Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  I’m completely in the dark regarding poor Patsy’s immersion in dung when I try to explain to my mother why I’ve been sent home in disgrace – indeed, I don’t know where my subsequent information on the subject came from, or why it’s connected so strongly in my head with that particular pickle … However, my mother doesn’t waste a minute but straight away gets into her coat and hurries to Aquinas Hall to put things right, leaving me and my grandmother anxiously awaiting the verdict. It isn’t long before she’s home again with the business sorted out. Of course I’ll be going to school as usual on the following morning! The incident is at an end, due to my intrepid mother and her persuasive tactics.

  That’s my first major bit of luck, having a mother who’s as much a friend as a parent, who is efficient and resourceful, who is not only on my wavelength but unshakeably on my side, whatever infantile or reprehensible behaviour I am guilty of. (It’s possible that her constant support gave me a false idea of the amount of leeway I could count on, but – if it did – my convent schooling would have gone some way towards redressing the balance.) My upbringing is left largely in her hands, though my cheerful father contributes his own brand of playfulness in the interval between returning home from his work at the Ulster Transport Authority in Duncrue Street and going out in the evening with his friend Jim Magee, who keeps a chemist’s shop on the Glen Road. He needs an active social life to keep him in good spirits, while my mother is happiest at home reading a book. My long-widowed grandmother, too, who makes a fourth in our household, has a say in the way my life is organised, and a wholly benevolent attitude towards myself (though she’s a bit bemused by my shyness, and keeps telling people not to mind me, that I’m very backward – which may have created an erroneous impression). All this I account as great good luck.

  Of course, I’m painting too cosy a picture here. Tensions and resentments afflicted my immediate family, no less than any other – indeed, in some ways the scope for both was greater than normal, for reasons I’ll return to. But as the only child of the household, and with my mother’s ferocious partisanship to bolster me up, I was in a privileged position (the word ‘spoilt’, I am sure, was frequently on the lips of my more acerbic aunts, and others), and shielded as far as possible from inevitable adult discords. I was lucky, but in the normal course of things, just as patterns have a way of repeating themselves, luck has a way of running out.

  ‘Bíonn a mhí-ádh féin ag brath ar gach duine’ (their own ill luck is in store for everyone); ‘Ní mar a shíltear a chríochnaítear’ (things do not fall out as we expect). These incontestable sayings are among the cache of six hundred Ulster Gaelic proverbs put together by an indefatigable nineteenth-century industrialist and scholar named Robert Shipboy MacAdam, who first saw the light of day in a room above his father’s hardware shop in High Street, Belfast.

  The year was 1808, and the town, being mainly Presbyterian, was more homogenous than it later became. Robert, a Presbyterian himself, soon joined a select number of pupils receiving an enlightened education at Inst (Belfast Academical Institution), a school founded on egalitarian principles. Inst, no doubt, was the scene of his first encounter with the Irish language. A Reverend William Neilson taught Irish at the school, and it’s easy enough to envisage MacAdam, in his antique schoolboy get-up, sitting in Dr Neilson’s class demonstrating his flair for languages. It was enterprising of Inst to have Irish on the curriculum. The language, at the time, was either used in everyday transactions, which still held true for some parts of the North, or it was an antiquarian pursuit. It wasn’t until later in the century that it got itself tied up, once and for all, with the whole Catholic/nationalist package, to the chagrin of some of its Protestant upholders.

  By the time he was twelve or so, young Robert MacAdam might have been aware, out of the corner of his eye, of changes happening in Belfast. For example, a lot of impoverished Catholics from country places were pouring into the Pound (named after an old cattle pound located about half a mile from the town centre), drawn in like flocks of migrating swallows by the presence of cotton and linen mills where they hoped to find work. The Pound, including streets such as Hamill Street and Barrack Street, was the oldest section of what later became the Divis area and the Lower Falls Road, and, from the 1820s on, it evolved into a counterpart of the even older, working-class Protestant Sandy Row, with its higgledy-piggledy housing, hardship and bravado. In these enclaves, and others like them, disruption and disaffection were rapidly taking root.

  One of the factories offering work on a non-denominational basis was the Soho Iron Foundry in Townsend Street, established in 1834 by Robert MacAdam and his older brother James. The previous year – with both their parents dead – the MacAdam brothers had moved to a new address, 18 College Square East, a splendid four-storey town house in an imposing and atmospheric terrace facing the long, neo-classical façade of their old school, Inst.

  College Square North, College Square East … you have to close your eyes and think back, hard, to gain an inkling of this pungent fragment of bygone Belfast. It is nearly all gone, eradicated, bulldozed out of existence in the terrible rage for redevelopment which overtook so much of late-twentieth-century architectural thinking. In MacAdam’s day, the town contained many graceful areas which stood as a testament to a local aesthetic – along with rough, insalubrious and dangerous quarters guaranteed to raise the hackles of social reformers.

  ‘We had not the most remote idea that such a den of darkness and squalor could be the abode of human beings,’ wrote the Revd W.M. O’Hanlon, with bated breath, following one of his investigative ventures into the slums in 1852. A certain hardihood was required to survive in a street like Rowland Street, off Sandy Row (say), or in the darker heart of the Pound – hardihood allied to a community spirit. And, of course, a sense of identity which could manifest itself in a number of ways. Some incomers into the Pound, through the middle part of the nineteenth century, had a resource in common with the factory-owner MacAdam: an enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, the Irish language.

  MacAdam recruited certain Gaelic-speakers, such as Art Bennett, a stonemason from Forkhill, County Armagh, to transcribe manuscripts and collect songs and pieces of traditional lore from all parts of the North. Another of his scholarly employees was Peter Gallegan, or Galligan, a hedge-schoolmaster and farm labourer from County Cavan, whose son had a job at the Soho Foundry. But his greatest ally in these linguistic enterprises was Hugh McDonnell who lived at Millfield, just across the road from Hamill Street in the Pound. Breandán Ó Buachalla, in his study of 1968, I mBéal Feirsde Cois Cuain (In Belfast by the Harbour), gives due credit to this pair of conservationists and language supporters: ‘It’s enough for me to say that, 100-odd years ago in Belfast, you had Hugh McDonnell, a Catholic, and Robert MacAdam, a Protestant, working together to save the Irish language [from extinction].’ And between them they established a tradition of admiration for Irish, and applause for those who spoke it, which has lasted right up to the present in the whole of West Belfast. The Ard Scoil (High School) in Divis Street and Cumann Cluain Ard (the Clonard Society) in Hawthorn Street, were centres of Gaelic expertise and sociability during the middle years of the twentieth century; and today you find a thriving cultural facility and meeting-place, Cultúrlann, occupying a one-time Presbyterian church near Broadway on the Falls Road.

  From his handsome house in College Square East, Robert MacAdam was within easy walking distance of both the Pound (cow-keepers and mill workers) and Sandy Row (weavers and labourers) – and of Townsend Street and his place of work, when he wasn’t travelling to Egypt on business, or taking down proverbs and stories from rugged old native speakers in the Glens of Antrim. Townsend: it wasn’t too long before this thoroughfare ceased to live up to its name, as the instinct for urban accretion found a full-blown outlet in the Falls. (Falls, from fál: the Irish word for hedge, or pound, as in cattle-pound: nothing to do with waterfalls, despite a later street called Fallswater Street; or, as some wit sugges
ted, with hordes of falling-down drunks emerging from pubs on a Saturday night. As far as hedge goes: it’s tempting to associate the Falls with a repelling prickly hedge, growing higher and higher, as a nationalist exclusiveness, in later years, became its dominant tone.) First there were fields and orchards, then came the jerry-building programme that gave the area its doughty back-street ambience. The rows of red-brick houses, courts, entries, factory chimneys discharging billows of smoke, begrimed back-yards … all these features of the Falls were in place by the mid-nineteenth century, though the workers’ rows thinned out considerably as you progressed up the road.

  Beechmount, for example, didn’t come into being until the late 1890s, and even then it was still considered a rural area, mills and brickfields notwithstanding. When the Dominican Convent opened its doors in 1870, midway along the road, its situation was described as ‘elevated and agreeable’. (I’ll come back to that rebarbative institution and its role in my own little portion of mí-ádh, ill luck, in due course.) My own home territory, St James’s – I was born at 551 Donegall Road, on the corner with St James’s Avenue – was an even later development, a product of the 1920s: semi-detached, red-brick, bay-windowed houses with average-sized gardens, and plane trees at intervals along the pavement. It was nothing special, neither attractive looking in its own right, nor of historical interest. I was drawn to places that distilled a sense of the past, like the nearby tumbledown Milltown Row, adjacent to the Cemetery and the Bog Meadows, with its straggle of still-occupied minuscule dwellings and, behind it in the distance in a steep hollow, the half-ruined house probably once assigned to the manager of the eponymous mill.

  I was also drawn to the Irish language, long before I got a chance to learn it: it wasn’t on the curriculum of my posh primary school, the aforementioned Aquinas Hall (fee: four guineas a term) on the Malone Road – ‘the faubourg Malone’ – the preparatory department of the Dominican Convent after 1947 and the advent of the Eleven-Plus. Aquinas Hall, a large suburban villa, originally Benvue or Benview, was built in 1875 for a Belfast ship-owner. It stood on the corner of Windsor Park; and, from 1889, its next-door neighbour on the Malone Road was Dunarnon, the property of a Magherafelt tea merchant whose great-granddaughter happens to be the novelist Jennifer Johnston.

  That late Victorian mansion has other literary associations: it was occupied during the 1930s by the father and stepmother of Louis MacNeice, and hence appears in the Belfast chapter (‘A Personal Digression’) of Zoo (1938), where it’s described as ‘a hideous house, but very comfortable … a front door with polished granite pillars and Corinthian capitals’. After the death of Bishop MacNeice in 1942, the house – 77 Malone Road – was divided into flats. A couple of years later, Dominican nuns acquired No. 75 and renamed it Aquinas Hall. It was, and remained, a hostel for Catholic women students, as well as functioning as a small private kindergarten school. By the late 1950s, the nuns had expanded their holdings to include Dunarnon, at which point, it seems, the whole caboodle became known as Aquinas Hall, with an address at 75–77 Malone Road.

  This caused some confusion (in my mind anyway). Around 1970, Paul Muldoon – according to his poem ‘History’ – clambered, in pursuit of a Catholic woman student, through a ground-floor window of one or other of these Aquinas Halls, ‘and into the room where MacNeice wrote “Snow”, / Or the room where they say he wrote “Snow”’. For some reason, I’d got it into my head that these lines referred to the conservatory at the front of my old school, a room into which I was ushered in September 1949, along with a crowd of diminutive strangers. (With its glass roof and walls, it seemed to me an unusual and agreeable sort of classroom. However, I was soon transferred to a more advanced class in an ordinary schoolroom, and came to regard the conservatory as a mere infants’ sanctum.) But it seems clear that this was not the room in which MacNeice wrote ‘Snow’. Well, the clue is in the phrase ‘the great bay-window’ – though my Aquinas Hall boasted one or two of those as well, as far as I remember.

  About ten years ago, coming down the Malone Road on a bus, I was horrified to observe that Aquinas Hall was flattened, and that building work had started in the once-abundant grounds where my friends and I held enthralled confabulations about the facts of life, or tried to think ourselves into an Enid Blyton adventure. However, when I remarked on this, several people assured me that I’d got it wrong, that Aquinas Hall wasn’t knocked down, merely taken over by the Arts Council and renamed MacNeice House. Was I becoming subject to hallucinations? A second visit confirmed that my old school was indeed demolished (a whole new development now stands on the site): whatever the history of the house next door, and its association with the poet MacNeice, it definitely was not the place where I received the beginnings of an education.

  That, with its royal blue uniform, its velours hat for winter and its summer panama, was considered a swanky school; French was taught to the top class there (ten- and eleven-year-olds) by a mad Dominican nun with a penchant for laying about her with a ruler. But, in my day at least, no Irish lessons were available. It is possible that Irish, with its bog-and-back-street associations, was considered insufficiently genteel by Aquinas Hall nuns, whom I remember as displaying a rather obsequious attitude towards the British royal family. The socially elevated location on the Malone Road may have gone to their heads. In the absence of formal teaching, I used to pester my mother to tell me any Irish words she knew, which weren’t that many: doras, a door; teach, a house; cat, a cat. (She must have known more; she did study Irish at school in Lurgan in the 1920s and 30s, and even went to Rannafast once for a holiday.) Oh, and sidhe, a fairy, as in banshee.

  Some children who used to visit relatives in our avenue were objects of wonder: they were being brought up as Irish-speakers, in the middle of Belfast (though of course in practice they were bilingual) – a modus operandi not at all common at the time. It’s true that it wasn’t without its hazards. Kudos might be heaped on your head on account of the dedication your Irish-speaking betokened; but, at the same time, you’d likely be judged a bit odd, a bit too fanatical or precious for your own good.

  The poet Ciaran Carson, born in Raglan Street off the Falls Road, had the experience of growing up speaking Irish and English interchangeably – a circumstance some hold to blame for his subsequent stammer. However, he mastered both tongues easily, unlike certain victims of the policy of compulsory Irish in the South, who were said to have ended up ‘illiterate in two languages’. Joking aside, the idea of undergoing instruction in every subject – geography, algebra, history, biology or what-have-you – through the medium of Irish, was daunting to the point of desperation.

  I knew it would never come to that as far as I was concerned, and I looked forward to the time when I’d be able to study Irish as an ordinary school subject. To me, my supposedly native tongue was mysterious and glamorous, like a legendary forebear fallen on diminished days. The time seemed long in coming. I was eleven before I sat in an Irish class where we chanted in unison, Tá mé, I am; Tá tu, you are, and so on, which wasn’t especially inspiring. The teacher was not inspiring either, being short and rotund and prone to point at herself while uttering the phrase Beag agus maith, small and good. We soon knew enough to go around pointing at one another while declaring robustly Beag agus olc, small and bad. It was a start. By this stage I was a Dominican pupil on the Falls Road, things, so far, having fallen out as expected. But, have patience, Níor ith na madaí deireadh na bliana go fóill (the dogs have not eaten up the end of the year yet).

  By the time I was sixteen I knew enough Irish to pass exams and conduct an elementary conversation, but it wasn’t until a year or so later that my career as an Hibernophile really reached its zenith. I might have been violently turned off the language, once it acquired certain doleful associations; but, in fact, I had sufficient wits not to hold the circumstances of my bit of mi-ádh, ill luck, responsible for the ill luck itself. However, it’s possible that this was the point at which the summer school took
root in my mind as a place of intrigue, elation and consternation, a theme worth pursuing.

  That year, my seventeenth, I went with some friends and classmates to study Irish at St Brigid’s College in Rannafast, County Donegal – a traditional rite of passage for Catholic-educated adolescents – and as a consequence ended up with no school at all to return to after the summer holidays. When school resumed in September 1959, and my class, now 6A, assembled at the start of term, I wasn’t in it. I was skulking at home – at least, until a makeshift arrangement was hurriedly set up. I then became a pupil at a countrified convent, and spent the year obtaining a rough finish to an infelicitous education.

  Since that time, I have not been well-disposed towards nuns, or piety, or denominational schooling. But, as I’ve said, my afición for Irish outlasted the upheaval. With a couple of like-minded friends, I began to frequent Cluan Ard in Hawthorn Street, a venue from which English was excluded. To participate in the desirable social activities of this club, you had to become fluent pretty quickly. Soon, among ourselves, we spoke nothing but Irish. We spoke it all over Belfast, in the Lombard Café over plates of apple pie and ice cream, at the Central Reference Library, on the top deck of buses going towards the Cave Hill. This practice was not without an element of showing off, indeed; but, at the same time, I believe, we genuinely wished to promote the Irish language and culture, as well as presenting ourselves as fearfully dedicated and uncommon. (The last was confirmed by the curious glances we attracted from strangers.) For us, the language was an exciting emblem of identity, providing access to an inner core of Irishness. Though some of us were totally unmusical, we had the words of many eighteenth-century songs and poems by heart, and the lore of the Donegal Gaeltacht at our fingertips.