THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST
Before I abandon these “Irish Cousin” years at Drishane, I should like
to say something more of the old conditions there. I do not think I
claim too much for my father and mother when I say that they represented
for the poor people of the parish their Earthly Providence, their Court
of Universal Appeal, and, in my mother’s case, their Medical Attendant,
who, moreover, provided the remedies, as well as the nourishment, that
she prescribed.
The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the
locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of
Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing
land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers
of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in
materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or
remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who were
often many years in arrears. Even in normal years the yield of the land,
in the district of which I speak, barely sufficed to feed the dwellers
on it; the rent, when paid, was, in most cases, sent from America, by
emigrated sons and daughters. There was but little margin at any time.
In bad years there was hunger.
Two or three fairly prosperous farms there were, and for the rest, a
crowd of entirely “uneconomic” holdings, a rabble of fragmentary
patches, scarcely larger than the “allotments” of this present war time,
each producing a plentiful crop of children, but leaving much to be
desired in such matters as the increase of the soil.
The district is not a large one. It contains about eight miles of fierce
and implacable seaboard, with only a couple of coves in which the
fishermen can find some shelter for their boats, and its whole extent is
but three or four miles in length, by a little more than half as many in
depth. A great headland, like a lion couchant, sentinels it on one side;
on the other, a long and malign spike of rock, thinly clad with heather,
and furze, drives out into the Atlantic, like an alligator with jaws
turned seawards. Not few are the ships that have found their fate in
those jaws; during these past three years of war, this stretch of sea
has seen sudden and fearful happenings, but even these tragedies are
scarcely more fearful than those that, in the blackness of mid-winter
storms, have befallen many a ship on the desperate rocks of Yokawn and
Reendhacusán.
It is hard to blame people for being ignorant, equally hard to condemn
them for thriftlessness and dirt in such conditions as obtained thirty
years ago in what are now called “Congested Districts.” Thriftlessness
and dirt were indeed the ruling powers in that desolate country. In
fortunate years, desolate and “congested” though it was, its little
fields, inset among the rocks and bogs, could produce crops in
reasonable quantity, and--as I do not wish to overstate the case--not
less luxuriant in growth than their attendant weeds. The yellow ragwort,
the purple loosestrife, the gorgeous red and orange heads of the docks,
only in Kerry can these _fleurs de mal_ be equalled, even in Kerry they
cannot be surpassed. The huge shoulder of the headland is beautiful with
heather and ling of all sorts and shades; the pink sea-thrift--would
that other forms of thrift throve with equal success!--meets the heather
at the verge of the cliffs, and looks like a decoration of posies of
monthly roses. _Osmunda Regalis_ fern fringes the streams, and the
fuchsia bushes have fed on the Food of the Gods and are become trees. On
a central plateau, high over the sea, stands one of the signal towers
that were built at the time of the French landing in Bantry. In its
little courtyard you stand “ringed by the azure world.” From west to
east the ocean is wide before you. On many days I have seen it, in
summer and winter alike lovely; a vast outlook that snatches away your
breath, and takes you to its bosom, making you feel yourself the very
apex and central point of the wondrous crescent line of fretted shore,
that swings from the far blue Fastnet Rock, looking like an anchored
battleship, on the west, to the long and slender arm of the Galley Head,
with its white lighthouse, floating like a seagull on the rim of the
horizon. Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and
purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of
passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have
happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small
green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries,
watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag
Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible
to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you.
In that climate and that soil anything could flourish, given only a
little shelter, and a little care, and the elimination from the
cultivators of traditional imbecilities; eliminating also, if possible,
fatalism, and the custom of attributing to “the Will o’ God” each and
every disaster, from a houseful of hungry children to an outbreak of
typhus consequent on hopelessly insanitary conditions.
“How was it the spuds failed with ye?” asked someone, looking at the
blackened “lazy-beds” of potatoes.
“I couldn’t hardly say,” replied the cultivator, who had omitted the
attention of spraying them; “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a
boggy place.”
Things are better now. The Congested Districts Board has done much, the
general spread of education and civilisation has done more. Inspectors,
instructors, remission of rents, land purchase, State loans, English
money in various forms, have improved the conditions in a way that would
hardly have been credible thirty years ago, when, in these congested
districts, semi-famine was chronic, and few, besides the “little
scholars” of the National Schools, could read or write, and the breeding
of animals and cultivation of crops was the affair of an absentee
Providence, and no more to be influenced by human agency than the
vagaries of the weather.
The first of the “Famines” in which I can remember my mother’s
collecting and distributing relief was in 1880. The potatoes had failed,
and I find it recorded that “troops of poor women came to Drishane from
the west for help.” My mother lectured them on the necessity of not
eating the potatoes that had been given them for seed, and assured them,
not as superfluously as might be supposed, that if they ate them they
could not sow them. To this they replied in chorus.
“May the Lord spare your Honour long!” and went home and boiled the
seed-potatoes for supper.
Poor creatures, what else could they do, with their children asking them
for food?
In that same spring came a woman, crying, and saying she was “the most
disthressful poor person, that hadn’t the good luck to be in the
Misthress’s division.” Asked where she lived, she replied,
“I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood.”
Spring after spring, during those dark years for Ireland of the
’eighties, the misery and the hunger-time recurred. Seed-potatoes,
supplied by charity, were eaten; funds were raised, and help, public and
private, was given, but Famine, like its brother, Typhus, was only
conciliated, never annihilated. In 1891 Mr. Balfour’s Relief Fund and
Relief Works brought almost the first touch of permanence into the
alleviating conditions. My mother was among the chief of the
distributors for this parish. Desperate though the state of many of the
people was, Ireland has not yet, thank Heaven, ceased to be Ireland, and
the distribution of relief had some irrepressibly entertaining aspects
that need not wholly be ignored.
My mother had herself collected a considerable sum of money, for buying
food and clothes (the Government fund being, as well as I recollect,
mainly devoted to the purchase of seed-potatoes). Many were her clients,
and grievous though their need was, it was impossible not to enjoy the
high absurdities of her convocations of distribution. These took place
in the kitchen at Drishane. The women came twice a week to get the food
tickets, and the preliminary gathering in the stable-yard looked and
sounded like a parliament of rooks. Incredibly ragged and wretched, but
unquenchable in spirit and conversation, they sat, huddled in dark
cloaks or shawls, on the ground in rows, waiting to be admitted to the
kitchen when “The Misthress” was ready for them. Most of them had known
nothing of the existence of the fund until told of it by my mother’s
envoys. It was my mission, and that of my brethren, to ride through the
distressed town-lands, and summon those who seemed in worst need, and in
my letters and diaries of these years I have found many entries on the
subject.
“_Jan. 27, 1891._--Rode round the Lickowen country. Sickened and stunned
by the misery. Hordes of women and children in the filthiest rags. Gave
as many bread and tea tickets as we could, but felt helpless and
despairing in the face of such hopeless poverty.”
“_January 30._--Jack and I again rode to the West to collect Widows for
the Relief Fund. Bagged nine and had some lepping” (an ameliorating
circumstance of these expeditions was the necessity of making
cross-country short cuts). “Numbers of women came over, some being rank
frauds ably detected by the kitchenmaid; one or two knee-deep in lies.”
“The boys walked to Bawneshal with tea, etc., for two of the worst
widows.” (The adjective refers to their social, not their moral
standing.)
On another occasion I have recorded that my sister was sent to inquire
into the circumstances of a poor woman with a large family. The latter,
in absorbed interest in the proceedings, surrounded the mother, who held
in her arms the most recent of the number, an infant three weeks old.
“I have seven children,” said the pale mother, “and this little one-een
that,” she turned a humorous grey eye on her listening family, “I’m
afther taking out of the fox’s mouth!” (The fox playing the part
attributed in Germany to the stork.)
My sister, absorbed in estimating the needs of the seven little brothers
and sisters, replied absently,
“_Poor_ little thing! It must have been very frightened!”
Mrs. Conolly stared, and, in all her misery, began to laugh; “May the
Lord love ye, Miss!” she said compassionately yet admiringly, “May ye
never grow grey!”
The difficulties of distribution were many, not the least being that of
steeling my mother’s heart, and keeping her doles in some reasonable
relation to her resources. I should like to try to give some idea of one
of these gatherings. Lists of those in most immediate need of help had
been prepared, I do not now remember by whom, and, in the majority of
cases, the names given were those of the males of the respective
households. Therefore would my mother, standing tall and majestic in the
middle of the big, dark, old kitchen at Drishane, her list in her hand,
certain underlings (usually her daughters and the kitchenmaid) in
attendance, summon to her presence--let us say--“John Collins, Jeremiah
Leary, Patrick Driscoll.” (These are names typical of this end of West
Carbery, and the subsequent proceedings, like the names, may be accepted
in a representative sense.)
The underling, as Gold Stick-in-Waiting, would then advance to the back
door, and from the closely attendant throng without would draw, as one
draws hounds in kennel, but with far more difficulty, the female
equivalents of the gentlemen in question.
“Now, John Collins,” says my mother (who declared it confused her if she
didn’t stick to what was written in the list), addressing a little
woman, the rags of whose shrouding black shawl made her look like the
Jackdaw of Rheims subsequent to the curse, “Now, John Collins, here’s
your ticket. Is your daughter better?”
“Why then she is not, your Honour, Ma’am,” replies John Collins in a
voluble whine, “only worse she is. She didn’t ate a bit since.” John
Collins pauses, removes a hairpin from her back hair, and with nicety
indicates on it a quarter of an inch. “God knows she didn’t ate _that_
much since your Honour seen her; but sure she might fancy some little
rarity that yourself’d send her.”
There follow medical details on which I do not propose to dwell. My
mother, ever a mighty doctor before the Lord, prescribes, promises “a
rarity,” in the shape of a rice pudding, and John Collins, well
satisfied, swings her shawl, yashmak-wise, across her mouth, and pads
away on her bare feet.
“Patrick Driscoll!”
Patrick Driscoll, bony and haggard, the hood of her dark cloak over her
red head, demands an extra quantity, on the plea of extra poverty.
She is asked why her husband does not get work.
“Husband is it!” echoes Patrick Driscoll, witheringly, “What have I but
a soort of an old man of a husband, that’s no use only to stay in his
bed!”
Other women press in through the doorway, despite the efforts of the
underlings, each eloquent of her superior sufferings. Another husband is
inquired for.
“He’s dead, Ma’am, the Lord ha’ mercy upon him, he’s in his coffin this
minute; and Fegs, he was in the want of it!”
Yet another has a blind husband.
“Dark as a stone, asthore,” she says to Gold Stick, “only for he being
healthy and qu’ite, I’d be dead altogether! Well, welcome the Will o’
God! I might be worse, as bad as I am!”
Philosophy, resignation, piety, humour, one finds them all in these
bewildering, infuriating, enchanting people. And then, perhaps, a cry
from the heart of the crowd,
“Sure ye’ll _not_ forget yer own darlin’ Mary Leary!”
A heartrending appeal that elicits from the Mistress a peremptory
command not to attempt to come out of her turn.
Nothing could be more admirable than my mother’s manner with the people.
Entirely simple, dictatorial, sympathetic, sensible. She believed
herself to be an infallible judge of character, but “for all and for
all,” as we say in Carbery, her soft heart was often her undoing, and
her sterner progeny found her benevolence difficult to control. She was,
in fact, as a man said of a spendthrift and drunken brother, “too
lion-hearted for her manes” (means).
“No wonder,” said one of her supplicants, “Faith, no wonder at all for
the Colonel to be proud of her! She’d delight a Black!”
Whether this imputed to the Black a specially severe standard of taste,
or if it meant that even the most insensate savage would be roused to
enthusiasm by my mother’s beauty, I am unable to determine.
I have a letter from my companion Gold Stick, from which I think a few
quotations, in exemplification, may be permitted.
HILDEGARDE SOMERVILLE to E. Œ. S. (Feb., 1891.)
“The women have swarmed since you left. I really think I know every
one of them now, by voice, sight, and smell, notably Widow
Catherine Cullinane, who has besieged us daily. Her voice is not
dulcet, especially when raised in abusive entreaty, but she has not
got anything out of me yet. It is as well that C. (a brother) and I
are here to manage the show, as Mother is, to say the least,
lavish. I was out one day when a woman called, a Mrs. Michael
Kelleher; she has the most magnificent figure, walk, and throat
that I have ever seen. She is tall, and her throat is exactly like
the Rossetti women’s throats, long and round, and like cream. She
would make a splendid model for you. I had seen her before, and
proved her not deserving,” (O wise young judge of quite nineteen!)
“her husband being a caretaker with a house and 4s. a week, and the
use of two cows, besides a daughter out as a nursemaid. She really
did not exactly beg, but came to see if she had ‘a shance of the
sharity.’ Her eldest boy, aged eleven, had fallen off the cowhouse
roof on to a cow’s back (neither hurt!), and we gave her Elliman,
which cured him. But the day I was out, Mother saw her, and
although I had given _full particulars_ in the book as to her
means”--(her princely affluence in fact, as compared with her
fellows)--“she gave her bread, tea, sugar, and meal, simply because
she had a baby the other day and had a child with a bad cold.”
Regarding the matter dispassionately, and from a distance, I should
say that either affliction amply justified my mother’s action, but
H. did not then think so.
“I don’t think this will happen again,” she resumes, severely, “as
Mother now regrets having done it. All the same, I had the greatest
difficulty in stopping her from clothing an entire family with the
Dorcas things, (which are lovely) as I told her, there are not 100
things, and there are over 200 people, and it seems wicked to
clothe one family from top to toe, so I prevailed. E. says the
Balfour Fund will help very few of our women.” (E. was my cousin
Egerton Coghill, who, like Robert Martin, had given his services to
the Government as a distributor of the Fund, and, in the south and
west of the County Cork, had some of the worst districts in
Ireland under his jurisdiction.)
“No one with less than a quarter of an acre of land is entitled to
get help,” my sister’s letter continues, “as they can get Out-door
Relief from the Rates, and no one with one ‘healthy male’ able to
work on the Balfour road can have it, in fact, only those with sick
husbands, or widows with farms, are eligible. As the fund is over
£44,000, and I have estimated that £150 would keep our Western
women going for 6 months, it seems to me very unfair to send the
quarter-acre people on to the Rates.”
It may be gathered from this that the difficulties of administration
were not light; it may also, perhaps, be inferred that the ancient
confidence in the landlord class (none of these people were tenants of
my father’s), which modern teaching has done its best to obliterate, was
not entirely misplaced. I do not claim any exceptional virtues for my
father and mother. Their efforts on behalf of their distressed
neighbours were no more than typical of what their class was, and is,
accustomed to consider the point of honour. It remains to be seen if the
substitutes for the old order will adopt and continue the tradition of
“_Noblesse oblige_.”
I have heard a beggar-woman haranguing on this topic.
“I towld them,” she cried, with, I admit, an eye on my hand as it sought
my pocket, “you were the owld stock, and had the glance of the
Somervilles in your eye! God be with the owld times! The Somervilles and
the Townshends! Them was the rale genthry! Not this shipwrecked crew
that’s in it now!”
I may as well acknowledge at once that Martin
[Illustration: A CASTLEHAVEN WOMAN.]
and I have ever adored and encouraged beggars, however venal, and have
seldom lost an opportunity of enjoying their conversation; ancient
female beggars especially, although I have met many very attractive old
men. At my mother’s Famine Conversaziones many beggar-women, whose names
were on no list, would join themselves to the company of the accredited.
“I have no certain place Achudth!” (a term of endearment), said one such
to me, “I’m between God and the people.”
It may be said that the people, however deep their own want, are
unfailing in charity to such as she. I had, for a long time, a creature
on my visiting list, or, to be accurate, I was on hers, who was known as
“the Womaneen.” As far as I know, she subsisted entirely on “the
Neighbours,” wandering round the country from house to house, never
refused a night’s lodging and the “wetting of her mouth o’ tay”
generally given “a share o’ praties” to “put in her bag for herself.”
She was the very best of company, and the bestowal of that super-coveted
boon, an old pair of boots, had power to evoke a gratitude that shamed
its recipient.
“Yes, Hanora,” I have said, “I believe I have a pair to give you.”
On this the “Womaneen” opened the service of thanksgiving by clasping
her hands, mutely raising her eyes to Heaven, and opening and shutting
her mouth; this to show that emotion had rendered her speechless. She
next seized my reluctant hand, and smacked upon it kisses of a breadth
and quality that suggested the enveloping smack of a pancake when it has
been tossed high and returns to its pan. Her speech was then recovered.
“That Good Luck may attind you every day you see the sun! That I
mightn’t leave this world until I see you well marrid!” A pause, and a
luscious look that spoke unutterable things. “Ah ha! I’ll tell the Miss
Connors that ye thrated me dacint!” A laugh, triumphing in my
superiority to the Misses Connor, followed, and I made haste to produce
the boots.
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Me heart ’d open! Ye-me-lay, but they’ll go on me in
style!”
Then, in a darkling whisper, and with a conspirator’s eye on the open
hall-door: “Where did you get them, asthore? Was it Mamma gave ‘em
t’ye?” (The implication being that I, for love of the “Womaneen,” must
have stolen them, as no one could have parted with them voluntarily.)
Then returning to the larger style. “That God Almighty may retch out the
two hands to ye, my Pearl of a noble lady! How will I return thanks to
ye? That the great God may lave me alive until I’d be crawlin’
this-a-way”--(an inch by inch progress is pantomimed with two gnarled
and ebony fingers)--“and on my knees, till I’d see the gran’ weddin’ of
my fine lady that gave me the paireen o’ shluppers!”
I think it will be admitted that this was an adequate return for value
received.