BIRTH, DEATH

Teresa Mannion was not a violent woman. Yet violence stalked her like a shadow from the moment she was born.

Seán Mannion's mother was born in the South Dock area of inner-city Dublin on Holy Thursday, 1916. Four days later, Patrick Pearse stood on the steps of the nearby General Post Office and read out the Proclamation of Independence. His words proclaimed an uprising in the city that ultimately laid the foundation for the creation of the Irish Republic, but it was an uprising uncompromisingly crushed by the British army. Within six days the Easter Rising was over, 450 people killed, 2,614 injured, and nine missing.

Meanwhile, in 4 Brady's Court, Mary McGrath lay in bed after an extremely arduous birth, her newborn daughter, Teresa, beside her, the roar of battle all around. At 39 years of age, Mary had found the delivery considerably more difficult than the birth of her previous seven children.

Her husband, John, continued to work loading and unloading cargo ships on the quays despite his wife's poor health, despite the fighting all around him. From the banks of the river Liffey, he could see the gunship Helga ploughing her way menacingly up and down through gray-black waters, launching shells into a decaying city. Decay became destruction.

Determined to suppress any future attempts at revolution, troops poured into Dublin from across the Irish Sea. There were random arrests. Random searches. Random shootings. In early May, a squad of soldiers burst into Mary and John McGrath's home. Unable to get up from bed, Mary was dragged to the ground. When John returned home that evening, he found his wife dead on the floor, his newborn daughter, Teresa, crying by her side.

Unable to cope with the weight of raising a daughter on his own, John McGrath sent his infant daughter west to his home village of Ros Dumhach on the Atlantic coast of Mayo, where Teresa was raised by her aunt.

* * *

Less than 100 miles down the coast from Ros Dumhach, Teresa McGrath's future husband was growing up in another isolated village on the west coast of Ireland. Like most of his peers, Peaitín Tom Mannion left home at a young age, looking for a better life in the United States.

That's where he was when he decided that he was going to the fight. Another low-paid Irish immigrant working on another Boston building site, Peaitín had been so enthralled by the 1926 heavyweight world title fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey that he decided to travel the 1,600 miles west to Chicago to witness the rematch.

The first fight had been an epic. A crowd of 120,727, the biggest in boxing history, stood in the pouring rain for 10 rounds to watch Gene Tunney give the heavyweight champion of the world a boxing lesson. Jack Dempsey lost his belt, and there was always going to be a rematch.

A year later, the two faced each other again, this time in Soldier's Field in Chicago. With a gate of $2.6 million, Tunney vs. Dempsey II was another record-breaker, but the fight took its place in boxing history for more than just the takings. It became known as the Battle of the Long Count.

For the first six rounds, Gene Tunney, whose parents came from Mayo in Ireland, was comfortably in control of the ring. In the seventh, however, Dempsey caught Tunney on the chin with four consecutive punches, hitting him a further four times before the champion slid off the ropes and onto the canvas. For the first time in his professional boxing career, Tunney had been floored. It's what followed that ensured that the fight is still being discussed to this day.

With the Queensbury Rules still being refined in the 1920s, new regulations had just been put in place before the Dempsey/Tunney fight. Boxers now had to retreat to a neutral corner before the referee could start his KO count. On the night of September 22, 1927, Jack Dempsey either forgot or ignored the new rule and stood above Tunney after knocking him out. The referee couldn't start the count until Dempsey went to the neutral corner and, by the time he did, Gene Tunney had already spent five seconds on the floor. Dave Barry had counted to nine by the time Tunney got up, having spent a total of 14 seconds on the canvas.

He went on to knock down Jack Dempsey in the next round, and although Dempsey didn't stay down, Tunney went on to win the fight by unanimous decision. Jack Dempsey never fought again.

Years later, by an open fire in Cill Bhriocáin, Ros Muc, a young Seán Mannion listened, hypnotized, to his father recount his witnessing of the Battle of the Long Count.

* * *

A few hundred yards down Snámh Bó road in Ros Muc is a small cottage with red windows and a red door. The thatch roof it once wore has since been replaced by corrugated zinc. Behind a whitewashed stone wall, rhododendron bushes and brambles compete to escape a feral garden.

The house, unoccupied, could easily be mistaken for a small vacation cottage, a refuge in wild isolated Ros Muc for a well-to-do couple from Dublin. But this cottage wasn't built as a vacation home. This was Peaitín Mannion's first home, built after fleeing from London with his new wife, Teresa McGrath, in 1939.

The Great Depression's decimation of the U.S. economy led to Peaitín crossing the Atlantic again in 1930, leaving Boston to settle into a new life in Britain. Another continent, another country, another building site. In London, he met Teresa, a young woman born in Dublin but, like himself, raised on the wild Atlantic coast of Ireland.

If Peaitín, as a construction laborer, held the stereotypical Irishman's job in 1930s London, Teresa fulfilled the employment stereotype on the flip-side of the gender coin. When she met her husband-to-be, she was employed as a cleaner and nanny by an upper-class family in central London.

By 1938, Teresa and Peaitín had married and had named their first child Mary, after Teresa's mother. It wasn't long, however, before the shadow of war cast a pall once more over Teresa's life. On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland left Britain with little choice but to go to war. Fearful of air attacks on London, authorities put in place Operation Pied Piper, a plan to relocate children from the city to other locations around England. When Teresa and Peaitín found out that their child was to be taken from them and relocated outside London, they took an overnight train across the country to Holyhead in northwest Wales and boarded a ferry to Ireland.

When the young couple arrived in Ros Muc, they moved into Peaitín's parents' home in the townland of Cill Bhriocáin....