Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  There is nothing fearfully askew about this as far as accuracy of recollection goes (though I’ve presented some things as facts when they’re only suppositions). But it is most unwarrantably simplified. It was wrong of me, for example, to apply the word ‘terrorist’ to my one-time best friend, who later went on to carve out a redoubtable career for herself in the South: her ‘Irishness’ took a different form from mine, or than mine would have taken if I’d stayed in Belfast, that was all. Living where she did (in West Belfast), at a particular time (the early 1970s), and as a crusader against social injustice, she didn’t have the option of remaining neutral or disinterested as things fell to pieces around her, of observing excruciating occurrences from afar and forming judicious opinions on them. She was there in the thick of it, having her political consciousness raised along with her hackles: night raids, sectarian aggression, violence in the streets, vehement partisanship, an atmosphere of anarchy – anarchy tempered by a local republican camaraderie. What could she do but get involved – and once that had happened, a sequence of events including all the horrors associated with a clandestine affiliation was set in motion. This old friend, whom I shall call Olivia McAloon (more about her later), became famous, or infamous, for more than being expelled from school. Recently, yet another St Dominic’s old girl, of a humorous disposition, bounced over to me in a public place to assure me that I was only the second most scandalous past pupil in the history of the school. In the notoriety stakes, our republican classmate had beaten me hands down.

  As for the other delinquent (a most unlikely delinquent) specified in my Observer article, who was never a kindred spirit or even a close school friend – I don’t know if it’s appropriate to attribute to her as much of the blame for my downfall as I do, or even if it is true that she married a policeman (I seem to remember hearing something to this effect, but I can’t be sure about this: I’ve chosen to assert it merely in the interests of symmetry). I’ve also conflated her character and that of a couple of lesser-known, more childish girls who were minimal participants in the dramas of that summer.

  And yes, Peyton Place did come into the picture; but it was not the only, or even the main, reason why I was expelled. There’s a lot more to the story than that, and several aspects of the business only became known to me after a considerable lapse of time. In the weeks after the verdict was delivered, I think I latched on to Peyton Place because I had owned a copy of this deplorable novel and it had gone the rounds of Form 5A; this provided an explanation of sorts when I was badly in need of one. I must have pieced it together from things said, or intimated, by some of the girls concerned; no one ever alluded directly to Peyton Place and its indecency, as far as I am aware.

  But I was not in a state to make much sense of anything. The whole episode was devastating and bewildering. Like Sean O’Faolain after hearing that his novel Bird Alone had been banned by the Irish Censorship Board, I felt that ‘Somebody had thrown me out of an accepted club without my knowing what I’d done.’ First I was told that I might resume my place in the school at the start of the new term, then – after a reversal of opinion – that I was, instead, to be ejected (the second, I was given to understand, as evidence of my depravity came to light). These successive edicts were conveyed to my mother. It seemed I was too depraved to be actually summoned to the school on the second occasion, confronted with my supposed transgression and given a chance to defend myself. Nuns were very autocratic in those days. At the same time, they were under the thumb of priests. More than twenty years went by before I gained an inkling of the part played in the whole sorry affair by an extraneous character, a priest attached to Clonard Monastery in Belfast, a total stranger to me. (‘Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir’, time is a good historian.) I learnt of his existence, eventually, through the novelist Michael McLaverty.

  It was after the publication of the Observer article. I’ve said that I wasn’t acquainted with McLaverty’s daughter, but the same was not true of her father, whom I did get to know, very slightly. In 1976, my parents had moved to a spot in County Down between Strangford and Ballyhornan, saying goodbye without regret to the Donegall Road and the sight of a burning bus forming part of a barricade every time they stepped out of the door. The owner of a weekend house just down the road, along the shores of the Lough, was known in the district as the author of several novels. One day my father was accosted while mowing the lawn by an elderly, gnomish gentleman wearing a black beret, and demanding to be told if a writer lived there. He was a writer himself, by the name of McLaverty. It was explained to him that the writer – me – was based in London, but came over to stay in County Down fairly frequently. (How had he heard of me? My ‘writing’ at the time consisted of a study of girls’ fiction, written jointly with Mary Cadogan, and a handful of magazine articles.) It wasn’t long before I met Mr McLaverty myself, some years before his astonishing loquacity and story-telling gifts were eroded by old age. (He ended his life being cared for in a nursing home.) We were all intrigued by him and his fund of anecdotes about Ballymurphy and the Strangford/ Portaferry districts of County Down. It’s true that after a certain point we noticed a degree of repetitiveness and forgetfulness, or misremembering, beginning to afflict him. He sometimes mistook me for one of his past pupils (I think – or were they all boys?) and complimented me on having grown into a lovely big girl. (I was over thirty at the time.)

  While he still had full command of his faculties, though, McLaverty read my Observer article and promptly paid a visit to his pal Mother Helena of the Dominican Order, the nun at whose hands my prospects for a university education came unstuck. To go by what he told me later, he found her in a penitent frame of mind. If she’d had the thing to do over again, she said, she’d have acted differently. At the time – well, drastic measures needed to be taken, to restore (as far as possible) normality and a high moral tone to the school. Mother Helena wasn’t to know that the world was on the verge of change – that 1960s freedoms would soon extend even to the corridors and classrooms of St Dominic’s High School on the Falls Road. The truth was, in the weeks following the discovery of our Gaeltacht goings-on, she came under tremendous pressure to make an example of me, me in particular, even though my relative innocence with regard to the Rannafast imbroglio had been more or less accepted. Father So-and-So of Clonard Monastery (if McLaverty ever mentioned this person’s name to me, I quickly forgot it), in his full rage and indignation, was insisting on my removal from the school forthwith. Why, when he had no more personal knowledge of me than he had of Mata Hari – indeed had never set eyes on me in his life? An aunt now comes into the picture, the aunt of one of the other girls involved, my best friend, Olivia McAloon.

  This aunt – Aunt Ita – was a gaunt woman, a cripple, who was often seen propelling herself about the town in an invalid carriage. Her great purpose in life was to carry out auxiliary work for the church, supplying flowers for the altar, organising collections on behalf of the Foreign Missions, that sort of thing. She was off to some non-essential church service every minute of the day. The Clonard priest was an acquaintance of hers, and it was to him that she went with the terrible story of her niece’s expulsion. It was no skin off Aunt Ita’s nose to cast me as the prime mover in the affair. She had never considered me a suitable chum for her niece. Something about me didn’t commend itself to her. It may have been nothing more radical than my current hair style, which – by accident – produced an ‘arty’ impression. Up until the age of fifteen, I’d been subjected by my mother to a nightly ritual involving rags or curlers, the effect of which was to make me look a bit like a sheepish Young Christian or an exceptionally gauche barn dancer. (The look she was aiming at, sort of Margaret Lockwood-cum-Doris Day, was unfortunately not available to me: I didn’t have the face or the personality to carry it off.) Then, the summer before Rannafast, I went to stay with the McAloons in a cottage in the Mourne Mountains, where my hair reverted to a natural state: straight. It was a revelation to me how much better it l
ooked, and I resolved to hold fast to the inadvertent improvement.

  But, in those days, to have straight shoulder-length hair, and a fringe to boot, proclaimed a deficiency of moral fibre, as far as women like Aunt Ita could judge. At the very least, it indicated a wish to attract attention; but it also suggested a dangerous leaning towards immoral archetypes seeping in from abroad. These might include X-rated films (Brigitte Bardot), or even Picasso’s iconic images of Sylvette David of the socially defiant fringe and pony tail. I was certainly familiar with these and other romantic-delinquent images, and I can’t deny their subversive appeal in constricted old Belfast. I remember a newsagent’s shop in Donegall Street in the city centre which stocked a selection of foreign magazines, Paris Match, Oggi and so forth, and for a brief period when I was fifteen or sixteen I bought and scrutinised these intriguing periodicals in search of a kind of glamour which I felt was missing from the Donegall Road and St James’s Avenue.

  Though I hadn’t contrived it with full consciousness, my new hair style was an approximation of those I’d noted in foreign or film magazines, and I suppose in a way it represented my first assertion of a social alignment that diverged from my mother’s, being only available to the current generation of under-twenty-fives (those susceptible to libertarian promptings, that is). Protest and a heady non-conformity were in the air, even in the toned-down air of Belfast; and some of us were of a mind to latch on to those invigorating ideologies. We believed we’d got the hang of the unfolding era, the incipient sixties – or at least, that we were equipped to get it in due course.

  Advancement-by-upheaval, though – in whatever area of life – is just a vague prospect for the future; in most respects we fit into the life around us and believe at some level that this life is changeless. Our everyday gestures of rebellion don’t go much beyond listening to Radio Luxembourg, or sticking resolutely to our seats while the rest of a cinema audience rises to its feet for ‘God Save the Queen’ … But now my innocent hair, my straight fair hair, has somehow got itself mixed up with that very tentative opposition to the status quo. At any rate, it acts on the older generation as a pointer to profligacy, inducing agitation in aunts, my own and others’, as I suppose it was bound to do. Aunt Ita wasn’t alone in her disapproval. But I read a unique vindictiveness into the officious poking of her nose into the matter of my Rannafast culpability, or otherwise. I imagine the tale she carried to the Clonard priest went something like this: I’d led the others astray, out of sheer badness, and then contrived to get off scot-free. God knows what evidence she produced to back up her story. Whatever it was, it sent him off in a jiffy on his mission of ill will. (‘Is fearr eolas an oilc ná an t-olc gan eolas’, better is knowledge of evil than evil without knowledge.)

  When Michael McLaverty recounted to me his conversation with Mother Helena, in the early 1980s, he alluded to this priest as if I’d always known all about him and his impact on my life; but in fact I’d lived all those years in utter ignorance of his existence. (I have to try to be fair here: it is possible that Aunt Ita and the nuns and the priest were perfectly correct in their assessment of my character – that they all perceived, long before I did, my inability to subscribe to the system they revered; that they saw me, rightly, as a disruptive influence and an opponent of Catholicism – or, for that matter, any other dogmatic religion. But if this is so, it was on my future, not my present, behaviour that I was being judged.)

  Father So-and-So: once his name came up, his role in the affair made perfect sense. This was one of the pieces that finally slotted into place, backed up by passing comments from my London friend and closest neighbour at the time, Rory McAloon (the brother of Olivia), with whom, for various reasons, I hardly discussed the matter at all. (I’m aware that the McAloons’ version of the events described below will not coincide with mine.) In those days, I lived with my husband, Jeffrey Morgan, in the top half of a graceful Georgian house in south-east London, while Rory and his wife and daughters had the other half – and it was because of Rory, whom I bumped into in Blackheath in 1976, that this joint ownership came about. He and his family were installed in the basement of the house when it came on the market (it was in such a shocking state that it was under threat of compulsory purchase and demolition by Greenwich Council), and he went to considerable lengths to secure the property, finally bringing us in on the deal. As architectural enthusiasts, we were intrigued. Along with the house next door, ours had functioned as a hostel for the employees of a local drapery firm, Hinds (many of whom were Irish shopgirls, some from Donegal). In an earlier incarnation, under a Miss Mary Tatlock, the house had been a boarding school – and then a Miss Jane Caroline Corbett and her heirs lived there between 1873 and 1940, after which began the long decline from London suburban respectability. Forty-odd years later, we moved in – after a full-scale renovation had been carried out.

  It was a lovely and unusual place to live. (This is true also of our present home, a stone-built one-time manse in County Antrim.) And our occupation of it was due to a set of circumstances arising from a link with the past, my past – a link so tenuous it was down to a spiderweb thinness, though about to be solidly reinforced.

  How it came about was this. For some reason, I was sitting on a bench at the end of Vicarage Walk in Blackheath, between a great friend in the area, a shrewd and incorrigible old lady from the north of England who concealed her formidable intelligence, but displayed her humour, by opting to look like an old-clothes woman, and an elderly black gentleman – idly sitting there, when Rory McAloon rode past on a bicycle, looked, stopped, looked again and rode back. It’s an occurrence that calls to mind Anthony Powell’s famous sequence of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, in which the vagaries of social intercourse are likened to a dance whose complicated movements keep bringing you face-to-face with a particular person, and then out of their orbit for a time.

  This fortuitous meeting, then, had consequences which none of us could possibly have foreseen. (To begin with, it’s unlikely that I’d be sitting here, looking out at a pair of 200-year-old yew trees, in a house with a hidden garden and mysterious attics, if it hadn’t taken place.) It nearly didn’t happen. It was a wonder that Rory had recognised me, after a lapse of twenty-odd years, and given the fact that we’d only known one another slightly, between the ages of eleven or twelve and sixteen, while I knocked around with his sister. We arranged to meet, that day in Blackheath, and one thing led to another … Our joint occupancy of No. 2 Cresswell Park proved to be quite a tempestuous business at times, Rory being volatile, maddening and moody, as well as amusing, generous and gregarious. As our friendship progressed, I became aware that his view of me was coloured ineradicably by the atmosphere in his home around the time of the Rannafast debacle. He envisaged me as a naughtier and more dashing schoolgirl than I ever was, cocking a snook at the Church and merrily getting up to all kinds of licentiousness.

  He also had me down – rightly – as a poetry-lover, like himself, and would sometimes curb his wilder instincts if I was about. Once, when he didn’t, I remember him charging at full steam after a crowd of juvenile intruders in the garden next door, yelling at the top of his voice; then coming back to where I was standing witnessing this performance, and declaring humorously, defiantly and apologetically all at once, ‘It’s the Falls Road coming out in me.’

  Rory moved out of our Blackheath house a couple of years before his premature death in 1998 when he was fifty-three. An excess of drink on top of such perennial complaints as asthma, stomach trouble, migraine, insomnia, did for him in the end. We still find his absence upsetting and perplexing.

  Long before I ran across Rory in Blackheath, my friendship with his sister had all but evaporated. It really didn’t survive the Rannafast summer, though intermittent attempts were made to prolong it. By the mid-1970s, Olivia’s life had taken a few dramatic turns. On top of being imprisoned for republican activities, she’d been shot in the head and stomach and was lucky to be alive. The expulsi
on from school, in Olivia’s case, was only the prelude to a much larger expulsion – or exclusion: from the whole of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Though her home was in Belfast she was exiled to Dublin, unable to cross the border without fear of arrest.

  In the face of these nightmarish occurrences, Olivia’s capacity for insouciance was somewhat diminished. When she read my Observer article in 1982 (it was reported back to me) she was affronted by the word ‘terrorist’ and consequently took a ‘scunner’ at me. Well, as I’ve said, it’s understandable that she should resent the attempt of a one-time friend to blacken her deepest convictions, merely in the interests of obtaining an effect of smartness.

  But it was a sorry end to an old school friendship. Allies in the Fourth, you might have dubbed us; and the Third, and the Fifth, while those early days threw up unimportant dramas, trivial school contretemps, around us. One of us might have to defend the other during a brief campaign by other girls of putting worms and spiders in her schoolbag, to see her lose her rag; or exercise her wits to concoct a plausible explanation for some bit of rule-breaking threatening to bring down ire on the other’s head. The great topics of the day, to which we were devoted, included the question of who would get off with whose brother at a classmate’s Hallowe’en party, whose end-of-term results were not up to standard, what teacher had it in for whom. (Some teachers were in a permanent condition of being fed up with the lot of us. I remember an occasion when a couple of us, caught frantically doing our geometry homework at the back of Sister Garcia’s history class, were sent to report ourselves to the mathematics mistress, Miss Smith. Miss Smith – all five foot two, saturnine mordancy of her – when we’d tracked her down to the Dominican staff room, turned on us a look of infinite weariness and disdain. ‘Go back and tell Sister Garcia,’ she said, ‘that I really couldn’t care less if you sit in her class learning Hindustani.’ And closed the door in our thunderstruck faces.) We were acting out in our own lives the substance of a thousand girls’ stories, immersed as we were in classroom politics, the forming and reforming of alliances and cliques, the modish contingent versus the hard workers, the good sports and their opposite, the affected brats. Some among us (only a very few, alas) were admired for their beauty, their ostentatious cleverness, or their ability to make things hum. Where we departed from the standard school of fiction, Springdale, St Madern’s or the picturesque Gulls’ Haunt, was in the religious conditioning that permeated everything, down to the pain in your thumb. If you complained of a pain in the thumb, you were told to offer it up for the souls in Purgatory – who thereby got themselves associated with so many minor discomforts that they were eventually themselves thought of as a pain in the neck.