A Twisted Root Read online

  ‘Cultural confusions’ is George Watson’s pertinent subtitle. As far as he was concerned, England was the great good place, a view compounded by his boyhood immersion in English public school stories such as Teddy Lester’s Chums and weekly story papers like the Champion and the Rover. ‘In that world,’ he writes – that is, the world of honour, fair play and English uprightness – ‘you would not see, with that sickening lurch of the heart, three shadowy figures detach themselves from a wall and saunter towards you, while you realised that your mental navigation had let you down ... and you had blundered into an Orange street. In Teddy Lester’s world, you would not get a half brick on the head because you were a “Papish”.’

  The self-perpetuating momentum of sectarian misdoing was the thing that engendered the greatest despair in the hearts of liberals and social reformers of all persuasions, in the past and later. No citizens of Belfast, Benedict Kiely wrote in 1945 in his book Counties of Contention, ‘could congratulate themselves on the uncouth, vicious thing that comes to life at intervals to burn and kill and destroy’. He wasn’t singling out one faction as being more reprehensible than the other, at least at street-fighting level – but of course, as a general rule, liberal opinion in Ireland has always come down on the side of Catholicism. I don’t mean the religious system, indeed, but the elements of society coming under that heading, since social oppression (roughly speaking) was a prerogative of the other side. ‘Avaunt his verses be they ne’er so fine, / Who for the Catholics – refused to sign,’ William Drennan wrote in 1811 about a clergyman-poet who’d declined to add his signature to a petition calling for Catholic Emancipation (see Chapter 4).

  However, no one should be in any doubt that forms of Catholic bigotry exist which are just as virulent and excluding as their Protestant counterparts. If the latter seem to have more aggression about them, it’s probably through being more insistently thrust in our faces. At any rate, this was true in the past. It’s hard to forget incidents like the one described by James Connolly’s daughter, Nora Connolly O’Brien, as she watches a terrified young shipyard worker pelting along Royal Avenue in Belfast with a gang of fifty men, all dressed in dungarees, in hot pursuit. ‘Islandmen chasin’ a Papish,’ she is told off-handedly when she asks a passer-by what is going on.4 Such things were still going on when Sam Thompson brought them to the attention of an audience outside Belfast with his play, Over the Bridge (see Chapter 9), first produced in 1960. And long before the days of political correctness you had a shoemaker in Belfast who advertised his wares with the unambiguous slogan, ‘Wear Kelly’s Boots to Trample the Papists’.

  Well! By the time you reach this stage of bare-faced provocation, you’ve gone beyond bigotry and into some indigenous realm of robust street-assertion – and actually interdenominational entertainment. As a piece of unrepentant Ulster lore, the ‘Kelly’s Boots’ injunction is fit to be cherished by all, along with ‘The Oul’ Orange Flute’ and the story about the Orangeman on the Liverpool boat listening politely to a stranger who was singing the praises of the pope, describing the pontiff as a great statesman and a worthy gentleman personally into the bargain. ‘What you say may be true,’ says the cautious Orangeman eventually. ‘It may be true, but I have to tell you, he has a very bad name in Portadown.’ ... All right, I know I’m getting into a mode of Ulster quaintness here, but bear with me for a moment: I don’t intend to overindulge in it. My aim is simply to indicate a tiny portion of the Northern Irish inheritance common to all of us, whether we kick with the right foot or the wrong foot – or whatever manufacturer’s boots we wear to do it. It would, indeed, be a very po-faced Catholic and nationalist who would fail to be amused by the ‘Trample the Papists’ legend.

  And there’s another, more serious point to be made in connection with that egregious advertisement (and here, at last, I’m getting to the central theme of A Twisted Root). Consider for a moment the name Kelly – or Ó Ceallaigh, as it would have been in its original form. It’s hard to think of anything more suggestive of Irish-Ireland, Gaelic and nationalist and Papist to the core. Somewhere in the background of your ultra-Orange bootmaker a change of allegiance must have occurred. And this, I’m convinced, would prove to be true of most of us in the north of Ireland. It’s only necessary to go back a generation or two, in many cases, to find some abhorrent antecedent popping up to alarm any would-be factional purist – or delighting those of an ecumenical disposition. ... A few paragraphs back I mentioned Brian Moore’s father and his aversion to Protestant bread. Dr Moore was a very prominent figure in Belfast Catholic circles in the 1920s and 30s, and utterly wrapped up in churchly activity – but, as it happens, his own father was a Catholic convert, and Dr Moore had a pair of nineteenth-century Protestant grandparents from Ballyclare to keep under his chapel-going hat.

  That’s just a tiny example of the pervasiveness of ancestral exogamy. Another occurs in the opening poem of Seamus Heaney’s pungent sequence ‘Clearances’, from The Haw Lantern of 1987. It concerns his Protestant great-grandmother whose name was Robinson.

  A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

  Keeps coming at me, the first stone

  Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.

  The pony jerks and the riot’s on.

  She’s crouched low in the trap,

  Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

  Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

  He whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’

  ... And ‘lapsed Protestant’ Glenn Patterson, in his engaging book about his Lisburn grandparents, Once Upon a Hill (2008), doesn’t have to go to any great lengths to uncover the Catholic lineage of one of them (see Chapter 7). And again: take the Falls Road, Catholic, Irish-speaking Carson family, and you find Liam Carson in his memoir Call Mother a Lonely Field (2010), and Ciaran Carson in various places, making no bones about claiming a great-grandfather – another turncoat – who started his adult life as an Orangeman in Ballymena. ‘And all of us thought him a stout Orange blade.’ Another memoir, the generically titled Protestant Boy (2004) by Geoffrey Beattie, evokes a true-blue, working-class upbringing in Ligoniel – but what the young Protestant Beattie doesn’t grasp for years is the fact that his favourite uncle, his Uncle Terry, is ‘one of them’: a Papist. (It’s true that Uncle Terence’s name, O’Neill, which he shares with a prominent Ulster politician, suggests an uncertainty about his denominational origin.)

  I could go on. And I will return from time to time to this melting-pot aspect of our heritage which exists as a strong undercurrent in Northern Irish life, even if many of us aren’t aware of it (or would fiercely repudiate any such integrationist commonplace). As I have indicated, I intend to underscore the point by highlighting a couple of strands of my own ancestry, which for the purposes of this book may be taken as representative. I am endlessly intrigued – without, I hope, falling too easily into an ‘ironies-of-history’ mode of perception5 – by the way things often work themselves out in an unexpected form; and when it comes to Northern Ireland and our sectarian divisions, it could be argued that the whole state of contention is based on a fallacy, the fallacy that every one of us is irreversibly and unequivocally attached to one tradition or the other. (I mean attached by genetics as well as political orientation.) As Irish-German Hugo Hamilton suggested in the title of his 2005 memoir, we are all ‘speckled’, streaked or piebald to a greater or lesser extent.6

  So: ‘Am I an Irishwoman?’ This is the question Brigid Brophy put to herself in one of the wry and spirited essays which she published under the title Don’t Never Forget (1966). Is she? Am I? Once, I’d have firmly believed I had a better right to that designation than a person born and brought up in London, but now I’m not so sure. In my case – and Brigid Brophy’s, and everyone else’s – Irishness, Englishness or whatever is only a part of it. If I go back far enough I find I can call myself Scandinavian (Blacar/Blacker), German (Heller, Stolzenbach) or Latvian (Lett). But if I do, I’ll be in danger
of disappearing up my own family tree, of taking off from its highest branches into some Never-Never Land at the top, where nationality and concomitant characteristics are watered down to nothingness. I’m really not interested in global interconnections; I just want to stick to one tiny spot (Northern Ireland), and try in a small way to undermine its internecine incompatibilities by emphasising all the composite undercurrents running through it.

  As for those ubiquitous ‘ironies of history’ – sometimes something so overwhelming occurs along these lines that it can hardly be assimilated. Sometimes, too, it may get just a bit distorted to improve its impact. For example – the historian R.F. Foster has pointed out that William of Orange’s victory at the Boyne ‘was not, as so often claimed, greeted ... with a Te Deum in Rome’.7 What a pity – however, it remains true that, due to the intricacies of seventeenth-century politics, the pope of the day made common cause with Protestant William rather than Catholic James. Te Deum or not, William’s victory at the Boyne caused rejoicing in the Vatican. Not that it makes a whit of difference in the streets of Ballymena or Portadown. You don’t see an image of Pope Alexander VIII, William’s ally, borne aloft on any Orange banner.

  Sixteen-ninety: let’s go back a century or so from that significant date, to the 1590s and the Elizabethan Wars in Ireland. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to present a potted history, either backwards or forwards: I just want to point out another staggering historical irony that’s come to my attention. Everyone agrees that the outstanding enemy of Elizabethan rule in Ireland was Hugh O’Neill, Baron of Dungannon, Earl of Tyrone, last of the great Gaelic overlords of Ulster. O’Neill was a formidable strategist, well versed in ‘shifts and devices’, half ‘civilised’ by his boyhood exposure to the ways of the English court, half Irish ‘savage’ in the eyes of his military adversaries. For Queen Elizabeth I O’Neill was ‘the fly in the ointment, the crack in the mirror, the thorn in the flesh’ (I’m quoting from Elizabeth Bowen’s 1943 review of Sean O’Faolain’s book The Great O’Neill). Elizabeth’s Deputy, Lord Mountjoy, saw the Irishman as ‘the most ungrateful Viper to us that raised him’; and the queen herself labelled him a ‘villainous Rebel’. All that – and Queen Elizabeth too (had she but known) might have echoed the cry of Macbeth when Banquo’s descendants appeared before him in all their illustriousness: ‘What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom!’ Elizabeth, of course, was childless and the Tudor line died out with her. O’Neill, on the other hand, was prolific in progeny and his descendants are innumerable. One of them sits on the English throne at the present time.8 Queen Elizabeth II is not descended from Elizabeth I. She can, instead, count Hugh O’Neill, that jagged thorn in England’s flesh, among her direct ancestors in the maternal line. Some kind of large dynastic wheel has come full circle here – though whether to the joy or dismay of Irish republicans I can’t be sure.

  Of course none of us, including the queen of England, can help our ancestors, the whole mixed bunch of them – though some in the north of Ireland, when it comes to a question of identity, may choose to believe they are indissolubly one thing or the other. They are not. One of my aims, when I started work on A Twisted Root, was to elevate the dark horse above the sacred cow, to argue for fusion rather than segregation, complexity instead of fixity. Here’s John Hewitt, Belfastman, Irishman, native and settler, again: ‘Kelt, Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane and Scot, / time and this island tied a crazy knot.’

  Chapter 1 – We Had to Build in Stone For Ever After

  Famine and pestilence, grief, greed and slaughter ...

  Anthony Cronin, Letter to an Englishman

  Not long ago I was reading, with great pleasure, Germaine Greer’s book about Shakespeare’s wife.1 This attempt to rehabilitate Anne Hathaway has much to recommend it, not least the aplomb of its central admission, that every one of its conclusions in favour of its subject is ‘probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice’. The accepted prejudice is that Shakespeare, as far as he could, washed his hands of his disappointing spouse. But the meagre known facts of this enigmatic marriage will bear a different interpretation, as Germaine Greer shows. Not that facts alone come into the picture. Greer has gone about the work of scrutinising every available piece of documentary evidence relating to a particular time and place – the Warwickshire market town of Stratford-on-Avon in the second half of the sixteenth century – and assessing the extent to which her findings are applicable to Mrs Shakespeare. Inspired conjecture is the method – and in the hands of an author as adept as Germaine Greer, it makes for a fascinating account. Every bit of her book is interesting and informative – but it wasn’t until I’d reached page 269 that I was jolted out of the usual engaged but disinterested reader’s mode. There appeared on that page a name which held significance for me personally. Katherine Rose.

  Katherine Rose is listed among thirty-nine girls who were born in Stratford in 1585 and baptised at Holy Trinity Church in the town. Another is Shakespeare’s daughter Judith. Of the remaining thirty-seven, Greer tells us, thirteen died young, in accordance with the usual pattern of childhood mortality. Another died unmarried in her early twenties. Most of the other Elizabethan Stratford girls in Greer’s list disappear from the records, probably as a consequence of moving out of the district. They might have gone into service or married elsewhere, Greer thinks. Their subsequent history is lost to posterity, unlike that of Katherine Rose (at least in outline). She – my unimaginably-distant, multiply-great-grandmother – was married at eighteen or nineteen to a local tradesman, a cutler named John Tipping, who either came from Stratford itself, or from one of its outlying villages, Alcester, Alderminster or Leek Wootton, possibly. The marriage took place at the same Holy Trinity Church on 10 June 1604.

  Was Judith Shakespeare, Katherine’s contemporary and perhaps her friend, among the members of the congregation attending that summer wedding in the second year of the reign of King James I? It would please me to think so, but that’s one fact among millions that can’t be ascertained. Was Katherine’s hair worn spread on her shoulders for the last time, before, as a married woman, she had to put it up and cover it with a kerchief? Did bridesmaids waken her that June morning by singing outside her window – her latticed window – ‘The Bride’s Goodmorrow’? ... And by envisaging an episode of early Jacobean revelry (with pastoral elements – in Stratford!), am I resorting to a piece of nursery-rhyme indulgence? Very likely; and I’m now about to make things worse by tying up the unreal picture I have in my head with a different set of pre-nuptial traditions and indigenous joie de vivre. In her wonderful book about the people, songs and traditions of Oriel2 (A Hidden Ulster, 2002), Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin discusses at length a couple of spellbinding songs – among many others – ‘Amhrain na Craoibhe’ (‘The Garland Song’) and ‘Thugamar Fein an Samhradh Linn’ (‘We Brought the Summer With Us’), both associated with ritual Gaelic forms of merrymaking, rejoicing in the arrival of summer, and rife with courtship and fertility implications. ‘Amhrain na Craoibhe’, with its resonant chorus – ‘Haigh do a bheir i ‘bhaile’s haigh di’ (‘Hey to him who takes her home, hey to her’) – is extraordinarily delicate and at the same time, racy. One heady summertime festival, at Forkhill, County Armagh, at which that particular song would have been sung, is dated precisely to 9 June; and it was probably taking place at the same time as the Rose/Tipping wedding, in another country. ... But similar jollifications held an important place in rural communities all over Europe; is there any more than a generic connection between the two different forms of celebration I’ve singled out here? Well, the connection is arbitrary, indeed; but perhaps not quite as arbitrary as all that. The descendants of Katherine Rose and John Tipping did reach County Armagh, but not for some time.

  My mother died in September 2001. The night of the 21/22. It was an unreal time. At her funeral a few days later, at the Catholic church of Kilclief, County Down, where I absolutely did not want to be, I overreacted to the generic jabber of the
young officiating priest who knew nothing at all about her, her kindness to cats, her relish for local, comic turns of phrase, the poems she could quote. ‘True to her faith’; ‘respected in the community’: these were the clichés he spouted. Well, she was a Catholic in as much as she was anything, but for the last thirty-odd years of her life she had ceased to be a practising Catholic, in response to the pressures and influences of the modern world. Religion did not play a great part in her life. Only in the run-up to her miserable death in the Medical Assessment Unit of Downpatrick Hospital did the trappings of her Catholic girlhood begin to creep back, as something to hold on to in a disintegrating world. When a nun entered the ward and sat down by her bedside, my mother claimed to have been ‘brought up’ by nuns, turning herself in retrospect into an orphan and banishing her own resolute mother, and her older sisters, from a selective image of the past which she at that moment held in her head. What she should have said was ‘educated by nuns’, her education running in tandem with a perfectly adequate and not excessively religious home life. But her brain had softened. She was eighty-eight. She thought she was on holiday – ‘This is a nice hotel, isn’t it?’ Then she thought she’d been stuck in some unsuitable location with a lot of drivelling pensioners. ‘There’s nobody my age here. They’re all old people.’ This was shortly before she sank into unconsciousness and ceased to think anything at all. Friends and relations came and went, stroked her hand and exchanged hopeless glances across her hospital-issue coverlet. Through it all, my father, four years her junior and in full possession of his faculties, exhibited remarkable patience and tact (he is not a patient man), going to endless lengths to tempt her with titbits and bolster her spirits. For a long time he believed that, if he got her home, he’d be able to bring her back to herself. But it was plain to everyone else the way she was going.