A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  The Orange young man who ‘interfered’ with the – I assume green – girls turns up in Edward Street being battered by a mob: from this predicament, I am pleased to say, he is extricated by Gerry Tipping who finds himself unable to stand idly by while harm is done to a fellow human being, of whatever colouration. Gerry, by some means or other, gets the offending youth to the safety of the tally rooms in Jordan’s Factory (the property, you will remember, of Gerry’s grandmother’s relations – though I doubt they’d be falling over themselves to acknowledge the kinship). Ructions over, ‘by 11 p.m. the crowd had dispersed and the usual normal conditions prevailed’. Whatever ‘normal’ means.

  Jimmy Tipping – ex-felon – at various times is host in Lurgan to General Tom Barry of Guerrilla Days in Ireland fame (an old friend), and to Major Vivion de Valera, oldest son of the Irish president. The days of real poverty, recklessness and raids-by-night are over, for some of the family at least. They just get on with their lives. All prosper, to varying degrees. Photographs from the summer of 1935 show a merry quartet, Jimmy, Bertie, Bertie’s wife Annie and a friend, on holiday in Kerry, all looking at ease on horseback as they trot exuberantly through the Gap of Dungloe. Back in Lurgan, Frank invents an automatic egg-packing device and patents it (not that it nets him a fortune, alas). And when the time arrives for Matt, Jimmy and Gerry to apply for formal recognition of their services to the Republic, they are able to muster a lot of support from people willing to speak on their behalf. All the relevant documents are in the military archives in Dublin, and I don’t propose to quote from them – well, apart from the following exchange, which I include as a riposte to the unionist view, the ‘troublesome youths’, ‘bad lot’ assessment of the authorities:

  Q.They were a great family, the Tippings?

  A.They were.

  Chapter 8 – The Importance of Local Knowledge

  ... Never go by Cupar Street, my father would warn me, and I knew this was a necessary prohibition without asking why, for Cupar Street was one of those areas where the Falls and Shankill joined together as unhappy Siamese twins, one sporadically and mechanically beating the other round the head, where the Cullens, Finnegans and Reillys merged with Todds and Camerons and Wallaces.

  Ciaran Carson, ‘Question Time’

  A time arrives when the fatherless Brady family of Lurgan receives a boost. Nora becomes a day girl at a top-notch convent. She is plucked out of her primary school classroom, where rote-learning, chilblains, snatters and blockheadedness are the order of the day, and deposited on top of a hill, in the select surroundings of Cornakinegar, and with optimum advancement anticipated. She can’t believe her good fortune.

  It’s 1924 or 5, and a one-time industrial school for boys, formerly an imposing Victorian mansion called Irishtown Hill House, has changed its function once again and opened its doors to fee-paying, day- and boarding-pupils. Girls this time, of impeccable Catholic standing, better-than-average brains, and (it is hoped) susceptibility to the school spirit. The elevated setting reflects its upward orientation in terms of social class and holiness. Our Lady’s Secondary School, soon popularly known as Mount St Michael’s, Lurgan.

  The school’s earliest intake isn’t quite sufficient to meet Ministry of Education requirements, so to bump up the numbers a year’s free tuition becomes available to poor, or poorish, primary school pupils of an appropriate disposition and intelligence. Some of these extra pupils are recruited from the convent in Edward Street, and a shining light among them is champion speller, grammarian, reader and general knowledge wizard Nora Brady, a child so good at answering she’s got beyond her primary-grade teachers. When Nora’s mother is summoned and the proposition put to her, she grasps it with both hands: anything to prolong her youngest daughter’s schooling is a godsend. She’s not the kind of mother who hurries her children into paid employment to enlarge the family income. Education is the key to a brighter life, she knows that, but until this moment advanced education has had no more relevance to her own situation than pie in the sky. Now, at last, it seems, the pie is in a dish and being borne towards her. And really, it’s no more than her due. The Bradys, like the Tippings, think well of themselves, they always have, but scrimping and saving has imposed a kind of martyred aspect on them. And my grandmother understands that it’s not enough just to trudge through life, taking blow after blow and still find the heart to laugh and joke – you need some extra ingredient, some source of grace or well-being, to balance the hard times.

  So here is Nora in her navy-blue-and-white Mount St Michael’s uniform – acquired at goodness knows what cost in exertion or privation – plus all the grammar-school accoutrements: satchel, lesson books, hockey stick, sheet music, drawing block, pens and pencils and what-have-you. And so much invested in the probable outcome of all this! The whole family rallies to make the most of the opportunity, for Nora and themselves. Those already working help with additional costs. As she leaves the house each morning, stepping out buoyantly for her new school, Nora carries the weight of everyone’s expectations on her unassuming and unbowed head.

  The pressure is enormous, but what makes it bearable, more than bearable, elating and enchanting, is the way she fits into the new environment, like the subject of a restored birthright in a fairy tale. From the minute she sets foot in Mount St Michael’s, Nora has a sense of being in her element. It was the biggest thing that could happen to her. The little world of classrooms, corridors, bells, nuns, lessons, japes, bosom friends, games, nature study walks to the shores of Lough Neagh; the glorious convent grounds complete with lawns, fir trees, pines, beeches, hockey pitch and tennis courts ... all this enfolds and sustains her. It’s a place apart from rainy, sect-ridden Lurgan, a refuge from a home still reeling from the death of Lily, and attendant sorrows. ... Her charming, tentative sister Kathleen, who married after the war and made a new life for herself in the south of England, was loth to recall those days of the 1920s and 30s, summing up the whole period as ‘not a very happy time’. That was all she had to say about it. But for Nora it was different. Nora is going places – or so they all believe – and everything is geared to help her along the way. She is shielded, as far as possible, from the effects of depression and deprivation – just as I, in my turn, am shielded from harsh realities such as a less than adequate household income, and intermittent parental discords.

  When I was young and unaccustomed to proper seaside holidays, my mother and I would often go to Dublin on the train. She had cousins there of whom she was very fond, the Ellen Brady tribe whose Lurgan childhoods were entwined with hers and her sisters’. They, the cousins, had migrated southwards with their family at the start of the 1930s, and at the same time my grandmother, with her family, had upped sticks for Belfast. What provoked this double exodus in opposite directions from Lurgan I don’t know. (The Tippings stayed put.) But contact between the scattered cousins was maintained at a high level. When it came to our Dublin trips, my mother’s and mine, in the late 1940s and ’50s, it might be just a day’s excursion, or we might stay overnight with Josie, Anne, Clare or Maureen; or even as long as a week. And every time the train from Belfast slowed on the outskirts of Lurgan, my mother would raise her arm and point to a four-square, grey building atop a hill, ‘That’s my old school.’ A jumble of emotions including pride, affection, wonder, reverie and wryness were intermingled in that simple statement. It is heartbreaking now to contemplate. I had no idea. I’d nod and smile, without paying too much attention. It was no big deal. Everyone of our sort1 had an old school somewhere. Didn’t they? At five or six, enclosed in my nutshell world, I was as ignorant as could be of the vast implications surrounding my mother’s status as an old Michaelonian.

  An old Michaelonian – but hold on a minute. Didn’t I say my mother’s scholarship was only tenable for a year, just long enough to give her a taste of heady grammar-school life, before the prize was snatched away, and her pre-Michaelonian destination of mill or factory reinstated? Yes, but Nora did so well a
t the school that the nuns were reluctant to lose her – a shame to curtail a promising academic career – and prayers were offered up for a way round the impasse. As a consequence – perhaps – someone had a brainwave. The suggestion may have come from the school, or my grandmother may have thought of it herself, but the upshot of all the cogitations on Nora’s behalf was the widow Brady getting into her best clothes and marching her daughter Nora, in her trembling-in-the-balance Mount St Michael’s uniform, off to the High Street offices of the fledgling British Legion.

  The British Legion came into being in 1921 to help ex-servicemen, war widows and their dependents. It was funded partly through the ‘Poppy Day’ appeal, and high on its agenda was the education of dead soldiers’ children. And here was one who fitted the bill, stepping smartly into the office with all her glowing recommendations accompanying her. An unassertive but steadfast child, she must have made a good impression on top of her mother’s resolute, no-nonsense demeanour. Between the two of them – and with Nora’s teachers’ strong backing – they make out a good case. The British Legion officials agree to shoulder the burden of Nora’s school fees.

  So she’s back at the school on the hill for the start of the autumn term of her second year (Form C1). Hardly anyone knows what a close-run thing it was, how easily young Nora might have vanished into a different milieu of factory hooters and boisterous behaviour in the street. Her place in the class is assured, and her essays go on being read aloud by the English teacher as models of composition and insight. All she has to do to keep educationally afloat is to pass her Junior, and then her Senior Certificate examination in every subject – which she does, though not without fuss and anxiety surrounding the maths papers in both exams. If no one twits Nora on account of her scholarship status, it’s possibly because her friends are not aware of it: I’ve written elsewhere2 about the kindness of nuns who included Nora in the bill-distributing ritual at the end of term, to save her embarrassment, having carefully placed inside her envelope a slip of paper with the words ‘No charge’. I think it’s unlikely, indeed, that a gulf was apparent between the few scholarship pupils and the rest of the school: whatever their backgrounds, these were all provincial Catholic girls, all more or less unworldly and uncouth, vigorous on the hockey field and unabashed by their County Armagh accents and country faces. It wasn’t uncommon for one or two to appear in the classroom in twisted black stockings or a slovenly gym-tunic, and come in for a wigging on account of it.

  It’s true that my mother, like the scholarship heroine of Winifred Darch’s Heather at the High School,3 might have based her anticipations of her new life on the treatment meted out to Lancashire ex-council schoolgirl Betty Barton (in the weekly paper The Schoolgirl’s Own) on her arrival at snooty Morcove (‘Scorned by the School’ was the title of the opening episode). Also like the eponymous Heather, she’d have found the reality to be different. But a wish to remain securely one of a group, not differentiated from her peers in any way, would have kept my mother silent about her home circumstances.

  There were, of course, other reasons besides a fear of snobbishness for keeping the British Legion connection dark. The word ‘British’ didn’t go down too well in republican Lurgan, with its illicit tricolours and Easter lilies as emblems of disaffection. I’m not sure how much of the true state of affairs was divulged by my grandmother to her Tipping relations (some of whom, as we’ve seen, were interned for anti-government activity around this time). Two of these, indeed, were themselves ex-servicemen; but all that, Salonika and Sud-el-Bar, was obliterated by subsequent overwhelming, countervailing commitments. They, the Tippings, might have taken a critical attitude to any dealings with the British. On the other hand, they could have understood that something was owed, and could legitimately be claimed, by Irish families bereaved by the First World War. ‘Good for you – take whatever you can get’ might have been uttered, commending my grandmother’s gumption. Or: ‘You’d no call to go crawling to those imperialist bastards.’ One or the other, I can’t say which.

  But no ideological considerations can deflect my grandmother’s drive to secure the best possible outcome for her daughter Nora. Whatever needs to be done, she will do it, and reconcile in her own mind any conflicting obligations arising from her actions.

  As for Nora – her romantic nationalism survives the acquisition of a non-Irish source for her school fees. And at the same time, her romantic ‘Great War’ obsession flourishes. ‘If I should die, think only this of me ...’ runs through her head – though perhaps with ‘Ireland’ substituted for ‘England’ in it. It doesn’t matter very much; it’s the slant of the poem that’s important, the high-flown self-sacrificial stance, not the specifics. Also, Brooke’s poem chimes with the notion of self-suppression, the unimportance of the individual, purveyed by nuns – one reason why it’s taught in Form C1’s English class.

  The Mercy nuns of Our Lady’s Secondary School aren’t greatly perturbed by the state of the country. Violence and alarms in the streets hardly impinge on them in their house on the hill (unlike their counterparts in the town centre). They like being Irish, of course, but only in so far as Irishness is conflated with Catholicism. They bask in their remoteness from pagan ways. And the aim is to instil in every pupil a similar aspiration to Hibernian holiness.

  Every facet of the social world of Mount St Michael’s is bolstered by religiosity. Hymns in the morning, hymns in the afternoon, prayers before class, holy water fonts all over the place, ‘Tantum Ergo’ in the school chapel, ‘pious objects’ in everyone’s possession, Missionary Society, sodalities of all sorts, virtue and modesty, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Benediction, the annual Retreat, lectures by priests on ‘The Suffering that Mortal Sin Gives to God’. A garden party for past and present pupils begins with everyone kneeling on the ground, nuns, teachers, visitors and all, heads bowed, to receive a blessing from a local Monsignor wearing a kind of fur-trimmed cape over a short white muslin dress with a deep lace border, and a long black skirt buttoned down the front. And a silly hat on his head to boot. And an intense solemnity surrounding the proceedings, with never a maverick schoolgirl to nudge the person next to her, causing the both of them to choke back an irreverent outbreak of giggles.

  Well, as far as I know. I’m envisaging a deferential gathering here. If all the pre-war girls of Mount St Michael’s were bursting with suppressed rebelliousness, they’d have controlled themselves and put up a front of angelic behaviour. It was what they were trained to do. The whole Holy-Father-Reverend-Mother-Corpus Christi-Virgin-Mary gallimaufry had worked its effect on them. It would be the most shaming thing in the world to be taxed with a spiritual deficiency. They had all been got before the age of seven and had swallowed the Church and all its ploys and edicts. The Catholic way of life could hardly have been more fundamentally taken for granted.

  (Taken for granted: but quite a high proportion of the school community has a name suggesting a different ancestry and affiliation. Holmes, Rodgers, Harrington, Berwick, Black, Walls, Forrest, Warren, Hinds and – yes – Tipping.4 And many others to offset the fior-Gaedhalach contingent, the O’Boyles, O’Hagans, Raffertys, McQuillans. And all of them lumped together under a cloistered designation. Products – like all of us – of ancestral mixing-and-matching, these girls have all come out unequivocally in a sectional mould. ... Take any classroom in the North, for that matter, and no doubt you will find a similar denominative mix. My own class at St Dominic’s High School in the 1950s, I remember, contained Waters, Commerton, Drummond, Buckley, Glover and so on, alongside O’Callaghan, Caffrey, O’Hagan, Devlin, Quinn, Mageean.)

  And these particular Mount St Michael’s lambs of the flocks of Catholic Ireland are immensely privileged, so they’re told, by being in receipt of an education extended well beyond the official school-leaving age of fourteen. They’re assured of it over and over, and they believe it wholeheartedly. They are being prepared for a life of service to God (eyes turn upwards and hands are pressed together prayerf
ully at the idea) – ideally, as nuns or missionaries or something ostentatiously vocational; or more likely – second-best – as Catholic housewives and mothers in some substantial Ulster suburb of new-built houses with garages and lawns. Whichever it is, underpinning the rest of their lives on earth will be that unassailable faith acquired at birth and cultivated thereafter as assiduously as Lord Emsworth’s prize-winning pumpkin.

  A full immersion in Catholic immaculacy will make each Mount St Michael’s girl a better person, and the social ethos of the school will make her a better class of person. (So the received wisdom goes.) She’s in a position to look down her nose at the brawls, shawls, catcalls and all the bitter routines of the streets. Walking home in the centre of a group of mildly sky-larking friends, through the gathering dusk of a winter’s afternoon, light fading across the rooftops of Lurgan, my mother can feel secure about her place in the world. And, later, she can reminisce self-deprecatingly about those charmed days, inspired, maybe, among other things, by that fleeting glimpse of the sacred spot from the Dublin train, ‘There’s my old school.’

  None of this, the nuts and bolts of a Mount St Michael’s training, is very much in the spirit of interdenominational accord. Catholic exclusiveness, like its Protestant counterpart, is a strong feature of the times, the period between the early 1900s and the 1960s (say). Despite the measure of inadvertent integration mentioned above – Harrington/O’Hagan – the integrated school is a thing of the future, as every sect holds fast to its own version of divine revelation.