Poor creatures, what else could they do, with their children asking them for food?
In that same spring came a woman, crying, and saying she was “the most disthressful poor person, that hadn’t the good luck to be in the Misthress’s division.” Asked where she lived, she replied,
“I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood.”
Spring after spring, during those dark years for Ireland of the ’eighties, the misery and the hunger-time recurred. Seed-potatoes, supplied by charity, were eaten; funds were raised, and help, public and private, was given, but Famine, like its brother, Typhus, was only conciliated, never annihilated. In 1891 Mr. Balfour’s Relief Fund and Relief Works brought almost the first touch of permanence into the alleviating conditions. My mother was among the chief of the distributors for this parish. Desperate though the state of many of the people was, Ireland has not yet, thank Heaven, ceased to be Ireland, and the distribution of relief had some irrepressibly entertaining aspects that need not wholly be ignored.
My mother had herself collected a considerable sum of money, for buying food and clothes (the Government fund being, as well as I recollect, mainly devoted to the purchase of seed-potatoes). Many were her clients, and grievous though their need was, it was impossible not to enjoy the high absurdities of her convocations of distribution. These took place in the kitchen at Drishane. The women came twice a week to get the food tickets, and the preliminary gathering in the stable-yard looked and sounded like a parliament of rooks. Incredibly ragged and wretched, but unquenchable in spirit and conversation, they sat, huddled in dark cloaks or shawls, on the ground in rows, waiting to be admitted to the kitchen when “The Misthress” was ready for them. Most of them had known nothing of the existence of the fund until told of it by my mother’s envoys. It was my mission, and that of my brethren, to ride through the distressed town-lands, and summon those who seemed in worst need, and in my letters and diaries of these years I have found many entries on the subject.
“Jan. 27, 1891.—Rode round the Lickowen country. Sickened and stunned by the misery. Hordes of women and children in the filthiest rags. Gave as many bread and tea tickets as we could, but felt helpless and despairing in the face of such hopeless poverty.”
“January 30.—Jack and I again rode to the West to collect Widows for the Relief Fund. Bagged nine and had some lepping” (an ameliorating circumstance of these expeditions was the necessity of making cross-country short cuts). “Numbers of women came over, some being rank frauds ably detected by the kitchenmaid; one or two knee-deep in lies.” “The boys walked to Bawneshal with tea, etc., for two of the worst widows.” (The adjective refers to their social, not their moral standing.)
On another occasion I have recorded that my sister was sent to inquire into the circumstances of a poor woman with a large family. The latter, in absorbed interest in the proceedings, surrounded the mother, who held in her arms the most recent of the number, an infant three weeks old.
“I have seven children,” said the pale mother, “and this little one-een that,” she turned a humorous grey eye on her listening family, “I’m afther taking out of the fox’s mouth!” (The fox playing the part attributed in Germany to the stork.)
My sister, absorbed in estimating the needs of the seven little brothers and sisters, replied absently,