In Between Worlds: The Journey of the Famine Girls

By Nicola Pierce and Lauren O'Neill

In 1849, the Thomas Arbuthnot set sail for Australia.

Onboard were 194 Irish girls.
I heard the emotion in Sarah's voice as she asked, 'Will we ever come back?'
'Come back where?'
'Home,' said Sarah. 'Do you think we will ever see Ireland again?'
Maggie and Sarah are on their way to Australia. Their homes and their lives have been devastated by famine, with death coming to so many. Even when they sought refuge in the workhouse they found horror and heartbreak there.
When the girls are given the chance of a new life on the other side of the world, they know they have to say yes – no matter the price.
On board ship, they are caught in between worlds. How will they find the courage and strength to build new lives in a strange land?

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788494625

Nicola Pierce

Nicola Pierce published her first book for children, Spirit of the Titanic, to rave reviews and five printings within its first twelve months. City of Fate, her second book, transported the reader deep into the Russian city of Stalingrad during World War II. The novel was shortlisted for the Warwickshire School Library Service Award, 2014. Nicola went on to bring seventeenth-century Ireland vividly to life in Behind the Walls (2015), a rich emotional novel set in the besieged city of Derry in 1689, followed by Kings of the Boyne (2016), a moving and gritty account capturing the Battle of the Boyne (1690), which was shortlisted for the Literacy Association of Ireland (LAI) awards. In 2018 Nicola delved in to the true stories of the passengers, crew and the legacy of the fated ship Titanic, in her illustrated book of the same name. To read more about Nicola, go to her Facebook page, www.facebook.com/NicolaPierce-Author and on Twitter @NicolaPierce3.

Book preview

REVIEWS FOR NICOLA PIERCE

Chasing Ghosts

‘A fascinating story about the Arctic. Perfect for readers of any age with adventure in their hearts.’

Irish Independent

Kings of the Boyne

‘Compelling and reveals … how all great historical events are shaped by the actions of those caught up in them, from king to foot soldier. Pierce draws together her characters’ stories, the real-life and the fictional … in ways that will catch the imagination.’

Books for Keeps

Behind the Walls

‘History as it really happened, with its gritty and realistic depiction of the terror-struck city of Derry in 1689 … A vivid evocation of life in a city under siege. Memorable characters … heart-breaking in places.’

parentsintouch.co.uk

Spirit of the Titanic

‘Gripping, exciting and unimaginably shattering.’

Guardian Children’s Books

City of Fate

‘Will hook you from the start … Historical fiction at its best.’

The Guardian

In memory of the brave 4,114 orphaned Irish girls who moved to Australia between 1848 and 1850, but also, in memory of my publisher Michael O’Brien (1941–2022) who rang me in 2010 to suggest that I write a novel about the Titanic …

Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.

Attributed to Chuang Tzu

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Maggie’s Prologue

1:Mama’s Map

2:Poor Stella

3:Sarah Knows Something

4:The Wake

5:In the Year 1845

6:One Year Later

7:A Road to Nowhere

8:Dada Comes to the Rescue

9:The Workhouse

10:‘We Are the Lucky Ones!’

11:Mrs Linde Has a Proposition

12:Leaving Ireland

13:Doctor Charles Strutt

14:Plymouth, England

15:Making New Friends

16:On Board the Thomas Arbuthnot

17:Maggie Says No

18:Henrietta’s Secret

19:A Storm on Deck

20:Apologies Galore!

21:Christmas Eve, 1849

22:Christmas Day, 1849

23:Miss Collins Makes Sense

24:Sarah Tries to Make Amends

25:8th February, 1850: Australia, at Last!

26:Breaking the Circle

Maggie’s Epilogue

Author’s Note

Further Reading

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Several people helped me with my research. I would like to give a special mention to Terri Kearney at Skibbereen’s Heritage Centre, Darina Molloy at Castlebar Library, Thecla Carlton at Drumshambo Library, composer Michael Holohan, writer Elizabeth Rose Murray and her musician husband Mick O’Callaghan, along with Margaret Bonass Madden, who supplied me with wonderful information about Irish wakes and funerals.

The first reader was my sister, writer and editor Rachel Pierce, who made several pertinent suggestions. I also want to thank my niece Anna Simms and Inga McGann, who thrilled me with their positive responses. In Australia, the manuscript was read by journalist Kate Nancarrow and historian Perry McLaughlin, who humbled me with their enthusiasm for this book, even as they were obliged to make corrections to earlier drafts.

This book exists thanks to my long-time friend and editor Susan Houlden.

I love the book cover and am in awe at artist Lauren O’Neill’s capturing the layers of my story in a single image. My thanks to her and designer Emma Byrne for transforming my manuscript into a piece of book art.

Michael O’Brien died unexpectedly after I delivered the book. I miss him terribly and hope he would have been pleased with the finished novel.

Come o’er the Sea

By Thomas Moore (1779–1852)

Come o’er the sea,

Maiden, with me,

Mine thro’ sunshine, storm, and snows;

Seasons may roll,

But the true soul

Burns the same, where’er it goes.

Let fate frown on, so we love and part not;

’Tis life where thou art, ’tis death were thou are not.

Then come o’er the sea,

Maiden, with me,

Come wherever the wild wind blows;

Seasons may roll,

But the true soul

Burns the same, where’er it goes.

Was not the sea

Made for the Free,

Land for courts and chains alone?

Here we are slaves,

But, on the waves,

Love and Liberty’s all our own.

No eye to watch, and no tongue to wound us

All earth forgot, and all heaven around us —

Then come o’er the sea,

Maiden, with me,

Mine thro’ sunshine, storms, and snows;

Seasons may roll,

But the true soul

Burns the same, where’er it goes.

Maggie’s Prologue

An Old Folks’ Home in Australia in the Year 1935

I think I will die today.

Do you hear me, God? Tell your mother to put the kettle on. I will be joining you just as soon as I can. Just as soon as I am done here.

Until then, I must smile and pretend to like my birthday cake when I would rather a whiskey.

A hundred years is more than enough years for one person, I reckon, particularly when it means putting up with scenes like this: that foolish woman, Mrs Olsen, putting her face too close to mine to bellow into my good ear, ‘Now, Margery, you must blow out your candles for the photographer.’

She has been eating garlic. I wrinkle my nose in disgust.

The photographer looks as bored as I feel. Well, good enough for him. I can smell his awful aftershave from here. I do not want my photograph taken. Then again, I did not want a birthday party but here we all are.

On my bedside locker sits my birthday card from King George V, if you please. No, he is not my king, but he does not know that. Anyway, it is not personal because he sends a card to everyone on their hundredth birthday. Or his secretary does, at any rate.

Do you want to know what it says? It is not very comforting or cheerful, but it is honest. I will give him that much.

His Majesty’s hope that the blessings of good health and prosperity may attend you during the remainder of your days.

‘Remainder of your days?’ said Rosie, giggling, ‘He doesn’t want you organising anything for your 101st!’

Rosie is my favourite nurse. She holds the cake in front of me so I can blow out the four candles. Well, they could hardly expect me to blow out a hundred. Rosie decided on four, with each one representing one quarter of my hundred years. She is great like that – is Rosie – for coming up with practical solutions. Another example of her cleverness is her bribing me to play along with this silliness. Taking my hand in hers, she solemnly promised that she would get me as much whiskey as I wanted. All I had to do was look like I was enjoying myself, for twenty or twenty-five minutes.

Deal, I thought as I squeezed her hand for my reply. I have not spoken since my last stroke when my mouth collapsed to one side and my voice was lost in the chaos.

Oh, Lord help me!

Mrs Olsen is clapping her hands for silence so that she can be heard telling everyone to sing ‘Happy Birthday’.

What is so ‘happy’ about my still being here?

Everyone that was important to me has been dead for years. I do not have a friend left in the world, except for Rosie, and she will be leaving soon to have her baby. Her belly grows a little bit more every day. The blue uniform stretches unevenly across it and the buttons look strained. I find myself staring at the bump with a mixture of pity and envy. That little being is already much loved by Rosie and her husband, Rick.

I was at their wedding. Rosie insisted. It was the last time that I left the old folks’ home. Well, now, I am ready to leave it again and, this time, for good.

See here, God, you had best get me organised because I am ready to go.

I am not afraid of dying. It is just another journey after all, and I get to leave this wreck of a body though it has served me long and well.

You see, I believe in Heaven and the Afterlife. Sure, what else was all this living for? And make no mistake. I have earned my place in Heaven.

The candles are flickering despite that windbag Mrs Olsen breathing over them. Rosie arches her eyebrow at me, warning me to be good. Well, I will be but just for Rosie, mind, nobody else.

That is the reward for being a hundred years old: nothing matters.

The candles are slim and bright pink. Awful colour! They clash with the chocolate icing and are too puny to represent a century.

How funny to think that I was born on the other side of the world. These days I almost forget it myself, and I bet not many in this room would believe it now. Since I cannot talk, I do not know what remains of my Cork accent.

Maybe I would have liked to have seen Ireland one more time. Only it would have been like going backwards, while I have always maintained that one must only go full steam ahead.

Things I remember about Ireland: being hungry, being cold and being miserable.

No, that is not fair. There is other stuff too, for instance that certain shade of green worn by the fields around Skibbereen. Never have I seen that particular green since. Oh, and the smell of a turf fire and the sweetness of Dada’s pipe.

And the awful, awful smell of death and dying and rotting potatoes.

Yes, that smell has proved impossible to forget, which is unfair considering that I have all but forgotten what my parents looked like. I remember dark hair, but I cannot say more than that.

Before my hair turned white, it was a mousy brown, the kind of brown that is almost apologetic. Maybe if I had stayed in Ireland, my hair would have been as dark as my parents’. It was the Australian sun that made short work of me, burning my skin raw and diluting the colour of my hair. Australia changed me in every way, I reckon. No, there cannot be much of Ireland left in me.

But isn’t a birthday an opportunity to think about everything that has led me to this moment, huddled here beneath my old patchwork blanket whilst pretending to nod along, keeping time with the chorus?

‘For she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow …’

A jolly good fellow?

Was I?

Well, let us see.

1

Mama’s Map

Iwas so angry at my parents for dying on me. I am still angry now. If I managed not to starve to death, I don’t see why they did. Of course, Mama would say that it was God’s will. She brings Him into everything or, at least, she did.

My mother. She is the reason that I am here at all.

Her pride and joy were an old pair of faded brown shoes that she kept for special days. Only we did not have many special days, so those shoes mostly sat under her bed, leaving her barefoot like the rest of us. She inherited them from some forgotten aunt who had worked in a big house a long time ago.

Every so often Mama took the shoes out for a wipe of the cloth that was used to wipe everything from the table to my brother’s snotty nose. And every time she did, I would ask to try them on, but she would just laugh and say in a pretend haughty tone, ‘If I cannot wear them today, you certainly shall not!’

Mama was not afraid to dream. As she fished out those shoes, she would have me spread out the tattered map of the world that Dada had rescued from a puddle outside Mrs Hegarty’s hotel in Skibbereen. Someone had mushed it up into a paper ball and left it behind as if the world had let them down in some dreadful way. We dried it out in front of the fire and then tried to make sense of it, turning it this way and that. It took a while before we began to understand what the different shapes meant.

When Mama suggested that I show it to Father O’Driscoll, I disagreed. ‘Why should he know more than us? He has never travelled anywhere either.’

Mama checked my cheekiness. ‘Now, little girl, do not be getting above yourself. Father O’Driscoll is a very learned man. Not everyone can be a priest. It is a vocation that involves lots of hard work.’

‘What is a … a vokaysen?’ asked Seán, my little brother.

‘You are not saying it right,’ I snapped, although I hardly knew if he had or not.

Mama tutted at my behaviour. ‘A vocation is a very, very strong feeling that a person must do something no matter what. So, Father O’Driscoll would have had to make up his mind a long time ago that he would be a priest.’

‘No matter what?’ said Seán.

‘Yes, my love, no matter what. It is a tough life and not everyone would be up to the task of carrying out God’s work.’

I resisted questioning this. Mama worked hard all day long, taking care of us and Dada and everything in the cottage and making meals and cleaning and mending our clothes and spending months on end planting hundreds of potatoes and then digging up the harvest when it was time to.

Meanwhile, Father O’Driscoll had a housekeeper and said Mass and heard confessions and visited his parishioners for bread and jam and whiskey. That did not seem like hard work to me. Why, I could do all of that just as well, apart from drinking whiskey. Mama had made me take some when I had a bad toothache. I hated it. She got me to dip my finger into the bottle and rub it along my swollen gum.

‘It is making me feel sick,’ I complained.

‘But hasn’t it made you forget about your toothache?’ was the triumphant reply.

In any case, I was proved right about not needing Father O’Driscoll’s help with the map. Once we found our own country, it allowed us to unlock the key to everywhere else.

I watched Mama trace the outline of Ireland with her finger as she said, ‘Margaret, look how small Ireland is. Can it really be so?’

‘No, Mama,’ I answered. ‘There must be a mistake. Someone has got their measurements wrong.’

There was no way that I could believe Ireland to be so small. Why all one had to do was walk out into the middle of our field and spin around. Ireland continued on forever, no matter if you faced north, south, east or west. Our country was as big as the sky. I was sure of it.

‘So, Margaret, where should we go this time?’

This was part of our game. Mama would choose a country for us to visit that obliged her to polish her shoes. We pretended that the shoes were magic and could bring us places.

So far, we had been to the Russian and Chinese empires, just because they were bigger than everywhere else.

I looked at the world stretched out on the floor in front of me, while Seán sulked in the background because I told him that he could not join in. This game was just for Mama and me. Scrunching up his grimy features, he pouted, ‘Well, I didn’t want to go anyway!’

‘Yes, you do!’ I laughed. ‘But you can’t. So there!’

It was easy to make him cry or lose his temper.

To distract us from quarrelling, Mama pointed out a country that sat alone. The Russian and Chinese empires were practically neighbours as was the Arctic – the one place that Mama and I agreed never to go to as we knew it was covered in snow and ice. Sure, why would we want to visit somewhere that was colder than Ireland?

I pronounced the name of Mama’s chosen country slowly, though we had no way of knowing if I was saying it correctly. ‘A … us … tra … li … a.’

‘I think that is right,’ said Mama. ‘In any case, this is where I would like us to go. Now, tell me, what do you think we shall see there?’

I studied the country’s shape and position, but before I could conjure up an answer, Mama answered her own question. ‘See how it is an island like Ireland, two oceans away. Only Australia is so much bigger.’

‘How much bigger, Mama?’

‘Well, let me see.’ She counted up and down on her fingers, reciting numbers in barely heard whispers, before announcing, ‘Hmm, maybe a thousand times bigger than here. Best keep that in mind while I tell you that no matter where one goes in Australia one can always hear the ocean. Now, most only hear the usual sound of waves crashing against each other and think nothing of it. However, there are others who can understand what the ocean is telling them.’

Mama’s answer thrilled us both, with Seán completely forgetting himself to ask in his most plaintive voice, ‘Please can I come too?’

Mama looked at me with raised eyebrows as if I, and not she, were the captain of our trip. I bowed my head solemnly, making a show of giving this matter a lot of thought, before saying, ‘Yes, Seán, you can come. But just this once!’

My brother clapped his hands in celebration.

Did he think that we were actually going there?

Mama’s shoes must have been the cleanest shoes in all of Ireland seeing as how she rarely wore them. She said, ‘I like to feel the earth’s breath tickling my bare feet.’

She claimed that she could walk on nails and not feel a thing. The soles of her feet were the colour of muck and she liked to boast that this meant that she was paying homage to the ground that gave us life. ‘You see how I can bring our home wherever I go, thanks to the soil that clings to me.’

I nodded. ‘So, no matter where you go, you will always be home?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Exactly that!’

‘Well, then, Mama,’ I said. ‘Let us go. Let us all go – to Australia!’

2

Poor Stella

Dada was not one to waste time on dreams. Instead, he preferred to spend his time worrying about all manner of things.

I found it strange how much he fretted about his standing amongst our neighbours. Mama showed no concern for what anyone else thought, although she did care that she did right by God, Our Lady, Jesus and the angels and saints. But, apart from all of them, she concentrated on being herself through and through.

Of course, she had her heart set on entering Heaven when she died and was doing her best to make sure that