The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

15. The Boat Train to Ulster

THERE WAS a gloomy irritable air about the passengers on the boat train to Ulster. It was not only that they had been on board for five hours and had three more to go before the ferry. It was worse than tiredness. It was resentment — as if they were being exiled or forced back to school or jailed after a period of freedom. But in fact they were homeward bound.

I had joined the train at Carlisle. I expected to see either drunks or sleepers — it was midafternoon. But the passengers sat silently, holding their sallow faces in their hands, and they became gloomier as we progressed through the long Scottish hills of the border — Dumfries and Galloway. They were the sad-faced people in the wind at gray Stranraer.

By then the Scots had got off the train — the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags; the poor stinking trampled terriers and their defiant owners; and the children screeching, "How much farva!" and "I can hear funda!" No trains got more befouled than the ones to Scotland, but this boat train was mostly empty by the time it reached Kilmarnock, and so on the last stage of its journey, along the Firth of Clyde, it looked wrecked and abandoned, the beer cans clanking and the bottles rolling on the floor, and an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke.

But I liked the hills and I was relieved once again to be near the shore. It was green countryside on a granite sea. Some of the coast was bare; in places there were forests, and hidden in deep lovely valleys there were baronial houses. The gray town of Girvan, with stone houses and squinting windows, had its back turned to the water and wind. At Glenwhilly there were crimson poppies beside the track.

It was here, just before arriving, that the returning Ulster people became very irritable.

"Go and sit dine!"

"I'm tulling ya fer the last time!"

"I says go and find your suster!"

"Don't look so surpraised!"

The Ulster accent is disliked in England, where it is regarded as a harsh, bastard, Lowland Scots with a Glaswegian glottal stop. It is a blustering accent, and just as Welsh people seem permanently conciliatory in the way they speak, so the gabbling Ulster folk seem forever on the boil, trying to swallow and be cruel at the same time. The accent seems full of strain and greed, and yet the people are relaxed and friendly. A linguistic quirk makes them seem angry; it is as odd and as fascinating as the national lisp in Spain. Each time I heard an Ulsterman open his mouth, I reached for my pen, like a missionary learning a tribal language and imagining a vernacular Bible or a dictionary.

Stranraer, in Loch Ryan, on the sea, was the main town on a peninsula shaped like a hammerhead. The ferry Galloway Princess was at the quayside, waiting for the arrival of the boat-train passengers to Larne. There were not many of us, but everyone was searched, including the children — and the officers groped even in the infants' clothes. I was frisked, and then my knapsack was sifted through. They found my sheaf of maps, my binoculars, my notebook, my switchblade knife.

"And what's your purpose in going to Northern Ireland?" the policeman asked. This was Constable Wallace. Crumbs, the things he'd seen!

"Just looking around," I said. "A little business, a little pleasure. I might do a spot of bird-watching."

"Carry on then," Officer Wallace said, and handing me my knife, he turned to his mate and said, "A spot of bird-watching."

There was a sign at the ferry entrance listing the various people who would not be allowed on board the Galloway Princess: rowdy people, drunks, and "football supporters… displaying their club 'favors' in any shape or form."

Over dinner, Jack Mehaffy said, "It's because the football clubs are one religion or another, and if you wear a certain color scarf you're a Catholic or you're a Protestant. It causes friction. They don't want trouble on this boat."

We met by chance: we were each dining alone and so were asked to sit at the same table. The conversation got off to a slow start. Later, Mehaffy said, "You don't talk too much unless you know who you're talking to. No one in Northern Ireland expresses opinions of any kind to strangers until he's very sure his listeners will be sumpathetic. If not, they'll puck a fight."

Perhaps our conversation was typical. It took us forty-five minutes to get to religion and another hour before Mehaffy volunteered that he was a Protestant. By then it would have been too late to quarrel about Irish politics. We were friends.

He had not stated his religion. He had said in a challenging way, "I'm British." But that meant the same thing as Protestant. He was in the tailoring business and he told me how, very soon, most tailoring would be done automatically by sewing machines operated by microchips. This was bad news for Ulster, where shirt factories employed large numbers of people. Mehaffy said many were being closed down — he had shut a number of them himself.

He had grown up in a neighborhood in County Down with Protestants and Catholics. "We didn't have much money, and when we were short it was the Catholics who helped us out, not the Loyalists, who were always running the Union Jack up the flagpole. We're still friendly with those Catholic families."

He told me about his being a scoutmaster and how he always had Catholic boys in his troop. He asked the local priest's permission to include those boys, and the priest said, "Yes, me only regret is that you're doing something I wish I were doing meself."

"I liked him for saying that," Mehaffy said.

We talked about tailoring, about unemployment, about strife, and that was when he said, "I'm British. But I'm also Irish. I mean, culturally I'm British, but I was born in Ireland, so I'm Irish too."

"Do you feel an affinity with the Republic?"

"No, no. The south is different. They have a different tradition there. Funnily enough, at one time I could actually see union with the Republic — a united Ireland. But now it's less and less a possibility."

He was reluctant to explain why, but then said, "The influence of the church is too strong there. Do you think any Ulsterman would accept the infallibility of the Pope?"

I said, "But they accept the infallibility of the Queen."

He laughed. He said, "And contraceptives on prescription! We'd never accept it."

Whenever the issue of union was raised, Ulstermen mentioned contraceptives.

"And there's the tribalism," Mehaffy said. "The tribalism starts in July, with the Orange parades. The Catholic parades are in August. And then, people who are the best of friends all year won't speak to each other. There's a lot of suspicion in the summer — a lot of tribal feeling — between Catholic and Protestant."

I said, "Is it possible to tell them apart?"

"There are people who say it is," Mehaffy said, and pointing to his eyes he went on, "For one thing, a Catholic's eyes are closer together."

We went out on deck and watched the cluster of lights at Larne drawing near. The mist liquefied the lights and made the harbor entrance dramatic. Mehaffy said that Ulstermen worked hard and had pride in their country. They hated people who tried to make jokes out of bombings and killings. This was while the ferry was making its way into Larne Harbour, and the lights were piercing the mist and illuminating the dark brown waterfront, the gleaming slates on the roofs, the oily lough to port. The wind groaned among the dockside cranes. Mehaffy said it never stopped raining here. The returning Ulster people who had been on the boat train stood silently at the rail, gazing upon Larne like mourners. Mehaffy said the trouble was, there was only one bloody topic of conversation, and who was really interested in that? The ferry horn echoed all over the harbor and lough, as if from a thousand empty holes in the night.

"I'm thinking of moving to England," Mehaffy finally said.

His tone was confessional, his voice a whisper. I was still staring at Larne and did not know what to say.

"I've got two kids," he said. "They're still young. They'll have a better chance there."

***

I expected formalities — customs and immigration — Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying vacancies. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.

"Just off the ferry?" It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup — pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork, Rejoice in the Lord Alway, waiting for the doorbell to ring. "Twenty-one-fifteen it came in — been looking around town?"

Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort — oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they'd done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind — the wild storm last night.

"Thonder!" she thundered. "It opened up me hud!"

We were walking upstairs under a large motto— For God So Loved the World, and so forth.

"It gave me huddicks!"

The house was full of furniture, and how many floors? Four or five anyway, and pianos on some of them, and there was an ottoman, and a wing chair, and pokerwork scenes from the Old Testament, Noah possibly, and was that Abraham and Isaac? The whole house was dark and varnished and gleaming — the smell of varnish still powerful, with the sizzle of a coal fire. It was June in Northern Ireland, so only one room had a fire trembling in the grate.

"And it went through me neighbor's roof," she said, still talking about the storm, the thunder and lightning.

Another flight of stairs, heavy carpet, more Bible mottos, an armchair on the landing.

"Just one more," Mrs. Wheeney said. "This is how I get me exercise. Oh, it was turrible. One of me people was crying—"

Mirrors and antlers and more mottos and wood paneling, and now I noticed that Mrs. Wheeney had a mustache. She was talking about the reeyun — how hard it was; about breakfast at eeyut— but she would be up at sux; and what a dangerous suttee Belfast was.

Christ Jesus Came Into the World to Save Sinners was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was saying that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.

"It's funny how tired you get when you miss a night's sleep," she said. "Now me, I'm looking forward to going to bed. Don't worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow."

The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swishlike sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.

***

That first morning in Larne I discovered everything there was to know about Ulster rain — how it bucketed down from a sky no higher than a two-story house; how it was never the quicksilver of the Channel rain but always dark, striking at such a merciless slant that it penetrated everything; how it was cold and noisy and how it could be sharp enough to sting; how it never cleansed but rather blackened everything it struck. And no matter how often it rained, it was always so surprisingly cruel that everyone mentioned it. It was impossible to ignore. In this solemn rain-darkened place people regarded the rain as unfair.

It was the setting that was solemn, not the people. (But solemn was an understatement; Ulster looked black and devastated.) The people were curious — they stared, they smiled, they talked loud and still managed to be polite. The women, most of all, seemed to me remarkable — just the way they stood and spoke, their decisive gestures, their spirit. It was true of girls, as well. They seemed bold and friendly and able to take care of themselves.

These were judgments I made on the train from Lame to Belfast. It was a warm and rattly branch-line train, with bushes on the embankment beating against the door handles, and bog ferns sliding across the wet windows.

I was talking to Dick Flattery. "It's not a civil war," he was saying. "The Catholics and Protestants kill each other, but they haven't actually fought each other—"

Now who would have thought you could make such useful distinctions between "fight" and "kill"?

"— they kill each other singly," he went on, "but they fight the army and the police."

Flattery seemed intelligent and detached. He had left Belfast seven years before, for good; he was returning now only because his father was ill. He wasn't planning to stay. He was frightened by the violence.

"It started as a civil rights issue, ten or eleven years ago" — he meant the marches, the first one in Londonderry in 1969—"and then it got violent. No one talks about civil rights anymore."

He swiftly referred to Catholics as "they," and I knew he must be a Protestant. I asked him whether he could tell a Catholic from a Protestant.

"The Protestants are from Scottish stock," Flattery said. "They look Scottish."

We were traveling along Larne Lough — dark water, dark banks, and the dark rain falling fast. We were talking about poverty.

"There's always been unemployment here," he said. "There's not the same stigma attached to it that you find in England. People here aren't lost when they're on the dole. It's really a kind of chronic condition — groups of men standing on the street, doing nothing." He looked out the window. "God, I hate this place."

Now we were smack on the coast, leaving Whitehaven and swaying toward Carrickfergus on a narrow shelf just above the sea, and then,

The little boats beneath the Norman castle

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind

and the halt.

Louis MacNeice grew up in Carrickfergus, but it was not only his poem about that town that seemed to me clear-sighted — all his Ulster poems were vivid and true. And he wrote so well about the sea, sometimes as a tumultuous thing ("Upon this beach the falling wall of the sea…") and sometimes as a fussbudget ("That never-satisfied old maid, the sea / Rehangs her white lace curtains ceaselessly"), and ultimately in its cosmic and thalassic sense ("By a high star our course is set, / Our end is life. Put out to sea").

He had looked out to sea here, beyond Belfast Lough into the North Channel, and he had certainly been on this train, or else he could not have written, "Like crucifixes the gantries stand," seeing the shipyard at Belfast.

I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face — moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore — but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

It was so awful, I wanted to stay. It was a city which was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. "There is no aristocracy — no culture — no grace — no leisure worthy of the name," Sean O'Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. "It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor." But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint — a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.

There were still bombs. Just that week a new type of bomb had started to appear, a fire bomb made of explosive fluid and a small detonator; it exploded and the fiery fluid spread. And it was very easily disguised. These bombs had turned up in boxes of soap flakes and breakfast cereal and pounds of chocolates. One in a tiny bag had been left on a bus, and ten passengers had been burned and the bus destroyed. That was my first day in Belfast: DRIVER STEERS THROUGH BLAZE HELL TO SAVE LIVES displaced the Falklands news.

THREATS was a headline in every newspaper, with this message: If you know anything about terrorist activities — threats, murders, or explosions — please speak now to the Confidential Telephone — Belfast 652155.

I called the number, just to inquire how busy they were. But it was an answering machine, asking me for information about bombs and murder.

***

On the way to Coleraine and the coast I was in a train with about ten other people, two in each car — and some got out at Botanic Station, a mile from Central. I had never imagined Europe could look so threadbare — such empty trains, such blackened buildings, such recent ruins: DANGEROUS BUILDING — KEEP CLEAR. And bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery, and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children — it looked like the past in an old picture. And a crucifix like a dagger in one brute's lapel, and an Orange Lodge Widows' Fund badge in another's. They said that Ulster people were reticent. It seemed to me they did nothing but advertise, GOD SAVE THE POPE painted on one ruin, and on another, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. And at Lisburn a large sign by the tracks said, WELCOME TO PROVOLAND. Everybody advertised, even urban guerrillas.

Fifteen minutes outside of Belfast we were in open country: pleasant pastures, narrow lanes, cracked farmhouses. But in such a place as Ulster the countryside could seem sinister and more dangerous than a crowded city, since every person on the move was exposed in a meadow or a road. The old houses all stuck up like targets, and it was hard to see a tree or a stone wall and not think of an ambush.

NO SURRENDER it said on the bridge at Crumlin. That town was-a low wet rabbit warren set amid cow parsley and wet fields. And then Lough Neagh, one of Ulster's great lakes, and the town of Antrim. Now the train had a few more sullen skinny faces on board. The towns were no more than labor depots, factory sites surrounded by the small houses of workers. But the factories were shut, the markets were empty, and the farmland looked flooded and useless. We came to Ballymena. I asked a man in the car if it was true that in Slemish near here ("where St. Patrick herded his sheep") children used to be kept in barrels to prevent them from fighting.

He said he did not know about that. His name was Desmond Corkery, and he guessed I was from the United States. He wished he were there himself, he did. He was after coming from Belfast, he was, and was there a more bloody miserable place in the whole of creation? And dangerous? Policemen and soldiers everywhere — and they talked about Lebanon and the flaming Falklands!

I guessed that Corkery was a Catholic. I asked him my usual question: How do you tell a Protestant from a Catholic? He said it was easy — it was the way a Protestant talked; he was better educated. "If he's using fancy words, you can be sure—"

And then Corkery became reflective and said, "Ah, but you're never really safe. You go into a bar, and you don't know whether it's a Protestant or Catholic bar. It can be frightening, it can, sure. You don't say anything. You call for your beer and you keep your mouth shut, and then you go."

But I began to think that it was an advantage to be a stranger here, not English, not Irish; and it was a great advantage to be an American. I never felt the Ulster people to be reticent or suspicious — on the contrary, it was hard to shut them up.

"And it was around here," Desmond Corkery was saying — we were past Ballymoney and headed into Coleraine; I had been encouraging Corkery to tell me a story of religious persecution—"just about here, that a bloody great team of footballers started to walk up and down the train. They were drinking beer and shouting, 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Up and down the train. 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Looking for Catholics, they were. One comes up to me and says straight out, 'You're a bloody Fenian bastard!'"

I shook my head. I said it was terrible. I asked him what he did then.

"I said no." Corkery looked grim.

"You told him you weren't a Catholic?"

"Sure I had to."

"Did he believe you?"

"I suppose he did," Corkery said. "He slammed the door and went roaring off."

We traveled in silence along the River Bann, and I thought how that denial must have hurt his pride, and it seemed to me that it was this sort of humiliation that made the troubles in Ulster a routine of bullying cowardice. It was all old grievances, and vengeance in the dark. That was why the ambush was popular, and the car bomb, and the exploding soap box, and the letter bomb. The idea was to deny what you stood for and then wait until dark to get even with the bugger who made you deny it.

***

It was drizzling at Coleraine, where I boarded a two-coach train to Portrush, a small seaside resort, emptier than any I had so far seen in Britain. But emptiness had given the place its dignity back: Portrush was rainswept and poor, and part of it was on a narrow peninsula with waves breaking on three sides.

The rain intimidated me for an hour or so. I had lunch with a man named Tubby Graham — there were only the two of us in the restaurant. Tubby was seventy and from Bangor. He liked motoring around, he said. "But I stay out of those ghetto places. Bushmills, for example — that's a completely Protestant town. And Derry's a Catholic one." He recommended Magilligan Point. Did I want a lift?

I said I had other plans, and when he was gone I sneaked down the beach and started walking toward Bushmills to see what a Protestant ghetto looked like. It was still raining, but I thought that if I kept walking, it might stop; and so it did, by the time I reached Dunluce Castle, three miles away. I walked along the sandy beach — not a soul in sight. And the cliffs were like battlements, made of white chalk with flint embedded in it. The only sounds were the gulls and the wind.

Farther on I climbed the cliff and walked through the wet grass to Bushmills. The more prosperous a place was in Ulster, the sterner and more forbidding it looked. Bushmills, rich on whiskey, was made of flat rocks and black slates and was cemented to the edges of straight roads. And now I saw what Tubby meant: the Orange Hall was large enough to hold every man in town.

I began to develop a habit of asking directions, for the pleasure of listening to them.

"Just a munnut," a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.

"Der's a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der's a bug one farder on — a brudge for trums. Aw, der used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der's graws." He moved the bacon to his cheek. "But it might be weyat!"

"What might be wet?"

"Da graws," Mr. Emmett said.

"Long grass?"

"In its notral styat."

This baffled me for a while— notral styat — and then I thought: Of course, in its natural state!

Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant's Causeway.

BOSWELL

: Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing?

JOHNSON

: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

I stayed on the coastal cliffs and then took a short cut behind a coastal cottage, where I was startled by a big square-faced dog. The hairy thing growled at me and I leaped to get away, but I tripped and fell forward into a bed of nettles. My hands stung for six hours.

The Giant's Causeway was a spectacular set of headlands made of petrified boilings and natural columns and upright pipe-shaped rocks. Every crack and boulder and contour had a fanciful name. This massive coastal oddity had been caused by the cooling of lava when this part of Ireland had oozed during a period of vulcanism. I walked along it, to and from Dunseverick Castle—"once the home of a man who saw the Crucifixion" (supposed to be Conal Cearnach, a roving Irish wrestler who happened to be in a wrestling match in Jerusalem the day Christ was crucified).

The basalt cliffs were covered with black slugs and jackdaws, and at seven in the evening the sun broke through the clouds as powerfully as a sunrise, striping the sea in pink. It was very quiet. The wind had dropped. No insects, no cars, no planes — only a flock of sheep baaing in a meadow on a nearby hilltop. The coves and bays were crowded with diving gulls and fulmars, but the cliffs were so deep, they contained the birds' squawks. The sun gleamed on the still sea, and in the west above Inishowen Head I could spy the blue heights of Crocknasmug. Yes, the Giant's Causeway was worth going to see.

It had been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years. Every traveler to Britain had come here to size it up. There had been tram lines out to it, as Mr. Emmett had told me in Bushmills. But the troubles had put an end to this, and now the coast had regained a rough primeval look — just one stall selling postcards, where there had been throngs of noisy shops.

This landscape had shaped the Irish mind and influenced Irish beliefs. It was easy to see these headlands and believe in giants. And now with people too afraid to travel much, the landscape had become monumental once again in its emptiness.

In pagan Ireland cromlechs had been regarded as giants' graves, and people looked closely at the land, never finding it neutral but always a worry or a reassurance. Hereabouts, there were caves that had been the homes of troglodytes. And it seemed to me that there was something in the present desolation that had made the landscape important again. So the Irish had been returned to themselves in this interval, and their fears restored to them, for how could they stand amid all this towering beauty and not feel puny?

Enough of these natural wonders, I thought, and at the hotel that night I buttonholed Mr. McClune from Ballywalter. "Oh, I like Ballywalter! Oh, yes, Ballywalter's pleasant, it is! We only get the odd bomb in Ballywalter!"

But he was worried about his sister.

"My suster is going down to Cavan this weekend. I don't unvy her. She's a Protestant girl, you see."

"Where is Cavan exactly?"

"In the Free State," Mr. McClune said.

I smiled; it was like calling Thailand "Siam," or Iran "Persia."

"A pig farm," he explained. "I mean to say, that's where my suster's staying. Now at this piggery there's a foreman. He is a member of the IRA."

"I see why you're worried," I said.

"But that could be a good thing, couldn't it?" he said. "It could keep her safe."

He meant that no one from the IRA would murder his sister, because a man from the IRA was employed by his sister's friends.

"We'll see what hoppens," he said.

We were having coffee at the Causeway Hotel, sitting in front of the fire. We were the only two guests. An Ulster conversation could be very restful. I was never asked personal questions. People talked, in general, on harmless subjects, unless I took the plunge. Mr. McClune, who was seventy-three and very wealthy — he had a Jaguar out front — said he had been to Australia and Canada and California.

"But I've never set futt on the continent of Europe," he said. "And I've got no desire to."

I said I was going to Londonderry.

"I haven't been to Derry for thirty-three years."

The next morning I walked back to Portrush. I passed a signboard indicating the way to Blagh. It was eight-fifteen and there were no cars on the road, and very quiet except for the birds — crows and finches. I kept walking, toward the train. It was green as far as I could see, and I could see twenty miles up the lovely coast.