Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  The news ended with talk of George Best being back on the drink.

  ‘Ah, it’s a shame,’ said the newsreader. ‘But what’s to be done?’

  Although I’d taken against her for her sharp manner and her unwashed duvet cover, the landlady was friendly over breakfast and said it was a pity I’d only stayed a couple of nights.

  ‘I’m just passing through this time but I’ll definitely be back.’

  ‘Well there’s a lot more to Belfast than you can see in a couple of days.’

  ‘I know. I was just interested to see the marching season.’

  She looked at me thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s a good day out. It’s a shame people have to call it that. It’s a parade, not a march. A friend and I were talking yesterday and saying it should be called the carnival season, like Rio de Janeiro.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I said, to keep the peace.

  I did want to spend more than a couple of days in Belfast – but at any other time of year.

  It was summer; seaside time.

  Newcastle had been a great place to be an energetic toddler. My escapes from the back garden to the sea front were something my parents cited as early evidence of wanderlust. I thought they were more early evidence of ruthless greed, because I’d escape to an Italian ice-cream stand, insisting I could swap stones and dolls’ heads for ice cream. The icecream man would have to oblige, while waiting for the local policeman to come by and escort me back home. The policeman didn’t have to conduct a great investigation to find out where I belonged – I lived next door to him.

  I recognized the Newcastle house – I knew exactly what road to turn into without reading the street sign – there it was, unchanged at the end of the cul de sac. I realized I used to cover an impressive distance on short legs to conduct my sea-front bartering. I rang the doorbell, thinking the house looked as though pleasant elderly people lived there now and might let me in for a cup of tea, in exchange for nostalgia about my life there as a child. Probably less valuable as currency than dolls’ heads, but it was worth a try.

  No answer. Peering round the side of the house, I could see the garden was the same simple patch of grass with a shed. I could picture where my brother’s pram would be parked by the high hedge on summer afternoons. He’d been billed as ‘a little brother to play with’, but all he did was sleep. So he may have been to blame for the runaway, con-artist lifestyle I fell into before the age of five.

  A man washing a car a few doors down was taking an interest in my snooping about. Maybe he’d ring the policeman who might still live next door. The policeman would come out, recognize me and realize I was now of an age to go to prison. He’d do me for attempted burglary, revenge for all the trips up the hill he’d had to make to return an ice-cream-stained child to stressed-out parents.

  *

  Oh Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight,

  The people all working by day and by night

  They don’t sow potatoes nor barley nor wheat

  But there’s gangs of them diggin’ for gold in the street.

  At least when I asked them that’s what I was told

  So I just took a hand at this diggin’ for gold;

  But for all I’ve found there, I might as well be

  Where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.

  Singer, watercolourist, storyteller and composer Percy French has been laid claim to by Newcastle. All his papers and memorabilia were housed in an archive in the town, although he was born in Roscommon, buried in Lancashire, and there were rumours the song was written about the view of the Mournes from the Hill of Howth, Co. Dublin, on a clear day.

  But it’s obvious the mountains do sweep into the sea at Newcastle, a far more arresting and inspiring sight than some squinty view from the Hill of Howth.

  By the edge of the mountains, the stone buildings and fishermen at work in the harbour felt like the makings of a simple life someone would miss in gaudy, goldless London.

  Old trawlers were still in use among the modern sailing dinghies; nets were being repaired, shellfish pots stacked, and I was sorry to see that I was too early for the Herring Gutters’ Festival – a four-day summer extravaganza with boat trips, live music, clowns, mountain walks, a float parade, a waiters’ race and a daft raft race. I particularly liked the warning at the foot of the advertising poster: ‘All times are subject to weather and Murphy’s law’.

  Trippers thronged around, buying rock, ice cream, and most of the high street seemed unmolested since the 1960s. It was a cheap and cheerful sea front, much of it needed a coat of paint, but Newcastle didn’t have to care about this kind of surface detail – it had a long, wide yellow-sand beach running parallel to the high street, and those mountains.

  I don’t know if trippers of the day scattered in alarm when eccentric local inventor Harry Ferguson made his 1910 flight along the promenade in a home-made monoplane. Ferguson also invented the four-wheel drive and won a multi-million-pound law suit with the Ford Motor Company, when they tried to infringe the patents on his invention of the modern tractor. He later merged with the Canadian tractor company Harris Massey to form the still profitable Massey Ferguson Tractors. Massey, by odd coincidence, began his career with a small mechanics shop in Newcastle, Ontario.

  In later life, Ferguson developed an influential interest in car and motorbike racing. On-road motorbike races were particularly popular in Northern Ireland. A triangular road race between Portstewart, Coleraine and Portrush, known as the North West, brought biking enthusiasts from all over the world.

  Until his recent death at a race in Estonia, 23-times winner of the Isle of Man TT and thirteen-times winner of the North West Joey Dunlop OBE MBE was the County-Antrim-born hero of motorbike racing, personally drawing international crowds to Northern Irish roadsides. One of Harry Ferguson’s campaigns had been to legalize and regulate these thrilling but very dangerous off-track races.

  I liked a kind of thrill that was less likely to break my collar bones, legs, arms… I bought an ice cream from what I was sure was the same old 1930s Italian shop, full of young women now, who looked as though they’d have no sense of humour about a child trading in dolls’ heads. The music playing loudly in the shop might have been intended as child friendly: the clunky comic song ‘Camp Granada’… ‘It’s stopped hailing, guys are swimming, guys are sailing…’, although the severe efficiency of the new assistants made it seem more likely the song was just on the radio, nothing to do with their intentions.

  Guys were swimming and sailing. The ice cream was still worth committing crimes for. I watched a train of children on ponies waddle down the promenade, cross the main road and disappear somewhere up a side-street. Other children ran in and out of the sea with bright plastic buckets and spades; fathers built elaborate sand castles, amusing themselves and boring their children, who preferred to dig a good hole and try to fill it with sea water. A seaside resort was a dependable place to come from, the essence and purpose of it wouldn’t ever really change. No wonder I’d been thrown by RAF bases in Wales and London – my father might have wanted a broader life, but Newcastle had been a very cosy, child-ideal little place to leave behind.

  At the end of the town, facing the mountains, the vast Victorian Slieve Donard hotel raised the tone way above the Kiss Me Quick, candy false teeth, main sea front atmosphere. The spired hotel was built by the railway company to attract wealthy visitors to the coastal resort. Charlie Chaplin stayed there, as well as the grander citizens of Northern Ireland. With the demise of the railway and some neglectful management, the place began to fall into disrepair and slipped on to the target lists of bombers in the 1970s. The nineties brought new owners, massive reinvestment and an upsurge of fancy visitors using the adjacent Royal County Down Golf Club. A few days after my visit, President Clinton was to head for Newcastle and a game on this golf course, where local observers reported him to have a ‘shocking bad temper’.

  Set in acres of sea-front gardens,
the hotel was named after the Slieve Donard, highest peak of the fifteen-mile-long Mourne range, in turn named after Saint Donard, who lived in a stone hut at the top of the mountain, while trying to convert the mountain people to Christianity. Although there were walkers in stout boots trailing about the mountain paths, the Mournes were still a place for feeling contemplative and awed by nature – if not quite driven to hermity sainthood.

  In a small country, it was strange to suddenly find so much remote, quiet space, but I suspected the Mournes were a magic dimension, expanding once you’d crossed into their silent territory. I wasn’t alone in this feeling; C. S. Lewis drew heavily on memories of the Mourne mountains for his descriptions of Narnia.

  In the eighteenth century, the coast south of Newcastle was a smugglers’ landing strip, bringing in spirits, tea, silk and tobacco from the Isle of Man. The goods were then taken up through the mountains on a track called the Brandy Pad to Hilltown, the distribution centre for the contraband. Hilltown still had an excessive number of pubs, a legacy from the wild old days.

  I stopped for more sea air at Kilkeel, a busy fishing harbour, piled with lobster pots. In an old stony part of town with winding streets, shops sold ornaments made from polished Mourne granite and black crystal jewellery. There had always been rumours of gold in the Mourne mountains but you’d have to mind yourself – the mountains were supposed to be full of little people and fairies who could turn nasty if you were caught taking anything away. There were turn-of-the-century reports of two-foot red-headed people, ‘wild looking with scanty clothing’, bothering prospectors and little troll-like men coming into settlements and chasing children.

  In this district, if you put a bench outside your front door you should put it on the right, so a friendly type of creature called a Pooka might turn up for a cheerful chat and bring you good luck. If you put the bench on your left, you’d get a bad Pooka, who would tell you nothing but terrible news and maybe cause you some harm. The bad Pooka was a gobliny creature who would particularly like to sit down with strangers and newcomers, to tell them stories of dreadful things that had happened to people in the area, fortunes swindled from fine families, murders… Then the Pooka would just go off without saying goodbye, with no apparent purpose but to make the stranger feel they’d made a bad choice of place to land up.

  The Pooka could travel. In the James Stewart film Harvey, the invisible six-foot rabbit who befriends Stewart is referred to as a Pooka. Some of the County Down Pookas took animal form, but I couldn’t find a local story about a six-foot rabbit. Perhaps Pookas, like so many of the Irish, got to America and became what they’d always wanted to be – for people it was presidents, for Pookas it was giant white rabbits in the movies.

  A friend who’d not made the journey since the nineties had warned me the roads I had to travel next, through the ‘bandit country’ of South Armagh, often had signs on telegraph poles saying ‘Beware of the Sniper’, or ‘Sniper at Work’. The signs were a dark joke aimed, like the guns, at the British army or suspect strangers. I meandered down tiny roads between Newry and the border, and finally spotted a sign on a pole ahead. It had a phone number and read: ‘Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How’.

  ‘So you survived the North?’ my friend Anthony asked me when I arrived at the cottage in the middle of nowhere, County Cavan. I’d survived it very well, thank you, I told him, and I hadn’t even noticed I’d crossed the border until I saw different-coloured post boxes. The little road I’d come along would probably have been blocked off at the height of the Troubles, to try and minimize lawless toing and froing – but now, not even a customs man. If only I’d thought to bring butter.

  Some would say Cavan wasn’t in Northern Ireland, but the former divisions of Ireland – Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught – had included Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan as part of Ulster.

  When Ireland was partitioned, Cavan, with its poor farming land, and nothing anybody wanted, had been given up by the British without too many tears. They’d also wanted to keep the predominantly Catholic Cavan population out of the new Ulster, to maintain a loyal Protestant majority. So the new state was three counties short of being accurately Ulster.

  Cavan people had a reputation for meanness. Jokes abounded: ‘How was barbed wire invented? Two Cavan men fighting over a penny’ Or more tellingly: ‘In Cavan they eat their dinner in the table drawer in case anyone comes to call.’

  The meanness came from a history of terrible devastation in the famine, endless struggle to make bad land pay and, until recently, as in most border counties, an inability to cash in on the Southern Irish tourist boom because of proximity to the border with the North.

  These border counties were notoriously full of the more lethal elements of INLA, PIRA, RIRA… So I was surprised when Anthony told me I’d missed the local Orange parades.

  Anthony’s mother said, ‘Oh yes, they have parades, they’re all black around here.’ Which gave me a bit of a mental double take.

  I’d completely forgotten that the North was black and Protestants were black. And when we met some of my Cavan friends’ relatives, they assumed if I was from the North I must be ‘black’. Anthony’s mother had quickly started to talk of my brother the priest.

  Why the North was black and Protestants were black was one of those things there are ten, at least, opinions about. There was the obvious recent connotation of black-hearted, black-souled and all that kind of thing… But in the seventeenth century, the Scots in Ireland were forced to swear ‘a black oath’ by Charles I, to make the Scottish Church conform to the English, which led to those who took the oath being called ‘Black mouths’.

  To complicate matters further, there were the black Irish in general. Some think this refers to the dark colouring of many Irish people, with romantic speculation about people all round the coast being ravaged by shipwrecked Spaniards. There were shipwrecked Spaniards occasionally, but they’d have been very busy… Some say it refers to the dark indigenous, pre-Celtic population, therefore a look still found in certain areas of the country.

  In America the ‘black Irish’ referred to the Catholics who arrived to escape the famine in ‘black 47’ – the potato blight that began the famine being referred to as the ‘black blight’.

  I’m not going to stick my half-black neck out and decide on an answer. Basically most of the Irish were called ‘black’ at some stage by someone who didn’t like them.

  Anthony’s cousins, just south of the black North, farmed hard and supplemented their income working in a factory in Monaghan half the year. Fishing and hunting tourism was opening up in Cavan, but it was still an area where working the land was the main purpose of it. It was a place where people died with a million in the bank and lived as if they hadn’t a penny, not meanness so much as deep fear of poverty. Next year could bring a bad harvest, cattle disease, factory closure, or some spill-over atrocity from the North to put off tourists.

  It might have become difficult to tell where the border was, but the North and South of Ireland seemed to be growing further and further apart psychologically. People in the North, of whatever religious persuasion, always had some tale of the villainy and treachery of people in the South. People in the South always had some anecdote of a terrible experience exemplifying the bigotry and dangerousness of the North.

  Happily, it seemed to have been established in the Cavan household that I wasn’t dangerous.

  Anthony’s mother had been brought up in the Cavan countryside and slotted back into country life without a lot of panic. Anthony and I, Londoners for too long, were inclined to panic – it was so quiet at night, so dark, and creatures scrabbled around in the roof.

  Anthony said we were ‘plastic paddies’, that is, people brought up in England who made a great deal of show-off noise about their Irish ancestry, particularly applicable to the sort of person who decided to return to their ancestry and write books about what it meant to them.

  I argued that ‘plastic paddies’ were second gener
ation, not people like me, who’d been born in Ireland.

  ‘You were born in the North, in Britain. Half black and plastic,’ Anthony teased me.

  I said, ‘You know my granny warned me. She’d say, “Southerners, they seem friendly, they smile and smile but they’d stab you in the back as soon as look at you.”’

  ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘But she married a Protestant, she was subjected to a lot of their propaganda.’

  ‘Black propaganda?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  After this pretence of really giving a damn, we went to the pub. A great barn of a place in town, where there’d been a riot in the eighties. Local young men had got so crazed at a Samantha Fox stage show, they’d stormed the stage. Samantha Fox had been whisked away and the disappointed young men of Cavan went wild with disappointment, wrecking the place until the Garda stopped them. There wasn’t a lot to do at night in Cavan.

  Although we tried to spend our evenings in the Cavan cottage burning a turf fire and reading Irish novels, Anthony and I soon started fretting that we couldn’t get any recognizable television programmes on RTE and some of them were in Gaelic. We flapped about helplessly when we realized the two shops in the village three miles away shut at five; and we were always having to call the farming relatives to fix water pumps, examine electrical failures, or tell us his mother was right, it was just mice in the roof, not bears.

  I took to walking the roads looking for kindling sticks for the fire we’d become obsessed with. Although there was warm sunshine until ten o’clock at night, we felt the turf fire was the one authentically country lifestyle feature we’d mastered. And stick-collecting along the roads at daybreak made me feel as though I was practically ploughing fields and herding heifers.

  One morning, I’d ambled about two miles from the cottage when one of the cousins drew up in his car, offering me a lift.