FOOTNOTE:
[[A]] It seems worthy of note that as I write in the year 1917 the Department of Agriculture and Technical Education have adopted this scheme, and are being assisted in its prosecution by the police. It took a Clown to refer to Time as a whirligig.
XXI.
The week after our excursion to Wormwood Scrubbs, seven men were sent down to us from Frongoch, where trouble had already begun. There were no cells to hold them in our prison, and so they were lodged in the reception-cells under the offices, where neither light nor air was bold enough to venture. They were brought over to us for breakfast, and lived during the day with us until they were taken back to bed.
Shortly afterwards five of our number were summoned to the Governor’s office, and returned saying they were to be released that day. We already had had that joke played on us several times, and so we gave no heed to them. But when in a short time we saw them industriously packing their kit, the joke wore a more earnest expression. It was no jest, however. Although no man changed his mien yet none but felt what a jewel freedom was when it became within the grasp of his neighbour, and when that neighbour rose up and went forth proudly wearing it. We sang them home, however, gaily enough. In a week two more were sent home. These seven comprised all the releases from Reading at the same time that two thousand and more were released from Frongoch. It was not very difficult to discover the reasons prompting most of these releases, and it need hardly be said that they had little relation to the events of Easter Week. The internments covered a much wider ground, which was chosen for much subtler reasons. The soldier’s hand might rule in Ireland, but the politician’s hand indexed the internments. And as usual the politician over-reached himself. For the men who were released found on their return that the country judged them unworthy to remain; and the Home Office officials were finally convinced that Ireland was inhabited by the mad when they received shoals of letters from released men pitifully arguing that their releases must have been in error, and giving proofs of their part in the Rising-Out.
We, however, settled down to the honour of imprisonment with fortitude. Already, when we had learned that the celebrations of the 12th of July had been forbidden in Ulster we had filled the gap with a procession and a meeting in which excellent Orange speeches had been made. Now we held a Hibernian meeting. Such things enlivened our days.
We suffered greatly from lack of exercise, and the closeness of our confinement began to tell upon us as the autumn approached. We had given up going out to the work-yard for our morning exercise, and kept to the little yard. This yard was beset on three sides by the buildings of the jail, and on the fourth side, beyond the high wall, Huntley & Palmer’s chimneys belched black smoke that blotted the sky. In a corner of this yard we made a hand-ball alley. No stranger alley was ever devised. Two windows, a drain-pipe, a railing across steps leading to the basement, and a ventilator grating, gave opportunity for chance and skill. And the exercise saved us.
Nevertheless, with the coming of winter the effects of our confinement could be seen on most of us. The food, also, had become bad. The margarine was often rancid. On two occasions the meat made several of us ill; and for three months I lived only on bread and porridge, both of which were, at least, clean and wholesome. Prisons are not built as health resorts, yet precautions are supposed to be taken that a mean of temperature is maintained. During a week of frost, however, the temperature in my room was 46° to 48° Fahrenheit. This was inside the cells: outside, the passage was full of draughts. Yet the prison was never ventilated, for the only place where air could come or go was the door. The result was that when one of the warders came in once with influenza, every man in the prison in time fell to it.
Yet we kept our backs straight. P. J. D. was informed by the Governor, on the authority of the Home Office, that if he would sign an undertaking to be of good behaviour for the future he would at once be liberated. He replied that the offer was adding insult to injury, and he declared that if his liberation depended on his signature of any manner of undertaking, he was destined to remain long in prison. The Chief Warder approached others of us, thinking to try the ground before any other offers were made; but he left matters as he found them.
In Frongoch at this time the same attitude was being taken. Matters there were also complicated by the attempt of the military to search out Irishmen who had returned home from England on the passage of the Military Service Act—to search them out, not for the Army, but for the pleasure of thrusting them into jails. And the result of the ensuing resistance was that seven of the leaders there were brought to Reading and put into the reception-cells, making our number thirty-five once again.
XXII.
So the winter days passed. The prison was wrapt continually in an unpleasant amalgam of winter fog and Huntley & Palmer’s smoke. We never saw the sun, though occasionally, when the fog cleared, we could make a guess at it where it strode the sky.
Little wonder if we occasionally got upon one another’s nerves. None of our nerves were of the best, and we all felt the deathly system of prison life like an oppression on us, blotting out all intellectual life and making a blank of mind and soul. Yet no outsider saw cleavage among us. That was a principle we never let down.
Of an evening we met together and discussed different aspects of national affairs, partly with the intention of defining our future action, and partly with a view to defining our points of view in their relation to one another. The two things were really one; for satisfactorily to outline the second was already largely to complete the first; and we were determined not to lose the chance with which we had been so admirably furnished. Moreover, when birthdays arrived we had modest supper-parties, in which song and good will supplied the lack of viands.
Yet towards the end, with illness and depression settling on most of us, we kept largely to our own cells, despite their icy temperature. We were suffered books—carefully selected. It became part of our business carefully to test the selection by arranging for a variety of books to be sent in to us by friends. Especially was this so when a happy accident gave us the name of our censor; and it was deeply interesting to see his path among the classics of Irish literature.
In this we were assisted by our friends outside. Indeed, not the least value of our months of imprisonment was the revelation of friendship, and its spontaneity and strength and unity in those of our race. We had but to express a need and it was at once met by leagues and committees that had been gathered together, both at home and in England, to befriend and serve us. If our state was like that of an island it was at least an island washed by a great sea of friendship.
The gifts cast up by the tides of that sea became embarrassing as Christmas approached. We had altogether to dispense with prison fare; and our thrills of excitement were not the less because we were so remote from the outer world. But the full bounty of that sea was never to be experienced by us.
Shut away though we were, we watched political affairs closely—watched not merely the surface that appeared, but watched for indications of the hidden streams that ran—and when John Dillon brought forward his motion for the discussion of the Irish Prisoners of War we guessed that he had learned some hint that we were to be released. This came soon after the failure to get us to sign pledges of good behaviour. When, however, the threatened motion was never taken, it was clear that we were not to be released. We were not greatly affected; but we watched that pending motion with interest. It became a theme of daily jest with us. When, after the change of government, the motion at last was discussed, the sign was clear to us; and we were not surprised when, the following day, we learned that Irish interned prisoners were to be released. In a noncommittal way some of us began to pack—like men who were content, the next moment, to unpack, and take whatever came without perturbation. On Friday, the 22nd of December, we heard that the Frongoch men were going, and during that day we learned that a courier was expected during the afternoon with papers for our release. No courier, however, arrived; and Sunday saw us content again to continue as we were without complaint. It appeared, as I afterwards learnt, that the Home Office had actually arranged for our release together with the men at Frongoch, but that the Irish Office had intervened. It was not till the Sunday afternoon that the Home Office won its way. For on that day, Christmas Eve, at half-past two, the Governor came into the prison to tell us that we were to be ready to go out in two hours’ time. It seemed indeed that our maximum of inconvenience had been sought; for it was impossible then for many of us to reach home for Christmas, and such men had need to lodge where they could with the more fortunate.
So at half-past four we passed out through the streets of Reading, singing our songs as we went. Each man went to take up his duty as he had always conceived it, but with the added hardness inevitably begotten of a jail. And each man remembered his fellows who still were in jail, the men who, for the same duty and for the same high cause, were serving sentences at Lewes, beside whom our sufferings were a light thing lightly endured.
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