Carn Read Free Page A

excellence. He passed them around and read selections of poetry to the astounded students. They had been written as a boy by the youngest of the dead men. The students
listened, aghast. They could not believe that someone who had been shot dead on a raiding mission had once sat in the same desks as themselves. They clenched their fists and became red-cheeked like
their fathers. The teacher’s voice trembled.
    But it did not last. A few weeks later, the frenzy had died down and people went about their daily tasks as before. Very slowly all trace of the event passed away.
    Then something happened that was to change the atmosphere in the Dolan house for a long time to come. Little more than a year after the death of the volunteers, Benny was wakened in the night by
the sound of his parents’ voices downstairs. He stood at the top of the stairs and felt the blood drain from his face when he found himself confronted by the sight of his father standing in
the hall. There was blood on his trouser leg and his face was dirt-caked. Benny’s mother was trying to calm him down but he kept ranting about something and made no sense. “It’s
all right,” Benny’s mother repeated, “it’s all right Hugo.” When he saw the tears in his father’s eyes, Benny was shocked, it sent a dart of anxiety to his
stomach. “It all went wrong,” he said. “Joe’s shot. I had to leave him Annie. They got Joe. We—we blew the wall. But there was three of them upstairs. We called on
them to surrender. They weren’t supposed to be there—they came down firing. It all went wrong. I don’t know how it happened. Oh Christ . . .”
    Benny went back to his room, his heart racing. All night long he waited for the sound of the police hammering on the front door. But it did not come.
    In the days that followed, Benny’s father did not leave the house. He sat from early morning staring into the dead ashes of the firegrate, cups of tea going cold on the arm of the chair.
The abortive raid was reported in the newspapers, along with photographs of Joe Carron, one of the raiders who had been wounded in the attack and later died.
    When people came to the house now there was no longer any chatter. Nobody knew what to do because Hugo Dolan would not talk to anyone. He just sat staring into the fire, his face grey. When they
said, “Joe Carron died a good man,” he looked up with eyes that had no feeling in them. When they castigated the institutions of Northern Ireland, he did not reply, their animation
followed by cavernous silences.
    Even when, the following year, the IRA formally announced the cessation of its activities along the border, Benny’s father made no reference to it. When he came in from work, he sat in the
armchair with his eyelids drooping, speaking only of the weather and the course of his business. News items which before would have halted all activity in the kitchen now drifted past
anonymously.
    The time passed and the people of Carn forgot there had ever been any trouble along the border. The empty shell of the custom-post was bulldozed and a new building erected in its place. The
blown bridges were rebuilt, the southern police and army were withdrawn. The customs men began to smile again and tilted their harp-badged white caps as they chatted leisurely to the drivers. It
all became the colour of an old photograph, fading by day as the new prosperity encroached upon the town of Carn.
    In Benny Dolan’s classroom, a portrait of the dead volunteer gathered dust in a corner, his copybook poetry lay forgotten in an ink cupboard.

    When Benny was in his final year at the vocational school, aged 16, there was an announcement that the town was to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rising and
the Junior Chamber of Commerce had decided to erect a plaque in the town square to the memory of Commandant Matt Dolan who had led the raid on the railway in 1922. Furthermore, the town square,
which was then called