Creagh
WITH THE RELIEF WORKS CLOSED, MARY WORRIED FOR HER FAMILY, FOR they now had little to eat. Two or three times a week they walked with the children to the small soup kitchen set up only a mile and a half away at the home of Reverend Caulfield, the church rector, and his wife. It made a huge difference to the Sullivans, for the children were far too weak and no longer able for the eight-mile round trip to Skibbereen to take the soup. Flor brought Molly in the rickety cart pulled by Smokey the donkey, as both her legs and feet had become strangely swollen and she could not walk far.
‘Little Annie can sit with me,’ Molly volunteered. ‘Poor Smokey is old like myself and not able for much of a load these days.’
Some days they were fed and others they had to quell their disappointment, when too many families came and the soup ran out.
John took the boys out hunting for any wild thing they might find or catch that could go in their pot. On one occasion he had killed a fat wood pigeon, using a stone in a sling he had fashioned, and she had plucked and cleaned the bird as she would have done one of their old hens.
Each day, they foraged and hunted in the fields. Nearly every bush and hedge was picked clean, and there wasn’t a rabbit or hare to be found, or a bird’s nest to rob. They collected snails, which she boiled up with some herbs and salt water. Her stomach turned as she swallowed them, but they said nothing to the children who sniffed at them before eating them. All except Annie, who kept her mouth closed stubbornly in refusal.
They dug up roots, which she boiled and mashed, and picked mushrooms and puffballs in the shady woods and young nettles.
‘But I want taties to eat,’ Annie whined.
‘Well, there is not a tatie to be had in the county, so you will have to make do with something else,’ she told her firmly. ‘Your grandfather Corny used to always say that nature’s bounty is there for the like of us.’
Con and Tim had found a hedgehog hidden under a pile of leaves. John cut its throat and covered it in clay before they roasted it over the fire. It was fatty but the meat tasted a bit like rabbit.
In desperation, they also fished in the river for little pinkeens, speckled trout and carp, even though the old heron had long since disappeared. They had little luck. At low tide they searched the rocks and pools for baby crabs, cockles and mussels, limpets and periwinkles, and gathered dulse, kelp and carrageen moss.
Famished, Mary even resorted to digging up earthworms. She watched them wiggle as she washed and cut them, and put them in her pot. She prayed that they were safe to eat.
But still the Sullivans grew hungry …