A Song Twice Over (73 page)

In some respects it went on very much as usual. The potatoes rotted in the ground but the rent had to be paid nevertheless. And when it was not, eviction orders, served sometimes by the stewards of landlords who rarely set foot in Ireland and had not the least notion of what went on there, came thick and fast. On a brisk March day Daniel stood in the village of Ballinglass in County Galway and watched as a detachment of infantry turned 300 people out of their cottages and then tore the buildings down over their heads when they tried to get in again, so that the land could be used to graze the owner's cattle. Seventy-six families in all, condemned to death, eating rotten potatoes in the landlord's ditches from which – to avoid the unpleasant business of removing corpses – they were soon driven off.

In April and May Daniel saw rotten potatoes being eaten everywhere.

Famine, then. And for those who still had the strength to be angry, Riot; menacing the landlords who
would
not, or, being almost penniless themselves,
could
not give charity; menacing the landlords who evicted for a private whim or simply to clear the land of hungry men who, being already resentful, would soon be troublesome. Menacing too, in the crossfire, the landlords who gave what they had and who, by men too desperate to tell the difference, were blamed nevertheless.

Yet a feast always followed a famine. Every Irishman knew that. Thank God it would be over by August.

In June the depots of Indian Corn, which had been only grudgingly opened, began to close, men like Daniel's friend in the Commissariat already being accused, in government circles, of being too generous, of exhausting their stocks by selling to all who had money to buy, whether genuine victims of famine or simply the eternal ‘Irish tinker' who was always hungry. And in July – the emergency being apparently considered over – a further cargo of Indian Corn was turned away.

In August …?

The Tory Government of Sir Robert Peel had fallen, brought down, predictably, on the issue of the Corn Laws. By opening the ports to cheap foreign grain he had helped Ireland and England's industrial north but had planted a dagger most maliciously in the backs of the landed gentlemen who had elected him. So, at any rate, those landed gentlemen considered as they cast him off, submitting themselves to the policies of the Whigs, for a change, whose view of Ireland seemed no clearer.

The food depots continued to close. So too did the public works which, in many places, had only just got started, the fact that the food depots had no more corn to sell presumably cancelling out the labourers'need of ready cash-in-hand, which would mean a great many half-made roads and bridges and half-drained tracts of land all over Ireland.

But who cared for that when the potato plants were not only growing but flourishing, promising the glut which always followed the hunger; the fat, full time which always came after the lean.

And then, one night in August, the potato fields from Southern Cork to Northern Donegal, from the west coast of Mayo to the eastern edge of Antrim and Meath, turned black. Everywhere. Making of that green country, from corner to corner, coast to coast, a festering, putrid, rotting mess.

The stink of it remained in Daniel's nostrils the whole of that summer and ever after. That; and the shattered, sickened hopelessness of the men and women he saw kneeling in their blighted fields, mourning over the diseased earth with a despair he knew to be total. Last year, there had been a few sticks of furniture in the house, bedding and blankets, pots and pans, to be taken one at a time to sell or pawn. Last year there had been a pig, a few chickens, a goat. Even a few precious coins of real money put by. This year there was nothing.

Last year the blight had spared not much perhaps, but at least a few fields here and there, something for somebody to be going on with. This year it had taken everything; would take everybody.

The public works could be started again, of course, all those roads leading nowhere to be dug by last year's scarecrows, fast becoming this year's skeletons. But apart from several ‘primitive' areas west of the Shannon, there were to be no government food depots at all this time, a sizeable number of commercial gentlemen who dealt in the import of corn and flour having demanded and received of a government elected by the commercial interest that there would be no interference with private enterprise. No government supplies suddenly flooding in to undercut their prices. No large-scale government buying in overseas markets to upset the proper balance of trade. A perfectly reasonable request – surely – since once the public works got going again and men had
wages
in their pockets instead of seed-potatoes, the food trade would flourish and
everybody
would do well out of it. And since the public works – the
wages
– were only intended to last a year, until the next harvest could be got in, it was an opportunity which really could not be missed.

The men in Ireland, of course, the men on the spot – Daniel, for one, and his Commissariat friend – were horrified. But the men in London, the grandees of both the Whig and Tory parties, so far removed from hunger that they could neither imagine it nor really believe in it, responded far more naturally to men of property who had votes to elect them, than to distressed peasants, who had not.

The food depots then must close, such stocks as remained to be distributed very sparsely among the worst affected areas, provided the relief committees of such areas were still able to pay for it.
Nothing
– with that precious balance of trade in mind – was to be given away. An order with which Daniel's friend found himself unable to comply, having already distributed such corn meal as he had left, with his blessings and some assistance from Daniel, an hour before – or perhaps
after
– the message reached him.

His depot was now not only closed but empty. Nor did he believe, in this black year of 1846, with poor harvests not only in the British Isles but all over Europe, making prices high and competition fierce, that it would be filled up again.

Food there would be in Ireland, of course. Rich food to suit the splendours of the Dublin social season, brought in from London and Paris with the ball gowns and the satin slippers. The balance of trade would see to that. But how many merchant princes were there in Ireland who knew how to deal in international markets and in the bulk that would be required to feed the Irish people? None that Daniel's friend knew of. Although he had encountered plenty of the small and shady dealers who were known in every Irish village as money-lenders, merciless collectors of debts, dealers in short-measure and shoddy who could charge what they liked now for a few crumbs of bread?

Did England understand? It seemed unlikely. Did anybody – particularly the gentlemen of Westminster – fully realize that unless they broke their promise to the merchants now –
at once
– and became active in those international markets there would soon be nothing edible to buy; even the detested Indian Corn having been snatched up, this meagre, blighted year, to feed the peasantry of Belgium and France?

Every Commissariat officer in Ireland knew. So did Daniel. Just as they knew that the Board of Works, sinking beneath the weight of hungry labourers but unable to find more than a handful of engineers to direct them, had given no significant employment as yet, paid no significant wages, so that even if the country markets were suddenly bursting with food it would be left, very likely, to rot. Like the potato. And when the road-building did get under way would it be easy, or even possible, to keep a family alive on the fixed rate of sixpence a day, with Indian corn already at tuppence a pound from the village traders; provided one was paid at all, of course, the Board having failed lamentably in finding enough wages-clerks.

What was left then? Nettles, it seemed, and grass. Until that too disappeared beneath the early and bitter snowfalls of November.

It was the coldest winter Daniel could remember. In London, he heard, the Thames had frozen over. In Ireland, turning up the collar of his own only barely adequate coat, he watched skeletons in rags fight each other for employment on such roadworks as had been started and then fight the Board of Work's officials for their wages when it was realized that no one was present on the site with the authority – or ability – to measure the amount of work done. And when the men fell down and died, as they often did, he saw other skeletons that were women come rushing to pick up the shovels from dead hands and dig or break stones or anything else for that sixpence a day which might keep the souls in the wizened and swollen little bodies of their children.

He saw gangs of emaciated, bewildered predators roaming everywhere, begging for food or work or hope – anything – listlessly, aimlessly. He saw children die, and stumbled over the bodies of others on narrow, country roads, hidden like fallen sticks by the snow, or shielded by other, slightly larger bodies which he supposed had been their mothers. He saw deserted villages emptied it seemed of their population, until one found them lying on the floor of their cabins, near-naked and too weakened to stand, hardly a rag left with which to cover themselves, no fuel, a cabbage leaf perhaps, or a handful of nettles stored away somewhere like a treasure. Death in their faces. Death too in the land which was a ruin now of weeds, undug, undrained, untended beyond any hope of next year's harvest. Even if any of them should live to see it, which seemed unlikely. Since how could they dig new trenches and plant new seed when they were too feeble, in some cases, to dispose of their dead? When it took the last of a man's fading strength to drag out the corpses of parent, wife, infant, and leave them in the snow.

Yet there
was
food in Ireland, as the Commissariat had said there would be. Every visitor from the mainland being able to see it in abundance and, returning to England, reporting in some bewilderment on the good butter and meat and plump fresh fish on view certainly in Dublin and Waterford and Cork and anywhere else an English visitor might be likely to wander. Thus confusing the opinion of mainland England where, with an economy based on cash not kind, it was less usual for men to die of starvation face to face with plenty.

The Irish people had no money. It was as simple as that. Would private English charity step in and collect it for them, where Government and private business enterprise had failed? Or seen no advantage? As a result of messages conveyed by men like Daniel Carey and the observations of that hardy species of ‘reforming' English lady and gentleman, £470,000 was raised in London that winter, £2,000 of it coming from Her Majesty the Queen, for the purchase and distribution of food, clothing and fuel, Her Majesty's Government contributing a model soup-kitchen organized by the chef of London's Reform Club, Alexis Soyer, who, from a 300-gallon soup-boiler in the middle of a long room with a door at each end, could feed relays of a hundred at a time at a rate of nearly a thousand a day. And cheaply too, Mr Soyer having created a recipe which called for only a quarter of a pound of meat to two gallons of water.

Watching the starving multitude file in at one end and out the other, a second multitude and then a third waiting to take their places, Daniel remembered others he had seen during that bitter January and February, simply sitting down, blank-eyed and vacant, in the snow, in the attitude of resignation which seemed to welcome death.

An attitude he understood. He was not well himself that day, the greasy odour of the soup curdling his stomach, his lean, pared-down body feeling the chill, his active, hunger-sharpened mind recalling too clearly the very images he wished most to forget. The new-born, still-born children eaten by rats. The cabin doors he had pushed open to find a whole family dead, for a long time he imagined, under the same blanket. The field of corpses he had helped to bury in communal graves so shallow that they would be an offence to decency, humanity and the nostrils when the thaw set in. The hollow despair. No, he was not well, although the only remedy he was ever prepared to take against the weakness of his body was to ignore it.

Famine and Riot. There had been plenty of that around those half-made roads and canals, around the houses of food profiteers, ‘evicting'landlords, members of local relief committees whose only crime, in some cases, was that they had failed to work miracles. Riot when it was known that, because of the new soup kitchens which were distributing their watery brew free of charge, the public works – which had been costing, or wasting, the British taxpayer £43,000 a day to run – were to be closed down again.

Was there now to be Famine and Fever?

It had always come before, following in hunger's wake as a black night after a black day, attacking bodies already too weak to dig a grave for a much-loved child. And attacking also – being not in the least particular – the doctors and nurses and nuns who tried to take care of them, the landlords in their manors, the silk and satin ladies at the Dublin balls. Anybody. Fever in its several varieties. Typhus, the ‘black fever'which scorched and darkened the body with congealed blood, bringing vomiting and madness and the vile stench that no one could ever forget. And its companion the ‘yellow fever'when a man fried in his own sweat, his skin the colour of sulphur. These two, and the ‘bloody flux'when a man's bowels ran out of him it seemed. A ghastly trio, stalking a ravaged population huddled obligingly together, the better to be infected, at the soup-kitchens and what remained of the roadworks or just sitting on the ground in the torpor hunger brings, taking infection with them when they got up and wandered off again to the next feeding centre, the next charitable woman dispensing soup from her own farmhouse kitchen, the overflowing workhouse, the prison.

Scurvy too, which takes out the teeth and turns the legs black. And the strange ‘swelling disease'of hunger, huge pregnant bellies suspended below ribs and limbs that were merely bones rattling between flaps of wrinkled, greying skin. Children with the large, wizened heads of old men and the sad, uncomprehending eyes of monkeys. All that. And Daniel, in his last despatch to London, had discovered that in the whole of Ireland only 28 hospitals had been set up to combat the expected epidemic. That in the county of Dublin there was only one public dispensary for every 7,300 people. In Mayo, with its population of over 360,000, only one public dispensary of any kind.