Castlebar was my first jail. I was more fortunate than many who were
swept-up during those days. I was at least accorded a prison-cell.
* * * * *
Compared with these things, which I learned afterwards, my condition
was kingly. I was treated as an ordinary criminal.
The events of the day had presumably come with too great a shock to
make much effect, for I was all the time strangely unperturbed and
calm. It was only when all my things had been taken from me and I was
placed in a reception-cell that the reaction came. A reception-cell
is about two-thirds the size of an ordinary cell, with only a small
window, and very dark. Its only furniture is a little stool. When the
door clanged against me and the key grated in the lock, an almost
overpowering desire came on me to shout aloud and batter on the door
with my fists. That was succeeded by a feeling of utter helplessness.
Tears had need to be controlled. I remember resolving never to permit
the caging of a bird, although that had always been a principle with
me. For now the principle took a new and poignant shape.
I was left there an hour or so (time ceased to count when emotion
became so much more heavily charged) before being removed to my
allotted cell. Castlebar Jail is constructed like the letter V. The
building runs down each side of the V, with a high wall connecting
the base, thus making a triangle of the whole. Each wing contains one
line of cells, on each of the two floors, in the outer wall. The space
included in the triangle is open to the sky, is floored with flints
(up through which two daisies nevertheless grew), and is used as a
special exercise yard. The main large yard lies beyond the left wing.
Two distinctive features of Castlebar Jail stand out in my memory as
contrasted with the English jails I was to visit. The English jails
were built of red brick, warm to the eye. Castlebar Jail was built of
grey granite, cold and forbidding, like a dungeon. On the other hand,
the cells and passages of the English jails were floored with stone,
whereas Castlebar Jail was floored with timber. I was to appreciate
the virtue of this later. One other difference is worthy of note. All
the English jails were of considerable size. Castlebar Jail is quite
small. The difference is noteworthy because it signified a difference
in the number of criminals expected, and in fact, as I learnt while
there, Castlebar Jail had been specially re-opened because of the
Rising-Out.
The reception cell in which I had been placed lay on the ground floor
of the right-hand wing, near the entrance at the apex. My appointed
cell was on the first floor of the left-hand wing, near the base. There
I saw for the first time, what was later to become a familiar sight in
other places—the equipment of a cell. In the far left-hand corner stood
the bed-board, raised on end against the wall, with blankets draped
over it. At its base was coiled the mattress. In the middle of the
right-hand wall stood the little table, with a stool beside it; and on
the wall hung a copy of the prison rules.
A cheerless morning, a cheerless experience, and a cheerless abode.
Even grimness, that faithful consolation in adversity, was hard to
summon. I put down my bed-board and stretched the mattress upon it,
wishing to forget everything in sleep. But in a short while the warder
passing on his round looked through the spyhole in the door. The key
grated in the lock, and I was roughly told to put up the board at once
and to arrange the things as I had found them. No bed-board was allowed
to remain down after five o’clock in the morning or to be put down
before half past eight at night.
The warder was a dark-visaged man, with a harsh northern accent. He
shouted when he spoke as though he addressed a herd of cattle. He was
a fair specimen on the warder side of an inhuman system, and one could
imagine from his manner the men whom he was accustomed to handle. One
could imagine, too, the soulless beings prisoners must inevitably
become under such a man and with such surroundings. Either they must
become meek and cringing, or, in the effort to defy so abject a fate,
they must become turbulent and violent. The former meant a life of
peace; the latter meant a life of ceaseless torture; but the latter was
at any rate a more honourable estate. After shouting threats and abuse
at me with which the whole prison resounded—after informing me that he
would soon dress me into shape, grand and all as I was—the warder went
out, leaving me feeling as though I had been pitched into a cesspool.
Yet his visit was salutary. It whipped one out of one’s misery, and
gave one something to fight for. I turned to the rules on the wall
and read them carefully and completely. The jail having been newly
re-opened, the Governor was a Chief Warder acting as Governor. (This I
afterwards perceived, for I did not then know the distinction between
Chief Warders and Governors.) Later in the morning he entered to give
me my instructions for the day; and when he did so, I had sufficiently
mastered the section relating to “Prisoners Awaiting Trial” to
interrogate him on its application to myself. I claimed the right to
books, to tobacco, to daily newspapers, to daily letters out and in, to
daily visitors, to my own meals ordered from the town, and to getting
another prisoner, if I so wished it, to clean out my cell each day.
Whatever was there to be claimed, I claimed. At first he sought to put
me by. But when I compelled him to an admission that I was at least a
“Prisoner Awaiting Trial” then I claimed the fulfilment of the rights
accorded to that type of prisoner. It required some address at first
to get him to converse, for the usual method was harshly and instantly
to strike down any attempt at conversation. It was necessary at first,
quite casually and calmly, to ask an interpretation of the rules; and
then, once the net of discussion was cast, it was not so difficult to
hold him in its toils.
He looked at me as though he wished he had removed the troublesome
rules. “You forget,” he said, “these aren’t ordinary times. You are
under martial law now. The soldiers are the masters of us all now, so
they are. I amn’t very sure that I know where I am myself. Rules don’t
apply now. Nothing applies. I get my instructions from day to day. They
might take you out to-morrow morning and shoot you, so they might, and
nobody to save you. Isn’t the whole of the City of Dublin in ruins?
I cannot give you but what I’m bid, and those rules don’t relate to
you—they don’t relate to anybody.”
He granted me permission, however, to send out for my meals, if I so
wished it, and to write one letter each day, on a sheet provided for
that purpose. As a tally against the failure of my other rights he
agreed that I might keep my bed-board down for certain hours of the day
a concession that very much perplexed my northern warder.
I learnt from the other prisoners afterwards that this Governor was
very rough and harsh with them. At first he was so with me; but
finally he shewed me as much kindliness as was possible under the
circumstances. He did so in a strange way. He would enter my cell and
shout at me as harshly as at any; and then he would close the door, sit
on my stool, and begin to talk quite humanly. Such conversations would
conclude as brusquely and sharply as they began. Thus a certain kinship
emerged between us. We were both Irishmen, with a stranger’s martial
hand against us both, thrusting me into jail, and abrogating his rules.
In that mood he always spoke to me as one fellow-countryman might to
another of some unintelligible foreigner that had come into our land;
and then he would remember that he was leagued with the foreigner,
whereas I was pledged against him, when he would make some curt remark
and leave me.