Famine Secret at Drumshee
Chapter One
‘Phew,’ said Fiona, as she came out of the cool darkness of the school
porch into the bright autumn air. ‘What a smell!’
‘Must be your stockings,’ said her brother Martin. He was twelve, a year
older than Fiona, and never missed an opportunity to annoy his sister. Fiona
tossed back her long blond hair and aimed a blow at his shins with her skipping
rope. He dodged around, just out of her reach, calling out in his most teasing
voice, ‘Fiona’s got smelly stockings, smelly stockings, smelly stockings.’
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Deirdre, Fiona’s twin. ‘He’ll soon stop if
you take no notice.’
But Fiona did not really mind Martin. On that sunny day in the autumn of
1845, Fiona was happier than she had ever been before. The happiness had been
fizzing and bubbling inside her all afternoon, and it was a relief to let it
escape.
That morning Mr O’Brien, the landlord, had paid one of his rare visits to
the school. He had examined all the children – and Fiona McMahon had shone
like a star. No matter what was asked of her, she could do it. She could add,
subtract, multiply and divide almost as well as the schoolmaster himself, she
could spell every word in the spelling book, and as for reading – well, no one
could read like Fiona. When she had read the last passage in the reader without
making a single mistake, Mr O’Brien had pulled out of his pocket a book called
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, which he had bought hat morning in
Ennis. Fiona had read it so well, with such expression that the whole schoolroom
– from the babies to Mr O’Brien himself – had listened in silence for over
a quarter of an hour.
The morning had ended with Mr O’Brien promising to call and see Fiona’s
father, to talk about training her to be a teacher in a couple of years. And,
best of all, he had given her Oliver Twist as a present. At the thought
of the beautiful little book bound in green, lying in her schoolbag, Fiona’s
happiness bubbled up again and she raced after Martin, breathless and laughing.
Martin, however, had lost interest in Fiona. He was standing by the road with
puzzled look on his face. There was indeed a strange smell on the air; and it
seemed to coming from the field across the road – the Big Meadow , the largest
field on the McMahons’ farm.
Could it be a dead cow? Martin wondered. But no, that was impossible; his
father was an excellent farmer who walked his lands every day. He would know
where every one of animals was. In any case, the potatoes were growing in the
Big Meadow and no cow would have been allowed near to them. Only that morning
John McMahon had said , looking at the potatoes, ‘When you all get back from
school this after, I think we’ll make a start at lifting those fellows. Looks
as if we’ll get a great crop this year.’
Frowning thoughtfully, Martin crossed the road followed by the twins and
ten-year-old Daniel, the youngest of the family. There was a thick hedge of
hawthorn and snowberry between the road and the Big Meadow; when Martin pushed
back the thorny branches and looked into the field, what he saw made him freeze
in horror.
Without a word to the rest of the family, Martin let go of the branches and
started to run down the road, his heavy iron-tipped boots ringing on the stone
surface. He turned in at their gate and, hardly slackening his speed, raced up
the steep avenue towards their house, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Da,
there’s something wrong with the potatoes in the Big Meadow.’
Long-legged Fiona raced after him, but Deirdre waited at the gate for plump
little Daniel. She looked across the hill to the field where their neighbours,
the O’Donoghues, had started to gather in their potatoes; and she felt her
heart grow cold.
Instead of putting the potatoes in the baskets, Mr O’Donoghue was throwing
them behind him, one by one. His wife sate on the ground with her apron over
head, a picture of despair. The east wind carried their voices towards Deirdre
she could hear Mr O’Donoghue crying, ‘Rotten! Every one of them is rotten!’
The next moment, her father rounded the bend in the avenue, carrying his
spade and went into the Big Meadow without a glance at Deirdre.
The potato plants in the meadow, which only that morning had looked so
promising in their neat rows of dark green, were black and limp. The stench was
overpowering.
John put his foot on the spade and turned over the eath. For a moment no one
spoke; then Fiona called out, relief making her voice high and shaky, ‘But
they’re all right! They’re beautiful potatoes.’
Deirdre looked at the potatoes; they did look fine. She felt almost sick with
relief. Her father lifted the spade again and dug up the next plant four big
dusty potatoes rolled out of the soil.
‘Are they all right, Da?’ asked Martin, looking at the handsome potatoes
and the withered, stinking plants with a puzzled air.
John made no answer, but went on to the next plant. This time, in his hurry,
he sent the spade right through one of the potatoes – and Martin had his
answer. The outside of the potato was good, round and fat and healthy; but that
was only the outside. The inside was a putrid, slimy mess.
The four children looked at one another in horror as their father bent down
and picked up the potatoes he had already dug. As soon as he touched them, they
broke, and the smell was so bad that they all turned their heads away.
At that moment their mother reached the Big Meadow. They looked at her in
despair. Nora McMahon was always the one who cheered everyone up, who managed to
look on the bright side things, but now she was silent. As she was coming down
the avenue, she, like Deirdre, had seen the O’Donoghues on the hill and had
realised the something was badly wrong.
In the end she spoke. Her voice sounded as if had to force the words out of
her throat.
‘Can you save anything from them, John?’ she asked quietly.
Her husband did not answer. He set to work like a mad man, digging out the
potatoes, picking them up, smelling them, squeezing them and throwing the rotten
ones into the ditch. They all watched in silence sick with apprehension, afraid
to say a word or even offer to help.
After fifteen minutes there were only three or four small potatoes in the
basket, and the ditch was filling up with broken potatoes oozing out their
creamy corruption.
‘What will we eat this winter?’ whispered Fiona to Deirdre.
Deirdre said nothing, just shook her head warningly. Fiona began to feel even
more frightened. She hated silence – she always liked to talk about
everything; but it looked as if no one was going to say anything at all. Her
father worked on frantically digging up the potatoes as if somehow, by sheer
speed, he might stop the terrible disease from infecting his family’s food for
the winter. Her mother just stood there, he face frozen and her arm around
Daniel’s shoulders. Martin was shifting from one foot to the other, one minute
looking as if he was going to offer t help, the next minute thinking better of
it ; and as for Deirdre – well, of course, thought Fiona crossly, who can ever
tell with Deirdre? She always looked the same, no matter what happened, Deirdre
kept her feelings to herself.
Their neighbour, Mr Arkins, came into the field. He was big and burly, with
the permanently red-brown face of a man who lived most of his life out of doors.
Now, however, he suddenly seemed to have shrunk, and his face was a muddy shade
of grey.
‘I can tell by the stink of them that you have the disease, too,’ he
said, his voice a broken echo of its normal booming sound. He stood looking
helplessly at the four mess which John had just dug up. Without warning, he
lifted his boot and kicked the potatoes over the hedge into the road outside.
‘God damn it all,’ he screamed, ‘how am I going to feed my family this
winter? We’ll starve, I tell you; we’ll starve! I’ve dug an acre this
morning, and even the few potatoes that were whole in the morning have turned
black this afternoon. I might as well drown the whole family the River Fergus
right now, and not have to watch them die by inches during the winter.’
The four children watched him in horror, and a whimper of terror came from
Daniel. Nora quickly pulled herself together.
‘Come on, children,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s get back to the house.’
‘But what did he mean?’ asked Fiona urgently as they went up the avenue.
‘He can’t drown all his children. What a terrible thing to say! And he’s
got the sweetest little baby-‘
‘Don’t think about him,’ answered her mother. ‘It may not be as bad
as they think. You know the way it is with men – they’re always making a
fuss. Let’s get something to eat, and then everyone will feel better.’
‘Yes, but what are we going to do?’ insisted Fiona. ‘If we can’t eat
potatoes, what will we eat?’
‘Well, we’re better off than most people,’ said Nora. ‘Your father
had a very good crop of oats this year; we can have plenty of porridge. We have
plenty of milk, the hay crop was good – that will keep the cows and the horse
going, so we won’t need to use the oats for them – the hens are laying well,
and when January comes we’ll get eggs from the ducks. We’ve got the meat
from the pig all salted, and if needs be, we can kill a calf. We won’t starve.
It will be a hard winter for us, but it will be a much worse one for our
neighbours. Remember, we have twenty acres, most of the other families around
her are lucky if they have a single acre to feed themselves.’
Fiona nodded and fell back behind her mother to wait for Deirdre, who was
standing looking across the hill.
‘Deirdre,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell Ma or Da about what Mr O’Brien
said, or about my prize. It will be spoilt if I tell it now, while everyone’s
thinking about potatoes.’
‘All right,’ said Deirdre. The twins were very different in looks and in
every other way. At that moment, Deirdre had as many worries in her mind as
Fiona did, but she preferred to keep them to herself and think about them. Their
mother always said that when the twins were born, God must have run short of
tongues so he only had one for the tow of the – and Fiona had the one.
‘You’d better tell Martin not to say anything either,’ Deirdre added,
and the two girls turned to wait for their brother.
‘Martin,’ said Fiona, as he came up the hill towards them. ‘Martin, don’t
say anything at home about my prize, will ? I’ll tell them about another time.’
‘The last thing I was thinking about,’ said Martin, grinding the words
out furiously, ‘was you and your stupid prize. Trust you to be thinking about
yourself. I suppose you’re afraid that there might not enough fuss over you if
people were thinking about starving this winter.’
With that he went on up the hill, kicking the gravel, his head down, his
shoulders hunched, the picture of misery.
Fiona glared after him. ‘He’s mean and stupid, too,’ she said bitterly.
‘I’m not just thinking of myself. I just thought it would be the wrong time
to mention it.’
‘Here’s Da,’ said Deirdre. ‘I think you should tell him. You know how
much he thinks of school and book-learning. If you tell him now, he will have
something else to think about tonight, instead of just worrying about the
potatoes.’
Fiona flushed crimson with shame. Martin was right, she admitted to herself.
She did not really want her moment of triumph spoiled.
She struggled with herself for a few seconds, and then ran to meet her
father.
‘Da,’ she said shyly. ‘I got a prize in school today from Mr O’Brien.
It’s a book called Oliver Twist, by Mr Charles Dickens. Mr O’Brien is
going to come and see you about me becoming a teacher.’
Deirdre was right. John and Nora McMahon’s delight in their clever daughter
helped to cheer up the house a little. Nevertheless, it was a sad and subdued
family that sat around the turf fire that evening. And while Fiona, in the
little bedroom which she shared with Deirdre, wept over the miseries of Oliver
Twist in the workhouse, her mother and father with heavy hearts, spoke in low
voices about the hard winter and famine ahead.
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War II Rescue at Drumshee (book 11)
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