The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  THE MODEL SHOP

  Sometimes the city is an exploded diagram of itself, along the lines of a vastly complicated interactive model aircraft kit whose components are connected by sprued plastic latitudes and longitudes.

  At the same time it mutates like a virus, its programme undergoing daily shifts of emphasis and detail. Its parallels are bent by interior temperatures; engine nacelles become gun pods; sometimes, a whole wing takes on a different slant. Everything is redolent of glue – scorpion-tailed tubes of it are scattered everywhere – and I almost drowsed in its unguent aroma, till I felt my vision being clarified and heightened. Now that I can see the city’s microscopic bits transfixed by my attention, I wonder how I might assemble them, for there is no instruction leaflet; I must write it.

  Remembering making model aeroplanes, I am absorbed by various degrees of difficulty. First World War aircraft presented little problem beyond the interconnective biplane struts; Second World War represented a more complicated technology, as in the case of the Wellington bomber, with its revolving gun-turrets and elaborate undercarriage. If I trembled but one millimetre, the Perspex windscreen would be smeared indelibly with excess glue, and my alter ego pilot, whose anal stub I’d just stuck into its cockpit matrix, would be blinded by a fingerprinted cataract.

  For I was no expert, compared to that sodality of boffins who, like entomologists or taxidermists, explored realms of minutiae unknown to the layman. They were adept at sanding down the tiny plastic nipples on the edges of detached components; or, not liking the cut of some particular jib or aileron, they would cannibalize similar items from a family variant and file them to the right proportions; in other cases, bits were custom-made from melted-down, remoulded waste.

  Masters of trompe-l’œil, they would contemplate the spectra of commercial colour charts and manufacture new hybrid tints from them: Tree-frog Green, Khaki Storm, Salamander Blue. They studied the chameleon in Belfast Zoo, since the whole enterprise was camouflage: in this respect, faux waterline stains were made, by subtle use of masking-tape and spray-gun, on the hulls of flying-boats and amphibians. Some distressed their fighter planes by drilling bullet-holes in them with Lilliputian drill-bits. Others, in their noble struggle for veracity, would ‘press the wheels on to a heated surface, in order to obtain flats to simulate the aircraft’s weight’,1 therefore sacrificing the craft’s ability to ‘fly’, since flats would look wrong in the air, unless, of course, the wheels were really ‘flat’; but then, how would it get off the ground? No. Flight must not have been intended, and ‘Whispering Death’ remains eternally in stasis, grounded, an exhibit of an earthbound plane of reality.

  And yet, as an object to be contemplated, it is like an aircraft in a real museum, retired from the war theatre to better inhabit the culmination of a drama. There is a narrative behind it, and there are wheels within its wheels. We learn, for instance, that the Beaufighter’s construction resembled the cannibal techniques of model-makers:

  Derived from the Beaufort torpedo bomber, the Beaufighter made use of numerous Beaufort parts, enabling production to be switched from one type to another without significant disruption to the production line. Major common parts were the outer wings, tail unit and undercarriage, the fuselage being modified to accept a reduction in the number of the crew being carried from four to two … the new aircraft was powered by the powerful Hercules radial engines … Naturally, changes were made to the Beaufighter during its development life, e.g. the original undercarriage was changed for a Lockheed designed unit, and the Beaufighter Mk. II was powered by Merlin engines. On later marks, the long dorsal fin became standard.

  And its nickname? ‘A combination of the unique whistling sound which was produced by the Beaufighter’s sleeve-valved radial engines, along with the tremendous punch it carried, earned the aircraft the nickname of “Whispering Death” from the Japanese.’

  So, you imagine Mr Humphreys, whistling as he recreates the past, and you realize that the model’s flattened tyres bear witness to the weight of history: ‘In all, the RAAF received 583 Beaufighters from various sources, and it was one of these, a Mk. 21, A8-50, which I decided to build. This particular aircraft, coded DU-H, served with No. 22 Sqn. RAAF, and was based in Sanga Sanga airstrip in the Philippines in 1944.’

  I admire such true believers in mimesis, even when approaching me with tremulous, blabby lips, emitting the cacophony of Messerschmitts and Hurricanes, their arms spreadeagled as they hold opposing forces in their hands and make dog-fights with them in hospital corridors. They are in a parallel reality. As we try to make contact, they gaze through us with the terrible clarity of angels, then float past into history on extended wings.

  It reminds me that, from time to time throughout the Troubles, especially after incidents more atrocious than usual, there would be crazes of religious mimesis. Typically, they were witnessed in damp patches on the many-layered wallpapers of terrace houses, or in their tiled fire surrounds, which, if you believed the sporadic reports, bore images of a Turin Shroud Christ. Never a Virgin Mary, as I remember it,2 which struck me as strange, since I surmised, like other iconographers, that these phenomena were a Northern response to the ‘moving statue’ syndrome which was wont to break out in the South in summers darkened by incessant rain, in which the brightest things were the daffodil-yellow anoraks of German tourists.

  Apparently, as you passed a roadside shrine, a blue-robed Madonna would wink at you from Her white-washed stone canopy. Others would see the image of Her hand beckon, or She would nod Her plaster head ambiguously. For, since these statues were dumb, their limited vocabulary of gesture could convey any message whatsoever to the eye of the convinced beholder. Some interpreters were inclined to think that these signals expressed regret at the demise of the Family Rosary; others saw them as a warning of impending Armageddon. Abortion and divorce were frequently discussed.

  A contemporary photograph in the Irish News shows an elderly housewife in a print apron pointing to and alleged Christ’s face in the fireplace, like an angel standing over the abandoned sepulchre. As I remember squinting at the badly reproduced image, it seems arrested at the opaque spawny embryonic stage of a Polaroid, not quite coalesced: it is neither one thing nor the other; but it is just possible to believe you see a bifurcated beard, the skewed bracket of an eyebrow; here, half an ear, there an unblinking cataracted eye.

  The image would inevitably fade from public notice. Yet the ephemera bore witness to the power of icons, and the almost Russian Orthodoxy of the Tridentine Rite comes back to me in incense mingled with damp overcoats smelling of tobacco, and many candle-flames are wavered by the dim bronze gongs. I hear the clunk of a copper penny dropped through the slot of a money-box as payment for a candle. It brings to mind the candle auctions of the sixteenth century, where an item would be offered for sale as long as the candle burned, and the bid on the instant of expiry would be successful; from whence, I imagine, the expression, ‘the game is not worth the candle’, as the disappointed punter finds himself the custodian of an exorbitant set of objects, such as ten Venetian glass candlesticks.

  So, your wavering orison dwindles to a smoking wisp-wick. How much more efficient are the Tibetan prayer-windmills, whose mantras are propelled by every breath and zephyr of the heavens! Even the votive offerings at Irish shrines have a longer shelf-life: the little pile of ball-point pens (signifying litigation), the hearing-aids, the walking-sticks, the rags tied to branches (signifying God knows what; the request was of a private nature, though a guardian angel might be party to it).

  And, in those troubled times, from time to time, angels could be witnessed with their long wing-cases trailing behind them, crawling up the neo-Gothic blackened spires of St Peter’s Pro-Cathedral like translucent locusts, or materializing on the airy girders of unfinished office blocks. The Bishop of Down and Connor denounced them as demonic visions; nevertheless, they continued to prosper in corners of the eye, lurking in alleyways like winos, never fully revealing the
mselves. As we passed, we could hear the rustle of their carapaces.

  1 ‘Whispering Death’ – ‘Robert Humphreys models an “Aussie” Mk. 21 Beaufighter in 1:72 scale,’ Scale Models International, April 1996.

  2 However, some time after writing this, I came across the following: ‘Mexican Virgin “makes divine appearance” in metro puddle – Every hour, about 2,000 people pay their respects to a dried-up puddle in a Mexico City underground station, in which they believe the Virgin of Guadaloupe has manifested herself.

  The “Subway Virgin” appears in a stain, about 10 inches long, left on Sunday after the water had evaporated.

  “I believe, yes, that it is the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadaloupe,” said Amanda Soliz, a supermarket worker who had joined the queue of thousands waiting to leave floral and monetary offerings and to light candles near the stain they say bears a resemblance to Mexico’s dark-skinned manifestation of the Virgin Mary.

  The Mexican archbishop’s office doubted yesterday that the image was a true miracle, saying it failed to rank with the divine appearances in Guadaloupe in 1531, Lourdes in 1854, and Fatima in 1917.

  “There are no theological elements that lead us to consider this a divine presence through these lines that have formed due to a water leak,” it said.’ (Guardian, 6 June 1997)

  MOORELAND

  On the 1st of November 1950, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was declared a dogma1 of the Church. Until then, as explained by the Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary of 1931, it had been merely a traditional belief:

  ASSUMPTION, The. i. It is the teaching of the Church that at the death of the blessed Virgin Mary her body was preserved from corruption and that shortly afterwards it was assumed (Lat., assumere, to take to) into Heaven and reunited to her soul. This belief is not an article of faith; nevertheless Pope Benedict XIV declared it to be a probable opinion, the denial of which would be impious and blasphemous. The doctrine is universally held throughout the Church, and appears to be more or less explicitly believed by all dissident Eastern churches. No direct reference to this corporal assumption is made in the office of the feast itself, but it has been a subject of explicit belief for at least 1,500 years, being stated by St Juvenal of Jerusalem at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and the feast was already celebrated in the East in that century …

  ii. The feast of the Assumption is kept throughout the Church on Aug. 15 as a holiday of obligation (q.v.) … it is also observed by the Orthodox and other dissident Eastern churches under the title of the Falling Asleep of the All-holy Mother of God …

  We used to light bonfires (or bonefires, as we more correctly called them in our Belfast accent) on the 15th of August, ostensibly to celebrate this feast; but I suspect a pagan occasion has been assumed here, since the Church explicitly sought to absorb local customs into its liturgical calendar. As Pope St Gregory the Great indicated to St Augustine:

  The temples of the idols in that nation (of the English) ought not to be destroyed but let the idols that are in them be cast down; let water be blessed and sprinkled in the said temples and let altars be built and relics placed therein. For if those temples be well built, it is meet that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God. And because they are used to slaying many oxen in that worship, some solemnity must be provided in exchange … For without doubt it is impossible to cut off everything at once from their rude natures.

  (Bede, Eccl. Hist. i, 30)

  In Irish, August is Lughnasa, the month of Lugh, the Celtic god of light and genius, equated by Julius Caesar with Mercury; traditionally, his name was attached to the harvest festival held on the 1st of August (Lammas); perhaps the 15th is an extension or reiteration of this feast?

  At any rate, the bonefire would be built in the left-over patch of land at the back of Mooreland. We would begin scavenging for its constituent elements towards the end of July. We would go in gangs across the hinterland of fields to climb trees and mutilate them with blunt hatchets. We’d scout building-sites for planks, wooden shuttering and cable-spools. We’d knock on doors and ask for old furniture, for August was a kind of Spring, when old suites would be thrown out, and new ones bought. Gradually, the bonefire would start to take shape, with its bits of stuff purloined from skips; its rustling, drooping willow branches forming a tepee; the broken sofa at its heart, where boy sentinels reclined in rota, lest the bonefire should be stolen, or set alight by marauding Protestants, or rival Catholics. There was also a crow’s-nest armchair at the apex, where one could be ensconced in Pharaonic isolation, to survey the realm of the neighbourhood.

  Trying to remember if we had a Billy effigy, in the manner of Protestants burning the Pope on the Twelfth, I’ve just phoned my brother Pat for corroboration. No, he says, but do you remember the year we tied up S— M—, and put him in the bonefire before lighting it, and didn’t drag him out until the last possible moment? I don’t, perhaps because the guy in question was my brother’s age, three years younger than me, and thus belonged to a different generation; at that age, three years is a generation. I remember S— as a big-boned, strong, dark-haired boy – awkward, perhaps, but not a candidate for bullying. Pat, being a teacher of pupils with ‘learning difficulties’,2 and thus something of a pragmatic psychologist, attributes S—’s scapegoat status to his being beaten up or whipped by his father, for whatever misdemeanour, on a regular basis; I do remember this, but not his tormented status as a living effigy.

  It reminds me of the boy we used to bribe to eat still-warm cow’s dung, although the circumstances were less dramatic: the boy, after all, made a profit; and the herbivorous aroma of cow’s dung is not unpleasant, unlike dog-shit. (Similarly, horses’ droppings have a wholesome smell, like processed hay.) Come to think of it, I was such a boy myself: once, I was bet a thrupenny bit that I wouldn’t eat a matchboxful of live earthworms (boys, in those days, habitually carried such accessories in their pockets). At any rate, I emptied the contents on to my palm and mouthed their writhing vermicelli before gulping them into me. Thrupence was a substantial sum then – it could buy you six half-penny chews, for instance, or one bar of Cowans’ implacable Highland Toffee, which lasted for hours. It seemed a fair deal; and I could imagine myself, for some seconds, to be a Kalahari Bushman, before entering the cornucopia of the sweet-shop.

  O three-dee bit, twelve-sided paradigm of the duodecimal system! Small, thick, brass coin, mysterious as those obols pierced with holes that emanated from the Far East, where they were threaded into necklaces and bangles of currency! I am almost tempted to go tomorrow to the antique stalls of Donegall Pass, where, last Saturday, I saw a glass salad-bowlful of them being sold at a 4000% inflationary rate of 50p each. I’d buy about £4 worth, to see if I could still manage the house-of-cards trembling-fingered balancing trick of standing them on edge one on top of another, till, trying to place an optimistic seventh or eighth, the expensive column teetered, fell and clattered in bits across the scratched mahogany veneer of the table; sometimes, one would roll off the edge of the piazza to hit the brown lino way below with a dint and trickle off under the sofa into oblivion.

  The body of the sofa was itself a time-capsule, a corpus packed with small objects that had crept from hands or pockets into interstitial areas between upholstery and frame: a repository of coins, hair-clips, pencil-sharpeners, broken crayons, holy medals, pencil-stubs and curtain-rings. We discovered one such involuntary cache one August in the fifties, when we threw out our old horsehair-stuffed, hide-covered sofa, and half-dismantled it with a hatchet before dragging it off to the place of immolation where, on the Fifteenth Night, it would be assumed as smoke into the heavens, its ashes wafting over the fields and chimney-pots, its skeleton carbonized into the scorched, brick-like earth, where bits of twisted metal were still hot to the touch for days. Years later, I will remember the burned barricades of other Augusts: the crooked collapsed frames and chassis of Belfast Corporation buses; oil-drums; globs of smouldering
rubber; heaps of broken brick; anthracite-black cobblestones; roadways frosted with the smashed glass of milk-bottle petrol-bombs.

  *

  I wrote that yesterday, and now, another August has occurred to me. About four hours ago, I was in the city centre. A benefactor had given me £60 worth of Waterstone’s book-tokens, so I went to their shop in Royal Avenue and exchanged my tokens for these books:

  Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes :

  Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926 by Walter Benjamin Encyclopaedia Acephalia by Georges Bataille, Michel Leris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos, and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups, and

  A Nostalgic Look at Belfast Trams since 1945 by Mike Maybin

  I’m browsing through the latter volume when all of a sudden my eye is caught by a photograph of Castle Place, in August 1952; as the caption notes ‘there are a lot of pedestrians about, probably doing their shopping’.

  What arrests me is the figure in the middle right foreground, who, unlike all the other pedestrians, is walking in the roadway, slightly to the left of the pavement. Although his back is turned towards the camera, I strongly suspect, from his postman’s uniform, his cap tilted to the back of his head, the strap of the bag slung on his right shoulder, his dumpy personage and jaunty mid-stride, that this is my father. I suffer from progressive myopia, so I take off my glasses and peer more closely into the photograph to corroborate my initial vision, which might have been too good to be true; but yes, I recognize his dapper little feet, the way he walks with his hands held rather stiffly, and I’m told that I too have a stiff-handed walk, though I’d deny it. His general demeanour convinces me. The circumstances, too, are right: the art deco clock above Samuel’s the Jewellers shows five past twelve, which time, I imagine, would coincide with the second delivery of the day, and my father must have just come from the GPO round the corner with a fresh batch of correspondence; and I know that for some years my father’s beat, or ‘walk’ as it was called, included Cornmarket and its environs, towards which he is obviously headed, as he passes Swears & Wells the furriers, whose window is being gazed into by several elegant-looking ladies (illegible posters suggest a sale is going on).