The poet Michael Longley, previously mentioned in this blog, died last week at the age of 85. I had the good fortune to have Michael Longley as my English teacher at Inst from 1967 to 1969. He was an inspirational young schoolmaster, introducing us to Homer, to Stravinsky, and, in person, to his friend Seamus Heaney, who read some of his first poems to us. Fifty years later I had the privilege to meet Michael again, when I interviewed him, during lockdown, for the Wigtown Book Festival.
With no experience of this sort of interview, I was a wee bit nervous at first, but Michael soon put me at ease, and I greatly enjoyed our conversation. I asked him about the different themes of his poetry and he read some of his favourite pieces. Towards the end of the interview, in answer to questions from viewers, he gave some fascinating insights into the art of writing poetry.
Over the years I carried the slim volumes of Michael Longley’s poetry with me all over the world. I recall asking his permission to read ‘Ceasefire’ at BRAC University in Bangladesh. Michael kindly allowed me to quote from two of his poems as epigraphs in my books of memoirs. My favourite poem of his used to be ‘Detour’, in which he imagines his own funeral meandering along the main street of an Irish market town, never reaching a conclusion. No doubt it will be read this week. I now think that my favourite poem is ‘Laertes’ which he chose, explained and read at the Wigtown Festival. Here is the link to the U tube video of our interview, called the Candlelight Master. The conversation starts at minute 6.20.
One of the joys of writing is learning the response of readers. Strangers tell you that they have enjoyed your story. Old friends get back in touch, and you learn more about one another. And sometimes people whom you did not know well show that they have understood you through your writing: they “really get you”.
Neil Faris was one such understanding reader. I had known Neil since I was a child, but I am closer in age to his younger brothers, Paul and John. I started school, at the age 4, in the same class as Paul, and I was best man at his wedding. John, who became a clergyman, kindly took the service at my brother’s funeral in 2017.
Neil followed this blog. He enjoyed my first book of memoirs Voyages with my Grandfather and encouraged me to write the seque The Corncrake’s Welcome. I sent some chapters to him and he offered meticulous and pertinent observations.
When I learnt that Neil was suffering from a severe form of cancer, I made a point of meeting up with him in Belfast. He was undergoing treatment and was not well, but we enjoyed coffee and scones at a cafe on the Lisburn Road, on a chilly October day. Six months later, he invited me for tea at his flat on the Malone Road, on a bright May morning. We chatted about our families, who have known each other for three generations, and we found that we viewed the world from similar standpoints. He was the grandson of a Presbyterian Minister, and I was a son of the Manse. We both attended Belfast Inst and both went on to study law. Neil’s years at Trinity College and mine at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin broadened our Northern Irish perspective. I felt both enriched and stimulated after our conversations.
Neil died last month. Tributes from friends and colleagues appeared in The Newsletter and the Belfast Telegraph. Neil had been a leading Northern Irish lawyer who fought for justice, human rights, and the environment, and had made a difference in all these fields. He kept going right to the end.
After his death I realised that Neil left me a gift, in the form of a review of The Corncrake’s Welcome which he wrote earlier this year. He thought that it needed polishing, and wanted to discuss it with me, but we were not given the opportunity to do so. Here it is, unedited, and sorry I am to lose an old/new/good friend and a valued reader.
Review of The Corncrake’s Welcome – William D Hanna, Troubador Publishing Limited, Market Harborough
William Hanna was a son of Windsor Presbyterian Church Manse on the Lisburn Road in Belfast, becoming, in a diplomatic career, an ambassador of the European Union. The Corncrake’s Welcome is his engaging memoir of his and his family’s life and times in the Belfast of the 1960s and 1970s.
First of all, William Hanna marries very well elements of his family history. He was able to persuade his father, Rev William Hanna, to write reminiscences of his childhood in Loughgiel, County Antrim. Rev Mr Hanna records a deep love for the County Antrim countryside, evoking the call of the corncrakes, then common enough in the fields around Loughgiel. The community there was ‘mixed’ between Protestant and Catholic and Rev Mr Hanna developed a lasting friendship with a fellow cleric – who became Cardinal Cathal B Daly and who introduced Rev Mr Hanna to Pope John Paul II on the famous papal visit to Ireland in September 1979.
William Hanna records well how both Rev Mr Hanna and Cardinal Daly were, throughout their years of service in their respective churches, true men of peace in the long weary decades of sectarian violence that afflicted Northern Ireland (and the island of Ireland and Britain generally). But there is much else of interest in the reminiscences of Rev Mr Hanna: including his origins in the covenanting tradition of the Reformed Presbyterian Church – a tradition that perhaps may be novel to many protestants.
But William Hanna by no means forgets his mother, Honor Hanna. He includes very interesting extracts of 1942 from her World War 2 diary, when as Honor Boyd, she was a nurse in Belfast. As well as recounting the travails of that life and times she records the deep trauma of the loss on active service in Burma of her brother Jack. Truly, as William Hanna writes, 1942 was a fateful year for the family.
The second half of the book is then the personal story of William Hanna (both growing up in Belfast & at the start of his career in the Irish Diplomatic Service in Dublin).
Now, the ‘Windsor’ area of South Belfast was by no means immune from the sectarian violence which intensified across Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, even though, of course, many other areas suffered far worse. William Hanna recounts episodes where his father as presbyterian minister stood firm against sectarianism and for peace.
Just one example of this. Not in any way an incidental point, but William Hanna records a dreadful sectarian murder at Moore & Oliver’s garage then on the Lisburn Road and almost opposite the presbyterian church. Surely, Rev Mr Hanna was a genuine peacemaker being able to bring not just some comfort to the bereaved family and also, as William Hanna was told, years later at his father’s funeral, how in calling on and praying with the bereaved family Rev Mr Hanna had ‘taken the hate away’. Truly an act of enduring grace.
In summary, there is so much in the book that captures the best of Irish Presbyterianism that it should be appreciated by all those who are presbyterian adherents and also by those who value the contribution that Presbyterianism has made and can make on the island of Ireland and wider afield.
I travelled back to Belfast last month to attend a school reunion at Inst. It was fifty years since I left the school, and I had never before been minded to attend such an event.
A few hundred old boys turned up, in dinner jackets and bow ties, with heads greyer or more bald towards the front tables of the Common Hall, where once ‘eager and joyous in youth’ we donned uniform black and yellow RBAI blazers and school ties.
As Michael Longley pointed out in a video a few years ago, Inst was founded by William Drennan, also founding member of the Society of United Irishmen, and coiner of the phrase ‘The Emerald Isle’, as a place of education for all, with no religious connotations. Indeed until the Education Act of 1947 there were no prayers at Assembly.
That had changed by my time, and when we attended Morning Assembly in 1966 we had to remember to bring red hymn books with us.
In our first years at Inst there was revolution in the air, at least among the bigger boys. I don’t recall that it was about the impending sectarian conflict in our city. It was more triggered by civil rights marches in the US, and student protest in Paris. Having discovered the similarity between our hymn books and Chairman Mao’s little red book, we waved our books in the air, like so many followers of the revolution. Some books were even thrown and trampled on the ground and burned near the tuck shop.
For this irresponsible and irreligious act a few radical pupils were punished. A gust of protest arose. Word went round that we would not sing the hymn the next day at Assembly. But the Principal somehow got wind of our proposed hymn boycott. At 9 a.m. we all stood to attention, as we were expected to, when Mr Peskett entered the Common Hall. But when he arrived on the stage, and took off his mortar board, instead of announcing the morning’s hymn he curtly told us all to ‘please sit’. He announced no hymn. Radical protestant movement in the centre of Belfast had once more been nipped in the bud.
Last month no hymns were sung at our Old Boys dinner, but a prayer was said, and we drank a loyal toast to the King. And, with the words printed on sheets to remind us, we all sang the school song in unison and with gusto.
The words of Inst ! Inst ! Ancient and Royal are stirring, but the music is borrowed from an old German drinking song, of the oompah oompah variety, and it was hard to tell if the old boys were taking the words seriously enough. A finer Inst school song was written in the 1930s by some of our uncles, but it did not catch on, and they may have taken it with them to their graves.
Ten old boys from my year turned up. That’s about 10% of the final year pupils. Half had stayed in Northern Ireland and half had left. Belfast wasn’t such a great place to hang around in in ‘73. It’s much improved today.
Some of us recalled our first English teacher, an Irish hockey international from Cork, who introduced us to Yeats, and got himself into deep water by an impressive but inaccurate throw of a duster across the classroom. It had been the boy behind who was talking, not the innocent chap who still bears the scar on his head.
Michael Longley, our second year English teacher one day brought a pal to his classroom to read his new poetry to us – poems with titles such as ‘Digging’ ‘Blackberrying’ and ‘Follower’ which were later to earn their author ~ Seamus Heaney ~ the Nobel Prize. We recalled how Longley once played a piece of classical music on his record player and asked us to write down the thoughts that came into our heads as we listened. We learnt afterwards that the piece was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Apparently one cultured fellow knew the title of the work.
I was delighted when the President of the Old Boys Association remembered our 1973 Ulster Schools Cup Rugby Final, even though we lost to Ballyclare, and when one old boy remembered playing rugby with my late brother John. There was a moment’s silence for absent friends.
What had happened to us all in the fifty years since we left Inst ? Some joined the family firm, and a pair of good mathematicians entered the insurance profession. A talented scrum-half became an architect; a fine artist chose to teach English ; a clever fellow turned into an Oxford don; and one boy – perhaps our highest flyer – became a pilot in the Canadian Air Force.
It was he who asked me how I became a diplomat, but, just as I was about to answer we were asked to stand to sing that old school song, and we did as we were told.
After that there were good speeches, and plenty of red wine, and I never did get round to explaining how a son of the Manse and old Instonian, brought up in such a British tradition, later became an Irish and European diplomat.
If you are interested to know more you may read my story, and that of my family, and how we responded to the Troubles, in ‘The Corncrake’s Welcome’ , just published by Troubador, available in paperback and soon in e book. https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/autobiography/the-corncrakes-welcome
P.S. I apologize for any inaccuracies that may have occurred in this post. The school’s motto is Quaerere Verum – Seek the Truth, and my memories may not all be accurate or reliable. I welcome observations or corrections.
If you were out and about in South Belfast last week you might have noticed a pair of grey-haired men jogging up the Malone Road and down the Lisburn. Tony was in Northern Ireland for a wedding, and I was there for a funeral. We decided to meet up and revisit old haunts, including Inchmarlo, our preparatory school.
Tony, who is a ski instructor in his retirement, was always a natural sportsman, and still is a competitive runner, placed 150 somethingth in the world in his category. I run in no known categories, local or international, and was relieved that my wonky left knee held up for our 7km circuit, gaining me Strava kudos.
Upon reaching Cranmore Park I found a pretext to halt a while. Where precisely had been the little woods where Miss Strahan led us on nature walks? There was once a pond, fringed with frogspawn, hidden under sycamores and horse chestnuts, giving masses of conkers in autumn. One day the woods were removed to make way for more rugby pitches. Inst’s insatiable quest to win the Schools’ Cup had triumphed over concern for conservation of the natural environment. Back then the ‘environment’ hadn’t yet been invented.
I showed Tony the place where, as I walked home from school at the end of term, along the chalk-flecked footpath, three or four great raindrops fell out of a clear sky onto the page of my report book, smudging the blue ink. I had opened the book to find out my marks and my place in class. We were not supposed to do this before our parents saw the book. My curiosity was now indelibly recorded for parents and teachers alike to see.
I wondered how reliable our memories would be the following day, when we were to tour the school, for the first time in 60 years. Tony pointed out that in my email to the Headteacher I had got our first year wrong: it was 1959 not 1958. But I recalled all the names of the teachers correctly. He was always good with numbers, and became a nuclear physicist. He also taught me my first words of French — which I won’t repeat here: I became a diplomat.
Next day we were warmly welcomed by the Headteacher and her deputy. But for me the school was still under the steely-eyed sway of our Headmaster, the ubiquitous Edgar Lockett. He was standing there, stiff and soldier-like, on the stairs above the Assembly; he was in shirt-sleeves in the covered way showing us how to play forward and backward defensive shots with the cricket bat; and he was smiling as he challenged us to spell Parliament and Government. A couple of lectures he gave me on the importance of hard work still ring in my ears.
I placed myself against the wall under where the clock used to be. This was where you were made to stand if you were sent out of the classroom for bad behaviour. Did this ever happen to me? It must have, for time now slowed down. I could hear the silence all through the building as I waited for the small impossibly suntanned Headmaster, to descend the creaking wooden stairs and quiz me about the nature of my misdemeanor.
Miss Kilpatrick’s class 1959/60 (thanks to Maurice Cassidy)
We adored Miss Kilpatrick, our first teacher, who one day placed fat black pencils in our hands and told us we could write with them. Unfortunately the blue cupboard with its panelled door in Miss Kilpatrick’s room was gone. But its contents were not forgotten. The headteacher still keeps a stash of sweeties as rewards. Miss Lamont mothered us and encouraged creative writing. I once wrote six pages for her about far off lands that I might travel to. But it is still Miss Strahan, striding the football pitch in her tweeds, with her shrill silver whistle, who is the most remembered teacher of those earliest years. She wrote that I must ‘hitch my wagon to a star’ and kept me in after class one day to write five lines: ‘I must not forget my handkerchief’. Tony remembered her pointing finger at lunchtime: ‘Eat that up ! ”
The floors were most familiar. The upstairs pine floor knotted and warped, the assembly hall criss-crossed by oak parquet, and the terrazzo in the cloakroom grey and white, precisely as I remembered it. We were small boys then, close to the ground.
The Ring, an oval-shaped path where we used to run, is still there. I showed Tony the final bend, where I was tripped up one day, and both my knees were sandpapered by the tarmacadam, turning rapidly from white to pink and then crimson. Ouch !
The rounders field now has an all-weather surface, but there is still real grass on the outfield of the main cricket ground. The Fathers v Sons match was due to be held the next day. In my mind Dad’s glorious cover drive rebounded against the red-brick wall. It didn’t matter that he was bowled out next ball. His four runs preserved my prestige.
Cricket at Inchmarlo, (image from school’s website)
Over in the dining hall Miss Weir, with her blue rinse hair, winged spectacles and handbag, was giving us elocution lessons, trying to wean us off Belfast vowels and consonants: “Cruella de Vil’s dinnah pahty took place in a black mahble room … and everything tasted of peppah.”
Next to the dining hall is the bicycle area where one day, when I was ten, I took a mental picture of me and my bike, and said to myself, “This exact moment in my life will never ever return”. I was right and wrong. It has returned many times in my memory, and it did so once more.
Tony and I had our picture taken at the friendship bench. The colourful wooden structure wasn’t there in the 60s, but we were then the best of friends, and remain so today, even though our paths diverged. Tony left when he was 8 years old. We both travelled far from Belfast and heard nothing of each other for over half a century. As I remember it, in our early years there were two gangs. Tony was the leader of one and I was his deputy. As Tony remembers it, he was often accused of being a swot, but I always had his back.
Inchmarlo remains a privileged place. The pupil numbers are small, and teachers have time for them, as well as for old boys. Edgar Lockett told us that the aim of education was to teach us how to think for ourselves. The school motto is Quaerere Verum — Seek the truth. Still a good guide after all these years.
Inchmarlo, Cranmore Park, Belfast (photo from school’s website)
Dr Fay assigned me to the chorus of one of his plays — Antigone — and so I can only make a minor contribution to their history in comparison with those, including the distinguished Irish cleric Rev John Faris, who played the main characters.
I became a classics scholar more by default than design. First form at Inst meant studying foreign languages — French and Latin — for the first time. Our new French teacher was perhaps a better coach of the 1st XV than of 11- year-olds struggling with avoir and être.
However our Latin teacher, Rev. McConnell Auld, was a decent chap, who tolerated our repeated mistakes without pulling our hair. He didn’t seem to notice that we decorated the covers of our New Latin Course textbooks, so that they became so many ‘Newts Eating Courses. The Auld sipped his chocolate, munched his biscuits and exhorted us to soldier on with porto, portas, portat as ‘the girl sits under the tree’ (puella sub arbore sedet) and as ‘the sailors launch their boats into the sea’, (nautae scaphas etc). It was because of the more sympathetic teaching of a dead language than a living one that I chose to study Greek in 3rd form, rather than German like most of my friends.
Rothwell was another good chap, though quite eccentric. He seemed to be obsessed with pigs. I wonder if anyone remembers his brilliant Scottish Presbyterian minister’s sermon which included the phrase ‘Where the Wild Haggises Roam’. He was a distinguished classicist who instilled in us a love of the languages. With only five boys in my Greek class, my turn to answer the questions came round so often that learning inevitably took place. Rothers also introduced us to the classical theatre, taking us down to Dublin to see Medea performed at Trinity, and entertaining us to lunch in The Buttery.
So by the time we entered Charlie Fay’s class, we knew classics quite well, and were inoculated to some extent against his infamous wrath. We steered our way through his lessons more or less unscathed, and without being brought to ‘our knees’ too often. Dr Fay may have seemed a monster to pupils who struggled with classics, but he was kind to those who showed any enthusiasm for the subject. We were few and he needed every one of us to take part in his plays.
In my youth I suffered from stage fright. My first and only starring role at school, at the age of seven, was as one of the Pleiades. Fortunately Miss Strahan, the choreographer of this piece of stellar entertainment for Inchmarlo parents, gave me no words to recite.
A couple of years later my one and only solo performance in the Windsor Church choir also turned out to be a silent one. I had learnt by heart the words of the second verse of The Holly and the Ivy (The Holly bears a berry as red as any blood) but when Alec Mc Neilly gave me my cue to perform in front of the congregation no words came out of my mouth, in spite the organ master’s smiling face, pleading with me to perform.
For a few years after that I succeeded in avoiding any solo stage appearances. When I learnt that my good run had come to an end, and there was no way to avoid conscription into one of Dr Fay’s plays, I was relieved to hide behind a mask, deep in the ranks of the chorus.
The choruses of Antigone were set to music by Geoffrey Trory, or Mr Trog as my Aunt Emily once addressed him, confidently, at a parents’ meeting. I can still remember the rising melody that Trory composed for the first chorus of Antigone:
‘Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these Is Man, who rides the ocean and takes his way Through the deeps, through wind-swept valleys of perilous seas
That surge and sway.’
Behind my mask I was at last able to perform in public. And I also sang in tune, which is more than can be said for some others, including Fay himself, who belted out the words from the wings when he thought the chorus was not getting its message across to the audience loudly enough.
Looking back today I admire the actors who played the leading roles In Antigone, learning swathes of Greek and English text, while all I had to memorize were a few chorus lines. As John Faris recalls, I also had sympathy for the parents who were condemned to sit through the play twice — first in Greek and then in English. Perhaps some of them sat in the Common Hall on a cold winter’s night, reflecting on ancient lessons about the laws of men and the laws of God. I suspect most were counting the minutes until the final curtain fell and they could drive their offspring safely home, through Belfast’s troubled City Centre streets, back to leafy Malone Road suburbs.
Recently I took my grandchildren to Cushendun and pointed out to them the house where, in 1970, we were summonsed by Charlie Fay to stay for a week with him and his wife and daughter, and study Antigone. That Easter I had been at my uncle’s farm in Loughgiel and had cycled over the mountains, past Slieve na Orra, where in 1583 Sorley Boy MacDonnell won a decisive victory against the MacQuillans, and down through beautiful Glendun to the village. It amazes me today that we were taught next to no Irish history at Inst, and certainly nothing about Sorley Boy MacDonnell, whereas we spent long hours translating Caeser’s Gallic wars and learning of battles between Athenians and Spartans.
At Cushendun Fay gave each of us household tasks. Mine was to sweep the kitchen floor each morning, since then a duty I have always taken seriously. We studied Greek all morning, translating the entire play, and were free after lunch. One afternoon one of the main actors in the play (was he Ismene?) was displaying his skills as a fly fisherman, casting into the river Dun, when a wind arose and he hooked his own ear. He was whisked off to the Cottage Hospital in Cushendall to get the hook removed. Comedy and tragedy are but a breath apart.
Today there is a little statue near the spot. It’s just below the bridge, near where Game of Thrones busses deposit sword-wielding tourists, who march solemnly round to the caves to take selfies, or enact battle scenes from the blood-curdling series, before having coffee at McBride’s. In fact the statue is not in honour of a Game of Thrones hero, Sir Jaime or Eurion, nor of Dr Fay, nor even of our unfortunate fisherman, but of a much-loved local goat, the last animal to be culled in the foot and mouth epidemic. Epi demos — from the Greek — a plague upon the people. We ignore the laws of God at our peril.
Thanks to our talented Classics teachers I did well in Greek and Latin ‘O’ levels. My last memory of Dr Fay is passing him in the N block stairwell, seeing him stop and turn round, with a look of regret. saying, “You should be studying Classics at ‘A’ level”. I did not want to disappoint him, but by that time I had found a good French teacher, outside Inst, and my eyes were fixed on Edinburgh and an M.A. course in Contemporary European Institutions.
Over the years I have sometimes pondered on the tale of tragic destiny that Sophocles presents to us in Antigone. I’ve thought of those old men in the chorus, who we first played when we were adolescents, coming on stage to declare, “Woe is me — the Gods are unhappy — this is not going to turn out well.” I sometimes felt my role as EU Ambassador in different countries, attempting to find common language among 28 national positions, was like leading a Greek chorus. Perhaps now that one of the most out-of-tune Member States has left the stage, the sound will be more EUphonious… perhaps not. As the chorus reminds us towards the end of Antigone “The future is not to be known; our present care is with the present; the rest is in other hands.”
Closely Related to Chester 
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