The inspiration for my work is my grandfather. He fought in the Irish revolution and subsequent civil war, met James Connolly and Constance Markievicz at Liberty Hall in 1915, shook hands with Michael Collins in a chance encounter in Rosscarbery, County Cork, and said Cathal Brugha was, “the bravest man I ever met.”
Thanks to my brother Tom, who initiated our Sunday visits with him in his Bronx apartment, I was able to have an adult relationship with the old man. As the song says, “I was grown, and he was almost gone.” He’d boil us up a piece of tenderloin and some potatoes, and we'd always find some beer in the 'fridge. He drank whiskey. And we got to hear stories he never would have told to us when we were younger.
As children he’d told us he had a gun that could shoot around corners. “I could shoot at them, but they couldn’t shoot at me!” Then he’d pop his false teeth out and make us shriek. But older now, and bolder, I could ask him questions. Like how he got the scar on his face, a wide, vicious mark running from the corner of his mouth up into his cheek.
“The bloody black and tans,” he said, and, making a chopping motion with his hands, “with a rifle butt.” He paused, and then added conspiratorially, “if they knew what I was doing they would have shot me.”
That only begged the question, what were you doing?
“Hiding my gun.” Judging from the location of that scar, he lost a few teeth that day, too.
He said he came to America because he couldn’t get a decent job in Ireland. At first I assumed it was because he was on the wrong side of the civil war, and that may in part be true, but now I believe it had more to do with his work for the ITGWU, the Irish Transportation and General Workers Union. “I was a bit of a red in those days,” was something he once said to me. Being his hometown was a hot-bed of anti-Treaty feeling, “being a red” may have been more the reason for his being black-balled then the mere politics of Sinn Fein versus Cumann na nGaedheal.
In either case, he was a life-long union man. In New York City he reconnected with his childhood friend Michael Quill, and when Quill organized the subway workers to create the Transport Workers Union (so-named in tribute to the ITGWU), Pop (as he was called by everyone) was instrumental in bringing his fellow bus drivers at the Fifth Avenue Coach Company on board.
Pop the bus driver. Another bon mot he would tell us when we were small: “I drove the double-decker, and people would yell down from above, ‘is anybody driving down there?’ and I’d yell back, ‘Nobody down here! Is anybody driving up there?’”
One time during those years of visiting him in the Bronx I tried to dig into his experiences in Ireland, and he told me more than I understood, myself still ignorant about much of the history that he lived and made. It wasn’t until years later I understood he was talking about the Four Courts when he described the leaders of his band of rebels ordering them to surrender. “We were in a castle up north, and they turned cannon on us and were blowing us to bits.
"'Boys,' they told us, 'we know you're brave men willing to die, but there's just no sense in it.'"
For a long time I’d thought he’d been in Donegal or Ulster, but after compiling stories he’d told his other grandchildren, and talking to my aunt and mother, I realized “up north” was Dublin, and the “castle” was the Four Courts, the bombardment being the start of the civil war.
COLLINS RISING is based on what I learned in tracing Pop’s stories. It has less to do with him in particular, but everything to do with his times and the people he knew and admired. In future books I will be putting him closer to the spotlight, but to even make the attempt of telling his story I felt the need to first create in my readers an understanding of the world he lived in.
The history of those days is so complex, so nuanced, and so misunderstood, I hope COLLINS RISING can bring it to life and breath fresh insight into what has become a history muddied and obscured. In the reactionary, post-revolutionary years dominated by Eamon De Valera's towering presence, much of Ireland's recent past was paved anew. The time has come to unearth what has been buried.
Please join me on a journey of discovery into a fascinating time and place, full of heroes and villains, and those caught in between.
COLLINS RISING by Terence Granville is available on Amazon.com
