Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  My mother’s faith in me might well have wavered at this fraught moment. But she had invested too much in my upbringing to modify her partisanship now. Indeed, it would have torn her apart to have separated herself from my interests or point of view, even to the extent of criticising any headstrong or asinine carry-on on my part leading to a crisis. In her eyes, the school and the nuns were the villains of the expulsion drama, while I – if not entirely blameless – was merely unfortunate enough to be unfairly implicated.

  It was all a tremendous disaster and botheration. But facts, even the abysmal fact of my dismissal from St Dominic’s, could have an alleviating slant imposed on them, my mother thought, once the shock of the nuns’ decree had worn off, gathering up the shattered pieces of her equanimity and setting about the business of rehabilitation. As I say, the episode fuelled neighbourhood gossip for years and years, but my mother persuaded herself that this was not the case. She thought she had quelled speculation by gritting her teeth and displaying a resolute aplomb …

  In her opinion, I have suffered a disproportionate punishment, and she is every bit as incensed with the Dominican authorities as I am. At the same time, it is not agreeable to consider oneself or one’s family as fodder for scandalmongers; and her entire being is focused on keeping the truth from as many people as possible, and – in damage-limitation mode – steering clear of the topic with everyone else, until it all dies down and is forgotten …

  God knows how she squared things with my father and grandmother, how much of the truth was relayed to them. Possibly she produced some acceptable version of what was happening at the end of that difficult summer. I was leaving the school, she might have announced – implying there was something voluntary about it – because the nuns persisted in blaming me for something I hadn’t done. Besides, Ballynahinch would suit me better. (My God!) Or perhaps my parents and grandmother sat up to all hours discussing the situation in depth and from every angle while I was in bed. I don’t think this is likely, but I simply don’t know. I was lying low and keeping quiet, myself, until my life should get back on to some kind of even keel. Certainly the distress and tension afflicting our home must have been apparent to everyone in it, but (as I remember it) my father and grandmother stayed in the background at the time. Neither of them, I think, subjected me to very much in the way of either backing up or dressing down.

  It’s part of my mother’s strategy for getting back to normal that the wretched topic of my expulsion is relegated to a zone as far away as possible from everyday activity. For many years, the circumstances surrounding my change of schools is a taboo subject in our home – with my mother, eyes agleam with sparkling malice, only allowing herself a flicker of satisfaction on hearing of any misfortune befalling the Dominican nuns. An ní nach bhfeictear nó nach gcluintear, cha bhíonn trácht air, when a thing is neither seen nor heard of, there is no gossip about it. Well, maybe.

  In truth, there is nothing glamorous or beguiling about being an expelled girl – although probably, in my mind, in retrospect, the role has taken on a tinge of those qualities (backed up by the reactions of people who, hearing about the business for the first time, are immediately intrigued. ‘What did you do?’ they ask; meaning, ‘How bad were you?’ – uttered with a measure of admiration). No – for me, the emotions of fear and rage, plus the sense of guilt and rejection, combined in my psyche to produce goodness knows what areas of malfunctioning.

  The fictional expulsion is something else. There’s a very funny scene in Edna O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, when bumptious Baba makes up her mind to get sent away from her Limerick convent and forces Cait (the narrator) to go along with her. They put their names to a rude rhyme concerning a Sister Mary and the School Chaplain and leave it lying about. It achieves its end.

  As we walked past her [a prefect] she withdrew in close to the wall, because now we were filthy and loathsome; and no one would speak to us. In the hallway girls looked at us as if we had some terrible disease, and even girls who had stolen watches and things gave us a hateful, superior look.

  ‘Your mind is so despicable that I cannot conceive how you have gone unnoticed all these years,’ poor Cait is told. ‘… This afternoon you did a disgusting thing, and now you have done something outrageous …’ Cait is cowed, while Baba, the daredevil, is bursting with glee and filled with aplomb. It’s a standard comic situation with the narrator casting herself as stooge and ingénue – and the convent is shown up wonderfully as backwaterish and shivery. Unfortunately we, in our predicament, have no one among us to match Baba’s insouciance. We’d all, given half a chance, slink back to the red-brick fortress on the Falls with our tails between our legs.

  Nanda Grey (the alter ego of Antonia White) is another quasi-fictional heroine who suffers from an overreaction on the part of nuns. Nanda’s Ouida-type manuscript, her attempt at writing a full-blown romance, which she keeps in her desk while she goes on composing it, falls into the wrong hands and gets her convicted of depravity. The year of this disaster is 1912 or ’13, the setting a swanky English boarding school, the Convent of the Five Wounds, Lippington (in reality, the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton). There are complications here, as it turns out: it is in fact Nanda’s father who insists on the proposed sentence of expulsion being carried out, comparing his daughter’s mind to a sink of filth and impurity. (People confronted with juvenile expellées tend to lose their sense of humour.) The nuns might even have been willing to reinstate her. But White’s portrayal of the school is effectively chilling, with its atmosphere at once repressive and lurid. The nuns’ declared objective is to break the will of each and every pupil, and especially the more recalcitrant, for the purpose of resetting it, as if it were an arm or a leg, ‘in God’s own way’. There are, you soon realise, extremely disturbing undercurrents to Lippington’s idealisation of order and sanctity.

  Frost in May, the autobiographical novel of which Nanda’s expulsion forms the climax, was followed by a couple of sequels in which the heroine’s singular misfortunes seem geared to suggest that anyone subjected to the rigours of a convent schooling is in some way disabled and unfitted for ordinary life thereafter. (The sexual impotence of a couple of husbands and recurrent bouts of insanity are only a few of the woes in store for White’s unlucky central character, now called Clara Batchelor.)

  A morning comes in early September when I have to leave the house at an unearthly hour and board a bus going down the Donegall Road, alighting at Ormeau Avenue where the starting point for Ballynahinch is located. My new school uniform has not yet arrived, so I am wearing ordinary clothes: well, a tartan pleated skirt and my St Dominic’s blazer. I have permission to attend classes in this get-up. The Ballynahinch colour is royal blue, and the uniform – to my horror – includes black lisle stockings and black laced shoes, items discarded by St Dominic’s as far back as the 1940s. This is a real worry to me; I dread having to appear in the street looking a fright or an oddity. Indeed, it is possible that all the misery, apprehension and incomprehension surrounding my expulsion got itself focused, for the moment at least, on those impending lisle stockings, which assumed something of the character of a bugbear in my mind.

  I have only a week’s respite before this torture is inflicted on me. In the meantime – on this first morning – I nerve myself to accost a stocky blue-uniformed figure standing at the bus stop, introducing myself as a new girl. She has the look of a hockey-player or form-captain about her. I am taken under her wing, once she understands I’m not a retarded first-former, but someone going straight into the Lower Sixth. Friends in the same blue uniform swarming up to join her are informed of this phenomenon, i.e. me. I resign myself to being an object of curiosity – friendless, for the moment, wearing the wrong blazer and joining the school at an absurdly late stage.

  Ballynahinch is a rather dismal market town (or so it seems to me at the time), and the Assumption Convent is a countrified school with a deranged headmistress and the bulk of the pupils eit
her furtive or hysterical. The building itself glowers over the town at the Belfast end of the main street; it’s approached via an upwardly curving drive. Disgruntled pupils inch their way along this drive, spirits plummeting as the hideous entrance looms in sight. (I may be exaggerating; but I really don’t remember the least jolly thing about Ballynahinch.) To be a boarder here, I soon understand, is to undergo a systematic quenching. (Lippington without the starchy and snooty tone.) One friend who did board, up until the second term of her final year (my only year), when her family’s move to Belfast enabled her to travel in on the bus with the rest of us, cannot, even now, hear the word ‘Ballynahinch’ uttered in any context whatever, without flinching. The word reverberates as ‘Lowood’ must have sounded in the ears of Jane Eyre.

  I’m sure I have an unfair view of Ballynahinch. If one had gone there from the start (as a day pupil anyway), no doubt one would have fitted in and absorbed the school spirit. As it is, I never do get the hang of it. Well, I am not there by choice; and no unexpected largesse about the place occurs to modify my view of it. As far as I can judge, the school is crabbed and dull, full of unnerving corridors and imprisoning classrooms. It seems in desperate need of Peadar O’Donnell’s big windows (in his novel of that title) as an aid to enlightenment. It does not foster charm or bonhomie. Every pupil is on her own, and any deviation is apt to be picked on.

  Not long after I arrive there, I find myself the butt of intemperate jeers on the part of a small group of my new classmates. My face doesn’t please them – as they’re for ever telling me – being covered in revolting freckles and further disfigured by albino eyebrows. My hair is peculiar. ‘Wouldn’t you just hate to look like that?’ – this, as likely as not, addressed to someone with a snub nose and permed curls.

  Once they’ve exhausted my appearance as a topic, they start in on my character. Someone knows someone else whose friend at home goes to St Dominic’s. (Oddly, no one ever taxes me to my face with having been thrown out of that school.) Significant looks are exchanged. I’m the disgusting sexpot who flaunted her bust at the senior ceilidhe by turning up in a see-through blouse with a neckline down around the waist. (What exactly I was hoping to achieve by this unimaginable attire at an all-female event is not explained.) Incorrigible dirty-mindedness is my predominant trait. And so on, and so on. All accompanied by nudges and sniggers.

  The only way I can deal with this is to affect an air of amused superiority, which is probably very exasperating. I don’t even bother to contradict the nonsense, but serenely eat my cheese-and-tomato sandwiches while turning the pages of an Agatha Christie novel – these baiting sessions usually take place during the lunch hour. At the same time, some highly coloured storybook titles – That Detestable New Girl, The Outcast of the School, The Troubles of Tazy – spring into my mind. (I must be fair – it was only a small minority of Ballynahinch girls who behaved with this kind of almost statutory hostility; and once they’d tired of their new lunchtime amusement, which happened fairly quickly, they didn’t expect me to make anything of it. Which I didn’t. But it didn’t help to create a happy impression of the school in my mind.)

  My enemies’ allegations have a soupçon – but only a soupçon – of authenticity. These are the facts. It’s happened that, during my last Dominican year, I’ve been summoned one morning to the office of our scraggy headmistress, Mother Ailbe, and there taxed with having been improperly clad at the senior school ceilidhe. The charge actually does relate to a low-cut neckline and it leaves me totally perplexed, the blouse in question having been plain white cotton, and buttoned nearly up to the throat. (The nuns’ obsession with keeping their charges modestly dressed seems to have persisted up until the 1970s at least, by which time the school had one or two male teachers on its staff. One of these remembers hearing a fluttery nun admonish her pupils every time he appeared in a corridor: ‘Girls! Button up your blouses quick! It’s that man again.’)

  While I stand there regarding Mother Ailbe with some bewilderment, she shouts at me that I’m the boldest girl in the school – a reprimand heard by nearly every pupil at one time or another; and then – as a grand climax – snatches a piece of black satin ribbon from the pocket of her Dominican habit and flings it at me: ‘Here! Go away and tie your hair back in a decent fashion with this. If your parents can’t afford to buy you a hair ribbon, you’ll have to have this at the expense of the school. I’m not having you walking about the place looking like – like –’ she spits out the comparison as if it is the most tremendous insult ‘– like a film star!’ At that moment, I gain an inkling of how Mary McCarthy (as recalled in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood) must have felt when told, as a reprimand, that her mind is like Keats’s: ‘Brilliant but unsound.’ Nevertheless, Mother Ailbe’s crackpot insinuation rankles. I complain bitterly to my friends about all aspects of the incident.

  (Scrutinising the 125th anniversary magazine of St Dominic’s High School, 1870–1995, I’m amused to observe that the great majority of pupils in the class photos wear their hair tumbling about their shoulders or streaming down their backs as mine did in the past, falling simply as it grew, without artifice or restraint. Clearly, looseness of morals and looseness of hair are no longer identical in the eyes of nuns.)

  By the end of my first term at Ballynahinch I’m accepted by my peers as a more or less normal member of the Lower Sixth, with archetypal schoolgirl characteristics and foibles which enable me to settle – if insecurely – into a niche in the class. But I only make two proper friends from that year. One is the traumatised boarder alluded to above (Sheila McMahon by name). An ironical attitude to her troubles gets her through the school, with only minimal scarring. As far as appearance goes, Sheila is by far the best looking girl in the class, with thick auburn hair and an attractive face: a circumstance that appears to gain her no plaudits at all. She takes some getting to know, being something of a dissenter by nature, and not entirely open to friendly overtures, or not, at least, in that fraught setting. A common interest in detective fiction and hostility to the school environment draw us together. (We are still friends.)

  The other kindred spirit I encounter in the class is the dark-haired, scholarly May McMullan from Raholp, near Downpatrick – a girl who subsequently becomes famous in the school for pointing out an error in one of our Irish language textbooks. (The whole class bursts out laughing as she performs this feat.) The minute I arrive at Ballynahinch, May tells me we’ve already shared a classroom – Martin Henderson’s, at Coláiste Bhrighde. Since she never made herself conspicuous there, I don’t remember her at all. It’s a shock to have that fateful place brought up so quickly. May is kind enough, however, not to make any comment at all concerning my change of schools. (She and I keep up a kind of friendship over the next few years, but finally lose touch with one another. I’m pleased to note, however, that May’s latest achievement is to translate the entire Harry Potter sequence into Irish.)

  Nothing about the Assumption Convent suggests to me that I might prosper there; and I don’t. As far as school work goes, I am able to hold my own, nothing more. Being wrenched from my O-Level course at St Dominic’s naturally does me no good. The lessons at Ballynahinch on the whole do not interest me. No nun or lay mistress there shows much flair for teaching. Some of them go about the business in an odd way. I am not accustomed to being taught (for example) while kneeling on the floor: this is a punishment sometimes meted out to the whole class following an infinitesimal instance of misbehaviour on the part of a single pupil. There’s one nun in particular whose idiosyncrasy is to fly into a paddy and take it out on a girl who sits in the row behind me, comparing her (among other things) to ‘an ugly plant growing up the school wall’. This child, Rose Something-or-Other, is so intimidated as a consequence that she seems unable to speak – at least, I never hear her volunteer a single remark during the entire year. Her voice, whenever she’s addressed by a teacher and forced to respond, comes out in a strangled and hesitant manner which is painful to he
ar.

  Ballynahinch furnishes plenty of material for the obnoxious-school story, but I don’t think anyone there had diabolical intentions; it was just that the whole place was awash in heavy-handedness and religiosity. My own sense of the school is biased and incomplete: I’d never have chosen to attend so backward an institution, and I stayed there for the shortest time possible. In my own view, I’m as out of place as a pony in a hen-coop. Half the girls in my class have crushes on nuns, for heaven’s sake; one of them actually goes away to be a nun; and some years later I learn that our French mistress too has joined the Assumption Order, swopping her Gasc’s Concise Dictionary for a missal.

  It’s that kind of place. Exposed for too long to its feverish Catholic imperatives, you might find your resistance to irrationalism endangered. You might swallow the whole package, prayer book, priests and precepts. St Dominic’s, for all its shortcomings, offers far more scope for stimulation: not that it’s any less authoritarian, but its size, and its situation in the heart of the city, mean a certain worldliness can’t be excluded from its precincts. Interaction between the pupils themselves, and between certain pupils and one or two teachers, carries at least the possibility of productive disputation, an exhilarating give-and-take. Though we’re miles removed from the confident heroines of the school stories we all devoured at eleven or twelve, something of that self-possessed spirit has brushed off on us; we’re not, unlike the bulk of the Ballynahinch girls, all of a lumpen piece.