If you were setting out in search of Irish family stories you probably wouldn't head to North Berwick. This pretty seaside town on the Firth of Forth, a short train ride from Edinburgh, is a sleepy place at this time of year, its streets almost empty, its beaches haunted by the calls of seabirds. Step inside the apartment of Elizabeth McCullough, though, and you'll hear enough extraordinary Irish family stories to wake you right up.
Where to start? That’s the problem. How did the Derry-born writer fetch up in North Berwick, I ask. The answer takes nearly two hours. It begins in the 1930s, with childhood holidays spent on the Inishowen Peninsula, in Co Donegal, and scoots from the Swiss border to the Scottish Isles, through the renovation of a farmhouse in France and a cottage on the Isle of Raasay that she still owns – “Otters and whatnot. My children said, ‘What in the name of God made her choose a place like this? Nobody will ever go to visit her.’ It has been an enormous success” – via the driving habits of her first husband.
His name was Rudolf Beer, and she met him when she was working as a photographer’s assistant in Belfast after the second World War. “He was Jewish. He looked exactly like Bertrand Russell as a young man. He was 42 and I was 21. And my mother was less than pleased. After about three weeks of being married I realised that it was a cataclysmic mistake. He expected me to boil his Aertex underwear in a zinc tub on top of the electric cooker in the kitchen – and not once but twice.”
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Beer drove a sidecar, very badly, with Elizabeth as a passenger. “We drove up the side of Loch Lomond: the road is not much changed to this day. He never learned to change gear, and turned us over on a couple of occasions. I had to lie to my mother. She said, ‘Why has Rudolf such a big gash on his forehead?’ And I said, ‘Oh, he bumped it on the garage door.’ ”
McCullough's grandfather Stonard Ormandy Kendall came to Belfast from northern England in 1910 as Lloyd's surveyor for the Titanic, and settled on the shores of Belfast Lough with his wife, Rosa. "The family went to Gweedore and fell in love with Ireland," says McCullough. "There are pictures. Everybody wearing inappropriate clothing – big straw hats and sunshades.
"It only occurred to me recently: why was he not on the maiden voyage of the Titanic?" she says as she brings bowls of soup to where we sit, surrounded by windows full of Scottish sea and sky. "Because all the senior people were. Probably Rosa said he wasn't going. I come from a long line of very strong-jawed martinets, I'm afraid," she says, laughing.
Square peg
In her first volume of autobiography, A Square Peg: An Ulster Childhood, published in 1997 by Marino Books, McCullough recalls her grandfather; "A sweet-natured man, his usual expression of exasperation was 'bother', but he was on record as once having been so provoked as to exclaim 'damnation'."
Theirs was a world of surface calm, of tennis parties and afternoon teas. Beneath this, however, dangerous domestic currents had to be negotiated: alcoholism, politics, financial figaries. Then came the tsunami of the first World War. McCullough’s uncle died at Passendale; two first cousins were also killed. “They copped it on the Somme. These are all well-heeled young men. The cream of Derry. And most of them, probably, virgins.”
Shortly after her move to North Berwick, McCullough made a chance discovery. “There had been a little hard suitcase of my mother’s – locked – which had gone from one attic to another and was never opened. I opened it.” She found a pile of letters, written to her mother by her mother’s fiance, who was killed in France in December 1917.
"They were very hard to decipher," says McCullough. "First of all when he was writing in pencil on bits of paper. Then he gets a fountain pen." She sorted through the letters, which were published, in 2005, as Jack & Dorothy: Letters from the Front 1915-1917, by "a small private firm which subsequently went belly up". It is a slim but potent volume. The photographs show a pair of happy innocents. The letters demonstrate the awkwardness – and, sometimes, silliness – of youth, the anxieties of first love, the miseries of the war.
They also illustrate, then as now, the emotional complexities of Irish politics. Jack, a Protestant Ulsterman, was nevertheless a convinced United Irishman who noted, when told by a clearly scornful Dorothy of the 1916 Rising in Dublin: “And yet I do believe the devils believed (some of them anyway) that they were fighting for Ireland’s glory. They were wrong of course and have paid with their lives . . .”
Jack’s final letter, dated December 11th, 1917, ends with the words, “You’re all the world to me, Dorothy.” He was killed shortly afterwards, aged 23. She was 21.
For this inexperienced Belfast girl one catastrophe would lead to another. Five years later Dorothy made a disastrous marriage; McCullough’s father was a hopeless alcoholic, and they separated before Elizabeth was born, in 1928.
It's surprising that no publisher has elected to reprint Jack & Dorothy, which McCullough would love to see reappear, perhaps in time for the centenary of the Battle of Passendale, in October 2017. McCullough has written a number of unpublished short stories and two further volumes of autobiography: Late Developer: A Greenhorn in Ghana, 1960-65, which chronicles her years in Africa with her second husband, Fergus, a World Health Organisation official; and Eighty Not Out: Memoirs of a Bad Mixer, published in 2012 by Blackstaff Press, which recalls her own (successful) battle with alcoholism. Of all these though it is probably Jack & Dorothy that deserves to reach as wide a readership as possible.
Eye for character
A glance around McCullough's apartment reveals that her creative interests extend into other areas of the arts. She is a shrewd collector of paintings and ceramics, and no mean potter in her own right. She also, clearly, has an eye for a literary character. At an age when most people would be happy to settle for reading books she is beavering away on her debut novel, Sam's Story. "I decide, sometimes in the middle of the night, where it's going next and which of the characters to send walking into the sunset," she writes in one of her sprightly emails.
McCullough has lived a singular life, and she has chronicled it with impressive determination. In a country where it sometimes seems as if every bird in the bushes has written a memoir – and is celebrated for it – it’s strange to find her here in North Berwick, struggling to make her literary voice audible to an Irish readership. It would be sad if McCullough herself weren’t so spirited and upbeat.
As she celebrates her 87th birthday this month, what does she hope for? “Well, I’d like some recognition,” is the forthright reply. “I’m an Irish writer, after all. And time is running out.”
Conflicting emotions: Letter from the Western Front
An early letter to Elizabeth McCullough's mother, Dorothy, from her fiance Jack, stationed in France.
7 December, 1915
Dear Dorothy,
I’m sorry about your feelings. I didn’t want that you know, but maybe as you’ve said it, it may be good for you. And like most girls of course you would make out that you’re the injured person. You seem to think that all you have to do is “feed the heart” and all will be well. Well if I was English perhaps but I’m not and if you insult me too deeply you know I’d feel compelled not to have any. I didn’t say I wrote with my feet did I? What I meant was that I had wet feet, and I’ll bet you don’t write long letters with soaking feet. Next time you’re writing (not me, someone else) just place your feet in a cold bath with shoes and stockings on and see how much you write.
JS Riggs
