Ashes In the Wind (37 page)

James could smell the smoke that had swirled around the papers and into every corner of every box, and could see the flames roaring up through the stones of his father’s, his forebears’, house hundreds of miles and a hundred years away on the south-west coast of Ireland.

The earliest letters were from his great-grandmother’s father, a prosperous clergyman in County Cork, negotiating his daughter’s marriage to John Burke of Derriquin. The Reverend Arthur Hamilton had a practical attitude to the match, emphasizing his daughter Letitia’s considerable virtues, by which he meant, ‘six thousand pounds in the three and a quarter per cent Consolidated Stock’. At one stage he was ready to call the negotiations off; the fifteen-thousand-pound debt burden on the Derriquin estate brought him to the conclusion ‘that the union of our children could not be advantageous to either party, as they would have the prospect for many years of comparative poverty’. There was a gap in the correspondence, then the couple were encouraged to meet in Dublin, ‘avoiding the idle gossip of Cork’,
and finally a letter in which the clergyman praised his daughter for her attitude to the marriage. ‘There is no nonsense or romance in Letitia. She is possessed with plain common sense, a quality without which few get on in the world.’

In another box there is a patchwork bag containing letters of condolence after William Burke, a captain in the 57th Foot, had been killed at the battle of Inkerman. The first letter was from an uncle in Cork, who ‘is in such a state of anxiety about poor William, watching for the list of casualties to come in by the
Telegraph
’, and then, on a more down-to-earth note, saying, ‘O’Leary won’t pay more than six pounds a ton for barley’. The list of casualties arrived with William’s name among the dead; the bag held forty black-bordered letters and a cutting from
The Kerryman
: ‘Like an avenging angel, said a brother officer, he dealt death to every Russian within sweep of his weapon. How he escaped so long I know not; he died after a splendid display of gallantry. Ireland may well be proud of him.’ The final item in the bundle is a letter from the War Office, confirming repayment of the money that had been used to purchase William’s commission.

It is the diaries, letters and cuttings during the Famine years that interest James most. The Burkes were not absentees, and he hopes to find evidence that they were better than most at dealing with the extraordinary misery caused by the successive failures of the potato crop after 1845. His father had told James that the Burkes had been good landlords; a letter from John Burke to
The Times
in 1849 had claimed that there had been no evictions on the Derriquin estate, although in the same box there was an anonymous letter calling him a liar.

One entry in his great-grandmother’s diary was so harrowing that James could hardly bear to read it. Letitia had been to visit her father in County Cork; on the return journey her carriage is stopped on the road near Skibbereen:

“by an emaciated figure, his skin yellow and his bones fleshless, who begged us in a hoarse voice, barely above a whisper, to help his family in the cabin which we could see just beside the road. This was little more than a shed, eight feet long by seven wide. Along the western wall was a newly dug grave in which three of his children were recently buried. Inside the cabin were five individuals, male, female and children, huddled around a fire of a sod of turf and a few sticks, all clearly suffering from a malignant fever; the two children were clutching their mother’s old gown and crying for food which she could not give them. I could see on a table in the corner the body of a dead man.

We went back to the village through which we had just passed and returned with tea, sugar, milk and some bread, which were ravenously consumed. I was able the next day to persuade the Poor Law Guardians to take the family into the fever hospital, but by then of the six of them only four were still alive. Both children had died in the night.

There are those who say that the potato disease bears all the marks of Divine affliction. It requires an unquestioning faith to understand the workings of Providence, and to believe that out of such misery good may emerge. I pray that my own faith and that of my dear husband prove strong enough to carry us through these terrible times. Although we have been less badly affected in our corner of Kerry, in the past two years twenty-seven of our four hundred or more tenants have died of the fever, and over thirty have taken the boats to Canada or America, though how many survive that arduous journey is hard to tell. Needless to say the rents cannot be collected, and yet the bank debts on the estate and the Poor Rate must still be paid.”

Later there was a brief reference to the religious revival sweeping through the South-West; John and Letitia were converted from the Church of Ireland and became Plymouth Brethren. Visits to Dublin were more frequent; in 1897 a final entry said,

My dear John has become increasingly certain that we must look for our salvation not by works on this Earth but through Faith in the life to come. He feels called upon to preach, that in watering others he may himself be watered. So we must leave this earthly paradise to our dear Henry to manage as best he can, while we go to preach the Gospel wherever we are called.

In the scrapbook are three crude drawings over the heading, ‘The prospect for Irish landlords’. Each shows a farmer in a tailcoat and billycock hat, saying to the landlord, in 1840, ‘Your Honour, there’s the rent’. In 1860, ‘I think there’s time enough’. In 1880, ‘Divil a penny I’ll pay’. Opposite the drawings there is a threatening letter on blue-lined paper:

Men of Dunkerron! Anyone who pays more than the Valuation is making his own grave and may expect six balls through the head. Resist the heavy-handed landlords. Ireland Unite! Ordered by Mr Parnell, our chief Adviser of Blood.

The Land League

James is shaken by the cuttings and the diaries. He had hoped to find an exoneration, evidence that John Burke had behaved in a way that had set him apart from and above his peers. Instead he discovers that his great-grandfather had behaved reasonably well, perhaps as well as a man in the grip of such forces could have behaved – but that was all. Not an absentee, not an evicter, not a Souper, but nothing more.

And James finds extraordinary the combination of genuine concern with the belief that the Famine was in some way deserved, or, in the Quakers’ words, ‘doubtless intended in wisdom for our good’. When James puts the papers back in their boxes, his ‘good landlord’ hopes are finally extinguished. And he marvels that the disaster of the Famine had turned his great-grandfather towards a God who was responsible for millions of Irish men, women and children dying of hunger and disease.

T
HREE
DAYS
OF
immersion in family papers and the horrors of the Great Famine are enough for James. He sends Anna a much redrafted letter, worrying about the beginning – Darling? My Dear? Dearest? – as much as the content. He feels like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy writing to a girl for the first time.

Dearest Anna,

I am sorry that my curiosity got the better of me on Tuesday.

I miss you. Let’s go away for a couple of days. Holy Island is within reach and might soothe both of us. I’ve hired a car for Thursday morning; if you want to come, I’ll be leaving the flat at about nine to catch the causeway tide.

Love,

James XXXX

He slips the letter under Jack Pearson’s door, not anticipating a reply, only half expecting Anna to appear on Thursday morning.

Anna does appear, carrying a small overnight bag. James is unable to control his broad smile; she smiles back and returns his hug and his kiss.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t your fault that I burdened you with all that baggage, and in the end I felt better for telling you. I’ve never been to Holy Island. And I need to get out of Allenmouth for a while. Zach’s followed me here – he’s staying with some of his born-again friends in a farmhouse on the Newcastle road.’

An early morning mist has burned away; the sky is blue and cloudless, the sea bright in the mid-May sunshine. They drive up the coast to the Holy Island causeway; the tide has turned and is coming in fast. On the causeway they pass a curious box on stilts fifteen feet above the sand.

‘What is it for?’ asks Anna.

‘It’s a refuge box, if you’re on foot and get trapped by the tide. The book says the road was built only in 1954; before that you had to follow the guide posts on foot.’

Their small hotel overlooks the harbour; James signs them in as Mr and Mrs Burke. Anna smiles when she sees this. Upstairs in their bedroom she says, ‘I’ve never been a Mrs before. Would they chuck us out if they thought we were living in sin?’

‘Not worth the risk. Hotels and guesthouses are the last bastion of sexual morality, especially in the North.’

Anna opens a drawer, empties her overnight bag into it and sits down in a wicker chair to watch James unpack. He lays out his ivory hairbrushes on top of the chest of drawers, puts his socks and pants in one drawer, his handkerchiefs in another, his shirts in a third.

‘Goodness, you are methodical; I see what you meant when you told me the army made you tidy.’

James looks sheepish. ‘I know, I know. It’s second nature to me, has been for thirty years. I still think I’m going to get an extra drill if my hairbrushes aren’t aligned.’

In the evening they walk down to St Cuthbert’s Island. The tide is out, and they take off their shoes and socks to make the crossing; the island is barely a hundred yards wide.

‘St Cuthbert used to come here to get away from the monastery. Otters would play around his feet when he waded in the sea,’ says James.

Anna walks over to the ruins of the old chapel. ‘No wonder Cuthbert thought this was a good place to meditate. I’m going to do half an hour’s yoga. Don’t wait.’

James watches as Anna sits down next to the island’s wooden cross. Then he crosses to the main island and looks back at Anna, sitting with her palms flat on the grass, her eyes closed, her breasts rising and falling as she breathes deeply.

They are on the island for three more days, days when the sky is cloudless and the sea blue. James finds living with Anna at close quarters infinitely better than her irregular visits to his Allenmouth flat. He loves watching her dress and undress, take a shower, asleep beside him in the early light; he loves knowing she will be there in the morning when they go to bed. It is a long time since he has shared a bedroom with a woman.

On their second day, James asks about visiting the Farne Islands, and the manager tells him that the boats leave from Seahouses further down the coast.

‘That’s miles away. Let’s go down to the harbour and see what we can find.’

The Holy Island harbour is smaller than Allenmouth, with three lobster boats tied up along the jetty. James asks each skipper in turn about the Farne Islands; the first two say no, the third is encouragingly doubtful.

‘I’d do it,’ he says. ‘But I can carry no more than three, and I need George to help me pull up the pots.’

‘I’ll be George; I’ve hauled pots before,’ says James. ‘And you can pay George to stay ashore.’

‘All right – but it’ll be twenty pound, mind. And a fiver for George.’

The boat is crowded with spare pots and smells of tar, diesel and fish. They motor two miles off the end of Holy Island and pick up a long line of lobster pots. One in five has a keepable lobster. James shows Anna where to hold a lobster while he puts a strong rubber band around each claw to stop them fighting in the tank.

At the Farnes they see puffins, arctic terns, guillemots, huge colonies of seals. A couple of porpoises accompany them on the return journey.

‘I’m impressed you know the names of so many birds. Seagulls are all you get in Newcastle.’

‘I’ve got the book and the binoculars.’

As they walk back to the hotel Anna says, ‘That’s what I like about you. I would have accepted the Seahouses story and given up. You believed it could be done from here and you were right. It’s not easy to persuade a Geordie fisherman.’

Inheriting Donhead from Great-Aunt Agnes came as a complete surprise to James. He had met her once or twice as a child; she had spent the previous twenty years in a home in Shaftesbury, suffering from dementia, and after one visit, when she had no idea who he was or why he had come to see her, he never went again. Donhead had belonged to her husband; although they had no children, it had always been assumed by James and by his father that everything would go to a nephew on John Fuller’s side of the family, a nephew who had cultivated his uncle and had become an MP in the European Parliament. So when James was summoned to Lincoln’s Inn for the reading of the will he expected to learn of a few Burke possessions that Agnes had felt should be his.

The will was brief. Donhead and its contents, and its deer park and eight hundred acres, and enough capital to provide a substantial income, and a flat in Westminster, were all left to James. George Fuller, the nephew, inherited a thousand pounds, some family pictures and a pair of cuff links.

‘Bloody hell,’ said George at the end of the session in Lincoln’s Inn. ‘That was my uncle’s house, his flat, his money. I thought the old girl would have had more family feeling.’

She did, but for my family, not yours, thought James. He had taken against George at their only previous meeting, when he had come to the Treasury to lobby James about the importance of reducing the level of inheritance tax on family estates.

‘Never mind, Sir George,’ said James. ‘You’ve got the baronetcy. Agnes couldn’t take that from you.’

Sir George muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘Fuck off,’ and left the room.

The inheritance didn’t change James’s character, or so he liked to believe, but it did change his way of life. He and Linda sold their small house at the unfashionable end of Fulham, and moved with the children to the country. James commuted from Donhead late on Sunday night and returned on Friday, while Linda immersed herself in Dorset life and indulged her passion for gardening on a grand scale. For both of them it was a translation into a different world, a world all the stranger because neither of them had ever imagined that they would live there.