Chapter One Hundred And Forty One
Farewell To Skerries
Skerries House, Friday, 10th December 1920.
Here in the grey skies above Skerries House, the gulls were screaming, their wild cries borne ashore on the bitter east wind blowing in from off the Atlantic Ocean. Far below the wheeling gulls, from the numerous nests built high on the precipitous ledges of the cliffs beneath the sea-girt house, there came the raucous screeches of immeasurable colonies of other seabirds - of guillemots, kittiwakes and razorbills; down on the shore, while the sea yet creamed the sands of the small cove, the tide was ebbing.
Some little distance from the foot of the cliffs, warmly wrapped against the icy chill of this raw early December afternoon, hand in hand, Tom and Sybil strolled slowly along the hard, rippled surface of the seastrand. If the truth were told, thought Sybil, Tom seemed somewhat pre-occupied; as well he might be, given what they both had been through in the last few days.
"Penny for them, Tom", said Sybil, and grinned.
"That's all they're worth to be sure, love," replied Tom. He smiled, reached down, picked up a flattish grey pebble and skimmed it into the foaming brine; slipped his arm around her shoulders, hugging her close. "But since you ask me, I was just thinking. As a boy, growing up on the streets in Dublin I swore to myself that if ever I had any say in the matter, I would see this place torn down.." He nodded in the direction of the gaunt mass of the house overlooking the shore below. "But now ... Now that it is really mine, what eventually becomes of Skerries doesn't seem to matter anymore. Truly, it doesn't. Once we're gone from here, whether it sells or eve if it doesn't, leave it to the wind and the rain, let the British army use it for billets, or have the IRA burn it to the ground. I couldn't care less. The only thing that does matter to me, now and always, is your and Danny's happiness and that of this little one". Tom placed his hand gently on Sybil's swollen belly.
"You're certain you're all right now?"
"I'm fine. Really. It was absolutely nothing".
The previous night Sybil had experienced some discomfort, so much so, that Tom had been minded to telephone down to Kinsale for the old doctor to come up to the house. Fortunately, Sybil's pains had passed and by the morning she was feeling a very great deal better, so much so that it was she who had suggested their afternoon walk along the beach.
Sybil smiled happily, her cheeks reddened by the coldness of the wind.
"Do you really have to go into Cork tomorrow? I don't want you to go".
"With martial law coming into effect today, along with what I've heard from several quarters now as to something being planned by way of a response to it? Yes love, I do. It's my job, remember? I'm meeting with a couple of men from Sinn Féin. They're arriving in town on the nine o'clock train. We've agreed a mutual rendezvous in the city. and then I'm heading off out of town to talk to some tenant farmers".
"Promise me now, that you will be careful, won't you?"
"You know me!" Tom grinned.
"Yes, I do. That's why I'm asking you to take care, especially now".
The British authorities had done just what Tom had said and as recently as this very morning too, in a desperate attempt to regain the upper hand and to try and restore some semblance of order, had proclaimed martial law, here in the Counties of Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary.
"I'll be back here tomorrow night at more or less the usual time".
Sybil nodded yet again, dreading, come the morning, the moment of parting.
With Danny left up at house in the care of the two girls they had the cove to themselves; this afternoon had walked, for the very first time, well beyond the ruins of the cottage on the shore, as far as the beached remains of a small steamer which had run aground in the bay, its timbers bleached white by many years' exposure to the wind and the rain. On reaching it, with Sybil obviously beginning to tire, arm in arm, they set their faces for home and slowly began to retrace their steps along the sea strand.
Sybil was to remember December 1920 especially vividly. The first day of the month had dawned icy cold, with the threat of snow in the frost hung air. With the coming of winter, even with the range in the kitchen now kept constantly alight, the fire in the drawing room lit after breakfast and the fire in their bedroom just before dusk, the remainder of the closed-up house was as chill and cold as any tomb.
Thankfully, Maeve had kept away from Skerries and on his infrequent trips into Cork, Tom was at pains to stay well away from the house on North Mall. Eventually, after the horror of the revelations contained both in Christopher's letters and in Maeve's entries written in Tom's old diary had receded somewhat, for now at least, for both Tom and Sybil life resumed its normal pace, continued much as before. Their relationship was as it had always been, both tender and deeply loving. Danny continued to thrive and Sybil's pregnancy advanced without any complications; kindly Dr. Barrett motoring up to the house from Kinsale twice a week and who was always at pains to remind Sybil that if the need arose, he could be contacted on the telephone. Each day Tom set off on his motorcycle wearing his leather jacket with his satchel slung around his shoulders, pursuing leads, in search of stories which would actually reflect for the wider readership of the Irish Independent just what was unfolding down here in County Cork.
Over the last few weeks, as late autumn had slipped almost imperceptibly down into early winter, they had developed their own daily morning ritual. Each day, unless Tom stayed home to write, shortly after breakfast was over, cooked by Sybil, and eaten sitting at the kitchen table, not only because they preferred it that way but because the drawing room with its improvised dining table was simply just too cold, wrapped tightly in her shawl, just like an Irishwoman Tom said, Sybil stood at the back door with Danny in her arms to watch him go. It was at moments like these that she realised just how much she loved him, counting the minutes and the hours until his return, heralded by the familiar putput of his ex-army motorcycle as he rode back into the yard at the rear of the house not long after dark had fallen. These days, it did not do to be out on the roads any later for if there was frost in the air, shot with the threat of snow, a drifting sense of unease was also in the air too, overhung the whole of the south of Ireland, but nowhere more so than here in the southernmost province of Munster.
Notwithstanding the continuing attacks on the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the beatings, burnings, kidnappings and the shootings, the last week of the preceeding month, November, had been especially bloody.
There seemed to be no end to it and in fact, much of it was almost tit for tat and the civilian population caught up in all of this, finding there was very little to choose between either of the warring sides. One evening, with Tom having just recounted the latest brutal incident to have occurred here down in County Cork, Sybil said that it reminded her of a line from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", the tale of two feuding families in Verona, the Capulets and the Montagues, where in response to the problems their continued fighting causes one character to exclaim:
"A plague on both your houses!"
And, so it went on.
One week the IRA kidnapped, court martialled and then shot dead two members of the Auxiliaries. A sergeant in the RIC was killed in White Street in Cork, while the very next day in the city masked men presumed to be either members of the RIC or else Black and Tans shot dead three civilians by way of reprisal for the shooting of one of their own the day before. A fortnight later four members of the IRA were captured by other Auxiliaries in Durris; their summary execution only being prevented by the intervention of an officer of the King's Liverpool Regiment. On reading of this act of kindness on the part of a British officer, Sybil thought instantly of young Will Atkins; wondered how he was faring, whether he was still here in Ireland or if he had returned to England.
Not only Cork, but Tralee over in the southwest had also seen widespread violence too, with the burning of the County Hall by the police and the setting on fire of properties belonging to known supporters of Sinn Féin by the Black and Tans. Here in the south, the month's violence had culminated with a bloody ambush mounted by the West Cork IRA on a patrol of Auxiliaries at Kilmichael. Seventeen of the hated Auxiliaries had been killed as well as three members of the IRA. Rumours were circulating and widespread that several of the men had been shot dead after they had surrendered. Whether or not this was true had proved impossible to establish and Tom had said as much in his frank report of the incident.
Not that the situation was any better elsewhere in the country. Indeed it was bad everywhere, no more so than in Dublin, with Ma's latest letter full of the horrors of what had happened in that city.
Tom's explanation to Ma and the rest of his adoptive family back in distant Dublin about just how he had come into the possession of the Skerries estate had been characterised by one thing: brevity.
He explained all away by saying that what had arisen had done so unexpectedly; had been as the result of the death of distant blood kin in the war who were unknown to him, which was not that far from the truth and that he intended selling the estate once the remaining farms had been conveyed to the present tenants. Ciaran had chafed Tom mercilessly about becoming one of the land owning gentry, so much so that his gentle, quietly spoken eldest son Ruari, who aged fourteen, Sybil had taught to dance in his father's barn, who ever thereafter always had an especially soft spot for both his Uncle Tom and his Aunt Sybil, snapped at his father and told his Da to let his uncle be.
As to whether Ma herself realised there was more to all of this than met the eye, she never said; she loved Tom dearly, did not press him for more information on something he clearly did not wish to discuss, knew that he must have his reasons. Nevertheless, after they both came south, Ma wrote to Tom and Sybil regularly, a succession of chatty, breezy letters full of news from what she termed, with out any trace of irony, the home front.
Ma's latest letter to find its way down to Skerries recounted what had just happened in Dublin, her utter disbelief and sense of revulsion made clear in it by numerous exclamation marks and under linings, some of which all but scored through her writing paper: the shootings of several British Army officers at a number of addresses in the centre and the south of the city by the IRA wherein eleven men were killed and five wounded, one of them fatally. Part of Ma's sense of outrage was no doubt engendered by the fact that one of her own friends, a Mrs. Flaherty, a cook, was in service with an English family which lived in Pembroke Street, but a matter of doors away and close to the scene of the first of the shootings where five British army officers had been shot, three being killed and two wounded, one of the men having being shot in front of his poor wife.
And then Ma went on to recount the awful aftermath, telling of what had ensued at Croke Park on the afternoon of the same day when, in response to what had happened that morning, officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, supported by the army and a group of Auxiliaries raided the football ground during a match being played there between Dublin and Tipperary, in search, it was being claimed, of those responsible for the shootings earlier in the day of British army personnel.
For some reason, which said Ma, presently remained unclear, the police had opened fire on the spectators at the match and fourteen people had lost their lives, among them Michael Hogan the captain of the team from Tipperary and a young boy who had run onto the pitch to pray beside the dying footballer. The sound of shots coming from the vicinity of the turnstiles had caused widespread panic among the thousands of spectators attending the match, with many trying to flee the ground, only to be met on St. James's Avenue by a British armoured car firing its machine guns into the air.
Ma made mention of the fact that Donal had intended to take Padraig, his seven year old young son along to cheer on the home side, but the lad had gone down with a heavy cold and so neither father nor son attended the match, something for which Ma and the rest of the family were now understandably decidedly thankful. At the mention of Padraig, Tom and Sybil had exchanged broad grins, remembering how at their wedding, the little boy had been obsessed with dragons, with Tom adroitly casting the Dowager Countess in the role of Downton's resident member of the species; this causing Mary to remark pithily that if granny ever found out that he viewed her as such, grandson-in-law or not, she would undoubtedly box Tom's ears.
And referring in her letter to Tom's own reports published in the Irish Independent of what had happened in the city of Cork and out in the countryside at Kilmichael, once again Ma made her oft repeated suggestion: that Sybil, now that her pregnancy was far advanced, along with little Danny should be packed off back to Dublin by Tom on the first available train. This caused Sybil to remark that Dublin sounded no less dangerous a place to be living in at this time than did Cork and that she had absolutely no intention of leaving Skerries.
Thereafter, in turn, both Mama and Mary had received the same curt refusal to their own tearful entreaties that for the same reasons as expounded by Ma that Sybil return, not to Dublin, but to England and to Downton. "My place, Mama, is where I am needed most and that happens to be by Tom's side" wrote Sybil for the umpteenth time, with a mounting sense of both déjà vu and exasperation.
For her part, Mary made the mistake, albeit well intentioned, of suggesting that Tom should take far greater care of Sybil and not expose her to unnecessary danger. Sybil had been incensed. This evening, after supper, seated by the fire in the drawing room, she had been on the point of penning a particularly vitriolic reply and it was only thanks to Tom's timely intervention that she did not do so. As Sybil would have readily conceded, these days Tom had a decidedly soft spot for his imperious, aristocratic eldest sister-in-law.
Instead, for the time being, Sybil took out some of her spleen on a pair of Tom's socks which he had meekly asked her to darn, knowing that darning was one of her least favoured pastimes. Mutely cursing Mary's nerve, Sybil silently fumed and stabbed her needle in to the second of her husband's threadbare socks, knowing this was a task that Mary would never undertake for darling Matthew but then the presumptive earl of Grantham's socks would never be allowed to get into the state into which darling Tom's did. Doubtless before such a deplorable thing ever happened, Bates or Barrow would have seen to it that at least two dozen new pairs would have been ordered from Turnbull and Asser on Jermyn Street up in town.
A short while later, laying aside Tom's freshly darned socks, by lamplight Sybil thought the darns in them looked perfectly respectable, although quite what they would look like in daylight was an entirely different matter, she now picked up her pen and began writing her reply to her eldest sister. "For your information, Mary, as you well know Tom takes the greatest possible care of me; he always has". Sybil sucked on the end of her pen for further inspiration, cast a loving glance over at her husband who, mouthing the occasional profanity under his breath, was busily scribbling away at his desk - Tom called it proofing - proceeded now to underline the word "always" twice and then did so for a third and final time "… and it does you no favours whatsoever to suggest otherwise".
It was just as Tom finished proofing his latest article that the telephone standing on his desk rang. Reaching across he picked up the receiver.
"Branson" he said in his customarily brisk fashion, waited predictably for a reply, but none came. A moment later and the line went dead. Tom replaced the receiver. That was the third time in as many days that had happened.
Sybil glanced up from the book she was reading.
"Who was it darling?"
"Search me". Tom shrugged his shoulders. "Just like before. No-one there. I expect it's probably a fault at the feckin' exchange and no wonder, will you just listen to that wind? Talk about wailing banshees!"
As if to confirm the truth of what he had just said, the sash windows of the drawing room rattled noisily. Sybil cocked an attentive ear and nodded her head. She yawned expansively. With her advancing pregnancy she tired easily. She laid aside her book.
"Anyway, I'm for bed. Are you coming up?"
"With you waiting upstairs for me, do you really need to ask?"
"What ever makes you think I'll be waiting up for you?"
"Have it your own way milady!"
Sybil paused by the door leading out into the hall.
"Oh I intend to, Branson!" she said suggestively and with a provocative look backwards over her shoulder.
Tom laughed.
"All right, yes, love, I think I follow!" He grinned. "Just as soon as I've closed the shutters and barred the door".
From the warmth of their bed, Sybil watched as Tom moved slowly about the lamp lit bedroom readying himself for bed; smiled as, now back from the bathroom at the end of the passage, having banked down the fire, placed the guard in front of the grate, he divested himself equally slowly of his clothes before slipping on his pyjama trousers. Catching sight of her watching him in the mirror, he grinned mischievously. Sybil smiled again; by way of emphasis patted the empty space beside her. Tonight of all nights, knowing that he knew just how much she wanted him, she wondered if he was deliberately taking his time over his preparations for bed; knowing Tom as she did, Sybil thought that to be entirely possible.
With Danny only having been born in February, Sybil's memory of her previous pregnancy was still fresh in her mind; how the ever increasing size of her body had meant that for any degree of intimacy to be possible, they had to be somewhat imaginative in their approach to the physical side of their relationship. Remembered too that as her time at last approached, when everything had become an effort, she had lost all interest in that and also that her usual desire for intimacy only returned several weeks after Danny had been born.
And now here they were once again, in much the same position as they had been just before Danny arrived. Of course, Tom was convinced that the new arrival would be another boy: Sybil was not so sure. Some innate sixth sense told her that their second child would be a girl. As Tom reached the bed, he pulled back the covers, Sybil turned down the lamp, watched as he clambered in and snuggled down beside her, his hand instinctively seeking hers, their fingers lacing together. She watched Tom thoughtfully for a moment, his well-loved face on the pillow next to hers; knew in that instant that she could not imagine a life without him. Realising that in the next few weeks, there would be few more opportunities like this to be afforded them, suddenly Sybil felt cheated. It all seemed so dreadfully unfair. As if sensing her distress, Tom smiled, reached up, kissed the top of her head and placed his other hand on her swollen belly.
"Sybil, darlin', I do love you so very, very much".
"I love you too, Tom".
"He's getting bigger all the time". Tom chuckled; now reached forward beneath the bedclothes to softly stroke her hip.
"You really do think it'll be a boy? What if it's a girl?" Sybil prodded his chest sharply.
"Then I'll either have to give Danny that model engine I ordered from Basset-Lowke or else return it!" Tom laughed. "No, seriously darlin', I really don't mind, just so long as you come through this all right and that he… or she… is born healthy" he said softly; the Irish lilt of his voice was intoxicating and her mouth greedily seeking his, she snuggled closer to Tom just as far as her increased size would permit. Her hand slipping lower, fingers probing gently, coming to rest on the front of his pyjama trousers, Sybil found Tom's physical response to her gentle ministrations all too predictable. She saw him grin.
"Now see what you've done woman," he drawled lazily; gave her a slow, smug smile.
"Me?"
"Yes, who else?" He grinned again.
"Well then, Mr. Branson. Perhaps we should…" Sybil giggled, rolled in his arms and turned out the lamp.
Necessity is said to be the mother of invention and their intense need of each other that night soon proved the truth of the old adage.
Later, while Tom slept, Sybil pondered why it was that this night of all nights it should have mattered so much to her that they made love. She fell asleep in his arms, having come to no conclusion; none whatsoever. In fact, she was not to know the answer to her unspoken question until very much later, when the blissfully happy, deeply loving relationship and the private world they had created between them had vanished, seemingly forever.
Cork, 9.00 am, Saturday 11th December 1920.
This morning here in Cork, as Tom motored down South Mall on his way to the first of his meetings, he did so with a mounting sense of trepidation. For most of the preceding week, the daily routine of the city had been disturbed by the sounds of gunfire and rocked by the occasional explosion. Today, as on other occasions, like many others, on his way into the city, Tom found that he was stopped several times at British military checkpoints; at the last of these on the Parnell Bridge, while he was waiting patiently in the queue to be let through, he saw men being pushed and shoved into a lorry and being taken away for questioning. It was while he continued to wait his turn to be called forward that Tom found himself dwelling again on some of what Maeve had written in his old diary. A scattering of her acerbic, bitter words formed in his mind:
"So they have come here at last... Tommy has brought his slut with him... her snivelling brat. She is not welcome here... Later, I went down to the chapel... placed new flowers there... told Christopher all about it. He says he loves me still. Agrees with me... she should not have come. Says if she will not go freely, then I must make her leave. Everything must be as it was before. We were so happy then. Why did he have to bring her with him?"
"Oi! You! In yer own bleedin' time, Paddy! Wake up you fuckin' dosey bugger!" The bellowed, coarse words of a British army corporal served to jerk Tom back to the harsh reality of the present.
Fortunately, as an accredited journalist, Tom had his pass with him, signed by no less a personage than General Strickland himself. This always did the trick. So, this morning, as before, each time after he had produced it for inspection, Tom found himself waved through every checkpoint in turn and so it proved here on Parnell Bridge. The same pass also permitted him to be out after the curfew; not that Tom had often availed himself of that dubious privilege. After all, both the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries were trigger happy; they shot first and asked questions afterwards and Tom did not wish to find himself stopping a bullet in his back after dark down one of the city's less salubrious side streets.
After crossing over the bridge, Tom turned left and rode down South Mall until just by the Imperial Hotel, he turned down Cork's own Pembroke Street for the first of his meetings that day with his two contacts from Sinn Fein.
In the quietness of the room, the bell of the telephone on the desk rang shattered the silence. The man picked up the receiver.
"Stathum", he said crisply.
"Corporal Jones, sir. Reporting as ordered sir. He's just passed through the checkpoint here on Parnell Bridge".
"Thank you" said Stathum just as crisply and replaced the receiver.
Author's Note:
All the violent incidents referred to above actually happened. The shootings which occurred out at Croke Park, Dublin are better known today by the sobriquet of "Bloody Sunday".
Established in 1885, Turnbull and Asser, on Jermyn Street in London, still exists to this day and are a bespoke gentlemen's outfitters.
Opened in 1898-99, Basset-Lowke of Northampton, England, was a toy manufacturer specialising in model railways, boats, ships and construction sets.