them. I assure you I’ve faced hostile crowds all my life.’
‘I’ll face them for you.’ Maud turned to Connolly. ‘I’ll keep them focused on the front and give you time to get her out.’ She patted the old lady’s hand. ‘I’ll give them a song.’
‘Would you, dear?’ Madame Despard’s chair was hoisted in the air. ‘Isn’t life exciting?’ She grasped Art’s hand. ‘See Russia for yourself.’
Maud strode towards the window. Thomas gripped her shoulder.
‘Are you crazy? You can’t go out there.’
Ignoring him as she used to ignore everyone once she got a notion into her head in Donegal, Maud stepped out onto the small wrought-iron balcony. She got her balance, then began to sing:
‘The Workers’ Flag is deeply red,
It covered oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold.’
The crowd could not hear the words but this did not stop some screaming that she was a whore while others chanted Bless the Pope more fervently. Smoke billowed from the smashed windows below in the rooms where fires were blazing. Art and Thomas tried to pull her back inside and she hissed fiercely, ‘Don’t you dare.’
Thomas looked down at the mob, hungry for blood and hungry for food. At the barefoot children staring up as if they were devils. At the ignorance and superstition and malnutrition and stunted growth and those protesters who were fervent and others swept up by the occasion who would just as easily join any other mob. He clambered out to be beside Maud and, with a laugh, she interlocked her fingers with his and took Art’s fingers in her other hand. The three never arranged to meet in Dublin, knowing that they would each bring a baggage of grievance and accusation with them but this balcony was neutral ground, where they could briefly be united by their collective difference from the baying mob. Thomas raised his voice defiantly and Art joined in too, the three of them singing with the sweet harmony that had once been praised in Killaghtee church.
‘Then raise the scarlet banner high,
Beneath its folds we’ll live or die,
Though cowards flinch
And traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.’