Constructed in 1839, the palm house was an elaborately curvy palace of glass panels, framed in thin, white-painted cast-iron bands. On the hot interior, the bands of iron were rusting and glass panes were cracked and edged in mildew – this only added to the charm of the building. A couple of men were busy watering and feeding plants, humming songs, content in their work. There were labels to tell me what all the Garden of Eden madness of plants around me were called in Latin – but who cared what they were called, they were doing enough just by being there.
The original plan had been for edifying entertainments to be put on in the Botanical Gardens for the workers of Belfast on summer Sundays. In the nineteenth century, these entertainments were mostly Protestant preachers shouting for sobriety, thrift and avoidance of popery – occasionally provoking a riot. These days, there were big rock concerts in the summer months, but the Botanical Gardens really felt more like a park suited to a small string quartet. The sort of park where ladies in long pale gowns would stroll about with parasols, commenting on the wonderful curiosity of foreign plants in the palm house. And they might feel slightly overheated and decadent in the gardens’ other building, the Tropical Ravine, a jungle housed in what looked like a plain brick shed.
The explanatory plaques on the balcony overlooking the artificial jungle bore no relation to where the plants were now – they’d grown and twisted to make a tangled, triffidy green wildness – branches and vines straining against girders, leaves flattened against glass roof panels, pushing to escape and overwhelm Belfast.
In the dark pools at the very bottom of the ravine, the over-large goldfish looked vaguely sinister but very much alive and unmolested. I didn’t think they were as exciting as the general feeling of stumbling into a forgotten secret garden. I heard birdsong and realized there were dozens of blackbirds darting about the branches around me. I stood mesmerized by hot weird nature, until another person came in and I had to leave because they’d broken the spell.
The gardens felt familiar from way back. As did some slightly moth-eaten stuffed tigers in the Ulster Museum. I distinctly remember being irritated by them as a child – stuffed animals were not like zoo animals and smacked of educational intent. The museum was asquawk with schoolchildren, chasing each other and trying to avoid educational intent. Then some nightmarishly hearty bearded teacher gathered them in an exhibition annexe to sing songs along with his guitar. These sounded like old folk songs, with flat-edged tunes and lyrics mourning maidens spinning. Appropriate enough, because there was an impressive display about the linen industry in the museum. Huge lumps of brass machinery and live-action waterwheels. But for me the best part of the linen industry exhibit was discovering the names for various parts of the process: retting, hackling, beetling, scutching – they all sounded like very satisfying things to be doing. Of course they weren’t. Linen was labour-intensive and none of it was easy labour.
The pretty blue-flowered flax had provided clothing in Ireland from at least the first millennium, building to a cottage industry and export market by the sixteenth century. The English government saw potential for this industry to develop. They offered long leases and low rents to attract people from Scotland and England to settle in Ulster and take up flax production. Other new arrivals were the Huguenots, French Protestants who had fled religious persecution; they had considerable knowledge of the linen industry. One of them, Louis Crommelin, set up innovative manufacturing processes in Northern Ireland. Crumlin Road in Belfast was named after this refugee entrepreneur – over the years the local pronunciation of Crommelin became the official name.
Spinning, weaving and bleaching techniques improved. Linen became a boom industry, industrializing in the nineteenth century, with Irish linen becoming a mark of high quality around the world. It provided work for a vast range of people from farmers to factory workers, from rich drapers to women who worked at home embroidering the cloth.
This home working was low-paid piece work. But betterpaid jobs in the mills and factories had their disadvantages too. Scutching, the breaking up of the flax stalks for processing, created thick clouds of lung- and eye-damaging dust and, when mechanized, became even more dangerous. Clothing was easily caught in massive rollers and there were hideous incidents of workers getting their limbs mangled in scutch mills. The finest kind of dust, called ‘pouce’, caused severe respiratory illness. Scutchers were notorious for drinking whiskey as they worked, to clear their throats and chests – increasing the risk of other kinds of injury from impaired judgement.
When the flax had been scutched, it had to be sorted into types of fibres by ‘roughers’, separating it into heaps called ‘stricks’. More dusty work. A more refined sorting called ‘hackling’ followed this. This was to separate the short, rough fibres, ‘tow’, from the finer ‘line’ fibres. Originally this was highly paid men’s work but when machines came in, male children took over for a fraction of the wage.
The flax was then ‘drawn’, to make it into ribbon lengths called ‘sliver’. Sliver was twisted into a loose thread called ‘rove’ and wound on to bobbins. Bobbins were taken by ‘doffers’ to the spinning room. Up to this point in the process it was dusty work, with side dangers of crushing, cutting and maiming. The spinning rooms were wet work. Linen fibres were kept flexible and fine by being held in a trough of hot water. Spinning in hot, humid conditions, then going home in the inevitably cold, damp Irish air, made spinners prone to bronchitis and pneumonia. The spinners would sit with their bare feet in the trough of water below them, developing skin irritations, swollen ankles, varicose veins and a particularly nasty inflammation of the big toe called onychia.
Weavers again had to work in humid conditions with hot jets of steam poured into factory weaving sheds. The condensation would drip on to the floors below them, necessitating work in bare feet – who had shoes to ruin in those days? – bringing more nasty foot and toe inflammations.
The cloth was then bleached and beetled – bashed smooth. Beetling machines were deafeningly noisy, hundreds of wooden hammers pounding the cloth, hundreds of fingers inadvertently pounded right off and workers too deaf to hear shouts of ‘Watch out!’
Linen was extremely difficult to bleach. At first the cloth was boiled in an alkali solution of water, wood ashes and seaweed. Then it was steeped in buttermilk, then washed in soft water. The process had to be repeated several times, requiring an immense amount of water and power. Later, dilute sulphuric acid replaced the buttermilk, then a chlorine-based bleach. As an aside to the processes, coal yards and chemical works developed in Belfast. A railway network developed to bring coal to the mills – today tiny, seemingly inconsequential places have railway stations because they once had mills.
Bleachers were responsible for the quality of the cloth at the point of sale and became very powerful. They needed acres of land for drying the cloth, adding to their power and wealth in assets. Near the bleach mills, long lines of cloth would be laid along ‘bleach greens’, giving an impression in old photographs of stretches of ectoplasm trailed across the countryside.
The museum exhibit on the linen industry placed a woman I’d known when I was a child in a context for me. We’d always known she’d had a hard life, and that she’d worked in a linen mill, but now I had a better sense of the details.
Mary Eliza lived in an old white cottage beside Granny’s farm. My brother and I once asked her how old she was, and she said, ‘A few years over a hundred.’
This may not have been true, but it might have been how old she felt.
Mary Eliza would sit down in her armchair with a cup of tea, sigh and say, ‘Well, thank God for nothing, because they can’t take it from you.’
Generally, Mary Eliza was not of a cynical turn of mind and was a great favourite with children. She was small, bent, had a wart on her nose and permanently wore a black shawl around her shoulders. Any fears her witchy appearance generated were overcome by fascination with her and her possessions. Boy children liked her singing k
ettle. Girls were fascinated by her kitchen shelves, full of unmatched, brightly painted crockery that she called her ‘fine china’. And she always had some kind of sweets to dispense generously from a fine china blue jar on the mantelpiece.
Mary Eliza was no relation, she’d just been incorporated into the family. I don’t remember her displaying any alarming signs of foot rot but from the age of twelve she’d worked in the mill in the morning, barefoot in damp spinning rooms, and then she’d go to school in the afternoons. The schooling didn’t take her far, she simply moved to full-time spinning at sixteen.
In old age, Mary Eliza pottered about, went on walks with Granny and took a long time choosing which cup and saucer to have her tea from. She’d cut pictures out of magazines for me to help with a project of mine, decorating Granny’s hen house, in the belief that it would encourage them to lay more. I also sang hymns to them – I’d seen something on television about talking to plants and adapted it for hens.
Both Granny and Mary Eliza were very encouraging and would say to me, when I was hanging around their kitchens, ‘You wouldn’t believe how much more the hens are laying, would you ever pop out and give them a wee hymn. Maybe sing them a few.’
Mary Eliza was the first person I remember dying. I reacted with hysteria, just because I’d never heard of such a thing.
‘But she was very old,’ my mother told me, ‘well over eighty.’
Age, it seemed to me, was no excuse for traumatizing me.
There was further trauma the next summer when my sister and I went to inspect Mary Eliza’s empty cottage. All her furniture had gone and her fine china had been thrown out into the back yard, smashed and covered in hen droppings.
‘Oh, the landlord’s men are doing the place up for new tenants,’ Granny said. ‘And they just threw her things out because her brother didn’t want them. They’d done it before I could stop them. I told them what I thought of them and that did nothing, so I told them it was worth money and they were fools not to sell it. That got them.’
Mary Eliza’s brother was the local wild man, prone to drinking sprees, with no use for fine china. He was notorious for his peculiar turn of phrase when reporting a death on a nearby bridge: ‘The poor woman was swept off the bridge in the storm and was found in the river, drowned and dead both.’
Mary Eliza had worked at Herdman’s Mills. This company’s main building had been a feature of the view from all around the area – constructed in pale yellow bricks, if it hadn’t been for the tall chimney, it would have looked more like an Italian palazzo than a mill.
When, by the 1960s, other linen mills had long closed their doors, Herdman’s had expanded, smartly moving into synthetic fibres when linen began to go out of fashion and flax became expensive.
As children, we used to be able to walk right by the extravagant mill building into the nearby village, Sion Mills. In 2004 I found the building hidden by ugly modern extensions, metal fencing and prefabricated sheds. Maybe I put a curse on it for making itself look less attractive, because two days after I’d been muttering about the spoilt view, there was news the mill was closing and the company moving to South Africa, where labour was cheaper.
My uncle Joe said people had thought well of Herdman’s – they’d adapted to the times and kept their people in work. At their height Herdman’s had employed over 1,500 people, at their closing they still employed 600. The closure was a shock and a disappointment.
The landscape of Northern Ireland was littered with closed-down mills, abandoned weaving sheds, rubbish-strewn mill races and stilled waterwheels. Occasionally museums, restaurants or stylish flats had been constructed in old mill premises, but there seemed too many to convert them all to something for the new millennium.
Apparently my grandfather could make long speeches about the villainy of the linen trade – he was very left of centre for an RUC man, even a Catholic one. The Herdmans were a religious family and had attempted to temper their villainy by providing a model village, Sion Mills, for their workers. They also provided schooling and created a successful local cricket team that made the news by beating a West Indian touring team in 1969.
The Herdmans made it a policy not to discriminate between religions, though they liked their workers to have a religion of some kind. And be sober. No public house was allowed in Sion Mills until 1869, when the Herdmans lost a court case. You’d still have to look a lot longer for a pub than a church in Sion Mills.
Most of Sion Mills was designed by a son-in-law to the Herdman family, William Unsworth, a student of Lutyens. He also designed the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon.
The village was a mix of half-timbered buildings and terraced cottages, with wide, grassy verges and chestnut trees in front of them. Behind a half-timbered gatehouse was the Elizabethan-style mansion, Sion House, where the Herdman family originally lived. Unsworth’s Anglican church on the main street was based on a church in Tuscany. With tall campanili and vast semi-circular windows, it was a leap of luxury no one could have expected to appear in a small mill village.
Almost as exciting was the Catholic church, built in 1963, all strikingly severe lines, with a modernist representation of the Last Supper on the façade, by artist Oisin Kelly. This church was the one I remember going to, vying with cousins to be next to Granny, or picked out as the one who hadn’t fidgeted once. With it being Saint Teresa’s church, there was a recumbent statue of a dead Saint Teresa inside the front porch – at the time I appreciated her more than the bold modern architecture. I’d nearly choked with rage when one Sunday my forthright cousin Kay said to Granny, ‘I’d like to be remembered like that when I’m dead.’
‘I’m sure you will, aren’t you just as beautiful,’ Granny said to her.
My perfect cousin. I wasn’t having it.
‘I’d like to be a statue too,’ I chipped in.
‘Being a saint isn’t about being a statue,’ Kay crushed me and went off linking arms with Granny. I was so furious I hid out with the hens all afternoon, singing them hymns and urging them to lay such a spectacular number of eggs that everybody would see I was a saint without me even needing to die.
Being brought up a Catholic can do very peculiar things to a child.
We’d have more interesting crossings into Sion Mills than church-going – trips to the little shops that could involve an ice cream for the return journey. First we had to brave the Swinging Bridge, a suspension footbridge over a deep rocky gully and the fast-flowing River Mourne. The bridge didn’t only swing as you crossed, it bounced, just enough to make you feel you could get tossed right over the edge and be drowned and dead both.
The bridge has been repaired since, but in our childhood, several planks were missing or broken, to keep the dangers below vivid in the mind.
‘Don’t look down the holes or you’ll get dizzy,’ Granny would say. I knew this meant that one glimpse down the holes and you’d be overcome and stagger crazily until you fell off the bridge. So it was a nightmare, trying not to even catch a glimpse of the holes while not treading in them, feeling the swinging and bouncing escalate as you neared the middle of the bridge, consoling yourself with the thought of ice cream as you came closer to the other side. But first… There was another bridge.
This was a concrete bridge over the mill race down to Herdman’s waterwheel. Granny said the water in there was very deep and moved at thousands of miles an hour. Still, the bridge felt solid and was no trouble, until I’d asked her if there were fish in the mill race.
‘I don’t think so. Maybe some eels,’ she said blithely. And because I thought eels were giant Sinbad’s Adventures man-eating monsters, I’d have to run across the concrete bridge from then on, grabbing Granny and screaming, ‘Eels eels eels!’ until we were safely fifty yards on land.
She would occasionally lag behind, saying, ‘You run on, dear, I’m too tired for eels today.’
So I’d be obliged to abandon her and watch anxiously until she caught up with me.<
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‘You shouldn’t worry,’ she said one day, to reassure me or shut me up. ‘They’d want a young one, not an old one.’
The little rectangular cottages of Sion Mills were unchanged and seemed entirely occupied by old ones. Walking around the neat streets on a damp afternoon, I smelt a familiar rubbery smell – turf burning. The elderly residents appeared to be taking the opportunity of a gap in the rain to have a front-stoop-sweeping contest. Furious swishing of brooms and little grey heads bent ferociously to the task.
Herdman’s had sold these historically listed cottages to the occupants in the 1960s, at very low prices; their residents were ageing and the younger workforce preferred modern council estates, to the rear of Sion Mills, or in nearby towns.
On the main road, I tried to figure out which shops had been regular ports of call. The butcher’s shop looked as though it had always been on the corner. As I went in, the man behind the counter struck up a friendly chat with some young boys buying meat pies, about whether the Strabane bus was going to be late and whether they had caught anything in their morning’s fishing… He seemed as though he’d have time on his hands for nostalgic conversation. When the boys had gone, I explained my life history as quickly as I could and asked if this would have been the butcher’s shop in the sixties.
‘Well, no, the butcher’s shop was round the corner then. This was a general store, that’s what it was then. My brother had the old butcher shop, and when I took over, I expanded us.’
‘Still, it’s funny how familiar the village looks after all this time,’ I said.
The butcher smiled. In a boomingly robust voice, he said, as if preaching from a pulpit, ‘Sion never changes. Derry, Belfast, all over the North there have been changes, but not in Sion.’
He gave me a free meat pie for my journey, saying, ‘Go on, it’s the last of them, it’ll only sit there looking at me.’
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 11
