At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [179]
“Ah get him an old bicycle, for God’s sake. There’s any the God number of men will risk their lives for Ireland. Few enough these days will risk their jobs. He’s sharp enough too. Put him in with a couple of the other lads. And find him something to eat. He’s not winked at food all day to look at him.”
He was already busy with the papers on the table. Doyler asked Kane in the corridor outside, “How did he know if I risked my job?”
“Inquiries confirmed your story, son. That’ll do you for now.”
They had an entertainment that night in the Hall. Doyler waited at the back, till a woman in the benches beckoned him forward. It was cheap sitting as standing, she told him. Bottoms squashed up till room was found. A man patted his back as he sat down. By nod and wink he was welcomed. He saw their laughing faces. He laughed a little with them. Then he nodded off, leaning upon his neighbor’s shoulder.
Two lads took him to where they lodged, a widow woman’s room at the very top of a tenement building. She bade him welcome, regretting if the welcome was bigger than the feast. In their curtained-off corner the lads showed him to side-step where the boards were rotten. There was a tiny paper-mended window and a mattress on the floor with little enough space for one. It didn’t signify. Nothing extraneous signified any more. Home now would be Liberty Hall.
It made him laugh in the months after, that the Hall had been so quiet that first morning. For never again, though he came there all hours of the day, and the night too, and he came to master the topsy-turvy of its corridors and stairs, never again did he find the remotest chance of peace in the place. People were ever rushing in and out, men and women on union business, boys of the Fianna and girls too, Citizen soldiers. The printing-press would be clacking away, musical instruments were blaring, somewhere deep in the recesses a mysterious hammering would be going on, you wouldn’t know what was preparing. Plays were rehearsed and put on, and God forgive him, he even acted in the chorus of one. And the trains all day rattled over the Loop Line bridge. He had never known a place like it.
Days on frost when no work was to be had, and whatever hour he had to himself, he spent there. He lent his hand to anything. Simple things at first, like carting coal or helping in the kitchen. He took messages on an old yoke of a bike, and he’d deliberately shine no light and cycle on the footpath, careless of any peeler. He went nowhere without a sheaf of the Workers’ Republic to hawk it in the street. Any reading that came his way, he devoured it.
With the other lads he’d go heckling the recruiting meetings of the British Army, while the Fianna boys—little newsboy gurriers, right larkers, right scrawls—crept in under the legs of the speakers, throwing up the booths till everything was mayhem. There was a strike at the docks, and he helped out there, standing picket if called on. He was a buttonman at last, with the pride of a buttonman, his red-hand badge stuck out from his lapel.
As time passed he was let in deeper to the secrets of the Hall. A munitions factory in the basement where explosives were devised: grenades of condensed-milk cans, bombs stuffed in cocoa-tins. He spent days filling shotgun cartridges, then nights bricking them away behind false walls. He helped in the workshop where bayonets and crowbars were made. There was even a miniature rifle range where he was let practice with a saloon-pistol. He was sharp and he was useful. And when there was nothing useful to be doing, which was rare but not unknown, he argued tactics with whoever was there to argue him back.
The army drilled in the late evening. A talk would be given after on a military subject. Saturday nights they camped at Croydon Park and drilled in the good green fields. He had no gun of course and wouldn’t be trusted with one a while yet. But he trained like the other youngsters with a solid pick-axe handle, shoed at one end with metal. It was