I am my own ghostwriter

Where’s the line between fiction (or poetry) and downright lies? Is it okay to claim a life not your own for subject-matter, and to put it at the centre of your book? And how do you balance the need to tell (some kind of) truth with the writer’s need to be freshly interesting, to make an old story new?

I wasn’t thinking of any of these questions one lunchtime in late 2018 when I idly entered the name Ellen O’Hara into the various archival databases of the New York Public Library, where I was a Fellow of the Cullman Center. Ellen, my mother’s grandmother, was a set of stories I’d heard decades before: as much as anything, I suppose I wanted to see if any of them might hold up to evidence and prove true.

My mother was born in New York in 1924. Her 12 years there before returning to Ireland in July 1936, shortly after (so goes the story) her father won a Mayo pub in a New York poker game, were the stuff of late-night stories in my own first 12 years. I grew up on a farm in Co Westmeath; these stories of Rudolph Valentino’s funeral and summers on Rockaway Beach and being taken to Radio City to watch the new film, King Kong, were my own personal Rural Electrification Scheme. These stories were when the whole wide world came to sit at a grey formica kitchen table in the heart of Ireland, to glamorise our lives.

My mother had lived with her grandmother in midtown Manhattan and had thought the world of her. Despite having no photo of her, no letters from her, nothing she could hold in her hand and say, “Yes, this was hers”, she conjured up a vivid sense of her that stayed with me and eventually became the bedrock of this book.

I am that deeply suspect Irish creature, a mother of an only child. It was by choice

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Ellen, born in south Co Sligo in 1862, left at a time when Irish emigration was characterised by the number of young, single women who travelled, alone and poorly, to find work in mills, factories, and (mostly) as domestic servants, doing the kind of work American girls deigned to do.

Women like Ellen succeeded (if they did) in ways that seldom earned recording in historical narratives: what is it, after all, in the great, public scheme of things to have raised two children to lives better than your own? And little mark did I find in the end, particular to Ellen: a few official documents, ships’ passenger lists, census records, a death certificate, a bloodline – and a grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

But I did find a bigger story, the story of so many Ellens and the kind of narrative paths their lives tended to have. Off the boat and into domestic service, working 15 hours a day. Out of domestic service and into marriages with holes knocked in them by long absences with men off working wherever they could find work, often far from home. Out of wounded marriages and into running small-scale boarding houses where younger Irish immigrants could find a familiar kind of home. And out of one scantly educated generation to the next one, with book learning and certificates, and less punishing work.

Give or take, that was Ellen’s story too. My job, if I was to tell it well, was to take the bare bones and dramatise it, but very carefully.

And so I did the obvious thing: I invented Ellen’s ghost and had her appear occasionally on a chair in the corner of my office and tell me things about her life. That these things tended to coincide with historical research and published first-hand accounts on subjects such as emigration trends in the last two decades of the 19th century; wages and working conditions of domestic servants; the culture of the New York boarding house; and the general trajectory of emigrant women’s lives, means only that Ellen’s voice is grounded in objective circumstance. But her voice – spiky, sceptical and resistant – is thrown by me: I confess I made her up. I had her speak in loose, “folk” sonnets that acknowledge the kind of complex language traditions a woman such as Ellen, schooled in two languages and steeped in rural idiom, might have recognised.

To be fair, I also made up a version of myself – a researcher who chronicles the difficulties of trying to discover and fashion a narrative from so little evidence. But her, I confine to prose.

Quotes from historians pepper the book, selected to illustrate the general experience out of which Ellen’s particular voice emerges.

The hope is that the constituent parts of Hereafter amount to a whole that, like lacework or crochet using different coloured wool, will be best viewed held up against light, so all its holes and gaps (which rhyme with the pits and erasures in the record where evidence of Ellen’s life should be), may be perceived as integral to the design.

Funny thing, really: you invent a ghost and you watch yourself inventing her, and then you find you just can’t not believe in her, even though you made her up.

What I didn’t invent, what history gives me, is a set of truths about the many Ellens and their lives and stories. Published research by established historians suggested ways to present Ellen as an example; to work into the fictional proposal of her, a more general and grounded truth.

Some of this is to do with money: a letter sent back by emigrant children with no money order in it was termed “an empty letter”. No news could fill it. One historian, Arnold Schrier, estimated in 1958 that the “aggregate sum of remittances returned to Ireland between 1848 and 1900 was a total of $260 million”. (That figure is the 19th-century sum – it’s not been adjusted to account for contemporary inflation, etc.)

Back at home, these women might have found work as servants, shopgirls or farm labourers, though openings were hard to come by and the wages a pittance in comparison with what they could earn in the US.

Emigrant women who worked as domestic servants, as “Biddys”, had more disposable income than their male counterparts whose wages had to cover accommodation, food, clothes and transport. That they sent home the bulk of these remittances is suggested by several contemporary sources. In an 1894 letter to his sisters in Lisburn, for example, one Patrick McKeown wrote: “Irish domestic servants seem to be the most successful and save more money than any class of working girls, as they are at little or no expence” (sic). An account to the Irish Folklore Commission elaborates: “Returned emigrants always said it was easier for girls to save money in America than for men. They were not exposed as much to the temptation to drink and gamble as men, and did not go out of doors to the same extent.”

As to what they did with those savings, we might look to an account in Donahue’s Magazine, of 1880, which recorded: “In Boston, during the four weeks ending on Dec 20, 1879, drafts to the number of 2,250 and representing 5,375 pounds passed through the teller’s hands. The senders were almost exclusively servant girls.”

Imagine it, all those “surplus” daughters shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, to be replaced by envelopes returning, with money orders snug inside. That money was a lifeline for their Irish families, buying American passage for younger siblings, securing rent, improving animal stock and drainage, building extra rooms on to cottages, replacing thatch with slate, paying off shopkeepers’ bills, keeping the wolf from the door.

These remittances might be said to have provided the backdrop for the large-scale buyout of Irish farmsteads under various Land Acts in the first decade of the 20th century. Is it foolish to draw a connecting line from these servants’ envelopes sent home, religiously, through to the independence movement that eventually secured the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and the foundation of the Irish Free State? It’s not a hard and fast throughline, of course; it’s speculative and I’m prepared to admit it has quite a few holes of its own. But it’s a suggestion, the way poetry often is, of an instinctive, if unacknowledged, truth.

And unacknowledged it largely went, this contribution made by Irish emigrant women to the national coffers, before and after Independence. Hereafter makes it its business to give these women their due.

Last summer, down a lane behind Lough Talt in Co Sligo, I found the remains of the house in which the real Ellen O’Hara grew up. If I should have encountered her ghost anywhere, it really should have been here. But it was just a derelict cottage, not nearly as resonant or haunting to me as the plain brown chair in the corner of my NYPL office, that I had Ellen sit in whenever I had her call on me. There, amid all the books, maps, photographs, historical journals, computer databases and my inventing hand, was where she came to seem real to me; where I heard her voice cohere. A voice I created, certainly, but a voice that climbs into its own language, tone and personality, so that it doesn’t sound like me.

Sometimes stories tell themselves, and sometimes they need urging. Hereafter is a record of that urging, eventually rounding (I choose to believe), on a plausible version of truth.

So far, at least, and for the time being, Ellen has kept nicely shtum about whatever I may have got wrong.

Vona Groarke’s Hereafter will be published by New York University Press on November 13th