A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  I went to Clonleigh once, when I was twenty-something. It would have been about 1972. My grandmother’s half-sister, Aunt Annie, was on her deathbed. My father drove us – his mother, his sister Ruby, my mother and myself – all the way from Belfast to the South. Emily and Ruby Craig stayed overnight at the farm, while the rest of us had booked into a small hotel not far away – probably in New Ross. There was nothing sombre or funereal about this excursion: we were all in high spirits. It was the summer holidays, and I was home from London. The drive was exhilarating, through the different landscapes of Down and Armagh and Louth and Wicklow. Whenever I opened my mouth, the car rang with nervous laughter; I seemed to have this effect on my relatives, with the simplest statement – ‘Oh look at that lovely old house over there, among the trees’ – causing an outbreak of hilarity. They never quite knew what to make of me. Their incomprehension was mostly benign, though an acerbic edge to it wasn’t unknown. It could go from, wonderingly, ‘She’s not like a Belfast girl at all’, to ‘Sure who’s like her since Leather-arse died’, pronounced with a dry intonation. It was at its peak, I suppose, when I was around twenty; thereafter my supposed eccentricities were toned down at family gatherings as I learned to fit in. Well, up to a point. A faint unease persisted on the part of some relations – not all – perhaps caused by my 1920s dresses and other London crotchets. These might have been viewed as an extension of oddities apparent almost from the word go. (The commonplace, ‘Nose stuck in a book’, among them.) I belonged to the family, no doubt about it, but I’d never quite conformed to family expectations. There was always something that set me apart – but if this was liable to provoke an unadmiring response, it would never have done so in my mother’s presence. For all her amiability and social know-how, my mother would have made it clear that the smallest critical assessment relating to me was absolutely off-limits.

  And now I was going to meet some totally unknown relations. Three women lived in Aunt Annie’s farmhouse: herself, and the two elderly nieces whose role was to minister to her needs. (Aunt Annie would have been well over ninety at this time.) Bessie and Dolly. These were a pair of stout Wexford women, probably in their late sixties. Their mother, long dead as far as I know, was Annie’s older sister. They, just to clarify these family relationships, were my father’s cousins. I don’t think my mother and I would have made the slightest impression on them. We were visitors, no more, to be offered hospitality in the kitchen-cum-dining-room with its autumn-leaf wallpaper and old-fashioned accoutrements. I don’t know if we ever got upstairs in the house – though I know about the four-poster beds in every bedroom, so perhaps we did. They, the nieces, in my brief view of them, showed a surface jocularity which overlay their countrywoman’s toughness and tenacity. They had handsome battered faces surrounded by wiry grey-brown hair, and their clothes were protected by patterned overalls. They looked well able to transact all the business of the farm, with only a hired hand named Danny for the rougher jobs. A capacity for hard work was all the nieces had in common with their aunt, my grandmother, as far as I could judge. She did not have a strong personality or any instinct for intrigue. She liked things to be blithe and uncontentious. She left opinions to others. I believe she was a dab hand at a pigeon pie, but if any such carnivorous cooking had taken place in my presence, no doubt I’d have run out of the room screaming.

  The point about Bessie and Dolly is that their name was Hornick. The Hornicks were of German Palatine descent, having originally arrived with other refugees from the Rhine Palatinate to settle near Old Ross in the early part of the eighteenth century. These Continental immigrants were, of course, Protestant, and what they were fleeing from in many instances was ‘Popish’ persecution. Like the Huguenots before them, they threw in their lot with the Irish Protestant community – which made them doubly vulnerable, as outsiders with odd names and conspicuous non-Catholics to boot, when the 1798 Rebellion went awry. A Philip Hornick was burned with the other victims at Scullabogue and his bones shovelled into the shallow grave by the side of the barn.

  So – the ancestral web I’m constructing reaches a point of thickening and darkening, with more of my family connections (if only by marriage) leading back and back to Scullabogue. And it doesn’t end with the Hornicks. It recently emerged that Bessie Hornick had been married at some time, though – whatever went wrong – this was a circumstance she kept very quiet. Many of the Craigs and other cousins were unaware of it, taking both sisters to be spinsters. But married she was, and her married name was Parslow. It’s a name, like Hornick, with a devastating resonance. Two among the dead of Scullabogue were also named Parslow.

  I didn’t have Scullabogue in mind at all when I went to Wexford in the summer of 1972, and I’m certain no one else did either. These particular relations, to the best of my knowledge, were not history-minded. I’m sure our ‘Catholic’ orientation, my mother’s and mine, wasn’t held against us. We wouldn’t have been blamed for Scullabogue, if Scullabogue had had any currency at the time. But I doubt that it did. It was just – if, indeed, it was known at all – a fragment of a desolate past, a shadowy horror and indisputable wrong. Nearly two centuries after it happened, Scullabogue had no place in the validating of local renown. It was best obliterated. Catholics weren’t about to assume ancestral guilt and go about beating their breasts, and Protestants had no wish to dwell on their victimhood, even long-ago victimhood. The years of peace, relative peace, counted for more than ancient and hellish pandemoniums. The heartfelt cry of Barbara Lett against ‘barbarous’ neighbours held not the slightest relevance for farming families in the middle of the twentieth century, when neighbourly cooperation and civility cut across religious barriers.

  And yet. A little Protestant enclave survived in Catholic Wexford, composed of people with names like Lett, Parslow and Hornick. Belonging to the Church of Ireland was the thing that bound them together. They had their rituals: church, Sunday best, high tea, evensong, excursions to nearby coastal resorts such as Fethard-on-Sea, business and social dealings with one another. It all seems very distant and decorous, and unequipped to persist into the present. Modern life eventually caught up with it. What happened – well, what happened to Clonleigh in particular? Aunt Annie died, the nieces inherited, the old house was abandoned, a new dwelling appeared – one of those bungalows of horrid aspect that erupted like boils all over the countryside as Ireland got into the grip of a rage for modernisation. ... In due course, the bicentenary of 1798 occurred and gave rise to a lot of commemorative edifices and activities, including a good many specially built Heritage Centres and a Vinegar Hill Day. And Scullabogue? If it couldn’t be entirely ignored, it wasn’t highlighted. The atrocity is commemorated as a ‘tragic departure’ from United Irish ideals, in a rather uninformative inscription on a stone positioned in a corner of the little Church of Ireland churchyard at Old Ross. No mention of Protestants or pogroms. There, in the graveyard, the Scullabogue stone stands – a blip in the middle of all the nationalist brouhaha.

  At this time too, a rash of plaques went up on walls connected with 1798 and its legends, and one of these of particular interest to me is situated at Newcastle House, Cleariestown, where the children of Stephen Lett (brother-in-law of Barbara) grew up and devoted themselves to the thrilling rebel cause. Yes, here comes that valiant boy James Lett again:

  When Erin gives due honour

  To those who fought and fell

  Beneath her flashing banner,

  ‘Mid roundshot, grape and shell,

  Upon the scroll of glory,

  Historian, don’t forget

  To write the name and story

  Of brave young Master Lett.

  James is commemorated at Newcastle House along with his equally valiant sisters, on whom the sobriquet ‘the Rebel Angels’ was conferred, as a consequence of their skill in embroidering banners proclaiming a subversive allegiance. The inscription on the children’s plaque reads: ‘In memory of young James Moore Lett and his sisters Mary, D
ora, Frances and Sarah, who courageously played their part in the cause of Irish freedom in 1798.’ Then comes a line in Irish: ‘Go ndeanfaidh Dia trocaire orthu go leir.’16

  Well! I now have to backtrack, to say that – via those distant Letts – I can after all claim an ancestral connection to the 1798 Rebellion on the romantic-Irish side – and to Scullabogue, and to the loyalists of Enniscorthy, and to Cromwell’s massacres, and to centuries of high and low deeds, all rolled into one. If adolescent James Lett’s17 behaviour on the field of battle – as I now learn – secured for his family name ‘an immortality in the annals of Irish patriotism’ (I’m quoting from an old newspaper article about a hundred years after the event), where does that leave his Aunt Barbara (to whom his mother and sisters weren’t very nice, at the height of the turmoil), his Uncle Newton and all the other ‘loyalist’ relatives? In a blurred or blended, murky, complex and inconsistent genetic mould along with all the rest of us, that’s where.

  Scullabogue. When all those patriotic poems were surging into my highly receptive head, when my green-white-and-orange immersion was absolute, it might have surprised me to learn that another perspective was available, that a whole different set of circumstances existed, to which I might have had access if I’d taken the trouble. (Had I but known ...). I chose not to envisage more than one kind of trigger for retrospective outrage. I ignored the possibility of putting the complex into the simple – as William Empson has it, in a different context – but simple-mindedly cried up every bit of family lore confirming an Irish identity, and blotted out the rest. I mean, I knew my attachment-by-breeding to Irish-Ireland was never going to be as secure as I’d have liked, but I was happily ignorant of just how much of a nonsense it was.

  Chapter 4 – Bards of Armagh

  ... I hear an old sombre tide awash in the headboard:

  Unpathetic och ochs and och hohs, the long bedtime

  Anthems of Ulster, unwilling, unbeaten,

  Protestant, Catholic, the Bible, the beads,

  Long talks at gables by moonlight, boots on the hearth,

  The small hours chimed sweetly away ...

  Seamus Heaney, from ‘The Settle Bed’

  My mother’s well-stocked mind contained a lot of songs and recitations. Sometimes she had to laugh at the things that swept into her head: comically sad verses, absurd-Irish doggerel. She didn’t choose to repeat these things, either silently or out loud, but they simply wouldn’t leave her alone: ‘Poor Pinch and Caoch O’Leary’; ‘The woman was old and feeble and grey’; ‘The Garden where the Praties Grow’. Her repertoire was prodigious. ‘The Old Bog Road’ was a feature of her mental landscape, along with ‘The Deserted Village’. ‘Barbara Fretchie’ was in it, rubbing shoulders with ‘Wee Hughie’. These and many other items of bromide were a permanent acquisition of her brain. Some party pieces, and other more serious lyrics and stanzas, were a legacy of her Catholic primary school in Lurgan, where a class of seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds sat undergoing a programme of rote-learning, with a variable outcome. It was the 1920s, a doleful decade. Some pupils – ‘scholars’, as they were called – were hopeless from the start, big ungainly girls with vacant expressions, or sharp-featured little oddities undone by poverty. But not my mother. My mother is destined for better things, including an education unimaginable to the bulk of her early classmates. She is singled out on account of her quick responses and her retentive memory. This is a girl, a little half-orphan from a poor background, who is clearly not mill-fodder. Before she’s thirteen, my mother is enrolled at a swanky new fee-paying convent school on top of a hill called Mount St Michael’s, to which she hastens every morning, bursting with pride in her second-hand navy school uniform, carrying a leather satchel filled with books and a hockey stick as a symbol of her new status. She is walking on air.

  She’s got to Mount St Michael’s on a scholarship, of course, and a succession of scholarships will see her through to her eventual BA degree from Queen’s University in Belfast. It’s an exhilarating time for her: she loves everything about the school, the nuns, the lessons, the atmosphere, new friendships formed and consolidated, her own prime position in the class, the sense of possibilities opening for the future. And, although her attributes (like mine) don’t include a good singing voice, she has, as ever, no bother with the words of songs and poems (and passages from Shakespeare). A high proportion of the songs she learns are Irish-orientated – though a long way from sean-nos: a local anthem is more likely to begin, ‘By Lough Neagh’s shores where the fisherman strays ...’ than ‘Ag Ur-Chill a’ Chreggan ’se codhail me ’reir faoi bhron ...’. The great revival of interest in traditional Irish singing hasn’t yet happened, and when it does happen it’s too late for my mother to be affected by it. For her, the store of national, and nationalist, songs is confined to ballads and folk songs in the English language of varying degrees of authenticity. Some have authentic airs and new words – ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, ‘Boulevogue’, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ – and some are entirely new: ‘The Kerry Dancers’, ‘The Rose of Tralee’. Most are pleasant and soporific and supposedly enshrine a devotion to Ireland even if they lack the genuine, austere or plangent note of a complex Gaelic folk tradition. One of them, ‘Bold Phelim Brady, the Bard of Armagh’, is a particular favourite of my mother’s despite its shillelagh and brogues-bound-with-straw motif.

  Well, it’s understandable: was she not herself a Brady of Armagh (County Armagh, at any rate)? I am sure she envisaged a kinship with this bold Phelim, whoever he was (actually I think the original of the song was an eighteenth-century Gaelic poet, though the English lyrics cast ‘the poor Irish harper’ in an unduly sweet-and-bland patriotic mode). That song – never mind its trite emblematic overload (‘the shamrock’, ‘the Saxon lion’s paw’, etc.) – its heart was in the right place. It was embedded in its ancient harpist’s dear native land. And that Phelim Brady was the goods, in my mother’s view. He had exclusive rights to the designation ‘the Bard of Armagh’.

  The original Brady sept belonged to Cavan, but some of its members, like the bold Phelim, must have migrated north-eastwards through Monaghan and into Armagh and Down. At any rate, the first of my known, or unknown, Brady forebears turns up in nineteenth-century Newry. What he was doing there, or what his occupation was, I have no idea. His name was Bernard, and I think he had married a Miss McManus. (I’m basing this supposition on the fact that three maiden aunts named McManus turn up at the Lurgan home of Bernard’s son Terence in the census of 1901.) Did he keep moving backwards and forwards? According to the 1911 census, the birthplace of Terence (1859–1915) was County Cavan. But Terence and his brother Michael grew up in Lurgan town. Terence became a tailor and married a local dressmaker named Catherine Harland. Their oldest son, William Brady (1881–1915), in due course married a girl from nearby John Street, Sarah Tipping. (William’s cousin David Brady, a son of Michael, had already married Sarah’s sister Ellen ... but that’s another story.) Hence my mother Nora Brady, and then me. So I suppose I can claim a miniscule line of descent from the ‘illustrious’ Mac Bradaigh sept of Cavan mentioned in the seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters (so can nearly every Irish person called Brady, for that matter ...).

  My mother was proud of her Irish name and its nationalist associations. She was happy to share a surname with the Bard of Armagh. ... Would it also have pleased her to learn of a rival ‘Bard of Armagh’ to whom she really was obliquely related? Not likely, since the second so-called bard was the redoubtable William Blacker (also known as ‘the Orange Minstrel’). He’d acquired the title on account of his Orange songs, in one of which occurs the alarming line, ‘But put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry.’ In full flow, with Williamite triumphalism firing his imagination, this scion of the Blacker dynasty goes on to compose the definitive Orange anthem, ‘No Surrender’:

  And Derry’s sons alike defy

  Pope, traitor or pretender,

  And peal to hea
ven their ’prentice cry,

  Their patriot, ‘No Surrender’.

  This is partisan history with a vengeance (but note that it’s Derry throughout, never Londonderry). We can picture William Blacker in the early years of the nineteenth century, stouter of face and figure than in his uproarious Trinity days, sitting at home in his study at Carrickblacker and cheerfully giving vent to an impassioned illiberalism. He is Protestant through and through – and Protestant unity, he holds, is the best defence against a bugbear of the times, a creeping Catholicism:

  Let the Presbyter strike by the Prelatist’s side,

  And stem, in strong union, fell Popery’s tide.

  We have to wonder what made him so implacably anti-Catholic – and wonder even more what he means by statements like the following: ‘But Popish power, in evil hour, / Has o’er us flung its galling chain.’ Popish power has done nothing of the sort. Popish power is non-existent in Ireland, especially in the years before Catholic Emancipation.

  Protestantism didn’t have to be so venomous and melodramatic. Many upholders of the Protestant faith were also subscribers to the liberal ethic. A supreme example here, I suppose, is Dr William Drennan (the actual founder of the Society of United Irishmen, back in 1791). Drennan is responsible for inventing the phrase ‘the Emerald Isle’ – but his verse in general provokes a lot more admiration than William Blacker’s, and not only because it’s written from a different standpoint. While Blacker urges, ‘On, on, gallant hearts, for the Bible and Crown’, Drennan is more concerned to ‘drive the demon of Bigotry home to his den’. As with many reasonable people before and since, the demon of bigotry is, for him, a cause of the utmost despair. ... At one point, reviewing in verse for the Belfast Monthly Magazine a long topographical poem called ‘The Giant’s Causeway’ by the Reverend Hamilton Drummond, Dr Drennan delivers to his readers an unabashed injunction: ‘Avaunt his verses be they ne’er so fine, / Who for the Catholics – REFUSED TO SIGN!’ The immediate cause of his ire (the year is 1811) is a past refusal by Drummond to add his name to a petition in support of Catholic Emancipation. But reading the Reverend Drummond’s lines about the recent Act of Union – ‘No more fell faction hurls her flaming brand, / But smiling concord waves her olive wand’, and so on, and on, florally and obsequiously – you can see why the whole drift of the poem would get up the nose of an old Irish separatist like Dr Drennan.