A letter had arrived that Hannah put aside until after their evening meal. In the end, it was Hannah’s curiosity that got the better of her. Every time she glanced at the envelope sitting on the dresser, she wondered what it could possibly be. Once or twice, while she was serving the meal, she turned it over to see the castle Sam had pointed out. Then she’d look again at the postmark. Unsurprisingly, it still said Armagh.
Sam was quite right about the castle. There was a neat little one on the back of the envelope. Of one thing she was quite sure: it was not Dublin Castle. From all she’d heard, communications from Dublin Castle were likely to be bad news. She was hoping beyond hope that this might be good news.
‘So, do ye think we may have a wee chile on the way?’ asked Patrick, when they were finally alone by their own fireside.
‘I can’t be sure,’ she said, surprised by the suddenness of his question. ‘But I haven’t bled …’
‘An ye were feelin sick,’ added Patrick. ‘I thought I’d seen that poor wee pale face before,’ he went on. ‘Sure, an’ I was right then. First Rose, then Sam. That’s how ye looked when ye were carryin’ them, but before ye showed anythin’ at all round your belly. But, if I mind right, ye weren’t sick for long, it were just right at the beginning you went pale an’ after that, then ye were as right as rain.’
‘Was I?’
‘D’ye not mind?’ he asked, scratching his head.
She certainly didn’t remember, but then it was more than nine years ago when she’d had Sam.
‘Shall I open the letter?’ she asked suddenly, as if somehow that would resolve the questions in her mind.
‘Sure, why not,’ he said. ‘It’ll hardly take a bite out of us.’
She laughed, as she opened the envelope carefully, not wanting to tear the paper where the little castle stood. She drew out the large, folded sheets, found there were four of them covered with a small but very legible copperplate and around them, a small sheet, half the size of the others with a short note in the same handwriting.
She unfolded the little note first.
Castledillon,
Loughgall Road
Co. Armagh
19 December 1846
Dear Hannah McGinley,
Your friend, or perhaps I should say, Friend, Jonathan Hancock, has asked me to copy this letter for you as soon as I received it from him. I do hope the bad weather, which we too have had in Armagh, has not delayed it too much. He told me of the work you are doing in Donegal and how important this letter would be for improving the food supply.
I hope this finds you and your family well.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Hamilton (Secretary to Sir George Molyneux)
‘My goodness, Patrick, I think this is good news,’ she said, glancing at the opening lines of the main letter. ‘Will I read it out to you, or will I read it and give you the gist of it?’ she asked, not sure what to make of the look on his face.
‘I think maybe, judgin’ by the length of it, ye might need a mug of tea t’ help ye along. Why don’t you tell me who it’s from and then I’ll make the tea while you’re readin’ it.’
‘Thanks, Patrick. Tea’s a good idea. I seem to be very thirsty today.’
She looked at the date of the copied letter. Dunfanaghy. 13th of the Twelfth month. She’d forgotten that Quakers referred to the months by number and not by name.
So, it was almost two weeks ago when the two Quaker ‘enquirers’ Joseph Crosfield and William Forster had visited Dunfanaghy and made their report to the London Relief Committee. The Committee had sent a copy of the letter to Jonathan Hancock in Yorkshire. He had sent it to Sarah, so she could see it herself and then send a copy to Hannah. Given the state of the weather, the letter had done rather well.
The Quakers had written:
Owing to the depth of the snow, and a constant succession of violent snow-storms, we experienced much detention, and did not reach Dunfanaghy until long after dark.
A portion of the district through which we passed this day, as well as the adjoining one, is, with one exception, the poorest and most destitute in Donegal. Nothing indeed can describe too strongly the dreadful condition of the people. Many families were living on a single meal of cabbage, and some even, as we were assured, upon a little seaweed.
Hannah paused. She knew that other areas were much worse off than they were themselves, but she had not known it was as bad as this. She started reading more quickly.
One of the local merchants had come to see the enquirers at their lodgings and told them what things were like for the worst off. The small farmers and cottiers had parted with their possessions to buy food and had nothing more to sell. Many families were subsisting on two and a half pounds of oatmeal a day made into a thin water gruel, about six ounces of meal for each.
She paused, looked up to see Patrick pouring the tea and said, ‘You must hear the next bit.’
‘Is it good news?’ he enquired anxiously.
‘It will be,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Thanks for the tea, love. Will you be seeing Dermot in the morning?’
‘I wou’d expect so. Around the usual time.’
‘Then listen to this,’ she said. ‘This is what he’s been waiting for. It’s no one’s fault about the delay. Shemmie the fish man told me months ago, and I told Jonathan when he first came here, but they hadn’t got the Central Relief Committee then, nor the London one either,’ she explained, as she found her place again in the letter.
Dunfanaghy is a little fishing town, situated on a bay remarkably adapted for a fishing population; the sea is teeming with fish of the finest description, waiting we might say, to be caught. Many of the inhabitants gain a portion of their living by this means: but so rude is their tackle, and so fragile and liable to be upset are their primitive boats or coracles, made of wickerwork over which sail cloth is stretched, that they can only venture to sea in fine weather. Thus, with food almost in sight, the people starve, because they have no one to teach them to build boats more adapted to this rocky coast, than those in use by their ancestors many centuries ago.
‘So what do you think Dermot will say to that?’ she said, setting the letter down carefully beside her and taking a long drink from her mug of tea.
‘Ach, he’ll be delighted,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘An sure, isn’t one of the boats near ready? That’ll do to start with till he teaches a few young lads ready for the next one. They were talking about three boats, weren’t they?’
‘Yes, that was the plan, but they had to get more money to pay for the other two.’
‘An, d’ye think they’ve got it?’
‘I don’t know, Patrick, not till I read the rest of the report. But maybe that’s as much as we can do tonight. I hope Dermot is early tomorrow. I’d love to see his face when I tell him, but if he’s late, you’ll have to do it for me. It’s school in the morning,’ she reminded him.
‘Aye, an’ you need your rest,’ he said firmly. ‘Though mind you, you’re lookin’ a queer lot different to what ye did this afternoon. You’ve got yer colour back again as well.’
*
Hannah slept well that night, waking only once when the wind whistled loudly in the chimney. But they were used to that. Patrick didn’t stir, so she just moved even closer to him and fell asleep again immediately.
She woke early, the light bright beyond the thin curtains after a fresh fall of snow. She slipped out of bed, pulled a rug from the foot of the bed over her shoulders and made up the fire. She took up the letter where she had left off.
Most of it she knew, though the term ‘conacre’ was new to her. But she soon picked up that it meant the system of ‘letting out’ a piece of land to a tenant who had to manure it before growing his crop of potatoes. By this means, the enquirers wrote, a tenant farmer could supposedly support a family of from five to eight persons for at least six months on half a rood of land. The landlord benefitted by the manuring and working of the land.
‘Half a rood?’ she whispered to herself. She couldn’t visualise it, but she knew it was very small.
But the next part of the letter she could understand and imagine only too clearly. She read it through quickly, then hearing no sound of movement, from either Patrick, or the children, she read it through again.
We were told that there were at least thirty families in this little town who had nothing whatever to subsist upon. And knew not where to look for a meal for the morrow. A quantity of meal was ordered to be distributed amongst them, and a sum of money left for their support, and also for a little turf, without which in this severe weather many would be frozen to death. The cost of turf is a very serious item on these poor creatures: and it would require sixpence per week, with the most economical management, to keep up the smallest peat fire imaginable. No public works were open in this district, although in this small parish there were, in the opinion of the rate payers, not less than 2,300 persons who were “suffering from want of relief.”
Hannah put the letter down and stirred the fire, which had been recovering from being smoored for the night. Small flames rose where she had pushed in fragments of twig, gathered in summer and left to dry in the barn. Shortly the fire would be hot enough to hang the pot over it and measure out the oatmeal for porridge.
She shivered and held out her hands to the blaze. There must be more they could do up here in Ardtur. Dermot would soon be getting his call to go and collect the boat and start fishing, but more help was needed. No one here in the valley was as badly off as those poor souls referred to in the letter. She would have to give it more thought and ask Bridget and Daniel and John if they could do more. And Patrick would certainly help if he could.