Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  And not about George, who’d started in a little street in East Belfast where I began to feel self-conscious. A man was watching me from his garden gate. Disturbingly, he was pretending to be polishing the garden gnome in his hands while keeping his eye on me. I was still wearing the anorak that had aroused suspicion in the Europa; perhaps this neighbourhood had been endlessly hassled by scruffy, anoracked characters, stealing gnomes from gardens near George Best’s old house. I wouldn’t touch his gnomes; I didn’t want a souvenir. Poor George. If only he had been related to us, he’d have had Uncle Eamon to talk to and it could all have been happier for him.

  It was getting dark and cold. No sign of a bus for half an hour. I wondered if I should have left the hunt for George until morning.

  A bus with a destination and number I didn’t recognize pulled up at the stop. I’d memorized the numbers I’d need for the city centre, in case something bad happened up in the remote reaches of East Belfast. The driver opened the door.

  ‘Where were you wanting to go?’ he asked, as if he’d caught me graffiting the bus shelter.

  ‘City centre?’

  ‘I go there. Get in.’

  ‘You weren’t on the timetable,’ I said as I paid him.

  For the first time he stopped scowling at me. ‘I’m a new route. I come as a big surprise to everyone.’

  He winked at me. ‘What, do you think I’m trying to kidnap you?’

  Uncle Joe hadn’t said anything about what to do if kidnapped by a bus driver in East Belfast, so no, I hadn’t been thinking that.

  ‘I was just thinking a London bus driver would never do this.’

  The driver laughed. ‘If I was as busy as those boys, you think I’d bother?’

  I sat in the empty bus and saw his point.

  The bus system in Belfast was still underused because buses were often attacked during the Troubles – pelted with stones, petrol bombs or hijacked for use in barricades. Taxis became the preferred form of transport. The cabs often operated as service taxis, waiting until they were full of people going in the same direction. They could be as cheap as buses and could dart around trouble spots to get people home.

  There were complicated things to remember about the cabs in the Troubles: as a general rule, the black cabs, like London cabs, were the Catholic ones. They’d go to Catholic areas and were rumoured to be a form of pension scheme for retired IRA men. Ordinary cars went to Protestant areas and had Protestant drivers. Maybe their drivers were retired paramilitaries as well, but these days I think there were just a lot of middle-aged men driving cabs of all kinds because there were no other jobs for them.

  Guided black cab tours were the latest thing being advertised in the expansive new Tourist Information Office. You could go on a black cab tour of the attractive Antrim coast, up to Giant’s Causeway, ending your day sampling product at the Bushmills whiskey factory. You could take taxi tours round the blue plaques of Belfast to see how many famous people had lived there. Or, you could take what some guides referred to as a ‘Conflict Tour’. Other guides took a more oblique approach in their leaflets and offered ‘a tour of the political murals in the Falls and Shankill areas, with an explanation of the recent history of the city’.

  ‘What next?’ Uncle Eamon had laughed at the leaflet. ‘Re-enactment of riots, tourists running about with paint-ball guns firing green or orange? Black cab tours. I don’t believe people want to do that.’

  I did want to do it, of course, but felt wrong for wanting it. It seemed too soon. It seemed too cynical that something recently a matter of life and death was now an entertainment. It was everything that had irritated me about all those plays, all those films and thriller series where the province was so dramatically useful, so fascinating for audiences living in nice calm places. But I also mistrusted my feeling about the showing of the Troubles to the world – perhaps I didn’t want them to be shown to me.

  Besides, if sites of violence were becoming tourist attractions, rather than sites of violence, didn’t that mean the Troubles were really ending?

  The guide on my tour, Peter, said he didn’t feel they were ending. He felt they were changing. Locations that were dangerous had changed, the ways the paramilitaries operated, and who they were, had changed. He said there were new problems: ‘Those former paramilitaries and rabble-rousers might be talking peace but they’ve left behind them some very sick and bitter people. There’s people who are traumatized and people who’ve just become bullies and criminals all over this city.’

  As a tour guide Peter was very interesting but not cheering.

  Evidence of the sick and bitter remnants had been on the news the night before my tour. A teenage boy’s suicide in the Ardoyne area of Belfast. He’d climbed the scaffolding on the tower of Holy Cross church and hanged himself. He was one of twelve teenage boys who’d committed suicide in this area of Belfast in the first month of the year.

  The Ardoyne had become a stronghold of the extreme nationalist group the INLA. The boy who’d killed himself, and his friend who’d killed himself the week before, had been terrified of the next thing the INLA might do to them. With justification. The eighteen-year-old friend had been shot in the legs by the INLA when he was sixteen. He’d done something dumb like sell drugs, steal a car, maybe he’d mugged someone.

  Last night’s suicide had been abducted by the paramilitaries the previous year, buried down a manhole for a day, to teach him a lesson for some kind of infringement of INLA local bylaws. According to his mother, he’d been full of paranoiac depression since then. He’d been terrified if he saw anyone talking on a mobile phone in the street, thinking this was a signal someone was being ordered to do something to him. His mother said the INLA controlled everything and everyone in the Ardoyne; no one would inform the police about anything because the punishment would be unimaginable.

  With this in my mind when Peter picked me up, I felt bothered all over again about doing the tour.

  Peter was younger than he’d sounded on the phone, in his early thirties with a fresh-faced look belying the packet of cigarettes on the dashboard. As we set out, he said, ‘Now I just wanted to check what it is you’re interested in. You did say you wanted the more political side?’

  I said I felt weird about it, what with things like the suicides in the Ardoyne still going on, but it was the political side.

  He gave me a sort of forgiving nod. ‘That’s what most people are interested in. It’s what they’ve heard about Belfast and they want to try and understand it.’

  He started the engine. ‘I can take you up to the Ardoyne if you like, the Holy Cross school is up there. You know about that.’

  The news reports and television drama about the Catholic children who’d been spat at, stoned and threatened while walking through a Protestant area to their school had gripped attention in Britain for a time. I knew it. It was one of the things that people used to dismiss the Northern Irish as incomprehensible.

  Peter said the Ardoyne had the highest suicide rate in the United Kingdom.

  ‘I read something in the papers this morning saying that teenage boys get into a copycat pattern with committing suicide. So this might not be the end of it. Then you have to remember that the suicide rate for young men is exceptionally high anyway. Apparently in America a teenager commits suicide every two hours.’ He made an awkward smile. ‘I looked this up on the internet last night because I had a feeling, you know, that teenagers did this, you know, killed themselves more than you’d think. On the site I found for the Samaritans it says for men under thirty-five it’s about five hundred in England a year. But that’s the whole of England, not this one little area of Belfast.’

  I said the suicides and the news of how the INLA still control the place had shocked me.

  ‘It’s bad if you have to live in certain areas. Generally people can go about their business in Belfast in a way they didn’t used to. There’s new shops opening. New hotels, new restaurants. Look at that Waterfront Hall. That’s
all glass. There’s more good news than bad in Belfast for the last five years, there really is.’

  ‘And it’s so beautiful,’ I said, so he wouldn’t start to conclude I was only impressed by bad news. ‘All the old buildings. And from most places in the city you can see the mountains.’

  I had been brought up watching news reports that didn’t show the real look and feel of Belfast – a city of colossal architecture, with a long waterfront, nestling in mountains.

  We turned into the broad, scruffy Shankill Road, with mountains on the horizon. Peter pointed out the Glasgow Rangers supporters club and a shuttered building where IRA gunmen had burst in and killed the shopkeepers. I noticed almost every shop in the road was locked and shuttered.

  ‘So have all these shops closed down now?’ I asked.

  Peter laughed. ‘No. They’re not open yet. It’s only ten past eight. They’ll start opening after nine, once they’ve got the kids to school.’

  So easy to mis-see in Belfast.

  We turned off into a housing estate, ugly sixties architecture, litter and neglect. There were similar estates all over Britain.

  ‘Public housing,’ Peter called it.

  We stopped to look at what made the estate Northern Irish, a political mural. Some schoolchildren passing glanced at us and moved on.

  ‘Do people mind you doing this?’

  ‘At first they thought it was strange, but when I explained myself they didn’t mind. They want people to take an interest. And I have this van now instead of the black cab, just so I’m not making any kind of statement.’

  Although advertised as a black cab tour, we were touring in a comfortable new people mover.

  Peter asked if I wanted to get out and take a picture of the first mural. I said no, because taking pictures seemed a step too much towards misery tourism for me. And I didn’t like the murals, regardless of content.

  It was inevitable that whatever happened, the murals were going to be preserved for tourists to look at, with a lot of patronizing flannel written about the artistry in them. I didn’t think these things were art. Mostly, they were like kerbstones of Northern Irish streets, painted red, white and blue, or in the shades of the Irish tricolour, to show how the people who lived there were supposed to feel. Belfast had a world-class university, increasing numbers of modern art galleries… The city had far more brains and talent than I ever saw in a political mural.

  We were looking at a clumsy black and white mural on a gable wall titled ‘Sinn Fein Contribution To The Peace Process’. There were four panels showing IRA men training FARC guerrillas in Colombia; smuggling arms from Florida; the IRA breaking into police files at Castlereagh; and Sinn Fein spying on their colleagues at Stormont. There was a central portrait of Gerry Adams, one side of him a suited man with a briefcase, the other side a man in uniform with a gun.

  ‘You see, he’s half a politician, half paramilitary,’ Peter explained.

  ‘Half a politician is better than a whole paramilitary,’ I said.

  Peter didn’t say anything.

  The next mural was the face of a UDA man who’d been killed by the UFF.

  ‘Don’t ask me to explain the difference,’ Peter said grimly. ‘It’s all territorial stuff going on with these Protestant paramilitaries now. All to do with money. Drugs and protection rackets. Apparently some of them live in Spain now. Control things from there, in the sun.’

  He waved a hand at the painted kerbstones: ‘More red, white and blue here than in London I expect.’

  We passed a mural of King Billy prancing on his horse victoriously. Peter checked I knew who he was. He slowed and said wearily as we passed another brightly painted man on a horse, ‘Here, they’ve even got Cromwell. That’s going back a long way, isn’t it?’

  I agreed. I’d taken King Billy for granted, but Cromwell… Although it was fair enough, Catholics still told tales of his wickedness to the Irish. Everyone had long memories.

  Deciding we’d dwelt too long on the negative, Peter drove on, saying, ‘The people round the Shankill have suffered a lot: drive-by shootings, assassinations, petrol bombs – but look at these new housing estates here.’ We drove into more modern public housing. ‘You see how nice they are? Despite it all, people take real pride in their homes.’

  Pride and some kind of notion to make the estate look like Tyrolean chalets, with carved wooden shutters and geranium-stuffed window boxes. There were acres of rose trellises, pokerwork panels and burgeoning hanging baskets. Anything that could be stuck on to the outside of a house to make a desperate bid for glamour had been slapped on to these houses.

  ‘You can imagine they’re just as nice inside,’ Peter said. ‘Everything like a new pin.’

  Despite all the housework going on to show how life was normal, the massive Peace Wall was still up between the Shankill and the Falls. And a new layer of fencing had recently been added to the top, as boys had been throwing stones over it. The metal gates between the Shankill and the Falls were open, but the police closed them at night. Otherwise, Peter said, boys gathered around them and caused trouble.

  This wasn’t necessarily some schoolboy vandalism – in Ireland ‘boys’ referred to men up to at least the age of fifty.

  On the Falls Road side, the houses were closer to the wall, gardens backing on to it. They had grilles of wire mesh over the gardens, stretching up to the roof of the house. This protected them from petrol bombs and stones.

  ‘You can believe me that each one of those gardens is perfectly tended,’ Peter said.

  Living neatly was obviously part of the key to sanity. Every window I could see in was spangly clean, with white white nets or elaborately ruched blinds. Miss Bamford could have held out a finger, trailed it round every surface in every house and not found a speck of dust to tut over.

  Peter lit a cigarette as he led me into a small Garden of Remembrance on the Falls side of the wall.

  ‘On the Protestant side there are more murals but on the Catholic side they have more of these Gardens of Remembrance. I’ll show you the Catholic murals later, but they’re fewer and more grouped together.’

  I asked if it was something to do with the nature of the Catholic religion, that they paid more elaborate attention to the dead.

  Peter dragged on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes, considering me. ‘I don’t think that’s true. The Protestants have murals to the dead, the Catholics have gardens. They both romanticize the dead.’

  I was considering Peter too, trying to figure him out, but he seemed carefully neutral – I suppose he had to be in his job. But the more we talked, the more frankly and angrily pacifist he revealed himself to be.

  The frosty morning was warming up with bright sunlight. The Garden of Remembrance had perfectly pruned shrubs and new wooden benches. There were plaques fastened to the wall commemorating the dead. On one plaque there was a list of ‘Volunteers’, IRA activists. The plaque with names not prefixed by ‘Vol.’ had a list three times as long. Peter pointed this out to me.

  ‘There are more civilians than IRA men.’ He drew a last long smoke of his cigarette. ‘Most of the people killed in all this are innocent.’

  As we turned back to the car, he said, ‘I doubt that wall will come down any time soon. The media might like to see it come down, they might see it as a positive thing. But it’s not like the Berlin wall. The people in Berlin didn’t want that wall. The people here want this.’

  A wall you couldn’t see through or see over.

  On another wall was a grouping of Catholic murals. There was a painting of plastic bullets, explaining that there was a new kind, even more dangerous. Critical of all sides, Peter pointed out, ‘Any of those things are dangerous. If a plastic bullet hits you in the wrong place, it can kill you.’

  There was a painting of an RUC officer and an identical officer of the reformed PSNI – Police Service of Northern Ireland. Peter said Catholics didn’t believe anything had changed, and Catholics still wouldn’t join the police fo
rce.

  ‘They’d have to leave their neighbourhood. They’d have to move to a mixed area. There’s still a lot of intimidation.’

  I had Catholic relatives in the police. They’d joined because they believed some Catholics had to, to try and change things. They lived in mixed areas and believed that things had changed, a little.

  Many of the Catholic murals related Irish struggles to other causes – the Palestinians, the Basques, the Catalans, the Palestinians again. There was a painting of a young Turkish hunger striker – the explanation under her portrait said she was inspired by Bobby Sands.

  A mural commemorating Bobby Sands himself provoked something in Peter. He looked at the mural with distaste and said nothing for a long time. Then he told me something I’d never heard before: ‘You know the families of the hunger strikers could have signed a form to get their son off the strike, have them intravenously fed, but they wouldn’t do it. Some people say the families were intimidated, but it was more subtle than that, they were made to feel it would be such a shame on the family to sign those papers. That their son would never forgive them and their neighbours would never look at them again.’ He looked almost tearful. ‘But if it was my son dying I’d have signed it. Imagine, people wouldn’t sign a piece of paper to stop their child dying.’

  Peter seemed so distressed I could only do what he was doing, stare at Bobby Sands and think about it.

  When I was a student people in London went on marches supporting the hunger strikers – not me. Whatever post-punk phase I was in seemed more interesting. Somehow I chanced into a party given by left-wing playwrights – one of the playwrights was reading a smuggled letter written on toilet paper by one of the hunger strikers. I wanted to punch her in the face. There was something so ghoulish, in a comfortable Chelsea home, this earnest woman holding a piece of toilet paper scrawled on by someone who was dying… Maybe I just didn’t want to admit that rather than chopping off my hair and tinting it pink, I could be interested in something to do with where I came from. Maybe I was right to be annoyed that these middle-aged, middle-class playwrights loved the fact that someone was dying for Catholic Ireland. There was something demeaning about being taken up as a cause. It made us seem more dispensable than any kind of discrimination – Irish Catholics were only notable if they managed to kill themselves in some interesting way. Our courageous ability to self-destruct was even more charming than our abilities with pipes and tin whistles.