The Crocodile by the Door by Selina Guinness

Author:Selina Guinness [Guinness, Selina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241960233
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Unless the Colonel wrote ‘Miss’ in error, it must have been Eleanor – the only spinster left among Richard’s three daughters by 1798 – who opened the door to the rebels. I wonder was it late in 1798, or earlier in the year. News of the sectarian killings in Wexford may have reached her ears; perhaps she had even heard of the massacre at Scullabogue in May, when the rebels herded Protestant men, women and children into a barn, locked the doors and set it alight, piking those who escaped. I imagine her terror as she handed over the gun and her humiliation at her fumbling, at being told she had got this wrong. When the men left to search for arms elsewhere, they would have gone up Cloragh Road towards Prossers’. In their wake, did she leave the house and run up the avenue to Tibradden? Or did she shoot home the bolts and look for somewhere to hide? Was she there when Mr Prosser came running to her door to seek refuge? Did she struggle to admit him, or was she too terrified to go to his aid? I wonder was Mr Prosser shot with the very gun she had surrendered. As her neighbour died on her doorstep, did she think she was to blame?

The rebels’ raid was a bold one. Less than half a mile away at Killakee, battalions of the British Army congregated in Stocking Lane to buy provisions for the long march over the newly built Military Road across the boggy Featherbed and down into the glens of west Wicklow, thick with hazel and alder, where Michael Dwyer and his men evaded capture long after the defeats of Wexford and Mayo. In these upper reaches of Rathfarnham, soldiers and rebels must have criss-crossed constantly. Our valley served as a back door to Dublin for the Wicklow men. John Philpot Curran, the attorney for the United Irishmen who defended Wolfe Tone and Hamilton Rowan, lived behind Whitechurch in a house called The Priory. His daughter, Sarah Curran, would woo her sweetheart, the doomed rebel leader Robert Emmet, in the grounds of Hermitage opposite, where Pádraig Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, would later be housed. In 1803, when Emmet’s uprising failed, he escaped briefly through this area into the high wastes of the Dublin Mountains, assisted by Sarah and his loyal servant, Anne Devlin.

I turn the page. Sarah Davis, too, witnessed the violence of the rebellion on a drive into Dublin with her sister and mother, ‘in a covered car with a feather bed inside. When passing St Stephen’s Green their mother, Mrs Jones of Killincarrig, saw the rebels hanging at the corner of the Square and told her daughters not to look. They of course looked out and saw the corpses hanging.’

The Colonel’s next anecdote comes from his own childhood, and recounts how he and his siblings were driven into town from Tibradden to take refuge in the Shelbourne Hotel during the Fenian Rising of 1867. His

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