I don’t remember why I’d been at the party, possibly a college tutor had taken me… I’d left mid-reading and gone to drink Snakebite in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. My youth might have been mindless, but at least no one was telling me, or my parents, I’d be most useful to society if I was dead.
We turned away from Bobby Sands’ giant painted face. I said, ‘It is an incredible thing to do, to starve yourself to death in this day and age.’
Peter shrugged, he’d obviously had enough of thinking about it. ‘Well, something gets into the culture and they all do it.’
I was getting a feeling that Peter was working as a tour guide in a city he really couldn’t stand. Perhaps he just couldn’t stand doing this particular tour. But business wasn’t bad, whatever he thought about it.
‘I’m strangely busy for February. But Belfast gets a lot of visitors now.’ Peter and I paddled out of deep waters into a nice little pool of small talk. ‘There’s the cheap flights thing. And Belfast’s cheap. Foreigners generally, far more foreigners who feel it would be all right to take a look.’
‘There’s a lot to look at.’ I pointed at a spire on the horizon. ‘I can’t believe how many churches there are.’
‘Three hundred churches,’ he said.
We turned away from the spire and towards the square tower of Holy Cross church. Scaffolding climbing one wall of it.
‘There’s where the lad hanged himself.’
There were a lot of ways a teenager could have chosen to kill himself. But hanging from church scaffolding? The boy wanted his death to cry out.
The Ardoyne was mostly not ‘bleak’, ‘grim’ or ‘strife-battered’, as I saw it described in London newspapers a few days later. The reports on the suicides and the INLA intimidation were full of clichés. And I realized that film made about Holy Cross school had completely ignored the geography of the area. It didn’t look the same as the ugly estates in the film. This was an area of tree-lined streets. There were large red-brick mansions and attractive detached houses. The Holy Cross school, the suicides – these things were more complex and unsettling because they were happening in places that looked pleasant.
Peter showed me where the Catholic section of the road became the Protestant section the Catholics had to walk along to reach Holy Cross school. A tree-bordered road, with the Catholic school on one side and the Protestant school directly opposite.
I asked why all hell had suddenly broken loose – hadn’t the school always been where it was?
‘I don’t know. The demographic changes and people get stranded. There was some change in the Protestant groups around here, some more extreme elements moved up this way. So there’s a little Catholic area back there that’s got cut off from its school. Then something bad happens, some intimidation of Protestants. For instance, the Protestant old people go all the way down to the Shankill to collect their pensions, when there’s a nearer post office in that Catholic enclave, but they feel scared in there. So something happens one way and gets paid back another way. And if there’s extreme elements around, they push people into reacting to something they were already furious about anyway.’
Peter then drove round to the main road, showing me what would have been the long way round for the Catholic children to walk to school, avoiding the angry Protestants.
‘There’s a main road,’ I said. ‘But it’s not an impossibly long walk. It’s not that much longer.’
‘No, and if their parents were having to walk with them anyway…’
He paused a moment then decided to tell me what he honestly thought. ‘The IRA put pressure on Catholic parents to keep insisting they walk their children the short route because they knew there was massive PR value in the pictures of Protestants spitting at Catholic children.’
It certainly had been a PR gift. I didn’t want to believe what Peter said, but it didn’t surprise me: ‘Well, they say the Republicans are great masters of spin.’
He enthusiastically agreed. ‘Yes, like I was saying about the hunger strikers. People get manipulated. It’s hateful.’
I realized that whoever was spitting, whoever was manipulating, what I hated was the gift given to people with contempt for the Northern Irish – look at them, look at what they’re doing now…
Heading back past Protestant-muralled Sandy Row, Peter pointed out how close it was to the centre of Belfast. ‘The thing is with Belfast being so small, if trouble starts, it’s soon in the middle of the town and brings it to a standstill.’
I still wanted to know where he was coming from. And how much was he saying things because my accent had led him to believe I was English. It was so hard to hear what people were telling you in Northern Ireland and not wonder what their agenda was. I told him that my family were Catholic and we’d left in the sixties because my father joined the British Air Force. I thought this exposed me as a bit of everything, unlikely to react to whatever he was.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘A lot of people did say, “We’ve got an opportunity, we’re leaving.” A lot of people left. It’s still an under-populated city.’
Again he’d evaded me. I wasn’t nearly savvy enough about all the subtle signs and whispers that had to be read from people in Northern Ireland to ask the right careful questions to get a fix on their position.
I did know I could have taken another cab and been told the recent history in a completely different way I didn’t know what to do with Peter’s opinions but comb through them for facts. I was constantly gouging around in my own opinions and finding lumps of things I wasn’t sure I’d thought, or inherited, or been hyped into believing. It was definitely one of the character traits of people from Northern Ireland – knowing that not only do people not tell the truth, but what they think is the truth may not be true. It made for a very cynical disposition.
On the news that night there was a story from the Ardoyne to make even the cynical feel a tug at their heart. A big INLA arms cache had been found in a minicab office in the area and the information had come from a local informant. The boy who’d killed himself on Holy Cross church had made something change.
The Falls Road was murals, Remembrance Gardens, grilles over gardens and full of disturbing thoughts, or, it was the place I visited a few mornings later when I went to look for Belfast Grandma’s old house.
I’d overestimated my skills as a map-reader and my strength of leg. The walk started well, Belfast looking very Sunday morning, with shop shutters closed and church doors open. I had to go west, then north, and with a bit of effort I’d make it in about half an hour.
An hour later, I was in the Falls Road, passing the murals and too far west, nowhere near north enough.
Two old ladies with small Scottie dogs were talking outside a newsagent.
A man with a black eye staggered towards me and asked me for some money to get home, I muttered something into my map and kept walking. Another staggering man with a black eye came past me and didn’t ask for money. Perhaps they’d been fighting each other and the second one had got away with the first one’s wallet… Maybe they’d both come out of the pub I was passing, the pavement in front of it smelling of disinfectant. I kept going in case more black-eyed men staggered out.
A group of teenage boys headed towards me, exuberant, and one of them shouted a confirmation of what I was thinking.
‘Mornin’! We’re still drunk from the night before!’ Then he held his arms open wide. ‘But we’re giving out free hugs.’
I said that was very nice but I didn’t need a hug.
‘You can see she doesn’t,’ his friend said. ‘She needs directions.’
‘Here. I know Belfast very well.’ The hugging one grabbed my map. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Thorndale Avenue.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s off the Antrim Road.’
He frowned at me, confused. ‘So you’re lost then?’
One of his friends grabbed the map. ‘Give us that. You can’t even read.’
The friend squinted at the map. ‘Where off the Antrim Road? That’s a long road and miles from here.’
‘It’s miles,’ the hugging one confirmed. ‘You’ll need a taxi. We’ll find you a taxi.’
Out of nowhere, one of the old women with Scottie dogs pushed her way into the middle of the boys, demanding, ‘Is this wee girl lost? Would you not think to help her instead of standing around?’
‘We’re helping, we’ve got her map,’ a boy protested.
‘What would you know about maps? Where is it you want, dear?’
‘Thorndale Avenue.’
‘Oh, I know Thorndale Avenue.’
‘My grandmother used to live there,’ I said. I was suddenly inspired by a wild notion that if the lady was old she might turn out to have known my grandmother…
Belfast was small but not that small.
The boys were losing interest now. One of them handed back the map and said, ‘She knows everywhere, she used to be a nurse.’
I was sure this had a logic and thanked them as they drifted off, shouting that they were going down the town to find some girls to hug.
‘Wee skitters,’ the old lady said. ‘Now, dear, Thorndale Avenue. I know it very well. Did you know Mary McAleese was born there?’
I didn’t.
‘So you’re not a relative of hers then?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
At least I wasn’t the only one out on the streets with farfetched notions in the back of my mind.
‘No. I just thought I’d ask. It would have been a thrill if you were, wouldn’t it? You’ll not have been there in a while?’
‘Not since the late sixties.’
She looked at me with deep concern. ‘Well, dear, you do know you’ll find it’s changed a lot. It won’t be the street you remember I’m sure.’
I said I didn’t mind.
‘If you’re sure, then. You’ll need a taxi.’ She spun round and waved to a man parked in a side-street.
‘Jim, come and take this wee girl to Thorndale Avenue!’ she roared in a voice twice her size.
She tutted over me as she put me in the car. ‘Imagine you didn’t know about Mary McAleese. You’ll need to know something good about the street when you see it now’
I thanked her and braced myself to find the avenue pretty much burnt to the ground.
It had been a genteel street of large red-brick houses, in an area so quiet we’d been confidently allowed to go off unsupervised into parks and, more interestingly, into a nearby scrap metal yard. A child-friendly proprietor had let us play for hours in the shell of a sports car.
Jim the taxi driver took a wrong turn and went down a street into New Lodge, where I had a feeling the scrap yard had been. New Lodge was painted with murals demanding truth and justice for the New Lodge Six, shot by the British army in 1973.
Possibly they’d been shot from the abandoned barbed-wire-covered army posts at either end of Thorndale Avenue.
The avenue was bashed shabby, several houses boarded up.
‘Ah, that’s all right,’ Jim the taxi driver said, as we pulled up outside the house. ‘It’s not one of the boarded ones.’
After a pause, while I looked at the down-at-heel but lived-in house, Jim said, ‘Your grandmother must have had money, then.’
‘She had lodgers,’ I said.
‘She could well have, these are three-storey houses.’Jim looked at me as if checking for distress or shock. ‘This used to be a snob area, a real snob area.’ From his tone, I knew he meant this to be commiserating.
‘Doesn’t look it now. Looks like it’s been through the mill.’
‘Oh, this area now…’ he said, ‘this area of Antrim Road, it’s still where you’d find a fair bit of nastiness.’
‘I remember it being really quiet, you know, we used to play in the street.’
Jim suddenly looked worried. ‘What happened to your grandmother?’
‘She went to live in Tipperary.’
‘Oh, that’s all right then.’ He started the car. ‘So you recognize it even so. Where else do you remember?’
‘I don’t know, we used to go to the zoo a lot, isn’t that quite near?’
‘A bit up the road. That would have been the old zoo, they closed it down because they were abusing the animals, but the new one’s lovely’
Abusing the animals? I didn’t want to dwell on that – abusing them?
Jim asked me where I lived in England.
‘I was in London for a few years,’ he said. ‘I did some work in a hotel. Kensington. But I missed Belfast.’
‘You didn’t like London?’
‘It was OK,’ he said dismissively. Then, as if he was worried I’d be offended, he added more brightly, ‘It was OK, you know, but… Ach, you see how people are here, you know, they’d talk to you once in a while.’
To change the subject, Jim pointed to Cave Hill mountain ahead of us.
‘You remember what they call that?’
‘Napoleon’s nose.’
‘That’s right! You’ll soon get back to being a Belfast girl.’
Cave Hill, visible from all around Belfast, did look like a man’s face. Why Napoleon, no one really knew. There were Neolithic caves up there but nothing French. Perhaps it was a revolutionary connection – at McArts fort on the summit the United Irishmen had plotted rebellion for two days and pledged themselves to fight for Irish independence.
We stopped in the car park of the new zoo. Excited children were bouncing up to the entrance, to what Jim said was supposed to be one of the most modern and humane zoos in Europe. As well it might be… Abused? I knew those animals, I’d wailed to be taken to see them every other day, they were my friends…
I had to know.
‘What do you mean they abused the animals at the old zoo?’
‘They got sick. No one was really in charge of it, it was too small and the animals were all diseased and neglected. They’d have been terrible-looking sick animals when you’d have been going.’
Obviously I’d loved them regardless. I did remember it had very small, smelly cages, with creatures pacing about crossly. I suppose if I’d really cared I would have called that ‘abuse’ but I’d had a far more disturbing interpretation of the word in my head. Luckily for any night’s sleep I ever hoped to have in future, Jim had clarified the matter.
‘Get out and take a look at the view,’ he suggested. ‘That’ll cheer you up and you’ll see why people don’t like to leave Belfast.’
There was the ring of small mountains around the city, the Lough waters stretching away in front of me, the Lagan river valley below and the city spread out looking quietly dignified.
‘Ten minutes from the centre, that view. Isn’t it grand?’ Jim said.
The view over the city was grand. But it was the sensitive, manic friendliness of complete strangers on the streets down there that would make London seem just ‘OK’ to someone from Belfast.
7. Witches, Bitches and Fishwive
Outside City Hall was a gathering of Belfast’s teenage punk rockers, with bondage gear and big red Mohicans, the like of which had long since become extinct in London. There were some American tourists debating whether to go in for a tour of City Hall; then they decided they’d rather have breakfast. They took some photographs of the punks and went on their way, one of them saying, ‘It doesn’t seem how I thought it would be.’
Who knows what they thought Belfast would be like, but I’d guess no matter how much they’d been advised that Belfast was fairly safe now, they’d have expected it to be a lot more grim.
The whole fabric of the place felt exhausted, but in the shells of grand old edifices, shoppers picked over cheap goods in pile-em-high stores and discount supermarkets. Side-streets were full of tumble-down cafés and minicab offices, or had been paved over and filled with new branches of organic stores, cappuccino bars, designer clothes shops and book stores. Streets further from the centre, seemingly full of old, empty buildi
ngs, had sudden surprising art galleries and cafés – a sort of squatter bohemia. And there were so many night clubs I worried if I stood still too long someone would try and refurbish me for late drinking and dancing.
The population was notably young. Heading south, toward Botanic Avenue and the University district, the people were even younger, there were more cafés, more clubs, old bookshops, new bookshops, comedy clubs and arts centres. I was seeing different races – Africans, Indians… And students, students, students.
Queen’s University was hard to get into these days, it had such a good reputation. The large numbers of Northern Irish school-leavers going to universities abroad wasn’t all about escaping the Troubles. The high educational standard in the country meant there just weren’t enough university places to meet demand, and at Queen’s the competition for places was international.
My parents had met in the gothic halls of Queen’s University, so I bought them mouse mats in the souvenir shop. They were constantly emailing me information about Northern Ireland, so they might be needing them.
‘Check on the big goldfish in the Botanic Gardens,’ my father’s last message read. ‘As a child I found them very exciting. Are they still there?’
Dutifully, I walked up from the university to see the condition of the fish. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to investigate another report of abuse.
I was glad he’d sent me on this mission. Coming out of the Botanical Gardens on a sharp, frosty morning and into the flower-scented warmth of the glass palm house, startling with early daffodils of every possible shape and shade of yellow, surrounded by coils of strange greenery, I caught my breath and didn’t want to leave.
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 10
