16–17 November 1939
At dawn Freddie accompanied Eva from their small flat above the Culpeper Herbal Shop on Jewry Street in Winchester, past the Buttercross and the great cathedral and down to the bus station opposite the Guildhall. The station was as dark as the streets outside. It felt eerie, with intending passengers being mere shadows in the gloom and the sole light coming from a two-inch hole in the cardboard covering a single lit headlight of the bus. After purchasing her ticket they went back outside to be alone, walking down to King Alfred’s statue on the corner. The fringes of thickly curtained windowpanes along Broadway were coated in black paint in case the faintest chink of light escaped, though Eva suspected that for now householders were more fearful of bullying wardens than of bombers in the sky. The immediate blitzkrieg that Chamberlain warned of had not yet occurred, but panic still ensued whenever the town tested its recently installed air raid sirens.
‘What will you do?’ Eva asked, already knowing the answer.
‘Naturally, I shall work out my notice in full,’ Freddie replied. ‘Thereafter I shall be unavailable to pack herbs into little boxes because I will enlist in the Royal Artillery Territorial Army.’
Three days ago Eva had decided to return to Mayo, after hearing two customers discuss Chamberlain’s prediction of a hundred thousand deaths before Christmas. Factories were working through the night to stockpile cardboard coffins, with lime pits already dug in expectation of stacked corpses. The only deaths so far were from collisions between blacked-out vehicles with drivers unable to see each other approach. But the scent of war pervaded everything in England, from the gas masks people carried to the stirrup pump and long-handled shovel to deal with incendiary bombs delivered to the herbal shop which Eva and Freddie had run for the past eighteen months.
It seemed impossible to Eva that any pilot could bomb Wolvesey Castle, visible from their window, but Freddie got angry when she made such remarks and lectured her about coming out of the ether to live in the real world. In the real world children were being evacuated from the cities and, as a mother, Eva was determined that her children’s safety came first, even though their boarding schools seemed remote and unlikely targets. In her heart however she knew that this war was the perfect cover to rescue Francis whom she sensed was suffering terrible homesickness. Freddie was stoic when she announced her intention, but the general manager of Culpepers proved less sympathetic – possibly because the woman came from Coventry, where a bomb had recently killed five people, planted not by Germans but by Irish Republicans. When Freddie phoned to say that his wife was leaving and he would need to employ a girl part-time, he refused afterwards to discuss what the general manager said. But her voice grew so shrill that Eva had overheard her declare how no English public school man would permit his wife to flee dishonourably in time of war. She had hired them as a responsible couple. If Freddie was the kind of man who allowed his wife to wear the trousers, then he could have a month’s notice and also flee to his cowardly isle while she found a true married couple to manage her shop. Next morning when the weekly sales figures reached head office and the general manager discovered that Freddie had sold most of shop’s stock to a party of visiting Americans, she hastily phoned back to say that he was welcome to stay. But Eva knew that the proud Fitzgerald had been hurt by her inference of cowardice and the reference to not having attended a good school. It was a cut Freddie could neither forget nor forgive.
The bus from Winchester was slow and it was noon before Eva reached Hazel’s boarding school. School life was changing Hazel. Her headmistress remarked upon it during the brief conversation in which she made plain her disapproval at Eva running away to Ireland.
‘You must be careful with the child, Mrs Fitzgerald. She takes on the local colour. Allow her to consort with Billingsgate fishwives and she will become one. Allow her to consort with the worst sort of snobs and she will become one of those.’
They were standing in the corridor watching Hazel emerge from class amid a pack of chattering girls. Seeing her like this, for a perturbing moment Eva felt that she did not know her daughter. Hazel seemed not to recognise Eva either, until her features softened and she ran past the headmistress to embrace her mother. Eva had feared that Hazel might not want to leave school, because she disliked holidays in the Winchester flat. But once Glanmire Wood was mentioned the girl had only one question before her classmates were forgotten: ‘Will I be able to keep a horse?’
Eva nodded, with no idea how to keep her promise, and they travelled together to Oxford to meet up with Francis who was being collected by his grandfather from his school. They spent the afternoon with Eva’s parents, whom she tried to persuade to return to the safety of Donegal. But since boarding up the Manor House, Ireland was like a closed book to them, especially with the news that Maud and her children were now stranded in South Africa after being trapped by the war’s outbreak while visiting Thomas.
Brendan’s continuing disappearance left a raw wound cutting into their hearts. Father was unable to mention his youngest son, while, when alone with Eva in her bedroom, Mother could talk of nothing else. Brendan’s silence since his solitary card from Barcelona left Eva’s parents paralysed. The hope remained that he might still be in touch with his eldest brother, but Art refused to have contact with any of them. Eva did not even know his whereabouts until Mother produced a recent press cutting received from Dublin.
Mr Art Goold, of Mountjoy Square in Dublin, was yesterday brought before the Special Criminal Court pursuant to the Offences against the State Act, 1939, after being arrested during a public disturbance. Goold was only released from jail seven weeks ago, having served a sentence for public order offences. When the date of his latest trial was being fixed, he insisted upon interrupting and insulting the court by shouting in a violent and unseemly fashion. Although called upon to stop he continued shouting in such a manner that no member of the court was able to speak. Goold was sentenced to suffer imprisonment for three calendar months for contempt of court, with the original charges to follow upon completion of this sentence.
Eva sat in silence with Mother after reading this, while Father took Hazel to see some horses in a nearby paddock. It was Francis who tried to cheer them up by donning silk scarves from Mother’s wardrobe and dancing about. The boy loved his grandmother and seemed punch-drunk at his unexpected release from school. Mother appeared to momentarily forget the ache of Brendan’s absence while laughing at Francis’s madcap agility in waltzing around. But after a time Eva noticed Mother’s smile being replaced by a wary look and suspected that her grandson brought back too many memories of her own lost boy.
Father took them to the station for the evening train to Liverpool, insisting on giving Eva money to obtain a cabin for the night crossing on the MV Munster. When they boarded, the noise of singing from the bars still reached them and each time she closed her eyes Eva kept visualising the empty pens on the lower deck from which she had seen cattle unloaded on the dockside before they were allowed to board. Terrified beasts shoving against each other and slipping on the wet cobbles while a white-bearded man calmly waited with a gun to summarily execute any beast injured in the crossing from Dublin. The cattle became juxtaposed in her mind with the Irish faces she had also seen disembarking – the more experienced emigrants encouraging the unbearably young-looking ones, all seeking jobs offered by the war that she was fleeing.
The children only slept fretfully and were cranky when they docked at dawn in Dublin, urging her to get the first train to Mayo. Eva was exhausted, but determined to confront Art. For her parents’ sake she needed to discover if he knew anything about Brendan’s whereabouts. If Brendan had died then surely some comrade would have contacted the family. If he managed to flee Spain, he would have made contact himself, unless his wounds left him suffering from amnesia in an overcrowded ward with nobody to watch over him. If he had been held in one of Franco’s jails, the victorious General had nothing to gain by keeping him when newspapers reported that almost all foreign prisoners were now released. Father’s appeals to the Foreign Office had yielded no record of Brendan being captured by fascists, unless they had simply shot him and dumped his body. Another alternative was that Brendan could be staying with Art’s wife in Russia or, even better, had gone to live in Dublin with Art. This idea was so alluring that Eva had made herself half believe it.
Her arrival in Mountjoy Square caused a stir along the row of Georgian houses now subdivided into tenement dwellings. Francis and Hazel shied away from the dirty children gawking at them while Eva asked a shawled woman if she knew where Art Goold lived. Hearing his name, the woman blessed herself and hurried on. Several others claimed not to have heard of him until a man detached himself from a pitch and toss school to direct her past a door off its hinges and up a long flight of stairs. Shouting children raced down past her, one almost shoving Francis through a gap where the banisters were missing.
A woman half opened her door on the first landing and eyed Eva suspiciously. ‘What are yiz after?’
‘I’m looking for Art Goold’s flat?’
‘And why would that be, Missus?’
‘I’m his sister.’
‘So you say.’ She impersonated a snooty voice. ‘Well, he’s not currently residing in his residence.’
‘He’s in jail. I wondered if anyone was sharing his flat?’
‘You mean a trollop? Goold wasn’t like that, so go to hell. You’re not the first interfering biddy sent by the Legion of Mary to save us.’
The women went to slam her door. Eva pleaded with her. ‘Please. I really am his sister.’
‘How do I know that?’
‘For goodness’ sake, the Legion of Mary is Catholic!’ Hazel interjected, her exasperated voice, which had picked up a tinge of an English accent, further antagonising the woman. ‘If he wasn’t my brother why else would we visit a place like this?’
It was Francis who prevented the woman from closing her door. ‘Please, we’ve travelled a long way and have a long journey ahead. Mr Goold Verschoyle is my uncle.’
The woman relented, opening her door fully. ‘Come in,’ she said gruffly. ‘If you’re Goold’s kin you’re welcome. Since he last got out of jail we’ve had a hundred clawthumpers sprinkling the stairs with holy water.’
Eva gazed around the immaculately clean but cramped room. Two small children watched from the bed and she sensed another child hiding beneath it.
‘Art asked me to mind the back attic for him, but the landlord will burn everything and rent it out again,’ the woman said. ‘He’s lived in different rooms here on and off for years. I thought he was a tramp till I heard his accent. Never knew a lonelier man or one so badly dressed. Any few pence he had seemed to go on books. For a while he taught a sort of hedge-school in the park, but the priests put a halt to it. You’d see him selling the Daily Worker outside the GPO with people spitting as they passed. His own kind don’t really want him and he’ll never be one of us. But he was good to me when my husband was out of work and loan sharks were trying to get their claws on my few sticks of furniture. Will you take tea and some bread for your chislers?’
Eva noticed a half-finished loaf on the square of wood that served as a table when put on top of the bathtub. From the bed, hungry eyes followed her gaze. ‘We’ve just eaten,’ she lied. ‘Did Art ever mention his brother?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Not to me. He turned up some weeks back after hearing the back attic was free. He’d been in jail and before that was staying in Crumlin with Mrs Behan who used to live in Russell Street – though that poor woman has her own sorrows with the Liverpool police after catching her eldest lad with an IRA bomb. You’d think Art would have had his fill of jail but he was barely settled in upstairs before the cops got him for creating a nuisance on the bogs of Kildare. Trying to unionise turf workers.’ She snorted. ‘You might as well unionise donkeys. Still you couldn’t talk to Art with the weight of the world on him. Is your other brother cracked too?’
Eva did not want to discuss Brendan. She had been stupid to yield to the hope that he could be lying low here. Her old mistake of wanting reality to fall into step with how she wished the world to be.
‘Can I see his room?’
‘Are you sure you want to? The police left a queer mess.’
Eva and the children followed the woman up flights of stairs that grew steeper as they neared the attic. The door was smashed open, with papers and books scattered on the floor.
‘Rowdies from the Catholic Young Men’s Society did most of the damage.’
Eva knelt among the debris to salvage any personal items. But nothing here reminded her of the brother she loved. It was like Art’s life was now only lived through slogans. Unsold copies of Moscow News and crudely printed pamphlets had been torn apart in a frenzy.
‘This one is for children.’ Francis gathered up some pages from a magazine called Sovietland. The cover showed five boys playing violins, standing behind another boy at a piano. Eva read the headline: ‘The Bolsheov Corrective Labour Commune for Juvenile Delinquents attracts worldwide interest from educationalists.’
‘Take anything you want,’ the woman said. ‘If you need more copies they’re hanging from a nail in the toilet in the yard.’
Eva searched around, feeling she should take something. A few books had survived the onslaught, including a play entitled Round Heads and Pointed Heads by someone called Bertolt Brecht. Published by International Literature in Moscow it was in English. Eva would have returned it to the heap of papers had she not spotted the translator’s name in small type: Art Goold Verschoyle. Another secret he never mentioned, denying Father the chance to feel proud. She saw Francis pocket a copy of Sovietland.
‘Do you think they might let me visit him in jail?’ she asked the woman.
‘Ask for a warder named McCarthy. He’s a good skin or at least as good as a screw can be. Say Mrs Fleming sent you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And tell Art his neighbours say hello. It’s a lie but it might make him happy. He cares too much for people nobody else gives a toss about.’
Eva and the children trudged along the North Circular Road, avoiding the mess left by beasts being walked from the cattle market down to the Liverpool boat.
She caught the vague impression of a face behind a grille in the huge iron gates of Mountjoy Jail when it was pulled back in response to her knock. It slammed again after she asked for Mr McCarthy and nothing occurred for so long that she thought they had forgotten her. Francis and Hazel felt intimidated by the high walls and foreboding atmosphere. But eventually a small door opened and an elderly man stepped through. Mr McCarthy listened to her story, then shook his head.
‘Visiting is not till the afternoon,’ he said, ‘and Goold will be gone by then.’
‘Set free?’
‘Far from it, mam. I follow the rules but that doesn’t mean I always agree with them. De Valera has introduced internment for subversives. Goold is being transported to the Curragh camp today along with a young Murray Bolger, an IRA bowsie from Wexford. But your brother is no gunman, he’s just a public nuisance. There’s no reason to intern him, unless de Valera wants to stir things up by throwing a few jokers in among the IRA.’
‘How long will he serve?’
‘For as long as there’s trouble in Europe. Dev is taking no risks of any lunatic dragging us into it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The army will be here at eleven to collect them. Hang about and you might sneak a word or two.’
The day had turned bitter, with squalls of rain. Eva was afraid to move away in case the soldiers came early but it was half-eleven before the truck reversed up to the gate. Four soldiers entered the prison, while two more kept watch from the back of the lorry. One winked at Francis. Another soldier got out of the cab to survey the narrow road, his rifle cocked. Children from a row of warders’ cottages came to watch. Hazel stared back at them, feeling humiliated. Finally the door opened and two soldiers led out a handcuffed young man. He laughed, turning back to jeer at a warder.
‘You have your mother’s looks, McCormick. She must have been a Kildare man.’
‘You’ll be wasted in the Curragh, Murray,’ the warder replied. ‘You should be on stage in the Gaiety…with some fecker sawing you in half.’ He stepped aside to let the other soldiers through. ‘Here, don’t forget your comrade.’
The young prisoner threw his eyes to heaven as he climbed onto the truck. Mr McCarthy must have forewarned Art, because Eva’s brother stopped after stepping through the door. Mr McCarthy nudged the soldier Art was handcuffed to. The soldier halted nervously, concerned lest his colleagues object.
Art had been allowed to wear his own clothes. His greatcoat was open over a black suit which – were it not for his high-laced old army boots – would have given him the appearance of a pietistic, down-at-heel cleric. He held himself erect, but had a haunted look as he stared at Eva.
‘Are they treating you okay?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you heard from Brendan?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know where he is? Is he alive or dead?’
‘I…’ He hesitated, with the soldiers growing impatient. ‘I know nothing…for certain.’
He glanced towards the truck as if it were not a vehicle to bear him into incarceration, but one that would allow him to evade her questions.
‘What do you mean, Art? Could he be with your family in Moscow?’
He shook his head, his distress obviously to everyone. The soldiers stood on either side of him, reminding Eva of the crucified robbers. ‘I don’t even know where my wife and child are.’
Eva grew frantic, knowing he was about to be taken away. ‘Write to me in Mayo? Why are they locking you up?’
‘I don’t know. My country is not at war.’
‘And we intend to keep it that way,’ one soldier said, indicating that it was time to board.
Art turned. ‘I don’t refer to Ireland. I’m a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.’
‘It could be worse,’ the soldier scoffed. ‘Your mother could be a Kildare man, like McCormick.’
The soldiers laughed and Eva couldn’t bring herself to ask anything else. No good answer could be forthcoming in such a desolate place. She went to embrace Art, and Mr McCarthy intervened, embarrassed.
‘He’s been searched, mam. They don’t want to have to search him again.’
She stepped back, abashed.
‘I will try my best,’ Art muttered, leaving Eva unclear as to what he meant.
She pushed Hazel and Francis forward and they were allowed to shake their uncle’s hand before the soldiers helped Art up to join the IRA prisoner. Art sat upright with a more militaristic bearing than his guards as the truck drove off.
The children waved. When Eva turned to thank Mr McCarthy, the iron door was already closed behind her.