Better Lives
Animal and children’s rights activist Janice Blakley sums up the Saturday, “My love of and belief in the power of the written word was reaffirmed as I sat in awe listening to the authors at Ballyscullion Park Book Festival. A truly wonderful experience and privilege to have been there. To quote Jane Austen, ‘I declare there is no enjoyment like reading’.” Let Ireland’s leading literary festival begin. Celtic Grace musicians serenade arrivals.
Rosalind Mulholland, who owns Ballyscullion Park with her husband Richard, launches the festival, “You come from far and wide, all over Ireland and the UK. It’s just wonderful that you’re here as lovers of books, ideas, poetry, history and storytelling. I’d like to remind us of the power of literature to connect people across generations and borders. I hope you will discover new voices and enjoy inspiring conversations and most importantly leave with a renewed love of books and storytelling and – really most of all – have a wonderful time!”
Ballyscullion Park, a demesne just beyond Bellaghy (best known as the home of Seamus Heaney: a literary and arts centre has opened in the village in honour of the poet) and above Lough Beg in County Londonderry, is both a private home and a wedding venue. It adapts well to the book festival. The main event space is the Marquee in the Walled Garden. The Ringrose Room and Stables Room, smaller spaces, back onto the Walled Garden. The Mulhollands’ son George manages the grounds and accommodation. Their daughter Cordelia looks after social media and events.
Smaller temporary marquees have popped up for the occasion celebrating the finest of Irish food, art and of course books. Cocobros Chocolate is all about colourful temptations. Exquisite cards by floral designer and photographer Suzie Scott (owner of Florestina which specialises in wedding and event flowers) illustrate her floral arrangements shot against a black background with all the depth of Dutch Golden Age still lifes. Louisa Scott Jewellery is inspired by ancient cultures and the natural world. The talented goldsmith and jewellery designer Louisa is Suzie’s daughter. The Secret Bookshelf has decamped from Carrickfergus, County Antrim, for the weekend.
“It is a singular honour to introduce this wonderful woman at this – so far! – fantastic festival,” says Madelaine Keane, Literary Editor of The Sunday Independent. “Jung Chang was born in China in 1952 during the Cultural Revolution. She worked variously as a barefoot doctor, a steelworker and an electrician. She then left for England in 1978, obtaining a degree in linguistics at the University of York. She was the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Her extraordinary memoir Wild Swans was published in 1991 and sold more than 13 million copies worldwide.”
Madelaine continues, “She went on to write a groundbreaking trilogy of the history of personalities of China including Mao which she wrote with her husband Jon Halliday, the Empress Dowager Cixi and the three Soong sisters. Her books have been unsurprisingly translated into 48 languages and she’s been awarded a CBE for her services to literature and history. Her new memoir Fly, Wild Swans was published last September.”
Jung explains, “After Wild Swans was published in the early 1990s many people have asked me to write a sequel to it but I always thought that there wasn’t enough material to say. And then in 2023 I changed my mind. I was talking to my mother who was very ill in Chengdu in China and I was watching her from the screen of my mobile because I was not able to go and see my mother even at her deathbed because of the books I had written. So obviously I was very sad and I looked at my mother – she was enfeebled by her illness but she was still strong and I thought since the ending of Wild Swans in 1978 more than 40 years had gone by. I wanted to write about our stories along with that of China and to bring those stories up to date.”
Aged 26, Jung passed a national exam for an overseas scholarship but she would not have been able to leave China because her father had spoken out against the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, though, had previously petitioned to the Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, and secured a paper which didn’t clear her father’s name but stated he shouldn’t be arrested.
Over to Jung, “That note got my father out of prison and my mother foresaw that this piece of paper would be useful for her children in the future. She hid the piece of paper in one of the padded cotton shoes which my grandma had made for herself for her crushed and bound feet. The note stayed there for 11 years. And in 1978 my mother unstitched my grandma’s shoe, took out the piece of paper and gave it to the Reformist Government and that got my father rehabilitated, allowing me to leave the country.”
The only British book Jung read growing up was Oliver Twist. She smiles, “The picture of this starving child Oliver with big eyes wanting more was etched into my head when I was a child! We were allowed to read it because it showed how awful Capitalist society was. Before coming to England, the only foreigners I had talked to were sailors in a south China port. When I was studying English we were sent to practise our English with the sailors. My fellow students and I were eagerly awaiting them in the International Sailors Club. We grabbed them as soon as they came on shore and of course we had no idea what must be on their minds!”
She says, “The sailors had no idea what we were talking about because our textbooks had been written by teachers who’d never met foreigners themselves so they were direct translations of Chinese texts. In those days people used to say in Chinese, ‘Where are you going? Have you eaten?’ So that was the English greeting I learned which I used when I first came to Britain!”
Jung settled in London and would marry the Irish historian and writer Jon Halliday. Writing a book about China was not on her mind. That all changed when her mother visited England for the first time in 1988. “We were walking in Hyde Park one day and she suddenly yelled, ‘Look! Look at that stone!’ It was a flat round stone. She said, ‘That looks just like a millstone.’ A millstone was used to crush baby girls’ feet to produce the three inch golden lilies like my grandma’s. So I asked my mother to tell me more about herself, my grandma, the stories. She stayed with me for six months and by the time she left London I had 60 hours of tape recordings and I started writing Wild Swans. It was my mother who made me a writer. I owe my happy and fulfilled life to my mother.”
Madelaine observes how the love between Jung and her mother “just leaps off the pages”. And: “How deeply symbolic it is that the letter that gave you your freedom was stitched into the shoes which were such a symbol of repression.” Jung responds, “My grandma’s bound feet were also the origin of my urge to write Wild Swans in the first place. My mother’s optimism was not wishful thinking or burying your head in the sand. It was to fight to gain what is that seemingly impossible goal. If you lose that optimism and the hope you might as well give up. My mother never gave up. Her life had many tragic events but her stories were never depressing. I drew a lot of strength from my mother when I came to write Wild Swans and Fly, Wild Swans. My hope is also based on rational analysis and not wishful thinking.”
Communism may be less of a segue and more of a connection of dubious tenuousness, but onto Benjamin Treuhaft in conversation with Lynsy Spence, author and founder of The Mitford Society. Ben is the son of Jessica “Decca” Mitford, one of the six Mitford sisters who fuelled 20th century newsreels with gallons of glamour and considerable controversy. Getting into festival spirit, his left big toenail is painted in the national colours of Cuba; his right, China. Decca was the Communist Mitford. Ben is a renowned piano tuner and piano builder. In 1995 he set up a charitable enterprise to send 237 pianos to music schools in Cuba to replace Soviet made instruments ravaged by the tropical climate.
“We didn’t talk much about Decca’s family history until she started getting her fame when she wrote her autobiography Hons and Rebels,” says Ben. “I was about 11 or 12. Then the whole Mitford thing started coming out of the woodwork. I think my mum had been trying to avoid it. She was too busy being a Red! There was a lot of work to do in McCarthyite US at that time.”
He recalls, “None of my aunts forgave Decca for marrying a Jewish lawyer. He wasn’t one of them and didn’t want to be one of them. But mum and Debo loved each other and had respect for one another.” The Communist and the Duchess. The youngest of the sisters, Debo would marry the 11th Duke of Devonshire and transform Chatsworth in Derbyshire into a leading heritage attraction. Ben finishes, “Now all these books are coming out. It’s so nice to have people writing biographies of one’s mother and aunts. Listening to Jung Chang was so fascinating. I wonder what my mum would think of her?”
Ulster University lecturers Stephen Price and Peter McMulllan lead a lunchtime tour of the Bishop’s Palace ruins deep in the estate woodland. They are armed with digital recreation image boards of the 1787 house built by Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry. “The Bishop’s Palace,” says Stephen, “had a 107 metre long façade with a domed central rotunda and two curved wings ending in pavilions which housed art galleries. He also laid out the picturesque landscape. The palace was dismantled in 1813.” An ivy clad stretch of one of the wings is all that remains.
Stephen confirms, “This palace was very similar to Ickworth, the Bishop’s house in Suffolk. The controversial image is our view of the oval hall in the centre of the rotunda. There are no extant drawings of the hall and descriptions are disparate and conflicting. All we know is that it had a double helix staircase accessing the two upper floors. The staircase was salvaged and taken to Shane’s Castle in Country Antrim, which was then destroyed in a fire. Rosalind noticed Fortnum and Mason’s shop in London has a good example of a double helix staircase!”
Richard Mulholland’s fascinating talk on the Bishop’s Palace and Ballyscullion Park is more than worth the sprint across the rain soaked lawn to the Stables Room. “The palace was never completed. The Bishop was a wonderful collector: one pavilion had French art; the other, German art. The portico was reused at St George’s Church of Ireland Church in Belfast. Pillars from the palace are now at Portglenone House in County Antrim. The replacement house Ballyscullion Park was built by Admiral Sir Henry Bruce, son of the Bishop’s cousin, in the 1840s. The architect was Sir Charles Lanyon. Ballywalter Park, my first cousin Brian Lord Dunleath’s house, is another Lanyon house. Some of the ceilings in the two houses are virtually identical.”
He continues, “In the 1840s the Mulhollands’ linen factory at Yorkgate in Belfast was the largest in the world. So the Mulhollands wanted to show off and built Ballywalter Park. It had the most wonderful conservatory but in recent years the metal had rotted and the glass was damaged. Pilkington Glass rebuilt the entire conservatory. It is perfect now. At £350,000 it would need to be!”
Richard’s grandparents, Sir Harry and Lady Sheelah Mulholland, bought Ballyscullion in 1938. Riddled with dry rot, they restored the house, added bathrooms and de-Victorianised it. “My grandmother came from Colebrooke Park in County Fermanagh, a simple unfussy house, which probably inspired her to simplify Ballyscullion. The sandstone pillars are very soft and easy to chip so needed to be restored. We wanted to paint the house white but when I sought a grant from Hysterical Buildings as I call Historic Buildings they wanted it painted Antrim Town Hall muddy brown! We didn’t take a grant.”
“Just after my grandparents finished the major restoration, the house and estate were requisitioned by the War Office as a military base. Most big houses in Northern Ireland were taken over during World War II. It was a small camp here of 80 soldiers. All the furniture was put into storage. At first Ballyscullion was used by the British army who didn’t look after it but then it was occupied by the Americans who were brilliant.” Richard has a literary lineage link: he’s a direct descendent of Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight.
Mid Saturday afternoon the accomplished novelist from Omagh in County Tyrone, Martina Devlin, chats with the American author, journalist – and occasional provocateur! – Lionel Shriver. Ballyscullion doesn’t pull punches but does pull big names. Martina opens with, “A previous mayor of New York City floated this as an idea. In the midst of a housing crisis New Yorkers were to be offered money to host migrants. Lionel takes this as the premise for her latest novel.”
Lionel reveals, “This novel is trying to go at the issue of immigration in a way I find very few or perhaps no other fiction writers tend to do which means I am not just inevitably sympathetic with the plight of the immigrants themselves but I am also sympathetic with the plight of the host population. There are reasons why fiction writers are drawn to telling the story of the immigrant – the conventional quest structure, the immigrant is on a journey facing obstacles, has a goal, is probably disadvantaged in comparison to the host population. It’s a great setup – that’s exactly the sort of thing you want in your heroes.”
“Whereas the host population isn’t going anywhere by definition. It just sits there; it doesn’t seem to have a story. The people who are experiencing a large number of visitors are understood to be the backdrop. They’re either going to be facilitators accommodating newcomers or they’re just going to be bigots. The understanding is these are not important people, they are not the story. I think actually the experience of having your culture transformed before your eyes and inhabited by completely different people who were not invited – I think that is the story. It’s full of moral challenges.”
Lionel sees immigration as a definitive issue and that’s why she’s drawn to it: “Although I would qualify this novel has much more dimension than that. It is not meant to be restrictionist propaganda. I think it’s a book that represents all sides of the immigration debate. It doesn’t approach it as morally simplistic. I think everyone gets a comeuppance in this book including the highly progressive liberal altruistic mother who eventually brings considerable heartache on her family.”
“In some ways this book speaks for the host population but is also very critical because the host population is passive allowing this to happen whereas the immigrants in this book are represented as active,” she insists. “They’re going out and getting what they want. They want what you have and they’re going to get it. In a way the author is quite admiring of this and critical of people who allow themselves to be run roughshod over and give away their resources.”
Lionel believes, “Collectively Western civilisation is the most considerable civilisation the world has ever seen. It has made more advances in every field than any civilisation has ever made. It is something to be proud of but not to take credit for and I think that’s important. It’s something to feel an honour to inherit and an honour to transfer to another generation.” She lived in Belfast for 10 years from 1987.
Martina asks: “The title is A Better Life – for whom?” Lionel replies, “That’s the question. It’s a simple title. It is a resonant expression because we are constantly being told that immigrants are coming into our countries simply because they want a better life. The truth is everything we do in life is motivated to make our lives better. Just because someone wants something is it a good enough reason to give it to them?”
“To provoke a response in the reader is much better than putting them to sleep. A lot of books I encounter are genuinely soporific.” Lionel is in the ring. “I am not going to refuse to write about a subject because I am afraid of offending people. I am also always looking out for topics, plots, people, positions, perspectives that other people are not writing. It doesn’t make any sense for me to write another novel that illustrates that racism is bad. It doesn’t mean that I think racism is good but we don’t need that book right now. I like to write something that fills a gap about a subject that, sometimes for very good reason, no one else is writing about.”
“What do you mean by good reason?” questions Martina. The response: “It seems dangerous. It’s going to get you into trouble. It’s going to have the critics denouncing you. There have been leftwing critics who hate this book and that means I must have done something right. Although believe it or not I am a registered Democrat!”
Martina ends, “To wrap up – and remind everyone this is a literary festival! – do you have a tip for struggling writers?” The diminutive intellectual colossus leans forward: “I think the most important thing is to write whatever you damn well please and don’t worry about what other people think of you. Fearful writing is boring writing. Younger generations have been cowed so don’t allow yourself to be cowed. Don’t think you have to obey the rules. You can break all the rules you want as long as you do it with brio.” Nobody falls asleep during Ballyscullion talks.
Dr Charlotte Blease, who will give a talk the next day on her new book Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us and How AI Could Save Lives, sums up the Sunday, “Ballyscullion Park Book Festival has a very eclectic mix of people and presentations: it’s a charming festival and day out. This event is extra special because of the warmth of the Mulhollands. This is the third year the family have opened their home and estate to host international writers. It’s the most memorable book event I’ve attended.” And so concludes Ireland’s leading literary festival for another year.
For book festival virgins and first timers to Ballyscullion Park, it’s easy to fall in love with both the event and the venue. Lionel Shriver declares in Abominations (2024) “falling in love twice is a lot of times”.
