No Comebacks

We Dubliners tend to be rather proud of the place. We would prefer foreigners, even garrison troops, to appreciate our city's qualities.

The earlier part of ex-Private Price's career came out like the latter part, very, very, slowly. He had been born in the Rhondda in 1897, of very poor parents. Life had been hard and bleak. In 1914, at the age of seventeen, more to secure food, clothing and barracks to live in than out of patriotic fervour, he had joined the Army. He had never gone beyond private soldier.

For twelve months he had been in training camps as others went off to the front in Flanders, and at an army stores depot in Wales. In late 1915 he had been posted to the garrison forces in Ireland, quartered in the chill of barracks at Islandbridge on the south side of the River Liffey in Dublin.

Life, I had to suppose, had been boring enough for him to have said he did not enjoy Dublin. Sparse barrack dormitories, low pay even for those days, and an endless, mindless round of spit and polish, buttons, boots and beds; of guard duty on freezing nights and picquets in the streaming rain. And for leisure ... not much of that either on a soldier's pay. Beer in the canteen, little or no contact with a Catholic population. He had probably been glad to have been posted away after two years. Or was he ever glad or sad for anything, this lumbering, slow man?

'Did nothing ever happen of interest?' I asked him finally, in some desperation.

'Only once,' he replied at last.

'And what was that?'

'An execution,' he said, absorbed in his soup.

Bernadette put down her spoon and sat rigid. There was a chill in the air. Only Madame, who understood not a word, and her husband, who was too insensitive, were oblivious. I should definitely have left well alone.

&nbs

p; After all, in those days a lot of people were executed. Common murderers were hanged at Mountjoy. But hanged. By prison warders. Would they need the soldiery for that? And British soldiers would be executed too, for murder and rape, under military regulations after court martial. Would they be hanged or shot? I did not know.

'Do you remember when it was, this execution?' I asked.

Bernadette sat frozen.

Mr Price raised his limpid blue eyes to mine. Then he shook his head. 'Long time ago,' he said. I thought he might be lying, but he was not. He had simply forgotten.

'Were you in the firing party?' I asked.

He waited the usual period while he thought. Then he nodded.

I wondered what it must be like to be a member of a firing party; to squint along the sights of a rifle towards another human being, tethered to a post 60 feet away; to pick out the white patch over the heart and hold the foresight steady on that living man; on the word of command to squeeze the trigger, hear the bang, feel the thud of recoil; to see the bound figure beneath the chalk-white face jerk and slump in the ropes. Then go back to barracks, clean the rifle and have breakfast. Thank God I had never known nor ever would.

'Try to remember when it was,' I urged him.

He did try. He really did. You could almost feel the effort. Eventually he said, '1916. In the summer I think.'

I leaned forward and touched his forearm. He raised his eyes to mine. There was no devious-ness in them, just patient inquiry.

'Do you remember ... try to remember ... who was the man you shot?'

But it was too much. However he tried, he could not recall. He shook his head at last.

'Long time ago,' he said.

Bernadette rose abruptly. She flashed a strained, polite smile at Madame.

'I'm going to bed,' she told me. 'Don't be long.'

I went up twenty minutes later. Mr Price was in his armchair by the fire, not smoking, not reading. Staring at the flames. Quite content.

The room was in darkness and I was not going to fiddle with the paraffin lamp. I undressed by the light of the moon through the window and got into bed.

Bernadette was lying quiet but I knew she was awake. And what she was thinking. The same as me. Of that bright spring of 1916 when on Easter Sunday a group of men dedicated to the then unpopular notion that Ireland should be independent of Britain had stormed the Post Office and several other large buildings.

Of the hundreds of troops being brought in to flush them out with rifle and artillery fire — but not Private Price in his boring Islandbridge barracks, or he would have mentioned the occasion. Of the smoke and the noise, the rubble in the streets, the dead and the dying, Irish and British. And of the rebels being finally led out of the Post Office defeated and disowned. Of the strange green-orange-white tricolour they had hoisted atop the building being contemptuously hauled down to be replaced again by the Union Jack of Britain.

They do not teach it now in schools of course, for it forms no part of the necessary myths, but it is a fact for all that; when the rebels were marched in chains to Dublin docks en route to jail in Liverpool across the water, the Dubliners, and most among them the Catholic poor, threw refuse and curses at them for bringing so much trouble upon Dublin's head.