"Suffering In Silence"

by Nell McCafferty

You know that feeling of peace when you open a good book? Everything that bothered you disappears. You enter another world. Right now, when we don't know if we're coming or going into Stormont, or the police, or direct rule, and the head has gone into a total marlay, here is the book for you: The Donegal Woman.

The cover picture would put you off. It shows a thatched cottage, typically Irish. You recoil, because you don't want another Mother Macree story. I only opened the book because I know the author, John Throne.

I stepped inside the cottage, on page one, and into a nightmare. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors, goes the cliché? With this book, now you know.

It is a true story, set in Donegal at the beginning of the last century, around 1910. It is the story of John's grandmother. John's sister, former mayor, Susan Hamilton, of the Ulster Unionists Party, says every word of it is true.

Their granny was a Donegal Protestant, of the small farming class around Lifford. She was sold off at a hiring fair, aged twelve, to a Protestant farmer. He roundly raped her for two years, and when she became pregnant, she was sold on in marriage to another Protestant, another farmer. The local Protestant Bishop, who wanted to keep matters within "the Protestant family", arranged the marriage.

The new husband got a cow from the rapist for taking on the little bride, and some hens from her father. The husband roundly raped her. She had four children, and was dead by the age of twenty.

The men in her life beat her physically and mentally into silence and obedience but they did not break her spirit- she recites their names, silently, to herself every night, as she falls asleep. Though she had not used her human voice from the age of twelve until fourteen, this girl learned to use it again in talking to her baby. She dared not speak in front of her husband, who thought it a dangerous sign of independence and disobedience.

She built herself an outside toilet, a little shed in which she kept the bucket. She got a rooster, acquired more hens, sold the eggs for money for cloth and wool, and knitted and made clothing for her children. Sometimes she used the money to buy them biscuits.

This is a ghastly, wrenching story, shot through with beauty and hope. Throne shows great understanding of all the characters involved - the Protestants who shut themselves off from Catholics, the absentee English landlord looking down on the agent who looked down on the small farmer, the men looking down on the women.

John Throne is astonishingly sensitive to women, and manages to show humanity in even the most brutish men. He has thought his imaginative way into their lives. You can smell the shite in the outside toilet, feel the toothache, relax when the sun comes out, sense relief when an animal is rescued from the bog, go tense when the men waken the girl from sleep to assert their sexual dominion.

Every time the question "why" arises, the answer follows. Throne wrote the book because his own mother was ashamed the night she told him the story of her mother. Throne's mother was near death, when she made the revelation. He responded that his granny was a hero and set about explaining why that was, in this book.

Throne was a committed member of the Derry Labour Party in 1969. I remember him as tall, too serious, and a Strabane Protestant in a leather jacket who was a very good poacher of salmon. (He learned that from his granny's children, his mother and aunts and uncles.) My mother loved cooking his stolen fish, which he brought to her in the Bogside, every season. John later went to America and became a union organizer.

There is a tang of the American storyteller, Steinbeck, in the way this book moves along. I hope that word of mouth shall see it a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. It is one of the best books I have ever read. It makes me want to vote for his sister. If she is true to her granny, she will be true to all of us.

Read and weep, in despair for what was, in hope of what can be. Also, read and enjoy. We need the break, while Diane and Gregory and Martin and Mark trudge painfully towards the Promised Land.