Mapping Norwood: An Irish-American Memoir

Chapter 2: My Father’s Chapter

35 2 My Father’s Chapter And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations. —Alistair MacLeod, “The Boat” The picture I’m looking at is a schoolroom shot. Everyone in the class must have had one taken. There’s a blackboard behind the boy with what looks like a poem chalked on it. He’s wearing a coat that’s too big for him, doublebreasted and rumpled, and a clumsily knotted tie. He’s holding an opened book with both hands. His hair is carelessly combed, and a cowlick falls just above his right eye. There’s a fresh-faced openness and innocence, a touching vulnerability, about him. This is my father, Charles Frederick Fanning, at ten or eleven. The picture is mounted in a colored postcard frame that folds twice for mailing, “copyright 1916 by T. C. Willson.” On the left side, from which the photograph looks out in an oval frame, is a school facade with open door and three steps. A boy and girl are skipping into the foreground . Both are well dressed, the girl in an orange pinafore, the boy in a classic blue-and-white sailor blouse, red tie, high socks, and knickers. He’s carrying two books and a plaid cap. Over all is the poetic gloss: “With lessons over / We’re in Clover / Run and Shout / School is out.” On the right side are a solidly middle-aged, middle-class couple sitting before a cheery fire. The woman has a collar and cuffs of white lace and a book in her lap. The man sits in a wing chair, wearing a smoking jacket and slippers, with a pipe in his mouth. The smoke from pipe and fire swirl up to form a frame for an imagined red schoolhouse with a wooden pump before it. The caption reads: “And to dream the Old dreams over Is a luxury divine, / When my truant fancies Wander to those Old School Days of mine.” Though he may not have known it at the time, the picture marks my father’s educational valediction. He left school after sixth grade and never went back. In the parlance current in my New England youth, there was a whole lot 36 My Father’s Chapter of “mixed marriage” between Protestants and Catholics in my father’s family . The potentially troublesome contradictions were dramatically doubled in that his parents were each half Irish and half Yankee.Typically, much less information is out there about the Irish parts. To some extent, the disparity is due to the difficulty of tracing nineteenth-century Irish Catholic antecedents , most of whom would have been small tenant farmers or farm laborers beforeemigrating.TothischallengecanbeaddedthedauntingMassachusetts context of Irish Catholic genealogical self-deprecation (until recently, that is) in the face of all those Mayflower legatees, Founding Fathers, Colonial Dames, and Daughters of the American Revolution, with their governing passion for energetic self-aggrandizement through family history. My father’s mother, Mary Ann Frances Shedd, was born in New Brunswick in 1877 to an Irish Canadian mother, Bridget Kerrigan, and a Yankee father, Frank Shedd. My father’s father, Charles Winslow Fanning, born in 1876 in Dedham, Massachusetts, had a Yankee mother, Sarah Rebecca Radcliffe, and an Irish American father, John Fanning. About the Kerrigans and Fannings back in Ireland, I have been able to discover nothing before the nineteenth century. For the Yankees, on the other hand, there is a veritable cornucopia of names, dates, and nuggets of history stretching way, way back.About the Figure 5. Postcard with insert photo of Charles F. Fanning, c. 1919. My Father’s Chapter 37 two main families, the Shedds and Drapers, whole books have been published —self-published, to be sure, but books nonetheless. Most of this is very recent news to me—a measure of how little it mattered to my upbringing , by which time any vestiges of Yankee clout were long gone—but I am now able to trace direct lines from my great-grandparents, Frank Shedd and Sarah Radcliffe, for twenty and thirteen generations respectively, back to the British counties of Suffolk and Yorkshire. Shedds and Drapers The Shedds came from Suffolk and Essex, just northeast of London and the home counties...