Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  Some men were trimming a hedge up on the main road, watching my plight with interest. I decided if night fell and I was still on the doorstep, they’d have to take me to town on their tractor.

  I thought I was saved when an old couple drove up, but they were looking to buy some special loin of rare pork. They joined me in a tour of the exterior looking for clues. A perfect Siamese crossed our path.

  ‘No,’ said the old man. ‘Nobody here but the cyat.’

  I’d forgotten that cat and car are words with a ‘y’ in them in parts of Northern Ireland. In other areas they’re definitely a kat and a kar, a ‘c’ sound so hard it had to be written ‘k’.

  ‘There’s a disappointment,’ the man said as they returned to their cyar. ‘I was looking forward to the pork. Well, good luck to you, dear, I expect they’ll appear eventually’

  I was alone again, with no one to help me but the cyat. Just as I was about to go and ask the tractor men for rescue, another, as I would call it, car, drew up.

  ‘Oh dear, I am sorry. My daughter told me you’d be arriving and I completely forgot. Have you been waiting long? She will be annoyed with me. I am sorry.’

  She was so worried, and such a cuddly, fluffy, grey-permed, grannyish old lady, all my annoyance evaporated. She showed me to a room, with French windows on to my private section of the rear garden. The room itself looked as though it had been decorated by Dale Winton’s maiden aunt. It didn’t have a surface that wasn’t covered with a delicate crochet mat, a piece of furniture that wasn’t trimmed with extra helpings of fabric and braid. I had three types of shampoo, a towelling bathrobe, every size of towel, sachets of luxury bubble bath, organic soaps, sweets in jars, assorted rare teas, a silver coffee pot and ground organic coffee.

  After showing me my room, the lady gave me a full tour – dining room, sun parlour, sitting room and cabins they were building at the back. Tor families, when it gets busy My daughter never stops…’

  She looked at me with sudden concern. ‘You must be tired, dear, imagine coming all the way from Belfast on the bus. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Let’s sit here in the sun parlour where there’s a lovely view. You can only see the pigs in the field from the sitting room. Some people find that interesting because they’re a rare breed, but I don’t think we’re interested, are we?’

  She was English, from Kent, she told me over strong, sweet tea. Her daughter had married a Northern Irish man she’d met at university.

  ‘When my husband retired, my daughter kept saying we should move over here. I wasn’t sure, but she is our only child. So we live in the next village. A lovely village. And we get to be near our grandchildren. My daughter and son-in-law are so busy with all their projects, they’ve just opened a second organic shop. My husband loves it here, he has golf galore and gardening.’ She paused, knowing that she was here now and there was no going back to Kent whatever she felt and there was no point telling a perfect stranger how she felt, so she might as well make the best of it… She pointed to the hill dotted with deer and edged with spreading trees, ‘Round here is what I call “rural”. I love to see trees like that, trees that have been left to grow in their own natural shape.’

  I said I was amazed to see the deer.

  ‘They do look good up there, don’t they? They’re farmed. There’s a restaurant in Killileagh, our village, where they serve the venison from here. And pheasant, there’s a lot of pheasant. It’s all very rural. In the spring near our house there’s a dell of bluebells…’

  In every sentence, she was making the best of it. Not that she wasn’t proud of her daughter’s enterprises.

  ‘They started with a little bit of land and a small house and they’re making such a go of it all. But she’s her father’s daughter. She’ll just struggle on. I remember when she was doing her finals, I said, “Do you have to work so hard?” And she said, “Yes, Mum, this is how it has to be.”’

  We talked a great deal about London and a little more about the lovely ruralness of County Down – then very sweetly she said in lowered tones, ‘Now, dear, have you ever been here around this time in July?’

  I said I hadn’t, but I knew it was a tricky time.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We just don’t leave the house, because it can be very dangerous, they can pull you out of your car and all sorts.’

  My heart went out to her, thinking she should warn me in case I was as lost as she was. She was relieved when I told her I had relatives in the North – I lied that I’d be moving on to see them in a few days, just so she wouldn’t have to think about me roaming alone in all the danger.

  ‘Now, you know,’ she said, ‘I’m worried about what you’re going to eat this evening. I could give you a lift to a restaurant, but I have to go and cook for my husband, so you might have to get a taxi back.’

  I assured her I had been eating all day, had fruit in my bag for emergencies and I’d be happy with an early night, rather than venturing out to restaurants.

  She looked as though she might accept this but gave me a packet of biscuits, just in case.

  ‘My daughter should be back in a couple of hours. Don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything.’ She stood to go, reluctantly. ‘I better leave you to get settled. Goodness, you’ll say that landlady’s mother is a real jawer.’

  I said, ‘No, it was lovely talking to you.’

  She said, with a great well of feeling, ‘Yes, yes, I loved it too.’

  And off she went, back to her life in a country she didn’t really like, despite the trees and bluebell dells.

  After I’d used the alarmingly luxurious bathroom and managed not to break anything, I fell asleep on my hand-embroidered pillows. A storm had got up when I woke, wind crashing about in the rural trees and the rare pigs were making an Armageddon type of noise somewhere in the darkness. I sat, huddled in my coat, on the steps outside my French windows, smoking and feeling vaguely tearful. It was sad, I thought, to come back to the place I’d been born and have no one to talk to but a sweet old lady from Kent, who thought I didn’t know the place.

  It had been an odd day anyway. I’d had a four-hour wait at Belfast bus station to get to Downpatrick, after an early-morning flight. I’d eaten burgers and chocolate to comfort my tiredness and made myself feel slightly sick.

  My plan was to buy my ticket then doze off the burgers, chocolate and creeping nausea. There was only one ticket window and a long queue of people, who all seemed to be irritated. In front of me was a tatty woman with a black eye and a whimpering little boy in a T-shirt that read ‘I’m British’ over a Red Hand of Ulster. She kept telling the child if he didn’t shut up… ‘If you don’t shut up… If you don’t shut up…’ I nearly swung her round and said, ‘What? For God’s sake at least be specific or I’ll black your other eye.’ But finally she stopped, the child stopped whimpering and I simmered down from homicidal to merely grumpy.

  I managed to find a space on a bench, was getting settled for a long rest, when an excessively bearded tramp came up to me, empty-handed, and asked if I wanted to buy a newspaper. I looked confused and he said, ‘Come on, you bitch, give me fifty pence and I’ll get you a newspaper.’

  I ignored him and he went off to call someone else a bitch.

  I decided to close my eyes so I’d look asleep if anyone else wanted to engage me in such charming banter.

  My aunt wasn’t the only one making an exodus. Two young men behind me were talking about leaving ‘until after the 12th’. From early in my eavesdropping I gathered one was twenty-two and had a shared house, the other was twenty-three and had just joined as a sharer.

  Twenty-two was from Fermanagh and a Catholic; Twenty-three was from Roscommon, a Southern Catholic. They were talking about their house being mixed, with two Protestant house-mates. Twenty-two said they’d discussed putting in the advertisement for a house-mate that theirs was a mixed house, but then thought they could be asking for trouble. They decided to say nothing and if someone turned up wearing a Glasgow Ranger
s shirt, they’d think, maybe not.

  The Protestant house-mates, Julie and Hazel, had been teasing Twenty-two that they’d joined in Saint Patrick’s day celebrations with him, so maybe the Catholics in the house should put on sashes and march up and down the living room for the 12th. Interestingly, he thought it showed good spirit on the girls’ part to join in Saint Patrick’s day, but for him, 12th of July celebrations were out of the question.

  Twenty-three was pleased he’d found a place in such a friendly house. He had some intriguing stories about his search for a home in Belfast. A girl he worked with had offered him a cheap place, but it was right in the middle of Loyalist Sandy Row. ‘I just didn’t want to run the risk.’

  Before that, he’d lived in the area up near Paisley’s church, quite a pleasant middle-class area – but near Paisley’s church.

  Twenty-three would go into the library to use the computers and one day he was in there, emailing, and a little boy came in, ‘All shaved head and Chelsea shirt, you know, a real wee bastard. And he stood in the door of the library and shouted, “I hear you’re a Taig!” I froze. I thought, Jesus, I’m spotted, I’m branded and I have to live round here. But he was shouting at another kid, a wee girl with a speech impediment, so she couldn’t rightly say what she was. So anyway, I was pleased I’d had a narrow escape. Then a few weeks later I went back to the library and I wanted to check if there was any mail on my Eircom box. The computer kept saying it couldn’t access the site. I went to the desk to complain and the woman made a real stuck-up face and said, “No, we can’t help you with that.” I was so irritated with her, I asked if I could talk to her supervisor, and she said, “She’s gone on her tea break but she’d tell you the same thing.” I asked how she knew she’d say the same thing. She looked at me cheekily and said, “She just will.” I couldn’t believe it and I was trying to think what kind of a scene I could make, but people were standing around listening in, I started to get nervous. I sarcastically said, “Thank you for your help.” And I was fuming for days, so I wrote a letter of complaint to Belfast Libraries, a real fuming letter. But that was no satisfaction, of course, because I decided I’d better not sign it, or give my name and address, because you just never know.’

  Twenty-two understood. ‘No. I know. Whenever anyone in Belfast asks where I’m from in Fermanagh, I never say the south, I always say, Enniskillen, a big mixed place, because you never know. It just takes one lunatic. I had a mate beaten senseless by three thugs with a baseball bat because he’d been walking home carrying hurley gear. It’s weird, you could decide to walk home a different way, or turn off a main road and you’re in the middle of hell.’

  As my mother told me, no good comes of eavesdropping. I didn’t: want to hear this conversation. I blamed Twenty-two and Twenty-three for putting me on a doorstep at midnight, listening to howling wind and squealing pigs, chain-smoking and feeling weepy. I didn’t want to hear baseball bats, or that Belfast Libraries would be downright rude to anyone who wanted connecting to a Southern Irish internet service. I wanted seasides and lakes; I’d built myself up to expect them. I felt stupid, lonely and very naive.

  In the morning of course, things weren’t so bad. Sun shining, lavender and roses outside the French windows all refreshed from the storm, and scented summery. I had some of my real organic personal coffee and realized it was ridiculous to panic that I was wrong about Northern Ireland because of overheard war stories from a couple of lads in a bus station when I was hot, tired, full of junk food and set upon by tramps.

  The dining-room tables had frilled cloths and hand-made pottery containers for home-made everything. I was given an Ulster fry that didn’t seem to have been fried but prepared by little gourmet elves, using secret processes to make the national dish without the usual side effect of craving a triple heart bypass immediately after breakfast.

  The determined daughter, Jennifer, was touncing her good health around the dining room. I could tell by her glances that she was a little curious about me, as I didn’t seem to fit with her guests at all. There was a big, amber-beaded, Margaret Rutherford type English lady and two sets of elderly Americans.

  As well as new tourist attractions going up with heavy emphasis on the Protestant emigration to America, there were efforts being made to sell the 12th of July to Americans of Protestant descent as something that was theirs to enjoy, if they’d never felt comfortable in all the frolicking greenery of Saint Patrick’s day parades.

  My father had always complained that Northern Ireland would be a better place if the Americans would leave it alone; he argued that both sides were funded through the Troubles by donations from American sympathizers of similar religion. My mother would snap his head off and say, ‘It’s the English, it’s nothing to do with America.’ She also vehemently blamed the South for abandoning the North, then profiteering from gun-running. On the plane over from Belfast I’d got talking to an old man from Lisburn who blamed the Troubles on inbreeding in rural areas: ‘What we need is immigrants, blacks and Bosnians, the more the merrier, so there’ll be less of this inbreeding making people daft.’

  I had a feeling I could go round for months with a clipboard asking people to list the causes of the Troubles and I’d never get the same answer twice. But it was possible there were more interesting things to do with my life.

  I walked into Downpatrick deciding to risk the direct route, as a mile walk would be good for me, but three miles, well, there was no telling what kind of malfunction that might cause in me or my ageing trainers.

  The road surfacing seemed to be done with, but cars were still being kept out, so I had perfect peace to feel nature-hugging about the scenery. This was very old countryside, used for hunting and livestock-rearing back through the centuries. Elegant houses sat proud in the dips and dales – you could have filmed a Jane Austen film and only had to move a couple of television aerials for an authentic, quaint country feel.

  I saw a familiar tractor, and sitting at the roadside drinking tea were the two men who’d watched my long lock-out from the guest house. They did the strange, wary thing Northern Irish people can do, hesitating to be the first to acknowledge they knew me, but poised, ready to be friendly if they were given an opening.

  I smiled and said hello. They immediately relaxed, broke out their smiles.

  ‘So you got into your B and B eventually?’ the older one asked.

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘They have that place very nice.’

  ‘Once you can get in it,’ I said.

  They both laughed. I noticed the young one was disturbed by my scruffy trainers.

  ‘Are you walking into town?’ he asked, shifting his gaze from my disgraceful feet.

  I said I was, because it was a nice day.

  ‘Aye it is,’ said the older one. ‘But don’t wear yourself out. If you’re walking back, remember it’ll be uphill.’

  While I was still unworn out, I walked uphill to the cathedral where Saint Patrick was supposed to be buried under a massive stone slab, along with Saint Brigid and Saint Colomba. Some Americans were standing looking at the slab, one of them asking what I was thinking: ‘How do they know it’s really them in there?’

  Not that it mattered. As anywhere else with a Saint Patrick association, Downpatrick had built on the legends and counted the money to be made.

  The Down County Museum, along the road from the cathedral, had a section devoted to Saint Patrick – I skipped it and moved on to look at the main exhibit. This began with lists of people hanged in Downpatrick through the ages and what they’d done to deserve it. The museum was housed in the old gaol, built in 1798, whitewashed clean now, but with plenty of descriptions on the walls of how crowded and smelly it had been. There were plaques telling stories of the minor crimes of poverty that had ended people up at this bad end.

  A popular County Down ballad, ‘The Man From God Knows Where’, was written in 1946 about the United Irishman Thomas Russell, who was hanged at the gates of the old gao
l. It was a popular song on the American folk and country circuit, and had recently been revived by an American folk singer calling himself Tom Russell. The original Thomas Russell wasn’t actually from God knows where but from Cork – in the song he’s just a mysterious stranger in Downpatrick, no slight on Cork intended.

  Convicts from Down gaol were often transported to Australia. Downpatrick had a growing number of ancestor-seeking Australian visitors – apparently convict ancestry, particularly Irish, was now no longer a stigma but something to show off about. A small exhibition displayed photos and happy letters from one Australian who had traced a female ancestor back to County Down gaol.

  The more recent past of County Down was displayed in an exhibition of black and white photographs. They were all of the late 1950s and early 1960s and, like my parents’ photos of the area at the time, they looked older. Something about the countryside, the cottage industries, small shops and hand-made clothes seemed to come from ten or twenty years before. The photographs resembled the streets, lakes and countryside that I remembered – but I remembered similar photographs.

  County Down Loyalists had a moderate reputation, compared to those of County Armagh, but I still felt taken aback to walk off the main road from the cathedral and find a Red Hand of Ulster flag in every garden. I was looking for the high school where my father had taught. A building that looked like an army barracks turned out to be the school. It had always had a big stone arch in front of it because after the museum gaol had been deemed too small, there had been a gaol on this site. The arch was a piece of history, but the new fortifications round the school were a modern necessity.

  The Catholic population of Downpatrick had grown through the last three decades and Unionist politician John Taylor had recently criticized the school for taking in too many Catholics, keeping places from Protestants. The school had been outraged: they insisted that they had a policy of taking people who were smart enough, whoever they were, and that was that.