A Twisted Root by Patricia Craig

Author:Patricia Craig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
Published: 2012-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

And what you don’t see in the picture is the drama and agitation surrounding their wedding, the tears and recriminations and delays. Neither do you see their infant son Stanley, born in October 1910. The Craig/Lett marriage was solemnised just a month earlier, on 7 September. A significant date: it was also my grandmother’s twenty-first birthday, the day she came of age. You’d have to infer from this that Emily’s engagement to William Craig did not go down well with the Clonleigh household. I don’t know if Emily’s mother was still alive (she wasn’t a year later, I learn from the 1911 census). She is missing from the domestic fracas. But the girl’s father was there, a man of strong opinions, and something impelled him to keep his fecund daughter from ‘regularising’ her situation until the last possible moment. Had he had other plans for her? It made no odds. The instant she was free to do so – and just in the nick of time – Emily Lett married William Craig. Had she already run away from home and moved in with the villain of the piece at his New Ross lodgings? Or did she remain at Clonleigh and brazen it out before the neighbours, all the while enduring paternal anger and disapproval? It can’t have been an easy time – and I’d never have thought of my grandmother as bold or strong-willed or enterprising; a pliable girlhood, I’d have attributed to her, a docile, amiable disposition. Perhaps I was wrong. Or perhaps none of the above scenarios existed. But you can’t get away from the facts, the dates of the marriage and of Stanley’s birth.

Stanley – or Robert Stanley, as he was christened – was born in Ayr, far from Clonleigh and its contretemps. The previous month, as we’ve seen, his parents were married in the parish church of Templeudigan, County Wexford (St Peter’s), where the officiating vicar no doubt averted his gaze from the bride’s protuberance. The witnesses were an Annesley Kavanagh and an Annie McClintock (about whom I know nothing whatever). The bridegroom’s place of residence is down as ‘New Ross’. His occupation is ‘coachman’. The fathers of bride and groom are both described as farmers. (Why do I think my great-grandfather Craig was at one point in his career a policeman on the Lisburn Road in Belfast? Either it’s a genealogical fallacy – and a few of those will creep in from time to time – or there’s an explanation for the change of occupation which I may find later.) Once married, the errant couple hasten to Scotland, where as far as anyone knows they’ve been man and wife for years. In a short time Robert Stanley comes into the world (was the ‘Robert’ in honour of Burns? Again, I have no way of knowing). Did my grandfather obtain employment as a coachman? It would have been something to do with horses anyway, he worked with horses all his life.

With a name like Craig, you

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