The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  BRICKLE BRIDGE

  Compare the bridges of the city to bar magnets: the traffic acts like iron filings drawn into force-fields; and often the bridges are jam-packed with metal vehicles throbbing motionlessly, polarized above a river or a mesh of train tracks.

  *

  At dusk, a parallel phenomenon can be observed, as clouds of starlings congregate and billow over and above the bridges. A pedestrian, leaning over a parapet, might gaze into the black magnetic Lagan, and see parabolic swarms of mini-millibirds whirl among the cloudy shoals beyond the rows of just-lit street-lamps. When he looks up, they swoop and tower above him, forming dense and complex auguries, wheeling unpredictably into the future which, in retrospect, becomes inevitable, as their twists turn faster than the split blips of an atomic clock; and before you know it, they have got to where they will be.

  *

  Co-ordinated, countless sentences of starlings flit and sway in baroque paragraphs across the darkening sky, as they compose exploded founts of type. It is coming up to the time of the year when the clocks go back. An Autumn chill is in the air, and shadows lengthen in the inky Lagan. The multitudes come home to roost in serried nooks and crannies, under eaves, on pediments and capitals, stilled and castellated on the tops of ornamental porticos, on balconies, cornices and window-sills, in sooty alcoves and gazebo turrets, lining the balustraded parapets, perched on the spokes of cartwheel windows and weighing down the hands of the Albert Memorial Clock.

  The same Royal lends his name to the Albert Bridge, downstream from the Queen’s Bridge. In the 1960s, traffic congestion on the latter necessitated the construction of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge; recently, this kowtow nomenclature was abandoned when the imaginatively named Lagan Bridge afforded further relief to the palpitating arterial roads. I have to admit I love this bridge: driving on its flyover, admiring the stylized white lines printed on the clean black tarmac, I feel I am taking off from an aircraft carrier – I think of HMS Formidable, for instance, launched by Harland and Wolff in 1939 from East Belfast, where I am coming from in 1996. I soar on a gradual aerial curve above the harbour and the docks, seeing them in new, sunlit perspectives, like Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge:

  Earth has not anything to show more fair –

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty:

  This City now doth, like a garment, wear

  The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

  Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

  Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

  All bright and glittering in the smokeless air …

  This brings to mind its opposite, the Belfast of 1947, envisioned in the opening shot of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, as the aerial camera pans down into a mass of chimneys and mill-stacks churning out ocean-liner cigarette-smoke over spires and cupolas. Momentarily, I have a déjà-vu of the tobacco-scented plush interior of a post-war cinema with its dim oyster-shell wall-lights, the screen flickering with the silver exhalations of a thousand smoking couples; and the votive glow of the EXIT sign brings me back to the red blip of my father’s cigarette-end scribbling phrases on the dark, as he relates the story of a film. I remembered A Night to Remember, for example, long before I saw it, for my father had told its story, the sinking of the Titanic, many times, and the actual film, when I first saw it in the Broadway cinema in the fifties, only served to corroborate his descriptions of the implacable properties of icebergs and supposedly watertight bulkheads, and the temerity of building Babel boats. I felt the chill of his Atlantic language.

  Titanic Memorial: 1920, by Sir T. Brock of London: Flowing marble statue of a sombre female figure of Fame looking down on two sea-nymphs holding a drowned man, on a grey granite base with basins at front and back. Gold-leafed inscription recording the names of those gallant Belfast men … who lost their lives on the 15th of April 1912 by the foundering of the Belfast-built RMS Titanic through collision with an iceberg, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. These included the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, and her doctor, John Simpson. The memorial was initially erected in Donegall Square North, in front of Robinson & Cleaver’s.1

  In fact, the memorial was removed (to the grounds of the City Hall) because it was thought to represent a traffic hazard; but the subterranean public toilets, which occupy an otherwise unnecessary island directly in line with the memorial’s previous location, still remain, though recently closed. Here, cramped in a dank stall, one could think oneself to be in the bowels of a U-boat; the plumbing hissed and whispered as if under marine pressure, for a depth-charge had gone off nearby, an illusion perfectly maintained by the IRA bombing campaign of the 1970s (it is gratifying to note that the toilets’ glass brick roof, or pavement, has survived unscathed).

  Also in the grounds of the City Hall, by the same sculptor, is Queen Victoria, victim of a fictional bomb:

  Centrally placed in the front lawn … is the marble statue of a dumpy Queen Victoria standing holding an orb that has been truncated through time or vandalism into a small begging bowl. The statue base carries bronze figures linked by heavy swathes, of a mob-capped girl holding a spindle, a boy reading a scroll, and a shipwright in apron and hobnail boots clutching a model steamship. At the climax of George Birmingham’s novel The Red Hand of Ulster, a shell fired from Belfast Lough by an English battleship ‘made flitters of the statue of the old Queen that was sitting fornint the City Hall’, greatly to the annoyance of the loyal people of the city.2

  Strangely, the IRA never saw fit to bomb the same statue, though it did others, notably that of the Revd ‘Roaring’ Hugh Hanna in Carlisle Circus; just a matter of yards away, the equestrian statue of King Billy which surmounts the Clifton Street Orange Hall had his sword blown from his hand; ‘it has now been replaced, but not quite at the right angle’.3

  Nor, so far as I know, did the IRA ever attempt to bomb any of the bridges of Belfast; perhaps East Belfast, on the other side, lay out of sight and out of mind, as it did to me for much of my life.

  Queen’s Bridge: Bridge of Newry granite across the Lagan at the end of Ann Street, built to the designs of Sir Charles Lanyon and John Frazer at a cost of £27,000. It was opened in 1844, and widened (by cantilevering out) by J.C. Bretland in 1885, when the ornamental lamp-posts from the Glasgow Sun Foundry were added to the parapets. This replaced the old Long Bridge that had been erected in the 1680s. It had been narrow, little over twenty feet wide, but spanned 840 feet and was twenty-one arches long, seven of which collapsed when rammed by a ship in 1692 (after being weakened, it was said, by the crossing of the Duke of Schomberg’s heavy cannon in 1689).4

  Boyne Bridge: 1936: Steeply humped concrete-walled bridge replacing the Saltwater Bridge shown on 1791 map, so called because it marked the tidal limit up the Blackstaff River. The old bridge, two arches of which are said to be encased in the present structure, was built by Edward Viscount Chichester in 1642, and its three arches were known as The Great Bridge of Belfast until the Long Bridge was built. It was also known as Brick-kiln Bridge or Brickle Bridge from the vicinity of brick-kilns that had been used to build the Castle and many 18c buildings.5

  Most of Belfast is built of brick. Brick is riot-friendly, especially when broken into halves, more easily to fit the hand. It then became a hicker, in Belfast dialect, a thing to be chucked, or thrown: these words might be related, since Chambers cites one usage of chuck as ‘a small pebble or stone’; hicker might derive from hack, ‘a bank for drying bricks’. The hicker is one ingredient of the ammunition Belfast confetti, which originally referred to a not-so-welcome shower of shipyard-workers’ bolts and rivets, and later, by extension, to any ad hoc compendium of hand-launched missiles, which might include slates, buckets, iron railings, jam-jars, ball-bearings, and coal, as well as the usual assortment of small bombs contained by coffee-jars or milk-bottles; once I saw formes and clichés of type, looted from Ticard’s the printer’s in Durham Street, being fi
red at the army. Another great element was the kidney-paver, a small human-organ-shaped cobblestone which fitted to the hand as if preordained by geological authority. Kidney-pavers are now completely extinct, since the civic authority which put them there in the first place tore them up one by one from their matrices, and replaced their habitat with concrete. Then the street would be occupied with military-mortar cement-mixers and a team of sappers in mismatching uniforms of greasy serge suits, a pair of whom would tamp parallels along the wet concrete street with a plank set on edge, two sets of rocking-horse handles attached to its ends. For a day and a night, or more, the street would be a no-go zone, demarcated by the serial monocular glow of red bull’s-eye oil-lamps hooked onto wooden rails between saw-horses, as the aromatic burning oil you sniffed was cut by acrid coke-smoke from the watchman’s brazier that had red holes punched in it. Nevertheless, some boys would not be deterred by this prospect, and would dare each other to leave their matrix footprints in the Hollywood Boulevard wet concrete.

  Ticard’s the printer’s lay near the Protestant vs. Catholic fault line of the aforementioned Boyne or Brickle Bridge, and here the ‘Battle of the Brickfields’ would be regularly re-enacted. On both sides of this divide, its denizens were known to have knocked down the back-yard walls of their own dwellings in order to provide themselves with cross-community ammunition.

  Herein lie some interesting etymological meanders: according to Dinneen, the Irish for ‘The Battle of the Boyne’ is Briseadh na Bóinne, i.e., the breaking of the Boyne; and brick has its root in break, allied to the flaw in Irish linen known as a brack. Chambers’ brickle, ‘apt to break, troublesome’, is appropriate in the context, and brock, whether it refers to food-scraps, broken down stuff, or to the animal, is also relevant; and the badger is a brockit beast, as he lends his distinctive fur coat to the concept of variegation, especially in black and white. To me, all these bricky words sound like Irish breac, speckled, which extends to mean, in the verb breacaim, ‘to cover a paper with writing’. Cuneiform-covered clay tablets of Babylon occur to me, as I inscribe these words in a Challenge A4 feint-ruled notebook with a red-inked Japanese Zebra ‘Zeb-rolle’ 0.5 pen that bleeds through a little to the other side of the page, giving it a speckly effect. This is not a serious problem, since I write the main text on the recto, using the preceding verso as a scribble pad for notions I might use in the future, or for possible revisions: for instance, I’ve just scrawled Lilliput Laundry, possibly to remind myself of its bizarre Ulsterpawky-humorous nomenclature, or of the classic SF film The Incredible Shrinking Man, or primarily, perhaps, of those indelible pencils used to label laundry and school-uniform name-tags. You sucked the point of the pencil to make it work, empurpling your tongue with gentian violet, and the DNA of your spit was engraved in the letters of your name, and it was possible that future scientists might make an identifiable schoolboy clone of you.

  Sometimes, though, in the spirit of experiment, I would write an occasional main page text on the verso of the previous, whose faint mirror image could be seen as a prelude to be improvised on, making me think of scientists atomizing carbon particles onto a blank page in order to make visible the missing contemporaneous notes, using, like clown policemen, those devices with squeezable rubber bulbs. I think a larger, mechanically powered version would have proved useful to the pursuers of the Invisible Man, and I seem to remember the Man had problems with smog, when he became a Jekyll-and-Hyde wraith; or with falling snow, when he looked like a wounded terrorist angel lost in the dark city, his slow footsteps blurring rapidly behind him in the blizzard, and the dominant sound-track is the tolling of the Albert Clock, permeated, sometimes, by the dissonant bass fog-horn of the complicit vessel that must leave at midnight, and you know the whole thing is bound to end in tragedy, as the Man becomes Nemo.

  But, rewinding to the holographologists, I see them in their white coats, brown shoes, and clingfilm-gloved hands, peering through Holmesian magnifying-glasses that have vanity-mirror ivory handles, deciphering the verso ghost-writing of my drafts, whose rectos I can barely read myself, sometimes, as they often resemble a barbed-wire hedge of emendations, carets, stets, arrows, underlinings, question-marks, and cancellations.

  Then I have to go and tidy the whole thing up, as I’m doing now, running my fingers over the keyboard of the ‘personal word processor’ acknowledged early on in this book, which only recently replaced the portable electric Corona typewriter I used for most of the fair copy; and from this admission you will deduce that the book was not written in this final, published sequence, but assembled in a patchwork fashion. It is quite possible that many readers will, in fact, approach it in a non-sequential modus operandi, dipping into and out of it, or skipping bits where the thread of the story gets lost; there are a lot of books I read this way (books of poems, especially, and specifically John Ashbery, whose work I have used in the past as a sortes Virgilianae when I got blocked, or the Gospel According to John, with its majestic opening: In the beginning was the Word …). At any rate, the noise and the action of these electronic keyboards is quite unlike the manual Imperials I learned on, whose spring-loaded machine-gun clunks resembled the chatter of linen looms, and both had fasces of visibly moving parts. The whole idea is like a 1930s SF flick dystopia, where phalanxes of nearly identical typists are overlooked by huge art nouveau clocks with blips for numerals, and are overseen by white-coated centurions with clip-boards. The typing pool is the size of an aircraft hangar or a movie studio, and all of the girl extras who are acting the typists want to be Hollywood stars.

  1 Marcus Patton, Central Belfast: a Historical Gazetteer.

  2 Marcus Patton, Central Belfast: A Historical Gazetteer.

  3 C.E.B. Brett, Buildings of Belfast (revised edition, 1985). The statue is of bronze, ten feet high, weighs thirty-seven hundredweights, and the stirrups, saddlecloth and pistol-holster were cast from the originals in the possession of the Baroness von Steiglitz.

  4 Marcus Patton, Central Belfat: A Historical Gazetteer.

  5 Ibid.

  THE STAR FACTORY II

  The stark reality of the Star, Factory is, on the face of it, more humdrum than the stories it has inspired. Located at 322 Donegall Road, between the streets of Nubia and Soudan, it is noted in the 1948 Directory as a ‘boys’ clothing manufacturers’.

  But mention of its product summons up what seems, at this far remove, an antiquated, arcane world, where Reebok is not a sportswear label but the kind of antelope you might see depicted on a South African stamp. I have from this era a fully clothed vision of tweed suits, V-necked sleeveless woollen pullovers, floppy-collared flannel shirts, snake-clasp belts, and elasticated braces, whose slide adjusting mechanism sometimes cut into your collarbone. I sometimes think I still bear the consequence of knee-length socks, their ribbed garter scars. One could write a mini-treatise on the liberty bodice, defined by Chambers Dictionary as ‘an undergarment like a vest, formerly often worn by children’, whose name always struck me as an oxymoron, given its life-jacket, straitjacket shape, its dotted joins of rubber buttons and blanket-stitched seams.

  In order to corroborate my memory of such clothing, I have resorted to my allotment of the family photographs, which I keep in an old wooden flute-box with two brass hook-and-eye catches. I thumb them open, and riffle through the sheaf of snaps: holidays, First Communions, or those inconsequential, important moments when one poses for the newly acquired box camera of a childless better-off uncle. Here is my Confirmation photograph, which shows me at about the age of eight (the Sacrament, then, was taken shortly after one had attained ‘the use of reason’, long defined by the Jesuits as seven). It would be 1956.

  There are, in fact, two of us – perhaps this was an austerity measure, a photographer’s special two-for-the-price-of-one deal – Roy McLoughlin and myself. In the left foreground, a pine table has been sanctified by a clean white tablecloth and a crucifix placed on it, supported by a glass jug. I have been arranged to stand almost dead c
entre, with my right hand brushing the cloth; Roy, being half a head taller, is behind me at my left shoulder, in the position usually attributed to Royal consorts. A makeshift shrine is poised on the dado rail of the wainscot immediately behind: a Madonna and Child, flanked symmetrically by two unlit candles in glass candlesticks, and two slender tulip vases holding sprays of mayflowers.

  The improvised piety of the occasion shows in our wide-eyed faces and uncertain smiles. Our embryonic adult suits are manifestly new and stiff: three-buttoned jackets (it was de rigueur to fasten only the middle button) with wide lapels; short trousers. His is serge, mine is tweed. Every time I smell tweed, I get a whiff of that other era, or further back, to the First Communion: this was a nubbly Donegal suit, whereas the Confirmation was a fine houndstooth; yet, as I think about it, the aroma is generic, not specific, since one tweed summons up all other tweeds in a kind of domino effect. One would have thought that each tweed would emanate its own charisma, like Scotch malts with their local attributes of peat and heather, their different waters: so, the brand of sheep, the type of chlorophyll it grazes on, the weather, flecks of this and that, the dark interior of crofters’ handloom cottages, all these must leave their redolent imprint; each bolt of cloth must be a web of DNA strands, and a trained dog could sniff one from another, but we cannot.

  Or maybe not that we cannot; we just don’t. One can admit the possibility of white-coated hierophants with flared nostrils – the parfumiers of tweed – mulling over dribs and drabs, like tea or whisky blenders; but no, smell is not a primary function of tweed, albeit a powerful one, which links moments of non sequitur in a time-evading narrative, as the last time reminds you of the first, and long olfactory shadows trail behind you like the remnants of a ticker-tape parade along the floors of canyon avenues in Manhattan, where, on a cold St Patrick’s Day, swaying, saffron-kilted, tweed-jacketed pipe bands tread ponderously by, as light snowflakes fall.