Missing in Action Read Online Free

Waterford in the distance.
    To the south the countryside opened up into a rich panorama of farms, fields and forests. Some of the best land in Ireland was here and it had been fought over by Celtic tribes and Anglo-Norman families for more than 2,000 years. If you stared hard from Boher, you could make out the spires of Mitchelstown’s churches and, in the distance, the Kilworth Mountains that shielded Fermoy from view. Pat knew that in those distant mountains was Flagstaff Hill, which marked the biggest military firing range in the south. It was a realm of soldiers in a landscape dominated by farming.
    To the east, the River Tar and River Suir carved their way through forests and farms, overlooked by Slievenamon Mountain, so beloved of all in Tipperary. In the west, the Galtees gradually gave way to the Ballyhoura Mountains, which formed a northern bulwark for the majestic River Blackwater. The river traced its source all the way back to Kerry and nothing quite underscored the value of the local land like the Blackwater.
    Pat knew that the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy had nicknamed the Blackwater ‘the Irish Rhine’ and had built their sumptuous grand houses along its banks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, usually alongside the crumbling remains of old Norman and English castles. Each great house was the centrepiece of the famed Anglo-Norman estates that often encompassed tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland. The great landowning families in that area were the Kingstons, the Mountcashels, the Moores, the Hydes and the Barrymores.
    Not that Pat knew much about the grand houses. The only great house near Boher – Mitchelstown Castle – had been burned down during the Civil War in the 1920s and not even its scorched stones were still in place. They had been sold to the Cistercian monks for the construction of Mount Melleray Abbey in west Waterford and transported over a period lasting from 1925 to 1931. Pat, like everyone else in north Cork, spent his life in the fields rather than the marbled hallways of the great houses.
    Bright as this June morning was, it was still cold in the shade, although early summer was beginning to chase the chill of winter from the ground. Pat’s back was aching from hours spent on his hands and knees thinning the turnips. Of all the difficult jobs in farming, this was one of the worst. It was an annual task that Pat hated with a passion. By 6 p.m., when it was time to go home, Pat’s back and knees would be in spasm from hours spent crouched over. And all for the princely sum of £2 per week. It was hardly enough to maintain Pat, let alone a girlfriend or, God help us, a wife and children. Pat painfully straightened and sighed, ‘there has to be an easier way to make a living’. One of the other workers, thinning a line of turnips just yards away, overheard the young man and smiled to himself. Young lads always dreamed of better wages, shorter hours, pretty girlfriends and even being able to afford a car. And then they learned that in Ireland this was not the way things were.
    In the Ireland of 1960, the majority of people were happy just to have a job and an income. Ireland, along with Portugal, was the poorest country in Europe and farming was the poorest sector of the economy. With an average of six workers chasing each job, it was an employers’ market – hours were long and wages low. If you didn’t like it, well, there was always someone else willing to do the work. Without a job, little else beckoned except the boat to Britain, the liner to the United States or, if you were lucky, an aeroplane to New York or Boston.
    Pat’s £2 per week wage was the standard national payment for a farm labourer. It came with the promise of three meals a day to be supplied by the farmer and these varied in quality depending on the individual landowner involved. In this regard Pat was very lucky – he worked for neighbours, so the food was excellent and he was treated every bit