The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  THE BIG WIND

  Beatrice Coogan

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About The Big Wind

  It all began on the night of the Big Wind. A wild and savage night in January 1839 when a storm struck Ireland, leaving such suffering and devastation in its path that a mark remained on the minds and hearts of Irishmen, and the land itself, ever after. It was the night Sterrin O’Carroll, ‘blossom of the storm’, was born in Kilsheelin Castle.

  Growing up during Ireland’s darkest hours, Sterrin forms a bond with a household servant called Young Thomas that deepens over the years into a forbidden love – a love as fierce and relentless as the storm that ushered her into the world. But their paths are divided by devastating events that change the course of Ireland’s history. After the bitterness and the sorrow finally wane, Sterrin’s indomitable spirit never weakens because, Thomas, like her beloved land, will return to her.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Big Wind

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Part 1: 6th January, 1839

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part 2

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  About Beatrice Coogan

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  To the memory of my husband, Edward Coogan. To my children—Tim Pat who honoured me in the dedication of his own splendid book; my sweet daughter Aisling; and to Brian. To my brother Father Timothy Toal of South Australia who helped me so much; to my brother Father Martin Toal of Rome, and to my two loyal friends Edna and John Tate who would not let me give up.

  Foreword

  By Tim Pat Coogan

  The motif for many of my teenage years and early manhood was the sound of my mother tapping out innumerable drafts of The Big Wind on her old Underwood typewriter. Prior to the creation of that sound, she had had a privileged and, indeed, glittering existence – although it was not always the case, for she knew life’s hardships too.

  When she was forty-nine, my father died, leaving her with no income while supporting three children: myself aged twelve, my brother Brian, aged ten and my sister Aisling, aged six. The level of state services may be gauged from the fact that the children’s allowance was two and sixpence for the third child and each successive child thereafter. Her mainstay during that time was the unfailing support of my saintly aunt Josephine, my mother’s elder sister. After all-night stints as a nurse she would often cycle out from St James’s Hospital in Dublin with bags of food on the handlebars, and spend a day cleaning our rambling four storey house, Tudor Hall in Monkstown, a leafy seaside suburb, populated by representatives of both the ancien régime and the new. A Protestant class on the way down, and a Catholic one on the way up.

  While largely eschewing housework – except for cooking, which she was good at – my mother entered on a number of money-making activities, as her father did before her. Beatrice’s attempted business ventures included a bakery and the running of a farm, but our main income came from turning the rooms of our huge home into flats and bedsits. Over the years, the once-rich wallpaper peeled off the walls and water began seeping down through the balconies over the drawing and dining rooms because my brother Brian had made the discovery that a kindly Jewish trader in Dun Laoghaire would give him pocket money for the lead lying idle all over the roof.

  Beatrice’s father, Patrick Toal, had been a well-doing Northern Irish Catholic, who was found by his boss one day in his civil service office with his nose, as usual, stuck in a book. The boss, who had returned to the office after a liquid lunch, was subsequently described wonderingly in the family as ‘a decent Freemason!’ When my grandfather told him he was reading a textbook ‘for his exams’, his boss told him bluntly that he was wasting his time studying as he was ‘the wrong sort’ – in other words, a Catholic. He advised my grandfather to, ‘Go away down south to your own kind and get a job for yourself down there’. My grandfather did as he was bidden, went to the predominantly Catholic south, joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), got promoted and retired with sufficient money to start a number of business enterprises in and around the village of Hazelhatch in County Kildare.

  One of these enterprises was a post office. After the Anglo-Irish War of Independence (1919–21) had broken out, an IRA Active Service Unit called at his post office looking for the takings – which were, of course, refundable. By this time, my grandfather’s acquisitions included my formidable grandmother, Marianne, and a large family, which included two boys who were studying for the priesthood in Genoa. Marianne declared this fact with the IRA officer in charge of the ASU in unfortunate terms: ‘How well you come here call when my two fine sons are away – you bastard.’ One of the few IRA commanders of proven illegitimacy was the gentleman standing in front of my granny and, more importantly, in front of his men. The result was disastrous. The man lost his cool, ordered that the post office and the adjoining house be set fire to, and for good measure, doused the family’s pet dog with petrol and hurled it into the flames.

  As was her wont my mother, away at boarding school at the time, enlarged somewhat on these precedings, saying it was her pony that was incinerated. But what is incontestable is the fact that my grandfather was now out of sync in two jurisdictions – with both orange and green. However, he took his revenge on Catholic, Protestant and dissenter by becoming a tax gatherer for the counties of Dublin and Wicklow. Hence it became possible for my mother to frequently quote a saying she attributed to him, ‘It’s a poor house that can’t afford one lady’. She certainly bore out this statement throughout the high-stepping days of her early career and marriage.

  Amongst her high-profile, if not particularly well-paid, activities were acting roles in the Abbey Theatre and contributing regularly to the Evening Herald. In the latter role, she attended a fashionable event in Dublin’s Mansion House in the company of a well-off, but dull Dublin baker. The event had been staged as part of a conscious effort on the part of the new Free State government to further the growth of civic consciousness and spread a little
gaiety at the same time, by choosing a Civic Queen of Beauty for Dublin.

  My mother left the hall – not with the baker – but in the company of my father whom she had met for the first time that evening, and with the title, ‘Dublin’s Civic Queen of Beauty’. This title, as she would frequently point out, rested not merely on beauty but on cultural and intellectual attainment; ‘none of that bathing beauty nonsense’, she would say.

  My father, Edward Coogan, was at the time one of the countries more eligible bachelors, a fine hurler who had taken law and commerce degrees while at university. He had abandoned both disciplines at the request of the country’s first President of the Executive Council, W.T. Cosgrave, who was in effect the prime minister. He told my father, ‘Ned, we are going to have to reorganise the guards and we have to put Eoin O’Duffy in charge because we can’t let him have his way and be put in charge of the army; he’s a wild man – would you go in there as deputy commissioner and keep things right?’ So, at twenty-four, Edward Coogan – Eamon, in the Irish form of his first name which he favoured – became the first deputy commissioner of An Garda Síochána and successfully set about the task of establishing an unarmed police force in the midst of a civil war. He had acquired a reputation during the War of Independence for his efficiency in setting up an underground administration for both the courts and local government services that hollowed out British authority. His work in the Gardaí also attracted praise.

  Despite Cosgrove’s words, my father had got on well with O’Duffy, who in fact became his best man when he married my mother in 1928. Many regarded the ceremony as Dublin’s wedding of the year. But, as in the case of Patrick Toal, the wheel of political fortune turned against him and, unlike Patrick, it did not turn subsequently in his favour.

  In 1932, Éamon de Valera climbed back into power, in large measure due to the support given to his Fianna Fáil party by the IRA. Those were the days when, in the wake of the civil war, Fianna Fáil branches by day became IRA companies by night. The young enthusiastic IRA men did not realise that behind his republican-sounding rhetoric, de Valera would in fact later intern and execute members of the IRA when the organisation became an embarrassment to his neutrality policy during World War II.

  However, in his early days in power during the 1930s, de Valera did throw a sop to Cerberus by firing or demoting several of the Garda officers who aroused animosity through their activities against both the IRA and Fianna Fáil, inciting election-time violence.

  Unfortunately, my father fell afoul of this policy. After a drink-fuelled incident that ironically involved the general manager of de Valera’s Irish Press newspaper, which I would one day come to edit, he received a demotion to chief superintendent, and for some years continued on in the force subject to a campaign of harassment. As a result, in 1941, he eventually resigned, without a pension, in what was in effect a constructive dismissal. This was not a good situation in wartime Ireland, wracked by poverty, unemployment and emigration. The latter drew off revolutionary tendencies, but with them went much of the energies and the hopes of a generation.

  My mother in particular felt the change in their fortunes keenly. But with the help of her family, and a small nest egg from the sale of his own father’s estate, my father completed his law studies and won back W.T. Cosgrave’s old Dáil seat in Kilkenny. It was widely assumed that he would become minister for justice in a looming election that was clearly going to capitalise on widespread dissatisfaction with de Valera’s rule in January 1948. The result of the election was as forecast: de Valera did go out of office for the first time in sixteen years. However, the stresses of my father’s life took their toll and he died a matter of days before this happened. For Beatrice, it was to be a long widowhood. My father died in 1948. She followed him, at the age of ninety-three, in 1997.

  As tenants came and went, the business ventures failed and delinquencies of my brother and me were coped with, my mother took to the typewriter and started tapping out The Big Wind. It took twelve years to complete, and then there were costly fallings out with agents and publishers, but my mother eventually fought through these obstacles and produced her monumental novel, which is often compared to an Irish Gone with the Wind.

  The story – beginning on the night of a famous death-dealing hurricane that swept through Ireland on a January night in 1839 – follows the heroine, Sterrin (from stoirm, storm in Irish) through the tumultuous and horrific events of the Great Famine of the 1840s through to the Land War of 1879–82. Apart from the dramatic subject matter of the novel and its insight into female psychology, my mother’s writing style – which saw passages from the book included in the secondary school’s English curriculum for the Leaving Certificate – helped the book through many imprints and formats, and for years it was a stock item in Irish bookshops. It is my hope that this Head of Zeus edition will return it to that position and bring the searing events of The Big Wind to the attention of a new generation of readers, including my own grandchildren. Even in the era of the smartphone, a good tale, well-told, still generates affection and respect.

  Part 1

  6th January, 1839

  1

  Another crash shook the long row of windows in the drawing-room. This time there was a rending and splitting that was unmistakable. The young man in the great winged chair by the fire laid down his book. It was useless trying to concentrate with that wind howling outside.

  ‘I’ll hold a crown that is one of the oaks near the house.’ He drew the heavy folds of Italian velvet from the window nearest the fireplace and unlatched the iron bars that held the shutters across the glass.

  He peered out. In the three-quarters of an hour since the shutters had been barred the configuration of the near landscape had changed. Something blotted out the lawn. He had the impression that the lawn was no longer there. He rubbed the glass impatiently with his fingers and strained to pick out the two long rows of black shapes where the avenue ran between the trees. Here and there he discerned the tall outline of a tree, but the familiar form of the colonnade was not there. There were unfamiliar spaces and he knew that every space was a fallen tree.

  His eyes travelled back to the centre front. Then he realised that the weird hulk that distorted the scene was the base of the giant oak tree standing up-ended, its torn-out roots in mid-air, its leafy branches down in a black cavity that had been a smooth velvet pleasance eight minutes ago.

  As he looked, a great squalling gust of wind came screaming across the park and hurled itself against the glass. He was flung backwards against a table. The heavy silver candelabrum that stood there was overturned. At the same time there was a crashing sound of breaking glass and into the room came showers of leaves, sticks, stones and big lumps of clay. The green velvet hangings ballooned inward and tossed priceless bric-à-brac from tables and mantelpiece. Lighted candles were knocked from their sconces. The great five-foot chandelier of Waterford cut glass swung wildly from the ceiling. Hundreds of its dangling pieces swirled together making a musical swan-song before they crashed to destruction against walls and mirrors and the uncarpeted spaces of the floor.

  When the frightened servants burst open the door the draught created a whirlwind that sent fresh destruction all through the elegant room. The green curtains lashed out in fury against the walls and their tasselled ends reaching to the mantelpiece sent shepherdesses and goddesses flying to the mosaic hearth tiles in smithereens. ‘’Tis the end of the world. Sir Roderick,’ cried the old butler. His master, cursing himself for his folly in opening the shutters, was now trying to close them.

  ‘Come and help me and stop talking nonsense,’ he cried. Another gust of wind sent the shutters flying into their faces and went roaring and whistling round the house and down the chimneys. ‘You there!’ Sir Roderick roared at the footman who was aimlessly picking up broken china and glass. ‘Drag in these big chairs from the hall and put them against these shutters. And you. Young Thomas,’ he called to the knife boy who was crouching in terro
r beside a curio cabinet, ‘go and help him.’ When they had succeeded in securing the bars across the shutters they had to hold their arms against the wood. Despite the strength of the iron bars, the wind hurling itself through the glassless window was straining the shutters inwards until they creaked aloud.

  The footman and the boy came slowly across the room gasping with the effort of dragging one of the heavy Flemish choir stalls that were used as hall chairs. They placed it against the barred shutters and went back to the hall for the rest. Backwards and forwards they went, helped by the master and the butler, until there was a chair at every window and two at the one that was broken.

  As the men were about to leave the room the door opened and the six-foot figure of Mrs. Stacey, the cook, came in followed by a group of servant girls. They all held rosary beads. The butler, leading the out-going procession, stood transfixed. Their audacity recalled him to his dignity as Commander-in-Chief of the staff. The kitchen had actually come unbidden to the drawing-room! It was as unheard-of and as horrifying as the storm that raged outside.

  He looked up at the towering cook. ‘Is it mad you are?’ he hissed. But Mrs. Stacey for once ignored him. With hands still clasped as though in prayer and the rosary beads entwined about her fingers she went beseechingly towards her master, addressing her prayers to him instead of to her Maker.

  ‘Sir Roderick, acquanie, I ask your pardon for makin’ so bold. But don’t ask us to stay down there. The water is a foot deep on the kitchen floor...’

  ‘Water? Where is it coming from?’

  ‘I don’t know where it came from. Sir Roderick. It just appeared in the kitchen without sound or warning...’

  An elderly housemaid pressed forward. ‘There was a roar like thunder and then, God between us and all harm, the door opened by itself and the water flowed in.’

  Sir Roderick thrust through the press of jabbering servants. ‘Why was I not told of this before?’ The butler tried to explain to him that it was to tell him about the flooding in the kitchen that he came up in the first instance, but Mrs. Stacey’s voice drowned his. When she realised that she was expected to follow her master downstairs she became hysterical and screamed at the top of her voice about tombstones.