Boycott

by Colin Murphy

  Mr Valkenburg smiled as he wrote a note to the Widow Barry. This Captain Boycott was certainly wonderful for business.

  Bernard Becker had taken The Lady Eglinton steam packet from Galway, which quickly conveyed him the length of Lough Corrib towards Cong. He had telegraphed ahead to the Valkenburg Hotel for a room and requested a car and driver to meet him off the ferry.

  He had spent the past days wandering the landscape of Galway, particularly her coastline. While the county was rich in terms of natural beauty, sadly the good Lord had not bequeathed the people any level of prosperity. He’d formed the opinion that the Irish were unquestionably downtrodden but that much of this was due to a clash of cultures. He believed that the Irish as a race were given to prevarication to some degree, and procrastination to excess. Nothing was done at the snap of a finger if it could be deferred until some more suitable time, this ‘time’ residing wholly in their imagination. The Saxon, as opposed to the Celt, he considered, obediently and promptly does as ordered, and if he gives a command expects the same. Any Englishman would be apt to storm at procrastinators and shufflers. It would be natural in these circumstances that the unfortunate Irishman would view the Englishman as an imperious tyrant.

  Yet for all that, he had seen the Irish peasant exploited to a shocking degree. He had written of the terrible neglect of the beautiful area known as Connemara, where, like Mayo, the bountifulness of the British Empire had yet to extend. Roads, piers, schools – whole villages in fact – were all in desperate need of investment. The entire place had simply been abandoned to the whims of the landlords. He had written of Connemara in terms of its general ‘tumble-downishness’. He had visited cottages that were little more than hovels and had come across one seashore holding where the rents were not only appallingly high, but the English landlord charged the tenants for gathering seaweed to use as fertiliser. When he witnessed such exploitation, he knew that no clash of cultures could excuse it.

  The rain had persisted for two days and even in the dim light he could see the white foam of countless crashing waterfalls on the distant mountains. He had learned that the situation in Ballinrobe was tense after the arrival of hundreds of soldiers and a body of constabulary sufficient to storm the walls of Troy. And their numbers were swelling daily, as evidenced by the presence of thirty-two RIC men on the steamer.

  On disembarking, his driver was there thanks to the ever-efficient Mr Valkenburg and he greeted Becker deferentially.

  ‘To Ballinrobe, your honour?’ the man inquired.

  ‘Yes, please, but I would like to go by way of Lough Mask House.’ Although it was late and the rain still fell in relentless sheets, he was keen to renew his acquaintance with Boycott ahead of the hordes of other correspondents.

  ‘It’s not on our way, your honour.’

  ‘I wish to call on Mr Boycott.’

  ‘Sure, it’s a different way altogether, your honour.’

  This was precisely the sort of dithering that had inspired his ‘clash of cultures’ theory. He decided to adopt his strictest Saxon tone.

  ‘Go that way, nevertheless,’ he barked.

  The man set off at a trot so gentle it would be midnight before they reached the house. Becker kept his frustration in check initially, but after thirty minutes his vexation at their snail’s pace got the better of him.

  ‘Can’t you go any faster?’

  The man pulled the car to a complete stop and turned to Becker.

  ‘Your honour, if I may put it plainly. I’ve been engaged to drive you to Ballinrobe, which I will do with pleasure. But I will not drive you to Lough Mask House. It is not in the contract.’

  Becker sighed. ‘I’ll pay you double.’

  ‘No, your honour. Doesn’t matter if you pay me a king’s ransom.’

  ‘Are you afraid? Is that it?’

  ‘I am not, your honour. But I won’t go against my countrymen. Mr Boycott is being boycotted, or haven’t you heard? Now, you’re welcome to walk if you want, only it’s a good stretch of the legs. Seven mile or so. So what’s it to be?’

  Becker cursed inwardly. ‘Ballinrobe,’ he muttered.

  An hour later they pulled into the town and Becker was further irked to learn that he was to be housed with ‘the Widow Barry’. His competitors had beaten him to the bedrooms. His accommodation actually turned out to be very acceptable and the good widow had provided a fold-up cot for him in her front parlour, which actually offered him privacy to work. Having washed, changed into dry clothing and enjoyed a hearty meal, he set off around the town to gain an overview of the situation.

  His first impression was of soldiers everywhere, wandering the paths and staring into the shop windows. The locals mostly seemed to be ignoring them or at least quietly enduring them. Yet the sight of so many armed men walking the streets of this small, remote place gave one the impression of a garrison town readying for war. The numbers of police added to the perception. They stood in twos or threes on the corners or patrolled in pairs along every street and alley, eyes nervous and suspicious. If anything, these men seemed more likely to come into confrontation with the locals. Perhaps, Becker thought, it was because they were Irishmen, regarded as being in league with the enemy.

  He ran into the first of his competitors near the barracks – four of them, in fact. One he recognised from The Times, and felt a surge of annoyance. It was as though he felt this story and town belonged to him, having been the first to exploit the current troubles. He swore an oath and determined not to speak to the interlopers. He ducked down a set of steps to the riverside walk, which would take him parallel to the ordnance ground between the two barracks. He scaled a brief rise and looked across the open space with disbelief.

  It was only here that the scale of the operation began to unfold. Spread out across the large ordnance ground were maybe a hundred tents, outside each of which soldiers grouped around blazing braziers. Men on horseback rode in every direction and sentries patrolled the perimeter, one of whom was eyeing him up and down as he stood there. At the far end of the green he could see carts trundling back and forth across the bridge that led to the cavalry barracks. Ambulance wagons were interspersed about the tents. Three pairs of soldiers hurried by, carrying what he recognised as those so-called ‘machine-guns’, capable of mowing down fifty men in seconds. He found the entire scene quite disturbing, especially as he felt he’d played no small part in bringing it about.

  ‘Oo the ’ell are you?’

  A soldier of no more than eighteen had come within ten yards of him, his rifle aimed directly at Becker’s chest.

  ‘Becker, press correspondent.’

  ‘Let’s see, then.’ He held out his hand for some form of corroboration and Becker fumbled in his pocket for his accredited press documents. He held them up and the young private eased nearer to study them.

  ‘All right, Mr Becker, sir. We can’t be too careful with all these Fenians about.’

  ‘That’s quite alright.’

  ‘But this area’s off-limits to civvies, sir. You shouldn’t be ’ere at all.’

  Neither should you, he thought as he turned back towards the River Robe, tinged with the silver of the gathering moonlight.

  CHAPTER 29

  THE LAWLESS STATE OF IRELAND

  TROOPS DISPATCHED TO PROTECT LABORERS AGAINST LAND LEAGUE

  Four troops of Hussars were dispatched hence for Ballinrobe by special trains at 2 o’clock this morning. Four hundred infantry have just arrived at Ballinrobe and will encamp near Lough Mask House. These precautions are taken in view of the intention of the northern Orangemen to send laborers to harvest the crops of Mr. Boycott, Lord Erne’s agent, for whom the local peasantry, at the instigation of the Land League, refuse to work. The Government will protect a moderate force of laborers, but refuse to permit anything approaching armed demonstration, which would certainly provoke a collision.

  –The New York Times, 10 November 1880

  L’AGITATION EN IRLANDE

  D�
��après des dépêches télégraphiques arrivées à Paris dans la soirée d’hier, les hommes de la province de l’Ulster marcheraient sur Mayo, dans la province de Connaught, où se trouvent des troupes anglaises, commandées par le capitaine Boycott. L’intendant du gouvernement, dans le but de protéger ces troupes, a envoyé à Mayo des renforts de soldats dans la nuit du 8 au 9 novembre. La guerre civile paraît imminente.

  –La Presse, Paris, 11 November 1880

  11 NOVEMBER 1880

  Annie Boycott emerged in her nightdress from behind the curtained screen as her husband entered the room. He had aged considerably these past months and she wondered if others thought the same of her. She had a permanent tightness across her chest, endured piercing and prolonged headaches, sometimes lasting an entire day, and often felt on the edge of reason. Dr Maguire had merely given her some powders and told her to find time to rest. What a monstrous joke! Although the household duties had eased greatly with the maid’s arrival, she had been obliged to resume working in the fields until just a day past, when they’d received confirmation that fifty men were coming to relieve them. But even though she had escaped the backbreaking labour, the strain of living under siege, of contemplating their future, denied her the ability to relax in any meaningful sense.

  He disappeared behind his own screen and she watched from the bed as his arms rose above the frame and pulled on his nightshirt. In recent days he had lost some of his famed truculence, only to replace it with a sullenness the like of which she’d never seen. He would never admit to being depressed, of course, as that would mean his spirit was wavering. And it was still possible to summon a cantankerous rant with a casual remark. But she was certain that he had regrets about his handling of the situation and that he disliked the surge of press attention, as he had pledged to talk only to that Becker fellow and one or two others. For despite the fact that when Charles spoke he could often be heard in the next county, he was largely a private man. What’s more, he despised the notion that he was seen in England as a helpless little man who was being bullied by a few Irish brutes. His letter to The Times had brought him far more than he had bargained for.

  Despite all that, she felt she must discuss certain matters with him.

  ‘Charles, may I ask you about the coming days?’

  He grunted an affirmative as he sat on the end of the four-poster bed, stroking his beard as he was in the habit of doing when ruminating on a subject.

  ‘Fifty labourers are coming, is that correct?’

  ‘Hmm. Arrive in Ballinrobe tomorrow night. Start work here on Thursday.’

  ‘And how many soldiers will accompany them?’

  ‘Why are you asking?’ he inquired gruffly.

  ‘Charles, I feel I’ve earned the righ–’

  ‘About four hundred.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Four hundred soldiers, or so I’ve been informed.’

  ‘Four hundred?’

  Annie had envisaged the labourers with a guard of twenty or so men to patrol the estate perimeter with the RIC. ‘Are you saying…just a moment…surely they’ll return to the barracks each evening?’

  Boycott glanced over his shoulder, his expression suggesting her question was idiotic. ‘Of course not. Organising the security to and from Ballinrobe on a daily basis would be impossible. They’ll have to stay here until the job is done.’

  Annie was sitting up straight in the bed now, the blankets gathered on her lap. ‘And where will all these men sleep?’

  ‘The labourers in the stables. The enlisted soldiers will camp in the open field beyond the woodland. The officers…’ he hesitated.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The officers will have to stay in the house.’

  ‘Here? In this house?’

  ‘Of course. As an ex-officer, I cannot possibly countenance asking them to sleep under canvas.’

  ‘How many?’ Her voice was rising sharply.

  ‘Six, perhaps seven.’

  ‘Oh my dear God.’ She put a palm to her forehead as she felt another headache swell inside her skull.

  ‘It will only be for a couple of weeks, three at most.’

  ‘Three weeks,’ she said despairingly. ‘After all that’s happened, now I must turn my home into a barracks and surrender all semblance of privacy. Is this ever going to end? Answer me that, Charles.’

  ‘I said three weeks, what else would you have me say, woman?’ His tone suggested that he himself was not immune to lugubriosity at the prospect.

  ‘And what about beyond that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean when the labourers are gone and the harvest sold, what then?’

  He stood now, becoming his old belligerent self, but looking faintly ridiculous as he began to bluster in his nightshirt.

  ‘Then we evict the blighters if they won’t pay their rents and find new tenants! That’s what we’ll do, by God. They won’t defeat me as long as I’ve air in my lungs.’

  Annie wiped away a tear. She almost felt pity for him, such was his blindness to the obvious that had all his life prevented him from seeing the world as it really was.

  ‘Charles. Even if we do as you say, no one will take up the leases. No one will go against the Land League for fear of being boyc– for fear of being shunned. Parnell has almost the entire country on his side.’

  ‘Then we’ll get them from England. Or Scotland. Plenty of proper, hardworking farmers over there, not like these Irish layabouts.’

  ‘Charles, will you please listen? You won’t get them. Not under these conditions. And let us say you succeeded. What then? Where will we shop? Who will work the farm next year and the year after that? Who will tend your horses? We’ll still be treated as though we have leprosy. They’ll never give in to us. Never. Is this to be our life?’

  He slammed a palm against the bedpost, then turned and walked to the window where he stood peering out through a gap in the curtain at the starlight floating on the surface of Lough Mask. After a minute he walked silently to his side of the bed and twisted the small dial on the oil lamp, depriving the room of all light.

  ‘Damn this place to hell,’ she heard him whisper in the darkness.

  She lay awake for hours watching the vague outline of his chest rising and falling. Every once in a while he grunted an unintelligible word and his head would turn from side to side, as though his troubles sought him out even in the realms of slumber.

  What troubled him though, down there in the pit of his soul, in the places that only the inner eye of sleep could behold and recall to memory? The ostracism? His financial situation? Or did it go deeper, did his dreams force him to confront the events of those last months on Achill Island, the events that had finally set the mould on his character, forever shaping him as the belligerent, petty and vindictive man that most people saw.

  When she asked him what they were to do after the crop was harvested and the enormous fuss abated, he’d blithely said that he would ‘evict the blighters’ and they would then carry on as before, as though the tenants were merely an infestation of woodworm and once banished, the problem would be solved.

  In that simplistic assessment, she had heard an echo of another time, when he had carried out a particular eviction not because it was an ‘economic imperative’, as he would frequently justify the act, but as a means of leverage, and in shameful vengeance. And God forgive her, in her desperation, she had encouraged, even applauded the act.

  When their daughter, Mary, had completed her schooling, including a year’s educational travel through southern Europe, she had returned, aged almost seventeen, to live in Corrymore House on Achill Island. Her first months home had been relatively uneventful, although Annie noticed a growing hostility between Mary and her father. She had inherited much of his stubbornness and was also given to flights of temper. Where they differed, however, was her compassion and innate kindness, which itself was a source of conflict as Charles castigated her for her easy familiarity with
the tenantry, as he had Annie when she was a younger woman. Yet Annie felt pride at sight of Mary’s behaviour, as she believed it had been her subtle influence when Mary had been younger that had woven these sentiments into her daughter’s nature. The one thing that had acted as a balm during these times of conflict had been Mary’s own beauty, for she seemed as a flower sprung from the unyielding Achill earth: black-haired with intelligent blue eyes, arching eyebrows dipping to a dainty nose and a smile that went straight to the heart. Even Charles struggled to maintain his anger with Mary for any protracted period.

  But her husband had not been the only one to suffer through Mary’s recalcitrant nature. Annie also found her relationship with her daughter increasingly fraught. She displayed no interest in their home or general life, rebuffing as many social occasions as she could safely explain away through illness, eventually telling Annie that she had no interest in indulging in pointless conversations with stuffy individuals about matters of no consequence. Her year in Europe had been an experience of diametric contrasts, she’d explained; on the one hand the tedium of society’s politesse, on the other the infinite expansiveness of the human mind revealed to her through Europe’s, and in particular Italy’s, museums, galleries and churches.

  One evening her father had almost struck her when Mary had argued that Catholics had been responsible for the greatest period of human expression in history, the Renaissance, and that furthermore her time in Italy had exposed her to many members of that religion and, contrary to his lecturing, as a collective group they were no better or worse than any Protestants she knew. The allegorical straw had come when she’d expressed an interest in becoming a member of that religion, as she found the rituals and invocations ‘were of a more spiritual, yet tangible nature’ than those within Protestantism.