I wrapped the red coat around me, swallowed by the folds of wool. Its hem skimmed the ground. Two shiny gold buttons fastened it at the front. It had been given to me by the family who lived on the third floor near the toilet closet. They had a young daughter who died last month. The wailing echoed through the tenement that Sunday as we dressed for mass. Many died of fever then. Others of want.
It was almost Easter in April 1916. I was ten years old. I remembered the mother calling to our door in Dublin, a tiny baby suckling at her deflated breast. She had tears running down her face as she pressed a pile of clothes into my mother’s hands. A little boy clung to her skirts, sucking ferociously on his thumb. He was hidden beneath her swollen belly. The red coat was at the bottom of the pile, luminous among the greys and browns. I didn’t know what it was at first but I snatched it before my sisters could and put it on immediately, claiming it as my own.
We lived in a Georgian townhouse on Henrietta Street, our family occupying one room of a ten-room house. Once owned by the gentry, my father said, it was now home to at least ten other families. My mother, father, two sisters and two brothers lived, ate and slept in a single room. At night I dossed on a pile of rags with the two younger boys who kicked and punched in their sleep. In winter my father would pull up some of the floorboards to use as firewood and we would take turns sitting in front of the open hearth. Getting as close as we dared, the tiny sparks singeing our clothes. Boisterous laughter as we flapped our hands trying to put out the tiny dancing orange sprites landing haphazardly on our laps.
In summer the toilets on the top floor overflowed and the smell drifted down the stairwell. We slept with the windows open, tossing and turning, searching for cool spots on the floor while raucous laughter spilled out of the public house on the corner long after midnight. My father would stumble in, cursing as he knocked an elbow or knee against the table searching for my mother. I would press my hands firmly over my ears to try and stifle the moans coming from their corner of the room.
We took turns staying home from school to help Mam with the chores. Dad worked long shifts in the Guinness factory on the other side of town. Every day we piled our laundry high in the big brown wicker basket we kept behind the door. A single tap in the rear courtyard served the whole house. Mothers and their young children gathered there to draw fresh water, gossip and scrub their clothes before hanging them on lines of twine, hoping for a break in the weather.
My mother decided to send me to the post office to mail a letter to her family in Cork. She thought us younger ones could do with getting out of Dublin and staying with relatives in the country. Just for a while until the troubles blow over is what she said. We stayed with our Aunt and Uncle two years ago. Taking the steam train all the way to Cork. My mother had prepared thick ham and cheese sandwiches on white crusty bread and flasks of warm milky tea to accompany them. We contentedly munched away as green pastures, rolling hills and grazing livestock flew by outside. Fewer children then.
I pulled my red coat tightly around me. Blew on my hands in the frosty morning and shoved them deep into my pockets. Our street at one end was barricaded with big boxes full of clay and the seats out of the gardens. I couldn’t get to my friend Daisy’s house anymore. I needed to take the long way into town, cutting across the canal.
McCarthy’s newsagent was boarded up, O’Flynn’s shelves stripped of bread and butter.
Even Norbert’s sweet shop had been ransacked. A single gum drop sitting on the counter.
The streets in town were blocked by overturned carriages, furniture, and even a dead horse on its side. Every now and then I heard the crack of rifles. The smoky city centre reminded me of the bonfires we would have to celebrate Oiche Shamhna or Halloween, the only day of the year where it was thought the dead could walk among the living. The Shelbourne hotel was a mess of broken windows and red splattering across the stone.
Suddenly there was a deafening roar, and I took shelter behind one of the hotel’s marble columns. I noticed a young boy around my age, a brown cap on his head carrying a glass of clear liquid to one of the fallen rebels. More pop, pop, pops, getting closer now. The sun glinting off my gold buttons catching the eye of a soldier across the street. With my hands over my ears, I watched as the boy suddenly fell in slow motion, a dancer breaking mid pirouette. He lay there not moving, his cap delicately landing at my feet.
The soldier pointed the musket of his rifle at me, his bayonet fixed beneath the barrel. I closed my eyes and pulled the red coat tighter around my shoulders. The gold buttons are still glinting in the sun. I stayed like that, frozen, smelling the gunpowder in the air. When I opened my eyes he had gone.
I started to make my way home in the direction of the Irish tricolour and a green flag with a golden harp flying from the top of the General Post Office. A column of smoke rising above the city. A group of rebels gathered around me, staring at the red coat. As we marched, I saw that we were headed straight for the khaki-clad soldiers. A rebel beside me grabbed my hand and pushed me to the front. The guns pointed directly at us. We continued to march. A momentary hesitation from the soldier as his musket faltered. Then a searing pain in my leg sent me to my knees. I didn’t feel it until I hit the ground. The man who had grabbed my hand collapsed on top of me, blood pouring from a wound in his head. The same deep red as my coat.
The rebels had scattered. I lay there beneath the weight of him, my red coat spread beneath us across the cobbles. I opened my eyes as someone lifted me up. A soldier, a weary look on his youthful features, carried me behind the wrecked buildings towards the Red Cross tents.
My red coat trailed behind us, the hem dusty and bloody from the street. One of the gold buttons had come loose, hanging delicately by a single thread.
