Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

“Yes, to be sure; we read all sorts of books.”

“I’m glad of it. It’s a comfort to me to think you read this book.”

Here again is an old woman with hair as white as snow, who deliberately informs me she is ninety-eight years of age, and next time I see her, corrects herself, and “believes it is eighty-nine, but it is all the same, she disremembers numbers.” This poor old soul in some way hurt her foot, and after much suffering was obliged to have half of it amputated. Strange to say, she recovered, but when I congratulated her on the happy event, I shall never forget the outbreak of true feminine sentiment which followed. Stretching out the poor mutilated and blackened limb, and looking at it with woeful compassion, she exclaimed, “Ah, ma’am, but it will never be a purty foot again!” Age, squalor, poverty, and even mutilation, had not sufficed to quench that little spark of vanity which “springs eternal in the (female) breast.”

Here, again, are half-a-dozen cabins, each occupied by widows with one or more daughters; eight of whom form my father’s pet corps of Amazons, always kept working about the shrubberies and pleasure-grounds, or haymaking or any light fieldwork; houses which, though poorest of all, are by no means the most dirty or uncared for. Of course there are dozens of others literally overflowing with children, children in the cradle, children on the floor, children on the threshold, children on the “midden” outside; rosy, bright, merry children, who thrive with the smallest possible share of buttermilk and stirabout, are utterly innocent of shoes and stockings, and learn at school all that is taught to them at least half as fast again as a tribe of little Saxons. Several of them in Balisk are the adopted children of the people who provide for them. First sent down by their parents (generally domestic servants) to be nursed in that salubrious spot, after a year or two it generally happened that the pay ceased, the parent was not heard of, and the foster-mother and father would no more have thought of sending the child to the Poor-house than of sending it to the moon. The Poor-house, indeed, occupied a very small space in the imagination of the people of Balisk. It was beyond Purgatory, and hardly more real. Not that the actual institution was conducted on other than the very mildest principles, but there was a fearful Ordeal by Water—in the shape of a warm bath—to be undergone on entrance; there were large rooms with glaring windows, admitting a most uncomfortable degree of light, and never shaded by any broken hats or petticoats; there were also stated hours and rules thoroughly disgusting to the Celtic mind, and, lastly, for the women, there were caps without borders!

Yes! cruelty had gone so far (masculine guardians, however compassionate, little recking the woe they caused), till at length a wail arose—a clamour—almost a Rebellion! “Would they make them wear caps without borders?” The stern heart of manhood relented, and answered “No!”

But I must return to Balisk. Does any one ask, was nothing done to ameliorate the condition of that wretched place? Certainly; at all events there was much attempted. Mrs. Evans, of Portrane, of whom I shall say more by and by, built and endowed capital schools for both boys and girls, and pensioned some of the poorest of the old people. My father having a wholesome horror of pauperising, tried hard at more complete reforms, by giving regular employment to as many as possible, and aiding all efforts to improve the houses. Not being the landlord of Balisk, however, he could do nothing effectually, nor enforce any kind of sanitary measures; so that while his own villages were neat, trim and healthy, poor Balisk went on year after year deserving the epithet it bore among us, of the Slough of Despond. The failures of endeavours to mend it would form a chapter of themselves. On one occasion my eldest brother undertook the true task for a Hercules; to drain, not the stables of Augeas, but the town of Balisk. The result was that his main drain was found soon afterwards effectually stopped up by the dam of an old beaver bonnet. Again, he attempted to whitewash the entire village, but many inhabitants objected to whitewash. Of course when any flood, or snow, or storm came (and what wintry month did they not come in Ireland?) I went to see the state of affairs at Balisk, and provide what could be provided. And of course when anybody was born, or married, or ill, or dead, or going to America, in or from Balisk, embassies were sent to Newbridge seeking assistance; money for burial or passage; wine, meat, coals, clothes; and (strange to say), in cases of death—always jam! The connection between dying and wanting raspberry jam remained to the last a mystery, but whatever was its nature, it was invariable. “Mary Keogh,” or “Peter Reilly,” as the case might be, “isn’t expected, and would be very thankful for some jam;” was the regular message. Be it remarked that Irish delicacy has suggested the euphuism of “isn’t expected” to signify that a person is likely to die. What it is that he or she “is not expected” to do, is never mentioned. When the supplicant was not supposed to be personally known at Newbridge, or a little extra persuasion was thought needful to cover too frequent demands, it was commonly urged that the petitioner was a “poor orphant,” commonly aged thirty or forty, or else a “desolate widow.” The word desolate, however, being always pronounced “dissolute,” the epithet proved less affecting than it was intended to be. But absurd as their words might sometimes be (and sometimes, on the contrary, they were full of touching pathos and simplicity), the wants of the poor souls were only too real, as we very well knew, and it was not often that a petitioner from Balisk to Newbridge went empty away.

But such help was only of temporary avail. The Famine came and things grew worse. In poor families, that is, families where there was only one man to earn and five or six mouths to feed, the best wages given in the country proved insufficient to buy the barest provision of food; wheatmeal for “griddle” bread, oatmeal for stirabout, turnips to make up for the lost potatoes. Strong men fainted at their work in the fields, having left untasted for their little children the food they needed so sorely. Beggars from the more distressed districts (for Balisk was in one of those which suffered least in Ireland) swarmed through the country, and rarely, at the poorest cabin, asked in vain for bread. Often and often have I seen the master or mistress of some wretched hovel bring out the “griddle cake,” and give half of it to some wanderer, who answered simply with a blessing and passed on. Once I remember passing by the house of a poor widow, who had seven children of her own, and as if that were not enough, had adopted an orphan left by her sister. At her cabin door one day, I saw, propped up against her knees, a miserable “traveller,” a wanderer from what a native of Balisk would call “other nations; a bowzy villiain from other nations,” that is to say, a village eight or ten miles away. The traveller lay senseless, starved to the bone and utterly famine-stricken. The widow tried tenderly to make him swallow a spoonful of bread and water, but he seemed unable to make the exertion. A few drops of whiskey by and by restored him to consciousness. The poor “bowzy” leaned his head on his hands and muttered feebly, “Glory be to God”! The widow looked up, rejoicing, “Glory be to God, he’s saved anyhow.” Of course all the neighbouring gentry joined in extensive soup-kitchens and the like, and by one means or other the hard years of famine were passed over.

Then came the Fever, in many ways a worse scourge than the famine. Of course it fell heavily on such ill-drained places as Balisk. After a little time, as each patient remained ill for many weeks, it often happened that three or four were in the fever in the same cabin, or even all the family at once, huddled in the two or three beds, and with only such attendance as the kindly neighbours, themselves overburdened, could supply. Soon it became universally known that recovery was to be effected only by improved food and wine; not by drugs. Those whose condition was already good, and who caught the fever, invariably died; those who were in a depressed state, if they could be raised, were saved. It became precisely a question of life and death how to supply nourishment to all the sick. As the fever lasted on and on, and re-appeared time after time, the work was difficult, seeing that no stores of any sort could ever be safely intrusted to Irish prudence and frugality.

Then came Smith O’Brien’s rebellion. The country was excited. In every village (Balisk nowise behindhand) certain clubs were formed, popularly called “Cutthroat Clubs,” for the express purpose of purchasing pikes and organising the expected insurrection in combination with leaders in Dublin. Head-Centre of the club of Balisk was the ex-schoolmaster, of whom we have already spoken. How he obtained that honour I know not; possibly because he could write, which most probably was beyond the achievements of any other member of the institution; possibly also because he claimed to be the lawful owner of the adjoining estate of Newbridge. How the schoolmaster’s claim was proved to the satisfaction of himself and his friends is a secret which, if revealed, would probably afford a clue to much of Irish ambition. Nearly every parish in Ireland has thus its lord de facto, who dwells in a handsome house in the midst of a park, and another lord who dwells in a mud-cabin in the village and is fully persuaded he is the lord de jure. In the endless changes of ownership and confiscation to which Irish land has been subjected, there is always some heir of one or other of the dispossessed families, who, if nothing had happened that did happen, and nobody had been born of a score or two of persons who somehow, unfortunately, were actually born, then he or she might, could, would, or should have inherited the estate. In the present case my ancestor had purchased the estate some 150 years before from another English family who had held it for some generations. When and where the poor Celtic schoolmaster’s forefathers had come upon the field none pretended to know. Anxious, however, to calm the minds of his neighbours, my father thought fit to address them in a paternal manifesto, posted about the different villages, entreating them to forbear from entering the “Cutthroat Clubs,” and pointing the moral of the recent death of the Archbishop of Paris at the barricades. The result of this step was that the newspaper, then published in Dublin under the audacious name of The Felon, devoted half a column to exposing my father by name to the hatred of good Clubbists, and pointing him out as “one of the very first for whose benefit the pikes were procured.” Boxes of pikes were accordingly actually sent by the railway before mentioned, and duly delivered to the Club; and still the threat of rebellion rose higher, till even calm people like ourselves began to wonder whether it were a volcano on which we were treading, or the familiar mud of Balisk.

Newbridge, as described in the first chapter of this book, bore some testimony to the troubles of the last century when it was erected. There was a long corridor which had once been all hung with weapons, and there was a certain board in the floor of an inner closet which could be taken up when desirable, and beneath which appeared a large receptacle wherein the aforesaid weapons were stored in times of danger. Stories of ’98 were familiar to us from infancy. There was the story of Le Hunts of Wexford, when the daughter of the family dreamed three times that the guns in her father’s hall were all broken and, on inducing Colonel Le Hunt to examine them, the dream was found to be true and his own butler the traitor. Horrible stories were there, also, of burnings and cardings (i.e., tearing the back with the iron comb used in carding wool); and nursery threats of rebels coming up back stairs on recalcitrant “puckhawns” (naughty children—children of Puck), insomuch that to “play at rebellion” had been our natural resource as children. Born and bred in this atmosphere, it seemed like a bad dream come true that there were actual pikes imported into well-known cabins, and that there were in the world men stupid and wicked enough to wish to apply them to those who laboured constantly for their benefit. Yet the papers teemed with stories of murders of good and just landlords; yet threats each day more loud, came with every post of what Smith O’Brien and his friends would do if they but succeeded in raising the peasantry, alas! all too ready to be raised. Looking over the miserable fiasco of that “cabbage garden” rebellion now, it seems all too ridiculous to have ever excited the least alarm. But at that time, while none could doubt the final triumph of England, it was very possible to doubt whether aid could be given by the English Government before every species of violence might be committed by the besotted peasantry at our gates.