Patricia Falvey (18 page)

I was stunned. My thoughts and emotions jumbled themselves up, and I could not wait to get out the door to clear my head. I allowed my sharp tongue to come to the rescue.

“And what makes you think I know how to write?” I said. “After all, I’m just a poor mill girl.”

He smiled. “Ah, no, Miss O’Neill. You are much more than that.”

As he walked off down Hill Street, I made a big show of buttoning Paddy’s coat and fiddling with his cap to let him get well ahead of me. I watched him until he disappeared into the crowds. He did not look back.

T
he war was supposed to be over by Christmas. All the news reports said so, and they were all wrong. By 1915, Japan had allied with Great Britain, and Turkey had joined the Germans in the conflict. Fighting was taking place on land and sea. It was clear the war was going to continue for a long time. In May, the fight struck close to home. First, the luxury passenger liner the
Lusitania
was sunk by the Germans off the coast of County Cork, and then London was bombed by the German Zeppelin airships. By 1916, the British government introduced conscription for men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one, although, thank God, it did not extend to Ireland. I assumed that Frankie must be fighting, but when P.J. came with word that Frank said he hadn’t signed up on the grounds that he was the sole support of his sick mother, I went into a rage. I had seen neither skin nor hair of my brother since that one time at the Fitzwilliam stables. Now I wanted to go back there and confront him. How dare he say he was supporting Ma! When I calmed down I changed my mind, of course, but I still didn’t understand why he would prefer life with our grandfather over going into the army. Frankie had always loved the notion of battles—he would have been in his element in the middle of a war.

In July 1916, one of the bloodiest battles of the war took place in France: the Battle of the Somme. Twenty thousand British troops perished on the first day. The newspapers were full of the story. Almost six thousand of those killed had been members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. The sorrow in Ulster was so great that the Orange Order, a Protestant organization, canceled their annual celebrations commemorating the 1690 victory of King William, Prince of Orange, over the Catholic king James of Scotland at the Battle of the Boyne, an important event to the Protestant community.

I could not get Owen Sheridan’s face out of my mind. I had never written to him. I had started a dozen or more letters, only to have my pen slow to a halt after the first few sentences. What was I to say to him? What could I tell him that his family and friends could not? How could I tell him that I missed him for reasons I myself did not understand? And then I thought of the looks there would be on the Sheridan family faces when they saw a letter from me addressed to him at Queensbrook House. Could they have stopped themselves from tearing it open and reading it? I would be disgraced—a poor Catholic upstart at the mill who got above herself and had the cheek to write to the likes of Owen Sheridan! And so I gave up the idea. I convinced myself that I had no obligation to write to him—after all, he had no notion of writing to me. Still, I kept my ear to the ground, hoping to get some news of him at the mill.

At home, political unrest increased. The Irish push for Home Rule had been put on hold when the war started, but a small band of frustrated nationalists, who had ignored a call by John Redmond, Home Rule Party leader, to join the British Army, formed the Irish Citizen Army and began planning a rebellion against British rule in Ireland. On Easter Sunday 1916, some eighteen hundred volunteers seized the General Post Office and various other major buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. Led by poet and schoolteacher Patrick Pearse, they proceeded to shoot it out with the British Army, holding out for a week before they were forced to surrender.

Around Queensbrook, as in the rest of Ireland, there was little sympathy for the rebellion, particularly after it was discovered that they had tried to smuggle in arms from Germany. It was only after the leaders were publicly executed in English jails and their bodies brought back to Ireland for burial that the tide of opinion turned. The English had failed to understand the power of Irish funerals. A man might have been a schemer or chancer all his life—but put him in a box and parade him down to the graveyard with bagpipes, and toast his passing at a wake, and suddenly he was the greatest fellow ever lived. So it was with the rebels. They were idealized as martyrs overnight, and a great shift in the Irish attitude toward the English developed as surely as if there had been an earthquake.

I had grown up knowing that as a Catholic I was in the minority in Ulster. I learned that the Protestants had been planted in Ulster by the English government, and many Catholics had been thrown off their land. Da had always been great for stories about those times and the battles that had led to the flight of the Earls and the wild geese. I took for granted that the best jobs at the mills went to the Protestants and that in general the Protestants were better off than the Catholics. It was a way of life to me, and it had not occurred to me there was much to be done about it. I planned my life on what was available to me based on my religion and status. I could be a spinner. Maybe I could be a weaver. But I could not get a job in the finishing shops doing embroidery or hemming linens. In the same way, Catholic men rarely got skilled work in the mills, let alone management jobs. The number of Protestant women who had to go out to work was small compared with the number of Catholic women. Protestant men had the better jobs and could afford to keep their wives at home.

I suppose if I had been a Protestant in Ulster at the time, I would have been more than a bit afraid of becoming part of an independent Irish Republic, where I would be in the minority. I would not only lose my privileged advantage, but I might be forced to follow the rules of the Roman Catholic Church. So I couldn’t say I totally blamed the Protestants for getting more and more nervous as the movement for Home Rule gained support. They were practical enough to know that if they could not stop Home Rule, they could at least fight to keep Ulster out of it. But as they united behind the idea of a partitioned Ireland, it turned out they were thinking about more than a political solution. The Ulster Volunteer Force, organized in 1912, was armed and ready to fight.

Stories trickled out about clashes between Catholic and Protestant workers in Belfast and other towns around Ulster. Catholic workers on their way to the shipyards were pulled off buses and beaten. Riots broke out, policemen were waylaid and shot, and the papers were full of predictions of doom. For the first time since Da’s death, I began to put what had happened that night in the larger context of the religious and political divide in Ulster. Slowly a picture of the enemy emerged in my mind. Was this the direction in which I should turn my anger? Was this emerging sectarian war my personal war as well? The possibility of it chilled me, and I put the thought away at the back of my mind.

At the mill, we were under even more pressure. The war had left them short of skilled male workers, and we were expected to make minor repairs to our own machines where we could. The system of fines was still in place. Poor Theresa paid half her week’s wages in fines. She could no more keep her mouth from opening than she could keep the rain from falling from the sky. The women were all in bad form, and at lunchtime they sat on the wall swearing and complaining. They talked halfheartedly about striking, but I knew they would not go through with it. It was then that the devil danced into my head, as he often did. What if we didn’t exactly strike, but slowed down? What if, when Theresa blurted out a word or the bars of a song, we all talked or sang at once? What could Shields and Mary Galway do to us? They could hardly sack us all—they needed every worker just now. There would be no obvious ringleader to pin it on. Even if they suspected me, they couldn’t prove it.

I grinned with delight the first afternoon we tried it on for size. The look on Mary Galway’s face when we all started singing “The Star of the County Down” along with Theresa was worth the price of the fine. She stalked up and down the rows of spinning frames, her face scarlet with sweat and indignation.

“Youse are all fined!” she shrieked like an old crow on a wire.

We all nodded and laughed.

Then Theresa blurted out, “Och, I’m sorry, girls, I couldn’t help it.”

We all turned to her and answered her out loud:

“Don’t worry, Theresa.”

“No bother.”

“Sure what’s a tongue in your head for, anyway?”

We kept it up all afternoon and all through the next day. At the same time, we worked slow and steady, and production dropped. Shields was fit to be tied. But we waited him out, and by the end of the week he announced that he was suspending the fine system.

“But youse better put your arses into the work again,” he bellowed, “or so help me I’ll swing for the lot of you.”

A cheer went up throughout the room. We had won our point. And I had won my first battle.

ABOUT A WEEK
after our victory at the mill, Joe Shields called me into his office. I’m done for now, I thought. Maybe someone had told him it was my idea to join in the singing and talking with Theresa. It would not have taken much to convince him, given my reputation for troublemaking. I squared my shoulders. I would not let him see that I was afraid.

“Sit down,” he growled.

I did as he said and waited.

“You’re the cheekiest girl that’s ever set foot in this mill, Eileen O’Neill,” he said as he eased himself into his chair. “Where you get your brass from I don’t know. And now this!”

I was right, I thought, sweat pouring down the back of my neck, I’m going to be sacked. With a shiver, my whole life passed in front of my eyes the way they say it does when people are dying. I saw Da firing the rusty rifle at the intruders outside the Yellow House; I saw Ma’s and Frankie’s faces as they left our house for the last time; I saw Paddy’s innocent eyes looking up at me as I promised him I would get back our home and bring us all together. Och, all the promises, all the dreams, they were slipping away like shadows in the night.

“Miss O’Neill!” Shields’s voice cut through my thoughts. I shot straight up in the chair. O’Neill was holding up an envelope in his broad, stubby hand.

“And now this!” he said again. “I almost can’t believe this!”

“What?” I said. Annoyance began to surface. “What’s that?”

“What’s this?” Shields’s face burned crimson, and bumps stood out on his bald forehead. “This is a fecking letter addressed to you from Owen Sheridan.”

“But he’s away in the war,” I said.

“So he is. But they can still write letters from over there. And this is addressed bold as brass to yourself care of me at Queensbrook Mill!”

I reached over to take the envelope, but he snatched it away. “You’ve gone too far this time, girl,” he said. “You’ve got above your station. Who do you think you are corresponding with the likes of Sheridan? How dare you interfere with your betters!”

Anger and confusion rose up in me. “I didn’t ask him to write to me,” I shouted, “and what business of yours is it if I did?”

His anger matched mine. “It’s my fecking business if you’re going behind my back and telling him stories about what is going on here in the mill—if you’re telling him rumors and lies about me and—”

“Och, don’t flatter yourself,” I cried. “If I was writing to him, I think I’d have better things to talk about than the likes of you!”

I thought he was going to slap me. He stood up, his whole body shaking, and raised his hand. But he must have thought better of it. Instead he pushed the envelope across the desk toward me. I picked it up and inspected it.

“I’m surprised you didn’t open it and read it for yourself,” I muttered.

Shields remained standing. “I would not stoop that far, miss,” he said, his voice more even now, “but I can tell you that you are in for a big fecking surprise if you think this fellow has any interest in you at all. He’s a rake, and you’re just one more foolish woman throwing herself at him. Oh, I’ve heard all about it—walking arm in arm with him bold as brass down Hill Street in Newry. Well, when the time comes he’ll marry his own kind, mark my words. And then the high and mighty Eileen O’Neill will get her comeuppance! Now go on, get out, and don’t be reading that thing on company time!”