When compiling a history of Ireland in descriptions of rain last week, I knew exactly where to look on the bookshelves for inspiration. Frank McCourt was high on the list of suspects. So too Heinrich Boll and Myles na gCopaleen.
The preliminary round-up also included Ernie O’Malley, for his memoirs detailing Irish conflict from 1916 to 1924. Although it must be 30 years since I read his work, I knew there was a lot of weather in there. O’Malley had, after all, spent years walking and cycling around Ireland as an IRA organiser, often sleeping in the open air. He may have been an even greater expert on rain than McCourt.
Skimming through his work again, however, I was reminded of just how much O’Malley wrote about the natural world in general. In that regard, he was unique among the memoirists of the period. You don’t get much of that in Tom Barry or Dan Breen. With O’Malley, at times, it’s as if the war is just background detail in a diary about landscape, wildlife and the changing seasons.
Here, for example, he’s writing about coastal west Mayo: “In rain or sun we loved this country; its haunting impersonal bareness, its austerity, aloofness, small lakes, the disproportionate bulking of the mountains, smells of shrivelled seaweed rotting in grey dirt-spume, brine, storm-wood, tarred rope and riggings, sea-wrack and mud after an ebb tide.”
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Here, like a literary Jack B Yeats, he’s virtually painting what he sees: “The glass green blue of a rough sea, clear depths under a cloudless sky, blurred distorted crabs and the flowing of fronds and seaweeds, slow apricot sunsets, steel grey, white and light blue clouds furled up by wind, splotched by rain until they mixed as on a palette, white green undersides of waves dashed back from pitted torn rocks, phosphorescence dripping from oars and bow on a dark night…”
That’s from a chapter on his childhood in the “shoneen” town of Castlebar, then at peace and comfortably ensconced in the British empire. But even later, when busy waging war against the crown, he always takes time to describe the countryside, as in north Clare during the spring of 1919: “The jet blackness of the rocks near Black Head changed to blue and grey as we went inland. The mountains were moulded in stone and shaped in recessive curves or angled like pyramids; in the valleys rock masses were piled like worn-out cities and small stretches of plain had the breadth of desert.”
In 1920, already two years away from home, he finds himself looking forward to another spring, with its “broken land, brown, umber, upturned earth smells awakened by the rain”. He continues: “The wild daffodil quivering on plant stem, purple-frittered wild Iris, the delicate cream of the primrose backed by its crimpled leaf and the rich golden glory of the sedate crocus…”
Then there is June 1921, at the height of the war when, commanding a unit in south Tipperary, O’Malley has the grim task of deciding the fate of three British intelligence officers arrested near Fethard.
In his view, much as he dreads carrying out the sentence, there is no choice. IRA prisoners are being executed. The officers will have to be shot too, to make their superiors think twice next time. It’s the brutal logic of war.
In the meantime, the captives are treated humanely. He offers to arrange a visit from a clergyman of their religion (they decline), gives them paper and envelopes to write last letters and even lets them seal the letters unread, on condition they give their word not to betray comprising details.
On the last night of their lives, to evade army searchers, O’Malley has to move the prisoners cross-country.
“A sloe-skin dusk came slowly down on the steep western slopes of Slievenamon and across the woods there,” O’Malley records even then. “It blurred the valley of the Suir below the Comeraghs; hedges of tangled hawthorn with fresh leaves, in amongst the neat stems of spruce, stood out against the rise of hills. There was a strong, spicy smell carried across from the bright pink blossoms of a corner hedge of wild crab.”
At dawn the next day, the prisoners were brought to a roadside where a six-man firing squad waited. After asking “Do you mind?”, O’Malley blindfolded the officers with their own handkerchiefs. Then they all shook hands, with him and each other. And as the firing squad raised their rifles, the men linked hands and said goodbyes.
Only here does nature take second place; it is used to fill the silence. “The three fell to the ground; their arms twitched,” wrote O’Malley. “The Q.M. (quartermaster) put his revolver to each of their foreheads in turn and fired. The bodies stood still on the green grass. We stood to attention. Then slowly we went up the hill across country making for the [command] Centre. None of us spoke till we had crossed a good many fields where wind had snaked the rye grass.”
