A Mind is an Attic
On Trespasses by Louise Kennedy and nosing out a family story
I wrote this in Heathrow Airport before boarding a plane back to Melbourne in time for the release of my second co-written time-slip novel with Nova Weetman, Outlaw Girls. Then I edited it in Singapore and finally sent it when I landed in Sydney. This post has therefore been on a long-haul flight and is very tired, forgive me.
It’s strange the way we don’t know the half of what’s upstairs in our heads. We have overstuffed attics for brains and there’s never a torch to hand when you need one. Then there’s the collective family brain, a dangerous obstacle course. I’ve spent the past weeks in London organising my parents’ actual attic, nosing out objects and their stories, separating things that don’t belong in the same box and reuniting those that make sense together. We’ve had petty disputes over what should be kept or dumped. Meanwhile we’ve all fallen a little bit in love with our history again.
Don’t we have bursts of doing this with our memories? There’s often a trigger, something that leads us up to the mind-attic and helps guide us to the right box. For me the trigger is often a novel.
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Louise Kennedy grew up in County Down near Belfast, and also in Dublin, worked as a chef for most of her life and started writing in her forties. Trespasses, her debut novel, is set in Northern Ireland in the seventies during The Troubles — this typically understated term is used to describe the thirty-odd years of conflict from the 1960s but originated with the Irish Revolution of 1912-23.
In Trespasses a young Catholic primary school teacher has a passionate affair with a married Protestant lawyer. Written with absolute conviction and few frills but rather a distilled beauty, it’s complicated, taut, unnerving, propulsive, and I’ll repeat an earlier word: understated. The affair is dangerous, daring to ignore the persistent, embedded threat of Protestant versus Catholic hostility, daily reports of bloody beatings and assassinations. Here’s a lawyer who takes on cases many think he shouldn’t and a teacher who goes way beyond for her vulnerable students. We know it won’t end well but it still took my breath away. It’s a novel I’d hold in two hands for as long the instructions told me if some of Kennedy’s skill would rub off.
Caught in the cross-fire
Trespasses made me seek out a one-hundred-year-old family story my brother told me once — too late at night and too many whiskies down to remember with clarity. I may also have heard this very story in a history class when I was fourteen but not been able to make the connection. Family history gets tucked away in the wrong box in the attic. I always knew we had Irish ancestry of course, on both sides of my maternal grandparents, but didn’t think I had a right to claim Irishness for various reasons.
We grew up Catholic in London during the eighties. One of the things we were scared of, along with ghosts, injections, and the priest during confession, was the IRA. When I was seven, IRA bomb attacks in London parks killed 11 and wounded 50. The following year an IRA bomb in Harrods killed six. The next year, the IRA tried to kill the Prime Minister. In my simple mind the IRA were the baddies. That position was revised when I had a history teacher at fourteen who spent a year teaching us the history of Ireland, going way way back, and of British colonialism throughout the world. But it’s only with this old dug-up family story that I finally know my link to early Irish republican activists.
On 21st November 1920 my great-grandmother’s cousin was assassinated by Irish revolutionaries, suspected of being a traitor. Captain Patrick MacCormack was a veterinary surgeon who served in Egypt in the First World War, where he tended to the thousands of horses, mules and donkeys who were in continuous work. After his discharge he was employed to purchase horses but somehow his name was added to a list of planned assassinations that took place during one of the “Bloody Sundays” Ireland is known for. Patrick was sitting up in bed in a hotel in Dublin reading the Racing Post, the betting newspaper, when a gang burst into his room. They fired shots into his head, neck, wrist and groin.
Following his murder, Patrick’s grieving mother wrote to Michael Collins, a leading figure in the Bloody Sunday killings and the struggle for Irish independence, to protest his innocence. She told him the family was closely related to several noted Irish activists and demanded to know what proof there was that Patrick was a spy for the British. Patrick’s innocence was swiftly confirmed and it was widely reported that the assassination had been a mistake. There was no evidence that Patrick had betrayed Ireland. He’d been put on a list by a brigade who lacked a decent intelligence unit, a gang gone rogue.
Patrick’s cousin, my great-grandmother Monica MacCormack, born in County Mayo, became the English and plainer Mona Brown by marriage. I wonder what else was lost after that. When I was very small we’d visit Great-granny Mona in a Catholic convent in a chic part of London. She had a beehive hairstyle and was hunched over; she could be jocular or stern and I believed that this depended on how “good” I could be, so I was as stiff as a board every time. Great-granny Mona would insist we eat her sugar-coated jellied sweets and whereas my brother relished them, I treated the invitation like a child being given a dose of cod-liver oil. To me she was as terrifying as Miss Haversham because I had no other context.
Family history gets swept up in the stories we write, though we’re not always conscious of it. The novel I’m returning to Australia to launch, Outlaw Girls, has a major turning point concerning Catholic bushranger Ned Kelly’s plan to kill his friend, the Protestant Aaron Sherritt, who he suspected was a police informant, or “fizz-gig”. This assassination was the beginning of the end of The Kelly Gang. Along with some other aspects of Kelly history, perhaps we’ll never know the truth about Aaron.
Now we’re in a new and unfathomably immoral time of innocents getting caught in the crossfire. Today I find myself out of words and out of comprehension when it comes to the tragedy of Gaza. Let me instead recommend the stunning Trespasses to recapture, reframe, and extract meaning and beauty from a past tumultuous time.
Thank you for reading Voracious.
If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy:
Read: To Sir, With Gratitude: when I was 14 a history teacher changed my life (archived Voracious post from February 2023)
Watch: Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, a 5-part documentary series