The conductor punches out the pink tuppenny ticket of Belfast Corporation Transport. Usually, I’d climb into the smoke-fogged Upper Saloon and occupy its front seat and pretend to drive, revolving my imaginary wheel and gazing down into the stream of Fords and Humbers, bikes, milk-carts, brewers’ drays, linen emporia vans and mineral water lorries. The desultory red of an Inglis’ bread-van, the yellow of a Hughes’, illuminated the occasion. I’d float proud and high above it all, looking spaceman-like at these familiar Dinky aliens.
Or sometimes, going on down-town expeditions with my mother, we would take the lower Saloon, her faint rouge mingling with the red upholstered leather aroma. She would lean into me as the bus curved down the road, past Lemon Street and Peel Street, past Alma, Omar, Balaclava Street, until we disembarked at Castle Junction. Coming up to Christmas, four o’clock was nearly dark, and Royal Avenue was lit by tall, spaced light-poles bearing glassy orchids of electric sapphire blue. The massive clock above the Bank Buildings shone like a Roman-numeralled moon. Snow and tinsel glittered in the shop windows. Salt crystals crackled under our feet.
I was most impressed by Robinson and Cleaver’s window display, where an impossibly talented Meccano boffin had constructed a Platonic model of a working windmill the height of a nine-year-old boy. I would pause with my nose pressed against the cool glass and admire this complicated paradigm of engineering with its berry-red and holly-green components: girders, flanged plates, trunnions, flat plates; double brackets, channel bearings, obtuse angle brackets; pawls and ratchets, sprockets, bush wheels, crank shafts; nuts, bolts, washers, spring clips, threaded couplings. The intricacies of its construction were too much to grasp, like the dimensions of the Titanic or the dense, cross-hatched melée of shipyard cranes, scaffolding and gantries that towered above the east bank of the Lagan.
Four or five Meccano revolutions of the windmill sails went by before my mother gently dragged me off. Robinson and Cleaver’s big, revolving, brass-lined doors engaged us with a faint pneumatic hush as we were swept into the foyer. Neon-lit cosmetic names – Coty, Yardley, Givenchy – surrounded us in mirrors. Lipsticks and eye-shadows. Cold creams. Compacts. Colour charts. We glided on the deep blue carpet and took the Versailles marble staircase to the first floor Ladies’ Garments Department. Here, taut corsets were displayed on headless torsos. In the corner of my eye I registered the flesh and blush tones of diaphonous ‘Spirella’ bras. I would be relieved to escape to the sober warmth of the Men’s and Boys’ Outfitters, with its dark serges and muted Thornproof, Donegal and Harris tweeds. As we passed through the store, we’d sometimes pause before a tall first-floor window to gaze down momentarily at the bobbling stream of shawls, hats and flat caps, or upwards to the luminous green cupola of the City Hall, the almost blue green, starry Christmas Tree emblazoned on the dusk.
Such occasions would necessitate a hair-cut. After pondering the revolving mystery of the barber’s pole – where did the candy stripes come from, where did they go? – I would go in and sit on the bench to wait my turn, reading the cardboard advertisements for Brylcreem, Styptic Pencils and 7 O’Clock razor blades, and wondering what they did with the hair shearings at the end of the day. I’d imagine franchises with Wig and Mattress Manufacturers. Or not. Mattresses were horsehair. It reminded me that when you rounded the corner from Muldoon’s and walked up Durham Street, across the Boyne Bridge into Sandy Row, you’d see red-coated King Billy on his white horse prancing in the Boyne of a gable wall. I’d wonder if his long, scrolled, auburn locks were wig or hair.
Now I am staring at my head without a torso, my hands invisible and paralysed beneath the barber’s nylon shroud. I try not to wince as the cold die-cast metal clippers snip and snag my ears and raw neck. He asks me my name and where I go to school, as if he were a mirrored Grand Inquisitor, compiling the denominations of the Parish. I am about to answer when he throws a jolt of freezing oil into the top of my skull. Then he violently kneads my head before he calms and draws a plumb-line parting on my cranium with a sharp steel comb. Afterwards, I walk and blink into the brisk cold air of Hallowe’en as if emerging from a picture-house.
Early showers of rockets whooped and burst their yellow stars against the deepening blue. Shawled, lip-sticked boys clattered by on high heels in the orange-and-russet-scented dusk. The smell, too, of pineapples and gunpowder and greengrocers’ barrels ammunition-loaded with brazil and monkey nuts. Outbreaks of squib fusillades put me in mind of the First World War, and I’d see the cracks between the paving stones as a complex of trenches, me as Baron von Richthofen in his red Fokker tri-plane which I’d previously constructed from Airfix. Arms outstretched in aerial manoeuvres, I purled and pirouetted my way home to crash-land in the hallway.
On days like this, my father would have worked the early shift and would be dozing on the sofa in his navy-blue postman’s uniform, his eyes and nose invisible beneath the authoritatively drooped black peak of his cap. His bag hung on a nail behind the hall door, and I’d explore its tan canvas interior for lengths of coarse twine or missives from the far-flung corners of the British Empire, written-on with ‘Unknown at This Address; Return to Sender’. When he’d wake he might tell me a story like ‘The Bottle Imp’ or ‘The Talking Horse’. By now, the room was nearly dark and he’d illustrate the narrative with deft time-lapse squiggles of his glowing cigarette-end.
That night in bed, rehearsing the momentous events of the day, I’d visualize these neon joined-up writings on the inside of my eyelids. Now I saw the oak names carved into the school desks, one on top of another till they’re indecipherable, the obliterated dates. Now I saw the lapidary names of streets in Roman capitals. I took up calligraphy again as I admired the blue-boiler-suited craftsmen inscribing signs of shops with careful brush and oils. I imagined writing on a slate, then wiping it all clean and writing it again. I saw black graffiti on white-washed gable walls: Remember 1690, Remember 1916. I saw the Battle of the Somme in newsreel black and white, the throng of shipyard workers pouring out from under the Titanic.
Come Spring, I knew my father and I would climb Black Mountain, panting up the broken limestone, cold-stream-pouring pathway from the Whiterock Road, up into the air-mail tissue-paper sky of Easter, far above the city. When we’d attained the celestial summit we’d sit down on the undulating heather, and he’d light up a Park Drive cigarette and point it towards the various details of the urban map spread out below: the biggest shipyard in the world; the biggest ropeworks; the green cupola of the City Hall; the biggest linen mill; Clonard Monastery; Gallaher’s tobacco factory; my school; the GPO; and in between, the internecine, regimental terraces of houses and the sprawled, city-wide Armada of tall mill funnels writing diagonals of smoke across the telescopic clarity of our vision. I could see the colourcoded kerbs of Union Jack and Tricolour. I saw my tiny self appearing at the front door of 100 Raglan Street, staring up through the absolutely smogless air, into all the ambiguities of blue: Virgin Mary, Denim, Boiler-suited, Prussian, Rangers, Oceanic, Irish Sea, Atlantic, Gallaher’s and Esso. I saw the petrol rainbow of an April shower and vanished into it, contemplating how I would get lost en route to school.
These memories were initially set down as a preface to a book of images, Belfast Frescoes, by the Belfast artist John Kindness. His work is described by Julian Watson, its publisher, as follows:
With the surprise of an old but still magic comic, or the marginalia in an ancient manuscript, here is a memoir of a childhood in 1950s Belfast, told in pictures and short sentences. Here also, through the remembered vision of childhood and in what is left suggested rather than spoken, is a description of present times.
It is odd that such an idiosyncratic and personal creation had a seemingly bureaucratic beginning. In the summer of 1993 John Kindness was approached by the Public Art Development Trust to submit a proposal for an artwork for the Belfast lounge at Heathrow Airport. The idea came to him that there would be a long gash in the impersonal international airport formica-c
lad walls. Revealed behind – as if by some peculiar alternative technology – would be remains and traces of something altogether more personal and specific, rather as ancient frescoes are found beneath crumbling plaster in long-neglected buildings.
As it turned out, the Airport did not proceed with any commissions. Archaeology there might have to wait for a few centuries, but the idea took a more immediate hold on John and with a depth he may not at first have anticipated, as all manner of remembered detail returned to his mind.
Even though there were no longer any walls for his frescos to be concealed in, he started work on the series in early 1994. Each of the resulting twenty panels is made in lime fresco on pieces of slate measuring 12 × 24 inches … This little book is designed by the artist. We wished to reproduce all the frescos in their original sequence with simplicity and directness.
Ostensibly simple these images might be, but their design is complex. My original brief was not to write about them, but to respond to them from my own angle; fittingly, John is a Protestant and I am a Catholic, but our Belfasts correspond, and we used to have great crack together in Belfast folk clubs in the late sixties. Each panel is underwritten by a brief commentary in careful schoolboy calligraphic roundhand, like the one I used for writing-up my stamp collection; and each panel has a frieze; both adumbrate the main subject in a playful and ironic commentary. For example:
Early in the morning in our house there was a cigarette that moved around in the dark, it was my father getting ready to go to work.
A lit cigarette has floated out from an opened flat pack of Gallaher’s Blues, a macho untipped cigarette once popular with the better-paid class of working Belfast men. The packet is a beautiful archaic defunct dark blue. Below it, a teapot and a teacup; both contain, or bear on their surfaces, images of a blue Titanic (its funnels like four lit cigarettes) about to hit the iceberg. To the right, a boy in blue striped pyjamas is getting up from his tousled yellow-eiderdowned, iron-framed bed, reaching like a swimmer or a sleepwalker for the handle of the nearby door, which is shown in cross-section, in its various grains and joints.
*
Frieze: In the bottom left-hand corner a vertical lit cigarette sends out a long plume or sentenced message of smoke, curling up to the top edge to become clouds and billows, in which suns, moons and stars, stylized like those on an astrolabe or old-fashioned clock dial, appear and disappear, and Leviathans and packet-steamers ride out a storm.
Or
If you draw on a page with lemon juice or milk, it is invisible until you hold it in front of the electric fire and it goes brown.
The boy artist Kindness is wearing a grey shirt, maroon and grey striped tie, rust-coloured Fair Isle sleeveless sweater, grey knee socks with maroon and green knee-bands; he is seated on a too-low stool at a knee-height desk, pen poised above a blank page resting on its surface, which also bears a lemon and a small glass tumbler. Reading from left to right, are the following: a page torn from a spiral-bound jotter on which we can make out these words, written in sepia longhand, ‘Robin Hood shot a nude riding through the glen He told Friar Tuck to run like …’1; two halves of a cut lemon; an italic-nibbed stationer’s pen with moiré blue handle; a scrap of paper on which is sketched a childish, embrowned female nude; another tumbler of water; a metal foil Co-op milk-bottle cap; and a one-bar red electric fire with a blue fabric-covered flex snaking up to terminate in a brown Bakelite plug and wall-socket.
*
Frieze: A nib in the bottom left corner leaks an upward plume of blue ink or smoke, whose spirals, as they reach the upper edge and run along it, become lemons suggestive of breasts; they are punctuated by nibs whose waisted pattern degenerates into female torso curves.
*
It is appropriate that Kindness, in these works, has taken slate as his ground material: not only slate, but actual roofing slates (you can see the nail-holes in the corners) since Belfast was as comprehensively roofed with that material as it was built of brick. On stormy days slates would fly from the roofs; if we had to venture outside, we were warned to stay well in to the walls lest we be decapitated; and broken slates had several uses – they could be written on and with, and short lengths could be fashioned into castanets, or stone-age knives and scrapers. It was good to be inside on such nights, as the whirlwind fife-and-drum ensemble of the storm crepitated overhead, and you thought of the stars being driven out of their courses. Wind whistled down the chimney, disturbing the glowing coals, making them flare and pop, echoing the atmospheric wheeps and sigmas of the Clydesdale wireless as we tried to tune into The Weather.
1 My memory of this children’s risqué ditty is somewhat different. The verse I know, a parody of the theme song of the TV Robin Hood serial of that time, goes, ‘Robin Hood saw a nude riding through the glen/Friar Tuck ran like fuck to warn the Merry Men/When they got there, Maid Marion was bare/And Robin Hood, Robin Hood, was in the nude.’
THE CLYDESDALE SUPPLY COMPANY
In the 1948 Directory, Royal Avenue is crammed with offices and businesses and retail outlets. Many important bodies are ensconced here: the Ulster Tourist Development Association, the Central Catholic Club, Pathe Pictures Ltd., the Belfast District Ancient Order of Foresters, the Blind Welfare Association, the N.I. Road Transport Board Head Office, and the Star Coal Company. Here, too, are costumiers, gunmakers, grain stores, dance studios, and insurance brokers.
As dusk begins to take the form of soot-fleck starling-flocks, it settles on the cornices and sills and architraves of Royal Avenue; filaments of neon blue tremble in their glassy hemispheres as the new electric street-lamps are switched on; lights come on in ones in small office windows, silhouetting the occasional audio-typist or silently dictating businessman.
These office warrens teem with many interim interiors of agents, auditors and caretakers: No. 10, for instance, is adumbrated by no fewer than thirty-nine premises within its five tall storeys. Imagining myself climbing the long stairwell to the Clydesdale Supply Co., radio dealers, I am put in mind of the ponderous drum-major tasselled hooves of a Clydesdale horse as it drags a load of bagged coal past 3 O’Neill Street, where I am listed towards my granny’s Clydesdale wireless, left ear pressed to its grille as I spin its needle-sentinel through the glowing blips of Athlone, Hilversum, Leipzig and Marseilles, hearing the solid thrum of its speakers beneath the dotty Morse and atmospheric static.
In the small hours, at the height of the Troubles, when incidents of arson or assassination occurred routinely, I used to listen to the short-wave police radio, from which I learned the alphabet of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta … So convincing was the aural landscape, that I sometimes believed the police could overhear me, or at least know that I was listening to their stillicides of window-wiper swash, as they crawled through West Belfast in unmarked cars. Such paranoia was common then, and perhaps necessary, given the proliferation of bugs and other, increasingly sophisticated surveillance devices (one of which can pick up the vibrations of a window-pane at some incredible distance, and translate their shivers into conversation, the glass acting as a tympanum).
At this point, the efficacy, or otherwise, of children’s tin-can two-way radios occurs to me, their empty Ovaltine receivers connected by a cricket-pitch length of postman’s string. Although your correspondent was within normal earshot, you suspended this belief for the buzz of imaginary distance: your nearby accomplice would suddenly dwindle off into a little-known adjunct of the Empire – Sarawak, or Borneo, perhaps – and reproduce its sound-effects of squawking birds and monkeys whooping through the trees, as he dispatched an urgent order for machetes. I’d immediately requisition an aircraft, and take off in it. In less time than it takes to tell, I’d find myself in the eye of a tropical storm, the needle on the petrol-gauge shivering at zero … and then:
For perhaps another two minutes the engine maintained its customary note. Then it spluttered. It cut out, came on for another few seconds, spluttered again, and then cut, as Ginger knew, for the las
t time. The airscrew came to rest. He held straight on, which was all he could do, in an uncanny silence, broken only by the boom of distant thunder. For what seemed an eternity of time he stared down into the opaque bowl below him, waiting for the end.
It came slowly. The mist seemed to harden. It became deeper, more solid, in colour. Then, through it, appeared a phantom world of uneven ground from which sprang stunted, misshapen trees and giant weeds. Easing the control column back as near as he dared to stalling point he floated down into them. At the last instant he flicked off the ignition and flattened out for a pancake landing. As the aircraft began to sink bodily he lifted his knees to his chin to prevent his legs from being trapped, covered his face with his arms, and waited for the inevitable crash. The machine checked, shuddering, as the undercarriage was wiped off. The safety-belt tightened on his stomach like an iron band. Then, with a splintering of wood and rending of fabric the Auster bored into some bushes, flinging him against the instrument panel. It tilted on its nose, and then, quite slowly, sank back. Silence fell.
Then it was time to wind up the episodic tin-can radio, and go indoors to snuggle by the fire and dip again into more of Biggles and the Black Raider, ‘Another adventure of Air-Detective Bigglesworth and his Air Police’, by Capt. W.E. Johns, first printed in 1953 by Hodder & Stoughton. I bought this book in Harry Hall’s second-hand bookshop in Smithfield, in what year I cannot tell; but I do remember glimpsing its cerise spine and sans-serif title on an almost-unreachable shelf in a cold, damp, booklined alcove. Palpable fog had crept in the massive gate, whose archway bore a keystone lion’s head with open, lapidary jaws. The monumental piers resembled those of factories or prisons or entrances to the underworld.
The Star Factory Page 15
