Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  To get a real sense of summer-school bedazzlement you have to turn to a writer like Sean O’Faolain, to whom the act of evocation comes as naturally as sneezing:

  In groups we spent the livelong days together. We spent half the day down in the village studying the language in the corrugated tin shed grandiosely called the College. The rest of the day we spent swimming in the rock pools, or climbing the mountains, or cycling to the farther glens, or dancing informally by the roadside at night, or more formally in the College, or boating on the lake if the moon was up, or simply sitting in the kitchen listening to some local boy or girl singing a traditional Irish song or playing old tunes on the fiddle, or we merely sat and conversed. Late hours were the common rule. I was always so pleasantly tired, so full of oxygen, that I could have slept soundly under a hedge or on a stone floor. On hot nights I often slept, in the clothes in which I stood, high up in the hay of the outdoor hay barn, waking only when I heard a horse’s hooves on the road or somebody working in the stone byre below. Nowadays, the learning of Irish has lost this magical power to bind hearts together …

  Well, maybe; but something of that first buoyant spirit persisted, though – as O’Faolain implies – compulsory Irish did a lot to stifle it. Irish was never compulsory for us in the North – indeed, its powerful connections with defiance and dissent were a part of its allure.

  The group I belonged to in the early 1960s, Cumann Cluan Ard, was fuelled by a wish to reinstate Irish as a medium of everyday communication. Its ambitions were unprecedented but not unattainable. By the middle of the decade, a lot of its members had paired off, moved into newly-built houses all close together, and established the nucleus of what became known as Belfast’s Gaelic colony. The next, inevitable, step was the setting up of nursery schools to accommodate their Irish-speaking infants. Then, as required, middle schools and grammar schools came into being, followed by radio programmes in Irish, shops selling Irish books and magazines, and other amenities to boost the undertaking.

  I was not personally involved in any of this. Shortly before these remarkable developments got under way, myself and my friend Maire, once keen members of Cluan Ard, had scarpered to England, respectively to London and Manchester, to further our own ambitions which had gradually diverged from fíor-Gaeldom. Nevertheless, the achievements of our one-time associates impressed us strongly. They had brought Irish out of the private, and into the public, domain. Their polite determination to speak their own language in all possible circumstances had tremendous implications for the future of the language, as a cultural survival wrested out of complexity and deadlock. Though the Shaw’s Road Gaeltacht was a place apart, its singularity had to do with conservation, not exclusiveness. Its inhabitants didn’t proselytise on the whole, but liked to show by their own example the relevance of Irish to contemporary life. They were, and are, idealists, but none the less practical for that.

  The setting up of this urban Gaeltacht coincided with the arrival of agitation in other parts of West Belfast, and the two in conjunction gave rise to a new version of an old question: were these Gaelic-speakers more, or less, Irish than their daredevil contemporaries who carried on the tradition of fighting, killing and dying for Ireland and never letting ordinary humanitarian reservations affect that grandiose resolve? No one ever came up with an adequate answer (all answers were partisan), but at the same time, terms like ‘cultural identity’ began to be bandied about, with emphasis (in liberal circles anyway) placed on the need to accord esteem to as many varieties of ‘cultural identity’ as could be pinpointed. It wasn’t long before the Irish language got itself counted among the resources of militant republicanism – a circumstance to which the Shaw’s Road Gaeiligoirí and others reacted with a measure of wryness. This wryness could hardly be contained following the appearance of political slogans framed in a version of Irish guaranteed to raise the ire of an old linguistic purist such as Flann O’Brien (say). ‘Tiochfaidh ár lá’, mar shampla.

  The summer after the Rannafast debacle – as I’ve said – I am back for a month in the Donegal Gaeltacht, in Loughanure on the other side of Annaghry, where I keep out of harm’s way and engage in no momentous misbehaviour. I am seventeen, and happy to have done with school (since the school is miserable Ballynahinch). I remember visiting a local house at Loughanure where one of the daughters sings ‘Buachaill ón Éirne’ in an enthralling manner. I remember, too, that my room-mates here are all demure girls with shiny hair and great proficiency in needlework. It is clear from the start that Loughanure is not quite so lively a centre of Irish studies as Rannafast.

  Further visits to Irish-speaking districts, over the next five years or so, take place in the company of delegates from an inter-University Gaelic Society which I have joined. On one of these occasions I get to know a couple of people from Dublin, a father and daughter called Thornberry – Ó Droighneáin in Irish – and it isn’t long before we’re on pretty companionable terms. A kind of holiday friendship springs up between the three of us in the course of walks and charabanc trips into the countryside of South Donegal, West Galway and the Dingle peninsula, and sociable evenings at ceilidhes or in some sort of makeshift concert hall on a hillside or in the middle of a bog with the wind howling outside and drowning out the current performance of Charlie’s Aunt – Aintín Searlais in Irish. Well, actually, it’s the father and I who are on the same wavelength, though it’s his pleasant daughter Joan – Siobán Ní Droighneáin – who is my contemporary. At least, we are on it with regard to literature: a common enthusiasm for the poems of Louis MacNeice, for example, is among the things that keep us sitting up until quite late in the evening before a succession of turf fires in different localities of the west, avidly exchanging opinions and making literary recommendations to one another. The elder Thornberry (Pádraig Mór) is a teacher at a Christian Brothers’ School in Dublin; but not at all hidebound or mealy-mouthed in spite of it. Nothing is out of bounds in our discussions – not Henry Miller (whom I abhor), Billy Bunter (a childhood favourite of both of us) or Lady Chatterley (which I haven’t yet read).

  It’s Pádraig Mór who introduces me to Ulysses, entrusting me with his own copy of the book, and stressing his confidence in my ability to approach it in the right spirit (i.e. not to go poking around for salacious passages). I do read it, with some difficulty – it’s not for another couple of years that I’m in anything like a position to grapple with the magnitude of Joyce’s undertaking, or succumb to the power of the narrative. But – at the time – I’m pleased to have struggled through this key item of Irish literature, however much of it is over my head.

  But – but – Pádraig Mór himself is subsequently overtaken by severe qualms of conscience at having foisted this supposedly titillating work on a juvenile (I think I was eighteen). The thing preys on his mind to the point where he comes to call at our house in the Donegall Road (he is visiting relatives in Belfast). His mission is to explain to my parents why he believed Ulysses would do me no harm, would, indeed, encourage an already strongly developed appreciation of literature, and make me into a more rounded-off person. He also wants to apologise if they feel he’s behaved inappropriately towards a teenage girl he isn’t related to.

  He needn’t have worried. No censorship ever operated in our house – I’d have been at liberty to read every page of the Kama Sutra or Under the Hill if I’d so desired. Besides, my mother would have known Ulysses as a literary work, nothing else; while as far as my father was concerned, the book would have seemed to him on a par with Oliver Twist … Pádraig Mór, all six feet of him, is ushered into the kitchen, given a cup of tea and put at his ease. At least, he’s beginning to relax and dismiss Joyce and all his works from his mind, when it’s suddenly borne in on him that my grandmother, from her accustomed armchair beneath the window, is subjecting him to a more than mannerly scrutiny. Finally, having thoroughly assessed his face and bearing, she can contain herself no longer but bursts out with, ‘This may seem like a strange question – but
– did you ever know someone called Minnie Cochrane?’ I did indeed, he replies, she was my mother. Well! That’s the rest of us excluded from the conversation.

  Minnie Cochrane, long dead, was my grandmother’s best friend in Lurgan when they were both young girls wearing dresses with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, before they and their descendants were scattered far and wide, to Belfast, Dublin, England and beyond. What’s survived of their friendship resolves itself into an image from 1899 or 1900. It’s a spring day, very early in the morning, before almost anyone is awake, and three figures are hastening towards the railway station in William Street and a train bound for Belfast. They are Minnie Cochrane and the boy she’s eloping with, whose name is Thornberry, and Minnie’s friend Sarah, a co-conspirator in the momentous escapade, who’s come to see off the runaway pair and carry one of their suitcases. Why the two couldn’t marry in the normal way with Sarah as a bridesmaid I have no idea; but as it is the vignette smacks of secrecy and drama and gets my grandmother in at the centre of the action. Girls and boys in Queen Victoria’s reign, it appears, were no less devious or headstrong than they were in our day. This was a colourful moment in my grandmother’s personal history. In our family lore it’s ‘I carried Minnie Cochrane’s suitcase when she eloped with Arthur Thornberry.’

  Another way in which I keep in contact with the Gaeltacht is in conjunction with friends from Cumann Cluan Ard. The spiritual home of Cluan Ard is Rannafast, and so my association with this wild place continues for a time, though on freer terms than those prevailing during the first disastrous summer. It isn’t at all the same. We Irish enthusiasts tend to go there at odd times of the year – April, October – travelling from Belfast in a hired minibus, or hitch-hiking whenever we can get away for a couple of days and are feeling energetic. And even during the months of July and August, when the College is functioning and the place awash in schoolchildren, there are houses set aside for club members who’ve established relationships with many of the local families. You can stay in these houses and not be answerable to any extraneous authority. Of course, by now we are old enough to accept the rules of behaviour governing the visit to someone else’s home, and to take a tolerantly exasperated view of schoolchildren’s antics. There is no call for our later landladies to nail up the windows to keep us in our beds at night. Oddly, I don’t remember, in these later years, running across any of the Rannafast boys who so preoccupied us during our first heady days in the Gaeltacht – or wanting to, for that matter, newer infatuations having supervened, to be fostered in their turn by the intoxicating locality.

  Once I’d left art school in Belfast and moved away from home these excursions tailed off, then stopped altogether, like my correspondence with the Thornberrys, father and daughter, which continued for a bit while I established myself as an expatriate with more than half my mind in Ireland, but then in due course ceased. I haven’t set foot in the Donegal Gaeltacht for a good many years. But the sense of a kind of Atlantic idyll remains implanted in my consciousness. The outcome of that first visit didn’t destroy the place for me. Rannafast and its goings-on may have landed us in a pickle, a pickle with weighty consequences; but the place itself never ceased to embody the spirit of a vibrant and pristine Ireland.

  What really were the consequences of Rannafast? There are certain moments in everyone’s life when the future begins to assume one configuration rather than another: if so-and-so happens, then such-and-such will follow on, as surely as the pale buds on the tree will turn to profuse green leaves. (Well, as long as they’re not wrenched off, or subjected to frost in May.) And whatever happens, you can’t help thinking about alternative lives, roads not taken, fantasies never acted out. Penelope Lively has a whole book of imaginary life-stories, or confabulations: an anti-memoir, she calls it. The title is Making It Up. It’s appropriate to describe this book as the opposite of a memoir, and not simply as a work of fiction, because the episodes envisaged would have required the merest twitch of reality, the most apparently inconsequential step in one direction rather than another, to make them true.

  Sometimes, in the made-up version, the imagined outcome is extreme. The entire Lively oeuvre would have been lost to the world of literature, for example, had the event described in the opening story of Making It Up, ‘Mozambique Channel’, come to pass. The author kills herself off as a young child fleeing Egypt with her mother and nanny, in 1942. A Japanese U-boat sinks the ship in which she is travelling, and then she is struck on the head by an oar in the scramble to find a place on a lifeboat. A later story has her – under her actual name, Penelope – wiped out again, this time in a air disaster of 1956. ‘Comets did fall out of the sky,’ she explains in a paragraph set in italic type, commenting on her own exercise in confabulation, and claiming its own kind of authenticity for the made-up event …

  It’s not my purpose here to imagine any of the courses my life might have taken, had things fallen out as expected in 1950s and ’60s Belfast – if I’d studied at university rather than art school, for example, and come of age in Belfast rather than London. But it’s certain that every major event in my life since 1959 has come about because of that decisive summer. Well, it may have been a stroke of luck despite appearances, I don’t know. Friends assure me I’d have been intolerable as an academic know-all, which was one possible outcome of the way I was heading. And I can’t really see myself as a grandmother of six, something that’s happened to a number of my contemporaries. The role would not have suited me. I have a lot to be thankful for, and perhaps a tiny portion of gratitude is due to those pestilential nuns of the mid-twentieth century Dominican Order, and their cack-handed administrations.

  We moved to Antrim in 1999. Our house is still in need of restoration, though the rot has been treated, central heating installed and plumbing and electricity brought up to date. Three or four years of neglect, before we came, had caused blocked gutters and all the other aggravations householders dread. Some domestic vandal of the late twentieth century took away the original lime-mortar pointing and inserted an inappropriate, supposedly durable, material: now it’s all to do again. At some point not too far ahead, the roof – the famous Irish roof, bemoaned by novelists from Maria Edgeworth to Caroline Blackwood – will need to be replaced. (Though we don’t have vast quantities of buckets, like those arranged along the corridors of Blackwood’s Dunmartin Hall – or indeed the corridors – a bucket or two is necessary to catch occasional drips.)

  The house feels as if it ought to be haunted, especially when you see it from a distance through a haze of fog or snow; and indeed perhaps there are lingering presences about the place, for those susceptible to such phenomena. It was built, around 1840, for a young Presbyterian minister, the Revd Charles Morrison, and his wife Margaret Oliphant – who shares a name, and possibly an ancestry, with the Victorian author of The Chronicles of Carlingford and many other books. Both Margaret Oliphants came from Edinburgh and had connections with the publishing firm of the same name (which ended in the 1950s as a publisher of girls’ school stories with a religious bias). The works of the writing Oliphant include some good ghost stories featuring sombre stone houses, not unlike this one, flanked by churchyard yews. But are there ghosts here? Some who know about these things have detected the presence of a sprite – and we know of at least two children, sons of the Morrison family, who died on the spot: one as an infant in 1846, and the other eleven years later, at eleven years. They are buried in the old Presbyterian graveyard nearby, with its sparse and faintly desolate air. As for my own view – I’d go along with Brigid Brophy on Shakespeare’s fairies: to be believed in utterly, but strictly in the realm of the imagination.

  Three years after the second pathetic death, the family washed its hands of Antrim and moved to North London, where the Revd Morrison had secured a post as principal of Hackney Theological College. The house was sold, in 1860, to a Mr Thomas Hugh Adams of Rokeel, near Ballymena, and another young family (I imagine) had a whale of a time climbing trees in the ga
rden and running wild among the adjoining fields and woods. (I’m sure there was an old nurse like Alice Milligan’s in the poem ‘When I Was a Little Girl’ using a topical threat to control her charges: ‘Come in! Or when it’s dark, / The Fenians will get ye.’) At any rate, one of the Adams sons was so attached to the house that he stayed in it for the rest of his life; a doctor, and unmarried, John James Adams was still here in 1941, when an accident on the front door steps in icy weather brought about his death.

  I’m interested in the first owner, the Revd Morrison, who was born in Belfast and educated at Inst, a few years after Robert MacAdam got his grounding in Irish at the same school. Morrison came to Antrim as minister of the First Presbyterian Church in 1840, and he – or his wife’s family – set about building the house, which was later called Ashville. We would like to think that Lanyon had a hand in its construction (Charles Lanyon, the architect of Victorian Belfast); he was working in the area at that time, and certain features of the house suggest the idea may not be unduly far-fetched. (It can’t be verified, unfortunately, since the whereabouts of the Lanyon papers is at present a mystery.) The grey stone house, not large, with subdued Gothic touches, built of local materials, must have exercised a considerable fascination even then; it was right out in the country and had a romantic aura about it.