‘They’re stricter when it gets nearer the championship,’ Paul said. ‘But at this level they just get on with it. People like to see a manly game.’
I didn’t think I’d start wanting to play, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed the match. It just kept going, none of the stopping and starting involved in soccer. Possibly because of the loose attitude to punching.
Armagh won but Laois had put up a respectable show. We all filed out satisfied. We thought we’d lost a child, but Jack knew Dermot well and tracked him down at a hamburger stall.
I told Paul he’d been right about the atmospheric moment at the start of the match, it felt emotional and it felt like I’d lived through it before in some film.
‘What they don’t tell you is how much money the army pay to be there. Armagh’s training field was where they have that fortress thing. The club took them to court wanting them out of there. To try and keep the peace in the meantime, the army make a massive compensation payment to the club. They don’t call it rent, but that’s what it is really. It’s a legal dispute that neither side will settle. So Armagh are the best-funded club in the league.’
‘She’s not claiming she saw punching again, is she?’ Veronica asked, catching up to us. ‘She doesn’t understand the game, she doesn’t know what she saw.’
‘We’re talking politics,’ Paul said.
‘Stop when you get in my car,’ Veronica said. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Compensation,’ Paul continued, ‘that’s big money here. People injured, house damaged, car blown up. They can get criminal compensation and things like that. There’s people all over the country got money out of the army for posts on their land, vehicles passing over their land scaring the livestock… Northern Ireland is full of lawyers now.’
Veronica made an exaggerated yawn. ‘Oh, Paul, tell her about something else.’
‘Look,’ Jack said, ‘a Chinese restaurant.’
‘A Chinese restaurant in Crossmaglen,’ Veronica said. ‘Now there’s progress.’
Back at my uncle and aunt’s, progress was being made on my aunt’s long-expressed wish to have the front room redecorated. A man was in measuring things, one of many friends of the family.
‘There was a time I’d have done this kind of thing myself,’ my uncle said. ‘But the old ticker might not stand it. And if I’m to die before my time, I’d prefer it to be in a nobler cause than wallpapering.’
He was sent away to read. My aunt did what she liked to do, find out if people had something to tell you that you wouldn’t have expected.
‘My niece is visiting here,’ she said to the papering man. ‘What would you think would be interesting for her to see?’
‘Interesting? She should go to the South.’
‘You don’t think there’s anything in the North?’
‘Fermanagh. People go to Fermanagh and look at the lakes.’
‘What about round here, though?’
‘There’s nothing round here. Only work.’
People did work hard, and had done for centuries. One of the things to see around Northern Ireland was stately homes, dozens of grand houses built by people who’d arrived to put the Irish to work with varying degrees of kindness. February wasn’t the season for viewing these manor houses, castles and fine abodes, mostly run by the National Trust these days and closed over winter. I was slightly relieved, as there was only so much of furniture and oil paintings I could find riveting.
A project to set the Irish to work with a degree of kindness was the mill village of Bessbrook, founded in 1845 by John Grubb Richardson, a Quaker linen manufacturer.
The village was built around two greens, the houses all matched – black and white with slate roofs. The village had schools, shops, a dispensary – but no pub and no pawnshop, these being considered undesirable by the Quaker landlord. One of the first model villages, Bessbrook was the inspiration for the Cadbury Garden Village near Birmingham.
‘They all have peculiar latches on their doors,’ Uncle Joe told me. ‘So I noticed when I went up there canvassing for the Alliance party. I never knocked on a door that had the same type of fixings. They’d all designed their own, with some bit of metal from the mill; animals, names, faces, mythological beasts, all manner of outlandish imaginings of door fixings.’
The Alliance party that had led him to encounter these outlandish imaginings of door fixings had become a fairly enfeebled movement. Founded with the main aim of making politics without sectarianism, they’d attracted their greatest following when violence was at its height, people drawn to their message of communication and an end to bloodshed.
‘One of the main reasons I’d say the Alliance faded was that we knew we were against sectarianism, but what the rest of our politics should be we never really agreed on.’
I thought he was being hard on the party he’d worked for, because none of the parties who now had power seemed to do anything that wasn’t about sectarianism – whether trying to end it or continue it. And the Alliance didn’t have the power to stop violence – because they were never responsible for creating it.
The founder of Bessbrook decided it would have no police station, as the community would be so contented it would have no crime. This was a fine ideal when there was work at the mill and religion was just about God. When the Bessbrook mill closed, men of the town travelled by minibus to work in Kingsmills. This was at the time when Loyalist murder squads were picking off Catholics they considered political. The IRA wanted to take some striking revenge to stop the killings. They halted the Bessbrook minibus and asked the ten Protestants from Bessbrook if there was a Catholic on the bus. The workers thought the hooded gunmen were Loyalists and said there was no Catholic. The gunmen insisted they’d heard there was a Catholic on the bus. The Protestant workers wouldn’t give him up. The gunmen said in that case they’d kill everyone. Thinking he was saving his passengers, the driver admitted he was a Catholic. The gunmen pulled him to one side and shot all the Protestant workers.
Decades on, Bessbrook was as pretty as a postcard but felt tense. Walking into a shop, I had the feeling you get when you’re staying with friends and you walk into a room, everyone stops talking, and you just know a massive argument’s been going on. You’re a guest, so everyone makes polite conversation – or in my case showed me the road I needed to get out of town – but you know there’s something…
‘Of course you’re lost,’ a woman in the shop told me. ‘People take down signposts, or turn them around.’
‘Why do they do that?’
‘Oh, all part of it, you know, the carry-on.’
I sensed the people in the shop relax when I left; they didn’t like to see people they didn’t know.
I drove over to Keady, where there was supposed to be an old mill and information centre about the linen industry. I found a solid red-brick building with a huge water wheel attached to it. In one part of the building there was a restaurant. Round the other side there was construction work going on.
I asked one of the half-dozen workmen, ‘Is there an old mill information centre round here?’
All six stopped work and looked at me. With slow amusement, the nearest said, ‘You know, I think that’s what we’re building.’
‘There,’ his sidekick grinned at me, ‘you wanted information and now you have it.’
The signposting problem made it hard to find my next place of interest, Scarva. This may have been because of the ‘carry-on’, or because I was getting blinded by a sudden snow blizzard.
Scarva was, eventually, small, quaint and quiet. In Scarva on the 12th of July each year there was a famous sham fight between King James and King William, with everyone dressed up in costumes of the day. King Billy wins, King James runs away, everyone takes off their costumes until next year and has a nice cup of tea. It should have been a silly Sealed Knot type of day out, if the events re-enacted weren’t making people kill each other hundreds of years later.
In a small p
ark, Scarva had a recently garlanded First World War memorial. Around 15,000 Northern Irish Protestants died in World War One. Five thousand were killed or wounded on the first day of July 1916, at Thiepval Wood. Commemorations coincided with the marching season and were a more touching reminder of what Protestants loyal to Britain felt than commemorations of King Billy. These men had died for Britain, in living memory, a long way from home.
At least as many Catholics, mostly from the South, died in the First World War, but memory of them became unfashionable with the rise of Irish nationalism. The Protestants were always proud of what they did. In such a small country, those thousands dead meant there were few Protestant families who didn’t lose someone for Britain.
In World War Two, Southern Ireland was neutral, although thousands of men from there joined up to fight Nazism. Twenty-three thousand recruits joined from the North, Protestant and Catholic. In 1941 Belfast was heavily bombed – on the 15th of April, 745 people were killed in German raids on Belfast in one night. On the 4th of May 1941, over 3,000 homes were destroyed and the shipyards were devastated by an incendiary attack. The bombing went on; the city had no air-raid shelters, citizens fled to the countryside. My father was evacuated to Tipperary, after a German bomb exploded at the end of his street. Northern Ireland went through what the rest of Britain went through.
Uncle Joe said to me, ‘When you see Protestants at a Remembrance Day ceremony you feel very moved. You see them differently. Hurt and betrayed all the time. They didn’t get a country as a compensation for falling out with the English; they didn’t fall out with the English but get treated like a nuisance and old stick-in-the-muds while the Shinners are suddenly the darling boys of Westminster.’
Their loyalty had been kicked in the teeth by the English for hundreds of years. It baffled me. ‘I don’t get them. Why can’t they just accept that they’re Irish? I don’t get why they don’t hate the English more than anyone.’
‘Ah, a lot of them do now. That makes them all the more stubborn that they’re not going to bugger off into the sunset with Gerry Adams. But there’s nothing fashionable about them, and there’s no glory here for Blair that lies in their direction.’
I realized wishing the Protestants would just give over and get on with being Irish wasn’t about me going to Crossmaglen and finding I was a Republican at heart – it was a typically contemporary English point of view. I’d come to Northern Ireland to find my roots and discovered I was Tony Blair, which was more than disconcerting.
13. Proud to Be a Prod
‘Is that the price of a pen? That can’t be right. No one has bought a pen for a while, I didn’t realize they’d gone up to that price.’ The lady with very bottle-blonde hair stared at the biro I’d handed her. ‘Twenty pence? I’d think ten pence for an ordinary old biro like that, wouldn’t you, dear? I’d charge you ten but it’s my son’s shop and I suppose he knows what he’s doing.’
Overpriced or not, the small, old-fashioned shops of Sandy Row seemed to sell everything – furniture, sewing machines, home-made bread – and there was a shop selling flutes, books about flutes, flute lesson books, flute carrying cases… I pushed the door, but a man walking past said, ‘He’s closed the week, dear. A family crisis.’
I wandered around a bit more, delaying getting back to my hotel room with the biro, which would mean I was in for the night and writing. Maybe there was something else I needed to buy… No, I had my new pen and had to get to work with it. I really meant to… Then I discovered a latch on my hotel window was broken and I could distract myself doing something that must have become almost illegal in modern hotels – fling the window right open.
In a city of harsh-worded graffiti and stern murals, I was surprised by the graffiti I could see if I took a good lean out of my window: ‘Happy 40th Joyce from all off the family’.
Perhaps if pens were still only ten pence, people in Sandy Row would spell better.
If I leant right out of the window and craned my neck, I could see the more typical slogan ‘You Are Now Entering Loyalist Sandy Row’. I could also see the Napoleon face of Cave Hill, the Boyne Bridge and the exotic pagoda roof of the Whitehall Tobacco Factory.
I knew tobacco had been one of Belfast’s boom industries in the nineteenth century, and thought it would be gone now, along with the shipyards that built the Titanic. But the sweet tobacco smell wafting from the factory contradicted heavily bolted doors and shuttered windows.
I had to go out again to investigate.
In Belfast, buildings that looked closed could be merely guarding against breakage. Whitehall’s had 170 windows shattered when a bomb exploded in the nearby Europa hotel, but otherwise they’d kept a low profile and only lost two days’ production to the Troubles, quietly continuing a successful trade.
In 1810, brothers George and John Murray had a small grocery store down near the Belfast docks. Their most frequent customers were sailors buying tobacco. The brothers decided they wouldn’t make their fortune in the shop, but they might in tobacco. They built up a tobacco business, finally creating a best-seller in 1862, with Murray’s Mellow Mixture. Pipe-smokers were a conservative crowd, so introducing a product that caused brand-switching was a real triumph.
In the twentieth century the company’s best-sellers were the range of Erinmore mixes. The main Erinmore mix had a blend so secret only one senior person in the company knew the recipe. New tobaccos were being created all the time. Experiments had been made with exotic curry flavourings, or fruits, like kiwi and lychee. One of the company’s professed aims in the present anti-smoking climate was to create tobaccos that weren’t unpleasant to the non-smoker; chemists worked away to create what the company press officer called ‘wife-friendly aromas’.
The factory smelt friendly to me and had the endearing, wayward eccentricity that seemed to go with pipe-smoking. The building had its pagoda-style roofing, amid square castle turrets, with flashes of gold mosaic and patterned brickwork on the exterior walls. I’ve always thought cigarettes were just something to smoke, but a pipe was a sign of character – and a hobby. There was all the tapping out of the bowl to do, the cleaning and scraping with special tools. Then there was the decision to be made about what kind of pipe – short, long, straight, curved. There were the different kinds of fancy woods to choose from, the scents and textures of different tobaccos… Never mind wife-friendly aromas, I was starting to consider smoking a pipe myself. Wasn’t it time chic handbag pipes for ladies were investigated? Long thin ones for the evening, bright coloured ones for the beach… There was something about the manly atmosphere of Murray’s factory that told me, despite only losing two days’ production to the Troubles, they’d rather burn their premises to the ground than hear my schemes for the ‘lady pipe’.
Staying on the edge of Sandy Row seemed a good idea, because I wanted to make a better attempt to understand the parts of the population that were, as the nuns at my school used to dismissively call every other religion, non-Catholic.
The big blank chain hotel was surprisingly cheap, this close to central Belfast. The cement seemed barely dry, it smelt of drains, but there was a very welcoming, red-faced, sweat-drenched man roaming the corridors with a trolley; he seemed to keep the hundreds of rooms spotlessly clean all by himself. His helpfulness made me feel as though I was in a little family-run B & B, without that awkward sensation of being in someone else’s house.
I didn’t understand why the cheap hotel was even cheaper at the weekend – until the weekend came.
Belfast had a young population, and after dark, a blast of night clubs throbbed around the city. Dublin might have established itself as one of Europe’s party cities, but much cheaper Belfast was catching up. Stag and hen parties travelled from the South of Ireland, flew in from Liverpool, Essex, Manchester, Newcastle… Teenagers who looked barely old enough to leave school left their homes to get completely plastered in Belfast.
My hotel filled with girls in nine-inch heels and two-inch clothes, cla
nking up to their rooms with bottles of vodka, Bacardi… I could hear them through the walls shouting, ‘Come on, Cerise, let’s get bladdered and then meet the others downstairs for a drink!’
Girls like Cerise and friends teetered around the streets, holding on to each other, leaning against walls, shrieking, waving blown-up condoms, and there always seemed to be one at the heart of the pack in a bridal veil, vomiting in a gutter. Still, it was fun for them and all new income for Belfast…
I took a less philosophical view of them when they came screaming back to the hotel at five in the morning, accompanied by some boys who kept shouting that they were from Manchester, in case all of Ireland hadn’t heard them the first time… It took them an hour to realize the girls had no interest in anything but shrieking giggles about how many bruises they’d acquired falling over at various locations in Belfast. The boys then abandoned making heavy hints about sex and were happy to shout about the more important matter of how much they’d had to drink themselves. Finally, the boys left, the girls crashed about in the bathroom, screamed a receding chorus and went silent. Possibly they’d all died on the bathroom floor. I didn’t care.
Don’t think I didn’t take my revenge on them. I got up at a quarter to seven, put the television on as loud as it would go, sang, showered like a rowdy herd of bison and slammed my door behind me.
I’d had an interesting night out myself. Mine had probably not damaged my liver in any way but it had spun my head around.
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 23
