“And why were ye thinking of him?” Borrow says that he asked the lad. “The English hanged him long since, as I have heard say.”
“I was thinking,” he answered, “that I should wish to be like him.”
“Do ye mean,” Borrow says that he said, “that ye would wish to be hanged?”
This youth was a drummer boy in Captain Borrow’s regiment. Borrow describes him upsetting the New Town champion in one of the bickers. Seven years later he was condemned to death at Edinburgh, and to earn a little money for his mother he dictated an account of his life to the prison chaplain before he died. It was published in 1821 with the title: “The Life of David Haggart, alias John Wilson, alias John Morison, alias Barney M’Coul, alias John M’Colgan, alias David O’Brien, alias the Switcher. Written by himself, while under sentence of death.” It is worth reading, notable in itself and for its style.
He was a gamekeeper’s son, and being a merry boy was liberally tipped by sportsmen. Yet he ran away from home at the age of ten. One of his first exploits was the stealing of a bantam cock. It belonged to a woman at the back of the New Town of Edinburgh, says he, and he took a great fancy to it, “for it was a real beauty and I offered to buy, but mistress would not sell, so I got another cock, and set the two a fighting, and then off with my prize.” This is like Mr. W. B. Yeats’ Paddy Cockfight in “Where there is nothing”; he got a fighting cock from a man below Mullingar—“The first day I saw him I fastened my eyes on him, he preyed on my mind, and next night if I didn’t go back every foot of nine miles to put him in my bag.” When he was twelve he got drunk at the Leith races and enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, which had a recruiting party for patriots at the races. “I learned,” he says, “to beat the drum very well in the course of three
months, and afterwards made considerable progress in blowing the bugle-horn. I liked the red coat and the soldiering well enough for a while, but soon tired. We were too much confined, and there was too little pay for me;” and so he got his discharge. “The restraining influences of military discipline,” says Dr. Knapp, “gradually wore away.” He went back to school even, but in vain. He was “never happier in his life” than when he “fingered all this money”—£200 acquired by theft. He worked at his trade of thieving in many parts of Scotland and Ireland. As early as 1818 he was sentenced to death, but escaped, and, being recognised by a policeman, killed him and got clear away. He served one or two sentences and escaped from another. He escaped a third time, with a friend, after hitting the gaoler in such a manner that he afterwards died. The friend was caught at once, but David ran well—“never did a fox double the hounds in better style”—and got away in woman’s clothes. As he was resting in a haystack after his run of ten miles in an hour, he heard a woman ask “if that lad was taken that had broken out of Dumfries Gaol,” and the answer: “No; but the gaoler died last night at ten o’clock.” He got arrested in Ireland through sheer carelessness, was recognised and taken in irons to Dumfries again—and so he died.
In 1814 and 1815 Borrow was for a time at the Grammar School at Norwich, but sailed with the regiment “in the autumn of the year 1815” for Ireland. “On the eighth day of our voyage,” he says, “we were in sight of Ireland. The weather was now calm and serene, the sun shone brightly on the sea and on certain green hills in the distance, on which I descried what at first sight I believed to be two ladies gathering flowers, which, however, on our near approach, proved to be two tall white towers, doubtless built for some purpose or other, though I did not learn for what.” He was at “the Protestant Academy” at Clonmel, and
“read the Latin tongue and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman.” From a schoolfellow he learnt something of the Irish tongue in exchange for a pack of cards.
School, he says, had helped him to cast aside, in a great degree, his unsocial habits and natural reserve, and when he moved to Templemore, where there was no school, he roamed about the wild country, “sometimes entering the cabins of the peasantry with a ‘God’s blessing upon you good people!’” Here, as in Scotland, he seems to have done as he liked. His father had other things to do than look after the child whom he was later on to upbraid for growing up in a displeasing way. Ireland made a strong impression upon the boy, if we may judge from his writing about it when he looked back on those days. He recalls, in “Wild Wales,” hearing the glorious tune of “Croppies lie Down” in the barrack yard at Clonmel. Again and again he recalls Murtagh, the wild Irish boy who taught him Irish for a pack of cards. In Ireland he learnt to be “a frank rider” without a saddle, and had awakened in him his “passion for the equine race”: and here he had his cob shoed by a “fairy smith” who first roused the animal to a frenzy by uttering a strange word “in a sharp pungent tone,” and then calmed it by another word “in a voice singularly modified but sweet and almost plaintive.” Above all there is a mystery which might easily be called Celtic about his memories of Ireland, due chiefly to something in his own blood, but also to the Irish atmosphere which evoked that something in its perfection.
After less than a year in Ireland the regiment was back at Norwich, and war being at an end, the men were mustered out in 1815.