"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View": Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History

Abstract

"One Little Slice, from a Child's Point of View":Locating Childhood Experience during the Civil War in County Kerry in Archived Oral History Helene O'keefe (bio) "My father had us all stretched on the floor after the first rattle of the slates. … 'Stretch,' he said, 'because the bullets will come in the windows.'"1 Eighty-nine-year-old Michael Fleming moved closer to the oral historian's microphone to share one of his earliest memories of how the violence of the Irish Revolution invaded his childhood home in Kilcummin, Co. Kerry. He was eight years old in 1921 when crown forces raided the family farm about six kilometers northeast of Killarney, a safehouse for the local IRA during the War of Independence and Civil War. "My aunt was in Cumann na mBan," Michael explained, "but my father" Gearóid Fleming, a farmer with six boys and two girls, "could do nothing" except "give them shelter," and he "had a couple of rooms let [to] the boys up in the mountain and bog between Kilcummin and Scartaglin."2 Gearóid, the first to hear the approaching lorries, "jumped out of bed" and "gave the door a belt" to alert the sleeping Volunteers, who got out and "went for the mountain." Michael's account of the violent raid that followed, conveyed orally with visceral vividness, resonates with that particular acoustic of war: [End Page 35] We had to stretch there. My father and mother and all were stretched down on the floor. I heard the bullets coming through the roof of the room we were in. … They did that for a couple of hours and [then] things were quiet, but still, my father wouldn't allow us to get up. The next thing was, the old lorries, the army lorries, started clattering again and going back the road, going to Killarney. My father said, "You can get up now." I'll never forget the smell of sulphur [that] was around the house. You know, I can smell it today. We were children and we were picking up the bullets. At that time the bullets bent when they hit the wall and the lumps of mortar, they knocked off of it, the smell of sulphur was in it. But we were delighted getting the bullets, you know.3 Oral-history testimonies are notoriously problematic, subject not only to what is asked during an interview and how the questions are understood, but also to the vagaries of human memory, subsequent experience, cultural contexts, and the distorting impulse to "perform" for posterity. Michael Fleming's memory of childhood, called up through layers of time and experience, yields few "hard facts" about the southwestern battleground in 1921. His powerful sensory recall, however, underscores the overwhelming nature of the event. It was an assault in every sense of the word. Uncertainty about dates, personalities, and even the duration of the raid is offset by the sound-scape of a childhood ordeal—an olfactory archive, the symbolism of domestic security shattered like slates. Across seven decades he summoned the cacophony of the "old army lorries," his father's urgent voice, setting his family to "stretch," the staccato of bullets, and the sulfurous residue of a raid. The recollected joy at gathering the still-warm bullets singles out the narrative as distinctly that of a child. Not all oral-history sources yield such immediacy, but eyewitnesses to revolution often concentrate on intense, highly charged episodes of confrontation or crisis. Research into the neurological and psychological processes of memory suggests that experiences engendering heightened emotion are often recalled with unusual perceptual clarity as "flashbulb" memories.4 While the emotion itself is difficult [End Page 36] to recall, its impact is traceable in the lines of the autobiographical narrative, in the symbolism, the sensory legacy, the fine details caught like flies in amber, in what is omitted as well as in what is articulated. Even those anachronistic or apocryphal elements, inevitable in mnemonic texts no matter how vivid, can lead us, as oral historian Alessandro Portelli suggests, "beyond facts to their meanings." Oral testimony like Fleming's can open new paths of inquiry into the long-neglected lived...