I remembered that in the general store days, this had been the shop where I’d be given free biscuits for showing off my English accent. Good to know I hadn’t lost my charm.
A man locking up the gate at Herdman’s scowled at me as I took a picture of the mill. He would be in no mood to be chatting and handing out free stuff. Although there was still steam coming from chimneys, it couldn’t be long now until the gates were locked for good. Signs announcing that the banks of the mill race were now a nature trail called ‘The Mourne Walk’ didn’t indicate there would be much replacement employment.
I took a meander along the walk, watching out for eels. The path wound upwards, overlooking the river – distracted by so many fears as a child, I’d never noticed how beautiful this area was. Two businessmen were walking the walk in the opposite direction – whispering, camel-coat-wearing men. Perhaps they were plotting some new venture to keep Sion Mills from fading to a lifeless future, conserved in heritage aspic – you could see it might go that way. Sion might never have changed, but without the mill it couldn’t be the same.
By the nineteenth century, linen was only a part of Belfast’s fortunes. Entrepreneurs were making money from shipping, tobacco, food processing and the gasworks, with the largest gasometer in the world. In 1888, Belfast was granted a city charter and the local businessmen wanted something to symbolize their new status. White Linen Hall, which originally stood in the centre of town, was a stylishly simple building, but it wouldn’t do for the new city. The site was bought and Belfast City Hall was constructed – a domed and pillared shock of pomp, inside and out. For my taste it had just too much marble, carving, modelled plaster work, muralling and stained glassery, but the businessmen of Belfast had spent nearly a million pounds and wanted it to show.
On the green in front of the hall was a statue of Queen Victoria, supported by a muscular ship worker and a couple of waifs spinning linen. The live punk rockers were leaning on her in the rain, smoking in cupped hands and having an animated argument as I passed them – about whether ER was on television at nine o’clock or ten o’clock. So much for Anarchy in the UK.
Inside City Hall, our perky blonde guide coped well with a tour that had a rearguard of giggling French girls, who’d come in out of the rain, found the tour was free and tagged along without developing any active interest in the proceedings.
Not that it was always easy to be interested. Every stained glass window was explained to us and the origins of every type of marble… Upstairs, where the Great Hall and the Banqueting Hall were less overlarded with decoration, I began to settle into appreciating the grandeur of the building a little more. The Council Chamber, laid out like the House of Commons, had oak panelling everywhere and luscious-looking carpets.
‘These are specially made carpets,’ the guide cooed over them. ‘Specially made from a silk and wool mix.’
I wanted to romp about on them barefoot, but though perky, the guide was quite strict in the way she kept us moving and might not have appreciated the delay while I indulged myself. We were allowed to sit in the councillors’ benches. Most of us lazily settled into the benches nearest the entrance – these turned out to be the Unionist benches. Three of the French girls, in search of adventure, crossed the chamber and sat opposite us. The guide looked at them and laughed: ‘That’s funny because where you are is the Alliance party seats and there are only three of them.’
I wished I had danced on her carpets. I didn’t think the anti-violence, anti-sectarian party should be so blithely ridiculed, however much they’d been excluded from the political mainstream. Mind you, she barely hid a look of distaste as she waved a hand to show where Sinn Fein members would sit, so she was unbiased in her bias.
On the way out, we passed a corridor lined with portraits of former mayors. There was a photograph of Rhonda Paisley, daughter of, in front of City Hall, where a banner was draped, reading: ‘Belfast Says No’.
‘Belfast says no to what?’ I asked the guide.
‘The Anglo-Irish Agreement,’ she said, puckering her face into a disapproving grimace.
I thought about asking her how she’d have started the peace process but wimped out, irritated with her, City Hall and myself for not being brave and eloquent enough to publicly defend the Anglo-Irish agreement. Because of me, those French girls might never hear the other side of the story. Not only that, a few hours later, I got into such a severe disagreement with four women from Dublin, there was nearly an Anglo-Irish brawl in my hotel.
I was minding my own business, not looking particularly English or belligerent. The hotel restaurant was almost empty, but the four women decided they wanted the table right behind me. I’d glanced at them as they came in – hard-faced, hard-permed, middle-aged women, who twenty years ago you’d have seen selling fish out of a pram in Henry Street. Don’t worry if you’ve never seen such a thing; believe me, these were the women the word fishwife was made for.
They were all a larger kind of lady but they’d plenty of room to shift their table back the other way if they wanted the acres of space they seemed to demand from a restaurant. I shuffled my chair in and thought I’d left enough room. But next thing I knew I was being bashed and crushed from behind, as a lady tried to shift me with her ample rear end until I was face down in my Pavlova.
‘Can she not move?’ I heard another one say.
I tried to keep the peace and moved as much as I could of my own accord.
Still with the shoving.
‘That’s as far as I can move,’ I said, pinioned to my table.
‘English, Mary. Did you hear?’ one of them said. And I was done with peaceful negotiation. I shoved myself backwards so I could breathe and waited for the wrath of Dublin to come down on me.
‘Oh, I’ll just ignore the silly bitch,’ my pinioner said and shoved her chair back.
They started deciding what they would eat. I had to get out of there because if the woman behind me got one garden pea bigger I’d be suffocated.
To show that I had a Granny who’d been trained by Miss Bamford, I slid out of my seat, smiled and with icy politeness said, ‘Excuse me.’
The echoing imitations of my ‘excuse me’ followed me up to the till. At a distance I felt braver and to hell with Miss Bamford. I tutted and glared at them. They glared back. The cashier was taking a very long time to sort out my bill.
I was close enough to hear my assailant say, ‘Is she still looking at us?’
‘She is. What’s she looking at?’
If I could still hear them they could lunge out of their seats and be on me before I got my change. Luckily, they had some whispered debate about what they were going to do to me, and I could make off up the stairs and lock my door.
In the morning I decided Miss Bamford would urge me in to breakfast to show dignity unbowed. They weren’t there. I couldn’t wait for them. I’d told Uncle Joe I’d be home that evening. He’d allocated the following day for an excursion with me and if I missed it, who knew when there’d be another gap in the 10,000 things to do he called retirement.
I wanted to take a big loop round to get to Portadown, so I could see some seasides, including Carrickfergus, where King Billy landed on his way to the Battle of the Boyne. And more intriguingly, where there’d been the last witch trial in Ireland in 1710.
I drove out of Belfast through stretches of heavy-looking Loyalist estates, the mountains beautiful in the background. It didn’t take long to reach the edge of the city and have sparkling sea alongside the road instead of UDA-muralled buildings.
A few brave souls were heading out from Whiteabbey in yachts. Whiteabbey was where Anthony Trollope lived while working for the Post Office. He wrote to a friend: ‘Though the North of Ireland is not the choicest permanent residence, it has some charms for the tourist.’
The view was charming. I pulled over to take in the seascape with less danger of crashing the car. The sun shone as if it had strayed up from a Spanish winter and a woman in a shop told me: ‘
Well, you know the old saying, if February’s fair, every other month of the year is cursed.’
I said I hoped this wasn’t an old saying that was true. She laughed and said, ‘Well, when do you ever see this kind of weather in February? So they were just saying anything and had no proof of it.’
I agreed with her. I think.
I had to get on, I wanted to see the stocks in Carrickfergus where a witch had lost an eye from being hit with a vegetable stalk by angry anti-witchers.
After a ten-minute daze of sea-staring in Carrickfergus harbour, I remembered my quest and found the stocks. Some schoolgirls were playing in them, taking pictures. They asked me to take a group photo of them all piled on to the stocks.
‘They put some witches in these,’ one squealed. ‘We’re wee bitches not witches, but what’s the difference?’
‘Sorry about her,’ another one said. ‘We don’t know who she is, she just appeared at midnight.’
Midnight apparitions did seem to be how the witch difficulties had begun. The witches came from the nearby peninsula of Islandmagee. The first victim of strange bumps in the night was at Knowehead House, home to John Hatteridge, the newly appointed minister. Mrs Hatteridge had stones thrown at her in her sleep and the covers were pulled off her bed by unseen forces. In the morning, some sort of beggar imp came into the kitchen, leapt about, ran off, then kept reappearing in the house, breaking things, stealing books and turkeys – and generally behaving badly. Next, he turned up in a surly mood, dug a grave in the garden and said it was for someone in the house. Soon afterwards, Mrs Hatteridge’s mother, visiting the house, died in her sleep.
Sceptical?
Well what about poor Mary Dunbar, who came to visit and within two days developed pains in her legs? Leg pains a servant girl suspected had been caused by an unfamiliar apron found on the kitchen floor. The apron was burnt, but Mary Dunbar started to have fits, shaking and screaming, declaring strange young women were appearing to her and tormenting her. Considering she’d only been invited for a week, Mary had become a bit of a nuisance long-term guest, so the busy clergyman’s wife employed young women of the village to look after her. Mary went wild every time a new one arrived, insisting they were part of the girl gang who were causing her terror and pain. Eventually, she accused eight girls who had the misfortune to be brought into her room to help her.
After a long day listening to Mary’s yelping, the clergyman and his wife suggested she might like to return to her parents’ house. The next morning Mary started to smell of sulphur, put on huge amounts of weight and couldn’t be moved from the bed. A doctor interested in witchcraft came to see her and pray over her. While praying, he saw a petticoat flying around her room and a mouse ran out of her bed – this convinced him to have the eight girls arrested and imprisoned in Carrickfergus as witches.
At the trial, Mary had several fits, eventually vomiting up pins, wool and feathers to convince the court there was evil afoot. She said the eight tormentors were always appearing as apparitions, shoving these things down her throat – and here were the things as proof.
Mary Dunbar was an attractive girl and quite well to do. The eight girls she accused were all a bit plain, a bit poor and mostly illiterate. They lamely denied the charges but could do nothing as impressive as vomit wool and pins to make their point. They were pelted in the stocks and sent to jail.
Mary Dunbar continued to have fits long after she went to live elsewhere, claiming her witch tormentors were still at her with the feathers, the wool and the pins. She sort of disappears from history after a while – perhaps she died, perhaps she realized that she hadn’t concocted the best method to win friends and influence people.
Carrickfergus town didn’t seem witchy at all. It was touristy with little knick-knacky shops and cobbled side-streets. I couldn’t find a bookshop, though there were several literary associations to the town. The Restoration dramatist Congreve lived at the castle as a child, his father was a soldier stationed there. Jonathan Swift’s first job was at nearby Kilroot, where he wrote Tale of a Tub. The father of the poet Louis MacNeice was rector of Saint Nicholas, the seventeenth-century church in the centre of town.
Congreve’s childhood residence, the dark, stark castle on the harbour, had once overlooked America’s first naval victory in their Civil War. Paul Jones sailed by Carrickfergus and made off with the British fleet’s HMS Drake.
Anglo-Norman John de Courcy built the castle to guard the approach to Belfast Lough and provide a stronghold in the region. Until the mid-seventeenth century, Carrickfergus was the only place in Northern Ireland where English was spoken. It was an important garrison and harbour while Belfast was still a village.
To make life more exciting for tourists, Carrickfergus castle held medieval banquets in the summer. Scattered round the courtyards and battlements were painted plaster effigies of soldiers loading cannon, shooting at things and looking disconcertingly colourful against the dark walls. There was a plaster representation of de Courcy himself, approaching the plaster statue of his wife, who was sitting at a window staring out towards her home, the Isle of Man. She looked as though she was pining and about to make a swim for it. Perhaps she started the trend for the east-coast Northern Irish to take their holidays in the Isle of Man. In the summer the island had once heaved with families from Belfast, but as soon as cheap packages to the Mediterranean came in, they dropped the poor island like a hot tailless cat.
On the way out, I overheard an American couple having a debate about whether it would be worth paying to see inside.
‘You can say it’s only an old castle, Ian, but what if we missed something great?’
‘I’m just getting real cold.’
‘A quick look, then, it’s only three euros, oh no, pounds, is that more, or less? How much was it at Andrew Jackson’s house? That was a steal.’
As well as having literary connections, Carrickfergus had been the home of this former American president.
Like many of the Irish of predominantly Catholic upbringing, I’d been led to believe that the Irish arrived to save America from not being Irish during the potato famine. But about thirteen American presidents were of Ulster Protestant origin; how many depended on who you were reading: sometimes the estimate was only eight, sometimes it soared as high as twenty-one.
As dramatically explained in Gangs of New York, the Presbyterians got to America long before the Catholics and were not happy to see their old neighbours turning up in boatloads, raggedy and escaping famine.
The Scots Irish, as the Northern Irish Presbyterians and non-conformists were called at the time, left because they had fought alongside the English, helped build up Belfast, the countryside farms and the mills but found they were discriminated against in legislation along with the Catholics. The established Church of England and Church of Ireland was the church to belong to if you wanted political or property rights. The eighteenth-century legislation was passed by Protestant King Billy, who wanted to destroy the Catholic elite and marginalize dissenters like Presbyterians, considering them too independent and too much associated with Cromwell. Betrayed, the dissenters got on boats and applied their diligence and sober determination to the new continent.
Many of the Presbyterian Scots had moved to Ireland in the hope of greater religious freedom and a society more dominated by their own beliefs. Further discrimination was a bitter disappointment. Those who remained in Ireland built up their power and influence by making money, until they were so wealthy they inevitably had power. By the late nineteenth century, the industrial wealth they serviced and largely controlled, was vital to Britain. By the early twentieth century, a Protestant was a Protestant and the denominations clung together, united by their determination to remain part of Britain. By the late twentieth century, Westminster’s government needed the Protestant Unionist vote to maintain their majority. The churlishly treated Protestants had come a long way to get that kind of power. But then, further betrayal. They found themselves being to
ld to sit at the same table as Sinn Fein and make peace. A pattern of loyalty ill rewarded by Westminster had repeated itself. Their ‘No Surrender’, ‘never again’ attitude today, that can seem so unfathomably stubborn, comes out of a hurtful history of being used and passed over.
It’s estimated that by the year of independence, 1776, one in seven of the colonists of North America and Canada were of Scots-Irish origin. In the American War of Independence, generals and thousands of foot soldiers were Scots-Irish, fighting the English who’d been so ungrateful to them back in the old country.
Outshining all the Protestant Irish presidents, the Catholics did have Kennedy, his photo on many Catholic mantelpieces as if he were family. The Kennedys had played a romantic strain of their Irishness that struck a chord in a country full of immigrants – they’d come from starvation and poverty in the old world and now look… The Northern Protestants had always been interested in getting on, rather than recognizing the PR value of romantically looking back. When they did try romantic harking back, they didn’t grasp that the victories of Cromwell and King Billy weren’t quite of the same broad appeal as talk of famine and persecution.
Not that the famine had become a mere marketing ploy for Catholic Irish Americans. A meal was no meal without potatoes in my family. My aunt and my mother could discuss the quality and cooking of potatoes with the minute attention to detail of art experts looking for a tiny fleck on a canvas, exposing an old master as a forgery. They galloped at stereotype with some kind of racial sense memory and just couldn’t leave a potato alone as a mere vegetable on the side of a plate.
‘Soapy’ was the worst thing a potato could be. Below this, and utterly unmentionable, were tinned potatoes. My mother had once pulled up short in a supermarket aisle and whispered, horrified, when she saw an English neighbour buying tinned potatoes: ‘She’s all airs and graces that woman and she’s serving her family those wee bullets, those wee balls of lard-tasting stones. How hard is it to peel a potato? Look, she’s bought a tin for every day of the week. God help them.’
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 12
