The floors of the House of Death are strewn with fallen plaster, broken glass and crockery. Death regards herself in the mirror before plunging into it with gloved hands. Bubbles escape with a hiss from champagne glasses. The Underworld reflects the world above, seen through a glass darkly. Orpheus, forbidden to set eyes on his wife, catches a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror of the Rolls-Royce; she vanishes on the spot. Glass is an aspect of death.
In about 1973, I worked in Central Belfast as a clerk in a branch of the Civil Service, Family Income Supplements, known as Fizz. It was at the height of one of the IRA’s interminable bombing campaigns. At regular sporadic intervals throughout the week, there would be a bomb alert; buildings would be evacuated, and the staffs of various downtown office-blocks and multi-storeyed stores would traipse happily out of them, glad of this disruption. Pubs outside the danger-zone would be frequented, and spontaneous parties thrown in them. Sometimes people disappeared for days. Or, the crowds of shoppers, the regiments of clerks and salesgirls, the cabals of lawyers and bookies’ runners would throng behind the fluttering white security tape that marked the demarcation of the zone: we were spectators of an imminent display of property-destroying pyrotechnics. The stilled streets were devoid of traffic, save for the parked bomb of the car and a protective barrier of static black-and-tan camouflaged armoured vehicles which looked incongruous in the unfoliaged city. The occasional approaching klaxon of a fire appliance interrupted the expectant calm.
Minutes or hours would pass before the device went off, and the delivery van became instant shrapnel, a rapidly-increasingly-exploded diagram of itself, visible in antiquated slo-mo newsreel footage or the eye of memory, as its wheels and engine-block and wings and gears and bonnet and boot and chassis and suspension and mirrors and interior trim and dashboard clock became history, like the flak of the Second World War or Battleship Potemkin, a shattered lens of spectacle. You felt the tangible shock of it on your face. Then there’d be a nearly simultaneous avalanche of glass, bursting and cascading from the windows of the buildings, crashing to ground level, till all of Royal Avenue was frosted with broken glass; and it was often rumoured that the glaziers and terrorists of Belfast had conspired in the coup.
The Glass Factory – to give it its full due, the Thermolux Glass Company Limited – was situated at 2–20 Divis Street, on the other side of John Street from the back entrance of Barrack Street School. Behind the Glass Factory was a rectangle of waste ground bordered by the back-yard walls of small terraced houses. It was an interstitial unknown zone of the city, strewn with dog-turds, broken glass and isolated puddles that reflected the boringly moody weather of the time, the usual photographic darkroom clouds. This space was a gladiatorial or duelling arena for the students of Barrack Street, who’d assemble after school hours or in lunch-time to witness two big boys attempting to beat each other into a ritual pulp, as they made a great show of extricating themselves from the sleeves of jackets that were firmly grasped by their important seconds, who would parley to each other at the same time, setting up the ground rules of the physical debate. I am glad to relate that in one such contest, witnessed in about 1963, the underdog, a farmer’s son from a townland beyond Ballynahinch, who was constantly interrogated for his rural accent and demeanour, won the battle hands-down by deviating from every unspoken rule in the book, as he gouged and spat and bit and kicked, getting a grip on most parts of his opponent’s anatomy, and gaining the respect accorded to lunatics or geniuses.
Sometimes I would wander the back of the Glass Factory alone, mesmerized by its banality, stopping to gaze at a patch of yellow chickweed thrusting out from its soil of crushed coke and coal-dust, or a discarded brick embossed with its maker’s name in bold Roman, or the broken amber shards of a beer-bottle. Here, squatting on a stone, or parading metronomically, I might eat my packed lunch of sliced pan bread and Heinz Salad Spread, or Spam, or lettuce-leaf, which my mother habitually wrapped in a sheet of the waxed trade-named paper that the loaf came in.
1 This toponymic lore is known in Irish as dinnshenchas. ‘The dinnshenchas reflects a mentality in which the land of Ireland is perceived as being completely translated into story: each place has a history which is continuously retold. The dinnshenchas is the storehouse of this knowledge, but the mentality which it expresses is to be found throughout all phases of Irish literature …’ Robert Welch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, 1996.
McWATTERS’ BAKERY
In the late sixties, there was a succession of jobs to be taken between school or university terms. Being the son of a postman, a word would be put in for me at Christmas-time, and I’d join the temporary army of the Royal Mail. Rising at dawn, I’d walk the mile or so down Stockman’s Lane to the King’s Hall, my footsteps echoing each other in the frosted air and the orange smog horizon beginning to evaporate into a chilly mauve or blue. For seven days, the Hall became a vast resounding parcel-sorting office, where Northern Ireland was divided into district-coded phalanxes of big wickerwork trolleys overseen by toponymical sages dressed in long tan drill coats, whose brains could instantly access a mental-synapsed Street Directory, guided by mnemonics like the one for a section of the Lower Falls: ‘Bow-legged Baker with a Pound of English and Scotch Nails’. These geniuses must have envisaged streets they’d never seen (for who could see all of Belfast, in its teeming terraces and factories and fractured loyalties?) and I thought of them as angels gliding high above the city, taking in its every aspect through their fish-eye lenses, recording the roll-call of the streets for Judgement Day, when the demolished and exploded urban fabric would be resurrected brick by brick from rubbish tips and landfills, and their galactic rubble swarmed before the Pearly Gates, mindful of their need to be reconstituted in their proper names and orders.
These overseers, adepts of blunt sarcasm, took pleasure in berating us students for our poor memories, and equal pleasure in responding instantly to our questions of directory, as the work took on a rhythm, and our calling out the names of streets became a chant of sailors guided by a master pilot, as he assigned them to their destinations. We sailed parcels through the air like World War flak into appropriate trolleys, and the atmosphere was heady with crushed chocolate and fruit, as Irish, Jerez, Advocaat and Scotch oozed out from their broken gift-wrapped bottles. A whole annual department of the Royal Mail was devoted to the compensation of this traffic lost in transit, and complicated tracking-forms devised for it by masters of bureaucracy.
Then, I loved the suburban ‘walk’, when I’d take the trolleybus to its terminus, and step out in to Drives and Avenues and Parks of new estates, where dawn dew or frost still shone on the privet hedges of front gardens, and dogs barked disconsolate welcomes. Each picture window would have its Christmas tree – some going for the real pine, others for brusque artificial monkey-puzzles, some for spinsterish snow-flake-patterned bonzais, all of them variously decorated with plethoras of glass and plastic baubles, winking fairy lights and sparkly tinsel. Opening sunburst-patterned squeaking iron gates, treading on the gravel walks, I’d approach the rippled glazed doors in a serial trance, seeing my reflection waver in them as I delivered envelopes through letter-boxes that were wont to snap at my fingertips. Sometimes a radio would be playing in a back kitchen, or I’d hear the sound of lonely hoovering, or coffee percolating, as I wound my way from door to complex door in an arabesque of odd and even numbers.
The afternoon city shift was another thing, as dusk came early with a scent of oranges and coal-smoke, grocers’ displays spilling on to pavements between beery pubs, haberdasheries, and poultry-merchants’ windows filled with dangling plucked turkeys. Sometimes, as the bearer of goodwill to all, I’d be invited into the parlour of a bar on the Shankill Road, where a slacked fire emanated a huge orange plaque of warmth, and a bottle of Blue Bass and a Woodbine cigarette would be proffered to me, beneath the photograph of a young Queen or an icon of King Billy. I felt like a compromised spy as I accepted this commission.
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In spring, there’d be work on building sites: labouring with tipsy barrows over the muck and sky-reflecting April puddles on narrow causeways of thick plank, wheeling the load up a precarious ramp on to the flimsy wooden deck of a hoist – when it started its cranky juddering ascent, driven by a phutting cloud-emitting diesel donkey-engine, you glimpsed daylight between the boards. Reaching the seventh storey, you experienced a twinge of hypsophobia, as you realized again that you would have to traverse the gap between hoist and floor on a single trembling plank poised high above the whole shebang below, which looked like a blitzed battlefield with cement-encrusted howitzers and dumper jeeps embedded in it between trenches. Putting this dizzy reconnaissance to the back of your mind, you took the aerial plunge and wobbled your full barrow over to the other side with a sigh of relief.
It was a great job when you were allowed to carry a Kango hammer, smaller electric cousin of the big-decibelled motorbiked-handled pneumatic drills controlled by little wiry men with bulging tattooed biceps. The Kango was built like a compact automatic weapon, and felt heavy-metal-snug as a snub gun in your arms as you cradled it. Its buck-lepping marsupial drill-power was brought into play to correct habitual design flaws, as when the apertures allowed in the cavity walls for electric sockets were misaligned, two brickies on either side having competed against each other to see who would finish first, and the relationship invariably got out of synch. Then the ghost-white plasterers would arrive with their hawks and trowels to cover it all up with a grey dawn skim, and no one would have known any different until the sparks came on the job and found the wiring-diagrams didn’t correspond. Or perhaps it was the other way about. At any rate, it was especially pleasurable to drill through the fractional depth of the plaster into solid brick, feeling the Kango’s blunt italic chisel-nib making impacts on it, sinking into it in steady irrevocables, till it burst into an emptiness of cavity with a sound like scree. Then I’d have a glimpse of myself in a mouse-dimension, scuttling through the Babel-towered intervallic levels, relaying messages from the Underground, stopping to gnaw covertly on a length of enemy flex, oblivious of the consequences.
When you blew your nose at snuffy intervals into a grey stiff crumpled hanky, you’d find your snotters had been infiltrated by cement-dust, stringy grits of it floating around in an ambient spawn. The palms of your hands burned with lime, and the knuckles of your toes were skinned by the unfamiliar metal caps of industrial boots. You discovered muscles you had never known, that pulsed with narrative aches and pains as you lay in an exhausted reverie in bed, unwinding, rewinding the worked pattern of the day, the building taking shape within its scaffolding.
Then I would think of nightwatchmen’s braziers, lumps of slag burning through holes punched into a bucket on a tripod, the visible shimmer of acrid emanating blue heat; tin billy-cans boiled on it, containing dust of tea-and-sugar emptied from pre-packaged twists of paper; the glow of oil-fired red bull’s-eye lanterns dotting a no-go zone. The watchman, a great-coated veteran of several wars, would relate sagas of the Boers to us children, meanwhile extracting his supper from its wrapping of waxed loaf-paper, sharing his unfamiliar sandwiches of corned beef and pickle, thick-cut ham and palate-tingling mustard, thin-sliced red cheese and cold burnt toast. Subsequently, he would smoke a big Holmesian curved briar pipe, for which he’d rummage in one of the fob pockets of his several waistcoats, as well as a tin of Erinmore or Warhorse cut plug, and his smoker’s pen-knife attached to his watch-chain, with various devices for chopping the stuff into fragments and tamping it into the bowl. A blue box of Swift matches would appear from nowhere, and he’d take a little splint from its magically open drawer, applying a red-tipped Hallowe’en flame to the packed tobacco in an aromatic gesture, as the fire caught, and drew, and gained his inhaled satisfaction. Then he’d embark on another episode of U-boat Baltic battle, by which time we’d be sunk on the verge of sleep in our beds, for our mothers had called us home hours ago, echoing our names down the long street; and I saw torpedoed convoys listing on the sea-bed, as various schools of thought swam in and out of their blasted hulls.
I worked for a summer or two in McWatters’ Bakery, at 125–133 Cromac Street, in the Markets area. This was one of the many great bread manufactories to be found in Belfast at the time, whose economies seemed to depend on a traffic of casual labour – badly paid, I dare say, though it did not seem so to me at the time, and I still remember the thrill of receiving the weekly pay-packet, which had a clever slot that enabled you to tally the crisp notes before you broke its seal (there was a transparent window for the loose coins).
These big bakeries – Inglis’s, Kennedy’s, Hughes’s, the Eglinton, the Ormeau, among others – maintained fleets of electrically powered bread-vans that purred in weekly rotas through the terraced streets, and their arrival at your doorstep was a great event. The breadserver would open the clever back door which swung up on two telescopic struts to make a rigid, rainproof awning under which he and the customer could do business and gossip in instalments. The interior of the van was revealed as a complex filing-system of sliding trays in which were shelved the batches of various plain and fancy breads, cakes, buns, and pastries; dwelling momentarily within their remembered aroma, I’m trying to think of how one accessed the top shelves – they were, indeed, pulled out with a miniature version of the hooked pole used to reconnect to their overhead lines the accidentally disengaged trolleys of electric buses, but how they were brought to eye-level was another question I don’t propose to go into, since the logistics of this apparently simple set of operations become more complicated the more they are examined.1 All the same, it is a pity that this useful oven-to-door personal service has been largely discontinued, though I do not see how the line might have been profitably maintained in the face of supermarket competition.
I believe it was the ambition of the permanent bakers to gain command of one of these upwardly mobile outlets, since the working conditions and the opportunities for social intercourse were much superior to those inside the factory, aspects of which resembled a vision of hell. The pan loaf bake-room was a particularly infernal chamber, with its glowing cast-iron gas-fired ovens connected by a miniature railway network of conveyor-belts on which clattered trains of dough-filled greased black loaf-tins; simultaneously, however, one sometimes thought of the process as a parable of death and resurrection, whose ultimate aim was the communion of bread with ourselves.
Here, the ambient temperature and humidity were such that you worked one hour on and one hour off; and the hour spent in the canteen (there was nowhere else to go, since I always worked night-shift on this duty) was passed in desultory camaraderie and boredom, between bouts of poker-playing and the relating of the many urban myths peculiar to the Markets area, in which great street-fighters and bar-room brawlers of the past were recalled vividly into the imaginative present, and the canteen then took on cantina connotations. All we lacked was drink, though it was not unknown for the occasional naggin bottle to be produced in a ceremonial gesture of bravado. It was here that I was taught how to roll hand-made cigarettes, which were especially popular with bakery workers, as they are with jailbirds, and it seemed the two were connected, since many of the casual staff had done some petty time or other. I am smoking a roll-up right now, as I write, and it is difficult to think of a time when I was unable to perform the fairly nimble roll-up operation, since I now do it on automatic pilot, and usually find myself with a lit cigarette between my fingers or lips without remembering how it or I got there.
And time was curiously skewed by the disparate dimensions of bake-room and canteen: sometimes the bake-room hour seemed interminable; sometimes it passed rapidly, as the rhythm of robotic work absorbed and hypnotized you, and you’d be surprised to see a proxy at your elbow, about to take over, as he nudged you out of whatever reverie you’d slipped into unwittingly. Even the canteen hour could drag, the talk declining into banal troughs or negative, exhausted silences. It was
a joy, then, to go outside and stand on the empty dark quiet street, thinking of the sleeping denizens of Belfast, whose daily bread depended on our labours in the underworld; or perhaps there was an all-night corner shop which catered for the needs of night-shift refugees, a solitary lit outlet which combined, within its limited shelved space, the functions of grocer, confectioner, tobacconist and newsagent, and its aged attendant would be glad to see another soul wander in from the dark.
When not working nights, I’d sometimes be hired by day as a cleaner, for a lot of Augean work needed to be done around McWatters’. The gravy-ring contraption, for instance, which consisted of a long bath of boiling lard through which the doughnuts were conveyed on a belt of sieve-wire, was habitually covered with a tacky congealed amber resin, nigh-impossible to shift. But generally, cleaning duties were regarded as easy numbers, since they afforded ample opportunities to skive, and you were usually assigned a mate, with whom you could pleasurably pass the time of day, smoking, playing cards in store-rooms, and exchanging late-adolescent philosophies.
The Star Factory Page 24
