Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Most people looking back, I am sure, ascribe an immutable quality to their childhood surroundings – of course, you’ve only to look around you in the present to see how these have been overtaken by change, mostly destructive change; but at the time it seems they never will change. They’ve acquired a permanent form, you believe, by a process of accretion which will surely stop with the coming-to-consciousness of the egotistical infant (yourself), whose apprehension of the way things are arranged coincides with the arrival at an absolute culmination of that small local world round about. So, the city I grew up in was immeasurably more dense and physically integrated than the Belfast of today with its eclectic configuration, its dismal refurbishments and eroded singularity.

  That old Belfast wrapped itself around you like the comforter specially procured for Baby Bunting in the nursery rhyme. It led you by the hand down its pungent entries and alleyways, along sedate three-storey red-brick terraces, up the sidestreets of Stranmillis and into la-di-dah Malone, through the fields at the back of the Falls Park where rough boys roamed with their dogs, past churches and flour mills and factories and primary schools, deeper and deeper into the throughother enchantments of Smithfield and the spirited byways of the Falls. It disclosed unexpected embellishments for you to savour: a pair of stone lions guarding the entrance to an ordinary house at the corner of St James’s Road; a small tin church halfway up the wild mountain loney; an intriguing effigy of an elephant presiding over a pub in Upper North Street. As an inhabitant of Belfast, you started out with a lot of affirmative possibilities which might lead you in one direction or another, as the city activated your conformist or dissenting tendencies. In certain circumstances, even its wrongs and infamy carried a romantic charge.

  And as for the Dominican Convent – well, although most of the lessons I learnt there are now, in Philip Larkin’s phrase, ‘a forgotten boredom’, the place afforded an outlet for the gregarious side of my nature. It was large and for ever astir and I had lots of friends; and something of interest was happening every day: a row in prospect over some misdemeanour, a glorious piece of gossip to recount, some unpredictable moment of elation. All the usual madcap enterprises. I rarely left the house with reluctance in the mornings, anticipating, rightly, some highlight of the day. ‘Fourteen-year-old, why do you giggle and dote?’ Stevie Smith wondered, before answering her own question: ‘I’m fourteen years old, that’s the reason.’ At fourteen, a teacher’s unbecoming hat was enough to set us off, and keep us entertained for days.

  Now, when middle-aged women come up to me at literary parties, full of the half-remembered events of forty years ago, my strongest reaction is to amplify or correct what they have to say. It seems to matter, God knows why, that they should get the facts right – not mislay or muddle any detail of that shady business in the past. Yes, I suppose it makes the episode more colourful to lumber us all with illegitimate pregnancies when we came home from the Gaeltacht – that is one persistent chimera which I’m obliged to contradict. In that respect at least, I wasn’t as headstrong as certain bygone members of my family, on both sides … And when Rathmore is cited, as it frequently is, as the school I attended during my final year: this produces in me an agitated response, since it misses the significance of that part of the affair. No, I have to keep insisting, no, it wasn’t Rathmore, it was a different school entirely; and that ties up with my brief perception of myself – to borrow Karl Miller’s motif in his engrossing memoir of his early days, Rebecca’s Vest – as ‘disastered me’. I wasn’t, I believed, a natural magnet for disasters, but suddenly they seemed to be proliferating; and one could only meet them in a spirit of humorous lugubriousness, if such a thing were at all attainable.

  As for Rannafast itself and what went on there: well, indeed, as I’ve said, that afforded enormous scope for speculation. And no, I find myself repeating obsessively, no, it wasn’t like that at all, that didn’t happen, this is what actually happened, this is the way it was.

  PART TWO: Monkey Business

  Even though it happened as long ago as the late fifties, I could

  still draw

  you a picture of the place …

  Paul Muldoon, ‘One Last Draw of the Pipe’

  The place, in my case, being Rannafast. The picture of Rannafast that’s stayed in my head is as decorative as a Carrickmacross counterpane and as distinctive as an Aran crios. It’s composed in sombre tones, the bitter-chocolate browns of turf bogs, greys of dry-stone walls and dark purplish blues of distant hills. It is patchy and jagged, all scanty sloping fields and rocky inlets and promontories jutting out as far as they can reach into the daunting Atlantic ocean. It seems to have withdrawn, or been cut off, from the rest of the world, and therefore has a timeless or fairy-tale quality about it. It is wonderfully dissociated from everyday banality. When I first set eyes on this radiant locality, I was close enough to my childhood reading to be put in mind of the storybook world of Patricia Lynch, with its bright white cabins on rugged hillsides, its unrepining adversities and heroic escapades. What follows is the story of some less-than-heroic, indeed inescapably everyday escapades, and the dire straits that resulted from them.

  The custom of packing pupils off to the Gaeltacht for a month in the summer has existed for many years, and has improved the spoken Irish, temporarily at any rate, of more than one generation. Irish colleges, bleak box-like buildings, are located in four or five centres in Donegal, with accommodation for pupils, at a reasonable charge, provided by all the willing families in the neighbourhood. The Gaeltacht houses are nearly all one-storey, white-washed and stone-floored, with black-leaded ranges for heat and cooking, and turf fires kept perpetually alight. Tithe na Rosann – the houses of the Rosses – were originally built in clumps of ten or twelve, but by the middle of the nineteenth century they had become more scattered. Thatched roofs were once, not so long ago, a feature of these districts, but most dwellings now are roofed with ordinary slate. They are sturdy houses, built to withstand fierce winds from the Atlantic.

  Every year, the influx of rampant teenagers from all over the province causes problems of discipline for those, priests and Christian Brothers and lay teachers, whose task it is to nip incipient sexual encounters in the bud. The billeting of pupils on the local families is organised on a gender basis. At times during the day when segregation isn’t possible, a sharp look-out is kept for signs of sexual attraction, excessive conversing, hand-holding and the like, between any two pupils: if detected, such signs will procure a scolding for those concerned.

  At the evening ceilidhes, which take place between eight and half-past ten, priests and teachers keep an eye open for couples dancing together more than twice. Those caught doing so are instructed, after the third dance, to find different partners. Since this regulation is not specified, newcomers often break it unknowingly, and are surprised to be reprimanded. In the eyes of priests, dancers singling one another out in this way are heading straight for an occasion of sin. Very zealous priests are known to walk the country roads after nightfall, armed with blackthorn sticks to rout out concupiscent couples from ditches or the back of turf-stacks, or wherever they’ve positioned themselves. It is not known if the priests are often successful in this manoeuvre. The boys and girls studying Irish in the Gaeltacht – according to rumour – always find ways of getting round such embargoes, to a greater or lesser degree.

  It is our first experience of the Gaeltacht. Of the Dominican pupils who’ve signed up for the course – ten or twelve in all – only two are my particular friends, Olivia and Colette (and especially Olivia). There are several others, though, belonging to our class, or our year, with whom we’re on friendly, if not intimate, terms. The convent’s senior Irish teacher, a Miss Boyle, has us all in her charge. We assemble at ten past eight in the morning at the Great Northern Railway terminus in Great Victoria Street, an excited group clutching oblong suitcases with padded handles, loaded up with shoulder bags and raincoats, ready to board the 8.25 train for Derry.
/>
  The train is not full. Olivia and I bag an empty carriage, and keep it to ourselves for most of the journey. There are movable armrests between the green upholstered seats, which we keep pulling up and down as we try out different postures for maximum comfort, and framed sepia photographs of Dunluce Castle and the Giant’s Causeway above our heads. We tear the wrappers from bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream and discuss our prospects for getting off with boys. Olivia is an animated redhead, an inch or two shorter than I am, with a droll manner and a keen sense of mischief. We are wearing our school blazers, maroon-coloured with a black-and-white emblem on the top left-hand pocket, over wide-skirted summer dresses made of gingham, or of some other kind of patterned cotton material. We are geared to the fullest extent to have an enjoyable time.

  A bus has been specially hired to take us on from Derry, along with others of our age-group bound for the Gaeltacht, and their teachers. A meal of sorts is consumed before we board the bus, chips in paper bags from a down-market café (the nuns of St Dominic’s would consider this to be letting down the side by acting in a common manner, but they aren’t there to object), and bottles of orange squash. A bee-line is afterwards made for the lavatories. Eventually we are all rounded up and shepherded on to the bus. Olivia and I get a seat at the back and sit there casting an eye over the strange girls and boys arranging themselves and their belongings for the three-hour journey with a lot of noise and hilarity. Only one person, as far as I can judge, looks at all right to fit the part of an object of infatuation: a young male teacher, harrassed by his responsibility for a crowd of unruly boys from a County Antrim school. I say as much to Olivia, who agrees that he’s not bad-looking. We lean back in our seats, gazing out at the passing fields and forests and villages.

  After an hour or so, the landscape begins to change. Less vegetation; hedges giving way to uncemented stone walls. Little steep fields strewn with boulders and yellow gorse. Occasional trickles of water running down to join the roadside ditches. The few trees are low, and bent in one direction. Then there are no trees at all; purple mountains suddenly spring into view; fields turn dark brown with turf. It’s like no countryside that I have ever seen. I can’t avoid the impression that we’ve entered a foreign country.

  As the bus gets closer to the coast some trick of atmospherics makes the landscape seem at once shimmery and distinct – all clear-cut edges, and changing colours as a mass of clouds behind a blue hill splits and shifts. Grass devoid of lushness, yellow, straw-coloured or olive green. White cottages standing out dramatically against dark fields and hills. The bus moves forward slowly along an uneven road. Behind stretches an interminable bog, conducive to agoraphobia. Black water, tufts of marsh grass, a trail of small white flowers … Bog cotton: ceannavan. Along a side-track a lorry is parked; turf-cutters lay down their spades to watch the bus go by. To the left, in the distance, rises a conical gothic peak, veins of quartz running downwards from its crystallised summit.

  One of the teachers on the bus claps his hands for silence. ‘Right, everybody. That’s it. Sin é – labhróimid i nGaeilge as seo amach.’ He’s telling us we have to speak in Irish from now on. Some of us look at one another in consternation. Of course we knew that English was forbidden among the holiday visitors to the Gaeltacht, but now that it has come to the bit … The babble on the bus resumes, in a garbled form. Fortunately, as long as the bulk of the sentence is in Irish, or what passes for Irish, we’re allowed to insert an English word in a pinch. A lot of very peculiar, half-baked, macaronic exchanges can be heard all over the Donegal coast during the holiday season.

  The college authorities are right, of course: if you’re forced to make the effort to start with, it soon becomes more or less natural. And since the acquisition of Irish is the official purpose of our visit, persistent English-speaking isn’t tolerated. Once or twice you may get away with, but after that you run the risk of expulsion, of being sent home in ignominy. Only dunderheads can’t at least pass themselves in a language they’ve been studying at school for years, and dunderheads aren’t supposed to be there in the first place. We are all senior pupils, fifth- and sixth-formers, and some of us even have the right to wear, on our lapels, a gold or silver fáinne, or ring – the emblem of an Irish-speaker of at least moderate proficiency.

  We’re nearly there. Just ahead, indicated by a lightening of the air, and a faint saltiness mixed with the smell of turf, lies the sea. We’ve reached the extreme edge of Ireland. Everywhere you look, you see grey rock jutting above the surface of the land. Stony and barren, Denis Donoghue called the place when he came with some fellow Newry schoolboys in the 1940s, all six foot six of him, to attend Coláiste Bhrighde, St Brigid’s College, outside which we’re deposited in our turn: a bit bedraggled from the journey, but in high spirits nevertheless. We have to sign a register and wait to be allocated to our lodgings. The first slight contretemps occurs when Olivia and I are put in different houses. It’s hard to explain in our untried Irish that we’d asked to be together, but we persist until the point is grasped. The rúnaí – secretary – a man called George McAdam, with a fraught look on his face and a pencil behind his ear, says he’ll see what he can do, but could we please go along with the arrangements as they are at present, until everyone gets settled. People are being sent off in groups of five or six, in various directions, and with local children to act as guides and carry the girls’ cases.

  Every house in the district is known by the name of its most prominent inhabitant. Teach Pheadair Bhig – Little Peter’s house – is the address given to Olivia and Colette, who turn left beyond St Brigid’s College, while I turn right, in a group that includes my classmate Angela Magill, a tall blonde girl not quite spirited enough for my taste but otherwise unexceptionable, and Maire Maguire from Form 5B – another redhead – about whom I know very little beyond the fact that she lives near St Peter’s Pro-Cathedral on the Falls Road in Belfast and has something of a reputation for bumptiousness. Teach Eddy Doyle is the house we’re heading for. The turf smoke which pervades the whole countryside is the most striking thing about the place so far – that and the rugged landscape, which already I find entrancing.

  The house is set back from the road, and halfway up a hillock. We trudge, in single file, up a mud track to the front door, where the bean a’ tí – woman of the house – is waiting to greet us. A lot of the welcoming expressions she uses pass right over our heads, but we grin and nod to indicate our satisfaction at being there. All the time I am wondering how quickly I can get transferred to the same lodgings as my best friend, Olivia McAloon – if she doesn’t join me first at Teach Eddy Doyle. Surely someone will be willing to swop!

  In the meantime, I deposit my belongings in the large back bedroom of the cottage where I’m to share a bed, provisionally, with Angela Magill. The room contains three double beds of brass and iron, with horsehair mattresses and rather unimpressive, 1930s or ’40s, crude patchwork quilts. (To find the indigenous red-and-white Irish chain or double Irish chain quilts in everyday use you’d have had to go back to the 1920s or beyond – and at sixteen I certainly didn’t have the knowledge, or the prescience, to look out for these and all the other country artefacts, the spongeware bowls and so forth, which came to activate my collector’s instinct so extremely from about the age of twenty-five on. In those early Rannafast days it was boys, first and foremost, that dominated all our thoughts – with schoolwork and exams some way behind.)

  As soon we are ready, we set off in a group of five or six to explore the countryside surrounding Teach Eddy Doyle. I am getting on rather friendlier terms with Angela Magill, and also discovering something of a rapport with Maire Maguire, whose irreverence and vivacity strike a chord with me. I think we may turn out to be kindred spirits. It strikes me how odd it is that I always get on with redheads. Turning towards the shore, the three of us cross-question a couple of new acquaintances about their school in County Tyrone or Fermanagh – I forget which – one of those country places which I regard
as the back of beyond: cattle in the streets, old-fashioned front parlours, that sort of thing. Such places, to my mind, lack the wildness and glamour of Donegal, which – so far – is living up to my expectations. I am revelling in the invigorating atmosphere. One of these countrified girls, Kathleen Shannon, is large and amiable and a bit slovenly in appearance. I like her. The other, Maureen Gearran or Garrity or something, is merely a mouse: mouse hair, a mousy cardigan, a self-effacing demeanour. Glasses to boot. At this stage in our lives, I and my friends are very intolerant of insignificance. We judge people on their looks (though fearfully insecure with regard to our own) but if these don’t come up to scratch, a decided talent or characteristic, a bright, engaging or amusing manner, makes an acceptable substitute. All of us take the utmost interest in one another’s doings and appearances.

  We haven’t gone far along the road before we spot Olivia and Colette coming excitedly towards us, waving their arms and breaking into a run. Olivia grabs me by the shoulders and twirls me round and round in the roadway. There are three lovely boys in their house, she announces jubilantly; wild horses won’t get her out of it. Sons of the family, all tall and handsome, though the house is Peadar Beag’s; Little Peadar has three big sons. I respond suitably to this information.