Free War Children by Gerard Whelan

disappointment, and hung on his every word. It isn’t every day you meet a man who’s taken up arms against a whole empire, and it was a far rarer thing in 1918 than it would be even a couple of years later.
    I first saw Tom on the afternoon of his return. His family and neighbours had gathered some money somewhere and laid in jugs of ale and porter and a little keg of whiskey they’d got from one of the Irishtown shebeens. They’d bought and cooked dozens of pigs’ feet and cheeks andwhat looked like half a hundredweight of ribs. They’d boiled a barrowload of potatoes, and there were rounds of brown bread the size of the wheels on a dogcart, and a big yellow brick of butter. There was more money spent on food and drink that day than the family would normally spend in several months, and no doubt some of the stuff was robbed somewhere (tasting, as Tom himself said, all the better for it). But it wasn’t every day, as old Granny Farrell commented, that you got a young fellow home that was after dying for Ireland. The neighbours crowded the already-crowded house, and there was music and dancing and singing and laughing. Dogs and children rolled on the floor, and as the day progressed and the drink did its work they were joined, sometimes unintentionally, by a few of the revellers. It was a great day entirely, and when it was time for me to go home for my tea I left late, grudgingly, dragging myself away, hating the fact that I had to go at all. I had no interest in eating. I was stuffed with fatty bacon and brown bread anyway, and stuffed in a different way with the talk and the laughter and the singing. I walked home to my silent, respectable house, hating every step.
    I heard afterwards that later that night Tom went out with a few of his friends to continue the celebration. On his way home alone, merry if not downright drunk, he discovered that someone outside of Irishtown had noticed his return after all: Phil Murphy and two of his constables waylaid him, and while the constables held Tom’s arms theKing of Irishtown gave him a good hiding – ‘just in case,’ as Murphy told him, ‘you’ve any fancy ideas about bringing your dirty little rebel ways home with you.’ When I saw Tom again his face was still swollen. Several of his teeth were gone, and he took off his shirt to show us his bruised ribs. Three of the fingers on his left hand were broken, the legacy of a final deliberate stamp from Phil Murphy’s big policeman’s boots as Tom lay bleeding and half-senseless in the gutter. I felt horrified and angry at this crime, but the Farrells seemed to take it as a natural thing.
    ‘Sure, they’re police ,’ Tom and Mickey’s father, Andy, explained. He’d spent a few years in jail himself, though for less noble causes than Tom. ‘That’s what police does to the likes of us,’ Andy said. ‘It’s the way of the world. I’m only surprised that they didn’t do worse. That Phil Murphy is losing his touch.’
    I’d known that the polite, upright figure who ate lardy cake in our parlour was regarded as a very dangerous man in Irishtown. I hadn’t known, though, that the fear in which he was held there had such direct, physical cause. The reason that I hadn’t heard about it before was simply that no-one had thought it worth commenting on: like Andy Farrell, the rest of Irishtown simply took Phil Murphy’s violence as part of the natural order. Like all the best tyrants, the King of Irishtown struck by night. In the interests of local peace and justice he had a habit of taking the law into his own hands, of administering beatings with fist and boot in the dirty alleyswhere respectable people didn’t care to go. Not all of the constables took part in these special actions, and some of them – for there were many decent men in the RIC, no matter what anyone says – certainly disapproved. But Murphy was the boss, and he was a bully with it.
    My mother was furious when I mentioned the incident at home