The drum-major calls a lull; its sudden woof reminds me of the silence of a school yard when everyone is in, or when an annual photograph is being taken. This one, lying on the table where I’m writing, shows the class of 1958, I think, tiered on the five broad steps between upper and lower yards.
Imagining their dimensions again, I begin to see St Gall’s Public Elementary School in all its different facets, adits, grades, corridors and stairwells, classrooms fugged with radiator-heat and the steam from damp gaberdines. There is a map of Ireland on one wall; on another, pinned to the display board, a diagram of the soul – an amorphous white blob with a black cancerous dot of mortal sin in it, and some grey venial smudges. Here, also, are our maps of how we got to school, which were that morning’s exercise: our teacher, wearing his didactic hat, uses them as illustration to a principle of spiritual convergence, pointing out our different crooked radii. If you laid them one on top of another, they would form a predetermined black star.
What future detours have these pupils taken since? I travel my eye back to the yard steps. Our arms are folded, like footballers’, as we gaze into the lens of then. Looking at these boys’ faces, I can recognize them; but I barely remember half of their thirty-three names. I no longer see them now, apart from Roy of the Confirmation, who occasionally swims into my ken in after-office drinking confraternities in off-beat venues like the Elephant, or the Fly. On these premises, chance encounters seem fortuitous, or retrospectively predestined. We connect in asterisks or nodes – node being, among other related concepts, ‘a point at which a curve cuts itself, and through which more than one tangent to the curve can be drawn’. Wandering through the mazy city, we also miss each other many more times, for our arrangements are not Filofaxed nor prior. When we do meet, we wonder when we last met in this haze of alcohol.
Lonely on a high stool, half-expecting a companion, the onset of a friendly argument, you stare into the whiskey mirror, or at the rank of spirit-level-bubbled optics, and contemplate their upside-down connected bottles with their labels printed right-way-up. You peruse the intersecting circles made by the base of your glass on the bar. You read the ashtray, and stub out another cigarette into its brand-name.
Kelly’s Cellars, though relatively famous, was another favourite haunt. It was said to have a ghost, dictated, I suppose, by its antiquity and the whispered palimpsests of centuries of conversations. Kelly’s is in Bank Street, formerly Bank Lane, which runs on one side of the long-since-culverted Farset, and it is a moot point as to whether ‘bank’ refers to the river, or to the Provincial Bank of Ireland on its left bank, or to the vast emporium of the Bank Buildings across the street from the Bank. Formerly again, it was known as Bryce’s Lane, then as Crooked Lane, or as The Back of the River; it connects Chapel Lane (where the original electric lighting station for Belfast was situated) with Castle Place, which borders on Royal Avenue built on the demolished Hercules Lane, commemorated by the Hercules Bar (its sign shows the eponymous hero wrestling with Hydra) on the corner of Chapel Lane and Castle Street. The Castle itself has been well described by Marcus Patton, in his meticulous and comprehensive Central Belfast: A Historical Gazetteer:
The first castle of which we have real information was, so the Plantation Commissioners reported, built on ‘the Ruynes of the decayed Castle’ and was to include ‘a bricke house fifty foote longe which is to be adioyned to the sayd Castle by a stayrcase of bricke which is to be … two Storys and a halfe high … about which Castle and House there is a stronge Bawne almost finished which is flankered with foure half Bulworkes … the Bawne is to be compased with a lardge and deepe ditche or moate which will always stande full of water’: they stated that it was ‘in so good forwardness that it is lyke to be finished by the mydle of next Somer’. An English visitor in 1635 (quoted by Smith) noted that ‘my Lord Chichester’ had a ‘dainty stately palace’ so close to the river that ‘the lough toucheth upon his garden and backside’. Maps of 1680 and 1685 show it as an Elizabethan castle with central courtyard, multiple chimneys, gables, and a central belfry; it was built of bricks from near Sandy Row. The Tax Roll of 1666 recorded the Earl of Donegall’s castle as having ‘fforty Hearthes’, making it, as Benn remarked, ‘the most magnificent dwelling in Ireland. at least in the matter of hearths’. The roll also describes ‘the bowling green, the cherry garden, the apple garden … strawberries, currants and gooseberries’, and ‘women gathering Violats in ye Fields to sett in the Gardens’ which extended ‘to the edge of the sea’. In 1698, William Sacheverell confirmed that ‘the gardens are very spacious, with every variety of walks, both close and open, fish ponds and groves’. These amenities were ‘all Inclosed in a kind of Fortification, being Designed for a place of Strength as well as Pleasure’, as Thomas Molyneux wrote in 1708.
Belfast Castle was destroyed by accidental fire on 25 April 1708, and three sisters of the Earl of Donegal were killed before ‘the men of the town could gett in within the wals to help’. Apparently several rooms were still inhabited for many years after, including ‘a fine parlour with black oak floor, wainscotted walls and huge chimney piece’.
Kelly’s, indeed, with its low black oak counter and its apparent plethora of snugs and nooks and crannies, its wainscoted, whitewashed walls, its pendulous pendulum clock, its open fireplace murmuring with glowing slack, could be a relic of that former ambience. ‘It is the oldest surviving public house in the city’, says Patton, ‘still retaining something of the atmosphere of the heady days when the United Irishmen plotted here and Henry Joy McCracken crouched under the bar to escape pursuing redcoats. Souvenirs stored at the Cellars include the big key of the old Smithfield Gaol and an elephant’s tooth.’ Reading this, I thought I remembered there was a secret passageway from underneath the bar, or through a cellar, to the Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street; but further study shows I’ve spun together two different yarns:
If local legend is to be believed, the United Irishmen when plotting divided their time between these cellars and a secret room in the roof-space of the second Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street …
C.E.B. Brett, Buildings of Belfast, 1985
That the town Marshal’s house had an underground passage is proven by a true story of a certain Campbell Sweeney, a drysalter of the town, who was confined in the cells of the building which was situated at the rere of the Donegall Arms Hotel, now Messrs. Robb’s drapery establishment. A friendly servant girl employed at the place told him that if he got access to the yard he might get into the sewer, which opened into the river in High Street, and there make his escape. This Sweeney was able to do, and came up out of the sewer in the back yard of a house built on the site of the present Ulster Reform Club in Castle Place. Sweeney called out to a woman in the yard and asked her to acquaint the Town Sergeant, a man named Dick Moore, who was his friend. This being done, Moore got Sweeney dressed in the servant’s clothes, and took him down High Street. Moore, where they went along singing loudly ‘Rule Britannia,’ was accosted by a soldier, and explained the presence of the uncouth female by saying that she was from the country and not up to the ways of the town. Down at the docks Sweeney got safely away in a vessel on which Moore’s son was signed as a sailor, and, once away and still away, Sweeney never returned.
Cathal O’Byrne, As I Roved Out
I occasionally return to Kelly’s. I like to sit there in an early-evening lull, when one can contemplate the plethora of bric-à-brac arranged on shelves, in niches and in alcoves: willow-pattern, Delft, dented brass half-gallon jugs, japanned tin boxes, guns, pictures, statuettes. A framed football team, with folded arms and centre-shaded, Brylcreemed hair, is hung immediately below the unreachable top shelf with its bottles variously full of rarely tasted, curious liqueurs and defunct brands of whiskey. Were they to exchange their hooped shirts for long white aprons, the footballers would appear perfect barmen; both trades share the collective ‘team’, realized as you watch the bar staff move into action on a jam-packed Friday night, conf
ronted by a four-deep rank of eager punters brandishing big notes and tic-tac fingers. Professional barmen have served their time at making time. They show no stress under pressure. Their peripheral, fish-eye lens vision enables them to see everything at once, and know the order of its precedence. Moving rapidly yet languidly, seeming many-armed and ambidextrous as they simultaneously pour three pints of stout, strip the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes, while negotiating a Bacardi-and-coke and three rums-and-black and tallying the cost in advance, they still go to the inner, publicly unheard, relaxed tick of the wall-clock. After a flurry of orders, they stand before the reredos like priests, in a zone of free time, gazing into public space at the anticipated future.
It was in Kelly’s that I drank my first pint of Guinness, not quite pleasurably amazed by its texture of thick black yeasty milk; and it was here that I was initiated into the ritual of going, half-jarred, to midnight Mass – St Mary’s, in Chapel Lane, was just a short stagger up the street. Here, dazed by chanted Latin, incense, alcohol and candle-light, I felt myself an eight-year-old clothed by the Star Factory, barely kept from sleep by the coldness of my crisp, snowy, cotton, Christmas shirt, as I fingered its plastic collar-cartilages in their stitched slots.
MAGNETIC STREET
The typical Star Factory shirt tailed well below the bum, and could double as a sleeping-vestment. Robed in it, like Little Nemo, you felt you could flit through the bedroom window and glide above the rooftops with angelic connotations. I used to be adept at this dream-flight, but lost the power some time in late adolescence; perhaps there is a hormonal basis to this capricious skill. The flying dream is necessarily a recurrent dream, since the ability to do it depends on your remembering it was done before, and when it strikes you in the dream – usually, a mundane affair, as when you walk along a dream street replicated in the real world – you are astonished that you had forgotten it. Yet, the flying dream is not a lucid dream: if you know that you are dreaming, you will cease to fly; and knowing the full extent of your powers depends on an ignorance of your real state. Beginning to hover in this bliss, you see yourself in other retrospective loop-the-loops and spirals, seeking out the layered thermals of the city’s altitudes.
When you fly, the mind acts on the disembodied body, like post-operative recuperation in a high magnolia hospital room, where a half-drunk bottle of Lucozade glows like a votive lamp on the bedside table. Boh-dee and mind, boh-dee and mind, Lucozade refreshes, Lucozade refreshes boh-dee and mind, the television jingle used to go; and remembering its beaded bubbles soaring through a glass of Lucozade to spit and blink within its rim, you saw them as the constant, orchestrated, upward flow of souls from Purgatory. I used to think that the soul did not reside in mind or body, which were subliminal to it, but occupied a total, other zone of self, a district not amenable to mind, and hence, the soul could never know itself; but I find that this proposition stands at a slightly heretical angle to official doctrine, as revealed by the Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary:
SOUL: The thinking principle; that by which we feel, know, will, and by which the body is animated. The root of all forms of vital activity. It is a substance or being which exists per se; it is simple or unextended, i.e., not composed of separate principles of any kind; it is spiritual, i.e., its existence, and to some extent its operations, are independent of matter; it is immortal (q.v.). The soul is the substantial form (q.v.) of the body. There are three kinds of soul, vegetative, the root of vital activity in plants; sensitive, the root of vital activity in animals; intellectual, the root of vital activity in man. The last contains the other two virtually (q.v.); the sensitive contains the vegetative virtually. The sensitive and vegetative souls are both simple, but incomplete substances, incapable of existing apart from matter; they are therefore neither spiritual nor immortal. See also IMMORTALITY: INCORRUPTIBILITY: BODY AND SOUL, etc.
It seems to me that one of the roles of the soul – to co-ordinate our postulates of flying dreams – fits comfortably enough into this orthodoxy. The soul might have the independent eyes of the chameleon which, given the ability to fly, would resemble a dragon: I see its blinking gliding flight in visionary Morse across the city, so camouflaged as to be invisible, into whose creaking pterodactyl wings my hands fit like the gloves of virtual reality. Suspended high above the city like a British army dragonfly, I computate the angles and declensions of this aerial photography, alphabetizing unconnected streets mnemonically: Omar, Omeath, Onslow, Ophir, Orangefield, Orby, Orchard, Oregon, Orient. I could be a night-flight bomber, agent of an internecine blitz, and I got the names off an out-of-date Directory, and I can wipe them out with a few considered twitches of my release-mechanism: not the names, but the actual streets of two-up, one-down housing, their mantelpieces crowded with fragile souvenirs, their walls displaying popes and queens; not the names, which will reside when the streets are bombed into oblivion, and came from somewhere else, before the streets were named. We can never know the full nomenclature, which existed long before our time, evolving constantly beyond the individual, these gabbled, garbled stories which refuse to be oppressed.
Names have power; and on my flights across the city, I became aware of names more powerful than others. I should explain here that night-flying had two basic, complementary modes: the high flight usually performed with extended arms; and the low glide, sometimes done in upright stance, which had the compensatory bonus of a built-in invisibility option, so you could peer through bedroom windows undetected and feel your whereabouts by the Braille of cast-iron street-signs. Magnetic Street, for instance, emanated such a force-field that it proved impossible to cross in full high-flight mode; sometimes it exerted such a pull that the most I could manage was a feeble hover, a few inches off the ground. It was a place to be avoided; but in waking life I would pass it often, on my way to the Donegall Road Branch of the Carnegie Library (Magnetic Street lay almost equidistant between it and the Star Factory). Magnetic Street was a cul-de-sac, but immediately behind it lay my route, a laneway known locally as The Black Pad, whose name struck me with a vague, pleasurable terror: this crushed-cinder track, littered with broken glass, marked the beginning of Protestant territory. The area proclaimed itself by small details of street furniture: graffiti, obviously; more subtly, the galvanized iron flagholders bolted to the walls of terrace houses, defunct for that part of the year which was not the marching season. Even the colours of the flower displays in front windows could be read as code, these pansies of bruise-blue and black, those clustered reds of sweet william.
I had exhausted the Fall Road Library’s stock of ‘Biggles’ books and, looking further afield for more stories of the intrepid British pilot, I explored the Shankill Road branch as well as the Donegall Road; though both lay in alien territory, they were agents of the same confederacy. Entering their tall portals, one became aware of the democracy of print, whose ink still lingered in the date-stamp redolence of pine shelves and brown linoleum. After acquiring a cache of ‘Biggles’, I liked to wander through the high dark stacks of the Adult section, where dusty sunbeams would illuminate the gold-blocked, arcane numbers of the Dewey Decimal Classification System. These libraries, for me, were the points of a star or a compass, important navigational beacons in the city I flew over nightly.
My experience of flying had led me to suppose that the somnolent brain contained thunderstorms of electrical activity that mirrored, by osmosis, the magnetic field of the earth. Magnets are the nearest thing we have to anti-gravity, and when you try to wobble together the like poles of a broken magnet, you feel their palpable disjunctive forces slipping in and out of one another’s compass. Magnets affect clocks, and H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, I suspect, was invented from magnetic principles; its likeness to a bicycle is not coincidental, since riding one is an epitome of balance, where avoirdupois seems cancelled.
The most impressive magnets were not the shop-bought horseshoe variety, whose power dwindled within days, exhausted by their iron contacts, but those chunky
nuggets of broken car dynamos that looked like bits of meteorite, gun-metal dull and incredibly heavy. Such items were strong media of barter, equivalent to rare stamps or full sets of cigarette cards. Their flint-sharp edges wore holes in your pockets. Compact, neolithic, they were emblems of the great electromagnets in scrap depots, operated from the cockpits of tall cranes, which swayed bristling conglomerations of metal through huge volumes of air, depositing tons with a crash at the throw of a switch. Hearing that melismatic avalanche, I would try to analyse its junked components: bits of tractors, cars, bikes, storm-drain gratings, perimeter fences, radiators, corrugated iron roofs, a virtual trolley-bus, broken ships and sewer-pipes.
I am thinking, here, of Eastwood’s Himalayan scrap-yard, whose site on the Andersonstown Road is now occupied by a shopping-mall. Close to it was St Agnes’ Parochial Hall, a building not much bigger than a scout shed, which used to be the venue of a Saturday matinée film show, and I have always been puzzled as to why this French word for ‘morning’ should refer to a public entertainment or reception usually held in the afternoon; its other meaning of a woman’s dress for forenoon-wear makes more sense. At any rate, the entertainment and the venue were pretty basic: the films were black and white serials or shorts – Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, Batman, Roy Rodgers, and the like – and bare wooden benches were provided for sitting on. I believe that this show had a regular beginning and ending time, though it never did begin on time, and the projector was wont to break down frequently, thus postponing the end, and you realized where the expression ‘the flicks’ came from when you saw big upside-down numerals twitching on and off the drizzly screen.
Shows in big picture houses had an all-day-long schedule and the viewers could enter at any time, so that if they arrived in the middle of a feature, they could stay in until the beginning came up again in the complicated running-order of shorts, newsreels, ‘B’ movies and features, and could seam together the gist of the plot by remembering where they came in. An epitome of such a cinema was the Broadway, a mile or so down the road from the Parochial Hall, and made the Hall look truly parochial by its imposing art nouveau tiled façade outlined in red neon. I have a serial cinematic dream whereby the plush interiors of these establishments become incredibly complicated, with many foyers, ticket booths, shallow scalloped staircases, cocktail bars and powder rooms; the auditorium is a variously tiered, chambered Nautilus space lit by dimmable oyster-shell wall-lights, red exit signs, or the huge flickering silver presence of the screen itself, dominating the proceedings through a veil of cigarette-smoke, scarves of smoke floating up through the prism of projected light; and the overflowing ashtrays attached to the back of the seats are shaped like scallop-shells. It comes as no surprise that many cinemas are named Colosseum.
The Star Factory Page 22
