by Paul Theroux
***
There was an army checkpoint down the road at Derrylin. On the way to see it I stopped in local inns, in villages so small they were not on any map. The inns were full of men and boys, and on summer evenings places like Crocknacreevy looked and smelled like Rhodesia, a tough and beautiful colony in the dust.
"They're not farmers," an innkeeper told me. "They're all on the dole. They're not bad, but they've been brought up to behave like cretins. They chuck their cigarette ends on the carpet and grind them in with their boot heels. Farmers don't stay up until all hours drinking. They work hard for their money, so they save it."
The army checkpoint was just a barrier manned by six soldiers, but this road went straight to the border. The soldiers would not talk to me.
Don't talk politics, don't talk religion, people said; but I thought: Ridiculous! What was the point in traveling around Ulster if you avoided those two subjects?
A Protestant named Mortimer gave me a lift and said, "The army are very rough when they first arrive in an area. Those men you saw are paratroopers. They've just got here—that's why they look so nasty. After three or four weeks they'll be a bit more polite."
I asked him whether they harassed people, as the papers reported.
"Aye. They do. Especially if you have some connection with Irish politics—or if they think you have. They come to your house at six in the morning. They don't knock you up—they kick your door off its hinges. Sometimes they tear the place apart."
I said it sounded fairly severe.
He smiled. "It's worse when they take you in. There are lots of stories. Even if they're half-true, they're very bad."
"Have you been arrested?" I asked.
"They don't have to arrest you," Mortimer said. "They take you in."
"And then?"
"Beat you up."
I said, "Maybe you'd be better off without the army?"
"I wouldn't say that. But it can be pretty rough with them." He thought a moment and said, "We get more trouble from the UDR than the army."
"Who's 'we'?"
He said, "Everyone."
I took a bus in an easterly direction to Dungannon. The hills were steep and green and very close together in this part of Tyrone, and in the small town of Clogher they were like green wrinkles on the face of the earth, the ridges of hills, one after another.
Every town looked as though it was expecting trouble at any moment. All the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were armed and alert and seemed nervous. They knew that the suddenness of violence was peculiar to this sort of piecemeal siege: everything happened in seconds.
I made the mistake in Dungannon of going repeatedly through the same checkpoint turnstile. "You again," the policeman's expression said. "Make up your mind—stay in or stay out." He seemed irritated, like a man who has to keep getting up to unlock a door. The town center was completely sealed off and surrounded by police marksmen with automatic rifles.
On the way to Portadown in North Armagh I sat in a bus filled with women and children. It was always the case. The children were hyperactive, jumping on the seats and yelling. One kicked at the window.
"Missus," the driver kept saying, "take that chayld awee from that wunder."
The villages all followed the same pattern: a church, a post office, a manor house, an Orange Hall, a cluster of tiny cottages. There were no strangers here, no city slickers moving in and fixing up the cottages, as they did in Dorset and Devon; and no people who had come here to retire and grow roses, as they did in Sussex and Kent. The old people in Ulster villages had been born in those same villages. They did not move to the coast. They did not move at all. This was a society in which everyone stayed put.
***
Where was the railway station? I asked people in Portadown. They said: Over there, over there. But there was no station; I couldn't see it. Over there, they said. Then Mr. Cleary said, "It's right here."
I could not see it, I said.
"Aye," he said. "It got blew up four months ago. But this is where it used to be."
It had been bombed one Sunday night. Mr. Cleary had heard the explosion himself in his kitchen. He asked where I was going.
"Newry," I said.
"Ah, that's all right then. The train doesn't go to Newry."
He meant I need not have troubled myself. Anyway, the train was gone. It went to Dundalk in the Republic: it didn't stop for twenty-five miles.
Why didn't the train stop anywhere? I asked.
"No necessity. No one goes to Newry."
Sean O'Faolain had written of being in Portadown in the 1940s and asking a man, "What is the outstanding characteristic of this town—a typical Ulster town—compared with any typical southern town?" And the man had replied, "I'll tull ye. No Jew ever made a living here or in Ballymena."
I told this to Mr. Cleary and he said, "Aye. That's true, right enough."
There was no quick way out of Portadown, and it was a dreary place. I wanted to go to Newry and then Kilkeel and continue up the coast. People said: Don't go to Newry—it's bandit country there, sure it is. I'm after coming there meself and I'm surprised I'm still alive, like.
"Aw, if they'd listened to Joe Gibson we'd still have a railway station," a man named McGrane told me. "But they didn't believe him. He's daft, see. 'I seen the kyar!' he says. He was trying to warn them. But he's sort of screwy. They just laughed, and then bang!"
"Who did it?" I said.
"No one took credit for it. Could have been anyone," McGrane said. "Take your pick. We've got the IRA, the Provos, the INLA, and Provisional Sinn Fein. There's the UDA, the UVF, the UFF, the Tartan Army, and Paisley's Third Force. There's also common criminals. There's people cashing in on the violence. There's bloody kids. There's too many, if you ask me."
McGrane was against union with the Republic: "If a woman don't want any more kids, the priest will come round and tell her not to take any conthra-conthra-conthrathep—" He winced, trying to say the word.
I said, "I get the point."
Thomas B. Mules was very fat and had small close-set eyes. He had stopped smoking only a few months before, because he could no longer afford it. He had gained forty pounds and now weighed two hundred and thirty.
Mr. Mules said, "Don't go to Newry."
"Why not?"
"Tis a Provo town," he whispered, edging nearer.
"So?"
"Talking English," he said. "Asking questions," he said. "Dey'll take ye for an SAS man," he said. "Dey'll cull ye."
"Cull" seemed somehow worse than "kill." It was like being noiselessly dispatched forever.
Mr. Mules said, "Go to Newcastle."
So I went to Newcastle, via Gilford and Banbridge, on more country buses ("Missus, please take yer chayld...").
All municipal buildings were protected in an unusual way. They were not merely fenced in—they were enclosed in cages that occasionally rose over the top of the buildings. They had elaborate gates and barbed wire, and the mesh was very fine. They made the police stations and telephone exchanges and all the other likely targets bombproof. It was strange to see such heavy security in what were otherwise sleepy country towns, and also strange—in the face of such ugly fortifications—to be told "Aye, but it's very quiet here, really."
In Banbridge I wrote in my diary: Over a week in N. Ireland pestering people with questions and I still haven't met a real bigot.
Because Banbridge was on the main road from Eire to Belfast, there were a number of checkpoints just south of town. Some were manned by the jug-eared volunteers of the Ulster Defence Regiment ("Open yer boot—") and some by the Royal Ulster Constabulary ("Have you ever been in the North before?"), and some by British soldiers ("Carrying a gun?").
On the country bus to Newcastle I kept glimpsing the Mourae Mountains. They were sudden and unusual in the gentle landscape. Farther east the land was stony, and the mountains, which had looked blue from Katesbridge, were pale green, and bare, smooth, bulgy, and undulant, lik
e a naked giantess lying in a green sleeping bag.
Newcastle lay beneath the high peak of Slieve Donard, and it was empty. In pretty places like this I got the full flavor of Ulster desolation: no one at the beach or in the park; no one promenading on the Promenade; no parked cars, because there was a bomb law against it; no one in the shops; and only one couple in the Chinese restaurant. Bright and bleak, the sunlit ghost towns of the Ulster coast!
Scrawled on a building in Newcastle was the slogan VIVA ARGENTINA. It was the first time in my traveling that I had seen a graffito in support of Argentina in the Falklands War. The irony was that the day I saw it was the day the British army entered Port Stanley, forcing the Argentines to surrender. The next morning's newspapers all had the same headline: VICTORY!
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.