by Maggie Wadey
I have already seen some official records: my grand-father’s birth and his marriage, both entered in the Borrisokane Parish records, but these records still seemed very much in the realm of the human. For one thing, they were in handwriting – almost illegible copperplate writing in faded brown ink – in leather-bound books kept locked in a safe in a corner of the parish priest’s study. It was my landlord, Sean Egan, who, seeing my distracted air and the pile of books growing on my table, suggested I consult the local priest. It was perhaps the obvious thing to do but it wouldn’t have occurred to me as permissible, and I didn’t take the suggestion lightly: I am a good deal more used to TV producers and librarians than I am to Catholic priests.
Father O’Halloran was a big man in the prime of life. The black skirts of his cassock swung just short of his ankles and his bare bony feet were thrust into a pair of unlaced trainers. I had arrived for our two o’clock appointment punctually though rather hot and untidy from clambering over Knigh Hill. Father O’Halloran, pale but patently inexhaustible, had just returned from a funeral. He took me into the little kitchen of his modern bungalow, one in a row of three grey bungalows standing in a cul-de-sac beside the new (c.1973) Catholic St Peter and Paul Church. A small, narrow kitchen table covered in cream-coloured American cloth, two hard little plastic chairs, and a used teabag drying like a tiny ginger scalp on the edge of the sink for further use. I wondered what to say if Father O’Halloran offered me a cup of tea, but he didn’t. Beside the window a pair of formal black shoes were propped up to air, their tongues lolling. A little graveside earth clung to their soles. We both looked at them but nothing was said and Father O’Halloran did not move them. A small print of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks hung on the wall behind his head.
The man I now sat down opposite had a remarkable physical mannerism: a stare was repeatedly followed by a pause during which the eyes slid away. I recognised it as a power ploy, conscious or not, I couldn’t decide. I’d seen it used by TV producers. But in Father O’Halloran there was no suggestion of the flesh, of indulgence in long lunches and expensive wine. Ironically, this Catholic priest brought to mind an image of the Puritan fathers. Where my landlord was liquid, charming, volatile, Father O’Halloran was stony, with solid flesh and veiled eyes – yet, different as they were, both were evasive. And I was shocked to experience the almost sexual charge of masculine authority in the relationship between a priest and his flock. I’m not speaking of the flesh, certainly not in the case of this man whose human powers were austere as granite, endowing him with the moral, physical and intellectual authority of the alpha male. Moses coming down from the mountain.
The parish record books lay, closed, on the table before us. From a court behind the church came the cries of boys playing basketball. The sun came and went, pulsing across the wall of the neighbouring bungalow. I had asked to see records for the birth of John Kavanagh in, I guessed, around 1870, and for his marriage to Kate Buckley maybe thirty or so years later. Father O’Halloran remarked that people frequently come to him with only the vaguest of research dates and he turns them away. He could spend his life, he said, going through the parish records on behalf of fourth-generation Americans with a passing interest in finding out about Auntie Mary. I sympathised. I took comfort in the fact that at least I’m not American. I’m English. But, in Tipperary, is that an advantage? The records are set out with the year written at the top of the page and beneath that the most basic of information: the month, the name, the place of baptism or marriage and the names of parents and sponsors. Father O’Halloran slowly turned the pages, working his way through the years from 1865, running one pale square finger down the margin.
And there it was: 1869, November 20th, John Kavanagh, born in the parish of Borrisokane. Four sisters and one younger brother were recorded here as well. The ease with which the task had been dispatched brought an almost palpable warmth into the room. Father O’Haloran relaxed. He turned the book around for me to linger over the record. I offered a contribution to the church. Father O’Haloran’s pale brow creased in disapproval and gently he pushed my hand away. ‘Now don’t give out that you’re a millionaire,’ he said, with his first smile. He suggested that twenty euros would be appropriate. Our conversation moved on to his own history: ten years serving the Irish community in Cricklewood – where he co-founded the Cricklewood Racial Society (‘It was still all right to make anti-Irish jokes in Cricklewood in the eighties,’ he remarked. ‘And everywhere else,’ I added, speaking from my own experience.) – were followed by ten years in the slums of Chicago. Something had been explained. I was impressed, but not surprised. The only question was, if Cricklewood and Chicago, why Borrisokane? It was not a question I felt able to ask.
In the second record book we found the marriage of John Kavanagh to Katherine [Kate] Buckley on October 15th, 1899, here in Borrisokane. Their names are recorded in an elegant but fading hand. My grandparents must have spoken, the registrar must have heard their voices and written down dates, places, their names: John and Katherine, names associated with saints and with ancestors and with the baptism of children yet to come; dates which are associated with the unspoken act of conception; places which are no longer there. So, here is the proof that my grandfather got what he wanted. Everything is in order, and John and Kate are about to set out to make their life together. My mother is on her way.
Seeing what little I know of my grandparents’ story confirmed in this way elated me. But sitting waiting in the lobby of the registrar in Nenagh I almost lose my nerve – what am I doing here sniffing things out, digging things up, making off with them like a fox with a dead chicken in its mouth? Then the hatch opens and I am called.
The registrar’s face is as sweet as her voice. As we exchange a few pleasantries her dark eyes rest on my face and I’m very aware of my English voice. When she places the certificates in front of me there’s a gentle tentativeness in her manner as if anxious that what is about to be revealed will distress me. I read that my grandmother, Kate, died in March 1944, at Knigh, her condition: married; her age last birthday: sixty-six; the causes of death are named as anaemia, bronchitis and cardiac failure. My grandfather died in January 1945, at Knigh, his condition: widower; his age last birthday: seventy; and the causes of death: bronchitis and cardiac failure. I notice John Kavanagh died only ten months after his wife. His name is spelt with a ‘C’ rather than a ‘K’. The age given for him is incorrect. In 1945 my grandfather would have been seventy-six. And his profession is given as ‘herd’. At this, my brain goes numb. Gently the registrar suggests that ‘herd’ means ‘a herder of cattle’.
I nod and turn to my mother’s birth certificate. Date of birth: July 18th, 1911. Four years earlier than she had admitted. Place of birth: Clashnevin. I am disorientated again. I never heard my mother speak of anywhere except Knigh. Next to ‘Signature of Informant’ is written the name John Cavanagh, and next to that, his mark, ‘X’.
My grandfather was illiterate.
2
When he was eight years old my great-grandfather, Patrick Kavanagh, came to Tipperary from County Mayo riding on his Da, Thomas’s, shoulders. This Gaelic-speaking child was small for his age and light as a feather from habitual want of food, in spite of which he would be expected to work alongside other boys and adults in the potato fields. The boy could pick stones, he could carry. His Da was a devil with a spade: Thomas Kavanagh could dig a trench and throw up a ‘lazy’ bed in half the time it took the next man. ‘Lazy’ is a misnomer since the raised beds were dug by hand in the most hostile terrain, and Thomas was rightly proud of his skill and his strength. A man who knows what he’s doing can dig a lazy bed out into the bog or up a mountainside where a plough could not go. It could give a better return than the plough. But nevermind a man’s strength or skill, if the weather turns against him he’ll be in difficulty.
Thomas Kavanagh was a Tipperary man who had followed a pretty face from the fair at Portumna back to Mayo, too dazzled by the west
ern sun to notice the sly glint in her big black eyes. Now, in the autumn of 1845, Thomas was back, one of ever-increasing numbers of men coming east to look for work, driven by the hunger and privation of the rocky western region. When the Bishop of Kildare had been asked in the 1830s what was the state of the population in the west he replied, ‘The people are perishing as usual.’ Desperate enough to undercut the locals, the men from Mayo were willing to work for 4d a day instead of 5d. Not surprisingly, they were sometimes driven violently out of the county.
Violence was something of a Tipperary specialty. In the early nineteenth century it was described as ‘the most crime-ridden county in Ireland, its very name conjuring up crimes innumerable and of the darkest dye’. In a pamphlet published in 1842 a magistrate of the county court claimed that ‘many of the outrages committed in Tipperary are so heinous in their nature, so marked by cruelty, atrocity and barbarity as to equal if not excel those of the most savage nations on earth, excepting only the absence of cannibalism’. However that may be, the outrages of 1845 were provoked by a very particular set of circumstances.
In October of that year, storms of wind and rain alternated with periods of ominous stillness. Dogs barked for no reason, birds fell silent, and people were struck dumb with superstitious fear. Ferocity of competition amongst the poor for land had meant that, for generations, the plot most commonly rented was the notorious quarter ground; that is to say, a mere quarter of an acre. Too small to sustain a cow, these plots were turned over entirely to the potato: Red Americans, Ash-Leaf kidneys, English Reds, Cups and, most common of all, the watery Lumpers. By the 1800s, it had become almost the only foodstuff amongst the poor, and the chief reason for this was that from just one acre – should you be lucky enough to have so much – you could support a family of six. On average, the adult male labourer ate up to thirteen pounds of potatoes and four pints of buttermilk a day. The leftovers went to the pigs.
Looked at from a woman’s point of view, this meant if you had a husband, six children and your mother-in-law living with you, you had to scrub and boil around fifty to sixty pounds of potatoes every day. On the other hand, scrubbing and boiling potatoes required no specialist skills and, eaten in the quantities described, it provided a tolerably healthy diet. The Irish were strong and their infant mortality rate low. Imagine your own children and think how easy it could be. A belly full of fresh, hot potatoes, flavoured with mustard seed or buttermilk, and then back out into the open air, filling your lungs with it, with the soft rain on your face, and berries in the hedge for afters. This was the bounty of Tipperary that Thomas Kavanagh remembered from his own youth.
The trouble with growing your own potatoes was twofold. Firstly, Ireland’s climate, particularly in the west with its perpetual light rain and mild breezes, is ideal for the spread of blight. The years 1845 and ’46 were exceptionally wet. Secondly – and this is trouble of a different kind – the high cost of fertiliser. The cheapest way round this was to use ash got by ‘skinning’ and burning the land itself, a method which – initially – gave excellent results. Long-term, however, burning was one of the chief ways of perpetuating the poverty of the Irish countryside, a feature much remarked on by foreign visitors. It was a method favoured by the poor for two reasons: it was cheap on their own rented plots and labour-intensive on their landlord’s.
A Borrisokane landlord set on improving his land – a man ‘exceedingly unpopular and obnoxious to the peasantry’ – was murdered for forbidding the practice. One man was hanged for the crime; two hundred others gathered in silent protest to skin, burn and sow his potato ground. Amongst those two hundred were my ancestors.
Walking back into Tipperary with his son on his shoulders, Thomas was not to know that 1845 was the first year of what came to be called the Great Famine. In October the first signs of blight were discovered in the crop. Overnight, fields turned black as soot. As Patrick and his Da walked the lanes the stink of rotting vegetables soured the air. In one of the larger fields, they saw a priest scurry along the rows, one white hand clamped over his nose, sprinkling holy water.
Little more than a hundred years later, my mother stands at a small yellow Formica table with her back to a door open on to a sunlit garden: red canna lilies stand tall as a man’s shoulder, and young banana trees fan leaves of a florescent green, their phallic fruit clustered above a brownish-purple hood. This is at my parents’ home in Jahore Bahru and my mother is putting the finishing touches to a chicken curry, following a recipe dictated to her by her Malay servant, a young woman who sometimes comes to work with her baby on her back. When she does this she’s almost tearful with apologies, but the baby lies on the verandah and doesn’t make a sound, his eyes, like black plums dipped in water, fixed on the light dappling the ceiling. Perhaps he’s soothed, too, by the liquid sound of hidden brown birds in the garden. My mother slices half a cucumber into paper-thin rounds. She puts her own home-made mango chutney into a little bowl. She adds lime juice and finely chopped coriander to the chicken. She works quietly and calmly but sometimes she has a fag stuck in her mouth and we tease her that cigarette ash is her secret ingredient. She tests the rice again and decides it’s ready. She has an unnecessarily large dish ready to hold it. She ladles steaming white rice on to only one-half of the dish, and on the other half she places a mound of plain-boiled potatoes. This is because she would never dream of serving a meal without potatoes. I don’t know what sort these are but they’re yellow, waxy looking, and fragrant with butter. Without knowing I’m looking, my mother forks one of these into her mouth and stands looking out at the garden as the potato’s creamy flesh melts in her mouth.
As the extent of the disaster became plain, brutal calculation broke down the old rules of hospitality. Cottagers turned strangers from their door empty-handed. Just a few weeks earlier, that would have been unthinkable. So, like a pair of tinkers, Patrick and his Da aimlessly walked the roads around Borrisokane. Lying on the bank of Lough Derg one heaven-sent sunlit afternoon they watched as three barges laden with grain slid silently by, on their way from Dromineer and thence to England. Accompanying it along the path went a line of armed policemen. The Kavanaghs shrank like hares deep into the grass until they had passed. Posted on a farm gate they saw a notice neither of them could read, but they understood well enough the coffin and the skull and crossbones with which it was illustrated:
‘Thomas Garvin, take notice to sell your potatoes at no more than 5s per barrel. If you do not, or if you hold them back, I will call to see you on my rambles. I mean to make an example of all such Oliver Cromwells as you are.
Signed: Captain Thunderbolt’
For a couple of days, Thomas and Patrick found work along the ditches of one of the big estates, clearing trees brought down by the storms. On the Kavanaghs’ third morning, rumour came that there was going to be trouble. A mob of men was coming to intimidate the estate steward for not employing every able-bodied labourer of the neighbourhood. Not being ‘of the neighbourhood’, Patrick and Thomas feared for their lives. They were in any case scarcely strong enough for the work. They left after receiving only one day’s pay: 4d for Thomas and 2d for the boy. The threatened intimidation did not in fact take place. Instead, the following morning a pay clerk, travelling to Borrisokane by pony and trap, was set upon by armed men. He was brutally beaten and the day’s pay taken.
Thomas knew he was being incapacitated by fear and hunger. He and Patrick took to sleeping by the back road into the Sopwell estate, sheltering under massive old Spanish chestnut trees. On the first night, Patrick, believing the mansion to be on fire, crept across the lawn to one of the windows. Inside the huge shining room he saw hundreds of candles burning mid-air. In their light sat a woman with bare plump shoulders, vulnerable as an egg, and not quite human to the boy – no more than he, a stinking bag of skin and bones, would have been human to her.
When the storms returned, the trees under which they took cover terrified Patrick. Back in Mayo there were no trees, not
hing to deserve the name. There were rocks, and lochs, and heather. At first, Patrick had been in awe of the mighty Tipperary trees. But when the wind made them groan, threshing their branches and straining at their roots, he believed they meant to break free and crush him. For several nights they were drenched by torrential rain. Thunder and lightning shredded their nerves. It was the storm and Patrick’s shrieking that finally drove Thomas to seek shelter with his aunt.
The woman whose door they knocked at hesitated to open it. Margaret Dunne (née Kavanagh) had only just accepted the fact that she was pregnant for the sixth time. Tears of rage still pooled in the hollows of her eyes. Margaret also knew there was yellow fever in the district. But when no second knock came she leaned into the silence and then, driven by curiosity, opened the door. She had time to think she’d made a terrible mistake before recognizing her nephew. His trembling child, white as a pulled root, she took to be four or five years old. All bones and big black eyes. His mother’s eyes. No one had ever actually said that Thomas had been ‘spirited away’ by the woman from Mayo, but Margaret’s first instinct was to reject the little boy as an alien, fairy creature. Instead, she pushed a stool to the fireside and brought her shawl for the boy’s shoulders. When her husband got home he recognised an opportunity – cheap labour – as much as an obligation. Work was made available on the Dunnes’ fifteen acres and at night man and boy bedded down in the straw in one of the outhouses, which was no hardship since neither Thomas nor Patrick had ever slept on anything else. For nearly a year Patrick was mute.