Celtic crosses lined up above them like chessmen on the turf; but if life were a game, it had a predictable outcome, as inevitable as the taxes and tithes. Life could be hard, too, unspeakably hard, as Michael’s parents reminded him, shuddering at mention of the deserted village in the hills, but there was also a sense of belonging and purpose to it all.
When he was old enough, Michael was prised from his mother’s skirt to creep unwillingly to the National School where the lessons were always in the English. “Ach, why must I learn the English?” he demanded of her. “Do the Grimshaws ever speak to us, or the Protestant farmers, save when they are in McDowell’s shop!”
By way of an answer, his Mam merely sighed, her sigh redolent of life’s sorrows, stupidities and injustices. “Ach Michael, mavourneen,” she finally replied in her soft voice. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Her words did not satisfy his curiosity. Much more forthcoming was Mister McDowell who had lived in America. It was the Famine, the dread horror of which hung permanently, a true nightmare on the brains of the living people of Ireland. Afterwards, many people had forgotten the Irish, bade their children speak English only. It was only a matter of time before everyone forgot the tongue of their ancestors.
McDowell’s shop: oh how Michael loved McDowell’s shop – a dark cave that smelled of tea and spices, tobacco smoke, oilskins and paraffin. There were barrels of flour, salted fish, dried fruit, oats, salt and sugar. There were boxes of baking soda and sides of bacon. The walls were festooned with kettles, buckets, slanes and spades, and there were drawers with cutlery, needles and threads, tools and pens and scissors and the like. You could even post or receive a letter there and buy the paper to write it on and the envelope and stamp and sealing wax to send it on its way. Down at one end there was a bar where, when they were older, Michael and his pals drank their first black pints and the men of the village would gather of an evening for the craic.
The villagers reckoned the old shopkeeper to be an educated and well-travelled man, for hadn’t he lived in America and worked on a newspaper there? He looked funny, but he was sharp. If you ever wanted to know what a leprechaun should look like, then James McDowell was your man. His round and wizened old apple of a face scarcely reached above his counter and he served you with hands all knotted like tree roots. He peered through wire-rimmed spectacles and the remaining white hair on the dome of his skull stuck out wild as the long grass in the wind. He was a kindly man; if he found children admiring his line of sweets in their jars behind the dusty old window, the chances were he would give them some for free. He was an honest wee man too, for unlike some others he never cheated on weight or quality.
He was not a natural shopkeeper. A journalist by profession, he had taken over the shop and bar late in life so that he could live in the land of his ancestors. His shop also served as the unofficial headquarters of the local Land League, which displeased the English people in the Big House no end and set him at odds with the greenuniformed policemen who appeared at intervals from the RIC barracks, Corkmen and Dublin jackeens most of them, Michael’s father said. Mister McDowell had never married and the story was that his sweetheart had jilted him at the altar. Not that he ever went near the altar in the village church, for people said his religion was Ireland and his saints were the Fenian dead and the rebels of ‘98. He lived alone in a couple of rooms above the shop. Michael feared he might soon die there, for he had a fearsome cough from smoking a pipe big as a blunderbuss and fouler than a Belfast linen factory chimney.
McDowell was a great one for the reading and it was said that he knew more than Mister Aloysius Byrne the schoolmaster or Father Breslin the priest. It was James McDowell who first opened Michael’s eyes to the beauty and wisdom that was in books, for múinteoir Byrne at the school was a sour-faced martinet fond of the strap who judged the village children incapable of any real learning. He’d even strap you for speaking Irish. Father Breslin with the dandruff all over his soutane was too distant and aloof to pay attention to the boys and girls of the parish. Breslin would rather visit the Big House, drink sherry, play charades and eat cucumber sandwiches on the lawns than spend time and effort on his parishioners. Mrs Cleary, whose daughter skivvied there, said he was tutoring the Grimshaw children in Latin, but he never set foot in any of the village houses unless he absolutely had to.
James McDowell inhabited a different mental universe. He received packets of books and papers from Belfast, London and Dublin, and as Michael grew older he would lend them to him. Many was the time with the winter rain and wind lashing the house that Michael would be curled up before the turf fire with a recommended book . What a world was in them! And Mr McDowell was there to explain what he could not readily understand. “It’ll surely turn the boy’s head,” scolded his Mam, but his Da stoutly defended him – for was it not education that would save old Ireland? he demanded. He was a great friend of McDowell, and Bridget admitted James was a good man, if a heathen.
If there was something the villagers needed that James McDowell could not provide, they could walk to Derry and back in a long summer’s day to get it. Derry was a giant of a city for them with its high city walls and maze of streets, though Michael later realised it was only a middling sort of a town. Still, for the villagers, it was an urban marvel indeed. It stood on the edge of their world. There are those, no doubt, who are restless and believe that the grass is greener elsewhere. Some young men went to sea and travelled as far as America, Cape Town or Australia, but they mostly never came back, unlike Mr McDowell.
Michael’s Uncle Vincent was one who never came back. He wrote to tell the family of the wonders of America, where he’d found work in a shipyard in Baltimore (perhaps because it was also the name of an Irish town, though one at the other end of Ireland). There would be work for the family, he urged. They weren’t convinced; how could any grass be greener than that of Ireland, Michael’s father demanded, though his mother waspishly reminded him of the time not long past when many died with their mouths stained green with grass and their stomachs empty, family among them. “To be sure, they did and all!” his Da snapped, his grey-flecked hair sticking up on end, making him look like an irate bird. “Isn’t that the reason the picture of Michael Davitt is pinned to the kitchen wall? And the one of Mister Parnell, tú bean amaideach?” That caused his Mam to purse her mouth like she’d sucked a lemon, for wasn’t Charles Stewart Parnell after living in sin with that Kitty O’Shea woman?
Michael’s parents were fond of an argument and Bridget had a tongue on her that could scold the varnish off a table. When exasperated by her, his father sometimes ranted: “Biddy, I don’t know why in God’s holy name I ever married you!”
“Ach, well, Patrick, if only you knew the suitors I had,” she would reply in a mock-sweet voice. “And instead I was after ending up with a man as silly as you!” But they loved each other for all that. While there were men who beat their wives and children, Patrick would rather have died than stoop to that.
The family house was a rented cabin next to Grimshaw’s boatyard and slip with the lough slapping at the foot of the garden, and always clean and comfortable. Bridget could not abide a dirty house even though the floor was of beaten earth and all manner of creatures roosted in the thatch. She was always busy, explaining her industry with well-worn proverbs: “Many a day shall we rest in the clay” and “Poverty waits at the gates of idleness”. There was always enough to eat, for she grew spuds in a lazy bed fed with kelp, along with turnips, carrots, herbs and greens, and there was even a goat for milking. Dulse, too, they would collect from the shore, though Michael never cared for the dried seaweed.
His wee sister Mary was often there to help Bridget with these tasks, and although she didn’t smile all that often, she did at Mary when she thought nobody was looking. Mary was the apple of her parents’ eyes, the sweetest child, with a great cascade of auburn hair and eyes the colour and sparkle of emeralds. Like Michael, she had inherited their mother’s slight build. Patrick, in contrast, had a stocky and powerful frame that had made him the terror of the Gaelic football games. And although Mary perhaps knew she was
