RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Bound up in my subversive faith, my intimations of Ireland were absorbed from a sense of obscure wrongs played out over the sea. I felt part of a separate and not entirely accepted caste. My school uniform was green; my mother knitted me an emerald-green jumper that I loved. I insisted that my eyes were green, even though people now tell me they’re blue; perhaps they’ve turned blue from all the sea they have seen. Blue was the colour of conformity; I associated greenness with rebellion. My Irishness, as far as I suspected it, was another disguise; but I seemed to feel instinctively that I was an alien too.

  My great-grandfather, Patrick James Moore, was born in 1856 in Blanchardstown, then a village six miles from the centre of Dublin. His father, Dennis, a blacksmith, and his mother, Rose Halpin, had been married in 1848, the year in which the Famine reached its peak. I imagine Patrick on his visits to the city, passing another young man in the street: Oscar Wilde, on his way to swim in Dublin Bay. And like Wilde, my great-grandfather would leave Ireland for England in the eighteen-seventies, albeit for wildly different reasons. Wilde would replace the hunger and disease of his homeland with decadent consumption as a gesture of unnatural defiance; my ancestor was driven out by the consequences of famine, and struggled to establish himself in a strange land. He moved to the port of Whitby, once famous for its whaling, where he worked as a seasonal fisherman along with the herring quines, gathering the fish before they too ran out. My grandfather, also named Dennis, was born in Whitby in 1886; the harbour lay at the end of their street. But economics forced the family to leave the sea for the mills of Bradford.

  There, in 1914, Dennis married Josephine, the daughter of Michael Wall, a sail-maker from Limerick. He too had left Ireland in the wake of the Famine, from a port which witnessed the emigration of thousands. One newspaper reported people leaving Limerick ‘as fast as sails can waft them from the shores of their fathers’.

  These two Irish families came together in an English attempt at industrial utopia. Saltaire was Titus Salt’s model mill town on the river Aire, outside Bradford; for Michael the sail-maker and Patrick the fisherman its name may have suggested the salt and air of their origin. Their children, my grandparents, were married in Shipley on 18 June 1914. Dennis and Josephine’s wedding photograph might as well have been taken in Dublin, so Irish are its sitters. Framed by a bare painted backdrop, poised on wooden chairs set out on the studio rug, the new family are convened for a new century. At the centre sits my grandfather, a tailor-to-be in his elegant suit, pinned tie, boots shiny, moustache twirled and trim. He was little and bony, like me, with bright eyes. Into his memory I read my own Irishness.

  Next to Dennis sits his handsome bride in a billow of lace, a twist of white flowers in her dark hair, a bouquet of red roses in her lap. Standing behind them is Bridget Wall, a veiled matriarch; her younger daughters, Rose Margaret and Kathleen, sit at either end. They look into the future. In a year’s time Rose Margaret will be present at my father’s birth, easing him out into this world in an upper room. Bound as much by otherness as by family ties, they all look confident enough; although my grandfather’s knuckles are clenched around the brim of his hat.

  Someone must have looked at this photograph and thought how life was better then, before the war, when three Irish brothers had married three Irish sisters. They had to become English in a country that looked on their old one with suspicion; plaster saints and the shame of famine were not wanted here. The Irish priest wrote out the register in Latin, converting my grandparents’ names to Denyius and Josephinus, as though their Irishness were something to conceal. No one could imagine what was to come. In 1915 my father, Leonard Joseph, was born, a year before the Somme; his son would watch the starman on television; my nephew would see it all on his smartphone.

  One evening, after dancing around the room with my father, Josephine went upstairs to bed and died of a heart attack. She was forty years old; she left behind five children. My father was just nineteen; he had to help bring up his younger siblings during the Depression. He would accompany his father on missions to give food to families, many of them Irish, so hungry that they snatched the bread out of his hands. He hardly ever spoke about those days, but he did recall a nest of rats running down the street, and a man whose body was found hanging in an outhouse on waste land.

  Soon after, my father escaped the sooty streets of Bradford for the southern air of Southampton as surely as his grandparents had left Ireland behind. He was going back to the sea. He arrived at a station where the waves still lapped at the platform edge, although the port was busy driving its water away, reclaiming great stretches of land; the factory in which my father would work was built on that new earth, where giant cables rolled onto drums and onto waiting ships, tethering one country to another. He too had reinvented himself.

  A photograph taken in the nineteen-thirties shows him as a young man, his hair slicked back, neat and handsome, standing on the coastguard lookout at Netley, close to the gates of the military hospital. He is posing to impress the photographer, my mother, whom he has just met and who knows this shore well; she was brought up here, walking this beach with her father. In the background is a four-funnelled liner. Its silhouette is the same as Titanic’s; the one was the ghost of the other. In the same way I would wear dead men’s clothes, dead women’s, too, as if I were an amalgam of my mother and father – which I am. The way they were then, what they aspired to be. Yearning for what we never had.

  My father came alive by the sea. On day trips to Bournemouth he would exhort us to breathe deeply as if to get rid of the soot of those blackened houses up north where our aunts and uncles lived and in one of which, one dark morning, I watched a man step out onto the moon. But we never visited the country to which he owed his genes and his faith.

  It has taken me this long to realise that my father was, to all intents and purposes, an Irishman, yet his connection to the island, and ours, had simply disappeared.

  The city of Cork is Ireland’s great exit point. From here sailed convict ships such as HMS Java, bound for New South Wales in 1833, with a cargo of two hundred transportees, among them twelve ‘Whiteboys’ from Kilkenny, violently opposed to Protestant tithes and guilty of swearing an illegal oath resolving to have a limb amputated rather than betray a brother. Their passage was recorded by Robert Dickson, the same surgeon who had placed the hermaphroditic Sam Tapper under observation; he noted in his journal that the Irish prisoners suffered far more than others during the voyage because they were so undernourished.

  Transportees had no choice but to leave Ireland; the hungry and dispossessed had a choice, but not much of one. Thousands left from Cork’s harbour at Cobh, their possessions parcelled up in brown paper, wearing their best, perhaps their only clothes. Melville recorded such scenes in Redburn, based on his first voyage to England in 1839. In Liverpool, Redburn sees a starving woman and ‘two shrunken things like children’ in a pavement vault, representatives of the refugees who lived in the streets and cellars, the sort of place that the young Heathcliff was found.

  On Redburn’s return journey, hundreds of migrants board his ship. The English passengers are protected by their twenty-guinea cabins ‘from the barbarian incursions of the “wild Irish” emigrants’, stowed away ‘like bales of cotton, and packed like slaves in a slave-ship’. Even before they leave British waters, the refugees’ spirits sink. Deceived by ship-owners about the length of their passage, they mistake the coast of their own island for their destination as they cross the Irish Sea: ‘America must have seemed to them as a place just over a river.’ One old man is only distracted from his search for land by dolphins riding the bow, shouting at them, ‘Look, look, ye divils! look at the great pigs of the s’a!’

  All this was so much invention. No such crowds boarded Melville’s ship, and there was only one Irish name on its passenger list, Thomas Moore. Yet as a New Yorker, Melville was used to such sights; and to those who asked whether ‘multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American
shores’, he replied, ‘if they can get here, they had God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.’ Melville wrote Redburn in 1849, as refugees from the famine were arriving in New York in their thousands, many more dead than alive. They would resort to squats in the waste lands of Brooklyn, ‘lying in the very heart of the city, and given over to hogs and cows, and to the squatter sovereigns who have erected wretched shanties upon it’.

  From 1845 to 1855, two million migrants left Ireland for North America; it seemed as if the entire island was being transplanted across the Atlantic (just as its turf was exported to Cape Cod). In Black ’47 alone, the year of the coffin ships, fifty thousand Irish died en route to America or shortly after they reached it. Vessels which had brought timber, tobacco or cotton to Britain were restocked with desperate people and overpacked to maximise profits on the return journey. The imperial British may have abolished the slave trade, but in this new fatal triangle, human ballast was dumped overboard and drowned, as Africans had been a generation before and are still drowning today. In scenes which might have been painted by Turner or filmed by CNN, other emigrants sidestepped the inevitable and threw themselves into ‘the seething waters’.

  The sea does not care. It never did. On his journey to the Cape in October 1849 – at the same time that Melville was sailing back to England – Thoreau came across the aftermath of another shipwreck. At Boston the Provincetown steamer was delayed by a violent storm; the same high seas had caused the brig St John from Galway, loaded with migrants, to wreck on the Grampus Rocks off Cohasset, across the bay from where Sylvia Plath would experience her own sulphurous storm as a child. Nearly one hundred and fifty Irish people had been drowned and were being washed ashore. The remains of the ship lay about in pieces; it was clear to Thoreau that it was rotten and rusty even before it foundered. Sightseers – drawn by a broadsheet handed around Boston, ‘Death! one hundred and forty-five lives lost at Cohasset’ – were milling about, gawping at the spectacle.

  Thoreau – who appeared to relish his role as a deathly, transcendental beachcomber, as if he might find America’s lost innocence there – watched as the bodies were recovered. ‘I saw many marbled feet and matted heads … and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, – who probably intended to go out to service in some American family, – to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, – merely red and white, – with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.’ When he found a large piece of the brig on the rocks, he was told that most of the victims lay beneath it.

  Locals, as unconcerned as the figures in Brueghel’s painting, were collecting seaweed washed up by the storm; to one old man the bodies were ‘but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him’. Thoreau concluded, ‘This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society’; the dead were so numerous, so strewn among the seaweed and their clothes so entangled with the wrack that, laid out in public, they lost their humanity. ‘If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?’ he reasoned, ironically.

  But one image stayed with him, like a nightmare: that of something white seen floating in the water days later, ‘and found to be the body of a woman, which had risen in an upright position, whose white cap was blown back with the wind’. This vision darkened the beach for Thoreau. These desperate people had come in search of a new life, ‘but before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of’.

  On the other side of the Atlantic that same year, 1849, Victoria, dubbed the Famine Queen, arrived in Cork on her first visit to Ireland. Her royal gaze was carefully screened from the countryside’s more terrible sights, from people whose hair stood on end as a side-effect of starvation, a precursor of some future dreaming. She declared Cork ‘not at all like an English town’, that it looked ‘rather foreign’. Yet it was part of her empire, and even now its port – which was renamed Queenstown in her honour – retains a colonial air. Its Victorian terraces are dominated by the gothic spire of Pugin’s cathedral, and out in the bay are the traces of naval installations which remained under British control until 1938.

  The ferry chugs over the water, pop music crackling from tinny speakers. It is not a long trip. Spike Island soon looms up, greener than I expected, hanging in the harbour in the way Whale Island lies off Portsmouth, or Ellis Island off Manhattan. This was the famine prison, Ireland’s Van Diemen’s Land; the largest penal colony in the world.

  The island has only recently become accessible; visitors are issued with safety warnings and informed about where and where not to go. Many of the buildings are decrepit, and on this sunny Monday morning we are told not to enter them. Peter and I pass crumbling grey barracks whose troops once manned the star-shaped fort. The grass has grown long and soft in high summer. Stonechats sing sweetly on concrete posts – although, as Peter points out, they are probably warding off interlopers to their territory. The tide is low, revealing a rocky shore, as good a barrier as any to men who could not swim.

  Originally called Inis Pic – perhaps a reference to the Island of the Picts – its name was anglicised as Spike Island. This sliver of land, once a monastic settlement, had long held Ireland’s unwanted; all the devils were here, too. Shakespeare may have seen Ireland as a model for Prospero’s island – England’s nearest, most troublesome colony as a plantation to be tamed and its wild people conquered – and Edmund Spenser, the author of The Faerie Queene, stationed in the county of Cork under Elizabeth’s rule, thought the land should be subjugated and even consume itself, describing the victims of repression and famine creeping out of the woods and glens: ‘they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spake like ghostes, crying out of their graves’. During Cromwell’s campaigns in the sixteen-forties, thousands were transplanted from Spike Island like some invasive crop to the West Indies, to be superseded by enslaved Africans. In 1847, reacting to the onset of the famine, the island became a prison for men reduced to stealing food or defying unpayable rent. From August 1847 to August 1848, 2,698 sentences of transportation were meted out. Those unable to afford a migrant’s passage stole to receive such sentences. In 1849, three seventeen-year-olds brought before Westport assizes accused of stealing hemp ‘requested to be transported, as they had no means of living, and must do the same thing again’.

  Two thousand men at a time were confined yet open to the harsh ocean and its weather, as though being readied for voyages to come. As near as it was to the land, the island appeared ‘as isolated as if in the middle of the Atlantic’. Inmates were set to work in acts of useless labour; locals believed that they were made to carry buckets of water from one side of the island to the other, emptying and refilling the sea. Serious offenders were kept in darkened cells, converted from latrines. Those who worked outside wore caps with veils to conceal their faces as Wilde would do; many were made ‘moonblind’ by the whitewashed walls. Weakened by malnutrition, one in ten died of disease. Others, already traumatised by the loss of their families to the famine, went insane; the hopeless hanged themselves, or jumped off the cliff. Those who tried to swim away were recaptured and more heavily chained than before, as though to anchor them to the island. For some, their only resort was each other: in 1850, the Catholic chaplain, Fr Timothy Lyons, criticised for being too liberal, was admonished for failing to report ‘indecent practices’ between inmates in the privies.

  On the far shore of the island a clump of trees conceals another decaying building, once the settlement’s hospital.

  ‘They call it Bleak House,’ says Peter.

  It has been entirely overtaken by undergrowth; to reach it we have to trample down chest-high briars and nettles. I re
member such sites from my childhood; Victorian houses left empty, and yet not. The upper windows are boarded up, but at the rear, the outhouses stand blatantly exposed. Their roofs have fallen in on old toilets and baths, their glaring white ceramic obscenely spattered with rust and rot. The place is repellent. I use my camera as a kind of defence, quickly taking images before leaving it to its darkness. I feel as though I am visiting a dark version of my home, my Spike Island; a place where alternative histories were played out.

  On the other side of the field a low stone wall encloses the graveyard. A team of archaeologists are digging in the dirt. Peter points out the dark stains in the exposed soil, each six feet long. The top layer is being carefully scraped away to reveal the remains of humans who long ago leaked into the earth. Twelve hundred convicts died on the island, but this small corral could hold two hundred at most. No one knows where the others lie.

  Mara, a young American leading the gang of students clad in fluorescent vests and sweltering under the July sun, shows us where the wooden coffins were found, neatly carpentered and painted white by their fellow prisoners. Their contents left scant clues as to whom their bones belonged, beyond a few fragments of textiles. On one man’s upper arm was a brass ‘A’, its significance a mystery. The only skeleton that may be identified – because of its size – is that of a boy who, according to the records, was just fourteen when he died here. The student chain gang digs on, in the same place where burial parties sweated two centuries ago. It is the unknown dead’s fate to be constantly disinterred; these exhumed inmates will be commemorated in a service of remembrance, although no one remembers who they are.

  Behind us, the parade ground is surrounded by three-storey Georgian barracks. In the nineteen-eighties the prison was reopened to deal with a new crime wave of car thieves and substance abusers. When Peter was a boy, sailing in the bay, the island was out of bounds: convicts being ferried across would swear violently at him and his friends. In the hot summer of 1985 the inmates rioted and took over for a day, setting fire to one of the blocks. The burnt-out building is left eviscerated, its windows empty, its wooden floors gone. I peer into a tunnel-like space pierced by the sun from above. Trees have grown up through three storeys, reaching up to the light. Rubble and rubbish strews the floor. It looks like a war zone, a place for a strange meeting.