The ghosts from my long-suffering family are no longer haunting me
Take time today to remember your dead: it took thousands of them to make you who you are, writes Miriam O’Callaghan
SUMMER 1906. In Glasgow, the world’s biggest ship, the RMS Lusitania, is launched. In Paris, Captain Alfred Dreyfus is exonerated. In Cork, my grandmother is at home, rinsing a pan after warming milk for her younger siblings at bedtime. She is 12. It’s been one of those golden evenings where even the trumpet-playing angel on St Fin Barre’s Cathedral is molten. As she runs the solitary tap in the house, there’s an urgent knocking at the door.
Her father gets up from his paper, makes sure the bedroom door is closed, puts his arm around his eldest girl. Together they stand at the front window as the rapping rings around the house. Outside, there’s a young woman. As usual, she’s looking directly at them. My grandmother knows she will hear the knocking as long as she sees the woman. The woman is her mother. She is dead a year.
So it was that, several months after she was buried, Catherine Tanner began to visit her family. It was only when the knocking started that husband and daughter confessed to seeing her previously in the kitchen and the yard.
Richard Tanner was a carpenter. He was also a Protestant and an epileptic. In an era when epileptics were freaks, feeble-minded or outcasts, ap- paritions of his dead wife were things he kept to himself. Particularly when he was rearing their six children on his own and determined to do so. He and Catherine had already lost their babies Margaret, Patrick and Minnie to turn-of-the-century epidemics. According to my grandmother, they were an especially loving family.
Until she joined them at 87, my grandmother continued to see the dead among the living. Having “the gift” of being able to walk people over and come back herself, she was much in demand to sit with the dying. She used to say that at almost every death she attended, “someone came” for the dying. She believed the dead wouldn’t harm a hair on our head, rather, it’s the living we should dread, especially the vindictive, the ‘respectable’ and the righteous. My father was of a similar view. The longer I live, the more I appreciate their wisdom.
In that summer of 1906, Richard Tanner was convinced his dead wife would return to the family for one reason only: to warn him of danger to their children. He was right. On August 7, he died unexpectedly in a catastrophic epileptic seizure. Within days, his eldest son would leave for Canada, his baby son would be taken in by neighbours, his other two sons and two daughters, aged between five and 12, would be committed to industrial schools, “sentenced to detention” for their ‘crime’ of “being found destitute orphans”.
I have written here how Thomas (five) and Richard (nine) were detained at Passage West and Greenmount Industrial Schools. Thomas’s committal to Passage West came to light only through the generosity of the Presentation Brothers, in particular archivist Brother John Brazil. In the weeks since, the archivists of the Mercy Sisters, Cork Diocese and The Good Shepherd Sisters, too, have been helpful.
The records of the children are scant, even pitiful. They give committal dates, reason, age, levels of literacy and numeracy, previous character. Why take the risk? A five-yearold orphan could well have been a recidivist murderer or marauder before their rounding up and incarceration.
I find the section “identifying marks” disturbing, imagining the children, unprotected by their parents, being examined by strangers. We seem to have been a unremarkable family, because only Thomas merits an entry. He was of “dark complexion” and had “a long nose”. On transfer to Greenmount aged nine, the only description of this child by the Mercy nuns is as “a good, obedient boy”. I wonder what it took to make him so? For three of the children, release was on “expiation of sentence” at 16. Or in the case of my grandmother’s younger sister: death. Kathleen Tanner died of meningitis five months after she arrived at the Good Shepherds, Sunday’s Well. She was nine.
From the records it is clear the State — and the Church as its agent — were focused on what the children were as a category, not on who they were as individuals. Plus ca change. The cultural carry-on at Tusla/HSE in high-profile cases such as ‘Grace’ suggests that, as a country, we haven’t evolved that much in 111 years.
In 1906, even the sparse record of my grandmother contains the wrong date of birth. This is in marked contrast to the breathless detail the holy herdswomen kept of another child who was her contemporary at the institution: Nellie Organ, or Little Nellie of Holy God.
I don’t wish to offend anyone with devotion to Little Nellie — and I do believe in miracles — but I find it unimaginable and unconscionable that a small girl with dental decay so catastrophic it had invaded her jaw bones, would be carried in a white frock to a pew in a chapel to nurture her ‘mysticism’, and not first in a white gown to a dentist’s chair to relieve the stench, the foul taste, the agony. Maybe the child was hallucinating from toxins and pain as she allegedly clutched the crucifix intoning, “Poor Holy God”.
Even the copious records kept on Little Nellie of Holy God diminish her. Nellie was a suffering, vulnerable child. What she was as Little Nellie of Holy God was a bulletproof martyr barrelling to sainthood, magnifying the Good Shepherds, exalting the local clergy in the icy sight of Rome. As what she was, Little Nellie was conscripted to infantilise a Catholic city, manufactured as an icon for the kind of lunatic piety that dismantled individual lives and damaged our psyche as a nation.
The Tanner girls also suffered from what they were, not who they were, and long before the Good Shepherds. When I was growing up, my grandmother’s constant narrative was that when her father died, his brother Benjamin came for the children but the local priest prevented him from taking them. Why? Benjamin was a Protestant and their Catholic souls had to be saved, in honour of their Catholic mother. The same Catholic mother who came back from the dead in warning to her family.
As a child, I took the story as gospel. As an adult, I began to discount it, not as a lie but more as a salve, so that the children’s abandonment might not seem so abject. But I shouldn’t have doubted her. According to the records, the local curate presented the children to the courts for sentencing by RM Starkie. On that day, Magistrate Starkie, too, saw the four children for what they were — orphaned, destitute, alone in the world, presented by the curate. I wonder what he would have thought, if anything, if he knew who they were by blood: the direct descendants of his ascendancy, county social set.
Growing up, I lived in my grandmother’s house. For 17 years, I saw her every day, thought I knew every story. But she never mentioned her younger sister Kathleen. Just as she never mentioned that her sojourn was at the Good Shepherds — the traditional dread of every girl in Cork.
My grandmother went on to marry a man who had a dim view of colonial Catholicism and the African race for souls. And as her marriage descended into silence, she began to live more with the dying and the dead, among them her own four children, the first her baby daughter, Kathleen.
In researching the family story, it is striking how time and again when it comes to how life turned out for its members, the what assassinates the who: Catholic or Protestant, male or female, old English or old Irish, Cromwell’s soldier or Quaker, heir or disinherited, rich boy marries poor girl and vice-versa. Yet those same records reveal the who of the family in its fortitude and intelligence. I love, particularly, the unmarried, God-fearing Protestant woman raising her son openly with love and pride in a society redolent of The Scarlet Letter. Equally, who the family is can be found in the marriages for love, regardless of religion or class and the inevitable loss of status and money.
So, reader, take a few minutes to remember your dead: it took thousands of them to make you who you are. St Augustine of Hippo said: “The dead are invisible beings, they are not absent.” His saintly reckoning didn’t take account of the who or the what of Catherine Tanner: Corkwoman, mother who defied death itself to defend her children.
Catherine Tanner died of pleurisy on June 30, 1905. She was 36. Now her great-grandchildren have claimed her children, she can rest in peace.
‘She began to live more with the dying and dead; her own four children...’