Between Fiction and Reality:The Lost Voices of the children of Easter 1916
Between Fiction and Reality
The Lost Voices
of the children of Easter 1916
Introduction
It was April 24th of 1916 when
Dublin, Ireland became a warzone between two countries. One side was a small
rebel group that wanted to gain control of Ireland, the other British troops
who had control of the island nation. Britain for the most part of history has
had control of a good part of the world and it has been said that “The sun
never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the
British Empire was in the East.”[1] The Easter Rebellion
sparked a national outcry from the people of Ireland to free themselves from
the rule of the British government and allow them to govern themselves. The
Rising wasn’t conceived overnight; it was meticulously planned by members of
the Irish Republican Brotherhood, so that it would take place throughout
Ireland. A few setbacks had caused the Rising to be centered around two areas
instead of a full scale rebellion. On the morning of April 24th it
had been decided that the rebellion would move forward, and the proclamation
was read to the people. The first lines were “IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the
name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old
tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag
and strikes for her freedom.”[2] The children of Ireland
stepped forward and fought for independence from Britain and the United
Kingdom, but it would also suffer from the rebellion.
During Easter week Ireland was
waging a war both at home and abroad, from this it would suffer casualties it
couldn’t have ever imagined. “In Easter week of 1916, Dublin was full of newly
widowed and distressed women, now totally dependent on British Army pensions
and ‘separation allowances’ for survival. The world was in turmoil; countless
thousands were dying in horrendous conditions on the western front as the war
raged into its third calendar year.”[3] Three years of their men
dying abroad, and now a revolution at for the families of 40 children who would
suffer the loss of these young lives. Easter Rising 1916, would claim the lives
of 40 children but it would take nearly 100 years for the lives of these young
children to be remembered in history. Their lives were lost along with
thousands of others but to many their lives were not as significant as the
lives of the leaders of the rebellion who were executed in the weeks after.
They were seen as martyrs to the future of Ireland and the children were forgot
to Ireland, with the exception of records and their own families.
In the past twenty years the lives of the
forty children as well as countless others have come to the forefront of
history. Diaries, records, and fiction books have portrayed the lives of the
children of Ireland from the time before the rebellion until their deaths. An
important book in which a child of Ireland is portrayed before the events of
Easter 1916 is written by James Joyce, featured the collection of stories Dubliners, “Araby” is a coming of age
story which takes place before the rebellion and shows the innocence of the
young protagonist. A more recent book in which a young protagonist is the
central character is Roddy Doyle’s A Star
Called Henry, in which the main character Henry lives through many
hardships only to become involved in the Easter Rebellion himself. Yet It isn’t
until Joe Duffy’s book Children of the
Rising and his efforts to make sure that the young lives of 1916 would gain
recognition that the names of these children would become something the world
and Ireland would begin to understand the loss of lives that occurred one
hundred years earlier. The reasons it took so long to acknowledge why their
lives matters but what also matters are how their lives are remembered in the
stories told by their families, as well as books. History has not done justice
to the young voices of 1916 and neither has fiction. If the signatories of the
Proclamation wanted all of Irelands children to fight for freedom, they should
have taken into account how others would have been effected by their decision
to start a rebellion and found a way to keep these young lives out of harm’s
way. The epigraph in Duffy’s book quotes Wilmot Irwin
saying, “It was the beginning of a new world and a different age. My childhood
of happy illusion was over.”[4] For many of the children
of the Rising, their childhood would be cut short, and for those like Irwin
they would be faced with the harsh reality of what was happening around them.
A Boy and a Carnival
named “Araby”
Before Easter 1916 the lives of children
in Ireland wasn’t filled with the questions of a severed Ireland, some went
about their lives as normal children who would play in the streets with their
friends. One story is of a young boy who plays around with his friends and has
a crush on a girl. These were normal interactions of the coming of age story
within James Joyce’s Dubliners, “Araby” where the young protagonist lives.
Joyce weaves the life of this young voice of Ireland,
When
the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners.
When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above
us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the
street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till
our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our
play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the
gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark
dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous
stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the
buckled harness. When we returned to the street light from the kitchen windows
had filled the areas. [5]
Joyce’s
portrayal of the life of a young boy can be echoed in the sounds and sights of
his words, as the boys play in the streets hiding from those who would pull
them away from their play. The sights, sounds and even smells of the streets
are portrayed in the story. Without them the reader wouldn’t be able to
understand the normal life of a child in the years before the Rising. What also
sets this apart from other stories of children is that it is also showing a
child growing up before the eyes of the reader in a short span of time. Araby is
a carnival and the young protagonist wants to go but not for himself. He’s
smitten with the sister of one of his friends which only shows one side of
growing up.
There is also another side of this
story and that is that the young protagonist doesn’t live with his parents, he
lives with his Aunt and Uncle. The reason is not stated within the story, since
the central focus of the story is his obsession with going to the bazaar to buy
something for the girl he likes. In the span of this short story the young
protagonist grows up, he went from playful young boy to infatuated young man
who cannot concentrate on what was in front of him, “What innumerable follies
laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to
annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school.
At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me
and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were
called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an
Eastern enchantment over me.”[6] His obsessive nature shows
that young boys grow up quickly when there is something that they want to
achieve even if it is the affections of another person. Yet when he finally
gets to the bazaar he is too late and the only adult he has an interaction with
him leaves him feeling as though he had wasted his time because in the female
attendant, who is English, he saw what can happen when it comes to the love he
holds for his friend’s sister.
I
lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my
interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked
down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the
sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that
the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw
myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with
anguish and anger. [7]
His
wish for any kind of love has vanished and the feeling he is left with is that
he will never truly hold the heart of Mangan’s sister because in the reality of
the world the feelings he holds cannot compete with other gentlemen who may
express interest. Even if he buys her a small trinket from the bazaar, for her
it will only be a time in which one of her brother’s friends had a small school
boy crush on her.
What Joyce portrays in “Araby” is
the innocence of the time before the Rising, and how young boys grew up in the
world of colonized Ireland. What would the young protagonist do if he were in
the midst of the Rising can only be determined by the reader in the years after
the Rising. The story can also serve as a time before Ireland was in the throes
of an all-out war against themselves and Britain. These characters are frozen
in time, in an Ireland that has yet to fight for their freedom. This Ireland is
filled with hopes and dreams of a life and world unchanged by war and
rebellion, these are the reason why they resonate with readers who wish for a
different time when life was easier.
The Tragic Life of a Boy
Named Henry
A story that is the opposite of
Joyce’s “Araby” is Roddy Doyle’s novel A
Star Called Henry, published in 1999 the novel portrays the life of a young
boy named Henry who lives through several tragedies, and the Easter Rebellion.
It is about a life forever changed by circumstance. Unlike Joyce’s young
protagonist who lives a middle class life with his family, Henry on the other
hand lives through the tragedy of his family’s downfall, and although the story
has comic moments within its pages it also paints a picture of the lives of the
young children of Ireland. Throughout Henry’s childhood he is accompanied by
his young brother Victor who is constantly by his side. The two of them live in
the streets of Ireland surviving by their wits alone while picking pockets in
order to survive. Yet the novel does paint a picture of Ireland and the
question of national pride. This question though Henry doesn’t have the answer
for when he was younger,
- Do you love Ireland, lads? Said one of
them
They
got no answer.
We
didn’t understand the question. Ireland was something in songs that drunken old
men wept about as they held on to the railings at three in the morning and we
homed in to rob them; that was all. I loved Victor and my memories of some
people. That was all I understood about love.[8]
For
love of their country was a foreign concept for two young boys trying to
survive through the brutal circumstances in which Henry and Victor had to live
through. They didn’t have time to care about Ireland when they had to be able
to take care of themselves. Children during this time period didn’t have
rights, they worked in conditions that would get them killed in order to
survive. Child labor laws weren’t at the forefront of their lives and for Henry
his thoughts on what his life were,
I
was eight and surviving. I’d lived three years in the streets and under boxes,
in hallways and on wasteland. I’d sleep in the weeds and under snow. I had
Victor, my father’s leg and nothing else. I was bright but illiterate,
strapping but always sick. I was handsome and filthy and bursting out of my
rags. And I was surviving.[9]
If
Henry were able to read and write would his life and his brother’s life have
been different, in the reality of what they were surviving through it wasn’t a
possibility. Education takes a step back for Henry and his brother because
survival is more important. The love of their country would only truly matter
after a great tragedy. For Henry that tragedy would be Victor’s death,
I
held his hand. I waited for his fingers to curl around mine. To prove me wrong.
I dragged him out from under the tarpaulin, hauled him across to a cinder path.
I was a shadow across him. I got out of the way of the sun’s early rays. I
still hoped. The heat would loosen him, send a shiver of life through him. His
fingers would stretch, curl and squeeze mine. He’d sit up and grin. And cough.
The
sun made a wet skin of the frost on the path and weeds but it did nothing to
Victor. His neck was crooked, as if he’d been hanged.
I left him there.
He
was dead. I wouldn’t let myself be fooled into thinking anything softer. I
wasn’t going to see him up there with the other stars, with the first Henry –
burning gas, a celestial fart – and all his brothers and sisters, twinkling up
there in a happier place. He was dead. I wasn’t even going to look at the sky.[10]
The
life of his brother was something that Henry cherished and it is also what sets
this story apart from Joyce’s work, Henry’s coming of age comes at the expense
of his brother’s death. He can no longer look at the stars of his dead siblings
because he had experiences the death of his brother and the stars are no long a
comfort to him. The tragedy is that Henry loses faith in a part of humanity
that wasn’t able to prevent the death of his brother. This is what makes
Henry’s role in the Rising important, not because he was fighting alongside the
other members of Irish Republican Brotherhood but because he was fighting for
the life that was taken away so early. In a small but the most significant
point of the story Henry has a conversation with James Connolly about the
Proclamation of an Irish Republic, where Connolly is asking for Henry’s opinion
on what is going in the Proclamation,
- What do you think? He asked.
- It’s the stuff, I said.
-
Is it perfect?
- Well, I said.
- Go on, said Connolly.
- There should be something in there about
the rights of children.
He looked at me. He saw my pain, and
the pain of millions of others. And his own.
- You’re right, he said. – Where, though?
-
Here, I said. – Between that there and the bit about the alien government.
That’s where it would fit.[11]
The
rights of the children would be mentioned throughout the Proclamation but as a
reference to all of the children of Ireland. The land that bore them life, and
they wanted to do right by it by giving it back to the people of Ireland, her
children. For Henry on the other hand the rights of children was a way to
prevent another death like the one that his brother suffered. It was a way to
save his brother even after his death. This was Henry’s redemption for not
being able to save his brother from the fate that was dealt to him.
The Children of the
Rising
A
Star Called Henry and “Araby” are two sides of the coin of Ireland, both
tell the story of young boys who came of age when Ireland was on the verge of
change and revolution. The story they don’t tell is the story of the actual
children lost during the Easter Rising. In Children
of the Rising, Joe Duffy explains that,
It
is likely that more children died violently in Dublin during Easter week 1916
than anywhere else on God’s earth, making it the most dangerous place in the
world for young people to be that historic week. Forty children aged sixteen
and under died as a result of the Rising, which broke out at noon on Easter
Monday. All bar one died by gunfire but, for the vast majority, we do not know
whose bullets killed them.[12]
Doyle’s
Henry joins the Rising at the age of 14, he became a fighter for Ireland so if
he were a real person he could have been one of those who could have been held
responsible for the death of many of these children. Blame wasn’t placed on
those who killed these children because it wasn’t known who shot the bullet
that would have killed any of the forty children who died during Easter 1916.
Henry would have most likely been a part of the revolution in a different
manner. In “1916: The revolution of the young,” Darragh Murphy writes “The Easter Rising was overwhelmingly
a young people’s revolution. As well as the hundreds of fighters in their late
teens and early 20s, many teenagers took part, either as messenger-boys or in
the actual fighting.”[13]
Henry was a fighter who fought when the time came but he is just a fictional
character in a very real revolution.
What
the real life stories of the children affected by Easter 1916 as illustrated by
Duffy’s book, as well as many others who have gained an interest on their lives,
is that these children lived normal lives but just so happen to stand in the
middle of a street at the wrong time. “At the time of the Easter
Rising, Dublin was a packed city, even more so than today. Many of the suburbs
had yet to be built, and most of the families were crammed into filthy,
overcrowded, disease-ridden slum tenement houses, overflowing with malnourished
children.”[14]
In a city packed with people to begin a rebellion meant that many of these
people were in the cross fire and their lives though important were also
expendable if they didn’t move fast enough. They mirrored Henry in many ways,
while others were closer to the life of protagonist of “Araby.”
The
stories of these children are all the same they were in the streets of Dublin
living their lives, walking with friends, parents when in a short moment
without warning everything went wrong. Yet what happened to them after tragedy
struck was also a mystery,
“The
children from 28 Charlemont Street tried to get home amid the confusion,
gunfire, excitement and chaos, but ten-year-old Christopher – according to his
family and Essie Coady, one of the friends who was with him – panicked and got
lost in the maelstrom. He was hit by a bullet near Portobello Bridge as Rebels
inside Davy’s pub fought a savage battle with British troops. His family
maintains that his mother retrieved his body that night, and it was laid out in
his grandfather’s house nearby Pleasant Street in a coffin hastily made by his
father.
Other
reports state that he was taken with injured soldiers, police and a civilian to
the fully equipped military hospital in the nearby barracks, run by Major
Charles Augustus John Albert Black RAMC, who had been honorary surgeon to the
Viceroy of India and had served with the South Africa Force during the Boer
War. Christopher’s death certificate states the cause as: ‘Probably haemorrhage
from gun-shot wound.’[15]
The
story of Christopher mirrors many of these children, whether his family found
him or not a bullet killed him. Where he ended up is a question that many other
parents faced in the tragedy of losing their child. There are still
unidentified remains of these children as well as countless others buried in
graves throughout Dublin. Bridges and houses are built over them as Ireland
tries to remember what had happened to their beloved country. One such story is
the story of
“Christina
Caffrey, at 22 months the youngest victim of the Rising, was shot in her
mother's arms at the door of her house in Church Street. She was buried in an
unmarked plot in Glasnevin that is now traversed by a walkway to the republican
monument. It is sadly symbolic of the theme of this wonderfully compassionate
book that her memory should have been trampled on for so many years and by none
more than the throngs arriving to celebrate the memory of those who fought and
died for a promise to cherish all the children of the nation equally.”[16]
The
fact that this child’s grave isn’t as important than the walkway to a monument
shows how disassociated the people who wrote the history books and built the
monuments that follow the Rising were from the tragedy of the life of this
young child. A monument isn’t as important as the loss of a life cut short at
22 months.
Conclusion to the Tragedy
The Proclamation written by the members
of the Irish Republican Brotherhood sparked a revolution in Ireland. A section
of the country no longer wanted to be ruled by Britain and wanted to be their
own country with their own rights. A part of the Proclamation says,
“The
Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every
Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty,
equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its
resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all
its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious
of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have
divided a minority from the majority in the past.”[17]
The
Proclamation was meant to unite the country and separate it from the British
empire. Yet the cost of this was the lives of thousands including forty
children. The country is still divided because Northern Ireland wanted to stay
a part of the British Empire. The separation has caused its own share of
problems over the years in a still divided country.
Joe Duffy’s book Children of the Rising provides the
history to accompany the stories by Joyce and Doyle. This background shows the
true problem with forgetting about a small part of the population. By
forgetting the children of the rising for nearly one hundred years Ireland
neglected the children of its country. They would rather focus on those who
started the revolution to free the country from Britain over those who lost their
lives tragically at the cost of the revolution. This is one of the many reasons
why history is constantly revised over the years, they have to include so much
of what was once left out originally in order to have a true complete history.
Works Cited
"Children
of the Revolution." History Ireland Children of the Revolution Comments.
May-June
2013.
Web. 31 Mar. 2016.
<http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-h istory/children-of-the-revolution/>.
Doyle,
Roddy. A Star Called Henry. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2000. Print.
Duffy,
Joe. Children of the Rising: The Untold Story of the Young Lives Lost During
Easter
1916.
Dublin: Hachette Ireland, 2015. Print.
"Easter
1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic." The Norton Anthology of
English Literature:
The 20th Century: Topic
3: Texts and Contexts. W.W Norton and Company. Web. 18 May
2016. <https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_3_05/easter1916.htm>.
Hayes,
Maurice. "Review: Innocent Children Killed in the 1916 Rising Are Also
Worthy of Our
Remembrance." Independent.ie.
Independent, 10 Oct. 2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.
<http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/the-victims/review-innocent-children-killed-in-the-1916-rising-are-also-worthy-of-our-remembrance-31598090.html>.
Joyce,
James. Dubliners. Guttenberg. Web. 19 May 2016.
Murphy,
Darragh. "1916: 40 Under-16s Were Shot in a Single Week." The
Irish Times. 23 Sept.
2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.
<http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/1916-schools/1916-40-under-16s-were-shot-in-a-single-week-1.2353790>.
Murphy,
Darragh. "1916: The Revolution of the Young." The Irish Times.
23 Sept. 2015. Web.
31 Mar. 2016. <http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/1916-schools/1916-the-revolution-of-the-young-1.2353779>.
"The
Sun Never Set on the British Empire,"Dominion over Palm and
Pine"" The Sun Never Set
on
the British Empire. Web. 18 May 2016.
<http://www.friesian.com/british.htm>.
[1] “The Sun Never
Set on the British Empire, “Dominion over palm and pine” Kelley L. Ross;
available from http://www.friesian.com/british.htm; accessed 15 May
2016
[2] “Easter 1916
Proclamation of an Irish Republic,” available from https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_3_05/easter1916.htm; accessed 15 May
2016
[3] Joe Duffy, Children of the Rising: The Untold story of
the young lives lost during Easter 1916 (Dublin, Ireland: Hachette Books
Ireland, 2015), 3.
[4] Ibid, VII
[5] James Joyce, Dubliners (Ebook #2814, 2001) “Araby”
Paragraph 3
[6] Ibid, paragraph 9
[7] Ibid, paragraph
21
[8] Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (New York, NY:
Penguin Books, 1999), 79.
[9] Ibid, 80-81.
[10] Ibid, 92-93.
[11] Ibid, 110.
[12] Duffy, Children of the Rising, 3.
[13] Darragh Murphy,
“1916: The revolution of the young”, available from http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/1916-schools/1916-the-revolution-of-the-young-1.2353779 accessed 7 April
2016.
[14] Darragh Murphy,
“1916: 40 under-16s were shot in a single week”, available from http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/1916-schools/1916-40-under-16s-were-shot-in-a-single-week-1.2353790 accessed 7 April
2016.
[15] Joe Duffy, Children of the Rising, 29.
[16] Maurice Hayes,
“Review: Innocent children killed in the 1916 Rising are also worthy of our
Rememberance”, available from http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/the-victims/review-innocent-children-killed-in-the-1916-rising-are-also-worthy-of-our-remembrance-31598090.html accessed 7 April
2016
[17] “Easter 1916
Proclamation of an Irish Republic”
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