The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  16. The 10:23 to Londonderry

  THE "TROUBLES"—that quaint Ultonian word for murder and mayhem—had something to do with the Irish differences between men and women here, I was sure. Why, look at this train to Derry. Nearly all the passengers were women, talking in normal voices. The few men on board were either shouting or whispering. The women were neither demure nor brassy; they were plain, frank, and a bit careworn. The men by contrast looked both jaunty and evasive, and they seemed to have nothing whatever to do. Women and men; duty and dereliction. Usually, though, there were only women around, and it seemed all the men had gone away to war—which in a sense was true.

  There were always women and girls waiting for buses at crossroads. They were early risers—they walked, they even hitchhiked. I saw them along the coast of Londonderry, the shore of Lough Foyle, from Bellarena to Waterside. It was a country of active women, going shopping or to work, shoveling manure, driving tractors, riding trains.

  People in Ulster traveled only when absolutely necessary, so it was significant that women traveled much more than men. Very often the only man on an Ulster bus was the driver. The wife was frequently the breadwinner, particularly in Derry: she was cheaper to employ and more dependable. I was never frightened in a train or a bus. They were seldom attacked, because t
hey were full of women and children. The children could seem almost demented—nowhere in my life had I seen such excitable rowdy kids—but the women were noticeably friendly.

  Women had assumed so many domestic and social duties here that a situation had arisen in which the men had no responsibilities. It was idleness as much as religion that made Ulstermen fighting mad. The proof that they were demoralized was the self-hatred in Ulster aggression. What was more self-destructive than a hunger strike? And wasn't it peculiar that the hunger strikers, far from being pacifists, were often very violent men who ought to have known that their captors were eager to be rid of them?

  LET THEM DIE was scrawled on the bricks all over Orange Antrim, and ten hunger strikers had recently fasted until death in the Maze Prison. Then there was the so-called Dirty Protest. I could not imagine a preoccupied and overworked Irishwoman dreaming up this loony tactic. But it was easy to see how a maddened and self-hating Irishman might decide to act out his frustration by smearing the walls of his prison cell with his own shit, and refusing to wear clothes or have a bath or a haircut. "Take that!" they cried, and pigged it in those cells for months, innocently believing they were getting even with the British government by stinking to heaven.

  I thought: This behavior is so strange, there's probably no name for it. But surely it was in a way profoundly childlike? This was how small children behaved when they felt angry and abandoned, when they wanted to be pitied.

  At home these men were treated by their overworked womenfolk as if they were forever boys and burdens. The shame or guilt this dependency inspired made the men aggressive; but they had all the time in the world to ventilate their aggression. Religion was hardly a restraining force. Irish Catholicism was one long litany of mother imagery and mother worship, which only bolstered the odd family pattern; and Irish Protestantism seemed mainly to be based on a tribal memory of bloody battles, remembered with special relish in the all-male Orange Lodges.