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My own stories - a work in progress (2)
I go to Connor, County Antrim
I will always remember vividly the day
in January 1990 when I ventured to Connor, 'returning' to the Cathcart home as
our ancestors were not able to. It
was a wet day and I had taken the train from Belfast to Ballymena and then a
bus from Ballymena to Kells, only a few miles down the road. I was almost demented with excitement
for, although I had travelled several times before to Britain, this was the
first occasion on which I had found myself actually visiting a village whence
came my ancestors. As the bus
trekked along the narrow, rustic laneways into Kells my eyes could not quite
take in all of the sights of the village which I admit is not so much
enchanting as quaint. First stop
was a telephone booth to check into a bed and breakfast. Sadly there were no responses and this
resulted in me booking a room at a country club which the receptionist assured
me was "just down the road a little way".
So, off I trekked along the main street of Kells, into the next village,
Connor, the home of the Cathcarts at last, and then, oddly, found myself in the
countryside. It was raining, my
coat was drenched, my luggage unbelievably heavy and I was
recovering - badly - from a terrible illness that had struck me two days before
in Galway. What was I doing here, I
asked myself, leaning against an ancient standing stone. I wanted to go home. The adversity and trauma I was at that
moment experiencing far outweighed any passion I should have been feeling for
traipsing after all these years the old sod. Nevertheless, off I set with all my luggage and in a
drenched coat into the mists of Northern Ireland, stopping off briefly to
explore the churchyard at St Saviour's Church, then it was up hill and down
dale, along narrow lanes and around corners. I had despaired of ever being found alive again largely
because not a soul in the world knew exactly where I was that day - absolutely
nobody! I was propelled by the
notion that I was probably walking along laneways and roads my ancestors had
done five generations before me, trying to see everything through Matthew's and
Martha's eyes. Totally out of the
blue a woman driving a car honked her horn and asked if I was on my way to the
country club. She had been
standing next to the receptionist at the country club and had heard the
confusing instructions being given to me and had taken pity on me. Although I had grown up knowing not to
accept lifts from strangers, this was no time to refuse help and so I was
driven to the country club from where I telephoned David Cathcart who
immediately drove down to meet me.
David
Cathcart was at the time a gentleman in his late 70s or early 80s. David and his wife took me in on my
word as a distant kinsman, not knowing I existed until I had 'phoned them from that telephone booth. David ushered me about the parish with only an
hour or so of daylight left for me to see the sights my ancestors had
known. He took me to the Connor
cemetery, to Whitestown, the original Cathcart home, and to the Flecks' home at
Tully to meet 88 year-old Willie and his wife Jeanie and daughter, Sarah
Mary. Willie was blind, almost
totally deaf and quite uncomprehending of who this stranger was arriving
unannounced. Although he and I
could not have a conversation, I revelled in listening to him and David talk
about matters they knew of and taking in their delicious accents. (I might mention here that visiting
Connor and Cathcart kin proved to be a revelation on several scores but also on
the subject of accent. I had
always assumed, naturally, that my great-great-grandparents Matthew and Martha would have spoken English
with an Irish accent; not so. All
of the Cathcarts in Antrim are descended from Scots who went to northern
Ireland as Plantation settlers in the seventeenth century. But they have managed, over many
generations, to retain their Scots accents and their language as well. David and his wife explained to me that
there are many words the people of Antrim will use that are Scots and so not
used by the Irish of Northern Ireland.
Even small children speak with a Scots accent which is to be expected
given that their families and teachers also speak Scots). I should also mention that although we
in Australia pronounce the name CATHcart, with the stress on the first
syllable, over there it is pronounced cathCART, stressing the second
syllable, which takes a bit of getting used to when addressing people
formally!)
My brief meeting with my Cathcart kinsfolk
Thankfully
David, being an historically-minded person, knew which sorts of questions to
ask Willie in order to elicit the answers which I might be interested in
hearing. Among other recollections
Willie recalled the day when he was very young trekking into the potato fields
only to find his grandmother dead in one of them. In the course of this meeting I worked out that Willie and my Grandpa were actually second cousins, more closely related than I had imagined
they could be. I was probably at
the Flecks for only half an hour, just long enough for introductions, two
photos - Willie had not known that the first photo had been taken and was
appalled to realise he still had his cap on and insisted on another being taken
without him wearing it - a glance at the countryside surrounding the farm
against the background of the setting sun and to drink in the wonderful
hospitality of the family who, again, had not known I existed until I had landed on
their doorstep with David Cathcart.
With
only literally minutes of light left, David rushed me to Whitestown,
knowing that that was what I had come all this way to see, the townland (row of houses) where
the Cathcarts had originated and he was right: the emotion was well and truly welling up within me as I
stood outside the door of the house they had all lived in so long ago. Whitestown is actually a townland,
nothing more than a long building consisting of three extremely old houses, two
of which had been modernised and where I spent perhaps an hour talking to the
current owners. I was at long last
able to see the home where great-great-grandfather Matthew Cathcart had been
born and lived for twenty years and I walked down the lane which David Cathcart
told me was the same lane my ancestor had walked down one morning on his way to
Australia all those years before, never to return to walk along it again. We
then went back to David's house at Tawnybrack, another townland cluster of
several small farms, for afternoon tea and where I spent several hours just
sitting and chatting, taking in the almost pure Scots accent and hearing stories of the 'troubles' (that part of
Antrim is almost exclusively Protestant).
We then went to the country club for dinner and they bade me farewell at
about ten o'clock after an exhausting, exhilarating, emotion-packed seven
hours.
Too
excited to sleep, I spent hours writing all of my
recollections and reactions in a letter - this was before the days of email! - to relative Bob Cathcart who had been
responsible for this side trip in that he had encouraged me to make it. Nine months later he would see it all
for himself and so two Cathcart scions had made the pilgrimage' to Connor in the
one year.
Although
I was in Connor only from 2 p.m. one day until 11 a.m. the next, it was an
emotion-charged few hours.
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