Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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      Hannah and Bill, my grandparents (Family Collection)

      I revelled in the summer holidays in north Kerry. Legends flickered into life before my eager-to-believe eyes. This world was larger, it was fantastical, and before it my life in the city was reduced to a brittle impermanence. Here a part of my tribe belonged and would always belong. In those days it was not the land-hungry peasantry I saw as my ancestors but, encouraged by my father, a race of warriors and kings and storytellers. My people in Ballydonoghue did not leave behind written accounts of their lives. They passed on stories by word of mouth. They came from a tradition of fabulism. On May eve children were sent to pick up bluebells to place on the hearth to keep away the people of the spirit world who fluttered on the edge of dusk as child-stealers and harbingers of death. It was considered the worst of luck to plough a fairy fort, usually a mound in the middle of a field in which the people of the spirit world lived, waiting their time to reclaim the earth. Fairies controlled the world of the spirits. To cross them was to invite disaster. Foreshadowings of mortality abounded. My grandmother Hannah’s favourite story was about a man who was passing by Lisselton graveyard one night when he heard the sounds of a football match. ‘Will you help out?’ a player asks. ‘We are a man down.’ Like any good Kerryman he joins in and scores several goals. At the end he is approached and told ‘You will be back next week for good’. Within the week the man was dead and buried.

      There were legends that hardened into fact, and hard facts that were softened until they became bearable. I found some local schoolchildren’s essays from the 1930s, when Ballydonoghue was little changed from my grandmother’s time. Cottages were still being lit by lamps, short journeys were made by foot, longer ones by donkey and cart; the social life of the parish revolved around Sunday mass and other religious devotions, weekend football games, and conversations at the gates of the creamery. There were dances, but these were often frowned upon and sometimes banned by the priests. A matchmaker by the name of Dan Paddy Andy O’Sullivan brought lonely farmers and prospective wives together. He also ran a dancehall, and in his youth he fought in the guerrilla war against the English alongside my grandmother and my uncles.

      ‘The name of my home district is Ballydonoghue,’ wrote one of the schoolchildren, eight-year-old Hanna Kelly.2 ‘About fifteen families live there and the population is over a hundred … some of the houses are thatched and some of them are slated. Most of the houses are labourers’ cottages.’ Gaelic was no longer spoken as the people’s tongue. But in everyday speech the translated forms of the old language infused conversation with a lyric intensity. They were heirs to hedge schools and vanished bardic poets and were natural storytellers with a broad extravagant accent that urbane city folk might mock but whose rootedness they quietly envied. The children’s essays noted the departure of young men and women for England and America, and remarked on the handful of Irish speakers who were left in the area. They wrote about the ruins of an old Yeoman’s barracks – a Protestant militia raised during the early 1790s – and about the lost grave of a Dane from Viking times, and of a fort with a pot of gold.

      Wide stretches of bog dominated the ground around Ballydonoghue. Willie Purtill used to joke that he graduated from school to the bog at the age of fourteen. Once or twice I footed turf with my cousins. It was backbreaking work for a city boy, and boring for a child who had inherited the Keanes’ capacity for dreaming and being easily distracted. But it was made bearable by the promise of sweets and minerals later. The bog stretched towards the Atlantic and I remember how, if you missed your footing, the mulch below sucked your boots off as you tried to walk out, and how once, after rain at Easter, the bogholes glittered like a thousand broken mirrors in the watery sunlight. At the end of the summer bog cotton flowered: to me it looked like snow or the windblown feathers of swans fallen to earth. It could be picked to be stuffed into pillows and cushions.

      Over the years there had been attempts to drain part of the bog and create more arable land and pasture. Between 1840 and 1843 the landlord, Sir Pierce Mahony, a liberal Protestant and ally of Catholic Emancipation, obtained more than £600 in drainage grants from the state. But within a year of the last grant the potato Famine had begun: there were more pressing priorities than drainage and the bog endured. The mid-century traveller Lydia Jane Fisher wrote lyrically of the local landscape, where the green and blue flax flower contrasted ‘with the golden oats, the brown meadows, and the dark green of the potato – all uniting to make the grand mosaic of Nature particularly beautiful at this season. The foxglove, the heath, and the bog myrtle refreshed our senses.’3 But a more realistic appreciation was given by James Fraser who saw that ‘the soil is generally poor, and still more poorly cultivated. The houses of the gentry are few and far between, and the huts of the peasantry are miserable.’4 Those who worked the land, like the Purtills, would not have seen any romance. It was the Keanes, their book-loving future in-laws in the town of Listowel, who would be able to rhapsodise to their hearts’ content about the joys of spring fields.

      I recall listening to my father, Eamonn, and a Purtill relative discussing the subject one afternoon in Ballydonoghue. ‘What you have, you hold,’ said my father. ‘Do you hear that boy?’ he said. ‘What you have you hold.’ Land defined the borders of the imagination. To be a man of substance you needed to own the ground underneath you. My father spoke of a relative who was a middleman at cattle fairs but he had no fields of his own. He was famous for his ability to strike bargains between farmers. To show that he was a man of substance he once pinned a five-pound note to his coat. It might seem a comical gesture until you think about the longing that lay behind it. He had no land and never would have. He would always be the dealer in other people’s livestock.

      The hunger for land warped men’s spirits. It could drive them to acts of malice. If a cow died on your rented acres you might dump it on your neighbour’s holding to transfer the bad luck. In her eighties one old woman recalled how a row between two hay mowers at the height of the threshing led to one being deliberately poisoned so that he had acute diarrhoea. ‘It was arranged to put something in his tea. In no time he had the runs. There was nothing for it but take off his trousers and work away [for] he was not going to be stopped.’5

      My uncle, John B, wrote a play called The Field about a man who kills an interloper in a dispute over the purchase of a field. The field is invested with a sacred quality whose importance can only be understood by those who work its soil. After the murder, a Catholic bishop addresses locals at mass:

      This is a parish in which you understand hunger. But there are many hungers. There is hunger for food – a natural hunger. There is the hunger of the flesh – a natural understandable hunger. There is a hunger for home, for love, СКАЧАТЬ