Not the Same Sky (4 page)

She had just remembered about the references. Would she have to write them? If not she would certainly have to go out to the places they came from and find suitable people to vouch for their character. Who would read the references?

‘Australia, away out of that with you!’ Julia Cuffe said.

Matron left the room. Was that laughing she heard behind her? Was there ever laughing in the room when she was not there? She did not know. Now she would have to prepare the girls for departure, and find out who had relatives fit to come visit. There was much work to be done.

Matt Dwyer said his goodbyes. He was glad to leave, to return to the order of his office. Matron would be able to handle the arrangements without him being there.

CHAPTER 4

Matron called Honora Raftery aside and designated her to help with departure preparations. There were trunks already arrived into the back hallway that needed to be cleaned and filled. When Honora’s sister saw them she looked to the top of the opposite wall and walked past. The instructions clearly stated that each trunk, measuring two feet long and fourteen inches high and wide, was to contain new clothes provided by the workhouse. There was to be a gown, a cloak, a shawl, handkerchiefs, collars, an apron, stays, a comb, hairbrush, prayer book, needle, thread, tape and scissors. The trunks were to be clearly marked, the name of each girl painted on the front, and the list of contents written on the inside of the lid. How could these things be afforded when other things could not? The instructions did not state whether any of the girls’ own familiar smelling clothes were to be folded in with the new. Matron thought this might give some small comfort, but wasn’t sure how to get old garments up to standard. And perhaps that was too trivial in the face of all that had to be done in the next few days. The filling would be done by local endeavour but Matron would need Honora’s assistance to ready the trunks.

They did not speak much as they cleaned them and covered the insides with paper donated by the local minister. Matron did not know what to say. The silence grew uncomfortable.

‘Do you know any of the other girls?’ she finally asked.

‘Not before here,’ Honora said.

‘You’ll get to know them now. You will all have this in common.’

This last sentence sounded unfinished, but what could she say?

‘There will be girls from other places too. Near two hundred of you.’

‘That many,’ Honora said, because she had to say something. In truth she couldn’t really imagine what that would look like.

‘How will we go?’

‘You will be brought to the ship, Dublin for you, and then to Plymouth I think, yes that appears to be the assembly point, that’s in England.’

‘Yes I know that. My father said I was good at knowing other places.’

Matron stayed silent for a moment. ‘Have you ever seen a ship?’ she then asked.

‘No,’ Honora said. ‘What will it be like?’

Matron hesitated. ‘I don’t know myself.’

‘Oh,’ Honora said, and leaned in to another trunk to brush the corners clean of dust.

‘But you will meet the others at the ship, I should think.’

‘Will we go together from here?’ Honora asked.

‘No, that won’t be possible. Some have relatives to go to for a day, and some will be put on the first carriage available and it will depend … I’m not really sure yet,’ Matron said, realising that she was not sure of a lot of things.

‘But we will see each other at the ship?’

‘Well certainly in Plymouth. That will do for now.’

Honora went to the edge of the room where some gathered around her. Others were too sick today to move or were uninterested. Betsy Shannon was heard to say, ‘I’m glad it’s not me that’s going.’ No one knew if she meant it or if she was making do with the fact that she was too old to get the chance.

‘Australia—mad, mad, bloody mad,’ Julia Cuffe said.

She was good at English, could already swear in it.

The night before Honora’s leaving, her sister Florrie whispered to her for many hours. There were other whisperings in the room, but Florrie’s was the clearest in Honora’s ears. ‘It is best you go,’ she said again and again, trying to give her sister the backbone that would be required of her.

‘But what will I do without …’

‘Shh, shh,’ Florrie said, not allowing some things to be said. ‘Now go to sleep, you will need strength for tomorrow’s journey.’

Was that a sigh of relief that Florrie heard, rustling before sleep? Could she hear a sigh,
I will live
? Could she hear that from above some other straw bed in the corner, or could she hear,
I don’t want to go, it’s better to stay
—because that was what the leaving had to say to those who were remaining here? ‘Shh,’ she said again, and a kind of sleep did descend.

Dawn came and the sleep was still around enough to dull the ache of girls getting into carriages. The sound of horses’ hooves moved out to the end of the town. The sound drowned out the noise of weeping. The journey was begun.

CHAPTER 5

Charles Edward Strutt didn’t think of himself as born for bravery or even excitement. He would have been happy to get lost in a village in Somerset, avoid war and get a desk job. If he had found himself in a place like that he would have been content. True, he might not have been interested in the tittle-tattle of such a place, the minutiae that makes an ‘our’ for the front of ‘town’. He might have grown impatient with the re-telling and embellishment of every single private thing. But he could have absented himself from the gossip, read in the evenings, and repaired his mind each night so that it could freshly, each morning, dwell on topics of more importance than gabble. Minor importance, perhaps, but the sort that keeps things ticking over on a daily basis, gives a rhythm to the hours and thereby provides comfort. He wouldn’t have dwelled on major questions—questions like why some are born to hunger and some to comfort. Presumably he would have found a wife. He looked like someone who would be made happy easily enough. Hopefully they would have healthy children and be kept busy by the minding of that health. He would never have suffered from pompous self-righteous zeal.

Yet this decent-enough plan eluded him. Perhaps it was his mother, perhaps his father. On the first days after he was born his father had looked at his son, given up the practice of medicine and started to paint. It may have been that the shock of watching the opening of his child’s eyes awakened a sensitive seam in him and he was simply unable to stop the expression of it. His mother, on the other hand, had always regarded her contributions to the world of books as the essential work of her life, as well, of course, as being a wife and mother. So she understood this rash departure from the world of realism. Now, with her husband’s decision, she would be better supported mentally, if not financially, in her endeavours. They would be able to say to each other at night, ‘And were you happy today?’ and it would mean did you scale an inch today, and can you see the mountain ahead? It would not mean happy as in some vague non-esoteric sensation.

His mother then lost a daughter. People said this as if she’d mislaid her. It was a better word than dead, it gave some possibility for hope. They did not say that both the mother and father had a dead daughter, no, simply that the mother had lost one, as if her battle to keep her daughter by her side had been fruitless. His mother then wandered into Swedenborg’s New Church, where she found comfort in a sermon about the state of new infants in heaven. She was thus able to continue writing, as opposed to spending her days in hopeless mourning.

Charles grew up affected by these events. When he had learned his languages well, he translated two works of Swedenborg’s into English, perhaps to know better what gave his mother hope. He trained as a surgeon, perhaps to finish his father’s work. He took a once-off job, or so he assumed, as surgeon-superintendent of the
St Vincent
, a ship that was to take two hundred and fifty-one emigrants to New South Wales, nine of whom were Irish.

This job could be his adventure before life. It was the first time he had met an Irishman. He did not have to necessarily know these Irish—they made up a small number of his passengers and looked the same as his others, in skin at least, if not in eyes. He enjoyed the job. It created in him somewhere a dangerous straying from the steady tread towards that Somerset village. But this would be his one adventure before steering himself back towards that desk. It might make him more attractive to the wife he wasn’t yet searching for.

His successful superintendship was talked about, and the talk made the rounds, becoming part of the plan, which was now well made by the public servants who were no longer going to their clubs and home to their wives and remaining
shtum
. The plan could no longer be upset by loose talk. Already ships had gone and there was a list of further possible surgeon-superintendents to be approached.

So Charles found himself here, at Plymouth, with a job to do and around two hundred Irish girls to meet. He wondered what condition they would be in. He had been filled in on the state of things so far—a local shipping officer had met him in his office, and further instructions had come by post. He was told that ships had gone and arrived, and while the reaction to the girls was anything but desirable, this was a minor thing to be borne in whatever way it could. It didn’t matter much. It didn’t matter at all in Ireland.

By now it was known that one year’s potato crop had not died and so hope should have been tentatively possible. But so many were gone, and dead, some never even buried. Their voices warned against hope. It is now known that never again was there a single day in which all the potatoes, those dug and those still in the ground, absorbed a silent disease and burst forth quietly into rot. But that is hindsight. The gathering up of girls from every county had begun and would continue.

Charles had been given a map of where all these girls came from, the ones on his ship and the ones already gone. But he was not told what the girls in Ennis, in Listowel, Dingle, Ennistymon, Scarriff, Loughrea, Gort, Portumna or Tuam said the day they were told. Nor was he told if they differed in what they thought and felt. That perhaps was the worst thing. He had seen names, dates of births—some of them only probable dates of births—addresses of workhouses at the time of departure, but there was no mention of their reactions in the notes sent to him.

Nor did Charles know how much warning the girls were given and if they had gone home to bid their farewells. He did not know how they left. Was there for instance a walking out the roads from towns, to Clarecastle from Ennis, let’s say, on the way to Limerick, or on previous boats was there a walking to Ballybay from Aghabog, let’s say, on the way to Castleblayney? And were there relatives walking with them? And could cries be heard far? He did not know and thought maybe that was just as well.

What Charles did know, was that this day in October 1849, around two hundred girls, by whatever road, had assembled here in Plymouth, England, and that he had better get on with his job.

CHAPTER 6

Charles Strutt looked towards the quay and saw what must be them, a bunch of girls. He walked towards them. Dots of things really, when looking at them from afar. Some of their clothes were too light, some just right. Some wore hats, well made. Even in hungry times things can be sewn. A couple of them had lace on their collars. He wondered about the provenance of this lace. It took his mind off the look of them.

Some had boots, some shoes. It was hard, looking from the end of the pier, to make out what kind of girls they were: sad, surly, hopeful, rough, gentle, tidy—all of that presumably, and variations. Nervous certainly, having first seen the sight of a ship only a few days before. And confused. Some gave small shouts as they moved about trying to keep warm. Some shuffled quietly, swallowing tears they had already swallowed hundreds of times since leaving Ireland. Some, dry-eyed, tucked at their belts and took up a new profession, that of making the best of it. They would polish this profession, and its gleam would crystallise to form part of the national character of where they were heading.

There were sounds of whispering. Some girls tucked in close to each other, and spoke about their leavings. They made them into tales that seemed to be from a distant past belonging to someone else, still in awe of what had happened. Anne Sherry told Honora Raftery that her aunt had seen her off. She said it was a clear day. Her voice didn’t waver as she spoke of this. ‘Wasn’t the boat from Dublin terrible,’ she said. She shivered. She could still feel the fright of it in her bones. She put her arms around herself, it helped to pat down the misery.

Anne also said that her brother had danced a jig for them when they were leaving.

‘On the pier, did you see him? He’s all right, not sick.’

There had been a man drawing a picture of it.

‘Did you not see him?’ Anne asked again.

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Honora, afraid to lie.

‘Are both your parents dead?’ Anne asked.

‘Yes, both dead.’

‘I think that’s the same with everyone here.’

‘When did yours die?’ Honora asked.