by Maggie Wadey
Or maybe it’s all a trick of the light. Maybe Ireland always has had an inherent nostalgia, a way of seeming to stand with its lovely back turned and its attention on something far off, something you can’t see. Consciously or not it must have entered the young Agnes’s soul. Certainly my mother’s character was tinged with a melancholy similar to that of the countryside she grew up in and knew so well. A child, like a monk, is celibate, communal, self-centred, ignorant of the wider world yet engaged daily in a search for the meaning of existence and its own place in life. A little animal on a spiritual quest, forming itself out of the surrounding elements like coral forming itself from calcium in the sea. Whether or not she knew it, my mother was born into a land more populous with ghosts than children, with derelict cottages, and ruined chapels crumbling beside graveyards set mysteriously in the middle of fields.
Sitting at the table in my cottage I unfold the copy of my mother’s birth certificate. Date of birth, July 1911 – not the date I knew. Place, Clashnevin – a place I’d never heard of.
3
‘This is where your mother was born,’ says Maureen Mounsey, parting the branches of the whitethorn and stepping delicately between wet cowpats dropped like tins of fresh brown paint into the grass. ‘This is “the back of the Birds’”. Sure it’s a pity there’s nothing left for you to see, but this is where the little place stood, here. Well, there were three of them, joined together in a row and above them, there’ – she points across the field – ‘was the Mass Stone.’
She adds, superfluously, that she believes the walls of my grandparents’ house were made of stone. There’s no trace of a building, nor of the Mass Stone now. It’s more than twenty years since the houses were demolished, the Mass Stone removed – most probably broken up and incorporated into a wall somewhere – and the field cleared and put to grass for cattle. A field like any other in Tipperary, green and damp and sweet.
In the first ten years of their married life my grandparents moved home five times. Their first child, Mary Rose, was born at a town address near the old Fever Hospital in Borrisokane in 1900 (a decent full fourteen months after their marriage). Their second child, Pat, was born in 1902 some ten miles away to the south-east, at Ballinree. Eighteen months later their third child, Thomas, was born in Druminure, a townland back near Borrisokane. Josie and Dan were both born at a place nearby yet mysteriously isolated, out on the bog and known as ‘the Island’. Most likely it was here that Mary Rose swung her little brother Pat round and broke his leg against the hearthstone. Journeying between these places the family travelled by donkey and cart. Damaged or not, Pat, as the first son, always sat up on the box beside his father. Often as not, they sheltered from rain under a shared piece of sacking. This is when, cocooned in scented privacy, my uncle Pat was told the stories that John himself had been told by his father, Patrick, stories from the Bad Times.
All this moving around can have happened for only one reason: since leaving his father’s house John Kavanagh had been the lowest of the low, a labourer to hire, one of the ‘untouchables’ of rural Irish life. But, by the time of my mother’s birth, they’d turned their backs forever on the boggy uplands, on the furze, the heather and the curlews. From the Island they would have crossed the remaining half-mile or so of bogland and gone down a track alongside young beech trees, the pale manor house of Sopwell in view, then out on to the rather lovely road that dips, graceful and tree-lined, down to the Ballintotty river valley and the lush damp meadows of Clashnevin in the parish of Ballymackey. And it’s here in this one place that, over the next five years, four more daughters, Bridget, Cathleen, Agnes and Nancy, would be born.
My grandfather had found work with a landed family, gentlemen farmers named Cross. James Cross owned six hundred acres, enough both to rent out several substantial farms and to need outside labour. My grandfather became one of the lucky ones, employed not on a casual basis but kept in regular work, and sufficiently favoured to be given living accommodation on one of the rented farms. The Mounseys, related to the Cross family by marriage, have rented this farm – the house and the land – on secure lease for six generations and Maureen told me that, when she came here as a young bride in the 1970s, at least one of these labourer’s cottages was still standing.
Although the Mounseys were kind enough to show me where my mother was born, neither of them ever met her or my grandparents. Roger and Maureen are my age, or a little younger. They know the Kavanaghs by name only. If they met them, say, walking down the lane from the church at Ballymackey, they’d no more recognise them than I would. Maureen nevertheless went upstairs to dig out a small, damp-stained suitcase from the wardrobe. Her husband doubted she’d find it, but she insisted she’d seen the case there only a few months – or was it years? – before, and hadn’t they been telling one another they should find a better home for the contents, for surely they were irreplaceable.
The rusty clasps opened silently, but the lid creaked as it was lifted and the case exhaled a faint musty breath. Inside were the work records Roger’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather had kept of the men employed at Clashnevin, including pay-books dating from the late nineteenth century. We worked our way through the books until, arriving at the first decade of the twentieth century, we found the names: O’Meara, Duff, Ryan, Healy, Bird, Shanahan. Kavanagh. Spelt with a ‘K’. In this way it was verified that my grandfather was one of seven men who worked and lived here, ‘at the back of Birds’’ (the ‘Birds’ I now understand, were a family by that name). But after June 1913 his name no longer appears.
These handwritten records continued until the 1980s when they were transferred on to the computer I’d already noticed set up in a cold, shambolic outhouse. This is where the dogs are housed at night, and the white bench-desk is splashed with brown streaks from their food. Above it, notices are posted on a corkboard that looks like its corners have been gnawed by rats. A single-storey, dark room, unceilinged – that is to say, open to the roof rafters – giving the room height, but there appears to be no chimney, so I guess the space would often have been thick with smoke.
Maureen showed me into this damp and chokingly vile-smelling room and as quickly showed me out.
‘This will give you some idea, Maggie,’ she was saying, ‘of what the Kavanaghs’ little house was like and there, you see, is where the fire would have been, with the mantle above—’ when she broke off, blushed furiously, and marched me back outside. She gave a little moan. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you,’ she said, ‘but you know, we’ve let the place go….’
Later, when I consult the House and Building Return for 1911, I understand the reference Maureen had made to ‘stone walls’. There’s a column on the census form in which the enumerator is directed to enter ‘O’ if the walls are made of ‘Mud, Wood or other Perishable Material’. The house in which my mother was born had stone walls – damp, no doubt – a slate roof, earth floor, three windows and just three rooms. Three rooms for, at the final count, eleven of them. The house just squeaked into what was categorised as ‘second class’, ‘fourth class’ being the lowest and consisting of a windowless mud cabin with a single room. Fifty years earlier, nearly half of Ireland’s rural population had lived in this class of house and this half had certainly included some of my Kavanagh ancestors.
However, by the time my grandparents arrived here at Clashnevin, the government had rehoused a quarter of a million people. A good number complained the new houses were ‘bird-baskets’, the chimneys smoked, the walls were damp and the hearths weren’t big enough to take their pots. When I found the House and Building Return in Nenagh Library, I exclaimed in shock, ‘Only three rooms! And can they really have been so small?’ But the young librarian gently reminded me, ‘It was the same for everyone. They had nothing.’ He smiled. ‘They expected nothing.’
That evening, back in my own cottage, I open a magazine called Household Hints, published in 1899. Maureen had come across a little stack of these magazines at th
e bottom of the suitcase containing the Mounsey family records. Some of the pages are stuck together with mildew.
I learn that at the turn of the 19th century the Dublin elite got itself into a fine old panic over the rural poor. The irony is that, by the time the authorities sat up and took notice, the poor of Ireland had already begun to ‘improve’ themselves: either by dying, or emigrating, or by ‘consolidating’, that cure-all for Ireland’s crisis of land. There were, however, still appalling levels of poverty, child mortality and TB, and the authorities appear to have had little difficulty finding someone to blame: Irish women. In an article from the 1899 magazine – the year my grandmother started out as the wife of an insecurely employed labourer – I read:
‘In the family life each mealtime should be looked forward to as a time of pleasure – a rest and refreshment for the body and mind. The woman of the household should set the example of always sitting down at the table neatly dressed, and of having the room, whether it be the kitchen or another room, where the meals are served in perfect order…all jarring subjects of conversation should be set aside.’
As late as 1911, the year my mother was born, teachers were being instructed to put it before their girls that ‘we in Ireland are very backward indeed’. A couple of years later, in the same popular women’s magazine, an article entitled ‘Are Mothers the Ruin of Ireland?’ suggested it was hardly surprising men drank and beat their wives; it only wished ‘they would beat them a good deal more until they served better meals and kept the children in order.’
It was an unusually hot, wet July when my grandmother’s eighth child, Agnes, was born. When she didn’t draw breath immediately, the woman who attended the birth put a touch of poteen to her lips, remarking as she did so, ‘Won’t that get it roaring in no time?’
Which it did. The baby continued to squall through the first three or four months of her life as if, the poteen having once got her going, she didn’t know when to stop. As if outraged that the option not to draw breath had been taken away from her. Agnes was the first of Kate’s children to cry so much, but at four months the storm subsided and the baby’s temperament changed. She grew into a quiet, observant child whose grasp on life was as strong as her seven siblings, most of whom ignored her as much as her mother did, except for Josie and Bridie who occasionally squabbled over her, patted her, rocked her and lugged her about with powerful indifference to her comfort. Agnes stayed passive as a sack of potatoes but her black eyes took in every little thing her brothers and sisters did and got: every morsel that went in their mouths, every clout they put on their backs, she made note of. Her hands were large, with long fingers, always reaching out for things. ‘Greedy’ her mother called them, but her father had his own word for them: ‘seeking’.
My grandfather hadn’t been brought up to herd animals or in any other way to look after them. There were his mother’s goats, but they were roped and unlovable: mean-tempered and blockheaded, with lemon-coloured eyes as dead as gobstoppers. John would gladly have sold the skin of those goats to the old man in Portumna who made drums. But the land he came to at Clashnevin, in a valley between two rivers, was rich meadowland where the wind turned the grass this way and that, parting it like a comb in a fine head of hair and, by the time my grandfather came there at the turn of the century, it was intensively grazed by cattle. It turned out he had a way with them, with the cattle, the dogs and the horses. His employer, James Cross, soon noticed and put Kavanagh with his seventy-year-old stockman, or ‘herd’, to be trained up in the herding of cattle and the breaking of workhorses. He chose my grandfather over John’s fellow labourer, a man named James Foley, who lived with his family about seven miles away in a house on Knigh Hill.
There was no need to tell my grandfather that an old boy like Leary, in his filthy suit with cuffs barely reaching his grime-encrusted wrists, an old boy who gave the passer-by no more than a shy nod, was full to the brim with knowledge. You couldn’t put a value on what he knew. He was able to judge the age, the health and the character of his animals at a glance, able to calm them with a word. He tended them in sickness, injury, and birth. He was mother to animals whose mothers either died or failed in their duty. He found animals that were lost and when the time came, he drove them to market, many animals over many miles. He negotiated a price, knowing to the shilling the value of each animal. He judged the desirability of a bullock, looking for bulk in the hindquarters where the best cuts of meat come from. He knew never to buy cattle from Mayo – that country in the west out of which John’s father had emerged – for they, far from flourishing on the rich grassland of Tipperary, would fail, even die. The old man had the skill, which John soon learned, of calculating the weight of an animal to within a few pounds just by looking at it.
This old stockman had worked for Mr Cross for the past thirty years, with never a day off for sickness. ‘I took a day off to get married,’ he used to say, with a wink. ‘And didn’t that cure me?’
Recently, however, the old man’s wife had died and his eyes had begun to cloud over with glaucoma. Sometimes he stumbled when he went after the cattle and his face froze with terror if he sensed an animal he hadn’t seen was suddenly close by him. He believed they knew, might even take advantage of his weakness, and a young bull ox was an unpredictable creature. A young stallion, too. ‘And why wouldn’t he be?’ the old man would say. ‘What other pleasure does he have? Why should he sing to the boss’s tune?’ My grandfather was not one to take advantage, but nor was he above seeing an advantage might come to him.
Like his mentor, my grandfather came to believe that horses were the king of beasts. It was here he learned to walk horses in the dew. All his life he believed in it for closing up the cracks in a horse’s foot or in a human foot, come to that. He never struck or spoke harshly to the animals in his care. Never mind they were nominally under his command, didn’t he have to bow to their necessities and their natures, like a child tending a row of beans – or like a man with a woman?
The woman in question, my grandmother, had only one claim to distinction – apart, that is, from her natural distinction of person – which was that her father had been coachman to the Bishop of Killaloe. But I’m amazed by her strength. Kate, now thirty-seven, had eight children, a cottage with three rooms and, naturally, no running water. The floors were swept clean twice a day and there was no dung-heap (other than her neighbours’) within sight or smell of Kate’s front door. All three windows in the house were opened at least once a day, an exercise so chilly, draughty and – so it was generally believed – injurious to health as to be the next thing to blasphemy. It was Kate who cut twigs from the oak and splintered them into toothpicks. She told the story of how, as a little girl, she’d sat high up on the box beside her father when he drove the Bishop’s black coach alongside the shining magnificence of the Shannon river. But if ever the Bishop himself came on board, so Kate said, she was set down in the dust. In her child’s mind it was as if the pairs of elements – bishop and commoner, male and female, rich and poor – must forever be kept separate. Forever and ever. Amen.
My grandmother’s one great pleasure was to sit in the field in the long grass just out of sight there beyond the Mass Stone, her hands folded on her lap, taking the sunshine. At such times, even Pat knew not to disturb her. If anyone dared ask what she was doing there, she would answer with great relish: ‘Nothing’. One summer afternoon she heard a mysterious twanging, the sound of tennis being played on a court out of sight beside the big house. When it was explained to her that grown women were batting a ball back and forth across a net, Kate laughed. Sometimes she sat too long in the damp grass, getting chilled before she went inside.
I realise I can’t imagine what the inside of my grandmother’s house was like. That is, I can only list what isn’t there: no cushioned armchair, no hot bath, no radio. No pencil and paper. No upright piano. During this Victorian era, the great era of things, of possessions – and in spite of my mother’s memory of brass lamps
and copper pots – my grandparents possessed next to nothing. No doubt, as the young man in Nenagh Library had suggested, they expected nothing. It was here at Clashnevin that Kate began to cough.
Sometimes, judging her moment, the oldest child, Mary Rose would ask how it was that Grandpa had come to be the Bishop of Killaloe’s coachman and Kate, after considering a while, would reply as if for the first time: ‘The Bishop fell into a faint at our door and my father drove him home in the cart, gentle as if he’d been a sleeping baby, gentle enough that the drop didn’t fall from the end of the Bishop’s nose, and when he came to his senses the Bishop said God had sent your grand-daddy to be his coachman.’
Kate always allowed herself a little snort at the end of this story and then, for hours afterwards, Mary Rose and Pat (with the iron on his leg already) enacted the scene, galloping around the field so rumbustuously that a good deal more than the drop on the end of the Bishop’s nose fell off; his legs fell off, his arms, his head and his other parts until the Bishop of Killaloe, dismembered and unmanned, lay scattered across the field and the children’s laughter faded down a slide of exhaustion and the long grass hid them, and even the infant Agnes, crawling in grim-faced determination this way and that, couldn’t find them.
But of course, most of this can only be in my imagination. This is where my mother was born, in the parish of Ballymackey, between the Ballintotty and the Ollatrim rivers. A green and pleasant place, but not one she ever told me about.