Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  My solitary brush with the ruc occurred when I was seventeen. It’s the Easter holidays, during my Ballynahinch year. With a couple of seditiously minded friends, I have come to Milltown Cemetery for the annual republican ceremony in honour of Easter Week. Well, one of these not entirely law-abiding girls is a friend – Maire, my Rannafast companion; the other is a friend of hers, or at least a fellow dissident. Her name is Lizzie O’Rawe. The two are up to something; I’ve received hints, all the way up the Falls Road in the wake of the Easter parade, that more is on the cards this afternoon than a jolly Sunday outing. Eventually they decide to come clean. They’re on an assignment for the ‘Army’ (the Irish Republican Army). Am I willing to help? Well! Here are my republican protestations being put to the test. I can do nothing but nod solemnly, stifling any unworthy qualms which threaten my equanimity. I do not have the temperament of a conspirator!

  Still, there’s nothing much to this afternoon’s exploit. Lizzie has a camera – but so have many people, who’ve stood by the roadside snapping the marchers as they pass along bearing flags and banners emblazoned with patriotic devices. The old guard of the ira, upright men in their sixties and seventies draped in tricoloured sashes, are at the forefront of the procession, and after them come troops of Irish dancers wearing embroidered kilts of purple or green, topped by saffron cloaks held in place with Tara brooches. It is all very showy and animated. But the carnival atmosphere has a steely undertone. The purpose of the occasion is to uphold the concept of a united Ireland, and to this end rousing speeches are delivered from a platform set up in the middle of the republican plot. While preparations for the speeches are going on, Lizzie mingles with the crowd, pointing her camera at the faces of policemen and B-Specials monitoring the event. The resulting photographs, passed into the hands of the right people, will be used for identification purposes. The role of Maire and myself is simply to act as camouflage, to help create an impression of innocent skylarking.

  Once it’s reached the cemetery, the parade disperses, to reassemble in an approximate circle around the republican plot. While microphones are being positioned the orators consult pieces of paper and smoke cigarette after cigarette to calm their nerves. People stand about in groups admiring the bravado of the occasion. Unruly children swarm all over the gravestones and shin up Celtic crosses while their elders’ backs are turned. The admonition ‘Don’t you do that again’ is heard on all sides, accompanied by the noise of slapping and resultant wails.

  Lizzie is still snapping away, focusing on any ruc constable she spots keeping an eye on things. She claims a couple of plain-clothes-men are on the film too. She and Maire exchange jubilant glances. Lizzie is a rough-looking girl with coarse black hair and turned-up nose. Severely cross-eyed, she wears dark-rimmed glasses which do little to moderate this defect. Her manner is very loud and boisterous. In a moment of censoriousness, it strikes me that nothing but the republican movement stands between Lizzie and juvenile delinquency.

  Milltown Cemetery is like Piccadilly Circus this afternoon: sooner or later you’re bound to meet someone you know. It isn’t long before we bump into a group of Cluan Ard regulars, a bit older than us, including one, tall and curly-haired, on whom I’ve been casting a mildly infatuated eye. His name is Fergus Hegarty, he is sensible and kindly and takes a schoolmasterly interest in us. ‘Taking photos, are you,’ he beams – fortunately making this unwelcome observation in Irish. Nevertheless, it elicits no reply. Three conspicuously cagey faces are turned towards him.

  The film is now used up, and Lizzie sits on the edge of a grave to unload it. She slips the exposed roll into the pocket of her off-white duffle coat. At this point the speeches begin. ‘The proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 and its establishment in 1919 was a clear and definite expression of the will of the vast majority of the Irish people for an ending of British interference in the affairs of the Irish nation.’

  This particular orator, blunt and indignant, has the right approach for getting everyone stirred up. ‘In 1922, Dáil Éireann, the established government of the Irish Republic, was overthrown, and partition of the national territory was imposed by Britain on the Irish people. Thus Britain remained in occupation of part of the Irish nation.’

  The voice booms on. ‘The professional politicians realised they had failed in their perverting activities when the young men and women of the occupied area – the six north-eastern counties – revolted once again against British tyranny; they banded themselves together and on December 12th, 1956, they challenged the right of the British Empire to hold any part of the territory of Ireland. On that eventful day they reasserted in arms the right of the Irish people to the ownership of all Ireland…’

  You can feel the righteous outrage emanating from the listeners, apart from those children who are really more interested in extracting the fullest entertainment from whacking gravestones with sticks. The rest of the audience appreciates these reminders of England’s iniquity, and the worse behaviour of her unionist hangers-on. These people gathered in the cemetery believe they’ve retained their national identity in the face of fearful odds. To prove it, they have their party songs, their heroes, their tales of atrocities going back to the time of Cromwell, their memories of barricaded streets on the Falls Road, their religious emblems, the disgust aroused in them by Protestant bigotry, their sense of being done out of something as far as material welfare is concerned. It doesn’t make for an equable way of going on.

  I’m craning my neck trying to see where Fergus Hegarty has gone, when Maire gets to her feet and starts brushing gravel off the back of her skirt. ‘Come on, it’s time to go.’ We’re half-way towards the exit opposite the Falls Park when Lizzie suddenly nudges Maire with an importunate elbow. Speaking in a voice hoarse with intensity, she urges her not to look round. ‘We’re being followed.’

  It occurs to me that the excitement of the occasion has gone to Lizzie’s head. Why on earth should we be singled out for attention among all the amateur photographers milling about the place? It isn’t reasonable. But Maire takes the warning seriously. ‘Don’t do anything drastic,’ she whispers. ‘Just walk naturally towards the gate. Have you got the film?’

  ‘Pass it to me,’ I catch myself saying, entering into the spirit of the thing. I am wearing a lime-green blouse elasticated round the top. ‘I’ll just shove it down my front. They’re not likely to look there.’ A brief fit of giggles overtakes the three of us. It passes off leaving us more apprehensive than before.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Lizzie moans. ‘We’re never going to get out of this in one piece.’

  Maire shrugs. ‘Don’t panic.’

  By now it’s dawned on me that Lizzie’s alarm is perhaps not wholly without foundation. I begin to wish I hadn’t been quite so precipitate in the matter of the film. Now the vital object is landed on me! Maire is saying we should make a run for it once we reach the main road. I’m not convinced this is a good idea, having had it drummed into me from an early age that every member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is issued with a gun. But Maire, having a better grasp of what is expedient for the civic authorities and what isn’t, understands that no policeman would ever fire in such a situation. If we’d made it to the gate, indeed, we might have had a chance of escaping with our trophy. But we’re not allowed to get that far. Two or three policemen close in around us, cutting us off from the nearest republican supporters who stand there gaping. Several conversations break off in mid-sentence.

  My shoulder is gripped by a uniformed policeman who instructs me to hand over at once the article I’m carrying for an unlawful purpose. I demand to know what he means – the others having conveyed to me, by scowling and snorting, that it’s best to brazen it out. It doesn’t do any good, of course. The constable patiently explains that it’s in our own interests to do as he asks without further fooling around. Otherwise we may find ourselves at the near-by barracks facing a serious charge. At this, Lizzie makes a grunting noise to show she isn’t
going to be intimidated. Maire offers the opinion that a mistake has been made. On the face of one policeman I catch an indulgent expression which indicates he doesn’t consider us a serious threat to the British Empire.

  We’re advised not to behave like silly girls. When this produces no effect, we find ourselves being marched across he road to the police station at the junction of the Glen and Andersonstown roads. It’s such an unusual predicament that I hardly know how to act. I do my best to assume a dignified and impassive look, as befits a potential martyr for old Ireland. At least, I hope this is how I appear to Fergus Hegarty, whom I’ve sighted once again standing just inside the cemetery gate, regarding the scene with astonishment.

  At this stage in my life, I don’t want to lose face as an intrepid republican; but far less would I want word of this exploit to reach the ears of my family, or my school. (Though nearly all my doings are relayed to my mother, this is one incident I will keep to myself, if I’m allowed to.) Politics or not, it can only cause a headache for everyone concerned, if it should come out that I’m in trouble with the police. I wonder what kind of a ticklish situation – this time – I’ve got myself into. I’m regretting that imprudent impulse to take possession of the infernal film.

  We’re admitted into the police barracks through a heavy door which clangs alarmingly behind us. It isn’t at all a suitable outcome for a gallant enterprise. You wouldn’t catch Roddy McCorley or Fergal O’Hanlon making a hash of things like this. It’s clear the constables regard us as wrongheaded nuisances, and not altogether unjustly. A mixture of chagrin and apprehension makes me retreat into silence, while the other two continue to act like people in the course of undergoing an outrage.

  Our names and addresses are extracted from us and recorded in a book. Lizzie’s name prompts a facetious enquiry as to whether she is so called in honour of the queen. She reacts predictably with a snarl: ‘Like bloody hell.’ Her voice is huskier than ever with defiance. The policemen’s good humour begins to wear off. ‘Just give us the bloody film like good girls, will you, and take yourselves off to your homes. You’ve committed an offence but we’ll overlook that if you do the right thing now.’

  ‘What film?’

  ‘We haven’t got it.’

  ‘Come on, come on.’

  ‘Have you got it, Pat?’

  ‘No, I thought you had it.’

  ‘I haven’t got it.’

  ‘You must have dropped it.’

  ‘What do they want it for anyway? There’s no law against taking photographs that I know of.’

  ‘Call this a free country!’ Maire exclaims.

  I don’t know where all this is getting us. A policewoman is sent for, since the next resort is to have us searched. After putting the police to all this trouble, no doubt the three of us will be charged and remanded in custody. A moment occurs when the policemen guarding us turn their backs to confer over some document laid on the counter. I seize the opportunity to extract the roll of film from my blouse and pass it to Maire with a frenzied surreptitiousness. Maire can do nothing but take it.

  ‘I thought you’d have a better chance of saving it,’ I explain later. We’ve been admonished, warned to behave ourselves in future, and sent on our way without further ado. The truth is – though all of us are implicated – I do not want the lion’s share of the blame to fall on me. I’m trying to undo the effect of my foolhardy gesture. Fortunately my explanation makes sense to the other two.

  ‘I tried to,’ Maire says. ‘I thought I could hide it underneath the seat of my chair, and then maybe get it back once they’d searched us and found nothing incriminating. But that great bully saw what I was doing and made a grab.’

  ‘Orange bastard,’ Lizzie mutters.

  Maire advises me to keep a look-out for this policeman, whose name is McGinty. Now that I’ve got a criminal record, they may well decide to put a tail on me. She confides that she has been kept under constant surveillance since the occasion, a few months back, when she refused point-blank to sign a document repudiating unlawful behaviour undertaken for political ends. ‘Of course they had to let me go. They couldn’t do a thing. But they’ve kept a close watch on me ever since. I don’t know what they expect me to do – blow up the City Hall, perhaps.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be much of a loss if you did,’ I respond automatically; the fashionable attitude of the day is to cast aspersions on that remarkable building. ‘I’m sorry we lost the film.’

  ‘Never mind, perhaps we can try again.’

  Some months after this event, Maire and Lizzie O’Rawe are peripherally involved in an arms raid which goes wrong. The principal raiders are caught and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. This incident marks the end of a revolutionary phase in Maire’s life. Henceforth her nationalist energies, like mine, will be concentrated on the language issue. As for Lizzie O’Rawe – she is so unnerved by the arms disaster (Maire tells me) that she has gone away to be a nun.

  As far as I know, whatever revolutionary leanings I possessed (shaky and all as they were) came via my Tipping grandmother: the Tippings are exceedingly knowledgeable about evictions and coffin ships, ancient wrongs and rebel feats, a whole heritage of injustice and subversion. Repudiators to a man of English claims to cultural supremacy, they stand for Irish Ireland at its most assertive. I am therefore mystified when a Lurgan relative alludes to my half-great-uncle Henry’s fondness for Little Lord Fauntleroy, a work (it appears) which he would often recite in its entirety within the family circle. ‘Recite’ is the word – but surely he couldn’t have had the whole book by heart? Did she mean he would read this story to the children in the family? If indeed he’d learned the whole thing, is this the source of both my parrot memory and my addiction to children’s books? None of this seems very plausible. Great-uncle Henry was over thirty by the time Mrs Hodgson Burnett’s stirring tale of a velvet-clad-heir-to-a-fortune came out in book form, and one would not want to overestimate its impact on Fenian rebels in the back end of Lurgan. Neither, one would think, would Uncle Henry’s rough Crossmacahilly boyhood have predisposed him to applaud bland juvenile literature, or to use it to divert younger members of the household. Other reports of Uncle Henry make him seem a bit testy and uncouth.

  This mystery, if no other, is easily solved by an act of memory. I am back in the Donegall Road, c. 1950, listening to my grandmother recall how her much older half-brother Henry had frightened the life out of her with his rendering of the patriotic ballad ‘Fontenoy’: ‘At Fontenoy, at Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, / With bloody plumes the Irish stand. The field is fought – and won!’, which he declaimed with such vehemence that she hid under a table until he had regained his everyday demeanour. So the misattribution leads gradually backwards in time to the comforting ambience of a well-remembered 1950s kitchen-cum-living-room, complete with coal fire and worn art-deco hearth rug, and then back further again to a more distant scene – imagined this time – involving a scared toddler in a back room of a small row house in 1880s Lurgan, scurrying under a table.

  I don’t have many images of my grandmother as a child – and only one, the Minnie Cochrane one, of her as a young girl. This is probably because she died before I’d have found it worthwhile to cross-question her: but I do remember ‘Fontenoy’ and a couple of other incidents, all involving fear and distress. One bad experience, which she sometimes recalled, had herself and her sister Ellen being menaced by an angry goose, a scene that takes shape in my mind with the two small girls, either barefoot or wearing black laced ankle boots and late-Victorian pinafores, immobilised in a back lane straggling off into the country, uncertain whether to run or to face it out. On another occasion, young Sarah was locked, for some reason, in – I think – a cupboard under the stairs (this may have taken place at school), an experience associated in her mind for ever after with Jane Eyre in the Red Room.

  If you can’t write fiction, as I can’t, though I’ve spent my whole life besotted with fiction – well, maybe it’s possi
ble to make some kind of a story out of shreds and shards of the past, your own past and the pasts of others, real or in books. The central story I’ve tried to tell concerns the Rannafast affair. (I couldn’t have written about it while my mother was alive; it would have caused her distress to have the agitating business raked up again, even after all this time.) But that story has led to all manner of surrounding stories, reminiscences, bookish reflections, social comment and so on, in the normal way of one thing leading to another. Early on, I took a look at Robert MacAdam, Belfast Presbyterian and outstanding advocate of Irish, because he was one of those who changed the way the language was perceived in the nineteenth century. He helped to create a climate in which the Gaelic League could come into being and flourish; the Gaelic League started the Irish summer school, and so on, and so on. As for me and my minor mí-ádh: enough good fortune has occurred in my life to tone down the bad bits, in retrospect anyway.

  The gifted Armagh author John O’Connor, in his single novel Come Day – Go Day (1948) employs a rich local vernacular full of eccentric flourishes to gain an effect of quotidian exuberance. ‘If I wouldn’t be better off handcuffed to a ghost it’s a quare thing to me’ (the things I have to put up with); ‘Don’t get your be’rd [beard] in a blaze’ (Calm down); ‘Ah for God’s sake give our heads peace’ (Leave off). These and other striking catchphrases were current in our house in Belfast as late as the 1950s, whether articulated wholeheartedly (by my grandmother) or self-mockingly (by my mother). ‘Dear God this holy day and hour’ was a frequent exclamation denoting full-blown dismay, one no doubt springing to the lips of bygone Tipping females as their menfolk exited the house in police custody yet again. A lesser cause of consternation, the arrival home of a couple of children soaked to the skin by a tremendous downpour, might result in the following avowal: ‘My head’s astray. These ones are only after coming in on the top of me like drownded rats.’