Next, Saint Patrick. No puppets, but there were taped commentaries and actors in touch-screen re-enactments of his life. The exhibition was called Saint Patrick’s Testament because it was centred round writings on the saint found in the ninth-century manuscript The Book of Armagh.
The actors in the screens told of the saint’s life in a chatty, intimate manner. Saint Patrick was a Briton, sold into slavery to the Romans, became holy in Rome, returned to Ireland, converted the Celts, chased snakes… All this disputed detail did have a core of truth. In the fifth century a holy man named Patrick did choose Armagh to be the site of his church and around it grew colleges, schools… By the eighth century, Armagh had become an ecclesiastical and scholarly centre. This centre of learning and prayer was ravaged and disrupted at the time of King William’s wars, but in Georgian times, Archbishop Robinson came to the city and worked hard to re-establish it as a capital of Christianity and learning.
Using the best imported architects and the warm-coloured local limestone, Robinson commissioned a palace and the public library – as well as restoring older schools and churches.
Robinson, star of the Armagh Story, another section of the exhibition, was a good man on the churches and libraries but maybe not a lot of fun. The green central mall in Armagh was once a race course. The large balconies on the surrounding houses were to provide first-floor reception rooms with a good view of the races. Robinson put a stop to the races and declared the mall should be a promenade for contemplative scholars.
My head, unused to scholarly contemplation, had started haemorrhaging with the history of Armagh and Saint Patrick – especially Saint Patrick. I’m sure he was very holy and influential, but after the kidnapping into slavery, his life was not the high-concept, action-filled, dragon-killing saint’s life of a Saint George type – he didn’t even go interestingly nuts like a lot of ancient saints. And he was in no way the green beer-drinking party animal you’d expect if you associated him with the Saint Patrick’s day parades in New York and Dublin. Credit to him that he seemed a man who would have firmly bolted his monastery against such parades but I couldn’t find him interesting.
There was something in Armagh that I had always found strange and intriguing. The Armagh Observatory and Planetarium. Of course, now I had the educating benefit of the Saint Patrick’s Trian experience, it all made sense – Armagh had been a centre of scholarship at a time when astronomy was a growth area in the sciences. Robinson, a keen amateur astronomer, had founded the observatory in 1790 and it had attracted many famous star-gazers over the centuries.
Patrick Moore, the Sky at Night man, was the first director of the new Observatory and Planetarium, opened in 1968. I wasn’t sure how many of Robinson’s old charts and instruments I wanted to study, but I fancied a look through a big telescope. It was the middle of the day, but if they promised me I’d get to see something good, I could always come back later.
The main glass doors of the Observatory were open. Inside there were all kinds of boxes and bags piled on the floor, as if they were moving out, or a burglary was in progress.
A young woman with a very pointy face came out of an office door and looked at me accusingly. I stepped away from the boxes.
‘We’re not open until two o’clock,’ she said. I was about to grunt acknowledgement of this and leave, when she added, ‘There’s not that much to see anyway.’
No? The whole sky didn’t count then?
She was too scarily pointy to be facetious with, so I asked what happened at two o’clock.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘We’ve had a lot of problems with funding here lately, so there’s no proper planetarium show. Nothing.’
‘No telescopes or anything?’
‘Yes, there’s telescopes.’ She was so irritated with me now, because obviously whatever had happened to their funding it was me that had done it. ‘You can come back later and look at them but there will probably be a lot of school groups in, you know, children,’ she added with a look of bitter distaste.
Yes, I did know children, I’d just survived interactive Lilliput with them and they weren’t so bad. Maybe I should tell her there was a very good lunatic asylum in Dublin, if the children tipped her over the edge she seemed very close to… But far too frightened of her, I just mumbled, ‘Thanks, I’ll come back later.’
‘It’s not what it should be here, just remember that,’ she said, again with the underlying accusation that she knew fine well it was me who’d done it.
I wouldn’t be back. I’d tried to enter into the scholarly spirit of Armagh, knowing I’d never make it into the saints’ club, but I’d been shown I wasn’t welcome there either. No wonder. As I sat in the car to write down some notes about Saint Patrick, and all I was supposed to have learnt an hour ago, I realized the only thing that had wedged itself in the mesh of my sieve brain was that the 17th of March, Saint Patrick’s day, hooted and tooted and dyed green all over the Irish Diaspora, was the day of his death. I found that rather depressing.
The sky was clouding over, it was getting even colder and everything was starting to feel bleak. Maybe because now I’d started to find all my aunts and cousins and under-cousins, I was missing their company. Maybe I shouldn’t have started the day at a lost grandfather’s graveside. I thought of abandoning sightseeing and heading home, but it was only one o’clock. It would seem wimpishly early to say I’d had enough. I realized I’d not heeded Aunt Helen’s advice, that sightseeing was best conducted with tea breaks at regular intervals. I made my way over to Robinson’s Palace, where there was the second establishment on my aunt’s list of excellent Armagh tea-rooms.
They were welcoming in the tea-rooms and restored my faith in what I’d come to regard as one of the immediate comforts of Northern Ireland – the friendliness. It seems like a galloping great Pat O’Brien of a cliché to talk about friendliness in Ireland, but it was there in crock of goldloads in the North. A shy, genuine desire to make someone who seemed a bit lost find a place and settle themselves. My relations who hadn’t seen me for years had done it to me, strangers at the airport had done it to me – not only directing me to what I wanted, but making sure it did turn out to be what I really wanted when I found it – be it a taxi stand or a place at the family fireside.
An almost superstitious feeling had welled up in me the minute I’d walked into the arrivals lounge – I was surrounded by people with Northern Irish accents, so everything would be fine. I knew where the superstition had come from. My mother would voice it when we got off the boat – it was usually a boat journey when we were kids. Someone would speak to her on the Belfast quayside, and she’d just beam with an all-body smile: ‘Ah, Northern Irish accents,’ she’d say and it was a signal to relax, we were on holiday, we were home safe.
The throaty rumble of the accent was hard to imitate. My mother and I brooked no pretenders. On an evening when we’d time on our hands, we had compiled a list of actors who’d got it wrong. Some you’d have thought would know better and some you wouldn’t: Val Kilmer, Jonathan Pryce, Richard Gere, Tommy Lee Jones, Mickey Rourke… They’d all tried and wandered pitiably all over the Celtic soundscape.
In fairness to them, a leading British dialect coach told me the accent was notoriously difficult to learn because: ‘The vowel system is not in the everyday canon. It might be easier for open-eared Scottish people to get it than Americans, English or even other Irish people. It works on a very centralized vowel system phonetically speaking.’
I didn’t know what that meant, but surely a famous Hollywood actor could afford to have it explained to them.
They were probably busy people. If they got the vowels right, they still had the sentence constructions. Full of leftover Gaelic word order, it could be so easy to get tangled, get stresses in the wrong places… Instead of saying, ‘I am,’ people said, ‘I would be the kind of person who…’ Instead of offering you a lift they’d say, ‘Would you not like a lift?’ And if they were making a list, they’d say, ‘I’
m after making a list, so I am.’ It was no accent for people to just make a grab at and hope to get away with.
I couldn’t do it either, my mother said I sounded terrible: ‘I can’t believe you can’t hear it. You veer around to all extremes in the one sentence. And you’ve every reason to be good at it, not like these poor creatures on our list.’
I don’t know what we were planning to do with the list. Blackmail? Offer my mother’s coaching services for the next time they wanted to try it? I’ve no idea. But we have our list, we’ll use it one day.
Thawed out, I thought I’d better have a look round the fine buildings of Robinson’s Palace. This was made pleasant by an actual guide rather than tapes and touch-screens.
Robinson had certainly been a stylish fellow. The private chapel was so delicately and simply decorated it was timeless. The walls were clad in a soft pink stone known as Armagh marble, actually the local limestone polished up, and to my eye a subtler, pleasanter stone than marble. Completed in 1786, the chapel, as my guide informed me, was considered to be one of the finest examples of Georgian neoclassical architecture in Ireland.
‘That means it’s Greek-looking,’ she added helpfully.
The palace itself was being used as council offices, so not open to the public. But we could inspect the old kitchens. Then we echoed along the low, 43-metre-long servants’ tunnel, leading from the kitchens and servants’ quarters to the palace. This was known as ‘The Whistling Tunnel’ because the servants had to whistle as they carried food along it to show they weren’t eating.
Just as she was chattily filling my head with such historical trivia, my guide abandoned me.
‘Now here in the stable block there’s a “Day in the Life” exhibition. Just press a button on the wall as you go into each room and the whole thing springs to life, showing you how people lived in Robinson’s day.’
Again I was alone with technology. Taped voices accompanied each room full of wax people – the stable boy, the lady of the house, a dinner party, the kitchens… And there was a model of Robinson himself, looking out over a beautifully painted backcloth of rural Armagh, conversing with a rather know-all young man called Arthur Young.
Arthur Young was an English agricultural reformer. As I listened to the tape of him, expounding on where the Irish peasant farmers were going wrong in the way they farmed flax, I felt, despite the posh Caulfield hackles I had, some kind of ancient Irish peasant hackles were rising on the back of my neck. Just something about that ‘the trouble with the Irish’ tone of Arthur Young’s voice, whatever the merits of his agricultural theories, hurried me home to the relatives as snow came down like a judgement on somebody.
Me probably, for having all the historical splendours of Armagh to see and getting a bit fed up with them.
Cars in the drive at my uncle’s didn’t mean anyone was home. One belonged to a cousin who was working abroad, one was an old car of my aunt’s that needed selling…
There were no lights on in the dusk gloom of the house, so I presumed I was home alone.
Years of being surrounded by people, pets and uproar had given my uncle Joe an ability to sit motionless in his chair reading a book, hearing nothing, seeing nothing else but the words in front of him. Not even noticing it was getting dark until all light had gone.
Usually there was a give-away cloud of pipe smoke from the chair to signal he was there and still alive – on this evening he must have been between pipes. I went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea, emerged with it and was very startled to hear an amused, lugubrious voice from his chair.
‘One cup of tea. Well now, Miss Caulfield, isn’t that the trouble with being brought up in England? It gives a person a very selfish disposition.’
I forgave him and made him a cup of tea. After all, he’d done me a favour, I’d been looking for an excuse for my self-absorption for years.
‘Your cousin Siobhan phoned,’ he said when he’d had the tea and smoked a pipe. ‘If you can dig your way out of the snow here tomorrow, she’s suggesting lodging you for a couple of days while she’s off work to take you to the seaside. Isn’t the seaside some important component of your book?’
‘Very important.’
‘Well, yes. From Timbuktu to Toraigh, we’d all be in a bad way if there was no seaside.’
I’d no idea if that was an actual expression or just something he said to amuse himself.
To amuse himself further he asked, ‘And then you’re going to leave us for Belfast, is that right?’
‘I’ll be back.’
‘You’ll be very welcome. Only, if you get taken hostage, make sure it’s on the Falls Road, we might know some people there could help you, but I’m not sure about our contacts on the Shankill.’
I knew he was joking, but then I wavered. ‘Do people get taken hostage?’
He laughed. ‘I was just trying to add some spice to your travels. But if anyone does kidnap you, they wouldn’t want to have to answer to me.’
Then, having fondly teased his naive niece into a nervous breakdown, he went off to watch golf on television because, monotonous as the game was, on television the true glory of its monotony really shone out.
5. Dogs Can Sing and Dogs Can Disappear
‘Let’s go. There’s an old naked man in that room up there, he’s seen us.’
‘Naked? Where?’
‘The right-hand bedroom. Quick, he’s coming to the window.’
‘He’s not naked. He’s got a vest on.’
‘He’ll still think we’re filming him.’
‘He’s opening the window.’
‘Run!’
My cousin Siobhan and I ran squealing round the corner and didn’t stop till we got to the car.
‘I don’t think we actually have to get out of town,’ Siobhan said as I grabbed the passenger door handle. ‘I think he’ll only go so far in his vest.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But let’s get up the high street, mingle with the crowd. Just in case he’s a real nutter who would come out in his vest, with a gun.’
We’d only been in Buncrana ten minutes and already we were children again, running squealing from some nonsense, getting the possible consequences hysterically out of proportion, close to collapse on the pavement with too much laughing.
Maybe there was just something in the air of Buncrana for us, too much ozone. Especially for a city girl like me.
We’d not been trying to traumatize elderly locals, just taking pictures of the old Buncrana holiday home.
‘I hope we’ve not brought on a heart attack or something.’ Siobhan reviewed the pictures in the digital camera with concern. ‘He might have a vest on but I expect it was a bit scary for him.’
We’d no time to let conscience hold us up. Our next stalking operation was to the guest house where my family had stayed.
The drive was overgrown but there was an ugly new sign out front, indicating the guest house was still open for business. Siobhan looked at the building and wailed.
‘It looks terrible.’
‘It is February,’ I said. ‘I expect they have a holiday in winter or something.’
‘But it’s not the same place at all. It’s ruined.’
It had been our guest house, I didn’t see why Siobhan was so disappointed. But it had symbolized something in her memory.
‘It was where I imagined royal people would stay,’ she said. ‘I’d think, my cousins from England stay there, so they must be a bit royal.’
‘Siobhan, as a child did you think all English people were a bit royal?’
‘I hoped they might be, especially if they were cousins,’ she admitted.
‘I thought everyone with a Northern Irish accent was a relation,’ I said. ‘Especially if they were famous.’
‘I think there was always a lot going on when we were children,’ Siobhan concluded. ‘Comings and goings of people we only vaguely knew, it’s not our fault we got the wrong end of every stick. Oh, look at this guest house, it’s ruine
d.’
I remembered a much more elegant grey Georgian house than the place we were looking at. A landlady sprang to memory. She’d a shiny Irish setter, an elegant, regal kind of dog. Everything had been just so inside, polished and full of Englishmen in tweed hats going fishing…
Dilapidation of the building and grounds wasn’t the disappointment so much, it was the obvious dilapidation of taste. The place had been painted a deep orange with peach trim. Not a political orange. Just part of a Donegal madness for painting houses in toy town colours. We’d seen purple trimmed with pink houses; blue and yellow houses; red houses and forty shades of green houses. Siobhan knew of no explanation for this but had definitely observed it was on the increase. Perhaps in the Mediterranean all these brightly coloured houses would have looked right, but in Donegal, particularly on a snowy February day, they smacked of a bleak desperation. They reminded me of ageing faces over made up. Houses in this landscape had to be plain grey, or white, if they didn’t want to look tawdry and slatternly, and that was that.
We peered in the windows of the once correctly grey guest house. No one around. The wide staircase had its tone lowered with a swirly beige and brown seventies carpet. And you could tell, even through the net trimmed window, that the inside of the house would smell of damp and vinegar.
‘Definitely new management,’ Siobhan said crossly, a childhood icon of glamour wiped from her memory.
The perceived glamour of our little English family had been a major topic of conversation on our return adventure into Donegal. My sister and I having shop-bought clothes had tormented Siobhan as a small child.
‘To me that was so posh. My mother would buy some material and give it to a wee woman in the town to make up into dresses for us. In those days, hand-made clothes was the cheap way. And not only did I never get clothes with a shop label in them, like you and Jo had, I was the youngest. All my dresses had been worn by three other sisters first.’
I said I did seem to remember my sister getting hand-me-downs.
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 6
