THE WINDOWS of the train from the west of Ireland were sticky with smoke and breath and crowds. Going south to Cork, to meet long lost American cousins, it was quickest to travel via Dublin, changing at Connolly Station for Heuston. The inter city rail link train was new all stainless steel, lounge bar upholstery and glistening windows.
Soon we were in the serried city of Cork, with its Mediterranean flavour. Glanmire was, full of taxis and UCC students returning after the weekend. My road journey took me through Midleton, Ballycotton and Cobh - whiskey, fish and emigration.
The word "emigration" has had its entrails and teeth pulled out by too many Leaving Cert essays and too many facile, point scoring debates on television. I had vague memories of stiff Irish people in sepia photographs and childhood parcels of L'il Abner comics. Cobh's Heritage Centre, which recently won an An Taisce award for appropriate redevelopment of an old railway station, won't make me cry I thought. It all happened so long ago.
The departure and exhibition area of the centre was closed off for repairs. Because we were in the company of the American cousins, they kindly allowed us to walk around. There were American trunks and old luggage carts; a mock up of a cabin interior of an oceangoing liner showing emigrants in the clothes of the day in their simple quarters; and there were benches, buckets and provisions. We walked through, absorbing everything.
Wave of Grief
Outside again, the cut stone quay drew a line between us onlookers and the ocean and America. I read a plaque bearing a list of American names, descendants of those who had left and who now wished to be associated with the heritage centre. As I read through the names, a wave of unbidden and almost overwhelming grief came upon me. I felt the tenacious sense of kinship which had lasted for generations and now manifested itself in the plaque a kinship with the ones who were not named and with those who never attained the American dream.
I thought of the pale, freckled people who fried in the early sweatshops, on the building of railroads, on the docks and of the young Irish girls in big houses learning to make bortsch. I thought bf those who saved their dollars so that the following generation might become lawyers, professors, brokers, publishers and Presidents. I thought of the old neighbourhoods, seen in many a James Cagney film - neighbourhoods which had degenerated into slums and in whose multi occupied houses elderly Irish people lived out their frugal lives, never seeing Cobh or Ireland again.
With this plaque the successful had remembered the faceless ones, the ones who sent a few dollars at Christmas, who mailed the American comics, the high heeled shoes and the American pencil cases - to reassure those at home of the gold in the street.
It was this list of names on the plaque which touched a deep sense of loss - the pull of race memory. An image came to mind of my grandmother clutching an American letter telling her that yet another of her children had died without the chance of ever seeing her or Ireland again.
Cornucopia of Plenty
Later, some miles away, in the golden drawing room of Ballymaloe House - a house of mellowed stone surrounded by daffodils and the sweet soil of Munster - it was as if the dark shadow which eclipsed life 150 years ago had skimmed by. The present was lit up, supported by the bounty of land and sea. In the nearby school of cookery, at Shanagarry, the past, laden with memory and lack of food, was juxtaposed with a cornucopia of plenty. Here, in a place displaying seals of approval from French epicures and English food critics, I silently recorded a litany of plenty - oils from Europe's olives and hazelnuts, Chinese rice wine, oyster and soy sauces; cardamoms and juniper berries, citrus fruit and root ginger, cream, butter, flour and seeds.
There, in a beautiful dish - among the finished masterpieces of cuisine, among the glazed tarts, terrines, homemade ice cream (in an ice bowl fit for a snow queen) and exotic salads - was Champ, our very own colcannon. This very Irish potato dish, flecked with kale, stood out among the dishes of the world. Students from South Africa, Hong Kong and America were earnestly noting down the secrets of its making.
Dear old Champ, which had departed in a casket of memory with those emigrants from Cobh, leaving an Ireland devoid of the unblighted potatoes needed to make it. There was a kind of poetic justice in seeing it triumphantly take its place at the high table while the great great grandchildren of emigrants asked how it could be made. The past is indeed being exorcised and reconciled with the bounty of the present.
Healed of Blight
The descendants of Quakers fleeing from religious persecution and the Irish fleeing from hunger now meet, generations later, to proclaim a new growth in a land healed of one blight and, hopefully, almost healed of another.
There were so many contrasting images jostling for a place in the mind the reunion with those beloved American cousins; Cork's buildings shoulder to shoulder by the river; the helpful, laughing girls in Bewley's at breakfast time; and the Australian who saw a travel film on Cork and came from Kalgoorlie on the strength of it.
In Cork city, food abounded everywhere: the English market was piled high with mounds of fish, meat, oysters, dried tomatoes, olives, tripe like the crepe soles of our childhood sandals, and the indescribable Drisheen.
On the way home by train to the west, we met a Leitrim man who used to sell cattle in Dublin's Prussia Street, 50 years ago, for 42 shillings and sixpence per hundredweight. His son once owned an Irish theatre.