Chapter Seven

In the spring of 1845 Ellen Meagher, the youngest of Conor and Maureen’s children was sixteen. There was a warm and comfortable monotony in the carrying out of routine duties and more than fifty years later Ellen would remember the banal and habitual events of that autumn morning even to the sound of her father’s voice returning from the first milking of the day.History subsequently recorded the numerical scale of what came to be known as The Great Hunger and in the dust dry official documents the bare bones of the living entity known as Phytophera Infestans remains alive; but it is not possible to put flesh on the skeleton of numbers, only the embedded memories of the survivors could communicate the reality of that time.Those who survived long enough to have a retrospective view of events agreed that the incidental progress of daily life obscured the sense of being part of a larger historical picture.Ellen was visited by an American nephew, the son of her brother Milo who left Duimhnagh not because of the famine but because there appeared to be little chance that he would ever attain full independence from the tyranny of his parents determined acquisition of land which they insisted must remain whole and intact.There was no precise day or month, not even a year when the collective consequences of the blight came to be recognised as a famine, she said,‘It was slow,’ she explained, ‘in September my father came in from the milking and said that the Friesian cow wasn’t giving up her usual milk yield. The potatoes

looked like they had mildew, he said; but that wouldn’t have meant much to us because my parents only grew enough for ourselves. The priest had arrived the day before and Fergal came from the rectory to tell my father. People in the village did tend to look to my parents as leaders because of the stone house they had built and because they were well ahead of our neighbours in the way that they farmed.’The slow accretion of small tragedies had an anaesthetic effect and it was only from the comparative safety of a distant and hitherto unimagined future that it was possible to re-assemble odd random memories into a coherent portrait of what had gone before.‘Nobody in Duimhnagh actually starved to death,’ Ellen explained, ‘we weren’t a proper fishing village because there was no harbour but a fair few families had curricles so we always had fish and there was the carrageen weed which we gathered at low tide. But still we missed the solidness of the old potatoes.’It seemed to Ellen that Killian was less than pleased to hear that he could not number the martyrs of the famine amongst his ancestors.‘People did die,’ she said, ‘the older people and the ones with consumption who would have lasted a bit longer if there was more food. There weren’t any corpses to be seen standing by the roadside like there was in some other villages. One day my father went to Castletown to buy seed and he said that the things he saw he wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. In one village which he passed on his way into the town there were families living under hedges at the side of the road. He said he was hard put to know who was alive

and who was dead for there was neither light nor life in the poor souls. The worst part of it, he said, was the way they just stared at him; they didn’t even try to ask him for help. It was as if they were waiting for God knew what to come along and rescue them. There was a woman with barely any flesh on her bones holding an infant and trying to get it to suckle but he said that there was no more milk in her breast than there was life in the child. My father gave some money to the man but as he said himself ‘twasn’t money they needed for there was little or no food to be had outside of the towns and the poor souls would be dead of exhaustion before they got there.’Ellen tried to explain to her nephew that he would not find what he wanted in Duimhnagh for it was fairly clear what brought him back across the Atlantic asking questions about the famine, absentee landlords, rack rents and religious oppression.These men returned to Ireland carrying ancient grievances along with the seemingly limitless wealth of America. They came home for their parents’ sake, to tell those who remained behind that their line had survived and prospered. They came to wreak revenge for those who died and for those who could not return.‘Didn’t my own father have to come away on account of the famine?’ he asked and Ellen answered that he had not left Ireland because of the famine but because her father would not allow him to have his own house built.‘My mother was always in charge but on some things they were absolutely united and they were determined that the farm would not be broken up because even before the famine the small farmers only barely

managed. Naturally this made it hard for the boys to settle down for they knew that they would never be independent but to be fair to my parents they paid for all of us to be educated and hoped that the boys would become professionals; doctors and solicitors and such like. Your father left Ireland in 1844 with a decent amount of money to get himself settled once he arrived in America. We never heard another word from him even though there were people leaving more or less every month and my mother sent a message every time.’It seemed laughable to Killian that anybody would be naïve enough to believe that a message sent from the village of Duimhnagh might survive the hazardous crossing of the Atlantic not to mention the rigours of Staten Island and the vastness of New York City.‘My mother’s folk left because of the famine,’ he said, ‘She came from Co. Roscommon. I went there before I came here and there’s not a soul left of her family or even a gravestone to mark where they were laid. There are a lot of Irish in New York and we’ve got the money to help people back here if they need it. My father told me that ‘twasn’t much easier to get along in New York if you didn’t know the right people. The people who were already there weren’t too keen on helping newcomers in case there wasn’t enough to go round but it was obvious that you had to help your own and so they arranged for a representative to meet people on Ellis Island and help them get through immigration. The people who made money agreed to contribute to the famine relief fund and afterwards the money kept coming in and people were still coming over saying that there was nothing left in Ireland, that it was a country for old men. Nowadays the

men who come want money to make Ireland independent and they invite people like me to come and learn about the people who stayed behind and how we can help them.’‘But what do you see?’ Ellen asked him, ‘the people aren’t starving anymore and nearly every farmer has a secure tenancy now. There’s nothing to fight for anymore’‘I know what I saw in Roscommon, my mother’s entire family wiped out and not even a grave to say they lived.’‘Build a monument if that’s what you want but don’t be sending guns for youngsters to shoot.’‘The problem is that not everywhere is as lucky as Duimhnagh.’‘There’s nothing lucky about Duimhnagh, Killian. We survived here because we did things differently. There were plenty of people who would have died if it hadn’t been for my father and the French priest and the Reverend McGorrigle. My father took up every tenancy that became vacant and sometimes the tenancies were offered even though the families still lived on the land. My father was a lucky man; everything he did was successful and he never knew how much money he was worth. If he ever thought about spending money he asked my mother whether he could afford it and she would say yea or nay and that would be the end of it. I’ve been trying to remember a bit more about the beginnings of the famine but you see apart from what my father could tell us when he’d been into Castletown we had no way of knowing. The entire potato crop was lost, we knew that but my father agreed that he would pay any due rents to tide people over and so nobody had to

leave their tigh. People said he was greedy but what they forgot was that if it had been down to Lord Mandeville they’d have been in the same case as the poor souls my father saw.’ Ellen fell silent; it seemed that she should be able to recall more, indeed she could recall more but the recollections she had were not of words or numbers. It was a very wet summer, she remembered but wasn’t that what made their land so richly productive? It was more often wet than otherwise but normally the hardy potato was unconcerned unlike other more histrionic crops that must have just the right balance of light and shade, the finest loamy soil and an intolerance of any rainfall that fell outside the narrowest limits of its tolerance.It was warmer than usual for she had walked with her mother to the rectory to greet the new priest and the air had been fragrant with the scent of and dog roses.Two days later the blight had embedded itself and the sweet foetid smell of rotting vegetable matter hung in an almost visible pall over the fields where the deep green potato plants lay like unburied corpses.‘The first time the blight hit was hard,’ she said, ‘but it had happened before and so it seemed not much different to having a bad growing year. People thought that if they could manage through this one bad year they would be alright; nobody believed that it could happen again. But by the time the second crop failed Duimhnagh had been fairly picked clean of anything that could be eaten and there was nothing left to eat apart from what fish could be caught by the curricles; even the rocks that were usually covered with limpets were stripped bare and for

a time it seemed that the shore had been swept clean of every living thing. During this time people were leaving you must understand but it wasn’t easy if you had elders to care for they would maybe be too weak to make the journey and even the younger people couldn’t manage a long trek to Cobh with no food to give them the strength to put one foot in front of another. ‘The day she remembered best of all was the day she walked to the rectory five years later and she heard the wood pigeons chortling overhead and it was another damp day; on just such a day the world, it seemed, had begun to end. But the world didn’t end and now she smelt again the remembered scent of life before the blight.‘I can’t tell you what it felt like,’ she said, ‘to walk along the same familiar paths and smell life again after so many years when it seemed that everything was dead or dying. It made me feel special, to be alive and here to witness this day was as if God had singled me out and said, ‘look, I am still here and I have created this morning for you to see that for every day of grief there will be a day of joy.’‘There won’t be any joy for those who died, Aunty Ellen.’‘But there were small miracles, Killian. There was a time when it seemed that we could not survive for eventually it didn’t matter how much cash we had, we couldn’t buy food that didn’t exist. Then one day there was a miracle. Everybody had fallen into the habit of going to the beach to gather the seaweed and crabs and any other creature that might be eaten.

Sometimes there would be a dead gull but we discovered that ‘twasn’t worth the energy of the eating for the meat was foul and made our guts heave ‘til we’d brought back every scrap we’d eaten.Nobody had found anything worth eating for a good long while and it hardly seemed worth the energy of getting down onto the beach. When there’s barely enough food to keep you alive you soon realise that you can’t just go throwing your energy away. ‘Twas a fine balance-if you wasted energy going looking for food and didn’t find any you’d be worse off but if you didn’t move around in the cold weather you’d perish of the cold. Truthfully more people died of the cold for the second winter we had some vicious frosts and hardly enough peat to keep the hearths lit so it was decided that the younger ones like me would be sent to gather what could be eaten and what could be burnt.I never minded being sent because the beach was the only place where there was neither the sight nor the smell of the blight. Usually I would take the cliff path down by the Martello tower to the shingle shore because there was more chance of finding life there than on the sandy shore where only the tubeworms which the fishermen used as bait could be found. The sandy beach was better if you were looking for something to burn because there was usually driftwood or coal but you had to get there early for everybody was in the same state. It was a terrible sight to see all these people looking like they had returned from the grave wearing the clothes they were buried in but with no flesh

to fill the garments and hardly the strength to put one foot in front of the other.I suppose my family was lucky for we had just about enough to keep going but my father insisted that we must keep only what we needed to keep body and soul together and whatever we had spare must be shared with our neighbours.My father was very irreligious so I don’t think it was entirely because he was a good man but he was very wise in the ways of people. I’d heard him say that it wasn’t right for us to continue eating our fill while people starved and he probably meant it but I think he was also remembering that my grandmother Pegeen Bawn had raised ructions against him and Eoign when his sister married the land agent. Apparently he and Eoign was a pair of blackguards and Pegeen said that if they weren’t stopped from their marauding they’d never be stopped for the land agent was powerful enough to be able to tell the visiting magistrates to let them off. So, as I say, I think my father was wise enough to know that if we didn’t share voluntarily then we’d most likely be murdered in our beds and they’d have everything from us anyway.He said it was important for us to be seen to endure what everybody else endured and so I went every day to gather cockles from the rock pools. I usually woke early for we went to bed as soon as the sun went down because it was easier to keep warm and saved us keeping the fire lit. Because my parents were no longer young I suppose it took it out of them more than myself and my mother who had always a busy soul seemed to fade into

slowness so that she was glad of her bed and didn’t wake often until late in the morning even though we still had some fowl laying and a few cattle still yielding milk.I suppose I got more of what there was to eat and so I usually woke earlier and was glad of the clean quietness of the beach where the smell of the blight and the hunger didn’t reach. Once or twice I was met by some of the other women and had to give them what I had gathered for the hunger had put them in a killing mood, poor souls.Of course I didn’t see it that way then I just saw that for all my father’s generosity towards them they would still kill me for the sake of a bit of seaweed and a few cockles that were there for anybody to gather if they had the wit to get out of bed as I had done; I also saw my father’s wisdom for it was certain that what we did not share willingly they would take from us.Anyway it was the sea kept us alive. One morning I woke very early, it was not yet light but I knew that I would not sleep again and so I decided that I would go early to the beach. I would not usually do such a thing because I did not like to venture into the darkness where there might be all kinds of devilish spirits but only the day before I had been confronted by the hungry women who looked like the old witches and banshees in the stories that the seanachai used to tell us and I was afraid of them.I knew every one of those women by name and in the days before the potatoes rotted they had sat beside my parent’s hearth listening to the seanachai telling his tales.I had danced in the reels with them in the flickering light of the Bealtaine and Samhain fires and they had teased

me with proposals from their sons for I was thought to be a good match because of my parent’s prosperity. It seemed that the blight took everything and rotted it so that even my father’s generosity was mocked; ‘twas well for us, they said, pretending that we were in the same boat when any fool could see that we were well set up. I could see how they felt and I was inclined to agree with them for it was true, we did have more than enough and sometimes it seemed to me that my father was a fool because everybody knew this. It was like giving something up for lent but lent only lasted six weeks and we had been practicing starvation now for three years.Although the sea had always been there we had not the knowledge of it that other villages had for as I said we did not have any harbour and so only those men who had curricles and the ones who set lines knew the timing of the tides. By the time the potatoes rotted for the third time everybody had learnt the movements of the sea; we knew the time of each high tide and each low tide; we knew exactly how high the water reached at high tide and we knew how far the low water mark extended at low tide. We learnt to predict the movement of the waves from the shape of the moon and we knew that during early spring and autumn the tides would be at their highest.Early in April the tide was at its highest and so I decided that if I left now then I would be able to gather what was to be had before the rest of the women arrived.It was still dark and there hadn’t been a moon the night before but once you became accustomed to it there were variations in the intensity of the darkness; when it was raining as it was that morning the sky overhead looked

as if it had been spun into a giant silver cobweb. The rain seemed to fall slowly, almost lazily around me so that where it landed I could see the darker shapes of trees and hedges and the early morning sound of the birds told me that it would soon be sunrise. Somehow knowing that the birds were awake and heralding the dawn made me less fearful although it was still fully dark and I walked quickly along the footpath which was bordered by sharp clumps of marram grass until it became submerged by the drifts of sand which led into the dunes proper. I knew my way more or less by heart and soon I was running down the steep incline that led to the bend in the coastline where the Martello tower stood. The tower was built during my grandfather’s time when the people rose up against the Sassenachs and the French were supposed to come with ships and soldiers to help them. North of the tower were the shingle shore and the rock pools where we gathered what shellfish we could find and to the south was the sandy shore where the seaweed sprawled in clumps along the wide flat sands.The first pale light was creeping out of the sea, bouncing off the sheets of rain and then back into the green and white swell of the sea. I stood watching and even though the red glow meant another damp day like so many other damp and hungry days I had a feeling of joy in my heart; and then a great rage overtook me when I thought of all the people who had died and those who would die under the indifferent glory of this damp sunrise.I clenched my fist like a child and wished for the power to demolish this brazen creation which mocked our hunger and allowed the sun to rise; the tides to turn and

every other natural thing that could continue to follow its own whim without having to think about nourishment.I took my old boots off and lifted my skirts to run along the rippled sand at the waters edge while I shouted my anger into the empty air. I wasn’t even looking to see what there might be worth gathering for it seemed to me that the hungry women were right, what need had I of the small gleanings to be had from this already bone empty strand?I stopped to catch my breath and the small waves sauntered playfully around my feet, tickling my toes like feathers. The tide was not fully in but had reached that point where it seemed as if it had not fully decided whether it would venture further or retreat. That day it was venturesome and a low wall of water lumbered slowly towards the beach; it was almost as if this wave had separated itself from the rest of the sea and wished to walk on dry land. I hopped backwards for fear it would engulf me and when it came crashing down around me the spray flew into my face so that for a few seconds I was blinded by the salt water. Almost as soon as the great wave broke the tide seemed to have spent itself and I could feel the grainy sand tugging beneath my feet with the pull of the receding tide. I think by this time I had given up on God for I could not imagine what form the certainly could not have imagined that it would come from the sea. There lying on the beach just a few steps away from me was an enormous creature the like of which miracle we needed would take and I had never seen in my life, nor had I even heard of such a creature. I had heard of such things as elephants and giraffes and although I had never seen such creatures

I knew that they were to be found in faraway countries where it was always sunny; furthermore I had never heard that they lived in the sea.I cannot even now begin to describe my fear of the creature and I was afraid even to move for a long time because I did not know whether it had legs that were hidden beneath its enormous belly. It lay quite still while the waves rolled and tumbled around it; sometimes it seemed as if it shifted of its own accord while other times it seemed that the waves tugged gently like parents trying to persuade a difficult and over large child from danger.I stood for a long while watching and waiting to see whether the monster would open its jaws and swallow me but by the time that I felt safe enough to move the tide was a long way out. A few times I thought the monster was attempting to make some sound but it was only the gurgling of the water as it settled into the stillness of the sand when the power of the tide was gone.During that time I don’t think I had any sensible thoughts about the creature because my mind was too busy wondering how I could escape but in the end I was so frozen with the cold and the fear that I knew I would eventually move and betray myself.Gradually I loosened my muscles, so slowly I felt the blood begin to run warmly through my arms and legs and I opened my mouth to take in great gulps of air as if I had been drowning. Then I tested my brain, very slowly I looked and as if I was talking to somebody who wasn’t there I made a picture for them to imagine what I

had seen; as if it was an imagined thing that nobody else would ever see.How big? That was the hardest thing to describe because who would ever have seen anything so big? Bigger than a steam engine but we did not then have such a thing in Duimhnagh.What colour? On its back a dark purplish grey and underneath almost pearly white. How many legs? None that I could see but it had short flippers like a seal, a sharp looking fin growing out of its back and a tail shaped like the whirly bits that fell from the sycamore trees in the autumn.How many eyes? Two small black holes set far back on each side of the front of the animal and the mouth underneath almost buried in the sand by its weight.Alive or dead? I didn’t know but it seemed that it must be dead for it didn’t move and I could see no sign of it breathing.I was still frightened but when I was a child I would scream and shout and run if I was frightened whereas now I was cautious with fear and started to walk very slowly backwards. When I was a child I was frightened of a lot of things, my mother blamed my father for indulging my fancies and when my mother would not put up with my timidity any longer he told me that animals know when we are frightened; for example I was frightened of dogs and so he said I should keep my fists closed and ignore the dog until it gave up bothering me and although I remained frightened of dogs they did seem to bother with me less.So I remembered his advice and walked slowly backwards for some distance until I felt certain that even

if the creature was shamming it would not be able to catch me if it decided to pursue me. Eventually I felt safe enough to run and so I did, the fastest run I ever made in my life without even flinching when my bare feet were scratched and bleeding from the furze bushes that grew along the footpath. I didn’t even pause to think about my mother’s reaction to the loss of my boots which I had forgotten in my panic.It was fully light by the time I reached the two mile bridge and a few of the women were walking in their tired way towards the beach but when they saw me running with no shoes upon my feet and without my usual basket they must have thought the end of the world had arrived for they stopped dead and I could almost hear the desperation in their souls for there could be little point in them wasting their carefully hoarded energy on a fruitless journey.There is a terrible monotony about starvation because even in times of plenty so much of life is devoted to food; every minute of labour that went into the growing of crops and the tending of beasts is dedicated to the moment when the vegetable is gathered and cooked, the day when the grain is milled and the bread baked or the time when the animal is butchered and eaten. So with the fields lying rank and stinking under the mouldering potatoes it was hard to fill the long hungry hours of wakefulness and brains fidgeted uselessly under the enforced inertia of our exhaustion.I stopped and gasped out my news breathlessly and I could see that the women thought I had succumbed to some form of fever brought on by starvation, indeed I

heard one woman say that it was getting beyond a joke when Conor Meagher was so fair minded that he’d let his own daughter starve rather than share what they believed he was hoarding with his neighbours.Noeleen Galway interrupted the women who were dismissing my story as nonsense and said that I might be telling the truth. Her husband had been a sailor and he had gone on a long sea journey to Baffin Bay where he said there was huge sea creatures called Whales that men hunted for they were the most useful creatures in the whole of creation. She asked me to describe the creature for her but I knew that she’d no more idea what a whale looked like than I did and so she said she’d send her man Brendan over to my parent’s house. I still had some doubts myself that when I went back to the shore the creature would still be there and certainly I had not begun to think of it in terms of food.It wasn’t long before Brendan Galway arrived and once I described what I had seen we went back to the beach so that I could show him where it was. I had to wear an old pair of boots belonging to my mother who as I expected was raging at the loss of my own boots. By the time I set out with Brendan Galway I was more worried that the whale would have found legs and walked back into the sea so that my mother would think I had invented the creature to excuse my carelessness. The whale was still there when we got to the beach and when he saw the creature Brendan started to leap and howl with delight as if I had shown him a gold mine instead of a dead monster.‘Thanks be to the Lord God almighty I never saw a whale half so fine when I was working on the whalers

out of Baffin Bay and it must be divine providence that brought the creature to this shore.’‘Is it dead, Brendan?’ I asked him for I was still frightened that the monster would wake and devour us and he said that the whale had probably died before it hit the shore but that there was meat enough on it to feed the whole village for a good while.‘But will it be fit to eat?’ I asked remembering the dead seagulls, ‘Will it not be foul like the dead gulls?’‘No,’ he answered, ‘for it won’t have begun to rot yet if it only came out of the sea this morning. I swear to you Ellen Meagher this whale will be the salvation of us all for nearly every bit of the whale has a use, ‘tis the most economical animal in the whole of creation.’The stories he told about his time on the whale ships sounded so fantastic that if I wasn’t standing beside the whale I’d have said he was romancing. I thought about all the warm winter evenings when he and Noeleen sat listening to the tales of the seanachai and he never told of his own adventures on the whale ships.‘There are hundreds of these creatures in Baffin Bay and they’ve never been used to any creature challenging them so ‘tis like taking lambs to the slaughter except that they take more killing than a lamb. The men who own the whale ships are as rich as Croesus for parts of these animals are worth more than their weight in gold. Think about it Ellen; Mrs.McGorrigle that keeps house for the reverend is a fine figure of a woman but what do you think holds the woman together? Her stays that are made out of whalebone, no less! And that perfume that she wears so that you can smell her coming at fifty paces, where do you think that comes from? Why ‘tis snot from

the whales head or else ‘tis out of the whales guts! And the fine candles that his reverence uses to light his study when he’s doing his antiquarian antics are made out of the blubber that keeps the whale warm while it swims in the freezing water that would have a man stone dead in less than five minutes. I’ll grant you the meat is a bit on the tough side and maybe not as tasty as a nice bit of bacon but ‘twill feed us nonetheless.’By the time Brendan had finished telling me about the marvellous uses of the dead whale every living soul in the village was gathered on the shore as well as the Reverend McGorrigle and Father Francis.Some of the boys climbed onto its back and were poking it with sticks in a half terrified way as if they might rouse the whale’s wrath. Brendan let out a roar and ordered them to get off the whale in case they tainted the meat or damaged the other valuable parts.Brendan Galway was usually a quiet man and not at all full of himself but he was the only man who had any knowledge of what to do with a dead whale. Even so he was reluctant to take charge saying that there was a lot more to dealing with whales than just butchering the carcass.Reverend McGorrigle being a man of many interests said that he had read some interesting accounts of the whaling industry in Newfoundland and he would go and fetch the book. The main problem was finding tools sharp enough to actually cut the whale up and so all of the men went back to their tighs in search of anything that might be used.Meanwhile the women were sent to fetch their pots and the older children were sent to fetch whatever could be

spared to get some fires going so that the blubber from the whale could be melted down.Before long the beach looked as if we were celebrating Bealtaine and the old woman Lenshe was chanting a song of praise to Mannwyddan the son of Llyr who ruled the sea and who had surely favoured us with this gift.The Reverend McGorrigle had set himself up in a folding chair and was reading passages from the book about whaling; some of it seemed to be news to Brendan but he listened just the same, nodding occasionally more out of politeness to his reverence than because the information was useful.Father Francis was not pleased with Lenshe’s praying to the old god and after he said a long blessing he preached a long sermon about some old fella called Jonah who got swallowed by a whale and lived in its belly for a good while.Brendan was a bit put out at the mention of this Jonah fellow because he said he was bad luck to sailors.I couldn’t imagine the size of a ship that would be big enough to carry the carved up remains of even one of these creatures never mind ten or twelve which was what Brendan said they did; nor could I imagine how men would be able to kill these monsters and do all that butchering on a ship in a freezing cold sea.At the end of the first day the head had been cut open and a great quantity of pale slimy stuff was gathered into the churns which were used for the milk when people still had cows to milk. This was what Brendan said was used to make perfume and the reverend said that it was indeed worth its weight in gold although where they

might find somebody with the gold to buy it I could not imagine.There was still a huge amount of work to be done before the whale was cut down to a manageable size and before any meat could be got from it but people were already weak and starving with the hunger. The rain had cleared away and it stayed dry and sunny but there was still a chill breeze and for people who had no flesh to keep them warm it was cold enough so a few pots were filled with anything that could be cooked- my mother agreed to kill a few of the older hens that had stopped laying and they as well as the last piece of salt pork were set over the fires to boil. I was put in charge of some of the younger children and we gathered crabs and cockles as well as the carrageen moss; a few of the men who had curricles put to sea and returned with some mackerel and into the pot to make a stew the like of which nobody had ever eaten before but I never saw people more gladdened by their food. You would think that with such a long hunger to satisfy they would have gobbled their food like animals but they ate slowly and in the pernickety way that I was taught by the nuns, as if they were enjoying a fine banquet in the highest company and with nothing more important to worry about than minding their manners. People nowadays talk about the famine but at the time we had no real idea that across the whole of the country people were starving just the same as we were; indeed we thought that we were having the worst of it when the truth of it is that in Duimhnagh we were better off than almost everywhere else.

It took nearly a week before we had taken everything there was to be had from the dead whale and I think that was one of the happiest weeks in my life; the children of course made a great holiday of it because we worked through the night as well to make sure that every last bit of the animal was saved.The next day we had removed enough of the blubber and we were able to start butchering the meat. A lot of people would have just eaten the whale meat and not bothered looking for the stuff we usually gathered like the fish and the shellfish and the carrageen but Brendan said that in Nantucket the whalers cut the meat into strips and hung it on lines to dry out so that’s what we did. Not everybody was convinced that the drying would work and Brendan agreed that it might not be cold enough and dry enough to work properly so my father went into Castletown to buy salt so that it could be salted down like we did when the pigs were killed. It seemed daft to be spending money on salt but as I said there hadn’t been food to buy for many a long day and salt on its own would do no good but make you drink the sea dry.It was amazing to see the uses that could be made of one dead whale but by the time we had finished stripping the carcass there was little left to show that there had been a sea monster there at all.Often during that week it did seem that we had been given a very special miracle because if it hadn’t been for Brendan Galway and his knowledge the whale might have been eaten but all the other parts would have been carried slowly back into the sea by the tides.Even with Brendan’s knowledge a lot of people thought it was mad to waste time gathering anything that was not

able to be eaten but Reverend McGorrigle having read every book in his library that told of whales and how they lived at sea as well as the marvellous products that were made from whales said that we must gather the bountiful harvest of the whales remains.The whale skin was very tough and obviously waterproof and the men managed to remove it in one great single piece which they stretched over poles so that it would dry out and make a weatherproof shelter beneath which they could work when the weather turned wet.Lines were set up along the shore and thin strips of the meat were hung to dry but it turned out that it was too wet for that to work and eventually we saw that all the meat would have to be salted and so my father had to go back to Castletown to get more salt; he said that there was a fair bit of curiosity about his buying salt for as I say very few people had any livestock left to preserve. The arrival of a whale on the beach would normally be news that would be told far and wide but people didn’t share information like that any more because ‘twould bring a crowd of people and plenty of trouble so my father had to pretend that he was looking to the future and buying up anything that was going cheap since there was no demand for salt or saltpetre or any other thing that was not immediately edible.This didn’t do his reputation much good and many years later the story of how Conor Meagher could afford to callously buy salt while the village of Duimhnagh starved was told as evidence of the treacherous greed of my parents.

While the women worked at salting the meat the men continued to scavenge the carcass for the other treasures about which Brendan had spoken; the massive jaw bone and the rib cage were stripped bare and the reverend got very excited saying that the skeleton looked very like some ancient bones of creatures called dinosaurs that lived on the land long before men were around and this got him round to talking about a fellow called Charles Darwin who said that we weren’t made by God but were just clever monkeys. Father Francis got very annoyed with the reverend and said that ‘twas all very well making jokes like that among intelligent men but ‘twas no comfort at all to people like us who didn’t understand what he meant. The reverend got very huffy with Father Francis and said that there was nothing in Mr.Darwins ideas that ruled out God and for him to remember that the people of Duimhnagh were not fools.The worst bit was when we had to open the guts of the whale to look for ambergris which Brendan said was also used to make perfume although it was hard to believe him for the smell of the whale’s guts was nearly as bad as the smell of the blight.The week of the whale marked a turning point for us all; this was partly because everybody was busy in some way or another, as I said starvation was a very monotonous business; also people became more generous with what they had and there was a new closeness between people even where there had been long standing enmity.The greatest regret was that we didn’t live in Baffin Bay where the whales lived in their hundreds and the potatoes could rot to hell for all the matter it made to us.

While we were busy dealing with the whale Brendan oversaw everything and at each stage he had a tale to tell of the whales he had seen on the whaling ships. I got the impression that he had not much enjoyed his time with them for he seemed to have an admiration for whales and when he described the way they blew huge spouts of water up into the air he sounded almost sad for the cruel way they were hunted.Probably the most important thing we learned in that week was that there were other ways of living; before the blight it seemed that the only way for people like us to live was off of the land and for most people that meant potatoes.After the famine was over it was clear to everybody that the people would have to change the way they farmed if ‘twasn’t to happen again.

Chapter Eight

Gradually there was a slow return to the comparative plenitude of the days before the blight but no household yet felt confident enough to abandon the cautious husbanding that had become second nature.Usually the winters were damp and wet; indeed it was the perpetual mild dampness that caused the blight to go from a single opportunist attack to an entrenched siege.When eventually there came a winter of sufficient severity to destroy the blight the population was so debilitated that it was difficult for Ellen to believe that anybody would be left alive.The whale had saved the village not just from starvation but also from perishing; although there was turf for the cutting it was damp beyond imagining because there was barely a single dry day during which it could be set to dry. If necessity is the mother of invention it is certain that the people of Duimhnaghs’ inventiveness were remarkable under the rigours of the famine.Although the community lacked any formal governing body there was an inherent respect for knowledge and so it was that Brendan Galway became the first point of reference whenever events or circumstances required more than the common body of knowledge. The reverend McGorrigle was also revered as a source of wisdom to the dismay of Father Frances who continued in authority on matters spiritual but had not yet stood the test of time as a man who could be trusted with more worldly concerns.

When the famine continued into its third year the population seemed to surrender themselves apathetically to the slow leaching of hope and faith in their earth to restore to them its benevolence and so when Ellen discovered the whale and Brendan Galway was able to explain the amazing versatility of the leviathan it was not difficult for them to believe that they had been granted a miracle.There was some small sectarian bickering as to the source of the miracle; Lenshe asserted that it was Mannwynann the God of the sea who had taken pity on their state; reverend McGorrigle said that it was no miracle at all but a testimony to the value of travel and learning to broaden the mind of man; Father Francis knew that the miracle was the work of his own almighty God but was too exhausted to argue the point.Ellen had never travelled further from her home than the nearest town which was Castletown and so she had no reason to believe that there was anything special about her home. Naturally she knew that they had been particularly and especially blessed by the beneficence of the whale which had undoubtedly stimulated the population into action but apart from that random good fortune she supposed that they fared neither better nor worse than their compatriots.Before the coming of the whale it was true that there was a generosity amongst the population that forbade the hoarding of food and an optimistic faith that somehow there would be sufficient unto the day although it was understood that that sufficiency might be somewhat arbitrary.

After the whale it was seen that with proper leadership Duimhnagh could emerge the winner in the bare fisted contest with the sullen potato crop. Predictably the whale was picked clean before food became plentiful again but somehow everybody felt that to succumb to starvation again would be a tantamount to spurning the noble sacrifice of the whale which popular myth now decreed had presented itself voluntarily for the consumption of the starving populace.The fact that Duimhnagh was not a fishing community and had at best an opportunist relationship with the sea made the gift of the whale even more remarkable. Whatever God was responsible the people of Duimhnagh knew that their survival was no mere random matter but had been pre-ordained; therefore however bleak the future appeared they had an implicit faith that they would not starve. And they did not starve.Each individual now harboured a small certainty that there was a future beyond this rigorous present and for each that future held something more than just sufficient unto the day.Nobody voiced this conviction because hearts held their own council for fear of tempting fate; it was understood that the only urgency was the next meal.They evolved a form of communism which rotated the supply of food so that those who had strength and youth were fed more than the bare nutritional requirement on the presumption that this would enable them to forage more effectively.Pegeen Bawns old tigh was swept clean and the hearth was kept alight so that there was one dry place to which any member of the community could retreat. The damp

turf that was cut each day was stacked to dry and Conor had constructed a frame of ironwork that allowed several pots to be suspended over the fire at a time, each of which was always full with a broth which Ellen later learned was called gumbo when on a visit to the southern states of America. The substance of the broth varied greatly depending upon how well the foragers had fared; sometimes it might be no more than water and nettles which were normally plentiful as well as various edible seaweeds and what shellfish could be obtained from the rock pools on the shore; even the multitudinous limpets were now dwindling in numbers.The curricles still put to sea but there was an increase in territorial disputes between the people of Duimhnagh who had merely augmented their diet by fishing and the other villages along the coast for whom fishing was an industry.In Duimhnagh there evolved a unique co-operation between each layer of the community which subsequent generations were inclined to disparage as being no more than misty eyed wishful thinking. It was claimed that the survivors of the famine were guilty, by virtue of that survival, of collusion with the corrupt and degrading system which was the cause of the famine in the first place. Ellen was to find herself explaining the multiple complexities that accrued upon the bedrock of bare fact; it was not easy to disagree with the informed ignorance of sympathisers who could not conceive that such a creature as herself existed. An Irish woman of good education whose father had climbed out of the mire of subsistence farming into a new elite who were poised to

reap the reward of their tenacious survival, land free of encumbrances and rights guaranteed in law.The portrait of Ireland and her people that had been created to beguile the civilised world had no place for creatures that refused to lie down and wallow in the mire like inert victims.A lifetime of conversations was to ensue before Ellen fully understood the unique harmony and unity with which her people had defeated the devastation of those hungry years.It had been Ellen who observed that the opportunity which the scavenging of the whale presented had animated people into industry and suggested that the old tigh be brought back into some degree of habitability.Once the work of salvaging every bit of the whale was complete it seemed to her that people were in danger of relapsing into their previous apathetic state and so she had suggested that those who were fit and able enough might be persuaded to help restore the old place into usefulness.Maureen was not enthusiastic at the idea for it had been her whole life’s work to create for herself and her family a homestead that elevated them above the paucity of the common lot. ‘Wouldn’t you tell her, Conor? Why would we want to be turning the henhouse back into a tigh?’‘I’m not wanting us to go and live in it, Mama but it could be made into a dry roof and a bit of heat and ‘twould keep people busy.’‘But sure they haven’t the energy to be busy, colleen!’‘But you’re wrong, Mama for they had the energy when they needed it.’

‘Tisn’t for me to be making more work for myself when ‘tis all I can do to keep my own mouths fed, will you tell her Conor.’Conor and Maureen had been observed enviously by the rest of the village and there were plenty who had waited expectantly for them to get their comeuppance. It was agreed that Conor was a decent soul who would do you a good turn if he could and if he couldn’t would certainly do you any harm. On the other hand the popular opinion was that Maureen would mind mice at a crossroads and had a tongue like a December frost.The truth was that Conor could afford to be the soul of affability because his wife would take care of the necessities and leave him with sufficient to maintain an illusion of independence.‘Well ‘tisn’t a bad idea, Maureen. I saw old MacDiarmuid only this morning and he trying to drag in a cart load of wet turf. The poor old soul’s two lads went off to America before the blight and Gerty’s been away with the fairies since before they went. She hasn’t even the sense to dress herself and he’s hardly more sense himself for I said to him what did he want trying to cart all that turf for I could see there was turf half way to the roof of his tigh but he just said that ‘twas as well to be prepared in case the weather turned cold again.’‘But Conor we’ve got mouths of our own to feed,’ Maureen protested but she knew that Conor would not gainsay Ellen and so she contented herself with stating that she would not be seen to do a hands turn on the old place but she supposed that if ‘twould do some good ‘twas her Christian duty to agree.

So Ellen had gone around the village explaining what she planned to do. There had been a mixed reception to her idea; those who had been awaiting the comeuppance were generous in their sympathy and agreed to help because justice compelled them to acknowledge past hospitality while others agreed because they had nothing better to do and could not readily capitulate to the solitary anticipation of slow starvation.Father Francis marvelled at the way in which Ellen Meagher was able to reinvigorate the people and remembered that she had been inclined to take the veil; he reminded himself that in the early days of Christianity it was not a necessary requirement for saints to be dead and wondered whether Ellen had been born out of time. The transformation was completed within a matter of days and Ellen let it be known that there would be shelter and warmth for all and the only requirement for admittance was a willingness to contribute to the common weal, each according to his ability.Conor had taken the trap into the village and assisted MacDiarmuid and his demented wife back to what became known as The House of Congregation. The old man had been reluctant to leave in case the smouldering fire which seemed to consume more warmth than it emitted went out completely. He was seated beside the fire in what was universally recognised as the privileged seat of the patriarch but it was evident that both he and his wife were in the last stages of starvation.‘You’re a grand man, Conor indeed you are a grand man but ‘twould be folly to leave for the fire’ll extinguish itself and I’ll never get it lit again with the cut of that

damp turf. ‘Tis bad enough to be starving to death without freezing as well!’‘My Ellen’s gone and rigged the old place with a good blazing fire and good hot broth and she’ll skin me alive if I don’t bring ye back to have the benefit of it.’Still the old man grumbled that he’d be missing his own hovel and ‘twould upset Gerty to find herself in a strange place but eventually Conor persuaded him that ‘twould only be for a short while.Conor believed that he had shed his last tears long ago when he had seen that family starving by the roadside, marooned in an empty insubstantial half world; but they had been strangers after all and he had permitted his consciousness to incorporate them into a sort of biblical tableau which rendered them mere representations, a bit like the people of Israel wandering for forty years in the desert; they were no more than parables.Seoirse MacDiarmuid had been a bull of a man in his youth, a man notorious for the brute power of his fists who was unconquered by any challenger in the province of Munster.Seoirse represented all his adolescent aspirations and the sight of the old man’s bewildered effort to adhere to the routines of a lifetime almost broke his heart. ‘You’ll have a drop of the hard stuff, Conor; before we go will you take a drop with me? Here, Gerty ‘tis Finbar’s young fella, you remember he married Maureen Bawn. She’s a bit deaf these days Conor but she’ll be delighted you called just the same. Just let me get this old fire going and I’ll join you in a drop for the road.’‘Seoirse will you leave the fire alone and get into the trap while I fetch Gerty.’

‘Oh, no Conor Gerty’ll have the hide off me if I let you go without having a drop first.’The old man stumbled to his feet and went to a shelf where he fumbled amongst hollow sounding crockery that echoed its emptiness until he produced a ceramic jug, ‘I was saving this for the time when there’d be praities again but ‘tisn’t likely I’ll see that day so ‘twould be an honour to share it with you Conor. Would you look at that fire, I don’t remember a time when the turf took so long to dry out but if you’ll just hold yer whist for a minute I’ll get the blasted thing lit again. ‘Tis good of you to call Conor you’re a credit to your old fella which I’m sure is more than the old scut deserves. I’ll just have a look and see if there’s a bit of something to eat. Gerty’ll be raging that there’s not a bit of bread to share with you but I never got the hang of baking bread and sure why would I think I’d need to?’Conors was thankful that MacDiarmuid’s confusion was fraying his patience for it was easier to bear than the remembrance of old glory.Eventually he lifted the old woman and sat her in the trap while he led Seoirse who followed quite willingly once he saw that Gerty was going also. Conor had become accustomed to the foul odours of famine but he had never before encountered anything like the stench that emanated from the old lady. A dead beast stank, he knew and although it was foul it could be buried, the smell no more than the consequence of an absent life. Gerty smelt like the carcass of an animal but there was the added contribution of long standing excreta which must surely have dwindled to nothing by now.

Father Francis marvelled at the competence with which Ellen dealt with her first guests despite the first recoil from the stink of the two old people.When asked how she knew what needed to be done she replied, ‘sure didn’t we have plenty of practice with my uncle Eoign stupefied since before I was born.’Gerty died within a few days of her arrival and for a time it seemed that Seoirse would not long outlive her for he became convinced that Gerty remained back at their old tigh. This delusion was countered by a piece of extraordinary coincidence in the form of a letter published in the Irish Times some two weeks before Ellen opened her Hall of Congregation and which belatedly reached the village via the generosity of Reverend McGorrigle. The writer of the letter was one Feilim MacDiarmuid now residing in New York and the letter was a perfectly commonplace call upon the citizens of Ireland to renounce the vile root vegetable known as the potato which he compared to a mandrake in its capacity to make mischief. The letter made a further call for the Irish nation to abandon altogether the consumption of alcoholic beverages deriving from that same malicious tuber. The writer did not elaborate on the subject of alcoholic consumption so that it was unclear whether his objection was only to products of potato fermentation or was a more general denunciation of the demon drink.Reverend McGorrigle reading this exhortation thought it unlikely that the author would be the same Feilim MacDiarmuid who had fled the country ten years previously having manufactured and distributed a batch

of poteen so potent that it was claimed to have been the direct cause of at least two deaths.Thus it was that in addition to the occupational hazard of the excise men he added the police who had issued a warrant for his arrest on two counts of manslaughter with a possible further three under investigation. Still it was a coincidence and he wondered whether his elderly and bereaved father would derive any consolation from the notion that his fugitive son was sufficiently settled in his new life to have leisure for the writing of letters to the Irish Times and so he brought the piece with him when he made his daily visit to the Hall of Congregation.Seoirse sat in the patriarchal seat which it was agreed he was entitled to by virtue of being the first guest to enjoy their hospitality. He sat attentively feeding the flames with a generosity which occasionally needed to be curbed for fear of setting the whole thatch alight and Reverend McGorrigle who if the truth be told knew more about ancient gods than he did about his own deity thought Seoirse might well have been some associate of the hammer god Thor. This impression was enhanced by the red glow which the fire cast upon him so that he seemed almost to merge and emerge from the flames. ‘Good day to you Seoirse, I bring greetings and tidings of your lad Feilim from the American colonies unless I’m very much mistaken.’‘And how would you have word of my Feilim when I’ve had not a bit of news since they slandered the quality of his distillation and I after teaching him myself the way to make the purest brew of poteen ever made?’‘A letter, Seoirse, a letter from one Feilim MacDiarmuid of New York city published in the Irish Times on

Tuesday March the 10th of this very year. I brought the piece for I thought ‘twould hearten you to have word of him although I confess I was not certain that it could be your own Feilim for the fellow has some very peculiar ideas. Still I thought it was interesting purely as a curiosity,’ he said before proceeding to read the letter for the benefit of Seoirse who was unable to read.If Seoirse was intended to derive comfort from the missive it was clear that he did not; indeed his outrage at the perfidy of his son was loud but as Reverend McGorrigle pointed out afterwards a man could console himself just as well with the perversity of his progeny as he could with their sanctity and Seoirse was just as animated by his grievance as he would have been with some subject to rejoice. It was the emotion that mattered, he declared; it didn’t greatly matter what a man felt strongly about so much as that a man had the capacity for strong emotions that would keep the blood hot in his veins.The truth of this observation was borne out by the renewed vigour with which Seoirse took charge of the hearth fire and often Ellen was forced to remind him that she wished only for the Hall of Congregation to be kept comfortably warm and his spendthrift feeding of the fire was an extravagance they could not afford for they still had to dry the turf.

Chapter Nine

During the times when Ellen was busy she had neither the time nor the vision to look beyond each long lean day to a time when there would be leisure to reflect on the wealth of half guessed possibilities that had flared so brightly while she had seen Brendan Galway ordering the salvaging of the whale.She had heard her parents discussing what would happen when the famine was over and the one thing she knew they were agreed upon was that there would be land reforms. This meant so far as she could gather that some people would no longer be able to continue to eke out a living as subsistence farmers and these people would need to hire themselves as labourers.Ellen had no faith in the land to support them and she had become fascinated by the idea of a community that could support itself by the manufacture of goods which could be sold, this idea having first presented itself when she heard Brendan Galway and reverend McGorrigle talking about the immense value of the inedible part of the whale. Although she had been to Castletown and spent on small luxuries, a ribbon or some eau de Cologne she had not come across anything with a fraction of the worth of the ambergris or spermaceti. And yet according to his reverence and Brendan the whale was not hunted for its meat but for those parts of a carcass that would normally be discarded as offal. Clearly if there were people who were prepared to pay such huge sums of money it was worth investigating those industries.

Before the famine there had been little room for a contrary nose for the business of farming was inherently smelly and to any land person these odours were proof of some success; if your yard smelt it was because your beasts were performing their bodily functions, a sign that they were healthily excreting the waste that resulted from their very efficient grazing of that much envied pasture and in the efficiency of natures design that waste was returned to the pasture and so it remained rich and plentiful.Pigs, she thought were far and away the most stinking of the beasts; this was presumably because of their voracious and indiscriminate appetites but still there wasn’t any animal that was easier to maintain than a pig and few that yielded so much meat or reproduced more successfully.The handling of carcasses did need a certain skill because the digestive system of any animal stank but the meat itself did not smell until it was put to roast and then, oh and then you knew why you rose before daybreak to tend you beasts; then you knew why you coddled each pregnant animal and sat beside it at night when it laboured to bring forth each new life; you knew why you grieved with the beast that bore a dead infant or struggled to persuade the weakling runt to take suck. There was a mutual agreement, a contract between you and the beasts you bred. It was understood that in all ways you would be in loco parentis to the beast; it was your responsibility to ensure that the beasts were provided with every necessary thing from sufficient food to shelter from the worst of the elements; it was your responsibility to nurse each beast and it was even your

duty to provide them with the necessary means to reproduce; with time and experience you leant to manage even this so as to give each beast the best possible chance of delivering healthy offspring without harm to itself. In return for this investment of labour and affection the animals and their offspring lived safely under your protection and you received enough meat to feed your family as well as the product of each animal, milk from the cattle and eggs from the fowl. Every objectionable smell gave evidence of contentment and continuity, the ongoing activities that are necessary for all living creatures.In the years of the blight each familiar smell was tainted and eventually destroyed by the foulness of putrefaction so that by the last year when she found the whale even the memory of wholesomeness was banished.Brendan Galway’s declaration and the further knowledge of Reverend McGorrigle set her thinking about the business of making smells, for essentially that was what a perfumer did; he made smells for people whose lives were far from the intimacy of fertilising, planting, feeding and harvesting the land.In the future, if her parents were right the people who were now starving and dependent upon the benevolence of her hall of congregation would have to move from their ancient smallholdings and engage in work which would remove them from all the intangible security of the familiar.Maybe she could harvest one last benefit from the sacred whale whose ribcage now supported its weathered hide just above the high tide mark. It had proved remarkably durable and had evolved into an ecumenical shrine of

sorts for despite the competing claims as to the architect of the miracle the whale itself was sanctified. The one thing of which she was certain was that the people of Duimhnagh must look beyond the confines of their own small world. They must look to a world that had leisure and wealth enough to pay for those intangible securities that were the privilege of those who endured the demanding business of living off the land. This they already did to some extent by producing grain for export and by selling their dairy surplus to the nearby town of Castletown, but there was a poor return for these activities and it was because of this that they were starving. It was plain that those who laboured to feed their neighbours enjoyed no part of the rewards for this labour.And yet there were people who would sail halfway around the world, face frozen seas and monstrous whales maybe twice the size of her whale, as she had come to think of it; and they did this to obtain that small part of the animal that was used to make perfume! Apart from the eau de cologne which smelt of lavender and was to be had from the apothecary for 2d she could think only of the frankincense which the kings brought for the Holy Child or the incense which was used to anoint the dying and she knew that both were equally valuable.Brendan Galway had shown her the small nuggets that he retrieved from the guts of the whale but the smell of the guts were too powerful for her to make any judgement about the merit of the smell. However she believed that despite the foul smells there was so much relief at their salvation as to make them immune to any stink.

The ambergris and the spermaceti had been committed to the care of reverend McGorrigle but Brendan was not at all sure what needed to be done to these substances in order to make them saleable, however he did know that it might take more than a year for the substances to reach their final destination and so he was confident that they would not be spoiled by some delay.Gradually the crisis became less critical and eventually there came a day when she went into Castletown with her father to purchase what was available and on their return she was able to say, ‘I was able to get everything we needed today, Dada, mind you those Mahone’s are nothing but a pair of brazen robbers!’Conor nodded his head and said, ‘they were never any different, a ghra and I know it’s been hard on them these last years but I’d be surprised if they don’t have to emigrate when there’s food enough to sell and money enough to buy it for people won’t forgive and forget these years.’It was a warm drowsy evening in June; the first of the potato crop had passed the critical stage and there was an almost audible silence because there was still some six weeks before the crop would be ready for harvesting. There had been no real spring and the weather had passed without the usual damp hesitance from the bright frozen sharpness of late winter almost immediately to the long, light dry days of early summer. The people were giddy with hope for this first crop that held the promise of a resurrection for the fields that had been cleared and replanted. There were many acres that lay untilled and were in the process of returning to a state of wilderness. It would be more than half a century

before this land came once again under the plough for there was emptiness about the country that made Ellen think of Adam and Eve in their Garden of Eden.The blight she saw as the serpent which had slithered silently among the tall grass and rooted itself into the land. Its determined hardiness had beguiled her people into the belief that it would feed the entire nation after which it disintegrated into rottenness and left them bewildered and starving.There was no joy in her heart for this resurrection she saw as just another attempt on the part of the wily serpent to lure the unsuspecting into a false confidence that it had mended its ways and would not fail them again; and yet what else could they do? These were the people whom Ellen saw as the ones who must be won over to the idea of wage earning. There were naturally many obstacles to be overcome and it took her a long time to allow the idea to be more real than the mythical four leaved clover for which she had searched as a child. She had approached the reverend to ask him about the processes involved in the transformation of those unspectacular substances into something that was prized by kings and priests.It was this confidence in his knowledge that made the reverend not just a burdensome clergyman who must be maintained despite the spurning of his spiritual services. Every person in the village knew that he could be relied upon to deliver honest and truthful advice on matters temporal and spiritual and Ellen was not disappointed.She wondered whether to tell him why she was interested but the reverend was not a man who needed to know why a question was asked since he presumed that

his own limitless curiosity was shared by everybody else and so he merely escorted her into his extensive library. There he produced several manuscripts which he knew contained references to the processes involved in the hunting of whales as well as the paths taken by the products that were obtained and the processes which were employed to transform them into the prized perfumes and incenses.The reverend was impressed by Ellen’s natural curiosity and her ability to apply what she learned. She asked him had he any idea what the perfumes they made smelt like, ‘oh yes, indeed I have in my vestry a considerable amount of incense which is provided at the expense of the diocese. I am not inclined towards high ritual myself although your own faith uses incense quite liberally in its churches; but of course there is no church of your own faith in Duimhnagh yet. We must see about rectifying that deficiency once the current food crisis is passed.’Ellen sniffed the incense and found it to be a most peculiar smell, her first impression was of power; this was no delicate girlish scent like her eau de cologne but a heavy enveloping odour which was pungent enough to compete and triumph over all the smells that she had ever experienced. However she was certain that it contained some elements which were not dissimilar to the many familiar smells that she had been considering when she had been trying to explain why people would spend such sums of money to purchase a smell.Finally she decided to explain her ambition to the reverend and again he did not let her down as she suspected Father Francis would have done by reminding her that perfume was the height of depravity and a

devilish device to lure respectable people into irreverent behaviour.Ellen had discarded the notion that she might have a vocation to take the veil although she feared that only a woman who had taken the veil could have the freedom to explore the world that the implementation of her plan required.She knew that she would miss the challenges which she had been forced to meet during the hardships of recent years and dreaded the day when there would be leisure for her mother to put her mind to the organizing of a marriage.So it was on that first day Ellen and Conor arrived in Duimhnagh having obtained every necessary provision during their excursion to Castletown. It had been a day of bright sunshine and as they approached the village each tigh seemed almost mystic with the reflected golden brilliance of the kind old sun that blessed the hedgerows and their small reclamation of land and the meadows where the buttercups and the marguerite daisies and thistles overtook the fields that had been under the plough for generations.The shadows were still sharp and violet where the light fell between the foliated trees and there were people gathered around the old green that had been untended for so long. Almost Ellen could think that the starving years had not happened except for the timid whispered conversations that told of a people who had survived some infernal struggle and were not yet certain that the day was again theirs.