Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  The stonework showed no wear and tear. In the construction, the blocks of limestone had been hewed in delicacy or roughness according to their places in the house. Where the finish needed to be robust, on corners and buttresses, the stone had been cut like tweed; on the decorated cornices it looked smooth as silk.

  Many of the windows had received elegant and pointed arches; not so crude as Gothic, they gave the impression of having been built for ladies looking out of their boudoirs to see what gentleman might come riding hard across the fields to carry them away. On several walls, windowslits had been inserted—a whimsy on the owner's part, since bows and arrows no longer played a part in defense of a castle when these walls were being built.

  And that, I surmised, had been the point of the creators: to make a house like a legendary palace, but with all the warmth of a home. This success of temperament must have made even the house's enemies— hostile tenants, would-be owners—gaze with wonder when they stood in the overgrown avenue. At the end of the march of one hundred beeches, amid gnarled cherry trees and sprawling, uncontrolled espaliers, the layers of stone rose one above another like a child's wooden blocks.

  I could imagine walking those grass terraces, giving the Orders of the Day to my steward. My wife, April, could stand in the great—now restored—doorway, welcoming family and friends. A girl—our daughter, Amelia—might stand at her window and let her hair down, like Rapunzel. Our son, Bernard Euclid Terence Oscar, could roam the ramparts and spy through the archery slits, preparing to repel invaders. And, as an entire family, we could walk down to the lake after breakfast on summer mornings and stand on the little stone bridge, talking to the swans.

  When I looked at the mountains in the distance, the Galtees, and the peak Galteemore, they were blue as the sky on this winter day; and with the terraced fields and gray sunken stone fences leading down to the lake, and the slopes on the far side climbing up into the beech and ash woods, no other estate in Ireland could have granted as much to the beholder. Here was peace indeed—here was beauty and light. This place, I told myself, is where I belong; I knew not why, but I felt it to be as true as the beating of my heart.

  One last observation called me; my father had mentioned that Mr. Terence Burke had locked the theater when his wife vanished. Its fortifications had proven so strong that nobody had been known to breach it, not even the most disrespectful of the local men. I found the doors through which the audience should have entered, and I located the more discreet access marked “Actors”; all felt as though they had been secured from the inside with bolted cords of wood.

  I walked back to the ramparts. The unfortunate Terence Burke (how I felt for him!) had taken the structure erected by his ancestors and increased it in wonders until it became as marvelous as a poem. If love and passion can be measured in stonework, the woman who married here had been loved with one of the greatest passions ever felt in a human heart. How matters run in families!

  Down the faded avenue, I looked back from my saddle. The house seemed different—and I know how often the face of a beautiful woman changes. I called out, “Halloo! Halloo!”—and the house gave me back my own voice, a sure sign of emptiness. Firmly I vowed that I would make it echo to laughter, and words of love and joy. I received such force of optimism from this idea that I galloped Della all the way home.

  The Anglo-Irish houses often excelled the châteaux of the Loire, the palazzi of the Italians, the country seats of the English and Scots. Their occupants lived up to the style. Few societies had as much eccentricity as the Anglo-Irish or lived so incomparably fast a life. They rode to hounds, they played tennis, they staged theatricals, they built inventions—such as the huge telescope at Birr Castle. On their terraces strutted peacocks; along the eaves squatted fantail pigeons; in their fields rose the brilliant tails of pheasants.

  Some tastes were much stronger. Sir Henry Bellingham of Castlebellingham, in County Louth, employed a man to do nothing else but rake over the gravel after anyone had walked on it. Lord Dunsany in County Meath so liked order and respect that, out riding one day, he directed his steward to shoot a tenant who had forgotten to raise his cap to his lordship. (The steward refused.)

  Many Great Houses had ballrooms and, amid house parties with hunting, shooting, or fishing, they held seasonal balls. Attended by friends from all over Ireland and from farther afield, numbers of a hundred and more were not uncommon in a house's dozens of bedrooms.

  Intrigues and scandals broke out everywhere. More than one man saw his wife disappear from the dance “to take the air” and never return, departed with a younger or more eccentric or more dashing blade. One night two English gentlemen, staying a summer in a West Cork mansion, exchanged wives—permanently.

  The women often possessed heart-stopping beauty; the men under-took hair-raising escapades. All spent money resoundingly. Lady Or-monde in Kilkenny would never dream of coming down to dinner without a full diamond tiara. The men splashed out on yachts, cars, and card games, on “slow horses and fast women.”

  As their end drew nearer, their dances grew wilder. And when the money from their tenancies began to dry up, whether through law or attrition, bankruptcy rolled through the Anglo-Irish houses like a poison gas. Few of their enterprises earned enough to support such lavish style. Soon the servants departed, the beds went unmade, and the bankers came to collect on myriad mortgages.

  As the banks sold off the land, usually breaking up the estates, the local people at last got their hands on what they felt was rightly theirs. With memory so bitter, no native Irish family ever moved into any Great House. After the inevitable auction of possessions, often not even attended by the long-gone and faraway owners, the new owners let the hated edifice stand in ruins.

  Their farm animals sheltered in the marbled halls on summer days. Or, from time to time, they stripped the house of its best stone to build new houses for themselves, or for their cattle, pigs, horses.

  That is, if the house remained standing. As rebellion intensified, many Irish estates came to grief when the local republican guerrillas torched them—sometimes with the landlord and his family still inside. Thus, in magnificent Irish architecture, was the baby thrown out with the bathwater—and few young inheritors of the time would have dared put a toe into such a cauldron.

  Tipperary Castle, as yet, fell into none of these categories—and it was the prize. By all accounts, it not only matched but surpassed the other houses in Ireland: Bessborough, Castletown, Lyons at Celbridge, Rockingham, Strokestown. To accompany and reflect their facades, columns, terraces, and towers, their creators had made beautiful landscapes, so that the eye found beauty everywhere. Terence Burke had chosen the gardens of Versailles as his models, and Charles O'Brien had now fallen for it all as surely and heavily as for its possible chatelaine.

  2

  After I visited Tipperary Castle, the clamor in my head grew louder; and the often burdensome affliction of love weighed heavier. I thought of Miss Burke every moment; I envisaged a life together, of goodness, peace, and kindness to others. To gather my feelings into some order, I set myself to listen to a different clamor, namely the public refrain that I had been most loudly hearing in my life—land and its agitations.

  In 1850, ten years before I was born, my grandfather's close friend Mr. Charles Gavan Duffy, for whom I am named, founded the Irish Tenant League. I never met Mr. Duffy, because, to my grandfather's sadness, he migrated to Australia when I was very young, but I am told that he was a great lawyer and an impatient politician.

  He founded the Tenant League because over ninety percent of all Ireland's land was then in English hands. And since tenants were neither prosperous nor secure, Mr. Duffy set out aims that he called the Three F's: Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale. He hoped that this effort would give an Irish tenant farmer the minimum protection of a lease— at that time, anybody could be summarily evicted.

  Likewise, as I have noted, rents could be—and were—raised on the landlord's whim. And
if by chance an Irishman owned his land, Mr. Duffy's movement sought to allow him to sell it on the open market and not succumb to a forced sale at a price stipulated by his nearest landlord.

  The O'Briens, although we lived outside such matters, have always been a very hospitable and convivial family, and thus we heard everything. All political news, rumors, family scandals, allegations, all births, legitimate or merry, all betrothals, marriages, murders, and deaths—all reached our paneled rooms. We heard the laughter of the people and, my parents being what they are, we also dried many tears. So, although from the banks we watched the rivers of blood flow through Ireland, we played no part in the eventual Land War, as it came to be called. Its forerunners of murder and debate merely took their place among the other great topics of discussion that ranged up and down our long shiny dining-table.

  How, therefore, may I characterize this important period, this gripping movement for land reform? Naturally, I remember it chiefly through conversations; for the moment, permit me to try and understand its spirit.

  From my father, as I have said, came the feel for land. But he took it beyond the personal experience; when he first began to teach me the story of my own country, he made land the central character of the drama. Logically, then, I should always have been prepared to interrogate the Irish passion for land.

  We are no more than a tiny North Atlantic island of thirty thousand square miles, and with no mountain high enough to stand near a Himalaya; our tallest peak, in County Kerry, stands a racing length above three thousand feet. Nor does every square yard of our country yield riches; our coasts are rocky and, to the west, harsh upon the Atlantic facade; not until the earth has settled many miles inland do we reach our renowned fertility. Yet, all over, whether in fat or bony fields, the Irish savagery of feeling, of earth hunger, exceeds all human ferocities. It is an emotion, and it comes of long history.

  Here is an account of my visit to a native Irishman who believed that his fields had rightly belonged to him and his family since the dawn of time, and who, as with our family, somehow contrived to continue owning his ancestral farm. My father directed me to him; I had often heard him say of this man, “Ah, he likes his land.” He lived outside a village called Oola in the county Limerick, a man by name of Martin Lenihan.

  Mr. Lenihan farmed not much, but he farmed it well; forty acres of good land, with a little marshland, some woods of hazel and beech trees; and he had water by way of a small river. I was no more than twenty when I visited him, bearing my father's good wishes; he had finished securing a new roof of straw thatch and, as I walked down the hill, his long house gleamed golden in the sun.

  We sat outside, by his front door. He had one son, who played nearby, a sickly child of four or so who gave him concern; the local talk said that his wife must have no more children.

  “May I ask you a strange question?” I said to him.

  “Like a policeman?” he asked, and he laughed.

  “My father often says of you that you love your land.”

  Martin Lenihan leaned back a bit in his chair.

  “Indeed I do. I do indeed.”

  “May I ask you, sir—what does that mean, that you love your land?”

  Martin Lenihan said nothing for a moment, and then he began to speak in his slow, comfortable way (whipping up a deal of spittle as he did so). Mr. Lenihan spoke so slowly that it was a pleasure to record his words—but in any case I had by then learned a version of Mr. Pitman's shorthand.

  Well. You know. Land is an odd sort of a thing—because it drags you in. I never seen the sea, I seen pictures of it, always moving, restless. It catches men up. Well, land is the same, a kind of sea that will only take you down into it in the end, when they lay you six feet under. But that's not what you're asking me, I'll bet. (Here Martin Lenihan laughed, a kind of gurgle.)

  If you work with land, you get to know it. I know every field I have here, I know how the clay, the earth in that field will feel if I bend down and pick it up in my hand and crumble it. I know where there's a corner of a field that's a bit wet, and I know where there's a crest of a field that has a bit of chalk in it—well, not chalk like school chalk, but a bit more limestone than usual.

  (Martin Lenihan's hands lay quietly on his knees; tufts of jet-black hair made the knuckles look like little pet creatures.)

  And my fields have names, like a dog has, or a horse. There's a field called Jimmy, because my great-great-grandfather Jimmy Lenihan, won it playing cards. There's a field called Cicero—for what reason I don't know. We have a field called Harry Lyons because a man called Harry Lyons was born inside it—his mother was caught out there in a shower of rain and didn't get home in time for the midwife. The field down by where the river comes in is called Soda, because my grandmother baked the best soda-bread she ever made, she said, from wheat grown in that field one summer.

  What else? Oh, I've a field called Jennifer—I named it that myself because I like the sound of the word.

  I'll tell you now when I first noticed land—I noticed it on my hands and knees and I was only about eight years old. We had turnips planted down there in the Road Field—that's a long stretch that runs nearly the width of the farm. It was raining and cold and my job was to thin the young turnip shoots so as to leave the plants to grow fully—they shouldn't be near each other or they'd all grow too small.

  And I began to see how the color of the clay under my hands wasn't one color at all but several colors. Well, I thought, this is like a bit of magic. And I began to think, What else is like this? What else in the world is anything like this? And I couldn't think of anything.

  And to this day I don't know of anything like the earth, especially when you dig into it. (By now Martin Lenihan had begun to sit a little straighter in his chair, and his face had grown a little redder as his subject excited him.)

  So when I went home I sat down to eat my dinner and I said to my father, “Do you like looking at the clay in the fields?”

  My father was the kind of man you could ask any question and he wouldn't think it ridiculous. He stopped chewing and he said to me, “Is that what you're finding—that you like looking at it?” And I said it was. My father chewed on and he didn't say anything more until he had finished chewing.

  Then he said, “I like looking at the clay in my fields. Here's when I like looking at it. When I've turned it open from the grass and seen its fresh bright brownness. When I dig into it and see its lumps and powders break on the blade of my digging. Or I bend down to pull out a root of weed and I get the dirt under my fingers. If I kneel down on one knee to look at it, I might see if it's too wet for a grain crop, or will it take potatoes this year. And I'll pick it up and hold it under my nose and smell something—and I don't know what it is that I'm smelling.

  “Except that it was a smell that was in that same ground when there were kings here ruling the province of Munster and the county of Limerick. And that smell was in that same ground when Saint Patrick walked here. And when Vikings with beards, Danes and such people, came in here looking for what they could rob from us.

  “And the Norman princes who came in here seven hundred years ago—they got that smell, and so did the English that their Virgin Queen sent in, and all the English after. And that's the smell that drives men mad. Especially if you get it and can't have it. The smell of the land. The smell of our own land.”

  That was my father's speech that day and my mother stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor, still holding a bowl, to listen to him say it. The dog stopped barking when he made that speech.

  Martin Lenihan rose from his chair and began to pace his yard; this quiet, undemonstrative man had come almost aglow when talking about his father and his land.

  I asked, “Did you yourself—have you become aware of that smell of the land?”

  Martin Lenihan spoke again.

  My father said that you can only get this smell if you understand land, if you understand all the little roots and stones and worms and other
works that are part of any piece of ground that you open up under your feet. He told me to watch out for the way the clay, the earth, allows little creatures to travel in it as we travel our fields. And then he pointed out to me the greater wonder that lay ahead—that when we planted things in this substance they grew and became large enough to eat and to keep us alive. “No wonder,” said he—“no wonder men go mad for land.” And I recalled how I had seen him kneel down and part the grasses of a field with his bare hands.

  We're not a boastful family. And we don't say a lot. But we held on to our fields. My family has been on this farm since before Saint Patrick, and I'd kill or die before I'd let another have it. If I didn't have the land, what would I have?

  (Here Martin Lenihan described a large fat circle in the air with his finger.)

  Nought. The duck's egg. Zero. That's what I'd have.

  So spoke Mr. Martin Lenihan from Oola in County Limerick. I have known many men like Mr. Lenihan, and in his words he told me the essence of this country's ancient story.

  But the people, the incomers, such as my mother's family, the Goldsmiths, and the Treeces, to whom land had been given as royal reward— what of them? Many had farmed their lands for, by now, several hundred years. Shall we believe in our hearts that Mr. Lenihan possesses the greater rights? Yet the Protestants have lived here for long enough to feel Irish, to belong to the fabric of the country's earth. For how long, for how many generations or centuries, may the Hand of History reach down to control?