The Whitest Flower. Brendan Graham

languages and followed strange customs.

      In the evenings they would sit across the hearth from each other and he would pass down to her the old sean-nós songs, stories and poems from Bardic times.

      ‘Come what may,’ he would tell her, ‘tradition and education will always stand to a person. It’s tradition that keeps the people strong and true to themselves, and it’s the education that will free them in the end. Never forget that, Ellen, a stór.’

      But her father’s greatest gift to her was love. She remembered how he would reach out his hand to her across the hearth’s space between them. How he would softly murmur into her hair, ‘Ellen, mo stóirín, mo stóirín rua, mo Ellen rua.’

      Now it was time for the education of her own children.

      ‘Tell us again about Cromwell and the Roundheads,’ said Patrick, showing signs of following his father’s nationalistic tendencies.

      ‘No! Do the lesson about our cousin “Granuaile”,’ Katie piped up. Her choice – Grace O’Malley, the chieftain’s daughter who, three hundred years earlier, had ruled the Connacht coastline from Clew Bay, dispensing with her enemies as quickly as her husbands – suggested a liking for the idea of independent womanhood. Katie particularly enjoyed hearing how, when summoned to meet with Queen Elizabeth I of England, Granuaile had considered it to be a meeting of equals.

      ‘And what about you, Mary – what would you like?’ prompted Ellen, knowing that the quieter twin would never put forward what she wanted, being content to let Katie make the running.

      ‘I like the story of the children who were turned into swans,’ Mary said.

      How like Mary it was to pick ‘The Children of Lir’, the most childlike and the saddest of all the great legends of Ireland.

      ‘All right, then. Patrick, fetch me the traithneens,’ Ellen instructed.

      Patrick darted outside and was back almost immediately with the three blades of grass he had plucked. He handed these to his mother, who put them behind her back, rearranging the stalks in her hand as she did so.

      ‘Patrick, you first – draw a traithneen,’ she said, presenting the three blades of grass to him.

      Patrick made his choice. Next it was Mary’s turn, and then all eyes were on Katie as she whisked the remaining blade of grass from Ellen’s hand.

      ‘Who has it? Who has the shortest traithneen?’ cried Katie, wanting to know immediately if it was she who would get to choose the subject for this morning’s lesson.

      ‘I have it!’ Patrick shouted excitedly.

      Cromwell had drawn the shortest straw.

      Ellen waited for the children to settle, then began her story: ‘Before Cromwell’s time, two hundred years ago, the Catholics who lived in Ireland owned three-quarters of the land. But the King of England, who was a Protestant, wanted to take all the good land away and give it to the landed gentry. They were the descendants of people who had invaded Ireland and settled here, and they were Protestants too. When they were good and did what the King asked, he gave them big castles and lands in Ireland’ – Ellen could see Patrick bristling with questions, but she continued – ‘and took it away from the Catholics who didn’t want to obey him.’

      ‘But why didn’t they fight him?’ Patrick couldn’t hold back any more.

      ‘Well, they did. And there were a lot of Catholics – more than there were Protestants. Then, over from England came a big army …’ She paused before posing the question: ‘Led by whom?’

      ‘Cromwell!’ shouted Katie.

      ‘Yes, that’s right, Katie. Now, Oliver Cromwell was a bad and wicked man and he hated the Catholics. He beheaded King Charles first, and then came to Ireland to kill the King’s supporters here, the Royalists. They were mostly Catholics. But Protestants, too.’ Ellen interrupted herself for another question: ‘What were Cromwell’s soldiers called?’

      ‘Roundheads.’ This time Patrick asserted his pre-eminence in matters military.

      ‘Yes, Patrick, good. They were called Roundheads because of the big round helmets they wore on their heads to protect them from the swords of the Irish. So, Cromwell and his army of Roundheads marched through Ireland, and they went into the villages and murdered all the men and the women, and even little boys and girls. Everyone was killed.’

      Ellen could hear the intake of breath, as three sets of eyes widened at this terrible telling.

      ‘That was a very bad thing to do to all the little children,’ Mary ventured, horrified at the thought. ‘And them not doing any harm at all – being only small like me and Katie.’

      ‘Yes it was, a stóirín,’’ Ellen said gently, ‘and the reason Cromwell did that was because he was afraid that if he killed just the big people, then the children, when they grew up, would remember this and make a big army to kill him back. Also Cromwell wanted to get the land, so he had to clear out all the people who held the land. That’s why the Roundheads knocked down the poor people’s houses and burnt their crops – so that nothing was left, no trace of them at all. It was as if they had never been there. Then Cromwell sent word that this would be the fate of any Catholics who stayed on their lands. He wanted to drive them over here to the mountains and the sea, over to the poor lands of the West. “To hell or to Connacht” he said he’d send the people – and he did just that, the devil.’

      ‘That’s why we’re here on this mountain, with only a little bitteen of land and bog to keep us,’ said Patrick, repeating a favourite phrase of his father’s.

      ‘That’s right, Patrick,’ Ellen replied. ‘That’s quite right. The old people – seanathair mo sheanathair, “my grandfather’s grandfather” – were driven back to this valley, to the rocks and the stones, by Cromwell. So always remember this …’

      Three heads craned forward.

      ‘It’s all to do with the land – everything goes back to the land.’

      ‘And he hung all the priests too!’ Patrick was warming to the subject now.

      ‘He did,’ said Ellen. ‘He put a price on their heads and the “Shawn a Saggarts” would hunt them down for money. Then Cromwell would hang them in front of their own people. One of his generals once said of a place that there was “neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him from, nor soil enough to bury him in.” Now, wasn’t that an awful thing to be thinking? They say Cromwell was the most hated man ever to set foot in Ireland, and the people haven’t forgotten – he still is.’

      While Patrick would have listened for hours to stories of hangings and the like, Katie and Mary were beginning to tire of the foul deeds of Oliver Cromwell. Their tiredness coincided with the sound of Michael returning, so Ellen cut short the lesson with a promise that tomorrow they would draw the traithneen for Granuaile or the Children of Lir.

      As she ushered the children outside, she wondered to herself whether she and Michael might now have been ‘strong farmers’ on the fine rolling plains of County Meath, had Oliver Cromwell not driven their forefathers to plough the rocks and bogland of Connacht.

      She wondered how their lives might have been if the Roundhead leader had never installed Pakenham’s forefathers at Tourmakeady Lodge.

      When the children were out of earshot she muttered to herself, ‘Cromwell – a curse on his name.’

      Ellen had decided that she would tell Michael she was carrying his child on the homeward journey from the Sunday Mass. She always felt uplifted after partaking of the Eucharist, but this Sunday would be extra special because the God of all creation would be within her, side by side with her unborn child.

      A month had gone by since that morning at the edge of the Mask when she had discovered she was pregnant. Everything had gone well with her since then, and