The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  One such assignment was the cleaning-out of No. 3 Flour Loft, which lay in a high remote annex of the factory, and had been disused for years. Here, ancient flour was drifted up the honeycomb walls of the chamber, and as we shovelled into it, thousands of dormant moths, grey-backed shellacky slivers of things, teemed into life and flight, swarming confusedly about our hands and eyebrows in a flitting pandemonium. Then we were given insecticidal spray-guns with bicycle-pump-action handles to enable us to zap the enemy, killing scores with a single squirt of drizzle. We’d rustle their fallen carcases into empty hundredweight bags.

  Here, too, we discovered caches of old lading-bills, dockets and receipts, corroborated by near-pristine Georgian postage stamps overwritten with elaborate copperplate signatures, and I wondered how they’d got there from the Victorian wooden-panelled office whose bay window viewed the big cobbled roofed yard at ground level, where the delivery vans and breadservers’ carts drew up to be serviced at loading-bays: it occupied an interesting dimension, since it ran at a slant between Cromac Street2 and Joy Street, and could be approached from either iron-bollarded entrance or exit. Consulting the 1948 Directory, I see that Nos. 90–102 Joy Street are designated as the back entrance to the bakery, and note in passing that there are at least three Carsons in the street: John, at No. 9; James, baker, at No. 53; and Miss Jennie, at No. 86; all possible relatives of mine within this pretty Catholic enclave, since my father’s father’s father, a Protestant cabinet-maker from Ballymena who turned Taig when he came to Belfast looking for work and took Catholic wives, had sired a family of twenty-two, thirteen by the first before she died, and nine by the second. So my father told me on my wedding day. But I confess I have not gone to the bother of looking up the ramifications of this family tree.

  The dockets, carbon-slips, and lading-bills appeared like marriage, birth or death certificates, tallied in imperial aplomb. Awry ranks of moths crawled over them. I felt a seethe of history behind it all, authorized, and sealed, and signed on the heads of kings, yet unacknowledged by the distant angels’ hierarchies who looked over us and out for us and after us, gazing through the clouds of the city with their terrible eyes to detect our small familiar-to-them movements in among the many terraces, and corner shops, and churches, and rag-and-bone-yards floored with dank brick and odorous public houses.

  We were brought up to accept the Crown but not believe in it, because its dominion had no power to extend beyond this temporal world, this Vale of Tears reiterated in our litanies and family rosaries, as we dipped our fingers yet again into the cold stoup of the holy-water font, and touched them to our cold foreheads. Through the incense of Benediction, by way of gold-robed priests intoning smoky Latin, in displays of star-shaped monstrances, we could hear the tremors of another auditorium, where tiers of saints and angels leaned slantedly to hear our every banal word, for this communication is impossible in heaven, such is its huge Vatican acoustic in which all the whispers sound the same, and hallelujahs are a common parlance.

  The white limbo of No. 3 Loft put me in mind of other work, like that in Ross’s3 lemonade factory – ‘Ginger Ale, Aerated and Mineral Water Manufacturer’s’, to give it its full title. Here, in a high attic space, we were assigned one of those pointless tasks designed by prisoners of a work ethic, in which the appearance of work must be maintained, even when there is no work to be done: we were to shift a huge accumulation of old bottles from one side of the room to another.4 Some of these were real museum-pieces: bottles of glazed clay, bottles of stone, bottles of pale green glass with air-bubbles embedded in them, bottles with names embossed on them, bottles with stone screw caps, and snappy spring-clip devices, bottles without long-popped corks: dusty, cobwebbed, empty bottles, eclectic regiments of slope-shouldered, drunk, dead soldiers. Regarding their profuse confusion, we wondered what principle of taxonomy might be applied to them, whether to sort them by colour, size, design, or apparent age; in the end, we contrived an ornate tableau inspired by chaotic principles, where, as we clunked and chinked them together in glassy rhymes, each juxtaposition suggested the next link, and interlocking snowflake patterns became evident, for we burnished the bottles as we worked. Then, through the broad high attic skylight, a glancing ray of April sunshine – momentarily solid, with dust-motes drifting in it like the souls of moths – would illuminate the whole ornate array, twinkling its myriad glints of blue and green and clear and amber, till it looked like a starship Armada riding at anchor in the Coalsack Nebula, or a downtown Christmas tree composed of its own innumerable baubles of glass, and for a second I thought I detected a whiff of Norwegian fir in the high back room, as if green needles of it had been strewn on the pine boards of the floor.

  It brought me back again to the Christmas post of Christmas past, and the sorting office of the General Post Office, where the legions of the city were divided into centuries and ranks of pigeonholes contained in upright formes. The high-ceilinged atmosphere was silted with a redolence of faded ink, gum, twine and rubber bands, illuminated by the technicoloured smell of stamps glimpsed on covers, accumulated and distributed: agate, bistre, carmine, deep blue, plum, purple, lilac, dull vermilion, milky blue, pale buff, orange, cobalt, slate, mauve, deep grey, deep red-brown, pale yellow-green, magenta, bright magenta, lemon, ochre, green, turquoise, Prussian blue, marone, pale violet, rose-red, chestnut. Most of these bore the head of the Queen of the British Commonwealth of Nations, so it was a nice momentary pleasure to come across a bit of correspondence from French India, Curaçao, Chile, Hejaz, Iceland, or The Vatican.

  Once, some thirty years ago, I discovered a letter lodged in a forgotten crevice at the back of a pigeonhole, addressed to Belfast, Maine, USA, and postmarked 9 October 1948. It bore one of the Irish Republic airmail issues of that year, featuring the Angel Victor flying over various pilgrimage locations: the 1d chocolate, over the Rock of Cashel; the 3d blue, over Lough Derg; the 6d magenta, over Croagh Patrick; and the 1s green, over Glendalough. In all of these the Angel, in a series of dramatic Superman poses, fills most of the available sky, and carries a banner bearing the slogan, Vox Hiberniae, in Roman capitals; the names of the comparatively small places depicted below are given, of course, in Irish, in a stylized art nouveau half-uncial ‘Gaelic’ script. Trying to remember or visualize the value of the Belfast, Maine stamp, I am baffled. But it occurs to me now that, back in 1967, I indulged a momentary fantasy of Victor over Clonard Monastery, encompassing the whole of Belfast with his carrier-pigeon’s aquiline angelic wings, recording all its architecture in the pupil-black orbs of his aerial Dresden vision: two-up-one-down terraced houses, shipyards, spinning mills, tobacco manufactories, tram depots, pubs, chapels, churches, ropeworks, barracks, corner shops, arcaded markets, railway stations, graving-docks, cinemas, post offices and photographic studios, much of it vanished now, into the maw of time, but still remnant in the memory of denizens and pilgrims like myself, and still extant in my father’s mind.

  When he comes home from work, he stoops over me with the slack enormous canvas bag at his paunch, and allows me to undo the thick tan leather straps from their glinting squeaky buckles. I plunge my head into the replicated coarse-weave gloom within, breathing its ample folds and crumples of absented correspondences. I detect a whiff of caramel or cinnamon behind it all, or clove-rock, suggestive nuggets of them stuck together in a quarter-pound bag with its serrated paper lips scrunched and twisted and sealed. Or the smell and glint of a bottle of Ross’s lemonade or sarsparilla with its opaque screwed glass stopper, the metallic resonance of a small tin toy. Even when it is devoid of presents, I can discover in my father’s bag a residue of string and thick brown rubber bands, the occasional stamp that has strayed from its envelope.

  Now he is stretched out sleeping on the sofa because he’d worked the night shift before the morning walk. I take off his peaked cap and lose my head within its big dark crown. I get a chair to stand on to reach his coat from the hook on the back of the kitchen door. I drape myself within an
amplitude of sleeve, cool linings that extend away beyond my fingertips, as the tail of the jacket reaches nearly to my heels or insteps, and sometimes skims the floor. I’ve remembered to sling the empty weight of the bag around me, feeling its hard leather strap cut into my left collar-bone, for I’ve taken off my sandals, and I’ve put my feet into my father’s huge shoes, relishing their cold pilgrim insole contours that were formed by him before me. I stagger in them around the floor as he sleeps. I deliver important messages within this universe of room. His hands are clasped on his chest as he snores, and his nicotined fingers twitch in concert with his lips, which silently rehearse the story he’s to tell me later on that night.

  It’s that night now. Like a boy with a Hallowe’en sparkler, he draws on the dark with a lit cigarette. The words are ghosted from his mouth in plumes and wisps of smoke, as I hold his free hand to guide him through the story, and we walk its underworld again.

  1 The children’s comic the Beano featured a near-relative of the bakery van, in its serial, ‘General Jumbo’. Jumbo looked about eight, and was every young boy’s role model then. From an issue of October 1953: ‘“The Army exercises are about to begin!” chuckled young Jumbo Johnson, as he stood proudly in Dinchester Park. “Very good, General Jumbo, sir,” returned the plump, cheery-faced man beside Jumbo, and he began to strap a strange gadget on to Jumbo’s left arm. The man was Professor Carter, Jumbo’s greatest friend, and that gadget was the wonderful device by which Jumbo controlled an Army by radio. All his soldiers, tanks and planes were small, perfectly made models. They were all stowed away neatly in the Professor’s van which was parked nearby.’ The van, indeed, had a roll-top rear door, which was opened by a hooked pole to disclose a compartmentalized army. I remember being more fascinated by the van than by the gloveless gauntlet with its aerial and ‘tiny knobs and buttons … cleverly-made controls’, which puts one in mind of the radio wristwatches worn by spies in forties B-movies, or, more latterly, of Buzz Lightyear’s interplanetary communications device.

  Lying in bed after reading a ‘Jumbo’ episode by the light of a pocket torch, I would ponder the mysterious interior of the van, and I’d sometimes shrink myself to perfectly made toy soldier size in order to explore more fully its dimensions.

  2 From Irish crom, crooked.

  3 A quintessential Belfast name which was borne by other important establishments, of auctioneering, flax and tow spinning, and coal importing, respectively.

  4 This reminds me of a job I was once given as a casual clerk, when, in a long lull, I was required to transcribe, in my best handwriting, the entire Northern Ireland Civil Service Code Book, a street-directory-thick album of loose-leaf ring-bound pages abounding in paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, indemnifying codicils and clauses, all numeralled and alphabeticized, with typewritten emendations and addenda pasted into it. The Code Book purported to be applicable to every known human situation, and I enjoyed this fruitless labour as I wrote it out in a version of the roundhand I had learned for writing up a stamp collection, imagining myself to be a Celtic monk transcribing, and perhaps improving, a particularly desirable illuminated Bible.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

  The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reprint lines from the following:

  Donald Attwater (ed.), The Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Waverly Book Company, London, 1931; Jonathan Bardon, Belfast: An Illustrated History, Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1982; Christian Barman, Architecture, Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1928; Laurence Beesley, The Loss of the Titanic, Philip Allan & Co., London, 1912; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1912–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996; C. E. B. Brett, Buildings of Belfast, Friar’s Bush Press, Belfast, 1985; Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, new edition, Cassell & Co., n.d.; Chambers 20c Dictionary, new edition, Edinburgh, 1983; The Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen, An Irish English Dictionary, new edition, Irish Texts Society, Dublin, 1927; F. L. Green, Odd Man Out, Methuen & Co., London, 1950; David Hammond, Songs of Belfast, Gilbert Dalton, Dublin, 1978; Robert Harbinson, No Surrender, Faber & Faber, London, 1960; Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1958; Robert Humphreys, ‘Whispering Death’, from Scale Models International, April 1996; Capt. W. E. J. Johns, Biggles and the Black Raider, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1953; Patricia Lynch, Knights of God, Hollis & Carter Ltd., London, 1945; Liam Mac Carráin, Seo, Siúd, agus Siúd Eile, Coisceim, Belfast, 1986; Chris McCauley, ‘Star Factory’, unpublished story, Derry, 1996; Eileen McCracken, The Palm House and Botanic Garden, Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, Belfast, 1971; James A. Mackay, Eire: the Story of Eire and her Stamps, Philatelic Publishers Ltd., London 1968; Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the White Ant, trans. Alfred Sutro, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1927; Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, HarperCollins Publishers, London; John Montague, ‘The Vikings’, in John Montague (ed.), The Faber Book of Irish Verse, Faber & Faber, London, 1974, Cathal O’Byrne, As I Roved Out, The Irish News Ltd., Belfast, 1946; Noel O’Connell, Father Dinneen – His Dictionary and the Gaelic Revival, Irish Texts Society, London, 1984; Marcus Patton, Central Belfast: An Historical Gazeteer, Ulster Architectural Historical Society, Belfast, 1993; Raphael’s Astronomical: Ephemeris of the Planets’ Places for 1922, published by W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd., who owns the copyright; The Reader’s Digest Book of Strange Facts, Amazing Stories, The Reader’s Digest Association, London, 1975; The Regent Priced Catalogue of the Postage Stamps of the British Commonwealth of Nations, Robson Lowe Ltd., London, 1934; T. Todd, Stamps of the Empire, Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1938, The Sunday Missal for All Sundays and the Principal Feasts of the Year, Browne & Nolan Ltd., Belfast, 1957 (copyright in Belgium, by Etabl, Brepols Turnhout); Julian Watson, introduction to Belfast Frescoes by John Kindness, Crowquill Press, Belfast, 1995; Wyn Craig Wade, The Titanic: End of a Dream, Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1980; Robert Welch (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, Oxford University Press, 1996; W. B. Yeats ‘The Statues’, in Norman Jeffares (ed.), The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan, London, 1979, © A. P. Watt on behalf of Michael Yeats.

  About the Author

  Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948. He held the Seamus Heaney Chair of Poetry and was the first Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. He published numerous collections of poetry, all of them with Gallery Books in Ireland, which earned praise and were awarded prizes all over the world. They include The Irish for No, Belfast Confetti and The Twelfth of Never. Carson received the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the Irish Times Award for his poetry, and The Star Factory won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award in 1997. His novel Shamrock Tea was long-listed for the Booker Prize. His translation of the Old Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Táin) was published by Penguin Classics, and his striking version of Dante’s Inferno will be republished by Head of Zeus’s Apollo imprint in 2020.

  Ciaran Carson died in Belfast in October 2019.

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