by David Rees
She laughed. “My husband never told me so,” she said.
A nation other than the Irish, he thought, would have been extinguished utterly by the calamities of history, chance and the British, but we are the toughest people on earth. For the first time since Anthony’s death, he began to think his own survival was of importance.
THE highways and byways of New York, he found, were no more paved with gold than those of anywhere else. It was a terrible place, corrupt, violent, and lawless. Wealth and poverty existed side by side on foul-smelling streets full of pigs, mad dogs, cattle and rats. There were no drains or sewers, no health authority, and the administration of the city was hopelessly inadequate. It was densely populated; people lived cheek by jowl with cemeteries, bone-boiling factories, glue works and slaughterhouses. There were some smart well-kept districts, but much of Manhattan Island was one big slum, and in the worst conditions in the worst part of the slum the Irish lived.
He set about looking for Madge and Dan. He had thought it would be easy, but he combed the city without success. It was these expeditions to the tenements and cellars that opened his eyes to the continued suffering of the majority of Irish immigrants. He discovered filthy rooms, verminous beds, men and women so nearly naked they could not go out of doors, people so ill-suited to life in another country ― starving, or sick, or with no skills at all except how to use a spade for digging potatoes ― that they would never find work, not even the lowest-paid drudgery no one else wanted to do.
He met families robbed of everything they possessed by crooks who promised jobs, by touts who sold counterfeit rail tickets, by the owners of private workhouses. He saw people who had been turned out of their rooms because they could no longer afford them, their money and their property grabbed by unscrupulous lodging-house keepers who charged exorbitant prices for food and a bed. The same families who had been evicted from their cabins in Ireland were now evicted all over again and forced to shelter in an American version of a scalp or a scalpeen ― tiny, unventilated basements that were often without light, without food, that contained not a single stick of furniture, not even a box to sit on.
He saw a community demoralized by drink and fighting: alcohol was cheap, and an obvious way to escape, temporarily, from misery and disappointment. In some of these holes the only possessions were bottles of whiskey. It was as bad as Ireland, though no one would acknowledge that fact: the starvation continued, and the fever, and the white-haired old women and the little children begging in the streets. Just as bad, psychologically, was the shock of the new environment; beautiful Ireland, its mountains, shore-line, mists and colours had been exchanged for damp, rat-infested cellars in a dilapidated, dirty urban ghetto.
Dr Coffey had money and connections; he was able to buy a practice and a house with a large, tree-shaded garden in one of the more salubrious areas of the city. Michael lived in his house for some years, never really unpacking his things, always imagining it was a temporary arrangement, that he would move out and go west to seek his fortune. But when he did move out it was not to go west.
He began his working life in New York as Dr Coffey’s secretary, though he spent two days every week at a nearby hospital as a porter and nurse. He earned good wages; his wants were few, and he saved money. In other matters he was not so blessed. The shadow of Anthony was too long; he could not think of another lover. There were male prostitutes in New York, as in any big city at any date, and he knew where to find them. Sometimes he did so. He did not see why he should be a sexual hermit.
He wrote two letters, to Noreen and Richard. Neither of them wrote back ― Noreen no longer considered Michael a brother of hers, but a possible source of contamination to her young son, and Richard did not wish to communicate with a person he had called a male strumpet.
He could not find Madge and Dan. He wondered whether the Lord Kingston had been diverted from New York for some reason, and had anchored at Boston or another city up the coast. He began to fear the worst, that it had gone down at sea. It was Cathleen McGillycuddy who told him the truth. He met her one evening in a bar: she was still painfully thin, but brighter, happier, cured of her sickness, and living in a room near Trinity Church.
“My second cousin, Eileen, rents it; she crossed the water a year ago,” she said. “A palace after what I have lived through. And how is yourself?”
He told her, then asked if she’d ever heard of the Lord Kingston.
She looked amazed. And upset. “The Lord Kingston,” she repeated. “Yes. I certainly have heard of it. My uncle and his wife and all his family were on that ship. Did nobody tell you what happened? It sank in a fearful storm, and not one man, woman, boy, girl or baby was spared.”
“Not one?”
“No.” She saw the pain and horror in his face. “There were people on board … you knew?”
“My sister,” he said. “And her husband. She was… pregnant.” His voice rose to a cry. “I have no one left now! No one!” He buried his head in his hands. “Madge! Dear, darling Madge!” he sobbed. “Drowned! No one will ever hear my story now!”
She lifted his head, stroked his face, and whispered: “It isn’t so. I’ll listen.”
“What is the point?” he said, wearily.
“There is purpose in everything. I told you that when I was in the hospital on Staten Island. Are you… quite alone in the world?”
“Yes. My … he … died of typhus. On the ship.”
“He?”
“There isn’t a name like husband, because the world doesn’t admit such things exist. But I was as married to him as any man and his wife are to each other. You are shocked?”
“I’m not shocked. Nothing can shock me now. Tell me about him: what was his name?”
“Anthony.”
Hours later, when he was too exhausted to say more, she said “There’ll be another Anthony. I’m sure of it.”
“You talked of purpose,” Michael said. “I have to find that first.”
“You will.”
“I can only try. I promise you.”
“Come and see me. Often.” She smiled. “You also have beautiful hair. Do you know that?”
“Yes,” he said. And smiled too.
ABOUT a million and a half people died during the Famine of hunger and its attendant diseases. Another million emigrated. Ireland lost almost a third of her population, and in the years that followed hundreds of thousands more joined their relatives in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. A nation that did not have enough room is now one that has too much to spare. No event or person in history, Cromwell, King William, the penal times, 1798, the Easter Rising, the Black and Tans, the Civil War, changed Ireland so much as the Famine. The pattern of early marriages was broken: no country in Europe now has so many elderly bachelors. An all-pervading melancholy seemed to replace the natural gaiety of the people, and it is still there.
Hatred of Britain and all things British was a child of the Famine. “We have subscribed, worked, visited, clothed, for the Irish,” said Lord John Russell, “millions of money, years of debate, etc., etc., etc. The only return is rebellion and calumny. Let us not grant, lend, clothe, etc., any more, and see what that will do.” The legacy of that attitude is the atrocities we live with now.
“I do not know how farms are to be consolidated if small farmers do not emigrate,” Charles Trevelyan said, “and by acting for the purpose of keeping them at home, we should be defeating our own object. We must not complain of what we really want to obtain.” The object the British really wanted to obtain was not total extinction, but it is difficult to see anything in Trevelyan’s words other than a desire to reduce the population substantially. If that could be done, Ireland would be more malleable, less seditious, no longer a threat. If hunger, disease and flight were to be the weapons, well, so be it. More than a century later we are paying the interest on the Russell government’s policies.
Several generations passed before those who left Ireland could take adva
ntage of the opportunities of the New World. No emigrants were as unskilled, as poverty-stricken as the Irish; they were the children of the slums, exploited, disliked, feared and ignored. But times change. Even Presidents now search for a scrap of Irish lineage and they parade it proudly, like a banner.
Michael was one of the few to benefit from the opportunities. Six years after his arrival he had saved enough money to go to medical school. When he qualified as a doctor, he began to practise in New York’s Irishtown, and he worked there for the next fifty years. He had learned, at last, to love the people of the one-roomed cabins, the ships’ holds, the city ghettoes. He eventually found another man to love and to live with, an Irish doctor, whose apartment was two streets away from the Coffeys’ house. It was not the same as it had been with Anthony; the intensity of that experience, its romantic passion and total commitment could not be repeated: it is for many of us only once in a lifetime, if that. He was fulfilled and relatively content, however; when he was dying he was able to think he had led a worthwhile, rewarding existence.
MY mother, on the occasions she has discussed her Irish ancestors, has talked of an incident that occurred at about the time of King Edward the Seventh’s death, when she was eight. Someone, a great-uncle or a great-great-uncle, had emigrated to America during the Famine. What happened to him there she doesn’t know. The only facts in her memory are that he died at a very old age in 1910, that he never married, did not make a will, but left a considerable fortune. Attorneys acting for his estate asked for anybody who had a claim to it to come forward and prove that they were his relatives. About a hundred people did so, and nearly every one of them was found to have no connection at all with the family. Virtually the entire fortune disappeared into the pockets of the attorneys, whose expenses and fees for sorting out the muddle were vast. My grandmother eventually received twenty pounds, and her children five pounds each.
The only other piece of information my mother remembers is that the solicitor who finally sent the cheque was a Galway man named Moriarty, of the firm of Hanrahan and Moriarty. This stays in her head because, at the age of eight, it seemed a peculiar, amusing surname. Mr Moriarty died sixty years ago, and his papers and documents have long since been destroyed. So nothing of Michael Tangney’s exists now.
Except for a silver spoon, which Mr Moriarty sent to my great-aunt Belinda; it has engraved on it the initials M.T. and this motto: Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings. It is on my desk in front of me, as I write this.
also in this series:
VINCENT VIRGA
GAYWYCK
Robert Whyte is only seventeen when he is hired to catalogue the vast library at Gaywyck, the mysterious ancestral mansion on Long Island owned by the handsome yet melancholy Donough. It does not take him long to realise he is deeply attracted to his new employer. But he has to reckon with a hidden evil waiting in the background, fired by the dark sexual secrets of Donough’s family past, sowing murder, blackmail and mayhem in its wake as it moves towards his destruction.
‘An extraordinary tour de force that merits special praise. A well-researched historical novel that gives us rare glimpses of what gay men were possibly saying and doing eighty years ago’
― The Advocate.
‘I enjoyed Gaywyck very much. To me a fascinating mixture of Wilde, the Gothic and, above all, the souls laid to rest in New York’
― Angus Wilson.
ISBN 0 85449 057 4 UK £4.95 / $7.95
* * *
CHRIS HUNT
STREET LAVENDER
In the busy West End streets of 1880s London, young Willie Smith quickly learns to use his youth and beauty as a means of escaping the grinding poverty of his East End background.
‘The rhythm of salvation and perdition - from reformatory to male brothel to good works among the teeming poor, via a superb episode in Bohemian Kensington - is fearlessly sustained. The effect of this harlot’s progress with a silver lining is irresistible’
― Jonathan Keates, Observer.
‘I read all 343 pages in two compulsive sittings. Chris Hunt has produced an accomplished amalgam of Victorian literary styles… Both a funny study of a young gay’s mounting consciousness and a voyeur’s guide to the seamy side of Victoriana’
― Patrick Gale, Gay Times.
ISBN 0 85449 035 3 UK £4.9$/US $9.95
* * *
CHRIS HUNT
MIGNON
The glittering Paris court of Henri III provides Marc with ample chance to advance his fortunes, as a mignon, one of the king’s pet boys. But when a threat is made on his life, he flees his native France to seek refuge in the England of Elisabeth I. Here life proves just as dangerous, when he encounters a celebrated new playwright by the name of Christopher Marlowe and is quickly drawn into an underworld of spies, crime and political intrigue.
‘A rattling good read which adroitly mixes an entertaining plot with plenty of authentic historical detail’
— Gay Times.
‘It’s fun for its campness, and absorbing from the historical point of view ― particularly interesting in its use of mystery surrounding Christopher Marlowe… A rich and detailed picture of Elizabethan London is revealed. Chris Hunt includes the minutest details of life at that time, contrasting the overcrowded squalor with the vast stretches of open space that still remained in what we now know as central London, highlighting the stark contrast between rich and poor.’
― Him.