Opening a second-hand book, breathing visibly over its pages, I think of all the hands it’s passed through, of their fingerprints, and careful signatures on flyleaves; I think of personalized ex libris plates; of invented coats-of-arms; of books being tokens of a Sunday School, distributing awards for ‘Regularity, Diligence and Good Conduct’; of dates and dedications; of those readers, to whom it was a present, and who didn’t read it; of all the dead who read it; of old tobacco-dust, embedded between pages; of creaking bindings, and of hinged, tissue-papered illustrations; of the X in Xmas …
Breaking free from this mnemonic chain, I find I’ve wandered into nearby Gresham Street, where, in 1948, the main articles for sale were books, bicycles and radios, recurring like salient motifs in a post-war spy thriller, evoking book-codes, valves and dynamos. The proximity of the General Post Office suggests mercurial telegram boys on red push-bikes. The two bird-fanciers, Montgomery at 7–9, and Creighton at 11, handlers of winged messengers and stoolie-pigeons, must be implicated too.
These latter outlets were the precursors of a pet-shop empire that, in the 1960s, occupied a good third of Gresham Street, their windows packed with rickety cages twitching with mice, gerbils, budgies, rats and goldfish: it was an almost-visible olfactory zone of animal-feed and cat-litter mingled with the horse’s droppings that were current on the street at that time. And I can see a ponderous Clydesdale take a blinkered right turn down Upper North Street into Royal Avenue, taking us almost back to where this chapter started. Not quite: alighting from the back of its cart, where I’ve just hitched a lift, I take a left, and reach the Belfast Central Library.
LIBRARY STREET
I am dreaming below the dome of the Belfast Central Library, imagining its radii of knowledge streaming out to the smaller branch libraries – Falls, Ormeau, Shankill, Donegall Road, Tullycarnet – the dome like the focus of a pulsar, or a flying saucer, emitting radio-beacon light-rays. I feel the whole thing ready to tremble, lift, and slip off into outer space to wander in dark forever through the incandescent galaxies.
I wake to the drowsed aroma of a wino sitting next to me, his nose slumped in a volume of Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Libraries attract crazies and eccentrics, who wander the circle of the reading-desks, coughing chronically, twitching with staccato tics. I recognize one by his Elastoplast-patched left lens: I used to see him often, in the neighbourhood of Botany, moving rapidly through the crowded alleyways, writing agitatedly in a black flip-back notebook. I have never caught his one good eye; but once, glancing sidelong as I tried to hurry past him, I got a brief glimpse of his open page, crabbed with uninterpretable symbols. Yet another has his left sleeve pinned in a habitual Napoleon pose, his right hand poised for an imaginary sword. Or, at the request desk, I often bump into the bespectacled youth who has placed an order for Mein Kampf. The hiccup man is not far behind.
In the library, nobody is what they seem. Ostensible normals will try to slip you a tract printed in a typeface full of question-marks and bullet-points. I have before me a particularly interesting example of the genre, proclaiming The Church of Retrospective Predestination: ‘HAVE YOU BEEN BORN YET?’ its headline reads. The text is backed up by several authoritative quotes, such as, ‘And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water unto the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the Kings of Judah?’ (II Kings, 20: 21), or ‘Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in the book all my members were written, which in my continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.’ (Psalms, 139: 16). The basic tenet of this sect is that only by looking back at our lives can we make sense of them, as we chart their many déjà vus and unexpected nexuses; and sometimes, I find myself on the verge of subscribing to it, especially in the course of writing this book which I cannot read until I’ve written it. In this context, I recall an entry in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Notebooks, where, high on laudanum, he is writing by candlelight and is convinced that the words appear on the page by their own volition; all his quill does is follow them. I remember writing the quote on the blank side of a blue, Belfast Central Library requisition slip, but I cannot put my hand on it now. How many episodes have thus slipped into the province of the unwritten shadow to this one?
Notes on beer-mats, Rizla paper packets, sales slips, envelopes and bookies’ dockets; quotes on Post-its, tax bills, tracts, receipts, and bus tickets; memoranda Biroed on the back of my hand; addenda scrawled on shopping-lists and business cards, and books of matches: directions for a future not yet written, and which might never be. And yet, these lost incunabula must still have a function, an intimate, hand-to-brain, recording-loop connection, similar to the automatic-pilot digits of musicians, which remember patterns inaccessible to normal thought. I often get up from bed in the early hours and go downstairs to the kitchen to scribble down some insomniac inspiration for this book, and vividly remember it in the morning, just because I’d written it; I’ve no need to go back to the actual chronicle. Why, you might ask, don’t I have a notebook by my bed, like a dream-diary? It seems to me the journey downstairs is a necessary one: it is a process of refinement, palpable on the soles of my bare feet as they experience the various textural frissons on the way – the coarse-weave bedside dhurrie, the cool black-painted floorboards, then the prickly hessian landing-and-stair carpet, consequently the faux marble dining-room lino, and finally the freezing kitchen tiles. Phrases can be shaped by that declension, and my chronic inability to find my slippers, lost as they are in the dark, dust-balled purgatory under the bed, their gasping mouths bereft of feet.
Trying to think of all the shoes I’ve ever worn, I feel an instep-ache of memory, stepping into my father’s huge, impassive brogues and their cold, puckered insole ridges, running my fingers over their Braille wing-tip upper punctuations. From time to time it would occur to me that the shoes could be submarines, inching in tandem pedal-movement over the convoluted sea-bed of the Persian hearth-rug. I would man them with injection-moulded toy soldiers (sailors, unaccountably, being unobtainable), and depth-charge them, from my Gulliver perspective, with empty cotton reels. This latter item made a useful tank when you tractor-notched its twin rims with a pen-knife, and constructed a driving-mechanism from a thick elastic band drawn through its core and attached to a pencil-stub. You wound it up like clockwork, and watched it crawl across the casualties you’d strewn on the Persian battlefield, some taken out of action by the die-cast, spring-loaded metal cannon and its matchstick ammunition. Yet the lethal matchstick was also a perfect first aid splint for a veteran decapitated lead soldier, as you inserted it into his neck-cavity, and impaled the disembodied head on the match-head, thus recalling eighteenth-century executions.
These were the then-ubiquitous ‘Swift’ matches, produced by Maguire & Paterson at their impressive, block-long Ulster Match Works on the Donegall Road, some four or five hundred yards up from the Star Factory. I still think of the powerful, cross-town, North-West axis formed by the Match Works and Gallaher’s Tobacco, Cigarette and Snuff Manufacturers at 134–148 York Street, which were, according to my father, the most extensive premises of their kind in the world. Belfast was also reputed to be the home of the biggest linen-spinning mill, the biggest shipyard, and the longest ropewalk, all of which superlatives were depicted on the Swift box, printed in an indigo or denim blue, its eponymous bird like a willow-pattern hieroglyph arrested in the eastern sky. It was, of course, a bird’s-eye view.
There is something intoxicating or mesmeric about a matchbox, as you shake it to hear its maraca complement of fifty, which, when you slide open its drawer, appears like a phalanx of stilled sentinels. Amateur craftsmen used to assemble complicated cabinets or sewing-repertoires from empty match-boxes. Magic tricks were performed with them. Slotted one into another, they became a goods train, involved in some important skirmish.
Children were notorious for detaching the sandpaper striking-strip and ple
asurably sucking it for its spunky1 gluey crunch; they used to lick the bulbous red heads too, deliberately mistaking them for ‘cherry lips’, a small, loose, wine-gum type of sweet once very popular. These were dispensed from open trays and scooped into serrated-edged, hand-sized paper bags, wherein they used to stick promiscuously together, and you’d enjoy dislodging them, introducing them in ones into your mouth, and kissing them until they melted. The bigger, boiled sweets – brandy balls and butter balls, clove rock and cough-rock – came in screw-topped ecclesiastical jars that you’d love to get your arm stuck into, to be sleeved by glass. I used to think of such jars as reliquaries, wherein the limbs of saints might be displayed, and the faithful were healed by merely gazing at them, such was the force-field of their mutual attraction.
Scented with vanilla and tobacco, the interiors of corner shops had a chapel-vestibule gloom, in which brass weights clinked religiously on scales, and a nicotine light exuded from the dark wood panelling. Russell’s, on the corner of Odessa Street and Sevastopol, was one such venue, where my granny would send me for a ha’porth of snuff – chunk-chink of the manual typewriter cash-register – which came in a paper twist, while broken candy came in pokes. My father sometimes manufactured candy in domestic portions, boiling up Demerara sugar and butter in a saucepan, letting it seethe and reduce before glopping it on to a flat greased tray, all the while singing, sotto voce, ‘This old man he had a horse-elum, had a horse-elum, had a horse-elum; this old man he had a horse-elum, down in Demerara …’ Sometimes he’d butter his palms and wind the still-warm malleable candy into a rope, which he’d snip with my mother’s dressmaker’s scissors into humbugs. These made a passable imitation of Callard & Bowser’s Rum & Butter Toffees, to which I was addicted for their initially indomitable rock-hardness, impossible to chew as vulcanite, until you rolled one in your oral cavity for hours, feeling its clunk against your teeth and gums; at last, able to masticate it, you could clamp it in a dental matrix, thereby making conversation useless. Major fillings were lost this way; now, their silvery amalgam puts me in mind of mercury, or of soldered electrical components, or the miniature radios which spies were reputed to have built into a hollow tooth, together with a bullet-point of cyanide, which was bitten into when the game was up.
My first extraction was by gas, at the Tooth Clinic in Academy Street. The apprentice dentist inserted a rubber bit between my teeth and put a black protuberance over my nose; years later in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, I would re-encounter this disguise in the shape of an antique airman’s oxygen-mask, as I took it from the dummy’s face and breathed into it: that tang of fear, the sudden slope away from things, the smell of a pilot-light as the air goes gas-flame Bunsen-burner blue – like the onset of a migraine, as you fall or fly into the deep – and the dentist’s chair has become an ejector-seat, in which its decrepit khaki occupant reclines like Tutankhamun.
Under the influence of gas, I flew to Ancient Egypt. There, I met similar Daedaluses, and masters of a Zodiac cryptology, whose complex pyramid and pylon architecture was a wonder of the world, especially when spied on from a flying boat, and one perceived its wiring-diagrams of constellations, or the lights of vast Los Angeles, firefly millions of amoeba blips in contraflows on freeways. I get that same buzz driving home from Aldergrove Airport, as I, descending from the Antrim plateau, take the high curve of the Horsehoe Bend, and look out from the corner of my right eye into the panorama of illuminated Belfast, my metropolis.
1 Chambers’ entry for spunk is worth quoting in full: n. a spark (dial. esp. Scot.): a spirited, usu. small or weak, person (dial.): spirit, mettle, courage: touchwood, tinder (obs.): a match (dial.): semen (vulg.). – v.i. to take fire, flame up (arch.): to fire up, to show spirit (U.S.): to come to light (Scot., with out). – n. spunkie (Scot.) a will-o’-thewisp: a fiery or mettlesome person: whisky (Burns). – adj. spunky spirited: fiery-tempered [Cf. Irish sponc, tinder, sponge – L. spongia, a sponge – Gr. spongia].
The Revd Dinneen (An Irish–English Dictionary) does indeed give sponnc as ‘sponge, tinder’, but not ‘a match’, which is what my Ulster Irish understands by it, and I learned not to use this word when asking Connemara men for a light, since they interpreted my request as ‘Have you got any semen?’ Their word for match was match. Typically, though, Dinneen comes up with some other angles: ‘the spark of life’, which I take to be a Jesuitical euphemism for semen, and ‘the herb coltsfoot (used as tinder, al. as tobacco and as a specific)’, which brings to mind an elaborate rural idyll of spunky little men in worn serge suits hand-rolling coltsfoot cigarettes, or tamping the dried herb into clay pipes, reminding us of the Irish wake tradition of circulating pipes of hemp about the company, and you wonder what sort of high they got from this frisky coltsfoot stuff, as they ignited it with flint and steel and tinder produced from flat tin tinder-boxes which, I imagine, never having seen one, to be like bicycle-repair-kit receptacles, or glasses cases. The magical giant dogs of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Tinder-Box’ then spring to mind, with their eyes the size of bicycle wheels, or windmill sails, or the screw of the Titanic, and I see the eyes of the coltsfoot smokers begin to spin and boggle in their sockets, as they inhale themselves into another dimension, and go walkabout in the underworld, carrying their little wisps of rushlight.
THE PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPH COMPANY
High Street, looking east, 1786
Since the modern camera did not exist, this is a photograph of an engraving. The main feature is the Market House, with its curious diamond-shaped clock hung on a gibbet-like support; here, in 1798, Henry Joy McCracken would be hanged. Five inn signs depend from similar devices. One is illegible; the others display a Phoenix, a Maltese Cross, a Harp, and a Crown.
In the foreground, two dogs are chasing each other, while a third looks on. A tricorn-hatted gentleman is chatting up two ladies, one of whom is looking over her shoulder, possibly at the shawled woman carrying a baby. Two cloaked figures conduct some business, and there are other knots of twos and threes in the background. In the far distance, a gang of men or sailors converge on the tangle of masts, spars and shrouds, where the Farset debouches into the Lagan.
The engraver’s master-stroke is his depiction of a horseman about to disappear into the archway of the Donegall Arms Hotel. In this split second, only the rear legs of the engorged horse are visible. It is nineteen minutes to three o’clock.
High Street, looking east, 1851
This, too, is an engraving, although the first photograph had been taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using the action of light on asphalt solution; but it looks more like a photograph than its predecessor.
Some good arrested-action detail here, too: the stage-coach poised in front of the Donegall Arms Hotel; an accompanying clutch of bystanders or prospective travellers; a small child tugging at its mother’s skirts, as she is engaged by an Abe Lincoln lookalike, in stove-pipe hat; and, in the near-immediate foreground, a peg-legged man carries a placard on his back. I can’t make out the words. The time on the public clock is illegible.
Castle Place and High Street, looking east, early 1880s
The picture was taken around noon on a summer’s day: you can tell by the drawn awnings and the shadows, so brief as to seem concealed beneath the full skirts of perambulating women. Being a photograph, its narrative intent is both accident and design; yet, you try to read the poised hither and thither of the citizens, arbitrated in magnetic angles to each other.
Some customers are about to board an open-roofed horse-tram, overseen by an erect policeman. His stance is nearly mirrored by a small newsboy carrying a stack of newspapers too big for him; this would be the early edition of the Belfast Telegraph, and I can almost hear his traditional call of ‘Err-lai: Tall-ai! – where the colon is a glottal stop.
A horse and cart are parked opposite Robb’s Department Store, part of which incorporates the façade of the old Donegall Arms Hotel.
I admire the ornamental standard gas-
lamps. On the evening of 30 August 1823, according to the correspondent of the Belfast Newsletter,1 immense multitudes of people gathered in the High Street ‘to witness the lighting of our streets with gas’. The principal light, powered by twelve bat-wing burners, was so bright ‘that a letter was read by it near the quay, 60 yards distant from the pillar’. He continued:
The light now used is of the purest kind, shedding on the streets a brilliant lustre – pleasing but not dazzling – and more resembling the clear effulgence of a cloudless atmosphere illumined by the moon, than any artificial beams heretofore produced by the imitative power of man.
Living objects in our streets thus illuminated were distinctly seen, even at remote distances – and did not as formerly resemble shapeless masses, now moving in obscurity, and now tinged, in part, with a doubtful gleam of light twinkling on them from dull or expiring lamps …
In the High Street, in September 1816, the last public hanging in Belfast, of two weavers who set fire to a cotton manufacturer’s house in Peter’s Hill, took place.
Castle Place and High Street, looking east, 1968
It must be a wet Sunday afternoon. Castle Place is deserted, and the only signs of animation are the dummies in Robb’s shop windows, where a solitary red double-decker diesel bus is parked. I see it as red, even though the photograph is monotone, just as I know it is bound for the Antrim Road, since I used to court a girl resident there about that time. I might have boarded this very bus and sat in its upper deck, dragging at a cigarette, impatient for the cool rainy avenues of Cliftonville and Brookvale; and, to pass the time, I would remember the driver winding the movie-camera handle of the closed, interminable loops of routes and termini, peering through his periscope, sometimes backtracking, anti-clockwise, when he found he’d skipped his scheduled destination.
The Star Factory Page 16