Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  In the first six hours after consuming food, everything is normal. The body digests what we’ve eaten and breaks down glycogen – molecules in the food that store energy – to make glucose. Glucose is our body’s normal fuel supply. It’s stored in the liver and muscles, and is used to power our cells and brain. In well-fed mode, the brain will consume a full quarter of our total energy requirements.

  About six hours after eating, the supply of glucose in the liver becomes depleted, and we start to feel hungry. The body shifts into a new energy mode called ketosis. In ketosis, our body makes alternative fuel by breaking down spare fat to release energy. The brain gets priority on the remaining glucose, and supplements this with the products of ketosis. If no other food is forthcoming, the body can continue in this new mode for several weeks. After this point, however, all the glucose supplies are gone and the brain urgently needs more. The body shifts mode again – this time breaking down the protein in our muscles and tissue to make amino acids, which the liver then converts to glucose. So our brain gets its fuel back. Problem solved.

  Except it isn’t. This phase is called autophagy. A polite term for self-cannibalism. The body is now eating itself for fuel. Our metabolic system does this cleverly – identifying the body mass that can be consumed, and that which must be preserved at all costs so our bodies can find new food. Yet it’s a temporary fix. Without food the body will eventually run out of things it can burn. In this state of serious starvation the immune system becomes compromised. The places where famine occurs are often those where tropical disease is rife and hygiene difficult to maintain, so hunger can quickly lead to deadly infection.

  Dysentery is an intestinal infection with two causes – bacillary dysentery, which is bacterial, and amoebic dysentery, caused by a single-celled parasite. Both kinds are highly infectious, and spread by transmission of infected faeces on hands or in contaminated water due to insanitary conditions. Symptoms include vomiting, cramps and bloody diarrhoea – a painful inconvenience to a healthy westerner, but a disaster to a starving and dehydrated child with no access to medical aid.

  Then there are diseases like beriberi, which spring directly from deficiencies in the famine victim’s diet. Beriberi is a disease that results from a lack of vitamin B1 or thiamine. There are two kinds: there is wet beriberi, which affects the heart and lungs, and dry beriberi, which attacks the nervous system. The former can lead to heart failure, while the latter damages nerves, reduces sensation and muscle control, and induces paralysis. Interestingly, it can be more prevalent in cultures where diets are dominated by white rather than brown rice, as the white variety lacks the thiamine content of rice bran. This contributed to widespread incidences of beriberi amongst prisoners of the Japanese in the Second World War, where meagre starvation diets consisted almost entirely of white rice.

  Towards the end of sustained starvation, two diseases in particular come to the fore: kwashiorkor and marasmus.

  Kwashiorkor is caused by a severe lack of protein, and its most infamous symptom is the swollen belly seen on many starving children during famine, caused by too much fluid in body tissue. Marasmus is a condition brought about by a desperate lack of calorific energy, and it most often occurs in the young. Marasmus is characterised by dizziness, diarrhoea, loss of bladder control, and a creeping lethargy that takes life like the fading of a torch battery. When death finally comes it’s most often by cardiac failure – the depleted heart is no longer able to find the strength to beat.

  Hunger is one of the oldest maladies to antagonise the human race. Unlike other ailments, its pathology is clearly understood, and the cure to it – adequate food – is in plentiful global supply. Yet hunger continues to ravage the planet. Just under 800 million people in the world today receive insufficient food to lead a healthy life. About one in every nine people on earth. As the earth warms due to climate change, accelerating drought is predicted to increase the prevalence of serious famine due to crop failure, threatening the lives of many millions more.

  Yet a human’s response to hunger, and the reasons for it, can be as individual as their humanity. An unforgettable image of my teenage years was Republican prisoners on the evening news in 1981 wasting away in Northern Ireland’s Maze prison. Ten of these protestors survived for between forty-six and seventy-two days without food – two and a half months without a scrap to eat. In 1943, Mahatma Gandhi – stick-thin and in his seventies – successfully completed three weeks of fasting in one of many political hunger protests. However, when a patient in a persistent vegetative state is denied all sustenance, death usually occurs within just two weeks. Why the variation? The main factor is water. If a person can remain fully hydrated, it’s possible to survive months of starvation. This can be stretched to years by even small amounts of food, as was demonstrated by survivors of prison camps in the Second World War. Greater body weight can help too, as fat reserves provide essential energy. Genetic factors also seem to play a part. A 2008 study found evidence that a population exposed to starvation could pass key genetic changes onto subsequent generations. Scientists examined babies born to mothers in the Netherlands during the war-induced famine of 1944. They discovered that the genes of these children were permanently changed by the famine their mothers had endured. They tended to be smaller in size, and more prone to diabetes. What’s more, it appeared that their own children inherited these traits. Recent studies on nematode worms suggest that starvation can produce multi-generational effects on DNA. Less a case of ‘the sins of the father’ than the pangs of the mother.

  Then there’s individual psychology. Hunger is an assault on the mind as well as the body. How much does the choice to be hungry, as in the case of the hunger strikers, affect the ability to withstand its effects, as compared to those whom hunger attacks uninvited? And how much does our own personal will, past experience and character affect the ability of our bodies to survive?

  The psychological dimensions of hunger are as subtle and profound as those of the body. In 1950, the University of Minnesota published a famous study on the behavioural effects of starvation. The experiment took thirty-six young, healthy and psychologically sound men and observed what happened to them when they had their calorific input reduced to the point of semi-starvation for a period of six months. It’s known in academic circles as ‘the starvation study’.

  The study saw profound effects on these subjects – not simply in physical decay, but in behaviour, attitude and virility. The men became preoccupied with food: how to get it, how to eat it, even how to prepare it. When they got it they would often binge on the little that was theirs, losing all self-control. The study also noticed wild mood swings in the subjects, and a ‘deep dark depression’. There were emotional impacts. The more gregarious subjects became progressively more passive and isolated. Humour diminished, and any interest in sex disappeared. One subject stated bluntly, with an interesting side-reference to seafood, that he had ‘no more sexual feeling than a sick oyster’. The study exposed a wicked truth concealed within the wider malady of hunger – that the physical want of our bodies echoes in the outlook of our minds.

  There are delicate behavioural echoes to be found in even the mildest hungers. A 2013 study at Cornell University in the United States found that if a subject shopped for food when hungry, they were more likely to stock their trolley with high-calorie products. It seems pretty intuitive – if you’re hungry you want more food. But the study went further than this. Hunger doesn’t just make you want food: it can affect what food you want. It can change the way that you think – the choices you make.

  Our free will is like a child in the company of ancient needs. We’re not just hungry, we’re hungry for something. It’s a directed desire – a desire whose trajectory can be steered by the privations of the body.

  A focused hunger.

  HISTORY

  The Arrivals: The McGann family, 1840–1871

  A death certificate dated 5 March 1868. Address: 31 Sherwood Street in the sub-dis
trict of St Martin, Liverpool. A child, Teresa McGann, daughter of Owen McGann and Susan McGann. Pronounced dead. Mother present. Age, one year old. Recorded by Robert McLelland, Registrar. Cause of death: Marasmus. A condition of extreme malnutrition occurring chiefly in young children.

  Starvation.

  Outside, barely a minute’s walk from the filthy hovel in which Susan McGann watches her infant waste away is the largest continuous stretch of dockland in the world. Through this vast commercial gateway flow the goods and wealth of a global empire. Food from five continents fills the great brick warehouses nearby, throwing their huge shadows across the teeming dockyards and the stinking slums beneath. Outrageous plenty. Close enough to touch, yet unimaginably distant for those in its filthy shade.

  Teresa McGann. Death by starvation in a land of plenty. Present at death: Susan McGann. Her mother. My great-great-grandmother.

  © Crown Copyright

  I stop for a moment to reflect on that human scene playing out beneath the facts of the document. A mother watches her own child starve to death in a filthy hovel. A child she’d baptised, with all the hope inherent in the act. The mother’s helpless to keep her child from dying. She has older children who are likely present in the same tiny room, and equally malnourished. She’s hungry herself. Hunger is ever-present. A constant lodger.

  And yet she continues. Susan lived for many years after this terrible scene. How does she cope with what she witnesses? How does she rise the next day and go on, like the records tell me she did? I think about my own son – his Mediterranean diet, his fine physique and his good health. I imagine him starving in my arms while I look on helplessly. I expel the image from my mind.

  In September of 1866, the same registrar had recorded Teresa’s birth at the same address. Mother Susan had signed the baby’s birth certificate with a simple ‘x’. She was illiterate in the language of her daughter’s country, but fluent in the universal language of hope. A new child, a new future. Yet in 1865, just a year before Teresa’s birth, I found another death certificate. Teresa’s sister, Susan. Named after her mother. Dead at just nine months old. Cause: Marasmus. Starvation. This was the second daughter Susan McGann had lost to hunger in just fourteen months.

  What did this hunger do to Susan, that she could keep placing one foot in front of the other? How did any of my family survive the year – let alone a century and a half? Where did these McGanns come from, and how did they end up in this Liverpool dockland slum? How did the hunger that now consumed them come to change the way they thought, the places they travelled, and the choices they made?

  The answer to all of this begins a couple of decades before this child’s premature death. And it turns on the fortunes of a single lowly vegetable.

  *

  Genealogy is a rather upside-down form of storytelling. You start with what’s effectively the ending – the present day. That’s the most complete chapter; one in which the main players are, helpfully, still alive to contribute. The task is then to work in reverse to flesh out the earlier chapters, generation by generation, digging backwards through the records like a miner with a pickaxe, searching for that crucial starting place: the defining rich seam for everything that followed. Chapter one. A family’s creation myth.

  Like mining, it’s hard, slow work. And the problem is that it’s hard to know when you’ve reached the end – or, in this case, the beginning. Any genealogist worth their salt will try to push back as far in time as they can – back and back through the generations until the available records peter out, and you’re left with little more than intelligent guesswork and a few rough clues in some field name or ancient land taxation document. This means that the chronological beginning of any family’s story is usually the most vaguely formed: hardly the most compelling way to begin a narrative. ‘Once upon a time, I think there might have been some guy who may have lived here at some point …’

  That said, it helps if you can at least start with a broad defining aim: a milestone in time that provides a focus for your family’s history research. In the case of the McGann family, one presented itself to me quite quickly. The name McGann is of Irish origin – a variation of the old clan name Mac Cana, meaning ‘son of the wolf’. Liverpool, the city where I was born and where my family had lived for generations, experienced a huge influx of Irish in the nineteenth century as part of their mass emigration to the New World. They brought their Roman Catholicism with them – a religion that had been part of my family for as far back as anyone could remember. It seemed likely that the McGanns were a part of this great Irish diaspora. It only remained for me to find the evidence.

  Only? Bless my youth! I was just a spotty seventeen-year-old when I started, and prone to bouts of romantic optimism. A family historian begins by gathering all of the family stories they can from those who are still alive to give it: anecdotes, names, rumours, illnesses, births, deaths, joys, tragedies. Even though elderly human memory can be unreliable, the living accounts of those who remember places and faces from years ago are the richest source of genealogical information. The first task is to commit these to record before they’re lost for good.

  I immediately hit a snag with Dad’s family. There were three surviving siblings in middle age: Mary, Jimmy and my father Joe. My paternal grandmother Lizzie had died when I was nine. Her husband, Owen Joseph, had died in 1929, when my dad was just five years old. There were no other surviving McGanns we knew of. No distant aunts or uncles – only vague scraps gleaned from when Dad’s generation were young children. Also, there was no knowledge of Irish heritage in the family. Nothing at all. Scottish? Plenty. But that was from my gran’s side of the family. They were textile weavers from Paisley who’d settled in Liverpool at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet not a thing from the Irish McGanns. Only that they’d lived up in the poor north end of Liverpool, in those narrow streets that nestled beside the docks.

  Spotty and unbowed, I resolved to find proof of my family’s Irish roots, and trace them back to the specific town or village in Ireland where they came from. My own origin story. I imagined myself pacing grandly into some windswept Irish village to announce my family’s prodigal return, enfolded in the welcoming arms of raven-haired colleens. Unsurprisingly, reality was a little less accommodating. I spent most of the subsequent thirty-five years or so searching, without success. Then, just two years ago, I stumbled on it.

  Tibohine. County Roscommon, Ireland.

  *

  The tiny settlement of Tibohine sits on the road between Ballaghaderreen and Frenchpark in the northwest of County Roscommon, near the border with Mayo and Sligo in Ireland’s lake-strewn mid-west. It’s a rural region of sparse, rugged beauty, bounded by the River Shannon to the north and overlooked by the ancient Fairymount Hill to the south: the tallest spot in Roscommon and site of a Neolithic hill fort. It’s the kind of place where time stands still, unless provoked.

  Unfortunately, such provocations are a periodic feature of Irish history. One of St Patrick’s bishops had reputedly founded a religious settlement there in the Middle Ages, but it became the feudal property of the Protestant English De Fresne family after Cromwell’s ravages. Following Catholic emancipation in 1829, a little parish church had been established in Tibohine – and into this poured the burgeoning mass of Catholic rural peasantry: to baptise their children, to sanctify their marriages, to lay their dead in the ground. It was the endless rhythm of life that had characterised this blameless corner of Ireland for centuries.

  The parish register of births for Tibohine in 1859 is a veritable crowded room of a document – hurried ink mottled with blots on unlined paper. It takes a few moments for the eyes to settle, and for names to begin to crystallise in the chaotic cursive. But there, under the entries for baptisms on 3 June, is a child. Eugenius (Owen) McGann. Son of Owen McGann and Susan McCarthy. My great-grandfather Eugene. A witness too – Teresa McGann – after whom our poor child in the Liverpool slum was likely named. A single flash of history’s camera.r />
  I found the baby’s father, Susan’s husband Owen, in the baptism records for nearby Croghan for 7 March 1819: his father was James McGann, and his mother was Elizabeth Fitzpatrick. The lives of his parents stretched back into the late eighteenth century. This was a family that had likely inhabited the same landscape for generations. Yet it was a family now on the cusp of traumatic upheaval.

  Successive conquests, land confiscations, rebellions and punitive laws had turned rural Ireland into a population flirting constantly with disaster. One of the most pernicious causes of this was the system of land ownership. During the 1700s, absentee English landlords leased large tracts of rural land to middlemen, who then sub-let as they pleased for profit. This encouraged widespread exploitation of the most vulnerable tenants, with land being split into ever smaller and less sustainable plots. Added to this were the draconian laws of tenancy. A tenant could be evicted on a whim, with no rights over the land they’d rented. Any improvements a tenant may have made to a plot or its dwelling would immediately belong to the landlord – so there was no incentive to improve one’s life or situation. Land was often of poor quality – boggy and infertile – making it difficult for a tenant to grow the cereal crops common in England. Then there were the extortionate rents charged by the middlemen, leaving very little for a poor tenant after the crop had been harvested. But without any form of welfare apart from the dreaded workhouse, families were forced to accept these terms.

  Most wicked of all perhaps was the common form of rent bondage known as the ‘Hanging Gale’ – the ‘gale’ being a regular rent due on the land. By ‘hanging over’ this rent in a constant state of arrears a tenant was trapped in rolling debt to the landlord without any security whatsoever. It was this perpetual condition of fear and insecurity that was to create one of the most destitute peasant classes in Europe – a class to which my Tibohine ancestors belonged. Infant mortality occurred in a fifth of all births, and only 34 per cent of the population was literate.