The Hunger

by David Rees

  Inertia, that lack of will to eat, to do anything, is a late stage in the starvation syndrome. At the onset, the body eats its own carbohydrates and fat; in the middle period it digests its own protein, the liver swells and the pain is at its worst; then people run about searching for food, screaming with the torment of hunger. To starve to death is a slow process. It is like being on the rack, every raw nerve tingling with agony, and it goes on for weeks, even months if there is water to stave off thirst, and the odd nut or edible leaf to swallow. That is the pain of starvation.

  In 1846 and 1847, the conscience of the British public was troubled; immense sums of money and whole mountains of clothing were gathered and sent to Ireland. It proved ― as Father Quinlan had forecast ― to be a drop in an ocean.

  To add to the problem, the winter of 1846―1847 was, all over Europe, one of the worst of the century. In London, just before Christmas, ice-floes appeared on the Thames. In Ireland, snow began to fall in November and continued to fall, nearly every day, till the following March. Freezing east winds blew, and there was continual frost, hail and sleet. Drifts of snow blocked highways, and traffic was at a standstill. The man who cultivated potatoes would, if such weather occurred in normal times, have stayed indoors by his peat fire, but now he had to go out, ragged and starving, to report at the road-building site — even if the weather prevented him from working — or he would not get paid. Many, weakened by hunger, died from exposure to the arctic temperatures.

  Michael and Anthony huddled over their fire, or sometimes when blizzards went on for hours they stayed in bed, clinging to each other for warmth. Whole days passed when they did not go outside and nobody came to the house. Michael, looking at the bleak, white landscape, the dead larch trees, the black etchings of hedgerow twigs, saw no sign of life anywhere, not even the prints of a bird in the snow. “We are two sailors marooned on a desert island,” he said. It was the same for the Peacocks, the Kelihers, the Lenehans, the Widow O’Gorman; everyone.

  “I fear for the seed you planted,” Anthony said. He had brought back from Dublin a quantity of vegetable seed — carrots, turnips, cabbage, onions, kail, lettuce, radish, and so on. Michael had dug over the kitchen garden and sown what was suitable for winter cultivation.

  “It will be safe,” he said. “The white blanket keeps it warm.”

  No work could be done on Clasheen’s contribution to the new, macadamised Galway-Clifden road. Six-foot snowdrifts covered the site of operations, which, as it happened, had just reached the gates of Eagle Lodge. All very well for the Altarnun, people said. A rumour had gone around that the Government would once again order the public works to stop. Himself had a fine new road to drive on from Eagle Lodge to Clasheen, but no others would benefit.

  On New Year’s Day 1847 a man called at the house with a letter from Michael’s parents. “Come and see us,” Eugene Tangney wrote. “We must have your help. We have nothing to eat.”

  MICHAEL struggled through the snow to Clasheen. At least I have boots, he said to himself; how do the poor wretches who have no shoes fare in this weather? But the snow was so deep in places that it came half-way up his thighs, and when he reached his father’s house his legs were dripping wet. He dried out in the forge; he had not expected to find the fire lit and his father working. “Not horseshoes,” Mr Tangney said. “I am beginning to think the horses are all eaten.”

  “Dr Lenehan has his mare,” Michael answered. “I saw him on my way now, riding to Coolcaslig.”

  “This work is for the doctor. He once told me he fancied a wrought iron gate for his front garden. Well, I have nothing better to do.”

  “I doubt he could pay for such a thing.”

  Eugene sighed. “Go indoors and talk to your mother,” he said. Michael went, bare-legged; his trousers and boots he left steaming by the fire.

  Madge was in the parlour, alone. “Now there is a pair of legs,” she said, laughing, “that would delight any girl who clapped eyes on them!”

  “No girl has ever clapped eyes on them,” Michael answered, “except my inquisitive sisters.” He surveyed himself. “You think they look good? Not too skinny?”

  “It is a crying shame no girl has yet had the pleasure! You are wasting the seed of the Tangneys by keeping yourself unwed.” Michael thought of Onan who spilled his seed on the ground, which displeased the Lord: wherefore the Lord slew him. But God has slain no one else for doing that, he said to himself. “Why this desire that everyone should marry? Is it the be-all and end-all of life to procreate? I don’t want a herd of squawling babies. What future can there be in it? They would only starve to death.”

  “Brother, I have such news for you.” Madge’s eyes shone with excitement, but she heard her mother approaching. “I will tell you later,” she said, and composed herself.

  Mrs Tangney was thinner, her face more lined. “There is nothing left to eat!” she said, dramatically.

  “Nobody in this house seems hungry,” Michael replied. His mother looked pained. “But it’s true,” he added.

  “You know how your father is.” She could not stop fidgeting with her fingers, pulling her wedding ring up and down. She sat at the table, then burst into tears. “I don’t know what will become of us!” she sobbed. “God must help!”

  “Mother ― ”

  “We are not hungry today,” Madge said, quietly. “Nor shall we be tomorrow. We have a sack of meal, a chicken, and a few vegetables. We can still get milk, and there is tea in the caddy. But that is all. We have no money to buy anything else.”

  “It’s your father’s doing,” Mrs Tangney said, drying her eyes. “Every day for months I am telling him we should not eat so much. With care, with real care, we could have disciplined ourselves and lived through till summer. He is an enormous man, you know that; a hill of flesh. He needs more food than others, and he could not get himself to cut down. He took a little of this and a little of that, and now it is nearly all gone. He has had no work. No money is coming into the house, and the better part of our savings spent in the hunger last year. The rest is spent now. We have nothing. Nothing!”

  “We have been most improvident,” Madge said.

  “Father is on the Relief Committee,” said Michael. “Why does he not ask the other members for help?”

  “The shame of it!” Mrs Tangney answered. “To go to Mr Peacock or Dr Lenehan for assistance! As if we were evicted squatters in some scalpeen, who at best only knew a one-roomed mud cabin!”

  “Mother, you have to ask yourself which is more important: your snobbery or your survival.” He felt very impatient.

  “You promised you would not see us starve,” she said, bitterly.

  “And I will remember my promise!” he said, raising his voice. “But you will help yourselves first! You have luxuries here you do not need. Rings, jewellery, the pictures on these walls, your best clothes. There are people who will take them in Galway for money or food.”

  “A son of mine suggests I should bargain with the gombeen man! It is … I could not have heard you correctly. And you in the comfort of Eagle Lodge!”

  “There is little comfort at Eagle Lodge; I can assure you of that. We get by, is all. There are no rents coming in; the roof is leaking and no money to repair it. Anthony ― Mr Altarnun — talks of selling the furniture we do not use; he is not too proud to go to the gombeen man! He has already pawned some rings his mother left him in her will. Sold two of his horses. Mrs Keliher and the baby have been sick; the medicines were expensive. He paid for them, and, if Dr Lenehan gets no money, how can he continue his practice? We would all die of fever before we go hungry.”

  “He would help some unwashed peasant woman but not the family of his slave-of-all-work! He is a strange man. Strange indeed!”

  “Mother, you disgust me,” Michael said.

  “We are in the hands of the Lord now.” She looked down at her own hands, rubbing again at her wedding ring. She wriggled it off her finger, then gave it to Michael. “See how much you can
get for that,” she said. “I cannot go myself. Will you do it for me?”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Before you leave, I will give you … There are dresses I do not wear, a cameo brooch, some silver.” She glanced up at him. “I don’t want you to feel disgust for your mother.”

  “I do not. I shouldn’t have said so. I’m sorry.”

  Mr Tangney came in with Michael’s clothes, now dry. He put them down on a chair. “Well?” he asked. The three of them looked at him in silence. “I see,” he muttered, then turned and limped out of the room. He is a broken man, Michael said to himself, and felt moved; he wanted to run after his father and kiss him, but the blacksmith would have been even more demoralized by a gesture so unmanly.

  “I remember a story of my childhood,” Margaret said. “An old woman nearing death is visited every night by a ghostly horse and his rider. The neighbours are out of their wits with fear, so they send for the priest, who comes and keeps watch. At midnight the phantom arrives. ‘Who are you?’ the priest demands. ‘Beelzebub,’ the horseman says. ‘This old woman received Holy Communion in a state of mortal sin. I have come for her soul.’ The priest tells the old woman to spit up the sacred host, and when he takes it from her mouth he says ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. Her soul is pure now.’ Then there is a deafening roll of thunder, and the phantom vanishes with a terrible shriek.”

  She turned to Michael and Madge. Madge was wondering what moral she would derive from this absurd story; Michael was putting his trousers on. “It is said,” Mrs Tangney continued, “that whosoever receives the body and blood of Christ unworthily is guilty of the body and blood of Christ. I would not want that. Tomorrow is Sunday, and I shall take Communion, may it please God, though first I must ask Father Quinlan to hear my confession. I am guilty of many sins ― pride, setting myself above others, lack of charity to the poor. Michael, will you come with me to the altar and take Communion too?”

  He stared out of the window to avoid her gaze. “I cannot do that,” he said.

  “Ah … why not?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “What do you do at that house that is so wicked you will not go to the altar rails once in four years?”

  “Mother…”

  “Yes?”

  “Whether I go to Mass at all is no one’s business but my own.”

  “I hope you are not thinking to stay away from Mass! It is a mortal sin!”

  He was, as it happened, considering it. The books Anthony lent him, particularly the Blake, made him seriously doubt, for the first time, that God existed. And the destruction of the potato was not God’s handiwork, he was sure; here he was in agreement with Mr Peacock, though the famine did not raise any questions about the Deity in the minister’s mind. Michael’s thinking was that if there was a God He would not allow so much suffering.

  From Blake he learned ideas quite heretical to Catholic doctrine; that man has no body distinct from his soul, that he who desires but acts not breeds pestilence, that brothels are built with the bricks of religion. ‘Know that in a former time Love! Sweet Love! was thought a crime’ was a statement that found an echo in his own experience; abstinence sowing sand all over the ruddy limbs and flaming hair, but desire gratified planting fruits of life and beauty there, was the authority he was searching for. However, if he came to believe that religion was nothing more than superstitious mumbo-jumbo, was ‘convinced that every

  chimney-sweeper’s cry was created by the blackening Church, it would be difficult to apostatize in Clasheen. It would cause too much comment.

  Mrs Tangney went upstairs to find the possessions she wanted Michael to sell. Madge, alone with him, could now say what she did not wish her mother to hear. “I shall be able to help them,” she said. “Soon there will be one less to feed.”

  He frowned. “What have you in mind?”

  “Dan and I are to marry. Next week.”

  The news astonished him. “Are you quite off your head? Now, of all times? How will you live?”

  “The Leahys are tenants at Eagle Lodge. So we won’t go hungry.”

  “You are thinking of moving into their cabin? It has one room and seven people in it, not to mention a pig. It is hardly the way to begin married life. Are you wanting to make love in front of the whole family?”

  “The pig has been killed and eaten. And… we won’t be living with them.”

  “There are no empty cabins, and Mr Altarnun’s brother would surely not let another be built.”

  “The Leahys are not tenants-at-will; they are forty-shilling freeholders. They can do what they like with that ground. You know that.”

  “Madge, you talked earlier of improvidence! This is ― ”

  “What have we to lose? I may stay here and starve, or be with Dan and we starve together. The choice to take is obvious.” Michael had no reply for that; what she said was true. He remembered his own words to Anthony: “then we’ll go hungry together.” Why shouldn’t Madge also do as she wanted?

  She was being no more improvident than thousands of Irish girls of her time. To marry late or not at all is a curse of modern Ireland, a bequest of the Famine years; but until the 1840s people frequently got married at the age of sixteen or seventeen. The main reason why people married so young was the appallingly low standards of Irish life. As Madge said, they had nothing to lose. They did not need money: to erect a cabin required only willingness and muscles. A few yards of earth for growing potatoes could be subleased from one or other of the families; a spade, a cooking pot, a chair, even ― what luxury! ― a bed could be scrounged somehow.

  “Which day next week?” Michael asked.

  “Thursday. At Kilgarrin; Father Coakley, the curate there, will perform the ceremony. It could not be in Clasheen ― Father Quinlan would insist that my parents be told. I shall tell them when … no, I will write them a letter.”

  “And I shall come with you to give you to Dan and to sign as a witness.”

  “Thank you.” She stood up, put her arms round Michael, and kissed him. “I love him to distraction, but… I admit… I’m more worried than I appear. It is a step down in the world.”

  “I know something about love, too.”

  “Who is she, Michael? Some flinty creature who has broken your heart: that is the explanation!”

  “Of what?”

  “Why you never have eyes for a girl!”

  “I kissed that red-haired colleen when I took you out dancing.”

  “Is it her? The O’Donovan twins never knew a good man when they saw one!”

  “It isn’t her.” He laughed, then he said, still holding her close, “Perhaps I will tell you one day. When we have lived to see better times. One evening, round the fire, when Dan is not there; just you and me.”

  “Why shouldn’t my husband be there? Has this … something to do with why you will not go to Communion?”

  He smiled, then placed a finger on her lips. “No more questions,” he said. He pulled her arms from his. shoulders, then walked across to the window. It was beginning to snow again. “What will Dan wear for the wedding?” he asked.

  “I am not marrying him for his clothes!”

  “Hmmm. I will ask Mr Altarnun to look out a suit, a shirt and a neck-tie. And shoes. They are the same height, the same build. Would it worry you if Mr Altarnun knows?”

  “He will not tell my father?”

  “Not if I say he should not.”

  “Thank you. Again. Michael, I love you.”

  “I’m envious,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He did not have to answer that, for his mother came back into the room. “I’ve filled a box with clothes,” she said, “and trinkets and … it’s heavy. How will you manage and it snowing again? Perhaps you should stay here tonight.”

  “Himself would worry.”

  “Ah, he will surely know where you are!”

  “Mother, a full glass of whiskey to warm me up, and I’ll get there
as right as rain.”

  “There is no whiskey.”

  “Oh… yes.” He felt embarrassed; he had forgotten for a moment that nearly all the provisions in the house had gone. “I suppose there is still a dreg or two in Flanagan’s Bar. A potato shortage doesn’t put every poteen-maker out of business.” He picked up the box, and said “You see I am strong,” then stepped out into the blizzard. It was late in the afternoon and the light was beginning to fade. The sky was ash-coloured, thick, as if it had vast quantities of snow still to let fall, and the wind was rising.

  “God keep you and don’t stay too long over there,” Mrs Tangney said. “We will not want to see a petrified corpse on the Clifden road tomorrow.”

  “It is Eagle Lodge I am going to,” he answered. “Not the South Pole.”

  They watched him walk up the street; before he reached the bar he was white with snow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  _______________________________

  T HE few miles took him hours: it was dark; the driving snow was blowing down his neck, under his hat, and into his trousers which were soon as wet as when he had arrived at the forge. The box, though not heavy, was a cumbersome nuisance. He was only half-way to Eagle Lodge when he began to think he might not get there, that perhaps his mother’s joke about a petrified corpse would turn out to be true. His strength was beginning to fail, and he felt light-headed: his body temperature was falling rapidly. His confident stride became a stagger, and he wasn’t even sure if he was going in the right direction; was he walking round and round in circles?

  Somebody else was staggering along beside him, he thought, a man of grey shadows. But there was no one there. I am going to die, he told himself, quite calmly and without any sense of panic at all; how is it a man can be taken so easily? It is strange.

  Eventually he sat down in the snow. The man of grey shadows seemed to be sitting next to him. “It is like this at the South Pole,” Michael said. “We are at the South Pole.”