Asking For Trouble Read online

  Imprint Information

  First published in 2007 by Blackstaff Press

  This edition published in 2011 by

  Blackstaff Press

  4c Heron Wharf,

  Sydenham Business Park

  Belfast BT3 9LE

  © Text, Patricia Craig, 2007

  © Photographs, Patricia Craig, 2007, except Robert French’s photograph of ‘St Dominic’s school buildings’ which is © National Library of Ireland, 2007; and Alexander Hogg’s photograph of ‘Lower Falls, c.1912’ which is © National Museums Northern Ireland, 2007.

  All rights reserved

  Patricia Craig has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  Cover Design by Dunbar Design

  Produced by Blackstaff Press

  A cip catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  EPUB ISBN 978-0-85640-882-3

  MOBI ISBN 978-0-85640-883-0

  www.blackstaffpress.com

  Praise for Asking for Trouble

  ‘This engrossing and discursive memoir … will surely take its place in the canon Ulster literature.’

  Edna O’Brien

  ‘This is a powerfully evocative memoir of many things: life in middle-class Belfast in the 1950s, the experiences of teenagers in a convent school, and above all the seminal, magical rite de passage called “going to the Gaeltacht” … I found the book refreshingly angry and totally absorbing - I couldn’t put it down.’

  Eílís Ní Dhuibhne

  ‘It’s funny and sweet (in the right sort of way), so sharp in its capturing of time and place that I believed myself to be wandering along that road in Rannafast with the girls.’

  Margaret Forster

  ‘Asking for Trouble is a great read - part memoir, part social history, part literary insight … [This] book is one in a million.’

  Gerald Dawe

  ‘A riveting memoir of a rebellious Catholic girlhood … Here’s a perceptive take on a Belfast that’s now, as they say, history.’

  Robert Greacen

  ‘a memorable, dense account of a vanished way of life, a social history, a bid for restoration, and a brilliant memoir’

  Polly Devlin, Irish Times

  ‘brilliantly drawn characters and scenes … a testament to the triumph of quiet intelligence’

  Aisling Foster, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘I commend this accomplished Belfast author’s marvellously readable memoir’

  Cal McCrystal, Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year

  ‘Riveting memories … an affectionately drawn story of a young girl’s coming of age, with minutely observed descriptions of Belfast.’

  News Letter

  ‘a riveting, entertaining and superbly written memoir’

  Irish News

  ‘powerful and absorbing … this book is essential reading’

  Irish Mail on Sunday

  ‘Craig’s descriptions of her time in Rannafast … are very funny, while the writing is lyrical and compelling.’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘Patricia Craig’s entirely meritorious book … upholds literary standards … while paying nostalgic tributes to her past where nostalgia is due, and missing no opportunities to exact her revenge on purveyors of “pietistic hogwash”’

  Patrick Skene Catling, Spectator

  ‘fascinating … I remember well the atmosphere of the time and she has chronicled it superbly’

  Rory Brennan, Books Ireland

  About Patricia Craig

  Patricia Craig is from Belfast. She moved to London in the 1960s but always retained strong links with her native city, returning to live in Northern Ireland in 1999. A leading literary critic and anthologist, she regularly contributes to the Independent, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Times and New Statesman, and has appeared on various television and radio programmes. She is the author of Brian Moore: A Biography (Bloomsbury, 2002) and has edited many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Ireland (Oxford University Press, 1998), The Rattle of the North (Blackstaff, 1992), The Belfast Anthology (Blackstaff, 1999) and The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff, 2006).

  Dedication

  For my mother

  Nora Teresa Craig (née Brady)

  1913–2001

  Preface

  This is the story of an escapade with disproportionate consequences. When I was sixteen I was expelled from school. So what, you may say: so were lots of people who never took it into their heads to make a song and dance about it. True – but I hope to show why this particular, infinitesimal injustice had implications beyond the purely personal.

  The contretemps took place in Belfast, still at the time an unassuming small industrial city, keeping itself to itself, observing a certain order in its manner of living and turning a deaf ear to any rumblings of unrest or aggravation issuing from its interior. The school in question, St Dominic’s, is filled with nuns, cross and bitter nuns or those who are moderately kind, as the case may be. They belong to an enclosed order, isolated from worldly concerns, and to emphasise this fact they wear the traditional medieval habit of cream serge topped by a black headdress, and featuring conspicuous rosary beads. As well as advertising their holiness, it gives them a look of being sinister and intimidating. The teaching staff includes lay members too, thank goodness, but these are subordinate to the religieuses. A convent inflexibility has the place in its grip.

  The year is 1959; hierarchical structures continue to function – though not as strongly as they’ve done in the past; the Great Northern Railway in Great Victoria Street, the Ulster Club and Robb’s Department Store are familiar landmarks; and an innocence nearly unimaginable today prevails even among inflammable adolescents.

  The Catholic Church, our church, went on maintaining a stern and strict policy with regard to sexual morality in particular, and few among my contemporaries would have had the know-how, or the will, to challenge it. I certainly didn’t. Most of us were secure and content enough in our small world, far from any centre of front-page events, and we thought that things would go on forever in much the same way: school with its pleasures and anxieties; marathon walks to the Hatchet Field up the Black Mountain via the Mountain Loney; minor flirtations in the Falls or the Ormeau Park; shopping in Brand’s Arcade and browsing among the book stalls of Smithfield; cinema-going with friends possibly involving a spot of carry-on with schoolboys in the back row; Hallowe’en parties with turnip lanterns and fireworks ignited on the lawn to enchanting effect; bracing seaside holidays at Cushendall or Warrenpoint. If it wasn’t exactly the life of Riley, back there in the late 1950s, it nevertheless held sufficient charm and vitality to render its transience regrettable.

  Everything changes. That life, or my version of it, exists now only in my head, where – inevitably – it has acquired a powerful nostalgic overlay which goes on intensifying in tandem with the amount of time that separates it from the present. Asking for Trouble, then, the story of an insignificant upheaval, has a dual purpose. It’s first of all a period piece, an attempt to retrieve a few of the aspirations along with the atmosphere of that distinctive time. But it’s also a work of social criticism, undertaken partly to remind myself, and my contemporaries, of the obsolete embargoes we existed under, and the extent to which these were accepted or circumvented.

  My concern is with 1950s attitudes, 1950s appearances, the mentality of the age – though of course I can’t avoid the knowingness of hindsight, which causes one to contemplate with bemusement or dismay a lot of the things that once seemed perfectly reasonable. My main target, I suppose, is the type of sorry schooling I was subjected to; but then I’d
have to admit that its churchly slant suited a good many of my fellow pupils better than it suited me. Of course, I experienced no sense of alienation and certainly didn’t hanker after a secular education at the time, never having heard of such a thing. You didn’t question the choices your parents made on your behalf, just as they didn’t question the preordained course of their offsprings’ lives. The handiest, denominationally appropriate school was the right one, as far as they were concerned; and in most cases it probably was.

  It’s just that, for some of us, the moral guidance we received seems equivalent to the practice of binding the left arm of a naturally left-handed child behind its back, in the interests of achieving a state of universal right-handedness. Conformity was the name of the game. Of course we needed to be instructed how to behave, but sometimes our instructors got it frightfully, spectacularly wrong. Fancy trying to impose sanctity and submissiveness on the devious, recalcitrant juveniles herded into their classrooms! The strong-arm tactics they engaged in to further this end didn’t do a bit of good, either. The effect was to germinate a covert rebelliousness in a number of us.

  However – as the following account will indicate – I didn’t find my schooldays particularly onerous, pre-calamity. There was nothing crushing or joyless about the major elements of the life I was leading. Fun and games were not excluded from it. I didn’t even find the school environment hostile. If I’d sailed through the whole six years of grammar school without coming to grief, it’s possible that my recollections of the era would be couched in a different mode. But it seems worth taking a sharpish look at the reasons why I did come to grief. And even after all this time, I have an investment in getting it right, in presenting my version of events with as much accuracy and period-colouring as I can muster. I want to see what the whole episode looks like, from a distance, and to devise, if possible, a new conclusion to the old business of being brought to book.

  PART ONE: Corrupting Influence

  … Horses’ dung is smoking on the cobbles.

  Cobblestones?

  I must have gone back further than I thought, to brewers’

  drays and milk-carts,

  Brylcreem, Phoenix beer. Or candy apples — rich hard dark-

  brown glaze…

  Ciaran Carson, ‘Calvin Klein’s Obsession’

  It was like a scene from my least favourite type of school story, featuring a stern headmistress, a nameless delinquency and a trio of unhappy schoolgirls, the whole bound up with an evangelical intensity. There we stood in our royal blue gym tunics, heads bowed, lips trembling, undergoing a fearsome scolding on account of some major offence which had just that minute come to light. Lunch hour was drawing to an end; soon the first lesson of the afternoon would begin. We’d been accosted, though, on our way to the cloakroom, and summoned into an empty classroom by a nun white-faced with fury.

  Exchanging dismayed glances behind her back, we wondered what we’d done wrong now. Our consciences weren’t exactly clear. We were nine years old and addicted to adventure. But nothing came to mind at that moment to justify the stream of abuse coming down on our heads as the nun let rip with intemperate invective concerning our deficiency in the areas of obedience, trustworthiness and the grace of God.

  We’d been rounded up by one of those nuns, quite common at the time, whose chief delight was wiping the floor with any pupil unlucky enough to be caught out in a misdemeanour. But what was this particular misdemeanour? A tentative request for information only results in extra upbraiding. We know perfectly well what we’ve done, we are told, and are actually making matters worse by pretending ignorance. How we have the gall to stand there denying our bad conduct passes all understanding …

  At this point two of us give way to tears. I feel pretty tearful myself, a captive audience while the details of my bad character are spat out at me; but I won’t cry. Cry-babies are the butt of scorn in my schoolgirl adventure stories whose heroines persevere with dignity in the face of injustice and always win through. I have taken them as an example, and I will stick to an appearance of sangfroid if it kills me.

  It doesn’t kill me but it gets me further pounced on. The snivellers are at least exhibiting a modicum of remorse, our tormentor declares, whirling round to focus her attention on me, while I am so hardened in turpitude that rightful admonition just washes over me. A sentence is pronounced. The other two, being properly chastened, may join the rest of their class without further punishment, but I’m to go home and remain at home until I hear to the contrary. It’s not an expulsion, exactly, but it might be the prelude to an expulsion. I am beset by all kinds of apprehensions as I retrieve my outdoor things from the cloakroom and leave the school premises without meeting anyone who might commiserate with me in my predicament. Then it’s back to the Donegall Road in West Belfast, where I cause consternation in my mother and grandmother by landing in on them at the wrong time.

  Part of the trouble is, I can’t explain why this severe punishment has been visited on me. But I’m not as innocent of blame as all that. I have an inkling that it might have something to do with having been observed during the lunch hour up to no good in a forbidden portion of the school grounds. We are fascinated by the stable blocks, outbuildings, boiler rooms, kitchen gardens and other amenities round the back of the school, partly because these areas have been placed out of bounds.

  There are good reasons for the embargo on exploration. One furnace room, for example, has a door at ground level which opens on to a sheer drop of about twenty feet. It was clearly constructed by someone fiendishly eager to engineer an accident, and it seems miraculous that (as far as I know) no accident occurred. I suppose the door would have been kept locked, as a rule; but I can testify to the fact that it wasn’t always locked. I had actually been down to the bottom of the iron ladder attached to the wall which descended straight from the outer door (though not on the occasion described above). Someone had dared me to lower myself over the threshhold and climb down, and I did it in the expectation that a secret passage would be revealed at the bottom, or a kidnapped heiress awaiting rescue, or at the very least a chest full of stolen treasure. But what confronted me, as I stood on the earthen floor still clasping the iron rungs, was out of a different kind of story – a horror story. The sight before my eyes, as I turned my head to take a look around the underground premises, had me scrambling upwards again at high speed. It had required the most tremendous effort of will not to cry out. A row of toads, an enormous quantity of them, it seemed, silently assembled against the far wall like the leitmotif of a macabre fairy story. (I’m assured that I have got this wrong, since Ireland is toad-free as well as snake-free – but the scene has remained fixed in my memory to this day in the way described. And whatever it was I saw over against the wall, it frightened the wits out of me.)

  Frogs and toads, for some unfathomable reason, trigger a terrible reaction in me. I wish no harm to the species, but I need to keep the utmost distance between myself and them. I daren’t reveal the presence of the toads to my friends at the top of the ladder, since we’re all at an age when any contemporary’s weakness is likely to be exploited, in the interests of fun. There’s a short story by Alice Munro in which the phrase ‘a condition of permanent vulnerability’ appears. It’s to do with the heroine’s passion for lines of poetry and her awareness of the likely consequences, should such a passion get bruited about. I can’t resist borrowing the phrase: a condition of permanent vulnerability wasn’t just a risk for me, it was a certainty, if my friends had got wind of my aversion to amphibians … And with a supply of the creatures available for dispersal, it was more than likely that some irresponsible classmate would fetch one into the light of day, or – horrors! – into my desk in the second-form classroom. So I have to affect a composure I’m far from feeling, and announce that there’s nothing whatever to see down there, it’s totally boring and not worth the risk of being caught by a nun – or of breaking one’s neck.

  That’s the end of that part
icular Toad Hall, as far as we’re concerned; but the lure of forbidden territory remains. We keep pottering round the back pathways, strawberry beds and cabbage patches, even though there’s nothing much to see or do there, dodging out of sight if a handyman or gardener should appear wheeling a wheelbarrow; and no doubt this is the reason for the trouble we’re in, again. Someone must have reported us …

  But a specific and more colourful transgression has stuck in my mind as a contributory factor, at least. I have a strong impression that we were held to blame for an accident featuring a small boy and a manure pit. Our school, Aquinas Hall, is a single-sex school; but once in a while, at the nuns’ discretion, a very young boy is enrolled for a term or two. I remember the son of a Ghanaian lecturer at Queen’s who briefly attended Aquinas Hall along with his sister (their exotic names were Grace and Raphael). And then came a small child called Patsy, around whom there hung an aura of unspecified deprivation – probably nothing more than the fact that he lived with his grandmother (lacking parents?), but we were instructed beforehand to be nice to him. It was Patsy who suffered the mishap with the manure pit, of which we weren’t even witnesses, let alone activists. I don’t know who got him out of it, but I can imagine the state he was in, and the annoyance of whatever teacher was charged with cleaning him up. And I’m not certain if he fell in or if he was pushed, but I know the incident had nothing to do with any of us. However, we may have been seen not far from the spot, and a wonky inference drawn from this circumstance. Nuns at the time were more interested in administering chastisement than in getting to the bottom of any supposed episode of rule-breaking.