Cold Is the Dawn

by Charles Egan

The line by the hotel was longer now. The people were in the same condition as the previous night. He suspected many of them might have been there all night. The same ragged clothes, the same half-nakedness, but at least it was no longer raining.

  How weird it was to hear such music in Belmullet, one of the most miserable places on God’s earth. And the army? Did they really think that starving people were in any condition to attack a corn store? Or that singing songs would stop them trying?

  He walked back out, heading south into the Mullet Peninsula. To the left, the oatmeal coloured sands stretched across the inlet towards the mainland.

  Geata Mór. Currach Buí. Droim Riabhach.

  Mullach Rua.

  He passed through what had once been a village. All the cabins had been demolished, mere heaps of stone, with rotting straw and reeds. He thought of what Sarah had told him about the evicted people who had turned up at Westport Workhouse rather than Ballina. But how many had died? He scrambled up the ruins of the cabins. In many, the Atlantic winds had blown the roofing away. On one, there was a skull, and the remains of a skeleton protruding from beneath the rocks. No rats here. They had already finished their business.

  Torán.

  Many of the houses still stood, and he knew from the smoke issuing from the cabins, that some were inhabited. Many more had been demolished.

  The village was quiet, but one man was leaning against the side of a cabin, observing him.

  ‘Are you planning more destruction?’ the man asked.

  ‘Not I. I’m no landlord’s man. I’m only here to see for myself what has happened in this town.’

  The man walked to another cabin, and beckoned Pat to follow. He opened the door, and ushered Pat inside. There was a family group in one corner, all dead. The father’s body was far gone in putrefaction. The corpse of the mother was fresher. Pat was relieved that he did not gag. He would have hated for this man to see his weakness.

  ‘It’s the custom here,’ the man told him. ‘The last to die closes the door rather than having the shame of their dying be seen by everybody.’

  They went out into the fresh breeze.

  ‘Ye’ve had an eviction here?’ Pat asked.

  ‘Mr. Walshe, the bastard. Half of Torán, all of Clochar, Mullach Rua, and more besides. The army and the peelers threw them all out. May God damn them all to hell.’

  ‘And where are they all gone?’

  ‘Many left, walking for Belmullet. Others made holes in the sand dunes, but they’re all dead now.’

  ‘Over there?’ Pat said, pointing at the dunes.

  ‘You want to go?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You may go on your own so. I’ve seen enough pain to last a dozen lifetimes.’

  There was a raw wind blowing off the Atlantic, though the sky was clear. Pat drew his greatcoat around his neck and ears, and walked into the wind. There were sand dunes ahead of him, and he walked half blinded, trying to keep the sand out of his eyes.

  He came to a sceilp in the lee of a dune. It had been well dug into the sand. There was no sign of a spade being used. The hole had been hand-scrabbled, or dug out with flat stones. The roof consisted of sods of marram grass torn off the dunes.

  He scrambled inside through a hole on the side. Inside, the height might have been two feet, where the sand had not already blown back in. Inside were three skeletons, two of small children, interspersed with seaweed and a heap of seashells. The last food of the family!

  He made his way out of the sceilp, and struggled up one of the dunes. He felt fear, though he knew he was in no danger. He sat on a bank of grass and rushes looking out over the Atlantic breakers. The sand was dazzling white in the sun. To the south, the high mountains of Achill showed brown and purple against the blue sky. To the west, green islands were set into the dark blue of the ocean, white clouds scudding above. To the north and east, the broken villages of the Lower Mullet.

  He took his notebook out of his pack, and began to scribble. After an hour, he slammed it shut, and placed it in his pack.

  He stood and walked along the ridge of the dunes. As he dropped into the hollow between two of them, he saw something yellow, waving. He knew it could not be reeds from the way it was moving. Curious, he went over. Human hair! Long, like a girl’s. He wiped the sand back and saw the white of a small skull.

  Another flat piece of white showed just above the sand. It looked like a stone or a large seashell, but he knew it was not. No hair protruded. Again, he wiped the sand away, and found himself looking into the sockets of two eyes. Only the bones remained. His fear returned.

  He stood again and ran down the slope of the dune, stumbling and falling at the bottom. He eased himself up again, and walked quickly away. He scrambled over the ruins of Torán and continued down towards the end of the Mullet.

  Clochar. Eachléim. Fód Dubh.

  More devastated villages. More ruins. He found one cabin where the roof had only partly collapsed and the door had shattered. Inside, was a heap of straw. Grateful, he dropped down on it. There were bones in the corner, but whether human or animal, he no longer cared. He slept for longer than he had thought possible.

  *

  He rose for his journey back to Belmullet. As he started walking, he saw a primitive currach in the water, one man paddling it.

  He dropped down to the water’s edge. The man had seen him. Pat waved. The man pulled a fish from the bottom of the boat, and held it up. Pat waved again. The man paddled the currach towards him. He held the fish up again.

  ‘A penny.’

  Pat thought of bargaining, but realised that this man was very poor.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. The County could pay.

  As he was taking the penny out of his pocket, a thought struck him.

  ‘What is that land over there?’

  ‘Kinrovar.’

  ‘Is it part of the mainland?’

  ‘It is.’

  Another way home? He had already seen Belmullet, and the long neck of the Mullet. No need to double back.

  ‘Is it far from there to Bangor?’

  ‘Near a day walking. Less for a fit young man. You wish to cross?’

  ‘I do,’ Pat said.

  ‘Tuppence more. Thruppence with the fish.’

  Pat paused. Expensive perhaps, but worth it to see a part of the country that no one knew?

  ‘Tuppence’ he said.

  ‘Thruppence.’

  Three pennies were exchanged. Pat took the fish, wrapped it in a shirt and put it in his pack. Then he found himself in the currach, holding a paddle.

  ‘So what happened here?’ he called out against the wind.

  ‘Evictions.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard that much.’

  ‘It was that Mr. Walshe decided to rid himself of his tenants. A coward of a man, he could not do it himself so he had the Forty Ninth Regiment to protect the drivers. The people were all turned out of their houses, and the roofs pulled down. That night the people made shelters of wood and straw, but the drivers destroyed them too. It would have pitied the sun to look at them, but there was no sun, and they had to go under hail and storm. It was a night of high wind, and their wailing could be heard at a great distance.’

  ‘What happened to them after?’

  ‘Sure what chance did they have? After the eviction, some walked away, some stayed. Half-naked they were. Some managed to crowd into some kind of cabin for a few nights before they died. Others lived in sandbanks, eating seaweed, trying to last it out. But none of them did, sure they’re all dead now, any of them that remained behind.’

  ‘None left?’

  ‘A few made off towards Belmullet, hoping to reach the workhouse in Ballina or Westport. God only knows what happened to them. I don’t. None returned.’

  *

  By the time they drew up on land across the sound, Pat’s arms were aching more than they ever had before. Even working in the quarry in Carrigard had never been like that. They beached the craft and he s
tood. The man disembarked, and helped Pat out into the surf. Then he shook his hand, gravely, and climbed back into the currach.

  Pat struggled up from the beach, and took out his notebook again. When he finished writing, he found a primitive track, and headed east.

  Many of the cabins here were no more than holes in the bog, covered with a layer of turf sods, and hardly obvious from the surrounding bog until nearly upon them. Here too, many had collapsed.

  The door spaces had no doors, and the tops were darkened by smoke. Some that were higher than the bog had entrances at both ends. Perhaps it was to let the wind clear the air of smoke. But what of heat then?

  Where the cabins were occupied, he could see within some of them as he passed. None had any furniture. No tables, no chairs, no benches, no beds. In some, flagstones served as benches. A few had some kind of chest for whatever possessions the family might have had. Some had clearly been forced open.

  Many cabins he entered were empty. In others, there were the remains of what had once been men, women or children. Once, he saw movement in a heap of rags and realised that this was a human person, though whether a man or a woman, he could not tell. No one else was in the cabin. He took some of his remaining bread out, but it was clear that he or she was beyond the ability to eat. He left and walked on.

  He passed people inside and outside cabins, many too weak to stand, their limbs thinned down to the bone, or sometimes frightfully swollen. Some children had bloated stomachs too, with bald heads and a down-like covering of hair on their cheeks. How often he had seen that before, in the workhouses and on the roads.

  At Trawnanaskil, a group of people had gathered on the beach. The tide was well out. An enormous black object lay along the beach in front of them. As he came closer, the people looked at him in alarm. He made an appeasing gesture.

  ‘’Tis fine, I mean you no harm.’

  ‘Are you from the landlord?’

  ‘Not I.’

  Most of the people turned away from him and went back to the whale, slashing at it with knives. One man stayed with Pat.

  ‘Is it here long?’ Pat asked.

  ‘Since yesterday. It often happens when the tide is high that they swim in too far.’

  ‘’Tis a big one.’

  ‘You might think so,’ the man said, ‘but it’s young yet. And ’tis terrible stuff to eat, but what else do we have. It was sent from the Almighty surely, to lessen our hunger.’

  He walked back to the road. Scrawny people walked towards him.

  ‘Is there any left?’ a woman asked him. Her face was shrunken, and heavily wrinkled.

  ‘Plenty enough,’ he said.

  Tulachán Dubh. Gaoth Sáile.

  Images of Torán and Clochar flashed through his mind, intermingling with pictures of a slashed and bloodied whale. He fancied he was on the edge of madness, but walked on.

  Hours later he reached Bangor. He went through the town without stopping, and turned towards Westport. It was near dark.

  He glimpsed a movement, then a man leapt over a stone wall, knocking the top stones as he did so. He ran towards Pat. Alarmed, Pat started to run down the road, but two other men appeared in front of him. He looked to the side, but there was another man there. Within seconds, they had closed in on him. Two grabbed his arms and forced him to the ground. One held his face into the mud, and his pack was nearly jerked from his back.

  He resisted, clasping his hands so as to hold the straps and pack on his shoulder. He was clubbed from behind, and blackness descended.

  Chapter 15

  Morning Chronicle, London. November 1848:

  We say therefore that we grudge the immense sum which it appears likely that we are to pay this year to Irish Unions very much indeed, because we know that it will be thrown into a bottomless pit, and because we feel the money, thus wasted, might be better spent in removing them than feeding in idleness the people of Mayo – in getting rid of the burden, than in perpetuating it. The district where this unmanageable surplus of labour exists is not very large; we are subsidizing 22 Unions only; and it is quite certain, either that we must go on subsidizing them, or that a large proportion of their inhabitants must die of hunger, and a large proportion of the remainder find their way as beggars into Great Britain. Under such circumstances, we submit that there cannot be a better opportunity for the experiment, of which so much has been said – of national colonization. At any rate, we can see no other plan which affords ground for the slightest hope as respects the districts to which we referred.

  Murty too was concerned about contracts, but his concerns were different to Murtybeg’s. For months past, he had been anxious, and his anxiety was turning into fear. Fear for his own future, and that of Aileen.

  The contract with Brassey was coming to an end, but what would follow it? Working as an independent gang with Brassey had meant high standards and, with the gang’s capacity for hard work, they were paid very well. So well in fact that they could afford to have Murty working most of the time on the paperwork, with little work on building rails. For a man of 63, this was vital. He could never keep up with the rate of work that the rest of the gang took as normal.

  Every week, he bought the newspapers and checked which of the main contractors were working locally. Brassey had no new contracts in the area at all. One day, he and Jim Doyle walked down to the Weeton Lane section of the Leeds & Thirsk, to check if there were any prospects there. One glance told the story. It was clear that that section was nearing completion. What was even clearer were the dozens of navvies standing around, waiting, hopelessly, for any prospect of work.

  ‘It’ll have to be Bradford, won’t it?’ Doyle said.

  ‘Yes,’ Murty replied, ‘and at least there’s work there. How much, I don’t know, and with who is another question. Mackenzie has contracts there. This fellow McCormack too…’

  ‘McCormack?’

  ‘He’s a contractor to Mackenzie. That’s what I’ve heard, though I’m not sure of the truth of it. Either way, he’s got works in Bradford. Anyhow, whether it’s him or Mackenzie, I don’t think we’d be able to work as a single gang.’

  ‘We won’t,’ Doyle replied. ‘And even if we could, what size of a gang would we be? Roughneen, Lavan, McManus and the rest of them. All gone off working with Edwardes & Ryan.’

  ‘Yes,’ Murty said, ‘and I thought when Danny died, they might not have stayed on with Murtybeg. But they seem to like it well enough. He’s still paying their foremen well. Same as Danny – that was always his way – pay his foremen well, and grind the workers into the dirt. And what’s worse, I fear young Murtybeg is doing just the same. My two sons, one after another, and all they can think of is how to make the most money out of poor suffering humanity.’

  ‘I know,’ Doyle said. ‘But the real question is piecework. We’re well able for it, that’s why we make so much money. But we’ll have to work like common navvies in Bradford. There’s no piecework there, and we’d be paid damned little. That’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? The way they pay us.’

  They walked back towards Bramhope.

  ‘You know, Jim,’ Murty said, ‘there’s one other issue here, and that’s the question of the ownership of Edwardes & Ryan. I’d been assuming that Murtybeg, having taken it over, was the actual owner. But this Irene woman, who lived with Danny, might claim that she owned it as Danny’s common-law wife. And, strangely enough, there’s another thing that has occurred to me over the past few days.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The thought that the first claim on a dead man’s estate might be through his parents. It’s even possible that I’m the owner of Edwardes & Ryan, in common with Aileen.’

  Doyle stopped, and grabbed Murty by the arm.

  ‘But…but do you know?’

  ‘I don’t, and I’d have to talk to some lawman to find out for certain. And somehow, I’m not sure that I really want to find out. If it is true, I could fire not only Murtybeg but Irene too. Then the q
uestion is, would there be an Edwardes & Ryan at all? It might be argued that the world would be a better place without Danny’s damned business. But I’ll tell you one thing for certain, I wouldn’t run it the way Danny did, and the way that Murtybeg is doing. I just wouldn’t be able for it.’

  *

  Another shock awaited Murty when he and Doyle returned. Gilligan – their own gang master – announced that he was leaving the gang.

  ‘Going to work with Murtybeg,’ he explained. ‘He’s written me a letter, offering me a job as a supervisor out on the Colne Extension. Six shillings a day! I couldn’t possibly refuse.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you could,’ Murty said, ‘though at least Judas held out for his thirty shekels!’

  Gilligan swung around, eyes blazing.

  ‘There’s no call for that. If it wasn’t for your damned pride, you could be working with your own son right now.’

  ‘I could, couldn’t I’ Murty said. ‘Help him abuse his starving workers.’

  ‘You should at least think about it,’ Gilligan said, trying to sound more reasonable.

  ‘Fine,’ Murty said, not wishing to provoke Gilligan further. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  But there was no thinking to be done. If Murtybeg had turned as vicious as Danny, then there was no point in working with him. But was Murtybeg that bad? His earlier discussions with Murtybeg had convinced him that the same approach was being used. The only difference was that this time it would be abusing the Mayo slum-dwellers of Bradford. Not the poor emigrants straight off the boat, but the poor emigrants who had made it out of Ireland and were starving in an English city instead.

  The fact that Gilligan was leaving destroyed any future they might have had anywhere on the Leeds & Thirsk, though that might have been unlikely anyhow. But if there was work to be had in Bradford, no matter what kind of work it was, it would give him the chance of judging Murtybeg’s work methods in that city. There were two problems though. The first was his own age, which would certainly tell against him. The second was Aileen. Her mental condition was fragile following Danny’s death, and taking her to Bradford would be a problem in itself. Finding somewhere to live, while he himself might only be earning half a navvy’s wage, would be far more difficult.