Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy

by Patrick MacGill

My bedroom was placed on the second floor, and a rickety flight of stairs connected the apartment with the kitchen. My room was comfortable enough when the weather was good, but when it was wet the rain often came in by the roof and soaked through my blankets. But the hard work on Bennet's farm made me so tired that a wet blanket could not keep me from sleeping. In the morning I was called at five o'clock and sent out to wash potatoes in a pond near the house. Afterwards they were boiled in a pot over the kitchen fire, and when cooked they were eaten by the pigs and me. I must say that I was allowed to pick the best potatoes for myself, and I got a bowl of buttermilk to wash them down. The pigs got buttermilk also. This was my breakfast during the six months. For dinner I had potatoes and buttermilk, for supper buttermilk and potatoes. I never got tea in the afternoon. The Bennets took tea themselves, but I suppose they thought that such a luxury was unnecessary for me.

I always went down on my knees at the bedside to say my prayers. I knew that young Bennet did not like this, so I always left my door wide open that he might see me praying as he passed by on the way to his own bedroom.

From the moment of my arrival I began to realise that the Country beyond the Mountains, as the people at home call Tyrone, was not the best place in the world for a man of twelve. Sadder than that it was for me to learn that I was not worthy of the name of man at all. Many and many a time did Bennet say that he was paying me a man's wages while I was only fit for a child's work. Sometimes when carrying burdens with him I would fall under the weight, and upon seeing this he would discard his own, run forward, and with arms on hips, wait until I rose from the ground again.

"Whoever saw such a thing!" he would say and shake his head. "I thought that I got a man at the hirin'-fair." He drawled out his words slowly as if each one gave him pleasure in pronouncing it. He affected a certain weariness in his tones to me by which he meant to imply that he might, as a wise man, have been prepared for such incompetency on my part. "I thought that I had a man! I thought that I had a man!" he would keep repeating until I rose to my feet. Then he would return to his own burden and wait until my next stumble, when he would repeat the same performance all over again.

Being a Glenmornan man, I held my tongue between my teeth, but the eternal persecution was wearing me down. By nature being generous and impulsive, I looked with kindly wonder on everything and everybody. I loved my brothers and sisters, honoured my father and mother, liked the neighbours in my own townland, and they always had a kind word for me, even when working for them at so much a day. But Bennet was a man whom I did not understand. To him I was not a human being, a boy with an appetite and a soul. I was merely a ware purchased in the market-place, something less valuable than a plough, and of no more account than a barrow. I felt my position from the first. I, to Bennet, represented five pounds ten shillings' worth of goods bought at the market-place, and the buyer wanted, as a business man, to have his money's worth. The man was, of course, within his rights; everybody wants the worth of their money, and who was I, a boy bought for less than a spavined horse, to rail against the little sorrows which Destiny imposed upon me? I was only an article of exchange, something which represented so much amidst the implements and beasts of the farm; but having a heart and soul I felt the position acutely.

I worked hard whenever Bennet remained close by me, but I must admit that I idled a lot of the time when he was away from my side. Somehow I could not help it.

Perhaps I was working all alone on the Dooish Mountain, making rikkles of peat. There were rag-nails on my fingers, I was hungry and my feet were sore. I seemed to be always hungry. Potatoes and buttermilk do not make the best meal in the world, and for six of every seven days they gave me the heartburn. Sometimes I would stand up and bite a rag-nail off my finger while watching a hare scooting across the brown of the moor. Afterwards a fox might come into view, showing clear on the horizon against the blue of the sky. The pain that came into the small of my back when stooping over the turf-pile would go away. There was great relief in standing straight, although Bennet said that a man should never stand at his work. And there was I, who believed myself a man, standing over my work like a child and watching foxes and hares while I was biting the rag-nails off my fingers. No sensible man would be seen doing such things.

At one moment a pack of moor-fowl would rise and chatter wildly over my head, then drop into the heather again. At another a wisp of snipe would suddenly shoot across the sky, skimming the whole stretch of bogland almost as quickly as the eye that followed it. Just when I was on the point of restarting my work, a cast of hawks might come down from the highest reach of the mountain and rest immovable for hours in the air over my head. It strains the neck to gaze up when standing. Naturally I would lie down on my back and watch the hawks for just one little while longer. Minutes would slip into hours, and still I would lie there watching the kindred of the wild as they worked out the problems of their lives in their several different ways. Meanwhile I kept rubbing the cold moss over my hacked hands in order to drive the pain out of them. When Bennet came round in the evening to see my day's work he would stand for a moment regarding the rikkles of peat with a critical stare. Then he would look at me with pity in his eyes.

"If yer hands were as eager for work as yer stomach is for food I'd be a happy master this day," he would say, in a low weary voice. "I once thought that ye were a man, but such a mistake, such a mistake!"