The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  The other months have other resonances.

  *

  JANUARY. Castle Place: this is the exact same image as that described on p.26, Castle Place and High Street, looking east, early 1880s. I cannot think why this photograph of high summer stands for January, but this print is a bit bleached, and the white awnings seem to carry a perceptible dip of snow.

  *

  FEBRUARY. Botanic Gardens:

  ‘The most striking and interesting feature of Belfast Botanic Gardens is the Palm House, with its two wings flanking a bold elliptical dome. One cannot but applaud the determination of the men who directed the Garden in its early days and who, without outside financial help, built a curvilinear glass house before Kew or Glasnevin had one … Originally the conservatories were heated by two brick flues, but in 1862 hot water pipes fed from Cockey’s Patent Boiler were installed by Musgrave Brothers for £95. The new system was not entirely satisfactory and in very cold weather the old brick flues had to be lit to supplement the water pipes. During severe frost it was thus possible to keep an indoor temperature of 32°F in the cool house and 45° in the stove house. New boilers were installed in 1871 and they were supplemented in 1881 by large terminal-end Saddle Boilers capable of heating 3,500 cubic feet of water. The work of installation was carried out by Wimmington Co., who also removed the pipes of the smoke flues. Further changes in its heating were made in 1892 when the Saddle Boiler was taken out and John Hall of Queen Street put in two Red Rose boilers.’

  (The Palm House and Botanic Garden, Belfast, by Eileen McCracken, Belfast, 1971)

  *

  MARCH. Victoria Street Station: there is no Victoria Street Station, and this photograph shows the concourse of Great Victoria Street Station described at the start of this chapter, albeit from a rather spare perspective. The hands of the four-faced turret clock above the big Gothic double-fronted kiosk show fourteen minutes past eleven; the place is practically deserted, so it must be a Sunday.

  *

  APRIL. Linenhall Library: it is April as I write, and I am aiming to have this book written by May; it is good to have a deadline, as it concentrates the mind. I feel a twinge of guilt when I swing my telescope to gaze into the beautiful book-lined constellation of this library, which is the most important repository of Belfast knowledge; I often think I should have consulted it more, as groundwork for the writing. But I have not the temperament for such research: trawling through catalogues; filling in the buff requisition slips; drumming my fingers on the desk while the library assistant disappears into an annex to search for one’s requests; being disappointed when a promisingly titled book turns out to yield nothing in the way of interesting facts, or does not exist on the shelves, having been stolen, lost, or loaned. Or perhaps you do come across a mildly emblematic historical reference, and feel obliged to use it because of the time spent in discovering it, and you contort your text to make it fit. At any rate, I have fond memories of the library’s reading-room, whose big sash windows overlook the busy throng of Donegall Square; and I think of dust-motes drifting down through prisms of light that end on the magnified, open pages of books drowsed over by scholars and fanatics. The focus of the photo is a wall-clock, but I can’t make out the time from this reproduction of it.

  *

  JUNE. Queen’s University: here, the image is badly blurred, and it looks like the Oxford College pastiche façade of the building is in the process of materializing from another dimension, an effect reinforced by the ghostly absence of people on the extensive foreground of lawns; other period views show white-clothed tennis players caught in mid-flit. I was an ostensible student at Queen’s, between 1967 and 1971; looking at its central tower, I remember the winding stair within it, which led to a superior turret from which you could spy on aspects of a darkened Belfast; having discovered the hidden entrance to this eyrie, I used to bring girl-friends up here on nocturnal expeditions. Similarly, we used to scale the fence to wander the grounds of the Vice-Chancellor’s gardens, a mysterious moonlit space of lakes and arbours between Stranmillis and Malone. Above its dark remove, the stars were swayed by moving clouds and branches.

  *

  JULY. Belfast College of Technology:

  ‘1900–07, by Samuel Stevenson: Symmetrical baroque building of five storeys in Portland stone; central staircase with rusticated columns set on a frontispiece whose quoins run up to a moulded cornice; Gibbsian columns support a segmental entablature enclosing Belfast coat of arms over door opening with wrought iron gates; arcades of giant order attached columns at second and third floors support main cornice, above which an additional storey was added in the course of construction; circular corner bays rise to double-storey lanterns with copper domes.’

  (Marcus Patton, Central Belfast: An Historical Gazeteer, Belfast, 1993)

  *

  AUGUST. The Hippodrome: at the time of writing, the site of this once ornate building is a car-park, pending future development. Previously, it was a theatre, then a cinema, and latterly a bingo hall. Patton notes that in 1993 it contained ‘interesting stage machinery, with ropes drawn down to the control deck, like some terrestial Marie Celeste’. It was refaced with metal cladding c. 1960, and until recently it was believed that much of the original façade remained intact. However, when the cladding was torn off in 1997, it was discovered that a majority of the architectural detail had been obliterated; and it was demolished, amid much preservationist controversy.

  *

  SEPTEMBER. Plaza Ballroom: I remember the big resounding sweaty space of the Plaza from my schooldays, c. 1965–6, when it held lunch-time ‘hops’, where we used to go to drink warm Coca-Cola and watch schoolgirls and typists and mods and rockers demonstrate the latest dance craze. The three black motor cars parked outside the Plaza come from the twenties or thirties.

  *

  OCTOBER. Queen’s Bridge: this is a great photograph, looking east to where the tall chimneys of glassworks, ropeworks and foundries punctuate the skyline of the County Down side of the Lagan. The bridge carries a complicated traffic of trams, drays, hand-carts, and pedestrians. Sailing-ships, barges and pontoons are tied up at the adjacent docks, and below the bridge is a dark reflection of itself in the tidal water. This used to be a regular venue for suicides, but this focus has long shifted elsewhere.

  *

  NOVEMBER. Belfast Free Library, Royal Avenue: this, too, is referred to, as the Central Library, on p.178 of The Star Factory. I’ve only just noticed the blurred – but legible – detail in the right-hand bottom corner, to the northwest of the Library, where the words ‘Brown Horse Billiard Tables’ are painted on a gable wall. This would be the defunct Brown Horse bar; trying to visualize what replaced it, I can only get a featureless blur. Annoyed by this lapse of memory, I jump into the car and drive down to where it was. The city is deserted at this time, eight of the clock on a beautiful spring evening, and the setting sun casts a long light down the unpeopled streets. I’m back at the desk in ten minutes. It turns out that the building is indeed featureless: new brick, some eight storeys high – I forgot to count them – this must be a storage annnex of the Library, a useful change of function; even more useful is the recent change I marked as I drove down the Antrim Road, where, on the corner of the Limestone, a bank has been replaced by a bar, done up in a pastiche Victorian style, with a wooden interior in which glass-fronted cupboards display old packs of cards and matchboxes. As I drove past, two policemen were interviewing three youths outside it, reminding me that further down the Limestone Road other changes have taken place in the past few days. Catholics have been intimidated from their houses, part of an ongoing head-counting territorial dispute in North Belfast, where many huddles of opposing loyalties rub up against each other in frictions, factions and fractions, a subject too labyrinthine to be entered into here. But I should note in passing that my eleven-year-old boy was beaten up – split lip, black eye, bruised ribs – a few weeks ago, as he walked past Tiger’s Bay, in his first major excursion from ho
me without telling his parents, and that is another story in itself, of loss of innocence, and gain of education. A different version of the same story happened to me when I was nine, when a classmate and I took the out-of-bounds short-cut home down Cupar Street from St Gall’s Public Elementary School.

  A long time ago, back in the Brown Horse, I see myself in a whiskey mirror, ordering a drink in it, as the light of a gold, blurred afternoon stolen from school falls through an etched window, and time is momentarily arrested as you lift the glass to your underage drinker’s lips, and sip. Later, I would go and join the smoke-break idlers – schoolgirls, schoolboys like myself – on the Library steps, where lights were proffered in cupped hands, or transferred from one cigarette end to another, and you registered the almost inaudible smooch as they touched.

  *

  DECEMBER. Royal Belfast Hospital For Sick Children: The ‘Royal’2 has a great reputation and is much loved by members of both communities. Here are neat rows of iron cots; sunlight falls through the generous casement windows on to the polished floorboards, and shimmers in the chambered ceiling; the sick children peer into the lens above and between the bars of their cots, attended by four Nightingales in starched uniforms.

  When I was about nine or ten, I was in the Royal for a few days, for a minor adenoids operation. Here I fell in love for the first time in my life, barring maiden aunts. Being fit, and not sick, I was allowed to wander the other wards. In one of them I met an older,3 ailing boy called Noel, who was in for some long-term, unspecified illness, and who could barely walk. I struck up a friendship with him and used to carry him on my back on our travels around the many corridors, wards, offices and annexes of the hospital, conducting a conversation with him behind my back, as he instructed me, from his higher perch, to go this way, or that, and he saw things I didn’t. I thought he was brilliant and wise, and it was my privilege to serve him, and to be his steed. We seemed to be able to talk about anything, and invented many interests in common, pretending an extensive knowledge of stamps or model aeroplanes to each other, as we inhaled imaginary fumes of Airfix glue and the Humbrol enamel paints that came in little dinky Lilliputian tins of a bigger scale than the aircraft you were building, for if you put one against the other, the smaller-than-cotton-spool-sized tin looked positively Brobdingnagian. Then we would enter the realms of Laputa. When the time came for me to leave this perfect companion, I was devastated. I moped around the back-yard of 3 Mooreland Drive for days, crying to myself. After many days, the pain subsided – though I remember it yet – and I was free to wander the fields of the Owenvarragh.

  1 So called for its shape, and not for any sinister design.

  2 Whose foyer is graced by the bronze presence of a twice-life-sized enthroned Queen Victoria bearing an orb and sceptre.

  3 At that age, ‘older’ might have been a few months.

  OWENVARRAGH

  At the back of Mooreland Drive was a plot of undeveloped land that would become Owenvarragh1 Drive; beyond that, fields of grass and buttercups dotted with cows’ clap, that I remember harvesting with a coal shovel and a tin bucket as manure for our back garden. The undeveloped half-acre was, for us children, a foyer or rehearsal space for that rural hinterland beyond us, containing its essential elements in miniature: here, a small tributary of the Owenvarragh River ran between blackthorn hedges, where we built tree-parlours. Ensconced in them, invisible to adult eyes, we made up secrets for ourselves, which remain untold, and so intricate as to be untellable. We dug fist-sized catacombs in the clay banks of the stream, and installed in them the bodies of frogs, mice and birds, returning to them years or weeks later to disinter their clean white skeletons.

  The small stream was enormous in its details of meander, its microscopic reefs and deeps and sandbars, the purl of its current round an imposing stone; sometimes, flood-borne minor Mississippi rafts of twigs would form a log-jam and a rippling dam of water became pent behind it, where we would launch paper-boat flotillas and bomb them with clay pellets.

  Beyond this adjunct of our new estate lay the Cows’ Field,2 its boundary marked by a tall electric pylon protected by storeys of barbed wire and skull-and-crossbones signs. When it rained, the pylon buzzed with intimations of mortality and suicide, and the cows would low and moan as they staggered up off their knees in an almost-integrated body to find uncontaminated pastures on the margins of the force-field. Years later, people would claim compensation for the cancers allegedly induced by these Eiffel Towers.

  South of the Cows’ Field lay the Jungle, demarcated on one side by the Owenvarragh, and on the other by the railings of Musgrave Park Hospital, which occupied a low plateau above the river, looking like a derelict RAF aerodrome with its rows of isolated Nissen huts, each one of which was a hospital ward. Making our way through the Jungle, we were subliminally aware of this near-necropolis above us, and its empty gravel walks whose order contradicted our meanderings. Although the Jungle was a mere strip of river bank some ten or fifteen yards across and some four hundred long – a bonzai zone of low, implicated scrub and thorn – we kept finding terra incognita in its labyrinth; or, exploring different routes between known places, we saw them from a new perspective. Here were tiny glades carpeted with moss and microcosmic galaxies of flowers; pools in them, sometimes, flickering with embryonic fish and water-bugs; dense undergrowths of ferns; rank columns of umbellifers, and phalanxes of bulrushes. One loop of the river was almost completely ceilinged by over-arching trees: this was a secret place of mine, where I would sit alone for hours on a minor sand-bank, studying the compass-needle flickerings of dragonflies, entranced by the languid fish; once, I saw a kingfisher dive like a blue bolt through the clerestory of branches and break the surface water in an eye-blink, before coming up, almost instantaneously, with a struggling silver flash in its beak. It was easy to imagine dim organ-music in this miniature cathedral, where leafy bifurcations met and whispered in confessionals, allowing tremolos of light to penetrate its shades.

  I knew then that if ever I was on the run – an IRA man, say – I could retreat here, to the heart of the Jungle; here would be my final See, or siege. Here I’d be absorbed and camouflaged, protected by its genius, with whom I’d long communed. Incorporated by its teeming ecosystem, I’d become a detail of its verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways, whose divarications, and the routes and tributaries between them, were innumerable.

  Yet, others must have had the same idea: scouting the territory, we would come across small clearings dotted by the charcoal interims of camp-fires, where important pow-wows had occurred throughout the long campaign of summer. Some of these we recognized as our own residue; around others, still warm to the touch, we found scattered cigarette-butts, evidence that others, older than us, had been here previously; and we felt a Crusoe wobble of fear, like when he saw a footstep on the sand of his supposed desert island. For we knew that the Jungle was an intermediate ground, that it contained a demarcation between Catholic and Protestant territory, though where precisely this border might be, or where we might infract it, no one was prepared to say. No map delineated it. We were given no specific caveats against it by our parents, since, after all, they only knew the Jungle by our non-committal reports; yet, we got osmotic rumours of the broader picture, where the Protestant majority might view our new estate as the tip of the iceberg of the Falls Road minority community, expanding under demographic pressure westwards into lush farmlands and the ornamental parks of planters’ houses.

  Making our way westwards through the Jungle, we felt the force-field of home gradually diminish, till, its signal imperceptible, we were exposed like aliens on the margins of our known world. This point was marked by the hospital rubbish tip, which spilled down from its elevation in a cornucopia of dead flowers, bloodied bandages, Roman-toga tumbling drapes of bed-linen, disgorged orange rubber tubing and discarded hypodermics. Staggering up its scree, we were archaeologists of the avalanche, finding dead Ever-Ready batteries, rusted scalpels, odd shoes, crutch
es, Bakelite plugs; once, we disinterred a practically intact radio. We dreaded to imagine the hospital activity that lay behind this waste, the Frankenstein interiors of morgues and incubators palpitating with galvanic zig-zag sparks.

  Contemplating these inner dimensions, we were also implicated in the wider landscape, finding new bearings and perspectives as the skyline of Black Mountain, a long mile or so to the North, shifted to accommodate our purposeful meanderings, whose river-source lay in the mountain. The sky seemed bigger here; unbalanced by it, we would get a dizzy, pleasurable tremor of agoraphobia. After a repast of camp-fire carbonized potatoes and scorched woodsmoke-perfumed toast, we would sprawl on our backs and gaze into the hemisphere above, seeing pictures in its lagooned archipelagos of moving cumulus and jigsaw-puzzle sky. On rare cloudless days, it almost hurt to look into the huge blue levels, where the diamond point of a jet scored a silent white line miles long, and amethyst became forget-me-not.