It was around Halloween, as my family remembered it, a time of tempestuous weather, when Needles washed up on the edge of Rosses Bay. The Foyle Bridge was not yet built. The train driver saw her from his passing cabin. She lay there with her hair, black as a raven, black as the Morrigan, black as the Egyptian night, unfurled on the shoreline. I thought of the long, wispy water-silk tresses I’d seen in streams. They found her money—not much—stuffed down into her pop socks when they recovered her.
I had this recurring thought of Needles, a cruel and kind thought. She is there on the shoreline and she is walking, she is walking somehow, somehow back from the river.
Roll of Microfilm
Joseph’s original background was rural; from Donegal, as Derry folks tended to be. His people were from Stranorlar. Not long ago I hitched a ride down there, with a trucker who talked incessantly. It wasn’t much more than a widening in the road. An ivy-shrouded hotel, a church with rusting scaffolding, an almost-bleached poster for an Easter Rising commemoration, and a sign to the Drumboe martyrs execution site, where four republicans were marched into the woods and killed by their former comrades. Along the road was a boarded-up Art Deco cinema called the Ritz. The town merged into its twin, Ballybofey, across the river, but once they had been strictly segregated, with Catholics forbidden to live there. The river was the Finn, which merged farther downstream into the Foyle. The river led my grandfather to the city. Genealogy followed topography. The village was on the edge of the wilderness. The road signs changed from old people and children to leaping deer crossings. The road led to a mountain pass through the Bluestack Mountains, huge boulder colossi and scree on either side. The pylons went from metal to wood, like antique oil derricks. The trees turned to pine as the soil thinned, a skeleton of stone beneath a skin of moss. It was a place where the wild lucid stars could be seen, where snows fall in unlikely months, where lakes freeze, where rivers begin.
The machine hummed into life, causing heads to turn in the otherwise quiet library. I unraveled the microfilm, carefully threading it under the tight panes of glass, as if examining microscopic organisms or biopsies. I wound the ends around each spool. The negatives appeared enlarged on the screen as it wheeled along. The light needed adjusting, the alignment, then the focus. Reeling back through their life-spans, headlines accelerating past. Now and then a photograph or an advert would catch the eye and the reel would stop. “EXPLOSIVES: If you know anything about terrorist activities—explosives, threats, or murders—please speak now to the CONFIDENTIAL TELEPHONE LONDONDERRY 262340.” They used to have the same message sprayed in stenciled yellow print on the sides of army Land Rovers. It was even printed on the backs of bus tickets, with the added line “in complete confidence.” I tried calling it now, out of curiosity. Three beeps and the phone line went dead and then disconnected. I wondered who’d called it when it worked. Informers, curtain-twitching neighbors, paramilitaries setting up ambushes or setting themselves up for ambush. Back then, nothing was as it seemed.
The newspapers zipped past, faster and faster, taking us back through life, younger and younger until we all shrank and became embryonic, then disappeared into the death before life and kept going into the prehistory before we existed. More than a century of local papers were kept like fossils: fraying cardboard boxes in filing cabinets. Each reel contained six months in a city. The mechanisms whirled and the text and blackened images passed on the electronic scroll. I felt like a character in a cold war spy novel, even though the papers were everyday information. Revelations hiding in clear sight. One of the reels was labeled incorrectly and I ended up a decade early. A priest columnist railing against juvenile delinquency and gutter comics and the godless English. A golliwog in an ad for Rigby’s Reflection Rum. A resolution passed for the playing of the national anthem at all dances. “Dublin Clerk Dead in Gas-Filled Room.” “New Prohibited Area in Kenya.” “European Women Kill 3 Africans.” “Briton Stabbed to Death in Canal Zone.” “Food Shortage in Poland.” “Tenants Squat After Killea House Collapses.” References to Mau Mau “clean-ups.” The search was on for missing radium after a Belfast air crash. “No fixed address” again and again. A call to add prayer to the nuclear arsenal. “Fight Mouth Acid and Save Your Teeth.” “Panic Grows as East German Purge Continues.” In the autumn of 1961 Hurricane Debbie had hit Ireland after bringing down an airplane on the Cape Verde Islands, blowing the rooftops apart and laying waste to houses. Fourteen died. Exactly a year before my grandfather’s death, a forty-thousand-ton Spanish ship, the Mirto de la Esperanza, taking seed potatoes to the Canary Islands, had run aground in the Foyle.
I moved forward toward 1963, the year I’d been seeking and avoiding. On May 10 a child watching the submarines at the quay fell onto the USS Headfin, bouncing off and disappearing into the river. A quick-thinking mariner, Victor Campau, leapt in after him and saved him. The docks were already slowly dying then, the Derry-to-Liverpool and -Heysham cargo routes closing in October. I wound my way forward to November. I tried resisting the urge to find portents of what was to come, but it seemed far too tempting, although the text remained resistant. “Wanted Button-Holer.” A performance by the Vampires Showband. Much talk of bazaars and the letting of lands. When tragedy occurred, it appeared deceptively innocent. A thirteen-year-old Boy Scout, searching for a seagull’s nest, falls from the cliff face at Horn Head. I edged through the days, page by x-rayed page, through a past as dumb about its future as we are about ours. All the unread footnotes that every city accumulates and buries.
The day my grandfather Joseph died, the main story in the paper was the dire weather: “80 MPH Gale Gusts Hit North-West” and the “worst flooding for 60 years” in the Glenties, Donegal. Further into the issue, “Honour Springtown Camp Pledge, Corporation Is Told.” Further again, “Powder Trap Laid for … Thief.” There was an opinion piece on “Irish Saints on the Continent”—chiefly Cataldus, the miracle worker. An ad for Bushmills: “That’s the Irish for you.” That evening the Odeon was showing Blood Money and Madame. The ABC was showing the Miss Marple mystery Murder at the Gallop, the Western Guns of Wyoming, the Sinatra comedy Come Blow Your Horn, and Night of the Prowler. The City went with Reprieve, “the most startling true story ever filmed.” The following night—a night Joseph would not live to see—the Miami Showband would be playing (“dancing 8–12”). They were twelve years away from being murdered, massacred by members of the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Ulster Volunteer Force, the most innocuous advert seen back through the dark prism of knowledge of what was to come. I wondered whether Joseph had read the paper earlier in the day, propping up the bar perhaps; if he felt anything different in the air, anything of unusual significance, any portent of what was to follow. The sad thing was that none of it was preordained. Any number of things could have happened differently. I pressed the Forward button and the paper sped through sports sections and classifieds and then petered out into the blinding white screen between editions.
With the high tide, the river spills over onto the land. Flood warnings go out too late. People are still queuing at the U.S. military base, next to a ceremonial guard and a mini Stars and Stripes, to sign a book of condolence for John F. Kennedy. The sailors go to Mass in their uniforms. Lyndon B. Johnson is already president, sworn in on Air Force One, next to a stunned Jackie Kennedy in a pink Chanel outfit stained with her husband’s blood. There’s a disconcerting note of small-town pride in the paper: “The news of the assassination at Dallas in Texas was flashed to the United States naval station at Clooney Road at 6:50 on Friday evening, about half an hour before it was heard on television. Londonderry probably being the first place in the United Kingdom to have heard the news. The Londonderry US naval station is the link through which Service and diplomatic messages to and from Western Europe are channeled. The flag at the US Naval Base was lowered to half-mast and will remain so for thirty days.” A bakery and flour mill closed until twelve noon in honor. JFK is already ascending to sainthood, a millenarian o
ne perhaps, given how close the Cuban crisis had taken us to the apocalypse.
The paper tells other stories. Chess leagues and sheep grading and dances and amateur boxing. The Sophia Loren film Boccaccio ’70 had been banned from Derry by a single nationalist vote. Men were apprehended taking scrap metal from the river’s edge. The city’s shipping traffic was decreasing. “Bring the children along to see Santa Claus in the enchanted forest” on the third floor of Austins. “Tennent’s lager makes a thirst worthwhile.”
The storm dominated: 87-mile-per-hour winds and “driving heavy rain” felled a ten-ton, forty-five-foot-high scaffolding at a zebra crossing on Guildhall Place, bringing telephone wires and a thirty-foot iron lamppost crashing down with it. At the site of the burned-out embassy (the “smart ballroom for smart people”), three workers were huddled and only narrowly survived, two dodging the collapsing structures and the third crawling out of an excavation trench, miraculously unhurt.
Then, in a small box column—smaller than those for butcher’s ads or liturgical formalities—“Foyle Drowning Tragedy: Thirty-nine years old Joseph Anderson of 128 Springtown camp, Londonderry, was drowned in the river Foyle at Derry on Friday night…” The unionist paper, The Londonderry Sentinel, offered a fraction more detail. Every word seemed stricken with weight, and yet it would have been passed over in a cursory manner by almost all who read it. “When he was seen in the river, a life-belt was thrown to him but he was unable to grab it and went under. He was brought from the water near the Guildhall a short time later by a RUC Constable and a Harbour Policeman. An inquest will be held.”
Drownings are romanticized in folklore, just as much as they are feared in life. Of the floating, singing Ophelia in the Millais painting, “Her clothes spread wide, / And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up,” before they dragged her under. The corpse is only beautiful from far away. There is no desperate thrashing, no last gasp or reaching for the light, no sense that a person can die from an accident as surely as from a grand tragedy. No bloated, unidentified bodies washing up.
Thirty-nine, he was. Strange to think of being older than your parents or grandparents ever were. How would that work in the afterlife? How would that work in this life?
45 RPM, Single, Mono (Electrola, 1962)
There are worlds where Joseph caught a wound to the head and ended in a French ditch; where he died in childbirth, as many had then; where any of the links and accidents, which led from the birth of the universe to these words, turned out differently.
One night Joseph steps onto the bus, a Green Massey marked 151, bound for Springtown. He fumbles from his pocket a crumpled return ticket or the coins to buy a single. He’s tired or he’s skint or the pub threw him out, or he just wants to get back to see his family or to sleep it off. The weather is rough and he takes a seat next to the window, the lights of the city multiplied by the raindrops on the pane. And I’m writing this half a century later thinking, “Stay on board, stay silent, put your head against the window and dry off; just stay on board and get home to your wife and your wee ones.” But he doesn’t. He never does. Instead he starts singing, and singing in German.
Drunks are sentimentalists, and sentimentalists—however charming—deal in the past and future at the cost of the present. Songs, in Derry, were often their medium.
They sang on the buses. Young lads. Scottish songs. Musicals. Rock ’n’ roll. Wannabe crooners. They are laughing and joking and giving each other shit. Joseph was older.
Huge matters of offense can come down to tone. Perhaps my grandfather swaggered down the aisle to the back seat, knocking against the rows, and took one look at his fellow travelers, sat in a swaying throne, and began an embittered provocation, the German anthem “Deutschland Über Alles” or the Nazi “Horst Wessel Song.” Maybe it was innocent or a botched joke, a cabaret turn of “Puppenhochzeit” or “Seeräuberjenny.” “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was number one in the charts. There was something musical, theatrical, in the air. Perhaps he had leaned his head against the vibrating window, a streetlight reflection of his face like a doppelgänger next to him, and sang, without even consciously realizing it, “Schön Ist Die Nacht” or “Lili Marlene,” with genuine nostalgia for someone he had once loved and lost, in an age where goodbye meant goodbye for eternity. What song it was goes untold.
My father remembered two particular things about his father. He “always had his head in a book” and his favorite song, which he sang over and over, was “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Pete Seeger’s folk song reflecting on those who never came back from the war. Joseph had come back when others he’d known hadn’t, but what good had it done? Perhaps he hadn’t really come back at all from his experiences, his failures—not fully.
Something made me check back through the records. I vaguely knew the Seeger song. It must have come out in the mid-fifties, late fifties at a push. Then I noticed a German version, by Marlene Dietrich, released the year before Joseph would die. Its name “Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind.” Single. B-side “Die Welt war jung” (“The world was young”). A radio in an Irish town, at the edge of Europe, tuned to Berlin. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps that was the song he sung.
* * *
Joseph sings in German, and a man stands and confronts him, and he continues to sing. It is not yet two decades since the war. Feelings still resonate. Troops are still in the city. War wounds reanimate in the winter cold, the broken bone, the bullet or shrapnel never removed. The man returns to his seat, but just as he is about to sit down, he straightens up again and walks to the driver’s cabin. Joseph Henry is still singing, a fraction louder perhaps, intentionally or obliviously; it no longer matters. The bus slows, a glance in the mirror, and the bus stops. Words are exchanged. “Get this fucker off the bus” is one line remembered. A scuffle ensues. Joseph is escorted off and onto the road, still within town. The bus leaves toward a home to which, without knowing it, Joseph will never return. He is almost blind drunk. Half-seas over, as the old saying goes. He watches the lights of the bus disappear, then maybe he curses and staggers off toward somewhere. Perhaps he is still singing as he staggers off the edge.
There are other worlds. Worlds where he did not sing, or sang another tune. Where the offended man did not rise. Where the bus did not stop. Where the earth did not rotate. Where the things undone could be put together again. Where he is still alive and the echoes are all different.
Joseph looked like Tony Curtis, Needles always said. The spitting image, if he’d cured that curl in his hair that most of his descendants still have. He always had his head in a book, it was agreed. Maybe all those old classics that I had consumed like oxygen as a boy, which had directed my life toward writing, for good and ill—Kidnapped, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, One Thousand and One Nights—were his. He had a swagger in his step. He carried a toothbrush at all times in his back pocket, Needles remembered with a smile. And he had green eyes, she said, not blue, like others claimed.
Bottle Top
My father would share his childhood memories, or lack thereof, only once he’d had a drink or, rather, lots to drink. His recollections were almost all of the outside. There were almost none, he claimed with only a degree of sadness, of the inside of the homes they’d made in the abandoned military camp. Da remembered the actual interior with ragged curtains pulled as partitions, between the two or three families in each hut, but what took place there was not significant enough to burn into his mind, or was too significant to retain. He remembered being bathed outside with his siblings in a tin bath, with the water heated in a blackened kettle over a fire. Ma teased him. “Tell them what your mum used in place of a cot?”
He tutted. “Would you give it a rest?”
“She used to put them in different shelves in a chest of drawers.”
My father laughed. “Happiest years of my life.”
On occasions, I would listen to my father and an uncle from Cork exchange notes over their relative
poverties, like the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, but the stories that stayed in the mind weren’t the deprivations so much as the small details: an admission, for instance, that a favorite children’s television show was The Clangers, but how it would be watched in silence through strangers’ living room windows.
There is the city and there is the environment. There are demarcation lines, boundaries of what they once called—with iron in their irony—the Liberties. Except this is known to be false. The city is not apart from the environment. It is an environment and its overlap with that which surrounds it, its reliance, the symbiosis, is always there, fluctuating like tides on the land. I thought of my parents as intrinsically city folk, urbane, cosmopolitan. Only later did I realize they had lived in the overlap, the edge lands, the shifting borders between urban and rural. The places called liminal, as if clear gateways and transitions still existed. And they, in different but related ways, had been pushed out there.
To speak of Springtown Camp is to speak of the ghost of a ghost. Where it once stood is now an industrial estate, the sort of characterless place where only the obliged go, to eyeless warehouses with names like Tradeforce and Budget Energy and Möbius-strip roads, empty enough to be used as a training space for those who’d never sat in a driver’s seat before. No one else visits these roads, bar delivery vans and disgruntled workers, and even they are a rare sight out in the open. The greenery is immaculately maintained. Springtown’s afterlife, physically at least, is a limbo. Its past lives exist now in memory, paper, and film.
Inventory Page 14
