The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  The Killing Snows

  Epigraph

  “Good God, what a frightful thing this is, happening to such a people, to such a country, all Christendom looking on.”

  The Telegraph or Connaught Ranger

  County Mayo, August 1846

  Dedication

  For Carmel, without whose encouragement and hard work

  this book would not have been written

  Preface

  This book is fiction. The story that inspired it was not.

  In 1990, I came into possession of two documents which were fascinating, and in their own way, quite savage.

  My father had been brought up on a small farm in County Mayo in the West of Ireland. Following the death of one of his brothers, he gave us a box of documents which, by their dates, had been stored for over a hundred years. They included a lease, a number of letters and two payrolls from the 1840s.

  It was with a sense of shock that I realised what they really were. These were the documentary evidence of the Great Irish Famine in East Mayo. They were also the confirmation of the stories I had learnt as a child as to how my family survived the Famine.

  The two payrolls were the most horrific. They detailed the wages for gangs of men, women and children working on two roads in east Mayo in the winter of 1846. The desperately low rates of pay proved that this was Famine Relief. Local research filled in more of the story, a brutal one of hunger, fever and death.

  The Irish Famine had started with the partial failure of the potato crop in the autumn of 1845. In 1846 the potato failed again, and this time the failure was nearly total. The Workhouses could not cope, and so the enormous Famine Relief schemes were started, and kept running through the coldest and worst winter of the past 300 years. Hundreds of thousands of starving people were employed on roadworks, building and repairing roads all across Ireland.

  Hunger killed thousands of them. The murderous blizzard of December 1846 killed many thousands more, and brought the Works to a halt all across the country. But they opened again in January 1847, and the arctic cold went on. By the time the soup kitchens took over in March the Works were employing three quarters of a million survivors, mostly in the West of Ireland, all trying desperately to feed their families on pitifully low wages. Then, as the winter receded, a vicious fever epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of people right across Ireland. 1846 was shocking, but Black ’47 would never be forgotten.

  But the research also confirmed an old family tradition which I had never believed. This was the story of utterly impossible love set against the terror of the times. So in the end ‘The Killing Snows’ is much more than historical fiction. It is an attempt to understand how such a love could have happened and how the impossible became true.

  Finally, a note about italic use in this book. Where the reader sees dialogue in italics, the character is speaking in Irish. In County Mayo in the 1840s few could speak English, and even those that could often spoke Irish out of preference.

  Charles Egan

  Luke’s Family

  Luke Ryan

  Michael, his father

  Eleanor, his mother

  Pat, his younger brother

  Murty Ryan, Luke’s uncle

  Aileen, Murty’s wife

  Danny, their eldest son

  Nessa, their daughter

  Murtybeg, their youngest son

  Brigid, Nessa’s daughter

  Sabina McKinnon, Luke’s aunt

  Ian McKinnon, Sabina’s husband

  All characters, except for a few historical persons, are fictitious.

  In County Mayo, the county towns of Castlebar, Claremorris, Westport and Ballina are real, but the East Mayo towns of Kilduff, Knockanure and Brockagh are fictitious, as are the settlements and mountains around them.

  Prologue

  In November, the first snows came to County Mayo.

  The wind came from the east and north east, bringing bitter cold and blizzards from Siberia. Some nights it snowed, but the next day the people would still tramp through it, rags wrapped around their feet. Some days too, the snow was blown on a violent gale that brought to mind the Big Wind of 1839. Now he saw the full cruelty of the piecework system. The work rate slowed, the wages dropped.

  Every morning, he rode out to the Relief Works with a feeling of dread. He rode past skeletal figures struggling against the wind, out along to where the roads were being built. They ignored him, it was as if he did not even exist, but he was used to this by now. Whether he wanted it or not, his duty was to supervise the Works, and theirs was to work.

  By the winter of 1846, the Workhouses across Mayo were full, tens of thousands still clamouring for admission. Road-building was the Government’s answer, the last and only chance for hungry people to earn their few pennies for corn. Here in the mountains he was the supervisor, the one who forced them to work or die. They despised him, and he felt he could not blame them. How could it have come to this?

  For stone they collected rocks from the fields around, but this ran out. There were many places where rock showed through the surface. With an eye well used to this, he had small quarries started beside the roads. They were tiny compared to anything he had ever seen in England, but even so, as they deepened, the people fought for the right to work in them. They were the only places where they could work out of reach of the freezing winds.

  But still they came.

  Every evening, as he rode back to his lodgings, he would think of her. When he arrived, she would be with her mother, cooking. Hard gritty corn, cabbage or turnips, rarely meat. He would sit with her father at the table, sometimes talking about the Works, more often silent. Always she would serve the food, leaning across him as he sat, her breast touching his shoulder or her knee touching his leg. For fear of what her father might say, he tried not to look at her, but it was impossible. Whenever their glances met, she smiled at him.

  Already he knew what her father thought. He saw him as a Government man, an outsider. Even though the two men worked together, and worked well, the older man would always treat him with suspicion.

  As the cold intensified on the roads, the people stuffed hay inside the saturated rags around their feet, but their toes and shins were bare; blue and purple and black with cold. Few had jackets, and very few had coats. The women tied their shawls around the children’s bodies as they worked. They brought blankets too and wrapped them around their freezing bodies. Many days it snowed or sleeted without cease, and the heavy wool only absorbed the bitter cold water faster. The children were the first to die, but age no longer mattered now. Every day, there were deaths on the Works.

  Sometimes the wind would shift to the south, the temperature would rise and his spirits with it. But always it shifted back again, and the Siberian cold returned. By December, people spoke of the worst winter in memory; no, more than that, the worst that Mayo had ever seen. Blizzards for days on end, lakes frozen over, drifts higher than a man, men and animals dead from the never-ending cold.

  And the Works went on.

  As the people died, and the numbers dropped, he would accompany the priest around the parish, or ride around on his own, to recruit more workers. Some days he had to fight his way through gales and drifts to pay the dying, or the families of those who had already died. But still he signed up more for the Works. He kept hoping, desperately hoping, for an easing in the weather.

  But the cold continued, the Works went on, and the people died.

  He kept thinking of her, he could not stop. It was more than attraction, much more. The horror of the days was bringing him close to the edge. Sometimes he felt a fear of the mountain
. Many days he could not even look at it. He did not know why this should be, but often he felt himself slipping towards the void, and only the thought of her would bring him back. It was not just that he wanted her; it was that he needed her, more perhaps than he had ever needed anyone. Only the evenings in the house, the warmth of the fire, the warmth of her presence, gave him the strength to wake in the mornings and ride back to the Works.

  He was caught. During the blizzards, all human feeling in him screamed to stop the Works, but if he did the roads would never be built, and he knew what Morton would think of that. Worse, he would not be able to pay them, not even the basic wage. Nothing.

  So the Works went on.

  Every two hours he called a halt. They built fires sheltered from the freezing winds; shivering in the quarries, behind hummocks, behind the walls of abandoned cabins and houses, anywhere they could get in from the cold. This caused fighting, as everyone tried to get closest to the fires, so he began to stagger the breaks, allowing only twenty off work at a time. At first the people carried their own turf slung over their backs in rough-made carriers of blankets and rags, but many families had little enough turf for the freezing winter, and they began to steal it from ricks belonging to families living in cabins near the Works. This caused more fighting, and he tried to have it stopped, but it was impossible.

  He tried to use dead wood from the woods nearby, but this was wet or frozen through. He had rough shelters built beside the fires, trying to dry the wood, and sometimes he succeeded. But no matter what was done, it could not keep the cold away. As he rode down the lines of workers, all he could see were hammers, pickaxes and shovels grasped in rag-wrapped hands, lifting and swinging slowly. Rags on hands! He had never seen that on the railways. There were many things here that he had never seen. Driving sleet and snow for weeks at a time. Bitter winds screaming down from the mountains.

  Dead men. Dead women and children.

  But still they came.

  When he was not thinking of her, he was thinking of a time before the blight and hunger. Carrigard – a different world then. Only twenty miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand. The farm and the house, his father and brother planting and reaping, his mother baking brown bread and cooking potatoes. Family and friends.

  And the love of another woman then.

  Was that so important now? He no longer knew.

  He thought too of the years he had worked on the English railways – another world again. The gang, the comradeship, everyone talking and laughing long into the night. It was hard work building railways, but he had been earning more money then than he could ever have earned in Mayo. Far more.

  But he had left it all, and for what? For this? No, not this.

  He had returned from England to farm again in Mayo. Even then there had been hunger, but not like this. When he had returned, he could not have known that this would happen, no-one could.

  But it had happened, and he knew that he would never again be certain of anything, not even of life itself.

  Chapter One

  He had come home in April, because his father had ordered him home.

  Luke’s father, Michael Ryan, was perhaps the toughest man that Luke had ever known. Michael had expected total obedience from him, not only through the years of his childhood, but also through all the years he had spent working in England.

  Michael was a tenant farmer – a smallholder – in Carrigard, a small estate of twenty farms outside the village of Kilduff in the east of County Mayo. The estate was owned by the Burke family, who were based in County Galway. Michael’s lease was tiny – eight Irish acres, or fourteen acres in English statute measure. But it was the largest farm in Carrigard, and Michael was a man to respect, accustomed to responsibility from a young age.

  Michael had been only fifteen when he took over the running of the farm, after his own father had been imprisoned. Luke was curious about this, but he could get no information on it. He knew that it related to the Rebellion of 1798, but he had no idea how. He never dared to ask Michael about it, and anyone else he asked refused to talk of ’98.

  Whatever the cause, Luke’s grandfather had spent ten years in Claremorris Gaol. He spent all those years breaking stones, and in the end the stones broke him. When the old man was released in 1808, he was no longer a man to respect. He had a son well used to authority, running the farm alone and commanding the respect of everyone in the family, including his own mother. But Michael had to yield authority to the older man, and bitterness ensued. Michael knew how to farm, but reckoned his father knew nothing.

  It was then that Michael had conceived the idea of the quarry. He wrote to the landlord in Galway suggesting that they bid on a maintenance contract for the roads around Carrigard. The contract had been for five pounds a year, and was in the name of the landlord and nominally in the name of Michael’s father. The quarry was located on the edge of the farm. It had given Michael the chance of running the farm on his own again, and it gave his father – Luke’s grandfather – the chance to do the only thing he knew how.

  Breaking stones.

  For fourteen years Michael waited. But the old man hung on and did not die until the fever epidemic which came with the famine of 1822. Michael’s mother was already ill and died a few weeks later. The next year, when he had paid off the back-rent, he travelled to County Galway to meet the landlord and his agent. He negotiated a twenty-one year lease, which was rare in Mayo. Now the law was on his side. If the rent was paid, he could not be evicted. As soon as he returned to Carrigard, he started to build a solid stone house beside the mud cabin that the family and cattle had lived in for generations. He left the old cabin to the cattle and, in a year of brutally hard labour, he worked the farm, quarried rock, broke stones, repaired roads, and built his house. He was forty years old and a free man at last.

  In 1824, he married Eleanor O’Kelly, his younger brother’s sister-in-law. Of their children that lived beyond a year, Luke was born in 1825, Pat in 1828 and Alicia in 1836.

  By 1846, Luke was working as a navvy building railways in England, Pat was helping his father to work the farm and quarry in Mayo, and Alicia was dead.

  Luke was at breakfast in his lodgings in Dover when Michael’s letter arrived. He glanced through it, before reading it again more slowly. Then he folded it and stuffed it into his pocket.

  ‘What does he have to say?’ Danny asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Luke said. He stood up to leave the table.

  ‘You’ve left half your breakfast,’ Danny said.

  ‘You can have it.’

  When the men were finished eating, they walked out along the railway to the cutting. It was raining. Luke and Danny joined the other men, hacking away the sides with their picks, while the others shovelled the clay and shale towards the wagons.

  Danny was Luke’s cousin. He had been working on the railways in England since the age of twelve and had developed a quick witted toughness since then. Unlike most of the gang he, like Luke, could read and write, and he could calculate faster than almost anyone.

  After two hours, Matt McGlinn brought their tea bucket to the shack. When he came back, Luke and Danny scooped up mugs of tea and stood by one of the wagons. The rain had stopped.

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell us?’ Danny asked.

  ‘I told you,’ Luke said, ‘it’s nothing.’

  ‘I thought someone was dead, from the way it took you.’

  ‘No-one’s dead.’

  Owen Corrigan was leaning on his shovel, staring at the ground. ‘It’s the hunger, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ Luke said.

  ‘Of course it is,’ McGlinn said. ‘It’s in every letter we’re getting from Ireland, nothing but hunger and more hunger and send us more money. You’d never know how bad it is, they make it worse in the telling.’

  Luke said nothing more. They fi
nished their tea and went back to work. Corrigan’s question had surprised him. Michael’s letter had not even mentioned hunger, and that was odd. McGlinn was right. Everyone else wrote telling of hunger in Mayo, but Michael never did.

  It was getting dark when Farrelly called a halt, and they walked back along the track towards their lodgings. Luke went upstairs and flung himself on his bunk. He stared again at Michael’s letter.

  For six years he had been with the gang. There were twenty of them, all Mayo men, working under Farrelly as their own elected gang-master. They had built railways all the way up and across England, from the western end of the Great Western Railway snaking towards Exeter, up to the Lancaster & Carlisle approaching the Scottish border and down again to the eastern terminus of the South Eastern at Dover.

  Farrelly ruled absolutely. He was tough, a man to respect and totally honest. He never took a skim from the gang’s earnings but ensured that most of their wages, after board and lodgings, were saved or remitted home to Mayo.

  Luke had every intention of continuing working in England. But then Michael’s letter had arrived. ‘Come now, or come never.’

  He knew his father well enough to know what that meant.

  The door opened, and Danny came in. ‘What in hell’s biting you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. I was just tired.’

  ‘The devil, you were. Luke Ryan tired this early. You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘Why can’t I be tired?’

  ‘Because I’m not letting you. Come on down, and join the rest of us.’

  ‘But I don’t want to.’

  Danny sat on the bunk across from him. ‘Look, don’t let the hunger worry you. All you have to do is work hard and send them money. They’ll be happy enough.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘I am right. You know I’m right. Now come on down.’

  ‘Not now. I’ll come later.’