FORBEARS

During my lifetime, happily, I have not had to endure poverty, though certainly my family has not been wealthy.

At home in the Isle of Man real poverty was something I did not see.  Perhaps it simply did not impinge on my consciousness but I doubt if this is so.  I was aware (from hearing my parents talk) that because a family might have money worries, my father would not be called in early enough to see a sick patient, thus leading to worsening conditions.  Money or no money, certainly he would never have refused to go.

Laxey where we lived was a fishing village.  There were jobs in mills and like the rest of the Isle of Man, Laxey was very much involved in tourism.  So, no, I never came in contact with poverty or destitution.

In Dublin my grandmother lived with my aunt in a well furnished, comfortable semi detached house where there was never any shortage.  Dublin was notorious for the beggars on its streets and on the very rare occasions that my aunt took me in to town I saw them.  She gave money to them always but I never had any clear explanation about them and did not equate them with the idea of poverty.

The situation at my boarding school was comparable to that in the Isle of Man.  We all wore uniform so we looked much alike.  The convent was a fee-paying one, so very likely we all came from not very dissimilar middle class backgrounds.  We would not have been brought up sharply against real poverty.

Granted, the nuns would lecture us from time to time about waste and poverty in the world.  But the talk was academic rather than specific.  And the lectures, when they were specific, tended to focus on the hardships of black African babies, rather than on the difficulties of people living for instance in the slums and back streets of Dublin.

Of course the school was in Ireland and Ireland was still very much an agricultural country.  The emphasis was on itself and its historical background; on Britain only in so far as it had affected Ireland. 

I knew nothing about the economic depression in Britain nor do I recall ever having heard about the General Strike.  Even in our final years at school we were more likely to be studying the French Revolution, the Irish Famine, Yeats and the Irish poetry of Patrick Pearce and others.  I do remember learning about the Shannon Scheme and how Ireland was forging ahead with it in order to provide cheap electricity for the whole country.

This all sounds a bit like a pampered existence.  It was not, though I do believe we were cocooned away from the grim realities experienced at that time by so many.  My own family was certainly not wealthy, although undoubtedly there had been money in my parents' family backgrounds.

When it comes to money, however, I reckon my antecedents were pretty good at getting rid of it.

On the distaff side there were coalmines.  My maternal grandfather, however, was an academic, a brilliant linguist, with no interest in coalmining and no intention of taking part in the family business.  He was said to have spoken seven languages, not to mention several dialects.  I know very little about him, other than that he became the Master of a Workhouse and that he was apparently, rather fond of the bottle.  In the end his family cut him off.

My paternal grandfather was a businessman - though not a very good one.  An Alderman of Dublin City Council he was much more interested in civic affairs and particularly in the Richmond Hospital there.  Although he was three times nominated to be Lord Mayor, he declined the honour.  Obviously his civic duties took up a great deal of his time and his business was somewhat neglected.  But for my grandmother's efforts their corner of the rag trade would undoubtedly have been not a little passe.

But she was one very smart lady.  The story is told of her that at the precocious age of four years old, she was competently reading 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'.  I am afraid I cannot believe that she understood it, but one must allow for a little proud familial exaggeration.

Be that as it may, her husband died comparatively young,  leaving the business in decline.  My grandmother took over complete control.  Determined to restore it to a healthy state, she pulled it together again, no doubt by its corset strings.

The smart Dublin set knew where to go for their elegant clothes. Was that side of the business perhaps a sort of haute couture of the times?  A client would come in for a fitting and whilst putting up with the pinning and pinching and snipping, be revived by a dainty little cup of coffee.

I remember hearing the story of one such lady trying on, for the last time, her gown for a ball to be held at Dublin Castle the following night.  The skirt was made of a number of panels of silk, each one lavishly embroidered in seed pearls.  Alas, the coffee went straight down one of the panels!

A disaster?  Not at all.  The panel would be replaced and the gown ready the next day.  A new panel was indeed made and inserted; and Madam, of course, had her gown delivered the following morning.  But the unfortunate little seamstresses had sat up all night, sewing on the seed pearl designs.

So the business flourished and under my grandmother, would no doubt have continued to prosper but for the visionaries and the Easter Rising.  Visionaries?  Dreamers?  Insurrectionists?  Rebels?  Patriots?  Fools?  Well, it is History now.

It was 1916.  The Rising took place.  The battle raged throughout the city.  The Insurgents occupied the General Post Office.  Men died: some for duty, some for dreams, some for just bad luck.  The story has been told and retold.  The Rising was crushed.  One by one the leaders were arraigned and summarily, day after day they were executed.  The Dreamers' dreams had turned to bitter dust.

It was a momentous period in Ireland's history but for my family it was the little side effect that made such a difference.  Up the Liffey came the British so-called 'gunboat' and fired a few shells.  And in Henry Street round the corner from the Post Office, up in smoke went my grandparents' business.

That was in April 1916.  In June of that same year my Irish Catholic father married my English Protestant mother.  He was an Irish doctor in the British Army.  She was an English nursing sister in Great War-time London.  They were married in Mitcham and had not a penny piece behind them.

I am not sorry.  Is it after all such a bad thing for young people to have to make their own way in life?  I am glad that my maternal grandfather had no interest in coalmines.  I would not wish to be rich to-day with money that I was afraid might possibly be tainted by coaldust in the lungs of miners long ago.  Nor would I want to be wealthy on the proceeds from the gorgeous gowns some poor little seamstress sat up all night to sew.

. . . . .

I was born in Dublin on May 5th 1918.  At that time my father was serving in the RAMC with the British Army in France.  He obviously felt that his pregnant wife would be safer out of London and prevailed on her to go and stay in Dublin with his mother - my grandmother, Mary.

I cannot imagine that this was a pleasure for either of the women.  My grandmother was a very able and astute woman, who for years had been a highly successful business manager. Apart from this, she had always been the driving power in her family, very much a matriarchal type.

She had had a loving husband but hardly the best bringer-home of the bacon.  She had had six children and lost three.She was as the one who had to bring up the surviving three. When her husband died it was she who had been forced to become a hard-headed, ruthless martinet in business.  She had built that same business into a soaring success; then in 1916 she saw it go up in flames.

The Riot Act was invoked, which meant no compensation and an economically difficult time ahead.  Finally, to crown her misfortunes, only two months later in that very same year, her eldest son must needs go and marry an English Protestant!

It is hardly likely that she would have welcomed the introduction into her household of that same young woman.  A young woman alien to her in terms of nationality and religion; not only this but one, moreover, with very definite ideas of her own.

For my mother too, the situation must have been fraught with difficulties.  Her father was a man frustrated and as a result, he had an uneven temperament.  He was certainly brilliant, but confined to a small sphere.  With a wife and four daughters to support (his only son died as a baby) he had no scope to exercise his brilliance.

He was inclined to sternness towards his daughters.  He did not go to church himself but decreed that on Sundays, only the Bible might be read.  A family story about him tells that one Sunday he had been inveigled (it was already late) into promising to follow the family to church.

Those were the days when sermons were indeed sermons, the text for the theme of each being 'announced' by the clergyman.  On this occasion, the preacher ascended to the pulpit and cleared his throat.  Then the church door opened and my appalled grandfather, the Master of the Workhouse, stood framed in the portal as, in ringing tones, the preacher declaimed: Behold the Master cometh.  I understand he never again went back to church.

For my mother and her sisters, any infringements of their father's rules could lead to being locked in a bedroom on a diet of bread and water.  Poor man!  Little did he realise that two of his daughters were tomboys and liable to climb out of the window, daring the others to follow.  Annie, their mother, was far too soft hearted to stick to the bread and water regime.  She was also apt to turn a blind eye on the window.

She was a lovable woman and a loving and caring wife and mother.  She was also compassionate.  After the death of her husband she moved to Liverpool, where through her church, she became involved in the rescue and rehabilitation of prostitutes.  This, not infrequently took her out at night and in the early hours of the morning, on to the streets of the city where she endeavoured to carry on her compassionate work.

Another aspect of this compassion was her love for animals which she undoubtedly passed on to her daughters.  This trait has come down through them and still to-day can clearly be seen even in her great-great grandchildren.

For her daughters their home in Wales with a stream running through their garden, was a children's paradise where the madcap girls ran wild.  Childhood life was not all stern father, bread and water and bedroom incarceration.

Indeed, childhood for them held many pleasures (but keep out of Father's way).  Girlhood came and went.  Home ties were not enough to hold the sisters and one by one they left. At that time, nursing was one of the few respectable careers open to middle class women.  So my mother and later her sister, Gwen, trained as nurses in London.  My mother joined Queen Alexandra's Royal Nursing Service.

Renie, my mother, the second eldest of the sisters, revelled in being in London.  Nursing was hard work and poorly paid - for the first year indeed, unpaid.  The second year, a nurse was really privileged.  She received the princely sum of œ5 for the year!

The regime was strict, but then she had been used to sternness.  She had also been the ringleader, at home, in climbing from windows, in madcap games and in devising schemes for dodging the consequences.  Nurses' Homes would not have proved to be any great obstacle.

Yes, for Renie, London was exhilarating, the hub of the universe.  It was as Mecca to the Muslims, the Promised Land to the Jews; or, more appropriately perhaps, simply the pulse of life.  She loved nursing and found she was good at it.  She had no difficulty in passing exams and advanced steadily till eventually she became a nursing sister.

In the meantime, there was plenty of fun to be had and, for a lively, pretty girl like Renie, no lack of young men to help her enjoy it.  Her working life, particularly in wartime, was busy and fulfilling.  She was in no hurry to change it or give it up - until she met my father, Fred.

It was from this background, then, that my pregnant mother went to stay with my grandmother in Dublin.  Like my grandmother, my mother was highly efficient and accustomed to management.  She was more used to giving orders than to taking them.  And of course, Grannie and she had already clashed on a previous occasion over the question of conjugal rights.

My father's brother and sister, Charlie and Florrie, were living at home at this time, which may have helped a little.  Also, next door was a family, the McSwiggans, with whom my mother became very friendly.  At an earlier stage my grandfather had been guardian to the McSwiggan children.  Mother often whiled away time in their house and sometimes Charlie would join them too, for a sherry.  But then the coal scuttle was always kept open so that, in the event of Florrie's coming to find them, they could quickly pop the glasses inside it!

My mother was walking down the then fashionable Grafton Street with Florrie when I eventually declared that I was ready to make an appearance in this world. My poor mother.  What a place to have her waters go.  And my aunt too.  Florrie had been very strictly brought up and she was mortified at such an event happening in public.  She panicked and my mother found herself alone in Grafton Street.  The mishap culminated in a long and difficult birth.  I had to be delivered by forceps and still bear the faint remains of a faded scar close to my right eye.

Mother was ill for months afterwards.  She was taken out to Howth with me and nursed and looked after by Grannie's sister, dear Aunt Maggie.  At the time, however, while Mother was still in the nursing home, Grannie's prime concern was to have me baptised within seven days, as stipulated by the Church.

Mother was too ill to get up, but the family collected me and took me to the church.  Mother wanted me to be called Rhona Lindsay.  Rhona, a Welsh girl, had been one of my mother's best friends.  Lindsay was the name of a doctor who had looked after her and been kind to her on her passage to Ireland.

Grannie was outraged.  The mere idea of some probably heathen Welsh name, and even worse, the name of a man who was in no way related to the family!  Obviously, I must have the name Mary in honour of the Mother of God. Apart from that, the proper thing was to give the child the name of a saint, and since I was born on the feast of Pope Saint Pius V...

The Italian 'Pia Maria' sounds charming but heaven help any child burdened with the English version.  Fortunately, Charlie managed to reconcile the opposing factions.  I was christened Rhona Mary Lindsay and have always been grateful that I escaped becoming Pi(o)us Mary.