Authors: Kate Kerrigan
Chapter Three
Aileen patted the last of the seaweed down on top of the compost where she had planted the seeds from the pods that she had found on the beach. Then she carefully placed the shallow tray between the vegetable bed and the low stone wall where it would get maximum shelter. What would happen to these strange seeds in the next three months? What would they grow into, and how would
she
have altered when she came back to claim them?
Aileen felt that she had been waiting for this moment all her life; at sixteen, she was finally leaving Illaunmor.
Although they would all be coming back in three months’ time, the young girl knew her first trip away from the island would change everything. Her oldest brother, Paddy Junior, had left for his first summer in Scotland as a boy of fourteen and come back a man with hair on his arms and a voice as deep as a holy well. As the youngest, and the only girl, everyone in the house had always treated Aileen like a child. By working in the world and earning money, she would be making the transition from girl to young woman.
That night, Aileen went into the bedroom and crawled in between her two brothers’ warm bodies. Familiar with the rigours of the journey they were facing the next day, Paddy Junior and
Martin were already asleep, but Aileen was too excited to close her eyes.
She looked up at the soot-blackened ceiling as clouds of her brothers’ warm breath wafted past her in the chilly spring night and thought how tomorrow she would be leaving for somewhere else, somewhere beyond Illaunmor – to enter a world so thrilling it was beyond her imagination.
The young woman lay awake for all of the night, her stomach twisting with excitement, her toes curling, waiting until it was time to get up, dressed and spend the day doing her chores before she and the Doherty men left for the night train at dusk.
The family spent the day leaving the house in good order for her mother – doing the heavy work that needed to be done before they left. The men dug out the vegetable field, stacked the turf in neat piles by the back door and cleared out the chimney, while Aileen swept and scrubbed the stone floors, washed and hung out the sheets to dry – jobs done willingly because she knew the repetitive boredom of this household drudgery would soon be behind her.
Now that this reality was upon her, Aileen suddenly had a pang of fear. This house and the patch of land that ran down to the road were all she knew. What would happen to her vegetable patch while she was away? Would her mother remember to keep the herbs trimmed back? Would she bother to plant out the carrots to be ready for the end of summer when they got back? Aileen put childish worries about her precious garden out of her mind and looked around the cottage. Although she knew she would be back in a few months, she was anxious that she had never eaten a meal, or lit a fire, or swept a floor in any place other than this house. It was all so familiar; she knew every inch, every detail. The long wooden table with a dip in the centre where it had been scrubbed down by generations of
Doherty women; the dresser against the corner wall with the good blue and white china jug and teapot they were never allowed to touch; the picture of the Sacred Heart above the fire mantel – his forlorn face streaked with turf dust – and the pot oven where Aileen had burned her first loaf of bread aged ten. On the hook by the fire was the grey and green pinafore her mother had ingeniously made for her from an old woollen blanket three years ago. She loved that pinafore and wore it doing all her chores. Aileen washed it every month, scrubbing it extra hard on the washboard and using a cupful of the expensive soapsuds her mother had hidden under the sink, instead of the cheaper bar of carbolic they used for everything else. The wool was thin and soft as silk now, and Aileen had planned to bring it with her, but last night, her father had said it would be too bulky to carry: ‘We must travel light, Aileen, and besides, picking potatoes is warm work – you’ll be roasted alive in that thing.’
Aileen resigned herself to leaving her apron behind, even though she sensed her mother wanted her to bring it to Scotland – perhaps as a talisman. The fact that Aileen was going meant that her mother would be left alone on the island for three long months. Aileen felt guilty about that, especially as she felt, more and more with each passing year, less inclined towards her mother’s company.
Their neighbour John Joe was waiting outside to bring them down to the bridge to meet the rest of the squad. From there they would walk to the station to catch the overnight train to Dublin Port, then the boat the following morning.
With the sun low in the sky and the air cooled, the moment had come to leave. Her father was calling for her to get into the cart, her brothers complaining John Joe’s horse was getting antsy (John Joe was too quiet a man to complain for himself), but Aileen had begun to feel giddy and faint. She had not eaten
a spoonful of food all day – despite her mother putting the last of the sugar on her oatmeal for her – and her excitement had turned into a kind of sickness.
‘Did you pack your rosary?’ Aileen’s mother was fussing over her, but the young islander was too excited to care. ‘Here they are.’ Anne picked her pink glass beads up from the dresser where they were always left and put them round her daughter’s neck, tucking them inside her geansaí and buttoning up her coat for her. ‘There now, child,’ she said, and kissed her. ‘Small wonder you look so pale and wanting leaving these behind.’
In that moment Aileen felt so tired that she just wanted to lie down on the settle and have her mother put a woollen blanket over her and sing her to sleep.
‘Pray to her every morning and night, Aileen, and the Blessed Virgin will keep you safe.’
‘For the love of God, woman, hurry up!’ Paddy was anxious to get going.
Both women turned towards the doorway. The house faced east to the Atlantic, and as the sun was lowering in the sky, it suddenly sent a shaft of deep orange light piercing through the open door that was so strong it seemed to trap them inside with its warm intensity. It appeared to Aileen, in her overtired state, that the outside world was on fire.
‘I’ve changed my mind. I want to stay here.’
Anne took her daughter’s face in both her hands, and using her thumbs to stroke back some strands of auburn that had escaped from her side plaits, she smiled gently and said, ‘Whist, my girl, you’ll be fine – and back before you know it. Now go.’
Then she prodded her gently out through the door. Aileen held out her hands for Martin to pull her up onto the cart, and even as her feet left the ground, steadying themselves on the wooden step, she felt the excitement of the past few days returning.
They trundled down along the stony boreen towards the road and Aileen looked back at her family home. Her mother was standing by the door waving them off. They would be home in three months, when the summer that was just about to start was all but ended. One season, yet it seemed like a lifetime.
Chapter Four
One season tattie-hoking in Scotland would guarantee the Walshes enough money to buy into Tom’s Galway hooker and young Jimmy desperately wanted in on that boat.
One day out in it was all he had needed. The speed of it! The sturdiness! On a good day, the currach would take you a mile out to sea. If God was kind and the nets were good, you’d come straight back in. If not, you could be drifting around in small helpless circles and return empty-handed. The hooker would take you as far out as you could go – until you found the fish yourself – then hold you there until you carried in such a haul you’d have to go to Galway itself to find a trader big enough to buy it from you. ‘You’d never have a bad day’s fishing in a hooker,’ he told his father. If you wanted, she could carry you as far as Dublin. Jimmy, invincible as he was, thought perhaps he could drive the beauty all the way to England and back again. America maybe! There was even a cabin with a bed on board. It was like a house! A man could live in a boat like that and adventure all round the world. He didn’t say that to his father, but nonetheless Sean had not taken much convincing that the hooker was the way forward for them as a family of fishermen. ‘I can handle it easy, and we could fish the whole coastline, Da. We’d never be short a load again.’
Jimmy was restless. Sean could see that his feisty son was not going to be content with life as a small currach fisherman. It was a miracle he was still here with them at nineteen, that he had not gone to England seeking adventure. A new boat would mean his son could be off down along the coast catching and selling fish in Galway and Cork even. He could find a wife and bring her home. A bigger boat was the only way to keep their status quo and ensure Jimmy a happy future.
Sean’s wife, Morag, wasn’t so sure.
‘What do we need another boat for?’ she said, when Sean told her his plans to go back to Scotland with Jimmy for a season. ‘Aren’t we good enough as we are? A family can only eat so much food, and we’ve enough meat cured and enough fish smoked to see us through the winter and the season’s barely begun!’
‘A bigger boat will change things. A bigger boat could make things better for the whole island. It’s progress.’
‘My eye,’ his wife said, wiping one of his filleting knives on her apron.
If his mother didn’t approve, his father wouldn’t go. Jimmy would have to let his father argue it out himself. He knew enough to keep his mouth shut when it came to his mother.
Morag Moffat wasn’t an islander. His father had met her in Scotland when he was working there as a young man and had lured her back to the small Irish island. The slight girl had been raised an orphan in the slums of Glasgow and at sixteen had acquired her first job as housemaid and cook to a small tomato farmer for whom Sean was also working. The boss had not been impressed when he caught Sean canoodling with his housemaid and cook. He fired them both and Sean carried the young girl back to his island, took up his father’s currach and had felt neither the inclination nor the need for migrant work after that.
A fact he repeated to his wayward son every time Jimmy talked about going away.
‘There is nothing out there you can’t get right here on this island, son. Trust me – I know it.’ Then he would tell him again the story of his mother and himself. About how his own mother and sisters had welcomed Morag as if she had been one of their own. How they had taken a while to familiarize themselves with her strange foreign accent, but had been instantly in awe of her beauty and the skills she had acquired at such a young age. Morag could read and write, like a proper scholar. The island women had taken to her right away and had showered her with the love she had missed out on as a parentless child. Jimmy’s mother would sit by the fire knitting, pretending not to listen or care, but a small smile would play on her lips as his father once again told the simple story of how he had come to realize his travelling days were over.
‘And we were back from Scotland not six weeks and I came in from the devil of a day at sea. We came back in with no fish and lucky with our lives. It had been so bad that for a moment I forgot myself that I was married and I came in and found this wee Glasgow girl piling the fire and in an instant my spirits were lifted. She didn’t hear me, and her hair dragged up at the back of her neck and I went over and I kissed her, like this –’ then Sean would go to wherever his wife was and kiss her with a big, comical mouth on him until she shooed him away, laughing ‘– and I said to myself, Sean, the only reason you ever went away in the first place was to find yourself this fine young woman. You’ll stay where you are now and luck will find you. And thank God it has. There was no man made as rich or lived as content a life as Sean Walsh of Aghabeg from the day he met this woman.’
If his love for Morag was the reason Sean was content to stay
on Aghabeg, she was not happy at the news that he was prepared to go back over to Scotland to work for the sake of a bigger boat to pay for a life they neither needed nor wanted.
‘You just want to be the biggest man with the biggest boat on Aghabeg, Sean Walsh, because you think it makes you more important than everyone else.’
‘And sure aren’t I already the most important man on the island with the biggest prize of them all,’ he said, grabbing her from behind, ‘and all the other men jealous of me and my fine wee Scottish wifey?’
She ignored him. ‘And who will cut the turf, would you mind telling me, if you head off now for the whole summer?’
‘I’ll have it cut before I go.’
‘Is that so?’
‘And I’ll have flour and sugar and tea stored up dry in the sheds for you, and praties dug and washed if you need them, and we’ll be back before you know it.’
‘One season?’ she asked.
‘One. I promise. That’s all it will take.’
‘That’s all I’ll take of you being away. One season is all I will put up with. Do you hear me?’
‘You’re the best wife any man ever had,’ Sean said, and embraced her.
Over his shoulder, the wiry Scottish woman’s eyes were trained on her incorrigible son, Jimmy. She knew this was his doing.
Chapter Five
There was one road through Illaunmor, which ran from the bridge to the top of the island. Then another, smaller one – little more than a dirt track – ran round its edge. The main road, like the island, was five miles long, and the pub and the church were at the bottom of the island next to the bridge.
After an hour on John Joe’s cart, they reached the part of the road where the rhododendron bushes were so overgrown it appeared they closed off the path, and then at the bend they opened to reveal the short, wide stretch leading directly to the bridge. Aileen felt her stomach tighten with excitement. She had been off the island a few times before today, but only on short trips across to visit the ‘big’ shop with her mother. These were the occasions when the travelling shop that came to their part of the island once a month let them down. Although Illaunmor wasn’t five hundred yards from the mainland, and there had been a bridge there since 1910, many of the islanders treated it like another country.
Island people were suspicious of everyone except their own and Aileen thought sometimes that was why her mother, a ‘blowin’ from the mainland, seemed unhappy living there.
Sometimes Aileen thought that her father didn’t just leave
every summer to earn money, but was trying to escape the island itself.
Whatever the case, it didn’t matter now, because this summer, this glorious summer, she was going with him.
The gang was at the far side of the bridge already. Aileen had quizzed her brother on the journey and knew everyone in any case. The island was small and even if you lived in the remotest corner, as they did, and spoke to few people, as they did, news of the comings and goings of their fellow islanders seemed to carry on the very wind.
‘Carmel Kelly. Are you sure she is going, Paddy? Carmel is as sour as rhubarb – she’s hated me since school.’
‘She’ll like you well enough now that she’s sweet on your brother,’ Martin butted in.
‘Shut up, you with your big mouth,’ Paddy Junior, the elder of the two, roared, and gave his brother a belt on the arm, although, Aileen noticed, he was smiling a bit.
‘Michael Kelly was a fine thing in school too, as I remember,’ Aileen said. ‘He’ll be going as well, I suppose?’ She had no interest in Michael Kelly, only in keeping her brothers’ and father’s attention on herself.
‘We’ll have no more talk like that,’ her father said.
‘If that dirty scut Michael Kelly as much as looks at my sister, I swear I’ll flatten him stone to the ground,’ Martin growled.
Michael and Carmel Kelly were both there with their father, who was the gaffer of the Illaunmor group. Mick Kelly was the man who took on all dealings with the Scottish farmers. He was responsible for the management of the Irish workers – their wages, their food and accommodation. Although he was technically the foreman, Mick was more friend to everyone than boss, elected to be in charge by the group themselves as the most senior and experienced among them. They would be with each
other every day and night over the following months, so it was important that the group got along. Aside from Carmel Kelly, there were three other girls that Aileen knew from school, all not too far off her own age, although she could not call any of them a friend. There was Attracta Collins, a quiet girl with blondish curls, with her father, Tom, and two brothers, Kevin and Noel; then Claire Murphy, Carmel’s cousin. She was noisy but plain and had a twin brother, Iggy, who was as crazy as his sister – though wiry and a little more attractive. Also there were brother and sister Noreen and James Flaherty – who Aileen barely knew. In the whole group there were more men than women, but Aileen hoped that between the four girls there, she would find a friend. Apart from the group stood one older woman, Biddy O’Callaghan – a spinster in her fifties who Aileen gathered would be the cook – or fore graipe – of the party.
Paddy was embarrassed to see that they were the last to arrive – especially given that most of the others had walked and not travelled by cart – so he hopped straight off to square things with Mick, whose son, Michael Kelly, in the meantime made a beeline for Aileen to help her off the cart.
Aileen thought Michael was a fine thing – large and square and handsome like her brothers – but by the time they reached the train station, Aileen was already fed up with him. She was anxious that she should get talking to the other girls. Not having sisters or female neighbours meant Aileen was uncertain of herself with women other than her mother. She was happiest of all in the company of her brothers, but they had made it clear that she was not to be hanging around them all summer. Paddy Junior and Martin had told her that while they would look out for her, she had to carve out her own place in the crew independent of them. Her mother, too, had instructed her to establish cordial relations with the other women straight away or she might have
a difficult few weeks ahead: ‘Make sure you get in with the women early on,’ Anne had warned. ‘Girls can be poisonous, especially if you’re pretty. You’re better having them for than against you.’
‘What will I talk to them about?’ Aileen asked.
Her mother got flustered then. Anne herself had no friends that Aileen knew of, aside from her sister, who lived on the mainland. ‘Oh, I don’t know – dresses, boys?’
Aileen knew nothing about either. ‘Books?’
Although Aileen had left school at twelve, she had been schooled by her mother since then. Now, at sixteen, she had read every book in the travelling library ten times over. However, for all that she would get lost in the dark jungles of H. Rider Haggard or delight in the prim and petty machinations of Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
, when she laid the book down on her lap, she would still be there in the dark kitchen looking across at her mother’s sad face staring into the fire and wishing for their men to come home. Oh, there were days on the beach when her brothers came back and would chase her across the golden sand. Tall and grown as the Dohertys were, they would throw great fistfuls of surf at each other and tease and shout and run like they all were still small children. But such days were gems in the chain of drudgery Aileen felt her life becoming. The same routines day after day, year after year: clearing the grate, setting the fire, baking the bread, putting on a pot for the dinner, stacking turf, whitewashing the walls, washing the same mugs and dishes, churning the same sheets and petticoats in the same worn buckets over and over again. The monotony broken only by her books and ticking off the days until the men came home, when the work would get greater, and the washing more diverse, but at least she would have their company.
Every year since she was ten and deemed old enough to be
of use about the place, Aileen had begged her father to take her with them to Scotland. Every year he had said no. She was to stay and finish school. Aileen would not leave school until she was fully literate. Her mother had lost her two boys to the land, but she would not have her daughter left wanting for an education. When she finished school, she then found she had to stay at home and keep her mother company. How could she tell her father that her mother was no company without him, that she spent the summers mourning and moping like a widow?
So, every Sunday from the age of twelve, Aileen Doherty walked the four miles to and from Mass barefoot, carrying her pampooties in her pocket, so that God might reward her penance by allowing her to leave with her father and brothers.
Now her dream had finally come true and her mother had conceded to let her go. The last winter had been harsh and killed off their best cow and several of their hens. The extra couple of shillings Aileen could earn for the family could replace both.
Aileen loved stories and would read any kind of fiction she could find. Besides the novels she read, Aileen had been made to read the Holy Bible and
The Home of Today
, a modern English tome that had been gifted to her by her mother. As well as being an education in household management and cooking,
The Home of Today
also contained thrilling photographs of houses in England and America where everything ran on electricity and they even had machines that would suck dust up off the floor. In England, they needed them because there were carpets everywhere. Aileen wondered if there would be carpets on all the floors in Scotland. If there were, she would be happy to sleep on the floor.
‘I doubt any of them can even read,’ Anne had said haughtily of the other women in the group. ‘An educated woman is a rare thing – you remember that.’
So on the one hand, Anne wanted her to make friends with the women, and on the other, she was to look down her nose at them. Aileen knew this was why her mother did not have any friends. While the other women and their daughters stood around talking after Mass on a Sunday morning, she and her mother never joined them. Aileen knew that her mother courted her own loneliness and she worried that if she did not find a way of getting along with these girls, she might do the same. Although, in all honesty, she did not know where to begin.
For the entire walk to the station Michael Kelly, the big hefty lug, had plodded alongside her, creating a wall between Aileen and the other girls, who were chatting and laughing away with each other. She could not get past him as he gabbled nervously about this and that: farming and milking and mastitis. He was trying to impress her with talk of a motorized tractor belonging to his cousin who had a ‘fine big farm in Louth’. The stupid eejit. On the one occasion Aileen managed to look beyond his bulk, she saw Carmel and the other girls talking behind their hands and pointing. She clearly heard Noreen say, ‘The dowdy cut of that jacket!’ and although she dearly hoped they weren’t talking about her long, brown coat, she knew that they probably were.
The train was already waiting for them in the station, steam firing out from its underbelly. The station house was packed with families saying goodbye and others tripping over each other to get onto the platform. This was the start of the season and it seemed that everyone on the island was leaving for the farms of Yorkshire and Scotland.
Aileen pushed herself away from Michael and searched for her brother Martin, who had been just in front of her a moment ago. She had lost sight of him when a rich-looking town woman in a smart coat had walked between them. Panic began to well
up in her at the thought of becoming separated from her father and brothers. The woman bent to pick up her case and at that moment Aileen saw her brother’s face turn as he called out her name. How could she have thought they would leave her behind? She almost knocked the woman down in her hurry to get to him, but as she grabbed her brother’s arm, he pulled it sharply away. He was still mad at her for not walking alongside them.
‘You’ll bring bad luck on us,’ he said. ‘I bet you didn’t even think of that, and you flirting with Michael Kelly like a prostitute – I’ve half a mind to throw you to the big amadaun.’
‘Don’t talk like that, Martin – can I sit with you on the train?’ She looked up at him and deliberately softened her eyes. She could always get round Martin: he was sensitive and he hated to see her cry. ‘I’ve never been on a train before.’ She squeezed both her hands into his folded elbows, which lay firmly across his chest, and coaxed her own slim arms into the gap. ‘I’m afraid. Please, Martin . . .’
They both knew she was playing him, but Martin was excited for his sister to be on a train for the first time and she knew that.
‘Come on, then,’ he said, and he hauled himself up onto the high step, taking her bag with him, and pulled her after him with his two hands.
They turned down a narrow corridor and her father poked his head out of a side carriage and waved them in. The carriage was small, with dark wooden panels and cushions built into the seats themselves. There was room for six – three on opposite sides. Seated opposite her father and their older brother, Paddy Junior, was the gaffer, Mick Kelly, and next to him was his daughter, Carmel. Attracta, the plain-looking girl with a large
rear, was there too. Aileen had noticed that the pair of girls had stuck together on the walk down.
‘Carmel, push up there and let Aileen sit in next to you,’ Mick Kelly told his daughter.
Carmel was sitting opposite Paddy Junior, and from the way she was gazing across at her brother Aileen observed that she wanted to be sitting next to him. The handsome young man was looking intently out of the window, even though the train was still stationary.
‘Leave the girls where they are. Paddy, you get up and let your sister sit down.’
Paddy Junior couldn’t get out of the carriage fast enough, and, followed by his younger brother, went and sat in another carriage with the rest of the crew. By the look that Carmel gave her as Aileen sat in her handsome brother’s seat, she could guess why. Paddy Junior was tall and broad and a younger version of his father, with a face that seemed chiselled by God out of smooth rock. Even his sister could see he was a head-turner. Poor Carmel had limp mousy hair that hung down the sides of her flat, mournful face like a pauper’s shroud.
Almost immediately after he had left, a determined Carmel said, ‘I’d better go and find Michael,’ and started to move from her seat.
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ her father said. ‘Sit back down. We’ve ten hours ahead of us and I won’t lose that seat.’
Carmel plonked back down next to Attracta, who looked equally horrified on her friend’s behalf that her beau had fled. Aileen thought that the two of them resembled stunned fish and she could not help but smile a little. She hoped the two girls wouldn’t notice, but was certain, as she turned her face towards the window, that they had.
The train started with a jolt and a hiss.
‘We’re off,’ Paddy said.
Aileen gazed out in wonder as the world sped by, the edge of the fields turning to a blurred line of midnight blue, the faint glitter of fires from inside houses dotted around the vast purple shadows of the Mayo hills.
They saw the silhouette of a man standing out against a moonlit patch, watching the train pass, his face lit up with embers from his pipe.