When I Am Going: Growing Up In Ireland and Coming to America, 1901-1927

By Daniel Ford

Annie Crowley was one of eleven children born in the farmhouse at Kilnahone, outside the village of Ballygarvan in the County Cork. Their father died a few weeks after the youngest was born, and the eldest emigrated to Australia not long after. Annie was six at the time, and a pupil at Ballygarvan National School, where the English language and English history were drilled into Irish children.
Then came the First World War, and the oldest girl went off to become a nurse in England. Annie was needed at home then, to take care of the house and the younger children. She loved the farm work, but soon became a rebel against the English crown, in the fight for independence that began at Easter Week in 1916.

The struggle ended in a bitter civil war, as diehard Republicans fought the leaders willing to accept an Irish Free State with token allegiance to London. Thousands of veterans of the Irish Republican Army emigrated to America, including her sweetheart Pat Forde from Ballinhassig. Thus Annie came to leave home, never again to see her mother or siblings, or the farm at Kilnahone.

An enchanting story of girlhood, growth, love, war, and loss. Includes a chapter from Michael's War, Daniel Ford's novel of the IRA. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kilnahone Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502279156

Daniel Ford

Daniel Ford has spent a lifetime reading and writing about the wars of the past hundred years, from the Irish rebellion of 1916 to the counter-guerrilla operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is best known for his history of the American Volunteer Group--the 'Flying Tigers' of the Second World War--and his Vietnam novel that was filmed as Go Tell the Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster. Most recently, he has turned to the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and Soviet Russia. Most of his books and many shorter pieces are available in digital editions He lives and works in New Hampshire.

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Contents

The Farm at Kilnahone

Growing Up in Ireland

Illustrations

Troubled Times

Leaving for America

A Postscript

The Crowleys

Copyright - Editor - Michael’s War

The Farm at Kilnahone

A CENTURY AGO, when Annie Crowley was eleven years old, Ireland was occupied by the British Army and governed from London. Their mother was bilingual, but Annie and her siblings were English speakers from the cradle. It was a curious turn of events that Britain’s successful Englishing of the Irish people coincided with a revival of Gaelic literature, especially in Dublin, along with renewed hopes for Irish independence.

The Crowleys lived at Kilnahone, a townland of two hundred and twenty-nine acres that included the farms belonging to them and to the Maddens, the Whites, and the Connells. These were strong farmers — a proud class in Ireland, then and now. The townland also included a grist mill belonging to the Fenwicks, who were poor gentry, as Annie calls them.

The name Kilnahone is derived from the 13th century Cillin na hUamhan, the Church by the River, whose broken walls still stand today. They can be seen on the north bank of the Owenabue — the Yellow River — six miles south of Cork City, a mile from Ballygarvan, and four miles from the now-burgeoning town of Carrigaline.

What follows is Annie Crowley’s story, as she wrote it in Arizona not long before she died. The italicized paragraphs and any words in brackets were added by me, her younger son. — Daniel Ford, October 2014

I REMEMBER my brother Billy’s birth. He was the youngest of all eleven children born to my parents in the farmhouse at Kilnahone. There were nearly twenty-four years between the oldest and youngest of us.

When Dad and Mother got married, Dad bought the farm and had the house built, and Mother came there as a bride. Before that she lived in Kinsale, on the coast about ten miles away. Her folks had two farms and she had six brothers. She went to the Convent School in Kinsale. She was twenty-one when she married Dad. He lived at Glinny, between Ballygarvan and Kinsale, before they married.

I was five years old when Billy was born. That was at Christmas, and five months later my father died. I do not remember much about Dad, he was just a shadowy figure, but I remember his funeral and my mother crying with the baby in her arms. Dad was fifty-one when he died.

Jack, Pat, and Dan were the oldest of our family and were grown up when Dad died and so were able to manage the farm. Jack was carefree and restless. He was well liked and had many friends. He loved to ride horses and had many a fall. He had a nice personality except when he drank, and he frequently did, and then he had a violent temper. He was quite spoilt, I think. In Ireland, the first born usually are.

Not long after Dad died, Jack decided to go to America. He went to Arlington, Massachusetts, where mother’s brother Andrew Walsh was. He did not like it there; he found the hot weather not to his liking and he kept getting nose bleeds all the time. In those days most of the Irish boys worked for truck farmers around the Boston area, and working in the hot sun was hard to Irish people who were accustomed to the cool summers. So after three months in America Jack returned to Ireland. I do not remember him going, but I do remember him coming home. He had a habit of pacing the kitchen floor when he was upset, and that is mostly what I remember about him.

He stayed home another year and then decided to go to Australia although he did not know anyone there. The night before he sailed, we had a big party. All the neighbors came and we had all kinds of fruit cake and cookies, also a half tierce of stout [twenty-one U.S. gallons] which no party would be complete without in those days. The young people danced in the kitchen. It had a smooth cement floor and was nice for dancing. The older people sat in the parlor. My sister Pidge and I stuffed ourselves with all kinds of cookies and jam as all the food was laid out on a large table.

Jack was the center of attraction and he loved every minute of it. I can still see him as he sat on the kitchen table with his arm around Molly Sheehan’s waist singing that lovely old Irish ballad:

What will you do, love,

When I am going,

With white sails flowing,

The seas beyond?

Then he shocked all the women by saying he would marry a black girl and bring her back to Ireland.

We always thought Jack would send for Molly Sheehan after he went away, but he never did, though he had sent her a gold watch from America. I think he was too selfish to share his life with anyone else. He died a bachelor, and Molly married a neighbor boy James O’Sullivan and was happy with him.

We never saw Jack after he sailed away to Australia. He tried to come back to Ireland during World War One, but as he was of military age he was not permitted to come, although he had his ticket all paid for. Again he wanted to come during the Black and Tan Troubles in Ireland, but again something came up to prevent him coming, and so he never came back. He wrote during the first years of his leaving, but as the years went by he wrote seldom. He sent for several cousins and helped them to get settled there in Australia, but they never seemed to stay near him, and I think he was a loner. The cousins all married girls from Ireland, old sweethearts they sent for.

Jack used to go to North Queensland every year to cut sugar cane. It was very hard work but he earned a lot of money. When the season was over he came back to the city where I am sure he had a good time spending it. He died when he was sixty-seven from a stroke.

Pat was very different from Jack, very easy going and a very good farmer. He loved to fish on the Owenabue. He and Jack White and Tom Hosford were always together. Usually two of them fished while the other watched for the police, because they were poaching. They used a gaff and stroke-haul [three hooks joined back to back and weighted with lead] and sometimes a net, which made it illegal. Once Pat got caught and he had to appear in court, so he hired a lawyer and got off with a fine of two pounds [about $100 in 2014].

Sometimes Pat would stay up all night fishing, especially during the rainy spring season when the salmon were plentiful. We ate so much salmon we grew tired of it. Sometimes we salted it down and kept it in the dairy, and then we would hang it in the fireplace chimney and smoke it.

Frequently he gave the salmon away. It was the sport of it and the danger that Pat loved. I often wondered how he didn’t get pneumonia because he was always soaking wet from fishing in the rain. As long as the Royal Irish Constabulary were the police, they didn’t watch the river very closely, but when the Irish had their own government and had the Civil Guard [after 1923], it was different. Once when Pidge and I were chatting to one of the Guards he laughingly said, I’d hate to be a salmon in the river if Pat Crowley was around!

Pat also liked to bet on the horses. He would go to Cork and lay his bet at the bookie’s office at the barber shop. He frequently won money on the Derby, the Grand National, and the other big races. He read the racing sheet faithfully.

Pat and I were very good friends although there were fifteen years between us. Pat lived all his life at Kilnahone and died there at age sixty-three.

Dan was a quiet boy and asked little of life, but he loved sports and went to all the hurling matches and of course bowling along the roads. He had a passion for greyhounds. He was always rearing greyhound puppies for Cork City people. We didn’t like the greyhounds — they were delicate creatures and sometimes got distemper and died from it. Also they raided the hens’ nests and ate their eggs.

Every Sunday after Mass, Dan would go hunting with the Shea boys and spend all day out with the dogs. Dan had one beautiful dog; he reared him from