History lessons

This weekend was mainly about sitting around reading the paper and a good book. Just what the doctor ordered. My cold came back after Edinburgh, natch. Not as bad, but I’m taking it easy.

I’ve probably mentioned before that I love the Irish Times. The writers are excellent and I learn a lot about the many miserable chapters of Ireland’s history (I’ve always wondered if the misery is what brought forth so much creative talent from one small island). For example, here’s an excerpt from a book about the apocalypse of the Irish famine.

It was, he thought, “as if the grave had that moment vomited her forth”. It was Friday, January 22nd, 1847, cold and wet, with a gale rising. Her married name was Keating. She was from Letter, two miles outside Skibbereen. And she had “crawled” those two miles to the house of Daniel Donovan, a 39-year-old dispensary doctor, on North Street. She was suffering from “malignant fever” and “emaciated to the utmost degree”, and Donovan, though a compassionate man, was afraid that she would infect his own young family. He handed her a shilling and told her to leave his door.
“I don’t want this,” she said of the doctor’s shilling; “But I want to get my boy buried; he is dead these 11 days, he died two days after his father; I got the sickness myself; my two children are dying; no person will go to give them or me a drink of the cold water, and I got up in the fever today and put the corpse in a ditch, and I came to you to get it put in the grave, that the dogs may not eat it.”
That evening, Donovan and Jerry Crowley, the town apothecary, went out to Letter. The “scene of misery” appalled them.
The mud floor of the hovel was one mass of filth, the rain pouring down freely through the rotten thatch; on the ground, which was a perfect cloaca [sewer], lay two children upon whose bodies the anatomy of the bones could be studied as perfectly as on a dried skeleton; and in the ditch in front of the door was a coffin, containing the putrid body of a dead boy of seven years old.
Donovan asked the woman how she had procured the coffin. She told him that it was the shilling that he had given her to buy food that paid for it. Neither she nor her other two children, she said, “cared about the victuals now, as they forgot the taste of them”.

The article concludes with the following:
This article is an adapted excerpt from Breandán Mac Suibhne’s ‘Subjects Lacking Words? The Gray Zone of the Great Famine’ (Quinnipiac University Press, 2017); an audio version, read by Stephen Rea, is available at www.fieldday.ie

OMG Stephen Rea. CRUSH! Anyway, you know it’s a good paper when it takes forever to get through it.
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