Ashes In the Wind
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For Jennie
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestos, never-ending complaints,
The born martyr and the gallant ninny;
The grocer drunk with the drum,
The land-owner shot in his bed, the angry voices
Piercing the broken fanlight in the slum.
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
W. B. Yeats, ‘September 1913’
THE MAN AND the boy are members of a dying tribe. In the foreground of the photograph they sit on a rocky outcrop that slopes down to the sea. There are trees on the right-hand side, a Victorian castle in the distance. Between these two and the castle there is a natural harbour, with the curved arm of a stone pier protecting a small boat from the onshore wind.
The man, in his early thirties, looks at the camera, left hand on hip, right hand on knee. He is wearing a round hat with a broad brim, tweed trousers and a sleeveless jerkin. The castle in the background is his, and the small boy is his son. The man looks confident; the small boy is smiling.
At first glance this could be anywhere in the British Isles, but the boat has a curved prow and rides high in the water; it is a currach, tarred canvas stretched over a wooden frame, light enough for two men to carry and one to row. This is a boat of the West and South-West of Ireland. In the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph you can read in white ink, ‘Derriquin Castle, County Kerry, 1908’, and on a second line, ‘Lawrence Collection, National Library of Ireland, No. 5284’.
The Anglo-Irish, their tribe, are dying like the Cheyenne or the Arapaho on the Great Plains of America at the end of the nineteenth century. They will go without a struggle, unlamented. Their names and their places, Butler of Waterville, Roche of The Island, Dease of Rath House, Gore-Booth of Lissadell, Bowen of Bowen’s Court, Gregory of Coole Park, and these two, Burkes of Derriquin, are lost on the wind.
I
Ireland
1908–1924
1
JOHN BURKE WANTS to be Tomas Sullivan. John wants Tomas’s worn brown boots, the scabs on his knees, his green jersey darned with whatever coloured wool had come to his mother’s hand. He wants to talk like Tomas. Soon enough he does, though his accent changes back when he gets home.
They are eight years old when they meet on their first day at the elementary school in Drimnamore. The two boys are the same height, but John is lean and fair, clean and tidy, Tomas stocky with dark red, curly hair, his face and hands freckled.
To Tomas, John Burke is a creature from another world. John is dropped off at school every morning in a pony and trap. It is five miles to Drimnamore from the Sullivan farm at Ardsheelan, and Tomas walks to school like all the other children, apart from the gypsy boy from along the coast road who trots up on a piebald pony with no saddle and a rope bridle, most days.
John is unsettled on his first day at school, aware that his accent, his clothes, his scrubbed pink cheeks, mark him out as different. He doesn’t feel at home in the classroom, where he speaks only when asked a question, in a low, nervous voice, aware of the contrast with the strong Kerry accents around him. He is even less at home in the playground, where he is pushed and jostled, not unkindly, in the puppy-like mêlée of a dozen eight-year-olds.
His heart sinks when they decide to organize themselves into teams; he stands against the wall with the other boys, knowing he will be the last to be picked. So when Tomas, who has appointed himself one of the captains, says early on in the selection process, ‘I’ll take Sean,’ John is staring at the rough surface of the playground and doesn’t move until the boy next to him pokes him in the ribs and says, ‘That’s you.’ This endorsement is enough for the rest of the boys, and Tomas is John’s friend and protector throughout his time at the elementary school.
Tomas is a force in the playground. He doesn’t pick fights, but doesn’t avoid them, and there is a dangerous glint in his green eyes. He accepts John’s homage with outward indifference. He knows John’s father used to be everybody’s landlord and the Burkes still own most of Drimnamore village. The six acres of Ardsheelan that provide the Sullivans with their hard-earned living are barely one-twentieth of the Derriquin Castle demesne and home farm.
For four years Tomas and John ride and fish and sail together. John is the better horseman, Tomas knows how and where to fish. John’s father Henry teaches them how to sail the Burkes’ wooden dinghy round Rossdohan Island half a mile from the Derriquin harbour, and soon no longer feels the need to watch them all the way.They catch mackerel in the Kenmare River and cook and eat them half raw on Rossdohan, they chase hares on their ponies over the mountain, they swim in the peat-browned waters of Lough Dromtine and Lough Lomanagh.
One warm summer afternoon they walk out along the coast road and camp at Staigue Fort, an ancient dry-stone ring fort seven miles from Drimnamore. John shows Tomas the souterrain.
‘My great-grandfather found it, it’s an escape tunnel.’
They are standing in the corner of the fort, looking at the overgrown entrance.
‘Let’s see where it comes out,’ says Tomas, who crouches and goes in without waiting for an answer. John follows, and the pair of them crawl along the low, black tunnel, its walls never more than a few inches away on either side, until Tomas shouts back, ‘I can see a light ahead,’ and they emerge, blinking, in a little copse a hundred yards above the fort.
John laughs.
‘Look at you, mud from top to bottom. Annie’ll skin you.’
‘You’re no better. It’ll brush off. I’m glad we did it.’ They shake hands, grinning.
Tomas shows John how to catch a salmon in the Drimnamore River, how to trot a bunch of worms downstream when the water is high, how to let the fish play with the worms for minute after agonizing minute, then feel the fish swallow the bait, then strike. It is understood that when they catch a salmon it goes to Tomas’s mother Annie at Ardsheelan, although Tomas says, ‘It’s hard to poach your own river.’
John is welcome in Annie Sullivan’s kitchen. Tomas is equally welcome in the kitchen at Derriquin, although he won’t go beyond the green baize door into the main house. Eileen Burke sits with them there, practises her Gaelic with Tomas and encourages John, who never becomes fluent, to join in.
‘Don’t you think those two spend too much time together?’ says Henry Burke to Eileen. ‘Shouldn’t he meet Charlie Butler, or the Herbert twins?’
‘They live miles away, it’s an expedition to go there for a cup of tea, and the boys never leave the drawing room,’ replied Eileen. ‘Tomas is good for John. If he’s going to live in Kerry, he needs some real Kerry men for friends, not just the gentry.’
When they are twelve, everything changes. John leaves to go to school in Dublin, Tomas leaves to help Annie on the farm. In the school holidays Tomas is busy up at Ardsheelan; John helps to save the Sullivans’ turf in the summer, but their old expeditions on foot and on horseback and in the dinghy are a thing of the past.
John is taught to cast a fly for salmon by Ambrose O’Halloran, the Derriquin keeper, and he tries to wean Tomas off the worm. Tomas has no time for fly-fishing.
‘You want to catch fish for sport,’ he says. ‘I want them for the kitchen. The worm’s the thing in a spate river. The Drimnamore’s good for the fly three weeks in the year, the rest of the time it’s too high or too low.’
John smiles and doesn’t argue.
Both young men are gradually overtaken by an awareness of what the world expects of them. At the elementary school they had thought only about each other and the rivers, lakes and mountains of County Kerry. Their physical separation, John to Dublin, Tomas to the farm at Ardsheelan, is accompanied by a growing knowledge of where each belongs in an Irish hierarchy defined by religion and race. Their old friendship has been stretched and thinned. So they meet less often, have an occasional drink in a Drimnamore bar on Fair days, but the evenings together in the Ardsheelan and Derriquin kitchens are over.
John’s mother was born Eileen Brodrick; her family had owned land between Cork and Youghal since 1541. Henry Burke met Eileen when her father asked him to stay for a week’s hunting with the Duhallow in County Cork. Middleton Park was intimidating, a perfectly proportioned Georgian mansion, its three-storey central block connected by curved and colonnaded arcades to a two-storey pavilion on each side. The landscape was flatter, softer, grassier than Kerry, the park, its trees carefully placed, sloping down to the River Lee half a mile below the house. A little Grecian temple topped a knoll in the middle distance.
Henry thought in comparison that Derriquin hardly deserved to be called a castle. On his arrival at Middleton Park his luggage was taken away. Shown later to a bedroom with a bright fire, he found his clothes neatly unpacked and his dinner jacket laid out, studs and cuff links in his evening shirt.
Every night they dressed for dinner, held in a long dining room with rococo plasterwork on the ceiling and Italianate landscapes painted on the walls. ‘By Zuccarelli,’ said Lord Middleton proudly. Henry nodded and said nothing. The silver, the candelabra, the half-dozen liveried footmen standing behind the seated guests, the smart young men from London, Etonians all, rendered Henry silent, incapable of easy conversation with Eileen and her sister Agnes.
Over dinner the conversation flowed around and over Henry, until one of the Etonians suggested that the Irish should be grateful for their civilizing English landlords.
‘We aren’t English, we’re Anglo-Irish,’ said Henry. ‘We belong here, those of us who aren’t absentees. Ireland’s been patronized and exploited since the Act of Union. It’s not surprising that most of us want Home Rule.’
‘Us? Us?’ said Lord Middleton, frowning. ‘I’m a Unionist and proud of it.’
There was a long silence, broken by Eileen who turned to Henry with a smile.
‘You’re the brave boyo, talking Home Rule in this Unionist fortress. Good for you.’
Henry blushed, and said little for the rest of dinner.
In the hunting field Henry was a different man, a bold horseman. Eileen, just as fearless, rode side-saddle in a dark blue habit and a veil. On the second day’s hunting, after an exhilarating twelve-mile point across banks, ditches, big blackthorns and stone walls, they took the last double bank together, up over the ditch, a long stride on the top as wide as a cottage, then out and down over the ditch on the other side. There were only seven survivors of a field of fifty. Breathless, tired, muddy, by now dismounted, they stood next to each other as the huntsman lifted the dead fox out of the mêlée of hounds. Eileen’s veil had torn away; as he helped her remount, holding her bent knee for what seemed like an age, Henry decided that this was the girl he would marry. They hacked slowly home side by side as the light faded, their legs touching most of the way.
That night at the Duhallow Hunt Ball, Henry asked for Eileen’s programme the moment they arrived and pencilled in ‘HB’ for every alternate dance, for supper and for the last waltz. Henry was a better rider than a dancer, but tall enough to make a good partner for Eileen. She was nineteen, Henry was twenty.
There was a fierce argument when Eileen told her father that she wanted to marry Henry Burke.
‘The Burkes are Williamite adventurers, and Derriquin is twenty thousand acres of bog and rock with a rent roll of two and a half thousand pounds. Half of it uncollected. Mortgaged to the hilt, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Middleton.
‘Well, I’m not marrying him for his money, that’s sure,’ said Eileen.
‘And there’s a dangerous religious streak in that family.’
‘Deans of Ardfert and Archdeacons of Aghadoe over three generations? Those livings kept the estate afloat. Besides, I thought you were a pillar of the Church of Ireland.’
Middleton, not sure he was winning the argument, stoked the fire noisily and poured himself a glass of sherry.
‘That’s not what I meant at all. Henry’s grandfather, High Sheriff of Kerry at the time, converted when the Revival came to the South-West. Joined the Plymouth Brethren and wound up preaching the Gospel in Weston-super-Mare. Why Weston-super-Mare, for heaven’s sake? Sent me a copy of his book, he did, Twenty-One Prophetic Papers. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Said I could be a brand plucked from the burning.’
‘That was meant as a compliment. Henry’s not like that, and he’s certainly no Plym. We agree on lots of things. I like him, and for more than his looks. And he’s asked me – that is, he’s asked to come and talk to you. You knew his father, you invited him to stay for the hunt ball, you loaned him a horse.’
‘I asked the young men for you and your sister Agnes to dance with, but not necessarily to marry. You could have the pick of County Cork. And this one’s lukewarm about the Union.’
‘So am I,’ said Eileen.
Eileen married Henry Burke despite her father. She understood enough about the Famine, for there were many still alive to give her first-hand accounts of its toll on the Irish countryside, to convince her that Home Rule for Ireland was inevitable. Her views enlivened and disrupted many Kerry dinner parties; several of her Ascendancy neighbours thought her a traitor to her class and her country.
2
JOHN BURKE’S TRAIN is armoured. Slabs of steel have been bolted to the sides of the engine and the top of the cab, where the narrow slits are barely wide enough for the engine driver to see ahead. On the platform are two large wicker baskets, the source of a warm murmur that contrasts with the clatter of the station. Three or four grey and blue and white heads poke out and as quickly withdraw. A large brown tag on each basket says, ‘Ballsbridge Racing Pigeon Society; please release at Mallow.’ The crowd on the platform waits patiently; train timetables are a pre-war luxury.
Kingsbridge Station, an Italianate palazzo with Corinthian columns, carved swags and urns and twin campaniles, looks out of place in Dublin’s reluctant sunlight. The building appears embarrassed by the railway tracks, engines and ticket offices that hide behind its imperial façade. Bullet holes scar the columns and the walls, and the little dome that tops the left-hand campanile has been given a rakish tilt by an artillery shell. Dublin is dangerous but alive; not a day passes without news of a shooting, an abduction, an escape, a Black and Tan outrage, an IRA ambush. Ireland, an angry beehive without a queen, already has two Parliaments, Dáil Éireann and Westminster, and will soon add a third at Stormont.
John, a country cousin in Dublin, is leaving the front line. He has none of the war stories that some of his older Trinity College contemporaries tell of the Easter Rising – the battles for the General Post Office, the Four Courts, Jacob’s Factory, St Stephen’s Green, the failed attempt to take over Trinity. So he is pleased when his train is stopped and searched twice on the long journey to the South-West, once at Kildare Station by the British Army, once by the IRA five hours later beyond Mallow. He is travelling in a second-class carriage among the bank managers, land agents, racehorse trainers, clergymen and nuns. First class is for the Protestant Ascendancy and Roman Catholic bishops. Third class has hard wooden benches for small farmers, their wives and their livestock.
The British Army search is silent; no questions are asked. A man from the adjacent carriage is taken away, protesting angrily.
‘At least it’s not the bloody Black and Tans,’ says a farmer as the train is waved on.
The priest is asked by a small wiry fellow, a jockey with a lightweight racing saddle
strapped to his bag on the rack above, what he thinks of the IRA.
‘I understand where they’re at,’ he says. ‘But there’s no absolution for murder.’
‘Have you ever been asked?’ says the jockey. There is no reply.
By the time they reach Mallow the carriage is full of cigarette smoke. Over the years the framed photographs of Irish landmarks on the walls, Howth Head, Killarney, the Cliffs of Moher, have turned to a yellowish brown. The jockey is asked what he’s riding.
‘I’m on two of Dinny MacShane’s tomorrow, one in the novice hurdle, one in the three-mile chase. Hopeful Colleen in the chase has a chance at the weights.’
The priest scribbles down the name on a scrap of paper, but when the jockey gets out at Mallow the farmer says, ‘Save your money, Father. That Mick Malone’s still a chalk jockey after seven years, and it’ll be another seven before he gets his name painted on a board. He never gets a decent ride, no harm to him.’
The priest smiles, puts away his piece of paper.
‘Ah, well.’
Beyond Mallow the train is stopped again in the middle of the country, this time by a dozen IRA Volunteers in a cobbled-together variety of uniforms. They are mostly fresh-faced farmers’ boys in their twenties; one of them looks no older than John. They ask the passengers in each carriage to open their bags. The priest points to his dog-collar and gets an abashed, ‘Sorry, Father,’ in response. After half an hour and no weapons the train sets off again and by the time they reach Kenmare the two-hundred-mile journey has taken six hours. John spends the night with his Herbert cousins at Muckross Abbey.
The next afternoon he is met by William McKelvey in the Humber. William, a taciturn Ulsterman, delivered the car, the first in Kerry, from Belfast in 1912, keeping it going for seven bone-shaking years over bog and mountain roads with an ingenuity that triumphed over the absence of spare parts. It is a long drive over the twisting mountain roads; as they reach the top of the pass the sun comes out and the Kenmare estuary spreads out before them in a dazzling mixture of colours – the colours, John thinks, of his mother’s watercolour box, Ultramarine, Cerulean, Indigo, Cobalt Blue. And for the land, Burnt Umber, Siena, Hooker’s Green.