I pulled back the curtain and looked out of the window, across the town square towards the church. The sky was azure, with just a few fluffy white clouds scudding across it. The perfect day for my expedition to the ruins of Kildoolin, and after the long day of travel the thought of a good walk to stretch my legs and clear the cobwebs was very appealing. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was just seven thirty. Aoife had said I could have breakfast at any time, but was this too early to expect a pub landlady to be up and about? I decided to take a leisurely shower, have a cup of tea in my room and generally potter about until eight o’clock which seemed a more reasonable hour.
I shouldn’t have worried. By the time I went downstairs, Aoife was already busy behind the bar, unloading the glass washer, polishing the optics, restocking the beer mats.
‘Good morning! Did you sleep? Will I get you the full Irish breakfast?’
I grinned at the hearty welcome. ‘Slept like a log, and the full breakfast would be lovely, thank you.’
She nodded and went through to the kitchen. While I waited, wondering whether a full Irish breakfast was the same as a full English breakfast, I wandered around the bar, peering at the various pictures on the walls. The pub had been too crowded yesterday evening to be able to look at them. There was a fine miscellany of pictures – black and white photographs of Ballymor; framed newspaper cuttings about the pub, its food and music; signed photos of traditional musicians sitting in the bay window playing their instruments. I recognised one or two of the musicians from last night. They’d started playing around nine o’clock, with no announcement, no microphones. Just a clutch of middle-aged men, who’d pulled instruments out of pockets and cases, and played jigs and reels and ballads and old Dubliners numbers for a couple of hours until Aoife had called time. I’d meant to get an early night, tired after the long drive, but the music had made me smile and tap my foot, and I’d stayed till the end, making an experimental half-pint of Guinness last most of the evening. The music had helped me forget, and that was good.
When breakfast came it was huge, just like a full English including bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, mushrooms, toast and fried tomatoes but with the addition of a huge hunk of black pudding – the real thing from Clonakilty, just up the road, so Aoife informed me. I wouldn’t need lunch, that was for certain. It smelt divine.
With that lot inside me, I went back to my room, stuffed a lightweight fleece, fold-up mac and bottle of water in my small day sack and set off for my walk. First stop was the tourist information office to pick up a map of the town, but they weren’t open till nine o’clock and I wasn’t prepared to wait. Declan had said the path began at the end of Church Street so I found that and followed it out of town. Sure enough, as the last housing estate petered out, there was a rutted track leading off to the left signposted ‘To the Deserted Village’. I turned off on the track, enjoying the exercise, relishing the sun on my back, thinking about Michael, my ancestry, the past, and most definitely not about the future.
The track climbed steadily, weaving its way between fields of ripening wheat which eventually gave way to open moorland, covered with magnificent purple heather. To my right was a range of hills; far over to the left I could just make out the sea, shimmering in the morning sun. There was a light breeze keeping the temperature just right, and I was accompanied by constant birdsong – a skylark was up there somewhere. All in all, it was a pretty perfect day. I was working up a bit of a sweat on the hill, and stopped to admire the scenery and have a swig of water.
Just over the brow of the hill, the remains of the village came into sight. I stopped and took in the view. It was more of a hamlet than a village – a single row of cottages alongside the track, with their backs to the hill and their fronts facing the view over the moors towards the sea. It would have been a beautiful place to live on a day like today, with the sun shining and only a light breeze, but I could imagine life would have been tough here when the weather was bad. Although it rarely snowed here in the south-west of Ireland, it could be pretty stormy at times, and the village was high on the moors and exposed.
I continued walking along the track towards the village. There was a worn-out sign for tourists, showing a plan of the village and with a brief summary of the famine, but it was faded and almost unreadable. The cottages were all ruined – very few had any kind of a roof left and none had doors. I imagined the roofs would have originally been thatched. The walls were made of a greyish stone, like the church in Ballymor. Some walls were more or less intact, and others had long since toppled, leaving mossy piles of rubble.
As I approached I could see the layout of the cottages – they were all tiny, single-roomed, with a fireplace at one end and a door in the middle of the side facing the track, looking across the moors to the sea. Most had two small windows, one on each side of the door. I guessed the windows would not have been glazed but perhaps originally had wooden shutters. The first cottage I reached was one of the more intact ones, although its roof was gone, so I ducked in through the low doorway to have a look inside.
The heather had found its way in, along with a few ash saplings, some gorse and plenty of bracken, and there was a burned-out circle on the ground – evidence that someone had lit a campfire. The cottage was tiny. I tried to imagine a whole family living here – where would their beds have been? Their table and chairs? I wondered what possessions people would have had, before the famine. Maybe Declan would know more. I smiled with pleasure at the idea of sitting in a corner of O’Sullivan’s quizzing him on it. Now that I knew Michael McCarthy’s home had been abandoned during the famine years when he was just a teenager, I realised I’d need to properly research that part of Ireland’s history. I made a mental note to get hold of some books about the famine so I could fully understand what had happened. It had obviously impacted Michael’s life – how could you not be affected by something like that happening around you? And maybe that’s what had become of his mother, Kitty. Perhaps she had been a victim of the famine. But if that was true, why then had he continued to paint her, and why the rumours that he had searched for her all his adult life?
I went out of the first cottage and into the next. This had one collapsed wall and a skull of a sheep in the remains of the fireplace, with a foxglove growing up through it.
The village was an eerie place, even on a glorious summer’s day. To think that once it would have been full of people going about their business – children playing, women cooking, men repairing thatch or tending to vegetable plots – and then the potato crops failed, people starved or moved away, leaving the entire village to crumble. Some walls looked pretty unstable, listing at precarious angles as though the next gust of wind would blow them over.
I pulled out my water bottle and took a long swig from it. It had been a hot, tough walk up here. Without meaning to, I found myself thinking of Dan, the way I’d hurt him, the secrets I was still keeping from him. I knew I wasn’t being fair to him. I walked further up through the village, going in and out of every ruined cottage, in an effort to put it all out of my head, for a little longer anyway. A stream ran down the hillside behind the cottages, and crossed the track between two cottages about halfway along the row. There were slippery stepping stones to enable walkers to cross the stream. I guessed this had been the villagers’ water supply.
There was someone else up here – someone sitting on a tumbledown wall that had once been part of the cottage at the far end of the village. A man, who was staring out across the moors towards the sea. As I approached I realised it was Declan. He hadn’t spotted me – he seemed lost in his thoughts the way I’d been lost in mine a few minutes ago. I coughed a bit and deliberately kicked a few stones to make a bit of noise. It worked.
‘Well, hello there, Maria! You found it, so.’ He stood to greet me, smiling, the sun making his hair look more blond than it had appeared in the pub.
‘Yes, thanks, great directions. We could have walked up together if I’d known you were coming.’ A
s soon as I said the words I wished I could claw them back. That sounded like a come-on. I racked my brains – had I mentioned Dan last night at all? Declan was lovely, and I certainly felt attracted to him to an extent, but I wasn’t available. I didn’t need any more confusion in my life. Dan was my man, despite everything.
‘Ah, it was a spur of the moment decision this morning. I often come up here, to sit and meditate, and just soak up the glory of God’s creation. On a day like today it was irresistible.’
‘It’s amazing.’ I stood beside him and took in the view. The heather was in full flower, giving the moorlands a deep purple hue. Here and there stunted ash trees grew, their leaves a vibrant green in contrast to the dark heather. There was gorse too – its time for flowering was mostly over but here and there were splashes of bright yellow bloom. The sea on the distant horizon glinted gold and silver as the sun, now high overhead, reflected off it. The air was scented with summer. It was hard to believe that this place had seen tragedy.
‘So, I wonder which cottage your ancestor lived in?’ Declan said, shielding his eyes with a hand across his forehead, as he turned to face me.
I shook my head. ‘No idea, and I don’t see how I could find out. Were all the cottages abandoned at the time of the famine?’
‘I believe so, yes. Not everyone would have died, though. Some probably went abroad, to England or America. Perhaps others went to try to find work in the cities – Limerick or Cork, or even Dublin. Public works schemes had been set up – building roads and suchlike – so people could earn money to buy food to offset the loss of the potato crop. But there weren’t enough places on them, or they were badly managed, or they weren’t running in the areas where the poorest people lived. The people here, like so many across Ireland, depended on their potato crops. They failed several years in a row in the late 1840s, with the blight making the few potatoes that could be salvaged almost inedible. And without the potato crops the people had nothing.’
‘What I don’t understand is, why did they only grow potatoes? Surely if they’d grown other crops and not been so reliant on potatoes, the blight wouldn’t have affected them so badly?’ I felt a bit like a schoolkid on an educational visit, but I’d need to understand this properly for my book.
‘The farm workers only rented a tiny patch of poor land from the big landowners – it’s all they were allowed to have, to grow their own food. You can still see evidence of cultivated land where the Kildoolin inhabitants grew their potatoes – halfway down the track on the right you can just make out lines and ridges in the heather. Potatoes are a high-yield crop; they’ll grow in the poorest soils and are very nutritious. There aren’t many vegetables you can live on if you’re not eating much else, but potatoes you can. On the big farms, plenty of other crops were grown – wheat, barley, maize – and cattle were reared. The great tragedy is that Ireland was producing enough food to feed itself, right through the famine years. But the majority of it was exported, mostly to England, and sold to make money for the English landowners.’
I felt guilty, as if I should apologise on behalf of all English people. ‘Did the landowners not realise what was going on, or how bad it was?’
He gave a small shrug. ‘Some did, some didn’t. Many were absentee landlords who hardly ever set foot on their Irish estates. Others were well aware of what was happening. To be fair, some tried to help by donating food. But some people were too proud to accept charity, preferring to work for their money. And there was the option of workhouses, but those of course were the last resort.’
I shook my head. ‘You’d think if your children were starving you’d do anything to save them.’ As I said it I wondered if that would be true for me – would I do anything to save my child? Was I capable of self-sacrifice? To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure. It was presumably something that came with maternal instincts, and I did not believe I had those. I wondered if my own mother had ever considered this question. I could not imagine her sacrificing herself to save me. She’d never really given up anything for me.
Declan was looking at me oddly. ‘Are you all right there, Maria? You look as though you’re fretting about something. If you want to talk . . .’
‘No, it’s all right. I was just thinking about these poor people, what they had to go through. You’re very knowledgeable on it, Declan. Thank you for explaining things; it’s very helpful.’
‘Ah, to be sure we’re all taught about the famine in history lessons in Ireland. It’s one of the big events that defines our nation. That and the 1916 uprising and fight for independence.’
I made a mental note to buy myself a book on the history of Ireland. It’d all be good background information for my biography of Michael McCarthy. From my thesis I knew plenty about his painting techniques, his style and his subjects, and his later life in London, but so little about his early life and the land of his birth.
We sat and chatted a while longer, then walked back to Ballymor together. He pointed out where the potato fields would have been, part-way down the hill, beside the track. I must admit I could not see much evidence, but maybe the heather was kind of growing in rows, following the lines of old potato ridges.
Declan left me in the centre of town. I wanted to start making some notes for my book, and had a long list of questions to research on the internet. Declan had told me about a good bookshop in the town, where I might find some local history books, and the prospect of a light lunch in a coffee shop followed by an hour or so browsing the bookshop felt like a good plan for the rest of the day.
I found a pleasant-looking café which overlooked the town square and ordered a sandwich and a pot of tea, then pulled out my phone. There was a text from Dan, which I opened nervously. Any decision yet? I still love you. xxx
Tears pricked at my eyes as I read the text. I’d been such a rubbish girlfriend to him and felt so guilty. As I ate my lunch, I recalled the events of last Sunday night, two days before I’d left for Ireland and one day before I’d booked my tickets.
Dan had surprised me by taking me out to eat at a swanky restaurant. It wasn’t one we often went to – only on very special occasions. He’d even reserved us one of the best tables – by the window, overlooking the river. At this time of year, it would be light till almost ten o’clock, so we’d be able to watch the sunset over the water as we lingered over our meal.
I’d made an effort and put on a floaty summer dress, some strappy sandals and a bit of make-up. It made a change from my usual jeans and paint-spattered t-shirt combinations that I wore when teaching art.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Dan said, as I came downstairs ready to go out to the restaurant. ‘Really pretty.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, giving him a kiss.
We walked to the restaurant – it was only about twenty minutes away and the evening was warm and still. Dan insisted on holding my hand the whole time. I felt as though we were teenagers on our first date. There was a slight tenseness about him which was unusual. He was normally so easy-going and relaxed. I wondered if he had problems at work. He worked in IT, and I knew he was under pressure to bring forward delivery dates on his current project.
But it wasn’t that at all that was making him tense and preoccupied during our walk to the restaurant. As we were shown to our table, and took our seats each facing the window at an angle, he ordered two glasses of champagne. The waiter brought them, along with the menus, almost immediately.
It wasn’t really what I wanted to drink – I’d have preferred a refreshing glass of sparkling water – but I lifted my glass to clink against his anyway. ‘Champagne, how lovely! Well, cheers then!’
He shook his head gently. ‘Not yet, Maria. There’s something I need to ask you first.’ He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a small box. Inside was a ring – white gold, diamond and ruby. Delicate, pretty, modern, and perfect. Exactly what I would have picked myself. He knew me so well. ‘Marry me?’ he said.
I was lost for words, and gaped for a moment
.
His nervousness made him fill the empty silence. ‘Registry office or church. Or hotel. I honestly don’t mind – whatever you want. All I want is you.’ He smiled and reached for my hand.
I found myself blinking at him while a thousand images raced through my mind – us standing at an altar exchanging vows while my mother, Jackie, watched disapprovingly (she disapproved of everything I did); Dan and I pushing a pram through a park together with another dozen children hanging off our arms; us aged ninety sitting opposite each other with nothing to say, in an old people’s home. Was this my future flashing before me? Was it the future I wanted? I loved Dan, with all my heart, but the whole marriage and children thing felt far too terrifyingly grown-up for me to contemplate. I loved him, no question, but could I agree to all this, right now, just like that?
I must have looked unsure, because his face fell and he removed his hand from mine. ‘You don’t need to answer now, Maria. But don’t say no straight out – think about it, please.’
I nodded mutely. I could promise him to think about it at least. I felt so sorry for him. My reaction surely had not been what he’d have hoped and dreamed for, but it was at least an honest one. Finally, I managed to squeeze some words out. ‘Dan, darling, I love you, you know that. This has been a bit of a shock. We’ve never before talked of getting married. Of course I promise you I’ll think about it.’ I took his hand again, and stroked it with my thumb.
‘I know we’ve never spoken about it,’ he said. ‘But we’ve been together five years now, we’re so good together, and I suppose I always assumed we would marry, like it was some kind of unspoken agreement. Sorry to spring it on you.’
The Girl from Ballymor Page 3