Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898. Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
belfry house on the tiptop of the rock could see all around him. “The Rock” is a seashore hamlet, inhabited chiefly by fishermen. The hill field was one of my father’s fields, and often I went over the wall on a Sunday morning to look at Corly Keohane ringing the bell for mass. I had to be up early those mornings to keep the Rock hens out of the cornfield; often and often the bedclothes were pulled off me at daybreak.
CHAPTER IV.
IRISH FIRESIDE STORY AND HISTORY.
I must have been at John Cushan’s school about six years. Paying a visit to the school after his death, I looked at the roll-calls, and I could not find my name on them after December, 1844. So I had been at school from the age of six to the age of thirteen. Bad times came on then. The year 1845 was the first year of the great blight of the potato crops in Ireland. The landlords of Ireland made a raid upon the grain crops and seized them and sold them for their rents, leaving the producers of those crops to starve or perish or fly the country. Thousands of families were broken up; thousands of homes were razed; I am one of the victims of those bad times. People now allude to those years as the years of the “famine” in Ireland. That kind of talk is nothing but trash. There was no “famine” in Ireland; there is no famine in any country that will produce in any one year as much food as will feed the people who live in that country during that year. In the year 1845 there were 9,000,000 people in Ireland; allowing that the potato crop failed, other crops grew well, and the grain and cattle grown in the country were sufficient to sustain three times 9,000,000 people. England and the agents of England in Ireland seized those supplies of food, and sent them out of the country, and then raised the cry that there was “famine” in the land. There was no famine in the land, but there was plunder of the Irish people by the English Government of Ireland; and Coroners’ juries, called upon to give judgment in cases of people found dead, had brought in verdicts of “murder” against that English Government. I will come to that time in another chapter of my recollections.
Many of the neighbors used to sit skurreechting at night at my father’s fireside, and it was here I learned many matters of Irish history before I was able to read history. It was here I came to know Tead Andy, of whom I wrote thirty years ago, when I was in an English prison:
In songs and ballads he took great delight,
And prophecies of Ireland yet being freed,
And singing them by our fireside at night,
I learned songs from Tead, before I learned to read.
That fireside was a big open hearth; up the chimney somewhere was fastened a rod of iron about an inch thick; at the end of it below was a crook; the whole thing was called a pot-crook, and on it was a movable pot hanger to hang a pot. Then with a turf fire and a big skulb of ver in that fire that lighted the plates on the dresser below with the photograph of all who were sitting in front of it; I, standing or sitting in the embrace of one of the men, would listen to stories of all the fairies that were “showing” themselves from Carrig-Cliona to Inish-Owen, and of all the battles that were fought in Christendom and out of Christendom.
Mind now, I am, in these “recollections,” taking in the time that transpired between the years 1839 and 1845—the time I was between the age of seven and thirteen.
In the skurreechting company at the fireside was an old man who had a lot of stories about wars and battles. One story he’d tell of one battle he was in that I could not thoroughly understand at the time, nor did I thoroughly understand it either, until several years after I heard it. It was a story of some battle he was fighting, and he’d rather have the other side win the battle than his side.
One Summer’s day I had my wheel-and-runners outside the door winding quills; an old man with a bundle on a stick on his shoulder came up the street and asked me who lived there in my house. I told him. And who lives in that house opposite? Jillen Andy. And in the next house? Joannie Roe. And the next? Paddy Lovejoy. That Paddy Lovejoy was the father of the rich man Stephen Lovejoy, of the Seventh Ward, New York, who died last year; and Joannie Roe was the sister of the old man Dan Roe, who was making the inquiries of me. He was an English pensioner soldier coming home to Ireland. He had joined the North Cork Militia when a young man, just as many an Irishman joins the Irish militia to day, for the purpose of learning the use of arms for Ireland’s sake; the war of ’98 broke out; the North Cork Militia were sent into Wexford; the battle that Dan Roe was speaking about at my father’s fireside, wherein he’d rather the other side would win than his side, was the battle of Vinegar Hill.
“Oh!” he’d say, “if they had only done so and so they’d have gained the day.”
Cork has got a bad name in Wexford on account of this North Cork Militia going into Wexford in ’98. But the same thing could occur to-day, not only as regards Cork and Wexford, but as regards all the other counties of Ireland.
Those militia regiments are officered by the English, who live in Ireland; by the landlords of Ireland, and by the office-holders of the English Government in Ireland. In ’98 the North Cork Militia were officered by the lords and the landlords of Cork; they were English; the rank and file of their command were the plundered Irish; the regiments were ordered into active service, and, under the military discipline of England the victims of England’s plunder were made to fight against their brother victims in Wicklow and Wexford, who were battling against the common plunderers. ’Tis a condition of things that the Irish nationalist of to-day has to take into consideration in connection with a fight for the independence of Ireland. Every day you will hear some good Irishman say “We will have the Irish police and the Irish soldiers with us when we take the field.” All right; but you must all be reasonable, too; you must first let the Irish policeman and Irishman red-coat soldier see that you are in earnest—that you mean fight—that you have fought a battle or taken a stand which will show him there is no turning back from it, and that if he turns over with you there is some chance of success.
The company of the fireside would be occasionally recruited by some poor old traveling man or woman who had a lodging in the house that night, and seemed to be a pensioner of the family, who had known them in better days.
Looking up at the rafters and at the rusty iron crooks fastened into them, I heard one of those lady lodgers say one night, “Mo chreach! do chomairc-sa an la, na bheidheach meirg air na croocaidhe sin, air easba lon,” which in English would mean “my bitter woe! I saw the day that the rust would not be on those hooks, from want of use.”
The bacon-hooks had no bacon hanging on them, and were rusty. Other articles of better times were rusty, too. On the mantelpiece or clevvy over the arch of the hearth, was a big steel fork about a yard long; it was called a flesh-fork. That used to get rusty, too, and only on Christmas Days, Easter Day, New Year’s Day, Shrove Tuesday and some other big feast-days would the girls take it down to brighten it up for service in the big pot of meat they were preparing for the feast.
The decay in trade and manufacture that had set in on Ireland after the Irish Parliament had been lost, had already been felt by my people. They had a Linen bleachery convenient to the town, and in a shop in the house in which I was born, we had four looms in which four men were at work. Mick Crowley and Peter Crowley had “served their time” with my father’s people as apprentices to the trade; they were now “out of their time” and working as journeymen. Peter was a great singer, and every farthing or ha’penny I’d get hold of, I’d buy a ballad for it from blind Crowley, the ballad-singer, to hear Peter sing it for me. Peter was a Repealer, too, and I should judge his hopes for a Repeal of the Union were high, by the “fire” he would show singing:
“The shuttles will fly in the groves of Blackpool,
And each jolly weaver will sing in his loom,
The blackbird in concert will whistle a tune
To welcome Repeal to old Erin.”
And I used to learn some of those songs of Peter’s.