Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Without any doubt, this is the way to revive the language, to send children to the Gaeltacht, where Irish is still strong and lively. A good many come every year, but more should come, and more again, till Irish spreads up and down throughout the whole of Ireland.

  This has all the elements of a true picture, indeed, but given an impossibly bland and Gaelic and wholesome slant, like de Valera’s vision of athletic youths and comely maidens diverging to the fullest degree from the English of England, and never demeaning themselves by laying a finger on one another. It embodies a kind of deflected vitality, as if – to quote the Irish Edwardian social commentator and suffragist, Margaret Cousins – ‘some more artistic way of continuance of the [human] race’ had been vouchsafed to the Irish, or at least the truly Gaelic Irish. And as it filtered down to us, the sanctimonious stance appealed to the cowed, or high-minded, or prudish among us, while affecting others only partially, and indeed almost passing the light-minded by.

  Between the pious brigade and the flibbertigibbets – those girls for ever back-combing their hair and applying powder to their faces – I would hope (though I can’t be sure) that some of us had the potential, at least, to be sane about sex: to give it its due as one of life’s great glories and pleasures.

  I am getting into deep water here: deep water with many cross-currents. I’m truly not envisaging some impossible erotic idyll, with couples all over the Gaeltacht enjoying continuous and carefree copulation. I’m all for restraint and discrimination – the former most particularly at the age we were at the time … As for the rest, I am merely trying, I think, to get to grips, however partially, with a complex web of religious pressure, social expectation, nationalist truism, anti-feminist fabrication and all the rest of it – all the bits and pieces of a system which, at some deep level, placed us all in a faulty relation to nature and natural forces. Coming to sexual consciousness, in those days, was fraught with even more abundant anxieties than is normal at the best of times.

  But we didn’t let it get us down. We’re determined to acquire as much practice, as much savoir faire, as is available to us, in the circumstances. I remember walks across the fields of Rannafast, away from the college, local boys striding ahead by previous arrangement, and us following after at a distance designed to throw officious teachers and other grown-ups off the scent. It’s only when we’re well out of range of any possible prying eyes that the two complicit groups first converge, then separate into pairs.

  On one of these occasions, I remember, I learn from Maghnas Pheadair Bhig a fact or two about life in the Gaeltacht (and away from it). Nearly all the men and youths of the district leave their homes at intervals for seasonal work on farms and in coal mines, in Glasgow and elsewhere. For this they are paid a high wage which includes danger money, and they’re expected (Maghnas says) to tackle tasks beyond the powers, or the inclination, of workers from Scotland or England. He paints a grim picture. It’s fearsome work, and the lot of them will go to any lengths to postpone their departure from the Donegal townlands. On top of the sheer hard labour, he goes on, the dockland atmosphere sets his teeth on edge. Prostitution is rife. And Irish girls are nearly the worst of the lot. To see the way they carry on with sailors is enough to make you ashamed of the place you come from.

  While Maghnas is telling me these things, he is running the fingers of one hand through my hair, and trying to undo my bra with the other hand. My button-through summer dress is partly unbuttoned. I make noises concurring in his estimate of Irish women’s lewdness. Indeed it is worse for them than it is for loose women of other nationalities. They have that much farther to fall.

  ‘The young girls of Donegal come radiantly innocent from their own glens and mountains but often, alas! they fall into sin in a far country.’ Thus the unsophisticated Glenties novelist Patrick McGill, echoing William Carleton’s tongue-in-cheek comment on the wives and daughters of the Irish peasantry. The observation occurs in McGill’s The Rat Pit of 1915, a sequel to the better known Children of the Dead End. These two novels make a pair, and tell the stories of – respectively – Dermod Flynn and Norah Ryan, both from the (imaginary) Donegal townland of Glenmornan. The first of these, Dermod Flynn, is sent, at the age of twelve, to a hiring fair at the Lagan, near Strabane, where the children of the Gaeltacht stand up like cattle to be poked and prodded by Planter (i.e. Protestant) farmers in search of cheap labour. (‘Ah, the poor Donegals,’ Benedict Kiely’s grandmother would say, remembering the famine years of the 1840s and barefoot, Irish-speaking labourers coming in droves to the hiring fairs of Omagh and Strabane, ‘the poor Donegals’.) After a couple of sessions here, Dermod is ready for the next stage in the deadly economic sequence: digging in the potato fields of Scotland.

  The story continues: the boy becomes an itinerant worker who tramps around Scotland in the company of a florid old layabout named Moleskin Joe, working by turns as a digger of sheep drains, a platelayer on the Glasgow–Greenock railway and a labourer on the waterworks at Kinlochleven. ‘I looked on life,’ he says – or the miscalculating author says on his behalf – ‘in all its primordial brutishness and found it loathsome to my soul.’ God bless us. It is hard to imagine anyone from the Gaeltacht speaking or thinking like that, in any language.

  Patrick McGill’s novels are full of arresting social detail, but you have to work hard to extract it from the mass of indistinct but high-flown comment surrounding it. For example, from McGill we learn that Irish and Scottish ‘tatie-hokers’ were formed into squads, accommodated in disused barns and outhouses where they slept under stinking horse blankets, and set to work at four in the morning. All day, the women crawled through the fields on their hands and knees, dragging heavy baskets. This is terrible for anyone, but worse, perhaps, if you’re young and vulnerable. And, in the first novel, among the original members of Dermod Flynn’s squad is a young Glenmornan girl who suffers all the worst excesses of Gaelic hardship. The dismal story of Norah Ryan, touched on in Children of the Dead End, is recounted fully in The Rat Pit.

  In McGill’s view, the combined forces of religious and commercial extortion are to blame for all the evils in the Irish countryside; and to illustrate the point he creates a diabolical shopkeeper who, on a whim, keeps from the women of Donegal the yarn they need to earn a pittance from knitting. Knitting for profit is an old resource of these women, and it’s linked with oppression in the minds of past social critics, such as McGill. The Rat Pit, though it arouses exasperation with its departures from authenticity, opens on an electrifying note. The author has assembled a group of women by the sea shore, just before dawn in the dead of winter. The bitter cold hardly breaches their hardihood as they wait to cross the estuary at low tide. These are turn-of-the-century knitters of the Rosses, women who think nothing of tramping sixteen miles, barefoot, to collect a bundle of yarn from a shopkeeper hell-bent on exploitation. It’s a bad novel, it’s true, full of social and emotional melodrama, but it makes an impact with its opening vignette.

  The shopkeeper has a rival in the ill-treatment stakes in the rapacious priest who saddles his parishioners with the building costs for a new mansion for himself to wallow in. ‘If yer father doesn’t send me the pound … he’ll have no luck in this world and no happiness in the next.’ All right, McGill is not the only commentator to be outraged by the excesses of grasping clerics – however, social criticism of this kind tends to be more effective if it’s presented with a satirical undertone, rather than the endless sensationalism McGill goes in for. If you turn to the work of Peadar O’Donnell, for instance, you find an equally committed socialism without the hokum and ineptitude.

  I know I’m being too hard on Patrick McGill, who passionately spoke out against the wrongs inflicted on the hard-pressed people of the Donegal Gaeltacht, and proclaimed their moral superiority as a kind of counterbalance to the low esteem in which they, as unskilled workers, tended to be held. But it can’t be denied that he goes too far.

  Glenmornan, for example, the birthplace o
f Dermod Flynn and Norah Ryan, is every bit as hapless a locality as the mythical Corca Dorcha of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. Here is a description of it: ‘… nothing … but rags, poverty and dirt; pigs under the bed, cows in the house, the rain coming through the thatch … the winds of night raving and roaring through wall and window.’ Whew! Here, without a doubt, is the source of all Gaelic misery. It is not an auspicious locality from which to emerge, as Norah Ryan’s trials all too clearly show. What happens? In a moment of weakness, Norah, the potato digger, allows herself to be seduced by a Scottish farmer’s son; and from this point on, it’s a matter of remorse, despair, decline, disaster, blight. The initial wrong turning propels her into pregnancy – what else – destitution and, eventually, prostitution. Her life is as luckless as the observances of pulp fiction can make it.

  The whole farrago, indeed, is devised to cry up the labour movement in Ireland; but somewhere along the line the author’s ideological bent has got the better of him. There’s supposed to be a thread linking Norah Ryan’s proliferating tragedies with the priests and shopkeepers sitting at home in Glenmornan ordering an unjust society; but somehow an enormous gulf opens up between cause and effect, into which half the cast is shoved (if they’re not beaten up, inflicted with illness or threatened with starvation, they’re run over or drowned in a canal – all this to ram home the point about the sufferings of the upright poor).

  Norah, as a character, is meant to embody mildness and selflessness as well as standing for undeserved adversity, but unfortunately Patrick McGill only succeeds in presenting her as ignorant and dim-witted. By absolving Norah from all responsibility for her own actions (well, she’s to blame for the initial act of unchastity, perhaps, but not very much to blame), he makes her a morally uninteresting heroine. Sex only comes into the picture as a means of degradation and misfortune; the very opposite of a positive force.

  Among the other things the Donegal poor are apt to be done out of is the ‘radiant innocence’ which is their birthright. McGill preaches charity towards the unchaste, indeed, but it never enters his head that chastity itself is a variable concept, or that a woman’s ‘virtue’ may reside in areas other than that of sexual abstinence. Of course, he is writing about the mores – the Irish mores – of the early part of the twentieth century; but all these attitudes persisted for long enough to affect us, as we came to adolescence at the tail-end of them. Our era was the immaculate 1950s, and the still-to-be-renovated 1960s, when benighted forms of Irishness and Catholicism retained their vice-like grip.

  Some new friendships are established in the Gaeltacht, and some old ties begin to wear a bit thin. In Teach Eddy Doyle, the sleeping arrangements are revised after a week or so, to enable the bolder spirits among us to leave our beds in the middle of the night, should the fancy take us to do so. The three of us who end up sharing a bed, who are game for anything to stir things up, to create an atmosphere of eventfulness around ourselves, are myself, Maire Maguire, and a late arrival, a short, dark-haired, pretty, voluble and high-spirited girl called Susie Greenwood, from a school on the outskirts of Belfast. (Also attached to our circle, but prevented by modesty, or an uncensorious piety, from joining in our late-night escapades, is the bosomy black-haired County Tyrone girl, Kathleen Shannon, who’d accompanied us on the first walk along the beach when I’d hurt my toe. Kathleen has turned out to be one of the most proficient Irish-speakers among the non-natives, as well as enjoying a good laugh as much as anyone, at a proper time of the day.)

  What usually happens in the night-time is this. A rapping on the window-pane occurs in the small hours, and one of us scrambles out of bed and shoves up the window-sash, peering out in the darkness, half-asleep, to try and make out who is there. (I am always hoping it will be Maghnas Bell, but there’s only one occasion, towards the end of the month, when this proves to be the case.) Then, if we’re in the mood to be daring, we slither or wriggle through the aperture and lower ourselves to the ground (only a foot or so), all the while racked by stifled hysteria and the most frantic cautiousness. Gasps are suppressed, whispers muffled and giggles quashed as we help one another out, and stumble into the arms of whoever has come along on the off-chance of obtaining a bit of sexual gratification – or its equivalent in exhilaration, in derring-do.

  Most of those involved in this peculiar transaction understand that it’s the fun of the thing, and not uncontrollable lechery, that gets a few of us out of our beds in the night to misbehave moderately by the side of a cow-byre – even if we hadn’t signalled as much by swathing ourselves in many layers of clothing before plunging out into the Atlantic night: layers designed to discourage unwanted liberties, to protect our reputations. It’s likely, I think, that one or two of these Donegal Lotharios are hoping to fall in with a truly bad girl (according to the ethics of the day); but most, I am sure, approach the business in the same spirit as ourselves. I can vouch for it that the genuine seducers, those serious about sex, have to go further than Teach Eddy Doyle to get their purpose fulfilled. We’re about as much use to them as sixpence to a spendthrift.

  Half the time, it’s a lottery whom one ends up with; sometimes we clamber out expecting to be met by boys with whom we’ve tentatively set up a late-night encounter, only to find ourselves in the clutches of perfect strangers – who must be surprised by the bulkiness of the bodies they’re embracing. On one of these occasions, I recall, I am clad in pyjamas, a skirt, a blouse, two jumpers, a cardigan and a borrowed short suede jacket; and my friends have wrapped themselves in equal quantities of garments to safeguard their modesty. People who try to grope their way through one or more of these layers soon give up. No one can accuse us of not doing our best to observe the rules of dress as laid down by the Catholic Truth Society.

  Still, if we come out at all, there’s a tacit agreement that we won’t object to being kissed and indeed we don’t, being eager to compare notes later and comment on the performances of those concerned. We pride ourselves on knowing what’s what, in this respect, on being able to tell the naturally gifted from those who are either annoyingly perfunctory, or subject to unproductive erotic seizures. We are very full of ourselves and opinionated.

  There comes a night when I awaken first as the window is tapped from the outside, poke Maire, then Susie, until she rouses herself, sleepily rubbing her eyes and muttering, ‘Tchím torch’ (‘I see a torch’) and ‘Cluinim gluaisteán’ (‘I hear a car’) – catchphrases that get themselves repeated sixty times a night with every glimmer of light in the distance, and every noise suggesting a squad of priests patrolling the district on the look-out for delinquents – and somehow propel the three of us out on to the grassy patch beneath the window, as agreed beforehand with a boy named Gallagher and a couple of his friends. However, the trio confronting us outside the window are completely unknown to us – later, we find that they are on the way home from attending a wake in Min na Leice, and just decided to try their luck at a house picked at random. It must have startled them to gain such a quick response – a knock on the window, and there all at once are three stout schoolgirls tumbling out at their feet.

  This incident is typical of many others – the most tremendous bustle and hilarity in the night, unpremeditated grapplings in the dark. It may or may not have been the time when one of the three locals is perceived at once to be completely bald – throwing each of us into a frenzy of determination not to be lumbered with him. It’s Maire who’s unlucky, beaten by Susie and me in the rush to attach ourselves to the two who have hair. None of the three of us can stop laughing, even though it isn’t at all wise to create a commotion. If it doesn’t bring the bean a’ tí down on top of us brandishing a rolling pin, it may reach the ears of some fanatical kill-joy among the college authorities – and then the direst repercussions will ensue.

  ‘Tchím torch,’ Susie keeps on whispering urgently, ‘Cluinim gluaisteán.’ It’s her imagination, of course – or if it isn’t, it’s nothing to do with us – but every time she says it
, it pulls us up short, to peer and listen for a minute or two. Then, it’s a matter of scurrying in pairs over the short springy grass by the side of the house, with its outcrop of stone, towards the back of the empty house next door to ours; when I reach this place, clutching the hand of someone I don’t know at all, I find that Susie and the other dark-haired person-from-the-place have got there before us and positioned themselves in a recess in the wall. The next thing I see is Maire scampering past arm-in-arm with the man without hair. (He turns out to be the brother of someone I know slightly, a Mickey Coyle, and only twenty-four years old; I don’t know if his premature baldness is an effect of genetics or caused by the drinking water, which is held to blame for the high incidence of toothlessness in the Gaeltacht; if toothlessness, why not hairlessness?)

  The sight sets me off into a further fit of giggles; and I hear Susie succumbing in this way too. Also, by this time I’ve discovered that the person I’m with – though perfectly amiable, and full of chat about the wake they’ve just been to, a wake for an old woman famous for her singing and soda bread – is no more use at kissing than the gatepost. And neither is his brother, Susie’s partner, as it turns out; for after a few minutes she comes striding past, saying she is going home to bed. ‘I’ll have to go with her,’ I whisper to mine, rather glad of a pretext for getting away. Susie and I clamber back in through the window, and subside on the bed in an eruption of laughter. ‘Was yours … ?’ ‘So was mine …’