A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  They know they are right. And no school rebel arrives out of nowhere to pose a challenge to the system, or disrupt the decorum of highly regulated corridors and classrooms. They are all good girls at Mount St Michael’s. They are silent at times when silence is enjoined on them, and meekly proceed in crocodile formation to wherever they’re summoned by a ringing bell. My mother in particular conforms to the school code and sails through the whole five- or six-year course. ... Move forward thirty-odd years, and you find the same is not true of her only daughter whose career as a Dominican schoolgirl in Belfast can be summed up in a storybook title complete with exclamation mark, Expelled! But that’s a generation closer to the inevitable undoing of the convent system, and an event which in some ways prefigures the last gasp of nunly autocracy. My mother shows no comparable tendency to look for trouble – at least, until she suddenly throws caution to the winds and marries a Protestant (albeit a convertible Protestant). Ah – you can hear the Sisters of Mercy sigh – here comes an infusion of bad blood; and so it is proved, with regard to the daughter of the marriage. But Nora still has quite a way to go before this impulse of exogamy overtakes her.

  She has a whole university course to get through. Her amazing progress doesn’t stop at Mount St Michael’s. Queen’s beckons, though not without an obstacle or two along the way. First come the dreaded maths papers – scraped through, with a sigh of relief. Then, having moved from Edward Street to North Street in Lurgan (some time after Lily’s death), my grandmother – as I’ve said – for some reason gathers up her family and sweeps them north to Belfast, to a dingy house in a street off the Stranmillis Road called Sandhurst Gardens, one of a group collectively known as the River Streets. The phrase ‘damp Lagan fogs’ comes to mind, again, courtesy of Maurice James Craig5 and his poem imploring the Lord to be kind to Belfast. These Stranmillis streets slope down to the Lagan and consist of small terraced red-brick houses with miniscule gardens in front and back yards running along an alleyway behind. Indeed the new habitation is very convenient for Queen’s University once Nora gets there; but first comes her final year at school and an arduous train journey every morning from Great Victoria Street station all the way to Lurgan, and back again in the afternoon. (I don’t think boarding was an option for her, and neither was a change of school at this late stage.) Some pressing reason must have underlain the leaving of Lurgan, no doubt about it, but what it was I have no idea. The two families, as I’ve said, the David Bradys and the William Bradys, decamped southwards and northwards at the same time. It didn’t have a beneficial effect on Nora’s school career, but neither did it knock her off-course entirely. More work, more adjustment, greater concentration, that’s all there is to it. She sits her Senior Certificate examination, passes it, and is accepted by Queen’s.

  This was a vastly more significant achievement than it is at present. Nowadays, third-level education is a right of everyone; but university students were a privileged minority, in those intoxicating, irrecoverable inter-war days. They were a small, high-spirited, but basically hard-working and tractable group, which suited my mother down to the ground. It was a wonderful time for her. She brings to Belfast her notebooks filled with cherished verse, and her tentative self-assurance (assurance nurtured in Lurgan by nuns more helpful than those of my experience). The gracious and expansive university milieu seems like an extension of the well-sited, well-loved school on the hill. Both are, and aren’t, Nora’s natural habitat, and gain in piquancy from the anomaly. It’s just a short step from each, no more than a mile or so, to the crowded and straitened family home with its tiny scullery and mangle in the yard.

  And here is Queen’s in all its splendour, a refuge of calm in the heart of unruly Belfast. Its carved stone, diamond-pane windows, its buttresses and battlements, all suggesting permanence and pageantry, a ceremonious attitude to life. Looking ancient – though it is, of course, only Victorian. Here are the lawns, the quadrangle, the panelled Great Hall, the gowned figures lending an air of formality to the scene. And here is Nora-from-North-Street acquiring a university sensibility, with her books tucked under her arm and her air of purpose. Here she is during a break between lectures, seated on a bench in the cloisters with a bunch of male and female friends around her, and a medical student – I’m sure he’s a medical student – acting the clown in the background. Girls are at a premium at Queen’s in the 1930s, when they make up only a quarter of the student population, and hence come in for a lot of gossip and joking attention. Especially if they’re at all pleasing in appearance.

  My mother led an active social life at Queen’s. This is plain from a clutch of letters from admirers which she kept to raise her spirits in grimmer post-war days. Jack, Joe, Jim, Sean and Frank were the writers – all unknown, all vanished into the maw of time. She’d sometimes mention, in sorrow and disbelief, a handsome university friend – maybe one of the above – who ended life with his head in a gas oven. But sorrows and tragedies were figments of an unimaginable future, back in the charmed ’30s with its Shakespeare and Keats, its dress patterns garnered from magazines and run up in cheap material to wear at the weekly ‘hop’, its lovely Queen’s Elms building where women students congregated. Unlike her contemporary John Boyd, or the slightly later Robert Greacen, my mother was not dissatisfied with Queen’s. She was not disposed to criticise its professors. The need to take notes during lectures didn’t aggravate her. Professor Savory wearing riding breeches under his academic gown was not a figure of fun as far as Nora was concerned. She hung on his every word. Everything to her was new and exhilarating then: autumn leaves swirling round her feet in the Stranmillis Road, the steamy Palm House in nearby Botanic Gardens, the keyed-up atmosphere of the examination halls.

  The Boat Club Hop, a ‘rugger’ match, a dance ‘up Islandmagee way’, a ‘Happy Tea’ – whatever that is – Rag Day, the student magazine ptq: all these are entered into with gusto. ‘I hope you were not scolded for staying out late on the night of the dance,’ writes Jack (or Jim). And again: ‘I am glad you suffered no ill effects from your “debauch”.’ The mind boggles: whatever can he mean? This is my stainless mother he’s addressing, she of what he calls ‘the supercilious eyebrows’. ‘Debauch’, indeed. Did Nora drink a glass of Babycham? I refuse to entertain the possibility of any more exorbitant impropriety. During my own inflamed student years (and later), I had to protect my mother from the things going on in my head (and not only in my head). Hers was a more innocent generation (or so everyone likes to believe about their predecessors). It was infinitely more shockable. So – no debauched goings-on in those days, thank you very much.

  But the wretched Jim (or Jack) won’t leave off. ‘I’m sure we could do famously if we were laid out somewhere along the Lagan,’ he suggests. Well! I had thought the Lagan towpath as a venue for wanton behaviour was a discovery of myself and my contemporaries. And here it is fulfilling the same function back in the days of (supposed) piety and decorum. ... Does Jack’s Lagan idyll ever take place? I don’t know – well, I assume it does, but my mother at twenty or twenty-one is really an unknown quantity to me. As for Jim/Jack: his medical student bawdiness keeps bursting out (so to speak). In his letters to Nora he alludes to the John Donne poem, ‘On His Mistress Going to Bed’, and at the same time hopes to provide her – if she’ll let him – with abundant saucy anecdotes to entertain her grandchildren. And adds: ‘You’ll never know how near I was to writing ‘our’ grandchildren.’ What I know is how near he came to writing me out of existence in the process.

  But what went wrong between my mother and her undergraduate suitor (and other suitors about the place)? That’s a story that can never be told: the facts are missing. For all her relish for learning, Nora becomes an exile from academia, by her own act and choosing. When she comes to marry, some years on, she opts for a person adept in banter and gregariousness, a singer in the John McCormack mould, of a lively temperament and unexalted means of livelihood (he works for the Ulster Transport Authority fitting
together parts of trains). Against the odds, it proves a happy alliance in many respects. ... It’s just my grandmother I can’t help feeling sorry for, with another thundering disappointment to add to her life of hardship and stress. After all the sacrifices, all the aspirations invested in Nora, she has not fulfilled her unspoken obligation of marrying into the professional classes, and thereby bumping up the Brady family’s social position. Not that her mother, my grandmother, holds this dereliction against her. Whatever Nora decides is right in her mother’s eyes; or so she persuades herself. (This attitude, transmitted to the following generation, prevails in relations between my mother and myself, possibly to the detriment of my behaviour. Many actions of mine that should by rights have infuriated her, are excused or even applauded due to her absolute commitment to my well-being – lovely for me, of course, if not ultimately conducive to a sterling character.)

  I don’t know why my mother’s university sojourn didn’t lead to a different outcome. The social life of Nora and her sister Kathleen is centred on Queen’s for a time (‘Remember me to K. and tell her how nice I thought she looked on Friday night last,’ writes J.), and then it isn’t. They go their different ways. Nora is the first to marry, followed by Kathleen who meets an Englishman, a soldier stationed in Northern Ireland during the war, at my Craig grandparents’ house at Dunmurry, and with whom she emigrates to Wickford, Essex, settling in a bungalow the newly-wed pair calls Lismoyne, in honour of the location of their first encounter. In the meantime, I have come on the scene and am growing up to question none of the choices made by my elders, none of the circumstances of my intriguing life (intriguing to me). It is just the way things are. It takes a long time for the thought to enter my head that my parents are perhaps not entirely on the same wavelength, despite a shared sense of humour and a good many friends in common. It’s something to do with one being a reader and the other not, one committed to sociability and the other more to social responsibility. Does the Protestant/Catholic divide come into it? Not at a fundamental level, I think, but perhaps the differing traditions and family settings do in some way work a bothersome effect. I’m not complaining: the marriage endows me, I believe, with an ancestry which is, at the same time, implicit in most of our Northern Irish backgrounds, and unusually explicit in my own case. ... But I wonder a bit about the paths my mother didn’t take, the kind of life she might have led with someone of a comparable upper mobility, a co-religionist or a fellow schoolteacher.

  Like one of those besotted Queen’s undergraduates, for instance. ‘It was very pleasant to hear that both you and I had passed that Scholastic Philosophy examination,’ writes another of Nora’s holiday correspondents (more sedate than Jim/Jack, who jokes in one letter about getting drunk and proposing to a barmaid in Derry, while on a mission to offload the magazine ptq). Scholastic philosophy – hmn. The phrase ushers in a fact of university life at the time. Religious segregation. Students were either Protestant (overwhelmingly) or Catholic, and a minimum of intermingling occurred. My mother, of course, knocked around with a ‘Catholic’ set: a Celia Lenaghan, Frances Kelly, Maureen McKavanagh, Maureen McKenna, Maureen Harbinson, Honoria Smyth, whose future thankless task is to teach me arithmetic at St Dominic’s High School, Maire Casement, another future Dominican teacher whose English lessons will constitute the highlight of my dodgy school career.

  The scholastic philosophy course was available to Catholics only.6 The department, says Marianne Elliott, had come into being ‘in response to a successful campaign to create separate Catholic teaching programmes in controversial subjects’.7 In the 1930s, scholastic philosophy was the province of Father Arthur Ryan (later Monsignor Ryan), an amiable and cultured professor by all accounts. Many of the current batch of undergraduates would end up as teachers, and the aim was to make them fit to teach in Catholic schools – and thereby perpetuate religious differentiation. Ah me. Few integrationist voices were raised at the time.

  The blame for this situation need not be apportioned solely to Catholics. Take Riddel Hall. This otherwise admirable hall of residence on the Stranmillis Road was unambiguous about its orientation. When it opened its doors in September 1915 – incidentally, the year and month of my grandfather William Brady’s death in the Dardanelles – it might as well have placed a banner across its seemly facade bearing the words ‘No Taigs’. It was set up explicitly to make a home-from-home for female Protestant students and teachers of Queen’s University, Belfast. ... Have I struck a note of criticism here with my outraged italics? All right, I know in one sense I’m applying standards of the present to institutions of the past. I know they did things differently then, and that it suited each sect to adhere to its own network of ideology, support and social organisation. I’m aware that in ordinary people’s minds, attachment to one sect, and repudiation of the other, was bound up with integrity, not bigotry. Bigotry was an attribute of the back streets, the very stupid, or those in high places with an axe to grind (e.g. the ‘Protestant’ government of the day). For everyone else, it simply made for an easier life to abide by the rules – the ‘Protestant’ rules, or the ‘Catholic’ rules, whichever you’d been born to. Abide by the rules – and never bother about contributing by your line-of-least-resistance to the upkeep of apartheid.

  Hindsight, that useful commodity, may allow us an amended moral attitude, but it shouldn’t encourage automatic condemnation of people who actually did a lot of good, like the two Misses Riddel (though I’ve got another bone to pick with them, or their relations, in a minute). This pair of well-off, high-minded sisters put up the money to build and endow Riddel Hall, thereby aligning themselves with the cause of women’s education in Ireland, and saving generations of clever young women from the miseries of bleak bed-sitting-rooms. Yes, indeed, only good Protestant girls from the country need apply for Riddel Hall accommodation – nevertheless, at the time, the new hall of residence represented an amazingly enlightened and generous action on the part of the two old benefactors (aged 84 and 78 in that year, 1915). We can credit the sisters with a feminist, or proto-feminist, attitude of mind, if not with ecumenical leanings.

  But who were these Riddels? Miss Eliza and Miss Isabella8 were among the youngest of the ten children born to a Belfast hardware merchant named John Riddel and his wife Annabella Charley (yes, of the same linen family that employed my grandfather William Craig as a groom, and founded the school attended by his children in the 1920s). John Riddel had died in 1870, but his sons took over the business and prospered and at some point the family acquired a substantial mansion called Beechmount House. The odd thing about Beechmount House was that it was on the Falls Road. Well, not the historic Falls of popular imagination, with its down-at-heel terraced rows of houses, its cobbles, backyards, factories, street games and disaffection. Beechmount House stood well back from the redoubtable road itself, on high ground in the shadow of the Black Mountain, the Cave Hill clearly discernible to the left, the whole of Belfast spread out beneath it, stretching away in the distance to the shipyard gantries. (It still stands in the same spot, but its function has changed, as we shall see.) ... Or maybe the eponymous beech trees screened out the view of grim glum Belfast, I don’t know. Here the very plain looking, unmarried Riddels lived on and on, in elevated style, until the last of them, Eliza, died in 1924.

  If you’d lived in the district around the turn of the twentieth century, you might have seen, like an image from another world, Samuel Riddel and his sisters driving down the Falls Road in an open carriage, clip-clopping along while you drew your shawl more tightly around you against the japs from the gutters, or raised your dingy old cap from your uncouth head. There they went, noses in the air, ‘like proper royalty’, as it seemed to local footsloggers at the time, awestruck by the unimaginable luxury of Protestant existences. ... When the people impressed by Riddel hauteur were themselves old, in the 1950s, they’d talk about elements of the past, including Beechmount House and its occupants, and captured the interest of Ballymurphy boy Joe Graham
(a future local historian9). The phrase stayed in his mind.

  Beechmount House, for all its seclusion, wasn’t happily situated. It was the Falls Road. Isabella Riddel missed the worst of the flaring ‘Troubles’ by dying in 1918, but the last years of her sister Eliza were filled with distress and apprehension, fear of what the world was coming to. Terrific skirmishes, violence, shouts in the streets. The news is appalling, day after day. And some of it very close to home. For instance: in May 1921 an ambush of police and B Specials takes place near the Ballymurphy brickworks on the Springfield Road. Fourteen men of D Company, armed with handguns and grenades, wait behind a hedge in anticipation of a police tender. ... Here it comes, round a bend, the ira men open fire, the police retaliate, the ill-prepared Volunteers run out of ammunition. A quick getaway is in order, and the keyed-up republicans go tearing and stumbling across a succession of fields, over a stream, past a clay pit, skirting a small council estate, through a gap and into the private grounds of Beechmount House, out of breath, dodging behind the trees and heading pell-mell for the Beechmount Drive entrance, past the gate lodge and so out on to the safe haven – comparatively safe – of the main Falls Road. And Miss Eliza and her servants cowering in the drawing room. We’re reminded of the moment in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September, located at the other end of the country, near Mitchelstown in County Cork, when a man in a trench coat, intent on Ireland’s business, hurries past the heroine Lois in her own demesne. It’s 1920, the Black-and-Tan war is under way, and nineteen-year-old Lois is susceptible not to the romance of the republican cause, but rather to the allure of the great house (a stand-in for Bowen’s Court).