Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  *

  Panels from the Britannic, the Titanic’s sister ship, decorated the upstairs room of one of Belfast’s most famous bars, the Crown Liquor Saloon. The Crown was known for fine Guinness, oysters and fast-moving bowtied barmen. The tiles, stucco and paintings all over the inside almost rivalled the decorations in City Hall.

  When I walked past the bar I thought there was a fight going on outside, but the bouncers were trying to stop a very fat, very drunk man from reeling into the traffic.

  ‘I need to get across the road.’

  ‘Not now you don’t – will you wait!’

  In an exact replica of the Crown bar, James Mason had hidden out in the 1947 film Odd Man Out. James Mason’s dying IRA man staggered out into the streets to face further fatal torments. The staggering fat man met a better end and was escorted to a pelican crossing by the bouncers, then manoeuvred into a taxi.

  ‘He knows where he lives, get him out of here, will ye, we’ve no time for this.’

  The bouncers went back to their doorway and I continued on my way to a concert being held outside City Hall. This was a massive event on an outdoor stage built across the hall’s entrance gates.

  People formed orderly queues around the block, people of all ages. A couple in their sixties in front of me said they didn’t care who was playing, they simply wanted to enjoy the fact that such a huge public event could happen in Central Belfast with no hint that there’d be disruption.

  The PSNI were obviously so confident there’d be no disruption they’d lent a number of their water cannon to the Dublin police. While the concert in Belfast passed off peacefully, Dublin had riots. They were hosting celebrations to welcome new countries to the European Union, but it wasn’t going well. The Dublin rioters seemed to be a mixed bag of disaffected youth looking to pass the time, and anti-globalization protesters from all around Britain. An even more depressing element among the protesters were straightforward local xenophobes objecting to the money that would go to poor Eastern European countries joining the union. Countries in exactly the state of disrepair Eire had been in before they joined Europe.

  It felt darkly pleasing that Dublin, for so long Cinderella to Belfast’s ugly sister, was having a bad night for a change, while Belfast was quiet and dull. The concert had been given the Father Tedesque name ‘A Beautiful Night’ – this didn’t bode well for the music content. There were some international stars, but there were also choirs of schoolchildren, vaguely famous Northern Irish singers and boy bands from Dublin massacring Van Morrison songs. As a man in his thirties behind me in the crowd said, ‘How can they have the nerve to do that in Van’s home town?’

  I muttered agreement and wondered, ‘Why couldn’t they get him here?’

  The man laughed. ‘I expect he looked at who else was on the bill and then heard it was to be called “A Beautiful Night” and told them to f off.’

  Despite the disappointing line-up, the crowds ambled home contented to have an enormous outdoor event in the city pass off so gently.

  Not so gently, the Manchester revellers in my hotel crashed home around five and began another hour or so of nocturnal squealing.

  The next morning feeling headachy and underslept, I went to a Presbyterian church. My granny and my mother would have been more mortified that I was wearing jeans than by the defection. Just like Catholics, Protestants dressed up for church.

  Everything inside was plainer than most Catholic churches – no shiny stuff, no fancy robes, no incense. There was a lot of Bible. There was a cross but slightly rambling sermon.

  I forced myself to engage properly and stop mentally fidgeting. I felt no more uncomfortable than I always felt in a church service – likely to do the wrong thing and not quite understanding what I was supposed to feel. At least I wasn’t being asked to contemplate the complex notion of transubstantiation – a Catholic service could send my brain into perplexed overload with that one. The Presbyterian service was much more down to earth and straightforward.

  I’d never liked the idea that every Catholic was supposed to believe and feel the same things. But in the Protestant service I didn’t have any greater sense that it was my individual relationship with the almighty that mattered. I was in a large group of people who were all supposed to feel the same thing about God, morality and using leisure time constructively – the theme of the main sermon, I think. A poor ability to concentrate for over five minutes could be the real root of my problem with organized religion.

  Still, at least I had discovered an unbiased inclination to mentally drift and fidget on both sides of the religious divide.

  Outside the church I started sneezing and feeling ill. I was sure the damp plaster in my hotel had given me some kind of bronchitis. I had some newly discovered relatives to meet up with and worried that giving them my germs would be a bad way to introduce myself.

  I don’t know what kind of relatives these were – the children of my grandfather’s cousin? Way beyond under-cousins into the outer realms of cousinage.

  Mark and Sam were Protestants from Lurgan, living in Omagh and Fermanagh respectively. They were a few years older than me, one was a businessman, one was in show-business – this is how they’d have defined themselves, rather than by religion.

  They lived within miles of my Catholic relatives but they didn’t know them. These were Caulfields who were barely related to me; how would they know they were related by marriage to the other half of my family? Mark did believe that most people in Northern Ireland were related anyway.

  ‘It’s such a small country without much immigration. What’s that thing about six degrees of separation? In Northern Ireland you’ve probably only got the two.’

  They thought it was funny I was staying on Sandy Row.

  ‘It was cheap,’ I said.

  ‘I can imagine,’ Sam said, looking at the concrete tower I’d condemned myself to. ‘And I’m sure it wasn’t here a fortnight ago.’

  We went for a drink in the upstairs bar of the Europa – I have a very forgiving nature.

  We talked about how many Caulfields there were, although none of them closely related to our dwindling branch. We plotted to storm and squat Dublin’s Municipal Gallery and discussed what we knew of my grandfather. They’d heard there had been some rift between my grandfather and some of their grandparents’ generation. They didn’t think it was about him marrying a Catholic: ‘People had very complicated opinions back then. I heard they didn’t like it that he’d joined the British army. Not because it was British, but because it was the army. Their religion would have been against that.’

  ‘And against gambling?’

  ‘Did he gamble?’

  ‘There was a rumour.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have liked that. But they were only cousins. How well do you know all your cousins?’

  ‘Some hardly at all. But I have a lot.’

  ‘You see, unless you make the effort it can be very hard to keep track,’ Sam said. ‘I only met your father a few years ago. I just didn’t know he existed before then. But our side of the family must have taken your grandfather back into the fold. He was buried with them.’

  ‘I went down there but there’s no headstone.’

  ‘That’s the Ebeneezer Tabernacle for you,’ Mark laughed. ‘But then I was with Presbyterians at school who weren’t allowed birthdays. What a nightmare. Imagine. No cake, no presents your whole life.’

  I was glad to find my distant Protestant relatives had very comprehensible things in their heads. Whatever falling out there’d been in previous generations because my grandfather had been a soldier, a gambler, married to a Catholic… It seemed that was all just ancient strangeness to the three of us.

  They didn’t talk about the Troubles, or politics, or history in the active, engaged and vociferously interested way my mother’s family did.

  I wondered if being Protestant, successful and middle-class was almost as good as moving to England for protecting you from the situation.


  But towards the end of the evening, talking about what I thought I’d be writing, Mark said wistfully, ‘I suppose you’d have a thin book without the politics. I’m so sick of it. There’s such beautiful countryside. Do you know anything about fishing? There’s great fishing in Northern Ireland. My children live in Scotland now. It has a very similar kind of scenery, so I won’t miss that. I see nothing else keeping me here, really’.

  *

  People were leaving; people were staying. Mrs Khan was definitely staying.

  Mrs Khan lived in the Malone Road district of Belfast, a mixed peaceful area for the moneyed of all religions, perhaps a little more Catholic than not. There was supposedly a Malone Road accent I remembered my cousins imitating – a refined pseudo-English accent. The district had very big houses, big gardens and a green wealth of roadside trees.

  Mrs Khan’s husband was a consultant cardiologist, a typical Malone Road occupation. They’d lived in Belfast for eighteen years and, as she said, ‘We live here, our children live here. Where are we going? We’re not going anywhere. We live here.’

  I’d arrived at Mrs Khan’s doorstep sneezing. She’d opened the door and sneezed.

  ‘I am so sorry, if I’d known how to contact you I’d have rearranged our meeting.’ She sniffed. ‘I have a flu, and I’m not thinking straight. Please come in, I hope I can give you a sensible interview and I hope you won’t catch anything.’

  My damp plaster chill had turned into a feverish shaky type of proper plague. I sneezed and told her I was already getting flu, so not to worry.

  Pretty, small and slight, Mrs Khan nodded as I explained about my book.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘People always think this is a homogeneous community, just the two religions, but it’s not like that.’

  She told me that not only had she been in Belfast eighteen years, her children were now professional people working in the city. She ran the Al Nisa organization, a support network for Muslim women in Northern Ireland.

  ‘The Muslim population of Northern Ireland has a small recent percentage of asylum-seekers, mostly we are established and professionals – medical professionals in particular – who have been paying taxes for years, not living on compensation or giros.’ She stopped, sneezed and looked at me sharply.

  ‘Do you mind me asking what community you are from?’

  ‘Mixed, brought up in England.’

  She nodded, as if making detailed mental notes about that.

  ‘Anyway… Yes, the population also has students and business people, people in retail, IT, that kind of thing. The Muslim community has certainly been well established for thirty years, but records go back at least seventy years. My husband has been researching this and thinks the history is longer, sailors, traders – Muslims around and about Northern Ireland for hundreds of years.’

  I asked her if she thought the situation had changed recently.

  ‘Yes. Sudden and recent change. A man stopped his car last week. I mean stopped on purpose, backed up in the street and started screaming names at me, telling me to go home. I said, “This is my home!” But I ran into the nearest office block because I didn’t know how crazy he was. This wasn’t some kid, that’s what really disturbed me, it was a middle-aged man.’ She had her own accent with occasional words sounding very Northern Irish. ‘Usually it’s kids. I don’t know how they bring them up here. They’ve been brought up on both sides hearing about their rights all the time. Their rights but not their responsibilities. I have rights too, I have the right to go about my business and no one is going to stop me doing that.’

  She spoke of Muslim households suddenly having to live in fear of stones, or petrol bombs through the window. Young men attacked by gangs, women pushed and spat at.

  ‘Where has this come from? This isn’t about September the 11th, this started before that. Getting worse now, but it started in the nineties.’

  ‘Where do you think it’s coming from?’ I asked her. ‘Is it bitter individuals, or…’

  She cut across determinedly. ‘Oh no. It’s orchestrated. It’s orchestrated for various reasons by different kinds of paramilitary gangs. It gains them popularity with these bitter individuals you’re talking about, but it’s orchestrated. Oh dear, all this negative talk. Let me show you something positive.’

  She handed me glossy brochures for her women’s organization.

  ‘The original idea was for Muslim women not to feel isolated in a new country. To have our own place to meet. To go to organizations like the police and medical services in a positive way and tell them about our way of life. We go into schools with exhibitions about Muslim culture. We’re trying to get a better media profile, not just bad news about attacks. I’d like to see our festivals reported, maybe a documentary about the Muslim contribution. We have events with other women’s groups to learn about each other. And a lot of what we do is just fun.’

  She showed me a long list of classes from Arabic and Qu’ranic classes, to keep fit and car maintenance. There were training courses in fostering, childminding, computers… There were group outings to the seaside and historical sites around Northern Ireland.

  ‘If there are no more questions, I have to go now, as we are having one of our social gatherings today and I’m running a bit late. This flu has made me all over the place.’

  If she was this tough and together when she felt she was all over the place, I was sorry for the person who crossed her when she was going full strength.

  *

  Belfast wasn’t the only part of Northern Ireland where attitudes to ethnic minorities had changed. In Portadown shops and the town’s indoor market had been run by Indian families for decades. There had always been feeble jokes about how no one minded them because they weren’t Catholics or Protestants. Most of the Asian families around Portadown had come to Northern Ireland after being expelled from Uganda. They’d chosen Northern Ireland to avoid some of the anti-Ugandan Asian fuss going on in mainland Britain – and because they felt they knew Ireland, having been brought up Catholics, attending Catholic schools run by Irish nuns and priests.

  It was their race not their religion that had caused the recent stoning of their shops on Saturday nights, usually by gangs of Loyalist youths.

  My mother said she couldn’t believe this had started: ‘I remember being really shocked when I came to England and heard racist remarks – I was proud we’d had none of that, whatever else was wrong with us, we never had that. There were Chinese and Indians in Northern Ireland long before even the Asians in Portadown. There’s Indian families in Derry were there since I was a child. They had shops, clothes shops. I think they started coming over after the Second World War.’

  Sally in Derry told me she definitely remembered Indians appearing in the city in the late forties and fifties. ‘I remember running out to stare at this Indian man on a bicycle with a big box strapped to it. I’d never seen the like. And they came into the poor, poor areas like the Bogside selling things, which was amazing for a start, but then they were offering to let people buy things at a few pence a week. I’m afraid we used to call them the darkies – you’d put a bit of money aside each week that you had to give to the darkie for something. No one had ever trusted poor Bogside Catholics with credit before. They were a godsend. Now they’ve shops, their children and their children have grown up here. What else do they have to do to be Northern Irish?’

  The Jewish area of Belfast was near Thorndale Avenue, a little further along the Antrim road. This was a very old community. Not only was Wolff, of Harland and Wolff, Jewish, the Mayor of Belfast in 1899, Sir Otto Jaffe, was also Jewish. The Jaffe family first came from Hamburg in the 1840s to trade in linen, and along with several other Jewish families had successfully established themselves in the Belfast linen trade within a decade. The Jaffe family built a synagogue in Great Victoria Street. Fleeing pogroms in Central Europe, more Jews arrived in Belfast and another synagogue was opened by the Jaffe family, near the Antrim Road. Duri
ng World War Two a children’s hostel was opened for orphaned Jewish children in North Belfast. There were over 1,500 Jews living in Northern Ireland after World War Two; now there were less than 200. This community had found itself suddenly under attack. Extreme Loyalists with their ‘little Britain’ attitudes were suspected of most attacks on ethnic minorities. But in the case of the Jewish community, their attackers were believed to be Republican extremists, expressing their support for Palestine.

  Traditionally the Jews had been businessmen, gravitating to the mainstream in society, therefore they’d grown closer to the Protestant community. The Republican identification with the Palestinians and the flying of the Palestinian flag on Republican estates led to some Protestants identifying themselves with Israel and the flag of Israel began flying on Loyalist estates. The Jewish community’s spokesman described himself as ‘bemused’ by this.

  The shifts from sectarianism to racism were a sad betrayal of Belfast’s past, the city port that had refused to let slave ships come in. The Protestant community had been very strongly against slavery. The ships weren’t allowed in, and many Protestant churches agitated to stop any contact with the trade.

  Although Belfast didn’t trade slaves, they did trade with slave plantations in the West Indies, provisioning plantations with food and beer, and cheap Belfast linen was used to clothe the slaves. Meat-packing and fish-salting for this export trade became lucrative, with consequent benefits for fishing and agriculture. Belfast’s sugar-refining industry was built on imports from slave plantations.

  The United Irishmen called for a boycott of sugar products and one of their founders, Thomas Russell, said, ‘On every lump of sugar I see a drop of blood.’