Free Trespassers by Julia O'Faolain

latitude.
    ‘God help him,’ she sighed and shook a wisely sceptical head.
    To my secret satisfaction, her taunt about my having missed the excitements of war now looked like being disproved. A contingent of the Local Defence Force marched promisingly often past our gate. ‘Left, left!’ urchins jeered and, lifting small, plump knees, imitated the men as they stamped by: ‘I had a good job and I left!’ Petrol disappeared, and our car was put up on blocks. Fascinating black rubber gas masks with long snouts were supplied to us, then stored in the attic, never to be used, though blackout light bulbs were screwed in and blackout curtains hung lest German planes use our too brightly lit coastline to guide their bombing missions. A cupboard with a lock was filled with food, including tinned corned beef and Hershey chocolate bars, both of which we ungratefully despised, sent by friends in the US who feared we might be starving. Meanwhile, Eileen and a succession of handymen drew up a map of what now began to look like a garden, laid out paths, and strewed them with beach pebbles which we collected with a horse and cart in the small hours, lest it be illegal to take them. There was uncertainty about this. The handymen planted tough vegetables like kale, which I furtivelyfed by the armful to Captain Disney’s half-dozen cows who, considering our field to be still theirs, regularly broke through our fence to get at more. I was blamed for this, and when we learned that we might be liable if a cow broke its leg, we reinforced the fence. Cleverly, the cows returned by night. Defensively, we wove thorny furze through our palings. No good. The cows were persistent and, when chased, panicked and charged across seed beds and cucumber frames. So we planted a hawthorn hedge and hammered pointed sticks into the ground to protect it.
    Having grown friendly with the cows, I declared myself to be a vegetarian, but was thwarted in this.
    Meanwhile, were we at war or were we not? Confused, I tuned in to adult anxieties. What was neutrality? Did I want us to be at war? I did! I did! I yearned for the excitement but concealed this, since adults, despite wistful memories of their own war, were clearly not keen on this one.
    Jobs were still scarce, and a rump IRA had again split and was again plotting. It had by now been banned, unbanned, then rebanned, and one faction, no doubt feeling a need to give signs of life, declared its own war on Britain, then seized state-owned ammunition from a magazine in Phoenix Park. Mindful of English threats to take back the ports, de Valera’s government promptly rushed through an Emergency Powers Act, bringing back internment which it had abolished seven years before.
    Naturally, I didn’t know any of this at the time, but gleaned wisps of fact and speculation from listening to adults’ chat.
    So for what did our ‘Free’ State now stand? Side-of the-mouth comment raged as usual on the number 59 bus, whose schedule was now truncated, as was its route. Shortages became the great subject of chat, and fuel was especially scarce.
    *
    What leavened our family’s social life was that Killiney was a partly Protestant village and that, although Protestants had lost power, pull and, in some cases, property, few – apart from Erskine Childers’ relatives – can have been lastingly affected by the sour, emotional fall-out from the Civil War. On the whole, any grudges they might bear for having been sidelined were concealed with such dignity that my mother was puzzled years later to hear two old Protestant friends of hers refer to ‘them’ and ‘us’. Who, she was wondering, were the alien ‘them’, when it dawned on her that her friends meant people like herself. Local Protestants, unlike the ones in the North, were tolerant and liberal, but had doubts about our being so. They had a point. When it came to mixed marriages and the children thereof, the Irish RC Church was inflexible. The marriage had to be