David Dickinson: Death on the Holy Mountain

‘Do you think he was lying, Francis?’ asked Johnny.

‘I don’t think he was lying, I think the people in Ireland may have been lying to him.’

‘So what are your plans, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Well,’ said her husband, ‘I think you should stay here for the time being. When the situation is clearer I hope you will be able to join me. I am going to see the good Mr Hudson in the morning and a day or so after that I shall set off for Holyhead and the Irish Midlands. Johnny,’ he paused to refill his friend’s glass, ‘could you do something for me? Go to Dublin and make a mark with the picture dealers so they will let us know at once if anything appears on the market. Better send it to me care of the Butler house for now.’

‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘I haven’t been to Dublin for years. They say it’s one huge slum nowadays but there are great birds down in the Wicklow Mountains.’

Later that evening Lady Lucy found her husband staring moodily at a map of Ireland spread out on the dining-room table.

‘What’s the matter, Francis?’ she said in what she hoped was her gentlest voice.

‘It’s all this,’ said Powerscourt, waving his hand in the general direction of Powerscourt House, Enniskerry, County Wicklow. ‘This is my past. This is where I was born. This is where my parents lived and died. They’re buried there, for God’s sake. If you could belong to one of the great pillars of the Protestant Ascendancy, the landlord class, the Anglo-Irish, call it what you will, then I belong to it. Don’t get me wrong, Lucy. I love Ireland very deeply. Those Wicklow Mountains where I was brought up, the west with its rivers and lakes and the dark ocean, they are among the most beautiful places in the world to me.’ He paused and looked down at his map again.

‘Forgive me, my love, I don’t see why that should be upsetting you.’

‘Sorry, Lucy. I’m not explaining myself very well.

‘Much have I seen and known: cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments . . .

‘I’ve been lucky enough to see all kinds of societies all over the world. But where Ireland is concerned I don’t know whose side I am on. Who am I? Irish or English? Can you be both? History tells me I am one of the Protestant Ascendancy. I should be on their side. But I’m not. Or I think I’m not. I’d like to be neutral. But if that’s not possible I think I’m probably with the other side. In a democratic age, after all, only the Catholic side can win. The Protestants are so heavily outnumbered. But I’m not Catholic. I’m Protestant. Even so, if you think the Catholic side should win, if anybody wins at all in these circumstances, don’t you see that in this case maybe I should be advising the people who stole the paintings rather than the other way round?’

Lady Lucy didn’t know what to say. She took her husband by the hand and led him upstairs. ‘It’s a long time since you’ve been to Ireland, Francis,’ she said brightly, trying to sound more cheerful than she felt. ‘Perhaps it’ll all seem very different when you get there.’

At nine o’clock the following morning a group of three bedraggled men and an even more bedraggled donkey were making their way up Ireland’s Holy Mountain. The mountain was Croagh Patrick, some seven miles outside Westport on the Louisburg road in County Mayo, about as far west as you could go in Ireland without setting sail for the New World. The Reek, as the locals called it, was wreathed in cloud this morning, a light rain falling. Below it the waters of Clew Bay with their three hundred and sixty-five islands, one for every day of the year, were almost invisible. Even before Christian times Croagh Patrick had been a place of pilgrimage and mystery to the inhabitants of ancient Ireland. St Patrick himself, Ireland’s patron saint, had fasted on its barren slopes for forty days and nights, giving the mountain its name. Every year on the last Sunday in July a great throng of pilgrims, many of them brought by boat or by special train, climbed to the summit and celebrated Mass nearly three thousand feet above ground. All of the three men could remember the words of the Archbishop of Tuam, the Most Reverend John Healey, the previous year. He had been standing on the roof of the old, rotten church to address the faithful. The Archbishop was a great bull of a man and within minutes a Westport bookmaker was offering odds on whether he would fall through before he finished. Healey was a passionate believer in pilgrimage, which he linked to the sufferings of his people.

‘Think of this mountain,’ he roared forth to the assembled multitude, over ten thousand strong, ‘as the symbol of Ireland’s enduring faith and of the constancy and success with which the Irish people faced the storms of persecution during many woeful centuries. It is therefore the fitting type of Irish faith and Ireland’s nationhood which nothing has ever shaken and with God’s blessing nothing can ever destroy.’

Charlie O’Malley, Tim Philbin and Austin Ruddy were all builders from Westport. They were part of a team of a dozen men charged with the construction of a new oratory for the celebration of Mass on the summit of Croagh Patrick. Three men, including the contractor, Mr Walter Heneghan, lived in a tent on the summit complete with cooking and cleaning facilities stolen from the British Army. Wages were paid on a Friday afternoon in Campbell’s public house at the foot of the mountain, the tented party descending to make sure that the porter had not changed its taste or been diluted while they had been on vigil at the summit. Everything that could be pre-fabricated or part fabricated was assembled at the bottom of the mountain and carried up by man or beast later.

This morning, as so often, it was Charlie O’Malley’s donkey who raised the standard of revolt. The beast was heavily laden with sand and cement. It sat down and refused to move.

‘For God’s sake, Charlie,’ said Tim Philbin, ‘what’s the matter with your bloody donkey this morning? This isn’t the same beast we had up the mountain yesterday. How many bloody donkeys do you have anyway?’

‘I had three at the beginning,’ said Charlie defensively. Charlie was a well-built man in his early forties, his brown hair growing thin on top. ‘As you well know, I said we shouldn’t have laden one of the animals so heavily last week. It took one look at Saturday morning and passed on straight up to donkey heaven.’

‘What do you want with so many bloody donkeys in the first place?’ said Austin Ruddy.

‘I am operating on a very important principle,’ Charlie replied haughtily, ‘taught at school with great pain from that evil black strap of his by Brother Gilligan.’

‘And what was the principle?’ asked Tim Philbin, poking the donkey’s back to see if he would get up. He didn’t.

‘It was first set out,’ said Charlie rather pompously, as if he had been turned into Brother Gilligan for the morning, ‘by a man with a strange Christian name, like Swede or Carrot, something like that.’

‘Potato?’ said Tim sarcastically.

‘No, it wasn’t Potato,’ said Charlie. ‘Cabbage maybe? Parsnip? Bean? Pea?’

A smile of triumph spread across Austin Ruddy’s face. ‘You boys can’t have been paying attention to Brother Gilligan. I shall have to drop him a line when I’m next in Westport. Turnip, that’s the name of the fellow. Turnip Townsend. Lived in the early 1800s, I believe. No record of him coming on pilgrimage to the mountain.’

‘The christening must have been very strange,’ Charlie mused. ‘John Joseph Turnip Townsend, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

‘It was a nickname, you fool,’ said Tim, giving the donkey another prod.