by Tim Robinson
I learned some refinements of the art that day: how to pierce the scraw with a little stab of the spade before folding it over, exactly at the right point for the potato to grow up through the slit, “to give it a chance, like!,” and how to bevel the edge of the ridge with quick pats and rubs of the back of the spade so that the rain would run off it. In a nearby field a man was ridging a field for mangolds to feed his cow next winter. His technique was quite different; the bare sandy soil, in which some crop had been grown the previous year, had already been shaped into long thin banks about four feet apart—Séamaisín said they were called uaille, but I cannot identify the word in the dictionaries—and seaweed had been laid in the spaces between them. Now he was crouched like a sprinter, using the full length of the spade-handle at a shallow angle, rapidly scooping soil out of the middle of a bank to build up a ridge on the seaweed beside it; the sharp crests of soil he left on either side of the bank became the firm sides of the ridges to right and left of it. However Séamaisín did not encourage my observation of this rival, and recalled me to our own ridges. “Keep your eye on the seed!” he cried, whenever my furrow strayed from the rectilinear. The ground was extremely shallow—in fact it was clear that the principal reason for ridging in Aran is to double up the depth—and I became scrupulous about prizing the last spoonful of soil off the bedrock exposed in the trench. Two pied wagtails flew into the field and fought furiously on the ridges. One by one Séamaisín and I forged the great brown ingots of earth.
The early days of April were blustery and spiteful; Laetheanta na Bó Riabhaí, the days of the brindled cow, Séamaisín called them. (The old cow was congratulating herself on having survived the winter, but cruel April overheard her and borrowed a few days from March to finish her off.) I joined Séamaisín for intermittent spells on the ridges, but it was the middle of the month by the time we completed the garden in the Plains and returned to Buaile Phatsa. And there, one late afternoon hour that had unexpectedly been wafted up from the south while we were quincunxing the ridges with spuds, the cuckoo called, two notes as exotic in grey Aran as sugared almonds: pink; blue. Old Nora Fleming, passing down the road, tall and slim in her long black shawl, paused on hearing the first cuckoo for the eighty-third time in her life, lifted her beautiful grey face and murmured to us, “I suppose it’s the same one comes every year.” Séamaisín glanced sideways at me to see if I appreciated the antiquated unreason of this, and turned the peak of his cap to the rear to shield his neck from the sun. M came up the road and took a photograph of us at work, overruling his protests at being recorded looking “two hundred years behind the times.” Cuckoo-farmers, but disdainful of her obsolete cuckoo-calendrical jokes, we went on jabbing up-to-dates into the earth.
The final act of the planting season is the “trenching” of the potatoes when they begin to show above the ground, that is, throwing the soil that has washed down into the trenches up onto the ridges again. This also gives an opportunity of perfecting the ridges for perfection’s sake. My part in the task was to work along each trench, prizing out stones and loosening the soil around and under them. Séamaisín followed me, shooting spadefuls of my scanty winnings in broad fans evenly across the ridge or in soft packets to plump out slight hollows, and now and again with a quick to-and-fro movement flicking a dab onto the rim and licking it into the bevel with the back of his blade. Reading between the lines of the ridges I discovered again the precious contradictions of rock and earth. And during that long sunny day with the cuckoo calling, Séamaisín passed on lots of life-wisdom, some of which made my heart pale: for instance, how to clean a deep gash by pouring milk on it and letting the dog lick it; and how to cut a short length of elderberry-twig, make a notch round it near either end, split it lengthways, take out the pith and fill each half with a mixture of “bluestone” or copper sulphate and olive oil, fix them together again by a bit of twine round the notch at one end, like a clothes-peg, then peg it round the bull calf’s scrotum above the stone and tie the other ends together, so that the “strings” are burned through and the animal castrated by gentle degrees. This useful tip led us into a discussion of breeding and heredity. Did I think ducks ever bred with seagulls? He had two peculiarly thin white ducks—they had waddled in and out of the field we were working in several times during the day—and recently some tourists had asked him what sort they were; he had said there was a bit of the seagull in them, and they had believed him! “That was good enough for them!” he cried, weak with laughter, pillowing his face in his arms on the wall. Then, following an obscure chain of associations, “Do you think will they ever get rid of the Royal Family?” When I answered that I hoped so, he laughed again, but uneasily; he seemed to feel that this was rather daring. We started to hack out the briars that were already stretching towards the ridges from the rough margins of the garden. As he wielded his spade he asked me if monkeys ever bred with apes, because he had heard that “the man” came from a monkey and an ape. He speared his spade vertically into the earth and lent on it to hear my exposé of Darwinism. He had once seen a monkey, he told me; the Guinnesses’ yacht had moored in Port Mhuirbhigh when he was a lad, and he was climbed out of his currach onto the jetty when he heard a noise, “mmm, mmm,” and saw this thing in the yacht, holding its little paws up; he had thought it looked like a person. But if that was true about the monkey and the ape, what about Adam and Eve and the Earthly Paradise? As I fumbled among different orders of truth, scientific and mythic, his attention wandered and he began to recite scraps of school-learning and folklore: “Palestine is a small country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean,” and something about the dog’s nose being cold because it was stuck out of a window of the Ark for forty days and forty nights; until we both came to a baffled halt and stood looking at each other in absolute mutual incomprehension. Then he seized his spade and said, “Well, whatever about religion, we’ve got to get out the briars!”—which Voltairean flash reignited our energies and set us slicing through the knotted roots again. We worked away, caps reversed, while the cuckoo called and called and called, dinning its prehistoric, bang up-to-date, binary logic into our brains.
BLACK HARVEST
The logic of the cuckoo is, of course, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” But even in the best of times this is simplistic, and since the cuckoo sang as blithely as ever during those years of “distress” that disfigured almost every decade of the last century, it can also be heard as a black joke. The potato is vulnerable to drought and to blight; it needs care in cultivation and in storage. “Cleaning,” i.e. weeding, the gardens is a task that bows the back and cramps the mind into vegetable hatreds: scutch grass, that breaks at the nodes when you pull it and regenerates from the smallest remainder (“I hate scutch grass!” I hear Mícheál cry); shepherd’s purse that flowers and seeds itself a thousandfold during a few days’ inattention; docks with great taproots that cannot be dragged out without cracking the ridges. Water is a problem on Aran; it used to be said that the potatoes would be good if they got rain on St. Johns’ Day and St. Macdara’s Day, that is June the 24th and July the 16th; but frequently they did not. Potatoes are often stored in the field where they have been harvested; they are heaped into a low mound, a layer of bracken or withered potato stalks over them, and covered in soil to make a maolán or “clamp.” This protects them from rain and frost, but one can still be disappointed on opening it up, for, as Mícheál explained to me, the rats are “cute” enough to leave no sign on the outside of the clamp to say that they are inside it, building nests and with lots to eat. Also, potatoes that looked healthy enough on being clamped might turn out to have been infected with the blight, and to be melting away.
Potato blight threatens on muggy days in July and August, when the spore of Phytophthora infestans, the fungus that causes it, spreads rapidly. Nowadays official blight warnings and insistent radio advertisements for proprietary fungicides remind us to spray the crop several times in the summer months. Until recently the Aran farmer wou
ld make up a solution of copper sulphate, and spatter it onto the leaves with an old paint brush or, in earlier days, a bundle of heather. Neglect such precautions, and the spore may wash down from the leaves into the ground and affect the tubers, tinging them with an inward-speading darkness. The effect of a severe infestation is vile. I remember the face of an Inis Meáin farmer who had just discovered that there was nothing in his ridges but sacs of black slime. One’s instinctive repulsion is doubled by a historically transmitted shudder. The potato famine of 1845–49 left a soft blackness of despair at the heart of rural Ireland, which I think will not be dispelled by all the grants in Europe.
The blight organism followed the potato itself from the Americas, with a delay of two-and-a-half centuries. During that period the potato had become a staple of the poor throughout much of northern Europe, but nowhere else had they been forced into such a dependence on the one foodstuff as in Ireland. A vast population growth and an unprecedented degree of exploitation had been made possible by the fact that a family could feed themselves almost totally by cultivation of a small potato-patch, liberating all the rest of their time, energy and land for the production of rent. The amount of potato the farm labourer forced down himself, when he could get it, was formidable; one reads of a father’s advice to his son on ensuring his share of the midday meal: have a potato in each cheek, one in each fist, two more at the back of your two fists, and your two eyes stuck into two others in the basket. “We’ll have the potatoes again at seven,” said the old lady who looked after me in Inis Meáin on my first visit, having served me with bacon and cabbage at midday; to her, na fataí, the potatoes, were still synonymous with food. The variety of potato most widely planted in Ireland in the years before the Famine, the “Lumper,” was very productive but watery and disease-prone; again one reads of landlords’ agents who would raise the rent of a tenant seen growing a better quality of potato. Thus the two million or more acres of potatoes planted in Ireland in the spring of 1845 constituted, in the words of one authority, “a vast congested potato slum, ripe for devastation by epidemic disease.”
Cruelly, the immediate cause of the disaster was a well-meaning attempt to remedy the instability of the situation. The Belgian government was conducting field-trials of various newly imported strains of potato to find one resistant to another disease, dry rot; the blight spores seem to have come in with these, either from Mexico or the central Andes region. In June the disease was noted in Flanders, by August growers in south-east England were prophesying a calamity for the poor, and by September the plague had reached Ireland. Over the next few years a million people died of starvation or fever, and more than a million fled the ruined country.
In Connemara, any enquiry into local lore will bring you to the famine-grave in the bushes behind the ruined cabin or among the rocks of the seashore. Such a thing has never happened to me in Aran. Official reports and oral tradition both indicate that there was perhaps only one death from starvation in the islands, that of a woman in Cill Rónáin. The blight was less severe here, and although the fishing was limited by the lack of suitable boats and nets, there was always shore-food—winkles, sea-urchins, a few sorts of edible seaweed—for those who conserved the strength to gather it. Nevertheless there was undoubtedly severe want; in the spring of 1846 Indian meal was distributed from the coastguard station, and the local relief committee reported that three hundred and forty people lacked food and fuel and were too weak to undertake cultivation. But island memory hardly distinguishes between this period and the other spells of recurrent tribulation of that century, so far as concerns its own suffering. The sufferings of Connemara were made vivid to Aran, however, by the number of refugees who came across the channel, lived in little hollows of the inland cliffs and worked unpaid for anyone who could afford to feed them, and most of whom were eventually forced by the bailiffs to return to their own deathly shores, lest they become an expense to the parish or the landlord. Some Aran tenants were persuaded to let their Connemara labourers go, by the threat of having their potato-patches taken from them (but Mícheál tells me that the bailiffs did not trouble the blacksmith of Oatquarter about the people he was harbouring, because they got a better service from him than from his rival in Cill Rónáin). Also there was forceful resistance to this sentence of repatriation; one bailiff came riding home on his donkey, dead, apparently throttled by some fiddlers and other musicians from Connemara.
But even in those lowest years, the insufficient and undependable crop of human kindness sometimes reached fruition, as the following scene from oral history shows. I leave the word to the teller, old Seán Gillan of Oatquarter.
When the Great Hunger was ravaging the country—it must have been in about 1846—things weren’t too bad in Árainn. Of course the odd stranger came in and lots of stories with them about the bad state of people outside. But not a single person died here, of hunger at any rate. Plenty of other things killed them. But the blight didn’t come here. And isn’t it an odd thing that the gardens nearest the sea were the soundest. Dónall Mhicil noticed this, and that year he sowed potatoes in bits of land he had all the way from Corrúch shore west to An Duirling Bhán. Patches here and there, only four or five ridges in each, perhaps, but all the same he had the most potatoes in this village or in the island if it comes to that. There wasn’t so much as one rotten potato among them. Fine healthy potatoes. You could say everyone in the village had good enough potatoes that year.
Did you ever hear tell of the Bideachaí? An amazing pair, always outside, slaving from morning to night, cutting seaweed, picking winkles, manuring the ground, fishing, reaping, sowing, reclaiming land. The Bideachaí had a mare, a big black mare. But the two of them were no size at all. Little men, stumpy, you’d say. They were strong, wiry, healthy, but they were short. And the mare was big. They used to have problems with her on the shore and in the garden. They had a lump of stone to stand on when they were topping a load of seaweed or throwing the rope over the load. You wouldn’t know for the life of you why they bought such a big horse. But that’s what they had when they were bringing the potatoes home from the garden out in the end of October. They were down there in the garden, with a straddle on the horse and two heaped-up baskets on the ground by the potato-clamps. There’s great weight in a basket of potatoes, as anyone knows who’s handled one, and they couldn’t work out how they were going to hang them on the straddle. They would have been able to put one of them up between them of course, but then one man would have to stay and take the weight of it while the other basket was being put up on the other side, and neither of them was strong enough to lift a basket by himself. It would be awkward to empty out the baskets and then fill them on the straddle. But while they were discussing the question this stranger came by from the west. He’d come in at Port Mhuirbhigh. He said “God bless the work!” and stopped to look in over the wall. One of the men inside asked him if he’d mind coming and taking the weight of a basket while they lifted the other one. In through the gap with him—the gap was knocked. “Let you two lift that one while I stay on this side,” he said. The two men thought he meant that he would lift the basket on his side with one of them when they had got the other one up. “What peg shall I put it on?” he asked. “The one nearest you,” said they. They hung their basket on the pegs of the straddle. One of them stayed under it. The other ran round the back of the horse to lift the other basket with the stranger. My God! Hadn’t my man got the basket up! A grip on the rim of the basket between finger and thumb of each hand, one heft and up it was! You know yourself what a feat that was. The little man just stood there with his mouth open, gulping with amazement. “Do you think I could get a couple of week’s work around here?” asked the stranger. Perhaps he thought that some help was what the two men needed. They told him that Dónall had sowed a lot of potatoes and that it was almost certain he’d need help. Everyone in the area heard about that basket.
My man was picking potatoes for Dónall for three weeks. I don’t kno
w what agreement they came to between them, but no doubt they made some agreement. It was the Hunger that had driven him in, and it was well-deserved luck for Dónall. He was well fed at Dónall’s and he recovered well. He was strong, powerful, with a great capacity for work. Ribs like a boat, and two shoulders on him like a rowingboat. Later on they found out he was a brother of Big Seán Thaidhg who was famous around Camas and such places. There’s a big stone down there in the ravine by that boreen at Diarmaid and Gráinne’s bed. It’s still to be seen. Two hundredweight in it if there’s a pound. Well, that stone was well out on the path at that time. It was awkward if you had a load to bring up on a horse or a donkey. You had to take your hand off the load or the creel, and it’s many a load went under a horse’s belly there. My man noticed this stone, and he said to Dónall that it would be as well to throw it out of the way. He was on horseback and Dónall was riding pillion. Dónall said he wouldn’t mind lifting it out of the way with him. “Don’t you bother getting down,” said my man, and he grabbed the stone between his two hands and lifted it clean off the ground and dropped it four feet from the path. It’s there in the ravine still, with a bit out of it that flew into the air when it fell. There was force in that lad!
When the potatoes had been picked and brought in, the big fellow was waiting for a boat to take him home. Out in November a boat came into Port Mhuirbhigh for the night, and it was to go out the next morning. Dónall said goodbye when he went out that morning, thinking that my man would have taken himself off by the time he got home. Probably Dónall hurried with whatever he was doing outside, for he was on his way home quite early. He was coming up across Creig na Corach when he noticed someone up by the well looking under a thornbush. That was a queer thing! Up he went. Who was it but my man from outside! He was only wearing one pair of pants. The men used to wear two pairs of pants, white homespun and grey tweed, at that time. He’d taken one pair off and he was filling them with potatoes. He’d tied each leg with a bit of straw rope. He’d been hiding the potatoes there, at night probably, so that he could take them home. No doubt he got a shock when Dónall came on him—but really Dónall got a worse one. “My poor fellow,” said he, “It’s funny you didn’t ask me for them! They would have been yours and welcome. Throw those away now, and come with me.” Well, the end of the story was that they filled two big baskets with potatoes in Dónall’s little house. Then they filled two more baskets, and each of them overflowing. The Bideachaí gave them their own horse and they took the load west to Port Mhuirbhigh.