As winter light from a cloudless azure sky filters through the stained-glass window of St Matthew’s Catholic church to illuminate the name of the man to whom it is dedicated, some words from DH Lawrence come to mind.
“We are bleeding at the roots,” the poet and novelist once wrote.
At the bottom of the window, those who come to visit this 19th-century church built beside one of the city’s sectarian faultlines are asked to “Pray for the soul of Hugh McDonald. RIP”. On 21 May 1922, while the whole of Ireland was being torn apart through the violent seizures of partition, Hugh McDonald became one of hundreds of victims of religious murder.
The 20-year-old had been travelling on one of Belfast’s trams from the city centre to his home at Saul Street in the tiny Catholic enclave of the Short Strand. The tram was halted by a group of armed Protestants on the Queen’s Bridge over the river Lagan, leading into the loyalist-dominated east of the city. When the gang asked if there were any “Fenians” (Catholics) on the tram, Hugh panicked and tried to get off. The loyalists ran after him, pinning him down in Memel Street where they beat him to death.
Hugh McDonald is one of several residents from the Short Strand area, all of them St Matthew’s parishioners, who lost their lives in sectarian strife during the formation of two states in Ireland. The window next to Hugh’s recalls John O’Hare, another Catholic parishioner who was beaten savagely and then drowned after being thrown into the Lagan two days later.
Hugh’s memorial window was paid for by his grieving mother, my great-grandmother Margaret. It includes a beautifully-crafted icon of a pelican that is a holy Catholic symbol because in legend the bird pierces its breast with its own beak to feed its young; a representation in Christian art of Christ sacrificing himself. Margaret McDonald’s own heart was not only pierced by the death of Hugh in such brutal and merciless circumstances.
Just over two decades after Hugh’s murder, Margaret would have lost three of her four sons to the 20th century’s wars and conflicts. Before she had to mourn for Hugh, my great-grandmother had already endured the death of her eldest son, Andrew. He had joined the Scottish Light Infantry and was killed on the western front towards the end of the first world war.
Catholics honour their dead on the Feast of All Souls – 2 November – by putting out water and salt for the departed whose spirits return. Margaret followed this tradition but added an extra treat for one of her dead boys: a bottle of Guinness. It is said she left it for Andrew every All Souls to remember her eldest son.
War cast its shadow again across Margaret and her Saul Street home 21 years after Hugh’s killing when another son died in the Battle of the Atlantic. On 8 March 1943 the supply tanker ship Fort Lamy sailed past Cape Farewell on the southern tip of Greenland. The ship was caught in a German U-boat attack and torpedoed. Nearly 50 members of the crew were killed, including 36-year-old Henry McDonald, a fireman and trimmer on the ship.
While his brother Hugh is commemorated in a window of the parish church where the McDonald boys were baptised, received holy communion and confirmation, Henry’s name is carved into the memorial to the merchant seamen who died in world wars that stands at Tower Hill, London. He was my paternal grandfather, whom I was named after.
On a dry, bone-chilling day during early Lent, while standing outside the grounds of St Matthew’s back in east Belfast, I was transported back in my mind across oceans, battlegrounds and Victorian cobbled streets, all the time thinking about Margaret McDonald’s lost boys.
She is surely commemorated too in that symbol carved into the centre of the third stained-glass window looking out to Bryson Street. Margaret’s sacrifice of living on for her remaining son, Bobby, to see him grow up and bring up his own family in the same enclave, is captured by the image of the selfless pelican.
And her son’s memorial is also a window to a world where our roots were bleeding and are bleeding still.