Yesterday afternoon, when the firing in Grafton Street was over, the mob appeared and looted the shops, clearing the great provision shops and others.
From the windows we watched the proceedings, and I never saw anything so brazen! The mob were chiefly women and children, with a sprinkling of men; they swarmed in and out of the side door, bearing huge consignments of bananas, the great bunches on the stalk, to which the children attached a cord and ran away dragging it along; other boys had big orange boxes, which they filled with tinned and bottled fruits. Women with their skirts held up received showers of apples and oranges and all kinds of fruit which were thrown from the upper windows by their pals; and ankle deep on the ground was all the pink and white and silver paper and paper shavings used for packing choice fruits. It was an amazing sight! And nothing daunted these people. Higher up, at another shop, we were told a woman was hanging out of a window dropping down loot to a friend, when she was shot through the head by a sniper, probably our man. The body dropped into the street and the mob cleared. In a few minutes a cart appeared and gathered up the body, and instantly all the mob swarmed back to continue the joyful proceedings!
H. and Lord S. were sitting at the window for a few minutes yesterday when the fruit shop was being looted and saw one of the funniest sights they had ever seen. A very fat, very blowsy old woman emerged from the side street and staggered on to the pavement, laden with far more loot than she could carry; in her arms she had an orange box full of fruit, and under her shawl she had a great bundle tied up, which kept slipping down; having reached the pavement, she put her box down and sat on it! And from her bundle rolled forth many tins of fruit; these she surveyed ruefully, calling on the Almighty and all the Saints to help her! From these she solemnly made her selection, which she bound up in her bundle and hoisted, with many groans and lamentations, on her back and made off with, casting back many longing looks at the pile of things left on the pavement, which were speedily disposed of by small boys!
Humour and tragedy are so intermixed in this catastrophe! A very delicate elderly lady who is staying here said to me this morning, in answer to my inquiry as to how she had slept:
‘I could not sleep at all; when the guns ceased the awful silence made me so nervous!’
I know exactly what she meant; when the roar of the guns ceases you can feel the silence.
5 p.m.—Colonel C. has just come in, having been in the thick of it for 48 hours. He tells us the Post Office has been set on fire by the Sinn Feiners who have left it. If this is true, and it probably is, I fear we have lost all our valuable possessions, including my diamond pendant which was in my jewel-case in H.’s safe.
To-day, about lunch-time, a horrid machine gun gave voice very near us, also the sniper reappeared on the roofs and this afternoon was opposite my bedroom window, judging from the sound. A man might be for weeks on the roofs of these houses among the chimney-stacks and never be found as long as he had access to some house for food. When we were working in my room this afternoon he fired some shots which could not have been more than twenty yards away.
I was almost forgetting to tell you how splendidly one of H.’s men behaved when the G.P.O. was taken. When the rebels took possession they demanded the keys from the man who had them in charge. He quietly handed over the keys, having first abstracted the keys of H.’s room! Imagine such self-possession at such a terrible moment.