Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Joyce Cary begins his novel of 1941, A House of Children, by citing the effect on him of a swaying branch of fuchsia, glimpsed through the open window of a house in an inland town: suddenly, there’s a tang of salt on the breeze, and some acute sensations of a childhood in Inishowen are returned to him in an all but tangible form. ‘I was waiting for a sail, probably my first sail into the Atlantic. Somebody or something must have fixed that moment upon my dreaming senses, so that I still possess it.’ Well, from Proust’s madeleine on, literature is full of such mnemonic triggers, agents of all kinds of creative retrogression – and for most people too, in everyday life, the experience is fairly common. For example, it’s virtually impossible, I would think, for any Irish person to get a whiff of turf smoke, in any circumstances whatever, without being instantly transported to an archetypal, agrarian-Irish domain. Sometimes, though, the movement backwards is precipitated by something more deliberate or mundane. We might be asked to recall an event from the past, or find ourselves in a backward-looking reverie, as a consequence of some chance reference or encounter. For myself, the act of ‘thinking back’ to the summer of 1959 and its aftermath, is a periodic occurrence, sparked off whenever I bump into one-time acquaintances (there seem to be a lot of them) who have the whole fiasco fixed in their heads.

  In the autumn of 1992 I was at the BBC in Belfast to record a programme, in front of an invited audience, about the editing of anthologies. How do you go about editing an anthology? It wasn’t a very exacting brief, but for someone who, like me, isn’t a polished performer, any public appearance is apt to induce a state of the heebie-jeebies. Due to some unfathomable inadequacy, in these situations I lose control of my voice or my wits. A terrible tickle afflicts my throat, turning the whole thing into a coughing marathon. Fluster is not the word. Sometimes it’s not so bad, when I’ve chivvied myself into a proper frame of mind beforehand, or when some contentious comment acts as a spur to loquaciousness.

  On this particular occasion in Belfast I manage not to cover myself in ignominy, though signally failing to match the fluency of my fellow panellists, poets Tom Paulin and Frank Ormsby, and the chairman (the actor James Ellis). We sit at a table on a raised platform, microphones in front of us, facing the audience who don’t give us too hard a time – well, they’re there, presumably, either as friends of the speakers, or because of some professional or personal interest in how a compilation such as A Rage for Order or The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse is put together.

  My role is to stick up for the prose anthology, my Rattle of the North having come out earlier in the year. A collection of excerpts from prominent Northern Irish works of fiction and non-fiction, this includes a passage from Call My Brother Back describing the removal of the MacNeill family from Rathlin Island to a street in Beechmount off the Falls Road. The new house, two-up two-down, is situated half-way along a run-down row; and beyond it are a brickyard and brickfields, with further ‘fields straggling up to the foot of a mountain’. Michael McLaverty was a young schoolmaster when he wrote this partly autobiographical novel in the late 1930s, and he never again wrote anything that equalled its delicacy of expression and lucid proletarian innocence (though his second novel, Lost Fields, and a few of his stories come close).

  ‘It’s your fault I never learned to speak Irish.’ This bewildering accusation, addressed to me after the anthologies broadcast, with everyone milling about the recording studio, comes (it turns out) from one of McLaverty’s daughters, a Dominican past pupil of my vintage, who is fully au fait with the Rannafast crisis and its repercussions on the school. What does she mean? The explanation is pretty simple. Thirty-odd years earlier, our paltry delinquency had got itself blown up to such proportions that the Gaeltacht itself, the scene of our disgrace, was classed as forbidden territory for St Dominic’s girls over the next couple of years. Encouraging senior pupils to spend a part of the summer in Donegal putting a gloss on their Irish was a thing of the past, at least for the time being. ‘Rannafast’ had become synonymous with ‘fast’ (well, there’d always been a tinge of that about the place, contributing to its fascination; but it was only now that it was out in the open, now the great scandal had broken and shame and infamy covered the school, the summer colleges, the insufficiently vigilant teaching staff and worst of all, us three expellees). Our unholy conduct was something no young pupil coming up behind us was going to get a chance to emulate. For some would-be Gaeilgeoirs, and others in search of extracurricular skylarking, this deprivation rankled – and we, idiotic enough to get caught out, were the authors of it.

  Three old ladies attending the 1992 broadcast in Belfast are also keen to speak to me. While the programme was being recorded I’d dimly registered their presence as they sat sedately on their upright chairs and made no contribution to the debate. They’d seemed as much out of place as nuns at a fashion show, among the teachers and BBC personnel and council representatives and literary social workers who made up the bulk of the audience. And, indeed, they disclaim all knowledge of literary matters. They have come along out of loyalty to a dear friend, recently dead, who took a keen interest in books and writing, and, moreover, had been an admirer of mine: she had all my books, and used to cut out and place in a file every newspaper article by or about me that came her way. A Miss May Brannigan. I’m naturally gratified by this information, since it brings the number of fans I’m aware of up to two – the other being an elderly (male) eccentric and self-taught painter from Greenwich in south-east London. It isn’t totally disinterested admiration, though. Local patriotism is at the bottom of it. It seems Miss Brannigan lived only a few doors away from us on the Donegall Road, just across from where her friends in the audience still live. Neverthless, I applaud her instinct to approve of someone’s progress (however limited) rather than judging them incapable of anything simply because you knew them in their pram.

  I am at a loss to recall any of these ladies, spinsters all, though I do remember others from the front of the road: Mrs Macnamara, who gave me Edwardian postcards to add to my collection; Mr and Mrs Clark, whose daughter married a Belgian soldier; the Armstrongs; Lily Beattie. While I stand there in the lecture hall at the BBC, with people commenting on various aspects of the programme, and friends trying to shepherd me across the road for a drink with the producer and contributors, part of my attention is focused on the Donegall Road in the 1950s – the far end of the road before the construction of the M1, with the Bog Meadows in one direction and the Black Mountain in the other: from my bedroom window, if you look to the right, you can see the mountain with its distinctive landmark, a field shaped like a hatchet, with a clump of trees and a barely distinguishable white house in the corner.

  It was from this vantage point that Colm MacNeill, the young protagonist of Call My Brother Back, sat with his brothers looking down on dingy, pre-war Belfast: the patches of waste ground, the mill chimneys and dishevelled terraces. They can nearly make out their own street, down there among the homely architecture of Beechmount. Turn towards the Park, from the bottom of this street, and you soon reach the roads sloping up towards the mountain: the Giant’s Foot, Rockville, Rockmount Streets and then the Whiterock Road with its comprehensive boys’ school, where Michael McLaverty held the post of headmaster for a good many years. Beyond the top of the Whiterock Road comes the Mountain Loney, at that time a country lane with an old tin church half-way along it, and a well of pure spring water at the end to refresh you before you tackled the mountain proper. I think the whole area is now built over – while the streets which McLaverty evoked in the novel Lost Fields are now lost streets.

  Michael McLaverty is very thick with the nuns of the Dominican Convent on the Falls Road, my old school. It is also the old school of my friend Patricia Mallon, whom – although we are almost exact contemporaries – I don’t remember from those days of the late 1950s. It wasn’t until 1985 that we met at an Irish Studies conference at Queen’s University, at which I was reading a paper on the treatment of women in No
rthern Irish fiction (McLaverty’s included), and struck up a friendship. She remembers me from our schooldays for the usual reason: the notoriety that was thrust upon me back in the past. (Má’s mór do chliú, ní maith: if your fame is great, it is not good.) Her opening words – ‘Does the name of Rannafast make you want to laugh or gnash your teeth?’ – make me laugh, but ruefully. As I’ve said, whenever I go into any social gathering in Belfast, up comes an ex-Dominican pupil to remind me of the episode, which seems to have loomed very large in the lore of the school – though at the time, and for a long period afterwards, I was not aware of its impact. Indeed, I had thought my exit from the school went relatively unnoticed.

  I can’t imagine why I believed this: it was, after all, nearly a mass expulsion – three of us cast out at the same time – and clearly caused a scandal of sufficient intensity to mesmerise the school. How they must have lapped it up – I’d have done the same if it had happened to someone else – and how our misdoings must have gained in exorbitance! What scope for the envisaging of lurid antics! I now know that we were held up as an awful warning for years to come. According to more than one teacher, signs of insufficient tractability were apparent in the three of us nearly from the minute we set foot in the school. We were blamed for holding far too good an opinion of ourselves, for being unamenable to discipline of any kind, whispering in class and eating ice-lollipops in the street, and forever carrying on insubordinately. Inter-house competition, games and other innocuous activities were supposed to have left us cold. (All this was conveyed to me, bit by bit, over many years.) We refused to pull our weight on netball field or hockey pitch, though perfectly robust in constitution, preferring to idle around making fun of those who exerted themselves in a proper spirit. The games mistress, in particular, claimed to have predicted our bad end. She was a Mrs Cumberledge, very bleak and bony, and infamous herself for being separated from her husband, for going to the Dogs (but only literally), and for turning up at the school every now and then wearing a fearfully moth-eaten old fur coat, which gave her the look of a shaggy snake. (I can still see that coat.) I detested her, with the kind of whole-hearted detestation that’s rarely available to anyone over the age of seventeen.

  Rumour had all three of us expecting babies, at the very least, after midnight orgies with Donegal turf-cutters, to account for the extremes of censure and innuendo surrounding our departure – and neither the games mistress, who certainly knew better, nor anyone else in authority went out of her way to contradict such misapprehensions. If the school, believing them, could be kept suitably cowed as a result, so much the better. (Some pupils, in shocked whispers, discussed the actual presence of boys in our bedrooms; while others, more admiring, wondered how we had pulled it off.) As for us – good riddance to the lot of us. At that juncture in my life, the future career that so engrossed Miss Brannigan from the Donegall Road very nearly remained as much a figment as the non-existent teenage pregnancies.

  Every now and then there occurs a moment when events from the past assume a striking configuration – when accumulated connections and coincidences enrich the original occurrence, or begin to impose a pattern on top of it. You can suddenly see aspects of the thing that weren’t apparent at the time, as well as marvelling at the way it all holds together. It ceases to be amorphous and acquires an outline – or at least, you’re handed on a plate the means of achieving an outline. It makes a proper story, complete with plot and sub-plots. And more. ‘We had the experience but missed the meaning,’ T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’. ‘And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form … ’ I’m all for having a pungent experience restored, though it’s not so much meaning I’m after – futile to attempt so highfalutin an exercise – not so much meaning, as implications: the implications of what went on in Rannafast and Belfast at a particular period, and in distinctive circumstances, with myself and my friends at the centre of it.

  It’s that moment at the BBC in Ormeau Avenue in 1992, with the combination of Michael McLaverty, his one-time St Dominic’s daughter and the late Miss Brannigan, that gets me thinking about the Falls Road and Rannafast, social history and convent benightedness, and the endless emphasis on chastity that marked our upbringing: all you’ve taken on board, as it were, merely by virtue of having lived through it. (‘She was a middle-aged woman who had led a certain, not very varied but perceptive life, who had lived through enough time to write a narrative of it … ’ – thus the heroine of A.S. Byatt’s story, ‘On the Day that E.M. Forster Died’.) It’s true that that occasion at the BBC might have furnished a starting-point for other stories – if we’re going to view the past as a succession of stories, carrying a particular import and with a beginning, a middle and an end; the Cobbles story, for example, or the Derby Street story, both capable of elaboration. However, it is Rannafast and its associations that suggest themselves most insistently – that are going to nag at me, I know, until I get them off my chest.

  There’s already been a slight rehearsal for this undertaking. In 1982 I was asked by the Observer to contribute to a series of articles it was running on the subject of being expelled from school. The piece I wrote was very short and frivolous – short enough to reproduce here in full. It was printed under the title ‘Corrupting Influence’.

  I was expelled from school for having once possessed a copy of Peyton Place and for having lent it to a classmate who thought it was the Kama Sutra. In fact, it served her purpose just as well. After years of good conduct, this girl – stocky and bespectacled – suddenly developed an enthusiasm for the pleasures of the flesh (in a mild form).

  What she learnt from Grace Metallious’s helpful novel she put to good use in the course of a holiday we spent in Donegal, and ended by depriving the school of three of its most hopeful pupils (herself included). Our expulsion had a profound effect on us. Of the other two, one became a terrorist in later life and one married a policeman. I lost the taste for reading American bestsellers.

  It happened the summer before we were due to go into the sixth form. Our school, a Belfast convent, was run on old-fashioned lines – no eating or going bare-headed in the street, no leaning out of classroom windows to wave at workmen building the new wing, light reading supposed to be confined to picturesque Catholic pamphlets with titles like ‘The Devil at Dances’.

  Seniors, however – those who could be trusted to uphold the standard of behaviour required by the school – were encouraged to attend an Irish language course which was held each summer in a Gaelic-speaking part of Donegal. Pupils from schools all over the province converged on this spot at the beginning of August, were allocated to various homes in the district and set about acquiring fluency in Gaelic. (Since this was the object, you were sent home if you were caught speaking English.)

  The college authorities here, we discovered, were nearly as strict as the nuns we had left behind in Belfast. Ceilis – Irish dances – were organised for our benefit three times a week; but if you were observed dancing with the same partner more than twice, you were reprimanded. Pairing-off was frowned upon.

  You had to be careful, too, how you dressed: one girl was taken to task for appearing in a blouse with the top two buttons undone. According to one rumour, priests and teachers attached to the college patrolled the roads at night shining torches behind turf-stacks and into ditches in search of concupiscent couples – making killjoys of themselves, it seemed to us, on the scale of Yeats’s Father Rosicross.

  Other rumours, however, had reached us before we left the city. We all looked forward to fulfilment, or at least entertainment, in the arms of some Donegal turfcutters; and we weren’t disappointed. Groups of these local boys, home for the summer from part-time jobs in Scotland, used to roam the district between one and three in the morning, rapping the bedroom windows of girls who, they thought, might be game for a little hanky-panky behind a cow-byre. We quickly acquired the habit of scrambling out in the middle of the night (priests and teachers all safely
in bed by this time – or so we hoped), wearing more clothes than we did in the daytime to discourage excesses of passion, and of scrambling in again at every intimation of danger. A dog barking or the glimmer of a torch in the distance was enough to send us scuttling for the windowsill.

  So much hilarity was bound to be followed by sobriety: this nursery maxim proved well-founded in our case. Things began to go wrong. Our landlady at last realised what we were up to and nailed up the windows to stop us getting out. Worse, at a ceili on the last night of our holiday, we – pupils belonging to our school only – were summoned to the secretary’s office and told that a letter, written by one of us and describing our activities in ribald detail, had reached our headmistress via the parents of the girl to whom it was addressed. As a consequence it was probable that we were all going to be expelled.

  As soon as we were released, we headed for the girls’ cloakroom where a state of extreme agitation soon prevailed. Who was to blame for this misfortune? We narrowed it down to two girls, both staying at a cottage at some distance from mine. I concluded, rightly at this stage, that I wasn’t too seriously implicated in the business.

  However, the fateful letter now in our Mother Superior’s hands – all exclamation marks and knowing innuendoes, I believe – turned out to be the work of a girl whose supposed naivety had been a byword in the school. Clearly, some corrupting agent had been at work. What was it, the headmistress wanted to know.

  It might have been a book she read. A book? What book? A terrible immoral novel called Peyton Place. And where had she got it? … That was when my far-from-brilliant school career went bung.