by Maggie Wadey
Mrs Kavanagh complains of the cold. She has become, as Jim O’Brien described her, ‘thin, thin as a heron’. Her skin has a grey clammy look to it, though Agnes doesn’t confirm this by touch. She does not touch her mother. Her mother is curious to know about Mrs Minchin. She goes quiet when Agnes talks about her, and from time to time gives a cynical little laugh. Especially the rose-coloured velvet and the devilled kidneys for breakfast – these especially make her snort.
Agnes is bringing in peat one morning when a flash of light off something on the lane takes her eye. A newly painted sidecar is coming up the hill. It stops at the gate and a priest climbs down. He is carrying the box that contains the sacred Host. Mrs Kavanagh comes to the door to welcome him and something in her manner suggests that this has happened before, but it’s the first Agnes has known of it. It isn’t Father O’Connor but a younger man, a priest Agnes has reason to dislike. Rather than encounter him, she puts the peat down by the door and quietly walks away. Later, her mother comments on Agnes’s lack of respect.
Agnes has walked into a trap. She had thought herself free. She’d meant to come back only to convalesce, but once here she’s slipped into the position of the youngest daughter, the one who’s expected to stay at home. Kate needs a daughter. Every day she makes her need plainer. Agnes has begun to notice odd lapses in her mother’s memory and concentration. Kate can’t disguise the fact that she would have preferred Nancy, but since she can’t have her, she’ll make do with Agnes. But will Agnes stay? Anxiety makes Kate critical and snappy. John appeals to his daughter’s understanding. Agnes the child, yearning for her mother’s approval, does battle with Agnes the woman who has been gifted with a young adult’s indifference.
Luckily for me, my grandmother overplays her hand: when Agnes has been home no more than a couple of weeks, and despite the bitter weather Kate, in a temper over something, orders Agnes outside on to the ice-cold hillside to feed the geese. So here it comes, the favourite of my childhood myths: my young mother stands in a twilit field – a very green field, for isn’t this the Emerald Isle? – surrounded by a litter of geese as dead, as white as pillows. They are dead because my mother has poisoned them, and this, I had always believed, was the reason why she had to leave Ireland.
But the fact is, as an account of why my mother had to leave, it won’t quite do.
The material I have doesn’t seem to fill the years between school and her going to England. And didn’t she tell me it was from the Brophys’ she had to rush to Dublin? Maybe I have the chronology wrong? No, there’s something missing. That much is obvious. Something to do with the time she spent in Dublin, in hospital, having her appendix removed – or so she told me.
The Kavanaghs’ new donkey is a right little terror. Agnes dislikes it and as often as the donkey tries to kick her she kicks back. Still, once she has the animal in the traces and they are out on the road, it’s pleasant enough rattling along under the trees towards Moneygall. She finds Mrs Minchin in the library seated at her desk over the accounts. Winter light has robbed her face of colour. She confesses to worry and dissatisfaction with her absent son, William. Agnes offers the information that her mother feels much the same with regard to her own son, Pat. ‘And why is that?’ enquires Mrs Minchin, with real interest. There are, in fact, several reasons why Pat is making his mother’s life a misery. But, having offered a confidence, Agnes retreats. ‘Perhaps all first sons are the same?’ she suggests. ‘And all mothers,’ adds Mrs Minchin, folding her hands around their glittering burden of rings.
But Agnes must harden her heart. When she says that she is going to England, Mrs Minchin immediately asks, ‘To join your sister, Nancy?’ and Agnes is touched that she remembers the name. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Nancy.’ Mrs Minchin studies her a moment. ‘Then I can’t persuade you to come back?’ Agnes shakes her head, and looks away at the long sad sweep of the garden. ‘My dear,’ says Mrs Minchin, ‘I’m extremely sorry to lose you.’ ‘Thank you, madam,’ is all Agnes can manage. ‘Thank you.’
On the platform at Nenagh Station, John Kavanagh takes the last of his daughters in his arms and kisses her. Agnes believes it’s for the first time. Well, maybe he kissed her when she was a baby. At her baptism, for instance – she’s seen fathers do that in the church in Puckaun, stooping awkwardly to kiss the baby’s forehead. But on no occasion that she remembers has Agnes’s father kissed her, though she has never, not for one moment, ever doubted that he loves her. His feeling for her has been the yardstick against which she’s measured what she takes as her mother’s lack of feeling. Now he pulls her close and through his old coat and his thin ribcage she feels the pounding of his heart. His clothes, his hair, the rough skin of his face all smell of turf and pipe smoke and probably it’s this that brings tears to Agnes’s eyes. She feels her chest heave. She experiences a moment of panic. She can’t go. She mustn’t go. He’s too old to leave, but this doesn’t stop her picking up her hatbox and turning away. Light flashes off the metal step. She puts her foot there. She feels the cold come up through the thin sole of her shoe. This is only the second time she’s ever boarded a train.
If Pat or my grandmother had been standing on Knigh Hill and the day was clear, they would have seen the trail of smoke go up from the engine as it left the station. Agnes was gone. This goodbye to her father is the point at which my mother’s storytelling broke off.
Part Six
Staying
1
‘Such a heart! Should he leave, how I’d miss him. Jewel, acorn, youth. Kiss him!’
–Anonymous, trans. from the Irish by Brendan Kennelly
My uncle Pat died in the county home, the Hospital of the Assumption, in Thurles. In his pocket they found a handwritten copy of the inscription on Saint Patrick’s breastplate. On his death certificate his name is given as Patrick Kavanagh and his home address as Knigh, Puckane (spelt in the modern way), Nenagh. He’s described as a widower and his age is given, correctly, as seventy-eight. He died a week or so short of his seventy-ninth birthday. Under rank or profession it says he was a retired farm labourer and old-age pensioner. The certified cause of death is given as (a) coronary occlusion (blockage) – three days, (b) atherosclerosis (arteries narrowed by fatty deposits) and (c) hypertension.
Billy Foley, the keeper of the Knigh graveyard, lives up a narrow road on the east side of Knigh Hill. His business is as a car mechanic and in the yard opposite his bungalow car corpses and car body parts spill out into the fields on either side and even out into the road. I found him cooking potatoes in the kitchen whilst his twelve-year-old daughter was idling over her homework in the corner of the living room. Billy told me he’d be happy to show me where my grandparents and my uncle are buried and wouldn’t he take me to the very spot once he’d got the potatoes on. This took only a moment as, having scrubbed them, he placed them whole and unpeeled in the pot – my aunt Bridie’s favourite way with a potato. Billy then gracefully offered me tea but I asked for water, which his daughter sprang up to fetch me. There was an atmosphere of remarkable tenderness between father and daughter. A few years younger than I am, Billy remembers my grandparents by reputation only.
‘Lovely people they were, gentlefolk, much respected. My parents always spoke well of them. They were missed, Maggie, I know that.’ Then he adds with totally unexpected vehemence, ‘But their son Paddy was a MONSTER!’
I reel at the violence and baldness of this claim.
‘Paddy married a Griffin, from Nenagh. They lived up there in the house—’ Billy jerked his head towards Knigh Hill which that afternoon was bathed in the serenity of May sunshine ‘—and he was violent to his wife, a real bastard. The children used to come down here to us crying and one night they were taken into Nenagh to be looked after by one of the aunties.’
Billy’s daughter remains sweetly expressionless, milk-white and blue-eyed. She gets into her daddy’s car to come with us to the graveyard, enclosed by a low stone wall, in the middle of the field which today has Jo
an Cleary’s cows grazing in it and one – can it be? – yes, dead, lying under the cemetery wall humming with flies. As we enter via the stone stile, Billy indicates one of the new marble headstones on which is recorded the death of his son, aged twenty, in a motorbike accident in America and, below that, the death of his wife a year or two later. Reeling from this, too, I stumble after the stocky figure of Billy and his palely drifting daughter to a spot in the centre of the graveyard which he identifies as the place of my grandparents’ burial.
The grass licks our ankles. Billy suggests I should try to remember the location by lining it up with a feature on the chapel to one side, and the black marble edge on one of the graves to the other. This spot isn’t at all the one I had in mind as the right place. But Billy Foley is the keeper of the graveyard plans and, like everyone else I’ve approached, remarkably generous with his time and his memories.
‘And how the feck would Billy Foley know where your grandparents are buried?’ demanded Mick Grace when I met him the following day. ‘Billy Foley wasn’t even born when they were buried so he went and put Paddy in the wrong fecking place, so he did. I was there the day your grandfather was buried, and your grandmother, too.’
Mick Grace, Danny Grace’s uncle, is a small, crooked-toothed man with sticky-out ears and a mischievous expression, like a dark little leprechaun, eighty-seven years old and living alone in a tiny terraced house in Nenagh. Taking my hand in his – which was dry and cold – he looked into my face and, with deep emotion, he said, ‘Your family and mine were neighbours’ – giving that word ‘neighbours’ an almost sacred inflexion – ‘at Knigh long ago.’
He showed us into his front room which was about the width of a railway carriage. There he perched on his single bed that was covered with a grey blanket, and Danny and I sat opposite on a sofa side by side, slightly lower than Mick, our knees and his almost touching, whilst a steady stream of traffic passed by just the other side of the small, net-curtained window. Mick is a little dark pip of a man, dry as biltong, so chewy, so fibrous, it’s hard to imagine that, like the rest of us, he must have emerged from the blood and mucous of a woman’s body, or that he has ever engaged in the messy business of animal congress himself, but he did, and he has.
Mick had a piece of lined paper torn from an exercise book folded over in his hand. But his sense of mischief meant that first he had to give me some of his anecdotes about my uncle Pat: the Daw did this and the Daw did that.
‘I remember one time the Daw was coming down the lane in the cart when it crashed into the ditch below with the donkey caught in the shafts – well both he and the donkey hollered fit to be moithered and it took a team of us neighbours to pull them out. Didn’t I put my own ten-year-old pennyworth into the pulling? And himself laughing so much he made no effort to help, not at all, and with a cut over one eye and bruises from head to foot. Anyhow, wasn’t it a Monday morning and Doctor Courtney there at the surgery – twice a week he came there to our house to give out the physics – and he was willing to help your uncle Paddy out with getting medical insurance. But as they was waiting to get assessed in the office in Nenagh, Paddy, with the arm they were after saying was broken, he was stood there looking at the girls grinning and twisting the baccy into his pipe with his right hand, until Doctor Courtney saw and slapped it down!’ Mick cackles with laughter. ‘But he got it, he got what he wanted. “I didn’t come down in the last shower!” he crowed. And with that money he said he’d buy a dacent suit to be married in, only he didn’t. Buy the suit, that is.’ There is a pause. Mick shakes his head. Then he’s convulsed with laughter again as he remembers: ‘After he was married he used to say, I’ve had enough of this ould place, I’m going to London to join Tom, and after that I’ll take the boat to England.’
So Pat was laughed at for his ignorance. (It brings to mind the middle-class rural couple in Jane Austen’s Emma who don’t know where Paris is.) But was he actually considered stupid, I wondered? As if reading my mind, Mick goes on:
‘Your uncle Paddy was clever.’ Mick taps his nose. ‘He used to cut scallops in Knigh Wood—’
‘Hazel sticks,’ offers Danny.
‘—and he’d sell them for thatching. He was known for that. There were people would come there to the Cross and ask for Paddy.’
Another story has a friend of my grandpa’s arriving above at the house to find it all closed up and Grandpa calling out to him through the keyhole: ‘I can’t let you in and I can’t get out. Pat’s locked me in and taken the key in his pocket.’ To my ears the story has a disturbing ring. And in other anecdotes, well, my uncle Pat comes over to me as a cod Irishman, a parody of the stupid, amoral, pitiably small-minded peasant. His being called ‘Paddy’ doesn’t help me but ‘the Daw’ – whilst suggesting all those characteristics – at least has the virtue of surprise, of novelty.
Still I’m at sea. I’ve no idea how to take him, how to weigh him. Was he a ‘monster’, or just a leprechaun on drink? I’m back around the family dining table as a child. ‘Did you hear the one about the Paddy who said he was going to fly a rocket to the sun? His colleague said, “You’ll get burned up, mate,” and Paddy replied, “I’ve thought of that – we’ll go at night.”’ Boom-boom! I think of an English friend of mine being maddened by her Irish son-in-law’s ‘fawning respect’ – her phrase – for ‘a small-town lawyer in Wicklow’. Scratch an English person and you often find a degree of condescension or scorn for the Irish, very different from their feelings for the Welsh or the Scots. Mick now unfolds the piece of paper he has in his hand and shows me what he’s written:
Your grandfather, as far as I know he came from Borrisokane
John Cavangh Knigh
His wife né Buckley
Sons, Tom, Dan, Paddy
Daughers Nan, Agnes, Cathlein, Mary Rose, Brigid, Josie
John worked at Crosses Norwood about 6 miles from his Home
He lived in a house of the Crosses
Buried in Knigh and his wife and son Paddy
Your grand Uncle Jim Buckley was gateman in the Nenagh work house
His sister Mary was going the roads of Ireland
They had a grandson John (Sean) Gavin
He was Mary Rose’s son he went to England
All went to England except Paddy he married a Griffin
from St Jessop Park
Apart from Pat, the one he remembers best is Tom. He describes him as ‘a bit of a swank’ who used to drive the threshers and wore two watches. Mick remembers when Tom went away to work on the ‘electrification of the Shannon’. It was a German firm, Siemens, working the contract and the scheme was expected to solve the electricity needs of the west of Ireland. To the boy Mick it had seemed a thrilling adventure, and he envied Tom being picked up in a lorry and waving from the back, grinning, with a cigarette between his teeth, as he set off into the unknown.
Later, Mick learned conditions at the site at Ardnacrusha were bad, and that when men were killed on the works they were just thrown aside and work continued. Two fourteen-year-old boys were sent to one of Ireland’s soon-to-be notorious ‘industrial schools’ for destroying just £2 worth of insulators at the Shannon Electricity Scheme. Tom and Dan both came home safely from Ardnacrusha, but this was the hungry thirties and soon they were away again, this time to England, disgusted by the only work Ireland had to offer them: breaking stones, work for which the men were paid by the yard.
My eye, meanwhile, has been taken by a name on Mick’s list, a family member I’ve not heard of before: my great-aunt Mary, nickname ‘the Maid of Arra’. The Arra Mountains are within sight of Burgess, where my grandmother Kate and her siblings were born. Mary was my grandmother’s older sister and for whatever reasons, choice, or having fallen on hard times, or the sheer difficulty of her personality, she was, I’m now told, ‘going the roads of Ireland’. I’m mesmerised by this information: Kate Buckley, who had ‘notions’ and whose kitchen floor you could eat your dinner off, had a sister who ‘went the road
s of Ireland’. Mick recalls she had an old sack in which she’d collect dropped potatoes, blackberries, mushrooms, hoping to sell them at someone’s door, and often she did, or at least she exchanged them for bread, milk, a lump of cheese. She had a habit, too, of collecting stones, little stones that took her fancy, and when they weighed heavy in her pocket, she’d sit down and make an arrangement of them at the side of the road. A shape. A pattern. A sign. Having done so to her satisfaction, the irritation, or rather, the agitation she exhibited during the arrangement of her stones would be replaced by a cosmic calm. Not everyone was good to Mary, there were some who’d make her run, but Mick remembers a widow bringing up seven children on her own and she always shared bread and tea with Mary when she called. Then, whether she began to make a nuisance of herself, or perhaps she turned funny in the head, Mick doesn’t remember, but, ‘One day they got the horse and cart to take her to Thurles to the workhouse.’
‘Who’s they?’ I ask.
‘Your grandmother. And as they loaded her into that cart, ould Mary bit your grandmother’s hand.’
Danny throws me a slightly anxious look, but Mick, who’s clearly judged me to be made of sterner stuff, goes on:
‘She didn’t last long in that place and it was back here they brought her to be buried. The priests were busy on the day of her funeral and Tom had to bring a bucket of clay to them to have it blessed. They couldn’t dig deep enough because of the stones and after an hour’s huffing and puffing the Daw said, “Will you give it a rest? She won’t be coming back up out of there anyways.”’