Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  4. The Heavens Are Closed

  ‘Oh, this isn’t busy. When I was younger I barely had time to bless myself but now I just have these few wee things I have to do.’

  Aunt Helen’s few things would have been a full-time job to anyone else. When she was younger she had her eight children, her work as a teacher, community ventures, socializing and devout religious observations… In the nicest possible way, she was like the Terminator: she just kept coming whatever you threw at her.

  Today she had a group of fellow pensioners she took on a weekly treat – ‘the girls’, she called them, although she was the youngest at seventy-four.

  ‘You’d be welcome to join us, but space is limited, they’d end up wanting to be in your novelty car, not my old thing, and the whole excursion would get very scattered and be no manner of treat for you. Did you say you had places to see? A pity your uncle will be no use to you today…’

  Uncle joe had a sacred commitment in his calendar – a golf day. I wasn’t tempted to join him, even as a spectator, although I had read about every course in the province. Ask the Northern Irish Tourist Board what the country’s greatest asset was and your mail box would be stuffed with golf holiday brochures. There were scrappy seaside courses and lush championship-level courses. There were over ninety golf courses in Northern Ireland; the baggage carousels at Northern Irish airports were a constant log jam of awkward golf bags coming from Tokyo, Madrid, Toronto, Helsinki, Capetown… Packs of happy men roamed hotel lobbies wearing one glove, looking like some international convention of absent-minded house-breakers. It took a severe amount of trouble to put off golfers – they had always visited Northern Ireland and known there was more to the place than fighting. So whatever it was they did out in their bunkers with the bent sticks that was so compelling, they’d been good for the country.

  I had bigger prizes to hunt than golf trophies. Just outside Dungannon there was a tiny village called Castlecaulfield, with a ruined castle beside it. Toby Caulfield built the castle in 1619 when he was sent from Oxfordshire to keep the Donnelys down. His boss, Lord Mountjoy, named the region Charlemont, from his own Christian name. The Caulfields became the earls of Charlemont, then took assorted routes into Irish life. Or went back to England as soon as they could.

  People assume Caulfield is a Protestant name; unless they’re Catholics from the South called Caulfield. I once crashed a car in Dublin and the large supervising policeman insisted Caulfield was a County Mayo name. As I’d caused the crash, I didn’t like to argue – and Caulfields were likely to be from anywhere, of any creed. They had hundreds of years as the powerful earls of Charlemont, switching religion through marriage and conversion, or not. Even if they didn’t convert, they had a reputation for being tolerant of Catholicism, especially after the eighteenth-century penal laws were passed forbidding Catholics to vote, join the armed forces or buy land.

  The penal laws also made it illegal to educate a child in the Catholic faith – hence the improvised ‘hedge schools’ for Catholic children and the continuing obsession with education among the Catholic community today.

  The earls of Charlemont backed Henry Grattan in the formation of the United Volunteers, a militia intended to replace British soldiers who were fighting the American Civil War. Although the United Volunteers declared themselves loyal to George III, they took up the American revolutionary cry of ‘no taxation without representation’, campaigning for economic equality for Ireland and an independent Irish legislature. When the Act of Union abolished the Irish parliament, the earls of Charlemont refused to sign. As punishment, the Irish earls were punitively taxed and had most of their property confiscated by the British Crown.

  Castle Caulfield wasn’t much of a prize these days, but the Municipal Gallery in Dublin once belonged to the Caulfields. I’d cast my eye around when I was last in Dublin – a bit of panelling here, a bathroom there… I could see the gallery making a very nice house for me and I’d been considering suing to get it back.

  Castle Caulfield was at the back of a modern housing estate and, apart from the gatehouse, was mostly just overgrown humps. Not a very imposing sort of ancestral home. The house had been burnt by nationalists in the 1920s, as had the other Charlemont home in the area, Castle Roxborough. In 1921 a building contractor had bought the ruin at Castlecaulfield and sold off most of the stone. The locals hadn’t felt very sentimental about the Caulfields at the time.

  I asked the woman in the village shop if she knew why the village was named, just in case she’d any evidence to help me get the Municipal Gallery back.

  ‘Well there is a castle down that way,’ she said. ‘But I only moved here from Coleraine five years ago, I’ve never bothered with it myself.’

  I bought some sweets from her, even though she’d lazily missed her chance to be involved in redressing one of the great wrongs of Irish history… Then again, the earls of Charlemont had probably done quite well out of Ireland and only refused to sign the Act of Union out of greediness to maintain their independent colonial power, not concern for the poor peasantry. It was just possible that if I decided to make a scene, the Dublin government would argue the gallery belonged to the Irish, not descendants of invading English lords, and I’d end up feeling very foolish.

  Disinherited, I drove up to Lurgan on a quest for a more recent ancestor. My Caulfield grandfather was buried there. As I’d never known him and what I did know about him seemed sad, I wanted to check he wasn’t in some terrible neglected or desecrated place.

  My father seldom visited Northern Ireland now and Grandfather Caulfield had few people left to care about him. Those Caulfields that were left, distant cousins, owned the plot and belonged to a branch of Protestantism called the Ebeneezer Tabernacle – a no-frills religion that didn’t believe in gravestones. They were old people, so my parents had decided there was no point upsetting them and sneaking in a gravestone for my poor grandfather, all alone, his Catholic wife buried miles away with her family in Tipperary.

  I had phoned these distant relatives, my grandfather’s cousins. They’d been very friendly and eager to meet, but I’d called at a time when every one of them was stricken with serious old people ailments, one just out of hospital, one about to go in… There were a couple of younger sons, both abroad on business. I was sad not to meet them because any scrap of information about my long-dead grandfather would have been welcome. Belfast Grandma had talked about him very little, my father only had childhood memories of him. There was the shrapnel. A photograph of him looking dapper, hat tipped over one eye, and a letter from some neighbours sent after his death saying, ‘His courtesy and charm will be missed.’

  A snarl-up of heavy lorries surrounded me as I drove into Lurgan. At the same moment a snowstorm came down out of blinding sunlight. I was sure I’d crash and end up in the unmarked Caulfield plot myself. But the snow and the traffic disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived – I could see clearly enough to fling the car into a parking space.

  Lurgan had been a prosperous linen town, and was now a busy shopping and market town. The poet, painter and polemicist George Russell (AE) was born in Lurgan, as was the Quaker scholar James Logan, who had helped found Pennsylvania.

  Of more interest to me, my guidebook informed me that the famous greyhound Master McGrath had been from Lurgan, owned by Lord Lurgan. In the town-centre parish church there was a stained glass window depicting this three-time winner of the Waterloo Cup, and Master McGrath was at the top of Lurgan’s coat of arms. All strange and interesting, because down in Tipperary, one of the ‘must see’ items on holidays to Belfast Grandma was a statue at the roadside of Master McGrath. Maybe we’d been told it was from the same town in the North as our grandfather, but I don’t remember listening to such tales – we’d just liked to stop and look at a big statue of a dog.

  The Shankill Park Protestant graveyard was off the main road and reached through a vast warren of a council estate. An estate with a tricolour flying from every other house. Typic
ally English misjudging Northern Ireland, I worried I might find the graveyard vandalized, gates padlocked… It was fine. It had a wrought-iron fence no higher than an average graveyard fence and the gate was open.

  It was a beautiful little place, well tended with leafing shrubs and dignified yew trees. The grass was rich green and birds were singing. There were graves dating right back to 1760. A large fancy tomb in the middle was for the Brownlows, the English family who’d run everything in the district when English families did. Lord Brownlow had been very active in encouraging planters to come from England and Scotland to take up cheap land leases to develop Ireland’s linen industry. Around this area of the country, several things were named after him, including a burnt-out, lawless estate in the nearby new town of Craigavon. The wretched Brownlow estate was a hive of UDA drug-dealing and intimidation. Probably not the legacy Lord Brownlow would have wanted for himself.

  All along one side of the graveyard was an area of neatly cropped grass – it looked as though unmarked people might be in there, but I realized I wasn’t going to have a psychic revelation to help me find my grandfather. My father had said to ask at the gatehouse to be shown the grave.

  ‘There’s an old boy in there knows where everyone is.’

  There was no old boy now. A friendly young woman in the gatehouse told me she had a map of where all the plots were, but I’d need to get the plot number. Presumably the old boy had died and taken some of his knowledge with him.

  I asked the woman if she knew of people being buried with no headstones for religious reasons, thinking this might narrow the field.

  ‘Oh, there’s lots with no headstones for lots of reasons. Sometimes, if they’re very old graves, the headstones are just lost. Then…’ she pointed to the long blank grass area, ‘there’s all those. That’s a plot the Salvation Army bought for victims of the famine. So there’s an awful lot unmarked.’

  She smiled sympathetically when I said I was looking for my grandfather. She was particularly sympathetic because the wind had just caught one of my eyes, making it water. To stop what must have looked like a weeping Englishwoman on her doorstep, she said gently, ‘All you need to do is go to Craigavon Town Hall, and they’ll have the plot number in their registry. Then I can show you on the map.’

  I thanked her and decided not to bother with the Town Hall. I didn’t need to see what exact patch of ground he was in; I’d seen he was all right, in a pretty and well-tended place. I walked back up through the streets of tricolours and decided being surrounded by them was probably right for him too, a Catholic girl being the love of his life.

  In a newsagent’s I saw a postcard with a drawing of the greyhound Master McGrath. I bought it to remind myself of the strange connection. Turning up in Lurgan and Tipperary, the famous greyhound seemed to have so much to do with my grandparents, I was starting to think of him as a deceased family pet.

  I drove down to Armagh, city of saints and scholars. I started with the saintly end of town, by accident really, because I was looking for a teashop my aunt Helen had recommended – couldn’t find it, but couldn’t miss the imposing Catholic cathedral. Maybe this had been her plan – she knew I’d only be going into a teashop demanding coffee, when really I should be paying more attention to my health and my soul.

  The cathedral nearly made me feel religious, if not like giving up caffeine. There was a steep approach and then a swoop of steps up to a high-spired frontage. It was the kind of ecclesiastical architecture that boomed ‘Sinner!’ at any small humans below. I expected a thunderbolt to pick me off as I climbed and climbed to reach the statues of archbishops at the entrance level.

  I made it. I respectfully familiarized myself with the archbishops while catching my breath. One was archbishop when building began in 1849, the other was archbishop when the cathedral was completed in 1873. Work on the interior went on long afterwards and the dazzle of stained glass, mosaics, paintings and marble had been recently restored and further embellished. It was such a sensual feast I had to be careful not to get over-stimulated and reel back down the long flight of steps.

  Uncle Joe felt there was no need for such a fuss and bother of decorativeness. It wasn’t so much that he thought people should be there for God not the architecture, but that the lavish interior had been provided largely by collections, raffles, bazaars and donations from the local Catholics. And again, the re-embellishment had been paid for by taking up collections from Catholics and gifts from the Vatican. He believed the money could have been better spent solving the ground-level problems of the Catholic Church – compensation for the victims of abuse was one of his suggestions. Or sending it out to the thousands of people dying of AIDS in Africa. I agreed with him. Mostly. But there was something about the celebratory extravagance of Armagh Catholic cathedral that I wanted to exist. I did like to see a bit of joy in a religion, as well as the trying to be good business. I liked a bit of height and spirage to make me amazed that people cared so much about God they’d put all that work into showing they cared.

  ‘There’s also building contractors,’ Uncle Joe reminded me. ‘They’d care a lot about a place like that.’

  Building contractors were busy on Saint Patrick’s Anglican cathedral, so it was closed to visitors. At the core of this cathedral was a fifth-century church, founded by Saint Patrick himself. The Catholic cathedral was also called Saint Patrick’s… And there’s going to be plenty more of Saint Patrick in this chapter, so if you’ve got something against him, I apologize, but it really can’t be helped.

  I visited Saint Patrick’s Trian in the centre of town, thinking it said ‘Train’ and was some kind of holy novelty ride – saints on strings would jump out saying ‘boo!’; skeleton nuns would trail ghostly tendrils of ragged veils across my face; puppet monks would swing across my path on ropes wailing piteously… It seemed like a hilarious idea. But it wasn’t the idea. The Trian was a heritage centre, with a restaurant, tasteful shops, exhibitions and lecture halls. The name Trian came from one of the ancient divisions of Armagh – it was divided into three sections. The heritage centre also had three sections: The Armagh Story, The Story of Saint Patrick and The Land of Lilliput, an exhibition about Gulliver’s Travels. Swift had written a considerable amount of this book while staying near Armagh.

  The woman at the main desk told me there was a bargain ticket if I took in all three exhibitions. With freezing weather outside, no aunt or under-cousins to keep me company, I thought I might as well fill the day and take the bargain ticket.

  ‘Lilliput’s just starting. I’ll phone up and let her know she’s got one more,’ the desk lady said.

  In my haste to buy a bargain, I hadn’t considered that something called The Land of Lilliput might not be a very scholarly and dignified exhibit. I entered a brightly coloured room where a dozen children were dressing themselves in garish approximations of medieval costumes. They were excited, I was embarrassed. I don’t know why, seeing as I started into the building hoping for some kind of saintly ghost train. I think I just felt caught – surrounded by giggling children, I realized that I was in Armagh, city of saints and scholars, looking for a laugh, and I should be trying harder to be appropriate.

  ‘Ah,’ I said to any grown-up who might help me. ‘They sold me a ticket, but I don’t have a child…’

  A nice middle-aged woman in a uniform, ‘her’, presumably, introduced herself as Deirdre and said, ‘Maybe they could have noticed that downstairs and explained.’ She smiled reassuringly. ‘But don’t worry, it is quite interesting to see how the exhibition’s laid out. It’s very innovative.’

  I said I didn’t mind, as long as I didn’t have to dress up.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to. And I promise I’ll answer any serious questions about Swift you might have.’ In a self-effacing tone she added, ‘I’m actually quite a student of his work.’

  Deirdre then clapped her hands, cheerily trilling, ‘Come along, children!’ And led us through to the Land of Lill
iput.

  It was quite spectacular, a twenty-foot model Gulliver pinioned, with dozens of Lilliputians swarming over him – all poking, carrying, squabbling in a frenzy of lively detail. The children loved it, had their photos taken and we moved on to the next part of what I now saw on my ticket was ‘a child-centred interactive experience’.

  The next section used puppets, holograms and films to take us through excerpts of Gulliver’s Travels. It was very soothing to spend time in a darkened room being told a story with holograms, puppets etc. I could have stayed all afternoon, but the lights came back on and the children and I blinked out of the fantasy to find Deirdre again.

  While separating sometimes petulantly reluctant children from their costumes, Deirdre gamely answered my questions about Swift’s connections with Armagh.

  ‘Ah, you see, in Swift’s day, Armagh was a big ecclesiastical centre, so he’d several associates in the area.’ She broke off to stare down a small boy who was refusing to hand over a hat. She faltered; he scampered away hat in hand.

  ‘Bring that back here…!’ She sighed and realized she didn’t care. ‘Anyway, you know what might be more interesting for you. Just round the corner is the Robinson Library, the first public library in Ireland outside Dublin. It has a copy of Gulliver’s Travels in Swift’s own hand corrections. You can see his own mark upon the page.’

  Then, perhaps because I didn’t look as sufficiently interested in seeing Swift’s own hand as a sane person should be, she suddenly added, ‘Did you know that, when he died, Swift left his money to found a lunatic asylum in Dublin? Because, he said, “No country needed it more”.’

  A new crowd of children were pouring in. Deirdre flashed into a big smile and said, ‘Welcome to the Land of Lilliput,’ as she tried to separate two little girls brawling over a pink nylon medieval frock. I could see how doing this all day might make your mind run to where you could find a good lunatic asylum in a hurry.