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| the scene of the crime - Harristown Bridge, County Kildare |
The poor - like
love and crimes against love - tend to leave very little trace in history.
The poor of the
Irish Famine, who died in their desperate multitudes, left less than most – not
even tombstones. If they were buried at all, it was often under hedges, where
their bones stood out whitely after harsh rain. Wild dogs would dig up shallow
country graves. Not surprisingly, many of the starving staggered into the towns
and dropped there, where at least their deaths were witnessed.
Researching a
notional family of the Famine in County Kildare, I found that it was often
through the records of the rich that I could view my quarry properly. So the
wealthy La Touche landlords of the Harristown Estate provided my first entrance
into the lives of their poorest tenants.
In March 2012,
I made a wretched rain-sodden trip to County Kildare, to hunt down a habitat for
the seven young Swiney girls – Darcy, Enda, Berenice, Manticory, Pertilly, Oona
and Ida, who were to be the protagonists of The
True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, published a few days
ago. It was in some ways the loneliest and saddest trip I've ever made.
I had not anticipated what would happen to my feelings as I turned
trespasser, climbing over fences to enter the beautiful grounds of the La Touche estate,
and seek out the places of my book and the scenes of various emotional crimes. I was searching for the native scenery of
the Swiney Godivas, a singing septet born in grinding Irish poverty and rising
to stardom and wealth, selling quack medical products.
Having looked
at our largest organ in my last novel, The
Book of Human Skin, I had turned to hair. It interested me as the part of
the human body that is most visible, most changeable, being both the aspect of
our appearance we can most easily alter (without surgery) and the
characteristic that first announces encroaching age. Hair is the only piece of
the human body that we still treasure after death. No one would tie a pink
ribbon around the kidney or finger of a departed loved one, but a curl of hair
is considered a touching relic.
A novel built
on hair needed an abundance of hairiness. So, in contrast to the thinness of their
existence, eked out on the edge of the Harristown estate in the post-Famine
years, my sisters are rich in torrents of hair. They may not have enough to
eat, and they may suffer the stain of supposed illegitimacy, but they carry shameless
luxury on their heads – 37 feet of it between them.
We Swineys were the hairiest girls in Harristown, Kildare, and the
hairiest you’d find anywhere in Ireland from Priesthaggard to Sluggery. That
is, our limbs were as hairless as marble, but on our heads, well, you’d not
believe the torrents that shot from our industrious follicles like the endless
Irish rain.
When we came into this
world, our heads were not lightly whorled with down like your common infant’s.
We Swineys inched bloodily from our mother’s womb already thickly ringletted.
Thereafter that hair of ours never knew a scissor. It grew faster than we did,
pawing our cheeks and seeking out our shoulder-blades. As small girls, our
plaits snaked down our backs with almost visible speed. That hair had its own
life. It whispered round our ears, making a private climate for our heads. Our
hair had its roots inside us, but it was outside us as well. In that slippage
between our inner and outer selves – there lurked our seven scintillating
destinies and all our troubles besides.
By the time I
went to Harristown, I’d already drafted out the Irish parts of my story and
written some of the crucial scenes, finding inspiration in the lives of
America’s Seven Sutherland Sisters, who really did boast this kind of hair.
As with all my
books, I needed to replay the first-draft scenes in the places where they occur,
using all the five senses to refine and invigorate the writing. Also, I knew
I’d be drawing on the sixth sense, that prickle all novelists will know, that
prickle between the shoulder blades when you are suddenly aware of your
character breathing quietly behind you and reading over your shoulder – and,
with luck, sighing in agreement with your words.
In the dizzy
narrow lanes of Harristown, I saw my sisters superimposed on the landscape. I
didn’t just see them: I heard and felt their lived experiences. The smell of
peat fires soured and tanged the air. The sound-track of my visit to Harristown
was the keening of the slow crows, the rude kisses of the mud seeking to suck
my woefully inadequate shoes down to Hell, and the relentless and seemingly
malicious whispering of the rain. I felt rather than thought about the dark
conspiracy between poverty and shame. Even if I hadn’t set out to write a sad
story, I think I would have been converted to tragedy by the that trip.
Before leaving
the UK, I had of course collated a snug fat folder of historical maps. I had
traced the railway lines and graveyards. I knew the bounds of the Harristown
Estate. My first mission was to find the bridge where Manticory, my red-haired
narrator, meets the first of several hair fetishists whom she shall have the
misfortune to encounter. It is the age of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and
thanks to paintings of amoral-looking ‘stunners’, whose wild, rich hair almost
spills out of their frames, the whole of
Europe knows now that hair is a signifier of untamed sexual vigour in women. And untamed sexual vigour in women, as every good Victorian knew, was bound to lead to trouble ...
To a child
obsessed with reading, the tall figure who blocks Manticory's way seems like troll of
the bridge. And the bridge itself is more than a physical place. In meeting that
man, at that time, alone, Manticory is separated from her childhood stories,
and dragged, by the hair, into a world where the architecture of her body renders
her vulnerable to sexual predators.
No more could I hold back
that man’s desires than the river could resist that bridge. He was back at my
parting, sniffing like a dog and moaning like a sick person asleep. His arms
snaked around to press me against his thighs, where something thrummed against
my unwilling chest as if he swished a fox’s tail before the fatal lunge.
‘I’m going to have you
now,’ he told me.
It was a pity to set such a horrible scene in such a lyrical
location.
In fact I had a choice of two lovely bridges across the
Liffey on the Harristown estate. One, called ‘the new bridge’ was built on the
road from the Carnalway Church to Brannockstown. The other one, much older, is
to the east, in a more isolated area behind Harristown House, a walk across the
fields from Brannockstown. It is here where I set the incident with Manticory
and her fetishistic troll.
In my mental
map of the novel, the bridge stands between the hovel where Manticory lives
with her sisters and the Brannockstown, where they go to school.
To get to that bridge, I had to trespass on the Harristown
Estate, now privately owned (no longer by La Touches) and sturdily gated.
Perhaps I acquired a little of Manticory’s sense of exclusion when the gates
were not opened for me by the owner, as I had expected, having written in
advance.
Maybe the lady did me a favour when, instead, I had to climb a fence, take a damp, lonesome tramp across a bald field and through a copse before I found what I was looking for just as the sun broke out for a solitary shattering moment.
The back of
grand Harristown House looks down on the bridge. To my mind, there was a
certain air of contempt about the grey stone hunched away from the bridge and
fields. It leaked into the book, as did the strange sensations of standing on
that bridge and feeling Manticory’s helplessness and the shame of her hunger in
my own stomach.
And, as so often happens on research trips, the emotional
dynamic of the novel played out with eerie accuracy. At Harristown bridge, I
found myself in front of a man with a cruel mask of a face, looking at me
with contempt. Just for a moment, I thought I must know him. But he was a stranger, after all. He had no interest in me and quickly walked away in search of something better than myself.
Manticory’s troll, however, has business with her.
He wound his other hand
around my hair and used it to drag me towards the trees.
My scalp afire with hurting, I whimpered, and
flung my eyes around. The rat-grey back of Harristown House hunched in the
distance, its blank windows indifferent to me. The lane was deserted in both
directions, with nothing but eddies of the dust rising that we in County
Kildare deem ‘fairy-blast’. It was, for a rarity, not raining, though the slow
crows hung like widows’ laundry on every still-sodden branch. The light was
dimming and the lowering sky took on a magical, churning quality, half of
silvery gnats and half of my own giddy terror, by which the clumps of moss that
beetled the parapet now seemed to commence to crawl and swarm. Below me to the
right, the limpid Liffey flowed into the seven maws of the bridge, which mashed
its composure into foaming ruin on the other side.
Harristown House was originally built in 1662 by the Eustace
family. At the time of my story, the owners were the wealthy La Touche family.
David Digues La Touche des Rompieres emigrated from France when his Protestant
faith put his family in danger. Trading in cambric and silk poplin, with a manufactory
in the High Street, La Touche grew prosperous. His home became the repository
for the valuables and money of all the Huguenot community in the city. The
family set up officially as a bank in 1716. The La Touches invested in land,
acquiring substantial property around St Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square and
Delgany. Five La Touches also served as Members of Parliament. When the Irish
Parliament was dissolved in the Act of Union, David La Touche, grandson of the
founder of the La Touche Bank, bought the grand building in Dublin for the Bank
of Ireland, of which he was the first elected governor.
Harristown was acquired by the La Touches in 1768 and became
the seat of the Kildare branch of the family in 1783.
The 1837 Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland
describes Harristown House as an elegant mansion
with a stately Ionic portico, beautifully situated on an eminence on the right
bank of the river Liffey, which winds through the demesne and is crossed by two
stone bridges, one of which, at Brannockstown.
At one time it boasted an ornamental lake, but
this was filled in at the end of the eighteenth century.
It was that vanished house I had to imagine
because the original structure was gutted by fire in 1891 and then rebuilt to its current
design.
Harristown itself is not really even a village. Now, as at
the time the Harristown Sisters is set,
it was a rural area sparsely populated. However, it was an electoral borough.
Harristown once had had its own railway line including a railway bridge over
the Liffey, built in 1885. The line closed in 1959, but, using my faithful
railways map, I found the traces of the station. It has been said that the
influence of the La Touche family resulted in the railway line being diverted
conveniently into the Harristown estate instead of proceeding logically to the
nearest town of Kilcullen. My sisters use the line, which also arrives close to
the tiny cottage that their mother Annora refuses to leave, even when they become rich
and famous.
‘The Master’ of Harristown was John La Touche. A small man
with a neatly trimmed beard, the Master was very far from being an absentee
landlord. Indeed, during the Famine, he took measures to reduce consumption in
his own household, allowing no white bread or pastry on the table. His deer
parks were emptied to feed the starving. He also supported Land Reform.
He succeeded to the property in 1844, on the eve of the
Famine, and lived there for sixty-two years. His wife, Maria, was a novelist,
an opponent of blood sports and a great letter writer. John Ruskin called her
‘Lacerta’, meaning lizard, explaining that she had the grace and wisdom of a
serpent but was without its venom.
John and Maria La Touche had three children – Percy, Emily
(known as ‘Wisie’) and Rose, who became the subject of John Ruskin’s obsessive
love until she died in 1875.
In the original draft
of my book, poor Manticory Swiney watches Rose La Touche living a childhood
dramatically removed from her own. Rose parades around the estate on her white
pony, Swallow, handing out religious tracts to the worthy poor, who would
probably rather have had a gift of potatoes or Indian Meal without weevils. But as my novel grew
in size, Rose La Touche was edited out. She’s there for me in palimpsest –
living the life, rich with choices and dignity, which Manticory is denied.
The Swineys are, of course, invented, as is their cottage, but
I imagined them as tenants of this small house on the Harristown estate,
attending the local National School across the bridge in Brannockstown, the
nearest village.
Annora, the mother of the Swiney sisters, cannot read.
Shockingly, that is not shocking. I am indebted to the local historian Chris
Lawlor for some sad and surprising statistics, contained in his marvelous book
- An Irish Village: Dunlavin, County
Wicklow. One Irish Catholic in four
did not know their letters. The illiteracy rate in nearby Dunlavin was 22 per
cent for Catholics in 1881, though 4 per cent for Protestants.
My
trip yielded another surprise. My sisters, I discovered, would have spoken
English rather than Irish.
National
Schools were set up from 1831 onwards. The language taught was English. The
Famine had in any case wiped out a million poorer Irish citizens, those most
likely to use their native tongue. The Famine sent another million away from
Ireland, looking for work. English was spoken more than Irish on the east side
of the country in any case.
Chris Lawlor took time out to meet me at the looming grey Killashee
House Hotel, and answered my long list of questions with exceptionally good
grace though with occasionally widened eyes. By that time I’d already pored
through An Irish Village, finding in
there the novelist’s treasure of what things costs, where you bought them, and
how you earned them.
Chris delivered on promises to send on afterwards some examples
of particular Kildare/Wicklow sayings and forms of address. His book was also
wonderfully useful for a list of local fairies and witches. He agreed with me
about the cognitive dissonance of otherwise ardent Catholics when it came to
the horned Witches of Slievenamon or the Dunlavin Banshee, in whom many country
Catholics believed as implicitly as in God. Annora is a model of piety but she
cannot resist a fairy.
The
Roman Catholic religion remained dominant among the poorer, less educated
classes in Ireland, even after the faith was suppressed. With the Catholic
Emancipation Act of 1829 there was a revival of the Catholic faith. It saw
another surge in popularity after the Famine, during which the British/Anglican
infrastructure had showed itself insensitive or indifferent to the plight of
the poor.
The suppression of the Catholic faith until 1829 meant that
worship was difficult for Catholics even decades after the ban was lifted. Many
Catholic churches had fallen into fatal disrepair. It took years for the
physical stock of the Catholic faith to be renewed in Ireland. The Roman
Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart and Saint Brigid in Kilcullen was not
dedicated until 1872. Catholics had to travel miles to worship. So my Catholic
sisters might have worshipped at St Joseph’s at Yellow Bog, or at St Peter's,
Twomile House, or at the Immaculate Conception at Ballymore Eustace, or at St
Nicholas of Myra built in 1815 at Dunlavin.
But in March 2012, I visited St Josephs and St Peters,
wrinkling my nose. Manticory was distinctly not there. I went back to my old
map of the Burial Grounds of Kildare. It took several encounters with farmer’s
wives, before I was buzzed through a gate into a field where I found the ivied,
roofless ruins of an ancient church with its own graveyard. Its desolation
marked it as a Catholic place of worship.
In a niche inside the roofless walls is a
stone that reads: 'Eustace Lord Portlester 1462’. Most of the tombstones there
are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indicating active use at that
time. Yet the Burial Grounds Survey of Kildare shows that the church was
recorded (so presumably functional) in 1837 but reclassified as a ruin in the
1897 – 1913 survey map of the area. It records the denomination as ‘mixed’, but
with the prosperous Anglo-Irish of Harristown worshipping at elegant Carnalway,
it seems likely that the majority – poor Catholics – would have used this
church.
One can still visit the beautiful Carnalway church when
services are held. I lurked around to catch it open and crept in at the back,
as I had set a scene for Manticory there. Carnalway was Church of Ireland –
Protestant – as was Harristown’s Master originally. (He later converted to
Baptist). So it is an act of heresy for Manticory to set foot in there. I tried
to read the quiet stones as she would have done – fearfully, and some strong
feelings emerged. Afterwards, I pressed my nose against the iron railings
behind which is the overgrown mausoleum that houses the mortal remains of
Rose la Touche, who died tragically young of a brain fever.
Steep, winding Kilcullen was the nearest town of any size to
Harristown – with a population of 699 in 1837. It had a market every Saturday a
police station, a dispensary and a court of petty session. In my book, it is
the place of the Swiney Godiva’s debut. The Kilcullen dispensary is an
important place of transactions. Fierce Darcy and her eternal rival the Eileen
O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt, have their first violent encounter there as infants.
And Mrs Godlin, who runs the dispensary, is one those characters every writer
needs to invent, as connective tissue between the old and transformed lives of
her protagonists. It is Mrs Godlin who will keep the sisters apprised of
goings-on in Harristown as they travel to Paris, Venice and London with their
singing septet. She makes sure that they know what they need to know, be it
gossip or tragedy.
My story ends in Venice – a town of four hundred bridges –in
a palazzo on the Grand Canal. Despite the fame and riches that have bought
her a new life, Manticory cannot leave her Famined past behind her.
It did not bypass my thoughts that all this magnificence was created
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Swineys immemorial back in
Ireland were living on oats and sleeping in windowless turf huts heated by
roasted dried cow dung, only dreaming of the luxury of a thin goose at
Michaelmas.
But Manticory’s Irishness is still a part of her. Reflecting
on the strange events of her story, she remarks, finally:
They say that the Irish don’t understand
irony, but in fact we’re teeming with it, like a head full of hair, like a head
full of memories, like a moth in a mousetrap, like a sack of shame that empties
itself into a book and finds itself redeemed.
The
publishers have created a rich and fascinating Pinterest board about long hair and literature
Michelle Lovric’s website
Chris Lawlor’s blog is here
