A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  With a name like Craig, you would think the small family would fit like Cinderella’s foot in the slipper into lowland Scottish life. But less than four years later we find them domiciled in Dublin where a second child is born. The abundantly named Emily Charlotte Annie Marie Heller Craig – fortunately soon abbreviated to plain Marie – is the first of four daughters.

  The original delinquent pair are now well settled and forging ahead as unimpeachable procreators. And if it wasn’t for nosy descendants prying into their private history, the initial sexual transgression would never have surfaced to slightly undermine their church-going respectability. As with my mother and Catherine Harland, I don’t believe any of their children knew a thing about it.

  But who exactly was this William Craig whom farmer Lett declined to take to his bosom? (As far as I know.) A wild boy who’d run away from home in 1898 at the age of fourteen and got himself taken on as a stable hand at Finnebrogue, near Downpatrick – in defiance of his parents’ project to secure for him a start in life as a railway clerk. They thought it would make a good career for him, but he wasn’t having any of it. He knew what he wanted, and it didn’t include dispensing tickets to the travelling public, or sitting on a high stool poring over a ledger. So he fled to Finnebrogue. How he subsequently arrived in County Wexford, or when he first encountered the comely but vulnerable Miss Lett, I have no idea. He seemed to get around, my grandfather, before he brought his family to settle in Dunmurry where he took up a post as head groom to the Charley family, sinking roots into the district and adapting to its ways. Here, at the end of 1917, a third child, christened William Albert Thomas – my father – was born. As for my grandfather’s father, the coachman/farmer/policeman who may or may not have been born in Dublin, but who definitely had connections with Leitrim, Donegal, the Ards peninsula and Belfast ... I know only a little about him. I know his political persuasion was as Orange as William Johnston’s of Ballykillbeg. And I have his death notice from the Belfast Telegraph of 28 April 1925. ‘... Suddenly, at his residence, Drumawhey, Newtownards, County Down ... late of Kinlough, Bundoran.’ Seventy-five years old, so he’d have been born in 1850. His grave is in Belfast’s City Cemetery – ten minutes’ walk from my birthplace. Between himself and his peripatetic second son, my grandfather, a good deal of Irish ground gets traversed. If they’d had a more distinctive name than Craig – Tipping, Topping, Twyble, Trimble, Turkington – their antecedents might be discoverable. As it is, researchers are stymied by the nearly generic patronymic. (When I was eighteen and determined to be as Gaelic as possible, I was known as Pádraigín de Creag: of the rock.)

  Well, I could claim the family originated in Ayrshire, Aberdeen or Orkney, and that one of them – the Reverend John Craig – was a colleague of John Knox, and therefore implicated in the start of the Covenanting movement and the whole exodus to Ulster. But hypothesis and probability can only take us so far. My Craig great-grandfather remains essentially unknown, along with all his forebears. With his wife, however – his first wife, my great-grandmother – it’s a different matter. And here my religious ancestry takes an unforeseen turn. To the whole admixture of Catholicism, Protestantism, Quakerism and probably Scottish Presbyterianism, I have to add a German Lutheran dash. In 1881, the three-generations-back William Craig, definitely a coachman at this stage, had married a young German governess named Mathilda Clara Maria Heller (she was known as Marie).

  Both of them were employed by the May family, one-time sovereigns of Belfast. We’ve now gone back to the 1870s and the Dublin residence of the Rt Hon. George Augustus Chichester May, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland between 1877 and 1887.2 George Augustus and his wife Olivia (née Barrington) had a lot of children, including Charlotte Olivia, Edward, George, Stella and Josephine (who died in 1873, aged four) – ten in all. During the months of winter and spring, the May family lived at 13 Fitzwilliam Square, in the lofty and punctilious manner appropriate to their standing, and to the era. The handsome square with its enclosed central garden was home to a lot of doctors and lawyers, soldiers and academics, and many of the families occupying its elegant, five-storey Georgian houses were related to one another. For instance, the younger Mays had hordes of cousins – Barrington, Jellett and le Fanu cousins – living close by, creating a juvenile network of gaiety and seasonal pursuits. A treat for the children might consist of a walk to College Green, in the charge of a nursemaid, to view the illuminations celebrating the Prince of Wales’s marriage; or a visit to the pantomime at the Theatre Royal, going through dark winter streets festooned with stalls attended by women selling apples and oranges by the light of lanterns made out of paper bags. On Sundays, they were all marched to church at St Stephen’s, Mount Street, with their parents walking arm-in-arm behind them, ‘after the fashion of the day’.

  A pattern for the children’s upbringing went something like this. A nurse or nursemaid for the infants, followed by a governess once the age of reason was attained. Then, at ten or so, the boys would be enrolled at a Dublin day school, before going on to Rugby in Warwickshire (or some similar establishment). By this stage they’d have had manliness instilled into them by being encouraged to kill every bird, fish or non-domestic animal that came within their orbit. It was called sport. It was a preparation for killing Boers, Asiatic wild animals and Irish insurgents, when 1916 came around.

  I learn all this, and more, from a very stilted book of reminiscences by an old soldier, Major-General Sir Edward Sinclair May.3 When Major-General Sir Edward S. May was a boy in Fitzwilliam Square, he listened to a lot of servants’ gossip about the Fenian Brotherhood and its hopes for Ireland, and among the things that stayed in his mind was a recollection of daily walks with his governess past Mountjoy Prison, while Fenian trials were taking place inside it. He doesn’t say what his attitude to the Fenian uprising was, but I think we can take it that it wasn’t approving. The governess in question can’t have been my great-grandmother as she was only thirteen at this time, and still living with her family in Bremen. (Edward May was two years younger.) But she may have come next in the succession of May family governesses. She was with the family in Howth on her twentieth birthday in July 1874, and the cards she received on that date from her employers – and kept for ever after in her personal photograph album – suggest she was held in high regard by the lot of them.

  This wasn’t the usual situation of the nineteenth-century governess. Numerous novels, journals and autobiographies tell a different story, one of taunts, privations and humiliations. Between Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw – between the force of destruction emanating from the attic, and exposure to extreme psychological or psychic peril – the young woman teacher sent out to make her way in the world requires constant vigilance to keep her from harm.

  She also needs to be endowed with fortitude. At a time when most women never moved far from the place where they started, the idea of uprooting oneself and living among strangers must have loomed like a nightmare before the faint-hearted. But my great-grandmother, not a whit daunted, left her home in Bremen with her Saratoga trunk, waved goodbye to her parents and siblings, and crossed the North Sea and then the Irish Sea to reach her destination in Dublin. It was a great adventure. The Mays, for their part, would have got what they paid for: a young woman well equipped to instruct and win over their daughters and younger sons, and keep order in the schoolroom. They were well enough placed to pick and choose among the applicants for the post of governess, and something about Marie Heller must have commended itself strongly.

  A lot has been written about the socially ambiguous status of the governess in a grand family. Is she a servant or isn’t she? What degree of hobnobbing is permitted between her and her employers? How does she deal with resentment in underservants obliged to wait on her? Each case was different, of course, and I get a sense that Marie Heller was something of a pet with the Mays and their social circle, perhaps because of the novelty of her origins. (She was also a good deal better educated than most of them:
I know of her immersion in the world of literature, and I’d like to attribute to her a certain moral and intellectual refinement as well.)

  She was born in Berlin, a city of tall houses, balconies and linden trees, in 1854. The previous year, her father, Friedrich Wilhelm Heller – how German that is! – had received an honourable discharge from the Prussian army, and was free to resume his original, ancestral occupation. He was a potter, the third son of a master potter, born in a place called Zellin, in 1814 – Zellin being located in Prussia then, though I think it was ceded to Poland after the Second World War. At any rate, it was somewhere close to what is now the border between Germany and Poland. His wife, Maria Bertha Dorothea Vogel (b. 1820), had a different upbringing as a Berliner and the daughter of a piper in the king of Prussia’s army. The names of Maria Bertha Dorothea’s parents were Johann Gottlieb Vogel and Julianne Stolzenbach – and that’s as far back as I’m going along the German line. These are only names to me, and foreign names at that. I can hardly comprehend that people called Vogel, Heller and Stolzenbach are among my direct ancestors: but there they are. Their northern European faces – those born in the age of photography, that is – gaze out inscrutably from the pages of Marie Heller’s family album. There they stand, in their studied poses, frock coats and nineteenth-century silhouettes, transfixed in a faraway realm of the past and utterly unapproachable. An image has survived of my Berlin great-great-grandmother Bertha Vogel, but it’s as enigmatic as the apparition of Miss Jessell in the Henry James story, and as wispy as woodsmoke. Indeed, I have very little grip on my German forebears; though – when I think of historic European cities with mediaeval courts and cobbled streets and four- or five-storey, half-timbered houses, I could wish it was otherwise. ‘Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets.’4

  When Marie was five, the family upped sticks for the Free Hanseatic city of Bremen (with a population of about sixty thousand, as opposed to Berlin’s nearly half a million). To move home at the time was quite a business, requiring all kinds of certificates including one which stated that the Hellers ‘had given no cause for complaint’ while they lived in Berlin. An unimpeachable family then, to which were added several offspring during the 1860s (though Bertha was well into her forties by this date). Marie, the fourth daughter, would have been a bright little girl who shone in the schoolroom (just like her future granddaughter-in-law, my Lurgan mother), with a good grasp of languages and a love of German literature. Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph von Eichendorff and Karl Simrock were among the poets whose works she wrote out meticulously – page after page – in a special poetry notebook: a resource for difficult times, a talisman she kept by her for the rest of her life. Marie’s future as some kind of teacher was already marked out, perhaps, at an early stage; though no one could have envisaged her eventual resting place in a desolate Leitrim graveyard with incessant Irish rain coming down in sheets against the headstones, and the wind soughing among the yew trees.

  Interspersed with the German family photos in Marie’s album are sepia pictures of the beau monde Mays and their acquaintances, and of the young governess’s Dublin friends. Among the latter is Miss Maria Merrin who seems also to be a resident of 13 Fitzwilliam Square – was she perhaps another May employee? Marie has inscribed a photograph of herself, a present for this Miss Merrin, with the words: ‘Remember in later years always your old friend in pleasure and pain, Marie Heller. 19 November 1876.’ The photographic studio is that of Geo. Mansfield, 90 Grafton Street, Dublin. You also find a Cissy Dempsey in the album, and Louise Helms who writes to Marie, ‘Forget me not’, in the standard sentimental fashion. One of the governess’s twentieth birthday greetings comes from her employer Mrs Olivia May, ‘with affectionate love’. It is dated Locksley, 16 July 1874. There was a country house called Locksley, of recent construction (1860s), one of a pair, the other being Rosedale, built at Howth for the Guinness family – is it the same Locksley? Possibly the Mays had rented the house for the summer. Other summers saw them ensconced at Violet Hill, near the seaside resort of Bray, at Killarney Wood or Bray Head House (the property of the Putland family). No doubt there were picnics, with hide-and-seek and the younger contingent dodging in and out of the trees, croquet on the lawn and excursions by carriage to local beauty spots.

  And there in the midst of all these decorous goings-on is my youthful ancestress, revelling in her popularity, speaking German or French to her charges, contributing to the gaiety of every innocuous occasion. I like to think that Marie Heller crammed a lot of enjoyment into the thirty-six years vouchsafed to her. I see her as a small girl with a watering-can attending to geraniums, nasturtiums or climbing roses on a balcony in Berlin; or – wrapped in rugs – being drawn on a sleigh through the snow-laden streets. Christmas, the great festival of the German year, was a time of magic and wonder to her. ‘O Christmas, Christmas! Highest feast!/We cannot comprehend its joy ...’. These lines, in German, by the poet Nikolaus Lenau, have a place in Marie’s hand-written anthology. Her relish for the Christmas season may have been transmitted to me, genetically – I can’t otherwise explain my delight in the changed atmosphere obtained by the glittering fir tree and other trappings of the time of year. I’m not and never was a crackers-and-paper-hat person; but each December, and more so as I get older and older, I insist on bringing into the house a Christmas tree to be festooned with antique baubles. This frivolity certainly isn’t an inheritance from the other side of my family, for reasons I’ll touch on later. Even my mother, who made something utterly enchanting of my childhood Christmases, was apt, on her own account, to disparage the whole annual fuss-about-nothing and tinselly tomfoolery (as she saw it). There was a defensive element to this, supposedly common-sense rejection of festive indulgence, as we shall see.

  I don’t know if Marie Heller ever made the return journey to Germany once she’d left home to be a governess, but I am sure the pull of the homeland remained. ... However, her position with the Mays is consolidated; and, in the great houses of her employers, she is sheltered from the fraught events of the day – Land Wars, evictions, boycotts, assassinations. The legacy of the Fenian movement. Time passes – 1876, (bringing the death of Mrs Olivia May, with what repercussions on the governess’s position, I don’t know) ... 1877, ’78 – and, on the home front, trouble occurs. Does the twenty-two-year-old son of the family cast a seigneurial eye on the twenty-four-year-old governess, or is it someone else who has designs on her? The truth can never be known now, but an established fact is that, in the early summer of 1880, the young German woman finds herself in an age-old predicament. Like Eliza O’Hara, like Elizabeth Harland, like her future daughter-in-law Emily Lett, she is pregnant out of wedlock. I am sorry to harp on all this amatory irregularity raging through my background like wildfire on a heath – and perhaps the source of the ‘bad blood’ attributed to me by the nuns of St Dominic’s High School in Belfast – but I can’t seem to get away from it.

  Bad enough for this to happen within a familiar, more or less supportive community, like Catholic, rural Crossmacahilly, or a family primed to take the matter in hand and act for the best; but for a lone German girl away from home, a ‘respectable’, God-fearing, Lutheran German girl committed to rectitude in holy Victorian Ireland, the shame and stress must have been excruciating. Talk there would have been, salacious gossip and avid speculation (such as I’m about to go in for). Was Marie shunned by her erstwhile friends Maria Merrin and the Helms sisters? Did Cissy Dempsey turn up her nose, once she’d enjoyed being properly shocked and enthralled? Above all, what was Marie’s view of her situation? Was she defiant or demoralised? Even if she lacked the adamantine integrity of Jane Eyre, she’d never have cast herself as a Hetty Sorrel figure. How deluded was she, and by whom? Were her employers sympathetic, or not? Was the future Major-General Sir Edward Sinclair May, who married at forty and sired five daughters and a son – was this individual, at this dramatic juncture, in a study or billiard room shaking in his shoes; or holding himself a
loof and a bit contemptuous from a family emergency that really and truly had nothing to do with him?

  The unanswerability of these questions doesn’t make them any less pertinent. The elder Mays, at the very least, bore some responsibility for Marie’s welfare, being in a sense in loco parentis. They’d hardly have put her out on the street, but what did they do? Was she sent away to some distant place of refuge or private nursing home? Was the whole thing just a botheration and annoyance to them, or did they know themselves to be more deeply implicated in Marie’s disgrace? How were the young May daughters shielded from the evidence of immorality? What urgent negotiations were carried on? All impossible to determine. Documentary evidence gives a little, just a little, to go on; and it discloses Marie, still single, in February 1881, with a baby in one hand – and no doubt her book of poems in the other.

  Enter the demon-king coachman William Craig. (I’m joking; it’s just that his copious moustaches, in the one photograph I have of him, make him the perfect model of a pantomime villain.)