I hope that Miss Purdon will not resent being called part of a movement. When she has written a few more books and read reviews of them she will become quite accustomed to this particular kind of insult. In reality she holds a position a little apart from other Irish authors. Her distinction is that she has chosen a new part of the country to write about. I do not know exactly where the Furry Farm is, but I am inclined to place it somewhere in the western part of Leinster, in Meath or Kildare, on the great plain which fattens cattle for the market. Other Irish writers, whether they wanted humour, romance, or mysticism, have gone to the maritime counties for their material. Galway, Cork, and Wicklow provide scenes for most of the plays which are acted in the Abbey Theatre. Some poets write about Donegal, others prefer North-East Ulster, and a few brave spirits have ventured into the streets and suburbs of Dublin. But I cannot remember that any plays or poems of importance have been written about the people of the central plain. They are regarded, for some reason obscure to me, as unworthy of a place in literature. They have, so one would gather, lost the virtues of Gaeldom without acquiring the sentimental regard for them which rescues Dublin from the reproach of “seoninism.” The accepted view of literary Ireland is that the people of Meath are as uninteresting as the bullocks which they herd.
Miss Purdon comes to us to prove the contrary. A great merit of her work is the fidelity with which she reproduces the dialect of the peasants about whom she writes. I do not know the western Leinster speech myself, but I am certain that Miss Purdon deals with it faithfully. She could not—no single person could—have invented all the phrases and expressions which she has put into the mouths of the characters of her stories. We have in her book the living tongue spoken by a neglected class of Irishmen. I do not say that the people of Meath and Kildare have the magic glamour of Celtic mysticism. I am no judge of such things. I have seldom succeeded in recognising it even in places where I know that it must be. But Miss Purdon’s people have imagination. How else would they say of a lonely place, “There wasn’t a neighbour within the bawl of an ass of it”? If they had not humour, they would not think of saying, “His pockets would be like sideboards, the way he’d have them stuck out with meat and eggs and so on.” The men who use expressions like these cannot possibly be stupid, and Miss Purdon makes them very real. They are, as their speech shows, of a type different from that of the peasantry of the Atlantic coast. Perhaps they have no appeal to make to poets; but they must certainly be capable of providing material for many plays and novels. Miss Purdon has discovered a new country, found a fresh subject for the pens of Irish writers.
G. A. B.
The
Folk of Furry Farm
The Folk of Furry Farm
CHAPTER I
THE FURRY FARM
There isn’t one now at Ardenoo that could tell you rightly about the Heffernans, or when the first of the name had come in upon the Furry Farm. People would remark that they were “the oldest standards about the place, and had been there during secula.” And some said that in the real old ancient times, it was Heffernans that had owned the whole countryside, and had been great high Quality then, until they were turned out of their home, through their being Catholics. Of course such things did occur, but not often. There would not be many willing to be mixed up in such dirty work. And, moreover, those that came in on land in that way, mostly always did it to keep their place warm for whoever had had to quit out. There’s a lot of nature in people, more than they get credit for. That’s how things don’t turn out as bad as you might expect very often. And of course along with all, there’s a great satisfaction in getting the better of the law.
It’s likely some friend of the Heffernans had stood to them in this way, when they had had to leave, and had just held the land for them, till they could slip back upon it again. But they had never said how it was. A queer, silent sort they were ever and always, that would never have much talk out of them about anything that would be going on, let alone about themselves.
But however it came to pass, at the time I am going to tell you about, there was nothing left of what had been once a very great fine kind of a place, only a bit of a ruined house, like, with the remains of a roof made of slabs of bog-oak over part of it, and it all reducing away under the weather.