Tipperary (18 page)

The Anglo-Irish houses often excelled the châteaux of the Loire, the palazzi of the Italians, the country seats of the English and Scots. Their occupants lived up to the style. Few societies had as much eccentricity as the Anglo-Irish or lived so incomparably fast a life. They rode to hounds, they played tennis, they staged theatricals, they built inventions—such as the huge telescope at Birr Castle. On their terraces strutted peacocks; along the eaves squatted fantail pigeons; in their fields rose the brilliant tails of pheasants.

Some tastes were much stronger. Sir Henry Bellingham of Castlebellingham, in County Louth, employed a man to do nothing else but rake over the gravel after anyone had walked on it. Lord Dunsany in County Meath so liked order and respect that, out riding one day, he directed his steward to shoot a tenant who had forgotten to raise his cap to his lordship. (The steward refused.)

Many Great Houses had ballrooms and, amid house parties with hunting, shooting, or fishing, they held seasonal balls. Attended by friends from all over Ireland and from farther afield, numbers of a hundred and more were not uncommon in a house's dozens of bedrooms.

Intrigues and scandals broke out everywhere. More than one man saw his wife disappear from the dance “to take the air” and never return, departed with a younger or more eccentric or more dashing blade. One night two English gentlemen, staying a summer in a West Cork mansion, exchanged wives—permanently.

The women often possessed heart-stopping beauty; the men under-took hair-raising escapades. All spent money resoundingly. Lady Or-monde in Kilkenny would never dream of coming down to dinner without a full diamond tiara. The men splashed out on yachts, cars, and card games, on “slow horses and fast women.”

As their end drew nearer, their dances grew wilder. And when the money from their tenancies began to dry up, whether through law or attrition, bankruptcy rolled through the Anglo-Irish houses like a poison gas. Few of their enterprises earned enough to support such lavish style. Soon the servants departed, the beds went unmade, and the bankers came to collect on myriad mortgages.

As the banks sold off the land, usually breaking up the estates, the local people at last got their hands on what they felt was rightly theirs. With memory so bitter, no native Irish family ever moved into any Great House. After the inevitable auction of possessions, often not even attended by the long-gone and faraway owners, the new owners let the hated edifice stand in ruins.

Their farm animals sheltered in the marbled halls on summer days. Or, from time to time, they stripped the house of its best stone to build new houses for themselves, or for their cattle, pigs, horses.

That is, if the house remained standing. As rebellion intensified, many Irish estates came to grief when the local republican guerrillas torched them—sometimes with the landlord and his family still inside. Thus, in magnificent Irish architecture, was the baby thrown out with the bathwater—and few young inheritors of the time would have dared put a toe into such a cauldron.

Tipperary Castle, as yet, fell into none of these categories—and it was the prize. By all accounts, it not only matched but surpassed the other houses in Ireland: Bessborough, Castletown, Lyons at Celbridge, Rockingham, Strokestown. To accompany and reflect their facades, columns, terraces, and towers, their creators had made beautiful landscapes, so that the eye found beauty everywhere. Terence Burke had chosen the gardens of Versailles as his models, and Charles O'Brien had now fallen for it all as surely and heavily as for its possible chatelaine.

2

A
fter I visited Tipperary Castle, the clamor in my head grew louder; and the often burdensome affliction of love weighed heavier. I thought of Miss Burke every moment; I envisaged a life together, of goodness, peace, and kindness to others. To gather my feelings into some order, I set myself to listen to a different clamor, namely the public refrain that I had been most loudly hearing in my life—land and its agitations.

In 1850, ten years before I was born, my grandfather's close friend Mr. Charles Gavan Duffy, for whom I am named, founded the Irish Tenant League. I never met Mr. Duffy, because, to my grandfather's sadness, he migrated to Australia when I was very young, but I am told that he was a great lawyer and an impatient politician.

He founded the Tenant League because over ninety percent of all Ireland's land was then in English hands. And since tenants were neither prosperous nor secure, Mr. Duffy set out aims that he called the Three F's: Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale. He hoped that this effort would give an Irish tenant farmer the minimum protection of a lease— at that time, anybody could be summarily evicted.

Likewise, as I have noted, rents could be—and were—raised on the landlord's whim. And if by chance an Irishman owned his land, Mr. Duffy's movement sought to allow him to sell it on the open market and not succumb to a forced sale at a price stipulated by his nearest landlord.

The O'Briens, although we lived outside such matters, have always been a very hospitable and convivial family, and thus we heard everything. All political news, rumors, family scandals, allegations, all births, legitimate or merry, all betrothals, marriages, murders, and deaths—all reached our paneled rooms. We heard the laughter of the people and, my parents being what they are, we also dried many tears. So, although from the banks we watched the rivers of blood flow through Ireland, we played no part in the eventual Land War, as it came to be called. Its forerunners of murder and debate merely took their place among the other great topics of discussion that ranged up and down our long shiny dining-table.

How, therefore, may I characterize this important period, this gripping movement for land reform? Naturally, I remember it chiefly through conversations; for the moment, permit me to try and understand its spirit.

From my father, as I have said, came the feel for land. But he took it beyond the personal experience; when he first began to teach me the story of my own country, he made land the central character of the drama. Logically, then, I should always have been prepared to interrogate the Irish passion for land.

We are no more than a tiny North Atlantic island of thirty thousand square miles, and with no mountain high enough to stand near a Himalaya; our tallest peak, in County Kerry, stands a racing length above three thousand feet. Nor does every square yard of our country yield riches; our coasts are rocky and, to the west, harsh upon the Atlantic facade; not until the earth has settled many miles inland do we reach our renowned fertility. Yet, all over, whether in fat or bony fields, the Irish savagery of feeling, of earth hunger, exceeds all human ferocities. It is an emotion, and it comes of long history.

Here is an account of my visit to a native Irishman who believed that his fields had rightly belonged to him and his family since the dawn of time, and who, as with our family, somehow contrived to continue owning his ancestral farm. My father directed me to him; I had often heard him say of this man, “Ah, he likes his land.” He lived outside a village called Oola in the county Limerick, a man by name of Martin Lenihan.

Mr. Lenihan farmed not much, but he farmed it well; forty acres of good land, with a little marshland, some woods of hazel and beech trees; and he had water by way of a small river. I was no more than twenty when I visited him, bearing my father's good wishes; he had finished securing a new roof of straw thatch and, as I walked down the hill, his long house gleamed golden in the sun.

We sat outside, by his front door. He had one son, who played nearby, a sickly child of four or so who gave him concern; the local talk said that his wife must have no more children.

“May I ask you a strange question?” I said to him.

“Like a policeman?” he asked, and he laughed.

“My father often says of you that you love your land.”

Martin Lenihan leaned back a bit in his chair.

“Indeed I do. I do indeed.”

“May I ask you, sir—what does that mean, that you love your land?”

Martin Lenihan said nothing for a moment, and then he began to speak in his slow, comfortable way (whipping up a deal of spittle as he did so). Mr. Lenihan spoke so slowly that it was a pleasure to record his words—but in any case I had by then learned a version of Mr. Pitman's shorthand.

Well. You know. Land is an odd sort of a thing—because it drags you in. I never seen the sea, I seen pictures of it, always moving, restless. It catches men up. Well, land is the same, a kind of sea that will only take you down into it in the end, when they lay you six feet under. But that's not what you're asking me, I'll bet. (Here Martin Lenihan laughed, a kind of gurgle.)

If you work with land, you get to know it. I know every field I have here, I know how the clay, the earth in that field will feel if I bend down and pick it up in my hand and crumble it. I know where there's a corner of a field that's a bit wet, and I know where there's a crest of a field that has a bit of chalk in it—well, not chalk like school chalk, but a bit more limestone than usual.

(Martin Lenihan's hands lay quietly on his knees; tufts of jet-black hair made the knuckles look like little pet creatures.)

And my fields have names, like a dog has, or a horse. There's a field called Jimmy, because my great-great-grandfather Jimmy Lenihan, won it playing cards. There's a field called Cicero—for what reason I don't know. We have a field called Harry Lyons because a man called Harry Lyons was born inside it—his mother was caught out there in a shower of rain and didn't get home in time for the midwife. The field down by where the river comes in is called Soda, because my grandmother baked the best soda-bread she ever made, she said, from wheat grown in that field one summer.

What else? Oh, I've a field called Jennifer—I named it that myself because I like the sound of the word.

I'll tell you now when I first noticed land—I noticed it on my hands and knees and I was only about eight years old. We had turnips planted down there in the Road Field—that's a long stretch that runs nearly the width of the farm. It was raining and cold and my job was to thin the young turnip shoots so as to leave the plants to grow fully—they shouldn't be near each other or they'd all grow too small.

And I began to see how the color of the clay under my hands wasn't one color at all but several colors. Well, I thought, this is like a bit of magic. And I began to think, What else is like this? What else in the world is anything like this? And I couldn't think of anything.

And to this day I don't know of anything like the earth, especially when you dig into it. (By now Martin Lenihan had begun to sit a little straighter in his chair, and his face had grown a little redder as his subject excited him.)

So when I went home I sat down to eat my dinner and I said to my father, “Do you like looking at the clay in the fields?”

My father was the kind of man you could ask any question and he wouldn't think it ridiculous. He stopped chewing and he said to me, “Is that what you're finding—that you like looking at it?” And I said it was. My father chewed on and he didn't say anything more until he had finished chewing.

Then he said, “I like looking at the clay in my fields. Here's when I like looking at it. When I've turned it open from the grass and seen its fresh bright brownness. When I dig into it and see its lumps and powders break on the blade of my digging. Or I bend down to pull out a root of weed and I get the dirt under my fingers. If I kneel down on one knee to look at it, I might see if it's too wet for a grain crop, or will it take potatoes this year. And I'll pick it up and hold it under my nose and smell something—and I don't know what it is that I'm smelling.

“Except that it was a smell that was in that same ground when there were kings here ruling the province of Munster and the county of Limerick. And that smell was in that same ground when Saint Patrick walked here. And when Vikings with beards, Danes and such people, came in here looking for what they could rob from us.

“And the Norman princes who came in here seven hundred years ago—they got that smell, and so did the English that their Virgin Queen sent in, and all the English after. And that's the smell that drives men mad. Especially if you get it and can't have it. The smell of the land. The smell of our own land.”

That was my father's speech that day and my mother stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor, still holding a bowl, to listen to him say it. The dog stopped barking when he made that speech.

Martin Lenihan rose from his chair and began to pace his yard; this quiet, undemonstrative man had come almost aglow when talking about his father and his land.

I asked, “Did you yourself—have you become aware of that smell of the land?”

Martin Lenihan spoke again.

My father said that you can only get this smell if you understand land, if you understand all the little roots and stones and worms and other works that are part of any piece of ground that you open up under your feet. He told me to watch out for the way the clay, the earth, allows little creatures to travel in it as we travel our fields. And then he pointed out to me the greater wonder that lay ahead—that when we planted things in this substance they grew and became large enough to eat and to keep us alive. “No wonder,” said he—“no wonder men go mad for land.” And I recalled how I had seen him kneel down and part the grasses of a field with his bare hands.

We're not a boastful family. And we don't say a lot. But we held on to our fields. My family has been on this farm since before Saint Patrick, and I'd kill or die before I'd let another have it. If I didn't have the land, what would I have?