Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, had been forced to resign over the repeal of the Corn Laws, which would have permitted the import of duty-free grain. Peel at least had the decency to order a larger shipment of Indian corn from America to Ireland, and had appointed a Relief Commission for Ireland under Randolph Routh to distribute it.
Only a month ago, Daniel O’Connell and the Mansion House Committee in Dublin had made an appeal to the Queen herself, informing her of the situation across the country and the effect it was having on her poor subjects. Queen Victoria’s reply had been to advise her Irish subjects that they were in her care constantly. To Dan’s mind, that care was certainly not adequate!
‘I propose that we appeal to the government for public works,’ Reverend Robert Traill said, getting to his feet to address the meeting.
‘Hear! Hear!’
‘I have written to the heads of government in both England and Ireland concerning the scarcity, and also to all the landlords in my parish, requesting that they let their tenants keep their grain, in order to spare seed potatoes for planting next year’s crop,’ he continued. ‘And I suggest to all the clergy present here that they do the same.’
Father John Fitzpatrick and the other church men present nodded heartily in agreement. Perhaps the landlords would listen to them!
‘With regards to Reverend Traill’s suggestion of public works, I propose that we apply to the government for assistance for the deepening of the river Ilen, which is badly needed, and for the construction of a military barracks,’ Henry Townsend added. ‘For these works would be productive and good for the town.’
Next, a young tradesman in the crowd stood up bravely.
‘Property has its duties as well as its rights,’ he reminded them, looking directly at the landowners and influential people present. ‘I am speaking for the humblest, and I ask that landlords make a reduction on rents, for people cannot pay them.’
There came shouts of approval and applause, but a few regarded him stony-faced.
Dan admired the man’s courage in speaking out at such a gathering, and hoped that his words would have some effect.
‘Now I turn to medical matters,’ Dan said, serious. ‘There have been a few small outbreaks of scarlet fever and smallpox in the district. I recommend that a section of the fever hospital be isolated for such cases. Unfortunately, further building at Skibbereen workhouse has ceased due to lack of payment by the Board of Works. However, this work must be done, for the people are in a poor state facing into the winter. Scarlet fever is spreading from the west and smallpox from the east!’
He could see the alarm in the eyes of all gathered at the mention of such contagion.
‘Of course, Dr Donovan,’ Tim McCarthy Downing responded. ‘You must take whatever steps you believe are necessary.’
As the meeting came to an end, Thomas Somerville of Castletownsend asked anyone present who was willing to set up and organize a relief committee in Skibbereen to remain behind. As a doctor, Dan felt it was his duty and volunteered immediately to become involved.
There was much work to be done if they were to alleviate the growing distress of the people of the district during the hard winter months ahead, for the many who had no income or food, Dan believed, now faced the very real threat of starvation.
CHAPTER 13
Creagh
July 1846
JOHN HAD PLANTED OUT THE SEED POTATOES IN MARCH, THE DAY AFTER St Patrick’s Day.
‘Mary, will you give up your old vegetable patch?’ he’d pleaded, ‘so I can set more seed potatoes?’
‘No, I need it for the vegetables!’ she had refused stubbornly, for after last year she intended to grow even more cabbages and turnips.
The winter had been the worst since they had married, for they had little to eat except what they foraged or what Mary could purchase with the money she made. She’d killed the last of their hens over three weeks ago as the bird was better in her family’s bellies than in her neighbours’.
They had cleared their two fields of any last trace of the diseased potato crop. They had raked up and burned the stalks and debris, and turned the soil, before John dug fresh new drills for planting. He and Pat had carted heavy loads of iodine-rich seaweed to their fields from the rocky shoreline, and spread it over the beds to fertilize them and feed the plants. They hoped that it would give them a better yield of potatoes.
She and John were like two broody hens with a clutch of eggs as they watched over this year’s new crop. They inspected their plants nervously for any sign of blight or leaf damage, but were relieved as the months passed and the drills grew tall and strong.
‘This will be the best harvest ever,’ boasted Flor, sitting on the wall across from his cottage. He sucked at his clay pipe as he and grey-haired Molly surveyed the potato plants all around them. ‘It will be a fine crop to make up for last year.’
‘They say it promises to be good, but we must not take the crop for granted,’ John warned, unable to shake off the nagging fear that the blight would return.
‘Brother, you are worrying over nothing,’ teased Pat. ‘For it is clear to all eyes that this year’s potatoes are thriving.’
Looking out across the fields at the pale pink-and-white potato blossom which blew and danced like a wave, Mary was reassured that their potato pits and sacks soon would be full again with this year’s harvest. Once their crop was stored for the year ahead, it would not be long before the hard times were behind them.
John and Pat were busy getting in the barley and wheat crop for their landlord.
‘The grain stores will be full,’ John remarked as they sat around the fire, sharing a pot of gruel and griddle cakes. ‘Though most of this year’s crop is bound for Liverpool, Leeds and London.’
‘Why must we feed the factories and workers of Britain,’ pondered Pat angrily, ‘when all we have is gruel to keep us until our own crop comes in?’
‘It has always been the way.’ John shrugged. ‘But it’s the wrong way.’
‘I’m telling you, it’s time that things change.’ Pat’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘We can no longer be like an old dog lying under its master’s table, waiting for scraps. The time is coming for the hound to rise up and bite.’
‘Will you hush up with your talk, Patrick?’ Mary warned, noticing that young Con and Nora were glued to his words. ‘Do you want to bring trouble down on this house and our children?’
‘No!’ He lapsed into silence and ate his gruel.
Con’s eyes shone as he looked admiringly at his uncle and Mary thanked heaven that at least her son was too young to be involved with Pat and his group of Young Irelander friends.
Pat disappeared in a huff as soon as he had finished eating.
‘Why did you chase him out of the place?’ rebuked John later. ‘You know it’s lonely for him, being on his own.’
‘He should have thought about that four years ago when he broke off his engagement to Frances McCarthy and chased after Julia Carmody.’
‘Unfortunately, a man is ruled by his heart not his head.’
‘I’m not sure that I would call it his heart!’ Mary teased. ‘He threw Frances over, with her father’s ten acres of land and a cottage, for that black-haired beguiler he paraded around the town with.’
‘Julia was not the woman for him,’ John admitted. ‘She’d not live on Pat’s scrapeen of land.’
‘Well, Frances is happy now, and her husband has charge of the land since her father took ill last year and died. I hear she is due a second child soon.’
‘It upsets him thinking of what he lost.’
‘Maybe Pat will find another girl.’
She felt a surge of pity for her handsome brother-in-law. With his long dark eyelashes, deep-brown eyes and easy smile, he had a certain way with women, but still lived alone in a small cabin and spent many of his nights drinking porter or talking politics and rebellion in the local síbín with another few wild men like himself.
‘He will be a lucky man if he finds himself a girl as beautiful and kind hearted as the one I found.’
Mary laughed. She had forgotten what a charmer her husband could be!
Dusk had fallen, and together they listened to the unexpected rain which had begun to patter on the thatch roof. John ran outside to look at the drills and returned soaked to the skin but happy.
‘Will you stop your worrying?’ Mary urged him as she pulled off his sodden shirt and made him sit by the glowing turf. ‘The potatoes are grand, just grand.’
CHAPTER 14
August 1846
MARY WOKE TO THE AWFUL CLOYING SMELL OF LAST SUMMER. DREAD filled her heart, for John was already racing outside, pulling on his britches as he went. Gripped with fear, she ran after him across the fields, for she could see the potato stalks drooping, their leaves already spotted with black.
Her mouth dry and heart pounding, she knelt down and began to dig frantically with her hands to unearth the potatoes. Her fingers closed around what seemed like three or four large, healthy ones, but as she lifted them out of the soil Mary could feel their flesh was already putrid and foul. She tried another plant, and another. It was useless. Every clump she touched was marked with disease. The potatoes in their mud-stained skins were already decaying, rotting in her hand.
As she shook off the clay, she could see the lumper potatoes were black in parts, soft and oozing, the stench so pervasive that it made her queasy. She looked over at her husband, despair already written on his face.
‘Look at them!’ he shouted, back bent digging in the earth with his shovel as he tried desperately to save their potatoes from the deadly blight that had spread through their crop overnight. ‘They’re destroyed.’
How could this happen again, she asked herself, when John had been more than vigilant and had tended their crop with such care!
The children had been woken by the commotion and ran outside. Con, Nora and Tim’s faces went white with shock as their father, streaked with mud and the stinking sludge, shouted at them to help dig and lift the potatoes from the ground.
‘Help us to save them!’ John ordered loudly.
Nora began to cry at the memory of it all.
‘Any good potato, even if it is very small but is firm and hard,’ he said, softening his tone, ‘throw it in the bucket.’
Little Annie, terrified by the smell and strangeness of it all, clung tightly to her mother as Mary took in the disaster around her, for every field as far as she could see was the same.
Con went on his knees in the dirt, digging at the plants to see what could be saved. Somehow, like a thief in the night, the pestilence had returned to poison their crop. John, meanwhile, had crossed to their other field. From the slump of his shoulders, Mary could tell that it too had been affected.
‘Rotten! Every one of them!’ he shouted despairingly as he checked each line of drills.
Nora worked beside her mother. Her little hands and face were spattered with the filthy slime. Tim went down the rows, checking the fetid piles for any healthy potato they might have overlooked, and Annie trailed behind him with a little bucket. Mary continued to pull at plants, lifting the potatoes. The stench around them had worsened and hung heavy in the air, over their fields, and the acres and acres of land. It clung to her hair and skin, and was so bad that she could taste it.
Surely to God, somewhere here there must be a few of their crop untouched by the murrain; a few that they could harvest and use!
Someone was crying, and it was a terrible sound in the stillness.
The family worked for hours. Mary’s nails were broken, and her fingers were red and sore. Every plant, stalk and drill was checked, and the few hard lumpers that were found were put carefully in the tin bucket.
The children were caked in mud, going from row to row with their heads and backs bent, like blackbirds searching the festering stalks and clumps for a small, firm pearly potato.
Mary’s back ached, but she couldn’t give up.
In the distance she could see Pat, digging his patch. She prayed that he had been luckier than they had. Flor and Molly were moving from drill to drill, carefully doing the same. In the fields all about her, Denis and Brigid and their children, and Nell, Tom and their sons were all digging frantically, searching their drills in vain. Every holding as far as the eye could see was already ravaged by the fast-spreading murrain.
Mary went inside and returned with two cans of water and some leftover griddle cake, which she shared between her family.
‘John, you must take a rest,’ she begged, passing him the can of water. She had never seen him in such a state. Soaked in sweat and covered in mud.
‘I cannot stop.’
He took a few gulps of water and threw the rest over his face and head.
Con, also sweating and filthy, stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, trying to help him. Nora looked as if she were about to collapse, and usually carefree Tim was grim-faced as he searched through every clutch of potatoes, desperate to find a few that they could eat.
‘Da, I got four,’ he proclaimed proudly, carrying them carefully to the near-empty tin bucket.
Mary tried not to give in to the mounting panic she was feeling at the devastation of their two fields and the complete loss of their crop this time.
John, agitated, continued with his shovel. Digging, digging and digging …
Eventually, Mary sat down and told the exhausted children to rest.
At last, John too put his shovel down and looked out over their fields. There was nothing more they could do.
The children were scared, their eyes full of fear. As they huddled together, Mary vowed that she would not let her children go hungry …
Part Two
CHAPTER 15
MARY STARED OUT AT HER FAMILY’S DEVASTATED LAND AND THE stinking acres all around them, unable to believe that such a calamity had befallen them again.
In the bright morning sunlight things looked worse. The foul stench still hung in the air, and the drills were filled with the rotting mass of stalks and potatoes where they had dug and laboured the previous day. How in God’s name would they survive this?
All night John had thrashed and turned beside her in the bed, restless yet exhausted. The children still lay asleep, curled up in their rough blankets like little mice.
Tears welled in Mary’s eyes as she surveyed everything the blight had taken from them. This time it had left them with nothing … Nothing to eat, sell, or pay their rent with. A deep fear at what lay ahead gripped her heart. She and John no longer had a purse of hidden money, nor even a penny or a shilling to call their own. Everything had depended on them raising this new potato crop.
She watched the smoke begin to curl from her neighbours’ chimneys as people began to rise and process the full extent of the catastrophe wreaked upon them. From what she could see, nobody had escaped the destruction of their crop.
John came outside to join her, gathering his thoughts as he assessed the damage.
‘If it is all across the county, I don’t know what we can do, for we are all ruined.’
‘We will manage somehow,’ she said, resting against him. ‘We are both strong and good workers. That has to count for something.’
‘It will count for nothing when the landlord sends his men for the rent, or when the children cry with hunger pains in their bellies.’
‘Don’t say such a thing!’
‘It is the truth.’ John sounded utterly forlorn.
In all the years she had loved him and slept beside him and borne his children, Mary had never heard such despair in his voice. Her husband was the one who usually rallied her when she felt low or worried, or was tired out from the children.
‘John Sullivan, I will not have you speak like that! We will do what we need to survive. I will not have us put out of this cottage and off the land, or see our children go hungry.’
His blue eyes held hers and she could tell he sensed her fury.
Relief washed over Mary and she took his rough hand in hers.
‘Aren’t we are a grand pair?’ John said, leaning over and kissing her gently, as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
She felt overwhelmed with emotion momentarily. They both knew well that this time, with no animals or possessions to sell, terrible times lay ahead, but at least they were together.
Brigid Leary called down to her, red-eyed and weary.
‘The children are so upset that I’m awake half the night,’ she confided. ‘Denis was weeping like a boy over the potatoes. I’ve never seen him like that before.’
Mary hugged her, glad of their friendship, as they shared their fears and worries.
‘I don’t know what Denis and I will do, for we haven’t a penny to our name. If he doesn’t get work, there is no saying what will happen to us.’
‘He and John will both find something,’ Mary encouraged her, not wanting to see Brigid more upset.
Around midday Pat came over. He looked rough and dishevelled, and clearly had been drinking.
‘Drowning my sorrows, like most of the men in the district,’ he admitted, gulping down two cans of cold water and pleading for half a griddle cake to set him right.
‘You are a saint of a woman,’ he thanked Mary as he ate quickly.
Mary said little in return but resolved there would be no more food for him under their roof when he was still in the throes of drink. A man who wasted his money on porter would not be welcome at her table any longer, for she had the children to think of.
‘I was down in the síbín last night. The pestilence is through the district. Not a field or a farm in the whole of Carbery is untouched. I tell you, there was a good crowd of us, all destroyed after yesterday. Not a man among us will be able to pay the gale rent when Marmion comes looking for it.’
The Hungry Road Page 5