Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Like drownded rats. As everyone is aware, a cultural and merchandising takeover on a global scale is ironing out all such quirks of speech, like the levelling of drumlins in a landscape. No one asks a child if she’s ‘progling’ (rummaging aimlessly in a drawer – I think that word must have been peculiar to our family, like Paul Muldoon’s ‘quoof’ for ‘hot water bottle’; I’ve never come across it anywhere else). Phrases such as ‘They’re coming like the half of Newry’ (at full tilt) have gone with the corner shop dispensing vegetables and buttermilk.

  I’ve got to get my tone right here: I wouldn’t want to be accused of profitless nostalgia, or indifference to shocking one-time privations. Other things have gone, like the danger of children being got hold of by nuns, or having no redress when caught in a fix. But progress shouldn’t entail so many dead – or deadly – ends, so much destruction. Of course, like almost everyone over the age of forty-five (say), I’m susceptible to the backward look, to anything that unlocks a door into a more vivid domain. I want to preserve in some form the spirit of the past, the distant past and the more recent past, even though I’m aware that one is essentially as elusive as Sir Percy Blakeney, and the other is filtered through goodness knows what degree of pigheadedness and fixation.

  I want to reinstate ‘all the dead dears’, as enumerated in the Plath poem, ‘mother, grandmother, great-grandmother … ’, right down to those unknown 1950s schoolgirls in their blazers and pastel-coloured dresses, marching straight ahead along the road beside St Brigid’s College in Rannafast, savouring the pungent odours of turf smoke and sea wrack, and envisaging an unclouded future.

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to record my gratitude to the Harold Higham Wingate Foundation whose award of a Wingate Scholarship enabled me to write this book. I am also grateful to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for financial assistance.

  As far as family history is concerned, I was lucky enough to have cousins on both sides whose researches I found invaluable. In this area Harry Tipping and George Hinds provided the greatest help. I should also like to thank Craig Hutchinson.

  Among those who read the manuscript and made valuable comments or suggestions are Gerry Keenan, Douglas Carson, Mary Denvir and Brice Dickson. I owe thanks also to Chris Agee who published a lengthy extract from the book in the magazine Irish Pages. I am grateful to Emma McDowell, and to Monika McCurdy who translated the poem on pages 64–5. I have benefited greatly from the enthusiasm for the project of the wonderful Blackstaff team, in particular Patsy Horton, Helen Wright, Janice Smith, and Cormac Austin; and from Anne Tannahill’s knowledge and expertise. Thanks also to Wendy Dunbar who designed the cover. My greatest debts, however, are to my mother Nora Craig, for reasons which will be clear to every reader of Asking For Trouble; and, less obviously perhaps but no less crucially, to my husband Jeffrey Morgan.

  Patricia Craig, Antrim, 2007