| 4:15p |
From Brendan Beehan's Confessions Of An Irish Rebel
With our lot were about twenty men whose ages ranged from seventeen to fifty. It was the most pathetic sight I've ever seen in my life, for they were all wearing their Sunday best and they were obviously bemused by the fact that they were going to prison. They just stood there, very downcast.
I turned to another prisoner, a Yorkshire kid who was an ex-soldier of the Eighth Army. 'Look at those poor bastards,' I said.
'Don't you know about them?'
'No,' I said and I looked at him as earnestly as I could, wondering if I had picked a craw-thumper who had been used to gazing over wide open spaces from the gate to the hang-house. But he only said, quietly, that they were coal-miners who had been caught screwing each other down the pit. And I remembered George Orwell's story of the mines and how sometimes the miners worked in shorts and sometimes they worked with nothing on at all.
Mother of Christ, I put it to myself, how they stand it in the pits, I do not know.
Now I have heard of very many depressing human situations, but the idea of having sex of any kind down a coal mine seems to me to be about the most depressing human situation that you could possibly find. And these men were highly respectable; they had worked hard all their lives and now they were exposed between the devil and the deep sea because they would meet the same temptations all over again in the nick. Now I don't know who should be in prison, but sometimes I think the people who dish out the sentences should try their luck in them.
I felt sorry for these men. 'Look,' I said to one of them, 'nothing that you have done, except that you interfere with a little child, is shameful. I'm here because I am a member of the Irish Republican Army and I'm obviously an enemy of the British Empire, but I have been over it before and I'm going to get over it again.'
'Paddy,' he said, 'that may be all right for you, but you don't know my old woman.' |