‘Demesne’: it’s too grand a word for the grounds of Beechmount House, all thirty-one acres of it notwithstanding. You can’t altogether detach the house from its environs, the dusty, rundown terraces, street lamps coming on in the evenings and a fine rain falling on patches of waste ground, the pigeon-fanciers’ lofts, the mongrel dogs, the fifteenth-of-August bonfires, the front-parlour shops selling honeycomb and yellowman, the pubs with spittoons and sawdust on the floor, the Mountain Loney with the wee tin church halfway along it, the Brickfields and back fields and sectarian murders perpetrated up sinister alleyways, the half-built houses at the top of the Donegall Road drawing swarms of Catholic refugees. The last intimidated out of their homes in ‘mixed’ areas, and not lending an uplifted tone to the mid-Falls district. And people in Catholic dress all over the place, priests and nuns and first communicants and what-have-you. And the future Father Ryan of the Scholastic Philosophy Department at Queen’s University growing up in a three-storey house on the front of the road, with iron railings separating it from the street, and large bay windows with looped lace curtains proclaiming an attachment to the middle-classes.
As we’ve seen, the Riddels drew the line at Catholics, so they did. Well, we shouldn’t blame them too much for failing to rise above the orthodoxies of the day. It’s different, though, when a piece of prejudice gets inscribed in a formal document. We’ve all heard of clauses in wills prohibiting a person of this or that persuasion from acquiring some specified property at the legator’s disposal. It seems the deeds of Beechmount House contained a similar proviso against a future Catholic ownership. The estate was never to be allowed to fall into Papist hands. ... At any rate, this was the received wisdom at Catholic-street-level. It was firmly believed all over Beechmount, the Whiterock and St James’s. If it’s true – a large ‘if’10 – it is uncertain whether the Riddels themselves, or their predecessors, were responsible for the exclusion order. Again, if it’s true, the framers of this bit of sectarian baiting had reckoned without Papist astuteness. ... Enter Daniel Mageean, Bishop of Down and Connor from 1929 until his death thirty-three years later. Mageean had long had his eye on Beechmount House, and when it came on the market around 1932, he arranged to buy it for the Church through a Protestant intermediary. Well! If we accept this story, it is hard to decide who comes out worse in the dodgy transaction, the authors of the initial reprehensible clause, or the bishop scheming to overturn it.
The phrase that comes to mind is ‘turning in their graves’. Appropriated for Catholic Belfast, the house exists for many years as a hospital-cum-old-people’s-home. Eventually it is taken a stage further and gains not only a Catholic, but a Gaelic overlay. At the present time, renamed Ard na bhFea,11 it is flourishing as an Irish-language school. Alas, the house and surroundings have undergone unsightly renovation. Bits subtracted and added on. Car parks and sports grounds where a shady beech grove once held sway. A ‘leisure centre’, God help us, in place of the original gate lodge. The trees incessantly sinned against by concupiscent trespassers of the 1940s and ’50s – all gone.
The moment of greatest consternation for ghostly Riddels and their ilk occurs in the summer of 1954, at the height of Father Peyton’s transatlantic ‘Rosary Crusade’, when vast numbers of telling-their-beads enthusiasts swarm all over the grounds of Beechmount House in an intense affirmation of Catholic identity. Oh holy, holy, holy, lord. ... And where am I, while a portion of my home territory is thus devotionally deranged? Not on my knees in the midst of the praying Mass going, ‘Hail Mary, holy Mary’, that’s for sure. I am not and never was a shining light of churchly exhibitionism. You would likely have found me in the back garden of 551 Donegall Road reading The Mystery of the Hidden House or The Reluctant Schoolgirl. Happily – though I accepted the obligations of being a Catholic child – I was not subjected to excessive religiosity in the home. I never knew a thing about the great Rosary Rally going on just a stone’s throw away from our sunlit garden, and, if I had, I’d have taken scant interest in it.
What did engage my interest, up to a point, was the high stone wall running along the Falls Road end of Beechmount House grounds, all the way from the Giant’s Foot Road to Beechmount Drive. For some reason, I was drawn to oddities and anomalies, and it was certainly odd to find a one-time gentleman’s residence, complete with gardens, in this part of Belfast. At eleven or twelve, on my way to and from school, I would pass this wall four times a day. In my mind I endowed the house beyond the wall with a gothic aspect far removed from the plain reality. But I never ventured up the long curved drive to see the place for myself. And once I understood it was an old people’s home I ceased to be intrigued by it. By this stage, of course, Beechmount House was well and truly incorporated into the Catholic Falls, with a nunly and priestly aura about it, and hand-wringing and woe for the wraiths of the Riddels.
When Riddel Hall for female students came into being in south Belfast during the First World War, a warden was appointed to oversee its arrangements. The first and most distinctive warden was Ruth Duffin, a relative by marriage of Miss Eliza and Miss Isabella.13 She was thirty-six years old at the time, and connected backwards through her ancestor William Drennan to the ‘United Irish’ movement and the entire ethos of liberal, Protestant, nineteenth-century Belfast.
William Drennan. I’ve referred to him earlier (see Chapter 4) as an old Irish separatist, but it’s possible I was over-simplifying things with this unequivocal tag. Yes, he founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791; but later in the decade he disengaged himself from conspiracy and rebellion. In the run-up to the 1798 centenary celebrations, Dr Drennan’s son, John Swanwick Drennan, co-opted his father for the unionist cause. At the same time, William Drennan remained an object of veneration for the extreme nationalist contingent. And both parties were right, in a way (which tells us something essential about northern politics). It depends on where you place the emphasis.
William Drennan, New Light Presbyterian, United Irishman, author of the stirring ballad ‘The Wake of William Orr’, had always held a place in the pantheon of radical Irish patriots, as far as I was concerned. He was up there with Emmet, Pearse and Tone. ... Then, towards the end of the 1980s, as a participant in the newly founded John Hewitt Summer School, I sat in a lecture hall at Garron Tower on the Antrim coast, and listened to poet-and-academic Adrian Rice restore a measure of complexity to the ironed-out, romantic-Irish version of Dr Drennan. Ultimately, Rice claimed, Drennan’s social ameliorism and egalitarian standpoint had raised him above ‘the diehard dogmas’ of the factions of Orange and Green. He’d have wanted no truck with any outraged rabble. He was a social reformer, and once certain reforms were enacted he’d have ceased to be an agitator to any degree, and upheld the status quo. That was how it seemed to William Drennan’s son (himself a doctor, a poet and a man of eighty-two at the time of the 1798 centenary celebrations). But Irish nationalists and Parnellites (we’re still in the 1890s) took a contrary view. Total separation from England, they maintained, ‘was the ideal taught by him’.13 Drennan’s own lines, ‘The cause it is good, and the men they are true, / And the green shall outlive both the orange and blue’, were constantly on their lips. Thus, you had rival factions laying claim to the larger portion of William Drennan. I would like to detach him from both of them, Green and Orange alike, and reinstate him as a symbol of integration. For whatever is or is not debatable about Dr Drennan’s political convictions and private beliefs, one thing is certain, he supported full social rights for Catholics, having identified this lack as a grievous abuse of power. He threw his weight behind the cause of Emancipation (and died before it was achieved). A reasonable and moral Presbyterianism – which Dr Drennan14 professed – precluded going along with any form of discrimination on grounds of creed or caste.
And here is his great-granddaughter,15 a hundred years on, attached to an institution excluding Taigs from its intake. (I’m sorry to go on about this exclusion policy on the part of Riddel Hall – and I’ve alre
ady acknowledged its commonplace, non-threatening aspect at the time – but there’s a certain irony here which I can’t resist noting.) However, if she missed out on her ancestor’s ecumenicalism, Ruth Duffin inherited something of his poetic ability. With her sister Celia Duffin, she brought out a couple of collections of verse in the ‘fairy fiddler’, ‘quare wee house’ mode – the vernacular manner interspersed with some lofty and archaic stuff. There were, at the time (1890s–1920s), quite a few prosperous Protestant women poets – ‘Moira O’Neill’, Helen Lanyon, ‘Elizabeth Shane’, Florence M. Wilson, and so on – who found their subject-matter in countryside lore and Ulster folk emblems, homing in on a mythical spot where pagan Ireland and Catholic peasant Ireland joined forces with Ulster Scots. You know the kind of thing – ‘He played by the braes o’ Comber, / A quare wee lift o’ an air; / It stirred the childer from slumber / With its notes so sweet an’ rare ...’ – verse, according to the critic Terence Brown,16 that ‘treats of an aspect of Ulster rural life that has a significance for many Ulster people’s self-understanding’. So it does, or so it did, and occasionally it rises to a stupendous indigenous piquancy, as in Florence Wilson’s ‘The Man From God-Knows-Where’ with its button-holing opening lines: ‘Into our townlan’, on a night of snow, / Rode a man from God-knows-where’. You have to read on, for the story and the local ideology. The year – the resonant year – is 1798; and then it’s 1803 and a crowd has assembled outside Downpatrick gaol to witness an execution. The poem is written in homage to an exemplary Presbyterian steadfastness and integrity. William Drennan would have relished its drift, and probably his great-granddaughter did too, though her own verse eschews any political content whatever. The Carbery/Milligan brand of defiance is as alien to her as a pawnshop on the Lower Falls.
There’s a single poem in which Ruth Duffin’s literary reputation resides, and it’s called ‘The Fairy Piper’:
Who hears the fairy piper play
Beneath the secret hill,
Though he should wander worlds away
Shall hear that music still.
This crystal-clear offering makes an appearance in my mother’s brown-paper-covered, personal anthology of cherished verse, along with Helen Lanyon’s ‘The House of Padraig’ and Ethna Carbery’s ‘The Spell-Stricken’ (and John Clare and Thomas Hardy and Yeats and Keats and Shelley and Browning and Tennyson and Wilfred Owen ...). But she’d hardly have known that its author was going about her duties as warden of a girls’ hostel just across the road from Sandhurst Gardens, in a building housing many of Nora’s fellow students – with whom she probably wasn’t acquainted. I doubt if she ever set foot in Riddel Hall. Its Protestant ambience (here we go again) would have struck something of a jarring note. But on the other hand, I think, she wouldn’t have known or cared about the religious affiliation of any of the poets, local or otherwise, who made it into her hard-backed notebook. ... I find it slightly odd that so many Ulster poets of the day – town-bred for the most part – should wish so much to immerse themselves in the trappings of picturesque Ireland, all bogs and boreens and banshees and baloney. (I’m not trying to strike a superior note here: I lapped the whole lot up, all the holy wells and rushy crosses and boys-from-the-Rosses, no less than any other indigenous-emblem addict.) And the dour Ulster, not to mention manse backgrounds of some, make for an added irony. ... Of course, exponents of an Ulster pastoral verse form were by no means entirely Protestant, or female, or even Big House people: think of Cahir Healey and Cathal O’Byrne, for instance. Or Joseph Campbell, head and shoulders (in poetic terms) above the rest. One of my mother’s university friends married a poet of this lilting type, John Irvine, who, like John Hewitt, fell under the spell of local place names: ‘Limavady, Cloonnagashel, Donaghedy, Carrowdore ...’. Indeed, I believe the huge black pram from which I surveyed the activities of St James’s Avenue and the Donegall Road was a gift to my mother from this Mrs Irvine – but the friendship must have lapsed, for I never got to know the pair. I liked his book By Winding Roads, though, with its William Conor dust jacket showing a donkey-and-cart, and lively illustrations. It was bought in Mullan’s bookshop in Donegall Place, and it sat on a shelf in our sitting-room for many years. It’s on one of my own bookshelves now.
The summer of 1937 comes, and, with it, the chancellor’s garden party at Queen’s University, a day filled with sunshine and excitements, at which a row of sweet girl graduates is photographed for a local paper. ‘Degree day smiles’, the caption goes: twelve joyful faces, the whole row linking arms and each of them putting her best foot forward, as if about to break into a triumphant quickstep. Happy days. And my jubilant mother among them, wearing her graduation gown like a badge of honour, all confidence and exuberance.
She’d have considered herself enrolled in an up-and-coming minority of women graduates, but alas, the promise of that early hard-won achievement was not to be fulfilled. It had something to do with the times, the years of economic depression, downbeat Belfast, a glut of women teachers on the market, no clerical or professional connections to put in a word. It is distressing to think of applications going out and out from 31 Sandhurst Gardens, and leading nowhere. ... Then, at last, comes a series of ill-paid, stand-in appointments, some as far afield as Ballymena or Ballynahinch. Nora’s work is to fill in for a teacher of English indisposed for a term or two, or a nun in the grip of a nervous breakdown. Well, it’s a way of gaining teaching experience. ... Then she gets married and cuts herself off even further from the prospect of full-time employment. Once you’re married you have to stay at home, says the Catholic church. You have to stay at home and procreate. That is your role in life. But then the war comes, and things change slightly. It’s not until 1943, however, that my mother secures a full-time job: in the censorship office at Stormont. Or, the Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department, to give it its full title. ‘The work of Censorship has played an invaluable part in the concealment from the enemy of vital plans and preparations, in the detection and suppression of enemy espionage propaganda and other subversive activities, and in the enforcement of the many regulations necessary to sustain and extend the national war effort.’ I’m quoting from a certificate of commendation presented in 1945 to ‘all ranks of the Censorship staffs’ – all now redundant – whose ‘zeal, diligence and skill’ are duly applauded.
This is my mother’s contribution to the war effort: reading soldiers’ letters and blacking out bits of them. I think she enjoyed it: the companionship, the sense of national urgency and the monthly pay cheque. And work as easy to her as falling off a form. My father continues in his employment with the Ulster Transport Authority at Duncrue Street. Their gurgling infant, meanwhile, is left in the care of her grandmother and aunt. They have all (myself excepted) lived through the terrible blitz on Belfast of 1941, when huge portions of the city were obliterated and temporary morgues set up in St George’s Market and the Falls Swimming Baths, where stunned survivors come to identify the dead. Something happened at Beechmount,17 I believe: the nearest the bombs approached to the Donegall Road. I can’t remember any of it, of course; but I was told stories about the lot of us huddled under the stairs when the sirens went. Or, in summer, joining distraught hordes streaming up the Mountain Loney towards the sanctuary of a hawthorn bush. By this stage in the war it must be plain to all reasonable people that England’s difficulty, in this instance, is also Ireland’s difficulty, that the hellishness of Nazi Germany is worse than the devilry of Stormont.
This wasn’t always the case. The minute war was declared, its bearing on Irish affairs was assessed rather differently by diehard republicans. Stories abounded of lights being left burning deliberately on the Falls Road, in defiance of the blackout, to guide Nazi bombers – proxy Sinn Féiners in the eyes of some – on the way to wipe out a detested regime. It didn’t work out like that, indeed, but the effect of such perverse wisdom was to reinforce Protestant misgivings about the ‘loyalty’ of the entire Catholic population. It’s just another nail
in the coffin of interdenominational accord.
‘Them sons of whores,’ wails a hurt old woman in Brian Moore’s ‘blitz’ novel The Emperor of Ice-Cream, ‘them bastards done it on purpose. They brought the German.’ ‘Who?’ asks Moore’s arp18 protagonist, Catholic Gavin Burke, understandably a bit bewildered by this tirade. ‘The Fenians, the ira,’ comes the snarled reply. ‘Them’s the ones who done it. They should be hung, every one of them, aye, and a fire lit beneath them.’
Brian Moore’s novel (his fifth) was published in 1965, and it draws very closely on his own experiences as an arp recruit in the early days of the war. Like Gavin Burke’s, his action caused affront to his Catholic nationalist family. ‘Gracious God,’ (exclaims Gavin’s Aunt Liz in the book), ‘did I ever think I’d live to see the day when my own nephew would stand in this room dressed up like a Black and Tan.’ Immediately – though they’re not addressed in the novel – genealogical complications enter in. Pro-Sinn Féin Aunt Liz is an invented character, but Brian Moore’s real-life aunts, his father’s sisters, were the children of a Catholic convert; the family’s ancestry included a strongly Protestant Ballyclare and Ballymena strain. (And the further back you go the more sectionally tangled it gets; but that, as I’ve reiterated, is probably true for most of us.) By the early twentieth century, though, the Moores had become as Catholic as Corpus Christi. Exorbitantly Catholic, but another twist of fortune had placed them in a house directly opposite the main Orange Hall in Clifton Street, Belfast – giving Brian and his seniors and siblings a grandstand view, each Twelfth of July throughout the 1920s and 30s, of Orange pageantry and braggadocio. And perhaps engendering a soupçon of atavistic empathy, as the Belfast parade in all its pomp assembled beneath their eyes.
A Twisted Root Page 30