Joan Trimble, who died recently, personified a world that was sacrificed to tribal pride on both sides of the Border. She was, I believe, the last of her type, though her middle-kingdom species once greatly enriched the culture of the world and of Ireland. Hers was the kingdom of Swift and Berkeley, Hume and Sterne, Wilde and Shaw, Horace Plunkett and Beckett and Yeats. It was of Ireland and was Irish, but there were too many hyphens there for simplicity, too much of a sense of separateness from the majority of the people on this island, too great a sense of kinship with the people of Britain and the world, for normal categories of identity to apply.
Tolerant world
Joan's Irishness was Protestant and catholic and unionist, and we have become so bewitched by tribal simplicities and the falsehoods of our national oracles that many of us find it difficult to understand the benign and tolerant world she represented. She saw in the union between Britain and Ireland an engine for tolerance, for breadth of vision, for a meeting of the cultures of the two islands. She and those who agreed with her might not have been entirely right; but considering the renewed political and cultural links between Britain and Ireland, might she and most Irish nationalists not have been taking different routes towards a comparable destination?
She was at home in independent Ireland; at home in Northern Ireland; at home in London. Her own commitment to Irish culture gave a special sovereignty all of her own. I do not know what passport she travelled on; nor does it matter. She came of a culture in which a passport was a travel document, a mere tool, not a matter of life, death or prison camp.
She was among the last of the high-born Southern unionists to embrace an Irish culture which had been embraced and subverted by republican conspiracists. That bizarre union of flag and gun and oath and jig and reel seized Irish music away from many Irish unionists in the new State in the 1920s, but it had no such effect on the Trimble girls. Their family home was in Harcourt Street, in the very house in which Sir Edward Carson had once lived.
What world was that they knew? And what can we know of it now? The street directory of the time gives us a clue. What was the Church of Ireland Jews Society, which was resident in number 16? Did her family make the acquaintance of local Jews such as Lionel Wigoder and Arnold Bermon, both dentists? Did the Trimbles learn at the Reed Pianoforte School (Principal, Miss Patricia Reed)? Did Joan encounter Harry Clarke in his meetings with the Craftworkers stained-glass artists in number 39? Did she see limping ex-servicemen sheepishly gather outside the British Legion offices at number 28, a score of houses down from the offices of the Ancient Order of Hibernians? Did she ever exchange greetings with the dentist Kevin O'Duffy, one of whose sons, Emer, was prominent in the Easter Rising, the other, Kevin, having been killed in action with the Royal Munster Fusiliers in Gallipoli?
Tangible realities
Thus Harcourt Street 70 years ago - real people living in real homes, and forming real communities of which we know virtually nothing now. How fleeting is human existence that the tangible realities of one era become utterly invisible to those who inhabit only a marginally later one. And somewhere in the Harcourt Street existence, among Jews and Catholics, ex-servicemen, Hibernians and Baptists, Joan learnt an ample version of Irishness that now, finally, is truly flourishing.
She became a musician and a composer, almost uniquely for her time, at home both in the vernacular music of her homeland and in mainstream classical music; and later she went to London, where she, with her sister, enjoyed great success which spanned the decades. But one of her most formative experiences she gained not at first hand but through the eyes of her doctor-soldier-husband Jack, who participated in the liberation of Belsen, and who never properly recovered from the sights he saw there.
When she returned to Ireland in her seventies she did so to manage the newspaper she had inherited the Impartial Re- porter in Enniskillen. She had the twin skills to guide her through the tribal and cultural rapids of that place: at home at once with Irish music and Irish culture, at ease with Britishness and the British identity, she was perfectly placed to cope with the moral and journalistic aftermath of the Remembrance Sunday slaughter in the town in 1987.
Affectation
It was after that fascist atrocity that I got to know Joan. She kept a keen eye on Dublin, and she once reproved me for writing the word "craic". It's an English word, she said; the Irish form came only much later. A bit of an affectation, writing it "craic", no?
It was, of course, and I have come to share her dislike for that rather laboured and pretentious neologism. She disliked phoniness of any kind, which no doubt endeared her to the people among whom she lived her last days. She was celebrated for much of her life for her musical qualities, and in Fermanagh for her passionate defence of peace and mutual regard. But more than any of these fine things, she was a wonderful woman - modest, brave, upright, honest and true: the quintessence of the qualities so highly regarded by the now all but vanished middle kingdom. She was its last queen.