A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  As the stuff of fiction, the Home Rule crisis of the early twentieth century engendered one outstanding work, a narrative equivalent of an aspect of Ulster and Ireland. It is George A. Birmingham’s The Red Hand of Ulster, published in 1912. Birmingham’s central character is an astute and genial Irish peer of the realm who observes with a certain playful detachment the complete volte-face overtaking rival camps whose standpoints vis-à-vis Great Britain have somehow got interchanged. For example, a character in the novel is an ardent Sinn Féiner who, having sought out the most potent source of rebellion against Britain and locating it amongst the unionists of the North, cheerfully accepts the editorship of a ‘loyalist’ newspaper. And all around him, loyalists are tying themselves in knots in the effort to assert their loyalty to Britain at the same time as disembarrassing themselves of it. And, once the refusal of Home Rule is backed by a demand for a complete British withdrawal from Ireland, a state of semantic deadlock is brought about, and the author has tremendous fun with this and all the other egregious anomalies which make up his theme.

  It’s not the first time the sectarian instinct in Northern Ireland has had salutary fun poked at it. You will find, for example, a wonderful set-piece in William Carleton’s novel of 1843, Valentine McClutchy. It exploits to the full the farcical element in sectarian inflexibility. What Carleton presents to his readers is a pair of complementary converts, an ex-Catholic Protestant and his ex-Protestant counterpart. Both men are bursting with new-found zeal and quickly square up to one another as the author brings them face-to-face. However, in the course of the ensuing argument, each man involuntarily reverts to his original theological position. The one-time Orangeman atavistically curses the pope, while the supposed ex-Catholic comes out as a Papist partisan. By this stage a crowd of supporters has gathered, an equal number of Prods and Taigs, and, Carleton tells us, ‘the Catholics, ignorant of the turn which the controversy had taken, supported Bob and Protestantism; while the Protestants, owing to a similar mistake, fought like devils for Darby and the Pope.’ It is hard to think of a more telling indictment of the whole incorrigible business, or one more drily expressed.

  But these are works of fiction, you may say, whose impact would not amount to much among hardliners in the streets of Lurgan or Belfast. Well, yes, but such things work, or should work, both in cumulative and subliminal ways, and at the very least suggest a structure for thoughtful, rather than instinctive, action. There are truths to be found in books which may filter down even to the non-reading public – even to the illiterate.

  It’s likely that my grandmother’s parents, and her older half-siblings, could read but not write (unlike her father’s country cousins, who were adept at both); but she herself was fully literate, as I can testify: a skill she owed to a short and piecemeal education with the Mercy nuns of Edward Street.11 According to the census of 1901, the previously jam-packed house in John Street had dwindled by that date to three occupants: Matthew and Ellen Tipping, and their daughter Sarah. Sarah’s age is given as nineteen, and her occupation as ‘veiner’ (that is, a person sewing veins in flowers decorating pieces of muslin, probably a factory job). ... Move around the corner to 37 Edward Street, and here you find a whole family of reading-and-writing Bradys, plus three old aunts named McManus who seem to have lived with them. I assume these were Terence Brady’s maiden aunts on his mother’s side,12 since his wife Catherine’s relations, as we’ve seen, were not conspicuous about the place, or at least not acknowledged as such. ... Here is the oldest Brady son William, also aged nineteen and a plasterer by trade. (His nearest brother James – Jim – is a draper’s assistant, though at some point, I think, ‘Uncle Jim’ gains experience as a soldier with the British Army.)

  Like the Tippings, the Bradys are ardently Catholic, and this means the courtship of William and Sarah is conducted at church-hall dances and ceilidhes, fund-raising concerts, outings organised by St Peter’s Church and in the company of co-religionists. Do they ever duck out of priestly and family supervision and get away by themselves? Probably, for I don’t doubt the pair of them were properly spirited young people, despite the pinched and seedy circumstances surrounding them. My grandmother was always one for a good laugh. And she’s already been complicit in the elopement of her friend Minnie Cochrane (with a boy called Thornberry), whose luggage she helped deposit on the Belfast train. Other escapades I have no knowledge of, but I’m sure they took place. My grandmother was voluble and filled with strong opinions. When I was fifteen or sixteen, she advised me to go about only with good-looking friends, lest those of unattractive appearance should drive boys away. (Or maybe she meant I needed a counterbalance to my unglamorous looks.) She wasn’t a gadabout, I think, being always conscious of life’s serious aspects. But she enjoyed gossip, as well as taking an interest in events of the wider world (and reading detective novels). She followed the Suez crisis and understood the implications of the death of Stalin. She wore smart coats and hats with veils.

  Young Sarah Tipping and William Brady have the whole of Lurgan Park to go wrong in – not that I think they did – not to mention the shores of Lough Neagh, or the fields and country byways surrounding their grim home town. I can’t say what drew them together, never having known my grandfather, but he’d have needed a certain robust self-assurance to go after the redoubtable Miss Tipping (she was still redoubtable in my day, though life had knocked a good deal of the undauntedness out of her). They were married in April 1902. She remembered washing her hair on the morning of her wedding day, and drying it in front of the kitchen fire. If she wasn’t pregnant at the time – and I don’t think she was – she quickly became so. The newly-weds had moved in with her parents at John Street, and there their first daughter Elizabeth – Lily – was born in January 1903 (nine months almost to the day).

  She was followed by Ellen, or Elly – later Eileen – (‘It was a cynical babe’13) two years later; then came Mary Joseph (Molly, or ‘Ructions’), sweet-natured Catherine (Kathleen), and finally my mother Nora Theresa in June 1913. At some point – probably after 1910 when Sarah’s father Matthew Tipping dropped dead in the street, causing consternation (‘Dear God this holy day and hour’) – the younger Bradys had installed themselves in a house in Edward Street: a better house, still opening on to the pavement, but with stairs leading up to an attic (as my mother recalled it). A few doors away lived Sarah’s sister Ellen, also called Brady, and her expanding family (nine in all). To the David Brady household was added the widowed Ellen Tipping, who lived on until 1927. So: in Lurgan’s Edward Street were domiciled two cousins – David Brady and William Brady – married to two sisters – Ellen Tipping and Sarah Tipping; also resident in the same significant street was a whole different bunch of double-kin: the Henry Tipping tribe (I hope you have all this clear in your head). All were in the grip of ideological grievances, coupled with a bit of blissful ignorance. As we’ve seen, all of them exemplified some undisclosed dilution of the Catholic, ‘true-Gaelic’ line.

  Times were hard. There was no way round incessant scrimping and saving. A plasterer’s wage wasn’t adequate to keep body and soul together, not in a household consisting of seven anyway. And work for the breadwinner was not always available. So the call for British Army volunteers, when it came, fell on receptive ears. It was suddenly permissible for Irish nationalists to align themselves with Britain in the worldwide ‘fight for freedom’. The expectation was that Home Rule would come out of it (‘For England may keep faith ...’14). And never mind that a contradictory expectation sustained huge numbers of Ulster unionist volunteers.

  Frank Tipping15 was eighteen years old when he joined the 6th Dublin Fusiliers along with his Aunt Sarah’s husband William Brady. Frank’s son Brian Tipping later recalled his father’s support for John Redmond, and his belief in the rightness of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s pledge to join in the conflict on the side of England. The Redmondite ‘National Volunteers’, twenty-seven thousand of them, had come round to the new way of think
ing. But the change of heart was not universal. Irish Volunteers held fast to the old, anti-British, separatist ideal. Their flag was hoisted under the slogan, ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’. Their path was set towards 1916 and the Easter Rising.

  When it came to the bit, a fair number of Irish recruits may have been uncertain about what exactly it was they were fighting for, and how it chimed with nationalist aspirations. What had Salonika and the Dardanelles to do with Ireland and conditions at home ...? For this heat-scorched, utterly alien territory was the place the 6th Dublin Fusiliers found themselves in 1915, and where Frank Tipping sustained a leg wound in the fighting around Suvla Bay.

  I don’t know if my grandfather ever had a chance to go at an actual enemy, after all the months of training. He may have evaded involvement in combat activity by dying too soon. It wasn’t only on the battlefields that casualties by the hundreds and thousands occurred. The War Diary of an Irish Soldier,16 by Captain David Campbell, tells a shocking story of non-existent hygiene among the troops in the Dardanelles, plagues of insects, ants and flies unavoidably swallowed in droves along with bread and bully beef. Dysentery, Captain Campbell says, played havoc with the Irish battalions, and William Brady – perhaps lacking a strong constitution to begin with – fell a victim to it. There’s a grave bearing his name and the date, 14 September 1915, in the Military and War Memorial Cemetery in Alexandria, though among some of his descendants a belief exists that he died and was buried at sea. I have his wedding ring on my finger. It was returned to his widow, who gave it to her youngest daughter; and when she died, it came to me.

  Nineteen fifteen has been described as the year of the telegrams, as postmen burdened with appalling news knocked at door after door. To Edward Street in Lurgan in due course comes one of these ominous messengers, and life thereafter for the William Brady family assumes a stricken and savourless character. But my grandmother Sarah Tipping – like her great-grandmother Sarah Magee – has reserves of stoicism which she summons up to help her adjust to her new and unwelcome identity: war widow. Instead of a husband, a partner and helpmeet in the upbringing of five young daughters aged between twelve and two, she has a solid bronze medal, four and three-quarter inches in diameter, inscribed with her husband’s name and the legend, ‘He Died for Freedom and Honour’. Freedom and honour, mar ’eadh. ‘Dead Men’s Pennies’ was the name the irreverent gave these medals. And in Catholic Lurgan, the thing was an ambiguous token.

  My Catholic, Irish-nationalist grandfather gave his life for England. That much is indisputable – but no uplifting rhetoric of the ‘Tell England’ variety was available to mitigate the bereavement of his and all the other Irish war widows. ‘Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,’ Tom Kettle wrote,

  Died not for flag, nor crown, nor emperor,

  But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

  And for the secret scripture of the poor.

  Dying for England was one thing, and an equivocal thing, dying for Ireland another. Easter 1916 came with all its confusion, upheaval and glory, and when the Rising was quelled and its leaders executed, there were those in the Irish battalions fighting in the First World War who wondered if they’d made the right decision. Popular songs like ‘The Foggy Dew’ took up the theme of bravely but mistakenly transferred loyalties:

  ’Twas England bade our Wild Geese go,

  That small nations might be free;

  But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves,

  Or the fringe of the great North Sea.

  Oh, had they died by Pearse’s side,

  Or fought with Cathal Brugha,

  Their names we’d keep, where the Fenians sleep,

  ’Neath the hills in the foggy dew.

  When I was fifteen or thereabouts I had an old 78 record of this and other rebel songs which I played over and over on a second-hand record-player in the front room of our red-brick, semi-detached house at 551 Donegall Road, Belfast. These songs made my hair stand on end. ‘All Around my Hat I Wear the Tri-Coloured Ribbon-O’ – I did indeed, at least in a metaphorical sense. Like John Hewitt’s grandmother with her cache of poems, I had images, clipped from newspapers, of Padraig Pearse and other 1916 leaders which I carried around in my purse, until they eventually fell to pieces.

  My single-minded admiration for every proponent of an Ireland free and Gaelic and unique and righteous eventually fell to pieces too, but not before it had bitten pretty deep into my psyche. Revisionism made sense when I became aware of it in later life, but during the romantic-Irish years I vastly preferred the crepuscular view, the clandestine affiliation, the unimpeachable cause. I remember a ferocious argument with some would-be cynical schoolboys over the integrity or otherwise of the hanged republican Kevin Barry. ‘He was eighteen years old,’ I hear myself shouting, ‘he died, actually died, for his beliefs, and you can stand there making excuses for his executioners ...’. Call yourselves Irish, I probably went on, before stomping off in a temper, utterly unaware of the extent to which I myself was, or was not, entitled to call myself Irish.

  Like mine, like George Watson’s (see Introduction), my mother’s cultural confusions were among the greatest blessings of her life. The literature of England, high and low, was for all of us a refuge, a source of pleasure and enlightenment, an inestimable resource. A bibliophile propensity overtook us early. ‘Delight in books’ was our unspoken motto. Without books, we’d have languished unconsolably. An unimaginable deprivation would have eaten away at us. Books were a necessity, not a luxury as our forebears might have regarded them.

  We had our different areas of enthralment, of course, along with a good deal of overlap. My poetry-enthusiast mother really appreciated very little poetry after Yeats. With some exceptions, ‘moderns’ such as Eliot and Auden left her cold. She was more attuned to Keats and Shelley than the Byron of ‘Don Juan’. And Tennyson: ‘glamour’, for her, meant ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ ‘embowered’ within her ‘four grey walls and four grey towers’. Certain lines by James Ellroy Flecker, from ‘The Old Ships’ and ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’, made her hair stand on end. The exotic-narcotic cadences perfected by this poet easily overwhelmed me too, whenever I gave myself up to them: ‘...for Famagusta and the hidden sun, / That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire ...’. Famagusta: it’s a far cry from Lurgan jeers and brawls and backyards and chilblains and the waterlogged Head of the Plain. ... Then, my range of children’s reading was considerably wider than my mother’s had been (more was available in the 1950s), but both of us, at different times, were addicts of Greyfriars School and the incomparable doings of Harry Wharton and Co. She rather liked historical fiction of the Margaret Irwin–Jane Lane variety, about which I took a slightly snooty tone (it was different if it was Irish historical fiction, when the subject would win out over any perceived stylistic infelicity). She revered Graham Greene rather more than I did, while my detective novels – Christie, Sayers, Nicholas Blake – didn’t hold much appeal for her. We both liked humorous verse, and local verse, and Scottish ballads, and poets of the First World War. With the last, though, I opted for Owen and Sassoon, and she for Rupert Brooke.

  There was a personal reason for that. Her father had died a death as inglorious as Rupert Brooke’s, in the same year and in the same part of the world, committed to the same cause. Frances Cornford’s tribute to Brooke, beginning, ‘A young Apollo, golden-haired ...’ caught my mother’s imagination. That the poetry of Brooke was saturated in Englishness didn’t matter a jot: it was lyrical and elegiac and accessible, and composed in a spirit she found it easy to respond to. ‘Just now the lilac is in bloom, / All outside my little room.’ It rhymed. Also, and it probably wasn’t even a conscious transference, I imagine a tinge of the glamour attaching to the person, and the poetry, of Rupert Brooke became associated, in my mother’s mind, with her own dead father. Since she’d never known him, she was free to attribute to her missing father whatever traits she chose.

  N
ot that she ever talked about him; no one talked about him, to me at least. I used to think my grandmother’s silence on the subject of her husband’s death betokened indifference: now I think the opposite was true. It was simply too painful to make a topic for casual comment. And the pain didn’t go away as time passed: other pain got added to it. When I was growing up, I’d have found it hard to envisage my grandmother with a husband: she seemed essentially to stand alone, a bit aloof, not liking to be touched, slightly detached from the routines of our small household, of which she was a part. (My child’s-eye view was faulty, of course; my grandmother’s domestic and financial acumen contributed greatly to all our well-being.) As for my lost grandfather ... as far as I am concerned, he disappeared into a void, leaving virtually no tangible mementoes of his existence: no photos, possessions, autographs, marks of identification. Only the ring on my finger and the Dead Man’s Penny in the drawer upstairs. No repeated anecdotes illumined his character or passed into family lore. As far as I know, only a solitary saying of his has survived, preserved in the memory of his second daughter. It relates to the children. ‘Make them do as they’re bid,’ he would say, as infantile chaos threatened to overwhelm the house, ‘make them do as they’re bid.’ It isn’t much of a pointer to the texture of a life.

  Nineteen hundred and fifteen. Within the close-knit, extended Lurgan family circle, my grandmother isn’t the only person to suffer an annihilating blow. Catherine Harland had already lost her husband Terence Brady earlier in the year, and now comes the terrible news of the death of her oldest son. It may have been the double affliction that drove her to drink (as we’ve seen, above). But, at the time, like everyone else connected to the Edward Street William Brady family, she rallied and suppressed her emotions for the sake of the children. The newly fatherless children were the focus of everyone’s attention. Catherine, the dressmaker, sewed clothes for them and sometimes had them for breakfast on their way to school. She made them porridge, which they hated, but were too polite to refuse. On one occasion at least, the porridge went into a pocket, to the detriment of the new, exquisitely worked clothes. ... Perhaps a resolve was entered into to ensure that all the young Bradys should thrive, in spite of everything. It didn’t work entirely, but considerable goodwill was there. And the baby Nora in particular came in for a lot of cosseting and indulgence.