Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  We are dumbfounded. Another of the adults in the room, I forget which one, explains to us in elementary Irish that a letter, written by one of us to a classmate in Belfast, and detailing our unspeakable transgressions, came into the hands of that girl’s parents, who were so appalled by its contents that they bore it straight away, probably at the end of a pair of tongs, to the nuns in charge of our moral welfare. Hence the diatribe above. The only other piece of positive information we can glean is that the indiscreet letter-writer is an inhabitant of Teach Pheadair Bhig, not Eddy Doyle.

  Released from the office, we fly to the cloakroom, where the majority of us break down in tears. (But not me; I’m not aware of having anything to cry about. The terrible letter, whatever it is, can’t be laid at my door; I’ve been far too busy having an eventful time to do more than dispatch the odd innocuous postcard; and I find it hard to take the notion of a mass expulsion seriously. I’m still pretty strung-up and agitated, though, affected by the general dismay, and understanding that the outcome for some of us may well prove calamitous. And I’m thankful – selfishly – that I never succeeded in effecting the wished-for transfer to Olivia’s house, the house seemingly at the centre of the row.)

  All our friends from other schools crowd in on top of us, agog to hear the details of the disaster. Whatever can have happened to overturn the carefree spirit of the place, and threaten to bring down the direst retribution on our heads! Excitements at the Chalet School aren’t in it. We are not normally tearful girls, yet the whole cloakroom is filled with sobbing and snivelling, along with choked disclosures about our horrendous plight – word of which circulates very quickly through the dance floor.

  Everyone, I note in my diary, is tremendously concerned and sympathetic – even Maghnas Bell, who finally rises from his bench to enable me to sit down, although we seem no longer to be on speaking terms. I do sit down, smiling gratefully at him, though in fact it’s the last thing I want to do; I want to be in the thick of the throng, discussing this newest crisis with all and sundry and securing reassurance that it’s a storm in a teacup (or an envelope). Cogadh na sifíní is the Irish expression: war of the wisps.

  Who is to blame for the current debacle? We narrow it down to two, my friends Olivia McAloon and Colette Buckley, both of whom admit to foolhardy insinuations in letters to classmates. Cross-questioned by me, each denies having mentioned me at all in any of her spicy communications. So I am pretty well convinced I’m in the clear – more concerned, in fact, for my friends than for myself. I’ve geared myself, however, to undergo a degree of fuss and reproof, since the evidence in black and white damning one or two is certain to brush off on the lot of us.

  (The evidence is more damning than I understand at the time. The thrilling letter, posted off by Olivia – it seems it was Olivia and not Colette, as I indicated in my Observer article, though she never exactly admitted as much to me, no doubt preferring to keep the thing enshrined in vagueness and mystification – the letter contained some lurid announcement to the effect that, if she were to have a child, she’d be at a loss to identify the father. What the earliest shocked readers of this letter fail to realise, I think, is that Olivia is quoting from one of her favourite authors, John Steinbeck: though whether this improves matters at all or not, I cannot say.)

  We are up at six-thirty the following morning, take our leave of the bean a’ tí and the others, and lug our cases down to Coláiste Bhrighde, where a fleet of buses is waiting. Some of us manage to get our belongings stowed on one bus, and ourselves on another, but it all gets sorted out at Derry. Our heads are still in a whirl from the previous evening’s upset. There’s already been a prodigious exchange of addresses and promises to keep in touch – and for those of us from St Dominic’s facing trouble at home, reiterated good wishes: it mayn’t be as bad as we fear.

  My attention is focused on getting a copy of the banned republican newspaper, the United Irishman, smuggled across the border – which, in fact, I accomplish with such ease that it’s something of a let-down. What is the point of defying a deplorable regime – the Stormont government – if its representatives can’t even be bothered carrying out the simplest checks against acts of insubordination! Once we’re safely past the customs’ post, I say as much to Susie Greenwood, who turns on me a look of exasperation: am I not in enough trouble already, she snorts, without trying to get myself arrested on top of being expelled from school? (This is a joke.) The seditious paper, which is wrapped around my waist with my school blazer buttoned over it, holds an immense significance for me at that moment. The shop in Rannafast had sold out when I’d tried to buy it, and what I’ve now got is Maghnas Bell’s own personal copy, which he kindly sorted out for me, and allowed me to keep. It’s my last link with the Gaeltacht – for the time being – and a twofold trophy.

  (In the 1970s, when I am staying with my parents in Belfast, I return home one day from a shopping expedition to find my mother with a box of matches in the back yard frantically setting fire to that actual, long forgotten copy of the United Irishman, which she’s come across in a tea-chest in the back bedroom containing such relics of my childhood as bygone issues of the School Friend, Eagle, Lion, some battered Rupert annuals and my postcard collection from 1955. In those dangerous years it’s not expedient to keep anything remotely dicey about the place. People driving to work with a copy of the morning paper tend to stow it out of sight beneath a seat, lest possession of the Irish News, or the News Letter, should identify them lethally with one side or the other.)

  It is strange to be back in Belfast after a month in Donegal, whose place-names are still ringing in my ears: Falcarragh, Burtonport, Dungloe, Bloody Foreland, Loughanure. Normally, I’d have savoured the return to a familiar routine, and the inspiriting prospect of a new school year, just a week or two away: the coming-on of autumn, a great smell of dead leaves burning, a bracing coldness in the air, smoke and fog, reunion with classmates, gossip, a different classroom and position in the school, new teachers, timetable, school books to be sorted out … all the bustle and exhilaration peculiar to the moment of reassembling. But this year, things are askew – to an extent to which I’m not yet aware.

  On my first morning home I’m awakened at about 8.30 a.m. by the arrival on our doorstep of Olivia and her aunt. They remain closeted in the front room with my mother for some time. I’ve already warned my mother to expect some trouble, telling her what has happened (stressing my own peripheral involvement in it). Olivia too, it seems, has confessed all. The aunt, summoned from across the town to deal with the crisis, hadn’t wasted a moment but had rushed to the school the previous evening. Word still was that the lot of us were up for expulsion. So I am hurried out of bed and hustled on to a bus going down the Falls Road. (Most houses in those days, ours included, are not equipped with telephones.) My mother and I wind up in the nuns’ parlour at St Dominic’s waiting to be interviewed by Mother Helena.

  The role of this nun, whom I recall as the prime mover in the business, puzzles me. She wasn’t the Dominican headmistress, though she had been previously, and would fill the post again in the late 1960s. My last headmistress at the school was a Mother Ailbe, very ugly and neurotic as I remember her; and she, at that moment, was about to be succeeded by a Sister Urban (whom I never knew). But all our dealings are with this Mother Helena, who pronounces my fate as she enters the room: I’m not to be allowed back at the start of the new term. When my mother remonstrates with her, however, she turns to me and demands a full account of my stay in the Gaeltacht. I do my best to give her what she wants – at least in a censored version, omitting any mention of illicit revelry, and denying I’ve ever done anything with Maghnas Bell other than walk along the road between his house and ours discussing the economic position of the Gaeltacht vis-à-vis the Republic’s government (in Irish, naturally). Mother Helena listens to all this without comment, and then requests my mother to return to the school – alone – on the following Sunday.

  (All I can thin
k of is an occasion during my first year at St Dominic’s, when Mother Helena – then headmistress – came into our basement classroom to talk to us eleven- and twelve-year-olds about piety, grace, the sacraments and the probable state of our immortal souls. ‘Your souls,’ she meant to say – always providing we hadn’t committed any mortal sins – ‘your souls, the souls of all good children, are all bright and shiny’; unfortunately the last phrase came out as ‘shite and briny’. A number of us, those deficient in goodness, nearly wet ourselves in the effort not to give way to hilarity.)

  That evening, I’ve arranged to visit the Ritz Cinema in Fisherwick Place, to see what turns out to be an unmemorable film called Rio Bravo, with my new friend Maire Maguire, who lives in Derby Street near St Peter’s Pro-Cathedral, with its twin spires dominating the whole of the Lower Falls. Maire tells me she’s already been summoned up to the school by a Sister Philippa, a nun with whom I’ve had the odd run-in in the past, though recently we’ve got on better terms due to my interest in the Irish language and culture. I’m fairly confident that Philippa, if necessary, would speak on my behalf. And Maire’s account of our Gaeltacht goings-on, as reported to me, seems to tally with mine. ‘And I told her how good you were – going to Mass every morning, and all.’ This makes us laugh. It’s true, though, that we’ve attended early morning Mass in Rannafast on a number of occasions when we didn’t have to – for what reason I can’t now imagine, unless it was (in my case at least) to demonstrate an affirmation of virtues I thought it right to subscribe to. My confidence, which was at a low ebb earlier in the day, begins to build up again.

  The nuns’ decision, relayed to my mother on the Sunday, is in my favour: I may, after all, return to the school. (‘The beast’ – i.e. Mother Helena – ‘said I was to be allowed back’, my diary has it.) Olivia and Colette are not so lucky. The verdict of expulsion stands, in their case. And Olivia immediately confides to me that her aunt is adamant about my role as ringleader. All she can do is shrug, when I ask for an explanation of this rancorous bee in Aunt Ita’s bonnet. There is clearly something here that I am missing. But I’m too relieved at escaping the role of outcast to devote much time to pondering an old aunt’s crochet. I am sorry about the other two, of course – especially Olivia; sorry they’ve been caught out and had this desperate sentence pronounced on them (and all over the head of a bit of fun). But I don’t feel that I have got away with murder – or the next worst thing, indecency – not unless Maire, Angela Magill and the other occupants of Teach Eddy Doyle who joined in the rollicks admit to harbouring the same misgivings.

  Olivia and Colette are accepted as pupils at the single (non-Dominican) convent on the outskirts of the city: Rathmore. This entails a change of uniform from maroon to dark navy.

  Three or four days go by. Another summons to the school arrives for my mother, possibly conveyed by the terrible games mistress, who lives not far from us on the Falls Road, near St John’s Chapel. It’s a Friday, I remember, and I have a friend to tea: a prim sixth-former from the other Dominican Convent, Fortwilliam on the Antrim Road, a girl whom I like without considering in any way a kindred spirit. It’s not until she, Pauline Something-or-Other, has gone home that the news is broken to me: the expulsion is on again.

  What has happened? Someone, it appears, has identified me as the owner of a dirty book which went the rounds of Form 5A, and provoked some previously chaste girls to assume an uncharacteristic licentiousness in the back end of Donegal. So the whole rumpus can, after all, be laid at my door. Never mind that I, myself, found the book in question – the lethal Peyton Place – so dispiriting that I couldn’t read it to the end, and had warned would-be borrowers that it wasn’t enjoyable, only bringing it into the school under extreme pressure, and then washing my hands of it. (It disappeared; and I never saw it again.)

  I sometimes wonder if the lesson I received at that point about the destructive power of bad literature wasn’t among the factors responsible for my eventual choice of profession – to be a literary critic, you need to hold strong views on the merits or demerits of any given work, and care about upholding literary standards. If I’d been asked to review Peyton Place for the nuns, they’d have understood that I didn’t regard it highly, either as work of fiction or a guidebook to the ways of lust.

  This time, there’s no redress. And various complications are about to heighten the blow. (I am not, at this stage or for many years into the future, aware of those behind-the-scenes machinations of the Clonard confederate of Olivia’s aunt.) Mother Helena’s first action after dismissing my mother is to get on the telephone to Rathmore, whom she directs to keep their doors closed tight against me, describing me as a corrupting influence. (I learn this much from Olivia, whose aunt has assured her parents that she’s best separated from me – the aunt no doubt having got the details from the Clonard priest who instructed Mother Helena in the steps she should take.) So, when my beleaguered mother rings that school from a public call box, she is told that the sixth form there is already crammed to bursting, and cannot accommodate a single further pupil.

  Ejected and dejected. Belfast at the time contains only three Catholic (convent) grammar schools, those I’ve mentioned above; and I am now barred from all of them, on the principle that ‘Salóidh aon chaora chlamhach tréad’, a single scabby sheep will infect a flock. ‘Disaster’d me’. In a social climate of less inflexibility the obvious course would be to apply at once for admission to a Protestant, or non-denominational, school; but this resource is not available to me. Apart from the scandal it would cause in the neighbourhood, it happens that my mother is a full-time employee of another order of nuns, the Sisters of Charity, also based on the Falls Road, whose Secondary Intermediate School, St Louise’s, has recently opened on what used to be part of the Bog Meadows near our house. It’s only in the last year or so that she’s been eligible for full-time employment, with the lifting of the Bishop’s ban on married women teachers. Before that time, her Queen’s degree had netted her nothing but a series of bits and pieces, private tutoring or filling in for someone off sick; to add to the ironies piling up around us, she has at various periods been a valued, though necessarily temporary, member of the St Dominic’s staff itself – and incidentally a source of deep embarrassment to me, when I’d meet her in a corridor striding along with a child behind her carrying her books. (She has even taught my year, though fortunately not my class: a circumstance too excruciating to contemplate.)

  Her cherished teaching post, for all I know, may already be in jeopardy due to her daughter’s disgrace (and my father’s wages aren’t sufficient to maintain the middle-class comforts to which we’re all growing accustomed) – but to step outside the line of Church regulations would make the thing a certainty. So, a Protestant school such as Belfast Royal Academy or Grosvenor High is not an option. But neither is applying to join the civil service or seeking a job as a shop assistant. With the new term now only a week away, the situation is dire.

  At this juncture, my mother recalls a school at which she’d once taught, briefly, a good many years ago; further urgent telephone calls are made, the upshot of which is the presence of my mother and myself in a different convent parlour, awaiting inspection. The school, Ballynahinch, an Assumption Convent, is – just – within travelling distance from Belfast. (This is important; there is no question of installing me anywhere as a boarder.) About half its pupils are boarders, while the rest travel in each day on buses from Belfast and various locations in County Down. It’s a small school – a hundred-odd pupils compared to St Dominic’s five hundred – and old-fashioned; just how old-fashioned I don’t yet understand. We’ve concocted a story to explain my departure from St Dominic’s – something to do with the failure of the O-Level curriculum to meet my particular needs. It’s unlikely that this story fools anyone at all, but that’s another thing I don’t understand at the time. A vast amount of talk and speculation must have gone on behind our backs, my mother’s and mine, but we have our revised
account – revised in the interests of expediency – and stick to it.

  It is probable that the nuns of Ballynahinch would have found themselves unable to embrace a pupil who came proclaiming her expulsion from a different convent (however unjust); as it is, they swallow the nonsense about the timetable – or pretend to – and enroll me as a new girl in the Lower Sixth. (Rachel Changes Schools; The New Girl at Greychurch; Her Second Chance … the next title in this series should be something like Leslie Wins Through or Sybil Makes Good, but I’m not sure that these are appropriate.) For myself, I’d very much rather have broadcast the facts about the Rannafast business and its aftermath, but I’ve taken in the reasons for not doing so.

  Throughout the drama, I haven’t had a single bit of crossness or word of recrimination from my saintly mother, who knows the truth of the matter (as I see it anyway), and is completely on my side … Didn’t she ever give way to a spurt of anger at me personally, for all the trouble and perturbation I’d brought hurtling down on both our heads? Did such a mutinous thought ever cross her mind? Of course it must have done, she must have wanted to take me by the hair of the head and give me a good shaking, or pummel me into a penitent frame of mind for all the worry I’d caused her, showing her up in front of her friends and relations, enabling those who’d pronounced me spoilt to nod their heads sagely at the arrival of the outcome anticipated by them. So much, they’d have agreed in avid whispers, for my mother’s benevolent child-rearing strategies. She’d have been blamed and held up to ridicule for the way I had turned out. Well, it could hardly have been otherwise: having a daughter at the centre of a juvenile sex scandal could only reflect appallingly on her. Expelled from school! Cast into the wilderness! What extremes of depravity were thereby blazoned!