Sunday 17 December 2017

Following Frances 4: Swanlinbar, Part 2


I’ve been thrilled by the visceral glimpse into Frances and William’s life afforded by my visit to the derelict Swanlinbar Methodist Church (you can read about it here), and I’m ready to drive away happy. But Gregory wonders if I’ve called at the manse yet. No – I had assumed that the manse lay between the church and the river, and that it’s long demolished.

It’s not. It’s a few houses up the Creamery Road from where I parked my car. Gregory suggests that I call at the door.


IV

I walk out the road, knowing it’s a long shot. But there working in the garden are Noel and his son Conor. I explain my connection with the house and I’m welcomed in. Noel’s wife Kathleen arrives back from doing messages in the town and we begin a tour of the manse.


It’s a gorgeous house, detached and set in a substantial garden, with stabling for a horse. The period features are intact – the tiles in the square hallway, with the staircase rising up around it, the shutters throughout the ground floor, the window frames with some little touches of stained glass. It’s the most elegant house Frances has lived in so far, and as her first manse, it always occupied a special place in her heart. Nora writes about her mother’s vivid descriptions of her new home and of placing her wedding presents around it.


Kathleen and Noel are the most generous and lovely hosts possible. In no time, I’m sitting having my lunch at a big old table in my great-grandmother’s kitchen. It’s bread and cheese and tea. The cheese is fancier than any Frances would have seen, but it’s familiar ground. We talk about the Swanlinbar of today, education and prospects for young people, agriculture, health and Irish political issues. This manse kitchen has listened to such conversations continually over the last 117 years. I feel immensely privileged to be involved in this one, and there’s a very grateful tear in my eye.


V

Frances and William lived here in County Cavan for three years. It was a quiet posting in many ways. Later, when I’m able to see the original documents in the library at Edgehill, I find that William officiated at only one wedding during these years, perhaps his first. It was a winter celebration, when Maggie Jane Moffitt married William Magee on the fifth of December 1900.


Maggie, a seamstress, thirty-one years old, had been living with her older brother Robert, his wife Doria and their seven children on the family farm in the tiny townland of Gortnaleg, just south of Blacklion. After her marriage, she moved in with William, his elderly mother and father and sister Hannah, on their farm in Druminiskill, just across into County Fermanagh. The Magees were a Church of Ireland family, and Maggie left the Methodist Church of her youth to join her husband’s denomination.

The census records of 1911 show Maggie and William living in Druminiskill with their eight-year-old son Richard. Hannah is still with them, occupying the position of unmarried auntie that Maggie had previously held in her own brother’s family. The Magee family remain in their Gortnaleg farm. Doria’s name is now transcribed as Deliah, or perhaps Deriah. The three eldest children have left home, and four more young ones have joined the family. The youngest is baby Wesley Jason, an astonishing mix of names, Methodist and 1970s, to my eye. Interestingly, two of the middle children, including Maggie Jane, named after her aunt, are recorded as being able to speak Irish as well as English.


All of that’s a bit of a diversion, but it’s also a little snapshot of a family history very typical of its time and place. I also wonder about the personal connections between the characters I see emerging from the church’s careful records. Frances and Maggie were the same age and had much in common. Might they have been friends? Might they have kept in touch during the years ahead, as Frances, a great letter-writer, moved from town to town and Maggie brought up her one precious son in the Lakeland countryside? Would they have heard of the important events to come in each other’s lives and sent sincere notes in their similar, careful late-nineteenth-century handwriting?


VI

Frances was six months pregnant with her first child at the time of Maggie and William’s wedding. The baby was due in March. With so many older and younger siblings, nephews and nieces, I would imagine that Frances had attended births before and looked forward with excitement and a realistic idea of what lay ahead for her own first confinement.

Her sister Rebecca, a reassuring and competent presence, came to stay in the manse. Everything was made ready for the expected time. But a complication arose. William received news that Swanlinbar was to receive a visit from the Reverend F E Harte, minister of Carlisle Memorial Church in Belfast, as part of the Foreign Mission Deputation. Fred Harte was a friend of William’s – they had been ordained together. Carlisle Memorial was William’s own home church. Offering hospitality at the manse was the right thing to do.


And despite everybody’s best hopes, the inevitable happened. Frances and Rebecca entertained their visitor warmly, and everyone retired to bed. Almost immediately, Frances went into labour.

Fred Harte tells the tale in his own book, The Road I Have Travelled. “I was three long weeks in the country speaking on week-nights and preaching on Sundays. The tour began at Enniskillen, from which I had a two hours trip down Lough Erne to Knockninny, thence to Swanlinbar, where a little boy was born to the Rev. and Mrs. William Bryans while I was in the manse. There was great commotion during the night, but I slept peacefully through it all. The little boy was called after me.”

Mr Harte was a notoriously heavy sleeper. Later in his book he manages to slumber through the night of the Donaghadee gun-running. Nevertheless, to modern sensibilities, having to stifle your labour cries to avoid disturbing your husband’s colleague in the guest bedroom sounds like a duty too far. Frances was certainly made of sterner stuff, though, and, ironically or as a genuine compliment, the little boy was indeed named Frederick Edward.


VII

Fred was joined the next summer by his brother Donald. The manse and its safe green garden were the perfect place for the little boys to play, and by the spring of 1903, Frances was secretly expecting her third child.



But spring was becoming a time of anxiety. She knew that a move was inevitable, and as yet there was no indication of William’s next posting. With every passing week she looked more fondly round her warm, square, nicely appointed house and feared that its comforts would be hard to equal. Her fears were to prove entirely justified.

Sunday 10 December 2017

Something to do with the sea


I blame the government for my lack of photographic and blogging action recently. This school year we have a new syllabus in place for two year groups, which makes for a much heavier workload than usual. I'm missing my weekends driving round the country - I seem to be spending far too much time sitting at my dining room table surrounded by A level notes instead.


But I did escape briefly from the Renaissance church anthem last weekend to drive one of my nieces along the County Down coast for an afternoon. It was a beautiful cold November day, ideal for a ten-minute walk every time we came to a harbour or a beach. Also ideal for eating at the Mourne Seafood Bar in Dundrum the instant the light went. We had salt and chilli squid, whitebait and mussels, all fantastic. 


It's funny how a short outing like that can completely revive your spirits. It's something to do with the sea, I think. I had to sit down with my notes the instant I got home, but it didn't seem quite such a chore as usual.







Sunday 19 November 2017

Frames and spaces


A high, beautiful space in the centre of Belfast. It's full of ghosts, emanating in layers from its Victorian brickwork. And every corner's a frame for a view, out or through.



We're upstairs in, appropriately, the old Frames snooker hall complex, once Robert Watson's beautiful furniture warehouse. It's stood through world wars, troubles, development and devastation and at least once it's been on the brink of demolition. Now it's waiting for its next act - perhaps an office space, perhaps an apartment.




All around us are faces, torn from magazines, preserved in the aspic of their heydays. It makes me wonder, randomly, how much I'd pay for the chance to look out of these high windows and see the old Belfast they saw. I'd give a lot.





Later, we're in another empty, lovely space. This is the Carnegie Library on the lower end of the Oldpark Road. It's also ready for new life and love, but full of the old energy of its hundred years of reading and learning. 



The architectural details are beautiful. The institutional pink paintwork, a pale, delicate version of the famous Baker-Miller pink, adds to the feeling that we're surrounded by benign spirits, wanting only to sit at a long mahogany table and take their turn with the day's newspapers or request a new Greek primer from the shelves.









You can find out more about the plans for this building here.

Sunday 29 October 2017

Ophelia Day



Unexpected bonuses - and counting my blessings very gratefully as I thought about people who hadn't been so fortunate in her wake - of Ex-Hurricane Ophelia's sweep through Belfast were a day off work and some beautiful light. The afternoon sun was warm and low and the clouds were busy and dramatic.


I went for a long walk round part of the west side of Belfast Harbour, exploring the area round Corry Road, Dufferin Road and McCaughey Road. I was hoping to find some subject matter that would fit the theme of 'Infrastructure', a forthcoming competition round in my camera club. I'm still not exactly sure what will count for this, despite lots of helpful advice. I suspect I'm focusing too much on the details that go on around the infrastructure and not enough on the infrastructure itself. And now that I keep saying and thinking of that word, it's beginning to sound wrong and strange, the way words do when you concentrate too hard on them.


But whatever with the infrastructure, it was an exhilarating walk. There were no other pedestrians round, just one guy on a bike, who winked at me and called out, 'Good luck!'. With what, who knows. But thank you very much.
















Saturday 14 October 2017

Everytown blues



You look behind Main Street.

You let the shadows sink deeper and the cracks show more clearly.

You see the words which hang empty and painful at the back of beyond.


You find the blues of everytown, the sad/beautiful poem that's different and the same every time.