But my grandmother was defeated by Christmas. Between poverty and bereavement, she had no cause to love its overcharged atmosphere. I doubt if much of a festive spirit prevailed at 26 Edward Street, in the first year following William Brady’s death, or later. A packet of sweets, a couple of oranges or tangerines in a stocking, was all each child could hope for. But again, an exception was made for Nora. The year she was five or six (she remembered), the entire family left the house on Christmas Eve and walked up the town to a toy shop to buy her a doll. I see them proceeding in single file, in their dark winter coats, like an illustration from an annual – Blackie’s Children’s Annual, say – the mother striding ahead and the straggle of daughters following, all for a stupendous purpose. The Christmas tree lit up with fairy lights in the town centre, the carol singers in the streets, would have added to the pungency of the occasion. In later life, I think, all of them to some extent made a thing of despising Christmas. But in that one year at least, a little of the magic of the season was vouchsafed to them.
My mother related another childhood incident, a grimmer one. She is still around five or six, and she has a bosom friend, a little girl of her own age: let’s call her Bridie. Bridie lives nearby. Some streets away – Black’s Court, perhaps? – in an unkempt kitchen house, lives a friend these two have in common, a motherless girl whose father and older sisters neglect her shockingly. We’ll call this one Sheila. My grandmother does not approve of Nora’s friendship with Sheila, due to the family’s bad reputation. There is even a suggestion that Sheila’s older sisters may supplement the family income by engaging in a bit of amateur whoring, bringing into play a dark and slatternly side of Lurgan life. But Nora sticks up for her friend, and she and Bridie are often at Sheila’s house. It’s a great venue for childish carry-on: no grown-ups to put a damper on things.
One day, a group of four or five small girls, including Nora and Bridie, has gathered for the purpose of play in Sheila’s kitchen. At one point they take a notion to wash dolls’ clothes. They are being serious and aping the domesticity of grown-ups. The clothes are duly washed in the sink with everyone lending a hand, and then hung up around the open fire to dry. Nora, wiping her hands on a dirty old kitchen towel, suddenly remembers she’s promised to be home by a certain time, and needs to leave at once. The others try to persuade her to stay on. But she knows she’ll be in trouble if she doesn’t get back when she said she would. She lets herself out by the front door and runs through the streets, arriving out of breath in time for her tea. Some hours later comes the news that Sheila’s house has burnt to the ground and everyone in it. Sheila, Bridie and the others – all burnt to a cinder. I don’t know if Nora drew from this horrendous event a moral lesson about obedience, if she felt later that she, the survivor, had been singled out for some celestial purpose, if the Catholic faith made a way of assimilating and assuaging the tragedy. I don’t want to take a moral tone about it. But it must have alerted her, at a frighteningly early age, to the unutterable fragility of existence.
No doubt my grandmother went down on her knees and thanked Providence for steering her youngest child away from an inferno. But Providence has yet a diabolical trick up its sleeve. Some time during the autumn of 1922, nineteen-year-old Lily Brady complains of abdominal pains. She becomes feverish. The pains escalate. A frenzy of anxiety engulfs the house. It’s no small matter, in those pre-National Health days, to summon a doctor: but a doctor is sent for. He comes with his Gladstone bag and diagnoses a stomach ache. Has Lily eaten something that’s disagreed with her? He prescribes some powders or pills and goes on his way. Some time later, before the horrified eyes of her mother and sisters, Lily dies of a burst appendix. Black days follow: the coffin, the priest, the rosary beads, the weeping relatives. And the terrible image in everyone’s head: the back bedroom, the screaming girl, the fruitless efforts of those around her.
The date is 2 October 1922. Two days later, Lily is buried in Dougher Cemetery with the full rites of the Catholic Church. How was this death allowed to happen? I envisage my grandmother at this moment, aged forty-one and dressed in black, as a kind of ‘bean caointe’ – keening woman – as in the sean-nos song which is rendered with such feeling by the great traditional singer Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin. The woman in the song is burying the last of her children – ‘Suilfaidh me an rod seo gan lui na leapa, / Faoi mo Neilli beag mingheal ‘ta sinte faoi thalamh’ (‘I’ll walk the roads without sleep or bed, / Since my sweet gentle Nelly is lying dead’). It’s an Omeath song, but, Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin says, a version was current in south Armagh, and no doubt it would have migrated northwards. Not that my grandmother or any of her family would have known it. They weren’t Irish-speakers; and, at the time, there wasn’t much general interest in the heritage of Irish-language song. But there would have been an empathy with the strong emotion contained in the searing lines of ‘The Keening Woman’.
Tragic Lily Brady went under the sod, and for ever after a steely silence was preserved on the topic of her life and death. It was almost as if she had never existed. Only the photo that came into her sister Eileen’s possession testifies to Lily’s presence in the world of factory work, huxters’ shops, sectarian onslaughts, Sinn Féin activities, sisterly companionship and friction, St Peter’s Church, flirtations with boys from round about, Sunday best.
All the elements of intense, unexalted life. Lily’s story, which can barely be imagined now, has to be fitted into what’s known of early twentieth-century Lurgan, and also into a poor, or poorish, Catholic household, but one very conscious of occupying a notable position in the neighbourhood. Once the shock of sudden bereavement was over, the ‘keening woman’ image was not a thing my grandmother Sarah would have clung on to. She’d have hated people to associate her, or those belonging to her, with a stricken or ill-fated course in life. A needy comportment was not her métier. Within the limits of her environment, she went all out to create a sense of auspiciousness, an up-and-coming atmosphere. Perhaps it was the Blacker blood coming out in her, but what she repudiated utterly was the poor mouth. You wouldn’t have caught her creeping off to the pawnshop with a shawl flung over her head, or borrowing anything from anyone. She stood on her own two feet. ‘A great manager’ was what her children said about her, looking back, and paying tribute to her resourcefulness in making a meagre income go a long way. No one in her care went hungry or barefoot, even if a lot of mending and making do went on.
I’m not sure if the two events are connected, but it’s around the time of Lily’s death, I think, that Sarah’s youngest, Nora, is briefly sent to sleep across the road, in some supportive arrangement with a neighbour. Nora crosses the road to go to bed, and then returns home in the morning to eat her breakfast and set off for school. ... Am I right to read into this an instance of the impulse to protect this child from the worst of the anguish afflicting the disrupted household? I suspect a benign conspiracy, initiated by her mother, to spare the nine-year-old a too-close acquaintance with the devastating effects of death and despair. Nora is favoured, in this and other respects, in ways her sisters might have come to resent – as, indeed, at least one of them did. Between Nora and Eileen, now thrust into the position of oldest daughter, deep resentments combined with mutual admiration and affection to create a complicated relationship. (When Eileen died in 1994, well into her eighties, my mother said it was the worst day of her life.) Nora’s friend in the family was Kathleen, the closest to her in age; but for the whole of her life, her sister Eileen was among the people who meant most to her.
Once I’d gained an inkling of the circumstances surrounding this second tragedy in my mother’s family17 (information acquired not all that long ago), I held the doctor’s incompetence to blame for the destruction of a promising life. I say ‘promising’, because that single existing image of Lily Brady shows an attractive, composed, intelligent girl, seated on a chair in some photographer’s studio, while her considerably less well-adjusted sister Eileen stands grimly by
her side. Eileen’s expression suggests she’s about to burst into tears, that she’s having her photo taken very much against her will. It’s clear that she would rather be anywhere else in the world than standing mutinously there beside her self-possessed sister. And in a way, this discontent with her lot was a marker for the rest of her life. Like my mother – and not, perhaps, like the two middle sisters – Eileen would have benefited from an education, but, after primary level, one was not available to her. Every step she tried to take to further her own interests was thwarted in some way. From an early age, she developed a sense that the world was against her. She developed, too, a good line in glares, some of which were directed half-humorously at those around her. Eileen had a formidable presence – and being aggrieved, pragmatic and good-natured all at once endowed her, at the very least, with an interesting personality.
I blamed the doctor for Lily’s death: but it seems, at the time, it was fatally easy to confuse the symptoms of appendicitis with those of a lesser ailment. It was a matter of carrying out a cursory examination and hoping for the best. But you can’t get away from the fact that a more conscientious or enlightened doctor would have got the sick girl to a hospital in time to save her life. She didn’t have to die, but she did die, leaving a ruptured and grieving household behind her. That year, 1922, saw a deeper than ever repudiation of the follies of Christmas among the North Street18 Bradys. The house was wrapped in darkness and lamentation. But gradually, very gradually, a slight degree of optimism about the future revived. It was tied up with Catholic neighbourhood solidarity, with continuing support from concerned relations, especially the large contingent of Brady cousins nearby (Sarah’s sister’s lot), and with the emerging scholarly abilities of the youngest child of the family, for whom the nuns of her primary school had high hopes.
The background to all the home-front adversity was a town awash in dissension and bigotry. The children going to Mass on St Patrick’s Day were preyed upon by gangs of jeering Protestant contemporaries who tore the shamrock from their lapels. Reciprocal aggravations: I think of my great-uncle Jim Brady drilling Irish Volunteers up and down Edward Street under the noses of old-established enemies (how did he get away with it?). Irish Volunteers – but, as it happened, Great-Uncle Jim was a British Army veteran. His sister-in-law, my grandmother, was a Dardanelles widow. Poppy Day in the future put her in a quandary. Confusions concerning questions of loyalty and allegiance proliferated. When the Treaty was signed in December 1921 my grandmother thought something momentous had been achieved – only to be put right by her Tipping relations who were holding out for a united Ireland. She’d hung out a tricolour in celebration: but some of her half-brothers and their sons came to her home in a rage and told her to take it in to hell’s gates out of that. There was no cause for jubilation: nationalists in the North had been sold down the river. The War of Independence – total independence – would continue.
Thinking about a particular period – the years between 1910 and 1920, say – and trying to place myself within a web of family and extended family connections, I’m brought up against so many diametric opposites that it seems a wonder I wasn’t cancelled out before I got started. Pro-Home Rulers and anti-Home Rulers, Carsonites and Redmondites and revolutionaries, those for and against British Army enlistment, subversives and conservatives and (mostly female) minders-of-their-own-business, unequivocal and ambivalent supporters of the war effort.19 ... The war effort. Here an extra anomaly of a personal character enters into the family history narrative. While my Brady grandfather was, with however many reservations, committed to fight on the side of the British, direct descendants of my Heller great-great-grandparents were fighting on the other, the German side. There’s scope here for a stranger meeting than Wilfred Owen’s.
However, if the end product of chance and interfusion (myself) adds up to a bundle of genetic and ideological inconsistencies, it’s an admixture – in my case and everyone else’s – for which there is a good deal to be said. It should (though it doesn’t always happen) exclude the possibility of fanaticism and discredit the chimera of a ‘pure’ bloodline, of any coloration whatever. As I’ve said before – and I make no apology for saying it again – all of our bloodlines in the north of Ireland are very likely to be tempered by a bit of the other strain – whichever that is, and whether it pleases us to know it, or doesn’t please us.
Chapter 7 – A Bad Lot
‘There was a man shot in the tram I was in,’ said Colm.
‘There was a woman shot stone dead on the other side of the street. There’s a sniper on the mill all the mornin’ and you daren’t put your nose out the door.’
Shots crackled fiercely and the man instinctively ducked his head.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ said the woman, blessing herself. ‘That’s near.’
Michael McLaverty, Call My Brother Back
Violence comes in cycles, say historians. But sometimes it comes on cycles.
Harry Tipping
It’s worth taking note of the bicycle’s role in the business of fostering revolution. All over Ireland, in the years between 1916 and 1923 (say), you might have spotted figures in trench coats cycling in all weathers through boggy back roads or mountain passes, up and down hills, dripping wet, sweltering in the heat, more often than not on borrowed machines with perhaps defective brakes, misshapen saddles or a buckled rim. They were all at it: Tom Barry living, before reliving, his Guerrilla Days in Ireland, Sean Treacy veering ahead with the 3rd Tipperary Brigade and going on to die by gunshot in a Dublin street, Dan Breen immersed to the hilt in his Fight for Irish Freedom. You had Ernie O’Malley pedalling past demesne walls with thoughts of iniquitous Big House people in his head and Pierce Ferriter’s poems in his pocket. Past military road posts and fortified barracks he goes, on and on: east Clare, Waterford, Donegal, Monaghan, all the hill districts and scattered villages of west County Cork. On the roads of Cork, O’Malley might have met the student Volunteer O’Faolain, similarly mounted on a bike, on the same insurrectionary business, undeterred by the noise of machine-gun fire, the prospect of an army ambush or a convoy of Black and Tans careering round the very next bend in the road. And in his pocket, as likely as not, the poems of Yeats.
Sean O’Faolain’s first collection of stories, Midsummer Night Madness (1932) is filled with the spirit of heroic, brutal and foolhardy undertakings in the name of Ireland free. It has old-style activists holed up in barns and outhouses, digging trenches, gathering information, dodging the enemy, scouting and skiting all over the countryside to more or less encouraging effect. Saturnine Volunteers hunched over handlebars possessed by a steely intent. And it wasn’t, indeed, only men, young men, who cycled for Ireland. Carrying dispatches or ammunition, alerting ira men on active service to dangers approaching, or hastening to lend a hand at some makeshift field hospital: these were ways in which the women of Ireland could involve themselves in the national struggle. Sean O’Faolain’s future wife Eileen Gould, for example, was a courier operating between Cork itself and the shifting divisional headquarters in various locations to the west of the city. Cycling skills were required, along with skill at evasion and a steady nerve. And luck – which couldn’t always be relied on. Eileen Gould was arrested and imprisoned (briefly) in 1923.
Irish republican women on bicycles might be said to constitute an offshoot, or a specialised section, of the cycling cult which began in the 1890s, and saw the ‘New Woman’ of that decade carried forward on wheels into a brighter, more expansive future. It required spirit and determination to progress from wobbling to freewheeling, but the end result was worth it. ‘...On a bicycle you feel a different person; nothing can come near you, you forget who you are. ... It [makes] life an absolutely different thing ...’. Miriam Henderson, in Dorothy Richardson’s outstanding series of novels with the overall title Pilgrimage, speaks for a whole generation when she lauds the bicycle and its liberating effect. And in early twentieth-century Ireland, its association not only wit
h personal, but with national freedom, gives it an additional éclat.
Sean O’Faolain’s friend, fellow-Corkman and author Frank O’Connor, includes in his first collection (Guests of the Nation, 1931) a story about an eager girl entrusted with an ira missive. Bring your bicycle. She does, donning gaiters and a stout woollen coat before cycling out of the city and into a warren of muddy back roads clogged with pot-holes. A sodden hay wain, an old woman leaning over a half-door, a boy driving a cart up a boreen: these pass her by like emblems of a country out of time, a country worth fighting for. And she, Helen Joyce, has a part to play in the fight. True, when Helen delivers her dispatch it’s accepted off-handedly, as something of small consequence. But what odds – she’s in great company, sitting in a ‘safe house’ by a blazing fire and listening to tales of blown-up bridges and hair’s-breadth escapes. But then reality breaks in, in the form of a dead young Volunteer, shot through the chest and stowed in a car outside.
A Twisted Root Page 23