Farley releases a strangulated sigh. ‘Look, if you want to have even a chance of keeping your job, you’d better get back here right away. Greg is climbing the walls, I’ve never seen him this angry.’
‘Oh,’ Howard says.
‘In fact maybe you should talk to him now – hold on, I’m going to put you on to him and you can –’
Howard hangs up the phone and switches it off. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s go and find these Memorial Gardens.’
The boys brighten visibly, and set off ahead of him up the street.
He has read about the gardens but never visited them. Islandbridge is an out-of-the-way and not especially inviting part of the city. Bleached posters for last year’s music acts account for most of the colour to be seen; down-at-heel pubs front mazy streets where at the turn of the last century thousands of local prostitutes attended to the needs of British soldiers stationed in the barracks that now houses the museum. It may no longer be the biggest red-light zone in Europe, but it couldn’t be accused of gentrification; as they turn towards the river, the grime becomes thicker, the flats more dilapidated. The boys are fascinated. ‘Sir, is this the ghetto?’ ‘Quiet.’ ‘Do people buy drugs here?’ ‘Shh.’ ‘Are those people on drugs?’ ‘Do you want to go back to school? Is that what you want?’ ‘Sorry.’ Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming – their trust that they are safe simply because he’s with them, as if an adult presence warded off all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.
The gate to the Memorial Gardens is at the end of a laneway, between a scrap merchant’s and a mental institution. They file through one by one; Howard does not know whether to be cheered or not when they find the park deserted.
‘How come nobody’s here?’ Mario asks.
‘Maybe they heard you were coming, Mario.’
‘Yeah, Mario, they heard the biggest bummer in Dublin was on his way and they all ran inside?’
‘You’re the bummer, asshole.’
‘Quiet, all of you,’ Howard snaps.
From here, aside from its eerie emptiness, the Memorial Gardens looks like any other park. The grassy lawn stretches off into the distance, rising on its left to a hill; the wind ruffles the water of the river to the right, and whispers through the leafless trees lining the avenue. The only edifice in sight is a small stone gazebo. They walk down and crowd into it. Inside a stanza from a Rupert Brooke poem is inscribed in the floor:
We have found safety with all things undying,The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth…
‘Look –’ Henry Lafayette points up the hill. A tall stone cross can now be seen, looming over the crest. They climb towards it, talking less now; fanning out over the grass, they appear to Howard younger again, as if they are going backwards in time.
At the top of the hill they find themselves in a long garden, encircled by trees and ivy-clad colonnades. Water trickles into the basins of two identical fountains, winter roses grow in the borders. The surrounding city can no longer be seen: they might be in the garden of a country manor, were it not for the towering cross, and, about a hundred feet in front of it, a white stone sarcophagus.
‘Their name liveth on forevermore,’ Dewey Fortune reads from its side.
‘Whose name?’
‘The Irish soldiers’, you spa.’
‘They got that wrong,’ Muiris says.
Lucas Rexroth shivers. ‘This place is spooky.’
This provokes a chorus of ghostly woohooos; but Lucas is right. The chilly air that shrinks their voices, the wet grass and lonesomeness, the strange disconnection from the world around, the inexplicable sense of having interrupted something… they give the garden the character of an afterworld – the kind of place you can imagine waking up in, stretched out on the grass, immediately after some horrific collision. The damp air swirls around them; gradually, the boys’ chatter peters out, and they shuffle about uncomfortably until each of them is facing Howard. For a moment he waits, reluctant to dispel the curious chanting silence. Then: ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘The Dublin Pals.’ And he begins to tell them what Slattery told him about ‘D’ Company – how they had joined up together from the school rugby clubs, how, while Robert Graves shivered and fought off rats in a ditch in France, they were dispatched to the furnace of the Dardanelles. ‘They were landed on beaches along the Gallipoli peninsula – hundreds of them, packed into a tiny space, waiting to be told what to do. Days went by, dysentery, enteritis, fever broke out, shrapnel was going off overhead the whole time, wounded and dead men were being carried through on stretchers, huge swarms of flies buzzed from corpses into the mouths of the living so it was almost impossible to sleep or eat.
‘Finally the order came through for an attack on Kiretch Tepe Sirt, a long ridge overlooking the bay. The men set out in unbearable heat that only got worse as the day went on. They hadn’t been given enough water and the Turks had poisoned the wells. They hadn’t been given enough ammo either and they soon ran out of that too. Near the top of the ridge they found themselves pinned down by Turkish guns. They sent for reinforcements but none came. It got so hot the gorse caught fire, and they had to listen to their own wounded being burned alive.
‘They spent the night trapped on the mountain, being picked off one by one. When they ran out of bullets, they threw stones. One Pal, Private Wilkin, started catching Turkish grenades and throwing them back – he did this five times before the sixth grenade exploded in his hand. At last, after hours of watching their friends being slaughtered, the men – Seabrook men, Clongowes men, St Michael’s men and others, who a week before had never been out of the country, most of them, let alone experienced enemy fire – mounted a bayonet charge on the Turkish guns. During this charge, Juster’s great-grandfather, William Molloy, got shot in the hand and had to crawl back to his own lines. He was one of the lucky ones. Half the Pals were lost that night.
‘After that episode the Allies changed their plans. The division packed up and the remnants of the Pals were split up and transferred to Salonika. As their ship sailed away, as they left their friends behind them on the cliffs and hillsides, the men vowed that their sacrifice, what had happened there, would not be forgotten. But as we’ve seen, it was forgotten. Or rather, it was deliberately erased. It seems pretty hard luck, after enduring so many terrible hardships and pointless deaths. But that’s what happened. The years went by and the Pals became casualties again, this time of history.’
He stows his notebook in his bag and looks up at the boys looking back at him, dotted around the viridian sward in clumps of three and four, like rain-jacketed statues.
‘It’s hard for us, living in peacetime, to imagine the mindset of the people who lived through the war. So many men had been killed, one in every six who served, and there was barely anyone who wasn’t touched by loss in some way. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives. Friends. This was a world overwhelmed by grief, and the ways that that grief manifested could be quite extreme. In France, for example, there was a plague of graverobbing. Poor families spent every penny they had on locating their sons’ bodies and bringing them home from the Front. In Britain there was a huge outbreak of spiritualism. Fathers and mothers held seances to speak with their dead sons. Very respectable, normally quite rational people got involved. There was even the case of the celebrated scientist, a pioneer in electromagnetic waves, who believed he could use them to build a bridge between our world and the next, “tune in” to the world of the dead.’
He halts momentarily, thrown by Ruprecht Van Doren, who is goggling at him as if he’s choking on something. ‘Above all, though,’ he fumbles for his thread, ‘people coped with their grief by remembering. They wore poppies in honour of their loved ones. They erected statues and built cenotaphs. And all over Europe, in villages, towns and cities, they opened memorial gardens like this one. This particular garden was different to all the others, though. Can anyone tell me why?’ He gazes evenly from face to pallid face. ‘This garden was never actually opened. It wasn’t begun until the thirties, and it wasn’t completed until the very end of the century. For the decades in between it was let run wild. People grazed their horses here, dealers used it to sell drugs. It was the memorial garden that no one remembered. And it represented most Irish people’s attitude to the war, which was to bury it.