Protestant and Catholic. ‘Not men and women in an Irish street,’ William Allingham lamented, ‘but Catholics and Protestants you meet.’ And here I am, attached by upbringing and schooling to one of these sects, but with half my ancestry firmly located in the other. (More than half, actually, though I’m not yet aware of it.) As far as I know, no grand ideas of bridging the sectarian gap ever entered into my parents’ heads. They married in spite of their differences, not because of them. Indeed, what drew them together in the first place was and remained a mystery to many. It was not a meeting of minds. She was bookish and he was convivial. She was pragmatic and he was feckless. She soon assumed her role as financial manager and stabilising influence, while my father went his own merry way.
How did they even meet? Looking back on their first encounter, in old age, my father endowed it with something of the force of an epiphany. (My mother was no longer alive at the time and couldn’t confirm or deny his romantic recall, or attribute it to his recent, overwhelming bereavement.) The meeting between the two occurred early in the war, in 1940 or ’41, at a dance in a Catholic church hall, St John’s on the Falls Road. It seems that – for whatever reason – my father had already strayed into the Catholic world: the social, not the religious world (though he took on the religion as well, half-heartedly, to enable their subsequent marriage to take place within the church).
Arriving at the dance with a Catholic friend, a young barber’s assistant by the name of Owney Muldoon, my father spotted one particular attractive face among the crowds of hopeful young women assembled at the far side of the hall, and knew in that instant (he says) that he was looking at his future wife. (What her view of the occasion was I don’t know. Whenever anyone with typical Belfast impertinence asked her why she’d married him, she would say, jokingly, that he’d pestered her to the point where she had to give in for a bit of peace. He found this response hilarious.) They were married, then, at the same local church, and with the same Owney Muldoon as best man – not my father’s elder or his younger brother, with both of whom he remained on excellent terms for the whole of their lives. In fact, as far as I know, not one of the Craig family was present at that Catholic wartime ceremony: the gulf was deep between the two sects and they tended not to set foot in one another’s places of worship.
It’s possible that, by going against the grain of Protestant Ulster, my father was indulging in a gesture of rebellion. It is also possible that this gesture was totally subconscious. He was not someone who was given to analysing his motives. But, whatever shocks he inflicted on his family – or they on him – a good supply of natural affection continued to bind him strongly to his siblings and to his parents, both of them, although by all accounts my grandfather was a hard paterfamilias, especially as far as his sons were concerned. He may have applied a few of his horse-training tactics to their upbringing.
However much he upheld the cult of the firm hand and the steely temper, though, my grandfather William Henry Craig, born in County Leitrim in 1884, hadn’t always acted in accordance with these principles himself. Among the things remembered about him was a strong streak of juvenile wildness. According to family lore, he ran away from home at the age of fourteen, in defiance of his parents’ plans to get him a start in life as a railway clerk, and found employment for himself as a stable-boy at Finnebrogue near Downpatrick … But then it seems the entire Craig family of six brothers and sisters ran away as soon as they were able. A couple of them went as far as Australia. The cause was a stepmother who appears to have acted in accordance with the Snow White stereotype. The children’s real mother had died in 1891 at the age of thirty-six – and here the story takes an interesting turn. In every family tree there are people who stand out for one reason or another, and with me it’s my great-grandmothers on both sides, Ellen Jordan on my mother’s side (I’ll take a closer look at her later), and Mathilda Clara Maria Heller on my father’s.
Mathilda Clara Maria, born in Berlin in 1854, came to Ireland as a governess in the employ of the May family – one-time sovereigns of Belfast who gave their name to May Street, the street which contains the Presbyterian church specially built in 1829 for the Revd Henry Cooke … The nineteenth-century governess, from Lucy Snowe in Villette to Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam Henderson bravely taking on pupils at a finishing school in Hanover, is a common figure in literature, teaching being among the few resources of clever women with their way to make in the world. Thanks to these and other works of fiction, we know quite a lot about the courage it took to embark on a journey to a foreign country, at twenty or thereabouts, with no certainty of receiving kindness or considerate treatment at the end of it, just the prospect of grappling with a lot of potentially troublesome youngsters and trying to impose order and some linguistic know-how on them. And being in an anomalous position, embodying a status symbol for employers who required a Mademoiselle or a Fräulein about the place to underscore their affluence – not on their level, certainly, but not quite a servant either.
Well, every reader of Jane Eyre has the picture in their head: the physical discomforts, the slights and privations – and then at last the glorious reversal of fortune. Alas, in reality the governess was more likely to end up in the situation of my great-grandmother: pregnant by a fellow employee of the upper-crust family. In her case it was a handsome coachman of the Mays’, another William Craig – and he seems to have hesitated to do the right thing by the young German woman he’d got into trouble, since no marriage took place until after the birth of their first child Bertha Elizabeth. (This pattern of a hasty – though not quite hasty enough – and more or less enforced marriage seems to have been quite common in nineteenth-century Ireland, in both Catholic and Protestant circles.)
What Mathilda Clara’s family back in Berlin made of their daughter’s disgrace, or even if they considered the illegitimate birth in the light of a disgrace, one will never know. The Hellers were Lutherans and one would assume they were reasonably strict as far as church dogma was concerned. My great-grandmother was the fifth child and second-youngest daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm Heller, a potter, and his wife Maria Dorothea Bertha Vogel, and the family would have had a certain standing and cultural aspirations beyond those available to a rough Irish coachman (I’m guessing here). Did Mathilda Clara find the Irish mists and rain and poverty-stricken countryside oppressive and hanker after the civilities of Berlin? In whatever spare moments she could snatch for herself, she wrote down lines of German poetry that came into her head (and maybe composed a poem or two herself). One poem she transcribed in her notebook, in a beautiful Gothic script, was written by Karl Simrock in 1838. It presents a luminous account of the Rhine with its legendary perils:
To the Rhine, to the Rhine,
Don’t go to the Rhine,
My son, this I advise:
Life will seem wonderful there,
And you will dare too much!
You will see the maidens so free
And the men so brave,
As if they were nobility;
You will join them eagerly,
And it will seem good and right.
And when on board,
Castles will greet you,
And the city with the ancient church!
You will climb the heights of mountains
And look down to the stream!
And from the river below
The water fairy will rise,
And if you see her smile,
And if the Lorelei should sing,
My son, it will be your end.
You will be bewitched
By the sound and the vision,
You will be gripped by joy and fear.
And you will sing forever: To the Rhine, to the Rhine!
And never return home again.
‘Und kehrst nicht wieder nach Haus’: did she find that last line at all prophetic? As far as I know, she is buried somewhere in Ireland, probably in a Church of Ireland cemetery in County Leitrim … It is all irretrievably
in the past, and family lore is a highly unreliable guide. I don’t even know exactly where my great-grandparents made their home. But it’s certain that poetry was a consolation to Mathilda Clara, enabling her to keep a hold on her sanity in alien surroundings far from the Tiergarten or Magdeburger Platz and with more and more children to raise. Her early death in 1891 one would naturally attribute to a calamity of childbirth.
I can’t help seeing some parallels here with my parents’ marriage: I mean the situation, not its outcome. My mother didn’t have six children or die young. But here you have two clever women, readers, desperate for intellectual stimulus, married to men of a considerably less scholarly type. My mother, too, kept notebooks in which she transcribed the words of poems she was fond of, from early Yeats to Wilfred Owen. A modus vivendi more or less satisfactory to both of them, though, was hammered out between my parents (it wasn’t exactly helped by the presence of my maternal grandmother who always took her daughter’s part in any dispute) – and one would hope the same was true of Mathilda Clara and William Craig, in the few years of marriage allotted to them … One or two tantalising glimpses into their offsprings’ lives exist in a couple of letters from Uncle John in Sydney to his niece Hazel (my aunt) in the 1950s. ‘We all survived a lot and still a remarkable family,’ he says. ‘I am sure you heard your father tell the fireside stories many times.’ Alas, the fireside stories are no more recoverable now than Mathilda Clara’s state of mind on her wedding day, or the old Ard Scoil in Divis Street.
Uncle John, born in 1882, was the second child of Mathilda Clara and William Craig; next came my grandfather William Henry, then Charlotte Martha Jane (Aunt Charlotte), Frederick Arthur (Uncle Freddie) and Albert, who seems to have left no trace: possibly he died young. Aunt Charlotte, who married a man named Kennedy and lived on the wrong side of the Lisburn Road, in Great Northern Street near the railway line, has left a whiff of an odd impression of capability and vulnerability behind her. ‘… I am always worrying about poor Charlotte,’ says Uncle John in a letter to Hazel. ‘You keep a good eye on her as she has been a really great woman in her day. Big-hearted to everybody.’ And: ‘Have not heard from poor old Charlotte for a few months. I do trust she is well and her black cat.’
I do trust she is well and her black cat. Aunt Charlotte – unlike her stern brother William – possessed an engaging personality which endeared her to all. I can barely remember her, but I do remember a brisk, sedate and birdlike old lady, still with brown hair though she must have been seventy, bustling about and amiably involving herself in all manner of family goings-on. Old-fashioned. A dominant presence among the people of Lismoyne. She was my great-aunt, and – if I’d had the wit – I could have elicited from her the fireside stories, the German mother and the whole absconding family of Craigs …
As it was, the bulk of my elders only impinged on my consciousness as a kind of reassuring backdrop to my own prodigious, daily concerns – what mark I would get for my English composition, whether my friend Pauline Toal would accompany me to the Saturday afternoon matinee at the Broadway cinema. It could hardly have carried a charge of less significance, that world of school friends and adventure stories, admonishing nuns, the trees on the patch of waste ground behind St James’s Park, the dog Kim, the sight of my mother alighting from the Donegall Road bus as we watched for her, my grandmother and I, from the sitting-room window – but at seven or eight I was immersed in it to the hilt.
And, so far as my allegiance was directed towards any ideology, it was Catholic Ireland, Irish Ireland, the romance of disaffection and potent nationalist identity that exerted the strongest pull. It was the way I was being brought up, the influences that surrounded me. Sunday mass, Easter lilies, the Falls Road ambience, ‘All around my hat I wear the tri-coloured ribbon-o’ … in such circumstances, the Protestantism of my father’s family could only impress me as an anomaly.
My grandfather William Craig and his brothers and sisters would naturally have revered the mother lost to them so soon; and acknowledgement of the German element in their heritage came out with my grandparents in the naming of their children – Emily Charlotte Marie Heller (Marie), John Frederick (Ricky), Bertha Hazel – a practice not even curbed by the First World War (a war that adds further complications, for me, to a family tree already bearing unexpected twists and roots; it caused the death of my Catholic grandfather, not my Protestant grandfather of course, whose German blood would have kept him from enlisting).
The issue of nomenclature was among the things the Craig family might have held against my mother, but didn’t (as far as I know). Not content with making an out-and-out Papist of my father (as it would seem), she’d even gone on to tamper with his good ancestral name, the name his parents had chosen with such devotion and care. William Albert Thomas. Albert, the name by which he was known, had an unpleasant, almost a ludicrous ring in her ears, and before they had been going out together for more than a month or so she had rechristened him Andy, a name that’s stuck to him ever since, except with some recalcitrant relatives. It’s true that it suits him better, but it’s not what he was called, before Nora.
In spite of these and other dissonances, though, my mother became great friends with most of her in-laws, particularly those of her own generation – some of these friendships blossomed especially when my parents had moved out of what was undeniably a Catholic quarter of Belfast, and into the religiously undifferentiated territory of County Down. But I’m getting into the future here. Back in the 1950s, my mother and I were welcomed at Lismoyne and made much of, ushered into the narrowest living-room I have ever encountered, with the table set for high tea at one end, the horsehair chaise longue before the black-leaded range, and the spaniel Sha – an abbreviation of Charlotte – in a frenzy of tail-wagging. Our regular visits continued even after the death of my grandfather when I was nine or ten; but gradually I asserted a preference for allocating Sunday afternoons to some teenage pursuit of my own. Lismoyne, though, the hospitable gate lodge, remains embedded in my recollection as a place of wellbeing and charm.
A Protestant, then, was never as alien to me as a Muslim; my experience to that extent didn’t parallel Denis Donoghue’s. Indeed, his remark to that effect made me jump when I read it. It occurs in his memoir, Warrenpoint: a mostly engaging, occasionally exasperating and wholly idiosyncratic account of an unrefractory boyhood in that County Down resort. What does he mean by it? As a boy growing up in an RUC barracks where his father was a sergeant, he must have been in daily contact with Protestants – but perhaps it’s a Protestant particularity of outlook he has in mind. Whatever it is, it’s an alarming admission. Clearly, for Ulster Catholics, there were degrees of circumscription.
‘I could never understand,’ Donoghue writes, ‘how William Empson, a critic I revere, could hate Christians and especially Catholics, thinking their religion nothing but a sordid cult of blood and sacrifice.’ I can’t understand how Denis Donoghue, a critic I revere, could have submitted so readily to the Catholicism of his upbringing, using his tremendous intellectual powers to rationalise the tenets of the Church, rather than employing a more undermining strategy …
For myself, I always preferred the spirited to the spiritual, protesters to accepters, intrigue to indifference. I relished the sense of things going on – though not, I think, to the point of upholding disruption. A tiny incident from the late 1960s illustrates that avowal. It was the time when civic disturbance was just beginning to get off the ground – or on to the ground – and I remember the affront I felt when an acquaintance described to me how she’d recently enjoyed a good night’s rioting. A crowd of them, she went on, returned to the same trouble-spot on the following evening, and were terribly disappointed when a similar outbreak failed to occur. Of the first occasion, when a policeman hit her over the head with a baton, she remarked that she had never enjoyed anything so much in her life.
I think of Caroline Blackwood’s jaded question in her ‘Memories of Ulster’. Can there be, sh
e wonders, ‘a boredom so powerful that it finally acts like an explosive?’ If there is, indeed, it’s not a sound basis for political action – though it makes a vivid impression: all the wrongs and repressions and afflictions of Ulster simmering away for a couple of centuries and finally reaching bursting point. The Blackwood essay enumerates a few of Northern Ireland’s ills – bigotry, inertia, ‘an industrialised provinciality’, a philistine mentality and so on. It harks back to MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’, with its
the voodoo of the Orange bands,
Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster,
Flailing the limbo lands –
The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn.
And one read black where the other read white, his hope
The other man’s damnation:
Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope …
and forward to Derek Mahon’s ‘Pale light of that provincial town … [punishing] nature in the name of God’, while obliquely endorsing Brian Moore’s critique.
These authors are all forceful commentators on a very flawed society, homing straight in on the causes of disaffection, and turning them, in their writings, to richness and stimulation. If it’s tackled with sufficient energy, the whole bad business of Northern Ireland’s awful heritage can gain an effect of piquancy rather than desolation. All these writers, though, approach the topic from a point of view of dislike, or at best ambivalence; they’re not enamoured of the place.
I have to record that I never hated Belfast, never hated the North, never even hated the school that so readily washed its hands of me. On the contrary, I enjoyed the sense – however illusory – of living in a more interesting, more diverse, more complex society than anything available to an English contemporary, an inhabitant – say – of boring Slough or Crawley (I had no knowledge of these places, but they sounded pretty dull). The look of Belfast, even my part of Belfast, didn’t have a lowering effect on me. I couldn’t get enough of rain, back streets, waste ground, the back ends of laundries and cinemas, bleak playgrounds with bonneted toddlers going round and round on wooden carousels.
Asking For Trouble Page 8