He’d picked basketball because it had no sectarian connotations, it was a foreign game played by everyone. But even so, his successes were tiny. And the Gaelic Athletic Association weren’t helping much. ‘Wringing a concession from them to use their grounds is like pulling teeth. A lot of attitude of “Why should we make the first move?” But somebody has to.’
John wanted to keep trying to make first moves, because, he said, I don’t want all this around my children. My eldest son who’s away at university, he said to me after some incident at Drumcree, just down the road, that he wasn’t going to have anything more to do with Protestants. I asked him how he’d buy anything in a shop, get on a bus… I told him, whatever’s happened you can’t decide to ignore two-thirds of the people around you. Anyway, it was just a momentary thing. He’s long since realized there are more interesting things to do with life than build up a hatred. Thank God. Because if one of my children did choose to get caught up it would break my heart. The only end to that road is death or prison.’
I told him his children seemed singularly uninterested in sectarianism, the Troubles… Jack didn’t even want to hear about it: and didn’t want over-cousins writing about it.
‘Hmm. Well, you’ll have to see,’ John said looking at me in his quiet, earnest way. ‘Maybe the thing you say you don’t want to write about will be the very thing you do write about.’
‘I wanted to write a cheerful sort of book,’ I said.
John thought about this more than I deserved. ‘I expect it depends what happens to you just before you write it.’
He pointed to a large house at a crossroads. ‘I wanted to buy that a few years ago. Have it for my tutoring business. But it would have been ashes the day after I’d paid for it.’
‘Ashes?’
‘My money would have been the wrong colour. The person selling to Catholics is in trouble and the Catholics won’t be left to live quietly with what they’ve bought. That’s why I built the extension on our own house for the tutoring business, just to get on with things regardless.’
‘So things aren’t getting better?’
‘Some things are, some things aren’t. And…’ He smiled. ‘How I feel about the way things are going depends on what I’ve seen on any particular day. You’re going along optimistically then something brings you up short.’
3. Shrapnel Jam
Optimism dominated the next day. A bright winter sun shone, as Mikey, my aunt and I drove through the gnarled plantations of apple trees surrounding the village of Loughgall. We were going to look at antique shops and find a nice tea-room.
‘There’s people round here have made fortunes from apples,’ my aunt said. ‘Fruit in general. Strawberries in summer. Pears. Blackcurrants. All manner of fruit but mainly apples.’
We talked a bit about the price of apples, how apple-growing, long and lucratively established in the area, was under threat with the entry of Poland into the European market. Those Poles, with their vast apple orchards and their inevitable price undercutting.
‘Maybe they won’t be as nice as Irish apples,’ Mikey suggested.
‘They’ll be cheap apples,’ Aunt Mary said. ‘That’s all most people want from an apple.’
Loughgall was chocolate-box cute. Pretty-coloured houses lined the village main street, and there were cute, or intriguing, objects for us to point out to each other in the antique shops. None of them cheap, but what you’d want from an apple you might not want from an antique. You’d want to keep an antique, know its history. Perhaps it came from one of the fine mansion houses around the village. Houses like Loughgall Manor, with its 300-year-old yew tree walk and ornamental lake. Houses built by the seventeenth-century settlers from Worcestershire who established the apple orchards of sharp cooking Bramleys.
Until my freezer-dipping generation came, a good apple pie and the ability to cook one was essential in a Northern Irish kitchen. My aunt would get up in the night if she thought there weren’t enough pies nestling in airtight tins in the kitchen below. My transplanted mother could still come close to weeping if she’d turned out a mediocre apple pie. So a blasé attitude to cooking-apple quality was all loose talk from my aunt – a bad apple would make a bad pie and all would be lost.
Loughgall also had Sloan’s House, where the Orange Order was founded by Protestant farmers in 1795. This pretty, immaculate village, surrounded by apple blossom in the spring, with shiny copper kettles in the ruched curtained windows of its beeswax-smelling antique shops, could provoke thoughts to bring you up short. But we were having a pleasant day and I’d made my promise to Jack. It was time for tea and a discussion with Aunt Helen about how I drank too much coffee and it was bad for me.
‘I’m not saying never have coffee. Just take tea instead occasionally.’
I said I didn’t really like tea but maybe I’d have a herbal tea.
‘Oh.’ She pulled a face. ‘You can’t drink that. Whatever kind they say it is, there’s only two kinds. The kind that tastes like air freshener and the kind that tastes like glue.’
We drove home past the Diamond, where the battle was fought between Protestants and Catholics in 1795 that led to the founding of the Orange Order and the flight of many Catholics from Armagh to the West of Ireland… Every corner seemed to have a story relating to the Troubles.
On the corner to turn back into Aunt Helen’s road, it was hard to see if a ten-ton truck was going to round the bend and hit us. A man opposite was fixing his garden fence and had a clear view of the road.
‘He might wave us out,’ Mikey grumbled.
‘Him?’ My aunt snorted. ‘Thirty years at the end of our road and he’d not wave so much as wave hello, let alone wave you out. He can see it’s me in the car. That’s what his problem is. And it’s how he is, but it’s that kind of wee sectarian thing that really annoys me.’
I swung the car over the road fast, sending up a flurry of black crows from a hedgerow, like burnt paper from a bonfire.
‘Serve the man right if a huge pile-up skids into his lawn,’ I said, as I gritted my teeth and pressed hard on the accelerator.
‘Oh, she does get cross,’ Mikey squeaked excitedly, once he was sure he’d survived. ‘And anyway, you’re not allowed to tell her about things like that. She’s promised Jack she won’t write about the Troubles.’
‘Has she?’ My aunt smiled. ‘Well I expect she’ll not get far in life if she ignores a promise made to young Jack.’
‘Fine for her. I have to live with him. You say you’ll do something and you don’t do it he’ll nag and nag… You should have heard him about the PlayStation…’
I did understand how Under-cousin Jack felt – not about the PlayStation, I’ve forgotten what that domestic drama entailed. But the Troubles… The irritating boredom of it all. I’d been older than Jack when the tedium of the Troubles had struck me – a teenager, busy with blue eye-shadow, platform shoes and seeing the sort of boys who worked on fairgrounds in a new and admiring light.
By the time I’d left school, Northern Ireland seemed very far away, I’d almost lost touch with the cousins, uncles and aunts. However, there were reports relayed to me, in my mother’s most reproachful tones. The cousins were all over-achieving, with proper jobs – doctors, teachers, university lecturers, bankers, civil engineers. And they all seemed to become adults immediately – getting married, buying houses – while I still had spiky green hair and wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I could afford to dither and rebel. I was almost entirely English.
But I couldn’t avoid feelings that would well up and surprise me. There was not only the constant news about Northern Ireland. There were the bombs in London and there were the dramas… Film, television and theatre loved the Troubles. I hated these dramas. I hated the radio phone-ins after some mainland bomb, where English people would talk endlessly about ‘the problem with the Irish’. You’d have thought all we did and all we thought about was something to do with the Troubles.
In a documentar
y interview, I remember a man from Belfast saying that living with the Troubles was ‘like trying to ignore an elephant in the living room’. Was this true? Was it as big as an elephant? And anyway, weren’t there other rooms in the house? It seemed to me there were people, particularly in my family, who’d learnt that if an elephant did get in, it was still possible to lock the living-room door and live in other parts of the house. Even if you sometimes felt a bit restricted, or disturbed by trumpetings and crashings in the night.
Through the seventies and eighties, I didn’t see my relatives often but I knew they were humorous, cultured, accomplished, hard-working… They somehow managed to restrain themselves from what, in England’s documentaries and dramas, you’d think must be an innate urge to destruction and self-destruction among the Northern Irish.
The public image of the country had made life difficult for people with the distinctive accent. My mother talked of ‘double takes’ in shops when she asked for service too loudly.
My local shop in London was run by Gerard, a chatty man from Derry. He told me an Englishwoman had stood at the counter berating him after a bombing in England.
‘She stood there in my shop, going on about this bomb when she heard my accent…’ Easy-going Gerard frowned hard at the memory. ‘And she demanded to know why the Irish hated the English so much. I just said to her, “Mrs, go look at your war memorials and see how many of us died for England.”’
Around that time he’d been on a train in London talking to his daughter.
‘We’d been getting quite noisy, laughing about things that had happened back in Derry at my brother’s wedding.’
At the end of the journey, a young man who’d been sitting opposite said to him, in a strong Belfast accent, ‘I just want to say, you’ve inspired me. I’ve not been here long and I’ve felt very self-conscious about my accent, what with all the bombs. But I’ve done nothing, why should I keep my voice down?’
None of this botheration for me; I had an English accent that I was working hard to make more fashionably Estuarine. Quite often, I pretended I was from somewhere else, or people immediately wanted to talk politics. At college, I’d let slip where I was from to some really irritating student from Dublin and he tried to get me into a political discussion. A Republican pose seemed to me the way he made an identity for himself at the big swamping English college. He told me if my family included no political activists, it was because they were middle-class. He said pacifism was also taking a side in Northern Ireland – the side of self-interest. His lack of self-interest led him back to Dublin and a career as a bank manager, so my instincts he was phoney were possibly right.
My family had definitely shifted itself into the middle classes, but pacifism had cost them more than it gained them. Instead of keeping to their tribe, many of my relatives had tried to engage in cross-community activities and politics. They were very dismissive of the threats, from all sides, but there had been recurring threats – hate mail, strange cars following them home at night, intimidating whispers in public places. Nothing had done them any physical harm, but they’d put themselves in the way of harm.
To his dying day, my grandfather, Bimpa, had sighed bitterly over the intransigent and self-interested among his fellow Protestants and what they’d forced the Catholics to do. The Catholics he’d married into. A love conquering all, fine and dandy kind of marriage – but a poor career move for an RUC sergeant. He was never promoted after his marriage and took early retirement.
A similar thing had happened on my father’s side of the family.
A Protestant from Lurgan, Grandfather Caulfield had been an officer in the British army, then a civil servant. Suddenly, in his fifties, he lost his heart and some might say his head – but he’d had enough of bachelor life. He married a Catholic girl, from the South. He isolated himself from his family, his colleagues in the Protestant-dominated civil service and the rumour was that his solace was gambling and chain-smoking – lung cancer killed him when my father was twelve.
There were sadder things about Grandfather Caulfield than the effects of sectarianism. He’d probably been a bachelor too long and didn’t know that even if someone marries you, they don’t always love you. Grandma told my mother she’d been charmed by him, and had met him when she was thirty-two and thinking herself lucky to be proposed to but…
When he’d been in the army, my grandfather lost half his foot on a World War One battlefield. Grandma kept the shrapnel from his foot in a jamjar on her mantelpiece. I remember my sister looking at it when she was barely tall enough to reach it and asking what kind of jam had been in the jar. Everyone laughed and no one knew the answer. But I think my sister was right to ask. If Grandma had loved him, she’d have carefully chosen what she kept the shrapnel in.
Poor Belfast Grandma. Sectarianism hadn’t been the cause of all her troubles, but it hadn’t helped.
Her family, down in Tipperary, had been shocked by her all round. First, in her late twenties, she’d run away to work in the Co-op in Belfast; then she’d married someone who seemed almost English. Hers was a family so enthusiastically Republican the women had run around with guns in the Irish Civil War. Her mother, reputedly formidable, had been incandescent with rage and full of never-darken-my-doors-type talk about the marriage. After Grandma was widowed, she did open the doors again, but always behaved as though Grandma was a disgraced sinner she’d had to forgive. No wonder Belfast Grandma wasn’t cuddly.
These were common enough stories in Northern Ireland. Not only were mixed marriages more frequent than might be imagined, there were still mixed communities and hundreds of busy people like John with their cross-community projects in areas where people had stopped mixing. There were constant stories of how, when it came down to it, some very unlikely people made exception to their sectarian rules.
Aunt Helen told me about some cousins of hers who were known to be ‘connected’.
‘They were all very big in Sinn Fein, and you know, some of them beyond that. The sort of people where it wouldn’t do to inquire too closely what the men in the family might be doing after dark.’
The father in this ‘connected’ farming family was dying. Everyone in the area had known him, an affable, helpful man, who’d always be the first to lend a tractor to pull someone’s car out of a ditch and all that kind of rural decency. One of the people he’d known since childhood, just around, just to talk about the weather with, was Ian Paisley. So despite the way their lives had diverged, Paisley came to pay his respects to the man on his deathbed. All other friends and the family left the room – their father wanted to see Paisley, but they didn’t.
Who knows what this staunch old Republican had to say to his long-time acquaintance, Reverend Ian, but unfortunately they were his last words. Paisley emerged ashen-faced from the father’s room and took the lady of the house to one side.
‘He’s gone,’ he whispered.
She whispered back, ‘Ian, slip out now so I can be the one to discover he’s gone, because no one’s going to believe you didn’t suffocate him.’
Paisley had taken this with a quiet laugh and slipped his bulk out of the door with unusual discretion.
Less strange but more touching was the story of the family who lived directly opposite Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe. There were no houses for hundreds of yards around, but these two houses faced each other. The full Catholic house of Joe and Helen and the Protestant couple opposite.
‘The old couple were very serious Loyalists,’ Uncle Joe told me. ‘We were on nodding terms but never more than that. Their son, David, grew up with our ones, playing in the fields together, and a much more toing and froing situation developed.’
The old couple moved away to a bungalow by the sea. David married and brought up his children to have an affable relationship with the Catholic neighbours. Their youngest: girl had great difficulty at school and it occurred to David there were two retired teachers living opposite. In fact, Aunt Helen was what is now referred to as a
special needs teacher, although she always said, ‘I’d say I taught the backward children, because that’s what they were called then.’
Backward or needy, nevertheless the little girl Rachel came on leaps and bounds with evening and weekend tutoring in Aunt Helen’s front room. There was some reciprocal arrangement with David, an electrician, and everyone was quite happy with the skills barter and the contact.
Uncle Joe was astounded to receive a letter of thanks from the grandparents, the old couple who’d barely managed more than a civil nod for years.
‘I knew the old boy, so I knew what it cost him to write and thank me for anything. I wrote back and said what a delight the child was, indeed, how delightful his whole family was. And that was the end of that, no Christmas card from them but a bit of something had shifted.’
David and his wife had done more than shift. Around the 12th of July, Rachel was very excited to see that every house in Portadown had a flag flying – a Union Jack, a flag of the Orange Order, a cross of Saint George…
‘Can anyone have a flag?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ her mother told her. ‘Anyone who can afford to buy one.’
‘But we don’t have one,’ Rachel frowned.
‘Well, that’s because Joe and Helen don’t have one and it wouldn’t be nice for us to put one up if they don’t have one.’
Rachel puzzled over this a moment and obviously decided it was an economic problem.
‘I know, next year, we’ll buy two flags and give one to Joe and Helen.’
Uncle Joe laughed remembering the story: ‘So there you are, and it’s not so much the story that tells you something, but that David rushed over to tell me this funny thing Rachel had said. I knew we were fine with them, that he felt he could tell me that.’
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 4
