Chapter One Hundred And Twenty Six
A Moment In Time
To their surprise, when Tom and Sybil reached it, the stone built terminus down on Albert Quay, south of the River Lee, proved to be unexpectedly and unpleasantly crowded with British soldiers. In order to reach the Booking Office they had no alternative but to jostle and push their way through the sea of milling, khaki-clad soldiery and, for their pains, were in turn themselves pushed and jostled.
Despite having Danny in her arms, Sybil found herself groped and subjected at close quarters to a repeated barrage of wolf whistles and lewd, insulting comments. All the while smiling sweetly, to these she responded in turn ... with a series of choice Irish expletives learned at the Coombe, loudly telling the noisy, over-familiar Tommies she found repeatedly barring her way to feck off otherwise she would swing for yous; while at the same time questioning in equally strident tones as to whether any of the soldiers' parents had actually ever been married and in the process earning her a series of admiring glances from Tom.
Eventually, breathless and slightly dishevelled, they made it through to the Booking Office where Tom purchased their tickets for their journey to Skerries Road. To their dismay they now learned from the young clerk who sold them their tickets that several detachments of the soldiers milling about the station would be travelling with them on board the Kinsale train.
With this in mind, it was with a mounting sense of trepidation, not to mention difficulty, that Tom and Sybil at last found themselves seats in a decidedly shabby Third Class compartment, along with the handful of other civilian passengers travelling down to one or other of the isolated stations on the Kinsale branch railway, be it Ballymartle, Farrangalway or Skerries Road.
Whether by choice or by military order the civilian passengers on the train all travelled in the last two coaches, where they sat jammed in like sardines, the rest of the elderly wooden carriages being fully occupied by British officers and soldiers, some of them possibly from off the convoy of open lorries which had swept past Tom and Sybil earlier when they were walking down St. Patrick's Street. Several of the passengers, among them Tom himself, were very uneasy about the presence of the soldiers on board the train and he said as much to Sybil.
The train steamed out of Cork and headed south towards the junction where it would leave the line to Baltimore and Bantry. While Tom read, cradling Danny in her arms, Sybil sat and gazed through the carriage window at a patchwork of small fields enclosed by dry-stone walls, where cattle and sheep grazed placidly. Dotted here and there were thatched roofed white washed cottages. By a gate a young boy stood waiting patiently to herd a group of cows across the line, while at a farm bordering the railway where washing billowed in a stiff breeze, she glimpsed milk churns being loaded into a two-wheeled cart. It all looked so idyllic, so pastoral, so peaceful and quiet, that Sybil found it impossible to reconcile the scenes now passing before her eyes with what Tom had told her was actually taking place here, down in the far south of Ireland.
However, before the junction was reached, along with their fellow passengers, Tom and Sybil were forcefully given yet another unpleasant reminder of the continuing British military presence in County Cork, by the sight of soldiers patrolling the imposing 500 feet long Chetwynd Viaduct, which carried the railway line high above the road to Bandon. More soldiers were seen guarding Gogginshill tunnel at Ballinhassig, while others were visible on duty on the Half Way Viaduct.
At Kinsale Junction they were both witness to a particularly ugly incident. Here, more soldiers were waiting to board the train. In a sudden and unprovoked attack, a porter on duty at the station, found himself clubbed to the ground with the butt of a rifle, then savagely kicked and beaten by several of the soldiers; after the lad had tried in vain to protect a young woman, apparently his sister, from the unwarranted attention of a burly British sergeant. Had it not been for Sybil laying a firm, restraining hand on his arm, Tom would have been out of the train in an instant to render assistance.
"Tom! No! No trouble please!" pleaded Sybil firmly grabbing hold of his wrist. "There's nothing you can do!"
"Let go of me!"
"Tom! No!"
"Someone should help him..."
"Yes, I agree, but not you. Tom, darling, your concern does you credit, truly it does. But, you've got responsibilities now. Think Tom, think! What use will you be to Danny or to me if you're arrested by the British and thrown into prison? Or worse. Are you forgetting what happened to Peadar".
Tom nodded. Defeated, his shoulders hunched, he sank back wearily on to his seat.
"No, I haven't forgotten" he said softly. "How could I, how could any of us ever forget that?"
In his mind's eye Tom saw again young Peadar, the husband of his sister Emer, being forcibly dragged out of Ciaran's barn on the night of Tom and Sybil's wedding; when the cèilidh held at the farm had been raided by several detachments of British soldiers under the command of Captain Miles Stathum and where Mary had earned Tom's heartfelt admiration for standing up to the brutality and excesses of the British soldiery.
Stathum!
Tom's lip curled almost in a snarl.
Oh, yes, he remembered Miles Stathum. That bloody bastard! The oh-so gallant British officer and gentleman, who they had the misfortune to meet first out on the Howth road, where a young boy had been killed in the cross-fire during an abortive IRA ambush on a British convoy. Stathum, who had sought to humiliate Tom in public and who, after Peadar's arrest at the cèilidh, had assured all of his family there present that the young man, a draughtsman with the Great Southern and Western Railway, would be given proper medical care and that the bullet wound he had sustained to his shoulder would be attended to. How could they have been so naïve as to believe him?
For, despite all of Stathum's promises which, not surprisingly, turned out to be worthless, not long Peadar's arrest, despite Tom's best efforts to get to see him, there had come the terrible news that Peadar himself had died in a cell in Kilmainham Gaol. The exact cause of his death was never established with any certainty but Kilmainham had a grim reputation. Although Peadar's Death Certificate said Heart Failure, everyone in the family knew he had been severely beaten by his captors and probably tortured too; to force him to reveal what he knew about IRA operations in the area and in particular the whereabouts of a cache of ammunition, revolvers and rifles stolen from an RIC barracks in the immediate neighbourhood of Clontarf.
"And you ask me why we want the British out of Ireland?" asked Tom bleakly, as the train puffed out of the station past where the young porter was now being helped from the ground by several locals. "Well, there's your answer. Ask yourself, Sybil, would that kind of behaviour ever be tolerated in England? No, of course not, but over here, why they treat us like we aren't even human", said Tom angrily. Having scribbled a hurried note down in his pocket-book, he promptly lapsed into what, for him, was yet another uncharacteristic, prolonged, and frosty silence.
Rendered speechless by the brutality which she had just witnessed, hugging Danny protectively to her in the crook of her left arm, Sybil did not answer Tom, the fingers of her right hand resting likewise equally protectively across the slight swell of her stomach. There was a time and a place for everything and now was not that to tell Tom that she was convinced she was once more expecting. Not of course that they had done anything to prevent it happening, apart from a naturally enforced period of abstinence in the couple of months immediately following upon Danny's birth; indeed thereafter, quite the reverse.
The branch train puffed on through the verdant countryside, stopping first at Ballymartle where several of their fellow passengers got off and then again at Farrangalway where the last of those travelling in their compartment left the train. Had it not been for a young man getting on there, they would have had the compartment all to themselves. The closer they got to Skerries Road, the more nervous Tom seemed to become. He got up several times and walked to the window.
"Why don't you come over here and sit down", asked Sybil at length. She laughed; a merry tinkling laugh and with her free hand gently patted the empty place on the seat beside her.
Tom turned back to her and smiled.
They made a pretty picture, the two of them, Sybil, with Danny lying in her arms, sitting there in the corner of the sunlit compartment.
A Madonna and Her Child.
A mother and her child.
A mother certainly.
But also a wife.
His wife.
A child too.
His child.
His whole world.
A moment later and Tom had done as Sybil had bidden him. Leaving off gazing out of the window of the compartment, he sat back down heavily on the seat, slid his right arm slowly about his wife's slender waist, feeling the familiar warmth of her body against his own.
Heedless of the young man sitting opposite them, but mindful of Danny, Tom began to caress Sybil's face softly with the fingers of his left hand, leaned in towards her for a kiss. Their lips met. The kiss, first languid, deepened. Tom tightened his arm about Sybil drew her closer, felt her tongue in his mouth, caught the beguiling, enticing nature of her scent. The young man seated opposite flushed scarlet, averted his eyes, looked steadfastly down at the floor, wishing himself anywhere else but here, aware that there could be no immediate escape. It was still over a mile to the station at Skerries Road.
Of the two of them, Tom was definitely the more romantic; would readily admit that to be so. But, in this particular regard Sybil, too, had her moments. And this proved to be one of those.
With Danny snuggled between them, Sybil turned thoughtfully to Tom.
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if..." She paused, stopped what she was going to say, ducked her head. Said instead:
"No, you'll think me foolish".
"I won't. Go on" said Tom his eyes sparkling with mischief.
"Well..."
The silence lengthened.
"What then?"
"Well... I mean... if... somehow... If somehow you could capture the essence of a moment and bottle it. And then... when you wanted to re-live it, all you had to do... would be to uncork the bottle and breathe in the scent... to remind you instantly of that very same moment. Well... how wonderful it would be".
Suddenly self-conscious, Sybil blushed.
Tom grinned and chucked her under her chin.
"And if that was at all possible, just what particular moment would you wish to capture, milady?"
Sybil was prompt in her answer.
"This one. Here. Now. The three of us".
Tom chuckled, kissed her soundly and then hugged Sybil and Danny to him in a fond embrace at the same time, notwithstanding his own lack of faith, thinking that some things must indeed be Heaven sent. Breathing a silent prayer of thanks to whichever god had sent him both Sybil and Danny, Tom reflected that whatever the future might hold, at this precise moment in time, it promised to be a beautiful afternoon.
Author's Note:
There was indeed a branch railway which ran all the way down to Kinsale. Although it closed as long ago as 1931, there are plans to convert the former route into a footpath. With one exception, all the places mentioned above existed just as they are portrayed here.