by Paul Theroux
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.
18. The 16:30 to Mallaig
AFTER MY DAYS of being menaced by Belfast's ugly face, I went by boat and train to Glasgow and found it peaceful, even pretty. It had a bad name. "Gleska," people said, and mocked the toothless population and spoke of razor fights in the Gorbals, and made haggis jokes. Yet Glasgow was pleasant—not broken, but eroded. The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified—no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions. In Ireland I had felt as though I had been walking blindly into the dark. But Scotland made me hopeful. This sunny day stretched all the way to Oban, where I was headed.
On my way from Glasgow Central to Queen Street Station, I fell in with two postmen. They asked me where I had come from. I told them Ulster. They said, "Och!"
"It's full of broken windows," I said.
"Aye. And broken hids!" one said.
The other man said, "We got our Catholics. Ha' ye nae heard of the Rangers and Celtics fitba matches? They play each other a guid sux tames a year, but there's nae always a riot."
No alphabet exists for the Glaswegian accent—phonetic symbols are no good without a glottal stop, a snort, or a wheeze. I met rural-dwelling Scots who told me they could not understand anyone in Glasgow. The Ulster accent took a moment to turn from noise to language: I heard someone speak and then in the echo of the voice there was a meaning. But this did not always happen in Scotland: the echo was meaningless, and in Glasgow it was a strangled peevish hiccup, sudden and untranslatable.
I rode in an empty railway car up the Clyde, past tenements. I wondered about their age. They were striking in their size and their darkness—six stories of stone, looking like prisons or lunatic asylums. Had the Scots originated the tenement? Their word for these old blocks was lands, and they had been using the word since the fifteenth century.
We went past Dumbarton (Dun Bretane, "Hill of the Britons"), along the muddy rock-strewn shore, the Firth of Clyde. Across the firth was the busy port of Greenock ("birthplace of Captain Kidd, the pirate"). There were hills behind it. I always had trouble with hills. These were not so much risen loaves as smooth and sloping and lightly upholstered...
A big old man came through the connecting door, and though there was not another person in the whole railway car, he sat beside me. I put my notebook into my pocket.
"I hope you're not embarrassed," he said.
Not embarrassed, but something—perhaps startled.
"I'm going to Oban," I said.
"Good," he said. "We can talk." He was also going the hundred miles.
But he did most of the talking. He was very old, and even sitting next to me he was a foot higher. He looked like a Pope. He had a fat nose and big baggy-fleshed hands. He wore a long black overcoat and carried a small parcel of books tied with twine: detective stories. His name was John L. Davidson and he had been born in Lanarkshire in 1895. He said that occasionally he did feel eighty-seven years old. How long had he lived in Dumbarton? "Only fifty years," he said. He lived in the Dumbarton Home for Aged Gentlefolk now. Everyone he had ever known was dead.
He said, "I'm only seven years younger than John Logie Baird. Have you not heard of him? He invented the tellyvision. He was born here in Helensburgh."
I looked out the window.
"Over there somewhere," Mr. Davidson said. "His teachers at school didnae think he was very bright. They thought he was a head case. One day he decided to invent a tellyphone. He put a wire across the road, a tellyphone instrument at either end, one in his house and one in his friend's. A man was riding a horse down the road, didnae see the wire—and strangled! Hanged himself on the wire of John Logie Baird's tellyphone! That's a true story. But he never hanged anyone on his tellyvision."
We came to Garelochhead; we traveled past Loch Long. The mountains above it were dark and rough, like enormous pieces of dusty coal. They were surrounded by pine woods. The loch was blue-black and looked depthless.
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"This loch is so long, so deep, and so straight, they test torpedoes in it," Mr. Davidson said. "You can shoot a torpedo from one end to the other—thirteen miles or more. Want to see something interesting?"
He stood up and beckoned me to the window, slid it down, and said, "Watch."
We were coming to a junction, more tracks, and an isolated signal box. There were woods and hills all around. I expected the train to stop, but it did not even slow down. Mr. Davidson stuck his parcel of books out the window and dangled it. A railwayman was standing on a small raised platform near the signal box. He snatched the books and yelled, "Thank you!"
"I've come this way before. The trains don't stop. I heard that the signalman here likes to read a good book. There's no shops here, no library, so I brought those books for him."
Mr. Davidson had no idea who the signalman was, nor did he know his name. He knew only that the man liked to read a good book.
"There used to be ever so many wee houses on this line, but now there's nae many. It's out of touch. You see people on the train—after they've finished with their newspaper, they throw it out the window to someone on the line to read."
Then Mr. Davidson screamed. He erupted in anger, just like that, without any warning.
"But some of them make me cross! People who travel through Scotland on the train, doing the crossword puzzle! Why do they bother to come!"