The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  When Pat and Murtybeg travelled to England and Castle Bromwich, they did not deviate from their direct journey. There were hundreds of harvesters travelling to England, but the flow of shuffling, ragged families was far greater. All they saw of Dublin was what they could see from walking to the lodging house, and afterwards to the docks. They travelled steerage on the slow cattleboat to Liverpool. There were hundreds of harvesters at one end of the boat, and the Kilduff men joined them, distancing themselves from the huddled mass of hungry families at the other end.

  ‘They might have fever,’ Eddie Roughneen said.

  Pat was seasick all the way, and stinking by the time they arrived. In Liverpool, the docks astonished him, but he did not have time to explore them, nor did he have the wish to. Liverpool overwhelmed him, not only in its frenzied activity, but in all its horrifying poverty. He had not expected that in England. That night, they stayed in Buckley’s, and the following morning they took the train to Birmingham. When they arrived, they walked out to the farm in a few hours.

  Pat soon felt at home in Castle Bromwich. For the first few days, he felt homesick, but there were many men from Mayo working on the farm and on all the farms around. There were other Carrigard men close by, and sometimes they would walk over, sharing whiskey, playing pontoon and talking long into the night. No one spoke of hunger.

  The men were proud of their ability to work hard. Pat could use a sickle or scythe from the age of five, and he found the work to be even easier than he had expected. But the hours were long. It rained less in Castle Bromwich than in Carrigard, but even so it was necessary to use every minute of sunshine in case the weather turned wet later. The weekends were ignored, and the men worked morning, afternoon and evening. Every day, they started mowing just after sunrise, while women and children followed behind the scythe men, stooking the corn.

  They were playing cards one night.

  ‘I forgot to tell you, Murteen,’ Mikey Jordan said, ‘there’s a letter there for you. I left it on your bunk.’

  Murtybeg left the room. After twenty minutes, Bernie McDonnell looked up from his cards.

  ‘I wonder where Murteen’s gone.’

  ‘I’ll just go and see,’ Pat said. He went to the bunkroom.

  Murtybeg was sitting on his bunk, still staring at the letter.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he whispered.

  ‘What! Who?’

  ‘Nessy. Nessy’s dead.’

  The weeks following Luke’s departure had been busy ones for Danny. He found three other men to join the gang. None of the other men knew them, but they were from East Mayo, and that was good enough.

  He and Farrelly concluded the negotiations with one of Brassey’s managers, and a few days later the gang left Dover and were back on the rails, headed for the Leeds & Thirsk Railway. At first they stayed in one of the shanty towns along the Leeds & Thirsk, but after a few days tramping around, Danny found a good lodgings in Bramhope at a good rate, and the gang moved in.

  On their fourth day working on the cuttings, the first beggars came. They were two men, father and son, Danny guessed, accompanied by a woman carrying a baby. They wore ragged clothes, and they were all lean and wasted. Farrelly started walking across to them, but Danny was there first. The younger of the two men came up to him.

  ‘Any chance of the start?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Danny said. ‘We have no work for you.’

  The man looked at him, uncomprehending. Danny knew from the accent that they were not from Mayo. He reckoned them from further south – Clare or Kerry perhaps.

  ‘It’s just how hungry we are. We haven’t eaten for three days.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Danny said. ‘Try one of the other gangs.’

  The man stared at him, with a look of absolute hopelessness in his eyes. Then, without a sound, he turned and walked away, the rest following.

  Farrelly came over to Danny. They both watched the family walk into the distance.

  ‘Since when did you not understand Irish?’ Farrelly asked.

  ‘Since I saw them coming,’ Danny replied.

  That night they argued about it all.

  ‘We just can’t take them,’ Danny said. ‘They’re not able to work. We can’t be sharing with the likes of them.’

  ‘But they’d strengthen up,’ Lavan said. ‘A few weeks here, get a bit of beef in their bellies, and…’

  ‘A few weeks,’ Danny said. ‘A few months more like, and the old man, he’ll never work again. He’s too old and too far gone.’

  ‘Aren’t you being terribly hard?’ Farrelly asked.

  ‘No I’m not, Martin. Take on one of those fellows, and you’ll have a hundred asking tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, at least it wasn’t one of our own,’ Lavan said. ‘Wherever they were from, it was nowhere near Kilduff.’

  Danny thought about that in his bunk that night. Not one of our own? Not yet. But there would come a time when men at home would hear how much Farrelly’s gang was earning and where they were working. Hundreds of starving people flooding in from Kilduff, Carrigard and the Mountain. He knew he could resist the pressure, but could the other men refuse men they knew? A second gang might ease the pressure. It was then that he had written to Luke, though already he had known that Luke would not return.

  Over the next few weeks they turned away many Irish beggars, but it was always in Danny’s mind. Slowly he began to appreciate that the problem might be no problem at all; in fact, it could be an enormous opportunity. It was just he had never thought of it that way. But then a letter arrived from Carrigard.

  He opened it, glanced through it, and crumpled it. Nessa was dead.

  ‘I know,’ Farrelly said. ‘It’s in my mother’s letter. Bad news travels fast.’

  For the next few days, Danny said little to anyone. He was surprised at his own reaction. He never thought of himself as a man who might cry, but many times he came close to it. Even though he and Nessa were so different, they had been very close when they were children. She, along with much of Mayo, had become less and less important over the years, but her death brought it all back to him in a savage way. For days he brooded over it, unable to accept that Nessa was dead.

  Then another thought began to settle in his mind. Nessa had not just died, she had been murdered. Murdered by the man who had caused the baby that killed her. She must be avenged.

  He wrote two letters. The first was to Carrigard expressing his grief to all the family. It was a difficult letter for him; he felt he did not have the language to express such emotions. The second letter was much simpler. It was to Murtybeg in Castle Bromwich.

  Within four days, Murtybeg’s reply arrived. Jimmy Corrigan was the man he wanted, but he had left Kilduff and could not be found. Danny swore that he would find him, and that Jimmy would pay the price.

  The work went on regardless, and Danny’s mind returned to other matters. During the week it was nothing but hard physical labour – smashing rock with sledgehammers; shovelling broken rock and shale onto rail wagons; dragging horses and wagons along the rails to the tipping points for the embankments. But now he knew that he was going to go further in life than that. Much further.

  On the weekends, he spent hours calculating amounts to be bid and amounts due on the contracts. Left to himself, the contracts and calculations were stretching Danny’s mind, and he was developing his own ideas further. Everyone assumed that any money that a man did not spend during the month would be sent back to Mayo. But there was no reason why this should be so, and while Danny supported his father’s family in Carrigard, he was also saving. This was something he had never mentioned to anyone, not even to Luke or to Farrelly. He had opened an account in his own name in a bank in Leeds. His account now held over sixty pounds in sterling. He was determined about starting his own business. And now he was beginning to see how.

/>   From all his experience with accounts and negotiation, he knew the going rates for each cubic yard or ton of ‘muck’ shifted, and how it varied depending on whether it was mud, clay, shale or rock. He knew that the main contractors added a percentage on top of this, and he could easily calculate their profits. But on looking through the figures, an anomaly struck him. The men in Farrelly’s gang were highly paid. Even though they worked very long hours, four and five shillings a day represented something approaching the highest wages in England.

  He knew that good workmen on building sites in Ireland would make a third or a quarter of that amount, even in good times. The hours might have been less, but the difference was still substantial. At Irish wages, muck-shifting could be very profitable for a contractor in England.

  The famine in Ireland only made it better. Men fleeing hunger would work for very little. He wondered just how low wages could be driven. In the far west, all along the coastlines of Mayo and Galway, there was no money economy at all. Even the rent was paid in labour days or in kind, almost never in cash. Men who rarely saw money, men who were starving, would work for almost nothing. They might not work hard, but they could be paid very little.

  Whenever haggard men approached them looking for ‘the start’ he was tempted to offer them a pittance to see what they would accept. But in the end it was not necessary.

  He was working alongside Farrelly. When they paused for the mid-morning break, he noticed a gang of men two hundred yards down the cutting. ‘They won’t get much on piece rate,’ he commented to Farrelly. ‘They’re working half what we are.’

  Farrelly looked down to the cutting. ‘They must be only starting.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll work much faster,’ Danny said. ‘They look pretty miserable from here.’

  ‘You’ve sharp eyesight,’ Farrelly said.

  Danny stood up and walked down the cutting, dodging between piles of rock and stone. As he came to the gang, a man came across and stopped Danny. He was by no means thin.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Danny recognised the Mayo accent. That was a lucky chance.

  ‘I just thought I’d come and say hello to ye all. You’re new, aren’t you.’

  ‘We might be,’ the man replied.

  And you’re sure as hell not, Danny thought. Too well fed for that. But there was no point in being aggressive if he was looking for information.

  ‘I was just a bit surprised,’ he said. ‘A man like you, letting them work that slow.’

  ‘They’re only starting. That’s why.’

  ‘Starting or not, you can’t make any money out of that.’

  ‘And that’s where you’re wrong,’ the other man said. ‘There’s more profit in these fellows than any gang on this railway.’

  Danny decided to challenge him; using the other’s own boastfulness against him; baiting him.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he said.

  ‘Not at tenpence a day, it’s not,’ the man answered.

  ‘Tenpence a day? No man would work for that.’

  ‘They’ll work for what they’re given. We pay them, we feed them, and we shelter them. What more can they expect, and they not even able to speak the Queen’s English?’

  Danny walked back. An Irish speaking gang, with no knowledge of English. He wondered where they had come from. The contractor was from Mayo, but that might not mean anything.

  As he worked through the afternoon, he watched the other gang. When he saw them leaving, he stopped working. ‘I just want to finish some of the paperwork tonight,’ he said to Farrelly. ‘I’ll see you in a few hours.’

  He followed the other gang as they walked back to their lodgings, staying well back so as not to arouse the suspicion of the gangmaster. As he had expected, they walked towards the straggling line of shacks along the railway line. The gangmaster continued towards the village, and Danny walked faster to catch up with the gang.

  The shacks were built from discarded sleepers and crates. He could smell the stink of the open sewers behind them, running off from the embankment. In front, children playing alongside pigs and dogs. Ragged women stood at the doors, or sat outside, watching them.

  He listened to the accents around him. It was from the West of Ireland, he was sure of that. It might even have been Mayo, but it was different to what his mother had spoken to him as a child. Still there were enough similarities. He walked up to a group of them standing outside, smoking.

  ‘Mayo, are ye,’ he asked in Irish.

  ‘What of it if we are?’ one answered. His voice was dull and broken.

  ‘I just thought ye might be, that’s all.

  ‘Are you Mayo yourself,’ one of the other men asked him.

  ‘I am,’ Danny said.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so,’ another asked him. ‘If you’re Mayo, you’re welcome here.’

  They brought him inside the shack. Two women were cooking inside, one frying kidneys and livers over an open fire in the centre of the shack, the other boiling a pot of chicken necks over another fire below an opening in the low roof. Danny sat with the men, gnawing on a neck. When he had finished, he threw it into a dark corner as the others had done. He could hear rustling and squeaking in the dark. Rats. The pot was passed around again, but this time he refused.

  He learned a lot. The men were from the far west of Mayo, down the narrow peninsula of Erris. They had eaten little for weeks. They told a horrifying story of a desperate walk to Westport, abandoning men who dropped along the way. Most had left their families behind, hoping to earn enough in England to send money back for food. What few sheep and cattle they had, they brought to Westport for sale – mutton and beef on the hoof that was needed for their own starving families. There had been no choice, they needed money to get to England, and the only way to get it was by selling their animals. Dublin was too far to walk from Erris, so they had travelled from Westport in a cattleboat to Liverpool where their gangmaster had met them straight off the boat. He had seemed friendly enough at first. He had given them the first full meal they had had in a year and cash in advance to send back to their families. Now they were earning tenpence a day, and half of that was deducted to pay off what they owed to the gangmaster. They were trapped in a system they did not understand, trying to make sense of it in a language they did not understand either.

  Danny walked back to his lodgings, thinking it all through. Tenpence a day? That would not last, but as long as it did, the gangmaster was making good money out of them. He had already assessed their rate of work and was doing rapid calculations in his head again. Even with food and lodgings, the results were far better than he had suspected.

  Chapter Six

  Mayo Constitution, May 1846:

  We again reiterate our former statement. There is no ‘famine’ in this part of the country.

  Luke found a powerful contrast in his meetings with Kitty. He was always saving himself for Saturday morning and the sheer ecstatic release. He found himself more irritable by Wednesday or Thursday from frustration. Then Saturday, and the build-up to the climax of their lovemaking. Afterwards the return of grim reality. Mayo was hungry, and Nessa was dead.

  He could see by how lean Kitty was that she had not been eating much over the previous months as the supplies of potatoes ran down. He was relieved though that Fergus was in England now, and sending money home. At least she had food to eat. Little but hard corn perhaps, but they were all eating that.

  Nessa was more disturbing though. She was always in their thoughts, Kitty’s most of all. It was more than sorrow. It was guilt too.

  ‘I was too wild,’ she told him one day.

  ‘Wild?’ he asked. ‘How do you mean wild?’

  ‘Sure, weren’t we all wild. Me, Nessy, Fergus and Jimmy. We thought we knew it all, we did. Laughing and joking all the time, never a bit of respect for anyone. Why should we? All last summer,
it seemed wonderful, the long days up the bog, doing whatever we wanted. And you can imagine what that was, can’t you? And the dancing too, all over the parish, wherever there was anything on. He was a great dancer, Fergus was, and Jimmy wasn’t bad either. And then going home, hugging and kissing and carrying on, Father Flynn chasing us, though he’d never catch us and never got close enough to see who we were. It was great fun, but we never stopped to think, Nessy nor me. If they were wild then, Fergus and Jimmy, they’d be wild forever. Fergus did the right thing, or so I thought. I reckoned marriage would settle him, it’s what all women think. Once they get their man, then they try to make him into a different man. But it never works out that way, that’s what I didn’t know. And Jimmy, he didn’t even hang around, he couldn’t face it like a man. Strange, isn’t it. Fergus didn’t have to marry me, there wasn’t a little baby to force him to it. But Jimmy, the one who should’ve done it, he was the one who disappeared, off to Liverpool and God knows where, as fast as his legs could carry him. Nessy and me, we thought we were so smart. But we were the fools, that’s all we were, and we never even knew it.’

  He thought about that. He had had women on the railways, but they weren’t real women like Kitty and Nessy. He couldn’t remember the names of half of them. He was lucky then too. Farrelly had warned him often enough about angry fathers, angry brothers and even worse, diseases that would kill a man. But he had missed all of that.

  ‘But why did you marry him?’ he asked at last. ‘No-one forced you.’

  ‘Maybe because I loved him. Did you ever think of that?’

  ‘And now?’

  Abruptly she pulled him off his elbows, and they started all over again.