Her decline had come on slowly, and then accelerated towards the end. A couple of broken hips contributed to the process. It was out the window with her unique, engaging personality, her charm, resourcefulness, humour, efficiency and kindness, all the things that marked my mother off from the general run of mothers and schoolteachers, in my experience. All the things the platitudinous priest knew nothing about. His mealy-mouthed tributes could have fitted anyone, and no doubt did. When I rose up, at the funeral, to say my piece (reluctantly allowed to do so because, with my father, I was the chief mourner: the Church, it seems, doesn’t really care for any form of secular speaking within its sacred precincts) – when I rose up, I began by declaring, ‘One thing it’s true to say about my mother –’ (I stressed ‘one thing’) – ‘is that all her life she was a Shakespeare enthusiast.’ I then quoted from memory the opening verse of the funeral song for Cloten from Cymbeline, which begins, ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. In my overwrought state I could only manage one verse, but I hoped it was enough to make the point that what I said was true and pertinent and particular.
My mother’s bible was A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, a book she’d studied closely during her golden years as a student at Queen’s University, Belfast, in the 1930s. She lived at the time in a house in Sandhurst Gardens, in the middle of a dingy terrace sloping down towards the Lagan with its damp fogs immortalised by Maurice Craig (see Chapter 8): damp fogs were then a feature of Belfast, wrapping its workaday streets in murk and mystery, engendering a good-humoured exasperation in pedestrians bumping into one another, or stumbling for the twentieth time over the stumpy base of a green-ribbed metal lamppost with outstretched arms like an elongated scarecrow. Belfast could seem, then, like ‘old, murky Edinburgh’ with its Burke-and-Hare atmosphere relished by Sean O’Faolain in his Irish Journey. Its seasons were distinctive. At Queen’s, for instance, summer was tied up with the carnival carry-on of successive rag days, 1933, ’34, ’35; a bench in the cloisters between lectures, flirtation, gossip with friends;3 and the lectures themselves, delivered with aplomb or eccentricity by professors with plentiful initials, R.M. Henry, H.O. White and H.O. – again – Meredith.
My mother, Nora Brady, took her studies seriously. She understood that hard work was necessary to gain her degree, and applied herself unstintingly to everything required of her – but naturally some parts of the course held more appeal than others. And at the top of her personal pantheon was Shakespeare – in particular, the tragedies; and of the tragedies the two that spoke most compellingly to her were Hamlet and Macbeth. And Bradley’s sensible, character-based approach to the plays struck a chord with her, from the moment his book was brought to her attention. The full glory of every line of Shakespeare’s was ingested by my mother, linguistic, dramatic and all. She didn’t need to have a gloss imposed on every textual ambiguity; mystery, impenetrability, held its own appeal. She simply took it all in. Whole passages from Shakespeare came to her aid in times of anxiety or upheaval. ... And because of all this, it’s a cause of chagrin to me that she died without knowledge of her own slight personal connection with the world of Shakespeare, a connection unfolding through her ancestors in the direct line who were Shakespeare’s fellow-townsmen, members of the same Holy Trinity Church, and quite possibly attended the playwright’s funeral there in 1616.
When I was twelve and a pupil in Form 2A at St Dominic’s High School on the Falls Road in Belfast, a performance of Macbeth was put on at the Grand Opera House next door to the Hippodrome in Great Victoria Street. The year is 1955. One morning after assembly in the study hall comes an announcement of a treat in store for the school. Well, not the whole of the school. Pupils en masse, from Form 3 upwards, will be privileged to enjoy an evening performance of Macbeth (those who can afford to pay for a seat in the stalls, that is). English teachers, one per class, will shepherd the lucky theatregoers into their plush-velvet rows and block any access of overexcitement before it can get a hold. That is the unspoken agreement: the emphasis that morning is placed on the educational and recreational sides of the outing. Marks and larks. I don’t know if many at the school are theatrically inclined, but a rare sense of impending festivity grips the upper forms and creates a buzz. And what of the rest of us? The excluded children of Forms 1 and 2 are left feeling resentful and flat. The edict concerning our unsuitability as playgoers especially gets up the noses of myself and my friend Fiona Devlin, since we are actually reading Macbeth in English class and gaining a lot of enjoyment from it – old enough to study the play, it seems, but not to view it. So it’s in an aggrieved frame of mind that I go home at lunchtime, catching a number 12 bus as usual outside the Royal Victoria Hospital and alighting at St James’s Park, tearing down the Park, pigtails flying, turning right at St James’s Avenue and in through our back gate, to solicit sympathy from my reliably partisan mother. ‘Why can’t we go as well? ... It isn’t fair.’
It isn’t, she agrees, and proceeds to do something about it. It is then too late to obtain a seat in any part of the Opera House except the gods. So up and up we go, on the night in question, my friend, my mother and myself, up flights and flights of stone steps to emerge at last, with a jolt of vertigo, into an unexpectedly steep area that has us hanging on to one another while we find some solid seats to sit down on. Relief! And there below us, when we nerve ourselves to peer over the edge, are the assembled upper forms of St Dominic’s – there is Miss McVerry, identifiable by her turquoise hat.
I am a little disorientated; the Opera House is a pocket of opulence in the lustreless city, not what I am used to, an overwhelming extravagance of decor. But from the moment the curtain rises on the wild and incantatory witches gathered round their cauldron, I am transported. It’s not aesthetic or theatrical excitement that grips me, exactly, but rather poetic – the lines, the words of Shakespeare and the way they are spoken. I am lifted out of myself and out of the downbeat ambience of Belfast. And all the way home, on the bus and on foot, a particular sinister and overpowering passage is ringing in my ears:
Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
Night’s black agents. In his poem ‘The Colony’, John Hewitt refers to ‘a terrible year when, huddled in our towns, / My people trembled as the beacons ran / From hill to hill across the countryside, / Calling the dispossessed to lift their standards.’ One town in the north of Ireland sheltering a huddle of menaced settlers was Lisburn, or Lisnagarvey as it was then: the year was 1641 and the dispossessed were on the rampage. Among the inhabitants of Lisburn at that time we find the Stratford Tippings – two, or possibly three, generations of them – some, no doubt, taking part in the fighting which broke out at the end of November, others seeking safety wherever they could find it. To discover what brought the Tippings to this ill-omened place it’s necessary to go back twenty years or so, to Sir Fulke Conway and his assembly of hardy adventurers, fifty-one families from Stratford and thereabouts, who, giving in to persuasion, had turned their backs on everything steady and familiar, every English blessing, and set off for unknown, remote and dangerous territory. Probably the group, in a general mood of apprehension mixed up with optimism, would have sailed from Bristol and landed at Bangor, then struck inland through the mud and murk of bedevilled Ulster – territory utterly new to them and not immediately holding out a prospect of welcome. ‘One can imagine the wayside camp in the rain and mud, watched over by a weary sentinel; for that woodland on the hillside might well hold a swordsman or two; and if there were no swordsmen in it there were surely wolves ...’.You can’t say historian Cyril Falls’s imagination is running away with him when he envisages this scene in his 1936 account of The Birth of Ulster.
Sir Fulke Conway of Ragley Hall in Warwickshire was an industrious planter of the lands in South Antrim granted to him in 1609 by King James I, inclu
ding the manor of Killultagh and the castle and village of Lisnagarvey. The castle had belonged to a deposed grandee of the O’Neill dynasty, but where the villagers were when Sir Fulke put in an appearance, or what state the ‘village’ was in, we haven’t a clue. We do know that forest as impenetrable as anything out of Grimm was the first thing to be noted about the area. Well, the name tells us as much, Killultagh – Coille Ultagh – meaning simply the woods of Ulster. These pre-Elizabethan woods were dense. It was said that, if you’d had a mind to, you might almost have walked from MacArt’s Fort12 to Lisnagarvey across the tops of trees, oak and elm and spreading chestnut. And down below, among the gnarled trunks and the loamy undergrowth, lurked all kinds of menaces, natural and supernatural. Wolves and wild Irishmen and shadowy bogeymen. So the colonists’ first task was to clear the land for ploughing and building, to fell as many trees as possible and divest the forest of most of its sinister associations. These ‘modern’ imperatives would have taken shape in Planter minds as a way of dealing with age-old dangers and superstitions.
Move forward to 1622 and we have to wonder if Sir Fulke Conway’s new wave of settlers had the least idea of what they were coming to. What lay behind them was a place, a region of England filled with lush hedgerows and deep country lanes, catkins swaying in the breeze, plum orchards and cider vats, neat villages complete with manor house, grey Norman church and outlying farms, as placid as a child’s picture book, at least on the surface, and destined to find a place in the minds of beset Irish incomers, perhaps, as a glowing Elizabethan idyll incomprehensibly relinquished. And in front of them ...? Well, recent history supplied an image of an utterly bereft and barbarous country, ruin and desolation on every side, multitudes of starved Irish strewn dead about the countryside, their mouths all green from eating shamrocks, nettles and dock leaves; violence and misery inflicted and reciprocated. ‘[W]e do continually hunt all their woods, spoil their corn, burn their houses, and kill as many churls as it grieveth me to think it is necessary to do so.’ So wrote Lord Mountjoy before he left the country in 1604 – the year of the Tippings’ wedding – bequeathing to his successors a legacy of remorselessness towards all Irish ‘rebels’, and an odd way of implementing the ‘civilising’ mission decreed by England for the benefit of outlandish Ulster.
The Tippings and their fellow-Plantees, in the throes of an absolute break with the past, probably would have understood little about the circumstances causing land in a foreign country, a remote outpost, to become available to them, just for the asking. It’s unlikely they’d have heard of the Earls and their exodus, or the great defeat that preceded the ‘Flight’ from Lough Swilly’s shores, and subsequent appropriation, by the Crown, of all the forfeit lands. Actually, the most concise and witty summing up of the situation – and its outcome – that I’m aware of, occurs in a recent poem, ‘The Yaddo Letter’ by Derek Mahon:
... I’d wander round the hills above Kinsale
Where English forces clobbered Hugh O’Neill
In Tudor times, wrecking the Gaelic order
(result, plantations and the present Border) ...
Result, all those indeed. And here, unwittingly contributing to the long-drawn-out process, were some innocent Planters – I’m assuming they were innocent of any genocidal or even warlike tendencies – arriving in a desolate part of the north of Ireland with their portable belongings, prepared to the fullest extent for arduous labour, eyes firmly fixed on the long-term advantage. Having no alternative, once they’d got there, they dug in their heels and settled. The ground on which they established their exiguous settlement would evolve in time into the considerable town of Lisburn; but first it was necessary to engage in building work, land cultivation and evasion of onslaughts from the outraged Irish – all the things they’d come prepared to tackle, and a few extra besides.
Possibly the Tippings, then in their late thirties, were accustomed to manual work. They may have been employed previously as tenant farmers or servants on the Conway family’s estate at Arrow, near Stratford-on-Avon, if they didn’t live in the town of Stratford itself. We know they were married in it, at Holy Trinity Church, but not the location of their first home, or what persuaded them to become immigrants into the unknown.
It seems likely that invitations to proceed to Ireland would have been issued first of all to those possessing invaluable construction skills, bricklaying, plastering, carpentry and so forth, and perhaps a skill in the making and selling of knives was considered an asset too. We needn’t assume, with old-style nationalist historians, that some discreditable motive underlay the Planters’ willingness to uproot themselves – that Ireland, unknown and unimaginable, offered an escape route out of some sticky situation prevailing at home. It hardly seems fair to label the whole lot of them the ‘scum’ of two countries (England and Scotland), as some contemporary commentators did. Their aim was probably no different to that of emigrants before or since – to gain a better life. The lure of unexplored territory was strong at the time, and there was Ireland, Ulster, on their doorstep, so to speak, without the bother of going the whole way to America. These new, hopeful colonists would hardly have been aware, at least to start with, of moral ambiguities surrounding their presence in Ulster – though no doubt native hostility soon became apparent to them. We know, however, that accommodations were worked out – that it wasn’t entirely a case of the native Irish being rounded up and deposited on hills and in bogs, wherever the land was scrubby and unproductive, while crowing colonists lorded it over them. The colonists hadn’t exactly marched in and grabbed the good Irish lands from under the noses of their rightful owners, though there was enough truth in the perception of wholesale dispossession to fuel antagonisms for centuries to come. Scrupulous historians, from about the mid twentieth century on, have been at pains to restore complexity to what had come to be seen as a simple matter of right and wrong, with these interchangeable entities depending totally on the standpoint you viewed them from. Planter civility versus native barbarism: this was one of the accepted oppositions. Native integrity versus foreign oppression was another.
Foreign oppression. A collection of poems by Francis Carlin, published in 1918, includes a resonant contribution to the ‘wronged Irish’ ideology. It is called ‘The Ballad of Douglas Bridge’:
On Douglas Bridge I met a man
Who lived adjacent to Strabane,
Before the English hung him high
For riding with O’Hanlon.
‘Before that time,’ said he to me
My fathers owned the land you see,
But they are now among the moors,
A-riding with O’Hanlon.’
… The ghostly speaker in the Carlin poem embodies a persisting and romantic sense of grievance about stolen lands and enforced degradation. Carlin’s historical imagination embraces an idea of Ulster – we’ve now moved forward to the late seventeenth century – as a wilderness still populated exclusively by wronged natives and ruthless colonists, with Redmond O’Hanlon, a sturdy defender of the dispossessed, singled out as the epitome of lawlessness in a good cause. He was a man in the grip of a mission: to inflict the utmost aggravation on strangers imposed on Irish acres. Robin Hood. The Irish Rapparee. Well, ‘Rapparee’ is not the word, exactly. The term only became current in the 1690s, some years after O’Hanlon was shot dead. You can trace the anachronism back to the nineteenth-century novelist William Carleton who based a work of fiction on O’Hanlon and gave it the subtitle ‘The Irish Rapparee’, when he should have known better. He should also have known not to extend O’Hanlon’s principled brigandage into the late 1690s, if he wished to stick to the historical facts. But did he? With Redmond Count O’Hanlon: The Irish Rapparee we’re in a Sherwood Forest scenario, adapted to fit Armagh. The normally serious and impassioned Carleton has somehow slipped into a different mode, the bad-but-colourful-old-days bagatelle. This is someone who denounced the diehards of his own day in his novel of 1845, Rody the Rover; or, The Ribbonman. But he t
akes a very different attitude to the bandits of the past, whom he makes as honourable and invincible as the original Fianna Éireann.
Redmond O’Hanlon – with Carleton’s help or without it – has bequeathed his name to a particular Planter hazard: a fear, amounting to obsession, of secretive wild men in rough garb relying on local knowledge to effect their deadly objectives. Anachronistically or not, he’s the quintessential rapparee. Throughout the frantic seventeenth century an image took shape in Planter minds of marauding Irish lurking in the undergrowth intending harm to their supplanters. And after 1641 it gained a hellish and concrete crystallisation. ‘There was great slaughter then, man woman, child, / With fire and pillage of our timbered houses; / We had to build in stone for ever after’, John Hewitt wrote in ‘The Colony’, a pointed monologue in which the narrator sticks up for Planter entitlements, while admitting the justice of aboriginal affront: ‘for we began the plunder’. Hewitt’s apparent Roman legionary is of course meant to be taken as an Ulster incomer of the seventeenth century: a far-seeing man, and one endowed with a liberal consciousness.
Incidentally, the name O’Hanlon carries more than one connotation. Members of that clan, only a generation back from the dashing Redmond of Carleton and Carlin, were deeply implicated in the unholy activities of 1641, having a hand in the notorious shoving of Protestants off Portadown Bridge and generally contributing to the cruelty and mayhem of the age. Mary Hickson, writing at the end of the Victorian era, dissociates herself strongly from the outlaw glamour conferred by posterity on this plunderer and son of plunderers and murderers. In Ireland, there are always contradictory ways of looking at things, and always many outlets for savage indignation.
A Twisted Root Page 3