‘Bunaglow’, in English, sounds like a brand of coal or anthracite; more interestingly, if accented on the last syllable, it can be exactly transliterated into Irish as ‘bun na gcló’, a phrase redolent with ambiguity, but almost impossible to translate. ‘Bottom of the shapes’ is a possible interpretation, but not entirely satisfactory. ‘Bun’ is a base, a bottom, foundation; but it can be extended in many ways, as elucidated by the Revd Patrick S. Dinneen, in a full column of his marvellous Irish-English Dictionary (new edition, 1927). To take some instances: ‘ar bun’, established; ‘tá an teanga ar bun’, the language is alive; ‘an madadh rua i mbun na gcearc’, the fox guarding the hens; ‘téim ’na bhun’, I set about doing it; ‘bun an urláir’, the floor furthest from the fire, three tricks at cards; ‘bun ribe’, a carbuncle or excrescence. ‘Cló’ is a stamp, type, print, impression, as in the expressions ‘ar a shon gan a bheith ann acht a chló, d’aithneochtha gur tarbh a b’eadh é’, though it was only the embryo you could see it was a bull-calf; ‘cuireadh ’na cló chum póige’, the expression of her face inviting a kiss; ‘ba thaitneamhach cló’, who was of entrancing beauty; ‘an cló’, the printing press; and ‘cló’ is also the act of conquering, subjugation, destruction, defeat; variety, change. So, depending on context, ‘bun na gcló’ can mean the origin of species, the establishment of stamps, the bottom line, a fount of images, an authority of peers, the arbiter of fashion, Commander of the Echelons, a bank of type, a metronome, the basics of taxonomy, the founder of a dynasty or sect, monotype, the genesis of embryos, Platonic forms, the inspiration for a memoir, Master of the Rolls, the original cliché, an impersonator or inventor, a minutebook, the primum mobile, the foot of tributaries, the General Post Office, where they all hang out, an ABC, a catalogue, a tramline terminus, party lines, ‘the cynosure of all eyes’, the Royal Mint, ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’, where the buck stops, a tinder-box, Aladdin’s lamp, a veritable Tower of Babel; in other words, a jungle.
The Bunaglow lies within a unique suburban precinct of half-wild woodland and parkland made up of the grounds of the Arts Council, Stranmillis College, Queen’s Elms Halls of Residence, and Lennoxvale House, formerly the residence of the Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University: comprising, perhaps, about seventeen acres, give or take a few; but its microcosmic ecosystem is immeasurable. Here are badgers, foxes, rabbits, field mice, owls; glades packed with bluebells, entanglements of wild roses, rhododendrons, hawthorns; a little espaliered crab-apple orchard; arbours, formal lawns, a derelict tennis court, two large ornamental ponds (formerly a principal source of water for the town of Belfast); mazy mossy pathways, gravel walks and cobbled courtyards. There is one ancient knobbly oak, a survivor of the aboriginal forest of the Lagan Valley. Plunging off the track into the remnant woods, you get a whiff of what it must have been, as your feet slide into the soft mulch and the fungal dead-leaf aroma is cut by the diuretic tang of stinging-nettles; the place is dense with whispering of insects and the noise of the leaves as they strive towards the light; dryads murmur from within the trees, and moths flit through the dappled moonshine, trembled by a zephyr. If you listen closely, you can hear the occasional swash of a car, far away on a dark suburban road. And for an instant, in a migraine flicker, you imagine yourself in the motor’s cockpit, manipulating the big Mercedes emblem of the steering wheel, absorbing the luminous blips of its console, as you drive full-beam into the tunnel of the calibrated dark, observing the insignia of street-names momentarily as you pass them, knowing the assignation will be met, or not. Then with a rush you’re back alone in the woods, where a night-owl hoots like a muted car-horn.
Years passed in a wing-beat. I shivered, and decided to go back to where the Bunaglow lay in its Hansel-and-Gretel dell at the end of a sylvan tunnel. I knew there’d still be a low glow in the fire; I imagined a man slumped in an armchair before it, thoughtfully smoking a pipe, and rehearsing the story he’d tell me when I got in.
1 One of them was the artist, John Kindness, whose ‘Belfast Frescoes’ are discussed in the chapter ‘Electric Street’.
THE TITANIC
There are many stories told about the Titanic: labyrinthine anecdotes, moral tales, recovered memories, retrospective omens. Here is a small sample of them:
For months and months in that monstrous iron enclosure there was nothing that had the faintest likeness to a ship; only something that might have been the iron scaffolding for the naves of half-a-dozen cathedrals laid end to end … at last the skeleton within the scaffolding began to take shape, at the sight of which men held their breaths. It was the shape of a ship, a ship as monstrous and unthinkable that it towered there over the buildings and dwarfed the very mountains by the water … A rudder as big as a giant elm tree, bosses and bearings of propellers the size of windmills – everything was on a nightmare scale; and underneath the iron foundations of the cathedral floor men were laying, on concrete beds, pavements of oak and great cradles of timber and iron and sliding ways of pitch pine to support the bulk of the monster when she was moved, every square inch of the pavement surface bearing a weight of more than two tons. Twenty tons of tallow were spread upon the ways, and hydraulic rams and triggers built and fixed against the bulk of the ship, so that, when the moment came, the waters she was to conquer should thrust her finally from the earth.
Wyn Craig Wade, The Titanic: End of a Dream, 1979
The R.M.S. Titanic was built by Messrs. Harland & Wolff at their well-known shipbuilding works at Queen’s Island, Belfast, side by side with her sister ship the Olympic. The twin vessels marked such an increase in size that specially laid-out joiner and builder ships were prepared to aid in their construction, and the space usually taken up by three building slips was given up to them. The keel of the Titanic was laid on March 31, 1909, and she was launched on May 31, 1911; she passed her trials before Board of Trade officials on March 31, 1912, at Belfast, arrived at Southampton on April 4th, and sailed the following Wednesday, April 10th, with 2,208 passengers and crew, on her maiden voyage to New York. She called at Cherbourg the same day, Queenstown Thursday, and left for New York in the afternoon, expecting to arrive the following Wednesday morning. But the voyage was never completed. She collided with an iceberg on Sunday at 11.45 p.m. in Lat. 41° 46′ N. and Long. 50° 14′ W., and sank two hours and a half later; 815 of her passengers and 688 of her crew were drowned and 705 rescued by the Carpathia.
Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of the Titanic, 1912
A floating palace sailed from Southampton in 1898 on her maiden voyage. She was the biggest and grandest liner ever built, and rich passengers savoured her luxury as they journeyed to America. But the ship never reached her destination: her hull was ripped open by an iceberg and she sank with heavy loss of life.
That liner existed only on paper, in the imagination of a novelist called Morgan Robertson. The name he gave to his fictional ship was Titan, and the book’s title was Futility.
Both the fiction and the futility were to turn into terrifying fact. Fourteen years later a real luxury liner set out on a similar maiden voyage. She too was laden with rich passengers. She too rammed an iceberg and sank; and, as in Robertson’s novel, the loss of life was fearful because there were not enough lifeboats. It was the night of April 14, 1912. The ship was the R.M.S. Titanic.
Passenger’s preview of doom
In many other ways than the similarity of their names the Titan of Robertson’s novel was a near duplicate of the real Titanic. They were roughly the same size, had the same speed and the same carrying capacity of about 3000 people. Both were ‘unsinkable’. And both sank in exactly the same spot in the North Atlantic.
But the strange coincidences do not end there. The famous journalist W.T. Stead published, in 1892, a short story which proved to be an uncanny preview of the Titanic disaster. Stead was a spiritualist: he was also one of the 1513 people who died when the Titanic went down.
Backward recollection
Neither Robertson’s hor
ror novel nor Stead’s prophetic story served as a warning to Titanic’s captain in 1912. But a backward recollection of that appalling tragedy did save another ship in similar circumstances 23 years later.
A young seaman called William Reeves was standing watch in the bow of a tramp steamer, Canada-bound from Tyneside in 1935. It was April – the month of the iceberg disasters, real and fictional – and young Reeves had brooded deeply on them. His watch was due to end at midnight. This, he knew, was the time the Titanic had hit the iceberg. Then, as now, the sea had been calm.
These thoughts took shape and swelled into omens in the seaman’s mind as he stood his lonely watch. His tired, bloodshot eyes strained ahead for any sign of danger, but there was nothing to be seen; nothing but a horizonless, impenetrable gloom. He was scared to shout an alarm, fearing his shipmates’ ridicule. He was scared not to.
Then suddenly he remembered the exact date the Titanic went down – April 14, 1912. The coincidence was terrifying: it was the day he had been born.1 Reeves’ mounting sense of doom flared into panic-stricken certainty. He shouted out a danger warning, and the helmsman rang the signal: engines full astern. The ship churned to a halt – just yards from a huge iceberg that towered menacingly out of the blackness of the night.
More deadly icebergs crowded in around the tramp steamer, and it took nine days for Newfoundland icebreakers to smash a way clear.
The name of the little ship that came so near to sharing the Titanic’s fate? She was called the Titanian.
The Reader’s Digest Book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, London, 1975
I regret I omitted in my last year’s Ephemeris to record the death of my old friend and correspondent, Mr. R.H. Penny, better known as ‘Neptune’. I have known him for about 40 years. He was a most honest and conscientious man, and the late Mr James Burns, Editor of the Medium and Daybreak, told me personally that he (Mr. Penny) was the most conscientious man he had ever met.
Mr. Penny was also very friendly with the late Mr. W.T. Stead, the editor and proprietor of the Review of Reviews, and did all he could to persuade that gentleman from undertaking that fatal journey to America. As many of my readers will recollect, he was drowned with hundreds of others in the Titanic, which struck an iceberg and was totally lost. I have often thought it strange that Mr. Stead’s familiar Spirit Julia did not warn him of the impending disaster. He had unbounded faith in this entity, and her admonition might have saved him from a premature death.
Incidentally, I may remark that Mr. Stead was a friend to Astrologers.
Mr. Penny was also fond of Spiritualism and the Occult sciences generally. He was a clever Astrologer, and I miss his correspondence very much.
Raphael’s Astronomical Ephemeris of the Planets’ Places for 1922
The night was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen: the sky without a single cloud to mar the perfect brilliance of the stars, clustered so thickly together that in places there seemed almost more dazzling points of light set in the black sky than background of sky itself; and each star seemed, in the keen atmosphere, free from any haze, to have increased its brilliance tenfold and to twinkle and glitter with a staccato flash that made the sky seem nothing but a setting made for them in which to display their wonder. They seemed so near, and their light so much more intense than ever before, that fancy suggested they saw this beautiful ship in dire distress below and all their energies had awakened to flash messages across the black dome of the sky to each other, telling and warning of the calamity happening in the world beneath …
I had often wanted to see her from some distance away, and only a few hours before, in conversation at lunch with a fellow passenger, I had registered a vow to get a proper view of her lines and dimensions when we landed at New York: to stand some distance away to take in a full view of her beautiful proportions, which the narrow approach to the dock at South ampton made impossible. Little did I think that the opportunity was to be found so quickly and so dramatically. The background, too, was a different one from what I had planned for her: the black outline of her profile against the sky was bordered all round by stars studded in the sky: her bulk was seen where the stars were blotted out. And one other thing was different from expectation: the thing that ripped away from us instantly, as we saw it, all sense of the beauty of the night, the beauty of the ship’s lines, and the beauty of her lights – and all these taken in themselves were intensely beautiful – that thing was the awful angle made by the level of the sea with the rows of porthole lights along her side in dotted lines, row above row. The sea-level and the rows of light should have been parallel – should never have met – and now they met at an angle inside the black hull of the ship.
Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of the Titanic, 1912.
My edition of The Loss of the Titanic was published by Philip Allan & Co. in their ‘Nautilus Library’ series, reminding me of Jules Verne’s Nemo, of underwater exploration, and my own dreams about the Titanic, where I am a disembodied robotic eye, gliding like a wayward star through the adits of its wrecked Atlantean cathedral, or through a porthole oculus, taking account of tilted apses and saloons, wandering their marble stairs and passageways.
1 My father, William Carson, was born on 14 April 1916.
THE STAR FACTORY I
The Star Factory had been long since demolished, but bits of its structure still lay at the back of my mind. Floating through its corridors, ascending its resounding Piranesi iron staircases, or wading through a flooded loading-bay, I realized that for some time I had confused the Factory with other establishments, or other purposes, and its dimensions had expanded. Exterior adjuncts of itself lay scattered on the landscape like relics of a bombed city. Other images ran parallel to it: the asbestos-roofed outbuildings on the margins of abandoned airfields, or the skull-and-crossbones signs on electricity pylons and perimeter fences; sometimes I could hear the clicking of defunct railway signals and the solitary parps of car horns; more often than not – on at least two or three occasions – I found myself re-entering the turnstiles of the Falls Road Baths with my hired bathing trunks and towel, experiencing its warm chlorine atmosphere almost instantly. Then I felt a discovered-cupboard memory of putting on a gas-mask from the nearly recent war, of my face being absorbed by its aromatic black rubber interior and taint of antique fear.
Or, according to another narrative, the Factory contained a great secret. Beneath the ankle-deep oily water that covered the terrazzo floor of one particularly murky corridor, discarded or lost objects could be detected shimmering: keys, watches, gold rings, a salamander brooch, watches, gold rings, fountain pens, the porcelain arm of a doll, like things scattered on the sea-bed from some titanic wreck. These must have been the votive offerings of pilgrims, metaphors for past lives or the lives they wished to follow, like the pennies we throw into wishing-wells or the shallow depths of public fountains. Many employed stratagems of augury before they came; but their observation of the avian paths afforded them no insight, for their futures would be altered by the very fact of entering the Factory.
Hence, there were dynasties of paths and destinations. Each family would tend towards certain entrances or adits, and the abstract space within was riddled with the swarming wormholes of their past and present; they moved, indeed, like slow illiterate teredos who might absorb the ink of letters oblivious to their freight of meaning, who browse on commas and full stops, and then enjoy a colon, inhabiting a sentence without digesting it. They had no thread of Ariadne. Of necessity, the story they had entered comprised many stories, yet their diverse personal narratives and many-layered time-scales evinced glimpses of an underlying structure, like a traffic flow-chart with its arteries and veins and capillaries.
They called this the Zone. The Zone was not the Factory, though it was of the Factory and bore its aura. It was an interactive blueprint; not virtual, but narrative reality. It was called the Zone in order to distinguish it from all the other enclaves into which the previous city had been long divid
ed; these were proper nouns with lineages of real names and topography behind them – Shankill, Falls, Ardoyne, Rosetta – and their nomenclators were maintained in high esteem. It was they who had been first consulted when the Zone appeared.
Period eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable, though it is retrospectively agreed that something happened. Some saw it as a tremor of the atmosphere, a visible shivering as if some new colour had been added to the spectrum; others felt the city bodily lifted up and set down again in slow motion. Crucifixes were reported to have fallen off bedroom walls at the exact time. Some others, in hindsight, swore blind that they had been in times and places where they’d never been; someone heard a cock crow thrice in the unlikely vicinity of the Clock Bar, where, it was rumoured, the minute hand had jumped back ten minutes, thus restoring it to that oxymoron, legal bar-time. There were many sightings of angels, some of whom bore swords of light. Dogs howled unaccountably, as they would at the sound of an ice-cream vendor’s chimes or the vibrations of a red accordion.
One observer described, with great reluctance, how a Brobdingnagian space vehicle had materialized above the city, its Argus multitudes of portholes blinking in an alien Morse. Pods had then evolved in lifeboat mode from the womb of the mother ship, drifting and descending like a dandelion propaganda drop of tiny Zeppelins. Meanwhile, he perceived its great dark broad Polaroid VDU windscreen glance down at him with split-second infinite incomprehension before it turned its gaze to the more important ship-building and tobacco manufactory quarters. Then it vanished, as if ‘was’ had never been.
The Star Factory Page 6
