by Joe O'Toole
In fairness to my grandfather, he was a man who was practical in business matters, and no doubt seeing how things were going, he took out a hefty insurance policy a few short years before he died. A significant sum of money came to Granny on his death, and it made a huge difference to the young widow.
‘It was a sad way to get it, but that was the way it was,’ Granny recalled, simply and unemotionally.
She extended the shop and set about building up the business with energy and determination. All distractions were removed, and to give her a break, the twins, Myko and Jack, who were just about ten years old, were sent to their grandmother’s house in Ballymartin, just a mile outside the village of Kilmaine. They attended Kilmaine primary school and later went to the secondary school in Ballinrobe. In the meantime, the business in Lettermore, even though it was somewhat off the main road, thrived under Granny’s direction. She developed a loyal and regular set of customers. Today, Tí Phlunkett, as it is called, is still busy under the ownership of my first cousins, Peadar and Oliver.
Myko was always loud in praise of Granny. ‘By God, she was a hard worker.’ He would recall how a pig was slaughtered regularly, mainly for the shop but also for the family. There would be no waste. Some of it was used fresh, more of it had coarse salt rubbed into it and was left hanging from ceiling hooks to cure. Prime cuts were smoked in a smoking shed out the back. Even the pig’s head, split and flattened, was eaten, as were the crubeens (feet), with cabbage. Granny would carefully collect the blood from the pig. Then she would extract the intestines from the body and scour them clean. That was hard work, squeezing the insides clean of excrement and the rest, and then running water through them until they were rinsed clean.
But that wasn’t the end of it. With the twins and baby Plunkett running beside her, she would take the intestines down to the little quay across from the house and wash them again in the sea, for the flavouring, seasoning and the preservation benefits of the salt water.
In the meantime, the pig’s blood was mixed in a large pudding bowl with a concoction of oatmeal, flour and various other scraps and offal, to be cooked off for hours and hours until nothing was recognisable in the dark, gooey mass. While it was still warm it was ladled into foot-long pieces of intestine. By the time it had cooled it had been transmogrified into the world’s best black pudding. Do people ever stop to think what they are eating?
GRANNY AND HER SISTERS
My granny, Margaret O’Boyle, grew up in a household that had seen its fair share of tragedy. Her little sister, Nora, died as a baby, and as was common practice at the time, the next child was also christened Nora in her memory. There were only two boys in the family; one contracted a virulent scarlet fever and within days the other lad was also infected. They were buried beside each other. Mary lived to adulthood but died giving birth to her first child. The baby also died.
The surviving girls, Margaret and her three sisters, Nellie, Nora and Annie, all chose teaching as a career. In order to get a teaching qualification it was necessary to have a thorough command of the Irish language, so they departed their native Kilmaine for Rosmuc to learn Gaeilge. Rosmuc, with its barren beauty, was a different world to Kilmaine, but they loved it and its surroundings and it seems that from the moment they arrived they felt at home and never really thought of going east again. New friends were made. Their Irish teacher, Sinéad O’ Flanagan, shared with them not just her language skills but also the whole panoply of Irish heritage. They were enthused by her telling of the folk tales, the myths, the tales of magic and the tales of Na Fianna. Both the written and oral traditions were studied. The O’Boyle sisters made them their own.
Rosmuc was a gathering place for many young idealists committed to the language. People were drawn to it. A tall young man named Eamon came to spend time in Rosmuc and fell in love with the place, and with the Irish teacher. The year after meeting her in Rosmuc, Eamon followed Sinéad to Tourmakeady where she was involved in the course for young teachers. The courtship continued.
And a romantic courtship it was. Tomás O’Toole told me the story. His cousin Richard had seen the pair together up at Droim a’ Droighin, beside the beautiful Gaynor’s Bay on the shore of Lough Mask, just about a mile south of Tourmakeady. An idyllic setting. She was resting against a large rock, and her young man was reading her poetry.
Knowing the history of the young suitor, I wondered what class of poetry he had been reading. ‘Was the poetry as Gaeilge, or in English?’ I asked Tomás.
‘Sure, it was from Aunt Mary’s English poetry book.’
I speculated aloud as to who the chosen poet might have been.
‘Well, I can answer that too,’ said Tomás. ‘There was only the one poetry book in the house at the time and we still have it.’
There it was, The Poetical Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, with its handwritten inscription: To Mary O’Toole from Thomas Conroy, December 24 1895. No doubt a Christmas gift.
What a wonderful picture, I thought. Eamon de Valera, the future President of Ireland, wooing his beloved by the lakeshore, reading the works of an English peer from a book gifted to my cousin Máire by the father of Pádraig Ó Conaire, the future leading Irish-language author. To this day, the rock that Sinéad rested against is referred to as Carraig Dev by the family.
Sinéad and Eamon eventually married and they both went on to make their mark on Irish society. Sinéad developed into a well known and most prolific writer of stories and legends for children, while Eamon de Valera, as we all know, became one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century. Granny and Sinéad corresponded for many years after they had all left Rosmuc.
When the time came for them to seek teaching posts, Granny and her sisters looked west, towards Cill Chiaráin. Annie and Nora were appointed together to the same school in Loch Chon Aortha, a few miles north of Cill Chiaráin; Nellie took up a teaching position in Cill Chiaráin. Her principal, Nicholas Keyes, was an unusual appointment. He had transferred from a position near Maynooth in County Kildare and had no connections whatever with Cill Chiaráin. Nellie’s love of the language was not shared by Nick. She was a soft and gentle person whereas Nick was irascible and forward. Nonetheless, opposites attract. The two became close and nobody was surprised when they announced that they were to be married. They set up home in Cill Chiaráin.
Granny was somewhat separated from her sisters because she was appointed to a job in the national school on the island of Inishbarra. This was just a quarter of a mile off Leitir Mór island, but was on the far side of the mouth of Cill Chiaráin Bay from her sisters. She did not live on Inishbarra but in digs in Lettermore. Each morning she went out by currach to the island school, and on the odd occasion when storms blew up, she was sometimes marooned and had to stay with a hospitable parent of one of the pupils. As a young woman in her early twenties, it was only natural as she was coming and going that she would meet others in the area of the same age. Herself and young Joe O’Toole from beside the bridge met. She thought him a bit wild but nice, she was attracted to him. They married around 1905 and it was then, as we have already heard, that Joe and Margaret decided to strike out and try their luck in Western Australia.
With Joe’s death in 1925, Margaret O’Toole was left to rear and provide for five young children. There was little or no free time, but the business was closed on a Sunday, and after attending Mass, doing the books and preparing for the coming week, she would, if the weather was fine, head off to visit her sister, Nellie. From Leitir Mór to Cill Chiaráin was a land journey of more than forty miles, but only a short, though potentially hazardous, sea journey. She would take young Myko with her and some local lads would row them across the mile-and-a-half strait in a currach. They would put ashore at Cooke’s jetty, and while she visited with her sister, the crew would head for the teach tábhairne. She was always terrified on those journeys. She hated stepping into the skittish currach; she would hold Myko to her when they bounced off the waves, and she praye
d as she covered them both from the spray of water that rose over the bow.
It was worse on the return leg with a crew who were by now well fortified by drink. About half a mile out of the quay at Cill Chiaráin the boat left the shelter of land and was at the mercy of the southwest winds, with the ever-present danger of being blown back on to the reefs around Cionlaí and Oileán na Circe. There were some dangerous stretches in the channels between the islands. Some of these could only be navigated at high tide or close to it. If the crew overstayed their time in the teach tábhairne and left it late before setting out, then it was risky. Myko would be sent to ask the men to come straight away.
Margaret loved her sister Nellie and made the journey for her. Nellie worried about her widowed sister trying to feed and educate her five children on her own. Margaret felt that Nellie was a little too quiet for her husband, who was a confident, forceful man and who also liked his drink. On those few Sundays, a couple of times a year, they shared their troubles, telling each other just enough to understand their circumstances but never so much that the other would be overly worried. Myko did not look forward to those days; he was a little afraid of his Aunt Nellie’s husband, Nick Keyes; the journey was scary and his mother was upset. When the visit was over, his mother and his aunt would cry quietly and softly as they took whispered leave of each other at the jetty. It made him uncomfortable and confused.
Once the rocky passage across to Leitir Callow had been safely negotiated, Margaret would brighten up and do her best to shorten the two-mile walk home to Leitir Mór by pointing out the local landmarks.
‘Look out there at Inishbarra. Can you see the old schoolhouse? That was where I got my first teaching job.’ A little later, as they passed the little road branching off down to the quay on the southern tip of Leitir Mór island, she would show him where she used to take the currach across to the school.
‘Was the sea always rough going across, Mam?’
‘No, a ghrá. You see, Inishbarra is to the south of us and the quay there is facing us on the north side of the island so there was usually good shelter from the wind. But there were times when I could not get across and times during the winter when I had to stay for weeks on the island. I used to walk in the wind to the west of the island and look across the bay to Cill Chiaráin point and wonder was Aunt Nellie out for a walk over there.’
‘Mam, why were you and Aunt Nellie crying when we were leaving. Why were you sad?’
‘Nothing to worry yourself about, a stór.’
Myko was much older before he learned why the two sisters grieved.
Annie O’Boyle was an attractive and energetic young woman who lived a full life. She loved her little school in Loch Chon Aortha, but she had broader interests too. She was a nationalist and, like all her friends, neighbours and colleagues, supported the IRA’s activities at that time. Much and all as she disliked their hard drinking, she admired the involvement of her two brothers-in-law, Nick Keyes and Joe O’Toole, in the War of Independence.
By the time the Black and Tans were sent to Ireland in 1920, Annie was marginally involved herself, running errands for ‘the cause’.
Any time the Tans were on their way from Galway to Cill Chiaráin they had to pass the school at Loch Chon Aortha. As part of their strategy to instil fear in the community they regularly checked out the school. It was Annie’s responsibility to warn people in Cill Chiaráin that the hated and dreaded Tans were coming. Nick Keyes, in particular, had good reason to keep well out of the way of the Tans.
Sometimes they arrived unseen at the school, and on those occasions Annie would give a pre-arranged wink to one of the older pupils who would absent himself on the pretext of some domestic responsibility. Annie and her colleague, Bridie Cooke, would then delay the Tans to give the young lad a good headstart to get to Cill Chiaráin. At other times she would see them coming through the turn of the road beside the lake and would be away before them. Racing on her bicycle into Cill Chiaráin, she would alert Nick.
‘Quick, the Tans are on the road. They’ll be here within the half-hour!’
And Nick would send the word out to anyone under threat. Nellie would be cycling demurely out of the village by the time the Tans arrived, and there were never any suspects to be found. When this happened a few times, the frustrated Tans realised that they were being pre-empted. Following a brief investigation, their brutally persuasive methods of interrogation yielded them the low-level intelligence that the person responsible for announcing their arrival was the young teacher, Annie O’Boyle.
They set out to teach the teacher a lesson.
Annie was conducting the junior classes when the door burst open, the window was smashed in and the tiny room was filled with men in the feared uniforms of the Black and Tans. Guns were trained on her.
‘Don’t move a muscle,’ the English accent, strange and foreign in these surroundings, reverberated around the classroom.
Annie froze with fear.
‘Away from that desk, you.’ Two of them dragged her backwards and pinned her roughly against the wall, knocking over the blackboard and easel.
The pupils screamed.
‘Please let the children go out, they’re terrified,’ she begged.
Even villains and bullies are helpless with children, particularly upset children.
‘Send them out.’
‘Siúlaigí amach go rialta anois agus fan sa chlós.’
The children were released to the schoolyard and Annie’s nightmare continued. They asked her, over and over: ‘Who is in charge of the guns?’
But she did not know and could not tell them.
They prodded and shook her. With a bayonet pressed to her navel, she was threatened with death. A flick of the blade and her clothing was cut through as she screamed with terror. Then they stripped her.
No doubt they did more, but that was as far as Granny ever told the story. It is impossible to know whether the soldiers sexually assaulted or raped Annie. But whether or no is probably irrelevant, because her dignity and self-respect was obliterated by their taunts, sneers and vulgarities. What they did they did, and then they ran her, stark naked, out of the school, into the schoolyard, and let her go.
I don’t know where she finished up that day. It would have been a mercy to have killed her because nobody ever met the real Annie O’Boyle again afterwards. Sure, her body lived, but from that moment her heart and soul died and her mind was dysfunctional.
At a time when modesty was the measure of maidenhood, to be seen naked was a public shame. At a time when victims of sexual abuse were shunned by society, her suffering continued.
Nowadays, when newspapers show acres of naked flesh every day, it may be difficult to understand the enormity of the trauma suffered in those times by a young woman who had been nakedly exposed before the community. For the rest of her life she was tainted and marked. Damaged goods.
She did try. She taught in different places for short periods, before eventually going to live with her sister, Nora. By this time Nora had moved into Galway. The girls’ mother was originally a Lydon from Galway City. She still had a house in Eyre Street, just off Eyre Square, which she had given to Nora. Nora convinced Annie to move in with her to escape the memories, and gave up her own teaching career to look after her sister. To maintain an income she provided lodgings for students. Annie wandered aimlessly around the city during the day; her mental health continued to deteriorate. The students were in the habit of leaving their bicycles outside the house. One day, some years later, poor confused Annie took one of the bikes, and acting on a memory of her time in Loch Chon Aortha, cycled west. It was the middle of winter, cold and miserable. After completing the forty-mile journey to Loch Chon Aortha, she arrived, exhausted and confused, at the house of old friends, the Coynes.
By this stage the Keyes had moved into Galway also, so Annie had no relations left in the area. The Coynes took her in and cared for her while word was being sent to her sisters in Galway. That was
more or less the end. Within a short period she had been signed into Ballinasloe mental hospital, where, incredibly, she survived, incoherently and vacantly, until the late 1960s.
I knew nothing of the existence of my grandaunt Annie until shortly before she died, but Granny had visited her regularly throughout all those years in Ballinasloe. The visits were disturbing and frustrating; as the years passed, poor Annie no longer recognised Granny as her sister Margaret. Her mind was stuck in the 1920s and she expected her sister to look the same as she did back then. On one visit, Granny was accompanied by her daughter-in-law Lena. Annie mistook Lena for her sister, and, pointing at Granny, said: ‘Margaret, who is the old lady?’
When she died, my uncle Plunkett found among her possessions in Ballinasloe an old Post Office book from the 1920s with ten shillings (about sixty cents) on deposit. That was her total estate.
Although the circumstances that brought about Annie’s incarceration were unusual, she was one of thousands who were committed to mental institutions in Ireland at that time, and for many years afterwards, and who never left. It was not that nobody cared. This was the contemporary medical advice. The concept of counselling did not exist. Modern cynics enjoy undermining and demeaning the whole industry of psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychology and counselling, and those that practice the disciplines are often the butt of jokes, as ‘shrinks’, or the ‘touchy-feely gang’. But they have the tools to relieve traumatised victims of their pain; to help people help themselves. And, in many cases, they literally put broken lives and spirits back together again.
If society had access to these a century ago there are many lives, such as Grandaunt Annie O’Boyle’s, which could have been mended.
Granny and her sisters were tough, adventurous and capable. They had experienced a natural lifetime’s expectation of grief before they ever left home and had shed their full measure of tears. No doubt the move to Connemara was an attempt at a new start. Granny O’Toole’s life was full of change and challenge. She took on teaching duties not just in the far west of Connemara, where she knew nobody, but in a remote island off it. After marrying Joe she upped sticks for Western Australia, only to return the following year to take over the pub in Galway City, before returning to Lettermore to run the business. Then there was Joe’s death and Annie’s tragedy. The Lord took one final swipe at her when, eighteen years after her husband’s death, she had to bury her only daughter, Mary Clare, her pride and joy, who died of tuberculosis in 1943. At the age of sixty, Granny then took much of the responsibility for the rearing of Mary Clare’s young children, Max and Joe.