Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  She was also in thrall to the nationalist version of history with its torments and triumphs (respectively inflicted by the English and achieved by the invincible Irish), though this didn’t preclude an enthusiasm for everything to do with the First World War, and in particular its poetry – her father, whom she never knew, having died in that war. But, for the moment, tremendously exhilarated at having got to Queen’s against the odds, she concentrated on enjoying as many undergraduate activities as she could handle. These included travelling on the train to Bangor with her friend Celia Lenaghan and heading for a prominent street corner where the two of them would stand flogging copies of the student magazine PTQ (Pro Tanto Quid, after the city motto of Belfast). This magazine was famous for the innocence of its dirty jokes – or the dirtiness of its innocent jokes, whichever way round you preferred – jokes along the lines of ‘If I told you that I admired your bosom, would you hold it against me?’ These ex-convent girls liked to be mildly shocked, as long as the shock didn’t arise from anything seriously objectionable, such as blasphemy.

  My mother at the time lived with her mother and sisters in a terrace house off the Stranmillis Road, from which she’d set out every morning, jaunty though myopic (and far too vain to wear her glasses), to walk the short distance down to Queen’s and the day’s lectures, past exclusive Friars’ Bush Cemetery, once a magnet for grave-robbers, the new Ulster Museum and the delightful small gate lodge at the entrance to the Botanic Gardens, which always made her think of Hansel and Gretel.

  English and History were her principal subjects, and she was and remained under the spell of these compelling pursuits for the rest of her life. She had her Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, her Bradley’s Shakespearian Tragedy, and copious notes taken down from Professor Savory to bolster her against inevitable ill hap. She was a scholarship girl, duty-bound to do well. Her anxiety to please, though, was tempered by a good-humoured, quizzical wilfulness which might have landed her in the soup with her tutors if the course she was taking hadn’t proved to her liking. There were bits of it, indeed, such as maths, which represented an obstacle for her. But English and History, always a pleasure and never a grind, saw her through. These things really mattered to her: the Romantic Poets, the English Civil War, and the escape of Red Hugh O’Donnell from the English stronghold of Dublin Castle on a snowy night in 1591.

  Selectively studious, she was nevertheless disposed to gaiety and enjoyed being voted the best-dressed girl at Queen’s in 1937 (quite an achievement for someone with absolutely no money to spend on clothes). She relished the attentions of male fellow students, some of whom spent a large part of the summer break theatrically pining for her, and expressing their desolation in breezy, flirtatious letters, letters beginning ‘Nora, my dove’. (It was around this time that Nora’s paternal grandmother died and left her and her sisters five pounds each. She and her closest sister, Kathleen, blued this windfall on a week’s blissful holiday in Rannafast, where they inhaled the ethnically and ethically pure air of the Gaeltacht and grew familiar with its salient features.)

  My mother’s educational luck had begun when she was twelve or thirteen, and the nuns of her primary school in Lurgan had recommended her for a scholarship to a recently rehoused Sisters of Mercy convent, Our Lady’s Secondary School, which quickly became known as Mount St Michael’s, after its new setting. It was located within walking distance of hilly North Street, Lurgan, where Nora lived at the time: you went down the hill, up an incline, over a railway crossing, round a bend, and there in front of you was the convent perched on top of its own hill, a grand Victorian mansion known as Irishtown Hill House in earlier days, surrounded by trees, firs, pines and beech trees, and complete with gardens, tennis courts and hockey pitch, for all the world like something out of Septima, Schoolgirl. From its upper windows you could see Lough Neagh, with the occasional fisherman’s boat or a tug guiding lighters to the Rivers Bann and Blackwater, and far away the mountains of Tyrone and Antrim contributing a suggestion of wildness – but only a distant wildness – to the scene. No mere school of fiction could hold a candle to Mount St Michael’s, my mother thought; to be a pupil here was the summit of happiness, and a near-miracle in her case, in those days of deprivation and social stratifying. She was the youngest of five daughters of a strong-minded war widow who fully supported her brightest child’s claims to be educated; but it wasn’t easy, even with the scholarship.

  There was no snobbery at St Michael’s, yet Nora dreaded kneeling down for prayers and exposing the soles of her shoes to public scrutiny. This was because there was no money in the house to pay for mending: if a hole appeared, it just got bigger and bigger and you had to go on wearing the shoe regardless, until the sole fell off. To show herself in this condition was a torment for a sensitive girl with a horror of slovenliness. But the shame she felt was all in her head: no one ever taxed her with being ill-bred on account of her shocking footwear. (Money was very scarce, but she nevertheless managed to scrape up 4d a week to buy the Magnet and the Gem, essential items of juvenile reading, and had founded her own ‘Famous Five’ at school, in honour of Frank Richards’s Greyfriars characters.)

  In the novel Call My Brother Back by Michael McLaverty the hero’s education at St Malachy’s College is sponsored by a priest who has spotted the boy’s intellectual gifts. This is fine – but then a moment arrives at the end of Colm MacNeill’s first term when bills for the school fees are about to be handed out. The diffident fourteen-year-old is overcome by trepidation at the prospect of being conspicuously omitted from this ritual. When he receives an envelope along with everyone else, it’s a relief at first, but then he is terrified that some awful mistake has been made, and an unpayable demand issued to his mother. In fact, inside the envelope is a slip of paper saying ‘Father So-and-So’s pupil’. Exactly the same thing happened to Nora at Mount St Michael’s. She was only aware of one other girl at the school in a similar position to herself, and both of them, like the McLaverty protagonist, were included in the bill-distributing at the end of term to spare them embarrassment in front of their friends. The slip of paper inside the envelope addressed to Nora’s mother bore the reassuring words ‘No charge’.

  It’s hard for me to reconcile this solicitude for their pupils’ peace-of-mind (I am taking the McLaverty account to be a true one) with the attitudes of those in religious orders known personally to me. My nuns would have been more likely to taunt a pupil for coming from a less than socially desirable area of the town, such as the Pound, Ballymurphy or Rodney Parade. During my first year at St Dominic’s, one twelve-year-old, the oldest in a family of nine from the Lower Falls, was found crying in the cloakroom because a nun, in front of the class, had commented sneeringly on the less than pristine condition of her white Viyella blouse. (Such were the trivial barbs often directed at us.) This, mark you, was during the supposedly more democratic 1950s, when almost everyone was a scholarship pupil and the few exceptions, those whose fees were shouldered by their parents rather than the state, were looked down on, on account of their supposed intellectual incapacity. There was no winning with these nuns unless you had average brains, were exceptionally docile and could boast a rich, turf-accountant or solicitor father. (I am talking about the general run of things: exceptions here would be the odd girl taken under the wing of a particular nun and encouraged in whatever aspirations she might have. But this was rare.)

  My mother rejoiced in her schooling and fitted in with her teachers’ expectations in a way that I did not. She became a prized past pupil who’d conformed to an unspoken school code and ended by reflecting credit on the place, getting her graduation photo into the first issue of the school magazine, the Michaelonian, in 1938, and contributing to the same issue an appreciation of ‘The School on the Hill’ – an establishment which, she claimed, ‘… had grown into one of the finest Convent Secondary and Boarding Schools in a country famous all over the world for the excellence of the education and training imparted by its Religious Orders to
the young’. Whew! Despite the punctiliousness of that assertion, however, I don’t believe that my mother was inherently more tractable than I was, or any more committed to academic success. (Though she had, indeed, a lot of gratitude to express, and this was one way of expressing it.)

  But between her schooldays and mine some vast changes seemed to have come about, social and psychological and in the reciprocal commerce of activity between church and community. At the same time, superficially, things went on in much the same way: Sunday church-going and other rituals were conscientiously observed, education continued in the hands of the clergy, sexual morality was still firmly in place. We were not aware of a general change in outlook, either present or impending; or if we were, it was only at a subliminal level. But something, other than my own incorrigibility (I think), brought about an extreme divergence in our respective school careers, my mother’s and mine.

  Of course it was a different world back there in County Armagh in the late 1920s, slower and steadier and a lot more sedate (or so we like to think). You were not exposed to unsettling furores via magazines, cinema and television, and altogether fewer channels existed to put ideas in your head. The concept of self-expression had not reached Lurgan. In Catholic circles at any rate, its opposite, self-suppression, was fostered in accordance with Church teaching. In practice, this could not work, or could work only partially, but it was kept to the fore as an idea, and incessantly enjoined on those in subordinate positions, such as schoolchildren.

  You were supposed to put others before yourself, and to curb the instinct to go all out to achieve your own ends. If you happened to be exceptionally talented in any area, the credit for this was due to God in the first place, not yourself; and your gift, whatever it was, was meant to be employed in the service of the school, not the individual. This was not peculiar to the Catholic education, of course; as a ploy to quash self-conceit it was axiomatic, a defining feature (in its ‘team spirit’ version) of innumerable girls’ and boys’ school stories, though generally without overt reference to God. And it was all very well, most sensible children would have thought, though not especially to be applied to themselves. Still, the habit of obedience would have caused them to pay attention to this and other recipes for achieving a state of grace.

  It was perfectly possible, even for an intelligent pupil like my mother, to regard nuns and their way of life uncritically – even to admire them for their piety and unworldliness. Convents, nuns, priests, the Mass, indeed everything to do with Catholicism, were part of the social fabric of that time and utterly taken for granted. They didn’t stick out like a top hat at a football match. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that convent life began to acquire an increasingly anomalous relation to ordinary life, and even then the winding-up of nunnish sequestration was a long-drawn-out process, and tied up with the secularisation of society as a whole.

  Eventually, the idea of a religious vocation for Catholic women seemed so mad and outlandish that it has virtually ceased to exist (in the last decade or so).

  But it wasn’t like that in the past, not for my generation and certainly not for my mother’s generation. And Nora in particular accepted the package of nuns and education without the smallest dissenting qualm. She was a Michaelonian, a hilltop girl; it wasn’t in her to jeopardise that status. For her it was the school that distilled a magnetising glamour, not the wider world which contained such things as unemployment or lowly employment, scruffy corner shops, back-yard toilets, overcrowding, wet pavements and front doors opening straight on to the street.

  The nearest my mother came to my Rannafast experience (without coming to grief) was a joyous occasion when she and four or five of her classmates (the brainiest girls in the school) were sent up to a convent at Ballycastle, on the north coast (The School on the Cliff), during the summer term, in order to sit some examination or other. They all failed the examination, but no one minded this very much; it wasn’t important. This was a hiatus in ordinary school life: what was important was to make the most of the beach, the sea bathing, the country lanes, the girlish high jinks, the fizzy lemonade, the proximity of someone’s male cousins who happened to live nearby. And they did make the most of all these delights. There are snapshots to prove it, showing my gamine mother looking pensive and self-possessed. Out of school hours, the girls loll about, picnicking under dry-stone walls and briar hedges, or stand on rocks accompanied by grinning schoolboys. They are out of sight of the Convent and free, for the moment, to gad about to their hearts’ content, in their silky flapper tops loosely belted around the waist, and flowing skirts à la Jeanette McDonald. What larks!

  Cardinal MacRory’s successor, Dr Mageean, was Bishop of Down and Connor between 1929 and 1962. Dr Mageean presided over my schooldays as well as my mother’s, setting the tone for Catholic life in the North during the long years of his reign. Catholics had to dance – if at all – to the tune of Dr Mageean, which boomed out as dreary and solemn as he could make it. He spent a lot of time ensuring that Catholic schools would not be contaminated by the smallest measure of ‘Protestant’ liberalism. No ‘Inst’ inclusiveness for him. There’s an Ulster-Scots word ‘jeuk’ or ‘juke’, meaning to dodge or evade: to have any kind of a jolly time during those years you had to jeuk Dr Mageean’s prescriptions for piety, such as shunning ‘Protestant’ entertainments and immersing yourself in the Rosary Crusade.

  His doctrinaire assertions didn’t stop with Church affairs. During the mid-1950s, as a young teenager, I held Dr Mageean personally responsible for the meagreness of my wardrobe and the cobbled-together nature of our summer holidays (a week here or there, usually with relatives in Coventry, Essex or Dublin). We had no money to spend on luxuries because of the ban imposed by Dr Mageean on married women teachers, who were ousted from their posts the minute they left the church and had picked the confetti out of their hair. Henceforth their skills, whatever they were, would be devoted to household management and the rearing of children. They were expected to stay put. ‘Somehow a girl was meant for one spot,’ says a character in one of Michael McLaverty’s later, inferior, works of fiction. ‘When she starts the roaming she’s like a dog that goes after sheep – never contented.’ Well! This striking pronouncement indicates the persistence of antiquated attitudes in the Catholic north of Ireland, while the rest of the world was moving on.

  And indeed, there was no jeuking the Bishop’s edict. So my mother, with one child – me – and her mother on the spot to act as willing baby-minder, was stuck restlessly at home until wartime marshalling of resources got her into the Censorship Office at Stormont. Post-war, it was back to the Donegall Road to sit looking out at the plane trees in St James’s Avenue, or reading – and rereading – the works of Graham Greene. This state of affairs went on until 1956 or ’7, when the pressures of modern life, not to mention the shortage of teachers as a vast new school-building programme got under way, caused the Bishop’s ban to pass into history.

  A few years later, it looked as though other malpractices, sectarian malpractices, might also pass into history, as voices of reason began to make themselves heard and egalitarian possibilities were bandied about. It was the mid-1960s, with its sense of new beginnings. Such a feeling of exhilaration hadn’t flourished so strongly in the North since the last decade of the eighteenth century and the United Irish movement – about which Tom Paulin lamented, ‘Hardly a classroom remembers / Their obstinate rebellion.’ Alas, the twentieth-century revival of that democratic spirit wasn’t destined, any more than that of the Lagan Jacobins, to come to fruition. Equally, it came up against intransigence, in the form of an awful atavistic figure popping up like an evangelical Jack-in-the-Box to rant about the Pope of Rome and the threat to Ulster’s Protestantism, and causing sectarianism to be reignited.

  One shocking image from those years is the Burntollet marchers, those remaining on their feet after an ambush by loyalists in the Ulster countryside had left half their number unconscious, clutching their heads whe
re batons had landed or streaming with blood, staggering on towards Derry in support of civil rights. Few at that moment could have failed to regard these people as heroes. They had looked at the society they inhabited, disliked what they saw, and tried to take some action to promote long-overdue reforms. The attack on them simply demonstrated to the world at large the justice of their position. But what was their position? As you find with almost everything to do with Ireland and its enormities, tangles and complications quickly enter in.

  A book like Bob Purdie’s sterling study of the Civil Rights movement, for example (Politics in the Streets, 1990), goes a considerable way towards indicating what the social reformer was up against. In the first place, the movement was never homogenous, but consisted of many small groups and sub-groups, all with slightly differing biases and objectives. They all, indeed, promised a better deal for those in the North enduring social disabilities; but some just wanted to knock humanity and a sense of justice into the existing state, while others were holding out for an entirely new system – Irish republicanism, socialism, Marxism or whatever. If some issues – principally, the issue of discrimination – caused sufficient outrage to bring them all, briefly, under the Civil Rights banner, there were still too many factions involved for anything approaching unity to be sustained. Looked at closely, the NICRA dissolves into the CSJ, CDU, NILP, CPNI, PD, NCCL, NDG, NDP, DCAC, RLP, RSSF … the abounding acronyms tell their own tale. It wasn’t a pattern peculiar to the decade; ever since the establishment of the Northern Irish state in 1921, opposition to unionism had been marshalled under a whole spectrum of headings, from Catholic nationalism to communism.