Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill

Nance and Enda). Whereas some might return from the Aran Islands with stories of their haunting beauty, what Grandma spoke of was, first, the rejection of a ham sandwich at the hotel (‘Ham? Ham my eye, it was all gristle’) and a further rejection of what purported to be a ‘salad’ sandwich; and, second, of some argy-bargy that took place on the ferry to the mainland. The boat was crowded and Grandma approached a German couple who were occupying a three-person seat for themselves. ‘“Excuse me,” says I, “could you and your wife move along so that I can sit down too?” “No,” the man said. I laughed, because I thought he was joking. Then I realized he wasn’t. “How dare you,” says I. “You’re on an Irish boat, sailing on Irish waters, and you’re on holiday – yet you won’t make room for me?” “No,” the man said, “you will not sit there.” “You are an arrogant German bastard. As long as you’re alive Hitler isn’t dead.” That did it. They moved along then.’

      My grandmother also talked about the deep past. She told a story that, like a horror movie, started with a prelapsarian scene of innocence and domestic tranquillity: her father reading to her in bed at the family home in Dunmanway, West Cork. This was a rare treat. Although Timothy Lynch, a quiet man, doted on his children, he worked a six-day week as a foreman for a bread company in Bandon, coming home at around five on a Saturday and going out again Sunday evening. Every weekend he had to cycle twenty-one miles each way, rain or shine. (He was something of an athlete: he played on the Cork football team in 1911. My grandmother played camogie, the women’s version of hurling, with less success: a goalie, she once conceded fourteen goals to Macroom.)

      As Timothy was reading his children a bed-time story, there was a hammering at the door. It was them – the Black and Tans. They were dragooning men to fill in the craters in the road. Timothy was pulled away and herded with others in the main square of the town. It was like Hitler, my grandmother said, all the able-bodied men were rounded up and forced to work for days at a time, and their terrified families might have no idea of their fate or whereabouts. As Timothy was led away, some of the children – there were eleven of them, seven girls and four boys – began to cry. This infuriated one of the Tans. ‘Shut up!’ he shouted. But the crying continued. The Tan became enraged. He drew out his pistol and shot the cat in the head.

      My grandmother had another childhood recollection of the Black and Tans. One freezing December day, a local Catholic cleric, Canon Magner, took his dog out for its daily stroll. Some time later, the dog returned home without its master, whining and whining. The housekeeper sensed something was wrong and a search party went out. They found blood on the road. Then they found the canon’s body in a ditch; he had ice on his face. He’d been stopped on the road by an open lorry of British soldiers, questioned, and shot. A lad called Tadhg Crowley was also at the scene. The search party found his body, too.

      ‘That was my political education,’ my grandmother said. ‘My family and the Black and Tans.’

      It wasn’t difficult to guess what education my grandmother received from her family. Her uncles Dan and Bob Lynch were interned in the North in 1921 during the Anglo-Irish War, and three of her brothers, Jack, Tadhg and Paddy, came to be interned during the Second World War. The only non-republican Lynch was Ellen Lynch, my great-grandmother. She was born a Kingston and there was Protestant blood in her; but even she had Fenian cousins, the two Quill brothers, who abandoned their nail factory in Dunmanway and disappeared – to America, in the family’s best guess.

      More than one of my grandmother’s children observed that she rarely spoke about her husband, Jim O’Neill. For example, Grandma had no ready tale about her courting days with Jim, which is perhaps why, when I broached the subject, she spontaneously said, ‘What did I know about him? I knew that he was beautiful.’

      She must have known that he was a republican, too, because she’d see him at the Gaelic League Hall, where you spoke Irish and danced Irish dances, and at Tomás Ashe Hall, the republican club in Father Matthew Quay, named after the Easter Rising veteran who died from forcible feeding during a hunger strike.

      Eileen Lynch was eighteen when she met Jim O’Neill. She had just moved with her family from Dunmanway to Cork city, where she worked in a shop. She wasn’t entirely without metropolitan sophistication: Grandma said that the Black and Tans’ womenfolk had introduced West Cork to rouge, powder, lipstick and bobbed hair. (‘Don’t go looking like a Black and Tan’s wife!’ the nuns would say to schoolgirls who wore make-up.) But Eileen and Jim didn’t go with each other immediately; there were other liaisons first. It wasn’t until she was twenty-one and he twenty-three that romance, as they say, blossomed. On 8 July 1934, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the Lough, Eileen Lynch married her beautiful republican.

      My grandmother quickly took to her parents-in-laws, Peter and Annie O’Neill, who lived up at Ardkitt. ‘Annie was a very kind woman who would bake cakes for the tinkers and happily put them up in the hay-shed,’ Grandma said. (‘In those days,’ she said, ‘itinerants were not like they are today: they’d come and be friendly with you and mend your pots and pans; tell you your fortune if they were women.’) But Grandma’s real admiration was reserved for Peter O’Neill. ‘What a man he was. What a man. He was a rebel; a lovely rebel. And he had the brains of – how many? – five professors.’ This was the Peter O’Neill story: that, in essence, my great grandfather was a scientist rather than a farmer. It had even filtered through to me growing up in The Hague: how he harnessed the stream that ran through Ardkitt and generated hydroelectricity for the farm; how he grew tobacco – tobacco, in West Cork! – and turned an enormous £300 profit for his first crop; how he cultivated tomatoes and mushrooms and kept honey-bees; how he was the only farmer for miles around who didn’t have a bush in the gap; and, most famously, how he invented and crafted a mahogany-framed egg incubator that hatched a hundred chicks and won first prize at the 1932 Cork science fair but, unhappily, could not be patented for want of money. ‘He was altogether unlucky with money,’ Grandma said.

      But then I heard from my uncles that Peter O’Neill was an alcoholic who drank every penny he made. Every first Thursday of the month was creamery day and Peter would go off early in the morning to collect his money. The next time he’d be seen was in the evening, asleep between the milk churns as the unpiloted pony pulled the cart home.

      My grandmother kept a framed photograph of Peter and Annie O’Neill and some of their ten children. Peter O’Neill, a ringer for my father, sits with patriarchal pride at the centre of a cluster of youngsters (Peig, Kitty, Nora, Paddy, Peter) and other relations. In the background, the ivy-clad frontage of Ardkitt farmhouse looms like an old college wall. There is no sign of young Jim, my grandfather, or his sister Mollie. By the time the photograph was taken, these two were living in Kilbrittain with their uncle and aunt, William and Mary-Ann O’Driscoll. My grandfather was farmed out when he was seven. Grandma explained, ‘There was such a lot of children at Ardkitt and his uncle in Kilbrittain had no children. So he was adopted – well, not adopted exactly, but he went to live at the Kilbrittain farm.’

      A little surprisingly, nobody suggested to me that Jim’s early separation from his parents adversely affected him. The redistribution of offspring from overpopulated to underpopulated homes was not an unusual occurrence in the country in those days and it made economic sense for young Jim to be reared by his uncle and aunt, who were short of manpower and had nurturing energies to spare. Also, the arrangement gave young Jim the chance to acquire an interest in the Kilbrittain farm, eighty odd acres of dairy land known as Graunriagh: the O’Driscolls were childless and in need of an heir.

      But Jim never did inherit Graunriagh. When he was twelve, his uncle William O’Driscoll died from peritonitis: it was the time of the Tan War, and the cratered state of the roads meant that William could not be transported to the hospital in Cork on time. The farm had to be sold. Mary-Ann O’Driscoll did not neglect her youngsters: provision was generously made that Mollie and Jim would each receive £500 at the age of twenty-one. The children never benefited from their inheritances. Mollie died, aged nineteen, of tuberculosis; and though Jim collected his bequest in Skibbereen, he immediately went to the office of a solicitor called Neville, in Cork, and transmitted the entire sum to his father, Peter, who needed to pay off farming debts and to stock Ardkitt with seven calves. The payment to Peter was made not as