The importance of looking back

“You need to take history and tell it through the right eyes, that’s so important.”

We are sitting at Marita Conlon-McKenna’s kitchen table, having tea and biscuits, and discussing her latest novel, The Hungry Road. The 10-year-old me who read Marita’s first book (and modern classic surely) Under the Hawthorn Tree and sobbed about the characters’ arduous trip to the other side of Ireland, is suitably excited.

“I just love Irish history,” says Marita. “Apparently when I was 12, I told my history teacher – she was from Glasgow, she was a kind of Miss Jean Brodie, feisty woman – that I was going a book about the Irish Famine. We’d barely touched it in school but I was very curious and I’ve always tried to find things out. I remember when Under The Hawthorn Tree came out, she told me that I had told her I’d do it.”

When it comes to writing, she likes ‘to take the different angle, not the obvious one.’ The Hungry Road was meant to be titled The Cottage but circumstances ensured that what was published was different to what Marita had anticipated.

“I saw beautiful locations along the Wild Atlantic Way, down to West Cork, absolutely fantastic aspects over the sea, tumbled cottages and ruins of cottages and old stone walls. I kept having this image of a ruined cottage on a beautiful piece of land overlooking the Atlantic and thinking what happened there. The story was going to be that someone in America inherits this bit of land, or they buy it in Ireland, and they come back to trace their family. The Famine would come in but it was going to be a modern story.

“But when I started writing, I started researching the Famine again and there’s so much more available now. I just found the present part was going away and away and away and I was really interested in the past. It was going to be West Cork or Kerry anyway as that’s where I saw the cottage. There’s Abbeystrowry graveyard in Skibbereen where there are 9,000 coffinless bodies buried in the pits. My grandmother is buried in the graveyard, she died when my mum was only 11. It was always a place of special feeling for me.”

A frequent visitor to Skibbereen and West Cork, Marita noticed a small plaque dedicated to Dr Dan Donovan, who, while working for the good of the area, published Diary of a Dispensary Doctor, detailing the reality of the plight for those affected by the famine.

“What he was doing and what he undertook was incredible,” says Marita. “Even though he was all day in the workhouse, in the town, in the dispensary, even though he was exhausted he would take out his pen and paper every night and write. I felt he wanted to record it for the time to be remembered but I also felt he wanted it down in fact for the future. The fact that he put so much effort into it, he was such a meticulous kind of man, I felt it was a message that he put it there to be read. It was in the Skibbereen, Cork and Dublin papers, then the London Illustrated News, the second highest selling paper in the UK after The Times, then the American and some European papers. This country doctor doing all this and I thought if I was doing a book I’d have to include him. If I hadn’t found Dr Dan’s diary he wouldn’t be in the book and it wouldn’t be the same, it would be a much weaker book.

“Then I was reading about the local parish priest, what he was doing, Fr Fitzpatrick, and I felt I was getting to know these good people in the town who had such good intentions and this calamity, like a big wave, came on top of them, and they really struggled to do their best. I thought that people didn’t know what those in towns did.

“There have been a few books about the Famine but they’re about ground down peasants and the big house, the master with the whip and the hounding hounds. There’s also a massive big romance in it too, but there’s absolutely no romance in my book.”

Marita knew she wanted to include a tenant farmer, the original plan for The Cottage, and Mary Sullivan was created, developing into a significant character. Like Fr Fitzpatrick, Dr Donovan and his wife, Henrietta, seamstress Mary recounts the events that changed Ireland in the 1840s.

“I wanted her to be something before she got married and I just had a picture of her with thread and scissors – so I had her as a seamstress,” explains Marita. “It was only meant to be a by-line, not a big thing, but I knew that when things were bad, that she would work. 

“When the potatoes fail, she vows to never let her children go hungry, that’s how the first part of the book ends. She represents tenant farmers who fought tooth and nail. Everyone thinks they laid down and died.

“People think the Famine was a passive disaster, but I wanted to show that, no, people were doing things. Everyone was trying to do something, they didn’t lie down and die. There was a lot more going on than people think.

“I just wanted to have different eyes to tell the same story. I felt if I was bringing a big romance into this, it was taking away from what was happening. I wanted people to read the book and care about Mary, Henrietta, Dan, Fr Fitzpatrick, the town and the people.”

We talk about luck when someone casually mentions something to you that will later appear in a book (no spoilers but it involves an animal) and the depth of research that goes into telling a story of this magnitude while ‘plaiting so many elements together for a reader.’

The Hungry Road also details life post-Famine, when one family, out of so many, makes the treacherous journey to the United States, in the hope of a better life.

“The Famine clung to them. it marked them and changed them,” says Marita of those who made the crossing. “Some had strength and courage to forge on and build a new life but unfortunately, some didn’t, some were so traumatised that they didn’t get over it. They must have had PTSD but didn’t know of it at the time. I wanted people to get that feeling that just because they left, that wasn’t the end of it.”

Marita’s depth and breadth of research is to be applauded and I would have happily sat all day in her home listening to what she found.

“There was so much more now than there was 30 years ago,” she says, comparing it to when she wrote Under the Hawthorn Tree. “I loved research, if I wasn’t writing, I’d be a researcher or a historian. Once I got his diaries, I’ve actually toned down in the book as to what I’ve read. Nearly everything he does in the book is recorded, there’s only a tiny bit of artistic license. I just felt it was real, and incredible. It’s about stuff that is there for all to see but has been unseen, or has been seen but not acted on.”

She’s no stranger to history research and having written books on 1916 (Rebel Sister –  I’d recommend reading), the Magdalene laundries, World War Two, the travelling community, among other subjects, she’s ready to write differently.

“The really big parts of history that interest me, I can rest easy, I’ve done them and I can go and write books that are nothing like that now,” she says.

“I love reading historical fiction. I’ve a grá for reading about the present, but also about the past. Fiction is about finding the good characters and then you have your story.”

The Hungry Road by Marita Conlon-McKenna (Transworld) is available now