Mother was so proud of me in 1975 and I was mighty pleased myself. I’d sat my GCSE exams the previous year and now I earned the distinction of being the first pupil of St Colm’s to sit and pass an A level in art. Mr Maguire, my one-time Latin teacher, had now become principal, and it was thanks to his confidence, my art teacher’s faith, and a shaky belief in my own ability that enabled me to pass it. This pivotal qualification was the springboard that would launch me into a completely different world and land me within the esteemed walls of the Belfast College of Art.
Mother was jubilant. Finally her prayers had been answered and my talent confirmed.
I was rewarded for all my hard work in a most unusual way. I had hoped for a few days’ vacation in Portstewart, but it was not to be. I did get a few days away – not in Portstewart, however, but in Purgatory.
My mother, being the devoted beggar of favours from on high, and rarely experiencing the bounty she desired, looked on my A-level success and subsequent admission to art college as a miracle.
She thus reasoned that it was a miracle which demanded thanksgiving of a special kind. A few token rosaries on bended knee would not do – Lord, no. Instead she signed the pair of us up to endure a gruelling, three-day stint in St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg, County Donegal.
Station Island, as it is commonly referred to, has been a centre of pilgrimage since at least the 12th century. Tradition holds that the good man sojourned there for a time yet there is no hard evidence to support this. The so-called Tirechán history puts him in the district of Donegal around the year AD 700. So it is possible that Ireland’s patron saint sought the solitude of one of the lonely caves on the lough in order to pray and do penance.
The island is a plateau of forbidding rock rising out of the still waters. It boasts an impressive basilica with a copper dome – and at that point sadly the grandeur and glamour of St Patrick’s Purgatory ends, as I was to discover during my short captivity.
This basilica started life as a humble church, built in 1780 on the site of the caves where St Patrick is said to have prayed. The imposing structure which stands on the island today is the culmination of many years of construction and artistic endeavour. There are just three other buildings on the barren rock: a small chapel, a dormitory for the pilgrims, and the priests’ quarters.
One can still see evidence of the Celtic monastic period, particularly in the ‘penitential beds’. And it’s in these penitential beds that the true meaning of Purgatory is revealed.
‘Bed’ is hardly the term I would use. These circles which inflict so much pain are the remains of monastic cells, or oratories, where monks passed their days and nights in solitary prayer and contemplation. They are rings of boulders and rough stones embedded in the soil, some at a steep incline; in the middle of each circle stands a crucifix. There are seven in total, each of their names commemorating a saint connected with the Donegal area.
From Draperstown to the island is a 70-mile journey and mother and I travelled the first leg by coach. We had a morning start, so early that it made our WI excursions seem genteel by comparison.
Johnny the Digger (remember him?) had organised this trip. He was a large, pious farmer who wore braces and a belt, which was a wise precaution, given his girth. He was obviously in sympathy with his fellow Kerry farmers who find those twin supports necessary too, ‘just to be sure, to be sure, begod.’
When I think about it now, I believe that Johnny, at some earlier stage in his career, must have contemplated the priesthood, rejected it – and spent the remainder of his life regretting that decision.
How else to account for his passion for doing good deeds for the Church and organising pilgrimages to focal points of devotion? There was Knock, Croagh Patrick, and Station Island, they being the most popular ones in Ireland. The Digger was a dedicated and fervent church layman who took his duties very seriously indeed, that repressed ambition of his being ever to the fore. Not content with allowing us the peace and relative calm of the journey before the purgatorial storm, he would launch into the rosary at every available opportunity. We must have said six in total, with him swaying up and down the aisle, bouncing off seats like an inflated buffalo, and roaring out the decades with some choice pronunciations of those sainted words.
‘Blissed art thou among wimmim!’ he’d bellow. ‘Forgive us our trispisses; and Sacred art of Jezis we place allertrust in ye!’
Whenever he detected a drop in pace or volume in our mumbling he took it as a sign of flagging zeal and blasted out the decades with so much ardour that even the bus windows rattled a response. I was hungry and tired (we’d been fasting from midnight) and now my head was beginning to throb with the Digger’s litany.
It took us over two hours to reach the island. The last leg of the journey was to be by water. When I saw the sodden-timbered boat I suddenly regretted having given in to mother. But I put aside my fear and joined about 90 others, and together we were steered across the lough to whatever it was that awaited us.
Lough Derg actually means ‘red lake’ and refers to the blood of the last great serpent Patrick is said to have slain. There was an urban myth abroad in the 1970s – and, given the superstitious nature of the Irish, probably still has currency – that if a red-haired woman happened to be sharing your boat then the chances were high that it just might capsize and drown you. The belief sprang from the only notable disaster of this nature; it occurred in 1795 when a vessel carrying 93 passengers sank just a short distance from the quay at Station Island. The only survivor was one very fortunate red-haired lady.
Mother and I were rather anxious in the light of this knowledge. Little wonder: among those we knew making the pilgrimage was a friend from my primary school, redheaded Marie. There were lots of anxious faces on that crowded boat when the innocent Marie stepped aboard. I reckon it was the only occasion when people actually prayed that they’d make it to purgatory rather than meet their end beneath the churning waters of a lake.
Not for nothing is Station Island referred to as St Patrick’s Purgatory. Upon landing, you surrender your shoes as well as your right to proper sustenance during the following three days. You also relinquish your right to sleep for the first 24 hours. This ordeal is clearly not for the faint-hearted and, after the first day, I began to question how that joyous A level could have brought down such affliction on my head.
The island was crowded with misery-makers chanting endless rosaries while making circuits of those woeful ‘beds’. There was a timetable of hardship for us to follow: something like 54 rosaries a day to be recited while circumnavigating each of the circles in turn. We paused twice daily for a single cup of builder’s tea – black of course and sugarless – and a slice of dry toast. There were also oatcakes which looked and tasted like compressed cakes of hamster food. I discovered on the first day that one nibble was enough to set my stomach on a protest race, in both directions; so toast tasting like cardboard it had to be.
My poor mother, God help her, was up for it all. She went at these duties with the diligence and fervour of a drill sergeant second-guessing the whims of an inspecting general, and made very sure I complied with every part of the ritual.
Then there were the feet. Hunger and exhaustion were bad enough but the sight of so many naked feet caused me pain as well. I never realised how dainty and inoffensive my own were until I encountered the variety of monstrosities stumbling about the island – a pedicurist’s nightmare, or a chiropodist’s dream.
Having endured enforced insomnia, delusional hunger – I swear I kept seeing Mars bars and French Fancies – and a brain-numbing headache that intensified with each passing hour, I wanted to throw myself into the lough and thrash my way back to sanity. My mother on the other hand took all this hardship in her stride. She smiled and prayed and loved every minute of it. But then she’d been toughened by so many years of hardship.
I could see that this suffering was not so much emotional as physical. Such pain is easier to deal with because it puts the powerless in direct touch with their own, bounded realities. They can see the blood and bruises, and that is joyous; it makes them feel part of the universe. Mental pain is intangible and cannot be so easily displayed. On Station Island the ‘offer it up’ principle, which characterised the Church’s stock answer to my mother’s suffering, was given a somatic vocabulary for all to see.
We underwent an all-night vigil in the ‘Prison Chapel’ – the name says it all. Outside we went, renouncing the Devil resoundingly with outstretched arms. Round and round we went, even if it rained, even if it snowed, buffeted by the wind and the sharp awareness of our sinning selves: praying, praying, praying.
Inside again to the relative warmth of the basilica. Up and down the aisle and nave we went, in single file like prisoners in an exercise yard, invisibly shackled by rosaries, sleeplessness and hunger, chained together by decade after decade after decade. Until at last the awakening sun fell through the stained-glass windows, bathing our heads in light.
The following day I staggered about, as if I had just survived 24 hours in the desert. All moisture pulled from eyes and mouth, my head throbbing. I was simply aching to stretch out on the nearest bench and sink into oblivion. However any attempts at sleep were quickly thwarted by a hearty priest who went about prodding those he saw were about to nod off. There was no escape; I’d just have to endure every bitter minute of it. Meanwhile my valiant mother soldiered on, performing her painful duties, striking her breast, bowing her head, kissing the cross, and desperately whispering her entreaties to God.
At ten o’clock on the second night paradise did indeed come, in the form of a bunk bed and a single blanket. I let mother have the bottom bunk and I collapsed into the top one. Only a set of drab canvas curtains separated us from our neighbours. It seemed that I had slept two hours at most before a bell started clanging outside the cubicle. I peered through the curtains, to see a termagant in green overalls; to the accompaniment of this unmerciful racket she was urging us out into the keen air of dawn. I had the sinking feeling that I’d just woken up in Lowood Charity School; at any minute Mrs Scatchard would haul me out by the hair to suffer a humiliating harangue from Mr Brocklehurst. Instead I got my shoes – my delectable shoes! – handed back to me and sat down to a Dickensian farewell breakfast in the refectory hall. This was to be our final day of purgatory.
Elation swept over me at the thought of release. I could not quite believe that I’d come through the torture. After a final round of the island we departed at midday, my mother ebullient and proud and I exhausted and sick. God had been well and truly thanked and, with the staunch devotion of the time-serving egoist, I kept telling Him that I was due a big favour in return for my sacrifice.