On 21 May 1932, Amelia Earhart made aviation history as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, landing just outside Derry in a city-side area known as Cornshell. More specifically, she landed in Gallagher’s field. More specifically – even still – she landed in the field above our new house. When asked later why she had done it, what it was that had driven her to make that journey, what had emboldened her for such a courageous undertaking, she replied: ‘I just wanted to see if I could fly the Atlantic alone. We all fly Atlantics in our own way . . .’
The history of flight is the history of a dream. It speaks of courage and of diving into the unknown: places outwith our everyday maps. What is it about being suspended above the earth that holds such intrigue for us? Flight is one of the most common dreams people have at key moments in their lives. We are, when we fly, neither on solid ground nor in the open air. It is a place all of its own making.
Humans have dreamed of flight for moons upon moons, perhaps since dreaming began. We imitate birds. We try to mirror their ways – to be winged and full of untethered freedom; we try to fly. The humans in our legends and fairytales, our folklore and myth, are often able to fly and we have grown up with the desire for wings embedded in our being. Ancient Chinese, Persian, Roman, Arabic and Celtic people have all tried to fly. Monks, scholars, warriors and craftsmen tried to build flying machines. We are a race that longs to be a winged one. One of the earliest and best-known accounts of flight comes from Greek mythology. Daedalus angered King Minos – ruler of the island of Crete – and had to flee immediately. The inventor Daedalus collected enough feathers from the eagles that flew above him to make wings. Minos’ men were within firing distance now. He took his son to the edge of the cliff, placed wings on their human forms, and made for the sky’s uncharted territory. Daedalus instructed his son to fly in the middle – to hold his place in the in-between, to have the courage to be neither here nor there. The end of the story is well known to many. Icarus, intoxicated with the thrill of flying, flew too high. The wax melted on his wings, and the feathers fell out. He was left flapping his bare arms. Daedalus watched his son fall into the depths of the waters below, swallowed up whole by the belly of the sea.
We weren’t exactly living on a cliff by the edge of the sea that winter when I turned twelve, but we were closer to water than we had been before, and its presence was a constant source of nourishment. We were – despite being surrounded by concrete and the leftover spoilage of constant rioting – located merely a handful of miles from the wetlands of Inch Island and from the vast mouth of the River Foyle. In the midst of police vans being burned right through to their metal innards, destruction and horrific violence (instigated by weans so young they should have already been asleep), swans and geese flew over our heads, calling in the hazy sky above us all. Almost every single time I saw these beautiful, majestic birds, I understood deep to my core what had spurred Amelia Earhart on. What could be more life-changing, more light-filled, than to look down at this broken, circling and gorgeous world from the same place as the birds we share it with?
Those days on that city hill, on the edges of so many things, were filled, no matter what new struggles came, with the wild world in all its living wonder. Violence had become the norm for thousands of us, but I knew – even then – that it was far from ‘normal’. Witnessing violence of the kind we did – so often, so intimately, to such a destructive end – does something to you. You are changed for ever. Life as you know it continues, day in, day out: as unending as time, and as constant as the falling rain. You try to slot in, to fit in the same lines that had been drawn for you, but you feel too hefty now; you have too much weight around your neck.
You listen to swans that you don’t know then are called whooper swans. You wonder why they keep coming back to land at all. Why would they ever choose to land in your part of the world? You watch murmurations of starlings on yet another night of rioting, and you want to know what the birds know. What draws them towards one another in dance. What keeps them so close together and what taught them how to gather, how to be so delicate with one another.
You go into school. You sit with people who only see violent things – those things like bonfires and scorched skin, flags and kneecappings – on the news. Whose parents warn them not to be friends with weans who live on housing estates. You do your Latin test all about the importance of thresholds in Ancient Roman literature, squeezing your eyes shut so tightly that it gives you a headache. You squeeze them shut to try to forget about the things you have seen at thresholds. The things that have come to your door in the last few months. You squeeze your eyes shut until the bell rings and then you go back outside into the world, to look for swans.
•
The ending of our time at Earhart Park came as swiftly as night falls, as swiftly as winter seems to come upon us all. The events of the ending all happened so quickly – exactly as they had in the old house. One Sunday afternoon I was at home with my stepdad on our front doorstep, listening to the lads across the square talking about Celtic football team, just as the youth club leader at my granny’s (Protestant) church turned up to collect me. Emblazoned all over the minibus were the signs that gave away the fact that we weren’t like the rest of the people living on that street. The words that gave us away as being different, in fact, from every other person on that estate, different from almost every other person who lived on the city-side of the River Foyle. The bus was covered in blue writing: Clooney Hall Methodist Church Londonderry. This was the sign that said that we were – in the words of the lad in the house opposite from us – ‘dirty orange bastards that needed put the fuck out’.
Things quickly went from bad to worse: rumours spread through the estate like wildfire, and very soon enough of the right people had made it clear that we would be taking a huge risk to stay. We didn’t wait to be ‘put out’ this time. We couldn’t call on the friends we had stayed with last time – we were on their side of the water now – these were ‘their people’ who wanted us gone, and you just didn’t argue back then; you still don’t, even now.
I am not sure if my mum and her partner would even have really discussed the options. There were none, so that made it a wee bit easier, I suppose. There was nothing that the housing association could do. They had no real options either. Where were they meant to place us? We were neither Protestant nor Catholic, and our parents had stayed together in a mixed marriage long enough to ensure that none of the essential parts of either of these camps could ever be instilled in us. At least not to the extent that we could claim either heritage. My brother didn’t want to leave his Protestant school in the Waterside, close to where we had been petrol bombed. He knew, even at such a young age, that he had no hope of learning the new language he would have needed to get by in a new school, a Catholic one, on the city side. The other weans could smell a traitor, it seemed. They would try to catch us out, every chance they got, and they always succeeded. When they asked about our Holy Communions, our confessions and our da, we hadn’t a hope in hell – either the Catholic or Protestant one. We didn’t fit in in the city side as fully as we hadn’t fitted in in the Waterside. We weren’t quick enough to learn that new language and had nothing to fall back on. We didn’t know what the answer was for which football team we supported; we had never even heard of Gaelic football, and none of the surnames we were able to switch between served us any favours. We were caught completely and utterly in the gaps between those two firmly rooted identities. That space in the middle was a terrifying and isolating place, and none of us ever really could have felt safe at any point along the way.
The threat of serious violence crept back into our lives again. So we ran, again, in the night, with what we could carry, on the dawn of St Patrick’s Day. The snow had been gone for two months, and spring was working away silently at making the land new again. The cherry blossom had started to come out and the trees on the laneway were full of goldfinches. I realised, without even thinking about it, that
I was going to miss them, and wondered if there would be trees at our next house.
•
It is a November afternoon more than two decades since that winter spent at the top of a hill, two fields away from the border. There is a single sparrow on the roof of the house two doors up from mine. There is a howling wind – the weather this year has been unsettled, squally, as though it is making to speak for the world – and the potted trees in the yard have fallen over onto the blue hydrangea. They are young oaks, only just turned three. I bought them the summer I moved back to Derry, right as the Brexit chaos we are now witnessing was first born. Those trees – emblems of my once-divided city – are reminders of so much. Of hope, of resilience, of unbreakable roots – where we come from, what we live through, what our future holds. I have found it increasingly difficult to look at those young trees, this year. There are other things nestled in alongside the hope they once represented; their growth speaks of unwelcome and terrifying change. Change that most of Northern Ireland, most of the UK, most of Europe seem vastly unprepared for.
I think of roots, and I think of belonging, of kinship and community. I think of that community beneath our feet, and of all that their knitted ways could teach us. Trees talk to one another, always. No tree is left alone and, in times of need, the goodness held inside the other trees – no matter how far away they may be from the sick one – is shared with the tree that is suffering. I think of trauma – those inflicted and those we inflict. I want to trust that we are going to learn from this mess – a mess we did not ask for, and which seems to be getting worse as the year marches on.
The sparrow seems as though it does not notice the storm that is gathering itself up in the thick and keen air. Its nest must be in the eaves, and it cheeps – one small and deep call after the other – unstoppably, full of resolute dedication.
I have been affected by patterns for as long as I can remember. By the order and sequence of things and events, by the symbolism that can be strung together for our lives from small, quiet, delicate artifacts. Items that we find, or that find us, that meld together and form skeins of meaning in an otherwise confusing, murky sky. I have been bringing found things into my spaces for decades, since the week my father left home. I have found such soothing nourishment in stone and wood, shell and bone – in solitary feathers and fallen things, in skele tal seed-heads, and in things no longer living. I cherish these gifted objects, and the very act of finding them, laying value on the precise moment of my life in which these exquisite offerings entered in. I keep them close, and, at times when the day feels heavy as a steel grey sky, I lift the one I feel most drawn to, the one I need to carry with me on that given day.
Our ancestors found meaning in happenings and patterns. They sought to foresee the future in the way birds swirled above hills, the way light fell on a stone, the amount of days without rain – or snow – or death. Winged creatures in particular have long been used to unravel messages for the humans they share the earth with. Magpies, crows, owls, cuckoos and many more birds carry wisdom from the past that is hard to shake off in our collective memory. We have always looked up as well as down. Many years after I lived on the hill that she crashed into, I found the final words that Amelia Earhart spoke. During her final flight she become caught up in extreme difficulties, far away from home and far away from Earhart Park. Her last words were these: ‘We are running north and south.’ Nothing further was ever heard from her.
The winter we spent at Earhart Park, geese and swans flew above me many times a day in a salmon-pink sky that smelled of the first coming of snow. I had never really noticed the way the sky behaved before. I had never before noted the way that colour can spill out over the edges of the sky – onto tin roofs, into the eyes of horses – how it can fill the whole world within your reach. I had never realised how light worked before that winter.
Light that is neither here nor there. Light that comes from nowhere at all, and from everywhere, too.
Light that feels like such a gift, a guide, a way to feel strong and safe. Light that will fall onto the land and the water no matter what is happening there, no matter what might have already happened there, no matter what may come to that body of water – that stretch of land – in the days ahead.
Light that must, like the birds, have been throwing itself down onto the patch of land you are standing on, dirtied underfoot with muddied snow, for many moons before you came along.
Light that will still shine down when the snow is gone, when you are gone, just as white and silent. Light that is as much an offering as anything you could bring into your space. Light that you cannot hold close in any physical, tangible way but that you see, decades later, that you have carried with you from brick building to brick building – across seas and borders, from place to place.
Light that holds you in place. Light that calls you with it, to any and every place it falls.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lost Things
WHEN LOSS COMES ONTO OUR path, the circles through which the moon travels fall all out of kilter. Time seems out to trick you, and everything feels foggy: grey and shrouded. The loss of one thing, I well know, can send a flare from a myriad of other times – other places – reminding us of anything and everything that we have already lost along the way, the fire of today burning kindling from a time long gone.
We were intimidated out of Earhart Park during the only spring we spent there. Our next move took us away from Derry entirely, to Ballykelly, a small village, where my then stepdad grew up. It was like a whole other world entirely, despite not even being twenty miles from the city.
It was quiet there, and calm, a kind of place I had never known before. Everyone knew each other, and friendships there seemed to be above any idea of difference. No one there cared what school I went to, what my background had been, or anything even remotely along those lines. When my stepdad’s sister took me to meet some of her friends, people that in turn became my friends, the first question I was asked was what my favourite Nirvana song was. Further chats were about why I was a vegetarian, why I didn’t smoke weed, and if I was scared of haunted houses. My stepdad was so loved there, and we were welcomed fully to the village as his family. Life felt bright, and much less scary. Years went by, peacefully, and nothing felt remotely like it had in Derry.
We were young, my group of friends, and we were a very close bunch of teenagers, made much closer by the sheer fact of boredom. Ours was a youth free from technology, in a sleepy village with two pubs, one pool table and a chip shop that we made and broke our young loves outside, with a half-bag of chips between us. It was the first time in my entire life that I hadn’t been constantly watching over my shoulder, wondering if I was allowed to be where I was in the school uniform I wore, or with the background I had. We all came from both backgrounds – it was an entirely mixed village. Protestants and Catholics were neighbours in Ballykelly, and everything felt exactly as I had always imagined it should. We looked out for each other. We argued and we got jealous and we fixed it the very next day. Most of my friends who came from there – not blow-ins like me – were related to each other. I never once said it out loud to another person but for the first time since that crow turned up in my bombed-out bedroom, I felt something close to safe. I felt as if nothing could ever go wrong there, as if I could finally let everything from the past go.
There is a darkness to the world we have been given, though, and such unthinkable violence in the paths we create along the way. Before the night that my room was petrol-bombed, I had never known that there was a map inside of me. A pathway that would continue to be drawn and redrawn; another invisible borderline, beneath the surface. I hid my grief under my skin.
There had been so much loss I had lost count. Names, faces, houses, accounts, family members, toys, books, trees, wellies, words – all bled into one. What is the shared collective noun for such loss?
Even in Ballykelly, loss lingered at the edges. We had lived there five years when mu
m’s partner began, all out of nowhere, to drink in a way I don’t recall him having done before. I remember it as becoming something he did every single day, sometimes to the stage that he didn’t know who he was, or where. He moved out of our house when I was sixteen, the first of two devastating losses that year held.
That year also saw the first death of a friend, something altogether different from every loss before it. He was eighteen; I was sixteen. He was my closest male friend, the only boy I’d slept beside in a bed, the first person to give me a Valentine’s card. He had curtains in his hair, held in place with thick, gunky gel; his waves were as sculpted as Binevenagh Mountain, and as blond as a cherub. He was murdered, most likely less than an hour after I said goodbye to him. His bloodstained clothes were found the next day, as we all searched for him, terrified, within sight of my home – practically next door to his own.
The trail of events leading up to his death had all been normal: nothing out of place, nothing to make anyone worry. The murder of a kind, funny, popular eighteen-year-old came as the biggest and deepest shock – not just to me, of course, but to the entire, small, close-knit village. For the first few hours of that Sunday morning, every one of us believed he would walk around the next corner. We all kept wondering whose house he had crashed at (he didn’t like going home after having had a drink as his parents didn’t approve) but all of us knew, though none of us wanted to be the one to say it, that he hadn’t turned up at any of our houses that Saturday night. If he had been going to, it would have been mine, or his cousin’s – our three houses made a triangle on the hill that led from Ballykelly to Glack, a hamlet a few miles away where some of our friends lived. We all kept saying how much he’d laugh (what a contagious, living laugh) when he caught us all out looking for him like on some dodgy crime series on TV. How he’d secretly be really upset with himself for putting us all through the worry – especially his wee mam. At the point where the silence came into the picture, when we stopped talking about what he would or wouldn’t do when he walked around the corner, it all changed, and it never went back to how it had been before.
Thin Places Page 8
