Tag: england

In Turbulent Times

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…no doubt hoping that the audience might have been larger. Denied by religious difference the pleasure of verbally crucifying Liam in front of his congregation in church, the Reverend MacNevin had decided to get compensating satisfaction by birching him in the barber’s shop. Unfortunately for the Reverend MacNevin only the barber was present. The other chairs were empty. Jackie Harrison’s assistant came in from Carraghlin only on Friday evening and Saturday.
‘I would have preferred not to inform you of this highly distasteful matter, Mr Dooley,’ the minister went on disingenuously, ‘but the act was witnessed inadvertently by two teenaged boys, one of whom happens to be my son. They went to collect waste paper at your house and it so transpired that they caught sight of the adulterers through your kitchen window. Fornicating on the floor. On the floor, I repeat. In their lustful passion they could not even wait to go to bed. I have extracted a promise from my son that there shall be no spreading of this unseemly scandal on his part, and he has endeavoured to extract a similar promise from his companion. But I fear the damage may already have been done. You can, of course, imagine the effect that such a sordid narrative must have on the imagination of adolescents. And what kind of an example does it present to them? The schoolmaster’s wife and an officer of the Royal Navy. By the greatest of good fortune, your wife is no longer a teacher at your school. You showed commendable prudence, Mr Dooley, in removing her from that position of responsibility. But I shudder to think what she might have been instrumental in instilling in the minds of her charges while she was so employed. That is why I have made it my painful duty to draw your wife’s gross indecency to your notice. It cannot be allowed to happen again. Furthermore, as a moral lesson to the young people of this village, it cannot be permitted to go unpunished. The very least you can do, Mr Dooley, is to forbid your wife ever to be seen in public with Joseph Carney again. What further steps you take to ensure that your wife does not repeat such immorality is, of course, up to you. I should think, however, that in view of the house from which she comes, such immorality and gross misconduct are indelible aspects of her character. Good day to you, Mr Dooley. And to you, Mr Harrison.’
With that the Reverend Lucas MacNevin, touching his hat to the two men, abruptly left the barber’s.
Jackie Harrison turned to finish the cutting of Liam’s hair. ‘None of this will go any further than these four walls, Liam,’ he promised.
But Liam did not hear what the barber said and would not have believed him if he had.

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The Unquiet Land

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…lack of ambition contrasted remarkably with that of Clifford Hamilton who had different aims on human brains. Yet when Caitlin thought about it, she could not avoid the conclusion that maybe Liam’s desire to fill young brains with learning was more worthy, if less prestigious, than Clifford Hamilton’s desire to open them up for medical probing. She admired Liam all the more for his altruism. He was indeed a true disciple of his idol, Father Padraig.
Beyond the school the pebble-dashed, two-storey rectory stood back a bit from the lane. Lamplight shone through the window of Padraig’s room upstairs; the rest of the house was in darkness. Padraig shared the rectory with Father Donagh Costello, the priest of the neighbouring parish “over the bridge” in Aughnashannagh. The pious widow, Brid O’Flaherty, lived in the same house as servant and cook to the two parish priests.
Caitlin paused outside the rectory, then passed by and climbed the rough-cut steps to the church. Aligned along the ridge, Our Lady Star of the Sea church occupied a spread of flat ground covered with the same beach-pebbles as the footpath from the road. Caitlin paused in the doorway at the west end of the church, stayed for a moment by the clarity and peace of the evening. She gazed out over the gravestones and the grass to the errant line of the cliff-top. Dark grey was the sea beyond, and blue the sky above. The blueness of the sky paled to limpid opalescence where the sun had set. No sound. No movement. Only a shiver in the short grass where the breeze blew across it. Inland the evening shadows darkened the purple hills, the green fields, the grey stone walls, the yellow flowers of spreading whins. Lights in farmhouse windows twinkled like stars. Thin twines of smoke uncoiled from cottage chimneys.
Caitlin felt a surge of joy within her. No-one knows how much I love this land, she thought.
She opened the church door with a click of the latch and closed it gently behind her. The hush of the evening out of doors deepened between the white walls and the dark, varnished roof-beams of the church. Three small windows high up along each wall admitted light by day but they were gloomy now. Below each window a picture hung. Padraig had told Caitlin their stories. Along the right-hand wall that overlooked the sea the first picture showed Jesus calling the disciples Andrew and John as they worked at their nets by the shore; the second showed Him in a crowded boat ordering the stormy waters to be calm; and the third showed Him walking upon the sea, holding an outstretched hand to Peter. Along the opposite wall the first picture was of Jesus pulling ears of corn as He walked through a field with…

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In Turbulent Times

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‘You’re too smart for them, Joe.’ Michael gulped a mouthful of tea that was still quite warm. ‘Your mother says you’ve been in America.’
‘Yes. I did a bit of travelling there.’
‘Must be a great country.’
‘Yes, it is. I loved what I saw of it. I told Nora that I was going to live in the States when the war was over.’
‘That’ll prepare her,’ Caitlin said in a heavy voice.
‘So you’re going to become a Yank, Joe?’ Michael said.
‘I think so.
‘Good for you. That’s where the future is, I’d say.’
‘Yes,’ Joe agreed. ‘That’s where the future is. In fact I’d say the future was already there.’
‘Grab your share of it, Joe. And good luck to you, son.’
҂
Nora waited anxiously as the days passed. She hoped heart and soul, more fervently than she had ever hoped for anything, that Joe had made her pregnant. She even prayed for it in church, pleading with God, who had robbed her of so much, to grant her this one compensating favour. And then she remembered that God did not reward sin but punished it. Would He punish her? Could He, who had already punished her so cruelly, continue to show only heartless vindictive ness towards her? The time of the month, as Nora reckoned it, had been most propitious for conception. The occasion itself, so beautiful, so transcendental, so highly infused with the passion of pure and overpowering love, could not have been other than providential. If she never had another possession in her life, Nora wanted Joe’s child with a ferocity that almost choked her.
‘If I can’t have him,’ she prayed, ‘allow me to have his son or his daughter, to love and care for as I would have loved and cared for Joe himself. Oh God Almighty, harden not Your heart this time. Wipe from Your mind all memory of the wrong we did to attain this end and give to our undying love, so true that only You could have inspired it, the divine consummation it deserves.’
Nora was tense, anxious, irritable and easily upset. She had a violent row with her mother that began with a purely innocent and casual remark from Caitlin about Owen Joe’s being too warmly dressed.
‘You’re one to be giving advice about looking after babies,’ Nora shouted heartlessly. ‘I’m surprised your incompetence as a mother didn’t kill me.’

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The Unquiet Land

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Caitlin has repented. She has accepted God and Christ. She came to me of her own free will, Finn. Jesus Himself said that ‘there shall be joy in heaven upon one sinner that doth penance, more than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance.’”
“This house is no church, Padraig,” Finn said. “You needn’t preach a sermon. Joy there might be in your airy, fairy-story heaven, but your soul-saving here brings nothing but sorrow and sickness and ill-will.”
Padraig made as if to object, but Finn would not stop in his bull’s rush. “Caitlin has become a nervous and sickly wreck. Ask Jinnie there. She’ll tell you. A strong, healthy, independent, life-loving girl reduced to a headachy, lack-lustre prissy. Is that one of your miracles? Is that the kind of transformation that makes you proud and causes joy in heaven? Damn your miracles. Damn your pride and your heavenly joy. And damn you too, Padraig. Damn you for your treachery; your baseness; your snivelling, spineless, milk-and-water cowardice.”
Finn was shouting in a passionate rage. Anger had possessed him, and he did not pause to think of what he was saying. Mother Ross had not believed him capable of such anger, and with Padraig above all. She left lying on the kitchen table the bread she had buttered for the priest and slipped unnoticed into the scullery. She stood in front of the sink, holding tightly to the rim of it, unable to do anything, while Finn’s lashing tongue continued to scourge Padraig in the kitchen.
“You would not love Caitlin like a man. You would not take her as a man would when she offered herself to you. She was too much of a red-blooded woman for your puling sanctity. So now you are trying to water her down to your own thin gruel. You cannot marry her and so you want to make a mincing virgin out of her. A useless nun. A body of dry bones and shrivelled veins and a mind as free and lively as a clod of clay. Damn you, Padraig, I say again. Damn you, damn you, damn you.”
Finn’s loud shouting died to a hoarse whisper, but the fierce anger flashed from his eyes and glowered in the dark cloud of his haggard face. He seemed to be struggling to overcome a powerful desire to vent his anger physically on Padraig’s thin, milk-white body. He was obviously having difficulty in bringing himself under control. Then in a somewhat calmer voice he said, “You have destroyed Caitlin’s happiness with your missionary mumbo-jumbo. You and your type are not concerned about human happiness, but human ‘salvation’—whatever that unfortunate word might mean. Salvation from what? Salvation for what?”

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In Turbulent Times

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…about his belief that there were two St Patricks. He has historical evidence that he says supports his theory. He won’t be home till tomorrow evening.’
Joe turned his head away from her in indecision and stared into the red-hot heart of the fire in the range.
‘Joe, I want to have your baby.’
His head jerked round, and he looked at her with confused incredulity in his eyes, unsure of himself. ‘Nora, think of Liam, your husband.’
‘Why must you be always so considerate of others, Joe?’ Nora asked. ‘Think of me now. I love you. I want to have your baby. I want something that is yours to hold on to and to cherish for the rest of my life, something that is part of you and part of me that will be a living memorial of our love. Please, Joe. I need this.’
He placed an open palm on each side of her face and looked into her deep, dark eyes where tears glimmered like raindrops on a leaf. He knew that what she was asking him to do was sinful, and part of him recoiled from it. But his moral reluctance was brushed aside by the strong, sexual urges of a twenty-nine- year-old male, more especially of a male who spent most of his time at sea. ‘All right, I’ll stay,’ he said quietly and kissed her on the forehead.
‘I’ll put Owen Joe in his cot and wet a pot of tea,’ Nora said. ‘You can sample the barmbrack I baked this afternoon. We even have home-churned butter to put on it. A gift from Janet’s mother.’
They sat quietly by the fire, Joe in the rocking chair, Nora at his feet, her back against his legs, a book open in her hands. Upstairs the baby slept in the cot at the foot of Nora and Liam’s bed. Outside, the sky was still bright, the setting of the sun delayed by the manipulation of the British war-time summer clock. The limpid blue of the daytime sky was gently suffused with a pale golden glow that spread from the west. A couple of early stars glittered in the east, and Venus shone with a steady gleam in the wake of the lowering sun.
‘You’re going to read me a bedtime story, are you?’ Joe gently stroked Nora’s soft black hair.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to read to me.’
‘You do, do you?’ Joe said lightly. ‘What have you got there?’ He took the open book that Nora reached to him and flicked the cover over. ‘J.M. Synge.’
‘Yes. Poor Synge,’ Nora said sadly. ‘He was thirty-five when he fell in love with a girl of nineteen, an actress called Molly All good, the daughter of a “Dour Orangeman” who objected to his children’s being brought up…

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The Unquiet Land

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the good life of the gentry kept her there, an eccentric about whom stories would be told long after her name was forgotten. Her son Finn, her fifth of six children, inherited his mother’s love of the mountains and the sea. The sea, however, is faithless and fickle and given to unpredictable outbursts of savagely bad temper. One Friday in January 1854, a large fishing fleet set sail from Carraghlin harbour in fine, sunny conditions. But some hours later those benign conditions changed dramatically, the tranquil sea turned tempestuous, and the fleet was storm-tossed in gales and driving snow. Thirty-six Carraghlin fishermen perished. Among them were Finn MacLir’s twin brothers. The date was Friday, the thirteenth.
That same year, 1854, Finn himself was a sailor on board the tea clipper, Gypsy Lady. Having crossed the South China Sea from the ancient walled city of Fuzhou with a full load of the first tea of the season, the clipper ship caught fire on the thirtieth of May in the Sunda Strait, off the coast of Indonesia. Aware that his crew were unable to control the raging fire, the captain took the decision to sink the fast, sleek ship. Some of the crew, including Finn MacLir, scuttled her by cutting holes on the waterline, and she sank in seventy-three feet of water.
Finn swashed through a life of Conradian adventures till 1880. Then the Land League, a political organisation founded in County Mayo in 1878 with the aim of helping poor tenant farmers to win back “the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland,” embarked on a campaign of violence across the ravaged countryside. The principal aim of the Land League was to abolish landlordism in Ireland so as to enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. So began the so-called Land War. Tenants refused to pay their rents, resisted evictions, attacked land agents. English-owned farms were burned, animals killed or maimed, haystacks set ablaze, the English owners set on like curs. The land-owning MacLir family, close friends of the land-usurping Hamiltons, was targeted. In one bleak October night old Brigadier Richard Hamilton was brutally butchered in his bed, and Finn’s father and older brother were locked in the barn behind their large house, and the hay-filled barn was set on fire. Bullets from the hill above kept any would-be rescuers away until the blazing barn collapsed in on itself and on the two hapless men within.
When his father and brother were murdered during the Land War disturbances, and both his sisters had married and moved to England with their husbands, Finn MacLir returned to Corrymore and took over the farm. He stayed on in the village, out of defiance, according to some;

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In Turbulent Times

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…cheeks, his thin body and skinny legs with the handsome face and wavy hair, the strong, muscular physique of the young sailor in his dark uniform with the shiny gold buttons and the Chief Petty Officer’s cap. He knew then that Nora Carrick was his wife and not Joe Carney’s only because of a cruel intervention of Fate on his behalf. They were two young victims of a Greek-like tragedy. And yet he could not conceive of ever giving her up. She was his by God’s will, and He must have ordained it so for His own purposes. She was his too by legal right, and no one would ever take her away. Even though he knew she loved him very little, if at all, he himself would never be but deeply devoted to her, as much in love with her as she with the sailor who sat facing her across the table.
In early June, almost two weeks before the expected date, Nora’s first child was born.
I’m afraid that little Owen Joe, your godson, is not a very handsome little man. He most certainly does not take after his godfather. God forgive me, Joe, but he is the image of Liam. He has a little old face and a bald head. His feet and hands are much too long for the size of his little body. I think he’s going to be tall and lean like Liam. But he’s a sweet-natured little thing, smiles all the time and rarely cries. I love him, Joe. I give him all the attention I can lavish on him. He is my rescuer from insanity, for he distracts me from dwelling morbidly on the sadness of what might have been, a tendency I had developed near the end of my pregnancy and which was pulling me down like a weight around my ankles, deeper and deeper into a depression that might have driven me mad.
Fortunately I escaped what they call the post-partum depression. I was strongly expecting to give in to those ‘after-birth blues’ because my mother, surprisingly enough, suffered from them badly after my own birth. But I escaped. Thanks to little Owen Joe himself. Thanks to that long, lovely letter I received from you. You will never know how much your letters mean to me. They keep open a life-line of hope, something I can hold on to in the knowledge and assurance that you love me still in spite of everything. Oh Joe, I have such sinful thoughts about Liam sometimes. I can’t stop them coming into my head and I try to dismiss them immediately, but as long as they are in my mind I enjoy the prospects that they open up. It is very sinful of me, Joe. I know it is. But I cannot help it.
Liam himself has started reading up on diet and nutrition, on health and exercise and all that stuff. I saw him reading a book the other day called How To Survive Middle Age. Now he walks for an hour every day and does exercises when he gets up in the morning. He has cut down on his cups of tea and what he does drink has to be only half strength and without milk or sugar. His change of diet is a big help to…

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The Unquiet Land

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…that rumour either—in fact Caitlin thought she would more quickly believe the other—and she was annoyed that Caitlin might be about to ridicule religion as she had ridiculed Padraig.
“No, it doesn’t make me laugh,” Caitlin said earnestly. “It happens to be true. I’m joining the Church.”
Nora turned and looked in disbelief at Caitlin. Her face showed her astonishment, but as the truth of Caitlin’s words became apparent, Nora broke into a radiant smile, and her eyes lit up with a joy such as Caitlin had never seen before.
“Oh Caitlin,” Nora cried, grasping Caitlin by the shoulders and staring into her eyes in rapture. “I can’t believe it has happened. I’ve so much longed and prayed for this day.” She leaned toward Caitlin and hugged her tightly as tears glimmered in her eyes. She straightened up, dropped her hands into the lap of her pink summer dress and asked, “When did you reach this momentous decision?”
“It’s something that developed gradually and not without a lot of heart-searching,” Caitlin said. “I think it was Joe-Joe Carney’s illness that started it.”
Nora looked serious again. “That incident with young Joe-Joe did Padraig a lot of good in the village. He needed that miracle badly. A lot of people were not at all happy about Padraig coming back among them as their priest and confessor. They remembered his background and they didn’t trust him.” Nora paused and glanced awkwardly at her hands. “You won’t be angry if I say something personal?”
“No.”
“These latest rumours of an affair between you and him are destroying all the goodwill Padraig earned from Joe-Joe’s recovery. People are saying unkind things about him again and gaining credence. You have to let it be known what’s happening, Caitlin. For Padraig’s sake.”
“Another miracle for the Father,” Caitlin said with an edge of sarcasm. “Very well, Nora, you have my permission, as not just my twin sister, but as my closest friend in this village of spite and vindictiveness, to broadcast the truth. Caitlin MacLir has accepted the One True Faith.”
“Does Daddy know?”
“I haven’t actually told him in so many words,” Caitlin replied, while a guilty shadow flittered across her face. “But he knows.”
“Or just suspects.”
“No. I believe he knows what’s going on.”

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In Turbulent Times

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Those who went to the house swore it had never been cleaned since Maggie’s mother was alive. It seemed that Maggie lived, ate, slept and washed in only one room. All the other rooms were packed to overflowing with the accumulated belongings and unsorted junk of at least two generations of Potters. In several corners in the house stood unemptied buckets of Maggie’s excrement and urine which neighbours said she used as fertiliser in her garden. Even more remarkable were the envelopes and canisters and small cardboard boxes filled with money—more than four thousand pounds in all—that passed to a man in the city, a nephew, it was said, who had never ever been to see his aunt in all the years that anyone in the village could remember. Old Rachel Dunn, Willy’s arthritic mother, was still alive in a nursing home in Ardross, a helpless cripple, clinging tenaciously to life at the age of eighty-seven.
Into Maggie Potter’s ill-starred house Liam and Nora moved in the first week of January 1943 when all the country could talk about was the rout of the German forces at Stalingrad. But Nora’s mind dwelled not on the frozen snows of Russia nor on the hot desert sands, where Tom Carney was fighting, but on the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic where the German submarine wolf-packs prowled: grim, determined, unseen predators of the convoys from America. Joe Carney was among the prey, and Nora feared for his life. She wrote to him almost every week, giving him all the gossip from the village and keeping to herself her misery and her cherished memories.
They’ve actually made a good job of fixing up the house and painting and decorating it. I never thought that Maggie Potter’s place could look so clean and trim. Even the outside walls have been whitewashed and the doors and window frames painted the usual dark green. As in the old schoolhouse, we have a kitchen and a scullery and a sitting room downstairs, two bedrooms and a box room upstairs, and a view of the sea from the back. The sea is pale blue and grey today and sparkling where the sun is shining on it. I used to love the sea but now I hate it for separating us and threatening you with so much danger. And yet I still love to walk along the shore and watch the endless convoy of waves reach the rocks and shingle and break there and whisper to me with their parting breath that they have seen your ship on their way across the ocean and that you are well and send your love.
Later that day, for the first time since she had written to Joe to tell him of her pending marriage to Liam Dooley, Nora mentioned in her letter that she was unhappy.

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The Unquiet Land

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Now Caitlin too was becoming angry, her face flushed. “Padraig has never wanted me. You do him a great injustice. He only wants to see me married to you. Until then there can be no more sinning.” She felt her anger subside like a guttering candle. She held her hands out to Michael, enticing him to come close to her again.
He did. He took her hands in his and gazed into her eyes with a mix of love, disappointment and confusion.
“You know I’m going to church again, Michael,” Caitlin said gently, soothingly. “I am a baptized Catholic. Father Riordan baptized me and Nora when we were born and my mother died. He was afraid that we might die too. Unbaptized. And be put in a sack in a hole behind Killyshannagh Chapel.”
“Finn MacLir would never have allowed that,” Michael said. “He would have seen you buried properly. Along with your poor mother.”
“My father was too distraught to know what was going on,” Caitlin said. “Una Slattery, when we were very little, used to take us to church when my father was at the fishing.”
“Do you realise how much you have abused your father’s trust, Caitlin?”
“I never did,” Caitlin protested. “I was a new-born baby when I was baptized. I was a little child when Una took us to church. You’re right though. These things were done without my father’s knowledge or consent, but don’t blame me or Nora.”
Michael remained dubious, his simple heart troubled. Though he knew that Caitlin and Nora were not to blame, he still felt that Finn MacLir had been cheated by others. But he could not put his feelings into words.
“Be that as it may, Michael,” Caitlin continued, “before I could receive Communion I had to go to Confession. I had to tell Padraig everything. Everything about us, Michael.”
“Does this mean, Caitlin,” Michael began awkwardly, yet with a heart-stopping surge of hope, “does this mean that you are going to marry me?”
“Yes, of course, I am going to marry you, Michael. You know I am. I love you.”
“When, Caitlin? When will we be married?”
“Soon. It takes a lot of planning.”
Caitlin’s answer sounded evasive to Michael. Hope dropped from him like a rock from a wall. Suspicion filled the hole it left. He lowered his eyes and half turned to walk away. “Whenever you are ready, Caitlin,” he said, his voice charged with controlled anger, “come and let me know.

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