Misery, survival and hope

Only briefly did she see her family again, even though she never travelled beyond a 10-mile radius of where she was born.

Soon, the farmer would come regularly to the barn where she slept and rape her. She became pregnant and had a baby at the age of 14. Because he was a respected member of the ruling Protestant class, the clergy decided to avoid a scandal involving "one of our own" and arranged for her to marry Campbell, a widower much older than she was.

He was almost as brutal to her as the farmer who fathered her child. For the rest of her short, squalid life, she had a baby every year and died in 1919, aged 20, from the influenza that swept Europe, leaving six children.

John Throne's powerful novel, for it is a novel, is about his maternal grandmother and based on what he had been told by his mother Mary, then in her 90s. Mary was Margaret's second child.

Throught the novel, there are whispers of goings on in Dublin and names such as Larkin and Connolly, hated home rulers and socialists, are mentioned.

We hear of men conscripted to fight in Flanders and even of revolutionary rumblings in Russia. Closer to home, the farm workers are organising and striking.

The main characters are Protestants and, although many of them live in abject poverty and misery, they are the ruling class. Allen, Campbell and Margaret's parents may have been very low in that pecking order, but most of the Catholics were even lower.

Throne gives an insight to how British colonialism operated. Margaret's husband Campbell is the lowest rung of that ladder. He owns his cottage, a few fields and arranges the letting of the peat bog on behalf of the local gentry.

Through him, we learn how the colonial masters kept people in their place by maintaining what they called the natural order of things. Campbell kowtows to his superiors and bullies those whom he views as his inferiors - including his wife. There is no way out upwards for him or for anyone else. The alternative is the boat to America.

Women do not register on this scale. Yet this is the story of a woman for whom the survival of her children is paramount. Her love for her children is her happiness, a beautiful ray of sunlight shining through the despair.

This is a book that I shall never forget.

GWYN GRIFFITHS