Patricia Lynch published two fantasy novels in 1939, both of which could be described as socialist utopias. Ireland was in great need of utopias at the end of the 1930s, and socialism was in Lynch’s blood, it seems.
Ireland was in her blood too, of course. Lynch’s parents were born in Cork; but the exact nature of Lynch’s own childhood relationship with Ireland is strangely uncertain. She may have been born in Cork in 1898, as she claimed, but her marriage certificate gives the date as 1894, and the genealogist Denise Dowdall suggests that she was probably born in London in 1882. Her father may have died in Egypt when she was six, as she claims in her unreliable memoir A Storyteller’s Childhood (1947), but he may also have died in London in 1883, when she was eight months old, as Brian Maye points out in a piece for the Irish Times.[1] Her older sister Laura performed as a music hall artiste and disappeared from all records in 1901; Patricia never mentions her in her autobiographical writings, and Dowdall thinks she may have changed her name, as entertainers do, and so vanished into the mists of make-believe among which she made her living.[2] Patricia’s older brother Patrick (as she called him), or Henry Patrick (as everyone else did), was a London-based socialist and trade-union activist who died of pneumonia in December 1916. At the time Patricia too was based in London, writing as a journalist and committed to the cause of women’s suffrage. Early in 1916 she went to Dublin to report on the Easter Rising for Sylvia Pankhurst’s newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought, later renamed The Worker’s Dreadnought. Posing as a schoolgirl, Lynch interviewed many women about their experiences of the Rising, and the resultant article, ‘Scenes from the Rebellion’, became famous both for its vivid account of the immediate aftermath of the incident and for its uniquely female perspective.[3] Her brother Patrick had been friends with one of the leaders of the Rising, James Connolly, and in 1922 she married another of Patrick’s friends, the socialist historian Richard Fox, author of several books about the struggle for Irish independence including Rebel Irishwomen (1935), Green Banners (1938) and James Connolly: The Forerunner (1943). After her marriage Lynch moved to Ireland with her husband, and it was here that she started publishing fiction, first in the newspaper The Irish Press and later for the London publisher J. M. Dent and Sons. In the end she wrote around fifty novels for children, ranging from folklore-inflected fantasy to historical fiction and social realism; many combine all three of these elements in different proportions. Lynch’s life story, then, is bound up with storytelling, as her memoir suggests, and elements of fiction are tightly enmeshed with her life story. In our current state of knowledge we can’t be sure where one ends and the other begins – at least, when it comes to her early childhood, which is the time of life she chooses to focus on in her novels.
What we can be sure of, though, is her socialism, as reflected in her work as a journalist, in her relationship with Richard Fox, and in her fifty-odd novels. Everything I’ve read of hers reflects her socialist convictions, as applied to the special circumstances of postcolonial Ireland. For the genealogist Denise Dowdall, Lynch is made up of contradictions:
The sweet, magical children’s tales of Lynch’s fiction belie the hard-nosed political radicalism that marked her early career in journalism. The obvious Cork brogue she gives herself in the dialogue passages of her autobiography is at odds with her life-long London accent. She was a Londoner with an apparent pre-occupation with Irish rural settings and at the same time an archetypal Irish writer who found a home for her books with a non-Irish publisher.[4]
I’d suggest, however, that Lynch’s ‘hard-nosed political radicalism’ didn’t so much belie her ‘sweet, magical children’s tales’ as mutate into them. The tales themselves formed part of Lynch’s own process of mutating into a fully-fledged Irishwoman; A Storyteller’s Childhood is packed with incidents that have close parallels in her fiction. The need for such a mutation – for reinventing oneself to integrate with a new community – is explained in her realist novel Fiddler’s Quest (1941), which is set in Dublin, the city she made her home. In it a young girl called Ethne Cadogan is taken out of an English convent school near Liverpool and sent to Ireland by her father while he migrates to America to seek his fortune, disappearing from her life in the process, as Lynch’s father disappeared from hers. In Dublin Ethne must rapidly adapt her behaviour, language and music to fit her new circumstances. She lodges with a generous, affectionate Dublin family while she waits for her grandfather to come and fetch her home to his island in the west. In the meantime she makes a name for herself by playing the fiddle, first for the family and their neighbours, later at Mac’s Dance Hall alongside professional musicians. Like Patricia, Ethne finds herself mixed up with the nationalist cause in Dublin soon after the Easter Rising, and the story ends with the young migrant and her host family making a hair’s-breadth escape to the west, taking with them an injured rebel and pursued by soldiers. At the end of her journey she finds her paternal grandfather, the famous fiddler ‘King Cadogan’, and a lively new rural community which embraces her at once as one of its own. For Ethne as for Patricia, making yourself at home involves reconciling yourself with your familial and national roots, a process that takes time, hard work, creativity, kindness and adaptability – a capacity to change your ways while remaining resolutely yourself throughout all the changes.
In this book, rural Ireland provides Lynch’s young protagonist with a model of communal living. Even working-class Dubliners such as the Raffertys look to rural Ireland for examples of neighbourly ways and cultural practices: from the ‘half-doors’ common in country cottages, through which one can conveniently interact with passers-by, to the shawls that provide their wearers with warmth in winter; from cooking to ceilidhs; from storytelling and ballad-singing to national and familial history.[5] Going west involves effectively going back into the past, where the soldiers acting on behalf of the British Government cannot reach you. The past is as safe a space in Dublin as it is in the country. The head of the Rafferty family, Mrs Rafferty, adheres to the old customs of her rural childhood, and so welcomes Ethne into her household without asking anything in return. Later an old Dublin ballad singer hides Ethne and the rebel fighter from the soldiers in a forgotten yard full of abandoned coaches and sedan chairs: ‘Hide in the past,’ the old woman tells them, ‘an the present can never find ye’ (p. 189). The past is also the place in which Ireland was ‘free and grand’, as one of the Rafferty children tells Ethne (p. 85). It isn’t entirely idealized – the ladies who rode out in those coaches often came home, the singer admits, sadder than when they left (p. 188) – but it’s somehow both over and done with, and hence no longer dangerous to the colonial authorities, and intensely present and alive, suffused with emotional energy by the songs and stories that drive the cause of independence in the years before the Civil War. The past interpenetrates the present, just as the rural west interpenetrates the Irish capital, offering glimpses of freedom and grandeur – and even sadness – that enrich all those who see and feel them. And the past belongs to Ethne and her migrant family as much as it does to the people of Dublin.
Like Lynch’s ‘Scenes from the Rebellion’, Fiddler’s Quest captures a moment in Irish history just after the Easter Rising, and does so from the point of view of women and girls. In adopting this female perspective it could be said to share the early feminism of James Connolly, Lynch’s brother’s friend, who was responsible for recruiting women and men on an equal basis into the Irish Citizen Army. Connolly also penned two plays that give women a central role in the struggle for independence, and wrote in The Reconquest of Ireland (1915) that if ‘The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave’.[6] Patricia Lynch’s husband Richard Fox clearly shared Connolly’s proto-feminism, given his authorship of a book on Rebel Irishwomen.
James Connolly also argued that the Irish nationalist movement had been closely bound up from the beginning with socialist convictions, thanks to the ancient Irish customs of holding land in common and electing their leaders. As he writes in Labour in Irish History (1910):
It may surprise many readers to learn that up to the date above-mentioned [i.e. 1649] the basis of society in Ireland except within the Pale (a small strip of territory around the Capital city, Dublin), rested upon communal or tribal ownership of land. The Irish chief […] held his position upon the sufferance of his people, and as an administrator of the tribal affairs of his people, while the land or territory of the clan was entirely removed from his private jurisdiction. In the parts of Ireland where for 400 years after the first conquest (so-called) the English governors could not penetrate except at the head of a powerful army, the social order which prevailed in England – feudalism – was unknown, and as this comprised the greater portion of the country, it gradually came to be understood that the war against the foreign oppressor was also a war against private property in land. But with the forcible break up of the clan system in 1649, the social aspect of the Irish struggle sank out of sight, its place being usurped by the mere political expressions of the fight for freedom. Such an event was, of course, inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would undoubtedly have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independent country, but coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of armed force from without, instead of by the operation of economic forces within, the change has been bitterly and justly resented by the vast mass of the Irish people, many of whom still mix with their dreams of liberty longings for a return to the ancient system of land tenure – now organically impossible.[7]
It’s this ‘ancient system of land tenure’ to which young Nono Rafferty refers in Fiddler’s Quest when she tells Ethne that the rebels ‘want to make Ireland free and grand, like in the ancient times’ (p. 85, my emphasis). For Connolly, freedom took the form of a socialist republic in which men and women were equal partners, and the place where an early version of such a republic persisted longest was beyond the Pale, in rural Ireland.[8]
If Fiddler’s Quest takes place shortly after the Easter Rising, the moment occupied by Lynch’s two 1939 fantasies is not so easily located, but both speak directly to the moment in which they were written. One depicts an Irish rural community which offers a model of communal living, like the West of Ireland in the later novel; the other introduces a chosen family which wanders through an Irish countryside which has not yet reached its potential as an egalitarian space dedicated to the principle of mutual support. One is embedded in an Irish past which interacts freely with the present, lending it strength and energy; the other inhabits a kind of mist in which the potential for such a fusion between past and present is glimpsed in fragments before being finally realised. Both have young girls as protagonists, and in both the girls’ rich imaginations combine with their rich capacity for affection to shape the place they live in for the better. Both focus on the poor and the labouring classes, and contain not a single character who can be described as ruling class. Lynch places marginal people at the centre of her narrative – children, women, rural labourers, travellers, sentient animals and birds – giving them direct access to the myths and legends of Irish literature, and thereby making them the heroes of the newly-fledged Irish nation thanks to their link with egalitarian ancient Ireland.
In the 1930s, Irish children in particular took on an important role in preserving those myths and legends. Lynch’s fantastic fiction of the decade coincided with a major initiative in Irish folklore which drew on the memories of children and their families as a major resource. In 1937, when de Valera formally established Ireland as a republic (replacing the Irish Free State, which recognised the King of England as its constitutional monarch), the Irish Folklore Commission invited schoolchildren throughout the country to gather folkloric material for what became the Schools’ Collection:
Over the course of two years, roughly 50,000 children representing almost 5,000 schools, from every county of Ireland (save for the six disputed counties that would become Northern Ireland), collected both English and Gaelic lore, in neat penmanship. Together they gathered almost three-quarters of a million pages’ worth of documentation.[9]
1939 marked the completion of the project, and both Lynch’s novels of that year could be said to pay tribute to the importance of children as custodians of the Irish past, in particular its fairy stories. In The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels – the third instalment of Lynch’s famous series of books about a donkey that serves as a catalyst for supernatural events – the child protagonists are constantly slipping into an alternative Ireland of the past inhabited by fairies and the heroes of old Irish literature. Most adults in the book don’t pay much heed to the supernatural, past or present; the children’s father, for instance – the turf-cutter of the title – believes that such things are the exclusive province of the young, which makes his son Seamus reluctant to tell him anything about them:
Seamus put his head sideways on the table and made a face at Eileen. He didn’t want her to say anything about the leprechaun, for it was no use at all talking to the turf-cutter about magic. He didn’t believe in it. He thought strange things happened to Eileen and Seamus because they were young, that was all.[10]
The children, on the other hand, accept the presence of leprechauns, ancient warriors and magic-working wise women as readily as they accept the presence of the turf-cutter’s neighbours and fellow workers. Eileen has her imagination prepared for this acceptance of magic by her love of ‘story-books’, printed pamphlets full of strange tales and high adventures. One imagines that the fairy tales retold by Lady Wilde, W B Yeats and James Stephens might be among them, though we know from earlier books in the series that she also likes stories about pirates and native Americans. Lynch’s own novel takes its place as one of these story-books for children, despised by some as ‘only fit for babies’ (p. 157) but recognised by others – not least the socialist and nationalist James Stephens – as in some sense a template for a truly democratic, imaginatively liberated Ireland. Sheila, the child protagonist of The Grey Goose of Kilnevin, shares Eileen’s predilection for story books, and carries hers with her on her adventures in a basket, so that they become increasingly battered and weatherworn as the novel goes on. Sheila herself is an accomplished storyteller and an attentive listener to oral stories. At the end of the book, when she returns after many adventures to her hometown of Kilnevin, she is given a ‘green-and-gold story book’ by a local woman as a gift to mark her return.[11] At the same time she finds a permanent physical home for herself and her travel companions in the town, which suggests that for Lynch home is the place where fairy tales and stories for children both get told and find their fulfilment. Depicting that fulfilment in fiction may risk having one’s stories dismissed as ‘only fit for babies’, but may also lay the groundwork for a confident, politically radical new community, in which the voices and desires of children are as fondly treasured as the voices and desires of women and men.
Both of Lynch’s 1939 fantasies give a prominent place to the present as well as the past. The turf-cutter’s cabin is linked to the modern world by the motorised barge that carries the turf to the rest of the country, crewed by the eccentric Captain Cassidy and his mate Tim Quinlan. Their role in the text is very similar to that of the captain and crew of the steamer Granuaile in Fiddler’s Quest, who link Dublin to England and the rest of the world via the Irish Sea, but also extend the warmest of Irish welcomes to the lonely migrant Ethne when she boards their vessel at the Liverpool docks. The Grey Goose of Kilnevin embraces the romance of rail travel when Sheila and her friends board a train to get to the races – though Sheila nearly gets excluded from that romance when she finds she hasn’t the money to pay the fare. Automobiles turn up occasionally in the Grey Goose, and a lorry can be found in the second turf-cutter’s donkey book, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Goes Visiting (1935), driven and eventually crashed by Tim Quinlan and Captain Cassidy. But motorised vehicles are always rare and glamorous; and they sometimes get mixed up with the stranger glamour of the Irish past. This happens when a circus passes the turf-cutter’s cottage in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels, its ‘steam-driven’ lorries (p. 142) packed with exotic animals, clowns, and wizards who can do real magic (albeit by accident), and accompanied by a girl who later gets offered the ring and role of the Queen of the Fairies. It happens again when a delivery man’s lorry mutates into Santa’s sleigh in the final chapter, while Santa himself gets replaced by an Irish leprechaun and some animal friends.[12] Most strikingly of all, a Silver Airman crops up from time to time throughout the child protagonists’ adventures, appearing at a crucial moment to rescue them from the clutches of marauding Danes in ancient Ireland. The Airman is dressed in silver armour, like a hero of old, his plane is anchored to the earth of Ireland by a line, like a child’s kite, and he seems able to fly in and out of the past with ease, collecting souvenirs as he goes in the form of eagle’s eggs and memorable ‘wonders’. Lynch’s Ireland, in other words, is no preindustrial idyll, but its industrial machinery is enmeshed with the land, water, beasts and history of the nation, complementing them as Dublin complements the Irish countryside to which its workers’ imaginations are always turning.
The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels revolves around the cottage on the edge of the bog where the turf-cutter lives with his wife and two children. In the first book of the sequence, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey (1934), the house was rebuilt from the ground upwards using a leprechaun’s gold, as if to affirm the crucial link between the material present and the imaginative world of Irish storytelling in which Eileen loves to spend her time. The second book took the child protagonists, Eileen and Seamus, away from the cottage to a nearby island for a short vacation; but in the third the cottage becomes the waystation where travellers from all over Ireland meet, talk, refresh themselves and rest; as Seamus tells one of the travellers, ‘Everyone comes to our house’ (p. 185), which means you can find whoever or whatever you’re looking for there, from family relations to distant ancestors to shelter, meals and conversation. It contains just enough to meet the family’s needs, with a little bit over to share with passers-by. Leprechauns, airmen, circus ringmasters, labourers and celebrities find a welcome there, turning it into a hub from which journeys begin and end and through which they pass, a still point of the turning world, as Eliot might put it – though without the religious implications of that phrase from his 1936 poem Burnt Norton (neither novel contains a religious figure in the present, though The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels includes a meeting with a hermit-priest from Ireland’s past). The book is full, in fact, of journeys whose beginnings and endings are never traced; Eileen and Seamus touch those journeys at a certain point, then watch wonderingly as they continue into the mists of the past or future. The cottage and its occupants remain stable, but change the trajectory of those journeys in crucial ways. It becomes, in fact, the centre of Ireland, and so of the world with which Ireland is linked by many narrative threads, as the cottage is linked to Dublin by the nearby canal. And it offers hope for the future to a planet on the brink of an all-encompassing war.[13]
The turf-cutter’s trade is literally practised in and with the soil of Ireland, and the cottage is rooted in the soil from the start of the novel. That this gives it just enough to manage forms the basis of the book’s economics, just as it formed the basis of de Valera’s economics for the new republic, whereby Ireland was encouraged to draw on its own natural resources thanks to a system of tariffs on imported goods, thus confirming its hard-won independence from its British neighbours.[14] In the opening section, the turf-cutter’s children, Eileen and Seamus, decide they would like the cottage garden to yield better returns in flowers and vegetables. When Seamus looks out of the window, he sees only:
a big patch of potatoes and a smaller one of cabbage. A few plants grew by the door and under the windows, but the rest was a wilderness. The turf-cutter and his wife had no time for gardening, while the children thought it was a fine place to play in – that was all. (p. 10).
Inspired by a ‘big, dusty book’ that belonged to their grandfather the children determine to create a garden like one of the coloured pictures, ‘where pinks, roses, lavenders, primroses, sweet peas, stock, candytuft, sunflowers, sweet william, and flowers the children had never seen or even heard of were growing all together’ (p. 10). Pooling their modest resources, the children head to town after school the following day, and find themselves in a gardening shop with magical properties, whose proprietor has limbs that can extend themselves at will, like the limbs of the engineer in the Ghibli movie Spirited Away (‘when the man reached out with his feather duster his arm grew so long that he could dust any part of the shop without moving’, p. 14). No explanation is offered for his strange abilities; he simply exists, like a working model of capitalism, and gets left behind as soon as they leave the shop clutching a poke of magic seeds. Like the man who gave the magic beans to Jack in the fairy tale, he tells them that if they plant those seeds successfully ‘ye’ll have the most remarkable garden in all Ireland’ (p. 16), wishes them ‘quick growing’, then vanishes from their lives for ever. But unlike Jack, the children find the seeds mostly unhelpful. Instead of producing a garden like the one in the picture book, they create a jungle full of hypertrophied plants and giant insects: ‘Eileen ‘screamed when an earwig as big as a cat scuttled out on the path in front of her’; she ‘hated earwigs more than any other insect’ (p. 23). The children must call on the services of their magic-wielding friend Sreng to banish the insects – but in doing so they must also rid themselves of the flowers and vegetables, since as Sreng puts it, ‘The good and the bad, you must take them all or lose them all’ (p. 27). The garden of excess, then, brings with it unexpected disadvantages, and so might serve as a metaphor for the philosophy of constant growth at the heart of capitalism, which makes the space in which it is practised so hard to inhabit for so many of its subjects.
Sreng is another passing visitor to the cottage, this time from the past, as well as the industrial present represented by the canal where he lives and works. He enthusiastically supports the children’s project of improving the garden by providing them with a bag of magic earth for their seeds, brought with him from the legendary time in which he had his origins. For Sreng is a warrior of the Firbolgs, the ancient inhabitants of Ireland, a ‘little dark man’ (p. 17) who is always being mistaken for a child (p. 42) and (ironically) a foreigner in the present day, and the bag contains earth ‘so old that a year is but as a day and a day is the same as a year to it’ (p. 19). Planted in this earth, the shopkeeper’s seeds germinate freely, despite the fact that they are being planted at the wrong time of year. Sreng’s participation in the garden project makes it something more than a metaphor for capitalism; it can also represent the prosperous future promised to the liberated Irish people by their own imaginations and those of their elected officials, de Valera among them. As it turns out, there is no short cut to such collective prosperity; only hard work, which Sreng provides along with the children, and time and patience in conjunction with the naturally occurring seasons will bring it about – unless one seeks magical help, which can bring chaos instead of order.
Sreng helps the children dig the garden before planting the magic seeds in the magic earth he has provided, but it is Sreng who points out that they must take the good along with the bad if they are to enjoy the fruits of these labours, and it is he who puts an end to the magic at their request, shooting at the giant insects with his non-fatal magic arrows until they have all returned to the proper size, and in the process signalling the end of ‘fast growing’ in the cottage garden. Magical growth, then, is another brief visitor to the cottage, lasting no longer than a day. Its aura lingers for a while in the neighbourhood, in the form of a single crop of giant flowers and vegetables, which win the children prizes at the local show and provide free food for their friends and neighbours. As their mother points out, ‘The Captain and Tim Quinlan would be glad of a few head of lettuce and a bunch of rhubarb’, while ‘there’s some of the bog people have never eaten anything in their lives but cabbage or potato’ (p. 30). Her response to a surfeit is to share it, so that Sreng’s and the shopkeeper’s magic of excess never disrupts the customs of mutual help that govern the rural community.
The children first met Sreng in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey, bringing him with them to the present where he found a permanent home with Captain Cassidy and Tim Quinlan. He remains a migrant, then, constantly in motion between the country and the city on the Captain’s barge, his foreignness instantly noticed by passers-by owing to his dark skin and strange accent. But despite his travels, from past to present, from country to city, Sreng is no more a foreigner then any Irishman; rather he is one example of the many waves of migrants that made up the Irish population throughout history. Eileen and Seamus first knew him as a leader of the Firbolg people as they fought to defend their land against a new wave of invaders, the Tuatha Dé Dannan, who became the pagan gods of Irish legend; but the Firbolgs were themselves invaders, and distantly related to the Tuatha Dé Dannan despite the marked differences in their appearance after many generations. The notion of racial purity has no place in old Irish culture. In The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels Sreng accompanies the children on a second trip to the past, this time to encounter yet another wave of migrants, the marauding Danes. The first Dane the children meet is an eccentric figure in the present day, like the elastic shopkeeper: a ‘tall dark man dressed in strange clothes who was digging potatoes in a field’ (p. 65), behind a half-submerged house which looks ‘like a big doll’s house, with its bow-windows and its pointed red roof’ – very different, in other words, from the other buildings in the neighbourhood, which are either ‘cabins’ like the turf-cutter’s cottage or larger farmhouses (p. 63). Later it emerges that this doll’s house is in fact ‘the great rock which marked the grave of the Dane’, and the man in strange clothes is the Dane himself; as Sreng points out, ‘’Twas surely the Dane who […] showed you a toy house that was not there’ (p. 95). In the past the Danes were invaders, but in the children’s present they have merged with the Irish earth and the Irish people, participating enthusiastically in the familiar Irish pastime of digging and eating ‘praties’. They may retain their acquisitive properties – the Dane seeks to exchange a pratie for a pair of Sreng’s magic arrows in the children’s possession – but their penchant for violence is reduced to flinging handfuls of mud when the children refuse the bargain. Danish warriors and everyday Irish mischief-makers have merged over time and become indistinguishable.[15]
Soon after this encounter, the children find themselves whisked back to a more dangerous time for Ireland, when the woods are full of wolves and the Dane’s rapacious countrymen moor their longships in Irish rivers as they sack and pillage the nearby communities. Sreng meets Eileen and Seamus in the wolf-ridden woods, having been whisked into the past by the same magic that took the children there, and together they rescue a hermit-priest from the ship where he has been imprisoned by the Danes, returning him to his cell near another prominent rock. The invaders pursue them and lay siege to the rock, but are driven off by the Silver Airman, whose aeroplane looks to them like a monstrous bird. After that the children return with the Airman to their own time, leaving the hermit behind in his cell, on his insistence, to fulfil his Christian duty: ringing a silver bell each morning to mark the arrival of Christianity in the furthest corner of Europe (p. 87). Sreng, then, repeatedly links Eileen and Seamus to times when violent warriors have threatened Ireland’s population. On this occasion the children rescue an old priest from the threat of enslavement or death, freeing him to return to his work of spreading peace with the aid of his bell; and the continuing presence of the Dane in the present day, digging praties like a local, confirms the fact that for all the pain it involved, the violent past laid solid foundations for the modern Irish nation.
In 1939, Ireland was again surrounded by potential invaders, from the Nazis, who had long been flexing their military muscles, to the British, from whose imperial grip Ireland had only recently prized itself free. When war broke out in September Ireland declared its neutrality, refusing to be enlisted in the British military cause as it had been in 1914. Lynch’s hermit-priest, the fearless old man who refuses to abandon his post despite his recent imprisonment and the continuing threat of marauding Danes and ravening wolves in the nearby forest, makes the choice of non-violence a form of heroism as impressive as the feats of the ancient warriors who inspire Seamus. In the two previous books, Eileen and Seamus – especially the latter – found themselves drawn to the warrior-heroes of old Ireland as if by a spell; indeed, Seamus was twice tempted to join a magically-resurrected warrior band, being restrained only by his small size and the love of his sister.[16] In The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels he again finds himself taking on the role of warrior, clutching a rusty spear given him by Sreng, but heroic posturing proves no match for the ferocious Danes, and he, Sreng and Eileen must rely on the Silver Airman to escape from the top of the rock where they have been penned. Throughout the novel, reconciliation proves more effective than violence as a means of keeping peace. Sreng’s arrows never hurt the people or creatures he shoots at; they are weapons of deterrence or self-defence, not conflict. The children make friends with most of the strangers they encounter, and any enemies they may have made by accident are quickly turned into friends by the end of the book, or at least deprived of any power they had to harm the people they despise. The turf-cutter’s cabin is neutral ground, like Ireland, and offers safety as well as provisions to those who need them.
At one point in the narrative, Seamus gets suddenly transformed by magic into an eagle, and flies off to the eyrie of another eagle in the far-off mountains. This eagle is one of a pair which have attacked the children several times in the first two books; they are servants of the wicked Wise Woman of Youghal who has plotted for years to make Eileen and Seamus into her slaves. Becoming an eagle shows Seamus for the first time that the eagles, too, have been enslaved, and he is in any case naturally empathetic with animals. Restored to his true form in the eagle’s nest, he frees the bird from a length of rope in which it has got itself entangled, and in return it flies him safely home to his own part of the country. Nations throughout history have adopted the eagle as an emblem of power, not least Nazi Germany. Lynch’s eagles, by contrast, are merely birds which have been exploited for evil purposes by scheming humans, and like most other people they will gladly reciprocate kindness wherever they meet it. The eagle entangled itself in the rope when it launched an attack on the Silver Airman’s rescue plane, to which the rope was attached; acts of violence against others, then, are also acts of self-harm, and Seamus’s lesson in inter-species cooperation offers a wholesome alternative philosophy to the one that threatened to engulf Europe at the time of writing.
Shortly afterwards the children free a second wild animal from enslavement. Seamus returns from his visit to the eagle’s eyrie to find himself on the back of a circus elephant, riding round the ring to rapturous applause from the massed spectators, among whom is his sister Eileen. Fed up of adventures, Seamus decides to ride the elephant out of the ring and home to the cottage, and the elephant concurs at once, since he ‘had long wanted to stray about the world’ as an independent traveller (p. 126). Eileen afterwards substitutes a magic toy elephant for the real one (she acquired the toy from a mysterious stranger in The Turf-cutter’s Donkey, so Lynch’s readers already know it can grow to full size and come to life whenever she asks it to), and the real elephant vanishes at once into the Irish countryside, while the toy takes its place in the circus. Eileen does not worry about the real elephant, we’re told, since it’s ‘too big’ to get into trouble, and can in any case find a home in Dublin Zoo if it ever gets ‘lonesome’ (p. 141). We must, then, presume that the circus elephant becomes another successful immigrant in Ireland, free to explore its new environment at will and liberated from the oppression represented by the showman (who affronts its dignity by calling it ‘brute’) and his sidekick the circus wizard (who pinches the elephant’s trunk when the showman’s back is turned). Beasts as well as people may find a welcome in the Irish bogs if they choose to seek it.
A similar liberation is offered to another circus performer – or rather two, a girl and an animal. Goldilocks is touted by the showman as ‘the most beautiful equestrienne in Europe’, while her horse White Wings has ‘the longest mane and tail in the world’ (p. 113). Eileen and Seamus absorb these hyperboles of circus rhetoric with uncritical enthusiasm; but they also recognise links between this seemingly unmatchable star and their own everyday existence. Seamus is sure he can match the equestrian skills of Goldilocks if he gets access to her horse, while Eileen sees her as a figure from one of her cherished story books, a fairy tale princess; Goldilocks is even reading a story book on horseback as the circus travels along the road that runs past the turf-cutter’s cottage (pp. 143-4). So the children invite her home, together with White Wings, convinced that she is someone like themselves who will appreciate the things they love about their lives: imaginative trips into the world of fairy tales, energetically physical adventures, acquaintance with fascinating people like their friends and parents. Instead they quickly learn the difference between story book princesses and real girls who adopt the airs of European royalty. It is Goldilocks who dismisses Eileen’s story books as ‘only fit for babies’ (p. 157), and she laughs at the Captain and Tim Quinlan when they come visiting, while mastering the show horse White Wings proves far beyond Seamus’s capabilities. In the end, Goldilocks is no more at home in the children’s cabin than her namesake was in the house of the three bears, and Eileen and Seamus are relieved to see her go, even though they lose White Wings in the process.
Yet where Goldilocks goes when she disappears from the cottage remains a mystery, like the question of what happened to Lynch’s artiste-sister. She may have gone back to the circus to resume her life as a European celebrity; or she may have ridden off to take up her destiny as a fairy tale princess. While she stayed at the cottage, the leprechaun who befriended the children in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey – and who later accompanied them on holiday in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Goes Visiting – visits the cottage with a proposal for her; he offers her a ring that will make her Queen of Tir na nOg if she accepts it, and Eileen never learns whether or not she took up the post when she eloped that night from Eileen’s bedroom. One way or another, the leprechaun’s offer confirms the children’s view of Goldilocks in relation to themselves. It is their closest fairy friend who makes the proposal, which means that these shoeless rural children share something of Goldilocks’s unmatchable glamour, being at least as familiar with wonders as any star of stage or ring.
As it happens, Goldilocks’s visit also offers the children a chance to show off their own special qualities. In the only chapter in the book without magic in it, Eileen decides to bake Goldilocks a cake worthy of her regal demeanour. Unfortunately it’s the first time she has ever tried to make one, and she has no guidance, since her mother is not at home. The results are predictable. She uses up all the cottage’s supply of eggs – which amount to four, one for each member of the family – and reduces the kitchen to a state of chaos, while the cake comes out of the oven as a shapeless black mass ‘like a lump of turf’ (p. 167). At the same time, the baking process, in which Seamus joins with enthusiasm and abundant supportive comments (‘hurray!’ he cries as they cut the cake, ‘Look! It isn’t really so bad. It’s only dark brown, and mebbe that’s the spice’, p. 167), showcases the loving relationship between brother and sister, while the disastrous outcome allows their parents too to display their talent for collective living. On walking into the shipwrecked kitchen at the end of a hard day’s work, the turf-cutter is at first forgivably angry, but he quickly chides himself for letting his temper get the better of him and begs his children’s pardon (‘say yez forgive me for getting’ into the tantrums’, p. 169). His wife, meanwhile, helps the children clean up the mess, promises to bake another cake the following morning with their help, and finds a soda cake ‘that Eileen had overlooked’ for the family to eat for dinner. Goldilocks may be worthy of a throne, but the children occupy a better space: a lovingly egalitarian household, in which mutually supportive labour, of the kind they practised as they baked their ‘lump of turf’, is more highly prized than high birth, good looks or personal accomplishments. No wonder the resulting cake was compared to the turf or peat by which the family wins its bread.
Travellers are of two kinds in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels. On the one hand there are the travellers who obey the unwritten rules of the road, as laid down by James Stephens in The Crock of Gold (1912) and The Demi-Gods (1914): they share any food they have, offer entertainment in the form of songs or stories, treat animals well and respect the property and needs of others. Of this kind are the Captain and Tim Quinlan in their barge, the warrior Sreng who joins them, and the Silver Airman. On the other hand there are the travellers who put their own interests before those of anyone they meet on the road, refusing to share things, despising strangers, and treating beasts with casual cruelty. Of this kind are the Danes of ancient times, the circus showman and his wizard, and the tinkers met by the children in Chapter Six, on the way to the market where they plan to show their giant vegetables. Tinkers represent a blind spot in Lynch’s utopian vision for Ireland. On the one hand there is an undeniable allure about their wandering way of life, so that Eileen, for instance, plays games with her dolls involving travellers (whom she calls gypsies) as well as pirates and native Americans; on the other they abuse both people and animals, as the turf-cutter’s donkey knows too well, having lived with them before the children freed him in the first book of the series. As they descend on the children’s donkey-cart and snatch vegetables without asking, the tinkers sing ‘The Song of the Tinker’s Tribute’, which summarizes their lives in Lynch’s universe:
Bread from the oven,
Butter from the churn,
Praties from the patch,
Cabbage from the plot,
Take what we can:
Eat when we may. (p. 32)
The song places the tinkers outside the economy that sustains Ireland in Lynch’s books, an economy based on labour, especially labour connected with working the land, and a fair distribution of the products of labour, such as food, shelter, clothing, and the occasional luxury such as Eileen’s story books or her toy elephant. José Lanters argues that the only tinkers Lynch depicts with sympathy are those who aspire to settling down, and while there are exceptions here and there in her writing, it seems to me that Lanters has put her finger on the reason for Lynch’s distrust of certain kinds of travelling culture.[17] Her hopes for Ireland and its future are firmly rooted in communal cultivation of the soil, and the rootlessness of committed travellers, when combined with a fierce contempt for those who work the land, can be seen as militating against this agrarian vision.
The second appearance of the tinkers sets them against the first kind of traveller I listed, the kind who freely share provisions, disseminate songs and stories, treat animals with kindness and respect the property and needs of others. Soon after she bakes her cake Eileen falls foul of her old enemy, the Wise Woman of Youghal, who shrinks her by magic and traps her in a toadstool house in hopes of acquiring the ring of the Queen of Tir na nOg, which the leprechaun gave to Goldilocks. As Seamus is looking for his vanished sister he comes across another wanderer, an old apple woman named Mary Anne, who is also, as it happens, looking for a sister. It emerges that this lost sister is the Wise Woman, that she has a name – Sally Anne – and that she once lived outside the town of Youghal. These mundane facts at once reduce her to the stature of an ordinary human being, and the apple woman suggests that she only turned bad when she went wandering (‘now she’s taken to roving, an’ I’m not going to let her bring discredit on her family, not if I can help it’, p. 182). The apple woman is a wanderer, like the Wise Woman, and may share her sister’s ability to work magic, since she accidentally frees Eileen from the toadstool with a magic golden nut Seamus found earlier; but she also earns a ‘dacent living’, as she puts it, selling apples on the roads of Ireland, a calling the Wise Woman rejected when she took to roving. The Grey Goose of Kilnevin features another kindly apple woman, who like Mary Anne is generous with her apples and never works magic, and Lynch mentions these wandering tradeswomen with affection in A Storyteller’s Childhood.[18] Perhaps her affection stems in part from the association of these travellers with the fruits of the soil, as well as their legitimate acquisition of those fruits from the growers’ trees.
Meanwhile Mary Anne’s ability to expose the Wise Woman’s earthly roots seems to give her power over her roving sister. When the children and the apple woman are attacked by tinker children led by Sally Anne, Mary Anne drives her sister away by hitting her over the head repeatedly with her empty apple basket, and the Wise Woman seems unable to stop her, despite the potency of her spells. The scene ends with the two old women disappearing ‘out of sight and hearing’ like the other travellers in the book (p. 189), and the reader never finds out if the wicked witch returned at last to her roots in Youghal. Eileen and Seamus, on the other hand, go home with the fruits of their labour, nuts and mushrooms; they are always harvesting the land, it seems (earlier in the book it was blackberries, and earlier still the giant vegetables), and this is part of what makes their lives utopian. On this occasion they also bring home the golden nut, which the apple woman dropped by accident after Seamus gave it to her as a present; the other utopian aspect of the children’s lives is their love of sharing. Their mother keeps the nut in a teapot for the apple woman, should she ever come to collect it (as she probably will), while Seamus persuades her to keep the golden husk of the nut as a thimble, so that a single object becomes the shared property of two people. It’s this instinct for collective living that the tinkers lack, according to Lynch, and that excludes them from the rural idyll she shapes in her books.
In Lynch’s Ireland, even the most capitalist of ceremonies, Christmas, becomes a celebration of collective living. In the final chapter of the novel, on a snowy Christmas Eve, a procession of people and animals come to the turf-cutter’s cabin hoping for something to eat: first a robin and some other birds, then a ‘small ragged man’ with a pig and a squirrel, who turns out to be the children’s old friend the local leprechaun, transmuted here into another wanderer. Seamus and Eileen show hospitality to all these visitors, Seamus inviting them into the kitchen, while Eileen generously divides her one and only baked treat – a man made of leftover dough from a loaf of currant bread – with the hungry leprechaun and his animal companions. As they eat, Eileen tells the leprechaun about the modest Christmas she is expecting. The turf-cutting trade has been poor this year (‘it’s been a desprit bad year for us on the bog’, the turf-cutter observes on p. 197), the children have no baubles to put on the little tree in the yard they have selected as their Christmas tree, and all the presents on offer are home-made. They have nothing fancy to eat on the festive day itself because unlike some other Irish children they have no ‘uncles in America’ (p. 198). Yet what they have is freely shared with friends and strangers, as it always has been, and the leprechaun ensures this brings them the seasonal banquet they deserve. A mysterious sack is delivered, the tree in the yard sprouts baubles and toys, Santa Claus puts in a fleeting appearance – despite the fact that Seamus doesn’t believe in him – and the leprechaun introduces himself, his pig and his squirrel to the children’s parents – despite the turf-cutter’s scepticism about magic creatures and supernatural episodes (in fact the parents see him as yet another human traveller, a little old man with a dog and cat). The leprechaun introduces himself on this occasion as ‘UNCLEFROMAMERICA’, and opens the sack to reveal a hamper full of treasures: ‘a roast goose, brown and shining, a Limerick ham, black and white puddings, sausages in strings, a jar of ginger, a tin of biscuits, a jar of jam, a box of crackers, a tin of sweets, a canister of tea’ (p. 207). Clearly these gifts are intended to reward the family’s generosity, despite their poverty, just as Santa is said to reward good conduct with a well-filled Christmas stocking. But thanks to the presence of the leprechaun, this particular Christmas miracle has a uniquely Irish flavour. Santa plays second fiddle here to the emissary from fairyland, who invokes the American Irish diaspora to make the festival more festive than it could have been if the turf-cutter and his family had been forced to depend on their own resources, as they have done in the story to this point. De Valera wanted Ireland to be largely self-sufficient – and many of the contents of the hamper are Irish, such as the Limerick ham – but Lynch seems to suggest that some of the nation’s resources lie overseas, in the shape of emigrants who had escaped the harsh conditions of Irish rural life, and in some cases found a better life elsewhere. In combination, the resources of Ireland and the resources of America could enrich the lives of both cultures, if divided fairly between them.
Lynch, in fact, could be said to have been urging her American readers to participate in the culture of sharing they have encountered throughout her novel. Interestingly, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels was the only book in the series to be published in the United States before it appeared in Britain or Ireland. The 1939 edition was published not by J. M. Dent, Lynch’s British publishers, but E. P. Dutton, Dent’s American distributors; the first British edition didn’t appear until 1946, by which time the fourth book in the series, Long Ears (1943), had already been published in Britain by Dent. Long Ears tells the story of the titular donkey from his birth to the day he came into the turf-cutter’s possession; it therefore brings the series full circle, completing the journey begun by Lynch in the first book when Eileen, Seamus and Long Ears had their first adventure together. The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels instead focuses on the hard but ‘dacent’ life of Irish labourers and their families; and it ends by invoking the spirit of Christmas, which has long been the time when children’s story books are traditionally bought as presents for children whose relatives can afford them. Books are precious objects to Eileen, although her battered specimens earn the contempt of the queenly Goldilocks; while the middle-class children who read Lynch’s book could be said to have enriched themselves with treasure in the form of knowledge about the lives and culture of the Irish workers who were their ancestors, and who remain their kin across the ocean. Those middle-class readers might also have been struck by the radical difference between Eileen’s living conditions and their own. One wonders, then, if Lynch and her publishers aimed to encourage greater generosity towards their Irish kin from any well-heeled aunts or uncles from America – real or imagined – who happened to read it to their offspring in the comfort of their homes?
The French film director Alain Resnais, whose most popular movie was Mon Oncle d’Amérique (1980), described the America of his childhood as a magical country which could be accessed through the silver screen:
“You know, for all European kids of my age, America was a kind of fairyland […] We were born with the idea that there was another kind of country where everything was easy and perfect, like cartoon films, and there was a lot of money and freedom. I remember that when I was ten [i.e. in 1932] and I was looking at the French flag, I didn’t feel a thing. But when I was looking at the American flag, my heart was really beating.”[19]
For American children, on the other hand, Ireland could be a ‘kind of fairyland’, full of leprechauns with crocks of gold and ancient gods and heroes of the kind described by James Stephens in his Irish Fairy Tales (1920), or Padraic Colum in The King of Ireland’s Son (1916). Lynch’s leprechaun sings a song which magically transforms the contents of Santa’s sack from a heap of fallen leaves – which is all Seamus sees when he first opens it – into a lavish Christmas feast: ‘Leaves in the bag change as I sit: / Gold in the crock and the candle is lit’ (p. 206). At the time of writing, emigration was depleting the Irish countryside; the harsh conditions endured by the turf-cutter and his family drove many of their neighbours to seek a better life elsewhere.[20] A miracle was needed to stem this flood of emigration, and Lynch’s novel provides one, jointly achieved through a collaboration between the Irish fairies and the Irish Americans, both of whom could be seen as legendary in their generosity. For Lynch, in fact, generosity itself was the miracle needed to make life in Ireland worth living, while an attractive home, like the turf-cutter’s cabin, was needed to encourage the end of the travelling life to which so many emigrants were committing themselves. The one could enable the other, her representation of the cabin generating generosity and imaginative investment in the Irish countryside within her readers, while these two kinds of investment encouraged the Irish people to commit themselves for life to the Irish countryside.
Needless to say, this was never a practical model for the regeneration of Ireland’s economy, but Lynch’s utopian vision of the nation’s present and future – growing organically from Ireland’s turbulent past, through the strange adventures of Eileen and Seamus – may well have planted fresh seeds of affection for Ireland at home and abroad. She herself had started out as an emigrant and a traveller, wandering from one setting to another along with her family until she seized the chance to return to the land of her ancestry. Here she dedicated herself to reimagining that land and her own childhood, finding fruitful soil in both for a better future. The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels endures as a testament to hope in times of conflict. As such it deserves revisiting by readers on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as on either side of the Irish Sea.
NOTES
[1] See Patricia Lynch, A Storyteller’s Childhood (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1947), p. 88, and Brian Maye, ‘The Godmother of Irish Children’s Literature’, The Irish Times, 26 August 2022. You can find Maye’s article here.
[2] See Denise Dowdall, ‘Patricia Lynch: A Storyteller’s Childhood Revisited’, Historyeye 2015. You can find it here.
[3] For further thoughts on Lynch’s account of the Easter Rising see my blog post of March 17 2016, ‘The Political Imagination: Irish Fantasy Writers and the Easter Rising’. You can find it here. For the full text of Lynch’s ‘Scenes from the Rebellion’ see here.
[4] Denise Dowdall, ‘Patricia Lynch: A Storyteller’s Childhood Revisited’, Historyeye 2015. You can find it here.
[5] Their looking back to the culture of rural Ireland is summarised in the nostalgic song sung by the old man Billy at a family ceilidh, ‘Me home’s a wee cabin upon a high hill’, Fiddler’s Quest (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1941, reprinted 1943), pp. 72-3.
[6] James Connolly, The Reconquest of Ireland, Chapter VI, ‘Woman’. You can find it here.
[7] James Connolly, Labour in Irish History, Chapter 1, ‘The Lessons of History’. You can find it here.
[8] See Michael Pierse, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp.45-6.
[9] Joelle Jackson, ‘How the Homework of 1930s Irish Schoolchildren Invites Folklore Studies Participation Today’, Folklife Magazine, August 17, 2021. Available online here.
[10] Patricia Lynch, The Turf Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1946, reprinted 1951), p. 170. All references are to this edition.
[11] Patricia Lynch, The Grey Goose of Kilnevin (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), pp. 282-3.
[12] It should be said that ‘lorries’ weren’t always motorized in the 1930s. In the fourth book in the turf-cutter’s donkey series, Long Ears, the circus lorries are drawn by horses, which makes it all the more striking that the circus lorries in The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Kicks Up His Heels are driven by steam; this identifies them as traction engines, which were expensive items of machinery even by 1939, when they were no longer being built.
[13] The cottage as a rural utopia is celebrated in a poem in Lynch’s second Turf-Cutter’s Donkey book, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Goes Visiting: The Story of an Irish Holiday (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1935, reprinted 1947). The third stanza runs as follows:
The roads of the world pass its door,
The roads of the world lead to it.
Those who go long to return,
Those who stay have no regrets.
Beneath its roof youth is a song,
Age a happy dream.
Love built it: Love keeps it.
[14] See Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-2002 (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), Chapter 5, ‘The 1930s: A Self-Sufficient Ireland?’, pp. 131-3.
[15] See Terence Brown’s discussion of the enduring ‘myth of Ireland’s assimilative capacities’, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, p. 45, where he quotes Douglas Hyde’s speech to the National Literary Society in Dublin, 25 November, 1892: ‘Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast issued forth in a generation or two fully Irishized’.
[16] See Patricia Lynch, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1934, reprinted 1940), pp. 173-6, and The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey Goes Visiting, pp. 37-41.
[17] José Lanters, ‘The “Tinker” Figure in the Children’s Fiction of Patricia Lynch’, ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 7 (2005), pp. 151-162. This can be found online here.
[18] See Lynch, The Grey Goose of Kilnevin, Chapter X, ‘They Meet the Apple Woman’, and A Story Teller’s Childhood, p. 1.
[19] Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘In Search of the American Uncle’, Jonathan Rosenbaum blog, September 5, 2024. You can find it here.
[20] On immigration from rural Ireland from the 1930s onwards see Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, Chapter 6, ‘“The Emergency”: A Watershed’, pp. 171-6. Lynch’s A Storyteller’s Childhood is full of references to young Irish emigrants whose departure leaves the nation depleted. As the old storyteller Mrs Hennessy tells the protagonist, ‘I do be sick an’ sorry to see the young people flying away. They’re all goin’ an’ none comin’ back!’ (p. 91).