The Hunger

  In rural Ireland in the 1840s, English landlord Anthony Altarnun and his servant Michael Tangney find themselves forced to cope not only with the horrors of the potato famine, but also the hostility aroused by their relationship in the small community they are trying to save from starvation.

  ‘A first class writer of enormous significance’

  ― TIME OUT

  ‘Compelling and powerful. Right from the first page it grips the reader’s attention…and provides a moving view of gay history, one which portrays it with courage and hope’

  ― GAY’S THE WORD NEWSLETTER

  ‘Intense and convincing, a fascinating novel’

  ― BOOK PEOPLE

  Cover art by Peter Dawson

  DAVID REES

  A native of Devon, David Rees is the author of many novels, including some for young people, and of several works of literary criticism. In 1978 he won the Carnegie Medal for The Exeter Blitz, and in 1980 The Other Award for The Green Bough of Liberty.

  First published in April 1986 by GMP Publishers Ltd

  PO Box 247, London N15 6RW, England

  Second impression 1988

  World copyright © David Rees 1986

  Distributed in North America by Alyson Publications Inc.

  40 Plympton Street, Boston, MA 02118

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Rees, David, 1936―

  The hunger.

  I. Title

  823’.914 [F] PR6068.E368

  ISBN 0-5449-008-6

  Typeset by Wilmaset, Birkenhead, Wirral

  Printed and bound in the European Community

  by Norhaven A/S, Viborg, Denmark

  Acknowledgment

  I am indebted to many books for the background information in this novel, in particular to The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith, which still remains the classic work on events in Ireland in the eighteen-forties.

  for David Grosvenor

  Table Of Contents

  _______________

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  _______________________________

  NEVERTHELESS, there is something odd about the man, Mrs Peacock said to herself. Her inability to define what that peculiarity was annoyed her; she was so proud of being able to summarise people in a few well-chosen words. Her eyes darted shiftily back and forth as always when she was nervous, or irritated, or trying to think. She voiced her doubts aloud to her husband. “There is something… queer about him,” she said.

  Reverend Peacock sighed and put down his pen. He was writing a sermon based on the parable of the loaves and the fishes; apt, he thought, considering the rumours concerning the failure of the potato crop and the possibility of a famine more severe than normal. In Ireland at this time ― the year was 1845 ― starvation occurred to some extent every winter, but reports that in some districts the potato had been destroyed by a hitherto unknown blight suggested that what was merely an annual scourge, usually borne with Christian fortitude and endurance, could turn out to be a catastrophe.

  Not that Mr Peacock had a great deal of sympathy for the improvident poor: what might one expect from people so thoughtless that they relied on a single food for sustenance? Which showed his grasp of the history of his own country to be almost wilfully deficient. He was not an evil man, however. He was the Church of Ireland minister of the parish of Clasheen, and of impeccably Anglo-Norman origins. The poverty-stricken Catholic peasantry who lived on nothing but potatoes did not form any part of his congregation. He was afraid of them, he admitted in rare, candid moments: that dark, sullen, brooding mass, secretive and discontented, that bred like rabbits. There were so many of them.

  “What do you mean, queer?” he said to his wife. The implications of that word have altered, of course, with time, though the Irish still use it to mean “strange”. Certainly to neither of the Peacocks did it suggest what it hints to us: probably no word in its vernacular usage had ever conveyed to either the Reverend or his wife the idea of attraction to a person of one’s own sex. But he was aware, through his scanty reading of the literature of the Ancient Greeks in translation, that in some far- off, flawed society in the distant past such errors occurred. Also, quite remarkably, in the Ireland of his day, there had been the extremely distressing case of the Bishop of Clogher.

  “He has never set foot in a church,” said Mrs Peacock. “Neither ours, nor Father Quinlan’s.”

  Mr Peacock sighed again. “We have discussed this before,” he said. “That is neither here nor there.” More charitable than his wife, he considered non-attendance at church something to be regretted rather than a matter for instant damnation. The Church of Ireland, even in the nineteenth century, was a more liberal and more elastic institution than its Roman counterpart.

  “I must beg to differ,” Mrs Peacock said. “I, for one … well, to other things: you have to agree that his house is run in a most peculiar manner. No servants ! It is most extraordinary. Neither cook nor bailiff… nor gardener … just that boy.”

  “Not exactly a boy: he is a young man in his twenties. I imagine he is cook, bailiff and gardener. Perhaps Altarnun is hard up. Many landlords are these days, you know; mortgaged to the hilt, and tenants not paying their rents on time.”

  “Hard up, my foot! The family owns two estates, one of them in England.”

  “We are not privy to the Altarnuns’ bank accounts, my dear.” Mrs Peacock pulled her shawl tightly about herself. “When I arrived at the house,” she said, “I rang the bell. No one answered it. I rang again, then discovered that the bell was broken; it came away in my hand. The door was ajar, and so … it was perhaps indiscreet of me, even, you may say, unseemly ― but I was there on important business: you had sent me. I went inside. I could hear Mr Altarnun in the parlour; he was not so much speaking as … reciting. I called out ‘Is anyone at home?’ My voice was evidently not loud enough, for the recitation continued. I knocked on the parlour door, but, again, the monologue went on. So I opened the door, and … I’m not sure how to put this …”

  Mr Peacock, until this speech, had paid attention to his wife with only half his mind; the other half was on the loaves and the fishes. He felt a little annoyed that she had come into his study to prattle about the neighbours, thus interrupting him in work of high seriousness. But now the sermon was forgotten. “Put it how you will,” he said impatiently. “What was Altarnun reciting? And to whom?”

  “Shakespeare.”

  “Shakespeare!” Mr Peacock frowned. It seemed a remarkable thing for a landlord to be doing at eleven o’clock in the morning, even if this one had only three hundred acres. Why was he not out of doors shooting, fishing, or galloping his horses?

  “The person to whom he was reciting, if you can call him a person, was that boy. The servant-of-all-work. Who was lounging, I may add, on the sofa with his feet up on a table.” “Good Heavens!” Mr Peacock stood up, looked out of the window, then paced about the room for a few moments. He stopped in front of his wife. “Now that is queer,” he said.

  “I told you so. What do you make of it?”

  “Make of it? Why, I make nothing of it. Nothing.” He picked a book off a shelf, blew the dust from it, and replaced it. “It is not our business,” he said.

  “Of course not.” Mrs Peacock stared down at her feet. Large ungainly feet encased in sensible walking shoes.

  “I think you should not discuss this with your friends.”


  “Naturally.” There was the tiniest hint of sarcasm in the way she said the word, for Mrs Peacock had virtually no friends, at least not in the immediate environs of the rectory. Clasheen was a small town in the wilds of County Galway, not far from the sea. The countryside was some of the most ruggedly beautiful in the world, a landscape of soaring mountains and rocky inlets of the Atlantic. Mrs Peacock often enjoyed herself walking for miles along the beaches or up the paths in the glens, but for civilised, human society she often thought she could have been better served in Tibet or Mongolia.

  The west of Ireland in the 1840s had little communication with the outside world; no railways, almost no decent shops, and certainly nothing of a social life for the “better” class of person ― no commercial entertainment in the way of theatres or concerts, few private parties or balls. The people with whom she might have been on visiting terms often lived vast distances from each other over roads that were pot-holed, boggy tracks. The peasantry, in her opinion, had much more fun than she did, dancing and drinking at their eternal round of fairs and wakes.

  Galway City was fifteen miles off. Clasheen was nothing, a parish of some five thousand people, the town itself a straggle of dull houses inhabited by the slightly more prosperous Catholics ― the doctor, the blacksmith, the small shopkeepers. The Protestant congregation numbered only thirty souls ― widows, a schoolmaster and his family, drunken squireens. Mrs Peacock’s friends were the wives of such squireens, and she did not consider them bosom companions but persons she was obliged, occasionally, to ask to dinner. She had no children. Her real friends were her two sisters who lived in Dublin, so the pleasures of human intimacy in her case were mostly conducted by post.

  She was not, let it be said, completely depressed by her situation. She was a voracious reader and letter-writer, devoted to her husband, and she loved the surrounding landscape.

  “Did you recognize the play Altarnun was reciting from?” Mr Peacock asked.

  “It was not a play; it was one of the sonnets. I know it well: I had to learn it at school ―

  All days are nights to see till I see thee,

  And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.”

  “Lord bless us! How odd! And … what happened when you appeared?”

  “The boy jumped to his feet and immediately left the room. The expression on his face was, I thought, somewhat insolent. Mr Altarnun was clearly embarrassed. But he recovered himself ― snapped his Shakespeare shut, apologised for not being in the hall to greet me and then asked, with perfect politeness, what he could do for me. I told him I had come on your behalf, that you were busy, and that you had received a letter from the authorities in Dublin.”

  The letter to which Mrs Peacock was referring came from a civil servant in the British administration in Dublin Castle, and announced details of the relief plan which the Government had devised should a disastrous famine result from the failure of the potato. (“Thank God Sir Robert Peel is our prime minister,” Mr Peacock said, more than once. “And a Tory!”) The Relief Commissioners, the letter said, were asking the more influential residents such as landowners, their agents, the clergy and the magistrates, to form committees which would raise subscriptions to buy food for distributing to those who in the coming months might suffer from starvation.

  Mr Peacock had experienced a big puff of self-importance that the letter had been addressed to him rather than Altarnun, Father Quinlan, or any other of the “influential residents”. He had spent more time that week with those residents and his fellow pastor of souls than he would have done if the letter had been sent elsewhere. For Father Quinlan he had a grudging respect; the Catholic priest was tough, intelligent, and persuasive. He reminded Mr Peacock of the blocks of granite that protruded in immense quantities through the soil in the coastal areas of County Galway; earth might be eroded by rain and wind, but granite endured.

  A sermon, however, on charity during times of famine and pestilence was needed for the Sunday services. Today was Saturday; the sermon was not even started, and Altarnun and two or three others had not yet been told about the letter. Which was why he had deputed Mrs Peacock to make the necessary calls.

  “What did Altarnun have to say?” Mr Peacock asked.

  “Oh, he was very helpful. If famine does occur, he would be pleased to sit on any committee you wish to form. He would, he said, be the first to give a large donation.”

  “So he is not poor.”

  “It seems not.”

  “Hmmm. I think he is a good man. He is kind to his tenants, one hears. Which cannot be said of most landlords.”

  “Tut! Do not forget my father has an estate.”

  “My dear, you cannot think I impugn him! It is a fact, however, that there are a considerable number of landlords, absentee mostly, who grind their heels in the faces of the poor. When rents cannot be paid, they throw the defaulters out, pull down their cabins, and turn them loose on the highways to beg ― men, women, children and little babies. Property is sacrosanct, but such behaviour is not Christian.”

  “No, indeed. Are you quoting from your sermon?” Mrs Peacock stood up and smoothed her skirts. “I had better find out from Bridget why lunch is so late.”

  WHAT ugly specimens they are, Anthony Altarnun said to himself after Mrs Peacock had left his house. Physically ugly, he meant, not morally. She with her darting, inquisitive eyes and hair cut any-old-how, sitting on her skull like an upturned bird’s nest; wisps of facial hair, and her purposeful, bandy-legged walk! The rector was even more unprepossessing. Dumpy, with a head much too big for his body, an untidy mop of grey hair, and a squint: it was disturbing to look at him, for his thick-lensed spectacles made his eyes misty, and you could never tell when he would change the focus on you from one eye to the other. And their clothes ― so dowdy, so shabby. Anthony put a high premium on an attractive appearance. It was a weakness.

  The boy ― who was twenty-seven, the same age as Anthony ― came back into the parlour. They smiled at each other, silent for a moment. Then Michael said “In the words of the Iron Duke ― a damned close-run thing!”

  “Yes. We must be more vigilant.”

  “I will ask my father to repair the bell.” Eugene Tangney was a blacksmith, a profession that was not just confined to the shoeing of horses; he was frequently called upon to repair every sort of ironmongery ― farm implements, carriages, kitchen utensils, even door-bells. In the rebellion of 1798 ― the Year of Liberty, the Year of the French ― Michael’s grandfather had worked in the forge all the hours God could give him, repairing pikes to stick in the guts of English soldiers.

  “You should be gone,” Anthony said, looking at the clock. “You know your mother detests unpunctuality.”

  “And what will your honour be doing while I’m out?”

  “Me? I shall inspect the potatoes.”

  “Ah. This talk of blight.”

  “Yes, this talk of blight.” Anthony sounded a little irritated. “I want to reassure the tenants. If that is possible.”

  “We shall come to no harm, I am thinking.”

  Anthony scowled. A blacksmith, and therefore the son of a blacksmith, was at this time in Ireland thought to be middle class. Except for owning a large shop, teaching, or the priesthood, it was almost as high as a Catholic could rise, socially and financially. The equivalent today ― the proprietor of a garage ― is perhaps lower down the scale. Because of their physical toughness, the roar and glow of their fires, the darkness in which they worked, the secrecy in which they wrapped their talents, they commanded respect, indeed awe; many were thought to possess magical powers.

  The Tangneys, as far as it was possible for Catholics to be in backward, distressed Ireland, were upwardly mobile. Like Mr Peacock, they had a poor understanding of the tenant-at-will who lived on five acres and sold his oats, butter, eggs and milk to pay the rent, and who was forced in consequence to live on a diet of potatoes. “Bog-trotters,” Mr Tangney said of them, though not to their faces. He was on
ly too glad to have left that sort of existence behind; his grandparents had been cottiers in the penal days. He had once heard Michael, as a child, talking in Irish to a friend: “Why are you after speaking Irish?” he had said scornfully. “The language of peasants, beggars, and workhouse paupers! Think English’. Talk English!”

  Anthony disliked the Tangney snobbery, the tendency in Michael to be uncaring and dismissive. To some extent he had opened Michael’s eyes, but still on occasion the patterns of thought which upbringing had fashioned came out. “I shall not allow the tenants to starve,” he said.

  Michael looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he answered. “I did not think.” He moved uneasily from one foot to the other.

  “They are no more and no less human than we are. Made in God’s image.”

  Michael lifted his head, and dared a smile. “That from you, who says there is no God!”

  Anthony laughed. “You’ll be late.”

  It was a mild, blustery morning in October; huge white clouds scudded towards the Atlantic, like so many boats departing for the United States, Michael said to himself. He swished his stick at the hedge nettles and blackberries as he walked the three miles to Clasheen, and sang: “I met her in the garden where the praties grow!” He had a good singing voice, and could play the piano quite well. Anthony liked to listen to him in the evenings, though Michael pretended to be shy of an audience, and would not usually perform until he had drunk several whiskeys. I’m happy, he said to himself: it was an emotion he had only begun to experience recently. Perhaps it was something to do with the weather, he thought ― the sudden warmth and sunshine after weeks of fog and drenching rain that chilled to the bone.