Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  Auntie Rose and her Miss Bamford ways I knew very well. Thwarted in Strabane, she’d married a railway worker and moved to Croydon. Visiting her was a constant pressure of hand-washing, sitting up straight and being told that women who wore trousers were ‘fast’. All this had felt strange in a two-up two-down railway cottage with an outside toilet, and I’d gone through a phase of feeling there was something slightly Miss Havisham about her – although she had a quiet and devoted husband in an armchair in the corner of the living room. But I’d been on the right lines – it wasn’t being jilted at the altar that had made her stuck in time; it was being denied the romance of the secretarial expectations Miss Bamford had promised her.

  Granny, Auntie Rose and certainly Miss Bamford herself would have been appalled to see Siobhan and me becoming raucously hysterical on the Greencastle car ferry back across to the North, trying to decide how to do away with ourselves quickly if the ferry sank, so we wouldn’t have to fall into the freezing stir of dark grey water all around us. Siobhan grabbed a handful of plastic carrier bags from the back seat, tipping the shopping out and yelling over the throb of the ferry engine: ‘We’ll stick our heads in these, and it’ll all be over quickly’

  Siobhan had diverted to do something as grown-up as grocery shopping because she had a husband, two children and a life I’d imagined might have rendered her more sensible than me. But she couldn’t claim the return to Buncrana with me had disrupted her normal steadiness of mind – back home in Castlerock she had her husband and two children but she also had a dog that sang. You only had to go near the piano in the living room and the huge golden Labrador would leap on to his performing perch on a window seat, wagging his tail. You could disappoint him and play some Chopin or you could get the best out of him with ‘Chopsticks’ or ‘Lavender’s Blue’. It was sort of madness-inducing after it went on for more than a minute, but the dog did bark loudly and in rhythm with the music. The more the dog barked, the more forcefully Siobhan’s children would bang the piano. It felt like the most noise and the craziest noise I had ever endured in my life. Luckily their house was a good distance from any neighbours, because if the Osbournes had lived next door they’d have had to get up a petition.

  Siobhan’s house, right on the sea front, all huge rooms and bay windows, did make me think about what the word for doing away with your cousins might be. I could lure her, her family and the singing dog out to sea and leave them there, forge a will bequeathing the house to me, the lovely cousin from England…

  No, not really a foolproof plan.

  Until quite recently, vast numbers of rooms and proximity to the sea didn’t add to the value of a property in Northern Ireland – because it was in Northern Ireland. So, as compensation for living there, anyone with a half-decent salary could live very well indeed.

  Receding fears of violence had sent Northern Irish property prices rising steeply, but it was still a place where it didn’t take that much money to have a quality of life unimaginable on the same salary in London. There was a steady stream of returnees in their thirties who’d left to go to university in England, Canada, even Australia, stayed on to build a career – and now just wanted to come home. Middle-class couples with young children were buying up big houses and resettling the countryside. Siobhan and her husband had tried London for seven years: ‘I keep telling the kids we lived in a flat as big as the kitchen we have now and they don’t believe me. They’ve got lovely little schools here, the sea, relatives a few miles away…’

  ‘What about you? Do you miss the bright lights or do you prefer it back here?’

  ‘It’s just more comfortable to be somewhere you understand. Where everyone talks like you. Don’t you feel it yourself, a sense of coming home?’

  I didn’t know. I felt very carried away with the thought of a cheap big house by the sea. But I suspect it was more the series of warm, hilarious reunions with uncles, aunts and cousins that was making me feel I’d returned to something I knew well. I certainly didn’t feel I was in a place I understood. I understood my cousins, but not the place.

  And we’d just been to Buncrana. Who wasn’t going to feel nostalgic about the location of childhood holidays? Even though we English cousins had been the slightly odd, trailing-behind trio of our family at play.

  The flashy hours of winter sun had abandoned us when we left Donegal. Rain came down in a bitter cold wind as Siobhan showed me the homeward sights: ‘On your left now, you’re passing Magilligan, prison on the sea. They’ve got a wide range of prisoners in there, I don’t know how many politicals but otherwise it’s burglars, paedophiles, the usual. Except they’ve started putting asylum-seekers in there. I think that’s awful, sticking them out here in the middle of nowhere, no bus service for their families, nowhere to stay. Anyway, the more foreigners come here the better, mix us up a bit. That’s something I miss being back here. Everywhere you go, everyone’s white, white…’

  Magilligan couldn’t have been anything but a prison. And there wasn’t much else to observe but the size of it, in such a small country.

  Past the prison there were miles of flat, bleak beach. Siobhan said this was an area where they spoke a language known as ‘Ulster Scots’. I’d read about this. A minority language, spoken mainly by older farmers and fishermen. It was getting all kinds of grants and reappraisals. Apparently there were 1,500 people who spoke it exclusively, but thousands more who had knowledge of this ancient form of Scots English. It had a new name, ‘Ullans’. It came from lowland Scotland with the settlers in the early seventeenth century and was similar to the lowland Scots in Robert Burns poems.

  Ullans had been dismissed as a dialect of English until Britain signed the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, and it became a recognized regional European language. Ulster Scots had been looked down on as a poor folk’s way of talking, but now campaigns were running to describe it as a language that had been discriminated against. The idea was that Ullans should have the same status as an indigenous language in Ireland as Gaelic.

  There were irritable claims from Ullans campaigners that words claimed for Gaelic – like the widely used ‘craic’, meaning fun, geniality – was Ullans, not Gaelic. It was the kind of Northern Irish rankle that made me feel very ‘oh, get over it’.

  But I defer to Siobhan’s more tolerant viewpoint: ‘Catholics have all the romanticism, all the claims to traditional things here. There’s very old things on the other side too. I’ve heard people round here talk it. It’s good if it doesn’t die out.’

  Yes, good, I argued, but it was a shame it had to be stirred into the pot of things to fight about.

  ‘Some people might stir it in,’ Siobhan said, ‘but things don’t always go that way. It’s more like an anoracky thing for academics.’

  We took a swerve off the route home to look at the famous Downhill Palace. The remains of a gaunt mansion on a windswept headland had a sign at its neo-classical gates, telling us to leave the car and walk to the ruins, but sleet was coming down in the wind and we couldn’t cope. Cheekily we bounced the car right up to the back of the ruins.

  The palace had been built for Bishop Hervey in the 1770s. It had once held libraries and a two-storey picture gallery, but a nineteenth-century fire had damaged the interior. Gradually the building had deteriorated into the kind of cliff-perched ruin you wouldn’t want to be in after dark for fear of Dracula.

  Closer to the cliff’s edge was the well-preserved Mussenden Temple, a domed rotunda the bishop had used as a summer library and place of worship.

  ‘People can have weddings here now,’ Siobhan told me. ‘Imagine, on a summer’s day, it would be gorgeous.’

  If you could ever stop the clifftop breezes getting up your frock and blowing away the bridesmaids.

  The temple was an elegant little piece of strangeness. It was inspired by the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli and dedicated to a young cousin of the bishop, who died before it was completed. Apparently the inscription round the dome translat
ed as: ‘It is agreeable to watch from land someone else involved in a great struggle while the winds whip up the waves out at sea.’

  Siobhan and I had struggles of our own as we darted out of the car to take pictures of the temple: sleet lashed us, a herd of sheep was staring at us, and a man in a tractor was approaching, shouting something at us.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s saying, but let’s get out of here,’ Siobhan yelped over the winds.

  We made it to the car, manoeuvred noisily and escaped a man who was probably just a friendly farmer wondering if we needed help.

  ‘I was brought up in the country,’ Siobhan said. ‘I know when someone’s telling me to get out of it and when they’re friendly.’

  ‘Maybe he’s someone who the bishop watched drown at sea and he comes up to haunt anyone who goes near the temple.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Siobhan said. ‘He was in a tractor. If he was a drowned ghost, he’d come shivering up covered in seaweed and barnacles.’

  We spent the evening in Siobhan’s local pub because she’d promised me as new blood to her pub quiz team. It was the sort of cosy old pub you’d see in a tourist board promotion of Ireland. Full of smiling, weather-beaten old boys and fresh-faced young girls coming in from the cold clad in thick knit jumpers, all greeting each other because they all knew each other and drank branded stout together.

  Siobhan had told me their area was called mixed, but was predominately Protestant. I noticed a few small, framed certificates on the pub wall, like Rotary Club certificates, detailing money raised for charity by the local branch of the Orange Order.

  ‘My friend who captains our team takes the quiz very seriously,’ Siobhan warned me. ‘So try your best.’

  I did, but was a little put out when the friend overruled me on a football question and I turned out to be right. I was wrong about so many other things after that I couldn’t get up a justifiable sulk.

  There was a question about how a new pope was declared elected, which surprised me; Siobhan had to remind me not to jump to conclusions, people in a middle-class Protestant pub were not going to start screaming and laying about themselves with bowlers just because someone mentioned the Pope.

  ‘You’ve got to be here more. Each little environment around the country is different. I’ve lived in London, I know how it’s made to look worse than it is.’

  ‘Made to?’

  ‘Not on purpose. Jesus, have you come over here thinking everything’s a conspiracy? If nothing’s happening, that’s not news, is it? You don’t see the pub quiz, you see a blown-up pub. Now, think, what’s the next line of this song?’

  We were on a very tricky music round. Some tables were surrounded by people humming and stumbling over the second line to an Adam and the Ants song. At other tables, older competitors were getting cranky, but they’d had an easy run of it with Charles Aznavour and the Beatles.

  ‘Do any of us know this?’ Siobhan asked. ‘Or should I run home and get my dog to help us out?’

  6. One Way of Looking at Belfast

  The Belfast Europa hotel had been bombed thirty-three times. For many years it was the only major hotel in the city centre. It was where journalists used to stay, hence the thirty-three bombs – convenient for the journalists as they didn’t have to leave the bar to get news; convenient for the bombers as they were guaranteed to make the news.

  I’d expected something more imposing, a battered but dignified establishment in a solid central avenue of Belfast. It was central, right beside the bus station. It had a gaudy seaside-night-club-looking frontage, with an excess of pink neon even seaside night clubs haven’t used since the seventies.

  The reception area was a little more impressive – high marble, over plush seats, and a sweeping curve of staircase leading to what a journalist had described to me as: ‘Nothing special rooms. Worth a couple of nights though, for the history.’

  I’d arrived from Portadown feeling very dishevelled. There’d been snowy squalls on the road, making me pull at my hair with driving stress and generally rub my make-up all round my face, as I tried to figure out what might be in the road two feet ahead of me. I’d dropped my backpack in a puddle as I carried it into the Europa and I was wearing a warm but very old anorak that always made me look a little Care in the Community.

  Still, if they were used to journalists, they were used to dishevelment and Care in the Community.

  I asked the receptionist, all grooming and manicuring to a Miss Bamford’s Academy level of perfection, if she had a room for two nights. She looked at me and distaste flickered into her eyes. She consulted the computer for what felt like an unnecessarily long time. Smartly dressed businessmen were gathering around the desk with questions for the girl. She turned to me, smileless.

  ‘We have a room,’ she said. And then added, not quietly enough, ‘But you know it’s a hundred and sixty pounds a night here.’ This was when she finally smiled. Pityingly.

  I knew then what the danger in the Europa hotel would be for me. Not bombs. The danger would be that I’d throw down my credit card to spite my face – ‘Only a hundred and sixty pounds, I’ll take three…’

  Common sense bellowed down the shouts of my pride. But the businessmen were all listening in now, I had to save face somehow. I remembered I owed a lot of emails.

  That’s fine,’ I said calmly to the receptionist. ‘You do have internet facilities in the rooms?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Phew.

  ‘But there is an internet café just two doors down.’

  I made a face as though I was considering the matter. ‘You have a gym, though,’ I said, trying to make her worried I might be someone famous in disguise, in dire need of a work-out before a starring role in a multi-million-dollar movie. I made a sneery face that I felt implied all this.

  ‘I’m afraid not. There is one two blocks north.’

  ‘Two blocks north,’ I echoed disdainfully.

  ‘They don’t have a car park either,’ a businessman interrupted. Possibly he was a salesman used to a life of bluffing and wanted to help me out, possibly he was just disgruntled with the hotel. As well he might be.

  ‘No car park? I’m sorry, that’s no use to me at all.’ I gave the receptionist back her pitying smile and then marched out, trailing my muddy rucksack, dishevelled dignity intact.

  I spotted an anonymous hotel just down the road and was relieved to discover I could have the thrill of staying very near to the Europa for less than a quarter of its inflated prices.

  ‘It’s because the Clintons stayed there, they’ve got all up themselves,’ the very different kind of receptionist in the second hotel told me when I complained of their neighbour. ‘I mean, there’s nothing in there worth that kind of money. And did you know it was bombed about thirty times in the Troubles? They’d have to pay me to stay there.’

  A bath and noticing the sun was out made me feel less grouchy about Belfast. I went for a stroll along the road, found the Grand Opera House. Designed by Frank Matcham, it had all the curly, gilded, fancy frills and painted cherubs a Matcham theatre should have. There were posters up for a play that pronounced: ‘Hilarious’, ‘Back for an extended run’. The play was a History of The Troubles According to My Da. It sounded interesting. It was sold out. The box office clerk suggested I book tickets for a show coming in the following month: ‘It’s the same kind of thing, you know, a quirky personal view of Northern Ireland.’

  I declined the tickets and went out feeling a little crestfallen to have discovered I was in the middle of researching a quirky, personal cliché of a book.

  I’d started now, so I’d have to go on with it. I had my bus map, I had my street map and knew exactly what house to look at to see where George Best was born.

  It was a basic-looking house, in a street of houses that looked the same, on an estate that all looked the same. There were tattered Union Jacks outside a couple of houses and vacant lots full of litter. If I was making a documentary about Georg
e, I’d have filmed the two boys kicking a football in a nearby cul de sac, with a boarded-up house on the corner. See how far George travelled in life… But then…

  Eamon, my footballing uncle, was the first person I’d heard express any sympathy for the back-on-the-drink-despite-the-new-liver George Best.

  ‘They took him away from the cosy wee world of East Belfast far too young and in all those years no one fought him to the ground to make him sort his head out. Did you read his autobiography? He doesn’t realize it, but every word in it tells you he’s had nothing but misery in his heart since he was a wee boy. Pele said Best was the greatest footballer he’d ever seen – imagine knowing that about yourself and still not being able to find any peace?’ Eamon sighed. ‘People think professional footballers are spoilt, but it’s a very stressful life. A couple of bad days, an injury and that’s it, you’re finished.’

  Eamon had been an international. He left because of injury and had taken up teaching. He reckoned he’d had the best of both worlds – could point to his clippings and caps and know he’d been good enough; could point to his big happy family, his teaching achievements and know he’d had a proper life as well.

  ‘George was definitely amazing. That’s a gift from God. But you should look at Danny Blanchflower. He was from Belfast. Captained Spurs when they won the double, was footballer of the year twice. He got injured and went into managing Northern Ireland – but he was a footballer with a university degree; he wrote about football and campaigned to stop footballers being exploited. Before his campaign they got paid next to nothing. There’s an all-rounder, a role model. Anyone tells you footballers are thick, tell them about Danny Blanchflower.’