The sign says ‘mind your handbag and belongings at all times’. Inside the church the women have shopping bags and care-worn faces. Each of them is here alone with god. I am here looking for Hynes.
He may not have believed. I don’t. Dreary coughing, the smell of wholesale cleaning fluids, tap-tapping boots under the gaze of weeping statues. A large scuffling woman panting at the Virgin. I give no offering. I have no money for the Infant King. One full circuit of the chapels and I’ve found no suitable saint. I opt for the brightest corner of the church. There are spring flowers there.
Peter Hynes was twenty-three years old in 1911 and shared a one-room tenement with his mother Eliza and his brother Patrick at 37 Clarendon Street. The house is gone. Now there is a Fas centre. The Hynes brothers worked as messenger boys for local grocers. Peter was adopted by Eliza. She was my mother’s grand-aunt. Peter Hynes is nothing to me.
Clarendon Street today is a quiet street between busier ones. Through a restaurant window I see plastic bowls circulating between tables on a conveyor belt. A few boutiques, a hotel, and this church. Under these scagliola columns on hard pews, is the last place left to look for Hynes.
The brewer William Williams named this street for a former viceroy. That was in 1782. Twenty years later the Act of Union separated the city from its wealthy patrons. The townhouses of Clarendon Street became penny hops, cheap dance halls, and there were brothels and bars, and a one-cell police station.
St Teresa’s opened in 1797 but most of what I see is late nineteenth century. Daniel O’Connell came here often, this was the church of his confessor. In the old chapel his Catholic Association met and planned.
When Hynes was 19-years-old Michael Davitt’s body was brought to the church. History does not record if Peter Hynes was one of the twenty thousand people who filed past the coffin in respect. Shutters closed, shades drawn, the body was taken to the Broadstone station. To Mayo.
Davitt’s deathbed choice of St Teresa’s was peculiar. Carted here without a public fuss at nine o’clock one night in May. But he had his reasons and carried them for thirty years. It was the friars of this church who took the body of his friend Charles McCarthy when none else would have him. An excommunicated Fenian, paroled and on his way home, a victim of penal servitude and a heart attack. Another martyr. At nine o’clock one night in 1878 McCarthy’s body was brought to this church. Davitt didn’t forget and made his choice.
And Hynes made his one too. As a boy I had his brassy medal in my hands. A medal he never saw and that I lost. ‘Ypres, 1915’.
‘Ypres’. I didn’t know about French then.
There had been no trace of Hynes in the bookshop on Dawson Street. I found only one book on the Irishmen of the Great War. There are more I know. They can be found. But here, on the shelves packed with revolution, a tome on every ambush, there was but one. And no books at all on the tenements. No record of the April and May battles of 1915 that took so many Irish lives. No record of what the women that wore black that year had said in response to the news. And oddly, only the one book on Davitt.
So I came to Clarendon Street looking for Hynes, where, when he was 15-years-old, crowds gathered to see Maud Gonne enter St Teresa’s Hall for the first staging of Cathleen Ni Houlihan. That play was strong on national blood sacrifice. The Abbey theatre was coming together. The play’s creator, W.B. Yeats got lost on the way and AE Russell arrived eating a bun and fell down some steps. History does not record if Hynes saw that.
Maud Gonne was well known in Dublin, and worked with the well-known Mrs Despard to improve the lot of the poor, who in turn called them ‘Gone Mad’ and ‘Mrs Desperate’. Despard’s brother commanded the army at Ypres. John Denton Pinkstone French, later, the Earl of Ypres.
But I am not looking for him.
The gas came in the darkness of 24 May 1915. A cloud three miles long and forty feet in depth bleaching the grass white. Near the village of St Julien, not far from the town of Ypres, 666 men of the Dublin Fusiliers, among them Lance-corporal Peter Hynes, had the bad luck to be in the front line. Only 21 of them survived unscathed.
Chlorine gas is nasty. It smells like a mixture of pineapple and pepper. Your bronchial muscles spasm, your lungs and throat fill with a thin yellow fluid, you puke, you have a headache, you die. One surgeon reported “we know little of it’s effects in the fatal cases, just that the dead are found with their faces twisted and a blue-green colour’.
By breakfast time that day 143 Irishmen had become nothing but names for the chiselers of the War Graves Commission. Twisted faces turned blue-green.
Nothing records the reaction of Eliza Hynes. With no body to bury she would not have been offered the option of the 66-character epitaph for a headstone she would never see. It is unlikely she could have afforded it anyway. It was not free.
So it is, that near the spring flowers, in the sunniest part of the church, I light two candles for a messenger boy and his mother’s grief. I have seen photos of his war, all drained of colour and life. And I do not like the sanitised green fields and blue skies of it’s memory. I don’t hold with candles much either. But I did my part in erasing Peter Hynes. I lost his medal. The blitz burned his army service records, being poor and dying in a national embarrassment did the rest.
His name is on an arch in Belgium where the Last Post sounds and he is a name among thousands remembered as soldiers. I wanted to find the 28-year-old who knew Clarendon Street. Play openings, Fenian funerals, bumps in the landscape of history that Hynes may have touched.
His is a name among thousands, all boys with no graves in a landscape of graveyards, all those bones and battlefields just proof of man’s defeat. I won’t find out more. Look further. The flames of those candles on Clarendon Street are full stops. I had forgotten Peter Hynes. I will forget him again.
…A man creaks in the doors,
Up a dim aisle his footsteps falter
Into a shuffling on the floors
And all is still again.
But in the rumbling street
A million muffled feet,
the myriad beat and tramp of distant men
Are heard. Outside a world roars
On; oh ! cannot ye
Spare but a moment for Eternity?
Oliver MacDonagh, from his poem, ‘Clarendon Street’.
admin @ March 28, 2010