*
May in the west of Wales. The lanes here are bursting with the dark pinks of campion, rich buttercup yellows and wildly frothing bouquets of white cow parsley which reach out, falling forwards, tapping the car as it passes. And, here and there, still patches of bluebells, creating a kind of purple haze in the dappled sunlight of early evening. Most days now, turning down a lane or walking up a track, I see hares ahead of me. And always then the same game. I pause. The hare pretends not to have noticed me, but then starts to lollop off the other way, with that curious, almost clumsy, looping movement. I follow on. The hare reaches a gap in the hedge or a gate, and then it’s off. No awkwardness of movement now, as it stretches out over the grass. Always thrilling to witness the instant acceleration of speed, the perfect elongation of the limbs as it cuts the field in two, sometimes alarming the young calves or lambs, unused to seeing anything moving with this kind of velocity. Only the tips of its tawny ears now visible, moving in the long grass, then gone.
I return to the lane that stretches down towards the sea, though it’s sunk so deep in these parts that only gates and occasional gaps in the thorn hedges give glimpses of dark jade-green water ahead. The hawthorn blossom this year stops me in my tracks – a relay of curving, chalk clouds billowing all along the hedge, so unfeasibly white that laughter is the only response. I bury my head in the flowers, a sweetness of vanilla, but something acidic too I can’t quite place. Five-petalled flowers, the white underlain by veins of lightest green, almost imperceptible. Rings of tiny black pinprick stamens I’ve never noticed before.
From the high cliffs on the coast here, on rare days of extreme atmospheric clarity, you can sometimes see the coast of Ireland, and even make out the distant hills of Wicklow etched across the sea. Walking here, from time to time, my phone bleeps an incoming text which always makes me smile wryly at the incompetence of the technology we’ve been told is so intelligent – ‘Welcome to Ireland! You’re on our travel package, so don’t forget to …’ But it’s quiet on the coast path today, as usual I’m walking an hour or so before dusk, and a haze of milky cloud has covered the sun. There’s a closeness in the air this evening, very distant rumbles of thunder. Almost no wind at all. I feel uneasy, as if the charged ions in the atmosphere are affecting my brain. I want the thunder to get louder, and the rain to rush in sheets of relief, after the week or so of intense late-spring heat we’ve had here.
Something haunts me about the Famine, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. No, actually, more than one thing, but I’ll begin with this – how few names there are of those who lived and died. How the vast majority of the accounts, even the eyewitness ones from the 1840s, tend to generalise and collectivise the victims. People are not named. Although the accounts are terrifying, sometimes traumatic, often you’re unable to see the particular child or the individual woman or man who suffered. And yet, often the witnesses are named, so paradoxically, they live in our imaginations in a way that the people they are describing cannot. Could this perhaps explain what at times seems like the abstract nature of the Famine? I think about the testimony I’ve been able to find. I sit on a hummock of grass high above the incoming tide, and read again the sheets I’ve printed out, the accounts in chronological order as the starvation intensified.
William Forster, a Quaker, saw this in 1846:
The children were like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones, their hands and arms, in particular, being much emaciated, and the happy expression of infancy gone from their faces, leaving the anxious look of premature old age.
Major Parker, a Relief Inspector of the Board of Works, saw this, also in December 1846:
A woman with a dead child in her arms was begging in the street yesterday and the Guard of the Mail told me he saw a man and three dead children lying by the roadside … nothing can exceed the deplorable state of this place … On Saturday, notwithstanding all this distress, there was a market plentifully supplied with meat, bread, fish, in short everything.
Asenath Nicholson, an America teacher and writer who spent two years travelling through famine-stricken Ireland and published her account in 1850, saw this in Dun Laoghaire:
Reader, if you have never seen a starving being, may you never! In my childhood I had been frighted with the stories of ghosts, and had seen actual skeletons; but imagination had come short of the sight of this man … emaciated to the last degree; he was tall, his eyes prominent, his skin shrivelled, his manner cringing and childlike; and the impression then and there made never has nor ever can be effaced.
Later, at Arranmore in Donegal, she describes entering a cabin and seeing a family, or what was left of a family:
They stood up before us in a speechless, vacant, staring, stupid, yet most eloquent posture, mutely, graphically saying: ‘Here we are, your bone and your flesh, made in God’s image like you. Look at us! What brought us here?’ … when we entered they saluted us by crawling on all fours towards us, and trying to give some token of welcome.
The Telegraph newspaper described this scene from Castlebar in County Mayo, in February 1847:
A few days ago I entered a miserable cabin, dug out of the bog; a poor woman sat, propped against the wall inside; the stench was intolerable, and on my complaining of it the mother pointed to a sort of square bed in one corner; it contained the putrid – the absolutely melted away remains of her eldest son. On inquiry why she did not bury it, she assigned two reasons; first, she had not the strength to go out and acquaint the neighbours; next, she waited till her other child would die, and they might bury both together.
The United Irishman newspaper reported an inquest held on 13 May 1848, which investigated why a deceased man’s mouth was stained green:
A poor man, whose name we could not learn … lay down on the roadside, where shortly after he was found dead, his face turned to the earth, and a portion of the grass and turf on which he lay masticated in his mouth.
And finally, this anonymous witness, with details so precise that they sear themselves into the mind:
Starvation had affected the children’s bones, the jawbone was so fragile and thin that a very slight pressure would force the tongue into the roof of the mouth. In Skibbereen I met children with jaws so distended that they could not speak. In Mayo the starving children had lost their voices, many were in a stupor characteristic of death by starvation. Yet I never heard a single child utter a cry or moan of pain. In the very act of death still not a tear nor a cry. I have scarcely seen one try to change his or her position. Two, three or four in a bed, there they lie and die, if suffering still, ever silent, unmoved.fn10
As I reread these words I’m assailed by more questions and doubts. I’m unsure about the ability of language to communicate some realities. I wonder if we’ve been approaching this particular catastrophe in the wrong way. Has almost everything written about the Famine eluded the grasp of those writing? The silence of those starving, their unheard speech, is incomprehensible. As is the proximity of the starving to their well-fed fellow citizens, a few dozen miles away in Dublin and Bristol and London.