Following Frances 6: Churchill

I

It’s summer again, and I’m driving from Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, to Churchill, County Fermanagh. Even for me, this feels like coming home.

The trees arch further and greener across the road. I catch glimpses of the lough every now and then. The scents in the air have a western warmth about them.

And the manse at Churchill is only nine miles, as the crow flies, from Frances’s childhood home at Gortnagullion, where her parents and her brother Joe and his family still lived. If you stood on a hill and looked through a gap, you could almost see the turf smoke rising from the McCrea chimney.

You can’t help standing on a hill here. Churchill is exactly what its name implies – quite a steep hill, looping up from the lough shore road, with the church the central point of the village. It’s not actually the Methodist church that gave the village its name, but it seems as though it should have done.

II

It’s a lovely manse, right beside the church, but not physically joined to it like the one at Aughnacloy. It’s double-fronted and substantial, with plenty of rooms to be explored. Today, it looks almost exactly as it does in my postcard view of it from the 1920s. Nora remembers it as ivy-covered, however, so some judicious pruning must have taken place between William and Frances’s tenure and the postcard shot.

As I walk past it, I see somebody ironing in one of the front rooms. I pluck up my courage and walk up the garden path. The doorbell is answered by Charis, who takes a break from the ironing to chat with me about how nice it is to live in this calm, friendly village. I’m too shy today to ask to look round a bit, but my covert glances over her shoulder confirm that many of the house’s original features remain.

III

This pretty place is so pleasant that I have to take a moment to remind myself what actually happened in Frances’s life while she lived here. This is the chronology.

July 1905: the family, William and Frances (now 36 years old), with toddlers Fred, Donald and Nora, moves to Churchill.

6 November 1905: four-year-old Fred, their beloved first child, falls ill.

7 November 1905: Fred dies.

12 February 1906: baby Gertrude is born.

29 November 1906: Gertrude is baptised by Randall Phillips.

3 February 1907: baby Robina is born.

Later in 1907: Robina is baptised. In an unusually flustered and scrappy entry in the baptismal register, no date is given and there is neither a name for the baby nor the signature of a baptising minister.

July 1907: the family, William, Frances, Donald, Nora, Gertrude and Robina, packs their possessions and leaves to move to Donegal.

It’s difficult to imagine what these two years must have been like for Frances, already at a low ebb physically after her recent illness. As the minister’s wife and a very active participant in church and village life, she was on public display. Grief and joy, stresses and depressions, impatience and calm, all seen and shared, and perhaps judged.

I'm unsure exactly how little Fred died. It seems likely, though, that it was related to his scarlet fever, which was thought to leave children more vulnerable to a range of other serious conditions such as meningitis. Nora wrote that he was taken from them after only a few hours' illness. She knew him as a big brother for less than two years, but she remembered and talked about him until she herself was an elderly lady.

IV

Nora didn’t remember the inside of the manse. Perhaps it was easier for Frances to let the children play outside in the gardens around it and in the pretty hilltop road. Here, they visited their neighbours, remembering most fondly the lady in a house across the street, who kindly fed them treats of crystal sugar.

Before my visit, I tried to find out what ladies lived in Churchill at this point and might have been dispensing spoonfuls of sweetness to the manse children. I found some potential candidates.

On Christmas Day of 1905, William officiated at the marriage of Maggie Sanderson, a member of his own congregation, to Patrick McMenamim from Bolusty More, round the lough shore road towards Rosscor. Maggie had until now lived in the village with her brother Thomas and his wife Margaret, and their children Lavinia, in her twenties, and the younger William and James. Lavinia was a witness at the wedding. I wondered if this family, with strong church connections and three doting women, might have been the one.

It’s often hard to tell from census documents where exactly the properties listed were situated. But once I arrive in Churchill, it seems clear.

Across the road from the manse, a couple of houses down, is a charming white bungalow with a walled garden. A plaque beside the door identifies it as Lavinia’s Cottage. Perhaps Lavinia Sanderson inherited it from her parents and lived there until she was an elderly woman. I imagine her feeding the village children with sweets her whole life long, while their mothers look on from their bedroom windows, smiling and regaining strength in the temporary peace and quiet.