Blood-Dark Track (42 page)

There was an irony about the poison used, because it was bluestone (a compound of copper sulphate) that finally eliminated the fungus which, in the second half of the 1840s, had repeatedly reduced the Irish potato crop to a black, rotting mess, a catastrophe that led to anything between 750,000 and 1.5 million excess deaths and a million or more emigrations. This part of Cork had not escaped the effects of the Great Famine. The Enniskean parish population fell by 46 per cent from 1841–51, the worst affected being the labourer-cottier class, whose dietary dependence on potatoes exposed them to starvation and whose living conditions – it was not unusual for a family to sleep with its pig on the mud floor of a turf-heated cabin – made them vulnerable to the cholera, dysentery and typhus epidemics that (as in the Mersin of those days) accounted for so many lives. The lack of decent shelter was exacerbated by opportunistic evictions and clearances undertaken by landlords (whose primary residence was often in England) to expand and consolidate their holdings. The townland of Ardkitt, which at that time was poorly drained and contained much more bog and rough pasture than today, saw its population drop by 35 per cent, and the village of Enniskean was depopulated by 53 per cent. The Great Famine was on my mind because, it so happened, its 150th anniversary had been marked earlier in the month by the Great Famine Event, in which President Mary Robinson and other notables had taken part. The Event took the form of musical concerts, readings and historical reconstructions,
and the media reported it as a great success much enjoyed by young people.

It was unclear how the O’Neill family fitted into this scheme of devastation. There wasn’t any family story about the Great Hunger, and I couldn’t even be sure that my ancestors – Jim O’Neill’s great-grandfather’s generation – had lived in this area at the relevant time. At any rate, Jim O’Neill had surely been displeased about the bluestone incident. However much he might have sympathized with the infliction of injury on Ascendancy landowners, he had a great respect for and, more importantly, a direct interest in the welfare of river and its stock; and the Key Hole was perhaps his favourite salmon holding pool.

I walked east along the bank. The trees grew thicker here and provided more cover than they did in the poaching days, when the railway company kept the branches in check. The bank, at this point a narrow ledge caught between the river and the railway embankment, rose six sheer feet above the water; dragging a net along here in the slippery darkness, from one pool to the next, could not have been an easy or safe business. The bank descended to water-level and I came to another bulge in the river. Here, among dripping alder trees, was the pool known as the Forge Hole. My grandfather used to reckon that if there was salmon in the Forge Hole there would be twice as many in the Key Hole.

There was something illicit about my solitary stroll, even though I was here with the consent of the Conners. But I would still have had to explain myself had a bailiff appeared and challenged me, and it was odd that I, an outsider with an English accent, might be less suspect in such a situation than a local like my grandfather. Which was not to say that Jim O’Neill was deterred by the laws of trespass or the people who enforced them. As a teenager (Grandma had told me), he was walking through the grounds of Kilbrittain Castle when a woman with a shotgun appeared and said to him, ‘No trespassing.’ ‘I’m not trespassing,’ Jim said. ‘I walked this land before you did and I’ll come and go as I please.’ On an other occasion, Jim returned from the river to his car to see his young son, Jim Junior, in the company of two men. He strolled up and asked peremptorily,
‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m a guard, that’s who I am,’ replied one, stating the obvious. ‘Did you identify yourself to my son?’ Jim asked, noting that the men’s uniforms were hidden under overcoats. ‘I did not,’ said the guard. ‘Well then, what are you doing frightening my boy?’ ‘Dad,’ Jim Junior piped up, ‘he wouldn’t believe me when I told him you were gone into the ditch for a call of nature.’ My grandfather – who to the guards’ knowledge had been gone for over half an hour – looked aggressively at the two men. ‘How long I’m in there is my own business, do you understand?’ Jim’s antipathy for the authorities was such that, in the late ’fifties, he resisted ‘out of principle’ the attempts of John Scanlon, Chief Inspector, Cork Board of Fishery Conservators, to recruit him to the corps of Bandon bailiffs. Indeed, Jim actually succeeded (quite how was unclear) in securing the active assistance of two of the Chief Inspector’s men, who would meet my grandfather in a pub in West Cork and tip him off about the whereabouts of the fish and the patrols. One of the two bailiffs, the story went, was a big bully of a man, but he was scared of Jim O’Neill.

The last time he went poaching was here, at Manch. It was in 1961, and with him were Jim Junior, Brendan, and Brendan’s brother-in-law Seán O’Callaghan, who had just served seven and a half years in prison. The net was in the water when suddenly the bailiffs appeared. My grandfather and Seán ran for it in different directions, while Brendan – in accordance with precedent and practice and legislation, he told me dryly – assumed the responsibility, as the man on the opposite bank from the bailiffs, of trying to hang on to the net. There was a tug of war, which Brendan won by securing the net around a tree. He hid the net in Glenure farm, where the Kilmichael ambushers found billets, Brendan said. Everybody got away that night, even Seán O’Callaghan, who was picked up by the O’Neills near the Red Fort, outside Ballineen, in the early hours of the morning.

I stopped in at the Red Fort on my way back to Cork and ordered some lunch. On the wall above my table hung a framed newspaper clipping with a photograph taken of ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’ in 1938. The photo showed two rows of men in trenchcoats, smiling
for the most part. All their names were set out, and below their names appeared the lyrics of the famous song about the ambush, ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’: ‘We gathered our rifles and bayonets and soon left that glen so obscure,/And we never drew rein till we halted at the faraway camp of Glenure./Then here’s to the boys of Kilmichael, those brave lads so gallant and true,/ Who fought ’neath the green flag of Erin and they conquered the red, white and blue.’ The most famous Boy of Kilmichael of all was, of course, the man who authorized action against Admiral Somerville – Tom Barry.

It was quite a coincidence, seeing the photograph here. Only an hour or so beforehand I had learned from Oriana Conner that the Ballineen-Enniskean Historical Society, in which she was active, had produced a booklet detailing what eventually became of the men who carried out the Kilmichael ambush. What the Historical Society found, when it looked into the matter, was that the ambush seemed to have had an extraordinarily adverse effect on its participants, many of whom went on to lead unusually difficult and saddening lives; and as I drove back to Cork city from the Red Fort, I wondered if there was any link between the Somerville shooting and my grandfather’s hard life. I reflected that the time had come to take a trip to Castletownshend.

And so, the next day, my grandmother and I drove into West Cork. It surprised me a little that Grandma, who had never in her eighty-five years in county Cork been to Castletownshend, should have so cheerfully assumed the role of my accomplice in the historical disturbance I was intent on committing. She knew about the Ardkitt gun and the abandonment of the getaway car near her aunt’s house in Rathduff, and it must have been apparent that somebody she knew very well had been involved in the killing.

We drove to Bandon and from there headed south-west to Clonakilty. It was a June day of breezes and sunshine, and we travelled, as if through cathedrals, under brilliant and shadowy vaults of leaves. Nettles, ferns, brambles, furze, and flowers – fuchsia, blazing yellow dandelions, gigantic daisies – grew densely on the road borders. West of Clonakilty, the air became briny and the country open and rough and boggy. The road narrowed further. Blue bodies of
water appeared in fields, and violet rhododendron blooms leaned out of gardens. In places the road revealed a rocky and peninsular shoreline, where the Atlantic showed in patches that were as blue as the Cilician Mediterranean. Eventually, after negotiating a succession of disorienting crossroads, we came to a remote village that adhered to a hillside at the mouth of a fjord. Its remoteness was not a question of absolute isolation. Skibbereen, where Jim O’Neill used to poach for autumn salmon, was only five and half miles away, and there were many places further to the west – Baltimore, Schull, Ahakista, for example – that were more distant from Cork city. The faraway quality of Castletownshend lay in the fact that, unlike these other places, it was not the terminus of any particular route or a point on the way to anywhere else. Of the net of lanes and alleys in which West Cork is caught, only a straggly, circuitous and otherwise fruitless loop makes it out to Castletownshend, with the result that only a purposeful traveller – a person with a specific reason for veering off the small main road that continues on to Bantry and, many miles later, Killarney – is likely to wind up there.

Castletownshend was as pretty and prosperous as any village I’d seen in West Cork. At its entrance, on the crest of the hill down which the village neatly tumbled, was Drishane House, of which only high walls, huge gates and a drive that curved into a wooded distance could be seen. This was the home of Christopher Somerville, whom I’d phoned a couple of days earlier; he declined to meet me, but he did confirm, in a sonorous English voice, that the Admiral was a relation – his great-uncle, to be exact. Past Drishane House was the plunging main street, lined with unusually handsome houses and brick and stone cottages. About halfway down the hill, two sycamore trees stood in the middle of the road, surrounded by a retaining wall; and nearby was a pub. We stopped there for lunch. I asked a lady where we might find Point House, explaining that I was interested in Admiral Somerville. After giving us directions, the woman suggested that we call in at the Castle and speak, if we could, to Mrs Salter-Townshend; she was an elderly lady and would probably well remember the incident of sixty-one years ago. So Grandma and I walked down to the Castle, whose high walls and
large open gate could be seen at the bottom of the hill. It was a short stroll from the gate to the Castle itself, a three-storey building of dark stone, crenellations and square towers overlooking the haven, where small fishing and sailing boats were moored. Immediately to the rear of the building was a thickly forested hill and the Protestant church of the village, St Barrahane, where Admiral Somerville was buried. At the front of the Castle were a level gravel forecourt, on which a few cars were parked, and a lawn where Germans were trying to play croquet; the place was evidently now in use as a guest house or hotel. The sea was held at bay by a stone wall, at the foot of which becalmed ocean water washed onto a tiny pebbled strand.

We rang at the door of the Castle. A woman of around forty, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, greeted us. She told us that Mrs Salter-Townshend lived in the bungalow these days. She added, not unkindly, ‘Whether she’ll be prepared to speak to you or not will depend on the mood she’s in. I can’t say what she’ll be like.’ Passing two grazing white goats, we headed up to the bungalow, which was located, I later learned, on the site of the original house built by the Townshend family shortly after its arrival in Cork, in 1648, as part of the English Parliamentary army. It was Richard Townsend [
sic
] who personally delivered the keys of Cork to Oliver Cromwell.

The bungalow was built in the eyesore style characteristic of many of the hacienda-like constructions that were materializing in rural West Cork. The door was answered by a woman dressed in a down-to-earth, utilitarian way who was, I guessed, in her late seventies. I explained that I was looking for Mrs Salter-Townshend and wished to discuss the shooting of Admiral Somerville with her. The lady answered, in that slightly mumbling voice used by the ascendancy class to take the edge off an English accent, ‘Well, I remember that; he was my cousin. It caused great pain to the family. I don’t think it would be right to go over it again, do you?’ As she looked at me, a man, red-faced, heroically dishevelled, whom for moment I took to be the gardener, poked his head around the door: Mr Salter-Townshend, I later learned. Mrs Salter-Townshend regarded me grimly. ‘We still don’t know who did it,’ she said.

Speaking in my most English accent, I mentioned another former
resident of Castletownshend, the Admiral’s nephew Sir Patrick Coghill – the SIME agent and subsequent captor of Joseph Dakak. Mrs Salter-Townshend said that, yes, she remembered him; he spoke Arabic and Turkish. The Coghill family still lived here, she added. Sir Toby Coghill, Patrick’s nephew, had two properties in the village and he spent part of the year here. She looked at us again, probably taking in for the first time the unlikely character of the couple standing before her. ‘Well, you can’t keep your grandmother outside. Please come in.’

We sat down in the front room, which had an unsurpassable view of the bay and a carpet that featured the same furiously swirling colours I’d seen in the farmhouses at Graunriagh and Ardkitt. Modest heirlooms furnished the room, and a painting by Sir Patrick’s father, Sir Egerton Coghill, Bt., hung on a wall. We continued chatting about the Coghills. Mrs Salter-Townshend said that the Coghill family home, Glenbarrahane, had been destroyed, which led to Grandma to chip in about the shameful neglect of old homes generally, which led to a discussion of the Georgian Society and, finally, of the unfortunate disappearance of Bowen’s Court, the ancestral home of the writer Elizabeth Bowen. One would never have guessed Grandma’s close connection to those who had so assiduously burned down Big Houses during the Anglo-Irish War. When Mrs Salter-Townshend momentarily turned away to pour tea, my grandmother gave me a conspiratorial wink that said, ‘You see, we’ve got her talking now.’

At this point it occurred to me that the conversation between the two old ladies – Mrs Salter-Townshend impatient, assertive and very kind, Grandma effusive and warm as ever – had a decidedly strange, even eerie, aspect: it was entirely possible that the cousin of the person serving the tea had been shot dead by the husband of the person drinking it. Feeling slightly compromised, I thought that the time had perhaps come to return to the subject of Admiral Somerville and disclose my interest in him. However, just as I was pondering precisely what the nature of that interest might be, our hostess rose and said that she’d an appointment and regrettably had to go. As we were accompanied to the door, Mrs Salter-Townshend
handed me some brochures about properties in Castletownshend which she handled as agent for the owners. She said warmly to my grandmother, ‘Come by whenever you’re next here.’