I’ve been thrilled
by the visceral glimpse into Frances and William’s life afforded by my visit to the derelict Swanlinbar Methodist Church (you can read about it here), and I’m
ready to drive away happy. But Gregory wonders if I’ve called at the manse yet.
No – I had assumed that the manse lay between the church and the river, and
that it’s long demolished.
It’s not. It’s a
few houses up the Creamery Road from where I parked my car. Gregory suggests
that I call at the door.
IV
I walk out the road, knowing it’s a long shot. But there
working in the garden are Noel and his son Conor. I explain my connection with
the house and I’m welcomed in. Noel’s wife Kathleen arrives back from doing
messages in the town and we begin a tour of the manse.
It’s a gorgeous house, detached and set in a substantial
garden, with stabling for a horse. The period features are intact – the tiles
in the square hallway, with the staircase rising up around it, the shutters throughout
the ground floor, the window frames with some little touches of stained glass.
It’s the most elegant house Frances has lived in so far, and as her first
manse, it always occupied a special place in her heart. Nora writes about her
mother’s vivid descriptions of her new home and of placing her wedding presents
around it.
Kathleen and Noel are the most generous and lovely hosts
possible. In no time, I’m sitting having my lunch at a big old table in my
great-grandmother’s kitchen. It’s bread and cheese and tea. The cheese is
fancier than any Frances would have seen, but it’s familiar ground. We talk
about the Swanlinbar of today, education and prospects for young people,
agriculture, health and Irish political issues. This manse kitchen has listened
to such conversations continually over the last 117 years. I feel immensely
privileged to be involved in this one, and there’s a very grateful tear in my
eye.
V
Frances and William lived here in County Cavan for three
years. It was a quiet posting in many ways. Later, when I’m able to see the
original documents in the library at Edgehill, I find that William officiated
at only one wedding during these years, perhaps his first. It was a winter
celebration, when Maggie Jane Moffitt married William Magee on the fifth of
December 1900.
Maggie, a seamstress, thirty-one years old, had been living
with her older brother Robert, his wife Doria and their seven children on the
family farm in the tiny townland of Gortnaleg, just south of Blacklion. After
her marriage, she moved in with William, his elderly mother and father and
sister Hannah, on their farm in Druminiskill, just across into County
Fermanagh. The Magees were a Church of Ireland family, and Maggie left the
Methodist Church of her youth to join her husband’s denomination.
The census records of 1911 show Maggie and William living in
Druminiskill with their eight-year-old son Richard. Hannah is still with them,
occupying the position of unmarried auntie that Maggie had previously held in
her own brother’s family. The Magee family remain in their Gortnaleg farm.
Doria’s name is now transcribed as Deliah, or perhaps Deriah. The three eldest
children have left home, and four more young ones have joined the family. The
youngest is baby Wesley Jason, an astonishing mix of names, Methodist and 1970s,
to my eye. Interestingly, two of the middle children, including Maggie Jane,
named after her aunt, are recorded as being able to speak Irish as well as
English.
All of that’s a bit of a diversion, but it’s also a little
snapshot of a family history very typical of its time and place. I also wonder
about the personal connections between the characters I see emerging from the
church’s careful records. Frances and Maggie were the same age and had much in
common. Might they have been friends? Might they have kept in touch during the
years ahead, as Frances, a great letter-writer, moved from town to town and
Maggie brought up her one precious son in the Lakeland countryside? Would they
have heard of the important events to come in each other’s lives and sent
sincere notes in their similar, careful late-nineteenth-century handwriting?
VI
Frances was six months pregnant with her first child at the
time of Maggie and William’s wedding. The baby was due in March. With so many
older and younger siblings, nephews and nieces, I would imagine that Frances
had attended births before and looked forward with excitement and a realistic
idea of what lay ahead for her own first confinement.
Her sister Rebecca, a reassuring and competent presence,
came to stay in the manse. Everything was made ready for the expected time. But
a complication arose. William received news that Swanlinbar was to receive a
visit from the Reverend F E Harte, minister of Carlisle Memorial Church in
Belfast, as part of the Foreign Mission Deputation. Fred Harte was a friend of
William’s – they had been ordained together. Carlisle Memorial was William’s
own home church. Offering hospitality at the manse was the right thing to do.
And despite everybody’s best hopes, the inevitable happened.
Frances and Rebecca entertained their visitor warmly, and everyone retired to
bed. Almost immediately, Frances went into labour.
Fred Harte tells the tale in his own book, The Road I Have Travelled. “I was three
long weeks in the country speaking on week-nights and preaching on Sundays. The
tour began at Enniskillen, from which I had a two hours trip down Lough Erne to
Knockninny, thence to Swanlinbar, where a little boy was born to the Rev. and
Mrs. William Bryans while I was in the manse. There was great commotion during
the night, but I slept peacefully through it all. The little boy was called
after me.”
Mr Harte was a notoriously heavy sleeper. Later in his book
he manages to slumber through the night of the Donaghadee gun-running. Nevertheless,
to modern sensibilities, having to stifle your labour cries to avoid disturbing
your husband’s colleague in the guest bedroom sounds like a duty too far.
Frances was certainly made of sterner stuff, though, and, ironically or as a
genuine compliment, the little boy was indeed named Frederick Edward.
VII
Fred was joined the next summer by his brother Donald. The
manse and its safe green garden were the perfect place for the little boys to
play, and by the spring of 1903, Frances was secretly expecting her third
child.
But spring was becoming a time of anxiety. She knew that a
move was inevitable, and as yet there was no indication of William’s next
posting. With every passing week she looked more fondly round her warm, square,
nicely appointed house and feared that its comforts would be hard to equal. Her
fears were to prove entirely justified.
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