A Twisted Root Read online

  Imprint Information

  First published in 2012 by Blackstaff Press

  4c Heron Wharf

  Sydenham Business Park

  Belfast bt3 9le

  with the assistance of

  The Arts Council of Northern Ireland

  © Text, Patricia Craig, 2012

  © Photographs, Patricia Craig, 2012, except ‘The massacre of settlers at Portadown’ which is © Fotomas/Topfoto, the photograph of ‘Carrickblacker House’ and the photograph of the ‘Egyptian Arch near Newry’ which are © the National Library of Ireland and the photograph of ‘Burntollet Bridge, 1969’ which is © Beaverbrook Newspapers and Belfast Telegraph.

  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.

  Produced by Blackstaff Press

  Cover design by TwoAssociates

  A cip catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

  epub isbn 978 085640 084 1

  mobi isbn 978 085640 089 6

  www.blackstaffpress.com

  www.blackstaffpress.com/ebooks

  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 Irish Times, London Review of Books, New Statesman, Independent and Times Literary Supplement, and has appeared on various television and radio programmes. She is the author of Asking for Trouble: The Story of an Escapade with Disproportionate Consequences (Blackstaff, 2007) and Brian Moore: A Biography (Bloomsbury, 2002), and has edited many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Ireland (Oxford University Press, 1998) and The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff, 2006).

  Praise for Asking for Trouble

  ‘… speaks its elegant mind’

  karl miller, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

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

  cal mccrystal, Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year

  ‘She has a wonderful eye and ear for the geography and sociology of the old Belfast of her childhood … her amiably discursive style and encyclopaedic knowledge of Irish culture enable her to offer the sharpest insights into the perennial “Irish question”’

  stanley price, The Oldie

  ‘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.’

  éilís 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 on the road in Rannafast with the girls.’

  margaret forster

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

  Edna O’Brien

  ‘… 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

  Dedication

  For Harry Tipping

  and in memory of my grandmothers

  Sarah Brady (née Tipping), 1881–1969

  Emily Craig (née Lett), 1889–1973

  * * *

  For history’s a twisted root …

  paul muldoon

  Family Tree

  Introduction – The Dangerous Edge of Things

  If there’s one single unalloyed good that has come out of the overdone debates about historical ‘revisionism’, it’s the idea of the historian as subversive. We should be seeking out the interactions, paradoxes and sub-cultures ... if only to rearrange the pieces in more surprising patterns.

  R.F. Foster, Varieties of Irishness

  Thoughts of history present themselves constantly. What version of history do we accept, though, if any?

  Derek Mahon, ‘Dark of the Moon’

  Some years ago, I wrote a memoir called Asking for Trouble. A Twisted Root is not a sequel, but there’s a sense in which it grew out of certain preoccupations of the former book. The memoir is centred on an alarming event of my early life: being expelled from a convent school in Belfast at the age of sixteen for a miniscule misdemeanour. The crucial episode of misbehaviour, with its disproportionate outcome, occurred in the Donegal Gaedhaltacht, in Rannafast, where I’d gone with some friends and fellow pupils of St Dominic’s High School, in August 1959, to polish my Irish. It involved some carry-on with local boys. When word of this small carry-on reached the ears of St Dominic’s nuns, they threw up their hands in horror and promptly cast out of the school the three ringleaders in the affair (as it seemed to them). I believed at the time, and still believe, their reaction was crazed and their treatment of the three of us ruthless and unjust. Others will disagree – indeed, some readers of Asking for Trouble did disagree, with varying degrees of vehemence. They rushed into print or went on the air to stick up for nuns, claiming that convent pupils all over Ireland and, indeed, Britain, had been summarily expelled from other schools for lesser offences. What did we expect, they snorted. Kissing boys behind turf stacks, and being caught at it, had put us beyond the pale.

  Those were the sniffy brigade. Other readers, those who had suffered horrors under a convent regime, thought I hadn’t gone nearly far enough in my castigation of that educational system. ‘More could be told’ – uttered darkly – was the verdict of the convent-afflicted. At this point, it looked as if the title, Asking for Trouble, might relate to the reception of the book no less than the activities evoked in it.

  That title – hmmn. I was not exactly happy with it. I feared it might be a contender for a Kate Adie award for unoriginality. But I stuck with it, due to its slightly ironic bearing on the theme of the memoir, and also because I had it in mind that it referred not only to the particular events I was writing about, but to an entire society on the verge of falling apart. Given the conditions prevailing in the North in the late 1950s – economic, social, religious and political conditions – it was clear that something had got to give. And, for a brief moment in the following decade, it looked as though the inevitable upheaval might actually engender a more equitable, just and progressive reshaping of Northern Irish society – but as we know, it didn’t happen. What happened instead exceeded the direst anticipations of the most pessimistic observers of Northern Ireland’s sectarian ethos. James Simmons puts it succinctly in his poem entitled ‘The Ballad of Gerry Kelly’: ‘Sixty-nine the nightmare started./Loyalist anger rose.’

  Loyalist anger rose, and at the same time, republican anger rose to meet it. Things fell apart. The death toll rose too. Destruction by bomb and fire overtook not only the centre of Belfast, but the centres of many pleasant historic towns, small towns, country towns, seaside towns. ‘Now with compulsive resonance they toll,’ John Hewitt wrote in his bitter ‘Postscript’ to the celebratory ‘Ulster Names’ of the late 1940s:

  Banbridge, Ballykelly, Darkley, Crossmaglen,

  summoning pity, anger and despair,

  by grief of kin, by hate of murderous men

  till the whole tarnished map is stained and torn,

  not to be read as pastoral again.

  Living in London, and well out of it, as I thought, I watched from afar with horror and desp
air as my native province blew itself to pieces. I was uncertain as to where my loyalties lay – or if loyalties were even relevant in the infernal imbroglio. I had long discarded the crusading republicanism of my teenage years. Civil rights, the People’s Democracy, had seemed to offer a rational alternative to out-and-out ‘Irish-Ireland’ affiliation; but those well-intentioned bodies had failed to withstand the warring objectives of people aligned to them. It all came down to sects and factions as conduits to chaos. And in the resulting meltdown it was sometimes hard to distinguish between ideologists and cynical exploiters of civic unrest. It was hard not to feel sympathy for the killed, bereaved, afflicted, of whatever persuasion or degree of complicity. It wasn’t hard to deplore the vicious sectarian instinct that flourished like bindweed among the ignorant, depraved and psychopathic. I’m thinking of gangs like the Shankill Butchers and its leader named Murphy. Sects and factions – but with Northern Irish individuals and their ancestry, it is often hard to tell where one sect ends and another begins.

  While I was writing Asking for Trouble, I became aware that the central story, the expulsion story, was surrounded by others endemic to the place I grew up in, and some of these had to do with family history and the way it had of throwing up oddities and ironies. Thanks to the researches of two intrepid cousins, Harry Tipping on my mother’s side and George Hinds on my father’s, I came into possession of a good deal of information previously unknown to me – or at best, only partially known and haphazardly assimilated. At some point it occurred to me that some of this information might be amplified to form a separate volume – not, I should say, a family history as such, but a book whose raison d’être is to indicate how interlocked we all are in the north of Ireland, whether we consider ourselves to be exclusively Protestant, Catholic, Presbyterian, Mormon, Shaker, Quaker or high-caste Brahmin. What I had in mind was a kind of Ulster cat’s-cradle constructed from history and identity and literature, image and allusion and invention – all woven together with whatever verve I could muster. I was partly inspired by a marvellous book, Rebellions by Tom Dunne (2004), which has the kind of density and balance I was aiming for, with its blend of history and family history, autobiography and social comment. My undertaking (I repeat) is not a family history. It is illustrative rather than genealogical, even though it focuses to an extent on the lives of some of my own ancestors, those who begin to emerge with a degree of clarity from the nearly impenetrable mists of the past. I’m interested in the past and its implications for the present, in historical ironies, in revelations dismantling preconceptions about attachment to this or that tribe, or other idées fixes. On a personal level, I’m excited by discoveries concerning aspects of my own background, and keen to insert these into the general picture. If I’ve got it right, each of the following chapters should tell a good – a pertinent – story about the way things were at a particular time in the past. Extracting the personal from the historical (and vice versa) is one of my objectives, even if I’m bound to fall short in certain areas (those of characterisation and verisimilitude, for example). And I’m delighted to find my direct and indirect forebears turning out to be a wonderfully heterogeneous lot – down and up the social scale (mostly down), in and out of church and chapel, Lurgan Papes and Wexford Prods, hanged and hangmen, street-brawlers and scholars, full-blown Orangemen and republican activists. I have to say that the ‘fior-Gaedhalach’, true-Irish, strain in my ancestry is the most exiguous, but it does exist (I think), courtesy of an umpteen-times great-grandmother named Esther O’Neill. Well, I’m laying claim to it along with other things that can’t altogether be verified.

  Graham Greene was fond of quoting a couple of well-known lines from Browning, which he said could stand as an epigraph to all his novels: ‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things, / The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist.’ In the context of Northern Ireland, we might adapt these lines to accommodate the Protestant Fenian, the principled rioter, the unchristian cleric, the merciless Sister of Mercy (and I’m happy to say I’ve uncovered none of the last among my ancestral connections). ‘The dangerous edge’, for me, suggests above all an edge of complexity, a subversiveness, that makes a nonsense of the monolithic certainties on which the entire structure of our centuries-old conflict is based.

  Earlier, I quoted the Simmons line about loyalist anger. Loyalist anger is the standard response to any perceived threat to Ulster’s status quo. From Thomas McKnight writing in 1896 about ‘armed assemblies of men’ and ‘Mr Parnell’ taking note of what he called ‘tumultuous and riotous gatherings of Orangemen wishing to murder the Irish Catholics’ to the burning of Bombay Street and Conway Street in Belfast, in August 1969, by a mob in the throes of loyalist anger, the past has always risen up, like a ghoul from a burial mound, to overwhelm any current egalitarian impulse. Whenever it showed the least sign of subsiding, atavistic outrage was easily reignited by some energetic demagogue like the Reverend Henry Cooke – described by one commentator as ‘the framer of sectarianism in the politics of Ulster’1 – whose entire being was geared to opposing what he called ‘fierce democracy on the one hand and more terrible popery on the other’.

  Dr Cooke in his antique clerical garb is a kind of cartoon embodiment of nineteenth-century Ulster illiberalism; but in fact, as well as contributing to the diehard Protestant ethic of the day, Cooke was also articulating sectarian doctrines to which many people subscribed, overtly or covertly. ‘You know,’ they might have whispered, ‘there’s something in what he says.’ This behind-hands quotation from John Hewitt’s poem ‘The Coasters’ takes us forward a century or so and refers to a different set of circumstances – but the author puts his finger on a continuing, low-grade, passive bigotry, a bigotry of boardrooms and suburbs, which played its part in contaminating the whole of Northern Irish society, to a point of dissolution. ‘You coasted along,’ the accusing poem goes:

  You even had a friend or two of the other sort,

  coasting too: your ways ran parallel.

  Your children and theirs seldom met, though,

  being at different schools.

  You visited each other, decent folk with a sense

  of humour. Introduced, even, to

  one of their clergy. And then you smiled

  in the looking-glass, admiring, a

  little moved by, your broadmindedness.

  Your father would never have known

  one of them. Come to think of it,

  when you were young, your own home was never

  visited by one of the other sort.

  The ‘you’ addressed by Hewitt is of course a Protestant Ulsterman, but I’m not suggesting that an equal amount of bigotry, aggression, name-calling or nepotism didn’t exist among ‘the other sort’ – the Catholics of Ulster. The novelist Brian Moore (1921–99), who grew up in Clifton Street, Belfast, recalled his doctor father’s refusal to allow any member of his household to adorn the table with ‘a Protestant loaf of bread’ – that is, one made by the Ormeau Bakery rather than Barney Hughes’s. Think of the episode in St John Ervine’s novel of 1927, The Wayward Man, when young Robert Dunwoody strays into Catholic territory in the back streets of Belfast, and is set upon by ‘a gang of rough youths’ who exact a tribal betrayal from him: ‘“Curse King William, you Protestant get, you!” They crowded round him, ... pulling his hair and beating his skull with their knuckles. ... He could see the vicious face of the leader of the gang turning more vicious still.’

  Or take the moment in a considerably inferior work of fiction published in 1911, The Belfast Boy by Agnes Boles, when a couple of Protestant girls succumb to terror on catching sight of a body of men coming towards them over Peter’s Hill. ‘ “Look!” cried Maggie Reilly,2 “It’s the Catholics coming to wreck the Shankill.” ’ Confronted with all this coming from both sides, you might find yourself harbouring a degree of sympathy with the author of an even worse novel, James Douglas, when he took a look at Edwardian Belfast and its goings
-on and renamed the deplorable city ‘Bigotsborough’.3 ‘The clash of broken glass was a familiar sound in the streets of Bigotsborough.’

  Sectarian noise was not confined to Belfast. Let us take a look at Portadown. The late George Watson, academic and literary critic, published a pointed essay in the Yale Review in 1986 about his experiences growing up as ‘a Portadown Pape’. Each day, coming home from primary school (he says), he and his friends had to fight Protestant boys who taunted them with the epithet, ‘Fenian scum’. Now – if you gave it any thought at all in this respect – you would take ‘George Watson’ to be a Protestant name. If you then found out that Watson’s father was an ruc constable, the family’s Protestantism would seem to be assured. But it wasn’t so. Both his parents, in fact, were Catholics from the South, from Kilkenny and Connemara respectively, and his father (born in 1898) had got himself transferred North from the old Royal Irish Constabulary after 1922. Members of the ric were at risk of assassination in the South, and Catholics were at risk of assault in Portadown. It seemed there was no escape from sectarian violence anywhere – well, anywhere apart from the family home, especially when the radio was on and a sonorous English voice, reading the shipping forecast or delivering a cricketing commentary, disseminated a tremendous sense of well-being and security.