Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Poems and novels enshrining Ireland’s wrongs alternated with P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie to bridge a gap in my reading pursuits between The Girls of St Bride’s and The Girls of Slender Means. In much the same way, during her own adolescence in the 1920s, my mother had latched on to Irish Catholic writers such as Annie M.P. Smithson (The Light of Other Days; The Walk of a Queen) to help her effect the transition from Anne of Green Gables to Graham Greene.

  Was nationalist reading only a stop-gap or a transitory resource, then? Not really; but there was a limit to what was available in this area. I was pleased at sixteen to come by chance on a work entitled The Green Cravat, a thrilling patriotic farrago in which Lord Edward Fitzgerald is remodelled on Scarlet Pimpernel lines. The Black City, set in Belfast, was another novel I carried home from the Falls Road Library, but it proved deficient in republican glamour … We were Irish first and foremost, readers of my mother’s generation and my own, but it didn’t stop us revelling in imported entertainment by the cartload. As Seamus Heaney acknowledges in one of his essays, indigenous Kitty the Hare never stood a chance against Rockfist Rogan in the Champion, or even Korky the Cat. Kitty the Hare … what else was there? Patricia Lynch, I think, had something to offer the discerning child reader – but perhaps not Brogeen. I never really took to retellings of folk or fairy tales, Irish or otherwise; and – leaving Ireland far behind – exotic adventure stories by Rider Haggard or Baroness Orczy left me cold.

  It was this sort of thing Elizabeth Bowen had in mind when she recalled its soul-stirring power with gratitude, but also with full awareness of its suitability for readers of unadvanced years only. It fell apart once an adult knowingness began to kick in – or if it didn’t, it suggested an unfortunate adherence to an infantile mode. Well, perhaps. Some of us, though, not ill-equipped for ratiocination, continue to gain a modicum of sustenance from our childhood books, those that remain re-readable, even if the feast they once constituted is immensely watered down.

  Other things are watered down too: domestic security, anticipation of some exciting social occasion, the sense of limitless possibilities for the future. But never mind: the passing of time brings with it the pleasures of retrospection. I’ve never been prone to sleepless nights, but I understand perfectly the delight in ‘sweet insomnia’ expressed by Mrs Hawkins in Muriel Spark’s novel A Far Cry From Kensington; Mrs Hawkins who lies awake revisiting the past, letting her thoughts of the night mesh with earlier thoughts of the night, until a state of productive reverie is attained.

  For me, at present, it’s a far cry from the Donegal Gaeltacht and the tangle of emotions surrounding it, the place itself and what happened there, the unwarranted outcome. Why did we act as we did? Sixteen years old, that’s the reason – a pretty obvious reason for a pretty routine carry-on, to which a proper adult response might have been a shrug, or, at most, a sardonic reprimand. It was nothing to treat punitively or get into a tizz about. But there, the time and the place decreed differently. ‘I am now,’ William Carleton wrote, ‘painting the state of education and society in the north when I was a boy’ – and I suppose some similar objective was lurking at the back of my head when I succumbed to the impulse to get going on this fragment of autobiography. Perhaps it had better be called deflected autobiography, since it was never meant to run on straight lines or tell an unvarnished tale.

  I also started off with some notion that I would write a book about Ulster puritanism, Catholic puritanism in particular, and its insidious effects – but then, I found my attitude to the puritan ethic was less straightforward than I’d supposed. As a means of fending off anarchy it is not to be deplored. Of course, as a result of my own experience, and for common-sense reasons, I am glad that sex is no longer regarded as a sin; but still, in this area no less than others, it’s desirable to have some kind of social force acting as a curb on profligacy. Otherwise, you just get hedonism gone haywire. It’s axiomatic that everyone in their right mind would want to see an end to all the old abominations, deprivation and discrimination and social ostracism, cruelty and sectarianism and oppression. But we still need guidelines to keep things functioning equitably. Identifying an abuse and then going to the other extreme isn’t always well advised. To cite an infinitesimal example: achieving a good examination result no longer means very much since no one fails. And, a more urgent concern, at no time in history has the asininity of the law been more apparent than it is at the moment, when it bends over backwards to protect and even reward the criminal, while often showing no such regard for the victims of crime.

  Education and society in the north. Well, in the 1950s, I was better off than William Carleton 170 years earlier, Carleton who got all the schooling he ever received in a barn, albeit one of the largest barns in the parish of Aughentain, or in a sod house scooped out of a bank in the roadside. When he set out for Dublin to make his way in the world, like the youngest son in a rollicking folk tale, Carleton had two shillings and ninepence in his pocket, a bundle on his back and a new pair of shoes on his feet. The shoes were important, for he had to walk the whole way. His journey was punctuated by the sight of hanged Ribbonmen dangling from wayside gibbets. ‘Merciful God!’ he wrote. ‘In what a frightful condition was the country at that time … It was then, indeed, the seat of Orange ascendancy and irresponsible power … There was then no law against an Orangeman, and no law for a Papist. I am now writing not only that which is well known to be historical truth, but that which I have witnessed with my own eyes.’

  We have all, with our own eyes, seen comparable sights in the North, as new outlets arrive for barbarity and nightmare. Each generation reinvents its own version of Orange and Green, Catholic and Protestant, Ribbonmen and Yeomen, Cowboys and Indians. Here in County Antrim they’re still at it, waving flags and shouting slogans to provoke their counterparts across the way. Of course, if it wasn’t the Union Jack and the Tricolour it would be something else; but the way gang warfare happens here takes it out of the sphere of transitory juvenile hostilities and into deep-rooted dissension.

  One of our moving-in presents, when we came to Ashville, was a large and elaborate family tree prepared for me by an old friend who is an expert in genealogy. (It was a present for me, rather than Jeff, since my Irish ancestry was more amenable to investigation by the genealogist than his Welsh ancestry.) The chart is in two sections, meticulously mapped out and not altogether to be taken seriously, since the top half traces my ancestry via such figures as Robert the Bruce, Jehosaphat, Abraham, Noah and so forth, right back to Adam and God. The bottom half, on the other hand, is rather more particularised and historically accurate, although it moves horizontally as well as vertically, to accommodate a lot of notables such as Queen Elizabeth i, Mary Queen of Scots and all the rest of them, Sir Arthur Chichester, John Knox, the Bonnie Earl of Murray, Parnell, the Sitwells and Sir Basil Brooke.

  Well! How have I acquired such exotic offshoots on my very plain family tree? It came about because my friend had asked for a copy of a straightforward chart I’d mentioned as having come into my possession, in case he might spot a name among my antecedents that would set him off. Sure enough, he did. Around 1670 an ancestor named John Tipping had married Frances Blacker of Seagoe near Portadown in County Armagh; and in the hands of an adept genealogist, the Blacker connection burgeoned outwards into all kinds of ornamental areas.

  Frances Blacker, my seven-times-great-grandmother, her husband and other relations died in 1689; fantasy or not, the most persuasive explanation has them heading for Derry, among the thirty thousand panicking Protestants converging on the city from all over Ulster in search of sanctuary – and not making it, whether through illness, exhaustion or foul play. However, at least one of the Blacker/Tipping sons survived; his son Henry went on to marry a Catholic named Esther O’Neill, and thereafter the plunge down the social scale was swift and severe. While the Blackers of Carrickblacker were maintaining their wealth and prominence, with a progeny conspicuous among churchmen and military
men, and had a hand in the founding of the Orange Order (this is the Catholic side of my family I’m delving into) – while this was happening, their relatives by marriage, the Tippings, were ekeing out a living as small-scale farmers and linen-weavers.

  When famine struck the North in the late 1840s, and the Revd Charles Morrison was mourning his infant son and trying to appease the Presbyterians of Antrim, my great-grandfather Matthew Tipping – who would then have been a youth of fourteen or fifteen – was growing up in a townland called Crossmacahilly, in a house his family had occupied since the 1790s, when the whole area consisted of bogland. A long, low farmhouse with a section at one end given over to hand-loom weaving, it held not only Matthew, his parents and seven brothers and sisters, but also his uncle John and his four children. (John died of famine fever in Lurgan Union workhouse in 1848.) Great-grandfather Matthew seems to have been quite a boy. Before he was twenty, he had impregnated a local fifteen-year-old named Eliza O’Hara; but no marriage took place until the couple’s daughter Helena was over a year old. It’s a wonder they bothered to marry at all. Given the social and economic conditions prevailing at the time, it’s unlikely that an illegitimate birth or two would have caused a stir in the neighbourhood of Legahory and Crossmacahilly; a more urgent concern was getting the rye-grass, turnip and parsnip seeds needed to replace the rotting seed potatoes, as potato blight persisted. Semi-starvation and household congestion were the order of the day.

  Once married, Matthew brings his wife and daughter to live in the two-roomed farmhouse, which he shares with an older brother and a cousin (his father having died in 1853), and goes on procreating until the place becomes as densely populated as one of Daniel O’Connell’s monster meetings. In the end, it makes sense for Matthew, Eliza and their brood to leave the meagre smallholding, which they do in the late 1860s, moving on to a huxter life in John Street, Lurgan.

  It took another couple of generations to get their descendants as far as the city of Belfast, but the movement from country to town was typical of migratory patterns established during the nineteenth century, once the Industrial Revolution, with its dire implications for hand-loom weaving, had begun to bite. Life for the Tippings goes on, in the new surroundings. When the luckless Eliza dies in childbirth – what else?– at the age of forty, Matthew doesn’t waste a minute before rushing into wedlock once again. His eye has lighted on a widow with three children, Ellen Dowds (née Jordan) – and she and he will produce two further daughters to add to the melee. The youngest of these, born in 1881, is my grandmother Sarah Tipping.

  To raise the domestic snarl-up to monumental proportions, Ellen’s daughter by her first marriage, Mary Ann Dowds, in 1886 marries Matthew and Eliza’s son Henry Tipping – a shotgun wedding, for which, no doubt, contiguity is to blame. It’s Matthew and Eliza all over again – but a different era, in which town life with its lace-curtain gossip-mongers and its priestly pressures bolsters up respectability. Respectability is the new social aspiration – and you’ve only to look at the sole surviving image of Ellen Jordan, cloaked and bonneted in full Victorian glory, eyes sparkling with intelligence and will-power, to understand that she at least will see to it that her daughter’s reputation is not destroyed, whatever the ensuing complications on the domestic front.

  As for Matthew – he remains a wicked old man who endangers the family’s precious, and precarious, respectability by getting himself arrested and brought to court on a charge of selling intoxicating liquor without a licence to do so. On a morning of July in 1889, after a tip-off from a begrudger, police had raided Matthew’s John Street home and taken away a half-barrel of ale from a parlour-shop premises supposed to deal only in vegetables and buttermilk. The indignant shopkeeper – ‘a respectable looking man’ according to a subsequent newspaper report – claimed the ale was for his own consumption, since a weakness of the digestive system made him unable to stomach milk or tea. His protest went down well with the magistrates, who dismissed the case. It was a victory for proletarian principle. Counsel for the defence, a Mr Menary, was cheered in the courtroom when he wondered aloud why a rich man’s cellar was safe from police intrusion, while ‘a poor man couldn’t keep a half-barrel of ale without having to explain his conduct in a criminal prosecution’. The barrel of ale was returned to its owner. His wife, though, was immensely put out to hear him described as ‘a poor man’ for all the Lurgan world to sneer at.

  Matthew lived on until 1910, when he suddenly dropped dead in the street on his way to the workhouse infirmary for medical advice. His wife Ellen outlived him by seventeen years, becoming an autocratic old lady who, in her final bedridden state, imposed on her irreverent grandchildren the duty of carrying her downstairs and depositing her in the front parlour where she presided over the affairs of the day. ‘Go canny wi’ your granny,’ the merry grandchildren would urge one another while transporting their burden.

  All I know about these old Victorian people, my great-grandparents, comes from hearsay; but I envisage them as a notable pair, he incorrigible, she indomitable. Most relatives who knew them, or knew about them, were apt to regard the two indulgently, some holding Ellen and her daughter Mary Ann Dowds to be a civilising influence on the earthy Crossmacahilly Tippings. But my grandmother disliked her mother, for reasons unfathomable to me; and she never, in all the time I knew her, made any reference at all to her father, Matthew. Clearly, there are interstices in my family history, no less than anyone’s, which would bear investigation.

  A pioneer of the Tipping trail is my cousin Harry Tipping, whose researches I’ve plundered for the preceding paragraphs. (He’s a distant cousin, but not as distant as it might be, since we are doubly related. His grandparents were Henry Tipping and Mary Ann Dowds: work it out for yourself.) This is the only strand in my background I can trace back as far as the Plantation era; but it confirms my belief that we’re all, in the North, so religiously and culturally intertwined that it’s just pot luck whether you come out Catholic or Protestant …

  My cousin Harry is a retired schoolmaster and bibliophile, whose scholar’s library of Irish books and specialist dealers’ catalogues testifies to a collecting gene which must have originated somewhere along the Tipping line, but seems to have come out, in the twentieth century, only in him and me. It was in his company that I recently, and for the first time, visited the remains of the Crossmacahilly farmhouse, now used to store cattle-feed. To approach it, you take a turning off the Lurgan/Craigavon road, and park by a gate at the end of an unfrequented lane.

  It is unfrequented for a reason. You climb the gate and lower yourself into a morass. I’d been warned to wear wellingtons, and I can see why. Mud is not the word. Perpetual rainfall and copious cow dung descending on the residue of the old bog have turned the whole area into a squelching mass. It provides a new insight into the expression ‘clabber to the knee’. You need a strong incentive to subject yourself to its mucky viscosity, which calls to mind (among other things) the Dormouse’s treacle-well. And there it is, a hundred yards away at the end of the lane: the old Tipping residence, last inhabited in 1941, now covered by a corrugated iron roof (to keep the bales of cattle-fodder dry), empty door and window frames, walls of decomposing plaster. We regard it intently. It’s a heady experience, coming face-to-face with your ancestral home, even if it’s nothing but a shack in a swamp.

  I doubt if the farmhouse was ever picturesque, but it would once have been clean and more or less orderly: old Ann Tipping, Matthew’s mother, would have seen to that. It is partly the rundown surroundings, the November gloom with full complement of clabber, that makes it so wretched. Once, it would have been cosily thatched, with neat patches of grass – perhaps even a vegetable garden – around it. It probably contained a dresser full of spongeware (crockery for the poor) and a settle bed or two. Its floor might have been stone. It included a stone outbuilding which might even have accommodated the overflow from the house. (All that ancestral fecundity in a small space perhaps was bound, eventually, to b
reed its opposite; and true enough, one branch of the family line will peter out with me. Never mind, the same fecundity has ensured there are plenty of others to carry on till the crack of doom.) There would have been neighbouring houses. There are trees all around, wild flowers no doubt at appropriate seasons, and fields to graze cattle. The current cattle eye us distrustfully, with much swishing of tails. I am not afraid of cows, I like cows, but these are very large and not fenced off. It’s their mud we’re up to the oxters in. The ancestral pull is getting undermined by accumulating discomforts of the spot.

  And yet. There is something here that gets under one’s skin and into one’s mental landscape, a hint of another world and time, both endlessly alien and utterly ordinary, suffused with imaginary memories. This is especially true, of course, of a place that holds powerful associations, as the Crossmacahilly clachan does for us, your actual descendants of the Tipping household; but you get a charge of historical apprehension from any weed-encrusted remnants in a field, or bits of stone walls returning to rag and bone.

  It would be patronising to imagine this household, and the thousands like it, as being deficient in intellectual or aesthetic stimulus: one simply doesn’t know. Of course, in the harsh past, mere subsistence would have taken precedence over everything else, but it’s tempting to hope enough energy was left over for non-workaday pursuits. We do know that a fierce republican ideology took root within the Crossmacahilly clan, coming to a head in early-twentieth-century Lurgan among the town-bred Tippings. The sons of Henry and Mary Ann Dowds were especially prominent in rebel circles. Night raids, arrest and internment grew as familiar to them as scallion champ. ‘No doubt the Tippings are a bad lot,’ reads a 1923 memo from the Lurgan office of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.