The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  McKinnon saw a letter on the table in the hallway. He picked it up, puzzled. ‘Who’s it from?’ he shouted at Sabina in the bar.

  She came back, drying a mug. ‘Now you don’t think I’d open your post on you. Nor be able to read much of it if I did.’

  McKinnon slit the letter open, Sabina peering over his shoulder.

  ‘So who is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Andrew Irvine.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Just a fellow I worked with on the Survey back in ’38. I told you about him. Scottish fellow.’

  ‘The one who stayed on in Castlebar.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It seems they want me over there.’

  ‘In Castlebar? For what?’

  ‘To help the Unions with the Relief Works.’

  ‘But you do that already.’

  ‘That’s right. But they’re talking of full time working.’

  ‘Full time?’

  ‘Yes, and not just here. All around the county, wherever they need me. I’m not surprised, I’d heard they were short of qualified men, and there’s damned few surveyors in Mayo. I’d been half thinking of writing to them anyhow.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ Sabina said.

  ‘I hadn’t decided.’

  ‘What will you do? Will you go?’

  ‘I’ll have to. It’s good money, and even if we don’t need it, your family might. And they really do need surveyors in Castlebar. There’s not enough for all the Works they’re planning, and there’s people starving. There are many might not make the harvest. How else will they earn money unless at building roads, and how else will the Government pay them except making them work, and the Workhouses can’t take a fraction of them. I can’t possibly refuse.’

  ‘What should I do? Go with you?’

  ‘I think it’s better not,’ McKinnon replied. ‘You might as well stay and run the bar. Not that it’ll bring in much over the next few months. But we must keep going.’

  ‘I know. But still…’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, my love. It’s not long to the harvest. I’ll be back soon enough.’

  McKinnon rode out to Carrigard and told them about the letter.

  ‘Well,’ Luke asked, ‘are you going to take it?’

  ‘Of course, but it’s not that I came down for. They’re starting with Relief Works.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael, ‘but through the Union. And who wants that?’

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ McKinnon said. ‘Sure, it’s through the Union, but they’re only doing the organising. Can’t you see, it’s Outdoor Relief, of a sort anyhow. They still won’t feed the people without work, but they’re not insisting that they go into the Workhouse either. There’ll be no need to break up families. They can stay in their own houses. And there’s more good news. It seems one of the new schemes won’t be too far away – just a mile down the road towards Knockanure. They’ve started already.’

  ‘What!’ Luke gasped. ‘When?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Wasn’t the Union working on that part already?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Oh yes. But up to now they’ve only been using inmates from the Workhouse. Now they’re planning to really improve it this time with hundreds more people working on it from all around here.’

  ‘Well, it’ll help, that’s for sure,’ Michael said. ‘Still, it won’t matter much to us. You won’t see us working as labourers for the Union. The early harvest can be good or bad, but there’s no way we’d do that.’

  Later McKinnon left to travel to Knockanure. Luke saw him out, and then they walked along, leading the horse for some time.

  ‘Your father’s a proud man,’ McKinnon said. ‘I can understand him too, so let’s hope the early harvest is good. Have ye enough planted?’

  ‘Now what do you think?’ Luke answered. ‘Do you think Father would let us eat the seed potatoes? If there’s no blight, we’ll have plenty to eat. That’s for certain.’

  ‘Let’s hope there’s not. But I’ll tell you this, blight or not, there’s going to be hunger around here. I reckon the early planting was well down.’

  ‘I know,’ Luke said. ‘Not that I blame them. Some of them reckon that if they don’t eat the seed potato, they won’t live long enough to eat any potato.’

  ‘Aye,’ McKinnon said. ‘And that will cause more trouble.’

  ‘Like what?’ Luke asked.

  ‘The Mollys.’

  ‘The Molly Maguires?’

  ‘Who else?’ McKinnon said. ‘People are getting desperate. They’re causing trouble around Westport, those fellows, hundreds at a time I hear. The peelers can’t control them. If it goes on like this, there’ll be men killed.’

  They crossed the bridge and went on towards the Union Works. He could hear it before he saw it – the sound of picks and shovels working without a break. As they came around a corner, he stopped and stared. There were hundreds of men and women levelling the road and digging ditches.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Luke said. ‘I never knew it was like this.’

  ‘Come closer, and you’ll see the need for it.’

  But Luke stopped. ‘I don’t want to go any closer. I can see enough from here. I’m afraid I’d know some of them.’

  What he saw was hunger. Gaunt figures, pinched faces, wasted arms.

  ‘Where have they all come from?’ he asked.

  ‘Further up the Mountain. They walked down here this morning.’

  McKinnon mounted his horse. Luke watched him riding through the Works until the crowd of people closed in behind him.

  In Castle Bromwich, they were out with the potatoes before dawn. Pat was with Murtybeg and Fergus Brennan, digging out the potatoes and piling them up into heaps for collection.

  ‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ Murtybeg said.

  ‘I was half expecting that,’ Pat said. ‘For Leeds?’

  ‘Where else?’ Murtybeg said. ‘And before you say it, I know it’s going to upset my mother, but there’s no helping that. You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s the real reason she’s so miserable. She knows the new schools are coming, and when they do, Da won’t be able to go on working. He won’t have a job, and neither will I if I stay with him. So I reckon my duty is to make enough money to keep them until they decide what to do.’

  ‘And what do you reckon that’s going to be,’ Pat asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but they might have to come to England themselves.’

  ‘England? They won’t like that.’

  ‘They’ll have to face up to it. What else is there?’

  After sunup, they spotted their master coming across the field towards them. He was accompanied by another man, who was very well dressed, far too well for working in the fields. He wore a high-necked jacket over a check waistcoat. His shirt was topped by a cravat, which Pat knew could not have been bought in Castle Bromwich. His knee-high riding boots were half covered in dust and well dried mud, flecks of it showing on his beige cavalry twills. They stopped three ridges away.

  The man took his knife and cut a stem from one of the potato plants. He held the leaf up, looking at it closely. Then he folded it and inserted it into the top pocket of his jacket.

  He came to the ridge where Pat and Murtybeg were working. He picked out a potato and held it up, again observing it closely. He cut straight through it. Then he picked up another and slit it, then another and another. The fifth one he did not bother cutting. He held it out for them to see. Around one of the eyes of the potato there were small, sunken, brown-grey spots, hard to see, but unmistakeable. Then he strode away.

  ‘I wonder who that was?’ Fergus Brennan asked.

  ‘God only knows,’ Murtybeg said. ‘But I think the blight is back.’

  The man’s name was Edward Yardley. He was a landowne
r from Staffordshire. The next day, he returned to his estate and wrote a letter to a friend in London.

  As to – Sir Robert Peel Shirecliffe House

  Houses of ParliamentTamworth

  WestminsterStaffordshire

  London

  August 8th 1846

  My Dear Robert,

  I cannot convey to you how saddened I was to hear that you are no longer Prime Minister. But it must be a relief for you to have the heavy weight of Government taken from your shoulders. Caroline and I both hope that you will take the opportunity to rest some weeks, and we look forward to seeing you here in Tamworth shortly.

  But these are difficult times, and I am not sure that Johnny Russell will have the commitment or the ability to continue the hard work that will be needed. Should the blight return, it will be essential to press the Government to undertake whatever is necessary to alleviate suffering and perhaps outright starvation. Even in Opposition therefore, you will still require information on the situation, most especially in Ireland, I expect.

  As you requested therefore, I have continued checking the potato crop here for you. Even before I left Tamworth, I saw early evidence of the rot with small patches of black here and there in the potato fields.

  The farms along Watling Street were no better or worse than Shirecliffe. In the six farms I visited over the next two days there were no patches of black in the fields, though the white substance that your informant mentioned was evident on the leaves. It rained the other side of Coventry, and the substance seemed to disappear. The farms around Kenilworth and Warwick showed no evidence of it. As I continued back towards Dorridge and Solihull, it had reappeared, even upon the better leaves. I have no doubt that this is the same fungus we saw last year.

  In Castle Bromwich, I clearly saw this substance on the leaves. One farmer told me that the potatoes showed no signs of rot on the potato itself, but I must tell you that this is not the case. Some of those that appear healthy are already showing tiny signs of rot, and while they may appear harmless now, I have no doubt that they will spread through the potato and may even infect those adjacent.

  How many we will lose, I do not know. If the rot extends across England and Wales, the effects might be appalling. If it crosses to Ireland, it will be frightful. I intend therefore to cross to Dublin and spend perhaps a week examining the farms around the city to see whether there are any signs of blight at that early stage. This is something we can discuss over the next few weeks, either in London, or here in Tamworth.

  Your suggestion of remuneration was most kind, but completely unnecessary. In any case, all funds raised should go directly to Irish famine relief, should the blight return there.

  Please convey our respects to Lady Julia.

  I remain, your true friend,

  Edward Yardley

  Chapter Eight

  Mayo Constitution, August 1846:

  We have been much alarmed during the past week of the fearful accounts of the potato crop. The work of destruction is going rapidly forward on every side of us. Within the last week, large quantities of tubers have become blackened, and the potatoes, when dug, are quite infected. The crops which a few days since were apparently safe, have, on investigation, been found diseased.

  All through the summer, the weather in Mayo was still acting in strange ways. Sometimes it was warm, but even when the rains came it stayed warm and humid. When Luke was working with the hay, he stripped down to the waist before he even started, but even so his trousers were wet with sweat within minutes.

  The damp caused more problems when the hay had been cut. It would not dry out. Luke and Michael turned it again and again, but it lay on the ground, dank and limp, slowly rotting.

  The occasional storm cleared the air, but not for long. After each storm, there would be an unnatural silence. Often mist would appear. Not the fogs of winter, but a warm summer mist; sometimes low lying, just covering the growing crops.

  But the late potato crop was abundant. Michael was delighted. ‘Didn’t I tell you it’d come back,’ he said to Luke. ‘We were right to keep enough of the seed potatoes. Make sure we’d have enough across the winter.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Luke said, thinking how many times he had heard this before.

  The next few days, he spent in the quarry with Michael, smashing stone in preparation for road repair in the autumn and winter. He still felt the emptiness inside. If the rain was heavy, he stayed in the quarry. Sometimes he sheltered under the whin bush, his coat over his head. Other times he just went on breaking stone, rain drenching his hair and shirt and dripping from his eyes and nose.

  He noticed the strange damp and misty days, but paid little attention to them. Sometimes it was warm, sometimes wet. They got some of the hay in when the days were dry, but most of it rotted. The potato crop looked good though. They began harvesting it.

  Luke was the first to spot it. The morning was already warm. As he dug his fork into the ground and started to ease up the potatoes, he spotted a fluffy white growth on the underside of the leaves beside him. He stopped and pulled off a leaf.

  ‘Have you ever seen this before, Father?’

  Michael looked at the leaf. ‘Oh, Christ Almighty.’

  ‘What is it, Father?’

  ‘This is the way it starts.’

  A few days later, Luke noticed something else. The edges of the leaves were turning into a darker green which seemed to attract water in the humid conditions. Soon the edges were turning brown. The leaves were no longer wet, but had gone brittle.

  ‘Are they going to rot, Father?’ Luke asked.

  ‘I think they will. It’s the kind of weather that would rot potatoes anyhow. But this thing of the leaves, I reckon it’s blight. There’s hunger coming.’

  When he woke one morning, he could hear the rain drumming on the slate. They worked in the rain that day, digging potatoes from dark to dark. Luke dug alongside Sorcha in the rain.

  ‘Do you remember 1839?’ she asked, without breaking her rhythm. ‘The year the rain never stopped. In all my years, I never saw a summer like it.’

  ‘No? As old as you are?’

  ‘Never in all my life. Even ’39. First the Big Wind, then the endless rain, then the rot and the hunger. The rain killed the potatoes. It was the rain brought the rot, and it will do the same now.’

  ‘It will,’ Luke said.

  ‘My father, he used to tell us about the year of the Great Frost when he was a child. It killed the potato, just as surely as the rain. They died then too, they died in their hundreds and in their thousands.’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ Luke said.

  ‘Indeed it was,’ she said. ‘A long, long time ago.’

  As they walked back that evening, he asked his father about the Great Frost.

  ‘Was Sorcha telling you about that?’ Michael asked.

  ‘She was. She said her father told her about it. He remembered it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought her father would have been that old. Though he might have been.’

  ‘How long ago was it, Father?’

  ‘A hundred years now. More maybe. They still spoke about it when I was young. I remember my grandfather going on about it, but I didn’t pay much heed.’

  ‘Was it that bad?’

  ‘I don’t know just how bad it was. The old people were inclined to lay it on a bit. They used to say that half the people around here died that year. I’m not sure I’d believe them. But one way or another, an awful lot died.’

  ‘An awful lot died in 1840,’ Luke said.

  ‘They did,’ Michael said, ‘but it was nothing like that. I’ll tell you this though, none of us are going to die, whether the potato fails or it doesn’t. One way or another, we’re going to live. We’ll make sure of that, me and you.’

  When they reached the house, Eleanor was sitt
ing at the table. ‘Come, and have a look at this,’ she said. She held up a potato.

  Michael held it beside the window. Then he handed it to Luke.

  Around each of the potato’s eyes there were sunken patches of purple and brown.

  At the end of the corn harvest, Murtybeg left Bromwich with some of the other men and travelled, not to Liverpool, but to Leeds. When he arrived, he walked north along the new railroad towards Thirsk. Within a few hours, he found the lodging houses where the Mayo gangs were staying.