She did this sort of thing all the time, no matter how much of a hurry she was in, she had to let at least one soldier a day know how annoyed she was to see him.
The soldiers’ absence felt like something had relaxed all over the country. It wasn’t about the politics, it was about how their presence made the place feel. Made ordinary people, as they went about their business, feel like criminals.
Of course, I have already confessed my family were criminals, guilty of many egg-smuggling-type crimes. And possible unconfessed damage to the interior of a hire car. The tray table thing kept popping out, we’d definitely done something to it, but we had to press on with our adventure.
‘We’ll glue it up and say nothing,’ my aunt suggested as we arrived at our destination. She had, after all, lived as a Catholic in the hinterland of Portadown, known as ‘the Orange Citadel’, for several decades and had learnt to discriminate calmly when it came to the subject of what should be worried about and what shouldn’t.
Aunt Helen settled herself in her friend’s kitchen, introduced me and chatted a while about how much I looked like my mother and, pleasingly, she concluded her observations about me saying, ‘I’ve found she has that same magic way about her that her mother has and her mother had before her.’
Her friend took a long stare at me. I tried to look as though I had a magic way about me but suspected my aunt had oversold me.
‘Now,’ Aunt Helen said, ‘I’ll stay here and talk local gossip with Kathleen while you two go down the yard and talk to the men about the eels.’ She looked at Kathleen. ‘As I said to you, Kathleen, Annie does a bit of writing, so the eels might be a story for her. Go on, Mikey, go with her, it’ll be more interesting for you than our gossip.’
I could tell by Mikey’s face he didn’t think going down the yard to the shores of Lough Neagh, with an icy February wind whipping off the water, would be guaranteed more interesting than gossip.
Not that gossip was accurate for what Aunt Helen did. She seldom stopped talking or asking people questions about themselves, but it was always jubilant: ‘Where did you get those beautiful curtains, they remind me of the curtains I was thinking of for the front room only mine had more of a blue thread through them, I think yours are nicer, lovely against your wallpaper, is that new wallpaper?’
Never anything bad about anyone who wasn’t in the room, never a word allowed into the conversation that wasn’t a positive reinforcement of everyone in the room. She’d hold her hand up if you tried to tell her something she feared would be scandal-mongering: ‘Now, if this is gossip, you know I don’t want it.’ Around her you learnt the difference between gossip and gossip. The way she orchestrated her constant need to converse and yet avoid the bad type of gossip was a skill I’d have tried to cultivate myself, if I hadn’t been so fond of hearing bad words about others.
Shivering in our fashionable outfits, Mikey and I made our way down the scrubby grass of the yard.
‘Will they know who we are?’ Mikey had asked as we went out of the back door.
‘Say you’re with me,’ Aunt Helen told him. ‘Go on, the pair of you. Come back and tell me what you’ve found out.’
‘Hmm,’ Mikey said, begrudgingly resigning himself to the assignment. ‘I expect they’ll tell us everything, what with Miss Magic asking.’
‘I think it’s only fair that she said that about me,’ I said.
‘You know she says things like that about everybody,’ Mikey crushed me.
Lough Neagh ahead of us looked grey, bleak and not at all the sunny shimmering type of lake I remembered as a feature of the countryside.
Mikey suddenly seemed a bit shy. He was so sharp I’d forget he was only just fifteen.
‘So,’ he said awkwardly, ‘you must be used to investigating things.’
‘Investigating? I don’t know.’
‘You must have investigated things before, to write books. What’ll we do? Just go up and say, tell us about the eels?’
I panicked as a dog in a cage barked at us and Mikey realized I might not be entirely a proper grown-up and on top of the situation.
‘Do you want to go back?’ he asked hopefully.
‘No, no.’ I stepped sideways away from the dog. ‘We’ll get chatting a bit first.’ I took a steadying breath, trying to sound urbane and James-Bond-like, to calm my younger relative. ‘Then ease our way into the eel investigation.’
Mikey nodded, happy to see we were putting distance between ourselves and the barking dog. ‘It’s like a zoo out here, have you ever seen the like?’
Not really. Although more aviary than zoo. The long stretch of yard leading down to the lake shores was full of bird cages, bird sheds and loose-strutting, peculiar-looking birds.
The first man, Ed, was in a long, low shed full of birds I did recognize – pigeons. We introduced ourselves and he showed us eggs that were about to hatch, temperature gauges, baby pigeons feeding… I wished I could think of intelligent pigeon questions to ask but I’d never been called upon to be interested in them before.
In addition to the pigeons, Ed had all manner of rare hens, including tiny, jet-black Bantams, like little feathery jewels. The birds were for competition. He pointed with pride to his potential prize-winners, then with sadness to a slightly distorted baby black bantam.
‘This one’s gone a bit wrong in the breeding,’ he said. ‘You have to breed them closely related, so you get these genetic freaks.’
The poor freak suddenly made a throaty complaint and darted off behind a bush, as if ashamed in front of the visitors.
I felt we’d made a good show of interest in the fowl collection. It was time for me and my investigative assistant to get to the point.
‘I was told you were an eel fisherman.’
‘Not me,’ Ed said gruffly, turning his attention to a piece of shed that needed hammering. There was an embarrassing pause. Mikey looked at me, imagining I’d know what to do next.
‘I see,’ I muttered feebly. Any notions Mikey had that I was good at leading an investigation flew off across the lake and gusted away on the cold wind.
Ed nodded to a dark-haired younger man coming up from the direction of the water. ‘Damien’s the one for the eel fishing. I went once but I couldn’t be bothered with it again.’
Well, if fishing for eels was anything like eating them… Once I took a bite out of a jellied eel and that was more than enough. No amount of rapturous talk about fresh eels fried in butter from Damien would convince me to bite one again.
‘Ask him if he eats them himself,’ Ed grinned when Damien had finished the eel-eating eulogy.
‘I don’t,’ Damien admitted. ‘People who live round here seldom eat them these days. They were food when people hadn’t two pennies to rub together. Now they’re just work.’
But people in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and fancy London restaurants were going crazy to eat eels – 700 tons a year crazy for Lough Neagh eels. And this craziness, like a lot of things in Northern Ireland, meant politics slithered about in the history of what would have seemed the simplest of trades.
I was getting into my investigative stride and did have a vaguely informed question: ‘I heard it was always the same families who fished for eels. That they pass the licence on.’
Damien nodded. ‘Since the early seventies, that’s when they set up that system. So the locals could be the ones to benefit. People say that’s unfair, but there’s only so many eels in the lake. Less now, the lake’s getting polluted and the water level’s been dropping. That could take years to sort out.’
Prior to 1960, the predominantly Catholic fishermen had plied a small livelihood from eel fishing. It hadn’t looked like being a great money spinner, so nobody bothered with them. A 1960 court ruling suddenly entitled the private company owning the fishing rights to the whole of Lough Neagh to buy all the catch, at a price they decided. So the fishermen couldn’t shop around for the best price – an independent way of life had suddenly become a job, unlikely
to have a fair rate of pay. Many of the fishermen took to fishing illegally, bumping up the statistics of Catholics with criminal records.
With the help of the local priest, the Lough fishermen formed a union and managed to buy a 20 percent shareholding in the company with the fishing rights. By 1971 the union had bought all the rights and become a co-operative, comprised of families who had traditionally fished for eels on the Lough. By the eighties, with these families being mostly Catholic, there was talk of discrimination against Protestants. But, as Damien said, this talk had rumbled on but not come to a crisis, ‘Because it’s not all that attractive as work. You don’t work long hours for your money but it’s tedious work.’
The eel fishermen would go out at night to lay the eel traces, putting a hook on the line at even intervals. I asked Damien if it was soothing to be out on the water in the darkness.
‘Not soothing, not so much. It’s intensive. You’re concentrating on the hooks so you don’t hurt yourself and the boat is moving all the time.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s a short burst of hard work, then it’s done. Same thing in the dawn, hauling them in. In a matter of hours your money’s made.’
I asked him how big an eel could get, because I had some schoolbook vision of giant rearing beasts with electric tails and shark’s teeth.
‘Oh, as big as two or three feet.’
I didn’t think we were talking about the same type of eels.
Damien was busy now, helping Ed put the finishing touches to a new house for weird hens. Mikey had wandered off up the garden in search of the genetically mutated black bantam, the incest survivor as he called it.
I had a new question. It had come into my head entwined with my schoolbook vision of eels, so I had a suspicion it was an embarrassing question. I was glad Mikey wouldn’t be near enough to hear it.
‘I was just thinking of something I remember from school. Don’t all eels have their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea?’
‘The where?’ Ed looked at me as if I was a little genetically mutated.
‘Yes,’ Damien said, though looking dubious. ‘I heard that. Somewhere like Mexico. And they have to swim for thousands of miles.’
‘Well,’ Ed retorted, ‘if they get to Lough Neagh from Mexico, fair play to them.’
Damien and I looked at each other, both troubled by the fragment of information we shared but couldn’t substantiate.
A rumpus up the garden changed the subject.
‘He’s in the dog’s pen!’ Mikey was yelling. ‘The little incest one’s in the dog’s pen!’
The big hunting dog was growling at the distorted bantam but backing away.
‘They’ll be all right,’ Ed said. ‘The dog knows to leave the fowl alone.’
‘The lion and the lamb,’ Mikey said brightly, coming back over to us.
Ed smiled at him. ‘Well, it won’t be the dog that kills it, but that poor thing won’t live long.’
‘What a shame,’ Mikey said. ‘It knows it’s doomed and meanwhile all its brothers and sisters will go on to glory, winning prizes…’ He undercut his romantic view of bantam angst, asking, ‘So are they worth a lot?’
‘Depends what you mean by a lot. They’re not from Mexico but they are from France, those wee black ones. They’re rare enough.’
‘Anyway, they’re gorgeous,’ Mikey gushed.
And Ed smiled more broadly. ‘You could say that. You could indeed.’
Very few places in Northern Ireland were far from the countryside; very few Northern Irish people were completely urban. People fished for eels and kept small hens, even if they did something else for a living. Ed and Damien were electricians. Mikey’s own father was a schoolteacher, forever busy on the family farm in his spare time, or helping a neighbour with lambing, or a market garden harvest.
Incidentally, and fair play to them, Lough Neagh eels, like all eels, did try to make their way to the Sargasso Sea to lay their eggs. The Sargasso Sea was closer to Bermuda than Mexico, so pleasant enough for an eel who could make it, I imagine. The baby eels, elvers, would drift back in the Gulf Stream for a couple of years until they pitched up in the lakes and rivers of Europe. This fantastic natural process was rather slow, so to meet the demands of crazy people who liked to eat them, tons of eels were raised on farms locally. Your Lough Neagh eel could have been everywhere, or nowhere.
The almost unbelievable lives of eels may have turned out to be true, but my aunt Helen told other tales about Lough Neagh that I couldn’t confirm as fact. She said the Lough was formed by the giant Finn McCool, who lost his temper with a Scottish rival and picked up a clump of earth to throw at him. He threw short, and the earth clump landed in the Irish Sea, forming the Isle of Man. The vast hollow where the clump had been soon filled with rainwater to form the Lough.
Fairy people were supposed to live under the Lough. There were tales of fishermen seeing lights and being lured down to wondrous magic cities below the water…
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s true,’ Mikey said.
‘Really?’ My aunt feigned offence. ‘Well, young grandson, this is the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, so don’t you think it would have been churlish to leave it without a few legends attached to it?’
Several minutes passed explaining the word churlish to Mikey.
‘Oh, I wish I’d never said it,’ my aunt complained as we bickered over possible meanings. ‘It’s not even a word I normally use. It must have been something I picked up from my English niece.’
‘Anyway, English niece,’ Mikey tapped my notebook, ‘largest freshwater lake, write that down. Using only very long words of course.’
We were giggly all the way home, all the way past Billy Wright and into the warm glow of Mikey’s home, where Aunt Helen had other grandchildren needing to be fussed over, to compensate for Mikey getting an exclusive afternoon excursion.
Mikey and his brothers and sisters were the children of my cousin Veronica. We decided the official word for this was ‘under-cousins’ – and that I was an ‘over-cousin’.
Veronica’s husband, John – my cousin-in-law? – presented us with bowls of home-made soup to ‘take the chill of the lake off us’. Then he rushed out to do something on the farm, tutor a child in difficulties at school, coach the local Gaelic football juniors or continue his struggle to organize cross-community sporting events. Veronica and my aunt went to visit a sick neighbour. Under-cousins and their friends gathered to cross-examine me about writing books. Mikey acted as chairperson.
‘Are there crimes in the books?’ a burly unrelated child asked me.
‘Not really. It’s just about Northern Ireland, what it’s like.’
‘Daddy says you wrote a book about Africa.’ Mikey’s seven-year-old sister Mary sat next to me. ‘Are there animals in it? Any lions or tigers or elephants?’
‘Some. There were some elephants, I think, but it wasn’t really about them.’
‘There are no tigers in Africa.’ Mikey the chairman waved a hand as if to disqualify Mary from the round of questioning.
‘If I don’t ask how will I find out?’ she retorted pertly.
Mikey’s ten-year-old brother Jack had been hanging back from the inquiring scrum. He was a gruff, sporty little boy, usually accompanied by an obedient train of followers.
‘You’re not writing about the Troubles are you?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think enough people have done that.’
‘Good,’ said Jack. ‘Thank Christ for that.’ Then he looked at me closely. ‘You promise it’s not about the Troubles?’
‘Promise.’
‘Thank Christ,’ he said, retreating to the back benches again.
‘Stop swearing,’ Mary said.
‘Fuck off,’ Jack said, delighted with himself.
‘Anyway, she’s writing about interesting people she meets,’ said Mikey. ‘So obviously it will be mostly about me, who else is there?’
Jack looked at him as if he was someth
ing that had just swum up from the Sargasso Sea. ‘You have to do something to be put in a book. You’re fifteen, you haven’t done anything yet.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Mikey said. ‘I’m just typical of my generation. I want to be fabulous and famous and I don’t want to have to do anything for it.’ He flounced off to another room to watch the final of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. A title that obviously summed up his feelings about life so far.
‘He has to do something, doesn’t he?’ Jack asked with a frown.
‘Not necessarily,’ I shrugged, thinking that being so splendidly himself was probably enough for someone to have achieved at fifteen in rural Armagh.
Ploughing a lone furrow ran in the family. Mikey’s father, John, tried hard to set up projects to encourage co-operation between the local communities. Sport was his thing, so that’s what he tried. He wanted the Gaelic Athletic Association to allow their premises to be used for these mixed events, provided he could get these events to happen at all.
He’d had one meeting – twenty Catholics attended and two Protestants. The Protestants he’d invited.
‘It’s very frustrating,’ he told me. ‘When they saw the two Protestants, the Catholics said, “You see, they’re not interested.” But I said to them, “Did you invite the Protestant over the road from you?” And of course they hadn’t. None of them had done what I’d asked them, to invite a Protestant they knew. Because they do know each other, Annie. They pass each other in the street every day. They know who’s going to be approachable, and who would be out of the question. But no. People don’t want to stick their necks out. It’s all very well muttering that the Protestants in this area have been in the wrong, a lot of them know that, so it’s up to us to say, “We know you’re not all the same, let’s change things.” But it’ll be up to me to keep going round inviting Protestants personally. People say they’re scared of intimidation from fellow Catholics, it’s not that. They’re embarrassed they’d ask a Protestant who’d say no, as if embarrassment ever hurt anyone. People get themselves scared talking about intimidation more than they ever actually experienced it. We can’t live like that any more. All we’re talking about is kids playing a few inter-community games of basketball.’
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 3
