The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  6

  As a child, my mother never heard the word ‘famine’. It was never talked of in her family, she never read of it in books, and at school – Annie O’Brien confirms this – all they were told, with little explanation, was that there’d been ‘a massive drop in the population in the mid-nineteenth century’. The reason the children didn’t know their own history was that, from the foundation of the National Schools in 1831, the school curriculum had been decided in Westminster, England. Every care had been taken with the syllabus to omit anything that might arouse a spirit of nationalism. No Irish language or Irish traditions were taught. In the music manual there wasn’t a single Irish air. Some of the founding myths of Ireland were allowed in almost fairy-tale form in A Child’s History of Ireland, but it was as if the teaching of history in English schools were to end with the myths of King Arthur.

  What at first sight seems even more surprising is that these National Schools were, as my mother recalled, strictly non-denominational. Even in my mother’s time, when the re-established Catholic Church had achieved such all-pervading power in Irish society, inside the National Schools no religious emblems of any sort were displayed, and Catholic children were inculcated with the catechism at school but outside school hours. Religious education as such was forbidden in schools. In both schools and homes, the Bible was rarely seen. Father O’Haloran (the priest at Borrisokane) tells of a priest who died in the 1970s who had a considerable library which included prayer books, breviaries and several volumes of religious commentary, but no Bible. Unlike Agnes, Annie O’Brien hated having to learn the catechism; the tedium of it, all those rules that made her feel like she was tied up in string. But she has never lost her faith in prayer and always puts a few pence in Saint Anthony’s box. A friend of Annie’s asked her recently:

  ‘Did you ever fall out with God?’

  ‘Oh sometimes I do,’ said Annie. ‘But then I fall in with Him again.’

  Prescriptive as the school syllabus was, however, not only was Ireland a long way from Westminster but the majority of schools were a long way from Dublin. Teachers in rural Ireland had, in theory, a degree of autonomy. They could, if they chose, teach subjects outside the official curriculum, and some did. Had Mrs Griffin chosen she might, in an alternative reality, have given the girls a lesson in history they would never forget.

  In the cold, ill-lit classroom there hung an ancient map of Ireland like damp blooming on the whitewashed wall. This is where Mrs Griffin might begin by pointing out to them that Ireland is an island, an island which furthermore seems to have turned its back on England and to be reaching out – see here, its limbs and fingers – stretching westward into the Atlantic, towards America. ‘Children,’ says Mrs Griffin, ‘we are not an English people. We are Gaelic. For hundreds of years Ireland was strong but divided. Waves of rebellion washed continuously back and forth over the country. Even the English invaders failed to establish single kingship and the rule of law.’ For centuries her motto has been, ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.’ And in every crisis in English history Ireland has seized the moment of weakness to stab her enemy in the back. In any way possible. In 1916, Roger Casement was found guilty of trying to secure German aid in the struggle for Irish independence. He was hanged in Dublin.

  The year of this history-lesson-that-never-was is 1917: eighteen months after the Dublin Easter Uprising, and a year before three-quarters of a million British troops – amongst them tens of thousands of Irish men – failed to come home from the killing fields of Europe (close on thirty thousand Irishmen died). The Moran sisters, sitting here covertly blowing on their fingers to keep them warm, have their father away fighting for England. There is a sudden sharp intake of breath as Mrs Griffin lifts her big black bag up on to her desk. Her fingers stroke its clasp. The girls are mesmerised.

  ‘It took the brutal violence of a monster to conquer Ireland.’ With her hand on the clasp, Mrs Griffin allows the tension moment to build before she clicks open her bag and from its dark interior she lifts – not the dead baby the girls are expecting – but a head. Just that: a severed head. ‘Oliver Cromwell!’

  Here was the ogre of Irish history, the man who, in 1649, had arrived at Drogheda, thirty miles north of Dublin, with massacre on his mind. It was the third of September, Cromwell’s ‘lucky day’, as it came to be known. He came with a war purse of £70,000 and a force of twelve thousand Roundheads. When twelve days later he set off to march south to Wexford, he left three thousand Irish dead. As the head swings round the children see a broad, thoughtful face with not quite closed eyes and the warty skin of a toad.

  I’ve come to the library in Nenagh, the reference section. This is a pleasant space, quiet, with little groups of men at one of the low tables reading the newspapers and gossiping. Next door is the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, once the county gaol. A class of primary school children comes in – white-socked girls with wags of shiny hair swinging down their backs and boys with the names of football clubs on their T-shirts – they flit along the shelves and dip into books where the names of Cromwell and O’Connell are writ large and chapters on the Great Famine are illustrated with brightly coloured pictures of the starving and the dispossessed. When I ask if I can take out membership in the library I’m self-conscious about my voice again, that is to say, my unmistakably English accent. With the sweetest manner imaginable, the librarian says, ‘Of course you can,’ and when I remark that I’m here for two months she smiles and exclaims, ‘Now isn’t that grand?’ Cromwell was here for nine.

  By the summer of 1652 more than half a million Irish had been lost to the sword, pestilence, famine or exile, reducing the population to 500,000. Which is to say, Ireland was conquered, and the way was clear for a massive scheme of land confiscation. What Cromwell had achieved was not unity, but a traumatised submission to English domination. In 1640, it was Catholics who owned 90 per cent of the land of my mother’s parish in North Tipperary. Thirty years later, as a result of the Cromwellian clearances, the figure was 16 per cent.

  When I joined my parents on holiday in Ireland in 1993, one of the places we visited, along with all the other tourists – many of whom, no doubt, were ‘of Irish descent’ – was Cashel in South Tipperary. Having admired the rock and the ruin of the abbey we walked through the little town to visit the castle. There, as we went slowly down the treasure-lined Long Gallery, my mother said wistfully, ‘We weren’t told about this side of things at school, we never learned about the history, or that there were such beautiful things in Ireland.’

  When she moved on, my father said quietly to me, ‘What she doesn’t realise, of course, the sad thing is, all these beautiful things would have belonged to the Anglo-Irish, not to the Catholics.’

  In compensation for his loss, John Kennedy of Knigh received 353 Irish acres in County Galway, half the acreage he had owned at Knigh and of dubious value being either rock or bog. ‘All that war had ruined, fled or was driven into Connaught.’ The west, rocky and inaccessible, facing out over the vast Atlantic – looking, as Mrs Griffin pointed out, to America – ‘received wave after wave of refugees and went its own way, taking with it the faith of its ancestors, the Irish language and the love of its country. Having once entered Connaught the Irish Catholics were penned there like sheep, forbidden under pain of death to pass the borders.’

  As the bitter curse has it, ‘To Hell or Connaught!’

  Even those Catholic estates that survived were dismembered. Penal Laws directed that, at the death of a Catholic owner, his land was to be divided amongst all his sons, unless and only if the eldest became a Protestant. This clearly affected not just large estates, but smaller holdings, too. Over generations, Catholic holdings became smaller and smaller until the notorious quarter ground was commonplace and the margin enabling the great mass of the poor to survive became narrower and narrower. As its name suggests, the Great Famine wasn’t the first: for example, between 1816 and 1842 there had already been fourteen pota
to famines.

  Loss of land was the first hammer blow.

  The second was the nature of the new aristocracy. Protestant, English, and opportunist as ash in the bog, it proved itself to be an alien race, in large part indifferent to and contemptuous of the native Irish (an attitude still sometimes apparent in the upper-class Anglo-Irish and English residents today). In the mid-1830s, the French writer, Gustave de Beaumont, visited Ireland. He formed the opinion that ‘a bad aristocracy’ was the prime cause of ‘the inveterate leprosy of misery’ covering Ireland. Was it surprising that, under these circumstances and in a country where the ruling class lacked moral authority, lawlessness and a contempt for the ‘official line’ should soon establish itself as part of the Irish pattern?

  Those men who, at the time of my great-grandfather’s arrival in Tipperary, were posting threatening notices on the gates of strong farmers, they weren’t a new phenomenon. For close on a hundred years there had existed secret societies whose anger had been fuelled by enclosure of common land and by high tithes. During their nocturnal attacks they murdered or mutilated both people and animals. Victims were as likely to be Catholic as Protestant, as likely the labourer agreeing to work for low wages as the master exploiting him. The essential nature of the associations was twofold: violent and secret. Unsurprisingly, Westminster’s school syllabus didn’t cover these aspects of the children’s history either.

  Meanwhile, between 1779 and the 1820s the population of Ireland increased by 172 per cent to eight million, two-thirds of whom were dependent on agriculture. With no industrialization to support it, Ireland’s economy was fragile indeed. When the Great Famine hit, it was partly the sheer size of the problem, the numbers involved, that was overwhelming. England’s first response may have been a cry of sympathy, but the policy of the British government towards the Famine was laissez-faire and, as the tragedy grew into mind-numbing proportions, there was a tightening of the Treasury purse strings – like the reflex tightening of a sphincter muscle.

  The ‘massive drop in the population’ Annie referred to was this: nationwide, a million died, a million emigrated and half a million were evicted from their homes. For nearly half a century to follow, emigration would remove up to half of each generation. The year my mother was born, 1911, the population of Ireland stood at 4.4 million, reduced from 8.4 million in 1846, the year of her grandmother’s birth. Those who died were mostly the poorest of the poor. Those who emigrated were generally from the ‘better class’. My great-great-grandfather, Daniel Dunne, who wasn’t quite either, stayed and prospered.

  ‘Children!’ Mrs Griffin might have continued. ‘Your Irish climate is mild but infamously damp. The further west you go the more the terrain is either rock or bog. There are no orchards, no turnip fields in Clare, or Mayo. The bog sustains nothing but cotton grass. There are snipe, but the poor did not own shotguns. Had they done so they might have been as likely to shoot the landlords as the birds. You ask (the children had not breathed a word) why did the poor not eat nettles, hips, grass? They did. Indeed, the nettles, the berries, edible roots and cabbage leaves disappeared from the countryside, and children and old people lay down beside the road to die of diarrhoea. You must remember, children, that the majority of deaths came not from starvation but from hunger-related diseases.’

  It did not cross the children’s minds to ask why their forebears had not eaten fish. Herring occasionally formed a very small part of the Irish diet, but the western coastline, famous for its beauty, is also notoriously treacherous, both the ocean itself and the rocky landfall. In 1846 there were no railways in the west of Ireland, there was a poor road network, and no means of refrigeration. The pace not just of transportation but of communication was fatally slow. The severe winter of 1846—47 that made relief difficult made fishing impossible. In 1846 the British government declared officially that ‘no deaths from starvation must be allowed’. In private it was a different matter.

  Another thing the little girls at Puckaun School, my mother amongst them, weren’t taught was that at that time in the English press their lost forebears were represented as pigs, or as Cecil Woodham Smith tells us, as ‘Neanderthals, the missing link between animal and human. A once stalwart people had been reduced to an anonymous teeming mass, entirely without the means with which to turn away the catastrophe howling towards them. They were abandoned to their doom.’

  When Mrs Griffin spits the children out into the damp evening air a new sound, the sound of marching, goes along the village road and into the field behind the school. My mother’s last memory of the school in Puckaun is playing in the yard, forming a ring with the other girls as they move backwards and forwards chanting:

  We’ve come to see Janey Joe, Janey Joe, Janey Joe,

  We’ve come to see Janey Joe, how is she now?

  Janey Joe’s washing, she’s washing, she’s washing,

  Janey Joe’s washing all the day long

  and so on through all the household tasks until,

  Janey Joe’s sick, she’s sick, she’s sick,

  Janey Joe’s sick all the day long

  and finally,

  Janey Joe’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead,

  Janey Joe is dead all the day long.

  But little do the children know – nor indeed does Mrs Griffin herself, though the sound of marching feet may have alerted her to it – that there’s more history to come. The birth of the Irish Free State will be preceded by some of the bloodiest chapters in Irish history yet. The first Sinn Fein club in Puckaun has just been founded. So far as the children are concerned, the club is little more than an extension of the pub, a place where their fathers get swallowed up in a dimly lit interior where they talk, talk, talk – only to have the organization suppressed the following year. But in a field at the back of the school a company of the IRA, C Company 1st Battalion, consisting of thirty-one men, carries out illegal drilling on Sundays and this obviously arouses a lot of interest amongst the boys, some of whom, within a couple of years, will be drilling amongst them 1.

  Soon the idea of a government force, to be raised in large part from disbanded ex-soldiers, unemployed and brutalised by war, will be conceived in the mind of Lord French, the viceroy of Ireland. This force will come to be known as the Black and Tans.

  Mrs Griffin in fact never opened her monstrous black bag. She never taught her children about Cromwell, or the Penal Laws, or the obliteration of the Irish language. Nor did she ever read – as I have her do – from Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger (not published until 1962). Nevertheless, it was because of all these things the children hadn’t been taught that, when my mother finally stood up to recite the verses she had by heart, the poem that fell from her innocent lips was Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’:

  I come from haunts of coot and hern,

  I make a sudden sally,

  And sparkle out among the fern

  To bicker down a valley.

  An English brook running down an English hillside described by a thoroughly English poet. On that summer day in 1920, this was still typical of the Westminster-decided curriculum in Irish schools. But all that is about to change.

  * * *

  1. My grandfather may never have owned a gun, but ‘By early 1914...about 250,000 men in Ireland were enrolled in some kind of paramilitary organization’ Roy Foster ‘Vivid Faces’ Allen Lane 2014.

  Part Four

  Teachers and Soldiers

  1

  Maybe being eight years old has something to do with it and watching the road ahead come at you between they grey ears of the dear old donkey instead of having to toil all that way, summer and winter, on foot along the Mass path. But mostly this happiness, leaping and dancing in Agnes’s chest like the flames inside her mother’s crystal, is because she’s at a new school. It’s a smaller school, in a different village, and instead of a dragon waiting malevolently at the door, there’s a calm, cheerful woman – often as not with a baby on her hip – moving amongst the children
in a large airy classroom like a woman contemplating a pleasant scene.

  The three little girls take turns at the reins and the donkey, when freed of the traces, spends the day in the blacksmith’s yard where on summer afternoons buddleia bushes pulse with butterflies. On cold mornings the children vie for the honour of lighting the fire for Mrs Keane, of having her smile and say thank you. She bestows this honour most often on the coldest, hungriest child, the one who looks as if he’ll be asleep before the morning break. Her monitor is a handsome young man of seventeen. At Carney School there’s only one classroom, which means the boys are in with the girls, but because the oldest boy is only eleven their boyness is diluted in the large mixed class.