The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  When Mick’s merriment has quietened down, Danny indicates that it’s time to go. In the doorway, Mick squinnies up at me:

  ‘Isn’t it Irish everyone wants to be now, Danny?’ he says. Danny laughs.

  ‘And not just Irish, God help us, but descended from an Irish cattle thief into the bargain.’

  ‘Is that so?’ says Mick.

  ‘Or better still, from some criminal who was politically motivated, that’s what they’re after now.’ He gives me a little nudge. ‘Be honest, Maggie, wouldn’t you like to have found a Kavanagh forebear who was hanged for shooting an English landlord? Or skinning a Black and Tan? What novelist worth her salt wouldn’t?’

  ‘Looks like I’m out of luck,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to make do with my uncle Pat.’

  ‘Your uncle married into a rough ould crowd,’ observes Mick, waggling his head. ‘Pat’s wife was trouble. Everyone could see that.’

  I decide it’s time to visit the registrar’s office again to summons a copy of the certificate of this wedding. The first thing that strikes me is the bride’s glorious name: Anastasia Griffin. And then, with a sinking heart, her age, recorded merely as ‘underage’, meaning under eighteen. The legal age for marriage in Ireland in the ’30s was fifteen. My uncle was thirty-one. Annie O’Brien believes Pat’s wife was pregnant when they married and when the marriage finally broke down she heard the children were taken away into care in Nenagh. I ask Danny about this and he recalls being told that when the older boy came out to visit his father, Pat pushed him away, not wanting to know, until eventually he was talked around and had the boy on his knee. ‘I knew Pat when I was still a child,’ says Danny. ‘And a lot of the old people then didn’t tolerate children – it wasn’t just a case of ‘children should be seen but not heard’, sure they didn’t want to see them either. We kids used to thieve from Knigh Wood, and Pat must have known. So long as we kept well out of his way he never bothered. But if you came within reach you’d get a thump from his stick just for being there.’

  ‘But the neighbours thought well enough of him. Everyone says Pat was a wonderful worker.’

  ‘Oh he was,’ Danny agrees, adding, ‘Do you want my considered opinion? I’d say Pat was as contrary as a bag of cats.’

  But Pat wasn’t just the subject of stories; he told them, too. A man who could be silent for days on end, he would then, one hand raised to remark the fact that he was about to speak, tell stories that rivalled old Scholl’s in their poetry and strangeness. And one of the stories Mick remembers him telling began like this:

  ‘It was from Mayo my grandfather Patrick came riding on his da’s shoulders, and that was in the Bad Times which no one speaks of but will never be forgotten.’

  Pat liked to claim his grandfather told these stories to no one but his younger son, Daniel who, being deaf and dumb, neither heard nor told. It was characteristic of Pat to enjoy seeing a look of puzzlement come on to his listeners’ faces and the notion of a deaf and dumb child being the only link with the past certainly appealed to him. But of course he himself had heard these stories from his daddy, sitting beside him on the seat of the donkey cart as they travelled from the high bogland down to Clashnevin. And naturally enough it was stories concerning his namesake, Patrick, that appealed to him most.

  ‘The boy had never seen a tree in his life before and wasn’t the voice frightened out of his body by the very sight of them, shaking their fists at him in the night...?’

  In this way the stories of Pat’s – and my – forebears came to be told and remembered. Stories from the days of his own life, too, and those of his brothers and sisters. The other side of the picture, the side my mother never gave me, but which has found a place here in this book.

  Recently, I came across an old photo, one I didn’t know existed: my father in the open doorway of the house at Knigh and at his shoulder, in the half-dark, my uncle Pat. This is the summer of ‘38, when Agnes came back to Tipperary, briefly, with her English fellow. To receive her parents’ blessing. And Pat is like a man of a different generation – though only twelve years older than my mother – a different century. Different world. In his rough workingman’s suit and hat, the faint shape of a grin, almost saturnine, on his shadowy face, he embodies the life my mother was escaping, whilst my father, little more than a boy, sunlight catching the fair gleam on his ginger curls, the crease in his grey slacks, glows with a history that still conferred an easy confidence on its young men. English to the core. The future. They stayed a week, and then they were gone.

  2

  ‘Health and life to you, a child every year to you, and death in Ireland.’ – Old Irish saying

  My grandmother’s death came late one March, when her spirits might have been rising with the spring. But of course she’d seen it all before. This was in 1944, during the Second World War, known here in Ireland as the Emergency. Mick Grace remembers how during that time my grandparents often borrowed a little tea from his family, then returned it when their rations came through. During the war an estimated £12 million was sent back to Ireland from emigrants in Britain alone. No doubt the Kavanagh siblings contributed in some small way to this incredible sum (Agnes did on at least one occasion) although, apart from rationing on such items as tea and sugar, my grandparents were little affected in the matter of supplies – less than their children in London – being self-sufficient in most things. But loneliness, old age and distress, these were other matters.

  On my grandmother’s death certificate her name is given as Kate Cavanagh (spelt with a ‘C’). She’s described as sixty-six years old (she was in fact sixty-nine), her condition as married, her occupation as housekeeper and the cause of her death as anaemia and bronchitis. The informant of her death was Josie McGrath (that same Josie McGrath who, as a young woman, tore the mask off the face of the policeman on the night the Clearys’ farmhouse was raided). On my grandmother’s death certificate Josie is described as a nurse, ‘present at death’. Doctor Tony Courtney registered the death but was presumably not present.

  The details of my grandfather’s death certificate are much the same. He died only ten months later, in February ’45. His condition was widower, his age, seventy years (actually seventy-six), his occupation, herd, and the cause of his death was bronchitis. Josie McGrath was again ‘present at death’ and this time is described as ‘Red Cross nurse’, which means her attendance was free. Bronchitis. Anaemia. I think about this. Can you die from bronchitis? And anaemia? It sounds to me like the sort of death you might expect from poverty and bad housing. But these weren’t my grandparents’ circumstances.

  TB notoriously leaves its victims tired and thin. There was, of course, a definite stigma attached to TB and perhaps a doctor was no more likely to write ‘TB’ on a death certificate than he was to write ‘alcohol’. My grandmother may, indeed, have had TB and been cured – my mother once referred to her being away at a sanatorium in Wicklow – only to then neglect herself, especially with no daughter left at home to nag her into eating. And then, after her death, my grandfather would not have done much in the way of cooking.

  ‘What’ll I do, what’ll I do? She’s gone,’ he said piteously and repeatedly, to the neighbour who used to come up to shave him.

  ‘Sure, you could join the navy, why don’t you?’

  The day of Grandpa’s funeral there was a foot of snow on the ground and the earth was hard as stone. Thank God Pat had Tom with him, home from England – under special dispensation in spite of the war – for the second funeral within a year. It was Tom who made the arrangements, paid for the coffin, hosted the wake. Mick Grace remembers they all nearly froze solid and fell into the grave alongside the corpse. Blind Lane was an ice-slide. Pat suggested they just let his father’s body slide down to the bottom, why didn’t they? – but they managed it, hoisting the coffin into the back of the cart and then, slipping and sliding and cursing, two at the donkey’s head, two at the back of the cart to stop it capsizing over, they manoeuvred their way sl
owly down the lane, taking it on the diagonal, from side to side with much creaking of the wheels, down towards the Cross where the priest and the serving boy waited, pinched blue at their extremities. Mick recalls the men had to fetch kettles of boiling water from the Clearys’ kitchen to soften up the frozen earth, Pat groaning as it yielded at last, and there was the lid of the other coffin, the cheap wood already rotting, cracking audibly as it received the weight of the second which swung from the ropes and clumsily dropped the last few inches.

  Pat, as the first son, then crouched down and shoved back into the piled earth the little wooden cross on which Tom had written, ‘Here lies Katherine Kavanagh nee Buckley, d. 1944, and John Kavanagh, her loving husband, d. 1945. Sleep in God’s Peace.’ This cross would have lasted ten years or so before it, too, became part of the earth, like my grandparents’ bodies, part of this land over which there have been so many bitter disputes.

  Knigh farmhouse and its accompanying glebe had been home for generations to a family named Harty: tenant farmers there from at least 1820, in 1876 they purchased the land for £500. On the eve of the First World War, Rody Cleary married Kate Harty and, there being no Harrty sons, over the years, it was Rody who consolidated the existing farm and, in 1920, he headed the poll for Sinn Fein in Borrisokane in the local elections. In the hungry thirties’ Rody went on to buy land on the outskirts of Nenagh, driving a hard bargain in what would now be described as a buyers’ market, when many were selling both cattle and land for a song. Finally, in the 1940s – indeed. whilst the Kavanaghs still lived there – it was Rody Cleary who bought Knigh Hill from the Crosses. Both the old house my family lived in and the land they farmed still belong to the Clearys. That is to say, to Rody’s daughter-in-law, Joan Cleary.

  Learning this I’m not just surprised but shocked, though why I should be I’m not quite clear. My grandparents had been dead for almost a decade. Besides, I know perfectly well my family could never have afforded such a thing. I suppose I know that, though, naturally, I wish they could have done. Is it that I feel, in not having had this revealed to me before, I’ve been somehow fooled? Things – and my companions – having not been as transparent as I’d imagined? Both fooled, and caught out in being foolish enough unconsciously to have patronised Rody Cleary’s daughter-in-law, Joan, for a simple countrywoman who had missed out on the rampant prosperity of the new Ireland? Taken in by Joan wringing her hands and moaning: ‘And dear Lord, isn’t everything so expensive! And the government not allowing you to do this or that or anything else to get the benefit of what you have!’

  ‘Sure,’ says Annie, with relish but no malice, ‘she owns enough to buy half the Vatican.’

  And indeed, in 2012, Joan Cleary is said to have sold land and property near Nenagh for two million euros.

  I’ve just come across a photo of Rody Cleary in Danny’s book – that smile! The watch chain, the easy posture, the tilt of the hat. Charm and confidence radiate from him. During a decade or more of Troubles, Rody was brave, committed, and canny. He had risked his life. He had spoken out. He had proved himself to be intelligent and capable. He had taken part in the building of an infrastructure that would be independent of English jurisdiction. Did he not deserve his reward? I recall Mick Grace saying of the Kavanaghs, ‘Politics? They had none.’ As if I’d asked did they go horse racing or collect watercolours. ‘And nor did we. What difference did it make to the likes us?’ No politics, and no land, neither.

  Pat wasn’t able to benefit from the sale of the woods where he’d been caretaker for so many years, nor from the sale of his old family home. He was, however, able to auction the contents. There was a trivet, a gridiron, a toasting fork and iron-stand, a meat mincer, a wooden rolling pin; there were skillets, iron cooking pots, the gallon bucket that had been used to collect the pig’s blood in – ‘the little gentilman’ as the O’Briens had called it – his father’s leather strop used for sharpening his razor, a box iron, a little iron for collars and cuffs, a keeler for cream, a small butter churn, a set of wooden butter pats – including one with the initial ‘A’ on it. There was a Jones’s hand sewing machine, a squat iron machine with a griffin holding arrows embossed on its side, a chest of drawers and one large wooden box containing a stack of ‘linen’ made from flour sacks, very fine, soft and much worn. There were the rush-seated sugan chairs and the settle, a game with Bible pictures that Pat remembered the girls playing with, and a damp-smelling pile of Tom’s old Westerns. There were wooden and tin eating implements, ten china plates, eight cups and seven saucers, including a cup from Manchester, and a big green dish Agnes had brought home from Busherstown. By the open door stood the magnificent mirror and reflected in it my grandmother’s precious collection of eighty-two jam jars. Not sparkling any more. Upstairs there were two double beds on one of which Pat laid out a blue dress of his mother’s.

  By midday it was all gone, to neighbours, to people come out from Nenagh. But no one remembers who bought the brass lamp that had made such a pretty tinkling sound when my grandmother pulled it down on its chain.

  So Paddy the Daw ‘gave up the key’ and left the house on Knigh Hill. After my grandparents’ hard-won triumph, and with the prosperity of Ireland putting out green shoots all about him, Pat was firmly set on the road that would take him down, down. A road begun years, generations, before but with a very different destination in mind. I’m told he was in and out of the hospital at Thurles during the decade or so before he died. Sometimes it seemed he might manage all right in the outside world. He might be out for a year or more at time, but he always spent his pitiful allowance on drink and he always had to return.

  But Pat didn’t vanish from Knigh. He kept coming back, as a tramp, as ‘little more than a common tinker’ as Annie said – like a ghost, haunting the magical place where he no longer had a home, relying on the extraordinary generosity of the Graces who fed him and allowed him to sleep in their shed which was dry and warm, and he slept there curled up on the hay like a stray dog. Like his grand-father, Patrick, when he came to Tipperary from Mayo, a traumatised child in the time of the Great Famine. In my imagination I’ve followed Pat there, sneaking in on him when I supposed him to be asleep only to become aware of two dark eyes – his grandfather Patrick’s famously black eyes – glittering at me. He wasn’t a sad, quiet, dignified old drunk; he was still lively, malicious, and crafty.

  As I talked these things over with Annie a pained look came on her face.

  ‘How could Paddy let himself sink so low?’ she asked. ‘Sometimes, Maggie, he was sleeping on a bench in Nenagh where the women would bring out food to him.’

  It was from that bench, or perhaps from the roadside closer to home, in the early hours of a bitter night in December 1981, that Pat was taken back to Thurles, to the Hospital of the Assumption. It was there in the hospital he died, in the middle of trying to take his boots off, saying it would never do, not at all, to come into the kitchen with his boots on. And raising himself up to express his indignation, he demanded: Who did they think he was?

  Part Seven

  Innocence and Experience

  1

  ‘Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history it is nevertheless necessary for life.’

  – The Talmud and the Internet, by Jonathan Rosen

  When my father, David, was a small boy the two most important things in life were maths and cricket. The wonderful thing about maths was that there was only one correct answer and, once you’d got the hang of it, it wasn’t difficult to work out what that was. Cricket was another matter: cricket was poetry. By the time he started school, aged four, following the others across the road to the little schoolhouse, my father knew his twelve times table and could bat a tolerable ball so long as it didn’t matter too much where it ended up. In both these skills he was self-taught. His father was an invalid and of his three elder siblings, one was a girl – my aunt Dorothy – interested in neither maths nor cricket, one was a boy whom his mother had dresse
d as a girl until he was five, and the eldest was a serious boy too preoccupied with his looming role as head of the family to give time to his baby brother. The baby of the family, and perhaps his mother’s favourite, David was self-reliant, inclined by nature to go to sleep when it was bedtime, to wake up when it was morning, and to enjoy school – all of which put him in the way of much teasing from his older siblings. In every other way he described his upbringing as one of ‘healthy neglect’.

  After cricket my father’s great pleasure was reading ‘Rupert Bear’ in the Daily Express. He never tired of examining the pictures, trying to work out what was going to happen next before the few rhyming lines told him. Rupert Bear was his friend. He understood and approved of everything Rupert said and did. It was in the spirit of Rupert that he escaped on to the village green as soon as it was light on a Sunday morning, taking his cricket bat, which his mother had got for him by saving Oxo coupons. My father was always first out on to the green but before long two or three other boys joined him. David didn’t mind much who it was so long as there was a willing arm to throw the ball and no one chattered too much. My father himself was a chatterer but only in class, or when getting under his mother’s feet, not out on the green with a cricket bat in his hand. On summer evenings and at weekends, whenever an adult match was being played, he would be there poised somewhere on the edge of the pitch, imitating the strokes, learning the vocabulary: leg glide, drive, square cut, stonewalling – he prayed he would never be guilty of that – hook, block, snick and sweep. And from the bowler: spin, flipper, daisy-cutter, donkey-dropper, Chinaman, a maiden over or a hat-trick. On the field there was the leg side, the gully, the first, second and third slips, there was silly point, mid-on and silly mid-on. There was the crease, the popping crease and the bowling crease.