On an Alien Shore. John Tully
to do. He had to thank the Grimshaws for that, he admitted, though he seldom had a good word for the family.
*
“As I say, we never wanted to leave Ireland,” sighed Michael, shifting his legs to ease the weight of the manacles on his ankles.
There was a sudden rattle of great black keys grinding in the lock and Warder Mulgrew stood in the doorway.
“It’s time for you to go, Father,” he said, apologetically it must be owned. It was time to escort Michael back to his cell, for the light was dying at the window. Soon it would be time for the stewed tea and the slice of bread they called supper before darkness fell and the ghosts came crowding into Michael’s cell.
“It’s been a great comfort talking with ye, Father,” Michael said as the two men shook hands; the shy and diffident priest and the young man on appeal, watched over by a little turnkey from Belfast who by now was convinced that the prisoner was innocent and not the killer his colleagues believed him to be.
3
THE NEXT TIME THAT Father Minahan visited, he found Michael in low spirits. He had received a letter from his sister Mary and his heart was sore over the news of their mother and father. The one, she said, was more poorly than the other. Their Da, Patrick, was never very strong after an accident in the dockyard, and last winter’s fever was after ravaging Bridget’s health. Mrs Reid from next door, bless her, was the best neighbour you could ever want; she was always bringing them things and would send her children on errands if there was anything Bridget needed. Without her help, the family could not have coped.
Michael feared that his arrest and imprisonment had set back any hope of recovery. Still, Mary was well and was bearing up, which was just as well, for there was nobody else there for them in this foreign land.
Mary was walking out with an Englishman called Barker – an iron founder at Armstrong’s heavy engineering and armaments works over at Elswick – and Michael prayed that he was treating her well. Still, the man had a decent trade and Mary claimed he was not overly fond of the drink, which was a blessing in these thirsty parts. Mary had grown up suddenly and Michael worried about the less than honourable attentions of men. He’d overheard them: “Eee, Billy, man! Look at the tits on that!” “Why aye man, she’s a reet bobby dazzler!” “Come roond to ma hoose, hinney!” Minahan made a mental note to see the family as soon as he could travel to Gateshead. He could understand Michael’s fears for them as it was some years since he had been able to visit his own parents in faraway Liverpool and his own mother was never in the best of health.
Their first meeting had not augured well. The priest had automatically assumed Michael was guilty of the crime of which he had been charged. He would confess his sins and be granted absolution in God’s eyes, if not those of the State. He would be yet another dumb or insolent fellow, a deviant warehoused here before his dispatch at the rope’s end or incarceration in some oubliette for thirty years.
It was not to be. The young man had fixed him squarely with his blue eyes and shook his head slowly. “Ach, I have all the regrets in the world, Father,” he had said, his voice low but firm. “But it is the victim of a miscarriage of justice I am – of English justice, for what fair play can there be for a poor Irish Catholic in this country in these hard times? I know that it is customary for felons to deny their guilt in the hope of exculpation. Ach, they’re all as innocent as babes, if you would listen to them! But Father, I despair that I am trapped on a conveyor. Once a man is after landing on it, there is no escape, and guilt or innocence doesn’t come into it.”
It is sometimes thought that the expression “his jaw dropped” is a mere figure of speech, but Father Minahan’s jaw did drop and his eyes opened wide at the conclusion of Michael’s peroration. It was a fine speech – and only partly reproduced here – for Michael had had the time and solitude to polish it and he was always one for the words. From then on, Minahan paid heed to Michael’s words. Once his suspicions of intelligent roguery had been stilled, he came to like and respect the young man. He pondered Daniel Defoe’s words, written here on Tyneside: “I hear much of people’s calling to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.”
Michael admitted to his sister that if Minahan had first misjudged him, then it was reciprocated, for he had assumed he would be cut from the same cloth as Father Breslin and all the rest of the black-clad regiment of God-botherers he had encountered. They always let the people down, those products of Maynooth and Allen Hall, he insisted. That, he admitted, was perhaps a trifle unfair, for there were good men in the priesthood, he was sure, and hadn’t his own mother wanted him to go for a priest? Nevertheless, weren’t the ones he had met personally, even the halfway decent ones among them, wilfully ignorant men with heads full of dogma and scorn for the world of books and learning, and contempt for the common people?
What in all fairness, he asked, could be said of Father Breslin courting the favour of the Grimshaws and neglecting the needs of his parishioners? “Father Minahan is not like that,” he told Mary in a letter. “He reads, Mary, he reads and thinks! And he is painfully aware of the sufferings of the poor, be they English or Irish!”
Devout Mary’s reply, painstakingly written in a large sloping hand, had stoutly defended the priesthood, for were they not the apples of God’s eye and who were we mere sinners to challenge them? But she welcomed Father Minahan’s intervention, for perhaps he would save her heathen brother in spite of himself! She added, as a postscript, that James McDowell was after sending money to cover the costs of the appeal; a truly sainted man, if a heretic.
As the time for the appeal drew close, Michael found himself increasingly dependent on Father Minahan’s visits. Time crawls in prison and he was always alone, save during the exercise period when he was taken into the exercise yard in company with other prisoners on appeal or remand. There they would pace up and down – up and down – up and down – from one high wall to another; a space scarcely twenty paces wide. It was crushing claustrophobia at the bottom of a deep well.
By a refinement of cruelty, talking was strictly forbidden and the turnkeys were vigilant, so save for the creaking of boots and the occasional cough, the men moved silently between the walls. Yet the prisoners had become adept ventriloquists, scarcely moving their lips and never turning their heads as they whispered to each other, enraging the screws who overheard the odd snatch of words.
The prisoners’ only sight of the world outside of the walls was a square of sky; blue at times, but more often grey and leaking with winter rain. Some days it snowed and the flakes spun down pure and white, only to be trodden underfoot into grey slush. Michael understood then what the poet had meant when he wrote: “Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage”, for he could see in his mind’s eye the snow settling in the woods and the ice forming on the River Wear which curled through Durham City. There was a purity and innocence in the world that could not be suppressed no matter how hard warders, bureaucrats, bible wallahs, policemen, politicians, poorhouse guardians, capitalists, gaffers, officers and NCOs tried to stamp it out. Every physical action in that tower of silence and suffering was remorselessly regulated but his mind, he exulted, was his own and they could not take it from him. Did not the wisdom of his ancestors teach that “Every man’s mind is his kingdom”!
Nevertheless, he admitted that since Minahan’s last visit he had been plagued with nightmares, often waking in the night soaked in sweat and, he feared, after calling out in his sleep. That, he worried, might result in him giving away something of his mind to the prison authorities, but then, they were not likely to understand the words, for he had been crying out in Irish. A screw would bash on the door and roar out for silence. One night, he dreamed he was back in Ballycoolish shaping a baulk of timber in Grimshaw’s yard. He swore he could smell the sharp, resinous smell of the fresh-sawn wood, feel the roughness of the grain, even hear the slap of the waves and feel the breath of the wind on his face. A lark, too, was climbing the heavens, far above the lough. Alas, when he awoke, he was suffocating in this great pile of bricks and iron, far from Ballycoolish on the Donegal shore.
“You say that your people, too, never wanted to leave Ireland,” he said