Dear Friends, Join us on Sunday, March 15, 3PM, to celebrate Ireland and St. Patrick's day, with a beautiful program of Irish songs and poems with harp! Enjoy verse, song, and harp repertoire that tells of the joys and sorrows of the Irish people, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Songs include The Fields of Athenry, She Moved through the Fair, Danny Boy, and more. Poetry by William Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and others. Harp music by Turlough O'Carolan and as accompaniment to song.
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A STORY OF THE IRISH FAMINE
A Free Read from The Killing Snows.
MY SON, MY SON.
They docked at Dublin. Six days of hard walking lay ahead of them.
In the city, there were hundreds of ragged people walking towards the docks. One family stopped them, asking for directions and questioning them about England and the railways. Luke knew they had no prospect of work on the rails.
On the west of the city, they met families making for the Workhouses - the North Dublin Union or the South Dublin Union. Luke wondered if either still had the space for them.
Lucan, Leixlip and Maynooth. In the small towns, there were beggars everywhere. Every day on the roads, they met groups of silent people walking towards Dublin.
Kilcock, Enfield and Kinnegad. They questioned more people. Some were young men going to spend the summer working on the English harvest, as they always did. But most told a different story, one of hunger, fever and despair.
Mullingar, Edgeworthstown and Longford. More beggars, crowds of them outside the Midlands Workhouses. More ragged families trudging across the bridge on the Shannon.
Termonbarry, Strokestown and Tulsk. West of the Shannon the solidly built houses of the midlands gave way to smaller thatched cottages and mud cabins. The fields were smaller and stonier. There were fewer hedges and no fences; only blackthorns and rough-built stone walls along the sides of the fields. The roads were deeply rutted after the winter.
Bellanagare, Frenchpark and Ballaghaderreen. On their last night on the road they slept in a barn just outside Knockanure. They were worn out, and it was well past dawn when the farmer roused them. They went through the town and past the Workhouse. A crowd of hundreds of thin and ragged people stood in line along the outside wall.
They walked on towards Carrigard.
Two hours later, they arrived. He shook hands with Corrigan and McGlinn. They left him and walked on to Kilduff.
He stood at the gate to observe the house. The gable that had collapsed in the 1839 storm had been rebuilt with carved lintels over the windows. The walls had been freshly whitewashed. The thatch on the roof had gone, replaced by regular rows of grey-black slate.
The door was half open. Silently he stepped inside.
His mother was sweeping the floor with a rush broom, her back to the door. So much had changed, but she had not. She was dressed better than he remembered though. Her long black skirt hung straight, with no rips or patches. A grey jumper clung tight into her back, the folded black triangle of her shawl hanging down over it, loosely tied around her neck. Over both hung her long hair, black as he had always remembered it.
‘God with you, Mother.’
She spun around. The broom clattered on the floor. For a few seconds, she stared at him in fright. Slowly she began to recognise his features. ‘Luke?’ she whispered. ‘Luke? Oh, my God ... LUKE.’
She ran over and hugged him, her head into his chest. She had started to cry. ‘Luke. My son, my son ...’
‘It's fine,’ he said, not knowing what else to say. He had not expected this. He waited for her to finish, but the sobbing went on. He put his arms around her. ‘Don't be vexing yourself. You'll be fine, I tell you.’
Suddenly she pushed back from him, rubbing her eyes. She pulled his head down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You're a right fathead, do you know that?’
‘Oh, I know it well enough,’ Luke said.
‘You put the heart crosswise in me. All these years, and you just walk in on me like that. You could have been the death of me.’
‘I'm sorry.’
‘And so you should be. Why didn't you tell us you were coming today? I wasn't expecting you.’
Within minutes, he was sitting at the table, trying to answer his mother's questions through mouthfuls of buttermilk and oatmeal porridge.
The table was solid smooth-planed timber, four inches thick he reckoned. The earthen floor was gone, replaced by flagstones, squared off with mortar between. They had been scrubbed and brushed clean. The stone walls were scrubbed too. A ceiling made of long wooden planks covered the entire room, with no sign of staining from smoke.
At the gable end, where there had been a hole to let the smoke out, there was now a well-constructed chimney over a large, wide hearth, pots on a ledge down one side, two more hanging on small cranes over the fire, bubbling. On one side of the hearth, there was a creel of turf, a stack of logs just beside it. Against the back wall, there was a butter churn he had not seen before, a spinning wheel beside it.
‘God knows, you've become a powerful man,’ she said to him. ‘Those English fellows know how to work men, didn't I tell you so?’
‘Oh, it wasn't the English.’
‘It must have been tough on you all the same.’
‘It surely was. Farrelly would never let up. He had us working day and night.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it was best you were with Farrelly. He's a man you can trust, and we knew he would take care of you. You were only a child. Fourteen years old, and to have the whole family depending on you. It wasn't fair.’
‘But it had to be done, Mother. Wasn't that the way of it?’
She shook her head. ‘Maybe it was, but I couldn't stop worrying. Lying awake every night I was, thinking of you over there in England. Hard work expected of you, and money expected of you every week.’
‘But wasn't it hard for ye here too?’
She flinched, as if the question had not been expected. ‘Yes, it was hard. That first year you left was desperate. God, we were hungry. Never enough to eat and the rent to pay. There were times I cursed Michael in my heart for the promises he made. The rent, the back rent and interest too. No one else around was able to do that, and they weren't evicted. But it was his pride, his cursed pride, that made him do it. It was fine for him, wasn't it? But it was you that had to do the paying, taking a man's work on a boy's shoulders. Oh God, how I've missed you.’
She reached across the table, putting her hand on his arm. ‘You're not to go away again.’
He gulped down his porridge. ‘No, Mother,’ he said. ‘But tell me about the farm. How is it going?’
‘It's safe now you're home. Now you're the one that will be the farmer.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and nearly wasn't, from what I hear. Two years without the lease. You'd think he would have told me before.’
‘I don't know about that. Maybe he didn't want worrying you.’
Or maybe he was too damned proud, he was thinking. Too proud to admit he was getting old, and they wouldn't give him the lease.
To hell with that. There were other matters to think about. What future had Mayo if the potato had failed again?
But everything here seemed so normal; far, far better than when he had left. Yes, his mother was a few years older than she had been in 1840, but even that was difficult to detect. She most certainly was not hungry.
It made no sense.
‘What about the hunger?’ he asked.
She looked up, startled. ‘Who told you about that?’
‘No one. Couldn't I see it with my own eyes, and I crossing the country?’
‘Yes ... I expect you could. Well, we're doing well enough.’
‘No hunger?’
‘No hunger.’
‘And Murty?’
‘Murty and Aileen too. And why wouldn’t they? Don’t they get the money from Danny?’
‘And everyone else?’
She looked away, avoiding his glance. ‘Oh, I don't know. Sure we'll talk about it all some other time.’
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