Patrick Kavanagh, a Biography

by Antoinette Quinn

  To his father’s dismay, Patrick, like many young men in the district, had strong Sinn Féin sympathies. His support was not of much use to the party since he was too young to vote in the 1918 election, but James and Bridget worried about their young teenage son becoming mixed up in violence and lawlessness. Often, when his friends came to the house whistling for him to join them, they would not let Patrick go.10 Inniskeen, like the rest of Ireland, was in political ferment by 1918. A company of the Irish Volunteers had drilled openly in Toal’s meadow in 1914, but local republican activism most often targeted the railways. The boycotting of Belfast goods was Dáil policy from September 1920 and on 14 March 1921 a goods train was held up at Inniskeen station in broad daylight and goods said to have come from Belfast were unloaded and set on fire, resulting in a claim for £447 damages. The changing of signals and the stopping of trains was such a daily occurrence by 1922 that the line from Inniskeen to Carrickmacross was closed until 1925. It was said that many of these incidents were not politically motivated and that some private citizens on the make were taking advantage of the turbulence of the times. Local shops were also raided and the Inniskeen police barracks was burned down in 1920.11

  Despite his parents’ precautions, Patrick did join in republican raids and hostilities. On one occasion he was involved in a raid on the post office. When he came home with a new flashlamp, part of the booty from the evening’s activism, his father thrashed him and sent him back to the village to return the stolen goods. James, as a tradesman, was on the side of law and order. He was known to have cash on his premises and, fearing that he might be a target, slept with a slashing hook by the door, ready to defend himself.12

  Even such apparently innocent entertainments as mumming took on sinister overtones during this period of guerrilla manoeuvres. Patrick joined a gang of mummers, young men who dressed up and performed a ritualised playlet in neighbours’ houses. He found that they were no longer welcome, since people feared being visited by roving groups of men, under whatever pretext. They were right. The habit of thieving and marauding had tainted the mummers and they sometimes resorted to blackguardism to extort money or stole food from their reluctant customers.13

  While 77.5 per cent of County Monaghan voters supported the Treaty, Patrick, like many Sinn Féiners of pre-voting age living along the Six-County border, was bitterly opposed to partition. After the Treaty, violence in the Inniskeen district escalated. Several Inniskeen Irregulars (anti-Treaty activists) were jailed by the new Free State Government, including Sire Hamill, for whom most of the Kavanaghs worked at one time or another. A railway bridge between Carrickmacross and Inniskeen was bombed on 23 February 1923. In the same year three Irregulars, caught transporting guns from Carrickmacross in a car stolen in Inniskeen, were executed in Dundalk Gaol. Physically, Patrick was a rather cowardly youth and his participation in guerrilla activities appears to have been at a fairly low level, but he was sufficiently involved by spring 1923 to have a rumour circulating that he had been arrested on 23 May, though by this time the anti-Treatyites had called off their campaign.14

  His father, on the contrary, was particularly anxious not to be seen to take sides in the Civil War, lest his trade suffer; he longed for the restoration of peace and stability. On 8 December 1926 James would attend the monster rally of the National League in Carrickmacross and become a paid-up member.15 This was a new, short-lived political party founded by John Redmond’s son and supported by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which offered an alternative to the pro and anti-Treaty parties, Cumann na nGaedheal under William Cosgrave and Fianna Fáil under Éamon de Valera. The National League argued that national unity could not be achieved while Civil War divisions formed the basis of electoral choice. Such ‘a plague on both your houses’ political agenda was congenial to James. Patrick’s unwelcome dabbling in republicanism did come to an abrupt end just a few months after his rumoured arrest, but not in the way his father would have wished.

  In late August 1923, at the age of 18, Patrick contracted typhoid fever, probably as a result of drinking contaminated water from a stream in the fields. The symptoms were severe headache followed by fever, loss of appetite and a general feeling of malaise. When the characteristic raised pink spots appeared on his chest and abdomen, the doctor was called, and once typhoid had been diagnosed he was taken by hired car to Carrickmacross Fever Hospital on the 28th. The house was fumigated lest any other member of the family be infected. Fever was dreaded in the district because it stirred up folk memories of the fever that had followed on the Famine, and, on the evening he went into hospital, neighbours came as far as the gate to sympathise with the family as if Patrick were dying.

  He spent about three months in the fever hospital, feeling wretchedly ill for much of the time and dreading the nights when he woke up in the darkness afraid. For a long time he was too weak to leave his bed, even though as his health improved he chafed at being a prisoner. It was his first extended stay away from home. James visited his son every Monday, the traditional shoe-maker’s day off, walking the six miles to and from Carrickmacross because the train times did not suit and he didn’t possess a bicycle. It was a long walk for a man of 68 and testifies to his deep affection for the son who frequently exasperated him by his idle ways, unenthusiastic approach to cobbling and farming alike, and wrong-headed politics. Lucy was then a pupil at the St Louis Secondary School in the town and she visited the hospital every day. Some republican friends also called by, which greatly enhanced Patrick’s status in the eyes of fellow patients.

  After his return home he was pitifully weak and tired. The illness caused him to go partially bald for a time and his remaining hair was gleefully razored off by his friend and cousin Johnny Caffrey, to encourage strong new growth. More seriously, he had developed a thrombosis in his left leg from the prolonged period of immobilisation, which would trouble him in later life.16 He was advised to keep his leg up as much as possible and James fondly hoped that this would provide him with an incentive to turn to shoe-making, but illness had not increased his aptitude. For months he rested at home or hobbled about the roads on a stick visiting neighbours’ houses, looking for other men to talk to. He also filled much of his leisure time by reading.

  Patrick had scarcely recovered from his illness when a new worry arose for the Kavanaghs. James had learned that his title to the Mucker holding was to be challenged in court by Mary Anne Cassidy, an elderly Inniskeen resident. He took the challenge seriously and was severely stressed about the forthcoming court case. When the case was heard in the District Court at the beginning of July 1924, however, he put a brave face on the matter, pooh-poohing the Cassidy claim to his home. The plaintiff told the judge that she had attempted to evict James in 1900 and that he should have been paying her rent all the years in between. James declared that Miss Cassidy was suffering from delusions and that anyone present in the court had as good a right to the house. The case was dismissed on the technical grounds that a hearing over the right to title had to take place in a higher court and, fortunately, Miss Cassidy did not pursue her claim any further.17

  The next day, 2 July, James was admitted to the Monaghan County Infirmary. For months he had been suffering with his prostate gland, but had staved off hospitalisation until after the court case. He was operated on and remained in hospital for two months. Troubles did not come single spies for the Kavanaghs that summer. The youngest child, Peter, was also a patient in the infirmary, having been admitted with a septic foot on 22 June.

  On the day James left for hospital, Patrick was distraught. His secure world was falling apart. First there had been the threat of eviction and now his elderly father, the omnipresent bulwark of his daily existence, was at risk, a vulnerable 69-year-old man facing a serious operation. His mother, too, had gone to Monaghan to be with her husband and son. At this time of crisis, the sheltered 19-year-old, with adult responsibility so suddenly thrust upon him, reacted by turning to religion for help, though not to orthodox religion.
Instead of going to the parish chapel or to the formidable parish priest, Father Maguire, he approached the silenced priest, Father Pat McConnon, a former curate in the parish, whose Masses he had once served, but who had been suspended from his duties since 1919. Supposed to be a seventh son of a seventh son, this former curate was credited by the villagers with miraculous healing powers, and women sought his assistance in cases of complications during pregnancy. Father Pat told Patrick to recite two short prayers: ‘Jesus, deliver us from evil’ and ‘O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee’, and that all would be well. Patrick walked back to the empty house where of all the large Kavanagh clan only Celia remained and he made her kneel down beside him and gabble the faith healer’s prayer over and over for the rest of the afternoon. When Bridget returned from her long day in the hospital, she was enraged to find that all the customary household chores had been neglected and no animals fed, because her son was too absorbed in storming heaven to attend to earthly practicalities.18

  Over the following months Patrick had his first taste of acting as the man of the house under his mother’s watchful eye. Peter came home from hospital on 20 August, but James remained on until 30 September and after his return he was frail and had begun to feel his age. Yet Patrick refused to be cast down by family troubles. Now fully recovered from his own invalidism, he was once more full of high spirits and had resumed his athletic activities, especially cross-country running and hurdling. While practising vaulting a gate in March 1925, he slipped and broke a collar bone. When Dr Barry failed to set it properly, either in the dispensary or later in her Carrickmacross surgery, he was dispatched to Monaghan County Infirmary, the third member of his family to be hospitalised within twelve months. This time Patrick was a patient for only a few days and, being a gregarious youth, enjoyed the companionship of his fellow patients in the Murray ward.19 The following year he was sufficiently recovered to captain the parish tug of war team when they were ignominiously defeated by the mid-Monaghan team, Ahabog. At this stage of his life he was still a teetotaller, so when the team stopped to buy drinks on the way home, one lemonade had to be included in the round.20

  Whereas in his recollections or fictional recreations of his early manhood Patrick always drew attention to his own fecklessness and dreaminess, his youngest sister Celia remembered him as a caring elder brother, a buffer between the stern adult regime of their parents and the disaster-prone milieu of her childhood. When she broke a large bowl, Patrick rearranged the dishes on the dresser so that it was some time before its absence was noted and there was no evidence as to what had happened to it; when she stuck fast in the mud of a bog where she was forbidden to walk, Patrick rescued and hid her, then washed all the mud off and fetched her a clean dress from the house; when the dog she co-owned with her brother gave birth to ten pups and they dreaded their mother’s reaction, Patrick drowned nine of the pups so that she was presented with only one. The drowning of unwanted domestic pets, such as litters of kittens and pups, was a commonplace in the country in those days, although to the child Celia it seemed that Patrick had solved an insoluble problem. When Peter’s first dog, Bran, strayed on to the nearby railway line and was killed by a train, Patrick, who came upon the corpse, buried it in a ditch and consoled his heart-broken little brother by telling him of a wonderful new pup that would soon be available and would become Bran the Second. He took a special interest in his brother from a young age, kicking ragball in the front garden with him and taking him to football matches. In future years Patrick was to be noted for his kindly, avuncular way with children, by contrast with his customary incivility towards many adults; this protective attitude towards the young, which would eventually extend to beginner poets, was developed during his time as elder brother to siblings who were ten and twelve years his junior. But as Celia discovered, his protection came at a price.

  Sometime in his late teens Patrick had begun smoking cigarettes, a habit his thrifty mother, in particular, regarded as the equivalent of burning money, so there was little hope of raising cash for cigarettes from the household budget. One method he resorted to in order to feed his habit was to compel his little sister to hand over every penny of the pocket money she had earned for helping out in a neighbour’s house. No matter how she tried to escape his demands by varying her route home or lying about how much money she had been given, he always outwitted her.21 Such exploitation would be as conspicuous a future trait as his tolerance towards children.

  From 1926, after the Boundaries Commission had agreed the border between the new Irish Free State and the separatist Ulster Six Counties, a whole new way of life and sometimes a new source of income opened up for villages such as Inniskeen which was only a couple of miles by ‘unapproved road’ from County Armagh. The border was too extensive to be policed and, since it was often economic to shop on the other side, smuggling was rife. Some republican families were prepared to flout the existence of the border for political reasons, because they disagreed with Partition; others refused to accept that roads along which they had been used to travelling all their lives now belonged to a different State. Because of the general break-down of respect for law and order consequent on the Troubles and the Civil War, some border dwellers enjoyed discomfiting or outwitting the constabulary and customs officers; smuggling could prove to be enjoyable as well as profitable. As always, there were a few who were happy to exploit the policing difficulties of the new dispensation to their own advantage, and the sport of cock-fighting, which was illegal in both regimes, got a new lease of life as participants and spectators could cross the border in a trice if police from either side appeared. One hilarious account in the Dundalk Democrat in June 1926 has them crossing and recrossing as police from both sides attempted to stop the fight. The cocks on this occasion represented County Monaghan and County Armagh. Cock-fighting was one of the few sports that James Kavanagh engaged in, but by 1926 he was becoming too elderly and feeble to indulge, and there is no record that the family profited from cross-border trade. Indeed, the poet would later regret that he was not in Inniskeen during the Second World War when a small fortune could be made from smuggling.

  For the Kavanagh parents the buying of more land had become increasingly urgent by the mid-1920s, because there was no future for the family in shoe-making. It was obvious that Patrick was only fitted to take over as a shoe repairer, the less lucrative side of the business, and, in any case, as his parents were probably well aware, the days of the hand-made boot were numbered. Footwear shops and even footwear factories were springing up in nearby towns. The boot factory, due to open in the County Monaghan town of Emyvale in June 1925, would manufacture 2,500 pairs of boots a week and specialise in the heavy and medium footwear favoured by agricultural workers. There had already been two failed attempts to set up a boot factory in Dundalk and it was only a matter of time before a successful factory would be opened. In fact, the Halliday family did set one up in 1928, by which time the town had fifteen shoe shops.22 Country cobblers like James could still carry on a good trade in repairs since shop footwear was expensive and most people made their shoes last as long as possible by having them resoled, reheeled, stitched and even patched, but this was dull, tedious and unprofitable work. By the time Patrick Kavanagh was writing The Green Fool, only a dozen years after the opening of the Emyvale boot factory, hand-made shoes were a thing of the past and he characterised his father as a shoe-maker of the good old days ‘when a pair of shop boots was an insult to any decent man’s feet’. Later he would attribute Kerry’s win over Monaghan in the All-Ireland Gaelic football final in 1930 to the fact that the County Monaghan team were wearing factory-made boots. ‘It was a wet afternoon and their boots turned to paper in the rain’ was his explanation of his home county’s defeat.23

  Diversifying further into farming seemed the commonsensical route for the Kavanaghs to take by 1925. They had already spotted a likely property, a farm at Shancoduff about three-quarters of a mile from Mucker, who
se owner, Thomas Reynolds, had died in December 1923. It was a little further from home than they would have liked, but at sixteen acres, three roods and nineteen perches it was substantial enough to move them definitively into the farming class. Together with the fields in Drumnagrella, their land would add up to over twenty-five acres statute measure, a sizeable holding in Inniskeen terms where a man with forty to fifty acres was considered ‘a strong farmer’, almost gentry. When Reynolds’ farm was eventually auctioned in May 1925, they bought it for £267. James put down a deposit of £65 on 14 May and Bridget concluded the deal with a cheque for £202 on 23 July. Whether she had accumulated this balance by her buying and selling of cows, pigs, hens and chickens, or whether she was merely acting as the couple’s agent is unclear; because of his illness, James’s earnings for the previous years would have been down.

  Just how large the sum was that the Kavanaghs had saved in the context of the depressed rural Irish economy of 1925 may be gleaned from the wages on offer to agricultural workers and others in the region at this period. On 31 May 1924 men’s wages at the hiring fair in the Market Square in Dundalk were from £10 to £13 for a half-year and women’s from £6.10s. to £8.24 Yet, so ingrained was Bridget’s habit of scrimping and saving that, in addition to her busy life as the mother of a large family and the effective manager of the family’s smallholding and livestock, she also worked outside the home on other local farms. In the March prior to the auction of the Reynolds’ farm, for instance, she absented herself from home for two days to cut seed potatoes for the Hamills. Her paltry earnings cannot have added significantly to the family savings and at about the same time James splashed out on a new suit, suggesting that her self-sacrifice was unnecessary.