Lucinda Sly

It was on a fine day in April that I travelled the long road from my home in Kerry to Carlow town. I had a fortnight’s work ahead of me there and I was eager to find out about these people who lived closer to the east coast than I did.

I arrived in Carlow early on a Sunday evening. After I had secured lodgings and taken a shower, I went for a walk around the town. I knew little about the town itself but that was quickly going to change. There was a fine long evening ahead of me and it was too early to put my backside on a bar stool.

I walked the town from top to bottom and from side to side. It was a wide, sweeping town with buildings new and old. Even though it was Sunday, the traffic on the streets was reasonably heavy. When I was going to school I learned that Carlow was a county of mixed religions. Without a doubt, the British influence was still strong throughout the county and had survived from
generation
to generation. Remember that this was a garrison town for a long time until the British were chased out of it. I remember
having
heard that there was a sugar factory there until recently. This
allowed the local farmers to grow sugar beet and transport it to the factory at little cost.

The land was also suitable for fattening dry stock. Often
buyers
would come to West Kerry to purchase yearling calves or
two-year-old
heifers for fattening on the rich land of Carlow having left our poor fields.

But it isn’t to give an account of the fertile land in Carlow that I put pen to paper here but to tell a true story – a piteous tale of a tragedy you wouldn’t wish on enemy or friend. It wasn’t in search of a subject that I made the long journey to Carlow. No! But rather, as I would in any town in Ireland, to find out what kept, and keeps, the heart of the town beating.

Having completed my walk, I saw a seat in front of me that looked like it was for public use. I was sweating profusely as I hadn’t done a walk like that for some time. Exhausted, I sat down, stretched against the back of the seat and spread my legs across the bottom rung. I looked around. I saw nothing I hadn’t seen in any big town in Ireland. Pedestrians passed me, some over and some back. Two saluted me, three didn’t. Then a few minutes with not a Christian passing by.

I wasn’t long seated when an old man sat down beside me. I thought, on first seeing him, that his clothes were unusual – black trousers like one would see on a priest or minister, the legs turned up like the old-timers used to do. The material seemed to be
calico
or heavy flannel; a dark brown collarless coat; a sleeved
waistcoat
inside that; a gold chain fastened by a clip in the top
buttonhole
and stretching across his chest into the waistcoat pocket; but
most remarkable of all was the small, black woolen hat on top of his head. Indeed, in today’s world there would be no such high fashion. The hippies put an end to that in the ’60s.

The old fellow took out a pipe, put it in his mouth and lit it without a word or salutation. That didn’t upset me as many things could be on a man’s mind that would put him in no humour for talking. I glanced at him to see if there was any stir out of any part of his body, but he sat there staring in the direction of a
supermarket
at the top of the street. I couldn’t hide my curiosity any longer.

‘Is this the town where you were born?’ I asked in order to break the silence.

He looked at me as if I had two heads.

‘I was born in London,’ he replied. ‘I was twenty-four years old when I set sail towards this godforsaken town.’

I didn’t want to question him too deeply, but, that said, this was an Englishman sitting beside me looking down his nose at a town in my country.

‘Listen, my good man,’ I said, ‘if you feel that life in this
country
is oppressing you why don’t you go back to England?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t so easy for me to do that now.’

The blood was boiling in every inch of my body by now.

‘I don’t see any fetter or chain tied to you,’ I retorted, ‘or is it a large holding of land that your people got from the King that keeps you here?’

The old man shifted restlessly in his seat and then he fixed me with his two tiny eyes.

It’s no land, money or gold that fetters me but a strong, tight grip that neither you nor many of your age would understand,’ he replied. ‘Don’t question me any further as you will receive no reply. You’re a stranger to this town?’ he enquired.

‘I suppose you could say that,’ I told him. ‘My name is Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé. I have a fortnight’s work here before I move to some other town. I came up from Kerry today and I hope to meet the local people as long as I am working here.’

This little bit of conversation banished the antipathy that was between us at first.

‘I hear that the Irish language has made great progress here lately,’ I ventured.

The old boy waited a few seconds before he said a word. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth and put it in his coat pocket.

‘To tell you the truth, I belong to another culture that doesn’t understand the Irish attitude to their language. The reason I’m here should have been over and done with long ago,’ he told me.

I took him at his word. People have many things besides language to bother them.

‘You didn’t give me your name,’ I said inquisitively.

‘I didn’t,’ was all he said.

I stared at him waiting for an answer. He raised his head.

‘James Battersby is my name,’ he informed me. ‘I was born and reared in London. I was educated at Oxford University. It was there I qualified as a lawyer and I was appointed to a high post later on. Without a doubt, many a day and night has passed since …’

He moved towards me in his eagerness to talk and he was
getting more interesting with every sentence.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘you came across many interesting cases
during
your lifetime particularly in such a big city as London …’

‘But didn’t I tell you that it was in this country I did most of my work,’ he said. ‘And I can tell you that I was more than busy here.’

While he was telling me this, his eyes didn’t move from the supermarket and restaurant at the top of the street.

‘Is there something special about that building up there?’ I asked. ‘Or are you expecting somebody to come to you from it?’

Old James cleared his throat.

‘It wasn’t always a supermarket and restaurant,’ he informed me. ‘It was there the county gaol was and it was there that Lucinda Sly and John Dempsey were hanged. They stood before judge and jury in Deighton Hall, close by. There was a large space in front of the hall and on the day of the hanging the place was thronged with a mob shouting and hurling insults at the two who were to be hanged. It happened on the 30th of March, 1835.’

When I heard that, nothing would satisfy me but to hear every last bit of the story of Lucinda Sly and John Dempsey.

‘I see that you’re interested in the story,’ old James smiled.

I jumped to my feet with excitement.

‘You could say that I am,’ I exploded. ‘This place was under British control. There’s no doubt that I’d love to hear the whole story from beginning to end.’

‘Yes,’ he said with a swagger, ‘if you listen to an old man I have plenty of time to relate the tale to you and I can assure you that I am the only person in Carlow that has the right story.’

‘I’ll come here every evening for the whole fortnight if
necessary
to hear the whole story from you,’ I replied.

‘You must be a writer,’ he ventured.

‘Of sorts,’ I said.

‘I’ll give you the full story,’ he promised me, ‘on one condition: that you will write it down word for word as I tell it to you and that you put an appendix of your own to it.’

‘I promise you sincerely that that’s how it will be done,’ I told him.

James set his woollen hat on the back of his head and he told me the story of Lucinda Sly, the last woman to be hanged in Carlow, and John Dempsey who was hanged beside her.

The tragic tale of Lucinda Sly began on a small farm near the town of Tullow in County Carlow. Her family were of English
extraction
and she had a strong Protestant background. Lucinda Hughes was her maiden name and she was twenty-seven years old when a match was made for her with a small farmer of similar background. His name was Thomas Singleton. When they were two years
married
, God gave them a son but shortly afterwards the husband became ill. He spent three months in bed at home and eventually died of consumption.

Lucinda was left on her own with a one-year-old child on a small farm with the grass of two cows making it difficult for her to eke out a living. The landlord made no exception for her even though she was a widow. Every three months she would have to pay him his rent just like all the other tenants. She had to harrow and sow in spring and harvest in the autumn like every farmer around her and her neighbours were of little help to her as most of them were up to their necks in hock to the landlord like herself.

Even though Lucinda was not a big woman, she was a powerful
worker. She would be up at the crack of dawn from the first day of spring to the last day of autumn. She knew exactly when to dig the land in order to sow the oats. This she did with a hoe even though the spade and plough were becoming more common about that time. But a small farmer couldn’t afford such comfort in those years.

When she made ridges for the planting of the potatoes, the land would be drying out and the weather suitable. ‘It’s better for the potato seed to be in the house than swimming in the earth’ as the proverb has it. When certain farmers would churn milk only once a week in the milking season, Lucinda would churn twice. And, signs on, her butter was famous in Carlow town and its
environs
. If she were working in the garden or milking the cows in the yard she had no choice but to leave her baby in the house. She had a reasonably easy life as far as the child was concerned, until young Thomas began to crawl and shortly afterwards to strew
knick-knacks
around the floor. She used the wicker basket in which she brought the turf home as a cradle inside and outside the house. But when the young fellow began to walk she had to think of a different plan.

One day Lucinda was churning. When she had poured the cream into the churn and spilled some on account of Thomas’s high jinks, she charged out the door with the child under her oxter. She didn’t stop until she reached the horse’s stable; she took the halter from a crook on the wall and brought it into the kitchen. She strapped the child in the halter, ripped the reins from one side of it and tied it to the leg of the kitchen table.

‘Off you go now and pull the table all over the house,’ she said as she went to the bottom of the kitchen again to resume her
churning
. She had a plan to remedy even the most difficult situation.

The neighbours wondered how Lucinda could make a living out of the small farm that fell to her after her husband’s death, especially as she had to pay high rent to a landlord who wouldn’t hesitate to evict a tenant if she were even a ha’penny short. But this wonderful, gentle, honest woman did so without complaint and without forcing herself upon her neighbours. No matter what hardship she was forced to endure, her son never slept on an empty stomach.

People say a son should take good care of his mother when he grows to be a man. That’s what any Christian would do if he had any conscience at all, after all she had done for him as he was
growing
. But wait, gentle reader, and your ears will hear a tale they won’t believe.

Somehow, this poor woman managed to give him the
rudiments
of education until he was a strapping young man of eighteen years. This she did but she herself often had to go without.

Even though young Thomas was hard and strong, he gave little by way of help to his mother. On the days she sold her butter, eggs and baked bread on the side of the street in Carlow, off he would go roving the town without any thought about helping her. But he would return when she had sold all her wares accusing her of
leaving
him hungry throughout the day.

Lucinda wasn’t a hard-hearted woman, but having spent many years slaving, sowing and harrowing the land in order to avoid
begging, it was time, she thought, for a change.

In olden times, Thursday was always the day for selling butter in Carlow town and one market morning Lucinda told Thomas to fetch the horse from the field and put him under the cart.

‘You know what day it is today? … Butter market day,’ she reminded him.

But Thomas remained at the table guzzling his mother’s brown bread and potatoes. Because it was getting late in the morning she told him once again to get up off his lazy backside and harness the horse for the road. But he only squeezed further into the table and stuffed another potato into his mouth.

Lucinda was famous for her butter and her light, tasty brown bread, and now the poor woman was putting the butter into a wicker basket and ten loaves of bread with it. She was easily able to sell them on the side of the street and in this way she had the
shopkeepers
’ profit for herself. The shopkeepers of the town were none too pleased with this as the best of the butter and home-baked bread were going directly to the customer without a penny going to them.

Young Thomas was still sitting at the table when Lucinda was ready for the road. She pushed the basket to the door and pressed it against the frame so that one could go in and out past it. Then she rushed to the bottom of the kitchen, her face red with rage. She took hold of the sweeping brush. She advanced on her son who was just about to drink a mouthful of milk from the bowl he held in his hands. She hit him on the side of the head with the brush. The bowl fell from his hands and he crashed from the chair
to the floor. She hit him again on the floor. But, as she did, he caught the head of the brush and pulled it out of her hands. He jumped up. He thrashed poor Lucinda left and right. Then he broke the brush across his knee.

‘I’m going to get my clothes and neither you nor any other Christian will see me inside this door again,’ he erupted and stormed into his room with a coarse bag he found at the bottom of the kitchen.

Lucinda picked herself up from the ground, her head spinning, not knowing if it was day or night. When she came to herself, she went out, took hold of the horse and guided him in the direction of the big town. If she didn’t she wouldn’t be able to pay her rent later that month.

Young Thomas Singleton left home that day without much thanks to his mother who had worked tirelessly for years in order to give him a good upbringing. But eaten bread is soon forgotten. Without a doubt, the way he left home broke Lucinda’s heart
particularly
as he had so solemn and quiet a father.

She heard that Thomas was working for a butcher in the town but, because of the abuse he inflicted on her, she wasn’t inclined to seek him out or to invite him back home. He was eighteen years old going on nineteen and she considered it was time for him to make his own way in the world.

Life got worse in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The landlords were exacting extra rent from their tenants and paying no heed to the Land League who were advancing the case of the small farmers. Life was so hard for Lucinda that she had
to sell an in-calf heifer she had intended to keep instead of an old cow (who later fell into a hole on the mountainside and was killed during the winter of 1825).

While she was selling her wares on the side of the street, Lucinda heard from one of her neighbours that a young constable named Thomas Singleton was newly stationed in Bilboa barracks and she questioned her as to whether he was her son. But Lucinda had had no contact with him since the day he walked out the front door. She knew only that he had quit his job in the butcher’s shop and that he had left Carlow town a few years previously. The
following
week while she was selling her butter on the side of the street, she inquired from a constable, who she knew to see, where this new policeman, Thomas Singleton who had come to Bilboa barracks, was from.

‘He’s a man from these parts,’ was the constable’s reply without adding or subtracting from the matter.

Lucinda knew from this that the new constable was her son as they were the only Singleton family within forty miles of the town.