In the early ‘eighties there lived in the Cloonalla district a small farmer named Peter Walsh, who was what is generally called in the west a bad farmer, which is simply the Irish way of saying that he was lazy and good-for-nothing, and for several years Walsh had been in the clutches of the Cloonalla gombeen man, the local big shopkeeper.
The ways of the gombeen man are quite simple and usually most successful, the success largely depending on a run of bad potato crops, as generally after two successive failures the majority of the farmers in a poor mountainous district have no money at all. They are thus forced to go to the gombeen wallah, who advances them so much money, according to the size of their farm and their capacity for drink, as a mortgage on the farm at a high rate of interest. But instead of paying them money he gives credit for goods, and there is a verbal agreement that he will not foreclose as long as the farmer deals solely with him and makes no bones about the prices he is charged. Formerly this was the terrible millstone 209which used to hang for life round the necks of many western peasants.
However, Walsh’s millstone troubled him not one bit, and he “staggered” along for several years until there came a sequence of three bad and indifferent crops, which finished him completely. Seeing that Walsh was not going to make any effort, the gombeen man closed on the farm, and Peter, the wife, and their one child, Bridget, aged three years, left Ireland for America, illogically cursing the British Government for their own sins and those of the gombeen devil.
Now the gombeen man had no use for Peter’s farm himself, so he proceeded to make Peter’s brother, Michael, drunk one Saturday night in his shop, and made the farm over to him with the former conditions, not forgetting to double the mortgage.
In due course Michael died without kith or kin saving Bridget, now a hospital nurse in New York, who one day received a letter from a Ballybor solicitor informing her of her uncle’s death, and that she was the sole heiress to his two farms in Cloonalla, and asking for instructions.
From her youth upwards Nurse Bridget had heard nothing but abuse of the so-called English tyranny in Ireland—in fact, up to the time when she went to be trained hospital nurse, her only knowledge of England and Ireland was the thousand and one supposed wrongs which Ireland had suffered at the hands of England since the days of Cromwell, and 210her one ambition in life was to see the downfall of the British Empire, and with that the freedom of her fatherland. In America, the Irish children find plenty of mentors of hate of England, both among their own people and the Germans.
In time, when Bridget began to earn some money as a nurse, she joined every Irish anti-British society, secret and otherwise, she could, and at the time of her leaving the States to take over her uncle’s farms possessed more wonderful and weird badges and medallions than she could conveniently wear at once: incidentally the societies relieved her of most of her earnings “to provide powder and shot for ould Ireland.”
On the liner, Bridget met many of her race, mostly men and women who had worked hard for some years in the States and saved enough money to return to Ireland, where they hoped to buy a small farm or shop and never to wander any more. One and all were longing to be in Ireland once again, and not one ever mentioned a word of the “brutal English tyranny” until Bridget started the subject.
Bridget landed at Queenstown, made her way to Cork, and set out on the long and tedious cross-country railway journey to the west. At the best of times the journey is a slow one, but during 1920 it became much worse owing to the great uncertainty of any train reaching its destination. Trains were even known to stand in a station for days on end while the driver, the stoker, the guard, 211and the station employees argued and re-argued what they would do and what they would not do.
Twice during the journey Bridget had glimpses of the brutal British soldiery when two military parties wished to travel on the train, and the driver and guard refused to start until the armed assassins of the British Government left. At first Bridget was slightly confused; no doubt the soldiers were terrible blackguards, but at the time they seemed to be quiet and inoffensive, and she remembered frequently having seen American soldiers in the trains in the States, and the drivers and guards there made no objection.
However, a fellow-passenger explained to her that the soldiers used the Irish railways to go from one part of the country to another in order to murder the unfortunate soldiers of the Republican Army, and that the guard and driver, as became good citizens and soldiers of the Irish Republic, were quite right to refuse to aid and abet the British by carrying them on the train.
At a junction some thirty miles from Ballybor she changed into a composite train carrying passengers and goods, and soon after leaving the junction the train pulled up suddenly in a cutting, and there was loud shouting and firing. Bridget was greatly alarmed and excited, thinking that she would now see the British troops commit some of the terrible crimes she had heard so much about in the States—she had heard nothing of the crimes of the I.R.A.
212It takes a long time in the west of Ireland to do anything, and it was quite twenty minutes before Bridget realised that this was a hold-up by the I.R.A., and that all the passengers were to get out and line up at the top of the cutting. The confusion then became terrific, half the passengers going up one side of the cutting, and the remainder up the other.
Wild-looking masked bandits then started shouting to the people to come down and go to the other side, whereupon a general post ensued.
Finally, the whole lot was collected together, searched, and at last allowed to take their seats in the train again; but the performance was not by any means over yet. Next, the waggons were all broken open, the contents thrown on the line, and then returned except Belfast merchandise, which was made into a heap—coffins, cases of jam and tea, boxes of linen, &c.—sprinkled with petrol, and then set on fire.
Bridget arrived at Ballybor on a summer’s evening, and at once set out for Cloonalla. Ballybor appeared a mean and dirty little town to her American eyes, and she hoped for better things at Cloonalla—a good hotel and decent stores. After an hour and a half’s drive the carman pulled up outside Cloonalla Chapel, and asked his fare where she wanted to go to. Not realising where she was, Bridget replied, to Cloonalla, the best hotel in Cloonalla, only to learn to her astonishment that the place boasted only one shop and no hotel 213of any kind. And in the end she was thankful to accept the hospitality of a farmer’s wife, and share a stuffy bed with the woman’s daughter.
Bridget received a shock when she saw her uncle’s house—she said that they wouldn’t put a pig in it in America—and the idea she had had of settling down there quickly vanished. However, she determined to stay on awhile in Ireland, and help to the best of her ability the famous soldiers of the I.R.A. (she had not realised yet that the bandits who had held up the train were the famous soldiers) of whom she had heard so much in America.
On visiting the solicitor in Ballybor, she found that her uncle had left her a few hundred pounds, and this she gave to the man Hanley, with whom she lodged, to buy cattle with to stock her farm.
As soon as Bridget had settled down she found ample scope for her political ambitions both in Cloonalla and Ballybor, where most of the young people of her own age found talking sedition far easier and more amusing than hard work; and as everybody seemed to have money to burn, she had a great time—political meetings, drilling, picnics, and dances. And after joining the Cumann na Ban she volunteered for active service with the local company of the I.R.A., little knowing what was before her.
At first the game was amusing enough, teaching the young men the rudiments of first aid, and lecturing to the girls and youths of 214Cloonalla in the school-house in the evening, followed by dancing until the early hours of the morning; and probably Bridget would have gone no further than this but for the unfortunate arrival of two professional gunmen in Cloonalla, who had been sent from Dublin to carry out the usual series of outrages and then to vanish before the storm burst.
The gunmen came with a list of local undesirables (from the I.R.A. point of view) to be removed—many of the names had probably been given out of private spite through the means of anonymous letters, a very favourite practice in Ireland—and at once proceeded to work, or rather to see that the Cloonalla Volunteers did the dirty work.
The following week seemed to Bridget like a horrible nightmare, starting with the murder of ex-soldiers, who paid the full penalty of being so stupid as to believe that the British Government would protect its friends and supporters in Ireland, and culminating in the revolting crime of the murder of a Protestant clergyman, who was seventy-nine years of age.
Early in the morning, before the household was up, the old man heard a loud knocking at the hall door, and on coming downstairs found the usual party of armed and masked men, who ordered him to follow them. He did so, and had no sooner reached the road than they shot him dead,—to be found by his old wife—the servants dared not leave the house—lying in the middle of the road in a pool of blood.
215That night the gunmen vanished, and with them the orgy of crime ceased for a time at any rate. There is no doubt that these revolting and apparently purposeless murders are instigated by the I.R.A., but nevertheless they are carried out by the peasants in most cases, and they will have to bear the stigma now and always. Under a determined leader they appear to take kindly to “political murder.”
Bridget was physically and mentally sick with horror, and made up her mind to return to the States as soon as she could dispose of her farms, and to this end bicycled into Ballybor to arrange with an auctioneer to sell the farms for her by public auction at the earliest possible date. The following day the auctioneer inspected the farms, and declared that she ought to get at least a thousand pounds ............