All that I had feared in Castlebar now returned upon me; yet,
curiously, not so keenly, not so sharply. Already there had been
a dulling of consciousness, a blunting of the susceptibilities.
During the early morning we were examined medically and then bathed
in antiseptic. We needed it; herded on the dusty floors of Richmond
Barracks we had collected what was to be collected, and had, as a
Tyrone lad put it, “grazed our cattle through-other”; and the doctor
nodded gravely over his inspection, like one who thought, “Well, this
is the Irish nation: report has not spoken untruly of them.” Then we
were taken back to our cells. During the afternoon we were taken out
for a quarter of an hour’s exercise in silence round one of the yards
at the back of the prison, and solemnly informed that if any attempt
to communicate with one another were detected we would be removed to
special punishment cells and fed on bread and water for a week. Back
to our cells then until the following afternoon.
That was our life. We were awoken at five and brought out for lavatory
parade. Soon after six breakfast was served out to us. This consisted
of a tin mug of tea, a square lump of white bread, and a small piece
of margarine. Inasmuch as the mug served for soup as well as for tea,
and presumably the tea was decocted in the same vessel as the soup,
there was a strong similarity of taste between the two. Nor was the
fluid that reached us always very hot. We were not permitted either
knife, fork or spoon. While we took our breakfast the staff retired
to theirs, and the curiously deathly prison silence descended on the
place. At a quarter to eight the staff returned with the jangling
of many keys, and soon the shouts of commands rent the air. For we
were now to scrub out our cells. On the ground floor each man had,
in addition to his cell, to scrub a portion of the hall opposite his
door. When this was accomplished, if the staff-sergeant had any general
instructions to announce, or could by any means devise an occasion
for instructions, we were put on parade in the hall to hear him
discourse. The staff-sergeant had a Biblical gift of iteration without
the Biblical music of phrase. Nor had he the faculty of disguising
his repetitions. He had, however, a certain ornateness of expression
which, though it was not exactly Biblical, succeeded in relieving the
monotony of his discourse. If he had two simple announcements to make
he occupied himself for half an hour with them, and with variations on
them, striding up and down the line of us, shouting at the top of his
voice, while his staff of non-commissioned officers stood amongst us
to see that we gave due heed to what he said. He was an excellent man,
however; and meant kindly.
Back then to our cells, where we sat till dinner. This was brought
round (by orderlies appointed from among ourselves) at twelve. Dinner
consisted of soup and a lump of white bread. The soup was contained in
the same mug as the morning tea, and was, until one became accustomed
to it, a strange looking spectacle. In the midst of it floated a lump
of something that varied according to one’s varying luck. If one were
fortunate it was, mainly, meat; if one’s luck were only fair, it
consisted of fat, with streaks of lean bravely running through it; if
one’s luck were completely out, it was gristle, with bits of meat set
in it like amethysts in quartz (and indeed the meat was illuminated by
strange colours astonishingly like amethysts). Either the animals slain
for our eating were curious beasts or my luck was badly out, for the
succession of gristle that came to my turn was noteworthy. Afterwards
I managed to smuggle out one of the islands that floated in my soup,
and sent it entire to a member of the English Parliament, thinking the
effect might be remarkable if it were thrown dramatically across the
floor of the House, as Burke once threw a dagger. Two or three potatoes
in their skins were served with the soup; and the whole meal had to be
manipulated with one’s fingers. I became quite expert with the course
of time in discovering where pieces of meat crouched in their layers of
gristle and bringing them to the light of day with my forefinger. Yet
often I decided that the meal was not worth the fatigue involved, and
left it where it stood.
The afternoons served our scanty pleasure, for then we were taken out
for exercise, which usually lasted twenty minutes to half an hour, and
on some occasions longer, according to the pleasure of the sergeant in
control. For the staff worked through the prisoners in batches through
the day. How one looked forward to that glimpse of sky overhead, to
that beat of the summer’s sun on one’s body. The yard was of great
size as befitted the size of the prison, and was laid with ground
clinkers, or some black earth of the nature of ashes, surrounded by a
concrete path. There was no colour to be seen anywhere, save the red
bricks of the gaol and the black floor of the yard. Yet the sky was
blue overhead, and the sun was golden; and though these things were
plaintive in what they told of a summer passing in pomp elsewhere, yet
their immediate gift made that half hour of the day the moment for
which we lived during the 23½ hours’ existence in a cell. Moreover,
after a time I tried an experiment. I quietly stepped out of the file
into the yard and began running easily within the circle that the
others made about me. I saw the sergeant look at me, not quite knowing
what to make of the innovation. Then another stepped out, and ran
behind me; and another, and yet another, till there was a string of
half a dozen of us. Nothing was said the first day; and the innovation
once begun it was continued. Thus we had another event to which to look
forward during the long hours.
At five came tea, which was a repetition of breakfast; and then set in
the hours we most dreaded. The staff went home at five, and silence
settled down over the prison—a silence that was not broken till five
the next morning. Now and then as the night watchman passed in his
padded shoes I would hear the spy-hole slot being moved aside and would
know that an eye was looking in upon me. Then the slot fell back again.
The eye had passed on to the next cell. But all the time the silence
was profound.
The lengthening day, with the altered hour, gave light till ten at
night. That is to say, the customary twilight of the cell did not
change to profound gloom and then to darkness till after that hour.
That made the case worse, for one would not take refuge in sleep. It
would be hard to say how many times I counted the number of bolts that
studded the door, how many times I counted the number of bricks in each
wall, how many times I measured the number of feet from end to end of
the cell, from side to side, and from corner to corner. This was one’s
occupation for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, save for the
time given to sleep, until one fell back on bitter blank staring ahead.
Sometimes, as though to make the silence still more oppressive, I heard
one of the other prisoners somewhere down the prison break into a song.
Then a harsh voice would loudly call on him to be quiet; and silence
would be supreme again. Already on my first day I had established
friendly relations with my corporal. He was, I discovered, a London
Irishman, and he happened to be more easily quickened to interest on
that account. I asked him once what the other men did with their time,
when he spied in upon them, thinking to find comfort for my hours in
a more intelligent knowledge of the life that was silently proceeding
around me.
“Most of them just sit on their stools and stare at the wall. It’s
horrible to see them. Lots of them are crying—some that you wouldn’t
think of. And a lot of them are praying, always praying. And that’s
worse, for things are not as bad as that. It makes me feel bad to see
them.”
I thought of Dame Quickly with her, “Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’
should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself
with any such thoughts yet,” and smiled. But I wished I had not asked
him my question.
Yet, strangely enough, the thing that I had feared with such horror in
its coming at Castlebar did not quicken in me such fear now that it had
settled upon me. The process had, as most processes do, brought its own
rather ghastly relief. In Castlebar I had been keen and sensitive; my
mind had been quick to speed ahead and anticipate the approaching evil;
and that, if painful, was a preferable estate to this dead inertia,
when the mind seemed hardly to have any existence in the body.
* * * * *
and I cannot wonder at it; for often one would spring to one’s feet
and march up and down the cell in a mental excitement that was almost
unendurable. Such times, when they came, came intolerably, for they
came with diminishing frequency; but the usual state was inertia. There
was something of learned patience about it; something of a reserve that
waited its day; but deeper set than these things was the blankness of
being that it was the first duty of the whole system to achieve.
I tried, for instance, to bring before me the faces of those whom I
knew, and to imagine what they might be doing as I thought of them.
I sought, thus, to give myself a life in the life that others were
living; but could I think of those lives, could I bring their faces
before me? It was not that they fled me. The mind simply would not rise
to the effort. I tried to surrender myself to problems of thought that
had fascinated me in the past, and to problems of being into which all
life’s meaning had been crowded. But at most the wheel only spun round,
never gripping the metal; and more often the wheel refused to move.
The life within the cell was significantly told by the card outside:
the name was turned to the wall, and only a number was turned to view.
Prison cells are not dwellings, they are sepulchres.
So the days passed, one by one, while the summer rolled by outside.
Even the will to fight seemed lost.