Read Shadow on the Land Online
Authors: Anne Doughty
She wondered what Rose Hamilton would have said if she’d put the question to her. As a girl and young woman it was to her she’d always turned when troubled or confused. Her aunt was a kind and good-natured woman who had given her a home without question, but she was not a thoughtful person and was always uneasy if she should ask a question that didn’t have a known and practical answer.
As she sat, the quiet and warmth soothing her, she remembered some of the things Rose said most often. She had come to the conclusion that some of our earliest experiences left us vulnerable to what happened to us later in life. After what had happened when her own family were evicted, she confessed she’d always feared being homeless, though in fact on the one occasion when it did happen, she’d coped quite well.
Maybe, if Rose were here, she would remind her that she’d lost both her father and her mother and
with them the homes and life of her childhood. Her father had been a sudden loss, hitting his head as he was swept overboard from the lifeboat during a rescue, so that he was unconscious as he struck the water. With a heavy sea running the attempts to save him didn’t stand a chance.
Though a delicate woman herself, her mother had coped for a time, then she’d lost heart and became ill. Emily and her sister had looked after her for months, knowing all the while she’d given up and had no real wish to live.
‘That’s one answer for you, Emily’, she said aloud, as she finished the last tepid mouthful of tea.
Rose would certainly tell her she’d got to keep up the will to live, whatever the circumstances. Hope was necessary, not just for her own sake, but for her family. She needed to think what her loss might mean to her children. She’d been fortunate in the new home her aunt gave her, but that
might
not have been so. The loss of her mother could have brought loneliness and misfortune when she was still too young to have the experience or maturity to cope with it.
She sat for a little longer watching the sun begin its descent on the short winter day, and then, thinking it a pity not to make use of the warmth from the stove, she decided against finishing the work on the stairs and turned back to the small sheaf of letters she’d hoped to reply to in the course
of the day. She sorted them out into a new pile and picked out a large, heavy envelope postmarked Dublin. It contained a letter and a manuscript. The letter she’d read back in January, but the wedge of flimsy sheets of a carbon copy with its somewhat erratic blue print she had yet to read.
The letter itself was from Brendan, a vigorous scrawl on invoice paper, all he’d had to hand on a cold, January day when no one appeared to be interested in buying books.
She began to re-read it, remembering with pleasure his reference back to their meeting of last April. Of the rest of the letter, she had only the vaguest idea, for it had arrived along with the news of Cathy’s sudden collapse and Brian’s desperate attempts to get back to Cheshire to see her. She had set it aside to re-read later. Only now did she realize how much later.
My dear Emily,
Sometimes the well-rubbed phrases of common exchange do serve our purposes precisely. I have had good cause to thank the ill-wind, or more precisely, the Army lorry that did me a mischief last April and was the means of bringing me to your hospitable fireside. Not only do I reflect with pleasure on that happy evening spent under your roof,
but your letters through out the year have cheered many a dull hour.
I am seldom guilty of such foresight as when I asked you if you’d be so kind as to keep in touch with me re the activities of the Hamiltons, especially those of the next generation with whom I am only slightly acquainted, but I am now exceedingly glad that I did. An entirely selfish demand on someone who has so many demands upon her time, let me at least say how much it is appreciated.
By way of some recompense for your efforts, though I know your generous nature requires none, I have been continuing my researches into the mysterious origins of my cousin Alex. Whatever they may prove to be, I assure you I will insist on retaining the rights of cousinhood on grounds similar to those put forward by a sitting tenant.
Emily put the letter down, smiled and realised that she really must not read in the fading light without her spectacles. She fetched them from the sitting-room, and sat down again, reluctant to switch on the electric light till the last possible moment.
The sky was a pale yellow on the horizon, shading into blue if she looked up into the arch overhead
and was completely cloudless. There would most certainly be frost tonight. When she moved the paraffin stove into the hall at dusk she’d have to leave the little bowl-fire lit for the geraniums.
‘They’d get a shock if I didn’t,’ she thought to herself, as she settled back to Brendan’s letter again.
Now, you will remember that only weeks after our meeting, I came across a box containing a correspondence with a gentleman named Andrew Doyle who it seems was commissioned in 1875 to investigate the whole question of child emigration to Canada.
It is, of course, a rather curious thing to have only one side of an on-going correspondence, but it certainly stimulated my interest in a subject of which I knew nothing. A strange thing to say, from one whose own country has poured streams of people across all the oceans of the world to populate some of the remotest corners of the globe.
Naturally, 1875 is some twenty years before our good Alex was despatched, but it seems that the general situation of emigrant children was established by this time and despite ‘the highly critical report’ which my correspondent refers to when commenting on Andrew Doyle’s activity, later letters show that, while some changes were made in an attempt
to improve the situation of the children, the abuses which Andrew Doyle outlined were only partly addressed and only in some areas.
None of this, my dear Emily, would appear to tell us anything about Alex that we didn’t already know, but by an even stranger coincidence than acquiring the box of letters, when I mentioned the subject to my much older friend and partner, Sean Henessey, I found I had started a deluge.
To begin with, a relative of his was active in the founding of the Fairbridge Child Emigration Society of 1909. He overwhelmed me with facts and figures, though the only one I can at present remember is 100,000. That was the number of children sent to Canada alone between 1869 and 1935. When you add on America, Australia and New Zealand, the exodus of the Irish Famine seems to shrink before one’s very eyes.
However, I digress. Sean is delighted by your interest in his subject and has copied out the most relevant parts of a book he is currently researching on the subject of child emigrants and the people who were responsible for despatching them. It may well be that your sharp eyes will pick out something in the text that I have missed, a hint that might lead us forward in discovering Alex’s past.
What Sean assures me is that copious records do exist. After 1865, it was obligatory for ships to have manifests that recorded all passengers, including escorted groups of children. He himself has obtained copies of some passenger lists as illustrations for the points he is making, so, with patience and time, we might well be able to find one Alexander Hamilton. If we did, Sean assures me, we would also find his age, destination, place of future residence or employment, together with his place of origin and his sponsoring organization.
I am quite overwhelmed by this impressive bureaucracy which I myself would have thought entirely an innovation of the twentieth century.
Good luck with your researches. I shall continue my random pursuits here in the brightly-lit capital where some Northerners at least come to find food, drink and solace from the woes of war. I do hope you and yours fare well. At least it looks as if we ‘neutrals’ are not now to be invaded by our current enemy or our traditional one, apart, of course, from local excursions back and forth across the border where the smuggling of everything from milk cattle
to packets of Rinso at least provides some entertainment amid the gloomy realities of the time.
My loving good wishes to both you and Alex and my greetings to all the members of my extended family.
Brendan.
Hungry, dirty and ill-treated children were nothing new to Emily. She was old enough to remember the crowded cabins in Galway, followed by those of Ballyshannon, Derry and Donaghadee, the ports where her father had served, and she knew that she and her sister were fortunate to have beds to sleep in, food to eat, and parents who neither drank nor abused them. But reading about the gangs of street children in London and the big cities of England who survived by stealing, the children beaten to death by harsh masters or left to die when they became ill, deeply shocked her. She had known it was bad, but had never imagined it was quite as bad as this.
Sean Hennessy had begun his work with an account of two women, Maria Rye and Annie McPherson, each driven by a fierce commitment to remove children from the destitution in which they were found, but even more from the moral corruption which they perceived. Following the stories of both women, Emily found herself admiring the zeal with
which they pursued their objectives, but wondered if they looked at the children themselves.
It came as an even greater shock to discover that many of the children sent to ‘grow in moral strength in the unpolluted air of Canada’ were not orphans at all, but children of poor parents who could not afford to feed them and had been forced in despair to bring them to the workhouse.
As Sean Hennessy pointed out, it was easy to show how unfortunate the circumstances of these children were, but what was not pointed out was what the ‘bright, new open-air life’ might actually mean for a child adjusted to the city streets, to poverty and to the company of its own people.
The more Emily read of the true situation of many of the emigrants, the more she agreed with Brendan’s Andrew Doyle. After 11,000 miles travelling round Canada to see what had happened to at least some of those sent out, no wonder his criticisms were so severe. Children as young as one year old carried off from the ship at Quebec by unknown people, boys and girls from the same family separated by the width of Canada, girls abused and then returned pregnant and in disgrace to the orphanage for punishment …
Emily had to stop. She could not bear to think of what the reality had been behind all the pious words, the fund-raising, the support by members of the government and the aristocracy. Children raised
to be slaves, badly fed, badly housed, but expected to be grateful for this new life an ocean away from any familiar face or well known place.
No wonder Alex had never talked about what had happened to him. Apart from the story about him going in a ship across a grey sea with a label on his coat collar that irritated him, in all their years together she had gleaned from him only the merest fragments.
He’d spoken of a woman who was kind to him, a young woman with an old husband. He used to bring her flowers from the meadow or the riverbank, but he had to be careful not to get caught in the little garden where she used to sit. If he was, he’d be beaten and sent back to his work, or kept working half the night when his companions were let go to their beds in the straw.
The light had gone now and Emily could read no more without putting on the light. But still she didn’t move. He must have been five or six when he went to Canada, but by the time he was eight he was speaking French and had ‘forgotten’ his English. And then he had learnt German. And where exactly was this place called German Township where he had met Sam McGinley?
She gathered up the letters, the blue carbon copy of Sean’s manuscript and Brendan’s letter, stepped back into the kitchen and laid them on the table. She drew the blind, pulled across the blackout and switched on the light. As it spilt down on the bare,
scrubbed table, she saw that Brendan had added a P.S. to his letter on a separate sheet which she hadn’t seen.
She took it up and read it twice through in quick succession, not able to grasp it the first time.
P. S. Talking about Alex the other day, Sean made a suggestion I hadn’t thought of. But then, that’s hardly surprising as he is much more familiar with the location of all the orphanages in Canada.
He said that it was possible the label Alex wore was not actually his name, but his Christian name and his destination i.e. Alex to Hamilton. (Hamilton, Ontario).
She paused, put the paper down and thought about it. Given all she’d read about the collecting and the despatching, it was a real possibility.
My poor love, to have nothing of your own but the one short word, Alex. To have done what you’ve done. Perhaps you deserve a medal as much as Robert Anderson
.
The wild March wind caught Emily in the face as she came round the gable of Cook’s farm, crossed the cobbled yard and stepped out onto the empty road leading back up to Rathdrum. The wind was boisterous, but not cold, the glints of sun had real warmth in them and the hawthorn hedges were already sprayed with new green leaves. She took a deep breath of the fresh air and smiled as she saw little swirls of dust run across the tarmac in front of her and disappear into the dry grass of the rough roadside verges.
She was heartily glad to be on her way home, the milk, butter and eggs for the next few days safely packed in her shopping bag, her returned copies of
Woman
and
Woman’s Own
carefully wedged to stop the bottles from rattling. The last thing she wanted on her way up the hill was to listen to the chink of bottles when in all the hedges the birds were active, singing their hearts out to mark their territory or
fluttering and scuffling amid the branches as they began to build their nests.
She had looked forward to her regular twice-weekly visit to the Cooks, always a source of news and lively stories, but today the time she had spent there had been both wearing and agitating. Normally the most outgoing of women, seldom without a fund of conversation or even of monologue, Mary wasn’t herself at all. Though a much less talkative person, Michael too was surprisingly quiet. His widowed father had arrived for a visit and, from the moment she’d been introduced he’d taken over the conversation and more than made up for both.
Emily had said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and commented how nice it was to have such a pleasant spell of dry, sunny weather. Immediately, the older man had protested. It was all very well for women spring-cleaning and getting the Monday washing dry and suchlike, but if this dryness went on then the milk yields would be down and forby Michael would have to feed hay to make up for the shortage of new grass and sure look at the price of hay, even if it were available in the first place.
Emily would have been more than happy to pick up her supplies and leave, but courtesy required she stay at least fifteen minutes and exchange news. Not that there was any news from Rathdrum, certainly none she wanted to share, but to begin with she did her best by enquiring about a setting of eggs Mary
wanted for a broody hen and confirming the plans for the next children’s outing.
‘You’d think those American boys out the road had better things to do than run around with a lot of children,’ Mr Cook announced, finally dropping down into a fireside chair, just as Emily thought his hovering awkwardly meant that he might be about to leave. ‘We’re hardly goin’ to beat the Jerries with all that lot are doin’. Why aren’t they out with them convoys that are gettin’ sunk left, right and centre? If these U-boats have it all their own way shure they’ll starve us out. Isn’t that exactly what Hitler wants to do?’
‘Now Da, be reasonable,’ said Michael coolly. ‘These young lads are still trainin’ to be engineers. One soldier is not the same as another. Different men do different jobs.’
‘All right, I give you that,’ he said abruptly. ‘They’d be no use out there in the Atlantic. So what are they doing marchin’ roun’ the place here with their faces black, if they’re engineers?’ he went on, grinning and showing his small, brown teeth, as he took his pipe out of his pocket.
‘An’ I’ll tell ye somethin’ else,’ he said, fixing them all with his eye, ‘some of these dances and socials and what have ye,
for the troops
, as they say, are open to all comers. And who d’ye think comes? Girls from over the border. As nice as ye please,
their
clothes aren’t on coupons, are they? And then
they go back with all the details of which regiment is here and which regiment is there and what every one of them’s doin’. Shure we might as well ring up Mr de Valera or the German embassy in Dublin and tell them all our business in the first place,’ he said, applying a match to his pipe and breaking off while he sucked furiously to get it going.
‘An I’ll tell ye more forby, for ye don’t seem to have one bit of a notion here what’s going on. If ye go down to Dublin and into one of these posh hotels you’ll see it full of people from the North and there sitting beside them as large as life these Nazis with their swastikas, eating and drinking and chatting away as if they were at home in Berlin.’
Emily had said nothing. Many well off Northerners went down to Dublin for weekends to escape the black out and the general weariness of wartime. Her own friend Dolly Love, from Dromore had gone down with her husband to visit her sister on her birthday. They’d no sooner sat down in the restaurant where they’d booked a special meal than some men in German uniform sat down at the next table. Arthur Love fought in the first war and was so incensed, he’d marched them straight out. Poor Dolly had been so looking forward to her dinner. Back home, all her sister could produce for them was scrambled egg.
‘Da, if the South is neutral, then anyone has the right to be there. There’s Americans and British in
Dublin as well, in uniform and out of it,’ Michael said coolly.
‘Neutral, ma foot. Yer man is hand in glove with Hitler. And Hitler’s just biding his time to invade. Sure, isn’t it the best way to get at England?’
Emily was beginning to wonder just whose side Cook senior was on. His reference to England was just as hostile as his reference to the Germans in Dublin.
‘Well, maybe, Da, we might be grateful yet for the wee American lads with their guns to give us a han’ when the Jerries come up the road from the South,’ said Michael quietly. ‘Right now I have cows to milk.’
‘And I have washing to bring in and a meal to cook,’ said Emily, as she stood up quickly and moved across the room to where Mary was standing by the entrance to the dairy, waiting for her, her eyes cast up in a heavenward glance as Cook senior clumped out through the back door without a backward glance or a word of farewell.
‘Emily, what am ah goin’ to do? He’s here for three more weeks, an’ he never stops. It’s the Germans and the South and de Valera. Mornin’ noon and night. An’ he thinks our postman is spyin’ for them, because he asked me how my brother was. Sure the two of them were at school together till Jimmy joined up. But you can’t tell him anythin’. What am ah goin’ to do?’
Mary turned a tearful glance towards Emily as she refilled her clean milk bottles and put their tops on, wrapped her eggs to fit the small cardboard box that had been going up and down the hill for years now and then opened her larder for butter.
‘Oh Mary, I
am
sorry,’ said Emily. ‘I don’t know
what
I would do,’ she added honestly. ‘I’d like to tell him to shut up, but then, if he were Alex’s father, I’d probably not feel I could do that any more than you can. Why does he come here?’
‘He gets lonely, Michael says, since Ma died. Sure he has no friends.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Emily, watching Mary as she deftly wrapped her butter in a sheet of greaseproof paper and then in the clean tea towel Emily had brought with her.
‘An’ we’ll have none left by the time he goes,’ Mary added crossly.
Emily laughed.
‘Oh Mary dear, don’t worry about that,’ she said, handing over her money in a battered envelope. ‘They’ll all be back as soon as he goes. It might even be good for us all to have no news and no good stories for a while. Then we’d appreciate them all the more,’ she added smiling. ‘I’ll maybe send Alex down on Tuesday and see if he does any better than I did. I don’t think your father-in-law has much time for women, has he?’
‘No, he never had,’ Mary agreed, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know how Michael’s Ma put up with him. But now he’s lost without her.’
‘Don’t let him get you down, Mary,’ Emily said encouragingly, as she picked up her loaded bag. ‘Three weeks does seems a long time, but if we can stick three years of war, we can stick three weeks of your man, can’t we?’
Mary managed a weak smile.
‘Aye, we can and I’ll be lookin’ forward to seein’ you and our friends at the Church Hall on Friday next. At least the wee ones will have a smile for us. I think yer man’s face would crack if he tried it.’
Emily enjoyed her walk. Though the bag began to feel heavy by the time she’d passed the steepest part of the hill she was still glad to be outdoors and grateful for the same dry weather that had so irritated Michael’s father. Thanks to it, she was well ahead in the garden, the soil now easy to turn after three years of crops and digging in compost. It had been a real triumph for her to do something she’d never done before and know what she was doing was worth all the effort.
She wasn’t the only one who must feel pleased at her success. So far, producing food had been Ulster’s best response to the war. While the farmers in England, Scotland and Wales had reached the targets for opening up new land by ploughing fallow
and meadow and even digging up the London parks and gardens, in Ulster they had excelled themselves, far exceeded the targets they’d been set.
Their efforts helped to make up for the half-hearted start to war production she’d read about in all the papers for the first couple of years of the war. She still wondered how the Stormont government could have managed to do so little in the face the huge demands the war created that unemployment had actually
gone up
. Worse still, there’d been even more labour troubles than during the severe depression of the thirties.
Perhaps, she thought, catching some hair out of her eyes, there was now a wind of change blowing. If they got the new government as most people thought was about to happen, then they would be active in stepping up production. If farmers and gardeners could do so well producing food, surely factory workers could make more planes and munitions, but people needed to be encouraged to do their best.
She remembered how, right at the beginning of the war, the farmers had each had a personal letter from Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture. Michael Cook had showed her his letter which he still kept, for he said doubling the herd was the best thing that had ever happened to his farm. There must have been many more encouraged by that same letter, written as one farmer to another, though Brook’s
estates at Coalbrook were enormous compared to the handful of acres of people like Michael.
If there was one thing in particular she had learnt from Chris Hicks and his boys, it was that individuals really need to feel what they are doing is worthwhile. They also need to feel they themselves are valued.
Thank goodness there weren’t many like Michael Cook’s father around, she thought to herself, as she passed through the always open gates of Rathdrum. Hitler ought to recruit more like him. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps Cook senior was a secret weapon for undermining morale. Undermining someone as irrepressible as Mary took some doing.
Emily laughed as she tramped down the drive. Wasn’t it strange the silly things came into your mind when you were free to walk at your own pace with no one expecting you and no particular need to hurry, not even to save yourself from getting wet.
She was completely taken aback when she came round the corner of the house and saw a jeep parked by the back door. To her surprise, there was no one in it.
She looked around the yard and peered down what was visible of the garden path as she opened the back door and lowered her bag gratefully onto the table. At that instant, the door to the hall opened and a tall, blonde young man in uniform appeared.
‘Oh thank goodness, ma’am, I was afraid something was wrong,’ he said hastily. ‘The door was open, but you weren’t in the garden. I was sure you wouldn’t leave the door unlocked, so I went looking for you. I’m so sorry, I hope you don’t think …’
He broke off looking flustered and awkward.
‘That I thought you might be going to steal the family silver or were inspecting to see if I’d dusted under the beds,’ she offered, laughing.
To her relief, the stricken look on his face disappeared and he smiled.
‘Well, it’s not funny to come into your own house and find a stranger looking round,’ he said apologetically.
‘But, you’re
not
a stranger. You’re Hank the Tank and you are also Alexander Lachlan Ross. I can’t imagine any harm coming from a man with a name like that. Besides, you were concerned about me. That was very kind of you. I must confess, I never lock the door when I’m just going down the hill for the milk. Maybe, I should in future.’
‘Well, perhaps …’
‘You’re perfectly right. Now, sit down while I put the kettle on. Whatever it is you’ve come for, as Major Hicks might say:
‘I could sure use a cup of coffee’
How about you?’
‘Yes, ma’am, I could indeed.’
Emily put a tray together so that they could sit
in the conservatory with the last of the afternoon sunshine.
‘Now, do have some cake,’ she said, cutting him a generous slice. ‘Without you, there wouldn’t be much fruit in it and without you I wouldn’t have any coffee either. Do you mind being called Hank or shall I use your other names?’
‘Call me what you like, ma’am, if you give me cake like this,’ he said appreciatively as he swallowed the first mouthful. ‘There’s a saying we have at home,
Call me anything you like except too early in the morning
.’
Emily laughed and decided his accent was definitely Canadian, not American.
‘Yes, we have that one here too. But then, it’s hardly surprising you know the saying when your name is a good Scots name like Ross and Ulster is full of Rosses. Do you know where your family came from?’
‘Well, my father’s family actually came into Ontario from Nova Scotia. My great-grandfather started writing the whole story in the front of the family Bible from the time they left Scotland on a ship called
Polly
in 1810,’ he began, smiling gently. ‘We don’t actually know about my mother’s family. She was adopted by Lachlan and Fiona Ross in Quebec, in 1895, and then they moved west to farm in Saskatchewan. She married my father, George Ross, out there and I was born in Saskatoon, but he
was a lawyer and his uncle had a practice in Boston, so he moved back into the States to take over from him when he retired. I’d have been joining the firm as soon as I’d done with College if I hadn’t joined up.’