The Great Famine 1847

 

The Great Famine

1847

Irish Potato Famine 1847 - drawing by Granger

 

There is no light – inside or out. Edward Griffin wakes in the pre-dawn gloom after another restless sleep. His new wife Catherine is sleeping more peacefully than he could ever hope to do. He reaches for his boots – still damp and muddy from yesterday. The previous night he had placed them in their spot next to the fire to dry. The smell of mud and pigshit greeted him every morning.

Outside it is raining, as usual for November. At least the wind has dropped, unlike the howling gale which blew like the devil last night. He prods the fire and reaches for another turf sod. The smoke fills the room, and Catherine stirs. Across the room one of the pigs lets Edward know it is hungry. The piglets erupt in snorting, harrumphing unison. “Yosh!” says Edward, grumpily. The dog barks outside.

He lights a candle.

Their cabin is about twenty feet long. The floor is hard-pressed soil. Stones retrieved from tilling the soil are piled into walls, mud filled. Edward has just enough room to stand up. The roof is formed from tree branches and hay or scraws – lumps of turf. There is no furniture beyond a narrow slat bed covered in straw and a blanket. Two lumps of wood provide somewhere to sit. One end is sectioned with logs to provide space for their two pigs and piglets. Their fowls roost where they can in the same room. There is no chimney – the roof has an opening to allow smoke to escape. There are no windows, so the only exit for the smells and smoke is the door and roof opening. A crucifix hangs on the wall above the fire.

Lumpers. For breakfast. And dinner. Lumpers – those godforsaken excuses for potatoes that Edward grows in their thousands on his plot. Ugly, bespotted, and tasting like wax. He boils some water on the fire and throws some lumpers in the pot. The sodden, damp smell of animal shit, wet clothes and boiling potatoes mixed with a little cabbage fills the little room.

Outside is less gloomy now. Somewhere behind the distant hills of Killarney and the suffocating clouds and mist the sun is rising. It will make a half-hearted effort to warm the Slieve Mish Mountains and Edward and Timothy Sheehan’s Corkaboy plot, but then give up mid-afternoon and allow the gloom to swallow the townlands of Dingle again. It was always thus at this time of the year.

Catherine stirs again. Mary the handywoman was here yesterday and confirmed that yes indeed there was a baby on the way. “Blessed be Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”, she had exclaimed. Catherine had told Edward later in the morning, glowing with pride, and he walked taller through the day, even while stooping over the potato ridges. He was going to be a father – how about that! This calls for an ale or two to celebrate – and that’s just what he did with Timothy and Michael Brien at the alehouse last night. Catherine scolded him when he returned, scootered and sodden.

Edward goes outside for a piss. The drizzle is beginning to lift, along with the light. Edward can see that Timothy has stirred as well. The two one-roomed houses are so close that Edward could spit across the distance, and he often does. It’s going to be a bad year for the taters, he thinks to himself. He pats the dog and returns to Catherine, who is tending the potatoes and cabbage. She’s not hungry. “You can have it. I’ll get some bread later.”

He thinks of asking her if she’s feeling OK, but then decides that maybe that’s women’s business, so forgets the idea. “Where ye scroungin’ today?” he says. Catherine spends her days, like many of the Corkaboy and Kilgarrylander women, scrounging for turf sods and hay from neighbouring landlords. On a good day she will load up her cape with enough to last a few days, and trudge home happy and hopeful of the future. On bad days she will get nothing, except a full view of how the Famine is gripping the souls of Kerry and squeezing the life out of them. Yesterday was a good day.

“Mr Rae said he has some hay scraws. I’ll go there first, then get the ferry across to Callinafers and over to Milltown. I’ll be back to feed the pigs.” Catherine was nothing if not resourceful, but even she was finding it hard to survive. And now another mouth to feed. They kiss, and Catherine departs. Edward watches his nineteen-years-old love, clothed in her long dress, hat and cape, and barefoot, plod along the muddy track and out of sight. He returns to the task at hand.

Over the next few hours Edward and Timothy tend to the potato ridges, weeding out the unwanted and making sure the wild pigs haven’t rooted their new seedlings out of the soil. The rain returns, but they toil regardless, each sheltered beneath the oiled winter cape which is their constant companion. When the cold wind blows off of Castlemaine Harbour their fingers lose sensation and gripping the stick they use to prod the soil becomes difficult. At least, Edward thinks to himself, it’s better than the icy blast when the wind comes the other way, directly down from Baurtregaum, the highest of the Slieve Mish peaks.

By lunchtime they finish their task. It is the first time that they speak to each other for the day.

“Saw Father Kelly yesterday. Said another three Kilgarrylanders headin’ to America.” Timothy’s voice was leaden.

“Who?”

“Tom.”

“Tom Cunningham?”

“An Gorta Mor has driven him away. Thomas Griffey as well, and Seamus.”

“O’Reilly? Him too?” Edward replies, matter-of-factly.

The two men are sitting under a tree, staring at the lump of bread each has to eat. Edward knows that he and Catherine will probably join the leavers eventually. After all, what is here to hold them? A miserable existence in the mud and pigshit of Corkaboy? At least they have some land they can point to and say, “This is ours”, except…it isn’t. Edward is a cottier, a co-tenant with Timothy on 17 acres of wind-swept bog, at the mercy of his landlord. He could be worse off – he could be a labourer, with only his sweat to sell, but in reality he knows there’s not much difference. Mr Rae, the landlord, could boot him out at any time for no reason, and if An Gorta Mor – the Great Famine -  continues for much longer he probably will.

The Great Famine. God Almighty, what did we do to deserve this? Edward had heard some pretty chilling stories, and seen it himself. The poor woman from Milltown whose husband died of starvation in her bed and she was too weak to move him, so she lay there as he rotted, for weeks. Her neighbour, who was evicted with her three children, and begged, and begged, for pittance, and carried the emaciated bodies of her two youngest in a sack, hoping to find a charitable soul to bury them. The family in Inch who stole two mouldy potatoes and took them home to boil up. When they found her and looked in the pot they found their dog. “Please don’t – it’s all we have” she cried as they emptied the pot in front of her.

“Will you go?” Edward asks Timothy.

“As certain as night meets day,” Timothy replies, firmly. “Annie wants me to contact the emigration agent when I go to Cork in a few weeks.”

“Where will you go?”

“Wherever they want us. Lots going to Canada. The O’Hallorans from Tralee have set up over there and will help you get set up too. Cold as b’jesus, though.”

“What about the sail?” Edward knew that Timothy wasn’t a seafarer, preferring two feet firmly on solid ground. The one time Edward had taken Timothy out onto Castlemaine Harbour to go fishing in Mr Rae’s boat he could not wait to be out of it, so three thousand miles across the Atlantic was going to be a mighty challenge.

“Trust the Lord, that’s all we can do. Anything has to be better than this.”

The rain continues. The two men will retire, each to their own cabin, in the afternoon. Hunger was a permanent reality for cottiers like Edward and Timothy, and listlessness followed a busy morning. Oftentimes they needed to fix their rickety cart, their jingle, but today, like many days, the rain forced them both inside, with their thoughts.

What does Catherine want? How would she cope with the long journey, and with young children? And what are we leaving behind? Edward’s father, Thomas, had died many years earlier, as had Mary, his mother. He had plenty of friends, but many of them were leaving as well. Erin, my beautiful Ireland, would I ever see you again? What can compare to the beauty of Castlemaine Harbour on a sunny July afternoon, or the splendour of the Kerry Mountains, or the wondrousness of Dingle Bay, or the warmth of the alehouse in Booleens? Sadness at the prospect enveloped him like the frieze coat he wore to ward off the icy winds blowing in from the Atlantic.

He wakes when Catherine returns with a heavy load of turf and hay. She drops the bundle on the dirt floor and crawls in next to him, obviously exhausted. She says nothing. As he holds her he wonders where life will take them – now, three of them. He remembers Father Kelly telling him about Francis Murphy, who is the Bishop of Adelaide in South Australia, and how Bishop Murphy had returned to Ireland looking for good Catholic souls for his new Parish.  Australia. That’s where they transport villains and murderers. Not likely. He falls asleep.

An hour later and the rain has stopped. Edward wakes and goes outside. The leaden sky is darkening as early nightfall descends. Their cabin, only a few yards from the road between Dingle and Castlemaine, squats in the mud. A trickle of smoke ascends vaguely from the roof and is quickly gone. Edward goes over to the potato store next to the house. It is full of blackened and decayed potatoes, eaten away by the blight. This is their supply until July next year – eight months away. He searches for any that might be edible, and finds two, which he puts in his coat pocket. He throws two of the blackened ones over to the pigs.

“Ahoy there, friend!” He turns to see a stranger approaching on the sodden road. They converse. Edward often stops to chat with anyone, strangers or friends, who are travelling the lonely roads. It is approaching dark, and Edward wonders where the stranger will stay the night. The stranger introduces himself – he’s Michael Fitzgerald from Dingle, on his way to Tralee to work on the canal. It seems the government are going to build a canal from the centre of Tralee to the ocean, so ships can dock in the main street of Tralee – can you believe that? And they want labourers to dig it out. Been talking about it for years – now they’re finally going to do it. Eight shillings a week!

The conversation shifts to the famine. The stranger tells him what he has seen on the road since he left – the poverty, and death. The families evicted because they could no longer pay the rent, forced to build a shelter in a roadside ditch, two hundred of them, then washed out by the rain. The man who collapsed in front of him on the road, dropped dead from cold, hunger and fever. “The breath is cowld in the poor divil’s body, he’ll no more feel the hunger, God bless him!”  And the children – the poor buggers wouldn’t leave him alone, tugging at his coat as he went past, then grabbing him so he couldn’t leave, then throwing stones at him when he broke free. Their hope that this stranger might offer them some food had quickly turned to despair and anger, and he bolted. He carried his shillelagh under his coat as protection against the wild dogs, he said, but he nearly needed to use it against the wild hungry children. Their eyes!

Every parish was the same, the stranger continued. And the rich man doesn’t believe it. They preferred to think that the poor were just lazy and dirty, “to go with their thievin’”. They don’t know the truth, and the poor man and his family pay for it.

“There’ll be some lodgin’ for ye at the inn at Booleens, about two miles down the road,” Edward said, finally. “God bless ye”, the stranger replied, and disappeared quickly into the darkness.

Catherine is up and is preparing some dinner. Rice and Indian meal. She had steeped the rice the night before, and now she was draining it, before boiling it and drawing it off. The result was a jelly sludge – unpalatable but filling. She had collected the rice and corn the day before from the parish poor supplies. Apparently it came from America – “America no less!”. The ships took emigrants one way across the ocean and came back the other way full of Indian corn to feed the poor. Nobody told her how to cook rice, so she cooked it up like she did potatoes. And the corn? “Peel’s brimstone” they called it – “the yaller Indian, God save us awl!”