Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  Credit union members would know how well educated someone was, would have heard that someone had been ill, or would understand that someone had fallen behind on repayments because they had been recently bereaved. Modern banks, with all the boxes to be ticked before they’d make a loan, particularly didn’t understand rural life. Credit unions didn’t expect borrowers to fit a computer profile.

  ‘Another favourite of mine was a man who applied for “money to buy calf”. And then you see a couple of weeks later that he hadn’t quite thought the investment through, because he applies for “money to buy hay for calf”.’

  Uncle Joe said the difficulty with credit unions was gauging the right size for them to be. If they were too small, there wasn’t enough money in the pot. If they were too large, they became unmanageable and faceless.

  ‘But it’s not just me and my pals with a drawer full of used fivers, you understand. All the money is kept in a bank and we’re properly insured.’

  Even in the bad years of the Troubles they’d only had one robbery. Suspected to be a gang of Loyalist youths who knew a local man had just sold his lorry and would be making a deposit. They stole the money from the office before it went over to the bank.

  ‘Luckily the sensible woman in the office at the time just handed over, said goodbye and locked the door behind them as they left.’

  Generally, among all levels of paramilitary groups and sectarian gangs, it was considered beneath contempt to rob a credit union. The bank yes, but never the credit union, even in the worst of times.

  The worst of times around Portadown were in the eighties, years when my uncle thought all sanity had gone and life might become impossible for his family.

  ‘That was when they started a seemingly indiscriminate killing of Catholics. I thought about leaving then, sort of thought about it. I’d always have the cars outside at night with their tanks at least half full, just in case. And we had money saved in a Southern bank. It was there because we were thinking of buying a place in Donegal anyway, but it was there for an emergency too. But we survived. It’s still dangerous for the young ones, but no one’s coming after an old bugger like me now. I’ve always kept to my ways, going out and about whatever time of night I felt like it, but at least now my friends and associates aren’t all to be found shut in with a baseball bat behind the door when I come calling at some perfectly reasonable hour, like midnight.’

  I wasn’t planning to succumb to the household ways and be roaming around the countryside after midnight, but my cousin Paul arrived home for the weekend and took me out to a very raucous pub.

  ‘We’ll only stay here a while, because the crowd gets younger later and it’ll get too loud to talk.’

  Paul was always considered a quiet one in the family but when he did talk, he usually made the funniest or cleverest remark of the night. He had some kind of career to do with higher mathematics and computers, so complicated you needed to be as clever as he was to understand even the job description. It took him all over the world, but luckily for me he was home. He’d walked in the door with fistfuls of broadsheet newspapers that looked as though he’d devoured them. It wasn’t just at maths he was clever; he’d absorb information from newspapers and life around him, distil it and give you an insight on the world you couldn’t have arrived at in a thousand years of thinking.

  Our next stop was at some friends of his who lived in the Garvaghy Road, the beleaguered Catholic area of Portadown. His friends didn’t seem too beleaguered, more concerned that Paul had brought enough beer with him. We started talking about my return to my roots. His friend Brendan said, ‘I’d a mate over from Australia last year, he was talking to my grandad about his family name and how he thought his ancestors came from this part of Ireland. “Ancestors?” my grandad said. “People round here are fuckin’ grateful if they know who their da is.”’

  There were long arrangements to be made about a trip to see Liverpool play at home, then we were off again. In the taxi, Paul was getting a string of text messages from a girlfriend.

  ‘I think I messed this up with a phone call I made the other night on my way back from the pub. They should put a warning on mobile phones for people like me: “Don’t drink and dial”.’

  We went over to visit Cousin Veronica and John. I’d no idea what time it was by this stage, their children, the under-cousins, were all in bed, and I envied them. I was teased for being tired and startled out of a near doze by Veronica’s shrieking disbelief that she had a cousin who’d never seen a Gaelic football match.

  ‘You just have to go,’ Paul said, ‘or you’ll never understand half your conversations with this family.’

  Not all the family

  ‘I’m very disappointed in you,’ Mikey said as Paul, Veronica, Jack and Jack’s friend Dermot and I set off the next day. ‘I thought, at last, someone who won’t want to talk about football. But…’ He shook his head and kicked at the ground in a non-sporting fashion.

  ‘I have to see a match, Mikey. I won’t necessarily start talking about it.’

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘They’ve pulled you into their evil cult.’

  ‘Do your homework,’ Veronica told him.

  He slouched out of view in the way only a fifteen-year-old can slouch.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe this car was nearly new,’ Veronica complained as we drove down the lane from their long, low house. The size of people’s houses in rural Northern Ireland was phenomenal. Quite often people built their own houses, chipping in their labour to help a friendly builder. Once, financial necessity drove this, but these days it was more often simply how people chose to spend their money. Home and family were important – the family might not turn out how you wanted, but at least the house could come close to your dreams.

  Cars were another important thing to spend money on. I saw more new cars on the road than there were in the fanciest streets of London – maybe fancy London had less to prove.

  Veronica’s nearly new car had suffered already because they lived among John’s farming relatives: ‘The old farmers just see a new car and think, “That looks roomy, I could get a sheep in that.”’

  ‘Tell her about the old car,’ Jack piped up.

  ‘Oh, we had an old thing that would have lasted out the year with normal use, but Johns uncle flagged him down and said, “Quick, there’s three maggoty sheep in the field.” You probably don’t know this, but if you’ve got a sheep with maggot you have to rush it back to the farm for dipping. So John and the uncle shoved the three sheep in the boot, with their heads looking out at the road behind. John and the uncle fell into some deep conversation, probably about the price of sheep, and next thing John looks in the rear-view mirror –no sheep. They thought they must have jumped out, but when he stopped, he saw there was no boot in the car. The weight of the sheep on the rusty boot floor had made it drop right out. They turned back, thinking the sheep would have no more maggot problem because they’d be decapitated, but there they were. Sitting in the road on the floor of the boot.’ She sighed. ‘So when we got this car, I said to John, no sheep, no hay, no nothing – this is a car for family only. The evening I brought it back, I was so pleased, you know, “Look at my shiny new car.” Well, I don’t know if he was looking out the window with binoculars, or if he’d planted a bug in our kitchen, because next thing, the uncle was there at the door saying, “Veronica, lend me the keys, I’ve a lamb has to be picked up.” Three hours later, he brought the car back, filthy, with a dent in the side and a cracked wing mirror.’

  Jack tutted. ‘Mum, you should have said no.’

  ‘And have him talk about me the way he’d talk about me? I’d rather end up walking.’

  ‘The problem of geriatric joy-riding in rural Ireland,’ Paul said. ‘Be sure and put that in the book.’

  ‘Vandalism by sheep,’ Jack said.

  We slowed down to pass a group of men at the side of the winding road.

  ‘There’s something you’ll only see round here,’ Ve
ronica said. ‘Road bowls.’

  Road bowls was pretty self-explanatory. Players had to get a twenty-eight ounce iron ball along a couple of miles of bendy country road in as few shots as possible.

  ‘What happens if they hit a car?’

  ‘Do you see many cars?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Hitting a car, or a person, to give you a good angle round a bend is probably OK,’ Paul said.

  ‘There’s a skill to it,’ Veronica said, waving to the men. ‘You have to know to throw short just before a corner and there’s a special cornering technique of getting a spin on it. There’s some sort of rule about staying in the road boundaries but not much else. The main point of it is betting. They bet hundreds on it.’

  It looked like a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday.

  Road bowls was hundreds of years old. It used to be played in the north of England and all over Ireland. Now, outside of Armagh, the only other place the game was played was Cork. It had completely died out in England – except in Essex, where Irish workers at Ford had reintroduced the game.

  The hills down through South Armagh were pretty, rocky and occasionally flashed with yellow gorse bushes. We were going to see Armagh play at home in Crossmaglen. There was no question of me taking an interest in any other team.

  ‘Tyrone have been doing quite well,’ Paul explained, ‘but they’re said to play a very skilful game, which to Armagh means they play like a bunch of Jessies. Whereas Armagh…’He grimaced. ‘They play a sort of Rollerball-style game.’

  ‘They play a very physical game,’ Veronica corrected him. ‘If that Tyrone player had his groin in front of someone’s fist last week, why wasn’t he looking where he was going?’

  Gaelic football was an amateur game. A star player would be back at work on Monday and did his training in his spare time. If there was a long period of training, say before the championships, they’d take it out of their own holidays. Costs of strip and travel were met by the fund-raising activities of club supporters. As players had to come from the county they played for, most people supporting them knew them, so involvement was intensely personal. Especially for Veronica and John, who spent a lot of time organizing community games. John had trained many championship players as juniors.

  ‘It’s not like soccer,’ Veronica said. ‘It’s a real family thing. Both sets of supporters mix in the stand. People always take their kids, even if they’re a nuisance. Do you remember, Jack, when you were a nuisance?’

  Jack sighed heavily. ‘She always goes on about this. I was five.’

  ‘I’d thought he was right by me but I realized as I took my seat in the stands he wasn’t there. I couldn’t see him. A man beside me asked what was wrong and I said my child had gone missing. Within minutes the word went all round the stands that a child was missing. The match was due to start but an announcement was made – they wouldn’t start until a missing child had been found. Regardless that this was a really big important match… A few minutes later a couple of Armagh players brought Jack out – he’d darted off and found his way in to talk to the players. So that’s the kind of community atmosphere you get. Mind you, there’s another part to the tale. A month later, I was organizing a minibus trip of kids to go to a match in another part of the country. One of the fathers turned out to be the man who’d been in the stand next to me. He said, “So it’s you taking charge of my son on this trip. Tell me, can I be sure you’ll not lose him?”’

  ‘I was five then,’ Jack reiterated. ‘She always has to go on about that story.’

  Crossmaglen had a large market square – trading had been the town’s mainstay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Horse-trading and agricultural markets still went on, but the reputation of Crossmaglen as the heart of IRA country had overshadowed the earlier reputation men of the town had for being astute dealers. There were songs about the ‘Dalin Men of Crossmaglen’, who not only traded livestock, grain and animal feed, but also second-hand clothes and exotic goods, such as citrus fruit, that they’d buy up on trips to England. They’d work in England for a while to get a stake, then return to Crossmaglen with whatever they’d spotted as missing in the marketplace.

  Another faded reputation was for linen thread lace-making. In 1895 a Miss Harris, who sounded like a friend of Miss Bamford, had opened an agency to sell lace and a school to teach local girls the craft. The lace was sold to stores in London, Belfast and Dublin, and by 1930, over 200 local girls made their living making lace. Then the genteel cottage industry started by Miss Harris was taken over by a large firm in nearby Cullaville. This firm didn’t pay the workers in cash; they paid with a ticket, usable only in the company shop for groceries, hardware and drapery. Some of the lacemakers rebelled and traded independently with city stores or dressmakers, but by World War Two, lace-making had almost vanished from Crossmaglen.

  Tricolours, signs on lampposts saying ‘Brits Out’ or just ‘IRA’ told you that lace-making was unlikely to make a comeback as the town’s preoccupation in the near future. There were boards outside churches with a Roll of Honour – lists of names of Volunteers who’d died in the Troubles. It was disturbing to see the number of people from the IRA alone who’d been killed in South Armagh.

  We deliberated outside a shop selling Gaelic football shirts. Jack and Dermot collected the shirts from all teams and there was a shirt in the shop window from some team that neither of them had.

  ‘But the shop’s shut, so there’s a tragedy,’ Veronica said.

  Conversation turned to their new collecting craze, soccer shirts. Veronica teased them all the way up to the grounds for supporting Manchester United.

  ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ she told them.

  ‘I don’t know anything about soccer,’ I said, ‘but even I know only girls support Manchester United.’

  Jack looked hurt for a moment then said sombrely, ‘Well, like you said, you don’t know anything.’

  Passing into the ground through turnstiles, we could choose to pay in euros or sterling; this close to the border either would do.

  We positioned ourselves well, just under the shelter of the centre field stand. The stands held about 200 people, waving and greeting – all the Armagh supporters knew each other. The Armagh supporters mingled cheerfully with the blue-shirted supporters of Laois. There were probably more women and children present than men.

  ‘Laois is a small county,’ Veronica said, ‘so they’re a bit disadvantaged in their choice of players.’

  Paul said Laois, pronounced Leesh, had originally been named Queen’s County in honour of Mary Tudor and was renamed in 1922.

  ‘So their team supporters could shout for the Queen’s but they tend not to.’

  ‘Why not?’Jack wanted to know.

  ‘That’ll teach you,’ Veronica said to Paul, who suddenly needed to go and buy us all coffee and sweets.

  It was a cold day, misty. Behind the grounds were some bleak-looking houses with cameras mounted on top. Behind them, a horizon of mountains hung with low grey clouds. Slapped up beside the ground was a massive, dark-green, steel-clad army post with a high observation tower. It was the kind of grim presence I’d forgotten about feeling in Northern Ireland. But in Crossmaglen there it still was, the dark weight of the war.

  Beneath the observation tower, the football supporters went about their business, buying sweets and coffee and hoping the rain wouldn’t come off the hills at a slant because they hadn’t got their kids far enough back in the covered stand.

  ‘Ask me anything you don’t know,’ Jack said.

  ‘Have you not been to a football match before?’ Dermot looked awed such ignorance could exist.

  ‘She lives in London,’ Jack said.

  Dermot looked even more awed. ‘Are you English?’

  ‘I was born here,’ I said, not wanting the child to associate me with all the dark metal beside us.

  ‘She’s my mum’s cousin,’ Jack said impatiently. ‘She’s writing a book.’

  ‘
A book about football?’ Dermot asked hopefully.

  Jack laughed. ‘That would be a short book. No. She’s writing about everything interesting.’

  Dermot nodded, as if he knew exactly what this meant.

  Paul came back and pointed to the dark cloudy mountains. ‘Doesn’t it feel like the start of a film about the Troubles? You know, some kind of sectarian thriller. It gets more like that. Just before the match starts, the people stand and sing the “Soldiers Song”, under the shadow of the big army post. What you’ll miss is the shot of the army helicopters hovering ominously over the mountains in the mist but you’ll get the feel of it.’

  It was a weird feeling. I straggled as we all stood to sing, I sort of knew the tune but… Some people seemed to know some of the words, but an old woman behind me belted out every syllable of every verse. Most people put their hands on their hearts. The voices drifted up towards the army observation towers, as they must have done for decades, more melancholic than defiant.

  … out yonder waits the Saxon foe,

  So chant a soldier’s song,

  Soldiers are we

  Whose lives are pledged to Ireland…

  The clouds rolled lower on the mountains, darker. I felt a well of emotion, realized how easy it would be to hand your life over to these moments of fellow feeling. If you were lonely, unemployed, unhappy… Surrounded by people telling you that the way to be part of it was to be part of it. The romantic sadness of dying for your country had welcoming comfort.

  But for me it was an emotional moment that passed. I’d had the same feeling at rock concerts and funerals.

  Gaelic football was very fast, very exciting to watch. It was most like Aussie rules football, or like rugby without all the hold-ups of the scrum – and the players tended to be less bashed to ugliness. They were young and tall. They wore black leather gloves to protect their hands when passing, which made them look very cool. Otherwise it was the usual sort of game – running up and down, touching down or kicking goals. I could see Armagh were going to win it, but Laois were just good enough to make it interesting. When Laois looked like getting a bit too interesting, Armagh became more physical. Right in front of me, just out of the linesman’s eyeline, an Armagh player punched an opponent who thought he might run after the ball – wallop in the face. Then on the far side, an elbow to the stomach. It was carnage. One in ten incidents of ‘physical play’ were apprehended, no one was sent off, and I was the only person in the stands gasping.