No Comebacks

It would probably have ended there but for the stupid, crazy decision of the British authorities to execute the sixteen leaders of the rising between 3 and 12 May at Kilmainham Jail. Within a year the whole mood had changed; in the election of 1918 the independence party swept the country. After two years of guerrilla war, independence was finally granted.

Bernadette stirred beside me. She was rigid, in the grip of her thoughts. I knew what they would be. They would be of those chill May mornings when the nail-studded boots of the firing parties rang out as they marched from the barracks to the j ail in the darkness before dawn. Of the soldiers waiting patiently in the great courtyard of the jail until the prisoner was led out to the post up against the far wall.

And of her uncle. She would be thinking of him in the warm night. Her father's elder brother, worshipped but dead before she was born, refusing to speak English to the jailers, talking only in Irish to the court martial, head high, chin up, staring down the barrels as the sun tipped the horizon. And of the others ... O'Connell, Clarke, MacDonough, and Padraig Pearse. Of course, Pearse.

I grunted with exasperation at my own foolishness. All this was nonsense. There were others, rapists, looters, murderers, deserters from the British Army, also shot after court martial. It was like that in those days. There was a whole range of crimes for which the death penalty was mandatory. And there was a war on, making more death penalties.

'In the summer,' Price had said. That was a long period. From May to late September. Those were great events in the history of a small nation, those of the spring of 1916. Dumb privates have no part to play in great events. I banished the thoughts and went to sleep.

Our waking was early, for the sun streamed through the window shortly after dawn and the farmyard fowl made enough noise to rouse the dead. We both washed, and I shaved as best I could, in the water from the ewer, and threw the residue out of the window into the yard. It would ease the parched earth. We dressed in our clothes of yesterday and descended.

Madame Price had bowls of steaming milky coffee on the kitchen table for each of us, with bread and white butter, which went down very well. Of her husband there was no sign. I had hardly finished my coffee when Madame Price beckoned me through to the front of the farmhouse. There in the cow-patted front yard off the road stood my Triumph and a man who turned out to be the garage owner. I thought Mr Price might help me with the translations, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The mechanic was voluble in his explanations, of which I understood not a word but one; 'carburateur' he kept repeating, then blew as through a tube to remove a particle of muck. So that was it; so simple. I vowed to take a course in basic motor mechanics. He asked a thousand francs, which in those days before de Gaulle invented the new franc was about a pound sterling. He handed me the car keys and bade me goodbye.

I settled up with Madame Price, another thousand francs (you really could take a holiday abroad for little money in those days) and summoned Bernadette. We stowed the grip and climbed aboard. The engine started at once.

With a final wave Madame disappeared inside her house. I backed the car once and turned for the highway running past the entrance.

I had just reached the road when I was stopped by a roaring shout. Through the open window of the driver's side I saw Mr Price running towards us across the yard, twirling his great axe around his head like a toothpick.

My jaw dropped, for I thought he was about to attack us. He could have chopped the car in bits, had he a mind to. Then I saw his face was alight with elation. The shout and the waving axe were to attract our attention before we drove off.

Panting, he arrived at the window and his great moon face appeared in the aperture.

'I've remembered,' he said, 'I've remembered.'

I was taken aback. He was beaming like a child who has done something very special to please his parents.

'Remembered?' I asked.

He nodded. 'Remembered,' he repeated. 'Who it was I shot that morning. It was a poet called Pearse.'

Bernadette and I sat stunned, immobile, expressionless, staring at him without reaction. The elation drained from his face. He tried so hard to please, and had failed. He had taken my question very seriously, and had wracked his poor brain all night for some piece of information that was for him utterly meaningless anyway. Ten seconds earlier it had finally come to him after so much effort. He had caught us just in time and we were staring at him with neither expression nor words.

His shoulders slumped. He stood upright, turned and went back to his billets of firewood behind the shed. Soon I heard the cadence of thuds resume.

Bernadette sat staring out through the front windscreen. She was sheet-white, Bps tight. I had a mental image of a big, lumbering boy from the Rhondda Valley drawing one rifle and a single round of live ball from the quartermaster in a barracks at Islandbridge all those years ago.

Bernadette spoke. 'A monster,' she said.

I glanced across the yard to where the axe rose and fell, held by a man who with a single shot had started a war and a nation on its road to independence.

'No, girl,' I said, 'no monster. Just a soldier doing his duty.'

I let in the clutch and we started down the road to Bergerac.

A CAREFUL MAN

TIMOTHY HANSON WAS A MAN who approached the problems of life with a calm and measured tread. He prided himself that this habitual approach, of calm analysis followed by the selection of the most favourable option and finally the determined pursuit of that choice, had brought him in the prime of middle age to the wealth and standing that he now enjoyed.

That crisp April morning he stood on the top step of the house in Devonshire Street, heartland of London's medical elite, and considered himself as the gleaming black door closed deferentially behind him.

The consultant physician, an old friend who had been his personal doctor for years, would have been a model of concern and regret even with a stranger. With a friend it had been even harder for him. His anguish had evidently been greater than that of his patient.

'Timothy, only three times in my career have I had to impart news like this,' he had said, his flattened hands resting on the folder of X-rays and reports before him. 'I ask you to believe me when I say it is the most dreadful experience in any medical man's life.'

Hanson had indicated that he did indeed believe him.