Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.
Some superstition also prevented even the children from eating the myriads of blackberries which ripened on the bushes.
Directly the calamity was comprehended, the English poured money into the country with unbounded generosity, but the management was bad.
The relief works organised by the Government took the form of draining and road-making. This entailed delay, owing to the preliminary surveying, and when employment could be given, the people were too emaciated and feeble to work. All over Ireland unfinished roads leading half way to places of no consequence are to-day grass-grown memorials of that ghastly effort of State assistance.
Almost the earliest of the private soup-kitchens for the relief of the sufferers was that opened at Dingle under the joint initiative of Lady Ventry, Mrs. Hickson, my future mother-in-law, and Mrs. Hussey, my mother. So as not to pauperise the people, subscriptions of one penny a week were asked from every house in the town. At ten in the morning those who wanted it could get a pint per head of really excellent soup for themselves and their families. Those who were known to be able to pay had to contribute a penny; the really destitute had gratuitous relief.
So bad was the famine that people coming in from the country fell in the street never to rise again. One woman was found lying on the outskirts of the town almost dead from starvation, her three children having succumbed beside her, and had she not been carried to the soup-kitchen she would not have survived them many hours.
My wife well remembers another case. One day her mother emerged from a cabin carrying what looked like a big bundle of clothes. It was the form of an emaciated woman, whose four children and husband had all starved. My mother-in-law took her to her own house, fed her at first with spoonsful of soup, and kept her there until she had rebuilt her once vigorous constitution.
My wife subsequently recollects her as a hale, buxom, young widow coming to say good-bye before emigrating to America.
Very soon all the coffins had been exhausted, and in many places the dead were taken to the graves and dropped in through the hinged bottom of a trap-coffin.
After soup had been introduced, Indian meal stirabout proved efficacious, and it was distributed from large iron boilers set up by the roadside to the gaunt, cadaverous wretches who scuffled for the sustenance.