Grandfather's Oldcastle internment and its effect on Gebler family
Writer Carlo Gebler spoke of his grandfather's internment in the prisoner or war camp at Oldcastle, and its effect of future generations of their family, at the launch of exhibition 'When the Dawn is Come: 1916 and Meath' at Solstice Arts Centre, Navan.
I stand before you, portly, balding, Anglicized, a person of middle age, of later middle age, or even advanced middle age, sixty-one years old, an Irish citizen (meaning passport holder) and a Northern Ireland resident, and tax payer. How do you read me? Does some of this that I’ve said register? Yes. The accent, the bulk, the hair or absence of hair, these have registered I wouldn’t doubt. Because such things do, these things to do with one’s appearance, they register. They make an impression. They are noticed straight away. And they are all true: but little would you know from them, from anything said by me or seen of me by you so far, that what I am, and, as a result of what I am, the way I have lived my life, and the things that I have done that I consider to be the most important things that I have done in the life that I have lived, the things that are the very kernel (spelt k – e- r – n – e – l) of my life, can with justice be said to be the direct result of events that happened about a century ago, in a place a few miles from here, up the road, a place incidentally that features in one or two old photographs that are on the walls of this exhibition and that place of course, I’m sure you’re dying to know, is, was, Oldcastle Aliens’ Internment or Prisoner-or-War camp, in Oldcastle, which, as I said, is a few miles, what way – that way, and it is because of that place and its meaning, personally for me, though how would you know this by looking and listening to me, that has brought me here tonight, to Navan, to open the County Meath 1916 Exhibition.
We are made by our past: events long ago make the hummus out of which our personality grows and it is our personality that determines the life we lead, the work we do, et cetera. The hummus from which I sprang, or in which I am rooted, and out of which I grow, as already hinted, is connected to the camp that existed in the Great War in Oldcastle and my self-proclaimed task tonight, is to explain to you, why that is the case. At the very least you will be diverted, it is a story I’m about to deliver, and we like stories don’t we?: and it’s an Hibernian story too, but it isn’t traditional: it may have happened a hundred years ago but it has no connections what so ever to those stories of insurrection of which we’ve heard so much in this year of centenaries.
So let me begin: One hundred and two years ago, September, or, at the very latest October, 1914, two detectives from Dublin Castle, and a single policeman from the Dublin Metropolitan Police, walk up to the front door of 119, Phibsborough Road, Phibsborough, in north Dublin.
Attached to the door or the wall there is a brass plaque that reads ‘Adolf Gébler, Professor of Music’ (and since you ask that’s Adolf spelt the wrong way ‘olf’) a brass placque which my grandmother, Adolf’s wife, Rita, a pious, philistine, socially ambitious, working class, Anglophile, Castle Catholic, nearly a decade older than her husband, has had made and put up. Why has she done this showy thing? Because her husband is indeed a trained musician, a graduate of the Prague Conservatoire no less, hence in Rita’s eyes a professor, although in the autumn of 1914, he is actually earning his living playing the piano in the Bohemian Cinema, on the Phibsborough Road, accompanying the silent black and white films that are shown there.
The police have come for Adolf because as an Austro-Hungarian national, now the Great War has commenced, he’s an enemy alien and seeing the plaque, they know they’re at the right address. Next thing: one of the three pulls the bell cord or raps the knocker, rat-tat-tat. I don’t know about this next part but let us say, for the sake of this account, it is Rita who opens the door:
She sees two men in suits and a constable in uniform: they see a very small woman, a little bird in a frock really, with a child on the hip, Ada, my aunt, born 1912 a couple of years after Rita and Adolf’s wedding, which was in 1910: they also see she has a swollen belly. Rita is six months pregnant: she is carrying my father.
The forces of law and order ask if they may come in. They are admitted. The door is closed. Proprieties must be observed. They have come for Adolf Gébler, one says. Is he at home? Yes, says Rita. Or maybe she says no, but he’ll be back. I don’t have that detail but what I do know, this comes from the family lore cupboard, is that when they finally get to speak to Adolf they tell him that he is under arrest because he is an enemy alien and he must go with them.
This announcement precipitates incomprehension: Adolf admits, yes, he is technically an Austro-Hungarian, that’s what his travel papers give as his nationality, but in practice he’s a Czech nationalist, he believes in Czech independence: he despises the Austro-Hungarian empire and the German Kaiser’s expansionist programme: and that’s why he’s come to Ireland and married Irish but really British Rita: it was to escape from all that.
Adolf having made his pitch, Rita makes hers. She has a toddler and she’s six months pregnant and so soon she’ll soon have a second child and she’s British and her two children are British and who will feed the children with Adolf away. What the police make of this is lost. What is known is they cuff Adolf and take him away, probably to the nearest barracks, from where they send him to Templemore in County Tipperary to an RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) depot for a bit: and from there they send him and 650 enemy aliens, the men Adolf subsequently liked to sarcastically describe as ‘the cream of Dublin’s German pork butchers’, to the Oldcastle Aliens’ Camp, Oldcastle County Meath, a hard labour camp with a punitive regime.
The war that follows is awful for both but worst for Rita for which its just one long cascade of catastrophe. My father is born on New Year’s Eve, 1915, towards midnight, as fireworks are exploding everywhere in the Dublin night sky. He is very soon at death’s door: milk allergy: he is saved by an old Dublin shawlie who proscribes goat’s milk. Rita is swindled out of her house, 119, Phibsborough Road: she moves into her sister’s north Dublin slum house and lives with her children above the scullery: as the wife of an enemy alien she receives six shillings a week assistance: she gets work as a barmaid and her sister’s nine year old daughter, Peggy, minds my father and Ada when Rita goes to work.
Family visits to the Oldcastle Camp are restricted to 15 minutes a month and that fact, combined with expense, and the difficulty of her daily life, plus what I found in the lore cupboard, makes me think she never visits Adolf, even once. Rita’s war really is awful: later she used to say she did everything but walk the streets to survive which I’ve always found an interesting circumlocution and leaves me wondering if she didn’t actually do the very thing she denies having done.
The armistice is signed in 1918 but the war as you may know from our cenotaphs, (I know from mine in Enniskillen anyhow) doesn’t end till 1919: so its late August 1919 when Adolf returns to Dublin and walks through the city, the shattered city, it hasn’t recovered from the 1916 business, to 43, Botanic Avenue, the slum where Rita lives with her sister, and lays eyes, for the first time in almost five years on Rita: she is so broken and old-looking he does not recognize her: worse, not only does he not recognize her but she knows he doesn’t recognize because she is so broken and old-looking. The marriage will never recover from this.
Next thing, after this debacle, Adolf lays eyes on his children. Ada – remember Ada? the two-year-old on Rita’s hip in 1914 – of course Ada remembers him. She’s seven now, and lovely: blonde and charming and confidant. She jumps straight into his arms, the ones that should be around Rita. My father on the other hand, has never met this strange man before, and he howls at Adolf to put Ada down and to quit the house. It is a bad beginning but it gets worse: Adolf has no English and no competency: he can’t handle money, he can’t cross the road, he can’t use a knife and fork properly; he’s been in camp for five years. Ada becomes his aid and interpreter, the gentle spirit who re-introduces him to the forgotten civilian world: my father is excluded and he excludes himself from this process. So there is no affection bond at the start: how could there be? They have never met, ever: and none develops after: how could it? And so no, or yes, they never bond, never, ever. Their relationship begins badly and only gets worse. It is a disaster. My father’s relationship with the ‘old man’ (as he called him) is a catastrophe: ditto his family life. They never click.
Now we leap forward several decades: I am born in 1954 and for the first fourteen years or so of my life, until my parents bifurcate, I live under the same roof as my father. When I remember those fourteen years I do not remember my father and I speaking, as in having a conversation, ever. I was told things, I was given instructions, that I remember, but of talking and a relationship I have no recollection what so ever. It may have occurred. I may have repressed it. All I can tell you is I cannot remember it having occurred, ever. All I can remember is the programme, the programme of ferocious control that he enunciated, and his ambition underpinning that programme that my presence should be entirely frictionless.
In 1991 or 92, twenty-five or twenty-four years ago, I am invited to work as a facilitator of creative writing in HMP Maze, Long Kesh to truculent Republicans: curiously, I don’t feel intrigued or flattered or honoured to be asked. What I feel is that something that was never in doubt has finally happened: I’ve been expecting this and now at last its come. I am not surprised to be asked. This was always going to happen and somehow I’ve always known it. That was what I thought. How or why I should think that, I don’t know. I’ve no idea. I’ve just been expecting this. That’s all. How strange yes, how very strange. and stranger still: I don’t stop and ask myself, why? How do you explain that you always thought, at a subliminal level that this was what would one day happen? I didn’t ask the question, but off I went, first to the Maze, then Maghaberry, where I did nineteen years on the wings and then to Hydebank and the Crumlin Road Goal, where I am now. Yes, long story short: prison teaching has been a big part of my life, and has changed me more than anything else I have done, and has made me more than any other single thing, what I have become, although, as I’ve hinted, when it started I was not surprised and as year followed year, I paid no attention, I continued not to ask the question why until Oldcastle, so to speak, knocks on my door.
About six years ago, November 2010, I am invited to the public library in Oldcastle County Meath by Ciaran Mangan. They are having an Oldcastle Aliens’ Internment Camp night, he says. Will I come? That sounds like fun, I think. You bet, I say.
When I arrive I am given photocopy of the programme of the 1917 Christmas choral concert given in the camp: the programme lists the men who sing at this concert, there’s about sixty of them: one of those men is Adolf Gébler: another (he’s the conductor of the concert in fact) is one Aloys Fleishmann, a German national, sometime organist in Cork Cathedral, arrested and interned as an enemy alien like my grandfather.
Having just introduced you to this Aloys, I am now going to confuse you because this part of the story concerns not one but two men called Aloys, the internee Aloys senior, and the internee’s son, Aloys junior, who is arguably the most important figure in twentieth century Irish classical music. He founded the Cork Symphony Orchestra for instance. He’s Ireland’s Sir Simon Rattle. That man’s daughter, Aloys junior’s daughter that is, is also in Oldcastle in the public library for the Oldcastle Aliens’ Camp night: she’s there to talk about the camp and her grandfather’s time there. She stands up and she has slides of two photographs projected on the wall, and one is a picture of her grandfather and the other is a picture of her father, and she points at these and she starts to speak.
She says that her father was five when his father was taken away and ten when he returned and that those five years – half his life – could not be made up for, and her grandfather was at first a stranger to her father after such a long absence. It was, she thought, no doubt far worse for her grandfather to see what it meant to have missed these vital years in his only child’s life, as he did when he came back. The relationship of the two Aloys’, she continued, of the son and the father, was never as close as that of Aloys junior with his mother, from whom of course her father was not separated during the war. Finally, she said, her father had once told that his father, her grandfather, was often depressed and moody after his return from Oldcastle Aliens camp, which he had not been before his imprisonment.
I am very struck by these words. I am the closest I’ve ever come to an actual epiphany, of the full Joycean kind. Now, at this point, in 2010, I’ve always known, in broad brush terms, the outline of the sad family tale: Adolf is away, and when he comes home he and my father don’t hit it off, and subsequently my father and I don’t hit it off either, and these events are connected because patterns repeat. I’ve always known this, loosely. I’ve also spent many years in jail by this stage talking to prisoners and I know, when father’s go away it’s a disaster for the children. But listening to Ruth what I see, which weirdly had never occurred to me before now which is mightily odd (I really must be a slow learner as my school reports said), what I see is that the key event in the family’s history, at least for the Gebler men, is imprisonment, jail, only I’ve never consciously articulated that idea to myself until this moment in the library. Yes, previously, I apprehended this: but now I comprehend it – and what a gulf exists between apprehending and comprehending.
And then, listening to Ruth I remember, years earlier, being asked to go into the Maze Prison to begin my teaching life, and not being in the least surprised, feeling in fact that what I’d always expected to happen had finally happened, and what I see, sitting in Oldcastle public library, is this; the reason I’d felt it was something I’d always known end up doing, was because, subliminally, I’d been primed to want the chance to help men, for which read ‘Adolf’ to write, to communicate, and thereby to repair and maintain relations with their sons, for which read Ernest, and which, had Adolf done so, would, in turn, have made Ernest a better father to me.
And there we have it: the psycho-analytical truth: this is the stuff (mawkish and saturated with wish fulfilment) out of which I am built. I haven’t spent all the years I’ve spent teaching in jail because it’s a good thing to do or because I have I conscience: it would be lovely to say that’s why I do it but it isn’t: I do it really because of my personal history in which I’m trapped: because he went to prison Adolf never formed an affection bond with Ernest, his son, my father, who in turn never had an affection bond with Carlo, me, his son. By facilitating literary practice I am doing something to rectify the awful consequences of estrangement between the generations, fathers and sons in general, my father’s father and his son, my father, in particular. That is at the nub of my jail practice: that’s what I’ve understood about myself and that understanding is good for the head, though don’t forget, it wasn’t enough to know, it also had to be shaped into an artefact, into the tale I’ve told.
Now, some of you are doubtless protesting, all this happened in the last century and your father is dead? Yes, both are true. But you never escape the force field of your personal history and your parental relationships: all you do, as you age, and if the Gods approve, is you understand them; and then you articulate them. My understanding of mine is what I am testifying to here today. It is what I am.
But there’s one part of his story, the quick among you will be thinking, that he hasn’t explained: how did he come by it if his father never spoke about it? You’re right. You’re right. Almost none of this story that I have told you was known to me when I was a child. It was all unsaid: it could not be said because to have said it would have obliged my father to disclose what came attached, the story of his miserable childhood, his woeful relationship with Adolf, Adolf’s absence from 1914 to 19191, et cetera. He couldn’t: he’d repressed all that: that was his coping mechanism. However, in his final years when his Alzheimer’s was settling in, my father tried to write what he called his ‘Auto-biog’: eventually, on account of his dementia the time came to put him in to a home: in order to pay for his care I had to sell his house (ironic reversal, child becomes adult and adult becomes child), and before that could happen I had to clear his house, and it was when I cleared his house that I found his ‘Autobiog’ papers, which I hadn’t known existed till then: oh yes, when they gifted these to me, the Gods smiled, albeit crookedly. Amounting to hundreds of handwritten pages his ‘Autobiog’ was prolix and confused and repetitive and out of order: it was too difficult and too truculent for me to use when I wrote the book that I wrote about us ‘Father & I’. But, a few years ago, following my epiphany in Oldcastle Library and, in some way, prompted by that epiphany, I got these ‘Autobiog’ pages typed up by my daughter and it is from out of that material that I have dug out much of the detail that is in the story that I have told you today: and that detail, and much more besides, I subsequently poured in to a book published last year, The Projectionist, the Story of Ernest Gébler.
I am a passionate and committed believer in psycho-analysis or the process of self examination and self excavation that traditional psycho analytical practice typically involves. I don’t know if the talking cure works (I’d like to think it does) but what I am sure about, which derives from the psycho-analytical system, is that what really matters vis-à-vis the life you make, the life you lead, is your specificity, your you-ness, which is made up of, comprised of and fashioned from, your history and your autobiography and your class and your education and all that kind of stuff, and that’s what drives you, and I would argue that if you really want to be an effective human being, first, before you do anything, you identify the kink, the hurt, the complex, the obsession, that is yours and yours alone, which operates at a semi-conscious or more likely an unconscious level and that is your psyche’s propellant, determining, directing and compelling you when you do what you do. The primary propellant in my life, which is the product of imprisonment, is my father’s failure to attach to his father, which in turn led to my father failing to attach to me and vice versa, which in turn, because family dynamics and dysfunction had primed me for it, led to my working in prisons, which has been incredibly important if not the most important thing in my life. Marking the past, celebrating the past, as we have been doing, as we are doing, can be interesting, can be informative, but understanding the self that was created by the past, and then accepting the painful, unwanted, unwelcome, uncomfortable material that comprises that self, that I would like to suggest is what we need now to do when we interrogate our past, rather awarding ourselves gold medals for valour or whatever.