Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  The National Front constantly courted the Loyalists as a like cause; they believed Loyalists were protecting Britain from the IRA. Straightforward Unionists were appalled by this connection, just as Conservatives in England didn’t see themselves as anything to do with the National Front. Some Loyalists vehemently denied this ultra-right connection even existed – but for others it was definitely all a like-minded brotherhood.

  A sports journalist told me he once reported on a Chelsea v. Rangers game, a friendly, where fans of both sides joined in a rousing chorus of Tuck the Pope’ at the start of the match.

  You could hear this kind of song on the District Line on Saturday afternoons if Chelsea were playing at home. A couple of times I’d stood among beer-sweating Englishmen, listening to them sing about what should be done to Catholics, or simply the Irish.

  Liverpool, Everton and Manchester United were considered ‘Irish clubs’. Their hooligan ‘firms’ sought connection with the INLA, PIRA, RIRA, etc. They went to Dublin for Saint Patrick’s day, waved tricolours occasionally – but the true Republican supported Gaelic games, so the connections had been less enthusiastically followed. And there was that left-wing aura about Republicanism that just didn’t sit well with the football hooligan psyche.

  There was a hinterland of Irish politics on both sides that was simply about gaining criminal wealth, bullying maintenance of local power and enjoying hatred. For the sincere political believers of either side it had always been impossible to be completely free from these elements professing the same aims and beliefs.

  In East Belfast I wasn’t facing tattooed Chelsea Head-hunters or even big men singing, just small boys, but I still didn’t want them to throw something at me. I kept walking and left them behind – then realized I was in a cul de sac. I took my street map out of my pocket to try and look as though I had a purpose for going up and down the road – being lost seemed more of a purpose than just noseying around. They were small, so I could always slap at them with the map if the worst came to the worst.

  They were looking and muttering, I could see it would crush their boyish pride to let me go past without at least shouting obscenities at me. I kept walking, feigning interest in my map, waiting for them to do their worst.

  ‘Look at you!’ one shouted ferociously I kept walking. Look at me what, what? ‘Look at you!’ he yelled again. ‘Pink shoes!’

  They roared with laughter, although when I glanced over, the shouting one looked a bit crestfallen that this was the best he’d managed in a crisis.

  I had something to eat in a café with those flat glass cups – not retro trendy, still there from the sixties. Two elderly ladies in bright blouses were taking tea at the table next to me. They didn’t seem to have anything to say to each other for a long time. Then, just as I was leaving, it got interesting.

  One of them suddenly said: ‘All this business about the gay bishop, it’s terrible. I mean that’s what the Christian Church is supposed to be about, minorities and outsiders. All I can say is I’m glad my mother’s dead so she doesn’t have to see this kind of hypocrisy.’

  The other one laughed and said, ‘Well I can see you’re on good form.’

  I thought of ordering a second dinner, to hear what other unexpected turn the conversation would take to make me feel happy about human nature, but I had things to do.

  I could have walked downhill to the right and seen the big white parliament building, Stormont. Instead I got myself all tangled up in muralled flats, far too far back down the road, looking for the site of C. S. Lewis’ birthplace, formerly Dundela Villas, now Dundela Flats.

  A childhood spent trying to get into wardrobes by accident had made me think this would be interesting, but there was nothing to see. A three-storey block of modern flats, with a blue plaque commemorating C. S. Lewis, ‘Author and Christian Apologist’.

  Lewis’ grandfather had been rector of a nearby church, with a lion head door knocker; this was supposed to be the inspiration for the messianic lion, Asian. When Lewis was eight, his mother died. The golden age before her death and the countryside of Northern Ireland were the Narnia he longed to return to, after he had been sent away to an unhappy boarding-school life in England.

  Outside the public library in Holywood Road was a statue of a man by a wardrobe, commemorating Lewis. It wasn’t much.

  There were a few C. S. Lewis tours run by resourceful independent citizens, but it seemed to me that Belfast City Council could spend less time carping about the Anglo-Irish Agreement and more time thinking of ways to provide jobs and income from the city’s neglected assets. At least a C. S. Lewis museum. The success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter had put the Narnia Chronicles next on the slate as multi-million dollar movie projects. Maybe that would inspire the Council. A C. S. Lewis theme park might provide a better prospect for kids in East Belfast than Chelsea shirts and militaristic murals.

  I stomped back up the Newtownards Road, thinking how annoying it was that I was supposed to care one way or another about all the flags and murals around me, annoyed with everyone in Belfast for not getting on with the peace and realizing what brilliant gold there was to pick up in the streets.

  I threw the sweat-smelling duvet into the chair at the corner of my room as I imagined I could still smell it from the floor, then realized it was probably me, cross and sweating in the heat. On television there was news that George Best, with a new liver and a stomach full of antabuse, had started drinking again.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, George, what’s the matter with you?’ I said to the television, remembered he wasn’t related to me and realized I had spent the day turning into some bossy know-all who thought she knew what everyone should be doing. Worse than that, I was slipping into a tone of thought I’d always found upsetting in books and articles about Northern Ireland. Journalists in particular, who’d spent too long in the province, seen too much and not understood enough, would descend from what had quite often been a liberal, open-minded start into a baffled, angry, ‘exterminate all the brutes’ attitude to Northern Ireland. Of course it tended to happen to them after too much interviewing of paramilitaries, politicians and bomb victims – not just over C. S. Lewis, unwashed bedding and George Best.

  I fell asleep and woke up early, still frowning at myself.

  In the stuffy dining room was a family of Americans. I ate a full Ulster breakfast, with fried bread, black puddings, two eggs, piled bacon, two sausages, potato bread, tomatoes, a different kind of bread fried… Even the coffee tasted lightly fried, so that was good – if the caffeine didn’t get me, the extra drop of lard would do it. I eavesdropped to see why the Americans were there, but only heard them arguing about whether they had to clean the hire car before returning it.

  As I’d been up so early, I’d done some reading and realized how ignorant I was. The Newtownards Road was at what was called a ‘flashpoint’ – adjacent to the Catholic district, Short Strand. For years there’d been toings and froings of bombing and brick-throwing. Hence the burnt-out houses. The boarded-up shops close to the dividing line. Hence the police presence this morning.

  Everything seemed to be closed and I couldn’t see a bus. Men in shirt sleeves and orange sashes came down a side-street, followed by a flute band in uniform. Then came some straggling women with pushchairs. I followed them. We stopped and were joined by a band of boys in decorative uniforms, more men with sashes and more women ambling along on the pavement. Among the camp followers, I noticed two teenagers with backpacks beside me. I wondered if they were tourists and where from, but they were local, they’d just brought their lunch with them. They didn’t seem to be very sure what was going on.

  ‘What’s the best way to follow the march?’ I asked them.

  ‘Find one of the feeder bands and follow it to the centre of town,’ one said.

  The second one asked me if I was English. I said I was, as that seemed easiest. They’d just accept me and not get that unsettled look people got the instant I said I was bo
rn there, needing to know what I was before they could settle again.

  ‘Just curious?’ one asked.

  ‘Just curious,’ I said.

  I asked if they knew what tune the flute band was playing. They looked awkward. They either didn’t know, or wouldn’t say. I drifted away from them to mingle with families waving small Union Jacks. I asked a woman how far the march would go.

  ‘Up to Edenbury field. But that’s miles. I’ll just go to City Hall’

  Near City Hall everything seemed to be building up. Banners, bands and the crowd seemed less vague. More women, joined by beercan-carrying men with tattoos, Rangers shirts and shaven-headed children.

  The Orangemen with their sashes all looked like respectable shopkeepers, keeping stern faced, but slightly embarrassed by such a public display of themselves – a tough job but it had to be done. The bands seemed innocent, boy scouty. There were no big Lambeg drums – apparently these were a rarity in Belfast now. There was plenty of drumming, though. Frenzied drumming of small drums that would get anyone that way inclined worked up into fighting mood. Band after band came by, wearing what appeared to be overly decorative Scottish military uniforms, followed by banners of Ulster this and that brigade. More drumming and flute playing. It wasn’t cheery music, it was music to march to – military, piped occasionally into melancholy by the flutes. It made me think of war films, men going off to battle who wouldn’t come back.

  There were Orange Lodges all over the world, even in West Africa, a remnant of Protestant missionary work. There were lodges in England, America and Canada. The Canadian lodge included Innu Mohawks, who were often shown in full regalia in Orange Order literature, along with pictures of Togolese and Nigerian Orangemen, to dispel any accusation that the order was racist. The Orange Order felt it was important to affirm that the order is ‘a society open to all Protestants of good character, and has been a multi-racial organization for a very long time’. They were against the break-up of the United Kingdom, whether by ‘European federalism, militant Irish nationalism [or] Scottish nationalism’. More fundamentally, the order stood for spirituality in society, social morality and nuclear family values: ‘the rise of secular culture-based individual self-indulgence has not created the liberal society the “flower power” generation promised. Instead we have an amoral, fragmented and confused society’.

  Their views on moral decline were no more out of touch with the world than the Pope’s, no more alien to the amoral, fragmented and confused way I liked to live.

  I’d expected to feel some anger, or some overwhelming irrational fear while watching the marches. I only felt hot and jostled. Maybe it was difficult to feel threatened by men playing flutes. I didn’t quite feel like I was having fun. It was all too determined. And someone behind me shouted in a Glasgow accent: ‘Kill a Catholic for Ireland!’

  The two backpacking boys seemed to have caught up with me and tutted.

  ‘That’s why we never come,’ one said. ‘Who cares about that shite?’

  ‘Isn’t that shite part of it?’

  He frowned at me. ‘Not everyone thinks like that.’

  The Scotsman started some bizarre jerky dance to the drum rhythms.

  ‘Lets move along a bit,’ the second boy said.

  I followed them. We found ourselves pressed against a shuttered shop window by big women screaming and cheering at people they knew in a passing drum and fife band.

  There was one big woman with a hairdo that would have been elfin on a smaller head but made her look like she’d gone bald and had to quickly borrow a small boy’s wig. She turned and beamed at me: ‘Is that an English accent?’

  Before I could say it was, she grabbed my face in her hands and kissed my forehead.

  ‘God bless you for being here!’

  She turned to her friends and said, ‘A wee English girl here!’ I tensed, fearing all five of them would be grabbing and kissing, but the others just gave me vague smiles. Their kissy friend had quite a raspy smell of vodka about her, so perhaps they were less far gone.

  A group marched past in some fancy regalia that looked like one of the camper branches of the Italian police force.

  The PSNI, who barely looked as though they were in uniform at all compared to the bands, were around, but less than I expected.

  ‘Not many police,’ I said to the boys. The big ladies had moved on. We’d room to breathe. Plenty actually: it wasn’t just that there was little visible police presence, the crowd wasn’t as large as I’d expected.

  ‘The police will all be further north, where there’ll be trouble.’

  The Catholic community of the Ardoyne had tried to stop the march going through their streets and failed. Frantic last-minute talks had gone on between community leaders, hoping to keep it peaceful.

  The boys weren’t going north, they’d seen enough. So had I. Wimpishly, I felt hot, sun-sickened, headachy from the noise and really didn’t want to go all the way up to the Ardoyne to see if there’d be trouble.

  I ducked away down a side-street full of what seemed to be an alternative festival of drunken tramps and then found myself in deserted streets, drum thuds and music receding. It had somehow become mid-afternoon. I’d no idea where the time had gone. Ashamed to say, I found the cool interior of a bland modern hotel and was grateful. No one there but me and some confused Spanish businessmen. I had food, gallons of water, still felt ill and expected I’d have to walk all the way back to East Belfast. Possibly dying of heat stroke in a gutter en route… But there was a cab number at reception.

  ‘I thought there’d be no transport anywhere,’ I said to the driver.

  ‘It’s just a parade,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a war on.’

  ‘Of course, I know. I just thought everyone had the day off.’

  He looked at me in the mirror.

  ‘Didn’t you like the parade, then?’

  ‘I got a bit hot.’

  ‘And a bit bored?’ He was about twenty with a trendy haircut.

  ‘A bit,’ I said, thinking with that hair he wouldn’t be offended.

  He was quiet for a long time. I didn’t much feel like talking, so if he’d disappeared into offended silence, I’d have been happy to leave it like that. But he was thinking…

  ‘You know, how I see it…’ he said, ‘it’s like going to the park to watch some band on the bandstand, that’s how I see it. What’s it got to do with people our age?’

  I was so pleased he thought we were the same age, I didn’t want to argue, but had to point out, ‘There were a lot of young people in the crowd and in the bands.’

  He made a scoffing noise. ‘Well, if they were in the crowd it was an excuse for a drink and if they were in the band…’ He made a more seriously scoffing sound. ‘Well, you know, there’s a lot of people in Belfast still live with their mammys and don’t know there’s a big world out there. As soon as I get the money I’m out of here. Where are you from?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Yeah, London, Manchester, you know, somewhere, anywhere that’s not depressing and people have a life that’s like modern, you know?’

  ‘You don’t think Belfast’s catching up?’

  ‘I want it now, not when Belfast’s finally caught up. I want to start a club. You know, a friend of mine’s brother has this lap-dancing place in Newcastle, makes a fortune.’

  This was all getting a bit too amoral, fragmented and confused for me. I grunted and pretended to fall asleep. He seemed to charge me a lot, but I needed to get into the quiet of the guest house and didn’t quibble that funding his emigration to a life of individual self-indulgence wasn’t all down to me.

  I’d wanted to be open-minded, but I’d crept away from the Protestants’ big day to lie down in a darkened room, watching the big day on the news. I hadn’t tried nearly hard enough.

  Protesters held up placards saying, ‘No talk, no walk’ referring to the Unionists’ refusal to talk to Sinn Fein. The protesters were supervised by senior members of
Sinn Fein. One senior member of Sinn Fein, picked out for a close-up by the news camera, wasn’t pleased to notice he was being given this attention and moved behind some PSNI men.

  Later, the police were putting up huge metal barriers to screen the returning marchers from the protesters, fearing the evening mood, with both sides fuelled by alcohol, might be less controlled.

  There were stone- and bottle-throwing incidents at night but nothing like the trouble that had been predicted. It seemed to be an exercise in good PR for all concerned.

  One of the afternoon’s main speakers was Unionist Geoffrey Donaldson. He said that in any other country of the twenty-first century, the pageantry, music and tradition of the Orange marches would be seen as a family day out and a useful, vibrant tourist attraction. Unfortunately for him the television edit cut straight to ‘a right wee bastard’, a shaven-headed, vicious-looking child in a Chelsea shirt tossing a mace and marching along to the drums as if on his way to kick a few heads in.

  It was reported on all channels as the most peaceful 12th of July since the Troubles began. But the Republican news paper An Phoblacht complained the next day of media bias, particularly in the BBC, accusing them of completely ignoring the offensive anti-Catholic slogans chanted and the fears of Catholic families on the route, who had lived in terror of post-march attacks for thirty years.

  It seemed to me that the Protestants had every right to their marches; the Catholics had every reason not to want the marches in their streets.