Friends Indeed Read online

  FRIENDS INDEED

  FRIENDS INDEED

  Rose Doyle

  Hodder & Stoughton

  Copyright © Rose Doyle

  First published in by H odder & Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline

  The right of Rose Doyle to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  For my friends

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I first heard about the Wrens of the Curragh when Kevin Myers wrote about them in An Irishman's Diary in The Irish Times of 24th July, 1996. Like countless women in history, they had been overlooked, and forgotten. I've incorporated many of their stories, along with factual detail, into Friends Indeed and hope this will, in their case, go some way towards putting things to rights.

  Starting was easy. Getting an agent like Darley Anderson made finishing it easy too. Thanks, Darley, for the kick start. Then there was the masterly job of editing by Sue Fletcher, who ironed it out, gave it a name and sent it into the world all polished up. Thank you, Sue.

  None of it could have been written without the generous and good humoured help of a lot of people. My thanks to Kevin Myers, unwittingly inspirational but that's life. Dr Maria Luddy, Director of the Women's History Project and an historian who knows all about the Wrens, gave unstintingly of her time and knowledge. Comdt. Victor Laing of the Military Archives in Cathal Brugha Barracks pointed me in the right direction and Comdt. Rory Hynes, Librarian at the Defence Forces Training Centre on The Curragh, helped bring the conditions under which the Wrens lived to life. My thanks too to Col. Des Travers and to the Kildare Historical Society. I'm indebted to Mairead Dunlevy of the National Museum at Collins Barracks for the tour of the costumes, to Ian Lumley for the tour of his Henrietta Street home and to Liam McNulty for the tour of Na Piobairi Uilleann's premises on Henrietta Street. Dr Con Costello's history of the Curragh camp, A Most Delightful Station, was indispensable. So were the writings of James Greenaway, journalist with the Pall Mall Gazette who, in 1867, wrote in riveting detail of his time spent with the Wrens — as did an outraged Charles Dickens the same year. For books and incidental detail, thanks to Brendan O Ciobhain, Bernadette Madden, Lorraine Dunne, Bernie Doolin, Eamonn Russell, Kate Bateman, Brendan Keenan and the ever obliging staff of the Gilbert Library in Pearse Street. And, for the ending, great thanks to Elgy Gillespie, in San Francisco.

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Allie

  August, 1867. Dublin

  The smells were the first thing. The heavy, fetid stench of animal sweat and fear and excrement, the evil smelling miasma from the river Liffey.

  The stink that was Dublin.

  They were what made me feel, at last, that I was home.

  ‘Close up that window,’ my father said.

  His eyes, bloodshot and weary and watchful, were open again. He'd been asleep since leaving the North Wall, tired as I was after the journey from Paris.

  ‘There's a herd of cattle ahead of us,' he said, you'd no business unlatching it.'

  'I need air. The carriage is stifling,' I said.

  'You don't need what passes for air in this part of the town.'

  His short, hairy fingers were clamped to his knees as he leaned forward. He smelled in need of a wash and of the wine he'd been drinking.

  My poor father was not made for travelling; he'd slept on the train journeys between Paris and London and been ill without stop on the boat crossings.

  'Close it up like I tell you, there's my good girl.'

  But though the air through the window reeked it was at least air. I'd taken a discreet sniff and balanced the closeness of my father's stale odours against the stink from the cattle ahead and decided that as long as we kept moving, and had the window open, I could put up with both.

  'I'd rather we kept it unlatched, Dada,' I said and he straightened in his seat. I knew what he would say next.

  'I spent a lot of money on you in that Paris convent. I hope, Alicia, that it wasn't wasted. I don't see any great improvement in your manners.'

  He studied the hands on his trouser-clad knees. He wore breeches usually; the suit of dark green trousers and coat had been meant to impress the nuns. He could have saved himself the discomfort. The Emperor Napoleon III in all his medals would not have impressed the sisters who'd taught me deportment and the French language.

  'The waste of money was in bringing me home,' I leaned over and touched one of his hands, 'though I'm glad to be with you, Dada. You know that.'

  His hand, holding mine briefly, was hot. 'I know that, girl.' He paused. 'Your mother will be pleased to have you home,'

  'No, she won't.'

  I looked away from the longing in his bloodshot eyes, gazed instead at the seabirds circling and cawing like drunken street traders above the Custom House. I wished I was one of them, high over the city, on the wing elsewhere. Back to Paris maybe, where the waters of the river Seine were limpid and flowing and never muddy like those of the Liffey. I hadn't expected, when I'd been sent to Paris to become a lady, that I would feel so free and love to travel so much. C'est la vie.

  And now I was home and I couldn't say, as my father wanted me to, that I would be glad to see my mother. I'd never been dishonest and two years in France hadn't changed me that much.

  My poor, poor father. He expected such a great deal from me, and from the fine education he'd paid dearly for.

  A bellowing and the roars of the drovers made the herd of cattle seem very near. The weather, even at that early hour, was warmer than any August I could remember. According to my father it had been a summer of uncommonly hot, festering days and the city had the look of it. The streets were straw-filled and dirty and the people so dusty it appeared as if an ashy brown was the fashion colour of the summer.

  Carlisle Bridge, when we got to it, was thick with a bustling dawn traffic of working women on their way to service, with horse-drawn omnibuses, hay carts, delivery lads on bikes and barking dogs. I don't care for animals and there were a ferocious number of them in Dublin that morning.

  We'd slowed to a near halt when, ignoring my father's protests, I leaned my head out of the window. 'Westmoreland Street is packed tight with the cattle herd,' I said, 'we'll be the rest of the day getting through them.'

  'We will not, by God.' My father's anger was sudden, aroused as much by my behaviour as by the animals' delaying us. 'I'm paying that slouch of a driver good money to get us home before eight o'clock.'

  His colour had risen and he thumped so hard on the carriage ceiling I thought the cane would go through it. It didn't, but the carriage didn't move either. Muttering an oath he took my place at the window. 'Keep going, you scoundrel,' he roared, 'I want to get to Haddington Road before nightfall.'

  The carriage jolted forward and he sat back, his face a mottled purple. He'd always had a temper but this new shortness worried me. I put it down to the amounts of wine he'd drunk in Paris and on the boat.

  Ahead of us the drovers bellowed and the cattle thundered into the opening between the Parliament buildings and Trinity College. They were headed for the marts and would be in front of us for a bit yet. The carriage bounded after them.

  'Your mother'll be waiting,' my father said and I looked away from him again. My mother would be doing no such thing, and he knew it.

  My mother would very likely be in her bed still or, if not, at her morning-long toilette. My father was as full of wishful thinking about my mother's behaviour as he was of an unfortunate adoration of her beauty. And she was indeed beautiful. Everyone said so.

  She was half mad too, though not many people outside of myself, and my father when he was honest, could see this. Her disenchantmen
t with my father was something else which was obvious to all but him.

  When it came to me, Alicia Eleanor Buckley, her only child, she wasn't so much disenchanted as disinterested. She wasn't a woman had taken naturally to motherhood.

  'You'll be anxious too to see your new home,' pride mixed with hope in my father's voice.

  'Yes,' I said, 'I am.' This was a lie and we both knew it.

  I'd been happy enough living over the cattleman's public house my father had owned near the Broadstone. Things could be rough in the pub but our rooms were comfortable and the people around were my friends, and my father's friends. But when the railway station came to the Broadstone it made the pub a valuable property so my father put in new glass windows, did away with the boarded-up shutters and got in gas lighting. This, of course, made it worth even more money. My father had sold the pub while I was away and written to tell me we had become members of “respectable society'.

  He now called himself a man of business and bought property. An old mansion in Henrietta Street that had become a tenement was one such purchase. The house he bought for us to live in in the south suburbs was another.

  We were almost at Trinity College when the carriage stopped.

  'By the Lord Jesus Christ I'll have that driver's guts.' My father hauled himself out of his seat and put his head through the window again. 'Didn't I tell you to keep going?' he shouted to the driver. 'Didn't I tell you to make a way through them animals?'

  The carriage shook.

  'There's a couple of them's bolted,' the carman's voice had a note of panic in it, 'the rest of them's unsettled. It'd be better to wait 'til the drovers have got them under control . . .'

  A bullock, careering back the way it had come, glanced off the side of the carriage and was set upon by a drover with a stick.

  'Damn you to hell,' my father roared first at the drover and then at the carman,’I’ll be the one decides whether you stop or go. Drive on.' He shook a hairy fist and I worried that he might have a fit in front of my eyes. 'Drive on or by God I'll have your licence taken off you. There's plenty would be glad to take your place up on that seat . . .'

  We'll never know what the man would have done. The stampede started, a savage drumming which made the ground seem about to burst open under us.

  Within minutes College Green was a nightmare of mutilated and dying animals, of chaos and panic and the screaming agony of hurt and frightened people. The tormented squeals and bellows of crazed cattle soon drowned the human cries and the stench of fear surrounded the carriage as thickly as a wall. It was as if hell had been let loose.

  My father managed to close the window and, trapped in the carriage, we braced ourselves against the battering by animal flesh, stiffened at the smack of bone against the wooden frame.

  The carman was down from his seat and could be heard, without much success, trying to calm the horse. The windows darkened with spurting blood. It seemed to go on forever.

  'We'll be all right. We'll get out of this.'

  My father's colour had drained. He was white as any sheet. I'm sure I was white myself. My heart felt as if it would burst from my chest. I wanted to scream but couldn’t make a sound.

  It ended as suddenly as it had started, a quick, nightmare silence falling on the streets. This was broken by whimpers and pitiful cries and the retreating hooves of the cattle, their occasional bellows growing fainter and fainter.

  'We didn't travel this far to be beat at the last fence . . .' My father reached to touch me but was thrown against the back of his seat when the carriage horse gave a screaming whinny and reared. 'No need to be afraid,' he said, 'we’ll be out of here in no time. No time at all.'

  'I'm not afraid.' I held myself tight in my corner and stared through the window. 'The drovers are herding the cattle up Dame Street,' I tried to assure him, and myself, 'the worst is over, I think . . .’

  There were terrible sights through that window. I saw people lying about the place in broken, unnatural positions, limbs and bodies askew, blood oozing from many of them and others looking as if they might be dead they were so still. I saw an overturned omnibus, fallen on one of the horses which had been pulling it. The other horse, also dead, appeared to have strangled itself in an attempt to be free of its harness. Some of nearby dead and injured had clearly been passengers.

  Even as I watched the police arrived, about a dozen of them at a hard run, and with them two doctors who went immediately to help the wounded.

  'The worst is over,' I said again.

  It was what I wanted to believe and was all I could find in myself to say. The cost had still to be reckoned, the dead and dying accounted for, the injured if possible made well. The pain, both of loss and ruined bodies, would go on.

  The worst was only beginning.

  The driver appeared at the window. He was an older man, about my father's age, which was something over fifty, with a bald head and whiskers. He'd lost his hat. The deep folds of his face were awash with perspiration.

  'They're saying it was a young heifer started it,' he rubbed his eyes with a shaking hand. 'The story has it that she broke ranks with the herd and went headfirst into the pair of horses pulling the omnibus . . .'

  When my father would have cut him short the man caught and held my eye. His own were full of tears.

  'That's the thing of it, that's how life is. It can turn on you any minute. There's two young people stretched out there in the street who got up this morning without a thought of death between them.'

  'That's enough caterwauling out of you.' My father's hands shook every bit as much as the carriage driver's. 'Get back on your perch and get us out of here. There's nothing to be done but clear the space for the police and doctors to do their work.'

  'Maybe we can be of help?’ I said but my father would have none of it.

  'Are you mad, girl?' He was shouting again as the carman, without another word, left the door and went back up onto his seat. 'This is none of our doing or affair. We're best out of here. Your mother is waiting . . .'

  I looked at him then, a hard look, and he stopped shouting. He wanted no more truths from me about my mother. He and I both knew that he lived in fear as well as in awe of her and knew as well that she would not be waiting. I was tired of the pretence.

  'Stop the foolishness, Alicia,' he used a more sober tone, 'I don't want you endangering your life. We'll go on home.'

  'It's you who have endangered my life, bringing me back to live in this city.' Anger made me irrational. 'I'll rot here, if I'm not killed first.'

  'In the name of God be silent! What happened just now was an accident. It could have happened anywhere, even in your glorious Paris. Your taste for drama will be your undoing, I've always said so. I'm doing what's best—'

  'What's best for you, Dada. What happened here is a bad omen. I feel it. You gave me freedom and now you've taken it back. I could have stayed and been a teacher of English in Paris . . .'

  The carriage jolted and moved forward slowly.

  'And ended in the gutter, like many a young woman before you.' My father, now we were on our way again, settled weighty and worried into his seat. 'I sent you to learn manners and put a curb on your headstrong ways and this is what my money gets me. You're nineteen years and should be thinking of marriage, like other young women your age.'

  I could have told him that what I'd seen of marriage growing up had done nothing to enamour me of the state. I kept silent because I'd seen enough of his efforts to please my mother to know he wasn't to blame for their misery.

  Instead I asked a question I half dreaded the answer to. 'Is Sarah Rooney married?'

  'Not married, no,' he was irritable, 'but a woman nonetheless.' He shifted in his seat, his weight seeming a greater burden to him than usual.

  'What do you mean?'

  'I mean nothing, nothing at all.' My father plucked at his moustache distractedly.

  I let the subject of Sarah Rooney go. I would see her soon enough.

&nb
sp; Sooner than I thought.

  The carriage inched its way past the gates of Trinity College. I was full of bad humour and irritability, staring through the blood-splattered window, when I noticed her. She was easy to spot, a good head taller than the people penned in with her behind the college gates.

  Seeing her changed everything: my mood, the prospects for my life ahead. It didn't matter, in those minutes, that she hadn't replied to my last two letters. Sarah Rooney was the friend of my youth, the sister I'd never had, the one person who would make my life bearable now I was home.

  It was Sarah, in our shared childhood, who'd shown me that to really live life you had to be fearless. Sarah, penniless and living in the tenements, had confirmed in me my belief that money and respectability were cloaks to drape over hollow lives. It was thanks to Sarah too that I'd learned never to expect loving arms, or caring, from my mother.

  She hadn't known she was teaching me these things. All she'd done was be my friend.

  'Sarah's over there, Dada, in the crowd the police have locked behind the gates.' I pointed. 'We can't leave her there. We'll have to stop and take her with us in the carriage.'

  'Sarah Rooney's no longer the child you knew,' he was curt, 'she's in service in the Haddington Road house now, along with

  her mother. She should be there at this hour, earning the money I pay her to keep the place in order.'

  'What's wrong with you?' I stared at him. 'You'd leave her there because you pay her a wage? Does that make her a different person?' I peered again through the window. 'Bess is inside the gates too.' I grabbed the carriage cane and stabbed at the ceiling. The horse stopped. 'They're in a terrible crush behind there, Dada, with the police shouting at them. You'll have to get them out of it. The police will listen to you.'

  'Things have changed and it's best they make their own way. Allie. They're born to it, people like that.' He stared balefully through the window. Being notoriously short-sighted, it was unlikely he saw either Sarah or her mother. 'Shouting or sweet talk, it's all the same to the likes of the Rooneys. They'll be let out of there soon enough and, by the Lord God, if either of them looks for full money for this day they'll be barking up the wrong tree. A fool and his money are not so easily parted.' He reached for the cane but I held it fast. 'Stop this foolishness, Allie.'