A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  There’s a story here, if only one could get to the bottom of it. Catherine was born in 1859 – and for succeeding generations, right down to the mid twentieth century and beyond, illegitimacy in the family betokened the ultimate loss of face. A sense of sin and degradation was tied up with failures of chastity, and it pervaded every religious group and every social class. A generation later, for example, we find even the worldly (and wealthy) Maud Gonne passing off her daughter Isolde as her niece. People were very prone to be sexually censorious, and if you knew of any irregularity in this respect among your immediate forebears, you’d simply have edited it out of the family narrative. I think it entirely possible that my mother never heard a word about her grandmother’s dubious origin. I’m sure she believed Catherine Brady’s family background to be as sound as anyone’s. It was Catholic, that was the main thing. But was it? ‘Harland’ is not an Irish or a Catholic name. Harlands first set foot in Ulster in the mid seventeenth century, arriving as immigrants from County Durham. A lot of them then proceeded on to America and a prosperous life, but some stayed put, sinking roots into County Down and County Armagh. They belonged to the Society of Friends. They were very plentiful around Lurgan and Seagoe. They married wives with striking non-Irish names like Duck and Bullock. They called their daughters Elizabeth, Abigail, Rebecca and Catherine. And they remained committed to the Quaker faith – or most of them did. According to the 1911 census, Catherine Harland’s mother Elizabeth Harland is the solitary Catholic of that name in the whole of County Armagh.

  We can take it, then, that a switch of allegiance occurred at some point in some irresolute branch of the Harland family (which then died out); and as with the Tipping line, conversion to Catholicism goes hand-in-hand with a drop in social status. In 1861, when Catherine is two years old, a hotel called the Greyhound stands in Lurgan’s High Street, and round the corner from it is a dodgy cobbled lane or court known as Greyhound Hotel Lane. In that lane lives a family called Harlan. (The Harlan and Harland spellings of the name are interchangeable.) Is this where Catherine grew up? Nothing is known about these obscure and lowly Harlans; but Catherine’s mother Elizabeth worked as a servant for the well-to-do Johnston family of brewers at 19 High Street, close by, which suggests a connection in terms of propinquity, if nothing else. We don’t know whether Elizabeth at the time was a live-in servant (and later cook) – but it wouldn’t have been unusual to find her illegitimate child being brought up by its grandparents and fed an assuaging fiction: that its biological mother was just an older sister in the family.

  The ascertainable facts (if they are facts) would have backed up this assertion, in Catherine’s case. According to the 1911 census, again, Elizabeth Harland was twelve years old when she gave birth to her only child. (Not that she discloses anything of the sort to the census-takers: the spaces under ‘children born’ and ‘children living’ are blank.) We can work this out from her own stated date of birth, 1847. But is it a true date? I don’t think so. Many people falsified their ages for the census returns, whether to prolong their working lives, because they’d simply got it wrong, being born before the era of record-keeping, or through forgivable vanity. And in the previous census (1901) Elizabeth had claimed to be fifty-nine years old, which pushes the year of her birth back to 1842. Whatever her true age, though, twelve or seventeen or something in between, Elizabeth was certainly young enough at the time of her daughter’s birth to require looking after or shoring up. And maybe she got it at her place of employment. Maybe she kept the child with her in a back room of 19 High Street. Maybe the Church of Ireland Johnstons were sufficiently conscientious to try to do right by their ‘wronged’ Catholic maidservant – short of incorporating her into the family, of course. For what we have here – well, possibly – is a kind of December Bride situation.

  In Sam Hanna Bell’s novel, set on the Ards peninsula of County Down around the turn of the twentieth century, the eponymous bride Sarah Gomartin works as a servant of the Echlin family, Presbyterian farmers in a desolate spot, and in due course gives birth to a child whose father’s identity she either doesn’t know, or refuses to specify. Which of the younger Echlins is responsible for the girl’s predicament, diminishing her standing in the eyes of the primitive, church-going, bible-clutching community? Either of the Echlin brothers would be glad to marry Sarah, but she holds out, biding her time, driven by an austere integrity, until circumstances bring about a change of heart. This occurs a long time after the initial transgression: hence the title. You read this novel for the pleasures of its Ulster rock-hardness, its spare but somehow picturesque Presbyterianism, the ancestral clock ticking away in the parlour, the scrubbed stone floor, the patchwork quilts. But I don’t know if women like Sarah Gomartin ever existed, sufficiently grounded in their own self-reliance to go against community regulations. A nineteenth-century, pregnant, unmarried girl, you feel, wouldn’t have hesitated to accept any offer of marriage, to get back her squandered reputation. Otherwise, it’s all up with her: ‘The neighbours will know of my black disgrace.’ Propriety matters. ‘The Girl’s Lament’, by William Allingham, gets at the essence of seduction and betrayal, Ulster-country style:

  In our wee garden the rose unfolds,

  With bachelors’ buttons and marigolds;

  I’ll tie no posies for dance or fair,

  A willow twig is for me to wear.

  For a maid again I can never be,

  Till the red rose blooms on the willow tree.

  Of such a trouble I’ve heard them tell,

  And now I know what it means full well.

  The telling phrase, ‘My apron-string now it’s wearing short’, encapsulates the sorry story, the whole grotesque (grotesque to our minds) atmosphere of shame and blame. It’s important to stress how deep-rooted was the dread of community censure; no point in applying free-thinking attitudes of the present to past sexual misdemeanours (if that’s what they were). I’ve uncovered quite a few lapses from strict pre-marital chastity among my forebears on both sides; but in most of these instances, someone intervened to put things right, before the social damage became irreversible. A hasty marriage was one thing; no marriage at all, another.

  Certainly the most dramatic case is that of my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Harland. Picture an attractive young child-servant employed in a household containing three lusty boys, all around her own age: James (born 1839); William (born 1844); and Courtney (born 1846). It’s not hard to envisage the kind of carry-on that might have taken place – or the inevitable outcome. I can’t be certain about this, of course; I may be barking up the wrong family tree entirely. Everyone can point to missing forebears, broken lines of descent – and I’ve no reason to jam these brewing Johnstons into an ancestral gap of my own. Well, no reason except the obvious one. And suggestive silences and inactions. Where, for example, was the local priest with his holy water and domestic-regulatory impulse? If a young, available, Lurgan Catholic had fathered Elizabeth’s child, you’d expect the pair of sinners to be dragged, protesting or not, before the altar. If the girl’s condition had nothing to do with the Johnstons, you’d think they would wash their hands of their erring housemaid. But they didn’t. We don’t know what arrangements were entered into, but they kept her on. Time passed. In the natural course of things the Johnston parents died and the sons entered the professions (as managing director of the family business, tobacco manufacturer and practising solicitor respectively). Their Catholic housemaid Elizabeth Harland was promoted to cook. She never married, and neither did they. The three bachelor brothers and the spinster servant lived on and on in the same High Street house. One wonders what terms the unequal quartet were on: did Elizabeth turn into a stately elderly housekeeper, a known and respected figure in the neighbourhood, or did gossip and scandal plague her all her life? Did her juvenile disgrace stay with her, like a tin can tied to the tail of an inoffensive dog? Why did no one ever teach her to read and write? (The census return has her down as illiterate.) Was she b
rave or defeated? Did she acknowledge her daughter, or try to pretend she was some other relation? And where was baby Catherine during her early years?

  Maybe her mother brought her up, as a single parent, and maybe Catherine knew who her father was, but was cautioned never to mention his name. ‘If anyone asks – just say he’s dead.’ On second thoughts – this seems a bit too enlightened a course of action for close-knit, nineteenth-century, stuck-in-the-mud Lurgan. As for Catherine’s father – he could have been a passing tramp, for all I actually know to the contrary, with Elizabeth too young or naive to understand what was happening to her when the child was conceived. Maybe the Johnstons were totally disinterested Christians. All one can be sure of is that Catherine was not abandoned, however her presence in the world was explained, and that mother and daughter were, and remained, on good terms. In later life, during the First World War, they lived together for a time in Glasgow. Elizabeth died in 1920, aged seventy-three (or perhaps a bit more). I don’t know when the Johnston brothers died, or who inherited the brewing fortune. It was considerably depleted anyway, due to the large sums donated by James, the head of the family, to help fund the building of a Temperance Hall. Was this to atone for some form of intemperance in his past, one wonders? (Ah, irony.)

  Family lore has Catherine, in her later years, inhabiting a house in Lurgan crammed with antiques – which suggests that some residue of the Johnston estate may, just may, have ended up with her. Alas, by this stage she’d taken to drink, and as the house was – conveniently – located next door to a pub, these valuable objects one by one found their way over the back wall dividing the two properties in exchange for bottles of gin. (Some of Catherine’s grandchildren knew not to call in on her on their way to school if the curtains were drawn: this meant she’d had a rough night.) ... When she died in 1938, Catherine had sufficient resources to leave £5 (£185 in today’s money) to each of her grandchildren, of whom there were many (my mother among them).

  However and wherever she was reared, Catherine acquired sufficient sewing skills to get employment as a seamstress. It was the lower of the two standard occupations assigned to women in nineteenth-century fiction (the other was the governess, which I’ll get to in a minute). Think of Little Dorrit, in the Dickens novel, going out daily from the Marshalsea Prison to sew for survival. Or Mrs Gaskell’s heroine Mary Barton, who earns a meagre living as a needlewoman in congested, soot-stained Manchester of the 1840s; or the same author’s Ruth, in the novel of that title published in 1853, who exemplifies the wronged-but-virtuous young dressmaker. Indeed, there’s a whole ‘seamstress’ genre featuring long-suffering stitchers whose fate is either to rise in the world, via marriage, or to descend even further into prostitution and a lurid death. Bastard infants accompany them along the latter route. And even for those who will make something of their lives in the future, the present drudgery is unremitting.

  Work – work – work!

  From weary chime to chime,

  Work – work – work

  As prisoners work for crime!

  Band, and gusset, and seam,

  Seam, and gusset, and band,

  Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumbed,

  As well as the weary hand.

  ‘Seamstress’ indicates more than a job: it signifies an entire condition of female lowliness and ill-paid labour. I don’t know to what extent the conditions evoked by Thomas Hood in his famous ‘Song of the Shirt’ were replicated in 1870s Lurgan, but certainly the town offered scope for hardship and exploitation, along with its sectarian delinquencies. Sore eyes and malnutrition. Perpetual exhaustion. Closer to home, too, and some way in the future, you have the poet ‘Richard Rowley’ (pen name of the businessman Richard Valentine Williams, who died in 1947) impersonating one of his own Belfast factory workers – ‘The needles go leppin’ along the hem,/And my eyes is dizzy wi’ watchin’ them’ – in a tone akin to the resentment and fatalism of the Hood poem:

  Monday morning till Saturday,

  I sit an’ stitch my life away ...

  An’ what have I ever done or been,

  But just a hand at a sewing machine?

  Catherine Harland, though, as the bastard child of an illiterate servant, might have counted herself lucky to gain a foothold in the sewing profession, whether she worked from home (wherever ‘home’ was), sewing shirts for a pittance, or, more likely, as a stitcher in a local handkerchief factory (maybe even the factory owned by the prospering Catholic Jordans). Later on, she describes herself as a dressmaker, which indicates a slight progression upwards. But she’s married by then. Through her work, Catherine has met a young Lurgan tailor named Terence Brady, and the two of them get married in 1880 when they’re both just twenty-one. (Unusually for my family, I don’t think Catherine is pregnant at the time. But she’d have had the best incentive in the world to practise abstinence: her own situation, and her mother’s.) To become a tailor, Terence would have had to serve an apprenticeship and gain necessary expertise, and as the wife of a respectable tradesman, Catherine could hold her head high and cast off the scandal of her origins. It was a triumph of a kind. Her mother’s ill luck, or ill judgement, was not revisited on Catherine. (But Elizabeth, the Johnstons’ servant, may have enjoyed a luxury unavailable to the vast majority of her contemporaries: a room of her own.)

  Young Mr and Mrs Brady set up home at 37 Edward Street, where their first son William was born in 1881. He was my grandfather. He was followed swiftly by ten brothers and sisters, of whom only half survived into adulthood. Losses and gains. I’m happy that Catherine overcame her social handicap to fit into normal Lurgan Catholic plebeian life. But in some ways her mother Elizabeth had the better part – room to breathe and congenial surroundings. Yes, I know her work as a servant and cook was hard, but independence and security of a kind must have counted for something. And she’d have had time off, perhaps to lend a hand with her proliferating grandchildren, whether these were acknowledged as such, or not. Or perhaps I’m talking through my hat. What do I know about it? The details of Elizabeth’s life, like those of innumerable other lives, are simply and utterly irretrievable. I’ve decided, though, that my great-great-grandmother was seventeen, not twelve, when her daughter was born. I’m basing this conclusion on the fact that many census respondents are overtaken by vagueness when it comes to the question of age. They make a wildly inaccurate estimate of the number of years they’ve been alive. The old rogue Matthew Tipping, for instance, claims a date of birth in 1841, which would make him ten years old when he first became a father. Sexually precocious he may have been, but we needn’t cast him as a biological phenomenon.

  Yes, Elizabeth was seventeen; and this makes the eldest Johnston son the most likely candidate for illegitimate fatherhood. But everything surrounding this time of drama – the shame and horror and remorse and agitation – is now lost for ever. The facts can never be recovered; and so, for the moment, I think, I’ve indulged in sufficient speculation about the matter. To stick with an unadorned sequence of events within a hundred-year span: Elizabeth gave birth to Catherine, who gave birth to William, who ‘begat’ Nora, who gave birth to me. While William lay in his cradle in a house in Edward Street, his future bride – already three months old when he came into the world – lay gurgling and kicking her heels in another cradle by the side of a hand-loom, in a house only a couple of streets away. She lay in her cradle, taking everything in, while her stern half-brother Henry Tipping prowled beside her with his hands clasped behind him, back and forth, back and forth, in the tiny room.

  Henry is twenty-five, and may already have his eye on fifteen-year-old Mary Anne Dowds, his stepmother’s daughter. But it will take another six years to get these two to the altar, though they’ve lived in the same house, along with all the rest of the mixed-up family, since 1876. When the Tipping/Dowds wedding takes place, it is – again – under duress. Mary Anne, twenty-one, is three months pregnant. No, says her grandson, my cousin Harry Tipping, it’s not inces
t: though complications on the domestic front may suggest otherwise. Henry and Mary Anne are not related by blood; it’s just that his father’s wife is her mother (or as my grandmother and her full sister Ellen might have put it, testing their contemporaries with a conundrum, their mother’s daughter married their father’s son ). ... And considering the conditions under which they all mucked in together, all the Tippings and Dowds and overlapping generations, it’s surprising that more in the way of coital shenanigans didn’t take place (as far as we know). ... At any rate, in September 1887, whether in a furtive or a festive spirit, Henry Tipping and Mary Anne Dowds (the gentle Mary Anne, she was known in the family) are pronounced man and wife and detach themselves from the whole jing-bang of John Street, from parents and siblings and half-siblings and step-siblings and all. Henry, showing a bit of enterprise, has already set himself up as a greengrocer, renting a small shop in Edward Street and the flat above it; twenty-odd years later, well into the new century, Henry transfers his business to rather better premises, still in Edward Street (76). Here his and Mary Anne’s ten children grow up conscious of Orange hegemony and Catholic ‘underdog’ status, and in due course align themselves with the republican movement in the North, up to and beyond the signing of the Treaty. (I’ll consider their activities at this time in the following chapter.)