Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  Ships were stationed from all over the world. The flags of a multitude of countries fluttered in the wind. There were dozens of warships in the Foyle and their guides: corvettes, destroyers, and frigates. The Atlantic convoys zigzagged across the ocean to evade wolf packs of U-boats. There was a 50 percent death rate at one time. The tankers and aircraft carriers had to remain in the lough rather than in the river. Anthony remembered unnamed Indian vessels, the Black Ranger, and a French ship, the Petrophault. There was a large troopship, the Manilla, and he’d watch them play hockey on the deck. Once, Anthony was trawling and thought he’d unearthed a defunct copper wire that would have made their fortune to sell on the black market, until they realized it was an actual functioning transmission cable. As they held it, messages were pouring through it about the war. Swordfish planes were dispatched from Maydown to protect convoys and try to obliterate the prowling enemy subs. The camouflaged dazzle ship USS Alexander Dallas (DD-199) escorted the Atlantic fleet into safety. HMS Foxglove was the harbor guardship, years after rescuing people from the doomed SS Hong Moh on the White Rocks in the South China Sea. HMS Bayntun, HMS Loosestrife, HMS Loch Dunvegan, and other U-boat killers with their successive weapons systems (with intriguing names like hedgehog, squid, and limbo) ran out of Derry. They turned the hiding place of the sea into a tomb of water. There was a turning point in the war when the hunters became the hunted, resulting in a 75 percent chance of death on board the U-boats. They became metal coffins, and what occurred to many of them in their last instances we will never know, in this life at least. For all the legends of ghost ships, none have been seen in living memory.

  Forty thousand sailors assembled in Derry; 140 escort ships. Innumerable supporting vessels with grain, coal, and timber. They accompanied convoys from the Eastern Seaboard, Iceland, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland on to the Lisbon run, and, even more dreaded, the Archangel–Murmansk route. It was a haven, or as much as anywhere could be then, perched on the continental shelf, with a long inlet that was difficult for enemy vessels to penetrate without guaranteeing their own destruction. That is not to say they were safe. When the decision came down the chain of command that the ships were to go out into or come from open seas, the sailors’ lives hung in the balance. The President Sergent was sunk, en route south-southeast of Cape Farewell by the submarine U-624, which was in turn sunk by depth charges from a fortress aircraft. All hands lost. HMS Black Swan, Scimitar. Anthony was there as all this went on around him, like a character in the corner of a Bruegel painting.

  The U.S. sailors and soldiers were the same. They came in off the ships on “liberty boats” to get pissed, have a feed, and try to get laid. Black markets grew up. In the South, because of neutrality, they took off their caps upon arrival and were free from the regime of military police zipping around Derry in jeeps. There’d be scraps, mainly between Americans and Canadians and both with the English. Rarely with the Irish.

  The river was abundant with masts, like trees or spears held in battle. And it was no bad time for fishing, given the amount of refuse that was thrown overboard the big ships and the shoals that congregated around them. There were always side effects. You lived in the side effects. The women of the shirt factories made uniforms for the boys and men who set off for war. The fabric they made ended up scorched, buried, shot through, floating in the sea. Occasionally a drowning, an accident or a suicide, would occur, ahead of history—just to prove, in the midst of overwhelming fate, that something resembling free will still existed.

  The promise of safety was the real siren. Anthony recalled being out at night on a little boat, fishing with a colleague and his son. One of them spotted something up ahead, looming through the dark. A single light was held up. It looked like some kind of meteorite covered in seaweed, a floating globe with metal prongs. Anchored to the sea floor. A genuine magnetic mine. Modified ships and low-flying airplanes had electromagnets that were supposed to blow these up, but the sea was more vast than man or technology. There are fifty million munitions objects discarded in the North Sea and Baltic alone, rusting, waiting, occasionally unintentionally hauled up. Something stirred this one to the surface. After the war, my grandfather found employment on a trawler, sweeping for mines; it’s exceptionally dangerous work, trying to find what others dreaded finding.

  Small mysteries abounded. Insignificant, apparently, in the grand scheme of things. The ST Leukos vanished with eleven men on board. It was discovered only later what happened to them, in a single line of a U-boat captain’s diary, having surfaced amid two ships: “I decided to give one of them a lesson with our gun.” The Ardmore vanished with twenty-four men. The Kerry Head, and its twelve men, was last seen being bombed, by people on the shore. Similarly, the lightship Isolda was exploded under bomber fire with six men on board. The Innisfallen, the Clonlara, the City of Waterford, and the City of Limerick (the last filled with fruit) all went into the depths. The British and Irish Steam Packet Company ship the Meath was struck by a magnetic mine at Holyhead, sinking with seven hundred squealing animals on board. I imagined those who had dived or been thrown from their ships in the sea during the war. Those starlit last moments. The sea somehow on fire with burning oil. Some too close, some too far away. Under mute stars, they all lived their last unrecorded moments, hoping for a rescue that would never arrive. The thermoclines, agents of history, reached up toward them.

  I wondered what it might be like to drown. Was there panic or release? I could not say. Some say the bodies of the drowned are found with torn muscles in their arms and shoulders, where they have been grasping out toward the light. Others say there is a serene sense of release, floating there, once the finite number of breaths in each life reaches zero.

  Storm Lantern

  It is the night of April 15, 1941. Easter Tuesday. Everyone with any choice is sleeping. A cold wind is scything along the river, off Magilligan. A full moon is broken by racing clouds. Two stooped figures on board a boat. Darker silhouettes against a dark background.

  “You hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Cut off the engine … and the light. Now.”

  The engine wound down with a splutter. Anthony turned the switch slowly on the hurricane lamp, steadying it with his other hand. The only light was the spliced moon on the water. The waves sounded suddenly more pronounced.

  “There…” His father, Dennis, pointed his finger upward. “There it is.”

  Anthony paused, weighing the air.

  “An airplane. The Yanks, no doubt.”

  “That’s a Jerry. Listen. You hear that engine? It’s different.”

  Anthony stared at his father as the boat rocked.

  “The Yanks and the Brits have a constant drone. You hear that? It’s whirring.”

  His father had been in the British Army for many years. He knew.

  “Christ, you’re right. Where is it?”

  They followed the sound echoing around the dome of the night sky. Due north, by any reckoning. It was following the coastline or the river, which meant there was one place it was bound.

  “You see anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  The clouds seemed to accelerate.

  “Maybe it’s nothing. Could just be passing. We’re too far away for—”

  And then suddenly the whirring became noticeably louder. They moved to the stern of the boat, bracing themselves at the gunwale, without taking their eyes from the skies.

  “It’s getting close. We should be able to see it. We should see its lights.”

  “There.” Dennis pointed upward.

  There were no lights, but it was there. A veil slowly consuming the moonlit clouds. It seemed to be descending and growing like black space, like a void even in the night. Before they knew it, the shape was roaring toward them, so low that they could look up, holding on to their hats as gusts rippled on the waves, and see the outlined crosses, the Balkenkreuz, on its wings. It bellowed past them and disappeared into a bank of clouds.

>   Anthony thought for a moment he had seen faces at the windscreen. Perhaps they had seen their faces. He would later wonder if he’d imagined it.

  “It’s heading towards the city.”

  “It’s trying to.”

  They sat in the dark and waited. They may have blessed themselves, Anthony mimicking his father. And the seconds stretched.

  The light reached them before the sound.

  * * *

  During the blackout the city tried to hide, but the plane followed the river, which betrayed the city and led them to it. Belfast was already burning. Harland and Wolff shipyards bombed. Workers’ housing blitzed. There weren’t many shelters for people. They protected the statue of Carson at Stormont, though.

  Magnetic submarine mines floated down on parachutes. The aim was to land them in the Foyle, where they’d lie dormant until a ship passed overhead and would suddenly attach themselves to the metal and then … well, goodnight, Irene. It was a windy night, though, so two blew off course, onto the land. One seemed to have been a dud, or its fall was cushioned by the sandpit that it dropped into at Collon Terrace. Those people didn’t know how lucky they were until later. The other landed right on a group of houses in Messines Park. The houses aren’t there anymore. They are gone. Three houses with families in them. The chimney and the wall of a fourth remained, but everything else was scrap, piles of it, all caved in. Bodies covered in blood and plaster. Rescuers looked like ghosts, with the plaster dust. There was one guy who’d been blown clean over a fence, and his unaccounted-for body was found days later by a blackout officer.

  They found one wee baby crying between its two dead parents in the bed. They’d pull away rubble, like digging into the ground, and they’d find beds, sofas, like they’d been under there for a hundred years. All the windows blown out in every direction. Tiles shorn off rooftops. What was once a piano lying in the crater. Strangest thing.

  There was one guy that my uncle used to mention. He was blind and wore black all the time. Had shades on indoors, like Roy Orbison. He would turn up at dances with all the young ones. Sit at the side. They said he was standing up against the bedroom window, looking out, the night that bomb dropped. Last thing he ever saw.

  My teacher said that the Virgin Mary had saved the church by deflecting the bomb onto the houses. It was a miracle.

  A Key That No Longer Fits Any Lock

  In the twenty years after the war, childhoods came and went. The place where my mother and her siblings had once lived, once grown up, once been happy, was no more. On the map, only half a century old, there are fields that are now streets, but more unusually, there are also streets that are now fields. Even Free Derry Corner is the gable wall of a vanished terrace of houses. I tried to walk in my mind the streets and alleyways and courtyards that have now vanished, to picture the vistas, to inhabit them, but the figures are faceless, the light is like that in a Giorgio de Chirico painting, unreal and filled with menacing shadows. History is discussed and decided at an inhuman scale. Yet history is really made up of the events that befall individual homes.

  The area Shantallow, whose name came from the Gaelic meaning “ancient land,” once had another name. A significant patch of it was called Bogs Lee. It is the site of a secondary school now and a housing estate, but in my mother’s youth it was, they recount, a rural arcadia with a house, grown huge in their memories, at its center. Ma and her siblings grew up there in relatively idyllic surroundings. My da would roll his eyes when my mother told the tales of what they had and how they fell from grace (“my grandfather was the first person to have a car in Derry, a Model T Ford”), and while, no doubt, memory is deceptive, the incidental details give the tales a ring of truth. It was her grandparents’ home originally, but it was large enough for all of them to live in. Ma would talk about it with a certain bruised pride that came from having lost it all through bankruptcy, and having been a young, disbelieving witness to that process. History was rewritten or simply rendered redundant; you lost your place, and certain people, certain places, were airbrushed out of existence or just faded with exposure to light.

  There were no public phones in those days. Private phones were rare and precious things, but Bogs Lee had a telegraph wire connecting it like a tightrope to the switchboard. Locals and passing strangers would follow it and knock to make a call, and my grandmother Philomena, or Phyllis, as she was known, would let them use it. “They would always leave a coin, whatever the denomination, and she would always fret if they could afford it.” Traveller mothers would call to the door to ask for milk for their babies and “she would never turn them away.” I wondered how often they were turned away for this to be a sign of exceptionalism, but Phyllis earned a reputation for unassuming charity, and soon calls were being made regularly by impossibly exotic figures. To Ma, then a child, they had stepped out of fairy tales, with their red shawls and their covered faces, and the older ladies with their long silver hair. Phyllis kept money on the mantelpiece for them, and for the nuns who visited. The nuns offered a prayer in thanks. The Gypsies offered a curse on anyone who wronged her. One was as good as the other. Life was hard for the Travellers then. My father remembered, even in the sixties, families living under black canvas sheets in ditches by the roadside.

  No idyll survives close scrutiny. The rainbow is easily unwoven. It was a huge house to the infant mind, but there were still five girls to one bedroom. Such was the size of the family (a typical Catholic family, at the time, of nine children) that the oldest and youngest barely knew each other, one leaving for university as the other left the maternity ward. Ma recalled mosaic tiles, reminding her of illustrations of ancient Rome that she’d seen in books. She remembered her mother, Phyllis, being glamorous. Always dressing in black and white, Chanel-esque, with button-up cardigans with pearl buttons. She was a hairdresser, up to date with the modern fashions of the time, but she disapproved of hair dye, believing the chemicals to be toxic. No good could come of messing with nature. Ma recalled her grandfather’s exquisite writing desk, how it was untouchable, and how she’d wait until no one was in the immediate vicinity and then pull a stool over and climb up to draw on it triumphantly; and how her grandfather was a real old-school gentleman, whom they all admired and loved dearly. By that stage, however, he was diabetic and would have fits; and they knew, seeing him “turn,” to back off (“we knew, without being told, to get out of the way”), watching him malfunction in fascinated horror. He was an oil and gas man—an innovator of sorts, without realizing the damage it was doing.

  For all their rural lifestyle, with the toddlers chasing around pigs and bantam chickens, their money was founded on industry, a reminder of which was the huge shed with oil containers and mechanical equipment from which they were all forbidden. Naturally this stirred the interest of Ma and Tony, the more subversive siblings, and Tony soon found himself in hospital with his stomach being pumped and a mouthful of charcoal, having inquisitively sipped petrol directly from the tap.

  Though he was formidable, Anthony was the weak link in the family. He was tall, strong, and broad-shouldered—ridiculously so for his time—next to the squat whippet of the average male. He looked more Nordic or Dutch. Not unlike Charlton Heston. He played football, semiprofessionally he fancied, as his frequently brandished photos attested. He was, however, an anomaly. He was full-blown peasant stock, for all the movie-star looks. He ate periwinkles with a pin. He brought home metal buckets filled with live crabs for the children to poke with sticks. By stark contrast, and hence the attraction perhaps, his wife and her two sisters were Fitzgerald-esque ladies with furs and hats and elegant poses. Perhaps she had been drawn to Anthony because of his physical presence. Perhaps because he had an air of disreputable arrogance, being a smuggler. Yet he was not a man to be relied on. He was strong only physically and in rage, and weak otherwise. He would take the business from his ailing father-in-law and it would fall to pieces in his hands. Perhaps she was attracted to him, and vice versa, because he did not
belong there. He was, as my mother put it, a cuckoo in the nest.

  My grandmother changes in photographs. Most of the time she looks eerily like my mother. At every stage of her foreshortened life, she is protean. She became her children. Certain looks and mannerisms. Always someone else. Her name, though, was Phyllis Doherty. In those days she was Mrs. Anthony McMonagle. That was how they addressed her when they told her the terrible news that would follow.

  I could never imagine my maternal aunts and uncles all together as children. They shared traits, echoes of their parents, but nevertheless were as different as star signs. Edward Gorey characters on separate pages, somehow surviving their escapades. One ate bluebells. One fell into a slurry pit (Anthony rescuing him at the last minute via a rapidly sinking plank). One got her tongue stuck to the freezer. One made mechanical wings and jumped from the garage roof, breaking his legs. The oldest were expected to fulfill their father’s misplaced ambitions; the rest were jettisoned to an extent. They were expected to be identical, with their hair in bowl cuts, and resisted idiosyncratically. My mother wore her haircut defiantly. Once, while being taunted by a pompous irritant of a child between the boards of a fence, she launched a dart, intending to scare him, and had to rush in hot pursuit to wrench it out of his forehead before he made it, with the evidence still attached, into his house, bawling.

  At the bottom of their lane was a standing stone their parents referred to as Billy Babbins’s Grave. Anthony and Phyllis told them it was haunted, to keep them from wandering down to the thoroughfare, the Racecourse Road, where Thran John’s pub stood. Except there really was a ghost, or a ghost story at least, attached to the area. The tale went that it was the specter of a jockey who’d fallen mid-race and broken his neck. He was doomed to wander the winds, looking for his horse. The great-aunt corrected the story that he had actually been a jockey who’d been murdered for his winnings, returning victorious from a race. Ghosts were placed there by guilty consciences. The kids would still venture down there, though they feared to after dusk. The main peril they encountered were two mad old sisters, whom they called the Talkers, who would walk the lanes talking in tongues. My aunts and uncles, as children, would hide in hedges listening to the glossolalia of the Talkers as they passed, trying to make sense of them, as if they were wandering, threadbare oracles.