CHAPTER I. HOUSE-HUNTING.
I left Ireland a few days ago, for ever. I motored from Dublin to Kingstown in an armoured car. An armed escort brought me to London, where Scotland Yard took charge of me, and I hope are looking after me still. However, when I arrived in Ireland I did not know what the manner of my departure would be, and it was indeed a case of " where ignorance is bliss." My husband had gone over in May, soon after we left Germany. On the 4th of May he was at the War Office, and was told he would shortly go to India ; on the 5th of May he was ordered to Ireland. They both began with " I," which was the only way that we could account for the mistake, but, alas ! it was not a mistake. I followed him in July. I had utterly refused to stay away any longer, and refused also to be daunted or depressed by the dismal reports I received from my husband and other officers and their wives who were there already, one officer going so far as to head his letter to me with the address "By Dublin. " Had I not been brought up on Irish hunting books, was I not prepared to love the country and the people, and was it not only a question of a few months before I too should be hunting in Ireland ? At last I should meet some of the characters I had read about so often in the ' Irish R.M.' and many other delightful books. I certainly did see a man once who looked like " Slipper," otherwise I never saw, met, or heard of any one who in the least resembled any of the characters in those books. Another illusion gone.
Before leaving London I was taken by a friend to a literary meeting in Chelsea. I was told the President of the Society was a delightful Irishwoman, and that she was certain to talk about Ireland and Sinn Fein. I was very keen to hear something about the other, or Sinn Fein, side. I knew once I got to Dublin I should only hear and see the military point of view, and I was genuinely interested in the Sinn Feiners, and had a good deal of sympathy with them. The lady was a disappointment : she certainly compared England most unfavourably with Ireland, and if you like to be amused at the expense of your own country, she was amusing. Like all the Irish people I have ever met, she dilated on the wit, gaiety, beauty, & of the Irish nation. But all that was neither interesting nor enlightening. As I was leaving, to my embarrassment, she drew me to her and kissed me (mere Irish impulsiveness, I suppose), and said : " Come back and tell me all about it, if they do not knock you on the head." I laughed at her little jest ; I did not laugh when that jest nearly became reality. The Irish Channel was very kind : the boat a big new one a great deal more comfortable than many I had travelled on to India. I arrived at Kingstown in a frame of mind ready to be pleased with everything and everybody. That condition lasted about one hour. The taxi ordered to meet me had not arrived. I found out afterwards that taxis ordered by military people seldom, if ever, did arrive, and as I drove in a dirty cab through the filthy Dublin streets my heart sank. Our soldier servant was waiting for us at the hotel. He was an old friend, and I remarked to him that I did not think I should like the place very much. He replied : " We must just make the best of it, madam." He made the best of it by deserting the next day in a blue-serge suit belonging to my husband ! I envied him.
I started off the next morning to look for a flat. The house-agent was gloomy and not particularly helpful. In some ways he was just like his English confreres. He had the same powerful imagination, the same peculiarly annoying habit of sending one long and fruitless journeys after flats that either had been let three months ago, or else had never been to let at all. He asked me how long I wanted it for, so I answered brightly for as long as the troops remain in Dublin. He replied that that would be for ever, and became gloomier still. He told me the rent of one flat was 9 a week : it seemed a good deal, but I said I would go and look at it. As I was going out of the door he told me it might be 9 a month. I asked facetiously if he was sure that it was not 9 a year. But,as I often noticed, no Irishman ever sees a joke unless he has made it himself, and not always then.
I must explain here that I shall make no effort to reproduce the innumerable brogues which, as ' Punch ' said, " fill Ireland with noise and empty it of sense." There were not many flats to look at. Dublin was very full, not only of military, but lots of people who had places in the country had been frightened out of them by one side or the other, and were now living in Dublin. At last I found a house that looked promising, outside at any rate. On entering the hall, though, there was a faint smell which reminded me somehow of Malta. I sniffed again ; what was it ? I suddenly remembered. Surely I was mistaken ? At that moment the servant came back, and with her was a goat. I had not been mistaken : no one who has ever lived in Malta could ever forget that smell. I suppose I looked, as I felt, astonished, as the girl smiled and said " He is generally in the house." I had heard that pigs lived in Irish cabins, but I had never heard that goats lived in Irish flats. However, the goat, though a large one, was but a small shock to the one I was presently to receive. A lady stood in the dining-room, and I explained that I had heard she had a flat to let furnished, and could I see it. I suppose she was struck by what she would call my " English accent," as before answering she said sternly : " Who are you ? " I told her, hoping that my husband's official position would vouch both for my respectability and ability to pay the rent. There was a silence, and then to my utter amazement she said : " How dare you come into my house? " and then a torrent of words, mostly unintelligible. I stared at her in utter speechless amazement. All I could think of was that she was evidently quite mad, and how was I to get to the door ? But after a few minutes, when she paused for breath, I realised that here was one of the people I had wanted so much to meet a Sinn Eeiner and that she was not mad, or at least only mad on one subject, England and the English. I had only been twenty-four hours in Ireland. I had not the very faintest idea that any one hated us, and that I, as the wife of an officer, was a special object of hatred. No one had ever hated me in Germany. I had started off that morning to look for a flat in Dublin in exactly the same way as I should have gone out in London. Then I suddenly found myself in the house of a woman who described herself as " England's bitterest enemy." When she got calmer I asked her if she would explain things to me, as I honestly wanted to understand the situation. She told me a great deal about Ireland under Cromwell and Lord French, and of General Dyer's methods in India ; she evidently classed them together, and spoke of all three in the same breath with equal bitterness. She then told me that she had prayed to God every night of the war that He would let Germany win, and she was now praying to Him to take the soldiers away from Ireland. I was rather bored by this time, and said that I hoped for my own sake that her present prayers would be more successful than her previous ones, and prepared to go. She escorted me to the door, still talking. I felt safer in the hall, and ventured a remark about Ulster, and how, though Irish, they had fought for England. " Ulster," she replied in tones of contempt " Ulster is England, so, of course, the Ulstermen had fought ; but had not lots of Irish boys fought too ? " though she personally had gone down on her knees to implore them not to. This lady then asked me why my husband had come to Dublin " a fine soldier like he must be, to do this coward's work." I could not think of any reason except that he was a soldier ; we certainly had not come for pleasure. I was asked why the English Government, who used to send clever men to govern Ireland, now only send fools. This, and similar questions, I could not answer, and suddenly the humour of it all struck me, and I began to laugh. But, poor lady, it was no laughing matter to her.We eventually parted friends, and she told me that I should be quite safe in Dublin, but did not seem so sure about my husband, and I left her with her goat.
I tried one more flat in the same square, one of the best in Dublin. But before entering, warned by my previous experience, I asked the lady if she objected to officers. This landlady was kinder : she did, and she did not object any way I might look round. No, she was not exactly loyal ; she was neutral, I gathered, with a strong leaning towards Sinn Fein. Unfortunately this flat had little or no furniture in it. It was indescribably dirty. Kitchen there was none. She said she used the cupboard and an oil-stove. I asked for a bathroom, and was told there was a tap on the landing. I thought of my beautiful bathrooms in Germany, with their tiled floors and walls, their endless array of taps, sprays, showers, and douches. Here I was offered a tap on the landing ; and once more I was overcome with laughter. Murmuring something about coming back later with my husband, I fled. I could not help seeing the funny side of it all. Those first few months in Ireland were a mixture of comedy and tragedy, until the tragedy came which blotted out all the comedy in a sea of blood, and made me feel that I could never smile at anything Irish again. Eventually, a day or two later, I did get a very nice service flat , in a house where there were eight or nine suites of rooms, several of them already occupied by officers and their wives, and others by six or seven men who shared rooms. I never quite knew what those men were, and I wondered if they were officers why they did not live in barracks . Two, we were told, were in the Ordnance, and the others we knew as " the Hush Hush men." They came in and went out at odd hours, and I never really got to know any of them. Five out of the six are now dead. I told an officer in the Intelligence Service of my amusing experience while house-hunting, and gave the name and address of the lady. He told me she was a well-known rebel, and that the troops had raided her house several times. I was never quite sure if it had been altogether amusing. It was a novel experience to be hated and told so. It certainly made me think. I realised just a little the intense hatred with which the English are regarded by a large majority of Irish men and women, a hatred which no one in England ever believes in or even tries to understand. If that feeling existed then, seven or eight months ago, it must be a thousand times intensified now, when tragedy after tragedy has occurred to inflame the passions of both sides. It is because I know that feeling exists, and because it was brought forcibly home to me by another woman my very first day in Ireland, that I personally can see no end to the present appalling position. They have not forgiven England yet for Cromwell's deeds. Perhaps when another 250 years have passed they will have forgotten Cromwell ; but when another officer's wife goes house-hunting in Dublin in the year 2170 (for, like my house-agent friend, I also think there will be troops in Ireland for ever), doubtless that wife will be met with a long account of the misdeeds of Lord French and Sir Nevil Macready, for time does not soften things in that unhappy country.