However, Antrim, as it turned out, was not a well-omened setting for the minister and his family. In between the two children’s deaths came a considerable scandal which convulsed church circles as ‘rumours besmirching the character and conduct of Mr Morrison’ began to circulate. What had he done? The thing is wrapped in mystery and speculation as close-mouthed elders kept the story from ever reaching the wider public; but one (watered-down) version has the minister casting a lascivious glance at a lady’s ankle as she stepped from a carriage. There were also stories concerning afternoon visits by Mr Morrison to farmers’ wives, while the farmers were occupied elsewhere.
But if that’s what all the fuss was about, you’d have to say the business engendered as absurd an outcome as our Rannafast caper. Morrison was summoned to appear before a Church Tribunal – a grave and disagreeable proceeding – and after much solemn deliberation, the Presbytery came out in support of him. But this verdict so incensed half Morrison’s congregation – including, no doubt, the outraged farmers with untrustworthy wives – that they took themselves off in high dudgeon to perform their heavenly worship elsewhere. (I have a good deal of fellow-feeling for the beleaguered Mr Morrison, and not only because it’s likely that it was in this very room – though with a view stretching all the way to Lough Neagh and not curtailed after sixty feet by a hedge blocking off the bungalow next door – in this very room that his defence to the Church Tribunal was prepared.) Following the large-scale defection, the humiliated cleric stuck it out for a time, doggedly going about his duties; but the hostility of his former parishioners must have had a dejecting effect. After the adversities of Antrim, the Hackney appointment probably came as a godsend.
In Ireland, nothing remains of the Revd Charles Morrison but the melancholy gravestone commemorating his sons and a few scattered references in church documents. Oh, and the house he built, of course, which now forms a part of the North’s very rapidly dwindling heritage. ‘Protestant or Catholic,’ Frank O’Connor noted, ‘we are as decent a race of people as you are likely to find, but without the black of your nail of any instinct for conserving things.’ It was 1947 when this fact struck him, and things since then have not improved. All the town- and country-house murders, or deaths by neglect, make a painful panorama. Some buildings on the verge of extinction could still be revived if anyone cared: the eighteenth-century courthouse in Antrim town, the once grand, neo-classical Upper Crescent in Belfast … The custodians of these and so many other treasures of architecture are useless, swamped by bureaucracy, without a vision, careless of the future. However you look at it, the future depends on the past, on continuities understood and assimilated, on the psychic wellbeing engendered by the simple presence of survivals from a different age. It would be well for Northern Ireland if its people could learn to cherish the past more, and remain stuck in it less.
If we had to enumerate the components of the force that plucked us out of elegant Blackheath, and deposited us on the outskirts of rural Antrim, we’d have to place conservation among them: it was Ashville that attracted us. Once found, it made its claims on our commitment irresistible. The project of renovation wasn’t, and isn’t, without plentiful anxieties. Arriving ahead of our removers, we sat on the stairs in an empty house (there was nothing else to sit on), with a tranquillised ginger cat, contemplating the fungus growing up the walls and the row of obsolete servants’ bells. Since then, the pleasures of inhabiting a house with a history have won out over the drawbacks inseparable from coping with its enormous demands: the unreclaimable garden, the still unconverted outbuildings. But it took a while before we were settled here, in any practical sense. After a week or two of trying to find shops that sold anything we could eat, and coping with life amid piles and piles of packing cases, my husband, an artist, began a huge painting called ‘Landing on the Moon’. It adequately reflected our state of mind at the time.
My parents came to visit, and my mother’s verdict was: it would be a lovely house if only it was new. The amount of work to be done and the current chaos dismayed her. And how would we earn a living, so far away from our previous sources of income? … Virtually without my noticing it, my dear parents had grown old and anxiety-ridden; and although they deserved a more efficient and selfless daughter to keep an eye on them, I was the only daughter they had. To be within reach of them, though not so close that we’d be living on top of one another, was among our reasons for uprooting ourselves. Another was London itself. For some time, the feeling had been growing on us that a less frenetic and clustered way of life was something we ought to try to cultivate while we had the chance. And our main requirement, if we were going to turn our back on everything familiar and step into the unknown, was an old Ulster house, preferably a listed house; never mind its state of repair, its practicality or even its situation on the outskirts of a town rendered ugly and damaged by redevelopment. Well, that’s Ashville: we’ve got it, with its precarious tranquillity, its hidden impairments – may they stay hidden – and its romantic aspect.
In fact, not only the house, but the whole surrounding countryside abounds in historical associations. The impact of these has been diminished, but not completely vanquished, by the transformations of the last forty-odd years. Once a sleepy little place with a population of 3,000, ‘mild and virtuous looking’, according to the social commentator Hugh Shearman, Antrim town has now been catapulted into the twenty-first century, with its terrible shopping precinct, its vast surround of housing estates – proliferating in all directions – and its new reputation for delinquencies of various kinds, many of them drug-related. Not that a dubious reputation is entirely new to it. Hugh Shearman, in his comments on the town, makes a little joke about its one-time supposed depravity, at least in the eyes of a raving cleric who rechristened inoffensive Antrim Sodom and Gomorrah, in a sermon denouncing its laxity in the matter of licensing hours. Shearman’s joke, with its note of quaintness, underscores the whole quaint element attaching to bygone Antrim – exemplified, perhaps, in its famous Pogue’s Entry, in which a boy destined for more than local celebrity was once squashed into a miniscule dwelling along with his parents and siblings. Alexander Irvine, whose account of nineteenth-century poverty and uprightness in a lowly setting (very lowly: how they all crammed into the tiny space I do not know), My Lady of the Chimney Corner, commends, among other virtues, the lunatic honesty of his mother, who made him take back to its owner a turnip he’d uprooted from a field.
The subject of mild jokes, a centre of egregious sermonising, possessor of a picture-book round tower and, in Pogue’s Entry, a miniscule literary landmark, along with aloof local toffs in the persons of Lord O’Neill and the Viscounts Massareene: Antrim, in this view, begins to take on a tinge of Ulster unctuousness. These things connect it to a bland past, a kind of countrified idyll in which even the most fearsome of social and physical deprivations are somehow rendered a bit folksy and – well – chimney-cornerish. But it’s not a true picture of course, or even a very potent figment to superimpose over historical actualities.
History discloses many more compelling images, from the burning of the town in 1649 during the Cromwellian wars to the day in June 1798 when pikes in the hands of United Irishmen could be seen moving along apparently of their own volition above the tops of hedges lining the roads into Antrim. It is likely that, as they marched, the bearers of these pikes had in mind the fate of local man William Orr, accused of administering the United Irish oath to a couple of soldiers of the Fifeshire Fencibles and hanged near Carrickfergus in 1797 after a farce of a trial. This, on top of all the grievances fostering rebellious activity in the region, would have strengthened their resolve. For some, though, ordinary countrymen untrained in military operations, it wasn’t enough.
James Orr, accomplished dialect poet and himself a participant in the Rising, details in one poem the evasive antics of many would-be insurgents who lost their nerve when it came to the bit:
Some lettin’ on their burn to mak’,
/> The rear-guard, goadin’, hasten’d;
Some hunk’rin’ at a lee dyke back,
Boost houghel on, ere fasten’d
Their breeks, that day.
Trousers round the ankles is somewhat at odds with the heroic aspect of the Rising, though it introduces a welcome note of humanity. Others in Orr’s satirical account, misliking the look of General Nugent’s Redcoats when they appeared on the horizon, threw down their weapons and promptly fled, sometimes making it home to the surprise and pragmatic thankfulness of their wives:
‘Guid God! is’t you? fair fa’ ye! –
’Twas wise, tho’ fools may ca’t no’ brave,
To rin or e’er they saw ye.’ –
By all accounts, James Orr’s own conduct at the time entitles him to take a less than commendatory view of the shambles he witnessed and later inscribed in sterling verse. There were those in the company who deserved the epithet ‘truly brave’ among the hordes of scarperers. The mustering point for all the local United Irishmen was Donegore Hill, which supplies a title for Orr’s poem. A mysterious and alluring hill on the outskirts of Antrim, Donegore goes on distilling a sense of the numinous, despite the motorway at its foot and a garden centre and a couple of inappropriate new buildings wrecking its integrity. Like Ashville House, it suggests itself as the setting for a ghostly occurrence – and Maurice Leitch, born and raised in Muckamore, a mile south of Antrim town, clearly had Donegore in mind when he wrote the resonant ghost story ‘Green Roads’, in which the suicide of a British soldier serving in Northern Ireland in the 1980s is presided over by a line of long dead pikemen, implements clasped in their charnel hands, ‘a few scythes, but mainly pitchforks and long poles tipped with metal. Their clothes looked outlandish as well, old and worn out from the effect of long drudgery in the open.’ The position occupied by this unearthly company, if indeed it was the top of Donegore, would have given them a view of the subtle and seductive south Antrim countryside with its fields and farms and woodland and gorse-filled meadows rolling away in the distance.
We’ve hardly cast off our qualms and disorientation, transplanted quasi-Londoners that we are, before we are up at Donegore admiring the lovely small stone church and the quiet burial ground located there, both redolent of a kind of aesthetic and social wellbeing to do with old Antrim (yes, I know I’m indulging in an excess of blitheness here, but the setting calls for it). And the next minute we stumble on a woefully neglected, important grave behind the church: cracked and lopsided tombstone, rusty railing, nearly indecipherable inscription: Sir Samuel Ferguson 1810–1886 … It’s a good many years, it turns out, since the poet John Hewitt and his wife Roberta used to come up here, bearing flowers and gardening implements, to tend the grave and pay homage to a fellow Belfastman of Antrim ancestry whose life was largely spent in Dublin, though his burial spot indicates the importance to him of his northern roots. Fellow poet too – and now I’m standing half-way up Donegore Hill in the summer twilight, in a Christian churchyard with pre-Christian thoughts surging into my head and the motorway only a distant annoyance down below, I have to wonder if ‘The Fairy Thorn’ with its overpowering uncanniness, its eldritch felicities, had its origin in this strange place:
For, from the air above and the grassy mound beneath,
And from the mountain-ashes and the old white-thorn between,
A power of faint enchantment doth through their beings breathe,
And they sink down together on the green.
Ferguson wrote ‘The Fairy Thorn’, based on a local legend, before he was twenty-four, and the first thing to note about the poem is the way it is charged with erotic energies – a merit you can’t claim for his later exercises in Victorian subfusc, such as ‘Congal’. Four young girls, bent on merriment, thoughtlessly arrange an evening out on a piece of enchanted ground, the upshot of which is the fairy abduction of one and the slow decline of the other three …
Ferguson’s perfect fairy poem, as many critics have pointed out, underpins the whole Celtic Twilight movement in the later part of the nineteenth century. It’s an unexpected accolade to fall on the shoulders of a Belfast unionist and barrister who married an heiress (Mary Catherine Guinness) and practised law in Dublin. But paradoxical elements are a feature of Ferguson’s life, at least in the eyes of those for whom his Belfast Protestantism chimes oddly with his enthusiasm for Gaelic culture. Not that, at the time, there was anything unusual about this. Born in High Street when it was still mainly a residential quarter, Ferguson would have been a boyhood neighbour of Robert MacAdam (two years his senior), and also a fellow Instonian (Charles Morrison was at Inst about the same time too); and we know from MacAdam’s correspondence that the two remained friends at least until well into middle age. We also know that Ferguson attended Irish classes in Hill Street, Belfast, in the early 1830s – though his proficiency in the language never matched MacAdam’s, however much he outstripped his old contemporary in social aggrandisement and poetic ability. When he composed his epics he relied on prose translations of the sagas by other people.
A hundred years after Ferguson’s birth, in 1910, his contribution to Irish literature was acknowledged in a celebration which took place by his graveside in Donegore. Among the organisers of this event was the flamboyant Belfast solicitor, antiquary, historian, after-dinner speaker and famous dispenser of hospitality at his home, Ardrigh, on the Antrim Road, Francis Joseph Bigger, who ceremoniously laid a wreath of bays on Ferguson’s grave. Equally ceremonious was the commemorative address by Alfred Perceval Graves, the father of Robert Graves and future expunger of ‘embarrassing matter’ from some of Ferguson’s works. The expurgatory impulse, which we’ve noted before, was still going strong in relation to Ireland, literature and translation from the Irish – all areas in which Ferguson was hugely distinguished.
Indeed, in some ways the same impulse is still going strong – or at least, there are those who would like to see it reinstated: old-style, rock-solid Catholic puritans, many of them survivors from the generation born before the 1930s (say). These hold fast to Catholic-Irish rules of propriety as they first imbibed them. They are either deaf and blind to (so-called) obscenity, or, if the thing is persisted in, put on a display of old-fashioned dudgeon. They can’t help it. They belong to an era in which any degree of sexual frankness is simply accounted nasty and shocking.
A couple of years ago I went to a talk in Belfast, partly because the lecturer was someone I’d known slightly at school, though she was a few years ahead of me and had since gained something of a reputation as an academic in the South. The subject of the talk was masterpieces of modern Irish language fiction or something of that sort: a topic that interested me, or at least one about which I felt I ought to be more knowledgeable. I mean, I knew I was never actually going to sit down, dictionary at hand, to read Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (Churchyard Clay), or, for that matter, the Irish version of Flann O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), but that was no reason not to gain some extra insights into these and other similar works.
So I find a suitable spot and fix myself in it half-way down the lecture hall. It proves to be a first-rate paper. The speaker begins by quoting Breandán Ó hEithir on Cré na Cille: young Gaeltacht people like himself, Ó hEithir says (the date of his comments is 1949), fed up with an teach beag in ascaill an ghleanna (the little house in the corner of the glen), ‘the sexless Nabla and the gormless Tadgh, could hardly believe our eyes when we read in the pages of this whirlwind of a book that the man with the dole form to fill, coming silently to the school after three o’clock saw An Máistir Mór having it off with his assistant in the classroom.’
This and other like observations cause a frisson of dissent, nothing more, to ripple through a section of the lecture room containing people who’d probably come to the talk expecting an teach beag in ascaill an ghleanna. What happens next is that the speaker, after delivering her paper with fluency and equanimity, appears to lose her head during the sess
ion of questions and comments which follows. My recollection of her suggests to me that she is actually a person who subscribes to a moderately puritan code – not, I think, out of any instinctive prudery, but rather from a kind of natural distaste for disorder. All the weirder, then, to find her coming out with wild allusions to all kinds of dangerous modern topics, unrestrained copulation, drugs, unnatural practices, fornicating bishops and all the rest of it. (Someone in the audience has raised the question of whether or not the Irish language is fashioned to cope with every facet of contemporary life.)
An elderly gentleman sitting behind me is propelled right out of the lecture hall in a puff of embarrassment and disgust. Having allowed a sufficient interval – no doubt he thinks – for decency to be resumed, he returns to his seat just in time to hear someone praise the vivid homoerotic outpourings of the Irish language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh. Himself an Irish-speaker, ‘Tuilleadh salachair,’ the outraged Gaeilgeoir growls at the woman next to him, in a tone of utter affront. Tuilleadh salachair – more filth: this might stand as a catchphrase for those who believe such nastiness is best stowed out of sight beneath the increasingly threadbare carpet of Irish decorum.
Tuilleadh salachair … this incident illustrates the overwrought condition a strict Gaeilgeoir can get himself into when obnoxious allusions are freely bruited about and previously sacrosanct matter, the literature of Ireland in the Irish language, proves susceptible to adulteration. (Never mind Merriman, Cathal Buidhe, a selection of those Rannafast songs mentioned earlier, and so on and so forth.) This attitude of mind (as I’ve indicated) is a hangover from the past, from an era when not only the-little-house-in-the-glen but novels like Mo Dhá Róisín (My Two Roses) – in which a pure Irish girl called Rose takes a vow of celibacy, to remain in force until Ireland should be free, leaving her boyfriend with no alternative but to go out and, incidentally, get himself killed in pursuit of that purpose (it’s 1916) – when works like these were taken seriously. At fourteen or fifteen I read them myself without too much dissent, indeed with admiration for the noble standpoint and with only a small amount of perplexity over the incessant high-mindedness of life in the Donegal Gaeltacht.
Asking For Trouble Page 23