Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

by Annie Caulfield

  Russell’s lover, Protestant philanthropist, political activist and feminist Mary Ann McCracken, was a committed abolitionist and constantly tried to rally more commitment to the anti-slavery movement in Belfast.

  In 1789 former slave Equiano spoke in Belfast against slavery. He was warmly welcomed, particularly by Quakers and non-conformists. Catholics were suspicious of the anti-slavery movement, mainly because Protestants were so centrally involved. And because the leaders of the Catholic Church were very conservative, particularly those who’d done well for themselves in America, exemplified by John Hughes, the Tyrone-born Bishop of New York, who said an abolitionist was ‘an anti-hanging man, women’s rights man, an infidel frequently, bigoted Protestant always, a socialist, a red republican, a fanatical teetotaller’.

  A busy man who managed all that.

  Slave trading in Britain officially ended in 1833 but American abolitionists wanted to keep pressure coming from Britain. In 1845, another former slave, Frederick Douglas, gave a lecture tour in Britain. In Ireland he was warmly welcomed by committed Catholic abolitionist Daniel O’Connell. At the death of O’Connell, Douglas said, ‘The cause of the American slave, not less the cause of his country, had met a great loss.’

  Douglas was a religious Protestant himself and under the wing of Belfast Protestant abolitionists he gave seven lectures in the city that were rapturously received.

  On his return to America, Frederick Douglas remained interested in Irish issues, particularly the increasing racism among Irish immigrants to the USA, speaking of this with disappointment: ‘Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against colour to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens, and yet no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have this same Irish people.’

  In the African Cultural Centre near the university, May, the tired Belfast woman running the office, had similar tales to Mrs Khan’s. Some of the African community had been there a long time – medical professionals, civil servants, academics and businessmen. Some Africans had chosen Northern Ireland out of curiosity, some had been posted there from the British mainland, some had married into the country. There were students and an increasing number of nurses. Again, attacks were on the increase. Most of the African community had moved to South Belfast and the University district, not to be among Catholics or Protestants, but to be out of areas where people were poor, unemployed and looking for someone to blame.

  ‘There’s a lot of envy. People in public housing see Africans buying houses. They don’t understand that the Africans are working three jobs to pay those mortgages. We don’t have that kind of enterprise here. We’re stuck in a benefit culture. It’s such a shame the way things are going here, but the government doesn’t govern. It has tantrums about the peace talks and doesn’t do anything about getting people back to work and rebuilding areas that the Troubles have wrecked. A lot of Northern Irish people have got so stuck they need energizing and leading. They’re not getting it and they don’t understand when they see immigrants getting on.’

  I thought she was being a bit hard on her own. ‘But isn’t there a class thing? A lot of immigrants are educated professional people, way ahead of the people on sink estates around Belfast.’

  ‘But immigrants will scrub floors, even if they’re doctors, to get on,’ she argued.

  I knew this was true. But people in Northern Ireland had become very discouraged from being enterprising, because of historical prejudice in the case of Catholics. Or the thwarting of entrepreneurial schemes by violence in everybody’s case. Immigrants arriving hopeful and energized were meeting a lot of battered-down, worn-out people.

  May showed me exhibition materials the organization had been taking into schools. Mostly it concerned the anti-slavery movement.

  ‘It’s something from the past to be proud of, and the children are so interested. We also do a music and dancing show. Actually one of the dancers brings her baby at the moment. The kids go wild about the baby. Imagine, schools out in the country, white white Irish children, they don’t get to see Africans let alone talk to them. Oh yes, schools of all denominations. Maybe they’ll grow up less narrow-minded and envious.’

  I suggested that, historically, successful immigrants were always resented, anywhere.

  ‘Maybe. Just because something’s always happened doesn’t make it right. People in Ireland are too fond of things that have always happened.’ She shrugged. ‘Sorry, I’ve had a lot of upsetting things to deal with this week. If you were here another week I could take you out to the schools with us. Show you something positive.’

  I nodded and sneezed. The lady with the baby was due to arrive, so I didn’t want to give it my germs. I walked back towards Sandy Row, seeing fewer and fewer non-Caucasian faces.

  There was a scattering of police in Sandy Row, protecting a solemn Salvation Army march up the road – slow, sedate and melancholic in the evening sun.

  My hotel was quiet, the hen parties and stag parties had checked out. The friendly cleaning man stopped me in the corridor, telling me someone had left some aspirin behind in the next room if I wanted them. And there were plenty more tissues if I needed more.

  ‘You poor love, imagine being so sick in a strange place.’

  It was dawning on me that it was a strange place, to me.

  I had thought Morrissey’s anthem of the plastic paddy, ‘Irish Blood, English Heart,’ was the wrong way round. I only had a bit of English blood and romantically assumed I had an Irish heart.

  If I wanted to come back to Northern Ireland, plentiful and welcoming family regardless, I’d have to make a huge leap of heart and mental effort to feel at home. Being a Catholic, or a Protestant, Irish or English meant nothing. I lived in London – every street full of different-coloured faces, every tube stop with a different culture. London was as vast and anonymous as a new continent – every day, if you wanted, you could re-create yourself. Or you could live in a community you’d chosen, not inherited. Being accustomed to all that, taking all that for granted had rubbed into me so much, like Flann O’Brien’s bicycle, it had become part of my identity. I’d immigrated and I wasn’t going anywhere.

  14. Definitions of Success

  Uncle Eamon set off down the cliff path ahead of us. ‘What we’ll do is take a wee dander round the headland and see how we get on.’

  Outer-cousin Mark might have been exaggerating when he said most people in Northern Ireland were related, but a lot of the population did seem to be related to me.

  I’d come up to the seaside resort of Portrush to clear the germs out of my head and to have some quiet time out of Belfast. I’d walked into a hotel dining room and there were my uncle Eamon and aunt Sarah. They’d whisked themselves away for a peaceful weekend break. They didn’t seem too disappointed to have the peace broken into by a stray niece.

  Sarah teased me, asking if I’d come up to Portrush for a sneak visit to Kelly’s night club, a notorious den of drugs and badness. I told her how I’d managed to have enough of Northern Irish nightlife just lying in my hotel bed in Belfast.

  Despite Kelly’s and a few other brash clubs and bars, Portrush remained a subdued resort town. The headland, jutting into the Atlantic, had unspoilt, sweeping views of waves crashing on rocks and the grassy cliff tops were crawled by bird-watchers managing to find quiet for their hobby.

  After our dander round Portrush headland, we drove on to the wide beach at Portstewart, a handy and permitted way to avoid parking. Range Rovers and fine family saloons were lined up on the sand; prosperous-looking people ran about with children, kites and dogs. Portstewart felt like a Malone Road of a beach, although it wasn’t as grand as it had been. The railway company weren’t allowed to build a station at sedate Portstewart for fear it would attract Vulgar people’ to the town. These days, vulgar people without their own transport could get a bus.

  We waited on
the beach for the sunset. It was something of a non-event, even though there was a sculpture near the boating pool with a plaque announcing that the song ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ had been inspired by a Portstewart sunset.

  Uncle Eamon said they’d just come up to Portrush to ‘foughter about’. This spelling doesn’t capture the pronunciation. This word has far more unscriptable syllables. Foughtering could be pleasant, akin to pottering but with a wistful edge, or it could be bad: you could foughter away your time when you should be doing your work, as I knew too well.

  While foughtering and dandering, Eamon, Sarah and I reminisced about Sion Mills.

  ‘It was such a good place to grow up, a real country childhood,’ Eamon said, happy at the mere thought of it. ‘I’d get up in the mornings and be off up the fields and into the woods. There were hazel trees there, I could make bow and arrows out of those and hunt things. Look for things to hunt anyway’

  I told them about my attempts to live a country life, collecting sticks for the fire in Cavan and ending up sounding like a crazy Margo from The Good Life.

  Eamon smiled, indulgently avuncular in my defence. ‘Well those farmers would be only just removed from the generation that did have to collect sticks for the fire. My mother and Mary Eliza used to go out for long walks by the river, chatting away and collecting sticks. Mind you, when the firelighters came in, my mother would still go for the walks, because it was Mary Eliza’s social life. I remember her saying, “I’m run off my feet but if I don’t take Mary Eliza out to get sticks she’ll be so disappointed.” Poor Mary Eliza.’

  We sighed sadly over Mary Eliza for a few moments.

  Sarah laughed. ‘So there you are, if you ever feel down about life, at least you’ve got more than a walk collecting sticks to look forward to.’

  Eamon remembered me singing to the hens. ‘I thought you were a strange sort of child. I thought it must be being transplanted had done it to you.’

  Of course, Uncle Eamon thought transplanting was what had done for George Best and Alex Higgins, as well as his hen-serenading niece. Not that he was against transplanting, you just had to know there’d be consequences. All his children had been born in central Africa, while he’d taught in a school for ten years. It had taken them a long time to adjust to Northern Irish life, where your skin became pale and school teachers didn’t have servants.

  ‘It was peculiar for them, but they didn’t take to an unnatural relationship with poultry.’

  ‘I really believed I would be the one to make Granny’s ship come in.’

  ‘She’d have had a long wait for a ship to come in on her egg money,’ Eamon sighed. ‘She went to the pictures a lot, you know, anything American. I think that’s where she got the idea there’d be a ship to come in.’

  I thought she had made a ship come in – hadn’t everyone done very well for themselves?

  ‘Oh, determined…’ He smiled. ‘She thought anyone related to her could be anything they wanted.’

  I left Eamon and Sarah to their dandering early next morning. I had a Sunday evening mission in Portadown and wanted to see as much as possible on the way down there.

  Of no interest to me, Portstewart and Portrush were surrounded by championship golf courses. More interesting was Limavady, where the Ross sisters had lived. They did nothing spectacular, except in 1851 Jane Ross noted down a piece of music played by an itinerant fiddler. It became the unofficial Irish national anthem: ‘The Londonderry Air’/’Danny Boy’.

  There were no glens and mountainsides on the road I passed through towards Derry; this was strange flat land known locally as ‘the levels’. These former marshes were below sea level, and had been kept drained by pumps for flax-growing, now they were used for market gardening. In World War Two, the wide, flat surfaces were used as aerodromes and present-day Derry City airport was at the edge of ‘the levels’. Continuing the aeronautical theme, further along the levels was Ballyarnet field, where Amelia Earhart landed after her solo transatlantic flight.

  In Derry, Sally’s family greeted me for Sunday lunch as if I’d just flown the Atlantic myself There was a crowd of Sally’s relatives around the table, new names and faces coming thick and fast. One familiar face was Sally’s husband, Dan. He cross-examined me about what was going into my book and as he served the main course he said, ‘Well, it won’t be any kind of book if it doesn’t include the gravy you’re having with this roast beef. I made this gravy and I want it properly recorded for posterity.’

  On hearing I’d been back to Strabane, Sally’s brother Liam reminisced about the most frightening man who ever lived in that town: ‘I couldn’t tell you his real name but everyone called him Gandhi, because in the summer he wore just a sack around him tied with string. He was some poor man with no legs, but he’d great strong arms and he’d move himself along on this contraption like a skateboard…’

  I couldn’t stop myself: ‘Leatherarse,’ I interrupted, making grandchildren splutter and take more interest in the conversation. ‘My mother told me he was the most frightening man ever lived in Strabane.’

  ‘And she called him Leatherarse?’

  ‘Because he was always dragging himself along, one of her brothers said he must have a leather arse, so that’s what they called him.’

  ‘He was a terrible, bad-tempered creature. If you caught his eye he’d swear blue murder and throw something at you.’

  My mother’s tales of Leatherarse had been vivid: ‘Apparently he’d lie in wait for children, then scoot out silently, so he’d be suddenly there, at eye level with them, and make a terrible screaming noise to freak them out.’

  ‘Where does he live?’ a nervous grandchild inquired.

  ‘Oh, poor Leatherarse will be long dead,’ Dan reassured her. ‘I expect children had teased the poor crittur and that was his revenge.’

  ‘He had a goat cart as well,’ I remembered. ‘On a Sunday he’d get dressed up and ride around the town on a little cart pulled by a goat.’

  ‘No? A goat cart. I wish I’d seen that,’ Liam laughed. ‘Did he get very far?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well.’ Dan raised his glass. ‘He might not have got far but he certainly made his mark: here we are all talking about him fifty years later. Here’s to Leatherarse, world famous in Strabane.’

  ‘Leatherarse!’ a child shouted.

  ‘Please,’ Dan said sternly. ‘Mister Leatherarse to you.’

  Apparently poor Mister Leatherarse had lost his legs in an accident working on the railways in Canada. This led to a drift in the conversation toward the topic of emigration. No one had sad tales of leg loss to report, but it was a wistful topic all the same.

  Derry had been a major port for the twentieth-century ‘suitcase brigade’, heading away from northwestern Ireland. Dan said he hardly saw his father as a child, he spent so long working in England.

  ‘At least he’d keep coming home with the bacon,’ Liam said. ‘There was nothing sadder than the Irish hanging around England who’d never made it and felt ashamed to go home.’

  ‘That was terrible,’ Sally said. ‘They went on their own, the men. That’s what was wrong with the Irish. Other people brought the whole family, so they didn’t come to that sort of end.’

  ‘Well it makes sense,’ Dan smiled. ‘Men should not be trusted to go anywhere on their own, and it’s a good thing those days are over.’

  Their son, who’d just moved back from London to Donegal, thought it still went on to a certain extent.

  ‘There was this couple I knew when I was working in London, nice enough. Where I moved to is their home town in Donegal. When they came back they’d a big flash car I didn’t remember them having in London. Turns out they’d hired it to put on a show for their trip home. What sort of bollocks is that? There’s still that mind set, that you can’t come home without making a big blow of yourself.’

  After much hugging, as if I was off to seek my fortune, never to be seen again, I had to leave them. I rac
ed to Portadown, hopefully not making a big blow of myself on arrival in an average-looking hire car.

  Under-cousin Mikey was disappointed I only had an average hire car this time, no secret panels, no surprise springing meal trays.

  ‘Oh, that thing. I hope they burnt it,’ Aunt Helen said.

  Everyone had gathered round the wide-screen television in John and Veronicas house for a Sunday evening event that had become as sacred to family life in Northern Ireland as any kind of church-going. Sally’s grandchildren had been fretting about it over lunch, although they had hours and hours to spare they wanted to go straight home after pudding to be on time.

  In my family, it was Uncle Joe who was fretting the most. He’d had the calendar circled for months and been impatient since breakfast.

  The holy event was a television show called Little School Around the Corner. Cameras went to a different primary school in Northern Ireland every week, interviewing the children about their school. Children sang, danced, played instruments, recited… Sometimes there was footage of a sporting triumph. This week, one of Siobhan’s children was at the featured school; we’d see her singing in the choir.

  Tension mounted as the programme time drew nearer. John flapped about with curtains to eliminate glare, Veronica fiddled with video controls, and Uncle Joe puffed so intently on his pipe I thought he might swallow it, set fire to his innards and miss seeing one of his precious grandchildren’s moment of glory.

  There were other children talking, other children dancing, other children singing solos – but finally, the choir.

  No one watched for brief glimpses of our girl at the back of the choir with more rapt attention than Uncle Joe. He hadn’t set fire to his innards but he was lit up with happiness. There he was, surrounded by family, watching family, having brought all of them safely through to happy lives. If they did need someone to teach a course on ‘Coping with Success in Northern Ireland’, Uncle Joe was the contented man to talk to.