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 for her interest in each farm, and fixed a near date for the auction, though he was very doubtful if the I.R.A. would permit it, and advised her to try and obtain their consent. But the last thing in the world Bridget wanted was to have any further dealings with the I.R.A., and the auctioneer left promising to do his best.
That night after the Hanleys and Bridget had gone to bed they received a visit from the captain of the Cloonalla Volunteers, who wanted to know if it was true that Bridget was going to try and sell her farms by public auction. Bridget told him that it was quite true, and that she was going to return to America. Whereupon he told her that the 216I.R.A. would not allow this, and that if she wanted to dispose of her land a Sinn Fein Court would value it, and the Republican Government would then take it over and pay her in Dail Eireann Bonds (to be redeemed at their face value when Ireland is free and the Republic established), and after telling her to stop the auction he left.
In a few days Bridget received an order to attend a Sinn Fein Arbitration Court in Cloonalla Chapel at night, where the judges valued her farms at one hundred pounds each (loud applause in Court by the men who hoped to get the farms), and ordered her to hand over the land the following day to the Cloonalla Volunteer captain, who had every intention of keeping the farms himself.
Bridget protested loudly that she was a citizen of the United States, that the farms were hers, and that if this was a free country like America she was entitled to get the full market value for them, which she had been told was quite two thousand pounds; and lastly, that she had proved herself a good patriot, and burst into tears.
All of no avail—the judges gave her three days to get rid of her cattle and hand over the land, at the end of which time if she had not complied she was to be deported, and her farms and cattle confiscated.
Bridget returned to the Hanleys’ house to find her boxes packed and dumped in the road, together with her bicycle, and the door of the house locked, and this in the middle of 217the night. After trying in vain to gain admittance she sat down on one of her boxes and started to cry.
Towards dawn she again made a piteous appeal to the Hanleys to be allowed to stay in their house for the rest of the night, and that she would leave the following day; and for answer Mrs Hanley cursed her, and warned her that if she was not gone before daylight her hair would be cut off, and “God only knew what else would happen to her.” In a blind terror she mounted her bicycle and rode madly into Ballybor, where she had to wait some hours in the streets before she could gain admittance to a lodging-house.
Bridget was made of the right stuff, and with the daylight and the contact with friendly human beings her courage returned, and she went to see the auctioneer once more, but received cold comfort. The man had been warned not to hold the auction, but was willing to, provided he had police protection (he saw his trade slipping away if he did not), and suggested that she should go and see the D.I.
Blake listened patiently to her tale of woe—he already knew the part she had played with the Cloonalla Volunteers, but liked the girl’s looks and her pluck, and at the end promised her protection for the auction, but warned her that he could not protect her afterwards, and advised her to get out of the country as soon as she could.
Bridget then hired a car and drove out to 218Cloonalla to try and collect her belongings. The boxes were still there by the roadside, but empty. And on going on to her farms she found that the fences and gates were smashed and her cattle gone. She tried in vain to get information of them, but found that not a man, woman, or child would tell her anything.
Returning to Ballybor, she again saw Blake, who promised to send out police to try and find her cattle. The following day the police went out to Cloonalla, rounded up the first score of men they met, made them build up the fences, mend the gates, and lastly, gave them two hours to return Bridget’s cattle.
The I.R.A. now turned the full blast of that potent weapon, the boycott, on to the unfortunate Bridget. Not a soul would or rather dare speak to her—at any rate in public. Little children meeting her in the streets or country roads ran away, fearing lest she might cast an evil eye on them. Shopkeepers were forbidden to supply any goods to her, and the lodging-house people would have put her out on the streets but for the interference of the D.I. By this time Blake was determined to see her through, and when the auctioneer attempted to rat, made him think better of it and stick to his agreement with Bridget.
The day of the auction arrived, and with it the biggest crowd Cloonalla had ever seen. In fact, so dense was the throng that when Blake drew up with the auctioneer and Bridget, he was afraid to let his men near the 219crowd lest they might be rushed. Standing up in a Crossley, he ordered the people through a megaphone to form three sides of a square facing the road, and, as soon as they had complied with his order, he told the auctioneer to get out and carry on with his work on the fourth side of the square. This he did, and, after describing the value and virtues of the farms in the usual flowery language of his kind, asked for a bid.
There followed a deadly silence of fully two minutes. Again the auctioneer called for a bid, and yet a third time—not a man in the huge crowd dared open his mouth. Land-hunger is the predominant trait in a western peasant’s character, and many men in that crowd would have risked their souls for Bridget’s farms; but so great was the power, or rather the fear of the I.R.A., that not a single man dared speak.
Seeing that it was useless to go on with the farce, Blake ordered the auctioneer to return to the car. At once the crowd broke with an angry roar, and made an ugly rush towards the road, but a volley of blank in the air quickly stopped them, and they turned to scatter in the opposite direction, while the police party returned to Ballybor.
That night, when she went to bed in the lodging-house, Bridget locked her door and piled all the furniture she could against it. About 2 A.M. some one knocked loudly at her door and bade her open, but she lay still and gave no answer. She could then hear the 220raiders entering the other rooms of the house, and the screams of inmates, followed by the curses of the raiders.
The girl lay shaking in bed, knowing that it was only a question of time before they came again, and when they did it gave her almost a sense of relief. This time they did not knock, and she could hear whispering, followed by a man wearing rubber soles running down the passage, and then a crash as he hurled himself against her door.
The door was rotten and gave, but the furniture still held it up, and the other men then put their shoulders against it, and finally it gave way altogether, and the whole lot pitched into her room in a heap on the floor.
As Bridget screamed, the men flashed their electric torches on to her, and by the light she could see that they all wore painted white masks, which completely covered their faces except the eyes and mouth. One great brute then seized her by the hair, and dragged her screaming down the stairs and into the street, where the others held her while the big man shaved her hair off with a razor. They then lashed her wrists and ankles, gagged her, and flung her in her nightdress into a waiting Ford, which disappeared into the night.
A police patrol, guided by the screams, arrived on the scene just as the Ford was disappearing in the direction of Castleport. Sending a constable back to the barracks for a car and more men, the sergeant in charge searched the lodging-house, only to raise a 221fresh alarm among the terrified inmates, most of whom were under their beds.
In a few minutes the car arrived, and the police raced off after the Ford as fast as the Crossley would travel.
For some time the police had had a strong suspicion that a creamery about half-way between Ballybor and Castleport had been frequently used by the I.R.A. as a detention prison, and as they drew near the place they saw lights disappear from the windows.
After surrounding the building, the sergeant knocked at the door and received no answer. Being afraid to delay lest they might be attacked, he told his men to take one of the two thick iron-bound planks carried under the body of the Crossley, and used for crossing trenches on the roads, and to use it as a battering-ram on the door. At the second blow the door splintered, and a third made a hole large enough for the police to pass in.
The sergeant now advanced into the building, revolver in one hand and torch in the other, and had nearly reached the back when shots and shouts were heard, and at the same time he saw a man disappearing through a door ahead of him and fired.
On reaching the door he was met by his own men, who said that three men had tried to escape that way, and that they had shot two, the third escaping.
They then searched the building, and found Bridget lying in a kind of coal-cellar, half-dead from fright and exposure, and, wrapping 222her in a policeman’s greatcoat, took her back to the lodging-house, leaving a guard there for the rest of the night.
The next day Bridget fled to England, to return to America from Southampton. Nothing in this world would have induced her to spend another night in Ireland.
She left the sale of her farms in the hands of the auctioneer, who, to his great surprise, some time afterwards found a buyer at a low figure in a man who came from the north.
The police saw the northerner into his new home, and left him there. The following morning the man staggered into the Ballybor Barracks, and when he had sufficiently recovered, he told Blake that soon after he had gone to sleep he was awakened by volumes of smoke, and on getting out of bed found that the house was on fire. Seizing his clothes, he just managed to get out before the blazing roof fell in.
Outside he was met by a roaring crowd, who beat him nearly to death with sticks, and while he lay on the ground he could hear the screams of his horses and cattle being burnt to death in the blazing outbuildings. The crowd then left him for dead, well pleased with their night’s work. After some hours he recovered and managed to crawl into Ballybor.