It is interesting how present is the past. A particular conjunction during the summer brought this home to me.
A few weeks back, my late uncle Kevin, or Kev as we called him, the last surviving sibling of my late father's family in Ireland, was laid to rest in St Gobnait's cemetery in Mallow, Co Cork. He was in his 90th year.
A week before he died, as luck would have it, I and some family members had lunch with him, and he told us the story, old in our family's history, of the burning by the Black-and Tans of my grandfather's house and business during the infamous "sack" of Mallow, perpetrated in reprisal for the Kilmichael ambush during the War of Independence, in December, 1920.
At the time, and for many years afterwards, my grandfather, the late WJ Thompson, known to all as "WJ", ran a motor business, specialising in Ford cars, tractors and trucks. Kev remembered, at the age of four, being held in my grandmother's arms across the street from the building, as the Tans helped themselves to petrol from my grandfather's business, poured it over the house and contents, and set them all alight.
"I thought it was great gas altogether. I thought we were having a bonfire," he said, a tribute perhaps to my grandparents' presence of mind on that occasion, not to let him see then that something much more serious was occurring.
The place was completely destroyed, as readers may see from the photograph accompanying this article, which was taken by a newspaper photographer, possibly for the Times of London (there is a reference to "Times Wide" beside the caption), some days later. Now in the possession of cousins in Mallow, it shows my grandfather standing amidst the rubble, with an unidentified woman passer-by, over the words "Thompson residence at Mallow after burning by the Black-and-Tans." Apparently, the belief in the town afterwards was that the business had been targeted because one of my grandfather's employees, in fact the man who manned the petrol pumps, was an IRA sympathiser, possibly an active one.
The burning is a fact of history, undeniable. What may be just folklore is a story my father used to tell of how the British had often commandeered some of WJ's trucks for daytime operations, only for Michael Collins to commandeer the same trucks at night for his business! My guess is that, like all rumours of war, there is a grain, at least, of truth in this. If true, the British authorities may have guessed what was happening, and that, perhaps, was the reason my family's business was attacked.
Possibly WJ was trying to "play both sides." To strident nationalists (or, indeed, unionists), I suggest that he was hardly to be blamed, if this is true. He, and countless others, were trying simply to survive in the chaotic Ireland which emerged from 1916, the Sinn Féin victory in the 1918 election, and the foolish British reaction to both. He was certainly no republican, and in later years was a staunch Fine Gaeler.
The burning had many consequences. One of them was quite ironic: my late father, John Bowen Thompson, known in aviation and Dublin circles as "Tommy", but in his native Mallow always as "Jack", instead of attending boarding school with his brothers (WJ, rebuilding the business, could not afford the fees), ended up as an aeronautical engineering apprentice in England and served seven years in the Royal Air Force before and during the second World War.
Another consequence was the purchase by my grandfather, after compensation was eventually paid to him by the British government, of a fine Georgian town house called Shortcastle, around the corner from the old business on Mallow's main street, which remained the Thompson family home for many years thereafter, becoming eventually the home of another uncle, Aubrey, and his family; I have many happy memories of it myself. As fate would have it, this was the building British film director Ken Loach used for the police barracks scenes in his recently released The Wind that Shakes the Barley, starring Cillian Murphy, now available on video. In this film, of course, an Irish house is burned in reprisal for the Kilmichael ambush. I wonder if Loach realised the resonance his choice of location had? Today, a plaque commemorating its role in the film has been erected on the walls of Shortcastle. Just a few days before he passed away, Kev attended the opening of the film in Mallow.
Kevin Thompson was known throughout north Cork as a fine horseman, and the secretary and treasurer for over 20 years of the renowned Duhallows. He said to me, at our final meeting, of the unionist Anglo-Irish with whom he used to hunt in the Blackwater valley in the 1930s and later, that they "were lovely people, I never had a problem with them".
That, and my late father's RAF service, points me to the truth of this terrible story, that what happens to you in life is not so important, morally, as how you react to it.
As we laid Kev in the grave, a huntsman of the Duhallows, Tom Healy of Aghabullogue, emerged from the crowd to play Going Home on a hunting horn. That, assuredly, is where Kev is now: Home.