Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  When I get to art school it’s a different matter. Acting the prude here, against the ethos of the place, provokes exasperation in a good many of my fellow students and earns me a dismally strait-laced reputation (strange that I remember going through the whole course in a kind of stupor of eroticism). I have to be good, since I’ve elected myself a representative of Irish-Ireland with its lofty cultural and moral tone. To bolster up this attitude I have before me at art school the spectacle of a fellow Catholic gone to the bad: a thin, blonde, good-natured giggly girl from a broken home who’s forever broadcasting her totally undiscriminating sexual exploits: she doesn’t, it seems, draw the line at anyone. Well! I should loathe to get myself similarly disrespected.

  What I don’t quite grasp, because it’s far more subtle, is the degree of sexual sophistication prevailing here – an opposing force to the constituents of the decent Catholic, or for that matter Protestant, North. And I am more susceptible to the effects of this force than I understand at the time. Looking back, I don’t present an alluring image to myself as a first, second, even third-year art student: virginal, teetotal and unadventurously dressed. I see myself at student parties, an incongruous presence in a twinset amid a lot of Juliette Greco look-alikes, while girls with harshly melodious voices sing non-Gaelic songs containing lines like, ‘Cocaine, cocaine, all around my brain.’

  But the basis for these and other dismal traits is getting increasingly shaky, as a prelude to being overtoppled altogether.

  PART THREE: Tuilleadh Salachair

  raised in a northern land of rain and murk …

  Derek Mahon, ‘Death and the Sun’

  I was still twenty when I went to live in London, in September 1963, moving further away from a charmed childhood and a world of indigenous preoccupations and steady objectives. It went to my head a little. One of the ways in which the frivolous side of my nature came out was in an enhanced obsession with clothes. If Belfast bred an abhorrence of conspicuousness or eccentricity – hence the woolly jumpers and pleated skirts of my adolescence – London embraced and upheld non-conformity in the matter of self-presentation. It was enormously stimulating. First there were wonderful, newfangled shops such as Mary Quant and Biba, with an atmosphere which cancelled the old idea of buying for practicality. And then came the antique clothing boom which made me an instantaneous devotee of Victorian striped petticoats and 1930s chiffons and voiles. I wore tailored costumes from before the First World War, and skimpy 1940s patterned crepe dresses with puff sleeves. The Portobello Road became my stamping ground. I skittered about like the madcap shopper in Elizabeth Bowen’s essay on dress, ‘relentlessly driven … by the exactions of her particular whim’. With my soon-developed, finely honed instinct for ‘Utility’ survivals or knickers purported to come from Queen Victoria, I was able – wherever I was – to make a beeline for the nearest supply of intoxicating cast-offs.

  Back home in Belfast, for example, my connoisseur’s nose took me straight to Sandy Row and a two-roomed, stone-floored huckster’s shop, presided over by a garrulous old body in a blue nylon overall. This was the well-known Maggie Moore’s, an old clothes shop and one-time exclusive resort of tramps and washerwomen. It was long a byword in Belfast for rock-bottom shabbiness or demented finery. ‘Did you see what she had on? She must have got it in Maggie Moore’s!’ Thus the respectably clad, in gleefully derisive mode. Maggie Moore’s: if its fame was great, it was not good. Locals dubbed it a flea circus, according to Robert Harbinson in No Surrender, his lively account of growing up in a street off Sandy Row in the 1930s. He renames the shop Aggie Moore’s, possibly to avoid litigation – though who was likely to take him up on his description of the place, I can’t imagine.

  By the time I discovered it, the original owner with her crystal ball and addiction to red biddy was long gone. Her successor was a relative, a niece I think, who’d inherited the whole terrible package of rotting and frowzy discards of the pre-war era. Some of these garments had clearly been hanging in the same spot under a skylight in the back room for fifty years. Many were unsalvageable, crumbling to dust if you laid a finger on them. But others – ah! others, like Briar Rose surrounded by the dust and cobwebbed accumulation of ages, might emerge intact from their mouldy cocoon. Wonderful, unmarked pure silk antique dresses, exotic chiffons, smart 1940s suits with padded shoulders, even, on one occasion, a dusty blue bouclé wool coat that shouted Schiaparelli. It wasn’t authentic of course, but even an imitation Schiaparelli was sufficient reward for braving the filth of ages and the utter bemusement of the proprietor who might have been seen making faces at a crony behind my back, while touching a finger to her head.

  Doolally I was not; I knew exactly what I was looking for, and I knew I might find it here, and at an affordable price. But I had to grit my teeth, hold my nose and enter the premises as cautiously as the Revd O’Hanlon setting foot in some shocking habitation in 1850s Millfield. If I was lucky, and some new treasure had been added to the stock of old clothes since my last visit, or if something in the back room had miraculously resisted decay, I had to bear it off at arm’s length to the nearest dry cleaner’s, and expose myself to further Belfast ridicule while trying to save face by muttering something unconvincing about a theatrical production. Actually, the theatrical production was myself, as I went about looking like a London working girl of the 1890s, a British Far Eastern wartime refugee in my ‘Tenko’ dresses, or a Connemara fisherman’s wife from the era of J.M. Synge. It all added to the gaiety of life.

  After a downbeat girlhood as far as daily wear was concerned, I suppose it was natural enough that a reaction should set in; and it was just luck that it coincided with an exhilarating upgrading of the second-hand tradition in clothes buying. Of course, there was second-hand, with its drab and poverty-stricken associations, and then there was vintage; but no frequenter of Maggie Moore’s, I am sure, would have known the difference. In London, I was precipitated into the middle of a costume extravaganza, and whatever of its impetus I assimilated, I carried with me back to sober-suited Belfast. It was as if the opposite of a Pandora’s Box, a treasure chest filled with limitless possibilities, had got itself opened and imbued the city streets with a carnival colouring.

  Of course, survivals from the past in every area – reading, architecture, interior decoration, mugs and jugs and what-have-you, had always answered to some requirement of my nature, and it wasn’t surprising that clothes should be added to the list. I had long been an addict of evocation. But, at the same time, my allegiance to the vogue for piquant pyjamas and Tess-of-the-d’Urbervilles sun bonnets no doubt had about it an element of a belated riposte to the antediluvian death’s-heads in charge of my schooling. These, nuns and priests and all, believed the closer a young girl’s clothing approximated to a straitjacket, the better.

  Well, they were people who’d been nurtured themselves in the cult of the hair shirt and the fetter-like wimple. If they couldn’t get us into actual straitjackets, the next best thing was to clamp down on any out-of-school style-consciousness that came to their notice. Anyone suspected of an interest in adornment would have to endure an onslaught of sarcasm … Did she really think, with her desperate looks, that a spot of lipstick or a frilly blouse would cause anyone in their senses to give her a second glance? If this was so – then more fool she. Better to accept, with due humility, the face and figure God had lumbered her with. Or words to that effect. For the rest of the class, the nun’s tirade would have us squirming in our seats in embarrassment and sympathy for the latest victim of sledge-hammer castigation. The nun, of course, would have thought she was doing her duty, nothing more. Nuns in those days were adamant in adhering to guidelines laid down by Irish church fathers a long time ago, church fathers whose lives in some crazy instances were governed by an immense devotion to the concept of purity in dress.

  It is, indeed, both amusing and amazing to consider those pronouncements which issued, in the early part of the twentieth century, from the mouths of especi
ally zealous priests such as Father James Cullen S.J. (This specimen of barmy purity has come into my hands via a dusty old book recovered from an attic.) Father Cullen’s biographer, a fellow cleric, laments at one point in his narrative: ‘In his efforts to start a Campaign for Modesty in Dress, he did not achieve much success.’ Father Cullen, it seems, spent a lot of his time looking askance at contemporary fashion, or pagan apparel, as he dubbed it; what really got his goat was the spectacle of Irish women having the gall to approach the altar for Holy Communion wearing all kinds of ‘repulsive attire’. Since he died in 1921, the year of the founding of the Legion of Mary, it’s hard to envisage exactly what caused him so much agitation: hobble skirts? Tea-rose tea gowns? Arts and Crafts dresses of the type worn by Lily and Lolly Yeats at the Cuala Press? Land girls’ breeches imported from England? The sight of ankles? Whatever it was that got his dander up, you might have thought – with the country in an uproar, as the Land War was followed by illicit drilling of Volunteers in the North and the South – you might have thought he’d have better things to do than interfere with people’s freedom to dress as they pleased. But no. It gets worse. What’s likely to instil the greatest alarm in present-day readers of Father Cullen’s life story is his strictures on the practice of putting insufficient clothing on little girls (his italics): the short skirts and bare legs of little – and worse, big – girls are an abomination to him.

  The Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart, founded by Father Cullen himself back in 1888 along with other periodicals such as the Irish Catholic, kept the subject well to the fore in devout readers’ minds as the flighty 1920s, with their plentiful temptations for the clothes-conscious, got under way. The onus was on true Irishwomen ‘to stem the tide of immoral fashions’. Failure to go about buttoned up to the chin was tantamount to proclaiming an indifference to Irishness – at any rate, in the eyes of priests and nuns and their followers. It was, indeed, a fairly futile proscription: these people were up against an instinct more fundamental than erotophobia, the instinct to achieve an appearance as pleasing as possible.

  But the fear of fashion and its implications for immorality: this force, by dint of incessant trumpeting, did work an effect on Irish social life of the mid-twentieth century. Its more egregious outlets are pretty well documented. Frank O’Connor, in his travel book of 1947, Irish Miles, is rendered speechless by the tendency of Catholic activists to go about pasting strips of brown paper over images of women’s chests on advertisement hoardings in cities and towns. And then you got odd members of the laity appointing themselves a scourge of the bedizened. Women and girls in the streets of Dublin, according to Austin Clarke in his autobiography A Penny in the Clouds, used to take to their heels – their high heels – in droves, at the approach of an eccentric person named Philip Francis Little, whose mission it was to denounce in a loud voice any shortcomings he spotted with regard to neck- or hemlines.

  There’s a priest in Brian Moore’s novel Fergus, a master at St Michan’s College in Belfast (a fictionalised St Malachy’s), who, the rumour goes, marches off every now and then to the school dentist’s office bearing a pair of scissors to excise certain advertisements from magazines distributed about the waiting room. It’s to spare the boys exposure to corsets and brassieres, or anything else likely to have an inflaming effect. (Things have changed. On a recent – 1998 – visit to St Malachy’s, I was amused to spot in the reception area an Ulster Tatler with a picture of ‘Christmas Lingerie’ all over the cover.)

  The scissors as an emblem of expurgators crops up again in a real-life anecdote about Brian Moore. When his first novel, Judith Hearne, was published in 1955, his mother in Belfast sent a copy of the book to her youngest daughter, Eilis, a nun in a convent in England. But first she took a pair of scissors and went through the book cutting out anything overtly sexual or blasphemous, leaving Eilis – Sister Anne – with a severely mutilated text. Like the mother of the Leeds poet Tony Harrison, Mrs Moore must have had the thought go sorrowfully through her head, ‘You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books.’

  It was a different world. Of course it’s unfair to apply the standards of the present to the ills of the past; change is a built-in factor of the human condition, and attitudes taken for granted at one moment are apt to be strongly repudiated the next. We are all enlightened now – or so it seems, until the next exposure of current misbeliefs comes into being. However, the Ireland of the mid-twentieth century, de Valera’s Ireland, presents such an extreme case of backwardness that it seems fair game. At the height of its churchly monomania, it was out of kilter with the rest of the world, especially the post-war world. Where else but in Ireland would you find an edict going out from an archbishop ordering members of a Girl Pipers Band to lengthen the hems of their kilts, lest the sight of knees marching smartly in unison should induce affront, or arousal, in spectators in the streets?

  Poking their noses into girls’ bare legs is only a sample of the ways in which the Archbishop of Dublin, Father Cullen and their ilk assert an unassailable power over their congregations. There is more to their scope for outrage than the cut of their flocks’ frocks. No aspect of life goes unregulated by them. ‘In Ireland,’ notes the American Paul Blanchard, in his 1953 account of the conflict between Catholic policy and modern democracy, The Irish and Catholic Power – ‘In Ireland … courtship is the business of the Irish priest, and petting is the business of the Irish priest, and even the etiquette of the marriage bed is the business of the Irish priest’ – along with birth control, mixed marriage, illegitimacy, sodomy, masturbation, divorce, separation, sex education, the kind of sanitary protection permitted to women, and ‘keeping company’.

  Well! To get the population into a tractable state with regard to all this it’s necessary to catch them early – and indeed, the guideline for teachers is set out unambiguously. Their aim should be to foster in every pupil ‘a true Catholic outlook on human life as planned by God’. Dissenters from full-blown religiosity need not apply. As the case of the novelist John McGahern illustrates, Church control over the employment of teachers extended until well into the 1960s. In the mid-century, fearsome Catholic groups came into being to sabotage ‘Protestant’ or liberal influences in the professions. In 1944, the edict placing Trinity College out of bounds for Catholic students was reinforced by Archbishop McQuaid in his Lenten Regulations. Catholics were segregated at University College Dublin, where their doings could be monitored by the archbishop and his henchmen. All this was vastly over the top. No one can reasonably disagree with Paul Blanchard when he deplores the Church’s ‘tendency … to represent all modern, non-Catholic progress as decadence’.

  Blanchard finds himself at a loss to explain the docility of Irish people in the face of all this priestly coercion and interference in their daily lives. It’s not a new perception. Around the turn of the twentieth century, you get George Moore attributing the malaise of western Ireland to the strong-arm tactics of fanatical priests – priests whose moral development is often in excess of their intellects. And for a rational commentator like Michael J. McCarthy (author of Priests and People in Ireland, 1902), acceptance of the Church’s ‘perplexing and interfering with our adult population in every sphere of secular affairs’ is a cause of surprised dismay.

  Why was it that scant attention was paid to these voices of reason, while the ludicrous pronouncements of bishops and archbishops were swallowed without a qualm? To even begin to answer that question, you’d need to take historical circumstances, ideas of national identity and other large matters into consideration. For certain critics of Catholic submissiveness, though, it was pretty simple: the people had had the spirit bludgeoned out of them by a barrage of spirituality. Or at least, they’d allowed themselves to be deprived of some vital impulse: as Blanchard has it, ‘the total sexual expression of the Irish people is much less than it is in other countries … The Catholic crusade against normal sexual life has actually created a nation of men and women who try to drown thei
r fundamental instincts.’ It’s wrong, he says, to blame the moist damp climate for eroding Irish ardour, as some have tried to do. Rain is not the primary constraining factor here.

  Elizabeth Bowen puts her finger on something fundamental about Irish writing before the 1950s, when she alludes to its sexlessness: by implication, the point she is making about Sheridan le Fanu’s Uncle Silas – that ‘no force from any one of the main characters runs into the channel of sexual feeling’ – this point may be extended to apply to the whole genre of Irish writing, traditional Irish writing. In its pages, the sexual act is simply edited out altogether (the more usual course), or presented as a feat, as in one of Benedict Kiely’s stories when he has someone applaud a pair of lovers in a field who ruin a half acre of turnips in their enthusiasm.

  Though it wasn’t peculiar to Ireland, of course, censorship operated here a long time before it was officially imposed. In a book which sets out, as far as possible, to defend the Catholic Church and its achievements (Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, 1997), Mary Kenny mentions George Orwell’s singling out of 1917 as the year in which literature took an unbridled turn. Before that date (she agrees) ‘mainstream literature maintained a certain decorum. It did not describe sexual acts in detail, and it seldom challenged established religion or morality.’ This is true as far as it goes. However – there’s a difference between those English classics of the nineteenth century, in which an erotic dimension is palpable, if subterranean, and equivalent Irish works, in which the point made by Elizabeth Bowen (above) is amply borne out.