Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

Of course, pained taciturnity is typical of many survivors of the Second World War, but my grandfathers’ case is complicated by the fact that, unlike the prisoner of war or the wounded combatant or the displaced civilian or even the interned enemy alien, Jim and Joseph did not have the benefit of having suffered a universally creditable and understood misfortune of war; and the fall-out of the Curragh infighting meant that for a long time Jim was even deprived of recognition within republican circles. Denied conventional acknowledgement of what they’d been through, my grandfathers can only have been shaken in their faith in conventional explanations of the world. The effect of this disillusionment was not to radicalize them — Joseph remained a conservative bourgeois, Jim an orthodox republican — but, rather, to make them wary of unseen, undeclared forces of the State: paranoid, it might be said. This shared trait was one of the very few things the two men, who were opposites in almost every respect expect their authoritarianism, had in common.

But in one sense, their paranoia — evident from Joseph’s testimony and Jim’s perennial suspiciousness — was well-founded. I don’t mean that after their release from internment they continued to be under the surveillance of the Special Branch or the Turkish secret police, although for all I know this was in fact the case; I mean that historical dark matter surrounded and manoeuvred my grandfathers more than they ever knew or, perhaps, could have known.

This is one way of saying that they were, of course, unlucky. They lived in extraordinarily hateful and hazardous places and times, in which men with powerful egos were especially exposed. I don’t have any confidence that, in their shoes, I would have fared any better than they did, or indeed that a descendant of mine, looking back with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight and a comfortable chair, won’t be able to point to defects in my apprehension of the world and make a case that I culpably failed to notice, or act or speak about, something that is perfectly clear to him; and no doubt my ghost will exclaim, ‘No! You don’t understand! That’s not how it was at all!’

However scrupulous I have tried to be, I have unavoidably subjected my grandfathers, defenceless in their graves, to an unfair trial; and sometimes, thinking back to the hostility I felt towards them at the outset, I have even worried if I haven’t been driven by a desire to lock them up in words as a punishment for the hurt silence which, I rightly or wrongly sensed, they’d bequeathed my parents. In the end, though, I like to think differently. Joseph and Jim may well be my prisoners, interned in death behind the bars of these paragraphs, but they are also escapees from the hush in which they were held by my family. And, no longer absent, they are, in spite of everything, and a little miraculously, no longer in the wrong. I now understand something about them, and understanding, as everybody knows, is the better part of forgiveness.

Which brings me to a story my aunt Amy once told me. Walking down the street one day, years after the war, her father caught sight a man with whom, because of some disagreement in the past, he was no longer on speaking terms. Joseph crossed the road and said to the man, ‘Would you go to my funeral?’ ‘I would,’ said the other. ‘And I would go to your funeral, too,’ Joseph replied, ‘so why don’t we talk now, before it’s too late?’ In his lack of rancour, Amy said, Papa was like Mandela.

It was an extravagant comparison, but I caught Amy’s drift: for it was Nelson Mandela who pronounced that if he’d been bitter and angry about his imprisonment of 27 years, he would not have been a free man. It had been a puzzle to me how my grandfather was able to enjoy agreeable post-war relations with Olga Catton and William Rickards when he knew that they’d almost certainly informed on him to the British; but now I understand that Joseph knew, and by his notation in his dictionary sought to transmit, something important about the need to forgive and — here I am thinking of his death-bed request for absolution from his wife — to receive and stimulate forgiveness. Of course, a capacity for amnesty may be indistinguishable from a capacity for forgetfulness.

Amy’s story is connected in my mind to something that happened on the last Sunday of Jim O’Neill’s life. My grandfather was lying in his hospital bed when he was stunned to receive a visit from his brother Paddy. An All-Ireland hurling final was being played that day, and the two brothers, who had been bitterly estranged since their fight at Ardkitt all those years before, watched the game on television together in near-silence. However awkward, the fraternization was powerful. The following day, Jim rescinded his instruction to Terry that Paddy be barred from his funeral. ‘Forget about that thing I told you,’ he told his son. ‘I’m sure,’ Terry said, ‘that he waited for his brother before he died.’

I claim the privilege, as a grandson, to dwell on my grandfathers in a way of my choosing. I could think of their lives as tragedies, as others have done, noting with sadness that the Toros Hotel, Joseph Dakak’s monument, was finally sold on 30 December 1999 and as I write is being gutted to accommodate the town’s first major department store. I could linger on the continuing hatred and violence in Turkey and Ireland, and link my grandfathers’ shortcomings to the lethal infirmities in those countries’ political cultures. But I would rather release Jim and Joseph from such gloominess and think of them at ease and home free. I want to see Joseph dancing with my grandmother in the mountains, she with her rectangular forehead and deep-set eyes and good cheekbones and sturdy ankles, he with a flower in his lapel, holding her neatly, moving her sure-footedly to the tunes of the Club orchestra, giving her his exclusive attention. I want to see Jim in his hat and suit walking in the country on an early, preternaturally hot summer’s Sunday. The children are nowhere to be seen, Cora the greyhound is off chasing a bird, and my grandmother is holding her husband’s hand. The couple are walking by the river when, to Eileen’s horror and delight, Jim suddenly tears off his clothes and wades quickly into a freezing swimming pool and calls for her to join him. This is how I would like to think of my grandfathers, at liberty from mortal emotions.