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Derenzy and Aunt Pansy to be: I wanted everything, somehow and in the end, to be all right. Nothing could be done about O’Neill’s aching joints, or Mrs Flynn’s widowed state. But in spite of the old gardener’s shortness of temper and Mrs Flynn’s severity over the rules she laid down in her kitchen, they neither of them appeared to be discontented. Josephine sometimes sang very softly while she worked and my sisters said it was because she was in love. She at least was happy and I was happy myself, apart from my single nagging trepidation.
    ‘It’s just that I don’t see the sense of it,’ I said to my mother.
    ‘You have to go to school, Willie.’
    ‘It’s awful, that place.’
    ‘Your father wouldn’t send you to an awful place.’
    ‘Does he think Father Kilgarriff isn’t any good?’
    ‘No, of course he doesn’t think that.’
    ‘Then why’s he want to send me?’
    ‘You have to meet other boys. Play games and take part in things. Kilneagh isn’t the world, you know.’
    ‘But I’ll live in Kilneagh when I’m grown up. I’ll always be here.’
    ‘Yes, I know, Willie, but that’s all the more reason to see what other places are like.’
    I did not reply. I had realized as soon as I’d spoken that my efforts would be useless. All I could do now was confess my feelings to my father, which I’d been nervous of doing in case they belittled me in his eyes. My mother pointed out that several years had yet to pass before the grim establishment could claim me. She offered that as the only consolation there was.

*

    The men of the village came back from the war. Only one of them returned to the mill, a man called Doyle with a grey, slightly crooked face, who for some reason was unpopular with the others. Johnny Lacy told me my father had taken him back reluctantly, feeling obliged to since the mill was a man short. A suspicion of some sort hung about him; I never came to know him. I continued instead to listen to the other men’s conversation about the confusion in the country and whether or not de Valera was right, although what about I was not precisely certain. I knew that an alternative government had been set up in Dublin and that fighting continued between the imperial and the revolutionary regimes. I heard names that had a ring to them: Cathal Brugha, the Countess Markievicz, Terence MacSwiney, but I didn’t know who these people were. The escape of de Valera from Lincoln Gaol had been arranged by Michael Collins, and at least I knew about him.
    I remember being surprised to hear my mother saying she had liked Collins the first time she met him: there had been, after all, that moment of awkwardness in the hall. But my mother was strange in this respect, given to blaming herself for taking offence when offence was not intended, and that may have been so on this occasion. Collins had an honest laugh, she insisted, his blue eyes had tenderness in them. If he ordered assassinations there was justice in what he ordered, for such death was an element in a war that was little different from the war her own countrymen had been waging against the might of the Kaiser. More energetically than my father, she supported the revolutionary cause and it was she who made him contact Collins again after his initial visit to Kilneagh. Dear Mr Collins, my father wrote, in a letter that exists today. Since you called in on us some time ago I have been thinking about many of the matters we discussed. As arranged, I have forwarded what we agreed to the address you left with me, but I am wondering now if more might not be done on my side. It could be to the advantage of the common ground we share if we met again. Except for Fridays, when I go into Fermoy, I am always at home here, if not in the house never less than twenty minutes from it, in the office of my mill. Should you again be passing near I would be delighted to offer you a drink, or lunch or supper. Yours sincerely, W. J. Quinton.
    A force of British