It is instructive to watch a master storyteller in action as he manipulates his various latitudes of anecdote and parable, and suits them to contemporary circumstances, bending the previous rules of the story a little to make it fit whatever conversation in whatever venue; and the room becomes a geodesic dome in which he moves through longitudes of time, incapable of being here and now without remembering the previous narrative zones he’s passed through. Sometimes, at grand soirées or ceilidhs, you might get three or four such characters, each vying to get his spake or spoke in, within the tricky, poker-faced etiquette demanded by such verbal jousting, each winding the others up with improbable logic and loopy propositions.
So the globe spins on its tilted axis, and the supper interval arrives in a lull. Tea is handed round in cupfuls chinking on their saucers, and a plethora of sandwiches – thick-cut ham and mustard, cheese and Branston pickle, salmon, chicken, egg and onion, ‘salad’ (lettuce, scallions and tomato lathered with Crosse & Blackwell’s salad cream), tuna – appears from nowhere, packed in triangle flotillas on willow-pattern plates, so that as they’re deliberated over and picked off, details of the underlying blue legend are revealed. I should also mention the bite-sized sausage rolls, the little plump cocktail sausages, and the pearl onions, the cubes of yellow cheese and chunks of pineapple threaded on to cocktail sticks (a perverse trio taste explosion), not forgetting the barmbrack slices with their odd sultanas glistening through smotherings of butter, the split-open fruit scones likewise, the sultana loaf itself, the wodges of currant soda bread, the radially dissected apple pie, the butterfly buns, and the final sophistication of assorted biscuits out of a tin.
By this time, the animated flow of the solo story has been taken over by cross-currents of talk, as the audience evolves into a company. Different nodes and knots of atmospherics crack about the room, as people shift their chairs a bit to rearrange the conversational domain, some leaning over backwards with one ear cocked, or hunched forward, concentratedly twiddling their thumbs in trying to catch the drift of a private elaborate joke; all this while the multitude is being fed, and parts of speech are syncopated by the noise of munch and slurp and sup and glug. Big freckle-fisted young men balance cups of tea on their broad thighs and grab sandwiches in threes or fours, one hand stuffing their faces while the other deposits a stash on paper-napkin-covered paper plates (those ones with the calibrated edges) for future reference. Then there’s a not-too-covert mineral bottle of poteen going the underhand rounds, poured in modicums into cups of tea to fortify them, or brimmed into the improvised miniature shot-glass of the screw-top, held delicately between finger and thumb, and knocked back with a subsequent appreciative gasp.
The ample repast I describe is a rural one, but might, on a reduced scale, be applied to Belfast. Here, the kitchen of the terraced ‘kitchen’ house performed a similar function to that of its more expansive country cousin, occupying most of the ground-floor plan. ‘Kitchen’, so-called, for, although most of the cooking happened in a wardrobe-sized scullery, the word still retained its social dimensions and gestures of hospitality, and lent itself to the main living space of the house. On the occasion of a wake, room could be made for the many mourners and the people paying their respects, sometimes in a relay, rosary fashion, as decades of the populace filed in and out. The staircase would become an omnibus, where a dozen or a score might be accommodated, cheek by jowl; but this involved a difficulty, since the corpse was invariably laid out on a double bed in the grander of the two minuscule upstairs rooms, and to view it, you had to climb a throng of passengers, stumbling over shoes and thighs and ankles. Arriving at the top, you stepped into the tiny chamber made big by the flames of two beeswax candles at either side of the bed, and saw the body stretched, trembling in the candlelight as if hovering above the coverlet it lay upon. Dusty yellow light fell through the drawn blind of the one window.
When the coffin came, sometimes the stairs would be so narrow that the undertakers had to take the window out. Otherwise the coffin might get stuck in an indecorous angle. So they lifted the empty coffin in through the glassless embrasure, and lowered it back on to the street. When the time came for the funeral procession to congregate, an Angel of Death would arrive to supervise the proceedings, the same Angel who was first on your doorstep with news of the decease. Typically, these were little shabby-dapper gregarious men who’d started off as bookies’ runners, and now survived on a mysterious series of moonlighting enterprises. They smelled of billiard chalk. They had the gift of the gab and sometimes acted as assistant managers of parish Gaelic football teams. They were partial to the odd bottle, and were often propped at bar counters in between jobs. Some were married, and some were not, but every family seemed to extend to one.
At funerals, their mild social nuisance value was transformed into a virtue, as they nominated quartets of coffin-carriers from the cortège and synchronized the ‘lift’ from one team to the next. After the burial, they’d make courageous attempts to buy rounds in the nearby Gravediggers’ Arms, before generously allowing themselves to be forestalled. Then they would embark on a panegyric of great football players of the past, as exemplified by the deceased’s second cousin, who could drop a fifty-yard ball at a perfectly weighted angle to his team-mate’s tangential run, and sprint up from behind mid-field in about two-point-something seconds to collect the return pass, after which he waltzed round two defenders before burying the ball in the top right corner; the Angel could see the net bulging still, as the seated shirt-sleeved crowd behind the goal rose up in a simultaneous wave to applaud the beautiful move, which he would demonstrate in slo-mo on a bar table, with matchboxes proxying for forwards, and cigarette-packets for backs.
Other examples followed from the teeming archive of his inward eye: how the chalk-marks on a snooker table illustrated, if pored over through a magnifying glass, the manifold screws and skids of the balls colliding and ricocheting, how each stroke left a dot of chalk on the cue-ball, which in turn deposited a microscopic track across the baize or, more especially, against the nap of it. So, one could reconstruct an epic frame from an examination of the empty green arena, until its supervisor, with a wide brush, wiped away the evidence.
Meanwhile, a choreography of trundles, clicks and clunks unreeled from the tape-recorder of his mind, eliciting the occasional shudder of a mis-cue, or the dead noise of a ‘kick’. Then the conjuror’s white-gloved referee would place a transparent device adjacent to the guilty ball, which he’d pick up and gnarl as if washing his hands of it; sacerdotally, he’d replace it on its invisible spot, and vanish the device back into the pocket of his black tux. During this lull the congregation would take the opportunity to clear their throats; the challenger thoughtfully chalked the tips of his cue and blew on its tip, before returning to the table with renewed, unbroken concentration and aplomb to make an unprecedented safety shot that came to rest in the jaws of a baulk pocket. From that point on, the snookered champion had no come-back, and the aisles of The Crucible were littered with beaten dockets.
1 Coiséin, Béal Feirste, 1986.
THE GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY
A ‘beaten docket’ is Belfast parlance for a betting-slip that has passed its sell-by date; so it is appropriate that a public house not two doors away from a bookmaker’s (Crown Turf Accountants) should be so called. The Beaten Docket is on a corner of Amelia Street and Great Victoria Street, directly opposite the Crown Liquor Saloon on the other; both face the allegedly most-bombed hotel in the world, The Europa, which occupies the site of the former Great Northern Railway Station, demolished in 1967, the first terminus of the Ulster Railway, whose train service from Lisburn to Belfast opened in August 1839.
Inside the station, overlooked by the big Roman-numeralled public clock, were several devices which enabled you to spend waiting-time, and money: a six-foot scale working model of a steam-engine in a glass case; an immense red unreliable cast-iron scales, whose needle trembled between calibrations as you stood on i
ts steelyard platform and tried to make yourself heavier by exerting hand-pressure on the bezel of its clock-face; a similarly shaped item, whose calibrations were the alphabet, and which embossed the slogan or name of your choice on an aluminium strip; another glass case, containing watches and soft toys which invariably slipped from the grasp of the mechanical grab you had paid a penny to operate; then there was a whole array of smaller slot-machines that looked like miniature monocular traffic-lights and which dispensed multi-coloured gobstoppers, fortunecookie-type plastic eggs which broke open at their equators to reveal the tiny components of your lucky dip, and dimpled golf-ball globes of chewing-gum. Hence, the whole concourse had the air of an amusement arcade, anticipating gregarious, day-trip holiday excursions, and sea-breeze posters advertised the virtues of comparatively far-off resorts. Yet, the gender-segregated waiting-rooms implied a more formal etiquette, where men and women slumbered apart in out-of-date upholstery. If you were lucky, you could sometimes see the stationmaster emerge from his office to check his watch against the public clock, flipping open its engraved lid with his thumbnail, looking at the time, winding its milled silver knob, then holding its back to his ear to hear its innards tick, dangling it momentarily on its pendulum fob before throwing it into the slit of his waistcoat pocket, after which he disappeared into his sanctum, and smoked another eighteen-minute pipe of Passing Clouds tobacco.
In 1959, queuing at the ticket booth, I am impressed by this routine. At the iron gate, another uniformed official takes my ticket and, in one deft movement, docks it with an empty star and hands it back to me. I tuck it into the breast pocket of my jacket. As I step on to the platform, under the neo-Gothic, cast-iron-ribbed glass roof – that ocean-bottom greenish rippled glass, that bends the world a bit as you look through it, and the wisps of steam this side of it resemble the passing April clouds outside above it – the waiting engine huffs impatiently, and white plumes escape from its stilled pistons.
I am taking the short two-stop trip to Balmoral. Enclosed alone in a compartment that smells of tobacco and autumnal-coloured moiré cut-moquette upholstery, I try to anticipate the momentary dislocation which occurs when you think your train is moving off backwards, until you realize a parallel train has moved forward, and yours is stationary. Eventually, you do move off for real, accelerating slowly past marshalling yards, where goods trains have been shunted in linear alphabets of flat-bed trucks, closed wooden wagons and cabooses, cylindrical gas and chemical containers, cattle-carts, and brake-carts. The whole elaborate system of junctions, sidings and crossovers is corroborated by interlinks of rods and levers, wires plumbed into black tubings snaking parallel to the tracks, under intervallic staves of telegraph wires strung out between high poles, as the sleepers below exude oil and creosote, and the heraldic armatures of railway signals click their intermittent semaphores, trying to orchestrate the movements. There is a burned-out cindery feel to the landscape, and the air is full of grit and glitter. The skewed angles of the deep cuttings resemble those of an exhausted open-cast coal-mine, whose zig-zag downward gradients culminate in a black tarn. Derelict, scummed mill-ponds flash with brackish, desultory April light, as runnels and sluices sink into culverts under the water-towers and coal-depots and engine-sheds. High brick walls of overlooking factories advertise their wares of vitriol and linen in fading white-painted letters, and the gable end of a gospel hall commands us to prepare to meet our God.
Then, to the southwest, the rows of terraced houses, backyards teetering with crazy DIY pigeon-lofts of all shapes and sizes, weekly wash fluttering, back doors giving on to a cinder track behind the perimeter fence of wired-together railway sleepers. To the high northwest, clouds scud across Black Mountain; lower down, they are reflected in the meres and bayous of the Bog Meadows, a place abounding in waders, coots, dippers, grebes, swans, and other birds whose names I do not know. The broad acres of the Bog Meadows, where land and water are ambivalent, formed a natural buffer-zone between the Protestant Lisburn Road and the Catholic Falls: I knew that even then, at the age of eleven.
Now I remember making expeditions to the Bog Meadows with two or three peers, armed with catapults, setting out from the new estate of Mooreland into winding Stockman’s Lane, finding a gap in its blackthorn hedge just above the Blackstaff bridge, to plunge into a rural field knee-deep in damp grass, buttercups and rushes, that sloped away from another recent Avenue of houses still smelling of new plaster, pine and brick; tumbled over behind a back garden, an abandoned cement-mixer was beginning to be overgrown with bindweed. Beating a path in single file through the long grass, we would negotiate a jersey-snagging, straggly barbed-wire fence, to emerge on the edge of the Meadows proper, where you had to jump a five-foot-wide ditch to enter the other realm.
Sometimes we would step the slippery stepping-stones across the Blackstaff into the margins of enemy territory, which we approached with the same trepidation felt by Robert Harbinson, coming from the other side, in his 1960 memoir of a Belfast childhood, No Surrender:
But the rows of houses did not go on forever. Beyond them lay the Bog Meadows’ marshy steppes where refuse heaps broke the flatness, and the narrow, shallow Blackstaff River meandered, colourless and unmusical … God ordained that even the Bog Meadows should end and had set a great hill at their limit, which we called the Mickeys’ Mountain. Among a knot of trees halfway up the flank a small cottage sheltered, and near by two fields were cultivated. Seen from the Bog Meadows they stood out amongst the bracken and heather like a giant hatchet. In terms of miles the mountain was not far, and I always longed to explore it. Somewhere, or in the hidden hills beyond, lay the boot stuffed with gold pieces buried by Neeshy Haughan, who once upon a time robbed the rich to help the poor, kindnesses repaid by a hanging at Carrickfergus. What things might be bought with the highwayman’s long boot of gold! But the mountain was inaccessible because to reach it we had to cross territory held by the Mickeys. Being children of the staunch Protestant quarter, to go near the Catholic idolaters was more than we dared, for fear of having one of our members cut off.
I’ve just shown this passage to my brother Pat, who is making his traditional Thursday night visit, and he comes up with a story that I hadn’t heard before, that the occupant of the cottage in the Hatchet Field was so stuck for company that he used to post letters to himself, so as he could ask the postman in for a cup of tea and a chat; this sounds slightly apocryphal to me, but then the Hatchet Field seemed to attract stories, and the cottage, when it fell vacant, gained the reputation of being haunted, maybe by the ghost of the same waylaid postman. In my dreams, the cottage has spawned many, more elaborate versions of itself, so that the area is like a scarped and anticlined Italian hill town, with terraced zucchini gardens and stepped passageways in between the houses set at odd angles to each other: an independent, self-sufficient state, remote from the business of the city which sprawls below it. I am disappointed when, in waking life, I look up and see that it is not there: even the cottage has gone, and not a stone has been left on a stone. But the faint outline of the Hatchet Field1 remains.
Imagining myself standing within it, I look down across Milltown Cemetery, across the Bog Meadows, to the Great Northern Railway line, to where I am disembarking, aged eleven, from the local train. It was here, at Balmoral Halt, that I used to go trainspotting, walking the mile or so down Stockman’s Lane armed with an indelible pencil stub and a police notebook. Sometimes I would take a detour into Musgrave Park, which bounded one side of the Lane, to explore the Islands of the Lake, as they were grandly known. In truth, the lake was a stagnant shallow pond, but to a boy it formed an exotic ecosystem teeming with insect and aquatic life: gnats, beetles, dragonflies and mayflies, newts, frogs, snails and leeches. It was a pleasure to stand barefoot in the Lake, wriggling one’s toes in the cool muck and appreciating the near-warm knee-bracelet of the surface water, as the intermittent June sun – huge gold-rimmed clouds sailing overhead – cast shafts of light into the cloudy weedy unde
rwater thoroughfares and grottoes, the whole Everglades shimmering and buzzing with activity. The three low islands within it were named, in diminishing order of size, but not necessarily of importance, as the First, Second and Third Islands. The First Island was also the one usually entered first, since it was accessible by a series of stepping-stones which brought you the five yards from the mainland into its tangled wilderness of willow, poplar, blackberry and ivy. Within it was the mysterious ruin of a small brick hut with a tiny, tea-chest-sized cellar in it, covered by a rusted iron trapdoor, which inspired speculation that this was a sealed-off portal to a maze of subterranean and subaqueous passages linking the Islands in a cipher of the recently antique Maquis war, maquis being a dense anti-Nazi undergrowth of shrubs, which was very appropriate to the Islands’ flora. To get to the Second Island from the First necessitated wading in Wellington boots or bare feet, until a gang of us undertook a major engineering project and built a causeway over to it using the bricks of the ruined hut, thus occupying a whole summer.
I liked the Second Island because it contained an especially climbable tall poplar tree, in whose uppermost branches one could sway for empty summer hours, gazing out across the Bog Meadows to where the verdigris-green dome of the City Hall dominated the skyline of the city centre. As for the Third Island, it was relatively inaccessible and featureless, and we did not visit it much; but it was necessary to the dimensional configuration of the archipelago.
After this detour, I would reach my destination, and would stand at the end of the gravel-covered platform, staring down the long shining curve of the track, anticipating the approximate arrival of the Belfast-to-Dublin Enterprise Express. I am reminded, now, that I was less than efficient as a trainspotter: I didn’t own a watch, and was fazed by the multiple columns of train timetables; so I contented myself by listing engine numbers, wheel configurations, and amount of carriages (especially mind-numbing, when applied to long slow goods-trains, which could run to a hundred and something modules of giant linear script). Nevertheless time was witnessed by the unreliable hands of the King’s Hall clock, a giant thirties modernistic affair with minimalist blips instead of numerals, which overlooked the Halt: I have just corroborated this by consulting the free Fortwilliam Pharmacy (our local chemist’s) calendar, whose months are illustrated by archival photographs of Belfast; the King’s Hall is May, which is appropriate, since this was the time of the Balmoral show, when the rural population of Ulster would cram the Exhibition Grounds behind the Hall to watch displays of plants and livestock, and the place was cacophonous with bleats, whinnies, cackles, and the glottal stops of country voices; the warm May air was redolent with sweet hay and dung.
The Star Factory Page 8