Authors: Kate Kerrigan
‘No,’ she said, grabbing his wrist as it crept higher up her thigh, although it would take more strength than she could muster to hold it there, never mind move it away.
‘No,’ she said again, but it sounded even less convincing now.
As her hold on his wrist loosened, Jimmy reached his thumb across and rubbed her gently, rhythmically, so that Aileen thought it was his intention to unravel her until she was completely undone, which, with a howl of delight, she soon was. He looked down at her and smiled wildly, and she laughed and smiled back.
‘That was wrong, Jimmy Walsh,’ she said, but they both knew she wasn’t one bit sorry.
‘You make a man want to do bad things, Aileen Doherty,’ he said, which made her want to go again. But before she could suggest anything, Jimmy stood up and, straightening himself, said, ‘Now, did you say something about going for chips?’
The chip shop in Cleggan was thronged.
‘Fresh fish! No war rationing on chips!’ a sign in the window advertised.
Her father and the men had talked about how Scotland was like Ireland in that way. ‘You wouldn’t know there was a war on,’ Paddy had said.
‘The Scots are more like the Irish than the English,’ Mick agreed.
Both countries had an easy, friendly way of going about things that wasn’t a bit like the uptight formality of the English. Plus, the island men all concurred, the English were arrogant warmongers – over-interfering with Germany when they should mind their own bloody business. ‘I’d never fight in an Englishman’s war.’ More agreements, and the more beer they had drunk, the more vehement the nodding would be.
Jimmy went inside to queue and Aileen sat on a low wall on the side of the road to wait for him. Facing out into the town, she saw the lights of hundreds, maybe a thousand houses all clustered together. How many people must live here? she thought. A girl could surely get lost in a place like this. You could lose yourself in the crowd, do as you pleased. The air was fresh and chilly, so she pulled her coat close into her chest, crossed her legs and hunched herself all together. She allowed her body to remember how much Jimmy loved her.
She was out and about in the big wide world, with the security of her father and brothers there to look out for her. Jimmy was, after all, the great love of her life. On top of all of this, there was chips and a half-bag of leftover Emeralds to look forward to.
The chips were heavy with vinegar, just how she liked them, and she and Jimmy ate them in contented silence. There was nothing more they needed to say to each other. Jimmy loved her to the detriment of himself, and she loved him back. He knew that, but she still wouldn’t say it yet. She wanted to keep something for herself. Aileen was afraid that, if she let go, she might be in danger of losing herself entirely to him.
When they had finished their chips, Jimmy got down on one knee in front of her and said, pleadingly, ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Of course, you silly boy,’ she said, delighted with herself.
The other couples outside the chipper laughed at him.
‘He’s as soft as shite,’ one of the lads said.
‘Sure he doesn’t even have a ring,’ his girlfriend added.
Aileen didn’t care. They didn’t know what true love was – nothing was going to ruin this night.
Sean Walsh came to collect the couple in a horse and cart. He’d been allocated the task by the other men, who were all in bed, asleep. Aileen and Jimmy decided not to tell him about their engagement until the next day. On the way back, Aileen lay across the floor of the cart with her head on Jimmy’s lap and looked at the stars and counted each one as a blessing on her own life as her sweetheart stroked the side of her cheek with his soft hand.
As she felt the cart turn the bend into the drive of their farm, she heard Sean cry out, ‘Mother of God, is that smoke?’
He whipped the carthorse and they lurched forward. Jimmy sat up suddenly, with Aileen after him, as Sean drove them into the heart of the burning bothy.
Chapter Thirteen
As the cart trundled across the cobbled stones of the courtyard, Jimmy’s father roared, ‘Fire! Fire!’ to rouse everyone out of their beds.
‘What’s all this?’ Biddy cried, rushing towards the cart in her night attire. She was followed by Attracta, Claire, Carmel and Noreen, half asleep in their nightgowns. Biddy screamed, ‘Holy God!’ as she saw the curtain of black smoke licking up the building in long, sooty lines from under the kitchen doorway.
Jimmy felt Aileen grip on to him, but he had no time to comfort her. Lives were in danger. Already his blood was up; he could feel the energy soaring through him, propelling him forward towards the building.
Sean hammered at the padlocked doors to the men’s sleeping quarters, remembering, in his panic, that Mick, who was inside, had the keys, but forgetting that the room could be accessed through the kitchen.
‘They’re trapped inside!’ Sean shouted at the women to look for a crowbar, a hammer, something – anything to wrench the sliding doors open.
Jimmy knew that the door next to the sliding ones, the ordinary kitchen door, would be open – although it was concealed by the curtain of black smoke rising up from under it. He would
take a chance and fly in there and get the men out that way. There was no time to explain, no time to lose, so saying nothing to anyone, Jimmy opened the kitchen door and rolled under the deadly puff of thick black smoke that came thundering out at him. He heard his father call after him, but it was too late. Without stopping for one moment to consider his own safety, or indeed the common sense of the situation, Jimmy decided he was going to save Iggy and the other lads, Aileen’s brothers and her father; he was unstoppable. He was Invincible Jim.
From the outside, it seemed as if the inside of the building would be filled with ferocious flames, so Jimmy was surprised to find that was not the case.
The smoke that had been pouring out seemed to have cleared when he opened the door, and although the place felt eerily silent and still, there was no dangerous fire – only a large ball of smoke above his head, which seemed to be drifting like a black ghoul towards the doorway he had just come through. He looked over at the fire in the grate and was amused to note nothing more than a cluster of dying embers – almost gone out. Jimmy was mystified as to where all of the smoke outside had come from, but he assumed it was gone now, and in any case, he had to get the men out of there.
Jimmy looked around, but there was no sign of anyone. He called out, ‘Hello?’ but the single word became muffled and faint when it hit the air and nobody answered. They must be all still asleep. The cloud of acrid smoke was moving steadily towards him, and so keeping his head down, Jimmy moved towards the tarpaulin curtain separating the kitchen from the sleeping quarters. As he pulled it back, he noticed that all the men were still in their beds, sleeping. He smiled to himself. Lazy bastards out cold and all the women running about and screaming for them!
In the far corner, there was a small, neat pile of coal burning
where it had clearly fallen out of one of the bags of fuel. It didn’t seem angry or dangerous and was more like the sort of small cooking fire you might make outdoors. Coal takes an age to set alight, he thought to himself – there’s no panic at all, and we’ll be all right for a few minutes yet. He was relieved, amused even that the men had not so much as been disturbed and thought of how they would all laugh at the fuss being made on their behalf. Nonetheless, the room was hotter in here and heavy with smoke. In fact, Jimmy’s own eyes were smarting and he was starting to feel dizzy. Holding his sweater over his nose, he realized it was pointless calling out to wake them. Firstly because it would bring them into a terrible panic, but also because the smoke was now filling his throat. He had better get a move on. So, crouching down on all fours, he crawled across to the nearest bed to rouse the first man. It was Aileen’s brother Paddy Junior. He prodded his chest and shook his arm, but there was no movement. He reached up and gave him a firm pinch on the nose. Just as he did that, he heard his own father’s voice call out from behind him, ‘Hold on there, lads – I’ll have the doors open for you now . . .’
There was a clatter as Sean pulled the doors outwards; then –
whoosh
– burning coals from the small fire in the corner of the room rushed towards him like a dozen cannons, bringing the tarpaulin up in a single sheet of flame. As Jimmy called out, ‘No!’ there was a loud explosion and a shower of red-hot pain blasted across his face. Then everything went black.
Aileen did not notice that Jimmy had run into the building for some time after it had happened; neither did she fully consider that her father and brothers were in the burning building. She was aware that Sean was shouting for help in opening the doors, and that Biddy was rushing backwards and forwards calling for
everyone to get pans and buckets of water. She saw Carmel screaming, her plain features drawn back in a shocking contortion, grabbing and clawing at the doors of the bothy as Sean tried to wrench them apart. She noticed how Biddy’s skirts were dragging and drenched at the hem from the puddles left by the buckets she was frantically, pointlessly throwing in the kitchen door. She noticed how the spilt water wormed its way down the gaps between the cobblestones and landed at the tips of her good brown boots, creating a lacy pattern at her feet. She was sitting at the edge of the yard fireplace on a raised bench of bricks. This was where she always sat to eat her supper. She could not move. Everybody was running about; people were shouting at her to help, to move herself, but Aileen could not lift herself up from her seat. She was stuck there as surely as if she had been glued there, or frozen in time. If she did not move, if she stayed exactly where she was, perhaps she would find that this event was not happening after all. Perhaps she would wake, as if from a dream, and find that her brothers and father had gone to the pictures with them that evening, or were still in the other house complaining of the cold and had never moved at all to the burning barn.
She could see that Carmel was screaming and that Biddy was shouting, but she could not hear them.
All she could hear was a sound from the chimney she had been cleaning earlier, one she heard just before the bird’s nest had plumped comfortably into the grate. Repeating itself in her head, in her ears over and over and over again, drowning out all other noises, all other thoughts. She was transported back to earlier on in the evening when she had been rushing her task. The muted clatter she had not given a second thought to at the time had been the snap of the flue closing.
Chapter Fourteen
Biddy had long since known that the Scottish people were good: that had certainly been her experience in her years as fore graipe for the Illaunmor tattie-hokers. However, even she could not get over their kindness towards them in the days after the bothy fire.
When the people of Cleggan heard about the terrible tragedy, they raised all the money needed to pay for the bodies to be returned home to Ireland. There were ten men dead in all: Mick Kelly (fifty), Michael Kelly (twenty), James Flaherty (twenty-one), Tom Collins (thirty-seven), Kevin Collins (fourteen), Noel Collins (fifteen), Iggy Murphy (twenty-one), Paddy Doherty (forty-seven), Paddy Doherty Junior (twenty-two) and Martin Doherty (nineteen). The fire had raged for the guts of that night; the barrel of tar had exploded and devastated the inside of the building with ferocious intent. The local Cleggan firemen could not put the fire out with their own pump and needed to call in two other units from large neighbouring towns to help stem the fire and prevent it spreading to the other farm buildings. When they had beaten back the flames, only the stone walls remained. It was a terrible sight that Biddy knew she would never forget. Worse than the death of her parents, worse than the death of
her brother; it was an act that shook the devout woman’s very faith in God Himself.
The bodies of the ten men sleeping in the barn that night were destroyed. Nothing more than black cadavers, she had heard the firemen describe how their exposed bones were lying flat in the places where their beds had been, as if arranged there by some evil intent. One was even curled on his side like a baby. The coroner concluded afterwards that each of the men had been dead from smoke inhalation long before the doors had been opened and set the fire into a rage. Their positions of repose suggested that each of the men had died in their sleep, so at least they had not suffered, but they did not find this out for a long time afterwards.
However, that was small comfort to the Cleggan firemen, who would be haunted to their own dying days by the sight of the ten ‘sleeping’ cadavers, along with the pitiful sobs of the women, as they came out shaking their heads. Biddy tried to console the young girls as best she could, while the firemen stood guard at the bothy doorway, four of them keeping the young Irish girls away from the ghoulish sight of the bodies before they were removed to the funeral home. Biddy tried her best, but the girls, wild with grief, clawed at the blackened uniforms begging to be let inside to say goodbye to their men. The Cleggan firemen stood firm and impervious to the women’s pleadings, even though their own hearts were breaking. What worse fate was there than to lose a father, a brother? Only to lose a son or a husband – and breaking the news to the mothers and wives back in Ireland was all these women had to look forward to now.
Biddy had not lost anyone directly belonging to her in the fire and, being the elder of the group, had to take charge of the young mourners. She was beyond grateful when complete
strangers from the local community, and beyond, stepped in to make all of the arrangements. The firemen from Cleggan called upon their colleagues from as far away as Glasgow and Fife to come out in support of their fellow Celts. Most of the Scottish firemen were themselves volunteer reserves and so were far from inured to the horrors of firefighting. Although it was agreed that the fire was no more than a terrible tragedy – and that in no way could they have saved the lives of the men inside the building – they still felt somewhat responsible for the welfare of these Irish unfortunates and wanted to help them in any way they could.
A fund was set up and enough money was raised to pay for the funerals and recompense the tattie-hokers for the money they had lost – not just in the fire but in earnings for the rest of the season.
News of the tragedy spread through Scotland and Ireland, and consumed two countries already weighed down with the bad news of war so that two days after the fire took place and each of the ten coffins arrived in Glasgow, the streets from the train station to the port were lined with ordinary Scottish people come to pay their respects.
Biddy was astonished to see the coffins being transported in black carriages with plumed horses; then each one was lifted onto the boat by uniformed firemen and passed into the care of the Dublin Garda Síochána, who had travelled over to accompany the bodies back.
However, with the overwhelming grief of these five young women resting on her spinster shoulders, Biddy was very grateful for the practical help given to her by the Cleggan women who travelled with them across to Dublin. The Cleggan branch of the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute and St Andrew’s Ambulance Association volunteered to travel with the six distraught women
and make sure that their nutritional and medical needs were tended to, making their return trip more comfortable than their journey across. A section had been cordoned off for them in the first-class area of the ship as a gift from the shipping company. Delicious food was also made available, with tea and coffee served to them as if they were gentry. There were cushions at their back and beds for them to sleep on, with soft down blankets laid over them with the attentive care of the gentle Scottish women.
At Dublin Port, it seemed as though every soul in the whole of Ireland had travelled to meet them. Biddy and the girls stood at the top of the steps of the boat, three decks up. They were already in awe at being so elevated, but as they looked down, each one gasped in astonishment at the sea of people stretched out in front of them. Their plight had touched the hearts of every newspaper reader and every radio listener in their homeland and Ireland’s mourners were out in force; the black of their clothes was woven through the city landscape, making it appear as if a deep hole had been carved through the streets of the capital. Although in Scotland Biddy had been surprised by the number of people who had come to pay their respects, she could see that here in Ireland, a dark shadow had been cast and the country was in mourning. Biddy knew they were not just weeping for the Cleggan tattie-hokers and the frail girls in her care, but for their own husbands and sons gone to England and America, and working to send money home. Some would die in factory accidents or bare-knuckle fights or anonymously of drink on the streets of London, Birmingham or New York; others would get good jobs and write and send money home; but the vast majority would never be seen again. They existed to the families they left behind as photographs on the mantelpiece, next to the Sacred
Heart of Jesus to whom their mothers and wives prayed daily for their safekeeping. By the time their duty was done, and their homes in Ireland paid for and their families secure, they were English or American men.
They found wives and had children who existed only in name to their Irish families. Many more men had simply ‘disappeared’ because they set up new lives abroad and abandoned their wives in Ireland altogether, and that was worse than a death in itself. Every person who had lost a son, or a husband, or a father in this way came out to mourn them and their own losses that day. The city people walked across town for an early spot at the docks. The country people locked up their cattle and put down their tools and travelled on carts and buses and trains to be there for the women who shuffled pitifully behind the ten coffins in black clothes gifted to them by the Scottish Protestant women.
Biddy was an intelligent woman; she understood why people came out that day and how the tragedy of the five vulnerable, shivering creatures standing on the deck of the ship with her had captured the hearts of the whole country. However, she still wished that they would all go home and mind their own business and let them travel back to Illaunmor in peace.
As they waited for an escort to lead them down the steps through the crowd, Biddy took one last look across at Aileen. The other girls looked dumbfounded, but nonetheless were aware of the fuss. Aileen had not seemed to notice anything since the fire. Not the luxury of the first-class passage, not the kindness of the Cleggan women, not the vast crowds or the pomp of the funeral procession and certainly not the scrappiness of the black clothes that had been lent to her. She wore a shapeless dress with a lace collar and a coat with sleeves that were too long and buttons that were large and awkward to close.
‘Why in the name of Christ did you allow yourself to be landed with this get-up?’ Biddy had complained that morning as she fiddled with the front of her young charge’s coat, although she had not expected an answer.
Aileen Doherty had not spoken a word or, in effect, moved an inch of her own volition since the fire.
She had simply put one foot in front of the other, shuffling dutifully behind the others from bothy to boat.
She had eaten some food, but only through Biddy’s persistence. On the morning of their journey, Biddy had cleared the kitchen so she could spoon-feed the young woman a half-bowl of creamy porridge.
All of the women were shocked by what had happened. Biddy herself was not convinced that the whole thing was not simply a bad dream that she had yet to waken from, and young Carmel Kelly had gone half mad. After her initial screaming on that dreadful night, she had convinced herself that her father and brother were not inside the building at all.
‘I feel sorry for all of you,’ she insisted, over and over again. ‘All I can say is thank goodness Daddy and Michael were meeting with Finlay the butcher in Glasgow when it happened. I don’t know why they’ve been delayed this long, but I’m sure they’ll be back soon.’
She then told herself they had gone ahead to Illaunmor and would be at home on the island waiting for her. No one contradicted her. The young women barely had the energy to deal with Carmel at the best of times, even Biddy, and with their own grief weighing so heavily, they simply played along with her fantasy. Soon they would be back on the island and Carmel’s madness could be dealt with by her own mother.
The same could be said for Aileen, although Biddy had a
special feeling of responsibility for the girl – perhaps because she had been her assistant but more likely for some reason that, as yet, she dared not name. Biddy was as sorry as any person could be for the other girls’ losses, but her main concern was looking after Aileen. The other girls had each other, but Aileen was very much out on her own and had withdrawn herself even further from the group.
Her sweetheart, Jimmy, had been so badly injured in the explosion it seemed doubtful that he would survive, although Aileen was in such a daze she had not even asked for him.
When the bodies were cleared from the bothy, Biddy saw Aileen wander in there and she followed her, standing by the door so she wouldn’t know she was being watched.
The earth floor of the barn had cracked open and there were broken craters of sand and ashes where the day before it had been a flat surface she herself had swept over in preparation for the men’s beds to be made on.
She saw Aileen sit on the ground, and instinctively this child of the land reached down and grabbed a handful of earth. She held it in the palm of her hands and seemed to study it, as if expecting some miracle to rise from the ashes. After a moment, she stood up, still in a trance-like state of grief, but instead of simply letting the earth fall from her hands, she automatically placed her hand in her pocket.
Biddy got a sharp pain in her stomach just looking at the girl pitifully preserving the ashes from her father’s and brothers’ deathbeds. She felt compelled to protect her, although as she realized that, a terrible thought crept into the honest old woman’s conscience. Looking across at the fireplace that had caused all this damage, she thought that perhaps in protecting Aileen, she was trying to protect herself too. However, she put all thoughts
of that nature to the back of her mind. It would be a long journey home to Ireland, and she had many long days ahead to contemplate the horrors of what had happened and the consequences that lay ahead. For all of them.