It felt like he was already mid-monologue when I arrived. I sat by the foot of his bed and let him talk. His stories were long and tangential. They very often had no conclusion and no intentional punch line or moral. Anthony was talking for the journey, not the destination. At times he would delve into riveting tales of seafaring, but they seemed entirely arbitrary; you could never be sure what direction he would veer off into. He had no capacity for editing or any desire for it. He would go on for extended passages, beating against a headwind by zigzags, then reveal some fleeting, utterly gripping secret and just move on. If you interrupted the flow, he’d become irritated. When I’d inquire about the origins of a particular word he’d said—“the hounds” of the mast, for instance—he’d pause, not at all for comic effect, before thundering, “Well, how the fuck do I know?” and then resume his rambling stream of consciousness.
He told his stories simply because he was still here to tell them, unlike so many he’d known. The BBC had been tipped off that he could spin a good yarn alongside his oldest friend, an Italian ice-cream-making patriarch called Sonny Fiorentini, whose father had moved over in 1912. The reporters had come from London to interview my grandfather about his days smuggling on the Foyle during the Second World War, from the Free State to the North. After a day’s recording, they found they couldn’t edit any of his lengthy spiels into coherence. He had a natural aversion to the sound bite. You were not hooked by what he said so much as pummeled by it, witnessing lucid moments whizz by.
Under cover of darkness, Anthony often sailed across the invisible border on the river out to the massive American naval vessels moored there. He’d shout code words to sentries to prevent them from firing on him and ask them to get the canteen officer, knowing that the way to men’s wallets was through their bellies. “You’d have boys hanging out of the portholes, shouting requests.” They’d be sleeping or up playing cards. There was a game called able whackets, where if you lost you got hit with a knotted cloth. Anything to pass the time. Sometimes they’d shout down requests for tartan paint or glass hammers, acting smart, but they were always hankering after something real. Anthony and crew would hoist up crates of eggs, precious after long stretches at sea with only egg powder. He’d supply chickens, butter, fresh cream cheese, porridge, vegetables, and lamb. In return there’d be lowered cigarettes, always cigarettes, Camels and Lucky Strike, lots of tea (chests of it), dollars and pounds, chocolate bars (the Americans called them “chicken bait” in derogatory reference to local girls), silk stockings, cosmetics, chewing gum, even comic books. My grandfather talked at the interviewer, bombarding the poor sap for three or four hours. It never made it to broadcast and was presumably filed away in a library in the depths of the Corporation; perhaps it lurks there still, or was taped over, joining the lost world beneath other recordings.
History multiplies if you follow leads into the undergrowth. Who were the individuals he was interacting with, these figures in passing? The war brought a beguiling number of sailors from all over the planet to this backwater. Men from the occupied Lowlands, boys from the landlocked forests of Alberta. New Jersey, Louisville, Gdańsk, Visakhapatnam, Honningsvåg. There were even ships full of Chinese sailors who found themselves on the other side of the planet, thousands of miles from Nanjing and Shanghai and Marco Polo Bridge. They kept to themselves, Anthony remembered. I wondered what they made of this place, from one edge of the world to another. Anthony didn’t query why—the grand scheme of things—or contemplate that the goods he hoisted upward, ascending onto the decks, might be the basis of a last supper for some of those sailors.
Having read and reread books like Moonfleet as a boy, I was excited to find out about my grandfather’s smuggling days. It was not, however, respected at the time. The authorities in the Republic frowned on it, administratively and personally. It was not just a question of taking chocolate or cigarettes or dairy or meat from the South to the North. It was not about lost revenue. It was a point of pride. And other things—guns and ammunition for other purposes and later use—could be smuggled too. The local guards would curse Anthony as he passed, saying they knew what he was doing and would soon snare him, “the bastard,” but they couldn’t, even standing on the shore, because Lough Foyle was legally British waters.
The smugglers were nevertheless looked on with envy and spite. It was thought they should do something useful, like pilot boats in through the channel, but some of them already did and were simply moonlighting. The market would always be there, just as laundered-fuel smuggling now dominates the borderlands. Supply and demand. It was not pretty or romantic at all. It meant the keeping of unforgiving hours, and sometimes unsavory activity and the possibility of sudden violence. Anthony recalled that as they made their way back from one of the ships, a sociopath on one of the decks started firing at them. Anthony was convinced he intended to do them great harm and missed only because of the sea conditions at the time, the rocking of the boat affecting his aim. He never found out who it was or why he fired.
Smuggling on the land was often a dirty business. There was less room for chivalry or sea fevers, especially at border crossings where the officials, some of them “iron arses,” couldn’t easily be bribed. Goods were therefore placed inside prams beneath swaddling babies, but even these were soon checked. I had heard of a fake funeral passing over the border with a coffin filled with bootlegged items. Another time a horse carcass, allowed to ripen for a few days so that closer inspection would be avoided, was taken over in a cart, its rib cage filled with whiskey bottles.
Accepting the existence of smuggling was one thing. Acceding to it was another. The authorities and rival sailors baptized them “bum-boat men,” denying them the legend of the word smuggler. They were the bottom-feeders, the groundfish in the demersal zone, of the sailing world. You had to be a canny operator, though. The guards couldn’t catch Anthony with his black-market goods because he knew the river intimately. He knew secret caves and coves around Shrove. He knew sandbanks and times of day when the tide would ebb and you could literally stand on ephemeral dry land, surrounded by the river. Shell Island. The Slob. The Tons. There was one notorious for wrecking ships, before permanent lighthouses. Inexplicable lights and sounds were witnessed there. It was said to be the dwelling place of the Celtic sea god Manannán mac Lir, who, when offended, dragged ships into the depths. They didn’t offer sacrifices or throw votives into the river to appease the vengeful deity. They only did this, it seems, in bodies of standing water like lakes or ponds. The river gods, always moving, protean, could not be placated with gifts or bribes. These were casually swept into the sea and could not be retrieved in times of need, like pennies in a fountain could.
Anthony struck a deal with the lighthouse keeper to store his goods there, palming him off with bounty. As the police racked their brains for his hiding places, they were there all along, for all to see, with a flashing light on top, mocking them across the water from the entire town.
I thought of those nighttime journeys out to the ships. Where they hid their boats. How they covered their tracks. What risks they took. Equally, though, were thoughts of what they had literally experienced. The weather at night, the fall of moonlight or darkness across the water, the sound of the waves, of anchors dropping, the sounds that came from the ships as they cautiously approached. Along the shore and in the quays, the familiar sound of objects dangling from the boats, clanking like bells when the wind stirred. Sounds that might alert and sounds that might betray.
During the war, the closer to the city you went, the more ships had amassed, until they were legion. It was said, maybe apocryphally, that you could cross the river by stepping from deck to deck. The naval base was encircled by silver barrage balloons, helium airships that rose one hundred feet off the ground, attached to steel cables that created a forest of metal that would shear off the wings of any low-flying enemy aircraft. For those old enough to remember, they would have set off recollections of the much-feared German zeppelins during the Great War
. Now they were protective angels rather than avenging ones. There were air-raid shelters, not just in underground bunkers, but overground. They had no windows and seemed more like concrete tombs. Brutalist machines for dying in. No one would actually die in them, at least not here. More hazardous were the large open-water tanks erected to provide water for the expected incendiary bombings, in which at least one child was drowned, mucking around. Downstream was the much larger menace, so colossal it suggested the infinite. The gate to the ocean expanses, sublime and monotonous and treacherous. Corvettes, sloops, destroyers sailed into the unknown and, in numerous cases, the next life.
Even the way I thought of this scene is predicated on what followed, and not just emotionally. When I pictured all this, I did so from a bird’s-eye view, the consequence of growing up with airborne photographs, soaring films shot from helicopters, digital maps. It was a view that would not instinctively have occurred to my grandfather, given that in those days flight was rare and a leap of the imagination. Anthony’s view was sea level, sometimes within the waves. The development of technology has subtly, almost unnoticeably, changed the way the world and the past are viewed. Memories and imaginations are edited from without. There were many hundreds of men on those ships, most of them asleep or near sleep when my grandfather visited. There must have been some who were glad to be there in the relative sanctuary of the Foyle, and others who cursed the place; some who were itching to fight, and others terrified but hiding their fear. All counting the days. They must have dreamt too. Of home, the past, the future. A degree of fiction seems inevitable in considering them. Rows of men in rows of beds, in rows of rooms in rows of ships out on that now-empty river.
In the daytime the scene would have been different. There were men painting ships on swinging rope platforms. Loading depth charges onto cranes. Idle banter in barbershops and laundromats, on a steamboat that took them back and forth across the river, bitching about Irish food, celebrating the girls and the drink. Radio chatter in code swam like unseen spirits above their heads. There was life and color beyond the monochrome of photographs.
Ill blows the wind that profits no one, and “the Emergency” was one such time. That’s what my grandfather, and others like him, called a war that had claimed more than sixty million lives. I used to think it a disrespectful, delusional term, but I no longer do. The war had many names (the Great Patriotic War in Russia, the Phony War for the first year in the West, the Continuation War in Finland, the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, and so on), and its boundaries appear clear only in hindsight, if even now. Did it begin on the Polish border? Or the Czech? Did it begin in besieged Madrid? Manchuria? Versailles? The Belgian border? Sarajevo? Braunau am Inn? Or much earlier and from many sources? “The Emergency” suggests something undefined by singular meaning or limits. At the time it was entirely unclear how it would all pan out, especially early in the conflict. The near future would have seemed a place of immense threat. At the same time there was a distance, however illusory, in Derry. The deaths are barely imaginable now. A death on average every three seconds; twenty-five thousand every day, for six years, but for the moment they happened in places with names in other languages. The destruction occurred just over the horizon. Those boys sailed off or flew away toward it.
Speculations were rife, not just when an invasion force might set off for mainland Europe but, especially in the early years, when an invasion force might land in Ireland. German spies were a continual talking point, exacerbated by the fact that there were both willing collaborators and steadfast anti-fascists in the republican movement. As it turned out, Ireland was so insular and parochial as to prove almost impregnable to the Germans who parachuted in. They filed messages back to the Reich that Irish society was maddening and their mission hopeless. Everyone seemed to know everyone, and no one could keep their mouth shut.
The invasion nevertheless was being planned and even had a name, Operation Sea Lion. That it is a curiosity now is down only to the contingencies of history. Had the Luftwaffe continued to destroy radar stations and decimate the RAF, Britain might have folded in months, perhaps weeks. The Royal Navy still posed a formidable threat, but without air superiority, it would have faced a bloody, unassisted fight. Ten thousand German paratroopers were to be dropped along the south coast of England to seize key installations and ports. Others would come in at Romney Marsh. Once bridgeheads were established, the Panzer armies would be brought over, and the race to outflank the British Army would begin. Einsatzgruppen would follow in their wake. There was a list, the Black Book it was called, of three thousand people to be arrested immediately, interrogated, and executed. Virginia Woolf, Paul Robeson (who’d already left), Sigmund Freud (who’d already died), Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and so on. Rebecca West sent Noël Coward (both on the list) a telegram saying, “My dear—the people we should have been seen dead with.” It’s easy to laugh now, but back then the future was, terribly, open.
The country, it was rumored, once London fell, would have been run from Senate House. Death squads would be set up in the capital, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, seeking collaborators not just in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists but in the existing police and security forces. The royal family would be en route to Canada, with the Duke of Windsor returned from the Bahamas to reassume his regency. Resistance would take to the Highlands, the woods, the valleys. Germany would turn to the east with its plans for colossal German colonies, mass starvation of the Slavs, Moscow ceasing to exist under a huge reservoir. Rewriting Poland and Russia and the Jews out of history. No longer existing. No longer having ever existed. Berlin replaced with Germania, with a dome so vast that empty clouds would form inside it. Hitler leaned over the model city that Albert Speer had built for him like a model railway set in an attic.
The foolhardy nature of the saying “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” would become apparent. An enemy of an enemy is no friend. Following Operation Fall Grün and the Nazi occupation of Ireland, beginning with a beachhead at Waterford, most Irish people would probably have fallen into line, as they did elsewhere. The topography would have aided whatever resistance was mounted. Flying columns that existed in the Anglo-Irish War and Civil War would have resumed against the occupiers and their collaborators. The likely outcome would have been low-level guerrilla warfare, with colossal reprisals against the civilian population. An authoritarian Catholic client state would probably be set up. Though he was pro-British, seeing which way the wind blew, Anthony would have changed his smuggling habits perhaps, selling to the Germans. And perhaps my father and his brothers and sisters and the generation to follow would have taken up arms against the new occupiers.
Pack of Lucky Strike Cigarettes
The peripheral nature of Derry’s docks to Europe was the reason for its unlikely reinvigoration. When Europe fell, one blitzkrieg after another, the insignificant islands in the sea remained free. With the opening of U.S. Naval Operating Base Londonderry in 1942, the city became Base One Europe. Naval vessels and their men were sent out from here for patrols or attacks. They returned for repair and protection or to take stock of their losses. They even sent out war pigeons with messages from here, probably the ancestors of the birds that skittishly flapped around as they laid waste to the hangars. Derry transformed during the war. Industry, the matriarchal shirt factories, had been the first catalyst from essentially an indentured-peasant age. The war was the next. The Americans brought ideas, technology, an essential otherness that remained familiar, that suggested you could do it too. After the war there was no question of shutting the future closed again. The genie will not willingly return to the bottle.
The establishment was temporarily deposed. The loyal orders and the Church, while still throwing their weight around and not definitively uprooted, subsided somewhat. It was a reconfiguration. The old oppressions—the overbearing, life-negating tedium of it all—were briefly reprieved. Magee College was taken over by the Briti
sh Navy. A secret bunker was built under the lawn in front of it. If Luftwaffe spy planes were overhead, they disguised their position by playing games of baseball on it. Talbot House became the U.S. Navy base. The country house of Beech Hill was occupied by U.S. Marines. The ammunition was stored at Fincairn Glen. A hospital was set up at Creevagh. The soldiers were housed at Beech Hill and Springtown. A thousand-foot-long timber jetty was erected on the river in six months by eight hundred Americans and two thousand locals at Lisahally. It was built from Oregon pine. It now lies in braille, an ogham script of ruins, the remaining tall posts covered in barnacles.
In the Victorian age the transatlantic telegraph was envisioned as angels walking on the ocean floor. Now messages came beneath the waves continually. Even after the war, it remained that way. The nuclear hotline from Moscow to Washington allegedly ran through the city. Benbradagh, near Dungiven, was riven with telecommunications aerials during the cold war. Derry’s local saint, Columba, wrote in Latin of living at the world’s edge. What had seemed a place of isolation, or at best liminality, became an advantage when the center was overthrown.
Kids stood up on window ledges to watch the U.S. Marine marching bands. Watchmen were posted on rooftops to look out for fires and spot enemy planes. American and British planes were named after girlfriends, good-luck mascots, and favorite sports teams. Nose-art on the front of aircraft became a specialty, like maiden-heads bringing fortune to ships or to ward off the evil eye of the flak-gunner’s aim. It seemed almost normal to send groups of boys into the thundering sky. Second World War Carter sirens stood prominently on rooftops for those who looked up. They resembled futuristic spindles, with a surrounding wooden frame casting shadows like gallows. Testing them gave passersby the creeps, as if howling backward from some apocalyptic future.
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