Rural Ireland, 1847
The Same Story
In the 1840s a disease destroyed the potato crop across Ireland, the single food most poor families depended on to live. Over a million people died of hunger and disease, and more than a million left the country.
I woke up hungry, the same as I went to sleep hungry, so really it is just the one hunger that does not stop, it is just there in the morning waiting for you like it never left.
The potatoes are gone. Not eaten gone, rotted gone. You dig them and they come up black and soft and they smell so bad you cannot even feed them to the pig, only there is no pig anymore either. Last year there were potatoes and we ate them and I did not think anything of it, I did not once sit and feel lucky for a potato, I just ate it because that is what there was. I think about that now. How I had them and never once thought to be glad.
What we have now is the meal, the yellow Indian meal they give out, and Mam makes a kind of stir of it with water. It does not fill you the way potatoes did. But it is hot and you put it in your belly and for a while your belly is busy with it and that is something. When I get my bit of it I do not think about potatoes or about anything better. I just think about the warm of it going down. You learn to be there with only the thing you have.
There is a road to the town and carts go down it. Some of them are full of grain, good grain, going to the ships at the port to be sent away over the water. Full carts of food going past us on the road while we are like this. I do not understand it and I have stopped trying to. Mam says not to look at the carts so I try not to look at the carts.
My feet are bad and there is a cough that goes around the cabins and you hear it at night from the other houses. You learn the sound of who is sick.
Here is the good part of today, because there was one. At night we had the fire going, the turf fire, and we were all in close to it, all of us together, and Granda told the story he always tells, the one about the king and the salmon, and we all know it, every word, we could say it with him. But it is good to hear it. It is the same every time and that is why it is good. For the bit of time he was telling it I was warm down one side from the fire and I was not thinking about my belly, I was just listening, and we were all there, no one gone yet, all of us in the one room in the firelight.
That was the good part. Being warm down one side and all of us still here and the old story going. I held onto that. I am holding onto it now.