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Ross Skelton’s parents were an Englishwoman, Christine Knight, from Devon, and an Ulsterman, Thomas Skelton, ex-RAF, of uncertain temper and literary aspirations. Neither was particularly affectionate or nourished any striking ambitions for their older son (though his mother did her best). Both are now dead, and their son’s memoir adds up to a kind of tribute to their resilience and capacity for keeping going in the face of one setback after another. It is also a stark account of a very particular Northern Irish childhood, which achieves the odd effect of seeming typical in a dour Ulster Protestant way while being completely out of the ordinary.
The principal setting for the Skelton family’s changes of fortune is a desolate and windswept spot on the Co Antrim coast between Carrickfergus and Islandmagee, the (perhaps) satirically named Eden Halt. The new Skelton home is a wooden bungalow in a row of 15 plus a railway carriage, to which their belongings, including a new baby, are transported by horse and cart. “Our move from the suburbs to a beach shack occurred when I was nine,” the author tells us drily. “You know we don’t have much money, don’t you?” his father tells him.
The year is 1950. Before this, young Ross has spent a lot of time in the company of his paternal grandparents, Ma and Pa, during their sojourn as caretakers inhabiting the back half of a local big house. The house contains relics of an earlier time of trouble – guns in the pantry – for Pa was active in the famous UVF gunrunning episode of 1912. But politics has taken a back seat in the middle part of the 20th century. The Skeltons have no time for the Orange Order. Young Ross’s understanding of the ancient “Troubles”, conveyed by his grandfather, amounts to the perception that “bad people had wanted to take Ulster away from the Ulster people”.
More immediate concerns are his new school, Eden Primary, with its quota of embryo delinquents, juvenile sex maniacs and Holy Joes, and the shingle beach in front of his home where crabs and lobsters may be found among the rock pools, along with washed-up bottles containing messages from Jehovah’s Witnesses destined to convert the cannibal inhabitants of the South Seas. His days are enlivened by encounters with various bleak local forms of eccentricity, such as neighbours astray in the head and a crazed baker running his delivery van into the sea (the sea having already swept away the Skeltons’ piano, a last reminder of their claims to gentility).
Religion as such does not loom large among the family’s preoccupations, any more than politics, though it has its uses: as a punishment for some supposed misdemeanour, Ross is obliged to attend services at Carrick Congregational Church for a year.
It’s an irksome obligation, for it gets in the way of his enthusiasm for homing pigeons, an enthusiasm due to be superseded by cycling. As it is out of the question that a bicycle might be bought, the resourceful 12-year-old builds one himself, acquiring the components from various sources. “Each Sunday I would set off for a ride up the Antrim coast road.”
By this stage, having passed the 11-plus to scant applause, he's enrolled at the local branch of Belfast High School. Neither at school nor at home, though, is his appetite for fiction stimulated. Indeed, throughout his rough-and-ready boyhood the future professor of philosophy at Trinity College Dublin – and the son of bookish parents – appears to have enjoyed only one children's novel, Enid Blyton's The Island of Adventure. Otherwise it's Superman and horror comics that make up his literary diet.
His father, meanwhile – and despite the family’s poverty – has ordered and receives in the post a couple of volumes of CG Jung’s collected works, whereby he hopes to improve his mental state. His wartime experiences and his temperament make Thomas Skelton an alarming presence about the bungalow. He also, in a sense, emerges as the dominant character in this book, with his beard and his beret, his Ulster-Scots taciturnity, his bad moods and his frequent changes of occupation.
From civil servant to navvy is quite a step, and, if a downwards one, it was initiated voluntarily, as far as we can tell. It was followed, or accompanied all the while, by beachcombing, lobster-fishing, fur-trapping, storekeeping, all interspersed with the scratch, scratch of his Parker pen as he sits each evening in his chair in the corner by the bookcase. “Father lived for writing.”
Thomas Skelton's lapse into labouring resulted in his only published book, Clay Under Clover, written with encouragement from his friend and fellow Carrickfergus man Louis MacNeice. (MacNeice's influence extends to the acquisition of a borzoi to join the more prosaic family labrador, the new dog conferring an added distinctiveness on the figure of Thomas Skelton as he walks it nonchalantly through Eden village.)
The rest of his literary output consists of articles for Country Life, the Anglers' Times and the Belfast Telegraph, the last adorned with illustrations by the young Raymond Piper, who often arrives in his suede chukka boots to visit the family at Eden beach. There he sits, drinking tea with Ross Skelton's mother, looking out across Belfast Lough and inspiring in the boy a temporary ambition to become an artist.
In fact Ross Skelton’s career outlives a wobble or two, including a spell with the RAF at Halton in Buckinghamshire, before he takes matters in hand himself and acts decisively to redirect it towards a distinguished academic future. In the opening pages of his memoir, he admits to harbouring “a deep need for clarity of thought and scientific certainty” – a rejoinder, perhaps, to his father’s much-cherished ideas about the mystical oneness of the universe.
Clarity of thought, indeed, and accuracy of recollection, determine the structure and unfolding course of this compelling memoir, while the author’s deadpan narration sometimes makes a comic business of domestic exacerbations such as constant rainwater from holes in the roof dripping on to the dinner table, or rats gnawing merrily away in the kitchen cupboards.
Patricia Craig's most recent book is A Twisted Root: Ancestral Entanglements in Ireland.
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