by Anne Doughty
Hannah’s greatest joy came one morning unexpectedly. She was looking at sketches and drawings of ‘My home’, done for homework, when she found that Johnny Donnelly, a large, awkward boy who spoke only when spoken to, had produced a sketch Hannah herself would have been proud to have made.
She stared at it and found herself near to tears. While all the other children had drawn houses, some like their own, some copied from picture books, Johnny had produced a landscape. Using the crayons, which none of the children had ever seen before, he had created a picture of Lough Gartan and the mountain slopes beyond with sunlight falling on the water from a sky piled with clouds.
John agreed with her. It was an amazingly perceptive drawing from a boy who had never had a coloured pencil, or crayon, in his hand before. Hannah found a place for it, and for some others, on the whitewashed wall of the schoolroom where all Daniel’s visitors in the evening could see it when they came to talk, and play their fiddles, and listen to his stories. She then went and told Daniel what had happened.
Daniel was delighted. At the end of morning school, before Hannah went home, he went round the class asking each pupil what they thought of Johnny’s picture. ‘Did you hear that, Johnny?’ he asked at regular intervals, while Johnny blushed with pleasure and said nothing.
At the end of his inquisition, Daniel announced to the whole class that Johnny had just won a prize. It might take a little while to arrive, he warned, but Johnny would be receiving a box of watercolour paints and brushes, as well as a sketch pad, for his own use only. They would be arriving from Dublin, with only one condition: that he kept drawing and sketching.
Hannah and John both smiled to themselves as they listened to Daniel addressing the class. They knew that Daniel had just received his ‘back pay’. At times in the course of the last few months, from Marie’s accident and the loss of his pension, Daniel had almost despaired of keeping up the school. Now, with all the help they’d had thanks to Jonathan Hancock, the school had been saved. Johnny’s prize was one way in which Daniel was going to celebrate.
Chapter 11
It had taken Hannah a long time to adjust to the ‘summer’ months in Donegal. Unlike the long, sunlit days, a feature of the same months in her old home in Scotland where the farmhouse was built on a south-facing site, close to the Solway coast, the low stone cottage on the mountainside overlooking Lough Gartan was a quite different matter.
Often chilly and windswept, even at the height of summer, rain came suddenly, sweeping down the valley, so that clothes hung out to dry had to stay out overnight, or be watched for the moment when it was worth catching them up and bringing them to air indoors before the next deluge.
Sometimes, as she came and went, doing her morning tasks, she looked sadly at the handful of bright flowers she had planted in old or leaking cooking pots. It was true the plants had unfailingly survived the winters, but often they were so wind-battered they were slow to bloom in the summer. She longed for the bright faces of the geraniums or wallflowers she had once tended so carefully, year after year, in what had been her mother’s garden.
To her own surprise, as July moved onwards, she began to miss her mornings at school quite badly and with it came missing Patrick even more than usual. While Rose and Sam had the company of the other children in Ardtur, only a few of whom went to school with them, she had neither Daniel nor John to talk to, her only companion the intimidating pile of napkins accumulated in the last six weeks of school, together with occasional visits from Sophie, who felt similarly deprived of John’s presence and came regularly to ask if Hannah had any news of him, more recent than she had herself.
John, to Hannah’s surprise, proved to be a vigorous correspondent. She had not really expected to hear from him when he went back to his family in Galway, but his letters began to arrive regularly, clearly labelled with his address, and she found she enjoyed responding to his questions and requests for news.
He seemed to be keeping busy by helping his mother to whitewash their coastguard house at Kilkerrin, looking after his younger sisters and visiting both grandparents and cousins. He spoke warmly of his grandparents, still robust and running a large farm. He also mentioned visiting old men known as storytellers in the district.
John explained to her how he had talked to the storytellers and told them about Daniel’s stories. He said, he’d found that some of Daniel’s stories were entirely familiar to them, but others he’d mentioned were quite unknown.
In a subsequent letter, he then told her he’d once asked Daniel if he knew a story called The Two Bottles, which he’d heard when staying with his Cullen grandparents somewhat north of Galway town itself. Daniel had listened carefully to his account of it, but said he’d never heard the story himself. He’d said that he found some aspects of it quite unusual.
It was obvious to Hannah that John was intrigued by the whole topic, so she was not surprised when his next letter revealed that he’d been looking for other storytellers in the Galway area who also knew the tale of The Two Bottles. He said he proposed to write down all the versions of it that he could find, to see what differences there might be between them.
Hannah found she was increasingly looking forward to his reports. To begin with, she had been touched that he took the trouble to tell her what he was doing, but then, as the letters arrived with such regularity, she reflected that perhaps she was the only person he knew who took any interest whatever in what he thought or did.
She had always tried to encourage him if he seemed unsure of some new plan he had for the classroom and in her first replies she had done the same over the storytellers.
Sitting by the glowing embers of the fire on an overcast afternoon at the end of a period of miserable dampness at the beginning of August, she put down his most recent letter and reflected that there were different kinds of loneliness.
Despite the fact that John had a large and lively family, that didn’t mean he could share his thoughts with any of them, never mind his hopes or dreams. His mother appeared to be a gentle and kindly person, but so far in his regular letters he had never once mentioned his father.
She thought back to her own childhood, to her three sisters who always had time to listen to her, and her father, who was a man of few words, but had a way of asking her if she was ‘all right’. Often enough, when he thought she was not her usual self, he would summon up one of her sisters and then suddenly disappear to attend to some urgent task.
Perhaps she hadn’t appreciated how fortunate she had been that even the loss of her mother at such a young age had not impinged upon her because she had so much love and care all around her.
To her own surprise, she found tears welled up and dripped unheeded onto the close-written sheets she still held in her lap. She wiped them with the back of her hand, made sure there was no sign of the children returning from their play, and returned to reading John’s letter.
*
He’d begun by saying that as far as he could see, the old stories were being forgotten and more would disappear if and when some of these elderly storytellers died. He continued:
Just imagine, Hannah, how much we would lose, if Daniel were no longer with us. When school starts again, I’m going to begin writing down all Daniel’s stories. I’m wondering if I made a collection of them, together with the ones I’m finding here in Galway, if we could get them printed in a pamphlet, or a book. I know nothing about printing and I suspect it would cost a lot of money, which I haven’t got, but perhaps we could find a way. What do you think?
The pages that followed were on different paper and clearly had been written in haste. He’d included for her the beginning of the story he’d mentioned – The Two Bottles – and instead of getting up and starting to prepare the evening meal, she sat reading it, the flow of words and phrases calling up a man, not unlike Daniel, sitting by his fireside addressing friends and neighbours, telling it with all the gestures and flourishes she had so often observed.
There was
a man, a right sort of a man, with a farm of land and four or five cows. But he had bad luck and a wife and a big family, and one by one he had to sell the cows.
Finally, one evening he says to his wife: ‘There’s a fair in the town tomorrow and I think I’ll sell the cow an’ get us a bit of money for we’ve no food.’
‘Oh well,’ says the wife, ‘if you do that then we’ll have no milk for the children.’
But the man said that one was as bad as the other and he’d sell the cow.
Anyway, that night he set out after the family had gone to bed, and he was coming along to where there was a cutting in the road, like between two hills, when the cow took fright.
‘Oh, what ails you, woman dear?’ says he … and he looks up and there against the moon he sees the outline of a man.
And the man slides down the slope to the road beside him.
‘Good day, Mick,’ says he, calling him by his name.
‘Good day,’ says the other.
‘Are you going to the fair to sell the cow?’ says the man.
‘I am,’ says Mick.
‘How much would you be looking for her?’
‘Well, to tell you the truth,’ says Mick, ‘I’d be lookin’ a good price for her,’ and he tells him the truth: that it was the last cow and the family were hungry.
Families being hungry was a new experience for Hannah when she came to Ardtur, but she’d been married only three years, when, in 1838, the potatoes failed. After two miscarriages there were still only two of them, so she’d used more bread and porridge to feed Patrick and herself, and only bought potatoes when they were a reasonable price. There were plenty of potatoes available in the markets, imported from various countries, but some traders were charging prices that only the gentry could afford.
She’d been so thankful that Patrick had work that winter. A road was being built some miles away under a new scheme for improvements that had recently been agreed by Parliament. Patrick was young and fit, but there were others in Ardtur notable for the heavy work involved. Sadly pressed, some had to go to the new workhouse in Dunfanaghy. There, the families were split up at the entrance. Husbands and wives were parted, the men set to work breaking stones. The children too were parted, brothers from sisters, and sent to their separate quarters.
When her only cow became ill, Patrick’s Aunt Mary lived in fear that she too would have to go into the workhouse. Without her milk money she could not pay the rent or buy food for herself. Hannah and Patrick had been able to help her out. Mercifully, the cow recovered and a nephew sent her some dollars from Boston.
Hannah pushed away the memories of that failed harvest as they pressed back into her mind and took up John’s story once more.
‘Well,’ says the man, ‘I’ve no money on me, but I tell you what I’ll do. I’ve two bottles here, and I’ll give you those, and as long as you keep them whole and intact you’ll never want for anything.’
‘Ach now, my dear man,’ says Mick, ‘what good would your bottles be to me, when I’ve a family to feed?’
‘Well now,’ says the man, ‘if you sit yourself down I’ll give you a sample of what they can do.’
So Mick sits down, and the man puts the two bottles down and says, ‘Come on now, bottles, do your duty,’ and out come two waiters, one out of each bottle, and they lay a cloth and spread dishes and crockery and all that was needed for the grandest feast Mick has ever had.
Mick is afraid that there is some enchantment, and that this luck might not hold, but the man says it will be the same every time, so Mick gives him the cow and goes home.
When he goes home it still isn’t day and his wife is in bed, for she isn’t expecting him.
When she gets up she says, ‘Well, did you sell the cow?’
‘I did,’ says Mick.
‘Well, what did you get for her?’
‘Well, I don’t rightly know yet,’ says he, ‘but I’ll show you. Call up the children, and set them round the table, for they went to bed hungry.’
So she wakens the children and sets them down at the table half-asleep, and Mick sets down the two bottles and says: ‘Now, bottles, do your duty,’ and out pop the two waiters who set the table, and spread a feast such as the poor woman has never seen.
Afterwards when all is cleared away the woman says: ‘There’s some enchantment in it. Sure, you might wake up in the morning and find no trace of the bottles at all.’
But Mick says the money from the cow would have run done anyway so they were just as well off.
Hannah turned over the page and found that the hasty scribble was now replaced by John’s usual, clear handwriting.
This is what we might call Act 1. I’m afraid I haven’t time to copy out Act 2 and Act 3 just now, but I promise I will. What I wondered was whether we could get the children to turn this into a play, perform it in Irish and then work on it so they could perform it in English. What do you think, Hannah?
But what Hannah thought was not to emerge for quite some time. As she turned over the last sheet to see if there was anything more written above his habitual neat signature, she heard a step outside the door.
To her surprise, she saw it was Sophie whom she had visited earlier in the day. She held a rolled-up magazine in her hand and dropped down gratefully into the armchair by the fire when Hannah welcomed her.
‘I think I’m the bringer of bad news, but I’m not sure, for my eyes have been giving me trouble an’ the print is so small,’ she began, unrolling the magazine and pointing to an item on the front page.
‘Is it what I think it is?’ she asked anxiously, as Hannah scanned the minute print.
‘I’m afraid so, Sophie. They say it’s right across England and spreading fast. No sign of it here yet, but they seem to think it’s almost sure to come. It looks like we’re going to have the potato blight back again sometime in the next few weeks.’
Chapter 12
The weeks of a humid summer passed slowly. Hannah felt oppressed by the low cloud and the general dampness of the air. The weather had a strange feel about it, as if somehow everything was suspended, the clouds not moving, the clothes not drying, the fire itself sulking. Even the children, her own and the children who lived nearby, seemed burdened by the lack of movement, arriving back from their play for meals, or an afternoon mug of tea with little of their usual liveliness.
As time passed, Hannah admitted she was grateful for the chance to catch up on her consignment of napkins. She’d persuaded the draper to leave a second month’s supply for hemming, even though she’d done so little on the previous consignment, but she was in no doubt at all that if she defaulted at the end of August, the draper had plenty of women who badly needed the work she had done now for many years.
How she’d manage to make the time for her sewing when she went back to three mornings a week at school, she had no idea whatever.
She wasn’t the only one to feel oppressed by the weather. Sophie, the most equable of women, began complaining about a variety of pains and aches she had never mentioned before on her frequent visits and even the younger women with children in the nearby cottages spent more time in each other’s houses.
But, most surprising of all, Daniel, whom she visited one or two afternoons in the week, admitted to ‘feeling low’. He actually confessed to Hannah that he was finding it a struggle to keep up his storytelling in the evenings, even though he was surprised to find he was receiving more callers than usual.
It was the draper himself, arriving close to the end of the month and accepting her offer of tea and a piece of cake, who made the comment that led Hannah to ask herself if Daniel had sensed something that was affecting everyone.
‘Sure, ask any of the old people an’ they’ll tell you it’s this weather brings the blight,’ he said, stirring his tea vigorously. ‘An’ then once it starts, you’d need a long, dry spell, or hot weather, to put a stop to it, an’ sure what chance is there of that kinda weather in these parts? Did you never have it like
this where you come from? Galloway, isn’t it?’
This clinging humidity was not something she’d met on the farm, but then they were near the sea there and sheltered from the north and west. She remembered only golden summers and green fields. But perhaps distance lent enchantment and she was not being very accurate.
‘I certainly don’t remember it ever being like this for more than a day or two,’ she replied. ‘But then, my father reared sheep and cattle. He did grow some vegetables, but that was only for the family; it wasn’t to pay the rent.’
‘Unlike the poor folk in this godforsaken place,’ he said sharply. ‘Have ye heard there’s blight now over in Antrim and Down? They say it came in on ships, but once it’s in, it can spread in the air. The next thing it’ll be in Tyrone and Fermanagh,’ he said, as he gathered up the crumbs of his cake with a wet finger and finished them off. ‘Will I leave you the full quota or are you still teaching at the school?’ he asked, throwing on the cap he’d dropped to the floor when he pulled his chair up to the table.
‘Yes, I’ll see you get the full bale,’ she said, making up her mind immediately. ‘Some other things will just have to wait. If things are bad with the blight round here, then my husband probably won’t find any work when he comes back from Scotland.’
‘Aye. Ye’ve a head on your shoulders. He’s a lucky man,’ he added.
He laid two small brown envelopes on the table, picked up the two heavy bales of napkins as if they were small parcels and turned towards the door. ‘That was a great mug o’ tea. I’m beholden to ye,’ he said, as he raised a hand in farewell and disappeared down the steep slope to where he’d left the donkey and trap tethered to a bush on the edge of the main track.
*
Later that day, the children settled with their storybooks, reading to Sophie. She walked up to see Daniel. He greeted her warmly and then fell silent. His mood seemed even lower than it had been a couple of days earlier.