Peeling Oranges by James Lawless Read Free Book Online Page B

when the sun catches it,’ I said.
    ‘And why wouldn’t it?’ she said, ‘isn’t this our month of honey?’ And she burst into a giggle.
    She commented on a little jellyfish which was ruffled by the breeze. ‘It’s like the wobbly phlegm on the streets in the tenements.’ She did not speak with vulgarity but in a factual tone. I sometimes don’t know what way to take her. However, one thing is certain. She will always carry the Liberties around with her, no matter where she travels. They are entrenched deeply in her soul, and no amount of sun will ever burn them out. She says already that she misses the bakery smells from Jacobs and the smell of the hops from Guinness’s.
    She swung me around, forcing me to dance. We laughed. A tickle and a chuckle.
    ‘Loosen up,’ she said, and I realised what a dull, cerebral fellow I must appear before her.
    She fulfils me now that she is with me. There is no longer any need for that other business. Pudere. It’s just that hardness is difficult to sustain. But she doesn’t mind. She keeps saying that we have plenty of time. But she has more time than me.
    ***
    At the same time the political atmosphere was growing more tense. When the left-wing Popular Front won the general election in 1936 there was an increase in violence against the Right. Churches were burned in Catalonia. Peasants revolted against their landlords. Many people felt that only the army could restore order.
    On their return to their hotel in Vigo, a telegram awaited Patrick from the embassy informing him that Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist leader in the Cortes, had been murdered by government police. The army under generals Mola and Franco were advancing on Madrid. Patrick’s instructions were to head for the French border immediately.
    ***
    Franco failed to take Madrid partly due to the intervention of the International Brigade.
    One of the rifles aimed at Franco’s troops belonged to a Captain Gearóid MacSuibhne of the James Connolly Battalion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
    Gearóid had been released from prison in Ireland, as it could not be proved that he was responsible for the June executions. He had Basque comrades (something which came as a shock to Patrick when he found out about it later from diplomatic sources). Attempts were being made to link the IRA to an international body of freedom fighters.
    In one of the letters I found in which Gearóid wrote to my mother, he told her of the strong communist strain which of necessity ran through the veins of Andalusian peasants who toiled as modern-day feudal serfs on vast estates ( latifundios) owned by wealthy landlords. They in turn shared in a bond of common suffering with exploited Asturian mineworkers in the North. ‘They are our brothers,’ he wrote in Irish.
    On his release, Gearóid immediately proceeded to assist in the organisation of a group of men – four hundred in all, including some writers and intellectuals. These men saw a global threat to the freedom of the individual being acted out on a Spanish stage, and were prepared to play a part for their beliefs.
    Forty two Irish republicans were killed in Spain; over a hundred were wounded, and of the twelve who were captured, Gearóid MacSuibhne was one. He was put on Franco’s black list together with a number of other prisoners, mainly officers. They were taken to Burgos prison.
    In 1938 Gearóid MacSuibhne was sentenced to death.
    ***
    I dig up in the local library some stuff on O’Duffy and his Blueshirts in Spain. They were on a Catholic crusade against communism. They saw little action and the cruelties of the Nationalists and the frequency of peremptory executions began to diffuse an ideology which had been so clear in their heads when in Ireland. And, as Patrick points out, there was a tendency to heap all the blame for anti-Catholic atrocities on the communists, whereas most of them were committed by anarchists, ‘something which the Blueshirt battalion failed to