August 1846
MARY WOKE TO THE AWFUL CLOYING SMELL OF LAST SUMMER. DREAD filled her heart, for John was already racing outside, pulling on his britches as he went. Gripped with fear, she ran after him across the fields, for she could see the potato stalks drooping, their leaves already spotted with black.
Her mouth dry and heart pounding, she knelt down and began to dig frantically with her hands to unearth the potatoes. Her fingers closed around what seemed like three or four large, healthy ones, but as she lifted them out of the soil Mary could feel their flesh was already putrid and foul. She tried another plant, and another. It was useless. Every clump she touched was marked with disease. The potatoes in their mud-stained skins were already decaying, rotting in her hand.
As she shook off the clay, she could see the lumper potatoes were black in parts, soft and oozing, the stench so pervasive that it made her queasy. She looked over at her husband, despair already written on his face.
‘Look at them!’ he shouted, back bent digging in the earth with his shovel as he tried desperately to save their potatoes from the deadly blight that had spread through their crop overnight. ‘They’re destroyed.’
How could this happen again, she asked herself, when John had been more than vigilant and had tended their crop with such care!
The children had been woken by the commotion and ran outside. Con, Nora and Tim’s faces went white with shock as their father, streaked with mud and the stinking sludge, shouted at them to help dig and lift the potatoes from the ground.
‘Help us to save them!’ John ordered loudly.
Nora began to cry at the memory of it all.
‘Any good potato, even if it is very small but is firm and hard,’ he said, softening his tone, ‘throw it in the bucket.’
Little Annie, terrified by the smell and strangeness of it all, clung tightly to her mother as Mary took in the disaster around her, for every field as far as she could see was the same.
Con went on his knees in the dirt, digging at the plants to see what could be saved. Somehow, like a thief in the night, the pestilence had returned to poison their crop. John, meanwhile, had crossed to their other field. From the slump of his shoulders, Mary could tell that it too had been affected.
‘Rotten! Every one of them!’ he shouted despairingly as he checked each line of drills.
Nora worked beside her mother. Her little hands and face were spattered with the filthy slime. Tim went down the rows, checking the fetid piles for any healthy potato they might have overlooked, and Annie trailed behind him with a little bucket. Mary continued to pull at plants, lifting the potatoes. The stench around them had worsened and hung heavy in the air, over their fields, and the acres and acres of land. It clung to her hair and skin, and was so bad that she could taste it.
Surely to God, somewhere here there must be a few of their crop untouched by the murrain; a few that they could harvest and use!
Someone was crying, and it was a terrible sound in the stillness.
The family worked for hours. Mary’s nails were broken, and her fingers were red and sore. Every plant, stalk and drill was checked, and the few hard lumpers that were found were put carefully in the tin bucket.
The children were caked in mud, going from row to row with their heads and backs bent, like blackbirds searching the festering stalks and clumps for a small, firm pearly potato.
Mary’s back ached, but she couldn’t give up.
In the distance she could see Pat, digging his patch. She prayed that he had been luckier than they had. Flor and Molly were moving from drill to drill, carefully doing the same. In the fields all about her, Denis and Brigid and their children, and Nell, Tom and their sons were all digging frantically, searching their drills in vain. Every holding as far as the eye could see was already ravaged by the fast-spreading murrain.
Mary went inside and returned with two cans of water and some leftover griddle cake, which she shared between her family.
‘John, you must take a rest,’ she begged, passing him the can of water. She had never seen him in such a state. Soaked in sweat and covered in mud.
‘I cannot stop.’
He took a few gulps of water and threw the rest over his face and head.
Con, also sweating and filthy, stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, trying to help him. Nora looked as if she were about to collapse, and usually carefree Tim was grim-faced as he searched through every clutch of potatoes, desperate to find a few that they could eat.
‘Da, I got four,’ he proclaimed proudly, carrying them carefully to the near-empty tin bucket.
Mary tried not to give in to the mounting panic she was feeling at the devastation of their two fields and the complete loss of their crop this time.
John, agitated, continued with his shovel. Digging, digging and digging …
Eventually, Mary sat down and told the exhausted children to rest.
At last, John too put his shovel down and looked out over their fields. There was nothing more they could do.
The children were scared, their eyes full of fear. As they huddled together, Mary vowed that she would not let her children go hungry …