Free War Children by Gerard Whelan Page A

– an unwise thing to do, but my anger got the better of me – and she threatened to wash my mouth out with soap.
    ‘That’s pure Irishtown lies,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you repeating them here. Sergeant Murphy would never do anything like that. It was probably a drunken fight Farrell was in, with some of his own low companions. A jailbird like that slandering good policemen! He should be put back in jail where he belongs!’
    When I said to my father that he should report the assault in the newspaper, he smiled at me sadly.
    ‘It’s not news, son,’ he said.
    ‘Not news? But he’d done nothing. The police attacked him! It’s an injustice!’
    My father sighed.
    ‘Son,’ he said, ‘it’s not the business of the police to enforce justice. It’s the business of the police to enforce the law and to keep order. Phil Murphy was keeping order in his own way. I may think it’s unjust, but who am I?’
    ‘You’re the newspaper owner – people should be told about this!’
    My father sighed again. He looked at me as though wondering whether I’d come down in the last shower.
    ‘And who in this town,’ he asked me, ‘do you think will want to read about police handing out a beating to a rebel from Irishtown?’
    * * *
    The British army’s need for fresh troops faded as 1918 wore on. The German war effort collapsed, and in November we had the Armistice and the Great War finally ended. There was little sense of victory in our town. People had got used to war, as they get used to anything. But there was more to it than that. People grew uneasy. Farmers and merchants – the very merchants who’d played a big part in the campaign against conscription – grumbled as they foresaw the end of their profits from high wartime prices. Even those Irishtowners depending on army wages wondered what would become of them when their husbands or fathers or sons were demobilised. These would no longer be brave soldiers fighting the enemy; instead they’d be unemployed men, used to violence, wandering the streets of a town that had no use for them.
    ‘This is when we need our politicians in parliament, to work for us,’ Phil Murphy said to my father. ‘And there they are off sulking.’
    The Irish Parliamentary Party had withdrawn in protest from the London Parliament in April, when the Conscription Bill was forced through.
    ‘It will all be different after the election,’ my father said to Phil Murphy. ‘We’ll know where we are then.’
    The general election called for December that year marked the point where politics finally came to our town in a big way. It was the first election held under new rules which let far more people vote. To the astonishment and disgust of many, even Irishtowners would have votes, and the novelty alone caused much excitement there. The town was even to have a candidate from the rebel party, Sinn Féin, the ones who’d been involved in the Dublin rebellion . Nothing like this had happened in our town before. The area had returned the same Member of Parliament for over twenty years, a prosperous farmer called Jonty Lehane who supported the Parliamentary Party and was an old friend of the party leader, John Redmond. He was a popular speaker with a great fondness for port, good brandy and the sound of his own voice. My father, who’d seen him speak in public many times, said Mr Lehane was a true moderate, for he’d never seen him either altogether sober or altogether drunk. My mother told my father he should be ashamed of himself – Mister Lehane’s cousin, she said, was a bishop. Mister Lehane himself had a speech impediment, she said, and it sometimes made him slur his words. But even my father, mild man though he was, couldn’t brook such nonsense.
    ‘A speech impediment?’ he said almost bitterly. ‘Aye – a cork from a brandy bottle got stuck in his gullet, maybe.’
    My mother just sniffed, in the way that she had, as though what he said wasn’t worth responding