Only one of them returned to the mill, a man called Doyle with a grey, slightly crooked face, who for some reason was unpopular with the others. Johnny Lacy told me my father had taken him back reluctantly, feeling obliged to since the mill was a man short. A suspicion of some sort hung about him; I never came to know him. I continued instead to listen to the other men’s conversation about the confusion in the country and whether or not de Valera was right, although what about I was not precisely certain. I knew that an alternative government had been set up in Dublin and that fighting continued between the imperial and the revolutionary regimes. I heard names that had a ring to them: Cathal Brugha, the Countess Markievicz, Terence MacSwiney, but I didn’t know who these people were. The escape of de Valera from Lincoln Gaol had been arranged by Michael Collins, and at least I knew about him. I remember being surprised to hear my mother saying she had liked Collins the first time she met him: there had been, after all, that moment of awkwardness in the hall.
