THE PHOTOGRAPH that sits on my piano reminds me that next year it will be a century since the 1911 census was taken. It’s one of the two only surviving full censuses of Ireland open to the public (the other being the 1901 census, which was also made freely available online this week). Taken in the early 1930s, the black-and-white image shows my mother and three of her seven brothers, fluffy and soft as chicks, she in her pale, short-sleeved dress, a bow flopping to the side of her head, the boys in sailor suits that came from America.
They cluster around their grandmother’s knee, and she sits like an old squaw in a dark dress, a woollen shawl draped across one shoulder but thrown back across the other one. Her left hand reaches out to touch the youngest blond child, John, whose right arm is dandily draped on one knee.
My great-grandmother was already in her dotage when it was taken, but she was safe and cared for in her son’s sprawling house in Dublin Street, Monaghan. Behind the little group, the hall door is open and I can see the yellow and red-tiled hallway where – much later – I would play in the 1960s.
But what interests me is this great-grandmother, with her strong country face, unquestionable replicas of which have been passed down to some of her great-grandchildren: the nose, which was not Jane Austen pert or conventionally pretty, the carved bone of the brow-line framing deep-set eyes, have returned through each generation.
The 1911 census, which has caused so much excitement in Irish families in recent times, reveals that she was married to John Macklin, a pig dealer, that her spoken language was English, and that she could neither read nor write. Of their six children on the night of the census, only two speak both Irish and English, and are described as the “scholar” Felix and Simon. For the rest, it’s English, English, English, and the language and cultural attritions of the past are evident in the 1911 census.
So far, I’ve been unable to recover much information about Mary. She was 55 in 1911, which means she was born in 1846, in the middle of the Great Famine. I know nothing of her parents, but what fascinates me is the presence of this direct line back to one of the greatest acts of colonial savagery that ever befell Ireland. First there was the language famine of Penal Law days, and with it the deliberate erasure of the native template, the language pool, the ways of consciousness that come from language alone. And then – a food famine to compound it all. My great-grandmother must have remembered something of that time and its immediate aftermath. Her mother and father had known it intimately. So, only four generations back from me, and five from my daughter, there is this chain of experience that brings us right to the heart of the worst that can be done to a weakened people.
It has been noted that, where researchers have attempted to establish just what exactly was remembered within families, those being interviewed sometimes murmur, "Well, it was bad, but not so bad as in Cavan . . .". Or Armagh. Or Donegal. The tendency to block out intense misery is typical of trauma, and the Irish were traumatised by the Famine. Interestingly, the historian and antiquarian Denis Carolan Rushe writes, in his History of Monaghan for Two Hundred Years, that "The County Monaghan suffered much from the Famine, but not so much as most other counties; many starving people strayed into the towns bringing fever and sickness with them, which increased the strain on the resources of the townspeople."
It is difficult to know the past and precisely what layer of victory or trauma has pushed up to form the surface of the present. It nudges us through the odd photograph, or through a trawl of a census, or through fragments of a conversation which slips casually off the tongues of older relatives. Denis Carolan Rushe also comments on the complacent manner with which the terrible Famine was referred to by English historians, observing that it was caused by the failure of the potato crop. But potatoes failed at the same time in America and all over Europe. The difference is, he writes, “in every country where there was danger of want, the ports were closed and the exportation of food was forbidden, but the Irish ports were open, and more food was exported from Ireland than would have fed the population twice over, while the inhabitants died by the thousand . . . the misery of our people had never been reached at any previous time, while the seas were covered with ships drawing food from the hungry Irish peasant.”
But back to my great-grandmother Mary: mother remembers her as undergoing a raging dotage. She would get fully dressed and hatted in the middle of the night. Sometimes at that dark hour she would meet her son on his way in from a game of cards. “I’m going down to see my father,” she would announce in her confusion, as all her memories scrambled for shape. She imagined herself the victim of theft and myriad dishonesties. At meal times she would rise challengingly to her enduring daughter-in-law, my grandmother with a defiant “You taste it first! You needn’t think you’re going to poison me ma’am!” Today, in the wrong nursing home, she could well find herself over-sedated and fast-tracked to heaven, although in the right one she would receive the care that those whose minds are closing off for good should always have. In my mother’s childhood, she lived with the family until her death. She was enclosed by them and she was safe.
And so I move from great grandmother Mary in her shawl, from her cautious awareness of the camera, and on to her grandchildren – my uncles in sailor suits, my child-mother’s blonde be-ribboned hair; from a time of sometimes not being able to read or write, to complete literacy and no memory of famine. And on again to me and my like, who swim in words every day, every hour, who have so many words at our disposal that we could – if not careful – drown in the current.