Strumpet City

CHAPTER TWELVE

In December defeat became a certainty. It afflicted the streets and peered through the windows of tenements with a cold, grey eye. The grates were often without fire, the rooms without furniture. Hope flickered for a moment when the Archbishop of Dublin, moved by their hunger and distress and the nearness of Christmas, succeeded in assembling a Peace Conference. It failed almost as soon as it began. In London the British Trade Union Council met to consider a plea for sympathetic strike action. It was refused. They promised instead to increase the subsidies so that Dublin’s strike pay could be improved. The opposite happened. The subscription lists in the Labour papers grew shorter, the central strike fund dwindled almost to nothing.

Mr. Doggett, fixing his new calendar for 1914 to the wall of the office overlooking the idle marshalling yard, looked beyond it and noted that the ships at the quayside were working normally. Free labourers now glutted the port. The police were there to guard them, of course, but he took heart. It could not possibly be long now. In January also Fitz attended a closed meeting in Liberty Hall at which the members were advised to go back to work if they could do so without signing the document that had started the whole thing. Joe, who was standing beside Fitz, looked around at him. They were beaten. For the present anyway. No one had said so, but everybody knew it. They would have to get back to work now as best they could.

‘That’s that,’ Fitz said. They stood at the river wall to talk awhile. The food kitchens in the basement were already closed. There were no longer queues with jamjars and cans.

‘What are the chances?’ Joe wondered.

‘None for me,’ Fitz said.

‘Still—no harm trying.’

‘No harm in the world,’ Fitz said.

Mary said the same thing. She had never criticised or complained, but she had grown thin and looked unwell. The police had wrecked what little remained in the room which once had been her source of comfort and pride. It had only the broken table now and, incongruously, the clock that had been Pat’s wedding present to them. The police had overlooked it. Or perhaps Father Giffley’s unexpected entry had saved it. She said he should try his luck. Maybe they would remember that he had always been a good workman.

He went down to the foundry with the rest. They were presented with a form which was not quite the same as the original. It demanded an undertaking that they would not take part in sympathetic strikes but it made no mention of relinquishing membership of their Union. They discussed it and decided to sign.

‘There’ll be another day,’ Fitz told them when they consulted him. He himself was called aside by Carrington. They walked in silence down the yard to an empty storeroom. At the door Carrington took a whistle from his pocket and stopped to blow two blasts. A boy appeared from one of the houses.

‘Get my sandwiches from the locker,’ Carrington told him, ‘and bring a can of tea.’

‘Yes, Mr. Carrington,’ the boy said.

They went inside. There was a stove lighting in one corner and from the window they had a view of the wintry yard. It looked desolate enough. Exposed machinery had gathered rust, grass had rooted in the spaces between the cobbles, the paint on doors and woodwork had faded and peeled.

‘We’ll have a cup of tea when the nipper comes,’ Carrington said.

‘I’m not here to drink their tea,’ Fitz told him.

‘The tea is mine. Don’t be so bloody shirty.’ His tone was friendly. But he was embarrassed.

‘I’d like to know what the news is,’ Fitz said. Carrington opened the shutter of the stove and stirred the coals until they flamed.

‘We might as well be warm,’ he said.

He offered Fitz a stool to sit on and gave him a cigarette. It was so long since Fitz had smoked that the first pull of it made him dizzy. For a while Carrington’s face became a blurred disc.

‘The news isn’t good,’ Carrington said at last.

‘I thought it wouldn’t be,’ Fitz told him.

‘I told you they wouldn’t re-employ a foreman who went out with the rank and file, and that’s the instruction they’ve sent down. You’re not to be taken on.’

‘Am I the only one?’

‘There are two others.’

‘Shop stewards?’

‘One is a shop steward. The other is just an incurable troublemaker.’

The boy came in with the sandwiches and the tea. Fitz rose to go but Carrington gripped his arm.

‘We’re not enemies, Fitz.’

‘No.’

‘Then stay where you are. I want to talk to you.’

‘Is there any sense in talking?’

‘Sit down.’

Fitz hesitated. But he took the mug of tea which Carrington pressed on him and accepted a sandwich. The feel of the sandwich in his hand roused reserves of hunger that had been building up for weeks. It had meat in it. He forced himself to delay before eating it. It took an enormous amount of will. After a decent interval he began to eat it. Once he began it was impossible to stop. He worked away steadily at it until it had gone. Carrington immediately offered him another, but Fitz waved it aside.

‘No shame in being hungry,’ Carrington said, ‘take it.’ He was smiling. Fitz gave in and took it.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘There’s one way you might get back,’ Carrington said, ‘but you’re probably going to be stubborn about it.’

‘Tell me what it is.’

‘If I could tell them you’d leave the union and give an undertaking never to join it again, it might make them change their minds.’

‘Is this your idea or theirs?’

‘Mine. I don’t even know if it would work. But I’m willing to put it to them.’

‘I’ll do anything within reason,’ Fitz said, ‘but not that.’

‘Fitz,’ Carrington said earnestly, ‘I have respect for you as a person and as one of my best foremen. If you do what I ask it’ll all be forgotten about in a few months anyway. What’s the sense in being stubborn?’

‘No,’ Fitz said.

‘Do you realise the position you’re in?’

‘I’ve a shrewd notion.’

‘I don’t think you have,’ Carrington said. ‘You’re the only foreman I know of who walked out with the men. It’s not just a matter of the foundry refusing to employ you. You’ll be blacklisted in every job in the city.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’ve been given the general list drawn up by the Federation with instructions to follow it, when I’m taking men on. Your name is on it. You don’t believe me?’

The information was hard to accept. As he reflected on it he felt panic beginning to stir in the back of his mind.

‘I believe you,’ Fitz said.

‘Then let me try what I suggested.’

Fitz hesitated. He shut his mind to speculation about the future.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You’re a stubborn bloody man,’ Carrington said. He offered another cigarette and they smoked in silence. Then Carrington said:

‘There’s something else I wanted to speak to you about. I’m thinking of that friend of yours who lost his legs here a couple of years ago. Mulhall—wasn’t it?’

‘Bernard Mulhall,’ Fitz said. ‘He died.’

‘I know that. Had he a family?’

‘A wife and an only son.’

‘That’s what I was told. How old is the son?’

‘About eighteen. He might be more.’

‘I think I can help him.’

‘I seem to remember Bernie Mulhall being on your blacklist too.’

‘I know. But there was a lot of admiration and sympathy for him higher up. I can offer him a job.’

‘Have you been told to?’

‘Not in so many words. But one of the Directors expressed interest in the case and sent word down the line. A bit mad in his way—Yearling.’

Fitz made no comment.

‘He’s the man that left you home on the evening of the accident,’ Carrington supplied.

‘I remember him,’ Fitz said.

‘Will you send young Mulhall down to me?’

‘I will,’ Fitz said.

‘And keep in touch with me. There’s nothing I can do here, but I get to know of odd jobs here and there. They might help to keep things going for you while you look around.’

‘Do you think there’s any point in looking around?’

‘If you can stand up to being sent from pillar to post. Don’t let them beat you.’

Fitz smiled at him.

‘I’m wondering whose side you’re on.’

‘Not on Larkin’s anyway,’ Carrington said. ‘Yours—I suppose.’

‘That’s something,’ Fitz said.

Willie Mulhall started in the foundry a week later. It was his first adult job. His mother came over to thank Mary the moment she got the news.

‘Now I’ll be able to pay back what I owe you,’ she said. She embraced Mary and began to cry.

There was nothing for Fitz. He went from job to job but was turned away time after time. In February the Strike Fund closed down altogether. When that happened Mary put the clock on the pram and wheeled it down to The Erin’s Isle Pawnshop. Mr. Silverwater refused to look at it. He was open for people who wanted to redeem the articles they had pledged, not to take in more. She returned home and Fitz put it back on its place on the mantelpiece.

‘What are we to do?’ she asked him. He had no answer for her. Except to offer to try what Carrington had suggested. That, too, was impossible.

‘We’ll keep trying. Things will be better as the rest begin working again. Something is bound to turn up.’

That evening he borrowed from Joe, who was back at work in Nolan & Keyes.

‘It’ll be a while before I can pay you back,’ he said.

‘Don’t be worrying,’ Joe told him. But he worried just the same. He had never before borrowed money without knowing how he was going to return it. He was starting at the bottom again—a scavenger for odd jobs.