You cannot persuade me it’s a crime
If they make love while they still have time,
But you who for learning have no rival,
Tell us the teachings of the Bible;
Where are we taught to pervert our senses
And make our natural needs offences?
This bygone Gaelic outcry had a lot of relevance, but very little currency, in the Ireland of the mid-twentieth century.
I have in front of me a picture postcard showing the road in front of Coláiste Bhrighde, c. 1955, complete with groups of sedate looking girls wearing knee-length cotton dresses, neat school blazers and ankle socks; aside from a certain period charm which attaches to the image, willy-nilly, these fifth- and sixth-formers look infinitely biddable and sensible, with never a hint of caprice or unruliness to ginger up the scene. So might we Dominican pupils have looked, I suppose, a few years later, to any chance photographer who happened along that stony road; strolling in twos and threes towards the Post Office or Sharkey’s shop, affecting the utmost indifference to any boys who passed us but inwardly seething at the prospect of coming face to face with some particular object of attraction.
Wednesday evening. After class at the college, and tea at the Doyles’, we set to work on our faces with Woolworth’s powder and lipstick, and sort out what we hope are our most becoming dresses, in preparation for the opening ceilidhe of the season, which, as ever, is due to take place in the central classroom at Coláiste Bhrighde: a spot on which, around eight o’clock, the entire population of Rannafast, both permanent and temporary, seems to be converging. There’s a tendency, at this stage, for boys and girls from the various houses to go about in separate clumps. Clearly, a lot of adolescent awkwardness is going to have to be overcome before a proper mingling is achieved; and in the meantime, being embosomed in a group bolsters up one’s confidence. Some of us, it’s true – myself and Olivia, for example – have already decided to disparage the whole flannel-trousered ungainly crew of schoolboys attending the college (boys whom we’d have been happy enough to be associated with at home). It’s only the muintir na háite, the people of the place, as far as we are concerned, who are endowed with adequate allure.
Why is this? They are rough wild country boys for the most part, turf-cutters in summer, migrant workers at other times of the year; not student material, not our type at all. Yet we latch on to them instantly. I suppose it is partly that the sudden freedom, the escape from family pressures, has gone to our heads a little; we’re experimenting in waywardness, trying out certain postures, estimating how far we can go. The muintir na háite, with their boldness and rumpus, suggest anarchic possibilities to which we respond with an equal measure of attraction and alarm. I am perfectly well aware that I will try to get out of any sticky situations in which I find myself – that a point will be reached at which timidity, prudence, social conformity or whatever will come on strong. Yet my entire being is geared towards inducing just such a sticky situation.
This first ceilidhe is a tremendous success, from my point of view. It is almost the high spot of the holiday. I am amazed at how well things go. Even my terrible dancing, my inability to master the basic dance steps, the sevens and threes which present no difficulty to anyone else, doesn’t bother me unduly on this occasion. I shuffle through the complicated sets of ‘The Sweets of May’ and ‘The Haymakers’ Jig’ – bandaged toe and all – in a state of exhilaration. Since that heightened evening at Coláiste Bhrighde, all that time ago, I’ve experienced a comparable feeling, I suppose, no more than seven or eight times. You catch someone’s eye across a crowded room – say – and instantly you are flooded with intense expectancy and wellbeing. It leaves you bubbling over with jubilation – and never mind if the reaction, the downside, is certain to be equally overpowering.
Picture us then, dolled up and strung up, in that makeshift dance hall on the very verge of nowhere – just as Irish, but otherwise bearing no resemblance at all to William Trevor’s desperate Ballroom of Romance – picture us revelling in the hullabaloo, the hearty fiddles and accordions, the talk in Irish, only half understood, the whoops and foot-stampings and other flourishes of the native population; and evading, as far as possible, the watchful eyes of priests. Most of the boys I dance with are schoolboys, starting with sixteen-year-old John Reid from Omagh who later develops a friendship with Angela Magill; but there comes a moment – a truly stirring moment – when I am singled out by the newly arrived Maghnas Bell, who marches straight across the room to where I am sitting, with arm outstretched to draw me on to the dance floor. He doesn’t even need to ask if I will dance with him. Well, why should he? I am sure a besotted expression is fixed on my face.
We have that dance together, and the next one; and then he explains to me the rule about varying one’s partners. (It’s a wonder the local boys are allowed to attend the college dances at all; I suppose it would look like an abuse of hospitality, a slight on the people of Rannafast, to try to exclude them.) I must have looked at him in some bewilderment. ‘Cad chuighe?’ I ask: ‘Why?’ But it’s too complicated to grasp in Irish. What I do grasp is that he’s suggesting a jaunt in a car on our next free afternoon, with himself and his cousin, whose name is Dinny or Danny or something of that sort; and do I have a compliant friend, he asks, someone who won’t object to a bit of rule-breaking? I nod at once, thinking of Olivia. They’ll pick us up, he says, along the road by the turning towards Annaghry, at two o’clock.
I rejoin my friends in something of a daze. Another dance is announced, and this time my partner – by another miracle, it seems to me – is our teacher Martin Henderson, the second most attractive man at present in the townland, in my opinion. (It’s only much later, when I’ve acquired a better understanding of the Irish college rules, that I wonder if he hasn’t been dispatched by Father So-and-So to get me out of the clutches of a predatory native speaker. The priests notice everything: they have their work cut out to quell any impulse towards impropriety and don’t scruple as to how they go about it.) To entertain my friends, following these attentions from heart-throbs, I mime a state of idiotic bliss; but it isn’t too far from what I’m actually feeling. I am filled to the brim with exaltation.
Around two in the morning we are wakened by a series of knocks, some scuffling and a sort of muted commotion going on outside our bedroom window. I make a move to investigate, but Angela Magill, with whom I’m sleeping, catches hold of my blue cotton nightdress, at the same time threatening to hit me over the head with my own torch if I put a toe outside the bed. In a cross whisper, she enjoins on me a titter of wit. Do I want to be sent home before I’ve been five minutes in the Gaeltacht? It’s a group of local boys, we know, doing the rounds of likely houses; looking to winkle out those among us who aren’t averse to a spot of naughtiness in the night. ‘All right, all right,’ I mutter, half asleep. The noise outside recedes, then dies away. I’d have been interested to see who was there, but I haven’t yet quite got the hang of this form of bad behaviour. That comes later. In the meantime, I am filled with buoyant anticipation for the promised excursion with the Bells.
The days go by and an unaccustomed heat wave settles over the Gaeltacht. Sleeveless, full-skirted frocks are sorted out, a lot of puffing and blowing is indulged in and sales of ice-cream soar. The incomparable beaches stretch pearly-white and inviting. This is one kind of absolute weather. The countryside, which is most like itself in rain and desolation, has turned as colourful and decorative as a Paul Henry painting. Everyone makes jokes about the Riviera. Copies of the republican newspaper, the United Irishman, come in handy to fan our sweating brows. Some of my free time I spend lying in marram grass among the sand dunes – well, the weather encourages it – or just behind some convenient turf stack or furze bush, in the arms of Maghnas Pheadair Bhig or some other sexual opportunist (but never Martin Henderson – well, he is a teacher, after all, not on our level; and besides, I learn from one of his pupils at Garron Tower that he’s engaged to
be married). I’m not alone in this try-out wantonness. If you know where to look you will find the whole countryside dotted with cross-purposed couples: one insisting, the other resisting (to varying degrees). We are definitely ignorant girls from school, the whole lot of us.
The prearranged car trip for our first half holiday duly takes place, and occasions a lot of surreptitiousness and hilarity. For example, it is necessary for the two of us, myself and Olivia, to scramble down below window level every five minutes or so. Any passing vehicle might contain a teacher from the college, and for us to be spotted would mean the end of our holiday. In fact a college priest, a Father O’Friel, does pass us at one point in a car travelling back towards Rannafast; we are out of sight, as it happens, hunkered down on the floor and jammed up against the boys’ legs, but the incident rams home the need for caution. What doesn’t cross our minds is the thought that, observed in that peculiar position, we’d have been convicted of sexual practices we had never even heard of.
It’s an unclouded afternoon. The Rannafast cousins drive us into Dungloe – in Irish An Clochan Liath, The Grey Stone – where we risk getting out of the car to stretch our legs, allow ourselves to be treated to an ice or two at a dingy café in the town’s main street, and listen to the Slim Whitman recording of ‘Danny Boy’ on a juke-box. It’s an elating business, breaking the rules and getting away with it – let alone being escorted by boys whom half our friends would give their eye-teeth to be seen with. (We don’t yet understand, or at least I don’t, that that is a fairly easy outcome for anyone at least half-way presentable to bring about. ‘Chasing the daft holiday bitches’, in the poet James Simmons’s phrase: that’s what Maghnas and the others are up to, and I don’t think it makes much difference to them which one of us they end up with. The more compliant, the better; that’s all.)
On the way back we stop again, this time to visit a chapel – on whose suggestion I can’t remember. The occasion, anyhow, enables me to inscribe a priggish remark in my schoolgirl diary some months later – something to the effect that, knowing these boys as I do now, I wonder at their effrontery in presenting themselves before a tabernacle (this is the kind of self-righteous character I’m cultivating at the time). I suppose, on that August afternoon in a corner of the Rosses, we must have dipped our fingers in the holy-water font before making the sign of the cross – even gone down on our knees in the holy hush inside and muttered a prayer or two. Who exactly is trying to impress whom? Envisaging the scene, I can only dub us an anomalous bunch of worshippers – the two youths sexually on the make, the future apologist for political expediency and the embryo apostate.
The daft holiday bitches. It isn’t long before the car is parked along a boreen (boíthrín: byroad) for the kissing session which is the primary purpose of the afternoon. This is something I can enter into with enthusiasm, knowing full well the limits beyond which I’m not prepared to go. These are very clearly delineated, in my head. Looking back, I am sometimes amazed that my actions, or non-actions, never provoked more unpleasantness; that my obstinate withdrawal of my person at one crucial moment or another didn’t cause my co-experimenter, whoever he was, to cut up rough. Still, it’s true that I can call on widely held notions of goodness to back me up – that the whole weight of religion, social usage, even intrinsic Irishness is on the side of abstinence, as much abstinence as can be mustered. Who, without renouncing their birthright, could argue all that out of existence? ‘But it’s nice’ doesn’t amount to much of a countervailing assertion against the brick-wall pronouncement ‘It’s a sin.’
Decent Catholic Ireland. ‘The term was vague and yet had meaning: the emergent nation, seeking pillars on which to build itself, had plumped for holiness and the Irish language – natural choices in the circumstances.’ Thus William Trevor in the story ‘Paradise Lounge’, evoking one of the breed of fierce old priests who held dance halls and make-up to be an abomination. From Yeats’s Father Rosicross on, Irish literature is full of them, denouncers and distorters to a man. John Montague knows the type – in ‘A Change of Management’ we get a bishop fixated on the licentiousness of modern life. (The story was published in 1964.) ‘On all sides we are wooed by the sirens of lax living, but – remember this – if Ireland holds a special place in God’s plan it will be due to the purity of her men and the modesty of her women.’
This – to me – rings fearfully true. We were constantly being subjected to exhortations along those lines, and, given the age we were, some of it was bound to get engrained into our psyches. We were shown no means of reconciling self-respect and an untrammelled attitude to sexual relationships. Girls who ‘did it’ – those few we knew about, or had listened to rumours concerning – were somehow surrounded by an atmosphere of seediness and inferiority. They were likely to be unwholesome and weak in the head. Far from free spirits, they were a disgrace; unable to grasp or abide by the rules of social behaviour. The verdicts ‘cheap’ and ‘damaged goods’ were the appropriate clichés, and clichés we were adamant would never be applied to us. No lust-ridden adolescent, parading his libido in front of us with rather more energy than ability, was going to get the chance to lose respect for us, thank you very much.
On top of the ethical aspect (though the two were intertwined) that social axiom was the thing implanted most implacably in our heads: that respect would be lost, following any lapse from chastity, as sure as night follows day. Many sensible older women, all our mothers and aunts and family friends (though not nuns, for whom Church teaching, rather than social expediency, was the primary concern) had assured us that this was so. The whole idea of sexual terrain was conveyed to us as a clash of wills. Men were only after one thing, and it was up to us – forewarned – to keep them from getting it. The alternative, from our point of view, was to forfeit our place in the marriage market. Having once given in, we’d be relegated thereafter to some sort of sexual dust-heap. And probably impregnated as well as denigrated. An odd implication, for the men themselves, was that the sexual act was somehow not repeatable – or not, at any rate, with the type of third-rate female who’d go along with it in the first place. Belief in all this nonsense probably helped to perpetuate it. Primed for post-coital revulsion, many straying Catholics (and not only Catholics) must have felt just that.
I’ve overstated the case, of course, just to outline the deterrents faced by would-be free spirits among the girls of my generation studying Irish in the Gaeltacht. A homegrown version of the sexual double standard which prevailed nearly everywhere (and only began to be eroded in the 1960s) held us fast in its grip. With our insufficient experience of life, and deficient clarity of vision, we weren’t in any position to pose a challenge to it.
I’m not suggesting that Irish boys, whether our contemporaries or those of an earlier generation, fared any better. The testimonies of such experts in repression as John McGahern and Patrick Kavanagh (to take those examples) leave us in no doubt about the sexual misery, guilt, waste or distortion fostered with such vehemence all over the country. ‘A nation of masturbators under priestly instruction,’ wrote Brian Moore in one of his novels: since no other sexual outlet was available, this practice was bound to flourish. It’s a bitter comment on the way things were. And some boys, I’m aware, puritanical by conviction if not by nature, were denied even that. Those were the ones for whom indoctrination had struck deep. They gritted their teeth and did without.
It’s true, as well, that we’re not all endowed with the sexual instinct to the same degree (not even in adolescence, with hormones in overdrive and emotions all over the place). Some of us are puritanical, or indifferent, or frankly antagonistic, by nature. I’m acquainted with a good many girls so devoutly Catholic that they’ve renounced make-up and go about with rows of holy medals pinned to their clothes. And boys of the same stamp, usually dowdy and dull, who wear Pioneer ‘total abstinence’ pins in their lapels and spend half their lives on their knees in the chapel. Station Island material.
Cal McCrystal
(again), who attended St Brigid’s College a few years before we did, recalls spending a lot of time chasing girls from an Enniskillen school and actually getting one of them into a tiny turf shed, where ‘a certain amount of molestation’ took place, stopping short ‘at a point where most girls in those days stopped short’. When word of this exiguous exploit got around, he was treated as a pariah – by his contemporaries, no less, who had swallowed the guff about ‘self-respect’ and ‘an occasion of sin’. Well! It would seem that some – though not many – of the Gaeltacht aficionados were genuinely there to improve their minds. Perhaps McCrystal’s school, St Malachy’s in Belfast, was particularly proficient in breeding an attitude of stainlessness and gravity – though it’s hard to estimate how tongue-in-cheek the following account of a trip to Rannafast in 1933 actually is. It was written (in Irish) by a senior St Malachy’s pupil for the centenary issue of the school magazine, the Collegian.
He praises the
… Gaelic spirit that transcends all the hardship. Every family has at least one cow, and it’s the job of the children to tend the cows after school is over … wet or fine, they have to go about this business, and you’d often see them sitting on a rock, half-drenched with rain, and not even a pair of shoes on their feet.
It’s a wonder to see how peaceful, patient and happy are the people of Rannafast despite every hardship. An outbreak of laughter will overcome any bout of low spirits that comes upon them … They can tell thousands of stories, and recite reams of poetry … As with work, they’re accustomed to storytelling from an early age.
You’d find old women telling stories as a pastime in the long winter evenings. In Rannafast at present there’s an Irish college which is doing great work on behalf of the language … Coláiste Bhrighde is a children’s college, but teachers and parents attend it too. There are ceilidhes nearly every night, and great revelry and excitement goes on in the company of the young Gaels of Ireland. The name of one dance or another is called out, and before you can clap your hands together, the floor is full of dancers impatiently waiting for it to start. It’s great to see this large crowd in one another’s company in a Gaelic district, and the English of England a long way away. The nights there isn’t a ceilidhe in the college, there’ll be one in some house in which there’s a good storyteller, and it’s usual for a crowd to be gathered round the fire listening to the stories.
Asking For Trouble Page 11