The Woman from Kerry

In 1861, when our story begins, Ireland was ruled by Queen Victoria. Irish Members of Parliament went to London and represented all thirty-two counties. The internal divisions of Ireland were simply the ancient provinces, Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught which every schoolchild knew. The northern province of Ulster was made up of nine counties, Armagh, Down, Antrim, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan.

Throughout the period of our story most people in all four provinces spoke Irish, unless they had come from Scotland or England in the first place. Many Irish speakers from Donegal went to Scotland each year to help with the harvest. There they learnt a second language which they called Scotch, but we would call English.

The lough lay gleaming in the sunlight, its surface mirror calm. Not a breath of wind disturbed the stillness of the afternoon. No cart creaked on the stony track above the shore, no raven called from the mountainside. Close to the water’s edge, a swan swayed on its eggs and stood up. As it stretched it’s wings, minute ripples vibrated outwards from the tangled willow roots below the nest, running in ever-widening circles until they slapped noiselessly against a curving line of boulders.

For long minutes, stillness and silence reigned, as unusual in the length of this well-settled valley as the warm sunshine on such an early April day. Light glanced off new foliage, a column of midges rose and fell in the shadows beneath a gnarled hawthorn. Then came a sound to break the silence. A soothing, rhythmic sound, like the hum of bees around a hive. Flowing down the steep slope on the western side of the lake, the chant of children’s voices moved out over the water.

‘Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connaught. Ulster, Munster, Leinster Connaught.’

On a low ridge between the rough track that ran along the lower slopes of the mountain and the boggy margins of Lough Gartan, a school house had recently been completed. It was so new, the grey-green mosses that mantled the encircling trees had yet to find a foothold on its dressed stone walls or slated roof. For yards around, the bare feet of children had tramped the ground so hard and so smooth that no growing thing could find a purchase on the dark, packed earth.

‘Antrim, Armagh, Cavan … Derry, Donegal, Down … Fermanagh, Monaghan and Tyrone.’

The new refrain had more urgency, then stopped abruptly. A single peremptory voice rang out.

‘You boy, Lawn. Stand up, turn your back on the board. Now tell me the counties of Ulster.’

‘Donegal …’

‘Yes …’

As the pause lengthened the class shifted uneasily in their seats. A big, burly lad, a good hand with a spade or a slane, Danny Lawn was no scholar. He could barely write his name and he had no memory at all for names and places.

‘Yes, indeed, Lawn. It is quite fitting you should put our native county at the top of your list,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Now we should like the other eight counties in any order you care to choose.’

With his back turned away from the blackboard where the counties were inscribed in the Master’s copperplate, only three of Danny’s classmates remained visible. With the simple logic of smallest at the front, largest at the back, the Master’s seating arrangements left him looking directly at two boys, his own older brother, Larry with his desk mate, Kevin Friel and one girl, Mary, the older of the McGinley girls from Ardtur, who sat by herself across the narrow corridor separating the boys from the girls.

Danny looked desperately from Kevin to Mary, knowing full well his brother would never lift a finger to help him. Larry might be the eldest in the family, but Danny was his mother’s favourite. Larry could never forgive him for that.

Mary’s eyes were fixed on the Master’s face. She didn’t dare move her lips in case he’d catch her. When the Master narrowed his eyes and fixed them firmly on Danny’s hunched shoulders, she glanced across at Kevin, hoping he’d help Danny out.

‘Aaa,’ began Danny slowly, as he tried to read Kevin’s lips. But Kevin’s lips stopped moving the moment the Master stepped from behind his desk and strode down the narrow aisle.

As soon as the Master left his desk a small child in the front row moved cautiously in her seat and followed his retreating figure with dark, troubled eyes. Rose McGinley knew the Master disliked
Danny. It was not the first time he’d found an opportunity to disgrace him in front of the class.

Rose shivered. From where she sat she could see only the backs of Danny and the Master, but she could see her sister Mary, her face flat and expressionless, her eyes wide. She was frightened, she could see that quite clearly, though she’d never yet admitted it to her. She went on watching cautiously, perfectly aware that turning round could bring the Master’s wrath upon her if he was to glance behind him and catch her. None of the other children with whom she sat had dared take their eyes away from the blackboard.

‘Ah what, Lawn?’

‘I can’t mind, sur.’

‘Well, we’ll have to see if we can improve your memory, Lawn, won’t we? Sit down and stay sitting down,’ he barked, as he looked up at the clock. It was half past three exactly.

Seconds before he turned on his heel and strode back to his desk, she had swivelled round again and was sitting perfectly still, her hands folded, her eyes firmly fixed on the counties of Ulster as if they had never strayed for one moment.

‘On your feet, up.’

In a single practised motion the class rose, repeated a lengthy Irish prayer, said ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ collected their few possessions and filed out without a word, the back rows leading
the way. Not a soul spoke even as they turned away towards their homes. They knew better. The Master’s ear was sharp. As they moved towards the scattered clusters of cottages that lay between the track and the mountainside, the swish of the cane and Danny’s muffled grunts were the only sounds to be heard.

By the time Rose emerged into the sunlight her sister was well ahead of her, walking quickly along the track, her head down, her practised eye picking out the worn boulders and humps of grass kinder to bare feet than the rock the winter frosts had splintered. She dawdled, looking around her and kept an eye on Mary’s purposeful stride.

Before and after school each day, Mary visited her father’s aunt, an old woman, strong in spirit, but unable to walk more than a few steps. Without her help there’d be no water from the well, no turf for the fire and no potatoes for the evening meal.

Moving slowly along the track behind her, Rose was surprised she hadn’t looked back. Usually she stopped as soon she was out of range of the Master and waited for Rose to catch up with her. Today she hadn’t paused. Rose glanced at her brothers as they ran past, walked a little more quickly as if she were following Mary, then slowed down again as soon as they were gone, her eyes darting from side to side of the rough track. Away ahead of her now, Mary strode on, wrapped in her own thoughts.

As she watched her sister’s retreating figure, her long-lashed dark eyes grew bright with excitement. As the last of her school fellows dispersed and Mary moved out of sight, she stopped dawdling, shot across the empty track, climbed nimbly over the ditch and crept along it till she reached the thread of path that ran between the grain and potato patches surrounding the small cluster of houses known as Ardtur.

Not yet eight years old, Rose was a fragile-looking child with pale skin and a mass of black, wavy hair. She carried no satchel, for only the oldest scholars were trusted with the National School’s battered reading books. Dressed in a worn shift, she moved with quick, light steps, her excitement growing as she made her way through rough, marshy ground and headed for the piles of boulders that marked the foot of the steeper slopes ahead.

They were much further off than she imagined, but she hurried on, thrilled by her good fortune and determined to get out of sight before anyone could call her back. Minutes later, she scrambled triumphantly through the tumbled remains of an old wall built from the stones dug out of the tiny fields that now lay behind her. She glanced behind her and hugged herself in glee. There was no sign of Mary or of anyone else.

She had never been so far from home by herself. Sometimes her mother took her for walks down by
the lough or up the hillside beyond Aunt Mary’s small, dilapidated cabin, but she’d never been on the mountain before. Though she’d looked up at it every day for as long as she could remember, this was the first time she’d set foot on its worn and craggy slopes.

The bare patches of rock were easy on the feet, but the wiry stumps of burnt heather were best avoided. Here and there, tangles of briar had dropped dry, thorny twigs among the fresh shoots of bracken. She tramped on one, twisted her face in pain and stopped to pull out the thorns. After that, she moved more cautiously, her eyes no longer fixed upon the crest of the mountain’s long shoulder, until now the boundary of her world.

Despite the tiny breeze she met as she climbed higher, she was soon damp with perspiration, her face prickled with heat. She paused for a moment, wiped her forehead with one slender arm and stood listening. If there’d been rain at all in the last few days, the narrow gullies seaming the mountainside would be tumbling with water. She could make a cup with her hands and have a drink and splash water on her face to cool it.

The thought of it filled her with longing. She could almost feel the water sliding down her parched throat and the coolness on her hot cheeks, but there’d been no rain for over a week. Her only hope was a spring. She looked around her, but saw
no sign of one. All those she knew came out low down, at the bottom of a hill or under a hedge bank.

She kept going, the cool breeze encouraging her as she climbed. Then she heard a call. It must be a bird, she thought. But when it came again, it sounded too like her own name to be a bird. She stopped and looked behind her. She was amazed at how far she’d come, the whole valley now spread before her. There was no one in sight on the slopes below or in the fields beyond.

She picked out the roof of her own house. Standing a little higher than those of their neighbours, it had pale gold streaks in the weathered thatch where her father mended it last autumn, then the roof of the school glinting in the sunlight. A little way from the gable end, a sapling with fat, grey-white buds raised its thin branches to the sky.

The day the school was opened, a man in a uniform had planted it. He was a nice man with a wife in a long dress and a big hat. He’d smiled at them and made a speech most of the scholars couldn’t understand, because they only had Irish. But she did because her mother had the Scotch. He’d said he was sorry it would be a bit too soon for them to benefit themselves, but he hoped his tree would give apples to their children and their children’s children.

The call came again. Startled this time, she turned abruptly from the green and sunlit prospect
below to the bare rocky slopes of the mountainside. She shivered. The voice was above and ahead of her. Uneasy now, she searched for signs of movement, but nothing stirred in the stillness, neither bird nor animal.

Could it be a banshee? she asked herself. She wasn’t entirely sure what a banshee was, but she knew it was a bad omen if you saw or heard it. Most people said it’s cry was a sure sign of a coming death. Others said the banshee itself was death to travellers, it’s human voice leading them to their doom in bog or quicksand, over cliffs or precipices.

She paused, uncertain what to do. Aunt Mary said you couldn’t be too careful when you were dealing with the Other World, but you must always try not to give offence. She would do as Aunt Mary did. She crossed herself quickly, said a prayer to the Blessed Virgin, and continued her climb.

‘Where in the name of goodness are ye goin’ Rose. Are ye lost?’

She leapt backwards and nearly fell over.

‘No, I am
not
,’ she replied crossly, as she gathered herself up.

Owen Friel was leaning back in the shade of an overhanging rock, his worn, peat-stained shirt and trousers as dark as the rock itself.

‘An’ what are ye doin’ here yerself?’ she came back at him. ‘Ye weren’t at school. They’ll come after ye.’

‘Na.’

He shook his head dismissively and went on looking out over the valley below. ‘I’m near the age to go. Da says they’ll not trouble to come away up from Letterkenny. He’s workin’ on the new drains above Warrenstown. I brought him up a can o’ tea a while back.’

Owen lived further up the valley in the same cluster of cabins as Aunt Mary. She’d seldom seen him at school, but when he did appear he sat silent, looking out the window whenever the Master took his eyes off him. He moved to one side and made room for her to sit beside him on a slab of smooth rock. Her legs already aching, she dropped down gratefully.

‘Does yer ma know yer out?’ he asked without taking his eyes away from the prospect below.

‘No. She had to go over to Termon to get paid.’

He stared at her, puzzled.

‘What put the mountain in yer head, Rose? It’s no place for a wee girl. Ye might have hurt yerself,’ he said, kindly enough.

She was about to protest that she wasn’t ‘a wee girl’, but then she saw he wasn’t teasing her. And she was wee, it was true. In the row under the Master’s desk, she sat with the five and six year olds and she was nearly eight.

‘I wanted to see the other side of the mountain.’

‘What for?’

He sat quite still, a look of amazement on his face.

‘To see where the landlord’s goin’ to build his castle.’

‘Landlord’, he repeated carefully. ‘What’s that?’

She frowned and shook her head. She’d done it again. She kept forgetting that if she used her mother’s words no one would understand except her brothers and sisters and the tinkers who came to sharpen tools and mend pots.

‘Tiarna,’ she said quickly, ‘the man Adair they talk about every night when the neighbours come in.’

‘Has your father the Scotch then?’

‘He has, but not much. Only what harvesters have. But my mother has it. She always says she has very little Irish.’

‘Is she from Tullaghobegley then?’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Over beyond,’ he said vaguely, waving his arm towards the north. ‘My father once got work with a man there. He says there’s a whole lot o’ them speaks the Scotch all the time. He tried to pick it up, but he wasn’t there long enough.’

‘My mother’s from Scotland itself,’ she said proudly. ‘Her father had a farm and a house with six rooms and a byre and a stable. My Da went to harvest two years in a row and the third year she came back with him. She’s told me all about
Scotland. She lived in a place called Galloway.’

Owen looked thoughtful as he took in this information. He had never heard of Galloway, nor had he ever known anyone who lived in a house with six rooms. Of course, she might be making it up. Children were always making up stories. But it wasn’t very likely she could make up words he couldn’t understand. And her such a wee scrap of a thing.