The scarcity of contiguous role models may have been a factor in the allure, for us, of more or less daring American teenage films including Peyton Place – shown, I think, at the old Imperial Cinema in Corn Market – whose delectable atmosphere was not reproduced in the book. When I read the book, I found it sickly and shoddy beyond anything I could have anticipated, and I couldn’t wait to get it off my hands (with the consequences adumbrated above). No, throughout the 1950s, the figure most assiduously presented to us as a role model was that of Maria Goretti, an obscure Italian peasant girl who fought off a would-be rapist and literally died to stay chaste. (She’d achieved the status of ‘Blessed’ by the time we became aware of her – I think she was canonised later.) The fate worse than death, in this instance, really was, in her mind, worse than death. Not that we understood, for some years, what Maria Goretti’s virtue consisted in, being insufficiently knowing to grasp the nature of the ‘sin’ she resisted so exorbitantly.
When we were only eleven or twelve, the nuns’ version of the story – a ‘man’ had tried to persuade the devout young girl to commit ‘a sin’, but even the prospect of dying bloodily couldn’t erode her aversion to wrongdoing – meant little to us. Was it a thieving enterprise he’d tried to coerce her into, or did he want her to tell lies on his behalf? Requests for enlightenment were met with evasion. Of course, before too long, we knew exactly what was entailed during the lethal confrontation in some backward part of Italy – by which point, I think, most of us were sufficiently pragmatic to reject the slant imposed by the Church over the pathetic occurrence. Better deflowered than defunct, in our opinion: or, what was the point in retaining an intact hymen if the rest of you was ripped to pieces? Nevertheless, the temporary popularity of Goretti as a Christian name among Irish Catholic parents testifies to the impact of the little Italian’s senseless heroism.
Those girls (there were a few) among us who aspired to a similar invincibility were ripe for admission to a society called the Children of Mary (a Catholic coterie whose raison d’être is a blank to me, if I ever understood it); the rest of us were judged of insufficient piety to merit the broad blue ribbon, with holy medal attached, which denoted membership of this Mariolatrous, senior-school group. Entitlement to wear this ribbon on top of my wine-coloured gym-tunic was a status I never craved. I was more interested in acquiring a fáinne, or ring, to pin on my blazer: a silver fáinne to begin with and then a gold one, indicating degrees of proficiency in Irish.
My Irish was coming on, but it was still very much at the lesson-book stage; it wasn’t yet a medium of communication with peers. I was fairly good at languages, though never outstanding – by languages I mean the two on offer, Irish and French. Among the fearsome grudges I’ve been harbouring against my old school, all these years, is its failure to provide for us, the A-stream, a grounding in Latin – an advantage you might have assumed to be inseparable from a Catholic education. But no: by some unfathomable quirk on the part of the curriculum-arranger, Latin was available to the B-stream in our year, but not to us – or not, at least, without an impossible jiggling of the timetable to fit it in. All the Latin I ever picked up was the word veritas – ‘Our noble motto,’ as the school song had it, ‘blazoned on the shield we wear, / Truth in thought and word and deed, / The heritage we bear’ and so on – the phrase Per ardua ad astra, our house motto, and as much of the Mass as stuck in my head.
This was supposed to be an efficient school, a school it did your reputation no harm to attend (unlike the supposedly inferior establishments for Eleven-Plus failures); but I remember it as a place where I was badly taught (with one or two exceptions) and badly treated (though I’d never want to play the ‘poor me’ card). I’m astounded whenever I read friendly references to nuns in general, and to those of my Dominican convent in particular – as, for example, in Mary Beckett’s novel Give Them Stones (1987). In this novel, the heroine’s sister wins a scholarship to the place – ‘the school on the Falls Road’ is all the identification it gets, but it’s enough – and comes home enthusing about the quiet nuns in their long white habits and big rosary beads, ‘the lessons and the kindness and the singing in the white chapel’. She’s writing about the 1940s, it’s true, but I can’t believe that things were so different then.
Kindness is not a quality I associate with nuns. My nuns didn’t have it in them. They were nearly all ordinary, not very intelligent women driven to irascibility or worse by the artificiality of their situation. One or two, I am sure, were certifiably insane, like the physical-punishment addict of Aquinas Hall, or the uncontrollable hysteric I met at Ballynahinch. Nuns at the time were stuck with the veil for life – except in very extraordinary circumstances – and some of them must have regretted the virtual imprisonment they had set up for themselves. We were always hearing about this nun or that nun who’d suffered a nervous breakdown. Once professed, they didn’t have the option of changing their minds – probably the last intake of convent fodder in that stymied position.
Soon, you’d get the cut-and-run syndrome which pulverised the whole idea of cloistered constancy. Starting as a drizzle, the I-leapt-over-the-wall brigade became a cloudburst, with nuns in droves ducking out of their vows as the life of holiness proved more than they could take. By the 1960s, even the Dominican Order was failing to hang on to its less-than-dedicated recruits. And when they resumed their laity, they went the whole hog. One contemporary recalls bumping into a young ex-nun at a railway station, and being slightly shocked by the extreme shortness of her skirt, the redness of her lipstick and breeziness of her manner.
The old perception of nuns as holy and good and the convent as a haven of stability was due for an overhaul, and, along with many ingredients of Irish myths and truisms, it was about to get it. Revisionism would soon come into its own. But, as yet, we had few intimations of upheavals in the political or the moral sphere. We thought we inhabited a world in which Catholic values were unchangeable, in which the Church hierarchy would continue to lay down the law, a law transgressable only by those already brimful of badness. All forces for change were regarded with suspicion by elders with mitres and elaborate headgear, and their stern views filtered right down to the lowest of their flock. At school debating contests, for example, those of us who upheld the mildest form of socialism were warned we were on a slippery slope: the merest push, we were told, would tip us over into a godless communism. (An alarmist attitude to a possible communist takeover was widespread at the time.) Communism, divorce and popular entertainment were the greatest evils of the modern world, and they were all tied up together. But Catholicism had its own, unassailable, resources, including the resource of domestic praying.
A few years earlier, our seven- , eight- , and nine-year-old heads had come under considerable liturgical pressure, as rosary dementia got the country into its grip. This craze, like a good deal of popular entertainment, was imported from America, and it smacked of a Catholic transatlantic smarminess which – even then – one or two of us found unpalatable. Well, I can only speak for myself, of course. At school (Aquinas Hall) we were urged to go around proselytising on behalf of the rosary, and in particular to persuade our parents to hold rosary sessions in their living-rooms in the evenings, if they weren’t already doing so. Even at that age I had read enough, and was scornful enough of the ‘ministering children’ strain in Victorian fiction, to resent any attempt to cast me, me with my self-professed affinity with anarchic William Brown, and Jane Turpin of the tearaway ingenuity – to cast me as one of those goody-goody, obnoxious softeners of obdurate adult hearts. I’d no more have suggested praying to my parents than nude bathing in the Falls Park ‘Cooler’. I couldn’t imagine anything more preposterous than the four of us (grandmother included) down on our knees going ‘Hail Mary / Holy Mary’.
There wasn’t a chance of it: we were not that kind of family. But, to my consternation, it looked as though I was unique in this respect, as the whole school immersed itself in the devotional brouhaha.
My family’s cheerful impiety – well, relative impiety – seemed perfectly natural to me. But I hesitated to disclose our aversion to communal praying, since I could tell it ran counter to the stirred-up sanctity enkindling our classroom. I thought if I just kept quiet I could pass as a rosary devotee along with everybody else.
But then a nun, in a further access of zeal, came in one morning bearing a chart which she proceeded to pin up on the classroom wall. Across the top of this chart ran the names of every child in the class, with the days of the week down the left-hand side. The idea was that each of us should tick every day on which the family rosary was said in her home. As soon as this was explained to us, I was filled with anxiety and agitation. If I were to be honest, my column would remain a total blank, week after week, and there I’d be, exposed as the pitiable and freakish child of an insufficiently dedicated household. There was nothing for it but to grit my teeth and produce a row of deceitful ticks. It wasn’t a complete row, as many people’s were; but I simply had to pretend that we occasionally knelt down, beads in hand, to say the rosary in common with everyone else.
I hated doing it, it made me feel uneasy and grubby, and even though I kept my ticks to a minimum, each one jarred as I filled it in. I thought I was committing some kind of terrible sin, a sin peculiar to myself, and endangering my entrée into eternal bliss. I also worried that I’d be caught out. I wasn’t, of course; no one ever questioned my claims to conformity in the matter of the family rosary. The only comment on the subject I remember was the observation that I should try to make it happen more often, to which I probably responded with a bashful smirk. I wasn’t a natural liar, but common sense and expediency were turning me into one. Is fusa tuitim ná eirigh, it is easier to fall than to rise.
In 1920, the Archbishop of Armagh had decreed that the only acceptable form of Catholic education was the school in which Catholic children were ‘educated as faithful Catholics in a Catholic atmosphere, and under the care and direction of their pastors, whose strict right and leading duty it is to watch over, direct and safeguard the religious education of the lambs of their flocks’. Blah, blah, blah. Such pronouncements boded ill for the prospect of integration. But integration as a concept carried very little weight at the time, or indeed later. Catholic bishops were still crowing over their exclusivity twenty-five years on, when they averred, ‘We have had control of our Catholic schools for over one hundred years, and whatever the action we are driven to take we are determined to maintain it.’ No surrender. They represented the Church as being in a state of siege, even when things in the North were relatively tranquil, harking back to the early days of the Northern Irish state, when ‘the very existence of Catholicity [sic] in Down & Connor, and in Belfast in particular, was menaced, and [when His Grace the Most Revd] Dr MacRory, by an appeal to the Catholics of the world, was instrumental in procuring relief for his imperilled people’.
His imperilled people. The period in question, it’s true, was a particularly fraught and traumatic era in Irish history, with a partial autonomy conferred on roughly four-fifths of the country, and the remainder sticking like glue to the uk connection. It was an awkward resolution of the Irish problem and bound to cause chaos and virulence; and chaos and virulence weren’t long in coming. ‘The outlook is desperate,’ reported The Times newspaper in August 1920, while in the streets of Belfast newsboys bawled out the latest casualty figures: ‘Twelve shot dead! Two hundred wounded!’ The Northern government, once it came into being, didn’t know what to do with the unruly minority it was saddled with, while those of the minority left high and dry by the terms of the Treaty seethed with disaffection and a sense of betrayal. Ambush, riots, machine-gun fire and pogroms were the order of the day. When District- Inspector Swanzy was shot dead in Lisburn, the ferocity of Orange reprisals caused a mass exodus out of nationalist quarters in the town, with whole families tramping by night across the Antrim Hills towards the (comparative) safety of Belfast.
There was misery for many, but the Catholic Church went out of its way to appropriate all the suffering and uprightness going. It was all ‘his imperilled people’, the highlighted image of ‘bishop, priests and people [standing] together in unbroken and … unbreakable solidarity’, and Catholic integrity lording it over Protestant iniquity. You’d have thought that what was going on was a religious war, not the hoary old clash of ideologies, the struggle on the part of some political activists to obtain social justice and a chance of betterment for those who lacked these graces, the determination of others to preserve a way of life agreeable to themselves and to their followers. It was sometimes hard to tell where principle ended and pigheadedness began. Bigotry on one side was naturally answered by bigotry on the other, and when it came right down to fisticuffs and jeering at street level, the Catholic/nationalist contingent gave as good as it got. There were people in Catholic Belfast for whom it was a matter of principle not to buy a ‘Protestant’ loaf of bread (i.e. one manufactured by the Ormeau Bakery rather than Hughes’s).
And there were other people, in other parts of the city, who knew absolutely nothing about the tradition of Protestant support for the Irish language, and couldn’t have cared less if they had known. They knew where they stood on the language issue, that was all, and it wasn’t the position occupied by Robert MacAdam, Sir Samuel Ferguson, Douglas Hyde, Francis Joseph Bigger and many, many others. ‘If parents want their children to learn Irish or any other useless language, they should pay for it out of their own pockets,’ snorted the opposition to state subsidies for voluntary schools, speaking in the infant Northern Irish parliament. Well, they weren’t alone in this opinion. Daniel O’Connell, the great Liberator himself, in the nineteenth century was also convinced of the uselessness of Irish. It was, he believed, a hindrance to social progress and a millstone round the necks of those, mainly the rural poor, bogged down in its benightedness. The sooner it became extinct the better. If it had to survive, the best place for it was in the heads and hands of those with sufficient lesiure and money to cultivate it – i.e. the (mainly) Protestant middle and upper classes. It is by way of suchlike ironies, paradoxes and complexities that the fortunes of the Irish language may be traced.
As for native Irish-speakers themselves – socially they were the lowest of the low, despised as ignoramuses by those among their peers who’d mastered English and begun the upward scramble out of poverty and muck; or they were the last custodians of an ancient and endangered civilisation, and best approached as one might approach an unfathomable tribe discovered in the remotest corner of the earth. We may be certain that neither attitude was much to their liking.
If Catholic hyperbole is detectable in Cardinal MacRory and his ‘imperilled people’, it surfaces again in a comment made about MacRory’s successor as Bishop of Down and Connor, the Very Revd Daniel Mageean. Dr Mageean was praised in 1941 as a pastor ‘who has guided and defended the Catholics of Belfast through the fires of persecution’, which makes him sound like a Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela. In truth, the fires of persecution added up to a moderately low-key affair in Belfast during the 1930s. Catholics on the whole remained unreconciled to the system they were living under, and the system itself certainly didn’t have their interests at heart. Some cultivated subversion, and some went in for the kind of congregational freemasonry mentioned above. Most complained about the unionist regime from time to time. And the chronic debility of the body politic erupted occasionally in serious sectarian disturbances, like those of 1935.
But, for the most part, Catholics in the North got on with their lives like everyone else, aspiring to middle-class respectability if their origins were lower, consolidating whatever degree of comfort they’d attained. They bought summer outfits and other goods at enticing department stores like Robb’s and Robinson and Cleaver’s, and enjoyed the camaraderie of St Malachy’s Old Boys’ Club or the bustle of Campbell’s Café filled with shoppers and dripping umbrellas on a wet morning in December.
My sense of the atmosphere
in Belfast during those pre-war days comes partly from books, and partly from the recollections of people alive to its nuances, such as my mother. My mother, Nora Brady, was a student at Queen’s University, where – among other things – she received a grounding in Scholastic Philosophy under the tutelage of Father Arthur Ryan (later Monsignor Ryan), a course of study unavailable to non-Catholics. As Marianne Elliott remarks in her magisterial history The Catholics of Ulster, this course came into being ‘in response to a successful campaign to create separate Catholic teaching programmes in controversial subjects’ – in other words, as part of the Church’s endeavour to safeguard the faith of impressionable young Catholics exposed to the heady non-conformity of Queen’s. It was no big deal, however, though probably it contributed to the undergraduate predeliction for religiously-differentiated alliances (a predeliction more pronounced at that time, I think, than it was a generation later – at least in my experience as a student at the Belfast College of Art). Overt sectarian prejudice didn’t stand a chance in the (more-or-less) liberal ambience of Queen’s, c. 1936, where my lively-minded mother had the time of her life. She never suffered personally on account of her (temperate) Catholicism, though she was well aware of the disabilities Catholics in general had to contend with, and deplored the subjugation of ‘the nationalist people’ – Cardinal MacRory’s people – as much as anyone.
Asking For Trouble Page 5