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

17. The 15:53 to Belfast

THE BRITISH VICTORY in the Falklands was not celebrated in County Down. The people I spoke to were perplexed and bitter. "Too many men had to die for that," Mr. Hackett told me in Newcastle. "Yes, I saw the papers," Constance Kelly said in Castlewellan, "but we're too busy with our own troubles to take an interest in that pile of rocks in the South Atlantic." And a man named Flannagan in Downpatrick said, "What about the lads getting killed here? There was a bomb in town not long ago, but none of the English papers printed a story saying, 'Tim Flannagan took a light head and is far from well at the moment.'"

I caught the school bus — it was the only one at that early hour — and went to Castlewellan with the yelling boys and the womanly girls of St. Malachy's. I was hardly thirty miles from Belfast, but instead of heading straight there, I took a roundabout route on the coastal side of the Ards Peninsula. I was making for Bangor and the train to Belfast. It was a June day of suffocating dampness, the brown sky like a mass of raveled wool, threatening rain.

Walking out of Downpatrick, where I had just met Tim Flannagan, I was thinking about the Falklands and the attitude here. What about us? the Ulstermen said. Catholic and Protestant alike objected to the attention given to the far-off Falklands and their seventeen hundred inhabitants (who, at that time, were not even full citizens of Britain). I came to a war memorial on the outskirts of the town, with a slab inscribed with the lines:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

What fascinated me was that the verse portrayed the advantage of dying young — being spared the fatigue and weakness of old age. The poet, Laurence Binyon, was English, but this was a very Irish sentiment. It seemed to me that the real problem in Ulster — and the reason there were so many bloody killings — was that everyone believed in an afterlife.

It was nine miles to Strangford. I walked to Milestone Seven, and then the rain started. I did not mind the rain, but the thunder growl worried me. I was on an open road between flat fields — no village, no trees, no shelter. I decided to hitchhike.

This was Ulster, and hitchhikers here often hijacked the car and kicked the driver into the road (the bombers and gunmen nearly always used stolen cars), and yet I got a ride from the second car that passed.

Mr. Hurley was a Strangford man. It was a mixed community, he said, and he was proud to say they all worked together.

"Of course, there's extremist groups operating in the area," Mr. Hurley said. "And there's political parties. And there's clubs and lodges. Now out of all that lot, you'd think one of them would reflect my thinking, wouldn't you? But none of them does. I think if we had better leadership we'd get somewhere."

He said he had worked in London as a plumber's mate.

"Three years in London and for the whole of that time no one asked me my religion. That's what I liked about London."

Strangford was about five streets — fifty families, no more — and a ferry landing. I crossed the harbor mouth on a ferry to the neat and rather formal village of Portaferry. It was unusual in Ulster to find a village with no graffiti, no bomb damage, no broken windows, no blasted buildings; and Portaferry was almost like that — the only sign of fanaticism was a blasted church.

"It's a wee pretty little town," a man said to me. "You should see it with the sun shining in the square."

It was still raining very hard. He said Portaferry was famous for its offshore whirlpools.

I said I was not staying here but was going on to Portavogie.

"I'm after coming from Portavogie meself," he said. "And how are ye getting there?"

I said I would either walk or hitchhike.

"I'll take ye," he said. "I have to go home for me lunch."

His name was Cosmo Shields, and he said his bus was just around the corner. I was surprised to see that this was no euphemism: a big empty bus was parked on the next road. This was his bus, he said. He had done his morning run from Newtonards and now he was going to lunch. He took the bus home, because he had an afternoon run up to Kirkcubbin and Belfast. Not long ago there had been sixteen buses on this peninsula, but as the drivers had died—"Most of them took heart attacks" — the buses were phased out.

It was not that people had cars nowadays, Cosmo Shields said. It was that they did not have any money and it was not safe to travel.

He had been lucky, he said. He had been driving for thirty-three years — he had driven double-deckers down these country lanes. But in all that time, making two trips a day into Belfast, he had had trouble only twice: both times he was stoned and the windows broken in the Short Strand district.

"Aye, but it wasn't me they was throwing stones at. They'd have thrown stones at the bus if you'd been driving it. It's the bus, see. Government property." He drove with his elbows on the wheel. He was a stocky man in his late fifties. He had not collected any fare from me. This was not a service run, he said. "Mind you, I've had plenty of trouble with drunks. And children."

I said, "The kids seem very jumpy."

"They're more destructful than ever they were!" Mr. Shields said. "They've got destruction in their heads. Aye, there's talk. People are worried about Ulster children nowadays." Mr. Shields swung his whole body over, and taking his eyes off the road for five dramatic seconds, he said, "Aye, the wee kids see what's going on."

We were just then entering Portavogie. It was attractive in the same way as Portaferry — no bomb craters, no hysteria, and an air of normality. High-sided trawlers were moored at the fish docks, discharging cratefuls of herrings and prawns.

Cosmo Shields was still grunting darkly. I guessed he was thinking about the destructive kids.

He said, "Aye, the way things are going, it'll hoppon soon, like."

"Pardon?"

"The end of the world." He was nodding with certainty now. "Aye, I reckon the end of the world is not far off"—

And in the same breath:

"— shall I take you up to Ballywalter?"

***

It was my walking and hitching up that coast to Bangor that made me modify my opinion of Ulster. Part of the society was wild, and religious mania only made that wildness worse — martyr-mad and eager to chant "Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ!" (as Doctor Paisley's congregation had done to the Pope in England just a few weeks before). It was an old society, with a long memory and no nose at all for the future—1690 was considered just yesterday by people who were not sure whether they had their busfare home tonight.

I had no idea where the cruelty came from. Tennyson said that Irish cruelty was due to a lack of imagination, but other writers had put it down to a strain of anarchy and an evasion of moral worries. The Irish could be glad about the idea of Ireland, but Ulster was a nebulous thing — and wasn't it really nine counties and not six? The people of Ulster, neither Irish nor British, felt lonely and left behind.

It was a society of hard workers who were unemployed. It was a beautiful country that was impossible to live in. It was a society that still had real peasants and real skinflint duchesses, pig farmers, and dowager countesses. And, amazingly in a country where roots went very deep, it had the highest rate of emigration in the world — especially lately: almost 140,000 people had left Ulster in the ten years between 1971 and 1981. It was, most of all, a society with tribal instincts — tribal warfare, tribal kinships, and (common among tribal people) a sense of isolation that inspired both suspicion and generosity, particularly toward strangers. They said, "Fuss is better than loneliness."

When I hitchhiked, I was picked up. When I asked questions, they were nearly always answered. I saw signs of violence, but I never felt I was in physical danger. I liked the Ulster curiosity — so different from the English narrowness and fear. I was dressed like a tramp or a bandit, but I was made to feel welcome. "Come home with me and have some lunch!" It was not until I visited Ulster that I received that invitation. I made my way up the bouldery coast to Millisle and walked to Donaghadee, which was rainswept and empty. "You should have been here three weeks ago," I was told in Donaghadee. "The sun was shining. It was lovely and warm. Still. Not to worry. Come in and get your feet up. I'll put the kettle on."

Most of these coastal places were only incidentally seaside resorts. They were small towns with the Irish Sea splashing against them and taking the sewage away and drowning the odd cat. Down there was an empty amusement arcade, an empty café, a fish-and-chip shop, a few broken benches, and a rocky foreshore covered with black seaweed — maybe kelp, maybe tar: it made no difference; no one swam.

"Come back in a few weeks," I was told.

"Is that when the season starts?"

"No. Just the one day. Orange Day."

"I'll make a note in my diary," I said.

"The twalth."

***

I walked via Groomsport to Bangor. Bangor resembled a certain kind of English coastal town. It was a little like Bexhill and a little like Dawlish; it was elderly and respectable and cliffy, and in a tawdry-genteel way it had a comic air of pretension that was rare in Ulster. But that was at the better end of Bangor. At the other end it was just as desolate and friendly as everywhere else. Some of Bangor served as a refuge for the fairly well-off, the businessmen and professional people who worked in Belfast but could not bear to live there. So Bangor was safer but a great deal duller than any other town its size in Ulster, including Newcastle, which did no more than gape like an oyster.

It was a sign of Bangor's relative quietness that there was no security check at the railway station. I took the 15:53 one day — all the trains went west; Bangor was the end of the line — and after a few miles it was like any suburb in England with old and new semidetached houses, rose gardens, and high hostile fences. Now I was passing along the southern part of Belfast Lough, and at Carnalea I could see the towns of Carrickfergus and Whitehead across the bay. I had almost completed my circular tour of Ulster.

The rain came down. In places there were meadows to the sea. Helen's Bay railway station was designed by Lord Dufferin as a mock fortification, with arrow slits in the towers and castellated walls — the Irish aristocracy seemed to me more foolish and artless than the peasantry. It was here in Helen's Bay and farther on at Cultra and Marino that people said, "I've never seen a riot nor heard a bomb, and I don't think I ever shall."

We passed Holywood and the large army depot, and then the gantries and cranes of the shipyard, which meant we were near Belfast, the old horror.

It was a city of drunks, of lurkers, of late risers. It smelled of wet bricks and burning coal. It stank. It had a sort of nightmare charm. When the rain came down in Belfast, it splashed through the roof and spattered through the window glass and poured into your soul. It was the blackest city in Britain, and the most damaged.

Belfast had a tourist bureau. Don't be afraid, was their message. I liked the blarney in their brochure:

No coward soul is mine.

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere

These lines by Emily Bronte (daughter of an Ulsterman) are often quoted to describe the spirit of Belfast. Visitors, having heard only news of the city's political troubles, are invariably surprised when they see the citizens' "business as usual" briskness and the positive signs of achievement…

But the Brontë poem ("Last Lines") was about the love of God and "Heaven's glories" and faith "arming me from fear." Trust in God and you'll be safe in Belfast!

The achievement, I supposed, was that after such a battering, the city still stood; after so many streets had been torn up and so many bombs thrown, there were still buses running; after so many windows broken, there were still windows intact. Life went on, but how could it not? Forty percent of the Ulster population lived in this city, and most of the remaining industry was here. But the outlook was grim. The shipyard, Belfast's largest employer, was said to be laying off four thousand men. "That's when the real trouble will start," a hard-faced man named Muncaster said to me. "The British government's been protecting their 'workers.' But what happens when they don't have any more workers?"

Muncaster—"Call me Jack" — was a real Belfast toughie. The city either destroyed a person or else made him merciless. The people of Belfast — most of them — suffered from what journalists had begun calling "compassion fatigue." They had seen so much misery and heard so many explosions and cries for help, they hardly blinked.

"What do I think of the bombers?" Muncaster said. "I think they're boring. When I hear a bomb go off I just look at my watch. I look at the time — I don't know why — and then I walk away. And I feel a little safer after a bomb, because there probably won't be another one that day. But God, it's boring!"

It was true — a dangerous society was frightening, and then inconvenient, and then annoying, and then maddening, and ultimately a bore. All the security checks! All the metal detectors! All the body searches and friskings and questions! I was being put through a security check one day and the police officer, a woman, shrieked and jumped away from my knapsack, crying, "Feathers! Feathers!" and shaking her hands. "Get them away from me!"

They were the hackles of a dead pheasant I had found down at Dundrum Bay.

In Belfast I stayed in a dirty hotel with a damp interior and wallpaper that smelled of tobacco smoke and beer and the breakfast grease. But there was no security check here. I had been searched in Enniskillen, a town that hadn't had a bomb in years; and I would have been searched at the grand Europa Hotel in Belfast — it was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and had sentries and guard dogs. The tourists and journalists stayed at the Europa — it was a good target for bombs. But no one of any importance stayed at Mooney's Hotel.

I called it Mooney's because it greatly resembled Mrs. Mooney's flophouse in James Joyce's story "The Boarding House." Our Mrs. Mooney also had an enormous florid face and fat arms and red hands, and she catered to traveling salesmen and drifters. The carpets were ragged, the wallpaper was peeling, there were nicks all over the woodwork. But I was free there, and I would not have been free in an expensive hotel; and I also thought that in this grubby place I was out of danger. It was Belfast logic, but it was also a pattern of life that I was sure would become more common in the cities of the future.

The bar at Mooney's was busy all night, filling the whole building with smoke and chatter.

"What time does the bar close?" I asked on my first night.

"October," a drinker told me, and laughed.

One day in Belfast I saw a poster advertising "the world première" of a play called The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty. It sounded political — that was promising; and the author, Martin Lynch, was a local man. It was being staged at the Lyric Players Theatre near the Botanical Gardens and Queens University. I splashed through the rain to buy a ticket — my shoes had been wet for three days! Rain was general all over Ireland, falling on every part of the dark central plain, softening the Bog of Allen and blackening Belfast still more.

It was still raining the night of the world première. But the play drew a good crowd, and I thought afterward I could not have seen a better play. It summed up the mood I had detected in Ulster — farce and tragedy, one turning into the other, one sometimes indistinguishable from the other.

Ambrose Fogarty, a Catholic from the Falls Road, is picked up on suspicion by a British soldier and taken to a police station for questioning. He is kept for three days and given the third degree. Fogarty is innocent; the British soldier is a lecherous, toffee-nosed brute who is contemptuous of Ulster and Ulstermen; two of the policemen are ineffectual; the rest are sadists and bigots. There is another suspect, Willy Lagan, but he is a fool — drunken, feeble-minded, and plucking a guitar; he is as comic as Fogarty is pious.

It was a play about persecution and torture. In places it was crudely written, but it seemed to confirm all the stories I had heard about the intimidation of suspects. Ambrose is asked to sign a confession that he is a member of the IRA and that he has taken part in an armed bank robbery. He refuses to sign — he denies everything. So he is threatened. He still refuses. At last, he is savagely beaten, kicked, choked, and his arm nearly twisted out of its socket. But all the police have succeeded in doing is giving a rather pleasant young man a grievance. The play ends with Fogarty political in a platitudinous way.

The violence was eased somewhat by the presence of the second suspect, Willy, who provided the comic relief by singing off key, appearing to cooperate and then collapsing, pulling faces, and saying everything twice. And he looked ridiculous: he was dressed in a zoot suit and a loud tie and had slicked-down hair — straight out of the American fifties. But he was too ridiculous, and really wasn't it all preposterous — Ambrose too innocent, Willy too bizarre?

"What do you think?" I was asked afterward by a lady in the foyer, as I was having a pint of Guinness.

I thought: It's loaded. And why were such plays always about innocent people? Why not make Fogarty an IRA man? After all, there were enough of them around, shooting people in the back and muttering Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone."

But I said, "Very interesting. But I'm an alien, so naturally I have a few questions."

"Why don't you ask them? The author's standing right behind you."

Martin Lynch was about thirty. I was immediately struck by his physical resemblance to his main character, Fogarty. I said that I had heard about such interrogations, but how true was his play?

"It's about me," he said. "I was arrested and held for three days. They beat me up. They tried to make me sign a confession. All that in the play — it's true."

"The Willy character is dramatically right, I think," I said; but I meant he was too convenient and preposterous.

"Want to meet him?" Lynch said. He called a man over.

This one was older and uglier than Willy Lagan, but there was no doubting that he was the original. He pulled a face, he winked at me, and started to sing. He wore a white satin necktie and a black shirt and a flashy zoot suit. He got onto his knees and made monkey noises; he snatched at my hand.

"We were in prison together," Lynch said, smiling at the man's antics. "Well, it's just like in the play. If he hadn't been there it would have been unbearable. I'm really grateful to him."

The man made affectionate monkey noises and rolled his eyes; and now it was impossible to tell at what point the play ended and the lives of these men began.

It seemed to me a healthy sign that there were such plays being produced, but it was a play about a deranged society. I kept wishing that it had been a play about a real bomber, because it was a society in which everyone talked about persecution but no one took any blame.

No one admitted to crime in Ulster. The most they said was "Look what they make us do!" It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag-waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders ("I've got something for your father") and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places — the shootings and house-burnings and the cattle-maiming — in the green hills, with the birds singing.

People said, "There's no solution… Ireland's always had troubles… Maybe it'll die out… I suppose we could emigrate…"

I kept thinking: This is Britain!

It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of "You started it!" and "He hit me!" And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days — I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.

But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.

I had been asked the question in England and Wales. "I'm in publishing," I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters. "I'm a writer" was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation-stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.

On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney's, talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—

"And what do you do?" Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.

Obviously I did something. I was an alien.

"I'm in publishing," I said.

Doran's face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.

"I'm working on a wee novel," Doran said, and ordered me another pint. "I've got about four hundred pages done — it's right in me room upstairs. Let's meet tomorrow and have another jar. I'll bring me novel with me. You'll love it. It's all about the troubles."

The next day I tiptoed past Doran's room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney's and shut the door on Ulster.