Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane
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Название: Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love

Автор: Fergal Keane

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780008189266

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СКАЧАТЬ deepened alienation between Catholic and Protestant.

      2

       The Ground Beneath Their Feet

      Come all ye loyal heroes wherever you may be

      Don’t hire with any master till you know what your work will be

      For you must rise up early from the clear daylight till dawn

      Or else you won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn …

      My shoes they are well worn now, and my socks are getting thin

      And my heart is always trembling for fear they might let in

      My heart is always trembling from the clear daylight till dawn

      I’m afraid I won’t be able to plough the Rocks of Bawn

      Anonymous ballad, nineteenth century

      I

      I walk the land in late October. I am coming down past Ballydonoghue church where my grandmother Hannah was baptised and married, where her father and mother were baptised, married and buried, where her brother Mick hid from the Tans, and where my people still farm and course their greyhounds and cheer Kerry’s Gaelic football team. The wind is in from the Atlantic and growing stronger as the sun sets on Tralee Bay. It is forty years and more since I last walked these lanes. It has been too long. After my parents’ marriage fell apart the trips to Kerry became fewer, and when I did come it was to see my cousins in the town. I keep close to the hedgerow to avoid the gusts. At the end of the hill I turn right towards Lisselton cemetery, which my grandmother would pass on her way to school early in the twentieth century. As the lane curves around towards the graveyard there is a small patch of ground on which lumps of rough-hewn stone are scattered. They are small, each less than the size of a football. There is a sign that reads: ‘Don’t pray for us/ no sins we knew/ But for our parents/ they’ll pray for you.’

      This is the Ceallurach, the burial ground of the unbaptised children of the Famine. In Hannah Purtill’s time there was no sign here to mark the land. They didn’t need one. Everybody knew. My grandmother went to school when there were still living survivors of the disaster. Even then, when people sought every patch of ground to work, the little field was left to become overgrown: outside the burial rites of the church but sacred in its own forbidding, heartbreaking way. Nobody would ever use the land.

      I am not a stranger to mass graves. In other places I have seen those mounds bulging out of the earth, the shreds of clothing and shards of bone, and humanity reduced to mulch. I have always seen them as an end result. They have been reached after the sermons of hatred, relentless droughts or the advent of some vast pestilence. But at Lisselton the graves of the dead feel like a beginning. They point me in the direction I need to be going. If I am to understand why my people picked up guns and became revolutionaries some of the answer lies here in these Atlantic fields. On this October evening I begin to walk back into my history. Before leaving I pray for the dead.

      Remembrance was private, to be kept suppressed in the heart. For with such immense loss, field after field of it across the county, with so many counting the absences, what could they do but face forwards, lean their shoulders into the work of surviving and hold their grief for night-time, after the quenching of lamps.

      Hannah Purtill was born about two miles away from the burial place, in 1901. She was one of four children. The family was small by the standard expectations of the Catholic Church. Perhaps my great-grandfather Edmund Purtill decided he would only rear the number of children his small farm could support.

      He laboured for the bigger farmers and worked his own few rented acres. Edmund was poor but not dirt poor. There was food on the table each day and his children went to school. I believe the Purtills came originally out of County Clare where the land was some of the worst in the country. I can find records of them in Ballydonoghue as far back as the 1830s. Rocky, marshy fields that gave nothing back without turning men and women old before their time, or driving their children to America. The Purtills were survivors. Famine had been part of their rural existence for centuries. Those who could work took to their feet rather than starve. Sometimes families followed. At some point in the nineteenth century the Purtills migrated across the River Shannon to north Kerry. The migrants were sometimes called spailpíns, meaning labourers. There was a poem we studied at school called ‘An Spailpín Fánach’ (The Wandering Labourer) about the plight of migrant workers in rural Ireland. The man declares he will give up his life of drudgery and serve with the army of Napoleon:

      Never again will I go to Cashel,

      Selling and trading my health,

      Nor to the hiring-fair, sitting by the wall,

      A lounger on the roadside,

      You’ll not see a hook in my hand for harvesting,

      A flail or a short spade,

      But the flag of France over my bed,

      And the pike for stabbing.

      The poem was part of our compulsory school Irish course and I regarded it as a chore. In those days I learned it in Irish, and I had yet to learn a love for the language my father spoke fluently. My Purtill ancestors’ world was too distant and I could not then conceive of a kinship with those hard-pressed men and women of the nineteenth century.

      The Purtills owned a couple of cows. The dairy cow had a mortal significance for the small farmer. The Famine had taught them not to depend on a subsistence crop that might fail. My uncle, John B. Keane, said that the ‘the milch cow was goddess … beautiful when she is young … [and] all education, all houses, all food depend on the milk cow, whether we like it or not’.1 The old homestead was still standing when I was a child. By then the Purtills owned some land and a small herd of cattle. I remember whitewash and thatch and the smell of turf burning on the range and a yard spattered with cow dung after the herd had been brought in for milking. I was allowed to milk one of the more docile cows, my grand-uncle Ned urging me on throughout with a cry of ‘Good man boyeen, pull away let you.’

      The old cottage was knocked down decades ago and replaced by a modern bungalow. When I last visited, my elderly cousin Willie was in the yard tending to his greyhounds. He lives there alone. As long as Willie can remember the Purtills raced dogs and hunted. There is a shotgun inside his front door for shooting rabbits and foxes, and, I am sure, to deter any intruder who might try and break in. I would call my СКАЧАТЬ