Storms wracked Ireland from coast to coast. It was as if Nature herself had joined Ireland’s enemies. The wind froze the rain that hit the ground as sleet. It grazed the hands and bit the face. It ripped up the stalks and shredded the plants that lay rotting on the long beds. The people watched and wept, drenched in despair.
The potato fields were as black as if they had been covered in tar. Families were deep in mud, pulling the mounds apart on their knees. They found nothing but stinking pulp. Women clawed their breasts and wept. Their men roared curses at the sky, threw themselves down and beat the ground with their fists.
What did it matter? Soon they would feel nothing. Not the wind, not the lash of rain, not the salt in their tears. What was there now to care about? Their sacred plots were lakes of decay, their hidden store of food diseased. Soon it would be the winter of dying. Habit and hope. Hope and habit. They fingered the beads of their rosaries and mouthed their Hail Marys.
The summer of great promise had given way to the autumn of dread. There was not a green potato field to be seen and in no man’s memory, nor in any of the stories that spanned grandfather to grandson, had there been such devastation and disbelief. And why? Had they not danced to the piper on the Eve of St John, confident of the coming harvest and the promise of a bursting crop? Had they not, as custom bid, lit their bonfires and carried hot coals along the boundaries of their fields to frighten off the evil spirits that would poison the ground? Yet the death spot was now spread across the leaves, brown and shrivelled, the last of their goodness sucked out.
‘It is God’s hand that is painting them dead,’ they wailed, ‘a biblical pestilence.’ ‘No!’ said the others. ‘It is the Devil’s fingermarks!’ Did it matter who was to blame? It was done and no miracle would undo it. For a second winter, the hungry would beg for charity and there would be precious little of that.
Soon a great silence, like the plague itself, spread across the country. Women stopped their complaining and men their cursing and children played no more. No dogs barked, no cocks crowed to start the day and no crows signalled its end. Hungry days became hungry weeks and they became months of famine. The lanes were black with silent funerals but no crooners followed the carts to recite lullabies for the dead. They were dropped into their graves without inquests or coffins, their deaths unrecorded, their stories untold. Hunger denied death its sorrow.
Panic travelled faster than the blight. People took to the roads as rumours spread. Was it true the government had opened its depot in Wexford and was giving away food? Was the Board of Works paying a shilling a day for labour on a new road in Kilkenny? Was there talk of a soup kitchen in Tralee serving free broth? Who could risk being left behind?
So many were on the roads. The whole country was in motion, the hungry following their noses on a journey that led them nowhere. There was no work or food in any direction and the doors of hope, like doors everywhere, had shut tight for the poor.
Five thousand beggars roamed the streets of Cork. They squatted by the workhouse gates waiting for the death cart to leave, ready to fight for the vacancy. They crouched by the bakers’ shops where the walls, warmed by the ovens, kept them from freezing to death. Such was the stench of death that fires were lit to purify the air. Dublin gentlemen went about their business in their curtained liveried coaches, turning their heads away from the beggar’s bowl and the misery congesting the streets. Yet there was not a tree-lined square, not a sweep of terraces, not an alley or gutter that was not massed with the helpless hungry. They stood by the railings of the great houses, waiting like starlings for the cook to throw scraps to them. They peered at the windows of the prosperous, saw the roaring fires in their hearths and the bright chandeliers in their splendid drawing rooms and they knew what they had always suspected. God belonged to the rich.
The fierce winds from the east had turned the season around. The grey skies dropped low and heavy and in that first week of December, the snow blizzards put an end to people’s wanderings. With a bellyful of potato mash and a sup of warm buttermilk a man could trot off to the North Pole and come back smiling. But when the buckle of his belt is scraping his spine and frost has cracked his lips, he can only reflect on his own absurdity, look for a space to settle and await his time.
The horrors were now being reported by those who could no longer turn their heads away from them. Crown servants, magistrates, priests, land agents, sea captains and even the Relief Commission’s own inspectors.
At a farm near Michelstown, County Cork, a land agent found a woman and her two children dead from starvation and half eaten by dogs. At Kenmare in Kerry, the priest had kicked open a door and found a man barely alive, lying on the bed with his dead wife and five children, rats eating an infant.
In Mayo, a man named John Connelly had been charged with theft. He pleaded with the magistrates for mercy. He said he had stolen bread to keep his family alive. They had been so hungry, he had cut off the flesh from the leg of his dead son to feed them. The plea seemed so outrageous that the magistrates ordered the boy’s body to be exhumed. And Connelly had been telling no lie.
Commander Caffyn of Her Majesty’s steamship sloop Scourge had sailed to the port of Schull to discharge a cargo of meal, a gift from the Quakers. He wrote in his log that in the town of eighteen thousand inhabitants, more than three quarters of them were walking skeletons and they had once been prosperous people. He wrote that a mass of bodies had been buried without coffins and lay only inches below the soil as the ground was too hard to dig and the people too weak to try. Bodies were being eaten by roaming dogs. He had shot two dogs. He ended:
There were more dogs than I had ammunition and so I was forced to leave them to their meals. I have been to many corners of this earth and seen much suffering and wretchedness among its many peoples. But never in my whole life have I seen such wholesale misery as this nor, God help me, may I ever be obliged to witness it again.
In the Killeries at Westport, County Mayo, a Revenue cutter, having just loaded sacks of corn, nearly capsized in port with the weight of the starving people who clambered aboard, scratching the decks in search of loose grain. The captain was forced to order his crew to throw them overboard – men, women and children – for fear his boat would turn turtle and be lost. He wrote:
Some of the starving wretches were strong enough to reach the shore but some, still alive, were too weak and drifted out to sea. What was I to do? Tell me, how do I face my Maker when my time comes?
Nicholas Cummins, a respected magistrate in Cork, sent a letter to the Duke of Wellington and to The Times of London, pleading for help.
I write this as an example of what is happening along the entire line of this southern coast. I went to Skibbereen and being aware that I should have to witness scenes of frightful hunger, I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry. I entered hovels. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead. I approached with horror and found they were alive, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. Within a few minutes I was surrounded by hundreds of such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. No man should be obliged to witness this. What man who sanctions it can face his Maker?
All these reports, one by one, found their way to the desk of Sir William Macaulay, representing a catalogue of horrors that Ireland, in all its centuries of suffering, had never known before. He sat fingering two letters he had just received, one from Whitehall, the other from Captain Wynne, one of the Commission’s own officers at Ennis in County Clare.
He placed the letters side by side and, after a long pause and for the first time since his arrival in Ireland, there were tears in his eyes, tears of pity, tears of anger, tears of shame and disgust. Captain Wynne had written:
Sir, the people are starving here, as yet peaceably. The snow is deep, the roads, such as they are, are blocked and no one has seen food for a month and more, not a single shred. I do not know how they survive. I do not know how much lon
ger they will.
Today I went through the parish and although I consider myself not a man easily moved, I am not a match for this. Women and children are in the turnip fields, crowds of them, scattered like a flock of crows, clawing at the frozen ground with their bare hands, fighting each other, even each other’s children, so as to feed their own. And in silence, such silence as to make a man believe he is watching phantoms in a dream. Sir, they are too exhausted even to make a noise. That terrible, terrible silence, I shall never forget. No pen of mine can adequately describe it. For pity’s sake, help them.
Then Sir William picked up that morning’s communiqué from Sir Charles Trevelyan and read it out loud as he had a dozen times already:
The tide of Irish distress seems now to have overflowed the barriers we opposed to it. You may ask what more we can do. I suggest we cannot do more. The rest we must leave to God. The lamentable loss of life among the Irish lower classes and the impotent poor is to be regretted but we must not forget there are principles to be kept in view. If food is scarce, then a smaller quantity must be made to last longer. Harsh as it may seem to some, I must insist that their misery and distress run their course.
Sir William wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. That week he had buried Martineau and, with him gone, impotence and despair were coursing through him. He left his desk and did what he was now in the habit of doing often. He went to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a large tumbler of whiskey and then another and swallowed them both in one gulp. He would have another one or two at lunchtime and another two or three at dinner before his claret and his port. How else, he asked himself out loud, was he expected to cope?
He felt betrayed, degraded. What was it he had been promised two years ago standing in Trevelyan’s Whitehall office? A short stay in Ireland, home by late summer, a brief excursion to this foreign land to sort out and settle an aggravating problem, the shortage of potatoes. How very minor it had seemed to him then, how trivial, how temporary, such a lesser thing in a lifetime spent witnessing great events. Was he not the senior commissariat officer at Waterloo, personally commended by Wellington himself? Had he not fought the Boers with Baden-Powell and, against all the odds, helped keep Mafeking alive? Had he not knelt before Queen Victoria and felt her sword on his shoulder as he was knighted for his services to her Empire?
He felt heavy with the exhaustion that comes with defeat, for he knew he was close to losing. His drinking provided hours of respite, long evenings of drunken oblivion. But with the dawn, he woke to utter despair. Without Martineau’s punctuality and discipline, he now slept longer in his bed. One morning he summoned his clerk to his bedroom and dictated a short letter to Trevelyan.
Sir, I am exhausted. I feel there is a fever upon me. I cannot write more as I am an invalid today and intend to remain quiet for some time yet to regain my health.
Within a week, Sir William received his master’s curt reply:
I am somewhat alarmed, indeed aggravated, to have received your note. I hope to hear tomorrow that you have got rid of your indisposition. We have no time to be ill nowadays.
The following month, August 1847, Trevelyan, citing tiredness from overwork, went on holiday with his wife and son, to France.
Tom Keegan was saddened and disappointed with himself. He had always been a faithful Catholic and in all his eighty-four years he had never once forgotten his prayers at the start and end of each day. He had always tried to think good thoughts and on occasions when he failed, every bad thought was followed by a brief Hail Mary and every curse by a solemn Novena. He had never questioned his faith, not even on the day God took away his wife and gave him a son in her place. God had been his companion as well as his master in an otherwise lonely life and if He had chosen to ignore the old man’s requests, as He did more often than not, then that was the Almighty’s prerogative. He was comforted by the Holy Pledge, that when a good man dies there is a place for him in heaven. He would reflect that if life with God had not always been easy, how much more dreadful might it have been without Him?
He held his hands over his eyes to shield them from the rain. He could see only a yard or so in front of him as he stumbled in the mud, feeling for the path with his toes, touching familiar corners of rock, which served to guide him.
‘God is salvation!’ He shouted it to the wind and again to the black sky as the sharp rods of rain stung his eyes. ‘God is salvation!’ He shouted it again and again as he struggled up the mountain’s slippery slope.
That morning, while he was working in his garden, talking to his plants as if they were a class of schoolchildren, a stranger had come by. He could not see who it was and he did not recognise the voice, for it was no one local. But the man told him that the blight was coming from over the hills and that some fields in Cork and Kerry were already black. ‘Get your praties out of the ground,’ he had said. ‘Get them out while the air is still fresh, for tomorrow you will smell it coming and the next day it will be too late.’
Although Tom Keegan did not know the voice, he believed its warning, for if a stranger brings bad news, it is seldom wrong. So he left his herb patch, brought a basket from the kitchen and went down on his knees to dig away the soft earth with his hands and pull the little tubers from their mother stems. He would then wash them clean and place them on straw in the dark dry loft over his bed, beyond the blight’s reach.
He had not been on the ground for more than a few minutes when it began to rain, gently at first so that he welcomed it, washing away the sweat on his brow and cooling his aching muscles. But then the sky broke open and, through the middle of it, the rain came down in spiteful, painful bolts. He bent lower, feeling for his crop, pushing the earth aside. He knew every inch and ounce of it. He had spent a lifetime nurturing, feeding, turning, hoeing, weeding, every grain sifted through his loving fingers, earth so familiar it was part of him. Now suddenly it was a bog, alien and hostile, and he was frightened. He tried to stand but the cold knocked him to his knees again. He fell sideways and there was mud in his mouth. He spat it out and, cursing the sky and every living thing, he crawled back to the cottage door and lay exhausted on the floor by the hearth.
It was an hour or more before he felt strong enough to kneel. He reached up, took the rosary from its peg on the chimney breast and, resting his elbows on the stool, began to pray. When he had finished, he waited and listened. He heard only the storm, so he whispered another prayer and waited again. But the thunder was even nearer and louder and the white flashes of lightning only grew brighter and more terrifying.
He ended his prayers, pulled himself up and rested against the chimney breast. He nodded. It was as he had always feared, something he had secretly suspected ever since he was a child. No one was listening.
At that moment Tom Keegan realised he had spent his long life paying homage to someone who was not there. Painfully, slowly, he straightened himself and unhooked the tiny locket of Mary’s hair from its peg, kissed it, wrapped it in his handkerchief and put it into his waistcoat pocket. Then, without bothering to put on his coat or cap, he went out into the storm and to the mountain path. He needed only his memory to guide him.
He climbed slowly, edging himself forward, until at last he came to a hollow where the mountain spring fed into a clear shallow pond. Here the wind seemed to him barely a whisper and the rain no more than a soft, warm and gentle drizzle. At the pond’s edge was an old twisted hawthorn covered in a mass of mistletoe and to its right a rock so smooth and straight it might have been hewn by a mason. By its side was the Cairn Beag, a small mound of stones he had built many years before as atonement to his Fairy King. He pulled the locket from his pocket and placed it on top of the mound. Then he turned slowly in a circle and then half a circle again so that when he stopped he was facing the pond.
He saw a mist, a delicate shimmering gauze caught in soft white light spread across its centre, changing its contours as the breeze caught it. With his hand on the rock to steady himself, the old man we
nt down on one knee and spoke to the Fairy King.
‘Sláinte leat and forgive me, Rí na Sideog. My bones are crippled with the cold and the pain of old age, as if you didn’t already know. I have a gift for you here, the most precious thing I have left, taken from the most precious person I ever knew. It is yours to take, or for her if she is with you.
‘You will have seen what is happening down there, so you’ll know why I have come. There is no one else I can turn to for help. Maybe it is too late. I think it is. Do you think it is?’
Still kneeling, he waited for an answer. The breeze dipped into the hollow, rippling the pond. The mist stretched out a finger beyond the edge of it, curled itself around the hawthorn tree and enveloped the nests of mistletoe.
The old man knew what the Fairy King was telling him.
‘It will cover everything then? Not a field spared? Not one of us saved? No one? Tell me, Rí na Sideog. No one?’
There was a sound, like the puff of distant bellows. The mist flowed out and spread itself, completely enveloping the water beneath it. The old man nodded again, understanding. He waited until he was sure his audience was over, cupped his face in his hands and began to weep. When the tears stopped he rested his shoulder against the rock and stood again. He kissed the locket for the last time, bowed to the mist and the Fairy King that sat forever within it and began his journey back down the mountainside.
Not a mile away, on a lane that led to the sea, a hundred people stood silently by the church of St Patrick. For two hours they had waited in the rain for the priest but what else were they to do? He arrived, without apology, just as the storm was directly overhead, so close there was no counting between the lightning and the claps of thunder. They thought it an omen.
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