Disgusted of Donegal

There is none of the lugubriousness of Angela’s Ashes in this memoir of an Irish childhood in the dim days of old, before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, but Patricia Craig had her problems. In 1959, because of the ‘corrupting influence’ of her misbehaviour, the Dominican nuns expelled her at the age of 16 from their convent school in Belfast, and she was barred from other Catholic schools in the neighbourhood of the Falls Road. Now a respected literary critic, anthologist and broadcaster, Craig reminisces in unequivocal prose that expresses a sturdy and benign temperament. In retaliation back then in Ireland’s medieval era in the middle of the 20th century, she expelled Catholicism from her life. For her, apostasy was liberation.

She tells what she calls ‘the story of an insignificant upheaval’ (which once must have seemed pivotally significant), in ‘an attempt to retrieve a few of the aspirations along with the atmosphere of that distinctive time’. Furthermore, she offers a work of social criticism, undertaken partly to remind myself, and my contemporaries, of the obsolete embargoes we existed under, and the extent to which these were accepted or circumvented.

Presented as symptomatic of the ills of that period, hers is a story of innocent after-hours hanky-panky and its woeful results in the Gaelic summer school at St Tobin’s College in Rannafast, near the Atlantic coast of County Donegal. During a month of rural sequestration, adolescent boys and girls, who slept in separate houses, contrived illicit midnight assignations in the hope that there might be exchanges of kisses. An innocence then prevailed, Craig writes, ‘nearly unimaginable today’.