Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  ‘Somewhere round Strabane the French people related to your Granny lived. This would have been on her father’s side, her grandmother was French. There were many theories, but it was likely her family had come over from Brittany to work in the linen industry.’

  ‘So we’re a bit French?’ I said as we drove home, the card table calling to my uncle.

  ‘Not enough for them to give you a passport,’ Uncle Joe said, ‘and probably not enough to brag about.’

  I’d been planning to brag when I got back to London, but maybe he was right. I had enough different bits and pieces in me anyway. Real North Western OCahan Gaelic, Presbyterian mix on my mother’s side; Belfast Grandma was really from Tipperary, and her husband had been Church of Ireland, of English ancestry. Wanting to be French as well was just greedy.

  On mountain roads again, I thought about Flann O’Brien’s novels and of Bimpa on his bicycle. According to the ‘atomic theory’ in O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, the particles everyone and everything was composed of began to interchange when they came into contact too often.

  ‘The gross and net result of this is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.’

  No wonder Bimpa had to have rest stops at the hotel bar; he was trying to save his atoms from bicycleness. Perhaps being part bicycle was why he didn’t like to be in cars.

  The Third Policeman had been written in the 1940s; it was possible that Bimpa on his bicycle could have been an inspiration for Flann O’Brien’s strange cycling mountain policeman. Who could say? Like being a bit French, it was probably a dubious boast I’d better keep to myself. But I would, and hug it to myself.

  We skirted back past Gortin Park, miles of forest that had been planted for timber, now preserved for their beauty. In World War Two, American soldiers had camped there; locals had been curious to see black American soldiers, living in a separate camp to the white soldiers. They’d been puzzled to hear the local police had to go and help the American military police break up fights between the black soldiers and the white soldiers – and to hear reports that the black soldiers’ camp had far fewer amenities than the white soldiers’ camp.

  The forest had no shouts in the night now. It did have a night walk advertised that I was sorry I’d miss: ‘World of Owls’ night’.

  ‘Is Gortin notorious for its owls?’

  Uncle Joe pondered this a moment. ‘I expect they wouldn’t be so impudent as to claim a world of owls if they didn’t have some owls.’

  Outside Omagh, we passed signs for the Ulster American Folk Park. Uncle Joe waved his pipe at them.

  ‘I’ve not been there, but going by reports I’ve had from my grandchildren, even a very poor quality display of owls would be more entertaining.’

  Unimpressive for local children, the park was however a smart move for attracting American and Canadian tourists who were tracing their ancestors. It had data banks on Irish emigration, replica American log cabins and farmsteads and the boyhood home of Tyrone emigrant John Joseph Hughes, who later became Archbishop of New York. This farmhouse was moved from a few miles away, stone by stone, and rebuilt in the park, as was the eighteenth-century home of Rocky Mountain pioneer Robert Campbell. Opened in 1976, the folk park developed around the farmhouse where Hugh John Mellon was born in 1813. His son built the steel town of Pittsburgh; the growing Mellon fortune helped build the Waldorf Astoria, the gates of the Panama Canal and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Other notable locals included the grandfather of Apollo 15 astronaut James B. Irwin; James Shields, one of Lincoln’s most successful generals; and Davy Crockett’s grandparents.

  We passed through Omagh. Apparently my uncle Martin had been in the street where the bomb went off, and left just twenty minutes before.

  ‘That’s the story with a lot of people round bombs in Northern Ireland. Most of us have just missed one.’ Uncle Joe lit his pipe and thought for a minute, looking for a way to defeat the dark topic. ‘But, as your grandfather would say, how many people just miss getting hit by a car every day?’

  9. Sodomy and Sailing

  I’d rung my aunt Helen the previous summer, at the start of July, and gabbled on about how I was going to write a book about Northern Ireland, and was coming over because I’d never seen the Orange marches.

  ‘But we’re just leaving, dear. We’ll be in Buncrana tonight. None of us stay in Portadown at this time of year. Wouldn’t you think of coming another time?’

  ‘But it kind of has to be now, really’

  ‘Well you’re very welcome to see us in Donegal but we’ll be away all summer.’

  I worried my aunt had gone off me, but she had been very ill, she was trying to pack… And she just hadn’t the time, or the heart, to explain to me why I was asking the impossible. I was so out of touch I hadn’t registered they lived where Loyalist gangs had been on sprees of killing Catholics in the eighties; where Catholic churches were petrol-bombed; where Drumcree was a couple of miles down the road; where the Orange marches just weren’t something to be idly curious about.

  There was no evidence she’d gone off me when I came back at a less fraught time of year. We were on one of our many trips out to teashops when we started talking about books we’d read on the subject of Northern Ireland. We both agreed our favourite was Dervla Murphy’s A Place Apart.

  ‘It’s a while ago since I read it, but there is one bit that really sticks in my mind…’ I began to say.

  My aunt nearly leapt across the tea table. ‘Where she goes to Ian Paisley’s church?’

  ‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I was going to say. She’s been really easy-going and suddenly she just gets this chill, this feeling of real hatred rising up in the place.’

  ‘That bit stayed with me!’ Aunt Helen was exuberant and definitely did like me, for sharing this remembered piece of reading with her. ‘I can still feel what it was I recognized when I read that. I was so grateful to her for describing it. Because that man…’ She looked tense, she was going to have to do something she didn’t like to do, speak ill of someone. But this was an exceptional case. ‘I remember when I had my first baby we lived in a flat in Armagh. Your uncle was away for a couple of days on a training course and I was alone in the flat, listening to the radio, and on the news Paisley was speaking. The things he was saying about Catholics… I locked the door and drew the curtains and prayed for your uncle to come home early’ She shook off the memory and shrugged. ‘I was young, you know, a bit more timid than I am now, but the chill Dervla Murphy described feeling in his church, that’s what I felt when I first heard him.’

  Many of the things Paisley said were more peculiar than chilling. He accused Catholic ceremonies of being an ‘amazing exhibition of carnal tomfoolery’. Which showed very little understanding of any Catholic church I knew; carnal tomfoolery was the one thing Catholics, especially girls, were taught to live in fear of.

  When the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret visited the Pope in 1959, Paisley was apoplectic, foretelling that ‘God’s curse will fall on England.’

  Born in Armagh, in a predominantly Catholic area, Paisley had a fire and brimstone preaching father, and mother. When his father fell out with his superiors and set up his own Protestant sect, the Paisleys suffered ridicule, isolation and extreme poverty – depending for food on donations from his father’s few followers.

  When Paisley was growing up, there were Catholic preachers who spoke against Protestantism as ‘heresy’; they’d tell their congregations not to associate with Protestants, and certainly not to marry them or go to their schools. Being outlawed and persecuted for so long, some of the Catholic clergy in Ireland had become very hardened, fearing any chink in their armour. There was a mood of angry sep
aratism and conservatism in much of the Irish Catholic Church that my father remembers as ‘narrow, obsessively anti-English and draconian’.

  Paisley hadn’t single-handedly introduced bigotry to Northern Irish society, of course, but his name was almost synonymous with it in our family. I read a lot about him, fearing he might have kicked Bimpa in the playground and we’d all inherited a prejudice. But for one thing, Bimpa would have just kicked him back.

  For another thing, Paisley created situations, and then covered his tracks claiming to be elsewhere at the time, praying at the time… There wasn’t much leeway to give him the benefit of the doubt or suspect we’d misunderstood.

  In June 1959, Paisley had spoken at a rally in the lower Shankill Road, organized by Ulster Protestant Action. Addressing a mainly young crowd he said, ‘You people of the Shankill Road, what’s wrong with you? Number 425 Shankill Road – do you know who lives there? Pope’s men, that’s who! Forte’s ice-cream shop, Italian papists on the Shankill Road! How about 56 Aden Street? For ninety-seven years a Protestant lived in that house, and now there’s a Papisher in it. Crimea Street, number 38! Twenty-five years that house has been up, twenty-four years a Protestant lived there, but there’s a Papisher there now.’

  The crowd marched up the Shankill Road and headed straight for the Catholic homes, throwing stones, breaking windows and painting ‘Taigs Out’ on the doors. Shops thought to be Catholic-owned were attacked and one, with a display of crucifixes in the window, was looted.

  It wasn’t only Papishers he didn’t like.

  Homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain in 1967 – but not in Northern Ireland. In the late 1970s, gay campaigners in Northern Ireland began to pressure Westminster to bring the province up to date and decriminalize homosexuality. Paisley began a campaign called ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ and caused such uproar Westminster didn’t change the archaic law. In 1982, the European Court of Human Rights finally forced through the legalization of homosexuality in Northern Ireland.

  Homosexuality wasn’t legalized in the South of Ireland until 1994. The Pope was still calling it ‘evil’ in 2004; but the grip of the Catholic clergy on Southern Irish politics was slipping. Paisley pointed to this as a proof of the religion’s feebleness, rather than as a sign of a more secular and liberal society developing over the border. And he continued his loud battle to prevent a secular and liberal Northern Irish society.

  Who followed him? He had a rank-and-file Protestant congregation that the other Protestant churches and the Orange Order couldn’t get away from him. Protestants fearing the declining number of jobs would be taken out of their hands; fearing union with the South would mean Catholic domination; fearing Sinn Fein would come to power and take terrible revenge… Then there were the fundamentalist Protestants who agreed with him that evolution shouldn’t be taught in schools. And Paisley appealed to something darker, a revulsion that Protestants from a mixed range of backgrounds felt for Catholics – as powerful and irrational as racism.

  Aunt Helen lived surrounded by Protestants and she had no difficulty with them, if they weren’t the kind who wanted to drive her out of her home, or petrol-bomb her church. She fretted over her young Protestant cleaner as if she was an extra daughter, worried for hours when she thought the cleaner was headed for a big domestic row with a volatile husband over a phone bill. She ran in and interrupted Uncle Joe’s golf-watching, she was so relieved to get the news that the cleaner’s husband had been managed and there’d been no hideous scene. She was proud that the cleaner had once said, ‘All my best customers are Catholics. They treat you well and have a bit of consideration.’

  My aunt even felt sorry for one of her pensioners group whose grandson was in a Loyalist gang and had been arrested for involvement in a back-street stabbing. But she did prefer to be in Donegal during what she and a lot of Catholics around Portadown didn’t refer to as July, or the holidays, or even the marching season; it was ‘Drumcree time of year’.

  So I’d snuck into Belfast in July, to see the other side of life. I was early for the marching and I had other business down the coast. I could pass the time, even if I had to pass it alone.

  When my parents were first married, my father had a teaching job in Downpatrick, we’d lived near lakes, then moved to the seaside at Newcastle. My memory of Downpatrick was hazy. As Flann O’Brien said, ‘I was very young at the time I was born.’

  I know my parents had fun in Downpatrick. Apart from a gorgeous first child, they had a share of a racing dinghy on Strangford Lough and in the evenings they sang in pubs with their fellow amateur sailors. Northern Ireland was like that, you could live a fine life on a schoolteacher’s salary. To revisit this unremembered joy, I took the bus from Belfast; buses were better for seeing the countryside and eavesdropping than driving.

  Through disappointingly smeary bus windows I managed a squinted view of pretty villages festooned with Union Jacks and the Red Hand of Ulster flags. Sometimes there were black flags with crests on them – this represented a section of the Orange Order, the Royal Black Preceptories, who were more ritualistic and religious than the rest of the order. So many flags flying defiantly in immaculately tended front gardens.

  The Red Hand of Ulster flags were the cross of Saint George with the hand emblem at the centre of the cross. If it hadn’t been for the emblem, you might think the flags were out to support England in international football. But these flags hadn’t had their meaning simplified by fashion.

  The meaning of the red hand was often disputed. A right hand was a common European heraldic device, representing the right hand of God. It was on the Ulster flag because it was the kind of thing that got put on flags. The legend that Heremon O’Niel, racing a rival chieftain for possession of Ireland, cut off his hand and hurled it ashore may not be true, and is a common Norse legend, not unique to Ulster.

  The Star of David is also on the Ulster Flag because the star was another shape commonly used in heraldry. It probably doesn’t mean that Ulstermen are the lost tribe of Israel – although there are websites forcefully arguing the case for this.

  But then, if everything on websites was fact, the world would be a very peculiar place.

  *

  Downpatrick was a predominately Catholic town with a Protestant hinterland. The bus station was rustically old-fashioned, but opposite was a giant modern food mart, a giant pizza joint, a giant cheap clothing store… Somewhere under these was the house I’d first lived in.

  I’d booked myself into a guest house an American friend had recommended – why had I listened? It might be charming but it was a mile out of town. I went into a minicab office by the big stores. It was full of drunk men and cross women with bags of shopping. The stressed cab controller knew where I wanted to go but warned me, ‘The main road up that way is closed. He’ll have to take you round the hills, so it’ll cost a couple of pounds extra. A fiver?’

  I immediately assumed the road was closed for reasons to do with the marching season.

  The reason I’d jumped the queue wasn’t because I was sober and English. The people hanging around were waiting to have a full group to share cabs to their estates.

  The driver again apologized that my route would be more expensive than usual. ‘They’re doing tarmacing on the direct road.’

  Strike one to me, there was nothing going on that was to do with the Troubles.

  The severely tattooed cab-driver had worked in North London and asked me if I knew a Colindale pub he’d frequented.

  ‘It was a good pub. They had lock-ins for all comers, you know. There were pubs in London in the seventies when it was difficult to have a Northern Irish accent and get served.’

  ‘Did you go to Kilburn?’

  My cousin Paul had been taken to Kilburn by a helpful workmate when he’d first arrived in London. He’d been horrified. ‘All those people from the South glared if I spoke, so I kept my mouth shut. My English mate fitted in better than me, we’re just not like those Kilburn Irish and t
hey don’t like us. Maybe they think the Northern Irish have given them a bad name, I just couldn’t figure it out.’

  The Downpatrick cab-driver had a similar view.

  ‘Kilburn? I was better off in an English pub. That’s what I didn’t like about being in London, it was our own were the worst to us.’

  He didn’t go into a tirade cousin Paul liked to indulge himself in, after a few beers, about how those Southerners had sold us Northern Catholics down the river at the time of the partition and never looked back.

  We were driving up into idyllic countryside, old mills by meandering rivers, grand houses, gnarled trees and deer standing staring across green hills – big-antlered proper stags at bay.

  ‘It’s beautiful up here,’ I said.

  The driver didn’t comment. He swung into the drive of my guest house, after narrowly missing a pheasant on the road.

  ‘Well, good luck to you in there,’ he said to me in a slightly ominous way.

  The guest house was very fancy. There were no Red Hands flying, but I think he felt it was no place for a Catholic girl – he’d craftily established my tribe with questions about where in the town my parents had lived, where my grandparents lived… People just had to know.

  The garden would have won awards in the home counties for its triumph of roses, dahlias and absolutely perfect borders. I was in no mood to see the pleasantness. I was thirsty, hot, tired, so to me the place seemed irritatingly fussy and chintzy.

  I saw from a notice in the window they had their own rare breeds farm that supplied their organic meat. I could see pigs the size and colour of Jersey cows in a field behind that looked rare enough. There was an organic shop on the premises, they cured their own bacon, made their own bread, laid their own eggs… I really regretted booking into the place, I’d be bound to stain something, break something – and I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to smoke. More worryingly, they’d got my deposit in advance but no one was answering the door. I rang, I knocked, I peered in windows… A lot of polish, pastels and water-colours, but no people.