Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Its next embodiment that I recall is a fellow student at art school, a person of considerable charm and aplomb, who can’t believe I’ll go on resisting his sexual advances – and God knows it goes against the grain to do so – but finally understands he’s up against invincible, if unnatural, prudishness. That episode ends in tears at an end-of-term barbecue, when he tells me point blank that he is rejecting me in favour of a girl who takes a more adult line about these matters. (I’m put in mind of the early Simmons poem, ‘Protestant courts Catholic’, which homes in on the dedicated pursuer, and the nervous but adamant repudiator of undue liberties.) It is a fearful blow to my self-esteem. I spend the rest of that ruined evening howling on the shoulder of one long-suffering friend after another, assuring them all that the one thing I’m glad about is the fact that I never did give in to the bugger (or words to that effect). Within a year, though, that’s a major regret – that all that inestimable ardour should have gone to waste.

  But that’s some way in the future. In the meantime, in the Gaeltacht, we heed the plaintive and insidious voices speaking to us out of the past: ‘Bheirim comhairle do mahná óga dá nglacfadh siad uaim í gan a bheith ag ól le fir óga ná ag creidbheáil a scéil…’ (‘Here’s advice for young women, if they’ll accept it from me, / Don’t be drinking with young men or believe a word they say …’). Seduction and betrayal, Gaelic fashion. The substance of a good many songs. The promises unfulfilled, the baby wrapped in a shawl in the crook of its young mother’s arm. We’re frightfully susceptible to the glamour and illicitness of it all, even while mapping out very different futures for ourselves. They are irresistibly romantic, the wronged eighteenth-century heroines with the blood spattering down over their little buckled shoes, taking loss and misery in their stride or exacting a supernatural revenge. We’d like to go wrong with equal style, if it weren’t laughable to think we might go wrong at all.

  What else can I extract from the somewhat blurred events of the Rannafast summer? I remember Martin Henderson being accosted by a tinker woman – this must have happened in one of the two local shops, or outside the college where a crowd of us has congregated – who goes to great lengths to persuade him that his life’s happiness depends on the immediate purchase, from her, of four piebald donkeys. Describing the animals’ great virtues, she insists they’re a gift at the price. Poor Martin can do nothing but laugh nervously, make helpless gestures with his hands, and plead a lack of suitable accommodation. He lives in a terrace house in Ballymena, he explains; and how would he even get them home? Everyone within earshot is rolling about in an ecstasy of mirth.

  The absurd woman, no doubt encouraged by all the laughter, becomes increasingly theatrical in her manner. She’s an exceedingly wild-looking tinker, with head and shoulders wrapped in a tartan shawl. To make matters worse she hasn’t a word of Irish. We have no idea why she has singled out our teacher as a possible collaborator in the odd transaction. Is she having him on? No one has ever heard tell of a piebald donkey.

  Eventually she takes herself off, with instructions to Martin to stand where he is while she leads one of the animals into Sharkey’s shop – it is probably Sharkey’s shop – for his close inspection. He waits until she is out of sight before taking to his heels – and spends the rest of the day, by all accounts, on tenterhooks lest she should reappear leading a donkey on a string like something out of a farce. As for us – we’re left clutching our sides and mopping the tears from our cheeks. How wonderful that such a performance should take place for our benefit!

  There’s a girl in our house named Breda, very podgy and unappealing, who fills the role of sneak and goody-goody without which no gathering of schoolgirls can be complete. When a car draws up alongside us one day, and its occupants – strangers to us, though one of them identifies himself as a cousin of a boy we know – offer to drive us to a Sinn Féin ceilidhe in Gweedore the following evening, and we accept, Breda promptly runs off bearing this intelligence to the bean a’ tí, who of course forbids us to do anything of the sort.

  She, the bean a’ tí, has already cottoned on to the nightly activity in and out of the house, and one afternoon we arrive home to find our bedroom windows nailed shut. She won’t report us to the college authorities, the daughter of the house assures us, but she’ll take other measures to curb misbehaviour. It’s not the first time she’s had to deal with this sort of thing – we didn’t imagine, did we, that we were among the first lot of summer visitors to indulge in such excitements in the night? It’s an annual hazard for landladies. (Even back in pre-war days, I learn from a friend years later, a Rannafast rashness routinely overtook about half of Coláiste Bhrighde pupils. Among those affected, or infected, was the future novelist and short-story writer Benedict Kiely, who, with another boy, broke out of his bedroom to meet up with a pair of similarly moonstruck Dominican girls – at which point, I am assured, actual congress took place. Wild nights, wild beyond our imaginings.) It is as well she isn’t running off to Father O’Friel and the others to lay complaints before them. A few of us do not have unblemished records – including, oddly enough, my upright classmate Angela Magill, who’s had a black mark placed against her name for sitting out a dance at a ceilidhe with a boy she’d previously been on the floor with: if it happens again, she is warned, she’ll be on the first bus home.

  I note in my diary, amid the usual embarrassing gush and guff, that they are terribly strict in Rannafast. Some naughtier girls (myself among them), spotted standing by the wayside in conversation with a group of locals, are instructed by a college official, Francis Cassidy or something I think his name was, to take care lest something untoward should befall us: these boys work tremendously hard in Scotland, we are told, and as a consequence run wild whenever they come home. We’d do better to stick to our own kind, fifth- and sixth-formers like ourselves attending the college. (If he’d been a priest he’d have told us to stay away from boys altogether.) We stand there meekly and attentively while filled to the brim with unspoken insubordination.

  Breda the sneak, in charge of Teach Eddy Doyle’s food supplies for a picnic, unwraps a bundle of thick jam sandwiches at which the more fastidious among us turn up our noses. We prefer to go hungry. To reach the spot chosen for the picnic, the Point, we’ve had to traverse miles of silvery sand, wading knee-deep in sea-water at one moment – did the men all get the bottoms of their trousers wet? And how did the priests and older teachers manage, without jeopardising their dignity? I can’t remember. It’s no trouble to us, though, to tuck our skirts into our knickers and forge ahead.

  I am enchanted by the paleness of the sand, which stretches away on all sides, and the blueness of hills beyond the horizon. It seems to me a paradisal place. Even the absence of our friends among the locals – departed en masse, it seems, to a football match in Letterkenny – hardly diminishes the perfection of the day. Swimming and paddling in the sea, lolling about among the sand dunes, an impromptu ceilidhe on the beach …

  Going home, we’re transported in relays by boat across the estuary, where the tide has come in. It’s one of those airy, scented, gold-tinged summer evenings, the sky still cloudless, a hazy light blue at this hour about to turn pink. ‘Girls, girls!’ some teacher calls to us in Irish, ‘No dawdling on the way home!’ Scrambling out of the boat, we find the sand loose and warm beyond the reach of the tide, as we sink into it ankle-deep. A few red poppies are in bloom along the edge of a cliff where grass grows short and springy. We pass the hollow underneath a furze bush which used to accommodate an illegal poitín still (more recently it’s accommodated myself and Maghnas Bell during one of our restricted kissing sessions). The luckier ones among us have got themselves beautifully tanned, while others – myself included – are freckled and scorched in patches. My knees, nose and shoulders are actually burnt – but never mind, I’m sure the glow will have faded in a day or two.

  Though our holiday coincides with an unusual heat wave, as I’ve said, the days aren’t uniformly sunny. I
remember a couple of thunderstorms, rain and drizzle early on in the month, an overcast evening or two – one in particular, during which an official entertainment, a treasure hunt, is in progress. Looking at my notes concerning this activity, I find it hard to make head or tail of it. On the way there, I’ve written, we meet a boy who tells us he has fallen off his bicycle and can’t come. This seems something of a non sequitur. A lot of bustle appears to be going on in the vicinity of Coláiste Bhrighde, I next observe. Another boy, clearly a native speaker, stands poring over a list of clues which he then translates for our benefit (we must have been issued with a printed sheet), while someone else runs around stealing various items to pass on to us, including a skipping-rope – from two young children who don’t appear to have had any say in the matter – and a hen. (A hen?)

  Paidí Mící Rua, I note, allows us to borrow his driving licence, another item on the list. I then digress to comment on the attractiveness of this person’s appearance – black curly hair and the rest of it – plus his peculiar penchant for making overtures to plain girls in glasses. We have got the measure (or so we think) of a great many of the locals. Despite all the help bestowed on us (I record) we lose the contest. It is probable that we have failed to approach the thing in the right spirit. No prize on offer from the college is among our objectives. The treasure hunt, like everything else, is judged according to the scope it offers for setting up assignations.

  Despite the setbacks my heart-strings have been subjected to, I still find my breath quickening whenever a figure with reddish brown hair, wearing jeans and an open-necked American check shirt, hoves into view. Maghnas Bell. It happens again on the evening of the treasure hunt. We’re on the way home when he detaches himself from a group assembled outside Sharkey’s shop, and saunters over to us. After more or less ignoring me for days on end, he has now (it transpires) taken a fancy to participate – with my cooperation – in our nightly fun and games. Specifically, he is asking to make a date with me for 2 a.m. Well! I ought to get on my high horse, I know, over the business of being dropped and taken up at Maghnas’s whim. But naturally I’m far too weak-willed to do anything of the sort.

  For the moment – once again – all I’m conscious of is elation. There’s a problem, though: I can’t get out, I tell him. The bean a’ tí has taken steps to pin us down in our beds at night by securing the windows. No matter – he’ll bring a pair of pliers. He’ll also come bolstered up by as much company as he can gather (he doesn’t put it like that). A group of muintir na háite will come knocking on our window, to the delectation – he implies – of those among us who are up for a final episode of unorthodox egress. (We are due to go home in a day or two.) My friends have gone on in front, leaving myself and Maghnas standing together like a pair of conspirators, hoping no censorious eye is falling on us. I say – out of the side of my mouth – I can’t be certain how many of us will be awake, and willing. But I’ll be ready to hop outside myself, I whisper, once the bean a’ tí’s defences have been breached.

  A pitch dark night in the Gaeltacht, and four adventurers banging cautiously on our windowpane, as agreed. Maghnas, his brother, his cousin, and a noisy young roustabout by the name of Feda. Anticipation having kept us from falling deeply asleep, we stumble out of bed wearing the usual precautionary wrappings, and grope our way towards the muted hullabaloo outside. One of our visitors clambers up on the windowsill wielding a pair of pliers, and we all wait anxiously while the bean a’ tí’s imprisoning nails are dealt with. Eventually the bottom pane shoots up, enabling us to tumble out. I am first through the aperture, my hand is grabbed by Maghnas, and we take off at a run across the grass beyond the clothes-line to the rocks ahead.

  All goes well for about ten minutes or so before Ulster puritanism, or prudence, needs to assert itself. ‘No,’ I mumble; then more firmly: ‘No, no, no.’ There’s a bit of argument, some attempt at persuasion – I’m the only girl that summer who’s refused to go the whole hog, all my friends are doing it, Maghnas tells me, which I don’t believe for a moment, even lying there in the dark I don’t believe it; then comes the belated assurance that he’d never force me to do anything I might be sorry for, since he likes me so much. I am clearly a person of great integrity and moral fortitude – or words to that effect. It is possible that the layers of buttoned-up cardigan, blouse, pyjama-top and petticoat have bred in him a compulsion to end the whole unprofitable business. ‘Blow this,’ he may have murmured to himself, at one with the worried young hero of Beryl Bainbridge’s A Quiet Life, whose sexual exploration is stymied by a woolly vest.

  Ambivalent as ever, I am half grateful for his forbearance, and half regretful – not that I’d had any doubts about the outcome of the episode. And that’s it; we get to our feet and head back towards the bedroom window, no longer having anything much to say to one another. Once I’m inside the house, Maghnas tries to follow; he gets one leg across the sill and thrusts his torso into the bedroom, taking me by surprise. Perhaps he hopes he may light on someone more compliant, snoring away in one of the big iron double beds.

  When I realise what he is up to, I gesture frantically towards Susie Greenwood, who rises up out of a tangle of sheets and blankets in her baby-doll pyjamas and joins me in shoving Maghnas out backwards; she gets a grip on his shoulders and pushes him out, all the while threatening, in a furious whisper, to ‘wreck’ everyone within reach (this is one of her expressions). Between us we force him back on to the ground outside – he doesn’t put up much of a struggle – just as Maire and her escort loom up out of the darkness. Maire, breathless, is through the window in a jiffy, and then the other two (whose identities are lost to me); and some hysterical confidences are exchanged in whispers before we settle down for what remains of the night.

  And that is the end of my association with Maghnas Bell. I only see him once again, at the final ceilidhe of the season, two nights later; arriving around eight-thirty or nine, he finds a seat by the wall and spends the entire evening there, never getting up to dance or speak to anyone, as far as I can see. I’m still sufficiently interested to keep an eye on him, though more concerned to present an imperturbable face: an objective which, as it happens, is about to be severely tested, in a totally unexpected manner.

  A ridiculous and vicious drama is brewing up about us – a drama of little consequence, indeed a source of pleasurable interest, for anyone not at the centre of it; but for three of us at least, a pickle of unprecedented dimensions. We’ve succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations in getting into our school’s black books. Our lives, in fact, are about to be wrenched off-course – whether happily or unhappily in the long run, it is hard to say. What’s beyond dispute is that things would have fallen out differently, if a summons, via a loud-speaker, hadn’t boomed into that fuggy room, on that August evening, as the last strains of music for the Sixteen-Hand Reel died away, and we stood there smoothing our hair and regaining our breath after the exertions of the dance …

  A tense silence comes over the room as everyone is asked to pay attention to what’s about to follow. Two local houses are specified, Teach Pheadair Bhig and Teach Eddy Doyle; all St Dominic’s pupils staying in either of these houses are requested to make their way immediately to the secretary’s office. No other school is mentioned. The tone of the announcement suggests that something serious is afoot; but, looking at one another open-mouthed, we haven’t a clue what it’s to do with.

  Summoned to the office, I note in my schoolgirl diary, ‘We went, quaking.’ Olivia, Colette, Doreen Hurley, Frances Quinn, myself, Angela Magill, my bedfellow Maire and several others whose names I’ve forgotten. That sentence from my diary has, I suppose, the merit of being laconic. As for the rest of my on-the-spot impressions – I am not very forthcoming about what took place that evening, or later: whether out of a wish to minimise the whole thing, the need to preserve a certain amount of secrecy, or through narrative incompetence, I cannot be certain. To make anything of it, at present, I have to read between
my own lines, as well as trying to dredge up the effect of the contretemps on my state of mind – or rather, successive states of mind, as confidence gives way to apprehension, and security about the future is succeeded by disbelief.

  I didn’t think I was in it up to the neck. In the rúnaí’s office, that evening, we are lined up in front of a kind of tribunal, consisting of some severe priests, the secretary himself, a grim lay teacher or two, and our own Miss Boyle, whose expression suggests we’ve come in with dung on our shoes. (Whatever we’ve done, it has let the side down.)

  The chief priest, Father O’Friel I think, begins straight away to harangue us mightily: ‘I have to tell you you’re all in bad trouble. A call has just come through from St Dominic’s School on the Falls Road in Belfast. I don’t know the ins and outs of it: the nun I spoke to told me it was far too shocking to repeat over the telephone. But I gather there’s been some carry-on with boys here. I have the names of the boys concerned. My advice to you all is to make a good confession at the earliest opportunity. I hate to think of the state of your immortal souls. I’m disgusted with you. I’d have thought girls with your advantages, a good education and all the rest of it, would know how to behave. It doesn’t say much for the way you’ve been brought up. The only thing you can do is pray to the good Lord for forgiveness. I don’t know what put such filth in your heads, girls of your age! I can tell you, if you weren’t going home anyway first thing in the morning, you’d have been sent away from the Gaeltacht in two shakes of a duck’s tail; we don’t want girls of your stamp here. I don’t know which of you’ – surveying us sternly over the rims of his glasses – ‘is the most to blame, but my understanding of the matter is that the whole lot of you are going to be expelled from your school. And serve you right. Now get out of my sight. Pah!’ – or words to that effect. It is all in Irish, so I may have missed some salient bits.