A friend has sent me a photograph, taken more than twenty years ago, of her baby asleep on her lap. It’s an outdoor scene – a shaft of light, a slab of granite, the varied greens of moss and grass, picnic paraphernalia. Her rumpled shirt suggests that her baby has fallen asleep after a feed. He lies back, abandoned to satisfaction, as she gazes into his face. It is a Madonna and Sleeping Child. But look, she says, he’s a little bit dead. And I can’t deny that the slumped head and outflung arm say ‘lifeless’ as much as they say sleeping. Life, death – what’s the difference? say the faces of the Madonnas. Their look speaks of their helplessness as much as of their love. They have given birth to loss, and they cannot now undo that fact.
1.
I think of history as a long line of bodies, stretching back through time, a bit like those evolutionary diagrams of apes standing straighter and growing taller as they evolve into humans. I know evolution is actually a series of branches, rather than a straight line, but the straight line is, well, so nicely straight. Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens, all descended from little Lucy. But my figures are all women, heavy with child.
There’s my mother on a South London street, in a collarless green tweed coat she made herself, cut in an A-line from the shoulder. It hides her bump nicely but better still it will keep her warm through the fiercely cold early months of 1963 as she takes me to the baby clinic to be weighed, and to collect the free milk and orange juice for my older sisters. She looks unbelievably stylish. Her dark hair is cut short and close to the nape of her neck. She has a stack of paper patterns (McCall’s and Butterick and Vogue) from which she conjures the most up-to-the-minute designs: a close-fitting waisted dress with the hemline above the knee, a smock with a rolled collar, a Jackie Kennedy jacket, a Jean Shrimpton miniskirt. In a few years I will be watching the little shell-shaped bobbin shuttling back and forth in the sewing machine, picking up the thread and fastening down the stitches, and she will try to teach me how to thread it. But for now I’m held firm under the coat.
Behind her stands my grandmother, heavy with my mother. It is the spring of 1930 in the West of Ireland and she is putting up with no nonsense. This is her sixth pregnancy in ten years and she has already buried one child. There will be more pregnancies and more burials to come. The small children tumble and fight around her and God knows where the eldest is – he has taken to heading off out to avoid being landed with another task. He’s away somewhere experimenting with trapping rabbits, or dangling a worm on a piece of string to see if the fish in the stream will bite. The labourer’s cottage is far too small for a family of seven – eight, including my great-grandmother, who is in her eighties and mostly sits propped by the fire, poking the embers and moving the pots around – and there is definitely neither space nor time for a sewing machine. My grandmother mends her old dresses, and darns her elbows, and knows to make things last. Her luxuries are a plug of tobacco, a swig of brandy in a china cup, a fine black hat, and good quality footwear. Every Christmas, after her daughters go away to work in England, she’ll get sent a new pair of Morlands ankle-boots – lined with sheepskin and fastened with a zip instead of laces – and she’ll wear them summer and winter, till the next year. She doesn’t do seasonal dressing. Decades later, in the 1970s, I will share a bedroom with her in the summers and I will watch her dressing in the mornings. Her clothes have hardly changed at all over the years: the suspenders and worsted stockings, the layers of petticoat and woollen skirt, the thick, long-sleeved blouse even in August, the boots. By then she will have inherited her mother’s place by the fire. But in this image from 1930 she is pregnant with my mother, and she spends much of her day outside – with the chickens and the sow, the milker and the small patch of potatoes, or endlessly fetching water. Her back is aching. She’s definitely tired-looking, carrying that new baby around.
Her own mother is a good deal more indistinct, standing behind her in my personal lifeline. She’s carrying my grandmother in the early 1890s, her thirteenth pregnancy – plenty of burials. If I look up images of West-of-Ireland women in the 1890s this is what I find: wary-looking figures standing outside whitewashed cottages in full woollen skirts and shawls. Always an apron. The guarded expressions are part of the charm – they wouldn’t look half so picturesque if they appraised the man behind the camera. The photographs are black and white so I can’t see the carnation-red petticoats apparently beloved in the West. And I’m guessing that my great-grandmother had little time for dyeing hers. I know very little about this woman – I know that this late baby will be her last and that by rights she’s already too old to do this again. She was born in the early 1840s, when the population in West Cork (indeed, in all Ireland) was teeming. I know that her first language was Irish, and that she learnt English as a child – though she never learnt to read and write so I don’t think that she got her English in school. I know that by her fifth birthday the potato crop had failed for several years in a row. I can be pretty sure that by the time she was ten she had suffered the effects of malnutrition, and had witnessed starvation and the deaths of relatives and neighbours from typhoid, typhus, diarrhoea and a host of other diseases that thrived among people who hadn’t enough to eat. She didn’t play. Reporters on the famine in West Cork made a point of noting that children no longer played games, and who can wonder?
She’ll have seen, even if she couldn’t quite understand, the cabins around her emptying of people. They went to the workhouse in Skibbereen in their hundreds, and over six months in the winter of 1846–7 more than seven hundred died there, of starvation and disease. Or they went to Cork City, looking for work or charity and a passage to America. The small townland where my mother grew up is an area of about 200 acres. This land supported twelve families in the mid-nineteenth century; they were reduced to five by the end of it. The parish holds the dubious distinction of being the source of a letter, written in January 1847 to the Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, describing the area as ‘one mass of famine, disease and death’. The dead were wrapped in calico and taken to the churchyard in a reusable coffin with a trapdoor bottom. Mass graves, unburied bodies dismembered by dogs and rats, the living crawling in the dirt: my great-grandmother will have seen all that. And she’ll have seen the desperate measures taken by those determined to survive – of whom she was one. Nearly a quarter of the population of Cork in 1841 were gone ten years later; but she held on. In 1870 she married a small farmer whose father had managed to keep hold of, or get hold of, 10 acres of land. Where there had once been eight or ten families, now there was one.
And further back, to my great-great-grandmother, I can’t see – I can only imagine. She must have been born around 1810, give or take a few years. I don’t know whether she had other children and whether they survived. I don’t know whether she outlasted the Famine, or whether she figures in those statistics of death by starvation and disease. I know that she cared for my great-grandmother sufficiently well for her to grow up and give birth to my grandmother, and so, indirectly, to my mother and to me.
All the shawls and aprons and worsted stockings say ‘tradition’, but so much of what happened to these women happened because of the ebb and flow of money and markets. Famine, land-hunger, war, emigration – they were all the consequences not of Ireland’s distance from industry and commerce, but its proximity. The common task for all these women was to keep life going, through conception, gestation, childbirth, breast-feeding, child-rearing, domestic work, the slow reproduction of everyday life. But even if all those pregnant bodies look like they were doing the same thing, pregnancy and childbirth don’t happen outside history either.
We like to think of generations as succeeding one another, in a long and perhaps even orderly line, like the one I’ve sketched. Sometimes we make the mistake of believing generations improve on one another, as though history were a story of progress, with the old departing, more or less graciously, to make way for the young. But what happens when generation goes wrong? When youth and sex and change are so threatening that they have to be stifled, or nipped in the bud as Samuel Beckett put it in the 1950s.
I keep returning to a story of generation gone wrong in my own family – a mother not married, and a child stifled. This was a crisis that occurred in Ireland in the 1950s, but it was rooted in a history that stretched much further back, and it cast a shadow for many years afterwards. It is an all-too-familiar story of desire, sex, illegitimate birth, institutionalization and emigration. And it happened in part because of the actions of my uncle – who got his lover pregnant and disappeared to England, abandoning her and her child to a mother-and-baby home and an orphanage. And because of my grandmother – who didn’t say no.
The story haunts me in part because it seems to come from a different era, Dickensian in its details: abandonment, cruel institutions, itinerancy. But it was still unfolding while I was a child, in the 1960s and 1970s, just as it was unfolding in similar ways and at the same time in hundreds of other families. Not one bit of it turned out well. I would like to go back and ask my grandmother, Was it worth it? Did you regret it? It would be no use, of course. Part of the point of what happened – part of the reason families put up with the institutions, and put up with the loss of their sons and daughters – was not to have to talk about it. And in the end, perhaps, not to have to think about it.
What would my evolutionary line of bodies giving birth to other bodies look like if it included all those who were lost and discarded along the way? What if it included not only the children who weren’t considered part of the family because they were born outside marriage, but the men who fathered them and disappeared to England to avoid the consequences? What if it included everybody who was missing? The problem here is not really one of remembering. We are talking about people – uncles, aunts, cousins – whom I wasn’t there to meet, or who weren’t there to meet me, and therefore I can’t remember them. Still, they made their absence felt. I understood very well as a child going ‘home’ to Ireland in the summers (from our actual home, where we lived the rest of the year and where we went to school, on the outskirts of the London Borough of Croydon) that a lot of the important people weren’t present, and weren’t talked about, but that didn’t make them any less important. Quite the opposite. Perhaps there is something in between remembering and forgetting – something closer to paying attention. Pay attention now. Listen to what I’m telling you. How often were we told that as children? And we did learn to pay attention, to the things not said as well as to the things that were out in the open.
Copyright © 2024 by Clair Wills
