The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  Before the buses were the trams, and Castle Place was known as Castle Junction; here, the radial routes of Belfast conspired to form an asterisk.

  Demolition of Hercules Place, looking north, 1879

  The view is from Castle Junction. Outside the Provincial Bank, an awry throng of gawping spectators; beyond them, a blur and haze of demolition, the skyline gapped. In the right foreground, someone has been double-exposed as two overlapping ghosts.

  Marcus Patton reports that ‘in 1804, the Sovereign of the town ordered butchers to sell meat only in Hercules Lane and Arthur Street, and by the middle of the 19c Hercules Street was populated almost exclusively by butchers … and as they frequently killed animals on the premises it was a most unhealthy and unsavoury area.’

  O’Byrne2 paints a different picture:

  On a Saturday night in Hercules Street the place seemed filled with life and light. Above the heads of the thronging people the flaring gas jets at the end of their long brass brackets made bright as day the crowded thoroughfare.

  With its rows and rows of butchers’ shops – there were forty-seven in all – it was a quaint, odd, many-coloured picturesque street, surrounded by a maze of twisting lanes and alleys and byways, in which a stranger might go astray, only to be rescued and set right again by the Bellman, to the amusement of the dwellers therein …

  Under the old, sagging houses, the pavement was encumbered with pedlars’ stalls and barrows, with all kinds of trade going on in the open air. Water-carriers and hawkers, farmers and fishfolk, merchants, pedlars and huxters, egg-wives and wag-goners, all seemed to find their way to Hercules Street …

  A peep into an old book containing a list of the inhabitants of Hercules Street, and fancy brought us back to where its people sat beside their supper fires a hundred years ago.

  And one picture does for all.

  A wide kitchen, ruddily bright from the big fire that burns cheerily on the old-fashioned hearth, a red-tiled floor, with wainscotted walls and a ceiling of old oaken timbers; a wooden settle on which its owners’ fathers and mothers sat before them, some dusky old chests and presses in which are stored away for safe keeping the precious and costly robes and gowns, the women’s Sunday finery, with heads of lavender and sprigs of rosemary to keep away the moths. And inside the same old presses are stores of household linen, hand-woven, the glory and pride of its fortunate possessors, and the sprigged and embroidered white linen petticoats, so stiffly starched – to be fashionable – that they could stand alone.

  A great dresser, covered with blue and white crockery-ware and copper pans, shining brass kettles, great half-brown crocks, wooden basin and gleaming glass, the latter made in Ballymacarrett, where the queer, beehive-shaped chimneys of John Kane’s glass works can be seen across the river to the left of the Long Bridge.

  At the back of the houses the old, vast cowsheds and stables are sweet with the smell of cattle and dried meadow-grasses, where great high-piled loads of hay seem forever to be arriving, bringing with them into the narrow, dusty way, the scent of moist fields and reaped grasses and the perfume of honeysuckle hedges. All through the summer days great sheep dogs lie asleep on almost every doorstep, and old, wise-looking, bearded goats wander about at will.

  I have quoted Cathal O’Byrne extensively because I love this ramble of fantasy, with its brilliantly realized details: he makes you see the ghostly floating petticoat without a corset or a torso, the vitreous-glazed dark brown outside of the crocks, and their speckled white interior bowls, reminding me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls’. You can easily visualize O’Byrne’s unhyphenated sheep dogs, snoozing in rows as far as the eye can see, and trying to count them makes you feel dozy yourself. Thankfully, they tend to wake up on occasions, whereupon they emit an alternate woof or baa to jolt you from this reverie; or you might be surprised by the sudden absence of one on the half-moon scrubbed before a doorstep, and you ring its owner’s bell to enquire why his woolly sentinel is not on duty; it transpires that the sheep-dog is sick and is ensconced in a bed in the return room, with its hooves or paws up in the air, undergoing one of the periodic bouts of identity crisis endemic to this breed. Meanwhile, a wandering goat has eaten your shoes which you left at the threshold, in the Chinese-temple fashion of those days, where everyone enjoyed the feel of their woollen sock-soles skating heel-for-toe across the black oak floorboards, polishing them with palimpsests of social discourse, in the balletic, pointed gestures of a Scottish so-called dance.

  Then there is O’Byrne’s great subjunctive floating past tense, neither perfect nor pluperfect: ‘a wooden settle on which its owners’ fathers and mothers sat before them’: we see their ghostly presences take on lineaments of flesh and blood, instantly acquiring tricorned hats, coiffed hair, dainty Regency high heels, frock-coats, oriental waistcoats, milkmaids’ puffed-sleeved blouses, many-petticoated high-waisted frocks, and other various embroideries of broderie anglaise and cuffs shot with Carrickmacross lace. Their grown children, with children of their own rolling around under their feet like lambs or pups or kids, do not seem to mind the droning pieties their parents speak from beyond their shared grave, for, although one does not have to heed ghosts, one should treat them with reverence, and appreciate their aromatic presences of blue lavender and spiky rosemary.

  I have been dipping into As I Roved Out for nearly forty years, off and on; and sometimes, in the course of writing this book, I acknowledge O’Byrne’s ghostly presence at my shoulder. The edition I first knew was the abbreviated one of 1957, and I can see its pale green spine in my father’s book-case in the ‘parlour’, alongside the darker, gold-blocked green of the Reverend Patrick S. Dinneen’s Irish–English Dictionary; and I feel there is a great complicity between the fantasist and the lexicographer, as exemplified by the Reverend’s definition of bearradóir: ‘a cow that eats the hair of her tail or of other cows’ tails.’ And in Dinneen I detect a shade of that other compromised Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

  In coming together to honour the memory of Fr. Dinneen,3 I am inclined not to any mood of sadness but rather to follow the line advocated by G.B. Shaw on the death of another famous Irishman when he advised to ‘put out your brightest colours … His memory is still green in his native parish, where he is recalled simply as ‘The Dictionary Man’ … As the century closed, Fr. Dinneen was in a ferment of zeal and activity for the Irish language to the point that he made a traumatic and dramatic decision. He resigned from the Jesuit Order in 1900. Much speculation has occurred about such an unusual event but I feel happy to accept the tradition in his family that he simply wished to devote himself full-time to the Irish language but his superiors would not permit it.

  As Noel O’Connell points out, ‘his Dictionary is not merely a compendium of words and their meanings. He gives examples of usage and idiom that have seduced the reader over the years into many fascinating byways.’ I have often opened Dinneen in a sortes Virgilianae, like now, at p. 959, where my thumb is resting in the margin at this word, scartha, which basically means ‘separated’, or ‘apart’, but Dinneen’s examples are, as always, fascinating:

  táim scartha le céird, I have given up my trade; chomh scartha leis is tá an adharc leis an muic, as devoid of it as the pig of horns (saying); a n-earball scartha amach ó fhuaimeint tighe, the last of them driven from the shelter of their homes; ní scartha duit le caidreamh na saoithe sean, you must not give up the society of those learned in antiquities; táim crom scartha ar an saoghal, life weighs me down.

  Here we detect a Jesuitical, biographical ghost behind the lexicographer priest, as he justifies his grappling with the language, in and out of the language. I am especially drawn to his ‘the last of them driven from the shelter of their homes’, whose Irish makes an interesting etymological tangle. Here, the word for ‘the last of them’ is earball, ‘a tail; a remnant; the end’. In Ulster Irish, this word is pronounced ruball, which makes me think of English rubble, and terraces of devastated Be
lfast brick houses fled by their inhabitants; at the same time, ruball suggests the curlicued tail of a pig, which I see snoozing on a kitchen floor. Then there is his ‘shelter’, fuaimeint, a word I never knew until now,4 which he defines on p. 492 as ‘vigour, force, effectiveness; sense; foundation’, and I wonder what it might have to do with fuaim, ‘sound, noise, clamour, report, echo’, as I get the thrum of a solid bass note below the floorboards which give me shelter, and the music of the phrase, which I say to myself now, a n-earball scartha amach ó fhuaimeint tighe, has the ring of an imperial or civil war, as the foundations of the state are turned upside-down.

  Then I replace Dinneen on his shelf beside O’Byrne in my father’s book-case which, when I opened its leaded glazed doors with its permanently in-situ key, exuded a sudden ink-horn smell of books and wood, wood which is adhmad, as in adhmad urláir, ‘the floor or bottom timbers of a boat; a poem’, and I enter yet another dimension.

  1 See Jonathan Bardon, Belfast: An Illustrated History, Blackstaff Press, 1996.

  2 Cathal O’Byrne, As I Roved Out.

  3 Fr. Dinneen – His Dictionary and the Gaelic Revival, lecture by Noel O’Connell, Honorary Secretary of the Irish Texts Society; given in the Irish Club, London, on 29 September 1984 in the presence of H.E. The Irish Ambassador Mr Noel Dorr to mark the 50th Anniversary of the death of Fr. Dinneen on 29 September 1934.

  4 though it must derive from L. fundamentum.

  ST PETER’S PRO-CATHEDRAL

  Some time in the sixties, my mother decided to convert the loft, a broad, triangular-prism volume of dark beneath the roof. An odd-job man wired it, and he devised a cunning, steep, right-angle staircase up into it, and he laid a floor on the joists. He put a window in the gable. He put up batten-and-plywood dado-height walls to make a nave of the space, with two enclosed, prismed aisles on either side, above the eaves; and he put in sliding doors through which you hunkered to gain access to its lumber-gloom. Inside, in a game of hide-and-seek, you experienced a tea-chest musk. The dulled Platonic outlines of cardboard boxes came to hand; rummaging the interior of one, you’d rediscover the shape of a shoe among the bric-à-brac of elephant book-ends, wicker-handled tea-trays and discarded lamp-shades. Then, when your eyes became accustomed to the light, you found there were broken chinks of light at the edge of the eaves, and the dotted rivets of the water-tank were buttons of light.

  The converted loft was my bedroom for several years. Relatively heavy objects, defying normal gravity, were wont to float up into it, even the family book-cabinet, which lodged itself against the party gable wall like a high altar under a triangular ceiling-canopy. The cabinet comprised a book-case screwed into the top of a writing-bureau. The bookcase had three shelves and two leaded glass doors. The bureau had three drawers beneath a 45° angled flap; when you opened it, two synchronized, green baize-covered armatures slid out from concealed sockets, to support the flap, whose obverse was the ink-stained leather-covered surface of a writing-desk. Consequently, pigeonholes and smaller drawers were revealed within, crammed with fraying correspondences and dog-eared family snaps: arcades in a Lilliputian Byzantium, smelling of faded ink and the gum of postage stamps.

  I open the flap again in my mind, and compose myself like an express postal-worker on an antiquated night mail-train, assigning letters to their destinations like an automatic pilot, swaying with practised ease against the lurch of the carriage, as a long white rope of smoke unfurls from the snort of the locomotive chattering through the dark, past sleeping villages and back-yard pigeon-lofts in conurbations, under aqueducts and viaducts and into tunnels.

  Alternatively, the cabinet could be an organ console; but mostly it behaved as a writing-desk, and it was here that I first began to write, in the late sixties and early seventies. I kept a kind of journal then, in a 13″ × 8″ unruled notebook with marbled endpapers that I got from a friend’s father who worked in Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. I haven’t thought about it for years, but now that I’ve remembered it’s stored in a drawer of the desk I’m writing at, I bring it out and flick through it, experiencing again the embarrassment I felt when last I looked at it. But one of the less embarrassing entries seems germane to this present sequence of explorations:

  5th June, 1970: … such strange dreams I had last night. My sleep seemed an unbroken story in dream, a strange story unfolding in the night. Linked by images of death & injury. At one stage I knew I was dead, I was a skeleton wrapped in a black rustling shroud. My friends walked with me & knew I was dead. I came back to life. Somehow my skeleton disappeared, absorbed into flesh again, scarred flesh. My legs were broken & stitched together. My left knee was a mass of cracks and hardened blood.

  I wish I could remember it all clearly – there was some coherent pattern to the train of events.

  One thing I do remember now – a tram which led you back into the past. It was a sort of excursion. You paid a few shillings & the tram moved off, supported apparently by thin air. As it moved, the scene around slowly shifted & altered through past time. There were only three passengers – myself & 2 girls, I can’t remember who they were, I knew them slightly. Much of this scene took place around Milltown, I think.

  I think this was inspired by a notice for City Bus Tours I read yesterday – or perhaps it was today. A lot of today’s events link with last night’s dream in an odd metaphysical way – death, injury, the tram journeying to the past – past & future inextricably mixed.

  The tram is also an extension of the recurrent dream I have had since a child – it always differs a good deal, but the basic elements remain the same – the red bus I can never catch. I stand at the stop, hold out my hand. The bus slows down, then suddenly revs up and moves off. It happens over and over again. Frustration? I don’t know. Now that I think of it, this dream was also there last night.

  The dream of the bus is always connected with the past – not my past, but a past I have no personal knowledge of – about 1930 (when there were no buses.) But I know too that this is the past of my childhood, even though it is before my time. It usually takes place at the Dunville Park stop or at the Grosvenor Rd. lights, or sometimes somewhere around Ballysillan. (Why there I cannot imagine – this area of town occurs quite frequently in my dreams, though I don’t know it very well – that and the Ardoyne area. It is all quite transmuted, of course – I invent streets & roads which don’t exist. Round York Street & Dock St. I have invented many streets which don’t exist – strange diagonal side streets full of derelict buildings, crumbled Victorian pubs, leading to York St.)

  Oh, and Smithfield, of course – this occurs quite frequently, I invent vast secret halls approached by winding staircases, full of motheaten leatherbound books. Always a curious air of decadence, of crumbling, almost a physical decay like crumbling flesh. The halls of books are tended by old women with parchment skins & stale perfume, slightly sinister …

  And today, before it occurred to me that I might quote my self of twenty-seven years ago, I happened to be in Smithfield – not the Smithfield of the latter dream, which was destroyed by firebombs on 6 May 1974, but the ‘sadly pale replacement for the much-loved Victorian covered market’ (Patton) built in 1986–7. There, in a second-hand bookshop, I bought the little pamphlet I have before me, No. 67 in Benn’s Sixpenny Library series (I paid a pound for it), Architecture, by the nicely named Christian Barman. I had opened it at this passage, which links urban space and dreams:

  Long before the bankers of Lombard Street were the bankers of Lombardy, from whom that street takes its name. And there was also, in Northern Italy, that other street, the great Street in general, of whose existence the people, as they wandered round the outside of their churches, were gradually becoming aware. This discovery of the street was the first step in the progress of the new architecture to which the name of Renaissance has been given; and it is in Italy that it was first made.

  The truth is that during the preceding centuries the street had been so far overlooked that it could ha
rdly be said to exist at all. It was just a hole in the town. Like the hole in the hub of a wheel extolled by the Chinese philosopher, it was a very important hole. Yet no one ever troubled to look at it. The churches and surrounding houses were observed, and between them there was just space, straight or crooked inlets from that greater Space that lapped the sun and stars. In architecture the movement known as the Renaissance is principally the discovery of the walls of these inlets. In its way it was at least as great a discovery in architecture as the discovery of the unconscious mind in modern psychology.

  And, appropriately, one of my current recurrent dreams of Belfast focuses on streets dominated by a church, St Peter’s Pro-Cathedral in the Lower Falls. Looking at it on the Ordnance Survey plan of 1931 (a modern map would not show the demolished streets, or versions of them, in which the dream takes place), I note how the church is like the hub of a crooked wheel, with streets bounding it and radiating from it: Alexander, Derby, Milford, Ardmoulin, Irwin, Baker, Massarene, Scotch, Bow, English, Cinnamond. Completed in the neo-Gothic style in 1866, the church occupies what looks like medieval space, although the streets do not exist by virtue of its presence, as they would have done in medieval times; their raison d’être is to house the workers in the spinning mills and foundries that made Belfast a once-great city. In my dream, St Peter’s has acquired a piazza, sometimes wet and empty save for a scattering of cobblestone-grey strutting pigeons, sometimes packed with the stalls, booths and awnings of an open-air market, where the conflicting litanies of dealers’ cries are rained on by the mewing of the seagulls wheeling overhead, and the air is laden with the scent of oranges and herrings. The buildings fronting on to this confabulation are eclectic: Chelsea town house, Glasgow tenement, Venetian palazzo, Oxford bookseller’s with compass windows, Amsterdam tall house overlooking its reflection in the water, Belfast grocer’s corner shop, Parisian boutique, New York diner, Dublin pub, New York deli, Warsaw synagogue, Berlin brothel, Bolognese haberdasher’s in an arcade, Delhi shirt-shop, Beijing tea-emporium, Havana humidor, Vienna café, San Francisco oyster bar, Copenhagen doll’s house outlet, Chicago kosher butcher’s, Dieppe wine-merchant’s, Los Angeles thirties automobile showroom, Carson City drive-in movie theatre, Constantinople kiosk, Byzantine bazaar-booth, Buenos Aires private library, the Workshop for the Blind on the Shankill Road, the Alexandria Memory Institute, Santiago copper-shop, lonely gasoline pump of Intercourse, North Carolina, Vladivostock ice-store, Tokyo shoe-shop, Kyoto temple, Laredo saloon, Kufra Oasis drinking-fountain, Mumbles ice-cream parlour, Roundstone cartographer’s, Newmarket bookmaker’s, the Boston Aquarium, Cork pictureframer’s, and ubiquitous McDonald’s.