A friend mentioned casually that he had seen, the other day, in Eason's of O'Connell Street, Dublin, a pile of John Healy's book Nineteen Acres. And why wouldn't he? For it is - surely one of the best and most poignant and most enduring accounts of life in the West in the harder times. Harder in a different way to the present. It is told with much love and compassion and observed with the clear eye of the report. First published in 1978 by Kennys of Galway and later by John himself and family; the House of Healy.
It is the moving story of those who peopled a small holding at Carracastle outside Charlestown, County Mayo, the nineteen acres of his mother's people, the O'Donnells. He starts off: "It isn't much of a road and it doesn't lead to much of a holding. The road is clay topped and rutted. The holding is just over nineteen acres. Half of it is reclaimed bog . . . Now once again the black hearse stops on the tar road, where it joins the dirt road . . . Down this rutted road, from the thatched cottage on the hill, Jamesie O'Donnell and Mary O'Donnell brought the fruit of their marriage bed one after another, until there was only one left, and sent them out into the world to do their best. I needed no one to tell me that Nora O'Donnell was the last of a great generation of a great, if anonymous people, who lived and loved and sweated and laughed and cried and worked again on and over this now economist despised holding of nineteen acres. Nora O'Donnell was my mother.
So, the book begins with a funeral, but the whole story of those who peopled the holding, told in less than a hundred and fifty pages, jumps with life and humour, even though it is, in a way, a requiem for a way of life that was disappearing. The vitality of his mother leaps out of the page. The holding itself is a personality in the story. The family went out to the United States, one by one. The old cottage gave way to a slated house, and, in the proper way, the fire in the old house was not quenched "before the new fire, built of the coals from the old hearth across the street, was safely glowing." It is a European story. A friend remembers seeing Poles, as late as the Thirties, boarding a ship for America from Danzig, carrying over their shoulders, their spades and forks and hoes. Now, as you drive from the east to Charlestown, you will see on your left, not far from the town, a small forest park dedicated to the memory of that lovely, steadfast man, John Healy.