The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  Margaret’s husband, Daniel Dunne, didn’t actually own his fifteen acres, nor did he have them on a secure lease. He rented them ‘at will’ – his landlord’s will, that is – at an annual rate of 20s per acre. In his turn, Daniel sublet two acres in eight different lots, at 10s per lot, providing eight poorer neighbours with a ‘quarter ground’ on which to sow their potatoes and himself with a modest addition to his income. In good years, twelve acres were enough to provide for his family and recently, mindful of the privations his parents had suffered in times of dearth, he had put an acre to turnips, an acre to cabbage, and two to barley. His wife, Margaret, kept a goat and some chicken she wintered indoors in a coop that formed the lower half of the kitchen dresser. Some of the Dunnes’ neighbours grew a few lines of carrots and turnips, too, but they used them – as their landlords expected – for rent, not to eat. Daniel, however, was determined his family should know the taste of such delicacies and grew enough to ensure that they did. It was these small advantages that would see them through the approaching calamity.

  Six months after the Kavanaghs blew in on the west wind ‘like the weather’, as Daniel put it, Margaret’s baby was born. The birth was easy and the baby – their first girl – docile but delicate. Luckily for her, she was born in summer and to a mother whose milk was rich with butter and carrots. Mary, as she was named, might otherwise not have survived. But the sight and sounds of a newborn baby made Thomas restless. When Margaret breastfed the child, he had to leave the room. His change of role from poacher to gamekeeper was also difficult to bear. He was obliged to take turns with Dunne in guarding the fields and seeing off the starving with stones.

  On occasion, reluctantly, Thomas took Patrick with him to the market at Nenagh. There they saw milling crowds, come in from God only knew where, bringing with them their piteous pleading, their filth and foul, hunger-related diseases. They heard them described as vermin. Boys fishing for eels in a stream nearby found many dead, poisoned, it was supposed, by excrement draining from the workhouse. But the streets of the town were no better, notorious for the cesspits at every door, cesspits deep enough to drown a man and rumoured to have done so. It was reported in the Nenagh Guardian that in Galway city, at the express desire of the local authorities, each soldier in the 68th Regiment fired twenty rounds of ball cartridge for the purpose of purifying the air and expelling cholera. Rather more efficaciously, as soon as they were home – before entering the house – Thomas and Patrick washed their hands in their own urine. They did not tell what they’d seen.

  Meanwhile, the fields alongside the river continued to wave with ripening wheat. In the great landowners’ enclosed pastures cattle and sheep continued to graze peacefully, fattening for their destination on English dinner tables. Only sometimes, like a fox at work in the dark, a starving man might slaughter and drag away one animal and maim the rest. The aristocracy continued to ride to hunt, to give house parties, but also to be more often absent in England, and at such times their massive grey houses went dark. This brought one advantage to their tenants, including the Dunnes: those vegetables normally given as part of their rent were kept back for their own consumption. In Daniel’s case, this meant a surplus, which he sold on at exorbitant prices. That winter was especially cold. Thomas saw great white bosomy clouds come to rest on the western horizon amongst broken sections of rainbow. Intense cold was accompanied by thick fog. Ice covered the rivers and streams. God showed no mercy. Nor did man: in spring, the price of seed potatoes and foodstuffs trebled, and in September the soup kitchens closed.

  Patrick, ten years old, was growing into his bones – Kavanagh bones, long and strong. He had learned how to make a trap of twigs to catch blackbirds. His father knew how to bring down crows with a stick. They took few fish. Poachers were imprisoned, and in any case, the streams on the Sopwell estate were said to have been emptied of trout. Margaret gathered nettles from the graveyard at Uskane. Sometimes, accompanied by Patrick, she did this at night. Then they would risk the landowners’ fields to take blood from the warm necks of cattle, sealing the vein afterwards with a pin. At home, Margaret mixed the blood with milk, or salted and fried it. Patrick watched and listened. He learned these new skills quickly and easily.

  When the spring thaw came, Thomas looked at the carrots – a vegetable his wife had never tasted – the eggs, and the goat’s milk in his aunt’s kitchen and he decided to go home.

  ‘I didn’t know you for that sort of a fella,’ said Dunne.

  ‘What sort is that?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘The sort to move on as soon as the dog starts wagging its tail,’ Dunne replied – which was the closest he ever got to expressing any kind of feeling for his wife’s nephew.

  Thomas left his son Patrick behind when he set off alone to walk back to county Mayo. Whether or not he ever reached home, or found his wife and children alive, I don’t know, but he never returned to Tipperary.

  Daniel Dunne, moving quickly, now acquired the lease on twenty acres vacated by a family whom poverty had forced to emigrate. One other entire family died of hunger and disease that winter. But their desirable house, which Dunne had long had his eye on, couldn’t be taken by new tenants. Fever was believed to stay in the walls, in the thatch and the dung-heaps. The bodies were left to be dragged away by dogs, the house was knocked down and anything that was left was burned. Then the land was dug over with lime and, come spring, Dunne put it to use. His little empire was expanding.

  Now began the mass evictions. From that area of bogland between Borrisokane and Nenagh two hundred were evicted. Many were actually ‘screaming with hunger’ but their screams brought no mercy. Others lay already dead, unable to benefit from the £1 gratuity given to those who were prepared to knock down their own homes. Deaths and evictions enabled Daniel Dunne to continue, hand over fist, moving up into new circumstances. Over the next few years, three families who were Dunne’s fellow tenants were evicted, the reason given being their bad management of the land. These evictions were carried out by the landlord’s agents, but Daniel didn’t speak out against them. Indeed, one took place at his suggestion because the man – protesting at his miserable wage – refused to work for Daniel at a time when he was most needed.

  The fact was, Dunne couldn’t afford labour problems. Conditions had been imposed on him by his landlord, including the proviso that the land must be dunged, not burned, and at no time was the area under potatoes to exceed that under green crops. Dunne was glad of it. He perfectly understood the benefits of this system. Before the Famine, Daniel had been amongst men who had posted threatening notices on the gates of blood-leeching landlords. Ten years later, he would no longer have felt able to afford such a gesture. It was through caution, hard work and ruthless opportunism that he acquired the lease on forty acres of land instead of fifteen, on four cottages instead of one, and turbary rights in a vast area of sweet-scented bogland where one day my grandfather, John Kavanagh, would walk dreaming of a woman.

  Between 1854 and 1878 the price of livestock rose by 81 per cent, oats by 58 per cent, butter by 86 per cent. Dunne was able to sell his produce for three times the price of an ordinary year. He sold and he saved. In 1865 – along with others of his kind – he placed a considerable sum in a savings deposit with the Savings Bank in Nenagh. He had a toehold on the land, on the ladder to respectability and prosperity. Here, with men like Daniel Dunne, begins the future Ireland: conservative, bourgeois, rural.

  Naturally, Daniel had ambitions for his daughter, Mary, now twenty years old. For several years he’d been weighing up the local men with regard to their eligibility and though, of course, none was good enough for Mary, mentally he had drawn up a shortlist. Status and wealth were his priorities – in particular, good land – and he’d gone so far as to turn the soil in fields belonging to one keen suitor in order to check its quality. Daniel had no intention of forcing his daughter into a marriage that was disagreeable to her. At the same time, this pretty, sweet-tempered girl – the apple of h
er father’s eye – wasn’t expected to make her own choice.

  Patrick Kavanagh meanwhile had continued to work on the Dunnes’ land as a labourer, nothing more, and with no prospect of more. Now twenty-nine years old, his situation was exactly the same as when he’d arrived out of the storm as an eight-year-old child. There were two Dunne sons in place and one in the graveyard. Patrick was one of the family and yet he was apart: he ate with them, but he slept in the outhouse. He did not work with the livestock, nor in his great-aunt Margaret’s vegetable garden. And he seems never to have lifted his eyes to look beyond the earth he worked, as good a man with a spade as ever his father was. He showed no interest in either women or drink, but he had a mean streak, a gene that was to pass on down through the generations: mean, stubborn, narrow, unlike Mary, who was gracious and sweet-tempered, and who all her life had been fascinated by her cousin’s fathomless black eyes.

  As a child, she liked to follow him when he sang as he worked out on the boundaries of the farm. Patrick sang in Gaelic, his voice true enough but without any art. Now, as a grown woman, it would be more than Mary’s life was worth if her parents saw her trailing after her cousin. But still, sometimes she does. Patrick ignores her. Then one day he turns suddenly, his eyes warning her off. Mary puts a hand on his arm – the first time they’ve ever touched – and as she does so, I realise that this is of course my great-grandmother: Mary Dunne is my mother’s much loved ‘Grammy’, and her father, Daniel, in all his brutality and ambition, is my great-great-grandfather.

  I imagine the young couple forced her parents’ hand in the most obvious way possible (illegitimacy was both fiercely disapproved of and rare in rural Ireland). Their first child, John, my grandfather, only just scrapes in at seven months: the marriage took place in the Catholic chapel – Patrick signed with his ‘mark’, Mary didn’t even do that – in Borrisokane in February, and John was born in September. By then the couple had moved into a two-bedroomed cottage which, with its single acre, belonged to Daniel Dunne, and there Patrick Kavanagh continued as a labourer in the employ of his father-in-law. This is the ‘darling little cottage’ of my mother’s childhood memories. And I think I’ve found it, a mile or so outside Borrisokane in a townland called the Curragh.

  Curragh means a marshy or boggy place. Named the Scohaboy, this bogland stretches south for three miles or so, flat, dark, treeless. Sweet-scented it may be, still this is the stuff of folk tales, ambiguous as quicksand. Here the light insinuates itself between earth and sky like something slinking just out of sight so that you find yourself constantly turning to see what it is. Nothing. Its presence a kind of absence that’s nevertheless as powerful as a forest or a sleeping beast. It’s here I come across a tiny cottage, standing with its back to the Scohaboy, facing green meadows – but also within sight of the Borrisokane workhouse. Long deserted, the thatched roof gone, enclosed by a little stone wall and with a wind-dwarfed apple tree beside it, the cottage is like a child’s drawing. This is where Patrick and Mary came to live when they married in 1868.

  Along with the house, the acre, and one of her mother’s goats, Mary brought her husband turbary rights in the bog. Turbary rights meant they could cut peat for their own use, or sell it, as they wished. It was a precious resource. But no other advantage came to the young couple from Mary’s embittered and humiliated father.

  Whether the marriage was happy is at best uncertain. Mary Dunne is absent from the census forms for 1901 – or rather, a little note at the bottom of the page states, ‘Mrs Kavanagh slept in Borrisokane.’ This may have been in the line of duty since by then – in the teeth of Patrick’s furious opposition – Mary had become, as my mother had remembered and described, a nurse. Often as not unpaid, still, Mary carved a considerable life of her own outside the home.

  I had assumed that Mary attended mostly on women, that she dealt with pregnancy and birth. In fact, many of her patients were men, ‘old boys living on their own.’ As often as not these old men were suffering from ‘a sore heart’, and the cure for that wasn’t in Mary’s bag, though ‘lichen was the next best thing.’ Of course Mary knew the priest disapproved. Her remedies weren’t just popular but, amongst those who clung still to the old beliefs, they were considered to be more effective than the priest’s own blessings. Father O’Brien didn’t actually prevent Mary from going about her business, but she believed his disapproval had an inhibiting effect on her patients’ recovery. Unlike the priest, she didn’t much believe in the value of suffering, nor did she make his distinction between body and soul. Some of Mary’s nursing took her to the workhouse, and it may be that’s where she was on the night Patrick closed his dark eyes for the last time since, on his death certificate, it’s not his wife but his daughter who is recorded as ‘present at death’. Maybe the marriage had been a ‘career move’ on Patrick’s part, or a romance that had gone sour. There’s a Scots saying: ‘As loveless as an Irishman’.

  My grandfather, John, was the first of five children; three girls and one other boy, Daniel, who, in the 1901 census is still living at home and is described as ‘deaf and dumb’. The description comes in the column headed ‘Deaf and Dumb; Dumb only; Blind; Imbecile, Idiot or Lunatic’, and with the direction, ‘Write the respective infirmity opposite the name of the person afflicted.’ Under ‘Rank, Profession or Occupation’, Daniel is described as a tailor. I picture him working at a bench set up under the thatch. Alone in the house I imagine he would have felt the vibrations of a stranger’s footfall. Which must have been how he sensed the curlew, as a vibration, sometimes becoming aware of its call before his brother did and putting a hand on John’s arm to stop him working. Out on the Scohaboy Bog the boys would stand side by side, very still, washed in the smell of heather and thrilling to that eerie, heart-stopping cry that some people believed was a banshee. No one knew what Daniel thought it was. An approaching thunderstorm, long before it had darkened the sky, drew the light out of both the gorse and Daniel’s face. This was the sort of thing my grandfather got to know when his teacher thought he should have been in school learning another order of things altogether.

  By the time my grandfather was born, free basic education was on offer to every child in the country. In John Kavanagh’s home town of Borrisokane there was a national school he might have attended. No doubt he went along those few days in the year he wasn’t required to work. But, until 1892, there was no legal compulsion for him to do so.

  I’d always supposed that, by the time of John’s marriage, old Patrick Kavanagh was dead. In fact, he was still very much alive, which makes me realise my grandfather didn’t exactly choose, as I’d previously imagined, to reject his inheritance, breaking his widowed mother’s heart in the process. With his father alive, to stay on in his parents’ house would have been an option only if he’d resigned himself to celibacy. Many of his generation – and generations to come – did so: in 1911, a quarter of middle-aged Irish men and women had never been married. But John had fallen in love, and with Kate, a woman who wanted life on her own terms. Besides, the house at Curragh had so little land. Even by the standards of the day it was hardly an economic holding. My grandfather had little choice but to leave home and make his own way. He was his mother’s son. Behind his gentle exterior there was a quiet will, and a streak of daring that helped him to move out into the unknown.

  But what did John hope for? When he walked out there on the Scohaboy, waiting in a torment of uncertainty for Kate Buckley to come to him, what did he believe he could offer this woman? She might be coming to him ‘with her arms swinging’, that is to say, empty-handed, but Kate’s hands were both strong and beautiful and she possessed a natural refinement which was immediately apparent in her bearing and in her speech. What would make this marriage worth her while, beyond the promise of John’s love? In the year he married, 1899, 32,000 people emigrated from Ireland. On their marriage certificate John is described as ‘labourer’ and Kate as ‘spinster’. Both bride and groom ‘signed’ with their mark, an
‘X’. John’s cross is large and straight. An honest, straightforward mark. Kate’s mark is smaller but with a little flourish, the strokes crossed like fingers. Emigration was surely unthinkable for this young couple, so ill-prepared for exile, but probably no more unthinkable than for many of the 32,000 who did leave. When my grandfather turned his back on his inheritance, all it amounted to was a cottage, an acre of land and turbary rights in the bog. It can’t have seemed difficult to improve on. What John and Kate had in abundance was youth and strength. Of course what they hoped for was a better life.

  In my rented cottage I am alone in luxury, with three bedrooms to choose from, a pretty kitchen, and a stable door. Some of my reading time is spent pacing the floor. Often I go to the door and throw the upper half open, sometimes on to a sunny morning, sometimes on to a starlit night. In the dark I can hear the companionable sighing of the horses in the paddock. In the daytime I can see the grey rooftops of the workhouse and the Fever Hospital. Both are now in the process of being demolished, keeling over like blank-eyed drunkards imploding on their terrible, anonymous pasts. Sometimes I cross the field, go through the line of trees and stand looking away, towards the bogland. The utter stillness of this vast, dark terrain silences my inner noise.

  I never once heard my mother mention either the Famine or ‘the Bad Times’ as it was referred to, as if to use the words ‘famine’ or ‘hunger’ was to tempt fate to repeat itself. Nevertheless, I now know that in 1840 the lane up Knigh Hill had seventeen inhabited houses where twenty years later – as now – it had two. I now know it may be the ghosts of dead children that give this unpeopled landscape its air of having been abandoned.