Nelson´s Pillar 1966

Nelson´s Pillar 1966
I was awakened from a deep sleep. All hell seemed to have broken loose. Ginger O´Hara my newly acquired friend, was dancing a jig around the linoleum covered floor of our shared bed-sit and roaring like a man possessed.
“They´ve blown up the pillar” he shouted triumphantly, his ear pressed firmly to his old transistor radio. “That´ll show the bastards”, he added kicking the waste-paper bin from one end of the room to the other. I had only known Ginger for a week or two but that morning I discovered that I didn´t really know him at all.
That bleak winter of 1966 found me in London. My first posting as a young hotel manager had expired the previous week and my next assignment wasn´t due to start for another month. My amorous designs on a certain blond student nurse in St.Johns Wood had attracted me to the metropolis like a moth to the flame. I was head over heels in love but I needed a place to stay and a mutual acquaintance suggested I contact Ginger.
“I can put you up for a few weeks”, the soft west of Ireland brogue came hesitantly down the line. “Take a tube to Picadilly Circus at tea-time. I´ll meet you under the Coca- Cola clock”.
Ginger was as good as his word. Not only did he provide me with a roof over my head but he also organized a job for me at Walls Ice-cream. It wasn´t much, but it paid for my digs and kept me in beer and fags while I worked on plans for my future life. Selling ice-cream from a Mr Whippy van wasn´t easy during that freezing winter of 1966, but that´s a story for another day.

Ginger O´Hara hailed originally from a little village in the west of Ireland, a few miles out from Galway on the road to Connemara. Like most of the land west of the river Shannon, the soil was poor, only suitable for sheep farming and emigration was high. The notorious Oliver Cromwell four centuries earlier knew all about the poor quality of the land west of the Shannon and had given Irish rebel leaders a life or death choice – ‘to hell or to Connacht’. Most of the young men in search of employment in the lean years of the fifties and sixties took the boat to England and found employment as manual labourers on the building sites of the larger cities. Michael was one of the more fortunate ones who had found a job some twenty years earlier in a small London centre Hotel working as a night porter. The pay was good and he soon got used to working at night. “You see things you’d never see during the day” he told me with a chuckle. Lots of things” he added mysteriously.
He was a softly spoken, mild-mannered man of some three score years. An unruly shock of curly hair which once was flaming red now contained a fair sprinkling of grey. Bright blue eyes twinkled behind thick- lensed glasses and he still bore the ruddy complexion of somebody who had spent most of his growing up years in the open countryside. Leather elbow patches on a well worn tweed sports coat did nothing to detract from the air of quiet dignity that he wore around him like a glove. Striped bracers supported his trousers and a large green tie bearing a shamrock emblem completed the ensemble.
Ginger lived on the second floor of a small row of red bricked terrace houses in a little mews behind the Hotel. A two bar electric fire provided the only form of heating in the high ceilinged room. The Piccadilly Underground line ran directly below the house and cups and saucers rattled in protest each time a train passed underneath, which happened frequently. Still, at twenty two years of age I adapted quickly and within a short time became oblivious to the rumbling sounds from far below. We had the use of a communal bathroom on the landing. By inserting a two shilling piece in the meter of a sputtering gas boiler, one was rewarded with a plentiful supply of scalding hot bath-water- if you managed to get there early enough.

Gingers bed-sitter left one in no doubt as to his strong identification with all things Irish. On the wall immediately over his bed was a framed tattered copy of the proclamation of Independence, bearing the signatures of the seven doomed leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. As if to give greater emphasis a large green, white and gold tricolor was draped from the ceiling overhead. Inside the door hung a holy water font made from delicate china. Michael it topped up regularly from a half gallon plastic container of water from Our Lady´s holy shrine of Knock in County Mayo that a friend had brought back from a pilgrimage sometime. A little red lamp flickered under a plastic coated image of the Sacred Heart just over the door and an image of Pope John 23rd shared pride of place over the mantel with a faded black and white newspaper photograph of President John F Kennedy taken during his visit to Ireland some years previously.
Each week in the post Ginger received a copy of the ‘Connacht Tribune’ which he read voraciously from front page to back. His only other source of news from the old country was by means of his ancient transistor radio. Despite the crackly reception he insisted on having it permanently tuned to Radio Eireann. Though a big man and now getting on in years, Ginger was very light on his feet and I would often arrive home to find him dancing a ‘Siege of Ennis’ all on his own up and down the bedroom floor to the stirring beat of Donal Ring´s Ceili band blaring out from the radio.
“I played centre forward for Moycullen Shamrocks hurling club when I was a young fella” he announced gleefully, tapping his way around the floor. “I could dance rings around ‘em. Nobody could catch me!” Modesty wasn’t one of Ginger’s more noticeable virtues. But not until that memorable morning of Nelson´s demise did I ever suspect that deep within Ginger´s gentle breast beat the hearty of a true Irish rebel.
*****
“OK Ginger”, I grinned. “They´ve blown up the pillar. So what happens next?”
“What happens next? What happens next?” he yelled as he jumped round and round the room, knocking over a standard lamp and kicking the waste paper bin in the air once again, blue eyes blazing, cheeks flushed red with excitement and arms waving wildly in the air.
“What happens next my young friend is that we´ll have to blow up the other one, that´s what happens next! A bird never flew on one wing” he exclaimed, waggling his finger at me for emphasis.
“You surely don´t mean the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square?”, I asked horrified as realization slowly dawned. “Bullseye! Bang on the button my son” Ginger panted, punching the air with a clenched fist. “We´ve got to support the boys. ´twill take the pressure off the lads in Dublin” he added. Then thoughtfully, rubbing his chin he turned to the little table by the wall and sitting down opened a writing pad and pulled a plastic biro from his jacket pocket. “Come over here” he said beckoning to me and pulling up a second kitchen chair. “We´ve got to make a plan. Not a moment to lose!”.
‘Now’, he said,’ the first thing we have to do is carry out a reconnaissance’. We´ll take the ice-cream van and drive round the square a few times, just to get the lie of the land like’.
‘Ginger’, I said, ‘you can´t be serious. For one thing what are you going to use to blow it up? Secondly there are thousands of people around Trafalgar Square, not to mind about the millions of bloody pigeons’
Ginger didn´t bat an eyelid. ‘You see, my young friend’, he said patiently, ‘ we´re not going to strike during the day. We´re going to do a recci during the day, just to get the lie of the land and we´ll lay the charge at about half past four in the morning. The graveyard-shift. It´s my time of day you see, in a manner of speaking’. The eyes twinkled mischievously behind the thick glasses. ‘ Hardly a soul about at that time I can tell you and the pigeons will be all having a bit of shuteye. I have the stuff down in the basement’ he added. ‘ Gelignite, fuses - the lot! I´ve been waiting a long time for this day!’ he said rubbing his hands together gleefully. ‘ ´tis going to be a cinch. And what´s more’, he said, ‘we´ll do a much better job than the boys in Dublin did. They planted the explosives half way up and only blew off the top half of the pillar. The Irish Army had to come in the following Sunday night and dynamite the rest. They blew in every window on O´Connell Street, the bloody eedjits” he laughed uproariously. ‘Cost the government a fortune . We, my friend, are going to lay the charge in the gent’s toilet right under the Column. I have a spare key you see. The attendant´s a pal of mine’, he added. Ginger had the whole thing worked out.
The following day we drove round and round the square taking good note of the position of the four plinths bearing various statues which surround the column. The gent’s toilet was quite accessible, down two flights of steps and slap bang under the centre of the column. Ginger looked left and right before trying the key in the lock. It was a perfect fit. He looked up at a section of the ceiling which appeared to be free of beams. ‘That´s where we´ll plant the gelly ‘ he said pointing. ‘She´ll go up like a rocket’.
‘Ginger’. I asked anxiously. ‘How do you know how much to use’. Ginger tapped one index finger to his forehead. ‘Brains’, he said. ‘Got to use the grey matter when it comes to these things! I looked it up in in the Encyclopaedia Britannica down in the local library’. He said.’ It was all there, under bomb-making. The whole thing. Quantities, fuses, timing, everything! Mick McCarthy, a publican friend of mine over in Kilburn; he´s our quarter master, you see. He fixed me up. He has tons of the stuff hidden away. Just waiting for the day. This will be bigger than Guy Fawkes’, he spluttered dancing a jig around the tiled floor of the toilet. ‘This will bring them to their senses’, he shouted, getting more and more excited. ‘They´ll have to give us back the six counties after this!’
*****
‘I told you, nary a soul around’, Ginger whispered as we made our way towards the Square. It was a cold, moonlit night but a large bank of cloud obscured the moon from time to time . As we tip-toed along using the dark shadows of the large public buildings for cover a light drizzle started to fall and we pulled up our collars and pulled down our caps. It was Sunday, the 17th March. Saint Patrick´s Day. Ginger had decided it would be ideal. ‘ It´ll get great coverage in the media’, he said, ‘all over the world!’ The odd taxi whizzed by but other than that there was nobody about.
Ginger had all the paraphernalia packed inside a large cardboard suit case bound together with a piece of string. We had parked the ice cream van a couple of side streets away from the square, ready to make a quick get away. But we took the precaution of removing the large Mr. Whippy ice-cream cone from the roof and covered over the tell tale signs on the side of the van with sheets of cardboard.
Pausing under the shadow of the equestrian statue of King George the Fourth we peered across the open space towards the steps leading down to the toilets. “Now”, shouted Ginger, breaking into a run and skidding to a halt at the top of the steps. ’Careful’, he called back ‘they’re a bit slippy’. We were halfway down the flight of steps when we heard the measured tread of somebody approaching on the footpath above. The footsteps stopped and the light of a strong torch caught Ginger in it´s beam just as he was reaching into his pocket for the toilet door key. He looked up at the large dark figure outlined against the night sky. ‘Keep your mouth shut’ Ginger whispered in my ear. ‘tis Constable Wilson. Not a bad sort. I´ll handle this’
‘Ginger’ the policeman called down. What the blazes are you doing down there at this hour of the night?’. ‘Just got taken short officer’, Ginger called back. ‘We were on the way home from a hop in the Irish club in Eaton Square and we were hoping the door might be open’ he added lamely. ‘Better come back up’ called Officer Wilson, ‘those toilet doors are always locked up for the night’.
We climbed wearily back up the steps, Ginger dragging the heavy suitcase behind him and trying to make it look inconspicuous. “What´s in the suitcase Ginger”? The bobby looked puzzled, peering down, his head tilted to one side. My heart sank. In my minds eye I could see the gates of Pentonville Prison opening up before us. Ginger looked a bit pale around the gills but I could see he was unruffled. Made of tough stuff was our Ginger. “Ah well now, that’d be telling” said Ginger with a grin.”But seeing ´tis yourself I´ll tell you anyway. Me and my pal Tom here were doing a bit of a sketch for the lads in the club you see. They were having a sort of a sort of cabaret night to celebrate Patrick´s Day and the two of us had to dress up. I played the part of Saint Patrick and Tom here played the snake. Ye see’, he added by way of explanation, ‘Saint Patrick was the lad who got rid of all the snakes from Ireland ‘.
‘Is that a fact now’? said officer Wilson, leaning over and eyeing the suitcase suspiciously as only a policeman could. “And what happened to all the snakes then?’.
‘That´s easy, said Ginger with a smile. ‘They all came over to England and joined the police force’!
Well the three of us burst out laughing as Ginger draped his arm around the policeman´s shoulders and the moment of tension had passed.
“You´re a card Ginger, that´s for sure. A proper card. Tell you what mate, why don´t the two of you come along with me. The stations just across the way. You can use the loo there and we´ll all have a nice cup o’ cha. Martha our tea lady makes the best cuppa in London. How about that?’ The suitcase with its dangerous contents was forgotton about and there was nothing for it but to tag along. Nelson would have to wait for another day.
*****
The other day never came. My new job back in Dublin beckoned and I decided to pop the question to the young lady in my life and subsequently moved back to Ireland, tied the knot and got on with the rest of my life. I have often thought of Ginger over the years and wondered whatever became of him; that gentle soft spoken night-porter with the heart of a rebel, ploughing a lonely furrow in the heart of the Empire, awaiting ever patiently to celebrate the day when the 800 year old shackles would finally be completely broken …..
THE END