Children of the Dead End E-Book

Patrick Macgill

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 497

Beschreibung

Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill's first novel. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven –an extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Leseprobe

CHILDREN OF THE DEAD END

This edition first published in 1999 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

4

Originally published in 1914 by Herbert JenkinsSubsequently published in 1985 by Caliban Books17 South Hill Park GardensLondon, NW3

Copyright © The estate of Patrick MacGill 1914

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 84158 000 5eISBN 978 0 85790 703 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, EdinburghPrinted and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD

1. A NIGHT IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE

2. OLD CUSTOMS

3. A CORSICAN OUTRAGE

4. THE GREAT SILENCE

5. THE SLAVE MARKET

6. BOYNE WATER AND HOLY WATER

7. A MAN OF TWELVE

8. OLD MARY SORLEY

9. A GOOD TIME

10. THE LEADING ROAD TO STRABANE

11. THE ’DERRY BOAT

12. THE WOMAN WHO WAS NOT ASHAMED

13. THE MAN WITH THE DEVIL’S PRAYER BOOK

14. PADDING IT

15. MOLESKIN JOE

16. MOLESKIN JOE AS MY FATHER

17. ON THE DEAD END

18. THE DRAINER

19. A DEAD MAN’S SHOES

20. BOOKS

21. A FISTIC ARGUMENT

22. THE OPEN ROAD

23. THE COCK OF THE NORTH

24. MECCA

25. THE MAN WHO THRASHED CARROTY DAN

26. A GREAT FIGHT

27. DE PROFUNDIS

28. A LITTLE TRAGEDY

29. I WRITE FOR THE PAPERS

30. WINTER

31. THE GREAT EXODUS

32. A NEW JOB

33. A SWEETHEART OF MINE

34. UNSKILLED LABOUR OF A NEW KIND

35. THE SEARCH

36. THE END OF THE STORY

INTRODUCTION

When Patrick MacGill’s avowedly autobiographical novel Children of the Dead End was published in 1914 it created a sensation, partly due to the unusual subject matter and partly due to the ‘navvy poet’ image of the author. It sold 15,000 copies in three months, although in the author’s native Ireland its vein of anticlericalism and social criticism attracted much adverse comment. MacGill’s account of the tyrannical Father Devaney, extracting money from his parishioners for his luxurious new house, under threat of eternal damnation for non-payers, is a harsh one:

The priest is spending three hundred gold sovereigns in making a lava-thury (lavatory). Three hundred sovereigns! that’s a waste of money.

and is coupled with an equally scathing portrayal of Farley McKeown, the gombeen man. McKeown was a money lender and entrepreneur who rose to prosperity in a famine period by buying in a shipload of Indian corn and making it available to the poor and starving peasantry at a usurous rate of interest which left them permanently entrapped in debt. MacGill’s account of the Donegal women knitting socks for sixteen hours a day for McKeown at a penny farthing a pair, a picture amplified in his companion novel, The Rat-Pit, has the ring of truth and bitter experience about it.

Information about Patrick MacGill’s life is scarce and accounts of his early years, education and formative experiences are almost entirely based on the assumption that Dermod Flynn, the hero of Children of the Dead End, is Patrick MacGill. The book is indeed subtitled The Autobiography of a Navvy and MacGill’s own foreword claims ‘most of my story is autobiographical’ and that ‘nearly all the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer’. If this is indeed so, MacGill’s skill as a writer is quite remarkable for a man whose formal education stopped at the age of ten.

Born in Glenties, County Donegal in 1891, he attended the village school where he failed to distinguish himself in any of his studies except poetry. On leaving school he worked casually on local farms for two years before going to the hiring-fair at Strabane, County Tyrone, to help the family finances and ‘push his fortune’ by feeing to a farmer for a six-month term. He spent two years in Tyrone, experiencing work with good and bad masters, before running off from his last position to go to Scotland with a potato picking squad.

Ireland, and in particular Donegal and the other northern counties, traditionally provided large numbers of casual labourers for seasonal work on lowland Scottish farms. Dermod Flynn/Patrick MacGill joins a fellow townsman, Micky’s Jim, who is organising a group of tattie-howkers from their home area and with them follows the potato harvest around the Clyde area. The squad includes Norah Ryan, his childhood school friend and sweetheart.

MacGill’s description of the squalid bothy conditions endured by the harvesting squad is certainly not overdrawn. The condition of such bothies was regularly investigated and condemned by enquiries into Scottish housing conditions and the unhygienic nature of the bothies – often hastily converted byres and pigsties – was only equalled by the dangers such workers experienced.

Conditions, such as MacGill vividly describes, continued for many years, as a tragic bothy fire at Kirkintilloch as late as September 1937 demonstrates. Twenty-six Irish potato pickers, from County Mayo, were sleeping in a bothy owned by a Glasgow potato merchant, when a fire broke out in the male sleeping quarters – a fire attributed to the hot-plate which formed the only cooking facility in the bothy. Ten boys and youths were burned to death, two men and fourteen girls escaped. One of the girls who escaped lost three brothers in the fire, another girl lost two brothers.

Dermod works out his season on the farms but at the end of the contract has lost all his savings gambling and is unable to face going home to his family in Donegal, penniless. So he sets out on the tramp with two pence in his pocket and experiences an even rougher and more miserable life than that of the itinerant potato harvester. After a couple of years of tramping and casual labour he meets up again with Micky’s Jim and his other countrymen and learns that Norah had left the squad, having become pregnant to the son of one of the farmers they worked for. Norah had gone off to Glasgow where Dermod follows but fails to find her. Norah’s story, interwoven as it is with Dermod’s, is told in more detail in The Rat-Pit. It is arguably the Norah thread in Children of the Dead End which evoked the comment from the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement:

It is unfortunate that Mr MacGill has mingled fiction with his autobiography. Both methods can present a true record of life but they do not serve precisely the same purpose.

Farm work in Argyll and navvying on the railways around Glasgow form the next part of Dermod’s adventures. It was while working for the railway that Flynn/MacGill develops a taste for literature and a habit of writing poetry. Here, certainly, MacGill’s description of Dermod’s awakening to literature would seem to reflect his own experience. Dermod reads Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables while keeping watch for the plate-laying squad, he reads Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus on the footboard of a ballast train, he joins the Carnegie Library and buys books from a second-hand bookseller. At this time he also discovers socialism:

I had seen suffering all around me wherever I went; suffering due to the injustice and tyranny of the wealthy class. When I heard the words spoken by the socialists at the street corner a fire of enthusiasm seized me, and I knew that the world was moving ...

An unsuccessful strike leads to Dermod quitting the railway and heading off with an old tramping companion, Moleskin Joe (the hero of a later MacGill novel), to work on the hydroelectric scheme at Kinlochleven in Argyll. This massive undertaking, extending from 1905–1909, formed part of the construction of an aluminium smelting plant and employed vast numbers of navvies who lived and worked in conditions of great danger and squalor. MacGill’s chapters dealing with life of the camp are among the most powerful and affecting in the book and reflect quite accurately what is known of the conditions at Kinlochleven. Some critics, such as the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, have felt less sense of identification with these chapters, arguing that Dermod’s childhood scenes were:

... real, in a sense in which the platelayer’s ghastly fate and much of the gambling, fighting, and drinking of the later navvy life are not real.

This may, however, simply reflect the difficulty that such critics have in coming to terms with the realities of industrial life. However the description of the navvies leaving the Kinlochleven works at the end of the contract is a passage of considerable poetic power. MacGill’s poetic gifts were, indeed, acknowledged by the Times reviewer who wrote ‘Mr MacGill’s first sentence proves him a poet’ and some of the Kinlochleven passages are surely as fine as the sentence so commended:

It was night in the dead of winter, and we sat around the fire that burned in red and blue flames on the wide open hearth.

The Kinlochleven job ending, Dermod returns south, settles in Glasgow and takes up work on the railway again. His creator, MacGill, went to Greenock to work for the Caledonian Railway and gathered together the poems he had been writing over recent years and had them published as Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook by an Irish printer. MacGill describes the next phase in his career in an interview published in the Scottish socialist weekly Forward in June 1914:

Every night I went round the houses in Greenock district and tried to sell my book. Some people thought I was daft; others thought I was giving the book away as an advertisement, and seemed astonished when I wanted sixpence for it ... However, one way and another, I sold about one thousand copies of the book, one of which fell into the hands of Neil Munro, who reviewed it in the Glasgow News.

Neil Munro, novelist, poet and creator of the immortal Para Handy, was at this time semi-retired from journalism but still wrote two weekly columns for the News. One of these was a highly influential literary column and the other was The Looker-On, a more general glance at whatever interested him or engaged his attention. In a February 1911 Looker-On Munro wrote:

At present working as a navvy on a repair gang on the Caledonian Railway between Greenock and Wemyss Bay there is a young Irishman who has been a manual labourer since he left the school at the age of twelve, and yet has had the time to cultivate no inconsiderable degree of literary taste, and even to write and publish a small volume of his own poetry.

Munro entitled his article A New ‘Surfaceman’ – comparing MacGill with another railway worker turned man of letters – Alexander Anderson (1845-1909). Anderson, after working as a labourer on the railway and publishing books of light verse under the pseudonym of ‘Surfaceman’, became Assistant Librarian at Edinburgh University in 1881 and University Librarian in 1901.

Munro describes MacGill as being a:

... little over twenty years of age, a tall, bright-eyed, black curly-haired lad with the muscles and the calloused hands of a navvy, but – in his bookselling evening hours, dressed with a rather unnavvy-like hint of the dandy in the matter of waistcoat and necktie.

and thought that MacGill had not yet made up his mind whether to be a comic versifier or a serious poet and judged him to have more facility of expression than depth of feeling. He concluded by reporting that MacGill had translated ‘with no little humour and technical skill’ some of La Fontaine’s Fables and Goethe’s Erl-King, noting that his knowledge of French and German was mainly derived from dictionaries.

Unless there is some unrecorded educational experience carefully concealed from the record, MacGill must be considered as an autodidact of quite remarkable proportions. His story to 1911 is remarkable enough – it soon becomes even more extraordinary. However this phase of his life is, unlike the earlier years, well-documented and gives some validation to the belief that truth is always stranger than fiction.

Munro’s review was seen by one of the leading literary critics of the day, Andrew Lang, who sent for a copy of Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook, reviewed it and in so doing produced a flood of orders from England. Later that year the Daily Express offered MacGill a post as a columnist and he left Scotland to ‘push his fortune’ in Fleet Street. His hero Dermod follows the same path, to work as a journalist on the Dawn, having earlier, during his Kinlochleven days, submitted articles about the navvying life to this paper.

After a few months of work on the Express/Dawn the paths of MacGill/Flynn diverge. Dermod returns to Glasgow to resume his search for Norah – who he eventually finds dying of tuberculosis in the slums of Glasgow.

However, in a development that the most imaginative of novelists could not credibly invent; MacGill – the child farm labourer from the hills of Donegal, potato picker, tramp, railway labourer and navvy – became a protégé of John Neal Dalton, CMG, KCVO, Canon and Steward of St George’s Chapel Windsor, domestic chaplain successively to Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V; sometime tutor to, and lifelong friend of, George V. From farm bothies and navvy’s huts his address changed to The Garden House, Windsor; from a place at the bottom of society he became positioned close to the centre of British society and worked at Windsor with Dalton as librarian and secretary; an Irish Catholic he found himself in the heartland of Anglicanism. When, in 1912, he published a collection of his poetry under the title of Songs of the Dead End, which included material from Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook and his earlier 1912 anthology, Songs of a Navvy, Canon Dalton wrote an appreciative introduction to the edition.

Children of the Dead End was followed in 1915 by the interlocking The Rat-Pit but by then war had broken out and MacGill had enlisted as a private soldier in the London Irish. His wartime experiences formed the basis of The Great Push (1915) and a series of other, now largely forgotten, novels. Indeed of his later work only Moleskin Joe, which harks back to his navvying experiences, has consistently held its place in the literary canon.

In 1915 MacGill married Margaret Gibbons, an Irish writer working in London. In the 1920s he took his family to Switzerland and later they moved to the United States. Part of the attraction of the United States may have been family connections – Margaret was the grandniece of Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore. MacGill was also booked to give a series of lectures, and the possibility of writing film scripts for Hollywood was another attraction, although all that seems to have come of this was a contract to write the screenplay for Suspense, a now almost forgotten 1930 film about the First World War. MacGill also had a minor acting role in the 1932 film of Noel Coward’s Cavalcade. Although MacGill continued to write for his English publisher, Herbert Jenkins, until 1937, producing twenty novels in all, nothing is recorded of his work after this date. Margaret MacGill was an equally prolific writer with twenty-five works of romantic fiction published mainly by Herbert Jenkins and in D. C. Thomson’s Red Letter Novels series. Her last recorded work in the British Library catalogue is Hollywood Madness, published in 1936, and evidently inspired by their stay in California. The MacGills later moved to Florida and Massachusetts. Patrick MacGill died in Florida on 23 November 1963 and is buried in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Children of the Dead End is significant as being perhaps the first literary expression of the experience of the post-famine Irish Catholic settlement in Scotland. It undoubtedly remains MacGill’s best known novel, populated as it is with what a Glasgow News reviewer described as ‘some vivid and novel characters’, and the scenes of life in the Kinlochleven work camps remain memorable. The influence of MacGill’s reading of Les Miserables in the railway tunnel comes through in his concern and burning anger for the plight of the poor and the downtrodden of society. Although at times the insistent moralising may seem somewhat overdone to modern taste, the vigour and energy of the narrative marks this out as a worthwhile, early and enduring example of the proletarian novel, comparable perhaps to Robert Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, in its perspective of life from the ‘dead end’ of society.

BRIAN D. OSBORNEMay 1999

FOREWORD

‘I wish the Kinlochleven navvies had been thrown into the loch. They would fain turn the Highlands into a cinderheap,’ said the late Andrew Lang, writing to me a few months before his death.

In the following pages I have endeavoured to tell of the navvy; the life he leads, the dangers he dares, and the death he often dies. Most of my story is autobiographical. Moleskin Joe and Carroty Dan are true to life; they live now, and for all I know to the contrary may be met with on some precarious job, in some evil-smelling model lodging-house, or, as suits these gipsies of labour, on the open road. Norah Ryan’s painful story shows the dangers to which an innocent girl is exposed through ignorance of the fundamental facts of existence; Gourock Ellen and Annie are types of women whom I have often met. While asking a little allowance for the pen of the novelist it must be said that nearly all the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer: that such incidents should take place makes the tragedy of the story.

PATRICK MACGILLThe Garden HouseWindsorJanuary, 1914

CHAPTER 1

A NIGHT IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE

The wee red-headed man is a knowing sort of fellow,

His coat is cat’s-eye green and his pantaloons are yellow,

His brogues be made of glass and his hose be red as cherry,

He’s the lad for devilment if you only make him merry,

He drives a flock of goats, has another flock behind him.

The little children fear him but the old folk never mind him.

To the frogs’ house and the goats’ house and the hilly land and hollow,

He will carry naughty children where the parents dare not follow.

Oh! little ones, beware. If the red-haired man should catch you,

You’ll have only goats to play with and croaking frogs to watch you,

A bed between two rocks and not a fire to warm you! –

Then, little ones, be good and the red-haired man can’t harm you.

–From ‘The Song of the Red-haired Man’.

It was night in the dead of winter, and we sat around the fire that burned in red and blue flames on the wide open hearth. The blue flames were a sign of storm.

The snow was white on the ground that stretched away from the door of my father’s house, down the dip of the brae and over the hill that rose on the other side of the glen. I had just been standing out by the little hillock that rose near the corner of the home gable-end, watching the glen people place their lamps in the window corners. I loved to see the lights come out one by one until every house was lighted up. Nothing looks so cheerful as a lamp seen through the darkness.

On the other side of the valley a mountain stream tumbled down to the river. It was always crying out at night and the wail in its voice could be heard ever so far away. It seemed to be lamenting over something which it had lost. I always thought of women dreeing over a dead body when I listened to it. It seemed so strange to me, too, that it should keep coming down and down for ever.

The hills surrounding the glen were very high; the old people said that there were higher hills beyond them, but this I found very hard to believe.

These were the thoughts in my mind as I entered my home and closed the door behind me. From the inside I could see the half-moon, twisted like a cow’s horn, shining through the window.

‘It will be a wet month this,’ said my father. ‘There are blue flames in the fire, and a hanging moon never keeps in rain.’

The wind was moaning over the chimney. By staying very quiet one could hear the wail in its voice, and it was like that of the stream on the far side of the glen. A pot of potatoes hung over the fire, and as the water bubbled and sang the potatoes could be seen bursting their jackets beneath the lid. The dog lay beside the hearthstone, his nose thrust well over his forepaws, threaping to be asleep, but ready to open his eyes at the least little sound. Maybe he was listening to the song of the pot, for most dogs like to hear it. An oil lamp swung by a string from the roof-tree backwards and forwards like a willow branch when the wind of October is high. As it swung the shadows chased each other in the silence of the farther corners of the house. My mother said that if we were bad children the shadows would run away with us, but they never did, and indeed we were often full of all sorts of mischief. We felt afraid of the shadows, they even frightened mother. But father was afraid of nothing. Once he came from Ardara fair on the Night of the Dead1 and passed the graveyard at midnight.

Sometimes my mother would tell a story, and it was always about the wee red-headed man who had a herd of goats before him and a herd of goats behind him, and a salmon tied to the laces of his brogues for supper. I have now forgotten all the great things which he went through, but in those days I always thought the story of the wee red-headed man the most wonderful one in all the world. At that time I had never heard another.

For supper we had potatoes and buttermilk. The potatoes were emptied into a large wicker basket round which we children sat with a large bowl of buttermilk between us, and out of this bowl we drank in turn. Usually the milk was consumed quickly, and afterwards we ate the potatoes dry.

Nearly every second year the potatoes went bad; then we were always hungry, although Farley McKeown, a rich merchant in the neighbouring village, let my father have a great many bags of Indian meal on credit. A bag contained sixteen stone of meal and cost a shilling a stone. On the bag of meal Farley McKeown charged sixpence a month interest; and fourpence a month on a sack of flour which cost twelve shillings. All the people round about were very honest, and paid up their debts whenever they were able. Usually when the young went off to Scotland or England they sent home money to their fathers and mothers, and with this money the parents paid for the meal to Farley McKeown. ‘What doesn’t go to the landlord goes to Farley McKeown,’ was a Glenmornan saying.

The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn for ever and ever in hell. ‘The fires of eternity will make you sorry for the debts that you did not pay,’ said the priest. ‘What is eternity?’ he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar steps. ‘If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and took a million years to count every single grain, how long would it take him to count them all? A long time, you’ll say. But that time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning in hell while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand, counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within the letter of the law.’ That concluding phrase ‘within the letter of the law’ struck terror into all who listened, and no one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it meant.

Farley McKeown would give no meal to those who had no children. ‘That kind of people, who have no children to earn for them, never pay debts,’ he said. ‘If they get meal and don’t pay for it they’ll go down – down,’ said the priest. ‘’Tis God Himself that would be angry with Farley McKeown if he gave meal to people like that.’

The merchant established a great knitting industry in West Donegal. My mother used to knit socks for him, and he paid her at the rate of one and threepence a dozen pairs, and it was said that he made a shilling of profit on a pair of these in England. My mother usually made a pair of socks daily; but to do this she had to work sixteen hours at the task. Along with this she had her household duties to look after. ‘A penny farthing a day is not much to make,’ I once said to her. ‘No, indeed if you look at it in that way,’ she answered. ‘But it is nearly two pounds a year and that is half the rent of our farm of land.’

Every Christmas Farley McKeown paid two hundred and fifty pounds to the church. When the priest announced this from the altar he would say, ‘That’s the man for you!’ and all the members of the congregation would bow their heads, feeling very much ashamed of themselves because none of them could give more than a sixpence or a shilling to the silver collection which always took place at the chapel of Greenanore on Christmas day.

When the night grew later my mother put her bright knitting-needles by in a bowl over the fireplace, and we all went down on our knees, praying together. Then mother said: ‘See and leave the door on the latch; maybe a poor man will need shelter on a night like this.’ With these words she turned the ashes over on the live peat while we got into our beds, one by one.

There were six children in our family, three brothers and three sisters. Of these, five slept in one room, two girls in the little bed, while Fergus and Dan slept along with me in the other, which was much larger. Father and mother and Kate, the smallest of us all, slept in the kitchen.

When the light was out, we prayed to Mary, Brigid, and Patrick to shield us from danger until the morning. Then we listened to the winds outside. We could hear them gather in the dip of the valley and come sweeping over the bend of the hill, singing great lonely songs in the darkness. One wind whistled through the keyhole, another tapped on the window with an ivy leaf, while a third swept under the half-door and rustled across the hearthstone. Then the breezes died away and there was silence.

‘They’re only putting their heads together now,’ said Dan, ‘making up a plan to do some other tricks.’

‘I see the moon through the window,’ said Norah.

‘Who made the moon?’ asked Fergus.

‘It was never made,’ answered Dan. ‘It was there always.’

‘There is a man in the moon,’ I said. ‘He was very bad and a priest put him up there for his sins.’

‘He has a pot of porridge in his hand.’

‘And a spoon.’

‘A wooden spoon.’

‘How could it shine at night if it’s only a wooden spoon? It’s made of white silver.’

‘Like a shillin’.’

‘Like a big shillin’ with a handle to it.’

‘What would we do if we had a shillin’?’ asked Ellen.

‘I’d buy a pocket-knife,’ said Dan.

‘Would you cut me a stick to drive bullocks to the harvest fair of Greenanore?’ asked Fergus.

‘And what good would be in havin’ a knife if you cut sticks for other folk?’

‘I’d buy a prayer-book for a shillin’,’ said Norah.

‘A prayer-book is no good, once you get it,’ I said. ‘A knife is far and away better.’

‘I would buy a sheep for a shillin’,’ said Fergus.

‘You couldn’t get a sheep for a shillin’.’

‘Well, I could buy a young one.’

‘There never was a young sheep. A young one is only a lamb.’

‘A lamb turns into a sheep at midsummer moon.’

‘Why has a lamb no horns?’ asked Norah.

‘Because it’s young,’ we explained.

‘We’ll sing a holy song,’ said Ellen.

‘We’ll sing Holy Mary,’ we all cried together, and began to sing in the darkness.

Oh! Holy Mary, mother mild,

Look down on me, a little child,

And when I sleep put near my bed

The good Saint Joseph at my head,

My guardian Angel at my right

To keep me good through all the night;

Saint Brigid give me blessings sweet;

Saint Patrick watch beside my feet.

Be good to me O! mother mild,

Because I am a little child.

‘Get a sleep on you,’ mother called from the next room. ‘The wee red-headed man is comin’ down the chimley, and he is goin’ to take ye away if ye aren’t quiet.’

We fell asleep, and that was how the night passed by in my father’s house years ago.

1The evening of All Souls’ Day.

CHAPTER 2

OLD CUSTOMS

Put a green cross beneath the roof on the eve of good Saint Bride

And you’ll have luck within the house for long past Lammastide;

Put a green cross above the door – ’tis hard to keep it green,

But ’twill bring good luck and happiness for long past Hallow E’en

The green cross holds Saint Brigid’s spell, and long the spell endures,

And ’twill bring blessings on the head of you and all that’s yours.

– From ‘The Song of Simple People’.

Once a year, on Saint Bride’s Eve, my father came home from his day’s work, carrying a load of green rushes on his shoulders. At the door he would stand for a moment with his feet on the threshold and say these words:

‘Saint Bride sends her blessings to all within. Give her welcome.’

Inside my mother would answer, ‘Welcome she is,’ and at these words my father would loosen the shoulder-knot and throw his burden on the floor. Then he made crosses from the rushes, wonderful crosses they were. It was said that my father was the best at that kind of work in all the countryside. When made, they were placed in various parts of the house and farm. They were hung up in our home, over the lintel of the door, the picture of the Holy Family, the beds, the potato pile and the fireplace. One was placed over the spring well, one in the pigsty, and one over the roof-tree of the byre. By doing this the blessing of Saint Bride remained in the house for the whole of the following year. I liked to watch my father plaiting the crosses, but I could never make one myself.

When my mother churned milk she lifted the first butter that formed on the top of the cream and placed it against the wall outside the door. It was left there for the fairy folk when they roamed through the country at midnight. They would not harm those who gave them an offering in that manner, but the people who forgot them would have illness among their cattle through all the length of the year.

If my father met a red-haired woman when he was going to the market he would turn home. To meet a red-haired woman on the high-road is very unlucky.

It is a bad market where there are more women than men. ‘Two women and a goose make a market,’ is the saying among the Glenmornan folk.

If my mother chanced to overturn the milk which she had drawn from the cow, she would say these words: ‘Our loss go with it. Them that it goes to need it more than we do.’ One day I asked her who were the people to whom it went. ‘The gentle folk,’ she told me. These were the fairies.

You very seldom hear persons called by their surname in Glenmornan. Every second person you meet there is either a Boyle or an O’Donnell. You want to ask a question about Hugh O’Donnell. ‘Is it Patrick’s Hugh or Mickey’s Hugh or Sean’s Hugh?’ you will be asked. So too in the Glen you never say Mrs when speaking of a married woman. It is just ‘Farley’s Brigid’ or ‘Patrick’s Norah’ or ‘Cormac’s Ellen’, as the case may be. There was one woman in Glenmornan who had a little boy of about my age, and she seldom spoke to anybody on the road to chapel or market. Everyone seemed to avoid her, and the old people called her ‘that woman’, and they often spoke about her doings. She had never a man of her own, they said. Of course I didn’t understand these things, but I knew there was a great difference in being called somebody’s Mary or Norah instead of ‘that woman’.

On St Stephen’s Day the Glenmornan boys beat the bushes and killed as many wrens as they could lay their hands on. The wren is a bad bird, for it betrayed St Stephen to the Jews when they wanted to put him to death. The saint hid in a clump of bushes, but the wrens made such a chatter and clatter that the Jews, when passing, stopped to see what annoyed the birds, and found the saint hiding in the undergrowth. No wonder then that the Glenmornan people have a grudge against the wren!

Kissing is almost unknown in the place where I was born and bred. Judas betrayed the Son of God with a kiss, which proves beyond a doubt that kissing is of the devil’s making. It is no harm to kiss the dead in Glenmornan, for no one can do any harm to the dead.

Once I got bitten by a dog. The animal snapped a piece of flesh from my leg and ate it when he got out of the way. When I came into my own house my father and mother were awfully frightened. If three hairs of the dog that bit me were not placed against the sore I would go mad before seven moons had faded. Oiney Dinchy, who owned the dog, would not give me three hairs because I was unfortunate enough to be stealing apples when the dog rushed at me. For all that it mattered to Oiney, I might go as mad as a March hare. The priest, when informed of the trouble, blessed salt which he told my father to place on the wound. My father did so, but the salt pained me so much that I rushed screaming from the house. The next door neighbours ran into their homes and closed their doors when they heard me scream. Two little girls were coming to our house for the loan of a half-bottle of holy water for a sick cow, and when they saw me rush out they fled hurriedly, shrieking that I was already mad from the bite of Oiney Dinchey’s dog. When Oiney heard this he got frightened and he gave my father three hairs of the dog with a civil hand. I placed them on my sore, the dog was hung by a rope from the branch of a tree, and the madness was kept away from me. I hear that nowadays in Glenmornan the people never apply the holy salt to the bite of a dog. Thus do old customs change.

The six-hand reel is a favourite Glenmornan dance, but in my time a new parish priest came along who did not approve of dancing. ‘The six-hand reel is a circle, the centre of which is the devil,’ said he, and called a house in which a dance was held the ‘Devil’s Station’. He told the people to cease dancing, but they would not listen to him. ‘When we get a new parish priest we don’t want a new God,’ they said. ‘The old God who allowed dancing is good enough for us.’ The priest put the seven curses on the people who said these words. I only know three of the seven curses.

May you have one leg and it to be halting.

May you have one eye and it to be squinting.

May you have one tooth and it to be aching.

The second curse fell on one man – old Oiney Dinchy, who had a light foot on a good floor. When tying a restive cow in the byre, the animal caught Oiney in the ball of one eye with the point of its horn, and Oiney could only see through the other eye afterwards. The people when they saw this feared the new parish priest, but they never took any heed to the new God, and up to this day there are many good six-hand reelers in Glenmornan. And the priest is dead.

The parish priest who came in his place was a little pot-bellied man with white shiny false teeth, who smoked ninepenny cigars and who always travelled first class in a railway train. Everybody feared him because he put curses on most of the people in Glenmornan; and usually on the people whom I thought best in the world. Those whom I did not like at all became great friends of the priest. I always left the high-road when I saw him coming. His name was Father Devaney, and he was eternally looking for money from the people, who, although very poor, always paid when the priest commanded them. If they did not they would go to hell as soon as they died. So Father Devaney said.

A stranger in Glenmornan should never talk about crows. The people of the Glen are nicknamed the ‘Crow Chasers’, because once in the bad days, the days of the potato failure, they chased for ten long hours a crow that had stolen a potato, and took back the potato at night in triumph. This has been cast up in their teeth every since, and it is an ill day for a stranger when he talks about crows to the Glenmornan people.

Courtship is unknown in Glenmornan. When a young man takes it in his head to marry, he goes out in company with a friend and a bottle of whisky and looks for a woman. If one refuses, the young man looks for another and another until the bottle of whisky is consumed. The friend talks to the girl’s father and lays great stress upon the merits of the would-be husband, who meanwhile pleads his suit with the girl. Sometimes a young man empties a dozen bottles of whisky before he can persuade a woman to marry him.

In my own house we had flesh meat to dinner four times each year, on St Patrick’s Day, Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. If the harvest had been a good one we took bacon with our potatoes at the ingathering of the hay. Ours was a hay harvest; we grew very little corn.

Of all the seasons of the year I liked the harvest-time best. Looking from the door of my father’s house I had the whole of Glenmornan under my eyes. Far down the Glen the road wound in and out, now on one side of the river and now on the other, running away to the end of Ireland, and for all that I knew, maybe to the end of the world itself.

The river came from the hills, tumbling over rocks in showers of fine white mist and forming into deep pools beneath, where it rested calmly after its mad race. Here the trout leaped all day, and turned the placid surface into millions of petulant ripples which broke like waves under the hazel bushes that shaded the banks. In the fords further along the heavy milch cows stood belly-deep in the stream, seeking relief from the madness that the heat and the gad-flies put into their blood.

The young cattle grazed on the braes, keeping well in the shadow of the cliffs, while from the hill above the mountain-sheep followed one another in single file, as is their wont, down to the lower and sweeter pastures.

The mowers were winding their scythes in long heavy sweeps through the meadow in the bottomlands, and rows of mown hay lay behind them. Even where I stood, far up, I could hear the sharp swish of their scythes as they cut through the bottom grass.

The young maidens, their legs bare well above their knees, tramped linen at the brookside and laughed merrily at every joke that passed between them.

The neighbours spoke to one another across the march ditches, and their talk was of weather and the progress of the harvest.

The farmer boy could be seen going to the moor for a load of peat, his creel swinging in a careless way across his shoulders and his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. He was barefooted, and the brown moss was all over the calves of his legs. He was thinking of something as he walked along and he looked well in his torn shirt and old hat. Many a time I wondered what were the thoughts which filled his mind.

Now and again a traveller passed along the road, looking very tired as he dragged his legs after him. His hob-nailed boots made a rasping sound on the grey gravel, and it was hard to tell where he was going.

One day a drover passed along, driving his herd of wildeyed, panting bullocks before him. He was a little man and he carried a heavy cudgel of a stick in his hands. I went out to the road to see him passing and also to speak to him if he took any notice of a little fellow.

‘God’s blessing be on every beast under your care,’ I said, repeating the words which my mother always said to the drovers which she met. ‘Is it any harm to ask you where you are going?’

‘I’m goin’ to the fair of ’Derry,’ said he.

‘Is ’Derry fair as big as the fair of Greenanore, good man?’

He laughed at my question, and I could see his teeth black with tobacco juice. ‘Greenanore!’ he exclaimed. ‘’Derry fair is a million times bigger.’

Of course I didn’t believe him, for had I not been at the harvest-fair of Greenanore myself, and I thought that there could be nothing greater in all the seven corners of the world. But it was in my world and I knew more of the bigger as the years went on.

In those days the world, to me, meant something intangible, which lay beyond the farthest blue line of mountains which could be seen from Glenmornan Hill. And those mountains were ever so far away! How many snug little houses, white under their coatings of cockle lime, how many wooden bridges spanning hurrying streams, and how many grey roads crossing brown moors lay between Glenmornan Hill and the last blue line of mountain tops that looked over into the world for which I longed with all the wistfulness of youth, I did not know.

CHAPTER 3

A CORSICAN OUTRAGE

When brown trout leap in ev’ry burn, when hares are scooting on the brae,

When rabbits frisk where e’er you turn, ’tis sad to waste your hours away

Within bald Learning’s droning hive with pen and pencil, rod and rule –

Oh! the unhappiest soul alive is oft a little lad at school.

–From ‘The Man who Met the Scholars’.

I did not like school. My father could neither read nor write, and he didn’t trouble much about my education. The priest told him to send me to the village school, and I was sent accordingly.

‘The priest should know what is best,’ my father said.

The master was a little man with a very large stomach. He was short of breath, and it was very funny to hear him puffing on a very warm day, when the sweat ran down his face and wetted his collar. The people about thought that he was very wise, and said that he could talk a lot of wisdom if he were not so short of breath. Whenever he sat by the school fire he fell asleep. Everyone said that though very wise the man was very lazy. When he got to his feet after a sleep he went about the schoolroom grunting like a sick cow. For the first six months at school I felt frightened of him, after that I disliked him. He beat me about three times a day. He cut hazel rods on his way to school, and used them every five minutes when not asleep. Nearly all the scholars cried whenever they were beaten, but I never did. I think this was one of his strongest reasons for hating me more than any of the rest. I learned very slowly, and never could do my sums correctly, but I liked to read the poems in the more advanced books and could recite ‘Childe Harold’s Farewell’ when only in the second standard.

When I was ten years of age I left school, being then only in the third book. This was the way of it. One day, when pointing out places on the map of the world, the master came round, and the weather being hot the man was in a bad temper.

‘Point out Corsica, Dermod Flynn,’ he said.

I had not the least idea as to what part of the world Corsica occupied, and I stood looking awkwardly at the master and the map in turn. I think that he enjoyed my discomfited expression, for he gazed at me in silence for a long while.

‘Dermod Flynn, point out Corsica,’ he repeated.

‘I don’t know where it is,’ I answered sullenly.

‘I’ll teach you!’ he roared, getting hold of my ear and pulling it sharply. The pain annoyed me; I got angry and hardly was aware of what I was doing. I just saw his eyes glowering into mind. I raised the pointer over my head and struck him right across the face. Then a red streak ran down the side of his nose and it frightened me to see it.

‘Dermod Flynn has killed the master!’ cried a little girl whose name was Norah Ryan and who belonged to the same class as myself.

I was almost certain that I had murdered him, for he dropped down on the form by the wall without speaking a word and placed both his hands over his face. For a wee bit I stood looking at him; then I caught up my cap and rushed out of the school.

Next day, had it not been for the red mark on his face, the master was as well as ever. But I never went back to school again. My father did not believe much in book learning, so he sent me out to work for the neighbours who required help at the seed-time or harvest. Sixpence a day was my wages, and the work in the fields was more to my liking than the work at the school.

Whenever I passed the scholars on the road afterwards they said to one another: ‘Just think of it! Dermod Flynn struck the master across the face when he was at the school.’

Always I felt very proud of my action when I heard them say that. It was a great thing for a boy of my age to stand up on his feet and strike a man who was four times his age. Even the young men spoke of my action and, what was more, they praised my courage. They had been at school themselves and they did not like the experience.

Nowadays, whenever I look at Corsica on the map, I think of old Master Diver and the days I spent under him in the little Glenmornan schoolhouse.

CHAPTER 4

THE GREAT SILENCE

Where the people toil like beasts in the field till their bones are strained and sore,

There the landlord waits, like the plumbless grave, calling out for more

Money to flounce his daughters’ gowns or clothe his spouse’s hide,

Money so that his sons can learn to gamble, shoot, and ride;

And for every debt of honour paid and for every dress and frill,

The blood of the peasant’s wife and child goes out to meet the bill.

–From ‘The Song of the Glen People’.

I was nearly twelve years old when Dan, my youngest brother, died. It was in the middle of winter, and he was building a snowman in front of the half-door when he suddenly complained of a pain in his throat. Mother put him to bed and gave him a drink of hot milk. She did not send for the doctor because there was no money in the house to pay the bill. Dan lay in bed all the evening and many of the neighbours came in to see him. Towards midnight I was sent to bed, but before going I heard my father ask mother if she thought that Dan would live till morning. I could not sleep, but kept turning over in the bed and praying to the Blessed Virgin to save my little brother. The new moon, sharp as a scythe, was peeping through the window of my room when my mother came to my bed and told me to rise and kiss Dan for the last time. She turned her face away as she spoke, and I knew that she was weeping. My brother was lying on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling with wide-staring eyes. A crimson flush was on his face and his breath pained him. I bent down and pressed his cheek. I was afraid, and the kiss made my lips burn like fire. The three of us then stood together and my father shook the holy water all over the room. All at once Dan sat up in the bed and gripped a tight hold of the blankets. I wanted to run out of the room but my mother would not let me.

‘Are ye wantin’ anything?’ asked my father, bending over the bed, but there was no answer. My brother fell back on the bed and his face got very white.

‘Poor Dan is no more,’ said my father, the tears coming out of his eyes. ’Twas the first time I ever saw him weeping, and I thought it very strange. My mother went to the window and opened it in order to let the soul of my brother go away to heaven.

‘It is all in the hands of God,’ she said. ‘He is only taking back what He sent us.’

There was silence in the room for a long while. My father and mother wept, and I was afraid of something which was beyond my understanding.

‘Will Dan ever come back again?’ I asked.

‘Hush, dearie!’ said my mother.

‘It will take a lot of money to bury the poor boy,’ said my father. ‘It costs a good penny to rear one, but it’s a bad job when one is taken away.’

I had once seen an old woman buried – ‘Old Nan,’ the beggarwoman. For many years she had passed up and down Glenmornan Road, collecting bottles and rags, which she paid for in blessings and afterwards sold for pence. Being wrinkled, heavy-boned, and bearded like a man, everyone said that she was a witch. One summer Old Nan died, and two days later she was carried to the little graveyard. I played truant from school and followed the sweating men who were carrying the coffin on their shoulders. They seemed to be well-pleased when they came in sight of the churchyard and the cold silent tombstones.

‘The old witch was as heavy as lead,’ I heard the bearers say.

They set down their burden and dug a hole in the soft earth, throwing up black clay and white bones to the surface with their shovels. The bones looked like those of sheep which die on the hills and are left to rot. The air was heavy with the humming of bees, and a little brook sang a soft song of its own as it hurried past the graveyard wall. The upturned earth had a sickly smell like mildewed corn. Some of the diggers knew whose bone this was and whose that was, but they had a hard argument about a thigh-bone before Old Nan was put into the earth. Some said that the thigh-bone belonged to old Farley Kelly, who had died many years before, and others said that it belonged to Farley’s wife. I thought it a curious thing that people could not know the difference between a man and a woman when dead. While the men were discussing the thigh-bone it was left lying on the black clay which fringed the mouth of the grave, and a long earthworm crawled across it. A man struck at the worm with his spade and broke the bone into three pieces. The worm was cut in two, and it fell back into the grave while one of the diggers threw the splinters of bone on top of it. Then they buried Old Nan, and everyone seemed very light-hearted over the job. Why shouldn’t they feel merry? She was only an old witch, anyhow. But I did not feel happy. The grave looked a cold cheerless place and the long crawling worms were ugly.

So our poor Dan would go down into the dark earth like Old Nan, the witch! The thought frightened me, and I began to cry with my father and mother, and we were all three weeping still, but more quietly, when the first dim light of the lonely dawn came stealing through the window panes.

Two old sisters, Martha and Bride, lived next door. My mother asked me to go out and tell them about Dan’s death. I ran out quickly, and I found both women up and at work washing dishes beside the dresser. Martha had a tin basin in her hand, and she let it drop to the floor when I delivered my message. Bride held a jug, and it seemed for a moment that she was going to follow her sister’s example, but all at once she called to mind that the jug was made of delft, so she placed it on the dresser, and both followed me back to my home. Once there they asked many questions about Dan, his sickness and how he came to die. When they had heard all, they told of several herbs and charms which would have cured the illness at once. Dandelion dipped in rock water, or bog bine1 boiled for two hours in the water of the marsh from which it was plucked, would have worked wonders. Also seven drops of blood from a cock that never crowed, or the boiled liver of a rabbit that never crossed a white road, were the very best things to give to a sick person. So they said, and when Bride tried to recollect some more certain cures Martha kept repeating the old ones until I was almost tired of listening to her voice.

‘Why did ye not take in the docthor?’ asked Martha.

‘We had no money in the house,’ said my mother.

‘An’ did ye not sell half a dozen sheep at the fair the day afore yesterday?’ asked Bride. ‘I’m sure that ye got a good penny for them same sheep.’

‘We did that,’ said my mother; ‘but the money is for the landlord’s rent and the priest’s tax.’

At that time the new parish priest, the little man with the pot-belly and the shiny false teeth, was building a grand new house. Farley McKeown had given five hundred pounds towards the cost of building, which up to now amounted to one thousand five hundred pounds. So the people said, but they were not quite sure. The cost of building was not their business, that was the priest’s; all the people had to do was to pay their tax, which amounted to five pounds on every family in the parish. They were allowed five years in which to pay it. On two occasions my father was a month late in paying the money and the priest put a curse on him each time. So my father said. I have only a very faint recollection of these things which took place when I was quite a little boy.

‘God be good to us! but five pounds is a heavy tax for even a priest to put on poor people,’ said Bride.

‘It’s not for us to say anything against a priest, no matter what he does,’ said my father, crossing himself.

‘I don’t care what ye say, Michael Flynn,’ said the old woman; ‘five pounds is a big tax to pay. The priest is spending three hundred gold sovereigns in making a lava-thury (lavatory). Three hundred sovereigns! that’s a waste of money.’

‘Lava-thury?’ said my mother. ‘And what would that be at all?’

‘It’s myself that does not know,’ answered Bride. ‘But old Oiney Dinchy thinks that it is a place for keeping holy water.’

‘Poor wee Dan,’ said Martha, looking at the white face in the bed. ‘It’s the hard way that death has with it always. He was a lively boy only three days ago. Wasn’t it then that he came over to our house and tied the dog’s tail to the bundle of yarn that just came from Farley McKeown’s. I was angry with the dear little rascal, too; God forgive me!’

Then Martha and Bride began to cry together, one keeping time with the other, but when my mother got ready some tea they sat down and drank a great deal of it.