The Easter Rising 1916 - Molly's Diary (Hands-on History) Read online

  My parents fear he has taken to drinking and gambling, sneaking out at all hours, and that that’s why he’s always hanging around Tom Clarke’s tobacco shop in Little Britain Street. But, Dear Diary, as promised it’s time for me to tell you a big secret . . . the truth is he really has joined Countess Markievicz’s Boy Scouts . . . and as Tom Clarke is not just a tobacconist with a long droopy mustache like a walrus but, as Nancy says, a Fenian bomber who spent fifteen years in jail, well, all I can say is the sparks would be flying if my parents put two and two together!

  Once I ran into Mr Clarke’s shop for a dare. It is quite a fancy shop on the outside with big gold lettering and a swinging sign for “Titbits” magazine. It has a hugely high counter and leaning on it was a portly young gentleman in an overcoat. He was talking to Mr Clarke’s wife, who is a sharp little woman and a bit scary, and he didn’t see me come in.

  I recognised him as Mr Pearse, the schoolmaster who wants everyone to talk Irish and writes poems. His first name is Patrick but lots of people call him by the Irish version of it which is Pádraig. My mother went to see him about Jack going to his school, Saint Enda’s in Rathfarmham, when he was thrown out of Belvedere College. They would have taken him and she thought Mr Pearse has some very good ideas about education. But he was too romantic about ideas of blood sacrifice, she said. I thought this meant Jack would have to kill a goat or something, like Abraham in the bible, but my mother explained it meant dying for your country in a fight. Mr Pearse wants Ireland to be free of English rule even if we all have to die. But who will live in the country then, asks Nancy.

  When Mother heard from Nancy that even some of the Irish nationalists had taken their children from the school, that put paid to that scheme.

  Pearse looked very solemn and a bit squinty-eyed that day in the shop.

  “It is a sacred duty,” he was saying to Mr Clarke’s wife. “The wives and dependents will be in good hands with you.”

  Mrs Clarke looked a bit sad when he said this, so perhaps she has a lot of things to worry about.

  He then noticed that I was standing there like a gobdaw, so he smiled at me, bade Mrs Clarke good day and left.

  Mrs Clarke was arranging the little tricolour badges she sells for a penny that the bakery boy, Tommy, was wearing this morning.

  “Can I help you?” she said smartly.

  “I-I-I was looking for my brother Jack,” I stammered.

  She visibly relaxed. “You’re in the wrong place.”

  I didn’t dare ever go back in again.

  Anto swears all the Clarkes are able to shoot guns, including the children. And they even have a secret hidey-hole in the back of their privy. Anto talks such arrant nonsense, I’m amazed his nose isn’t as long as Pinnochio’s!

  I am sworn not to tell my parents about Jack. Miss Nugent doesn’t know how to control him – or me!

  Dear Diary, I confess I sometimes join him – hitching up my skirts to shimmy up drainpipes and scramble on the roof of the Pillar Café and the Imperial Hotel. It is a bit scary but great fun. I am not as nimble or courageous as Jack and wouldn’t dare do it without him, but now that I am twelve I will try to be braver.

  My mother says I am too devoted to my brother and that I am like his shadow, that if he put his hand in the fire I would too. Alas, that is no longer true. Now he only wants to be with Anto and I am very sad.

  But, in truth, Jack is as important to me as my own heartbeat. If anything ever happened to him, I fear I would pine so much I would die. I think I would do anything for him. I know it is silly but sometimes I dream he gets into trouble, and that only I can save him.

  Miss Nugent has just come in downstairs. She has a face like a fish, bulging eyes, no chin and a mouth clamped shut in disapproval of everything. She has just come back from being a governess in India. That’s why my father employed her – to give her a start, he said. Her real aim, Nancy says, is to trap someone into marrying her. She met some horrid old colonel on the boat who is staying in the same hotel as she is and she is laying siege to him.

  “I would rather teach all the heathens in Asia than even one O’Donovan in this filthy godforsaken backwater,” she says a thousand times a day.

  I’d better go. Miss Nugent is calling me. But I only have to stand her for half an hour for an English lesson.

  Twenty minutes later . . . 10.50 a.m. Saturday morning.

  My bedroom.

  I have a confession to make. I have really upset Miss Nugent even though I promised my mother I’d behave. She kept calling us nasty names and I was nearly in tears because it is my birthday and I want it to be a happy day. I made a hames of my Shakespeare quotations.

  “Now complete,” she instructed, “‘Cry havoc and let slip the . . . ’”

  “Cup of tea?” I said.

  “‘Dogs of war’, Miss Idle,” she growled at me and frowned at Jack. ‘ “‘Time and the hour runs through the roughest . . .’”

  “Trousers,” said Jack, in a devil-may-care voice.

  “Does it now?” her eyes bulged at him. “‘Roughest day’, Mr Dunce! Roughest trousers indeed!” And her stomach growled.

  She suffers from the dyspepsia and her stomach makes all manner of growling noises as if she has swallowed a small dog.

  I thought her stomach was making her cross. So I tried to be kind to her and fetched her a glass of liver salts.

  Well, she nearly choked when she tasted it. Her face turned bright red and she roared at me: “You stupid booby! Are you trying to kill me?”

  “But I read it in my First Aid book,” I said, fighting back the tears.

  She rushed into the kitchen. I followed her and saw to my horror that I had used the salt instead of the ‘liver salts’. She held it up and shoved it near my face.

  “You did that on purpose! Or else you can’t even read.”

  “I was just trying to nurse you – it said it in my First Aid Book . . .” My voice was trembling and I could hardly say the words properly.

  “Nurse my foot! I hope you never get near real patients, for you will kill them all,” she cried.

  She grabbed her coat and things and ran out the door, saying I had made her ill, and went home in a dreadful temper.

  I was distraught. Not just because she thought I had tried to poison her, but also because I’d been careless and didn’t pay attention and make sure I was giving her the right medicine. Perhaps she is right and I would be a terrible nurse, never mind a doctor. Even Mother says I am a bit slapdash.

  Jack dried my tears. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She didn’t sound that sick to me. She was just looking for an excuse to make a quick exit.”

  We were all alone then, Jack and I, Mother having nipped out on another mission of mercy. He went up to the attic to tinker with his tin soldiers and I came up to my room to write this.

  11.45 a.m. – still Saturday 22nd April and my birthday!

  My bedroom.

  Because Jack was being nice to me again, I went up to his large attic bedroom and asked him to explain to me who all the different armies were.

  He smiled at me and pulled my pigtail in a friendly way. Then he dragged the counterpane off his bed. It was the beige tasselled one with our faint footprints from the time we’d jumped on the bed in muddy boots. There are marks all over the grey rug too. Nancy could never quite get the stains out!

  “Imagine this is Great Britain,” he said, laying it on the floor. Then he took off his pillowcase and placed it to the left of the counterpane, “and this is little Ireland.” He put a pile of soldiers in England, then the group he’d been tinkering with on the pillowcase. I noticed they were larger than the others and he had painted their uniforms green.

  “And the rug over there is Europe, where the Kaiser is fighting everyone,” I said.

  Jack laughed and put some of his German tin soldiers on the rug. “Look, they’re just invading France.” France was a faint footprint of Jack’s. “And there is little Catholic Belgium which has been
invaded by the Germans.” He pointed to another smaller stain above and to the right of France. Then he picked up some of his redcoat English soldiers. “Now the English are going to help the Frenchies and little Catholic Belgium.” He made the Germans and the English bash into each other.

  “Ah, but there aren’t enough English soldiers,” I said. “They need some of the Irish ones.”

  “Well spotted,” he said and walked over on his hands to the pillowcase of Ireland and did a belly-flop down, nosing some of his soldiers.

  He has so many of them: Napoleonic, English cavalry, Grenadier Guards, American Revolution. Most are about three inches high but his Prussian infantry are bigger. I think these are the ones he has turned into an Irish army.

  “But not so fast,” he said in a funny voice. “It’s a little bit more complicated in Ireland.” He juggled soldiers in the air and, catching them nimbly, positioned three different groups on the pillowcase.

  He stood upright again and pointed to the first group at the top. “These are the Ulster Volunteers. They want to fight in the war because they want to stay in the United Kingdom.” He made them jump over to Europe.

  I drummed on the floor and hummed a marching tune, “The Minstrel Boy”, as he skipped them along.

  He pointed to a pile in the middle of Ireland. “These are the Irish Volunteers who believed in Ireland’s right to independence. But at the start of the war against Germany, most of them decided that they would help the Empire, if they would get Home Rule after the war and those were then called the National Volunteers.”

  “And what is Home Rule exactly?” I asked.

  “It means the Irish will get their own parliament, like they had in the eighteenth century.”

  He marched them away in a line over to the counterpane, leaving behind a few of the larger-sized ones whose uniforms he had painted green.

  “So this left a small group of Irish Volunteers who said: ‘We are not going to fight your war, Mr King. In fact, we want nothing to do with you and your imperialist ways. Up the Republic!’” He formed them into a triangular squadron on the pillowcase with a flourish. “Now the Irish Volunteers aren’t the only ones not too keen on the Empire. The Irish Citizen Army don’t want to fight for England either because they were formed by the trade unions to fight for the rights of the workers and the poor. Now where are they hiding?”

  He pretended to search his pockets, then magicked another two green soldiers from behind my ear and put them down on the Irish pillowcase. It’s a magic trick he’s been trying to perfect for a while. And it was thrilling to see him pull it off. He gave me a conspiratorial wink.

  “They’re the ones from Liberty Hall, who will fight for neither King nor Kaiser,” I said.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  “But where are the Fenians?” I asked.

  He took his old teddy down from a shelf. “Why, the Fenians are a group of old fellows, like Tom Clarke, who have held the flame for a free Ireland. By force if necessary.” Teddy too was plonked down on the pillowcase and I propped Jack’s slide rule against him, so he is armed to the paws! I saw a little tricolour badge on Jack’s dressing table and made him smile when I pinned it on Teddy’s ear.

  “And the Fianna Boy Scouts?”

  “They are the youths of Ireland who are learning the ideals of a glorious future,” he said.

  I ran to my mother’s room and returned with a couple of little bisque baby dolls of porcelain that she collects, about three inches high. I added them to his soldiers.

  “They are the little baby soldiers,” I said.

  “Waah, waah, waah!” Jack cried. “Give us our own country or we’ll grow up to fight you!”

  We laughed and laughed. I was so pleased to have made him happy that it made me forget my worries. I didn’t want to spoil the mood by questioning him too closely about what he gets up to himself.

  “Now put Mother’s dolls back, Molly dear,” he said to me, turning all serious. “There is something I have to do.” He ushered me to the door but, before he closed it, he looked me straight in the eye. “If I asked you to do something for me, without asking any questions, would you do it, Molly?”

  I nodded eagerly, but then bit my lip. “It depends. I’m twelve now and Mother say I’m not to run around after you any more.”

  “I just want you to check the names of some of the equipment Father has in the Instrument Room,” he said casually.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Father is always trying to interest me and I’d like to learn them and surprise him,” he said. “And I’m not very good at writing or spelling, so you’d make a much better job of writing them down.”

  I embraced him. “Of course,” I said, pleased that he wanted to impress Father and had asked my help. He handed me a piece of paper with the names on, all ink-stained and crossed out.

  But then he pushed me out of the room gently, and I felt all alone again.

  So on a fresh piece of paper I corrected his shockingly bad spelling and wrote out some of the names of the equipment in the Instrument Room: fast-speedduplex repeaters, duplex Wheatstones, line concentrators and so on. I’m not sure I got the spellings completely right but certainly my attempt was better than Jack’s.

  Jack’s door was locked so I shoved the note under his door.

  It makes me a bit sad that he has secrets from me, but I have to learn to be more grown up, as Mother says.

  Besides, I can have my own secrets now, in my very own diary. And I have cheered up, looking at all the bustle out the window.

  Our skinny house of four stories is above Richard Allen Tailors, next door to O’Farrell’s Tobacco Importers. Mr Allen provides outfits for all the servants and so I know every maid in Dublin from meeting them coming in and out. We are in the same block as Noblett’s Confectionary (yum!) on the corner, then Dunn’s Hatters and Clerys department store and the Imperial Hotel above it. Clerys has enormous plate-glass windows.

  The rooftop of our terrace block is another world. It frightens me when Jack leaps from chimney to parapet, the low wall at the side. There is a small pitched roof and raised stone capping at the front of the building so you don’t fall off, and quite a lot of space at the back for lounging about. There are several big chimneys with rows of pots. One of them bears an advert for Will’s Tobacco. Further along our terrace, the Imperial Hotel is as fancy as a giant iced cake and is much grander than its neighbours. But you can climb a metal fire escape to get up there. Once on the roof, it is quite a large flat expanse with several more tall rows of chimney pots where we like to play hide and seek. Then we can see the copper dome of the DBC on the next block quite easily.

  My father likes to live near his work but that is not the only reason my parents like the city. They say it is easier for couples of “mixed marriages” – that is when two people of different faiths marry each other. I have heard my mother discuss it with her Catholic dressmaker friend who is married to a Protestant tea-traveller. They say how sad it is that some so-called Christians disapprove and bicker over what religion the children are brought up in. That it’s worse in the suburbs because people are all in each other’s pockets. At least in the city people don’t know your business and there’s more intermarriage. My father is also a Catholic. His people are from Cork, but he was born in Goa in India. People think that is strange enough, never mind my mother being a Quaker, where they don’t even have priests! Jack and I are being brought up in both religions because my mother says it’s all the one God.

  I have never met my parents’ families as they were both cut off when they eloped. How romantic! She was training to be a nurse and he was in the army, Royal Engineers Corps, then. My father says Mother is a frustrated nurse, which is why she looks after all the poor people and is so active in the First Aid training. She is a trainer for the Saint John’s Ambulance Brigade,

  But, truth be told, we all love Dublin city. It is teeming with life even though it is noisy and messy and some of the people
who live here are poor and unfortunate.

  I don’t miss not knowing most of our relatives, because there is so much going on under our noses! Nelson’s Pillar is the very centre and Dublin spins around it like a wheel around an axle. It has 138 steps inside and is 135 feet high, almost as high as the width of the street and more than twice the height of the surrounding buildings, according to Jack. From the top you can see all the rooftops that Jack likes to dance across, and the Georgian Squares, the green dome of Rathmines church, the roof of the ‘Pepper Canister’ church, the spires of Saint Patrick’s and Christchurch Cathedrals, the green of the Phoenix Park, the biggest park in Europe. All set against the purple backdrop of the Dublin Mountains to the south. And, dividing the city, the broad stinky River Liffey that flows at the bottom of Sackville Street to the Irish Sea.

  There is all manner of diversion here. Like on Henry Street, there is the Waxworks where the displays are as good as Madame Tussaud’s in London. They have the Prime Minister David Lloyd George and King George the Fourth. Also some old fusty ones like Wolfe Tone, whoever he was. And not just wax but also visiting real-life curiosities. Here I have seen Anita the Living Doll – just twenty-six inches tall – and Marcella the Midget Queen who sings all kinds of songs.

  Real people, I’m telling you, not waxworks! Just last month I saw the one-hundred-year-old Bushmen who were wild and dancing. My mother does not approve of this. But I am great friends with Mr James the manager who lets me in free. Normally it would cost a penny, so I am saving my mother and father a great deal of money every time I visit.