On the other hand, perhaps this person has been in the picture all along, a known seducer with an aversion to matrimony – at least, when the prospective wife is not an Irish girl (he married again, after Marie’s death). Perhaps he really is the father of the child, the baby Bertha, called after Marie’s mother back in Bremen. Certainly I never received the smallest intimation that all was not as it should be with the parentage of ‘Aunt Bertha’, as the 1880s baby became known to my father and his siblings. Of course I didn’t; it was the 1950s, when respectability reigned and no one in their right mind would have brought up an ancient scandal in the family. No one would have given any credence to it, either. All right, you can’t get round the date on the marriage certificate, April 1881, proclaiming extraordinary tardiness on the part of bride and groom – but no need to go further and make it a marriage of convenience into the bargain.
I can’t quite accept this version of events. The marriage was certainly a come-down for Marie Heller. Coachmen were very numerous in the carriage-owning era, and for all their sumptuous livery they were classed as servants; whereas she was on the next thing to an equal footing with the employing family. I can’t believe that this accomplished young woman, speaking several languages fluently, and possessed of a certain European urbanity, would choose to throw in her lot with a rough Irish coachman, had any reasonable alternative been available to her. The alternative she faced was, of course, social ostracism and probably penury, as an unmarried mother at an especially censorious time.
The scenario I envisage is this. Some unknown person beguiled and bamboozled Marie, conscripting her for the sorrier role in the standard, not to say trite, seduction-and-humiliation plot. The Mays,5 whether interested or disinterested parties, were then faced with the task of finding a husband for matrimonially downgraded Marie, and the best they could do in the circumstances was the coachman. And that only after protracted to-ing and fro-ing. Perhaps a financial inducement was proffered, or an undertaking given, de haut en bas, that a well-disposed eye would be trained on any future children born to Marie and William Craig. (And so it proved. At any rate, my grandfather William Henry experienced no trouble in finding employment as a coachman, a stable hand or groom with local grandees at Finnebrogue, in Wexford, in Scotland or, eventually, in the Lagan Valley.)
Marie’s life was in shreds, however, and she opted out of it, ten years and five children later, by turning her face to the wall. I doubt if she’d ever have become acclimatised to the moods of the Irish countryside, or a day-to-day existence decidedly at odds with the future she might have mapped out for herself. Perhaps sex was a consolation – or a punishment accepted in a penitent spirit for the mess she’d made of things, her social wrongdoing and foolish gullibility. At any rate, the children of the marriage came quickly, following on from John in 1882 (my grandfather was next, in 1884), and from the first son on were indubitably Craigs. But over Bertha, I think, a question mark remains.
All this may be wrong. But there is that fact of the back-to-front sequence of birth and marriage. Another fact is that her Germanness and his Leinster identity (if that’s what it was) combined to breed a family of Ulster unionists and Orangemen. They signed the Covenant in 1912, at the height of the stupendous outcry against Home Rule. They paraded on the Twelfth with their sashes and banners. In her well-tended, hedged-in garden at Dunmurry – her special domain – my grandma Craig grew clumps of Orange lilies.
George Augustus May outlived his children’s German governess by a year. He died, for some reason at a house called Lisnavagh in County Carlow, in 1892, aged eighty-seven. He died as he had lived, a toff, unknown to the ceilidhe house, the agitators’ meeting place or the soup kitchen. The household over which he presided during his heyday would have been a conservative one, committed to ‘ascendancy’ values. The glamour of the Fenian movement, ‘cultural’ Irishness or an affinity with the aspirations of Charles Stuart Parnell would have passed it by. Irish disaffection would have been anathema to it. Particularly, at one end of the century, George Augustus might have remarked the fate of a predecessor in the role of Lord Chief Justice, Lord Kilwarden, murdered by a mob in Dublin during the uncoordinated rebellion of Robert Emmet; and at the other end, in 1882, he had the Phoenix Park assassinations of Lord Frederick Cavendish and T.H. Burke by a reprehensible offshoot of the Irish Republican Brotherhood called the Invincibles, to underscore in his eyes the fiendish nature of Fenianism.
None of this would have meant a thing to the girl from Bremen. But, worldly or workaday, it was Protestant Ireland, not Catholic Ireland, that reeled her in. Her Lutheran sensibility chimed with a Church of Ireland decorum (leaving aside the lapse of chastity rebarbative to both). She wasn’t to know that, a long way in the future, a renegade grandson would throw in his lot with the other camp and help to build barricades in Belfast against a ‘Protestant’ onslaught, during the troubles of the early 1970s. (At the time I’m writing, that grandson, my father, is a healthful and cheerful ninety-three-year-old, loosely attached to the Catholic church at Kilclief, near Strangford, County Down, and strongly attached to his local Catholic community.)
Take a year at random in the nineteenth century – say, 1859. In the north of Ireland the great religious revival is gathering a head of steam, as Presbyterian staidness flies out of the window and unbridled hysteria enters in. Susceptible people all over the place are ‘saved’ or ‘converted’ with maximum melodrama. A situation prevails in previously inexcitable Ulster communities which is curiously akin to Lewis Carroll’s ‘reeling and writhing and fainting in coils’. The social commentator James Winder Good, writing in 1918, describes what happened:
From the North of Antrim, where the first manifestations were displayed, the fire spread rapidly south, until ... practically the whole of Presbyterian Ulster was ablaze. The enthusiasm was even more vehement in towns than in the rural districts ... [with] ‘screams of the most unearthly description proceeding from places of professedly Christian worship at all hours of the day and night, girls with dishevelled hair and pallid faces ... supported in the arms of young men and young women, to their homes from the churches where they had been struck ...’.
(The quotation comes from an embarrassed observer of these unprecedented antics, the Reverend William McIlwaine.) Trances, seizures, visions and ‘miracles’ are the order of the day – and one can envisage the bemusement of Catholic onlookers as their church’s reputation for ‘superstition’ and emotionalism is suddenly and exorbitantly overtaken.
Among the latter, possibly, are Matthew Tipping and his wife Eliza, a young couple still occupying part of the Crossmacahilly farmhouse with its linen-weaving accoutrements and its apple orchard in full fruition, and with a new arrival – their son James, the future Lurgan stone-thrower – added to the rest of the inhabitants jostling for a bit of space. ... In another part of County Armagh, eighteen-year-old Ellen Jordan (Matthew’s next wife) may also be witnessing unexpected religious excitements among the overwrought of the area, and thanking her lucky stars for her own ancestral, sensible and dignified, Catholic creed. She may also, in the usual way of spirited adolescents, be exhibiting impatience with her parents’ harping on the awful old Famine (safely in the past), and on the failed, and farcical, uprising of 1848 – though she is probably herself a supporter of the embryo Fenian movement. There is plentiful news of evictions and other evils in the Irish countryside to keep Ellen’s nationalist instincts working at full throttle.
In the town of Lurgan itself the young domestic servant Elizabeth Harland is giving birth to her daughter Catherine, an occasion not calling for rejoicing on anyone’s part – though, as we’ve seen, Catherine does not allow herself to be disabled by her origins. Catherine’s route to respectability, her future husband Terence Brady, is at this moment taking into his infant lungs the purer air of County Cavan – ‘lakeside orchards in first bloom’ – though before long he too will be transplanted with his family to dusty, sect-ridden, throughother Lurgan.
It’s easier to conjure up a picture of Mathilda Clara Maria Heller, a solemn little girl of five, saying goodbye to Berlin and the balconies and cobbles and flower shops, the Kranzler-Ecke, the fish market, the smell of coffee and confectionery, the carts laden with branches of young birch trees in the spring and streets thronged with officers in military uniform. Utterly unaware of remote, bleak Ireland and everything to do with it, she is on the way to Bremen, where her father will set up his pottery business. I hope there is space among the family’s possessions for her cherished children’s books and books of poems (I’m sure she owned some of these). All right, I know I’m attributing some of my own proclivities to this unknown great-grandmother, but it’s not entirely without foundation.
John Hewitt has recorded in verse his mild antipathy towards his Methodist grandmother, describing her as ‘stiff and hard’. But, he adds, she had a mitigating feature: she carried a cache of poems clipped from newspapers in a pouch on her garter. Tennyson, Whittier, Longfellow, George MacDonald. And, ‘remembering that satin pouch of poems / I clasp her bony hand’. Yes, keeping poems by you seems to be a measure of integrity – one I’d go along with anyway. And to bolster that conviction in my mind I have those skilled amateur anthologists, my mother and my father’s grandmother, bequeathing to me an intense susceptibility to the power of poetry. And it was probably that dual genetic inheritance that predisposed me to become an anthologist – if not entirely a poetry anthologist – myself.
At school in Belfast in the 1950s I never won prizes for anything – with one exception. When we were twelve or thirteen, and in Form 2A at St Dominic’s, our English teacher, Miss McVerry, announced one morning a competition for the class. ‘Now, children, I want each of you to take an unused exercise book. And in it, in your best handwriting, between now and the end of term, I want you to copy out any poems or pieces of prose that you particularly admire. It must be your own choice, remember, and it can be absolutely anything you like, from a nursery rhyme to a passage from Shakespeare. If any of you have a clean exercise book in your desk, you can start now by writing “My Anthology” on the first page. [She then proceeded to chalk up these words in large letters on the blackboard.] And at the end of term, there will be a prize of a book-token for whichever of your efforts I judge to be the best. Now – any questions, or does anyone have any idea about the sort of thing you might start with? Yes, Mary?’
It was the first time I’d heard the word ‘anthology’, but I knew at once that this project was right up my street. I couldn’t wait to get it under way. In fact I produced two ‘anthologies’ (the first exercise book was filled pretty quickly), spending most of my evenings over the next couple of months seated at the kitchen table surrounded by papers, books, paint-boxes and jars of dirty water. I went one better than everyone else by illustrating my choices, mostly with pictures copied from books I owned (‘Where is Persephone, you naughty sea children?’; ‘He tied Lucy and Henry to the kitchen table’). I was nothing if not an eclectic compiler. I had Chaucer (surprisingly, in the Middle English versions) and Spenser alongside Louisa May Alcott and ‘Roddy the Rover’. Kipling’s poem about not ‘giving your heart to a dog to tear’ (I was very fond of dogs) is followed by ‘Charlotte Bronte’s Creed’. Poetry and prose are intermingled throughout. Thus was the pattern set – minus the illustrations – for my Blackstaff Belfast and Ulster anthologies, and Oxford Book of Ireland.
I won the prize. It was a book-token for seven shillings and sixpence. I’d like to say I bore it off to Mullan’s or Erskine Mayne’s and exchanged it for something like The Faber Book of Contemporary Poetry or Sean O’Faolain’s translations from the Irish, The Silver Branch. But I know it was expended joyfully on the School Friend Annual for 1956, or The Secret of Grey Walls by Malcolm Saville. I needed poetry to amplify my life, but I also needed – and still need – a large element of frivolity in my bedtime reading. (Nowadays it’s supplied by wonderful contemporary thriller writers like Andrew Taylor, Sue Grafton, Michael Connolly, Alafair Burke and the incomparable Reginald Hill.) I was – and still am, as a collector – a children’s books addict.
As for the poetry business – some of my ancestors on both sides, I am sure, never gained pleasure from a line of verse in their lives. But it’s not fair of me to single out the two who did, and elevate them, for that reason alone, above all the rest. And, if you make assumptions about people’s relations to literature, you may be setting yourself up for a salutary comeuppance. My utterly unpoetic and ill-educated father could, for example, in his prime, recite from start to finish not only ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, but Portia’s central speech from The Merchant of Venice. And my two-times-over half-great-uncle Henry Tipping – but hang on a minute, I’m getting entangled here in the skein of my own ancestral complications. Two-times-nothing; that only applies to his and Mary Anne Dowds’s children. His mother Eliza O’Hara was not related to me. My half-great-uncle Henry Tipping, then, an uncouth and grumpy old sod by all accounts, nevertheless revered Thomas Davis’s ‘Fontenoy, 1745’ – to the point of not restraining his rendering of it in the presence of his terrified infant half-sister Sarah.
... The treasured wrongs of fifty years are in their hearts today –
The Treaty broken ’ere the ink wherewith ’twas writ could dry,
Their plundered homes, their ruined shrines, their women’s parting cry,
Their priesthood hunted down like wolves, their altars overthrown –
Each looks as if revenge for all were staked on him alone.
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, nor ever yet elsewhere
Rushed on to fight a nobler band than these proud exiles were.
Fontenoy was the site of the battle in which the Irish troops of King Louis XV inflicted an overwhelming defeat on the English forces under the command of the Duke of Cumberland – ‘the Bloody Duke of Cumberland’; and, of course, you could say it’s not so much poetry as patriotism that animates great-uncle Henry as he roars out the list of ‘treasured’ enormities. The wrongs done to the Irish were entwined in his heart and head – and never mind if the blood of those on the side of Thomas Davis’s plunderers and desecrators has sneaked to an extent into his own bulging nationalist veins. There’s no one to say, ‘But hold on a minute,’ to disturb his conviction of possessing an unblemished Irish ancestry.
Chapter 6 – Cultural Confusions
The roll call in the side chapel of the Royal Irish Fusiliers might have taught us something: O’s and Macs mingled in death with good Proddy names, Hamilton, Hewitt, Taylor, Acheson.
John Montague, from ‘History Walk’
Throughout the nineteenth century, savage street-fighting occurred periodically in key towns in the North, including Belfast, Derry, Portadown and Lurgan. Belfast’s bad reputation in this respect goes all the way back to 1813, when two men were shot dead in North Street – victims, as George Benn has it, of ‘party collision’.1 The affably sardonic F. Frankfort Moore, in The Truth about Ulster (1914), records an experience of his early life, when a careless nursemaid led him into a turbulent quarter of the town while a riot was in progress. Too young to understand what was going on, but quite old enough to relish the excitement of the occa
sion, he stood with his nose pressed against an upstairs window of a local house into which his nurse had hastily bundled him, watching Belfast go about its usual stormy business. ‘I saw a flying crowd of men and women, boys and girls of the mill-working order, and behind them were riding at the trot three dragoons with their sabres drawn and at the “carry”.’ It was 1857, Twelfth-of-July parades had just taken place, and rumours of ‘Papist’ threats to cherished Orange clergymen such as Dr Cooke and Dr Drew had inflamed the situation. Protestants and Catholics were once again at one another’s throats.
Paving stones, porter bottles and iron nuts all came into play and inflicted considerable damage on sectionally undifferentiated heads and limbs. The most vicious and violent years of the century were 1857, ’64, ’72 and ’86, the last tied up with the Liberal government’s first Home Rule bill (and Protestant jubilation over its defeat). Major sectarian outbreaks were a feature of Belfast, where street-fighting had swiftly assumed a strategic character, but provincial towns like Lurgan weren’t behindhand in taking up the cudgels in support of one side or the other. Most of the combatants fuelled by factional fury would have had nothing in their heads but enlarged folk-memories of atrocities perpetrated against their co-religionists – or perhaps not even that. For some it was just a matter of a distorted birthright: if you’re born a Protestant the onus is on you to fight the Taigs, and vice versa. You don’t need to know what it’s all about.
Hence the missiles propelled into Protestant faces by Tipping hard men of the 1880s. The first Lurgan generation – sons of weaver/shopkeeper Matthew – had nothing to lose, and something to gain in the way of community prestige, by standing up for their Catholic entitlements. I don’t think their actions at street level – assault and rampage – were motivated by any idea of political reform. It was more instinctive than that. It was bred in the bone and expressed with the fists. As for their Protestant counterparts – well, from the year of Emancipation on, ‘the theory of insatiable Catholics extorting privilege after privilege at the expense of harassed Protestants colours all Orange thought’, wrote the social commentator and historian James Winder Good in his study of 1919, Ulster and Ireland. True – but again at street level, thought didn’t come into it. Nothing more elaborate than blows struck at foes was the rationale.
A Twisted Root Page 20