‘My great granny remembered the smell of the famine’

I was searching for something else when I found it.  A receipt for a grave in Deansgrange, Cemetery, Dublin.   

It was dated 1936, that’s nearly ninety years ago.

It was my great granny.

While she died before I was born, I always felt I knew her.

She was famous or maybe infamous would be a more appropriate description of her.   

My Mam was a great story teller and we got vivid accounts of their life with Granny.  

“Go down the street and get tuppence worth of bull’s eyes, it’s her oul feet.” Uncle Hughie’s kind face was their saviour on that first night on grandmother’s floor.  

It was late in the evening when they arrived at the cottage in the North Strand area of Dublin, from a very rural Dundrum.   

A sad little group of four small kids and a father.   

They were wearing their Sunday coats on Thursday, always a sign of serious happenings.   

Their mother was three days dead.  

“You were glad to come back” Grandmother’s terse greeting was the beginning of a difficult integration time.  

“I’ve been offered a job in the British Army Bakery,” their father pleaded.   

“I need the money for the children, and I can’t bring them with me.”  

It was Dublin, December 1922, the country was undergoing massive change, so were they.  

At the dairy-cum-grocer-cum-newsagents there was another battle to overcome.  

“Country mugs”  

A rough looking boy pushed and knocked baby Mena to the ground. Mena cried out.  

“I want my daddy, Is daddy gone to look for mammy?”  

Anger threatened to burst mam’s heart.   

So he thought he was dealing with slouches.   

He had a lot to learn. She who was nine years old, had survived the big flu in 1918, had sat on Patrick Pearce’s picture, while the ‘Tans’ searched the house after an ambush on the Dartry Road and who had attended Michael Collins funeral weeks earlier.   

Could she protect them now?  The newspaper headlines told of truces and treaties, their struggle was just beginning.  

Back at the cottage Uncle Hughie shared the sweets and they told their story.  

Gran, who appeared not to be listening suddenly leapt to her ‘oul feet’ with the speed of a wild cat.  

“I know who that was. He won’t trouble you again. Bad cess to them. Let me give you a bit of advice.

“Years ago, when I was a little girl, my bonnet and shawl was put on me and I was sent in a horse drawn carriage across the city with a package. It was hush money. That family would not be fit to clean the shoes of my grandchildren.”  

“Here Ma, suck that”  

Uncle Hughie passed a bull’s eye over heads and Gran calmed down. They never discovered what hush money was, but that particular boy never bothered them again. Gran was not the easiest person to love, but sometimes good to have at your back.  

It was dinner time on that first night that she produced the pig’s cheek. She took a red hot poker out of the range and singed the hair off it, before placing it in a pot on the range.  

“We couldn’t eat that,”  

Mam spoke up for the first and probably the last time about the dinner menu.  

“I was born in the eighteen fifties and I distinctly remember the lingering smell of the famine,” she started.   

“In this house, we do things my way.”  

The lecture was to be repeated almost daily.   

Who could argue with the famine stories.   

Uncle Hughie winked and blinked behind her back and most times managed to keep the peace.   

He would promise to make laurel cake when she went to bed. In his innocent mind, he thought laurel cake and bulls eye’s were the answer to all life’s ills.  

There were difficult days at the cottage, Granny had taken a case against the bakery employers during the ‘lock-out’ in 1913.   

She demanded that they, being apprentices would work – regardless of what Jim Larkin or the employers said.   

This led to their name being mud in the baker’s hall.   

They had to go every morning and wait for ‘casual work’.  

“We will never be ‘constant’ in Kennedys again,” Uncle Hughie explained to my mam – out of Granny’s ear-shot of course. “we are lucky to get three days a week.”  

He was paid in five shilling pieces and would bring home comic cuts, bulls eyes and a jug of porter to help Granny sleep. 

She would take the red poker out of the range and mull it with all her might.  

That crooked poker was brought into play on a regular basis. And when Granny was vexed, she would fling the poker at the door, where it quivered.

For what seemed like a hundred years, Uncle Hughie’s kindness kept them going. Then one night there came the knock on the door and the telegram boy. Their dad had passed away.  

“God’s curse on the king,” Granny said, ashen faced. “It was the consumption, Ma, nothing to do with the king,” Uncle Hughie replied.  

The shouting woke Mena? “It’s your daddy, love,” he whispered.  

“Is he home, Uncle Hughie,” she cried. “Did he find Mammy?”  

They could only hope that he had found their mammy, but he wasn’t coming home. In her inimitable way, granny spoke. “I think God has retired and handed over to the ‘Divil‘. Imagine leaving a cranky old crock like me and taking young parents from their children. Uncle Hughie put his arms around her.  

“It’s no wonder she’s half mad,” he said. “That’s the fourth son she’s lost.”  

Granny forgot the famine, “Take a shilling from the jug, get four Peggy’s legs and sixpence worth of bull’s eyes.” she sobbed. “Hughie, make them a bit of laurel cake. It was indeed a troubled night. Many years later, when I told my uncle Tommy,  

I was writing about her – he was annoyed. “An old bat” he grumbled. If you had to live with her, you’d know. Maybe… but somehow I think I’m coping with stuff better than most.   

That famine whiff maybe still in the genes.