A BOY IN PRISON A friend had promised to send me Heine’s poems. To my disappointment he failed to get them and sent instead a school edition of _Hermann und Dorotea_. Those fine spring days, while the others were exercising, I lay on the floor of my cell and read and re-read it; two lines of it are still in my head, because in the days that followed I tried to take them as a precept. Menschen lernten wir kennen, und Nationen, so lasst uns Unser eigenes Herz kennend uns dessen erfreun. The cell, condemned as inadequate for one, contained four; three slept on the floor and one across the radiator. My cell-mates were, Cronin, an ex-soldier and a very good-tempered fellow; Johnson, a big man with a laughing rogue’s face, and a country boy whose name I have forgotten, dark, square-headed, handsome, silent and stupid. By day Cronin made rings out of shilling pieces and in the evenings he amused himself with me, singing. On my first night in the prison I was wakened by the officer of the guard flashing his torch in my face. Somewhere down the passage I heard him, his voice echoing, say that there had been a raid and that one of our men had been captured—with a revolver. That meant death, and for a long time I remained awake thinking of death and what it meant, and of the man who would die so soon. I saw him as an embodiment of us all, young, poor, bewildered, struggling against we knew not what; his mother perhaps making a miserable living as a laundress in some slum. Then I thought of her; imagined her sitting by the fire at that moment, now screaming and struggling, now hushed and quiet, while the neighbours tried to comfort and reassure her. I imagined how she would go to the priest and beg him to intercede for her son, and how at last, wearied by her appeals, he would promise (perhaps with no intention of keeping his promise); then she, in the style of poor people like ourselves, would write to her boy to tell him that Father McCarthy or Father Maguire would speak for him, that the Blessed Virgin would intercede for him and the Sacred Heart watch over him. I imagined her going to early Mass, stumbling down the lane with the plaid shawl drawn tight about her face: kneeling far back in the darkness under the oblong gallery, her eyes fixed upon the suffering Christ and his weeping mother in their gaudy grandeur of crimson and blue. And she would pray half-aloud in a tortured whisper until to her tear-dimmed eyes the actor’s face of Christ would seem to break into a pitying smile and she would be comforted ... and at the same moment a green-clad officer with a pale dissolute face would put his revolver to the head of the bleeding figure writhing beside the prison wall...And that was life. Early that morning I was wakened by Johnson, whose harsh and sneering voice was curiously subdued. He led me across the grey cylindrical building balconied and echoing, its tall barred windows aglow and framed in the half light of sloping stone. We went down another corridor which was quite dark. In one of the cells the morning light, cast upwards on to the arched and whitewashed ceiling and down again on the wall, picked out an officer, standing there, silent and very sinister in his grey-green uniform. Just as we entered what seemed a bundle of rags rose heavily from the tall square of darkness under the high window. There was a low growl from two or three men standing in the shadows. It took me some time to distinguish anything; then I noticed that the face of the man who had risen was swollen and black with beating. ‘Ready?’ asked the officer in an expressionless voice. ‘Is this how you treat your prisoners?’ snarled Johnson, clenching his fists. ‘He should have thought of that when he was pouring petrol on the children last night.’ It was a lie, and we knew it, and we knew too what folly it was to speak. I held out my hand first, and the boy who was to die took it. To this day I remember the touch of his hand, and how it was swollen like his face and there seemed to be no bones in it. In silence we leaned over the balcony and through the suicide net watched him stumble down the clanking winding stair after the officer, past the heap of refuse stinking beside the high, barred gate, and disappear for ever from our sight through the little door that led to the world and eternity. That night when I hung up my coat it was thick with vermin. Sometimes—not often, for those periods of comparative silence were too precious—I took exercise with the others. It was very crowded outside; we had scarcely room to move in the yard, and the concrete circle round which convicts had walked served Ned and his gang for their rounders. What I did come to see was the nun. Behind the prison was a penitentiary for fallen women, and beside it the convent where the nuns who administered it lived; and every day when we were at exercise a nun sat beside an open window and waved to us. One only, never more; I felt the other nuns disapproved of us, and how much more of her! And in the solitary figure of that nun who had not yet detached herself from the world of passions that we represented, there was for me something terribly lonely and heartbroken, and for years the thought of her made me lonely too until at last I put her into a story called _Nightpiece with Figures_. But a number of the men preferred the back of the prison which was overlooked by the penitents’ garden, and when the women were walking there in their wide French caps of starched linen, half a dozen faces would be pressed between the bars and whistles and cat-calls would ring out until the soldiers below raised their rifles. At a meeting of the prisoners a small, dark, talkative man made a very bitter speech against this indecency, and I suddenly started awake, for the man who was speaking might have been the original Baburin of Turgenev’s greatest story. At the other end of the scale from these fanatical Baburins was my favourite, Ned, a ragged, toothless, underfed-looking man with blue eyes and a cropped skull, who invented a hundred follies to keep the men gay and remained himself, or so I think, a lonely, melancholy figure, a Pantaloon with a tragic heart. I should have loved to know more about him but he never responded to my overtures. I met him only once after, that was during an election and he looked more ragged and underfed than ever, and I felt that through his unswerving loyalty there was breaking a terrible disillusionment. Later I heard he tried to drown himself. Cronin and I continued our singing. One night Matt Lenihan joined us. Matt was a gay lad with a melancholy voice. The three of us gave some offence by not joining in the Rosary. When Matt realized that we had missed it he was very depressed. He returned to his own cell groaning. We went to bed. Lights were quenched. The whole great prison sank into a sort of repose, broken by distant sniping. ‘Then I heard stockinged feet come up the passage. It was Lenihan. ‘O’Connor, kneel up and say the Rosary.’ ‘What’s wrong with you, you mad bastard?’ asked Cronin. ‘I can’t sleep. Honest to God, I can’t. Listen, there were red and blue devils and every sort of thing tearing round the cell. We’ll be damned if we don’t say the Rosary. Do you hear me, O’Connor?’ Cronin struck a match. He was laughing and it was clear that he thought it a new and amusing prank. Lenihan was laughing too but there was a wild gleam in his eyes. ‘Cronin, kneel up! Kneel up, O’Connor!’ ‘Go away to bloody hell from this!’ shouted Johnson angrily. ‘I won’t go away until they say the Rosary. I won’t stir a bloody foot until they say the Rosary. Lord God, is it destroyed you want me to be?’ He was dragging frenziedly at the pair of us, laughing all the while. At last he got us to our knees but he had scarcely got past ‘In the name of the Father’ when Cronin began to giggle. I giggled too. The country boy began to shake with half-suppressed laughter; next to join in was Johnson whose bad temper gave way before the spectacle of myself and Cronin on our knees and Lenihan giving out the Rosary. At last Lenihan himself joined in. ‘Ah, Christ,’ he protested, shaking helplessly with laughter and glauming wildly at myself and Cronin in the darkness, ‘don’t, don’t, ah don’t, leave ye! We’ll all be damned I tell ye. Ye bastards, will ye stop laughing? Ah, say the prayer, can’t ye? Say the bloody prayer. Cronin, kneel up or so help me God I’ll choke the life out of you.’ There was renewed scuffling and shouting and somebody began to knock on the cell wall. Stupid with mirth, Cronin was dragged once more to his knees; I slid back on to the mattress. Once more in tones that he tried to make deadly solemn Lenihan gave out ‘In the name of the Father.’ Then we all exploded in concert. Pausing,for an instant I heard it about me, and thought I had never before heard such strange laughter. There was shouting all along the passage. ‘What’s up?’ ‘What’s wrong with them?’ ‘Shut up, blast ye!’ and so on. ‘Oh, God,’ groaned Lenihan. ‘I’m destroyed. O’Connor, O’Connor, kneel up! Maybe you’ll die to-night. Maybe they’ll shoot you to-morrow morning. Kneel up! Oh, God, we’ll have the sentries atop of us!’ A boot clattered in the corridor. Lenihan rose and fumbled his way out of the cell, groaning. I heard him replying to questions at every cell door, shouting, his melancholy voice broken by wild bursts of hysterical laughter. ‘The Rosary. They kept me from saying the Rosary and now I won’t sleep a wink. Oh, God, what’ll I do?’ In the early morning we were lined up, some hundreds of us, in the grey yard before the governor’s house. From that we were taken in lorries through the barely-wakened city. After an hour in the train we were marched through another town to the terminus behind a blown-up viaduct. It was April, and even that few minutes under the sun and so close to the green fields was unforgettable. In the train again we were served with tinned fish. I ate none of it, for which afterwards I was thankful as it created a thirst there was no way of appeasing. Midnight came and we were still imprisoned in the train. Finally we reached a wayside station. It was flat country, not a hill anywhere. In the distance a searchlight moved up and down the sky and over the quiet fields, picking out whitewashed cottages and trees and flattening them against the night with sharp edges like pieces of theatre scenery, garish in their greens and whites. We moved towards it and it went with us, half-human in its mechanical precision. I was fascinated, watching it reveal the faces of my companions as they staggered on under their burdens, and the monstrous shadows, spreading and contracting, that drifted like smoke over the cardboard trees and hedges. It became almost a new sensation with hunger and thirst and weariness, and like a hallucination it made a fantasy of these; bursting upon us like a March wind, rising, falling, blooming upon the dark sky like a flower until its beams were blunted upon the shaggy side of some low cloud. Gradually we began to perceive what it was leading us to. Changing like the shapes of a kaleidoscope under that restless eye, there emerged a block of low irregular buildings. These too became part of the fantasy; now it was a long cement hall, its broken window-panes seeming like holes burned in canvas; now a group of small brown wooden huts, every board in them sharp as in an old woodcut, their canvas roofs shining like slates; now great red-brick buildings that looked like what they were, aerodromes. The image never remained still. The only fixtures in this fantastic world were the barbed-wire entanglements and the main gate which were lit with great arc lamps and the little wooden hut outside which we halted and in which we must be received. We stood there for hours; it was bitterly cold. It was early morning when I was admitted. I was marched to the quartermaster’s hut and served out with a spring bed, a mattress and blankets. I lifted them and collapsed. Some of the prisoners carried my bedding while two tall military policemen helped me to my hut and saw me into bed. When I opened my eyes next morning I saw a long, many-windowed building, divided, at about the height of a man, into two aisles, in each of which were two rows of beds, iron and trestle. Everyone round me was asleep, rolled up in brown prison blankets like my own, and the place suggested a Franciscan dormitory. Through the clerestory windows over my head I saw blue clouds. I was only a few yards from the door and through it and the side-door of the concrete porch outside it that someone had left unlatched I caught my first view of the compound. And there, beyond the sunken wire, glowed the fields! It is the same picture | always see whenever I hear the Good Friday music from Parsifal; Parsifal’s _Wie duenkt mich doch die Aue heut’ so schoen_ alone expresses the astonishment and delight of that waking. Everything was bright; there was a high wind blowing and it brought the breath of the fields about me; the prison and its horrors were far away. The interior life of a place or a human being is so indescribable that I wonder we ever attempt it. Eleven years later I revisited this internment camp, now deserted, only to find I had lost my bearings in it. Then the framework of a gate started the engine of memory and I shot off. Suddenly the friend who was with me caught me by the arm and asked, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why did you do that?’ It was some time before I realized what I had done that astonished him: I had made a sharp turn in one open place, had picked my way along a path once fenced with barbed wire, though now the path was obliterated and the barbed wire gone. That is what I mean by an interior life. In the camp I soon lost touch with my old companions and made friends among the new. After prison with its rowdy and indiscriminate contacts this was a place of privacy and culture. There were a thousand internees but one came to know very few; in a town twice its size everyone would have known everyone else, but left to themselves men are unsociable and incurious. For the first few months it was easy to maintain the illusion that one was in a town; there were classes, lectures, plays, concerts, debates, books; the great dining hall in the North Camp had been rigged up as theatre and church with a stage at one end and an altar at the other. In the mornings I was often first to wake, had a shower bath and a stroll and put in an hour’s work at my books before old Dan came through the huts blowing reveille. Soon after that came first count. Military policemen stationed themselves outside while we stood at the foot of our beds and listened to the whistles coming nearer. Then one blew at our door, the hutleader called us to attention and one of the camp command with a Free State officer stamped through the files, tapping each man as they passed. Sometimes counting and recounting went on for an hour till we were sick of it. Next came Mass. It was a crippled service because we were all under ban, and only one man who served Mass communicated. When Mass was over the whistle went for breakfast, and after breakfast there were fatigues for those whose turn it was. I as a teacher was exempt from fatigues, and when I hadn’t a class put in my morning at work. Except in the summer work was not easy, because in our great barrack of a hut there was a continuous hum of talk and tapping of improvised hammers, and men were all the time going and coming and stopping to ask questions or start aimless conversations. After dinner if it were fine there was a procession to the playing-field, a wide field overlooking the sea from which you could watch the trains puffing north and south. Then tea and finally that evening warmth of relaxation and debate of men who all their lives have been used to work, before the whistle sounded for second count and we rushed to the cook-house for hot water for our tea or cocoa. When the light had gone out for the last time the hutleader gave out the rosary and then there was silence. It was a monastic existence, devoid of responsibility and care, and at first, particularly while fighting still went on outside and there was still chance of an honourable peace, I was happy enough. My best friend was a country lad from the coast of Clare. I had been in camp only a day or two when he spoke to me and told me that he remembered poems I had contributed to a children’s paper at the age of twelve or thirteen. He was a heavy youth with a more than labouring awkwardness; he can have been no more than nineteen, but his body was hunched and twisted like an old man’s; he always shambled with eyes on the ground, a lock of jet-black hair hanging over one eye, his thick black brows knitted. His massive features that would have been the joy of a sculptor’s heart had a sort of shimmering delicacy that suggested an intense interior conflict; he had a slight stammer that exaggerated the slowness of his speech, and when he spoke earnestly there appeared on each temple a faint pallor that somehow caught the light and made him seem transfigured. His smile, sometimes candid and wistful, sometimes brilliant and passionate, suggested lightning over a moor. Neither of us had yet framed any criticism of our companions, but it was not long before we discovered that we differed from them in a certain robustness of outlook which we had in common. We both loved life. I first began to appreciate the distinction when I noticed in the autograph books that were always circulating in the camp the number of quotations from Shelley, a poet I disliked. But it was not only Shelley, it was Shelley’s period and type and all it stood for, Mazzini and ‘Terence McSwiney and Pearse and a gospel of liberty and self-sacrifice and hero-worship which in Ireland has degenerated into a sickly idealism that covers every reality with a sort of syrup of legend. Against these abstractions that reduce life to a tedious morality O’Neill opposed his knowledge of simple people and I the philosophy I had been acquiring from Goethe. To McSwiney’s dictum that victory comes not to those who inflict most but to those who endure most I retorted in Goethe’s phrase that a man must be either a hammer or an anvil. One began by feeling this idealism as a harmony: one ended by doubting the existence of a treble. When the whistle blew for count it was nominally for our own and not the enemy officer that we paraded and stood to attention. Later on that struck me as a rather silly evasion. And there was the astonishing tale of John Mahoney (let us call him that) which, in the beginning, seemed no more than the very funny incident it was. John frequently disagreed with his hutleader. The hutleader said John was insubordinate, John retorted that the hutleader was favouring the other men at his expense. What the right and wrong of it were I don’t profess to remember. At any rate, by way of protest John refused to do his fatigues. So one day two policemen, that is to say two prisoners wearing armlets, brought John before the command court which consisted of several prisoners like himself, and the command court sentenced him to extra fatigues by way of punishment. These also he refused to perform and in a day or two he was up before the court once more. One would imagine that sensible men faced with the simple fact that John and his hutleader could not agree would simply send one or the other to a different hut. But no! Discipline must be preserved. So John was sent to prison. Now ‘the prison’ was a tiny hut isolated on a knoll at the eastern end of the camp. That day the rumour spread and the compound was in an uproar. O’Neill and I rejoiced. It gave us the same feeling of moral relief we had experienced when we had found in some autograph book, cheek by jowl with a quotation from Shelley, those lines about the kiss ‘that broke the mainspring of her heart and left her mouth wide open.’ But John, the doubly-imprisoned, was far from being beaten. He did something that staggered us all. He declared a hunger-strike. Not against the Free State, mark you, not against imprisonment in the camp, but against the Irish Republic and imprisonment in the isolation. And how was one to disentangle two causes from one creature? How could the Free State, with such a trifling complaint against so good a man, stand aside and allow him to be done to death by the wicked Republic, which at any rate it did not recognize? And how could John, who had seen his country’s liberties pocketed by the Free State (which he did not recognize) and been its prisoner for a year, how could he accept the protection of a usurping authority against the legitimate Republic? John’s challenge was double-edge, infuriating logic. How exactly it ended for him I forget, but his hash was settled at a mass meeting of the prisoners where the sacred principle of majority rule was proclaimed by the camp intelligentsia. Since we were ourselves a minority at war with the state I thought this illogical, but I must confess that I made very little effort to follow the speeches; my sympathies were too wholeheartedly with the outcast. I became friendly with a big-boned, wild-faced man with a shaven skeleton head and a bare hairy chest. I called him the Prophet because he talked politics in a deep, thrilling rumble-bumble of a voice that tickled the drums of your ears. Both studious, we were condemned to exist apart in the large huts that were becoming increasingly difficult to work in. Besides, the fighting was over, releases took place every day, and an appalling restlessness had begun to invade the camp. One day we discovered that a group of men were being ejected from their room for insubordination. It was a charming room, warm and quiet and large enough for three: in an evil hour we applied for it. I have called my friend the Prophet, but we were both prophets—and martyrs. For no sooner had we applied than we realized that we had committed in Irish eyes the unforgivable sin, and we were too proud to withdraw. If we hadn’t applied no one else would have done so; the men would have been formally ejected, the room would have been vacant for a day or two, and then one evening they would have reappeared and taken up their old quarters without question. No discipline, no law can withstand that anarchic Irish personal factor that eats up principles as an old goat eats up a fence. You think you can build up a personal life, can sit at home and mind your garden? Just try. Sooner or later that old goat, for all the long stick that knocks so forbiddingly between his horns, will come through your fences and trample your flower beds and munch your fairest posies. But we hadn’t realized it. And solitary and dignified we carried our mattresses and beds and books into the new hut under a fire of taunts and threats from the ejected and their friends. There was vague talk of reprisals, beatings and police protection that pleased the camp for a fortnight. And for a while my friend and I were very happy. We foregathered with our new hutmates at night over the stove, sang songs, swapped stories, debated. But disagreements arose between myself and the prophet, and oftener and oftener I heard the prophetic note in his voice, and less and less the lilting scatter-brained one that had enchanted me. Boom-boom-boom it went all day and the triangle between his brows became more marked, and I began to realize, dimly and helplessly, that my charming comrade looked on me as a devil incarnate. Why was that? I asked myself. One day I arrived to find the prophet had posted over his bed a very romantic poem, full of fine sentiments about liberty and martyrdom and recreants and what not else. It was not as bad a poem as I thought then, seeing in it nothing but a sermon directed against myself. That evening I wrote over my own bed in small but firm letters: Neither in death nor life has the just man anything to fear. And that evening the prophet’s brow was like a thunderstorm. When he spoke to me his voice was choked with passion. Nor, though I felt a distinctly just man, did I feel I had nothing to fear. Next day there was another poem over the prophet’s bed, and the same evening I wrote over my own: Grey, my dear friend, is all your theory, And green the golden tree of life. After that we had a terrible row nor did we speak to one another again until the tragi-comedy ended, a few days later. A young fellow from the south received a wire to say his mother was dying and begging him to come home. One could secure parole only by signing a declaration of allegiance (a savage condition, having regard to opinion within the camp which was dead against signing). It was a pity, I said, that God hadn’t made mothers with the durability of principles. The mother, being of softer material, died, and the lad began to mope. Worse news came; his brothers and sisters had been left homeless, but his was kept from him. One evening he overheard a conversation about it and threw himself on the wires under the rifles of the sentries. When they brought him back to his room he said ‘They wouldn’t even shoot me!’ One morning the doctor ordered me to hospital. On the same day the great hunger strike was announced. It was decided, very cleverly, to put the issue, for and against, to the men at county meetings: this meant that the few like myself who opposed it were practically unheard. So close on thousand men solemnly pledged themselves to abstain from food until they either died or were released. That evening I went into hospital. On the same evening while I lay in my bed, rejoicing again in the feeling of clean linen and the myriad virtues of pillows, a military policeman brought in a tall lad with a vacant face who had to be undressed and put to bed. Then the policeman sat down by the bed and lit his pipe. It was the man whose mother had died; I had fresh reason to admire the durability of principles. I did not sleep that night. A sigh, a stir of clothes and the tall lad slipped quietly out of bed and padded across the floor to the window beside me. He stood on the windowsill, gripping the bars with his hands, his face crushed between them. God only knows what he saw. Once I dozed and woke to find him standing there, fixed by the searchlight, crucified against the bars, his grey shirt reaching half-way down his thighs. Another sigh and he padded back to bed again. A few days later I left the hospital to be with O’Neill and the other objectors. It was a bitter, black day, the compound, almost deserted, was a sea of mud. I entered one hut to see a friend. The men were lying every way; some in bed, some dressed but unshaven; they did not look at me. Partitions and doors and lavatory seats, everything wooden had been torn away to make fires, round which groups of them sat gloomily, watching the pot of salt water that simmered there; the only sustenance they allowed themselves. But what struck me most forcibly was the silence: all that busy hammering and shouting was gone. As I left the hut I was followed by a general hiss—objectors were not popular. Then it began to break: first in ones and twos, and then in small groups. These men’s rations had to be claimed; that took a full day, so we objectors divided our food amongst them. The first-comers were treated with derision and contempt by the cookhouse staff, and it amused me to observe how with numbers they attained dignity: soon it was they who were bullying the cookhouse. The day after my return a big group of my county men broke, and the command hut which obviously rated my influence higher than I did ordered me to occupy a deserted hut and to enter no other. But the agitator who was speaking now was one much more eloquent than I, and him they could not lock up. In the next few days the break became an avalanche. Then came surrender. The soldiers brought buckets of soup to the wires and men tore themselves to dip their mugs in it. Bleeding, famished, ill, half-crazy, and yet happy seeing relief come, they snapped and fought like mad dogs while the soldiers sweated under the steaming buckets, the sentries lowered their rifles and the officers stood about smiling. O’Neill’s face was very pale, and he spoke almost in a whisper. We both knew that what we were watching was the end of a period; the end, in our day at least, of something noble, priceless and irreplaceable. Afterwards there was another mass meeting. The command thanked and complimented the men; it was a splendid moral victory: the men cheered like mad, but all the same the camp remained what it was then, a grave, and a ruined grave at that. The national impossibilism had produced its deadly aftermath, apathy: it was not the weariness of a healthy man, it was the deadly thing with which we had been familiar in our childhood and with which unless a miracle happens we must die—the moral stagnation of a people who at every turn reject life. It was a November day, bright and cold. I was sitting in O’Neill’s room when a man burst in and called ‘O’Connor, you’re wanted. There’s an officer looking for you.’ I did not stir. It was a favourite and cruel joke. ‘You’re wanted, I tell you,’ he continued. ‘You’re wanted,’ said O’Neill with a wistful smile. And even then I only half-believed it. O’Neill and I went to my hut. The officer we were told had been and gone. I sat down, trembling, overcome by a sudden feeling of despair. And then a green-clad figure appeared in the doorway; it reminded me of another such I had seen in a dark cell in a city prison, but that had been a call to death, this was a call to life. ‘Is O’Connor back yet?’ asked the voice. ‘Yes,’ I answered weakly, ‘Here I am.’