Jenny Wren — Eb maj.

When you stumbled from the soldiers, the whiskey lit your face
Small pennies were the tokens you earned in that cold place?
Lightest was your body, loudest was your call
Your boudoir strewn on bushes, your legacy, your fall
Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren.

You followed him from sligo with new love in your breast
To the Curragh and the camps, you followed like the rest.
They posted him to Malta, you said you’d wait, but found
A nest you hadn’t planned for, a hell-hole in the ground.
Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren.

And there your life grew bitter, and led your dream astray
For how else could you feed the child, you soon laid in the clay.
The quick years fell about you, your life was cursed and low
As you worked to dig your own grave, no stone would ever show.
Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren.

And I have wandered this wide place but I could find no trace
On the hovels where your sisters, wore the bravest face;
Except those small white bones I found in one abandoned nest,
On the sward of wind-swept Curragh, where you found your rest.
Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren.

Today your sisters ferried from continents afar
Smuggled through the country in frightened midnight cars;
They work to feed their bosses, far from the love they’ve known
Enslaved and used like cattle, no mercy ever shown.
Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren.

Their tale like yours is bitter, a sadness that you found
As you lay beneath those cold night stars, your boudoir on the ground.
Forgotten, just a story of heartache and of wrong
Of lives lived in dark hovels, and never heard in song.
Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren, Jenny Wren.
Frank Callery © December 2012.

HISTORY
HEROES AND VILLAINS
Nellie Clifden – The Irish Prostitute Who Nearly Brought the British Royal Family Crashing Down
The Curragh, 6th September 1861. Nellie Clifden watched the two moustachioed officers approach through the tumbling Kildare rains, their red tunics fading into the deep green furze of the gorse. She recognised them from before. The Grenadier Guards, the most elite infantry regiment in the British Army, had been stationed at the Curragh all summer.
As the officers drew closer, more and more women appeared from the furze, perhaps sixty women in total. Like Nellie, most wore a frieze skirt wrapped around their legs and a blanket around their rain-soaked shoulders. Aged between seventeen and 25, many were orphaned during the Great Famine which had desecrated Ireland during their childhood years.
Bereft of options, they had turned to prostitution and made their way to the Curragh Camp, the biggest army barracks in Ireland. To the 12,000 troops stationed at the Curragh, the women of this extraordinary harem were known as the Curragh wrens.
The soldiers called them ‘wrens’ because their homes looked like nests. There were ten nests in total, each one stitched into a dense strip of gorse just a few hundred metres from the entrance to the army camp. They measured no more than nine foot long and seven foot broad. The roof, if you could call it that, stood just 4½ foot high. There was no window, no chimney. But the walls were impressive, 20 foot thick in places, a closely compacted mesh of bog earth and gorse branches.
At length the two men drew up outside Nellie’s door. She ushered them in through a ramshackle corrugated door held in place by two splintery posts. The men crouched low and entered in upon the bare earth floor. A solitary shelf supported a teapot, some cups, a small box and an unlit candle. The men could see the pile of straw beside the hollowed out ground where Nellie and her sister wrens had their beds.
Nellie invited them to sit upon two upturned saucepans beside a turf fire, the smoke languorously spilling out the door. It was a wet afternoon at the tail end of summer. Outside the wind was howling across the plains of Kildare.
When the officers finished making their proposal, Nellie laughed. She was a good-humoured girl and the officers considered her the best of the wrens.
Some said she was from Connemara but nobody knew how or why she had ended up at the Curragh. Perhaps she had come with a soldier who had since died or otherwise abandoned her. Maybe she was still hoping he would return.
One of her friends was a wren whose life story began with ‘no mother, no father’ and an aunt who kept a whiskey store in Cork City. One day an artilleryman had come into the whiskey store and, by and by, the girl became pregnant. When his regiment was posted to the Curragh, she followed him. Some years later, she told a journalist how the soldier wanted no more to do with her when arrived. ‘He told me to come here instead, and do like the other women did. And what could I do? My child was born here, in this very place. And glad I was of the shelter, and glad I was when the child died - thank the blessed Mary! What could I do with a child?’