The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  p.m. Padraic Pearse surrendered his sword to Brigadier General Lowe, who treated him with great courtesy.

  James A. Mackay, Eire: The Story of Eire and her Stamps, London, 1968

  And Pearse’s profile puts me in mind of that of a Catholic priest, in bas-relief on a tomb in Milltown cemetery. The Revd Domhnall Ó Tuathail, a renowned Gaelic scholar, died in the pulpit on 3 December 1922, three days before the issue of the first ‘Saorstát’ overprinted stamps. His epitaph is taken from Íosagán (Little Jesus), a work of saccharine religiosity by Padraic Pearse: ‘IS IOGHANTACH AN GRÁDH BHÍ AIGE DO’N NÍDH IS ÁILNE ’S IS GLAINE DÁR CHRUTHAIGH DIA: ANAM GLÉGHEAL AN PHÁISTE’ (He had a wonderful love for the most beautiful and cleanest thing ever created by God: the shining soul of a child). The Reverend’s left eye has been used by the faithful as a holy touchstone, and through time it has been worn into a polished black monocular socket. When I went back yesterday to check these details, I decided to have a look at the Republican plot as well. As I stood before its granite Ogham plinths, browsing the lapidary columns of names from 1798 on, I realized a British Army patrol had infiltrated Milltown from the Bog Meadows. I bowed my head as the soldiers filed slowly past me, cradling their guns like babies, scanning the regions of the living and the dead.

  1 I still love this name: one can, of course, read it as the past tense of a verb; more interestingly ‘rang’ is Irish for ‘class’, cognate, no doubt, with ‘rung’ (as in a ladder) and ‘rank’.

  2 Commissioned, I believe, by Elizabeth I, for the first Irish translation of the Bible, by William Bedel, in 1681–85.

  MILLTOWN CEMETERY

  When British special forces shot dead an IRA team in Gibraltar in March 1988, the three bodies were brought to Belfast for martyrs’ funerals. On 16 March at Milltown Cemetery, a lone Loyalist, Michael Stone, fired shots and threw grenades at the crowd, killing three people.

  Jonathan Bardon and David Burnett, Belfast: A Pocket History, 1996

  According to folklore, Michael Stone, when challenged, gained entrance to the heavily stewarded cemetery by uttering the Sinn Féin graffiti slogan, Tiocfaidh ár lá (our day will come). Apocryphal or not, the phrase is riddled with historical and linguistic ambiguity. Strictly speaking, tiocfaidh ár lá is bad Irish, based on an English subtext; in Irish, one cannot own a day (ownership being a hazy concept in that language) nor can a day have active volition. Accordingly, an alternative expression, beidh an lá linn is sometimes seen inscribed on gable walls – literally, the day will be with us, or in English, the day will be ours. This, it seems to me, is a reflection, conscious or not, of ‘Lillibulero’, ‘the famous ballad in mockery of the Irish Catholics, which sung James II out three kingdoms’, according to Chambers, ‘from the meaningless refrain’. However, it is generally agreed, at least in Ireland, that the refrain (lillibulero bullenala, in full) is a corruption of the Irish, (an) lile ba léir é, ba linn an lá, that is, ‘the lily was plain to be seen, and the day was ours’. A further irony: ‘Lillibulero’ was the theme tune of the old BBC World Service.1

  The name Michael Stone carries a double reverberation: Michael is more usually associated with Catholics (hence the term ‘Mickies’), who regard St Michael the Archangel as the conductor of the souls of the dead; and stone images of this angel are posted at some of the graves in Milltown Cemetery. An apologist for nominal predestination, à la Tristram Shandy, could make much of this case; or a psychiatrist might interpret Stone’s act as one of revenge against his name. There are other twists – St Michael’s was the principal voice heard by the French royalist, or loyalist, Joan of Arc; and the Archangel’s role in leading a successful military campaign against the rebel forces of Lucifer might well have occurred to Stone. The word-bubble ambiguities of ‘Michael Stone’ rub up against each other like pebbles, accidentally contiguous on a huge beach.

  Sometimes I am in religious awe of the power of names. Milltown is a banal enough example, but it carries for me a recollection of the tiny mill-village adjacent to the cemetery, which you approached by a steeply descending chalk-and-dirt loaney that took you off the broad thoroughfare of the Falls Road into a time-warped zone of half-occupied ancient staggered dwellings and a derelict mill that had once been powered by one of the many streams that emanated from Black Mountain, flowing beyond the mill into the misty fen of the Bog Meadows. There was a disused sandstone quarry nearby, carved out by artifice and weathering into a microcosmic Grand Canyon, which I used to explore in detail in my early teens, imagining brick-kilns, tunnels, chambered galleries and mausoleums within its compass. Then, St Gall’s Gaelic Athletic Club maintained its HQ in the rear of the moribund Milltown Industrial School, a grim-looking building which might formerly have been the mill-owner’s residence, and was taken over by the De la Salle Brothers who managed St Gall’s Public Elementary School. I am a past pupil of the school, and an erstwhile member of the club, which acquired some ground on the verge of the Bog Meadows and was made, by dint of some voluntary and moonlighted labour, into a hurling and football field. In my day, it was rough, slanted and bumpy, with baldy patches in it; now, when I perceive it, driving on the M1 through the remnants of the Meadows, it has been ironed out into a broad green flat sward; and there, just beside it, is the tiny red pit of the quarry.

  It was on the former pitch that my left retina was detached when I jumped to catch a high ball and the sliotar2 was deflected by my fingertips against my open eye, and I became instantly half-blind. The remedy for this injury, in my case, was to lie in a hospital bed for a week without moving my head, in order to allow the retina to regenerate its contact with the vitreous humour. This inordinately boring operation was indeed a success, but I attribute some of my steadily progressive myopia to that accidental, or mishandled ricochet. It requires me to look closer into things.

  Driving on the M1 at night south of Milltown, you can observe a curious optical phenomenon, as the headlights of the passing traffic bounce off the gravestones and the blank stone eyes of archangels in an orchestra of random constellated Morse, like the flash outbursts of Olympian photography in colossal stadiums, and you feel the dead are signalling to you.

  *

  The stream that powered the mill was the same that gushed from a rocky orifice on Black Mountain and gurgled down the Mountain Loaney, a steep winding limestone path which was both river-bed and road, and in summer it was great to walk barefoot up it with your shoes tied around your neck, relishing the ache of your palpable soles against the pebbles, and the bracelets of cold water chilling around your ankles. When you’d made it to the spring, you’d put your mouth to its forceful gout and gulp it breathlessly and thankfully, as it spattered your face and hair and rinsed away, with a glacial shock to the brain, all thoughts of tiredness. Then it was time to turn around, and look back and down at the city you had come from.

  Here and there, scattered throughout the maze of factories, mills, barracks, schools, the filing-systems of terraced houses, are glints and gleams of water: mill-dams, reservoirs, ponds, sinks, and sluices, all fed by the little rivers springing from the Antrim Hills: the Forth River, the Mile Water, the Clowney Water, the Falls Water. Without this water, there would be no Belfast as we know it, since its industries were impossible without it. Wandering at ground level within the dense urban fabric of brick walls, in the valleys of shadow cast by the tall factories with their blanked-out windows, it was beautiful to get, through the iron rails of a locked factory gate, a glimpse of a wind-rippled milldam on which drifted a flotilla of swans. All of Belfast murmurs with innumerable rills, subterranean and otherwise, like the Farset River that ran below the yard of St Gall’s School in Waterville Street.

  Without the Farset, the name of Belfast would not be.

  *

  The late Deirdre Flanagan, in her authoritative study, Béal Feirste agus Áitainmneacha Laistigh3 (Topothesia, Galway, 1982), notes that the ‘educated’ accent on the first syllable, Bélfast, has been prevalent for at least thr
ee generations, preceding the admittedly powerful influence of the British Broadcasting Corporation; but many of the working class pronounce it Belfást, as do most country people, and practically all of my father’s generation (those few who survive), since the Irish Béal Feirste, from whence it derives, is weighted on the last syllable. What the name means is another thing:

  The utmost obscurity and perplexity, however, attend the derivation of the name … the name of Bealafarsad, which means, according to some, hurdleford town,4 while others have translated it, the mouth of the pool. Either of these explanations might receive some corroboration from local facts, but as it is a matter of complete hypothesis, there seems to be further room for further speculation.

  So wrote the exasperated George Benn, in 1823. Dubourdieu, writing some years earlier, claims that Belfast ‘is supposed to have derived its name from Bela Fearsad, which signifies a town at the mouth of a river, expressive of the circumstances, in which it stands’. Ward, Lock’s Guide to Northern Ireland (no date, but it looks like a 1950s job) has yet another version: ‘While the bell in Belfast’s civic coat-of-arms is a feeble pun, the word “fast” refers to the “farset”, or sandbank (also the now-covered-in High Street river “Bel” in Celtic means “ford”, i.e. Bel-feirste, the “bel”, or “ord” of the “farset”)’.

  Here is Deirdre Flanagan (in my inadequate translation):

  Despite authoritative glosses by scholars on the appellation ‘Belfast’ since the times of Joyce,5 its etymology remains largely misunderstood, especially by the general public – the notion that it means the mouth of the river called the ‘Farset’.

  She then draws our attention to numerous sources which corroborate her assertion that the name of Belfast derives from the ford or sand-bank in the River Lagan. En route, she quotes some interesting sixteenth-century English mutations: ‘Belferside, Bealefarst (an old castle standing on a ford), Bellfarst, Kellefarst (sic), Bellfarste, Bellfaste, Belfaste, Belferst, Belfirst, Belfyrst, Belfarst, Befersyth, Beserstt, Belfast’, and I imagine these Shakespearians in doublets mangling the Irish language with their tongues as they strut on the bridge across the River Farset, or the Town River, conducting important business.

  The first reference to anything resembling Belfast is in the Annals of Ulster, ‘Bellum Fertsi inter Ultu & Cruitne, 668 AD’, a pivotal battle resembling a mirror of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and glossed on by Jonathan Bardon in his magisterial Belfast: An Illustrated History as a battle between ‘the Ulaid, a warrior caste of the Erinn’ and ‘the mysterious Cruithin, a people closely connected with the Picts of Northern Britain.’ Bardon gives the date as 666 AD, an altogether more apocalyptic number, being the one of the marks of the Beast which appears before the end of the world in the Bible. It is not my role to establish which of these dates is right, but their disagreement accords with the slippery metathesis of fertas – the earliest record of the word – into fearsad. Patrick Dinneen in his 1927 edition of An Irish–English Dictionary glosses it as a shaft, a spindle, the ulna of the arm, a club, the spindle of an axle, a bar or bank of sand at low water, a deep narrow channel on a strand at low tide, a pit or pool of water, a verse, a poem. In keeping with all of this, my father tells me that the Axis forces in the Second World War were known in Irish as Lucht na Feirste, the Axle People, as if they had recently invented the wheel; or you can see the word as the snub hub of a Stuka’s propeller blades.

  Serendipitously, the Farset is an axis between the Catholic Falls and the Protestant Shankill, as its power source was responsible for a string of mills in which both denominations were employed, with separate entrances for Prods and Taigs from North and South of the divide, notwithstanding the same terrible conditions, producing linen which they could never afford to buy. Instead, the women who wrought in the mills made underwear for their children out of flour-bags.

  The most satisfactory translation of Belfast, according to Deirdre Flanagan, is ‘approach to ford’. I register this meaning tentatively, remembering or peering at the Farset, though I didn’t know its name then, between the rusted bars of the iron railing of the entry at the back of St Gall’s Public Elementary School in Waterville Street, gazing down at its dark exhausted water, my cheeks pressed against the cold iron. I did not know its name, then, but was mesmerized by its rubbish: a bottomless bucket, the undercarriage of a pram, and the rusted springs sticking out of the wreck of a sunk abandoned sofa.

  1 After writing this I consulted the traditional singer Brian Mullen, who has a new twist to the derivation: the Gaelic scholar Breandan Ó Buachalla has a most plausible theory that Lile refers to the astrologer William Lilly (1602–81), who made accurate prognostications about the outcome of the Jacobite wars.

  2 ‘A good quantity, as of food at a meal, a hurley-ball’ – Revd Patrick S. Dinneen, An Irish–English Dictionary, 1927.

  3 ‘Belfast, and place names within it’.

  4 Interestingly, the Irish for Dublin, Baile Átha Cliath, means precisely ‘hurdleford town’.

  5 Patrick Weston Joyce, social historian, musician, linguist and geographer, 1827–1914.

  THE BUNAGLOW

  The three-piece suite, comprising a chesterfield and two companion armchairs, was traditionally focused around the hearth so as to form a winter stockade, beyond which was Arctic lino; within was a warm snug, where the fire threw flickering patterns over the bit of mesmerizing Persian carpet. On the mantelpiece, besides the dead-centred analogue clock and the two mute china dogs, there’d be a brass letter-rack in the shape of a turf-cutter’s donkey and cart (a souvenir of Galway) crammed with buff envelopes; a tin of Rinstead pastilles; a snowstorm featuring the Eiffel tower; a pewter mug half-filled with loose buttons, foreign coins and pencil-stubs, etcetera. In lieu of television, we stared into the burning coals, dimly aware of the disembodied static voice of the bakelite sun-burst-grilled art deco radio, sometimes making our own sporadic conversation, or listening to my father repeat a story for the third time that week. At Family Rosary time, these circumstances would be overturned, as we knelt down and dug our faces into the dulled velveteen cushions, trying to contemplate the Mysteries without deviation, exploring the mental darkness in the interstices of the chesterfield, feeling the posterior heat; decades slipped through our fingers, as the quarter-hour of mantra dragged towards its terminus.

  Some years ago, I inherited a nearly identical piece, its scuffed hide beginning to fray and split into hyphens between its regimented sentences of brass tacks: I was about to say ‘carbon-copy’, with its implication of shirt-button-keyed manual typewriters; but the flimsy sheet itself, that left blue smooches on your fingertips, is wrong on this occasion. The chesterfield came from Sans Souci Park, where I had shared a house with three peers;1 when we split up, as is the inevitable wont of four unmarried heterosexual male cohabitees, the furniture went different ways. I still have the utility oak bed, dressing-table and wardrobe with its mirror Narnia door, a suite that I bought in a defunct auction rooms whose name I can’t remember, but whose premises lay where the old Dublin Road Toll House in Bradbury Place used to be. Its one low storey was flanked by tall Victorian buildings, making it look like a tea-cosy cottage; its threshold lay below pavement level, its lintel below head height, so that, stooping into the imaginary room beyond, one could visualize the slow metronome of a pendulum clock, and a kitchen dresser with its orchestra of Delft placated by the light of a Vermeer interior. The same calm brightness falls across the crinkles of a wall-map, or pours like cream from the blue jug, as it dots the bodice buttons of the girl who is reading a letter: gazing at this reproduction of a painting, we eavesdrop on its silent narrative, whose full story we will never know, since its rendering, in salient places, is deliberately illegible. What seem like pearls weighed on a minim scale are weightless blips of light.

  In my childish circumstances, the scroll-armed chesterfield would sometimes become a flying-machine, a hybrid of Verne’s Clipper of the Clouds and Andersen’s Flying Trunk. Crewed b
y three or four children (though one could manage it with ease) it made remarkable expeditions for such an ostensibly floor-bound item. We often flew to Turkey in it and back in the space of a day, or less. We would always remember the sherbet fountains, the elaborate hubble-bubble pipes and refractory camels, the scent of kif and kumquats drowsing through the alleyways and cool arcades; when night came, suddenly as brushed mascara, we knew that it was time to leave. After describing some Immelmann turns and loop-the-loops, we’d return the vehicle safely to home base, gliding through the immaterial walls, hovering for an instant above the four cardinal points of its castor-dents in the lino, before settling into them, as if programmed.

  At any rate, the Sans Souci chesterfield – no, ‘settee’ is what it had become by then – became part of the furniture of ‘The Bunaglow’, where my wife Deirdre and I lived for seven years. The Bunaglow is the gardener’s cottage attached to Riddel Hall, formerly , according to the 1948 Directory, a ‘Residence for Women Students at Queen’s University: Miss Power Steel, Resident Wdn., Miss Boyd, matron; Richard Chamberlain, gardener’, and latterly, the headquarters of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, where, at the time of writing, I have worked for twenty-one years. In 1948, neither Hall nor cottage were numbered; some thirty years on, the Post Office designated the Hall as ‘181a Stranmillis Road’, and the cottage as The Bungalow opposite 198 Stranmillis Road’ (occupied, in 1948, by Miss V. Jolly); but the metathetic computer of the Northern Ireland Electricity Service addressed its bills to ‘The Bunaglow’, and it is still called that by us, in spite of a recent rationalization whereby the Arts Council is 185 and the cottage 187.