Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  Most potatoes had to be peeled, but a really good potato, a ‘floury’ potato, a Sistine chapel type of a potato that was very hard to get hold of in England, that treasure should be steamed in its jacket.

  I realized my mother might still be able to hold her own in a potato debate, but she had succumbed to English ways and rarely served a steamed jacket potato. I’m sure she’ll tell me it was not her fault, that she’d been worn down with trying to make a silk purse out of English potatoes – but she’d deprived me of the ability to eat a proper potato properly.

  The potatoes would be served in a bowl, then you’d put yours on a side plate and deftly remove the skin with a knife. My aunt and uncle and even small under-cousins could do this almost in a single movement. I’d create a crumbled mash on my side plate, end up eating half the skin and generally reveal myself to have forgotten my heritage. People had died for potatoes and I couldn’t even remember how to eat one with respect and orderliness. I deserved to have my throat stuffed with pins by witches.

  8. Half Man, Half Bicycle

  My aunt had abandoned us, off on a weekly spree as a bingo caller for the local pensioners. Uncle Joe and I had been thoroughly fed and given directions to various kinds of pies and cakes, should we have anything so shaming to her as room left for more food during her two-hour absence. So we were expecting to survive, but she had left us with a problem. She wanted to see Emma Thompson’s film of Sense and Sensibility – our job was to tape it. This wasn’t going to be beyond our pooled abilities, but the faulty video recorder could only record the programme being watched.

  ‘So if you wanted to watch anything else you’re sunk,’ my uncle said, as he dutifully co-ordinated the technology. ‘For myself I’m a great believer in all this kind of culture, as long as I don’t have to partake of it.’

  We spent the evening reading the papers, having the occasional flurry of conversation, with breeches and gowns flickering in a corner of the room. Then there was some moment of high drama in the film, some weeping into lace hankies over Hugh Grant, some fling of a dishevelled lady across a chaise longue that drew both our attention. The crisis seemed to pass. The ladies in bosom-pressing gowns were sipping tea, looking at apple blossom and talking with polite cheeriness of forthcoming picnics. My uncle watched for a while longer, slightly baffled to find himself involved. Then, to escape any accusation that he’d taken an interest, he coughed and picked up his paper saying, ‘Well, it’s all a far cry from paedophilia on the internet.’

  My mother rang me later to check on my progress; I told her about her brother’s reaction to Jane Austen.

  ‘He’s a wonderful strange kind of humour, he could always take me to the fair with the way he says things.’

  When I spoke to my mother from Northern Ireland, she would take me to the fair, by throwing in some Irish expression I’d not heard her use in years. As if we were going back to the place together and she could let rip with a side of herself she’d put on hold, in case people had no idea what she was talking about.

  I told her I’d bought some new clothes in Belfast, the city was full of bargains and I didn’t seem to have a clean stitch left in my luggage.

  ‘Oh, well now, you always think more about fashion than practicality. You want a few wee outfits to throw in a bag that wash like ribbons and never need to look at an iron.’

  After this advice she needed detailed descriptions of the look and disposition of every cousin, under-cousin… I could clearly see the stars and moon over the fields outside my uncle’s house and suspected I might still be on the phone for a clear view of the winter sunrise.

  Conversations with my father didn’t have so much active interest. He would ask what streets I’d walked down in Belfast, what monuments I’d seen and if peculiar memories, like large goldfish in the Botanical Gardens, were still unsullied. I could have just read to him from maps and guidebooks. Belfast was a fixed childhood landscape to him; he didn’t want to hear anything had changed, been knocked down, blown up or turned into a car park.

  I started to tell him about Thorndale Avenue, and he said, ‘Just don’t show me any photographs. Did you go into the new zoo? Apparently they’ve used the mountain landscape very effectively.’

  He hadn’t been back as often as my mother; he watched the news too much. He had no family of brothers, sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, under-nephews… to keep a present-tense feeling of the country’s ordinary goings-on in his mind.

  Nevertheless, I had a notion that he’d like it if he went back, find more to recognize than he imagined. I did a hard sell on the present pleasantness of Belfast but only got him to a vague ‘It sounds as if it’s getting back to normal, but I wouldn’t know it.’

  Perhaps he was a real emigrant – looked back but didn’t want to go back.

  Uncle Joe had emigrated from County Tyrone to Armagh, so making a decision to visit his childhood home only involved the trauma of facing a day without golf. The journey back was an anniversary, almost. He’d made the journey with me on a summer day just over ten years before, when the countryside was prickly with checkpoints, soldiers and moments when you weren’t quite sure if all hell was going to break loose.

  Tired that day, having crossed through Tyrone and beyond, to walk the coastal path by Giant’s Causeway, it seemed my uncle and I were stopped and questioned by soldiers every fifteen minutes. We’d headed home through what were then referred to in the press as ‘The Killing Fields of East Tyrone’ – an overstatement, but it was a district savaged by bombing and assassinations.

  My uncle had just been telling me, as we drove a remote road – because he loved the closeness to the countryside you could only get on remote roads – that the trouble with such remote roads was you’d sometimes get checkpoints run by ‘boyos’ – paramilitary chancers wanting to hijack your car and beat the hell out of you if you objected. We turned a corner and the road was suddenly full of hefty men holding sticks. Ever cool, my uncle just gripped the steering wheel tighter and kept driving. Uncool, I was ready to shout, ‘Give them the car, Uncle!’

  But the men parted to let the car past and continued on their way to their hurley game, sticks hoisted over their shoulders.

  That kind of edge was off the journey this time. We crossed the Sperrin mountains up towards Dungiven, where my mother and her brothers had their first family home, driving through thin drizzle and patchy mist.

  ‘We’ll not have much of a view, but then you’re getting the privilege of weather typical of the region,’ my uncle said.

  The misty Sperrins had the same look as the mountains of Donegal: yellow gorse bushes, black turf bogs, infrequent sheep and a feeling of hard lives being eked out since very long ago, surrounded by bleak beauty.

  The Sperrins were dotted with circles of standing stones and megalithic tombs. These built up the impression that the area drifted with otherworldly forces. Several houses in the mountains offered accommodation to visitors, advertising as a plus point one or two ghosts about the premises for an authentic Sperrin experience.

  Aside from a vague frisson of spookiness, walking and fishing were the main visitor attractions. The recently opened Sperrins Heritage Centre offered a chance to pan for gold in the rivers. The tales of how much gold was in the hills varied, but there was enough to create speculation of possible fortunes yet to be made. A couple of Northern Irish jewellers made expensive one-off designs in Sperrins Gold. A medallion of the gold was given to Barry McGuigan to celebrate his world title. But anyone planning on digging up the mountains on the off-chance there’d be a huge mother lode… They’d have to get past my uncle first.

  ‘Your aunt teases me that I love it up here so much, I’d be happy all alone in a hut, with visitors on Sundays to bring me pipe tobacco and the papers. She might be right.’

  ‘When you’d read all the papers, what would you do?’

  ‘Walk about, take it all in, I’d be fine.’

  My uncle often muttered about Edens of solitude but rathe
r undersold himself as a hermit to me by being gloriously gregarious.

  The part of his vision of himself as some other self that rang true was the need for pipe tobacco. Having been warned off cigarettes by doctors, he chain-smoked a pipe, getting up a nice fog in the car as we kept the windows closed against freezing fog descending outside.

  ‘On a clear day, and there are some, you can see right across to Donegal,’ he said as we came over the top of the mountains and down towards Granny’s farm.

  As we’d made our reconnaissance of the territory ten years previously, I knew there was no more Granny’s farm. The old grey square house, with Bimpa’s vegetable patch beside it, had been flattened and replaced by a huge ranch-house-style bungalow that we all referred to as ‘The Hacienda’. The owners of the Hacienda cut down ancient trees and bulldozed dry stone walls out of the way, to be sure their show-off ridiculousness of a house could be seen clearly from the road.

  The farmyard and pig sheds were still there, as was the tin-roofed barn where an electric generator had whirred and groaned noisily. Sometimes, we’d have to cheer Bimpa on as he restarted it after some cantankerousness had plunged it into surly silence. Sometimes the whole thing had to be dismantled and beaten with hammers before it would get back to work.

  If we were on our own, the barn was out of bounds. But we felt more confident than adults that we wouldn’t have an urge to stick our heads in the generator, so we ignored this rule because we absolutely had to go in the barn to fetch straw to make dens or, one summer, to look for kittens. Evil old farm cats had somehow produced these loveable creatures. They were probably fathered by the scarred and ferocious Mick MacManus, chief of cats, named after the wrestler Granny adored.

  Gradually, the kittens were given away, except one little crookedy blind one. It staggered around the barn for a week or so, then disappeared.

  ‘It was drowned,’ Granny said when I inquired after it.

  ‘How could it be?’ I couldn’t imagine how the little sightless thing, with a dragging leg, could have made it down to the river and fallen off the Swinging Bridge, drowned and dead both.

  ‘One of the farm men put it in a sack and drowned it in the rain barrel,’ Granny said breezily.

  I started to wail.

  ‘Look, Mick MacManus and those other cats would only have tortured it to death.’ Granny softened, recalling that I was not really a farm child accustomed to pet euthanasia. ‘It was the kindest thing. It was in pain.’

  I made a point not to tell Granny of any aches or pains for a while after that, in case she took such a brisk attitude to me.

  But the next pain I had was so drastic I couldn’t keep it from anyone – a spectacular accident, with blood everywhere and the top of my left index finger nearly separated from me. Fortunately, it was horrific enough to mean I avoided retribution for the accident being my own fault.

  Rain was falling, the kittens were adopted or assassinated, the hens had heard a full repertoire of songs from my brother and me, and we were getting bored. We decided to inspect Granny’s latest entrepreneurial project, baby turkeys we’d been forbidden to visit unsupervised in case we annoyed them.

  Granny had them in a child’s cot lined with straw, they were the ugliest beasts making ugly, strangled sounds.

  ‘Let’s touch them,’ I urged my brother.

  We poked our hands in – the feel of them was so repulsive, I leapt back squealing and smashed my foot down on a light bulb on the ground behind me. The shattering of it with a firm stomp of a Wellington boot had been quite satisfying, so what a gift to find there was a pile of used light bulbs in the corner of the shed.

  Who knows what Granny was collecting them for? Maybe they could be sold to someone for recycling when she had amassed enough; maybe she was trying her hand at conceptual art. Money-making schemes went on in Granny’s head so feverishly it was strange she never got to see the day she was always talking about – ‘the day my ship comes in’.

  I didn’t see money or ships arriving with the light bulbs – I saw a way my brother and I could have some fun. I think he may have questioned my whisper of, ‘Hey, let’s smash these.’ But he knew better than to seriously question my authority when some red mist of destructiveness had risen in my head. We stomped and smashed, stomped and smashed until there wasn’t a complete light bulb left. Then we had to smash the pieces of broken glass as small as possible, not for any reason, just to keep smashing.

  ‘None left,’ my brother said disappointedly, after a frenzied stomp around. He’d got the red mist now. To help him feel he’d had a fair go at all the glass, I spotted a large piece and generously put it down at his feet. I didn’t move my hand away fast enough, my brother stomped, I screamed, blood poured out of my finger, he screamed, ran out of the shed and brought back Granny, my mother and a younger uncle, Martin. My mother screamed, my brother had stopped screaming but started again, Granny pulled off her apron and wrapped it round my gushing hand, Martin threw me in his car and rushed me to the doctors in Strabane.

  I fainted twice in the car but surprisingly remained conscious while a wheezing old doctor cleaned my wound with shaking hands and stitched my finger together, with the steadiness of someone having witch-tormented fits. My uncle loaded me up with sweets on the way home and told my mother, ‘The usual doc’s on holiday, they had some old boy in there they said was a locum, but he seemed as skilled as a trained calf.’

  I can’t bend the top of my finger to this day, but it’s an ill wind. The horror of the calf-handed old doctor, on top of all the blood, meant I was the princess of bravery for a week and never had to stand trial for the massacre of the light bulbs. Everyone knew my brother was never to blame for anything, that it would have been my idea, so he escaped persecution as well, although he now claims I got all the sweets and accolades for bravery, while his post-traumatic stress syndrome and survivor guilt were completely ignored.

  Mary Eliza’s cottage was fresh painted and in use; the farm opposite looked the same, extended somewhat, but it had old white outbuildings, with red corrugated iron roofing, that seemed familiar – only the Hacienda had landed crassly in the middle of our memories.

  Uncle Joe decided he’d seen the Hacienda quite often enough, parked a disapproving distance up the road from it and skulked in the car with his pipe, while I went out into the drizzle to wander around and maybe have yet another bounce across the Swinging Bridge.

  A middle-aged man was scraping mud off the path to an old house on the way to the Hacienda. He looked at me, as if he knew me from somewhere but couldn’t quite place me. I smiled and was going to go on with my bridgebouncing mission when he asked, ‘How are you?’ in a way that implied he’d like to know who I was and what I wanted, more than how I was.

  ‘I was just taking a look round. My grandmother used to live up there, in the old house.’

  He looked at me for a moment, hesitant but had to know.

  ‘Who was your grandmother?’

  I said her name and he grinned.

  ‘Married to the police sergeant. I used to be friends with those boys.’

  I was about to tell him that one of those boys was in the car up the road, when he named my youngest uncle.

  ‘Eamon, that played football, I was at school with him…’ Then a spark came in his eyes, his heart seemed to leap. ‘Are you his sister?’

  After a moment to register what age he’d accused me of being, I said, ‘No, I’m her daughter.’

  The hopeful spark flickered and died away.

  ‘Ah right, so she’s married now,’ he muttered.

  Disappointment shadowed into his eyes, as if he’d been there lurking outside the house in hopes for a matter of months, not decades. And then, as if to serve my mother right, he said, ‘Well, I’m married myself now.’

  My mother says I’m imagining a pining suitor at the end of the path, she doesn’t remember the man at all.

  Still, if she was being admired from afar, she might never have known.<
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  The man didn’t remember Uncle Joe: ‘He’d have been older, gone away to school. But I knew the young one. And the policeman. We’d go in the car with him to Strabane sometimes.’

  He remembered Mary Eliza and was pleased to be given the name ‘Hacienda’ to call the new house.

  ‘It’s that all right.’

  I thought it was time I went back to the car to tell my uncle why I was talking to a strange man.

  The man said goodbye, then added, shyly, ‘Tell Eamon you met Kieron Smith at the head of the Duck Walk.’

  He grinned to himself as I left and sauntered back toward his house.

  The Duck Walk was the slope that led down to the Swinging Bridge. Maybe ducks did walk down there to the river, but I think it really had the name because it was steep enough to make you waddle coming back up it from Sion Mills with shopping, or a few whiskeys inside you.

  Uncle Eamon knew who I was talking about. ‘He wasn’t a friend of ours really, but we sort of tagged him on to us. How funny he thought you were sis. But you probably look like she did the time he’d last seen her.’

  Seen her whilst pining from the end of the path I’m sure. Still, he’d had a go in Bimpa’s car, which was such a rare excitement it was also worth pining for. Bimpa hated to drive and went so slowly everyone might as well have walked. Pre-Hacienda days, the track out of Granny’s house had high walls on either side, quite difficult to see out of, but leading on to a tiny country road, not the M1. Nevertheless, Granny had to stand in the road and wave Bimpa out, after checking and double checking that nothing was coming for miles.

  ‘If your Granny could have walked in front of the car with a flag all the way he’d have been happier,’ Uncle Joe told me, ‘but people weren’t doing that so much in the sixties.’

  This strange nervousness didn’t go with the rest of Bimpa. He’d been a crack shot, an RUC champion boxer, a badminton enthusiast and had cycled a long mountain beat alone in Catholic territory for years.