Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  It was, indeed, a place where it was easy to get into the grip of a grievance, and at moments it seemed as though everyone, everyone in the province was advocating some form of remedy for its discords. You had the nationalist remedy, the republican remedy, the reformist remedy, the conciliation remedy, the socialist remedy, the republican-labour remedy, the liberal-unionist remedy, the hard-line remedy, the Gaelic remedy, the priestly remedy, the cultural-nationalist remedy, the middle-of-the-road remedy, the atheist remedy, the anti-segregation remedy, the pro-segregation, or ghetto, remedy, the repatriation remedy, the Kilkenny cats remedy. In the face of all this, it’s possible to feel some sympathy with a body like Saor Uladh (Free Ulster) which once opted out of the whole business by proclaiming a republic in the centre of a County Tyrone village.

  However, it is probably true to say that the North, for all its unruliness, has never lacked a civilising spirit to interpose itself between competing prejudices. And this liberal spirit sometimes surfaces in unexpected places – I am thinking, for example, of the Irish-speaking club mentioned above, Cluan Ard, located in a street not far from St Dominic’s High School, on which my social life was centred between the ages of seventeen (the year after I was expelled from school) and twenty. This club enriched the lives of a good many people, not all of them Catholic, and fostered wrong-headed aggression in no one. Even though English was never spoken on the premises, it held fast to the anti-sectarianism of the republican tradition. (This unfortunately could not be kept up. By the 1970s, with the ‘Troubles’ raging, very few Protestants, however liberal-minded, would have dared to set foot in West Belfast.) Whatever fluency in Irish I once had, it was acquired in this spot, or in the Gaeltacht, not at school; and here, as well, I gained a smattering of insight into the erotic, or bawdy, element in Gaelic literature, and began to understand that Ireland’s literary heritage wasn’t confined to the pious unrealities of a novel like Mo Dhá Róisín (My Two Roses) or Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow. The eighteenth-century County Louth poet Cathal Buidhe Mac Giolla Gunna, for example, has quite a bit about the delights of seduction, even if in the end it all boils down to a heart-rending renunciation: ‘Acht anois, faraoir, tá mo shaolsa caite, / Is is miath liom stad agus léigean dóibh’ (‘Now, alas, my life is spent, / And I must stop and leave them to it.’).

  At the same time, at twenty or thereabouts, I was reading Brian Moore and relishing the cogency of his case against Belfast and against provincialism, including the provincialism of an Irish-speaking Ireland – not that I went along with it entirely, indeed, but it appealed to me at various levels. He made disgruntlement invigorating – the disgruntlement of someone whose birthplace is a backwater. Belfast, in the view of Brian Moore, does nothing for its citizens beyond stupefying and hamstringing them at every turn, lumbering them with deadly ideologies, dulling their perceptions and soaking them with its perpetual downpours. In the background to his writings of the 1950s and ’60s, though it isn’t singled out for special attention, is the unionist misrule which overshadowed all the other indigenous forms of oppression (church, economy or whatever). It’s a place, he implies, from which anyone in his proper senses will remove himself as soon as possible. ‘A dull, dead town’, he calls Belfast, in The Emperor of Ice-Cream. And Judith Hearne positively bristles with the stifling effects of suburban Catholicism.

  But it was the sexual failure – indeed the sexual shipwreck – of Diarmuid Devine in Moore’s The Feast of Lupercal that most strongly alerted me to the horrors attendant on a puritanical education. Poor Devine, after an episode of excruciating ineptness, bitterly envisages the words of penitance he will offer the priest in confession: ‘… do not worry about that sin, Father. Tried it once and didn’t like it.’

  Tried it once and didn’t like it. There’s a powerful indictment of Catholic puritanism for you. Moore’s point is that the school Devine went through, and to which he returned as a teacher, did for him in this important respect (‘It was a matter of ignorance, pure and simple.’). He has neither a natural talent nor the skill acquired through practice to see him right – and when, at thirty-seven, he takes a fancy to a silly young girl from Dublin and tries, very tentatively, to involve her in a sexual relationship, an appalling evening ensues.

  Moore has presented the schoolmaster Devine as a casualty of the Catholic education, a person in whom a natural modesty and primness interact with churchly inflexibility and the mood of the time (the book was published in 1958), to devastating effect. He is, indeed, an extreme case. Others, more pragmatic, would have sidestepped unacceptable embargoes, such as the embargo on ‘company-keeping’, or manoeuvred themselves into some kind of principled opposition to the religiose conditioning of the era. The years between fourteen and eighteen – say – are indeed a time when all kinds of passions are rampant, including the passion to purge society of its ills.

  When I edited The Oxford Book of Schooldays some years ago (yes, there’s a joke about my own educational experience) I called one section ‘At Odds with the System’ and into it I put the rebels, the dissenters, the social critics, the scoffers, the outsiders, the outraged – all those whose temperaments weren’t in step with the schooling they received. My own temperament – it is now clear to me – clashed with Catholicism, though I certainly hadn’t articulated any such unorthodoxy before the age of sixteen. I swallowed what I was told, and acted accordingly, going to Mass on Sundays, confession once a fortnight, and so on – though never in any spirit other than that of performing a chore. (Given the choice, I’d rather have tackled the back yard with scrubbing-brush and soap.) It was possibly a question of heredity: I didn’t have a religious temperament, neither of my parents had a religious temperament, I don’t think my grandmother had a religious temperament (though in her case it was harder to be sure, since the trappings of Catholicism, holy water, saints’ statues and so forth, meant more to her). A secular, academic school would have suited me down to the ground. But there I was, pitched by circumstances into a convent, and – as yet – only moderately receptive to intimations of oncoming scepticism.

  Of course I’d like to align myself with that intrepid group, those at odds with the system, but I fear I am not entitled to do so. I was one of the herd, never a leader or an innovator. I can’t claim to have suffered for my principles; principles were not conspicuous as a motivating factor among my classmates of Form 5A. Such defiance of authority as we engaged in tended to be somewhat underhand (inventing excuses for not having done your homework; passing notes in class). It would have been a different matter if I had repudiated the nuns of St Dominic’s and their restrictive ordinances, instead of sticking to their wretched code as far as I was able. I wish I had, but I lacked the gumption, or the insight, or the courage to be openly insubordinate. I was far from being an apostle for sexual liberation.

  Still, the majority of us weren’t as ignorant or inexperienced as Moore’s Mr Devine, in our seventeenth year; for some of us, sexual intercourse existed as an intoxicating prospect. What would it be like? Wonderful, we thought, having gained an inkling – the merest inkling – of what might be in store for us, with the help of the more knowing boys of St Mary’s or St Malachy’s, at the back of the City Cemetery, in the Falls Park, up an alleyway, in a garden shed, on the slopes of the Cave Hill or up against our own back gates. It was always, at the very least, a compelling topic.

  When I read a poem like Tony Harrison’s enticing ‘Allotments’ – imbued with a frisson of the wayward and demotic – I find it strikes so many chords that it’s hard to approach it in a proper spirit of detachment. ‘And young, we cuddled by the abbatoir, / Faffing with fastenings, never getting far … ’ Smoke, cobbles, brick, alluring darkness, industrial grime, frustrated lust … all that comes back with a full force of recollection.

  In Leeds, though, they weren’t inhibited into the bargain by a moral prohibition enforced so strongly that it nearly got absorbed into one’s system. The poem’s allusion to the River Aire,

&n
bsp; The cold canal that ran to Liverpool,

  Made hot trickles in the knickers cool

  As soon as flow …

  prompts me to reflect that it wasn’t a cold canal, but a cold doctrine of sin and damnation, that produced the same effect on us. It made us behave like prissy Sally Shannon, the bane of Gavin Burke in Moore’s The Emperor of Ice-Cream. ‘We can’t,’ she tells him, as he reaches for the waistband of her knickers. ‘It’s a mortal sin.’

  The phrase ‘It’s a mortal sin’ was uttered frequently, in those days. It’s true that for many girls, some of my own friends among them (the hormonally challenged), the embargo on fornication wasn’t especially irksome; for myself, at that age, it was manageable, as long as the sexual instinct had at least a partial outlet, and as long as I remained pretty confident that I wasn’t going to end up like Elizabeth North’s headmistress in the novel Dames, who only gained a vital bit of carnal knowledge in late middle age. ‘So that is an erection, thought Miss Bedford.’ Deferred fulfilment was all very well, but I didn’t want it to be deferred as long as all that.

  Ten years later, the authority of the Catholic church in Ireland was beginning to subside, even if Catholic attitudes didn’t necessarily follow suit. An inexorable flexibility was in the offing, meaning in practice that you’d be able to call yourself Catholic, while picking and choosing among the tenets of Church teaching. It was an advance on utter authoritarianism, I suppose, but it came too late to be of any benefit to me, since my natural atheism had asserted itself once and for all as soon as I got to London and the Central School of Art at the age of twenty. I don’t have any hankerings after a spiritual framework for my day-to-day activities. I’m also a bit bewildered by incomplete apostacy, believing, I suppose, that it makes more sense to be one thing or the other. But now the definitions have changed. You can be divorced and call yourself Catholic; you can be an unwed mother six times over and remain within the flock. Good heavens, you can be a Catholic bishop and go about fathering offspring if the fancy takes you. This is a newfangled Church. It is also a disintegrating Church, one that can’t afford to alienate any of its adherents, whatever ‘sins’ they come laden down with. Well, all along, this Church showed an instinct for expediency.

  I know the Catholic Church wasn’t all bad. I know it performed many useful, indeed indispensable, functions. It acted as a curb on would-be violence and hooliganism. It knocked obstreperousness out of some of those harbouring anti-social inclinations. It provided a badge of identity, a stake in the community, for people who needed some guiding system they could fit into, to make sense of their lives. But some of its behaviour was very bad indeed. For example – during the 1950s and ’60s, as I remember it, the onus on poor parishioners to subscribe to various Church Building Funds was completely over the top. The Church Building Fund and its needs were really dunned into us. One diabolical scheme to drum up money involved a solemnly touted bit of moonshine designated ‘The Golden Book’. A donation of £5 or more entitled you to have your name inscribed in this metaphysical ledger; and once you were in, your place in heaven was assured. If your name was not in the Golden Book, due to parsimony or carelessness, you had to take your chance, but payment of the entrance fee would guarantee salvation. So we were told, and it may have given some of us an idea of heaven as a vaunted football match or celebrity concert for which tickets were at a premium.

  On top of the cynical manipulation of the credulous suggested by this and other expedients for drumming up support, you have to consider into the bargain all this putative church building and what it entailed. What it entailed in many cases was the destruction of historic churches which distilled as much of a sense of the numinous as it was possible to attain; and what you got instead was a series of replacements in 1960s concrete-and-crassness. This may be read as a visible sign that the Church was relinquishing its role as custodian of anything at all in the way of spirituality.

  ‘Puritan Ireland’s dead and gone,’ wrote John Montague; but it didn’t go quickly enough to decontaminate our escapade. Indeed, it never died out completely; the puritan ethic is not a spent force even yet, though it’s no longer backed up by social usage or an unassailable religious system. It survives as a caste of mind, not necessarily an unattractive caste of mind. A puritan note is sounded in Tom Paulin’s ‘dream of grace and reason’, ‘the sweet equal republic’ that came to nothing. There are old Ulster churches, small, whitewashed, with polished pews, in which you can nearly see the point of puritanism, with its high regard for propriety, calm and order. And for plainness and sobriety, those Planter virtues which reached some kind of epitome in the poet John Hewitt, whom I used to visit in Belfast between the late 1970s and his death in 1987. His Ulster puritanism was carried with grace and vigour. There he sat, in his tweed armchair, looking upright and sturdy, with his pipe, his books and his strong liberal views, an old-fashioned latitudinarian secure in his humanism, while Belfast blew itself to pieces around him. Offered the Freedom of the City – or what was left of it – in eventual recognition of his importance as a poet, and as a conduit for civilising views, his comment was, ‘I thought I already had it.’

  Perhaps it’s only when puritanism is tied up with sexual prudery that it turns disabling.

  Unlike many people possessed by the urge to explore some aspect of their lives, or unfold a narrative to show themselves and their times in a particular light, I have very little to complain about. I didn’t undergo an unsatisfactory upbringing. I was not deprived, abused, accident-prone, made little of, precipitated into awful circumstances or forced to grow up too quickly (some might say I’ve never managed to grow up at all). Of course, like everyone’s, my childhood contained long stretches of boredom, doldrums interspersed with dolours. Sometimes a dreadful action was imposed on me, like having to appear as a flower in a silly school play. ‘It’ll all be the same in a hundred years,’ my mother would say encouragingly, to put the thing in perspective.

  I loved my wayward father and sometimes at night I couldn’t fall asleep until the sound of his key in the front door announced his safe return from wherever he’d been out on the spree; and I loved my sharp-tongued grandmother whose hard life hadn’t completely knocked out of her a capacity for fun. But the centre of my universe was my clever and affectionate mother, who ensured – among other things – that my infancy was enlivened by copious recitations of verses which she had by heart. Among these was one which I found particularly diverting. (I’ve never come across it in any other context.) It concerned a pair of namby-pamby mice: ‘Now Horace and Willy were stupid and silly, / And couldn’t say boo to a goose’; then there’s a bit about ‘tears’, ‘Which only made Daddy / Fly into a paddy / And give them a whacking, poor dears.’ The two mice muffs are sent away to be educated at Rat College (‘College’ engagingly rhymed with ‘knowledge’), where they do so badly that they are promptly returned to their doting parent with a letter of explanation. If he’d had them much longer, the headmaster tells her quite frankly, ‘… I’d have given them both to the CAT. / I remain, yours respectfully, Rat.’

  I am two, three at most, and already able to distinguish between ruthless humour, which is bracing, and some ruthless threat creeping out of the night, which is disturbing. There’s another story, in an old lesson book, about a wolf in sheep’s clothing slinking in the dark towards a flock of unwary lambs, which I don’t like at all. But my mother is always there to cushion me against upsets. It is also her role to adjust the dodgier bits of information I pick up at school. One day (I am five) I come home smugly repeating something I’ve just heard, about how it must be so awful to be a Protestant and banned from heaven, and how lucky we are that it doesn’t apply to us. ‘But your Grandma and Grandpa, your Aunt Charlotte, Auntie Ruby and all the rest of them are Protestants,’ she says, matter-of-factly. This gives me something to ponder.

  These relations, newly revealed as heathens according to my school theology, are my father’s family and live in a gate lodge once
attached to a grand house (now demolished) at the Malone Road end of Dunmurry Lane. It is very nearly right out in the country. My grandfather is a horse-trainer, riding instructor and head groom to a prominent local family. The defunct big house was called Lismoyne, and my grandparents’ gate lodge has kept the name. It dates back to 1845 or thereabouts, later than the house, and is possibly the work of the architect Thomas Jackson. For me, though, visiting the place on Sunday afternoons, travelling from Belfast with my spruced-up parents on the Hillhall bus, it is just an intriguing small house, full of odd corners and enticing nooks, a house in which something is always going on. It is crammed with flighty young aunts and ebullient uncles and all kinds of distant cousins; there are dogs and horses and pecking hens about the place; I go on walks with my Auntie Ruby and drag my feet, for pleasure, through piles of autumn leaves down the road along the demesne wall, or, at a different season, up the lane behind the house to gather armfuls of bluebells. My grandfather persuades me to perch on a Shetland pony, and a photograph exists to proclaim my lack of horsemanship as I turn towards the camera, beaming all over my face but clearly ill at ease and not displaying a natural rider’s posture.

  Lismoyne is a part of my life. Orange lilies grow in my grandmother’s garden (my Wexford grandmother, who never lost her southern accent), and a Union Jack is hung out on the Twelfth, but as yet I have no awareness of these emblems or what they signify. If I even register the fact that my mother’s mother and my father’s parents never meet – well, I’d have put it down to the fact that these are all old people for whom the journey between West and South Belfast would constitute an intolerable trek.