The Emperor of Ice-Cream is probably the finest novel to come out of the Belfast blitz, Belfast’s encounter with terror and destruction coming in from outside, not – for once – home-brewed. The resulting cataclysm should have fostered solidarity, an all-in-it-together orientation. In some ways it did, while German bombs rained down on Prod and Taig alike. Few on the ground would have demanded information about a bombed-out person’s religion before lending a hand. But, instinctively and insidiously, the old sectarian bogey came poking through the new awareness of a common predicament. You get the Clonard and Holy Family parishes, for example, congratulating themselves on counting low numbers of Catholics among the people killed in the April 1941 blitz19 – the blitz placed fairly and squarely by Moore’s old Shankill Road shawlie (above) at the door of the ira. ‘Them’s the ones who done it.’
‘All very wearisome and very perplexing,’ as Benedict Kiely remarked on the subject of Belfast bigotries. Nevertheless – writing in 194520 – Kiely sensed the presence of ‘new ideas, generous ideas ... ideas as energetic as the inspiration that built the factories, deepened the river, marked the black water with the shadows of tall cranes and leaning gantries.’ He was being a bit over-optimistic, but the times allowed it. The war was over. People of a liberal bent held the same belief in a new advancement, a society – at last – decisively non-sectarian. Surely to goodness, thought Brian Moore, the just-past global conflict had put Belfast’s squabbles into perspective: how, in the modern world, could the Orange-and-Green monster go on exerting its baleful influence? Alas, we know the answer. The snake was scotched, not killed. Even while he tried to consign it to the past, Benedict Kiely remained miserably conscious of ‘an uncouth, vicious thing that comes to life at intervals to burn and kill and destroy’. Inherited spites and hatreds proved as indestructible as Grendel before the advent of Beowulf. Periods of apparent calm and reason were doomed to fall apart, endlessly. As I write, in July 2011, Belfast nights are filled with the noise of petrol bombs, rubber bullets, crashing vehicles, shouts, screams, smashed paving stones, half bricks, broken glass, running feet.
Wearisome is not the word. We’ve seen it all before, in the Pound, Millfield and Docks area in 1857, Sandy Row, Brown’s Square seven years later, the Brickfields, Donegall Street, the Shankill Road, Divis Street, Short Strand, Willowfield, Lancaster Street. The noise of shooting, ‘Starting in the evening at eight, / In Belfast in the York Street district’, assaulted the infant ears of Louis MacNeice. John Hewitt remembered night after night seeing the sky ‘lit with fire’. By 1922, he says, ‘We knew of and accepted violence / in the small streets at hand’ – as the longed-for, vividly imagined ‘tolerant and just society’, receded further and further into the distance.
Wartime members of the ira were in something of an anomalous position: not Nazi supporters, indeed (unless they were mad), but still implacable opponents of Britain and its Stormont adjunct. Many ira men chose to ignore the war and its implications as far as possible, sticking instead to the old republican strategies of drilling, parading, attacking police targets and raiding for guns. A lot were rounded up and interned, and for this and other reasons the organisation was not highly effective at this time, or, indeed, greatly revered as a resistance movement. There wasn’t, for instance, much sympathy for a Volunteer from Bombay Street who was hanged at Crumlin Road gaol in 1942, following the shooting of a policeman (a policeman bearing the not exactly unionist name of Paddy Murphy).
I don’t think my mother experienced any nationalist qualms on account of her war work in the censorship office. To bolster her decision to accept this employment, she might have held in mind an image of her father in the earlier war, a soldier in a British uniform meeting his death in the Dardanelles. She probably had Rupert Brooke or Francis Ledwidge running through her head on the way to the office. (In the days when the office is being wound up, she brings her two-year-old to be admired by her Stormont friends and colleagues. I have no recollection of the occasion.) I am sure she understood that changed circumstances can call for previously unthinkable adjustments to an ingrained set of opinions. In matters of politics or allegiance, she was never inflexible. She had praise for those who acted in accordance with some reasonably formulated principle, like her Tipping relations. Going further back – and if she’d known about them or it – she might even have understood the Blackers’ de haut en bas commitment to civic order as filtered through paternalistic obligations. Calm, order and good prospects for the future were the breath of life to her.
At some time during 1938, I think, my grandmother had moved house for the last time. With Kathleen and Nora, the daughters still at home,21 she moves from Sandhurst Gardens to the Falls Road end of the Donegall Road. It is a slight step up in the world. The new house is semi-detached, with two bay windows, a gate and a paved path leading to the stained-glass-panelled front door, over which a sun curtain is suspended during the summer months. The house stands on a corner, and a garden extends round the side and into St James’s Avenue. It boasts a privet hedge and iron railings (soon to be requisitioned to help win the war). A gate for tradesmen – coalman, milkman, refuse collector – is let into the side hedge. It is painted green and shuts with a snib. A stub of a long-gone tree still sits in the front garden, and a sally tree grows between the side wall and the hedge. A trellis structure separates the front garden from the side, and to this, in season, is hooked an infant’s swing. A yard, a shed and a wooden garden seat on the back lawn complete the lower-middle-class picture. Inside the house, on the ground floor, are three rooms: the front room known as the sitting-room, a living-room called the kitchen, and a tiny kitchen called the scullery. Three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs represent a new luxury. It seems like a good place to live. The house is rented from a Dan McGinley who, with his brother Joe, runs a grocer’s shop at the top of the Donegall Road. It will be my home until I reach the age of twenty and decamp to London.
It’s to this house that my mother brings her new young ex-Protestant husband towards the end of 1941. The whole area – St James’s, Whiterock, La Salle, Ballymurphy, Rodney Parade – is intensely Catholic, with its focal point in St John’s Chapel on the Falls Road. On this place of worship almost the entire population converges on Sunday morning, with Mass taking place at hourly intervals between seven o’clock and twelve. (Only very infirm or lazy people leave it until twelve.) The exceptions to this weekly display of denominational fervour are the few Protestant families dotted about the district who keep to their own devotional routines. These, however, are not otherwise separated from the life of the community. Certainly such families have no interest in presenting themselves as a beleaguered minority. We have two in our avenue, St James’s Avenue, Twybles and Smiths, who experience no discord on account of their beliefs. True, they keep to themselves, but then so do most of us. We have pretensions in our area. Some of the younger generation subscribe to the high-quality monthly Collins Children’s Magazine – which is not to say we’d never be caught taking a sneaky look at the Beano. Solicitors and shopkeepers and teachers live here. Neighbours are not constantly in and out of neighbours’ houses, after the manner of the riff-raff of the Lower Falls, thank you very much.
Fast forward to 1971 or thereabouts and an appalling phase of the thirty-year ‘Troubles’. Some rearrangement of residences has taken place, not for the first time in Belfast’s history. Protestants no longer feel safe or comfortable in a Catholic district, or the other way round. A few house exchanges are effected amicably, between acquaintances of different beliefs, but more families of the ‘wrong’ persuasion are intimidated out, threatened with arson or injury or, at best, ostracisation. Walls are daubed once more with the old offensive slogans: ‘Taigs out’; ‘Burn all Prods’. It’s a bad case of recidivism. After a few – a very few – hopeful years, the sects are once again up to the oxters in vile primordial muck.
Around this time, my father has an alarming experience on a Donegall Road bus. At a certain point
beyond Maguire and Paterson’s match factory and the old Bog Meadows (recently appropriated for the start of the M1 motorway), the whole St James’s Catholic ethos gives way to a pumped-up Protestantism. It’s a feature of the area between the Donegall Road and Tate’s Avenue known as ‘the Village’. Village lads – ha! – for amusement of an evening, assemble at a bus stop below Celtic Park: the first ‘Protestant’ stop on the route towards the city centre. The assumption is that anyone already on the bus will be Catholic and therefore fair game. My father is caught unawares in this way on one occasion, and surrounded on the upper deck by a gang of youths hell-bent on bodily harm. Where has he come from? Where is he going? Who were his parents? What street is next to Kitchener Street? What team does he support? What flag does he venerate? (Or words to that effect.)
Fortunately he is able to supply the right answers (right for the circumstances). He is coming from the greyhound racing at Celtic Park, he says, and is on the way home to loyalist Dunmurry. He simply walked up, not down, to catch the bus at the closest stop (otherwise he’d have missed it). His name is Craig. In the garden of his house, orange lilies are planted to bloom in season, and a Union Jack is faithfully displayed on the Twelfth. One of his own sisters lives in Tate’s Avenue. An uncle was a dignitary of the Orange Order. He gives the name of the lodge: St Nicholas LOL 264. All true – but not the whole truth. He is, in fact, on the way to visit his mother and his sister Ruby who still live at Lismoyne. The flag and the lilies are matters of fact, and so is Uncle Freddie’s Lodge. What’s expediently omitted from the account, of course, is his marriage to a Taig, his own conversion and actual place of residence just yards away from the priest-ridden Falls. No matter: his Protestant credentials see him through. He’s allowed to go on his way unharmed, and is lucky to wangle it, things being what they were at the time.
I’m reminded of the poet Ciaran Carson’s ‘Question Time’,22 which partly consists of a fraught exchange between the narrator (Carson himself) and a gang of youths (Catholic this time) who intercept him as he cycles into the Falls Road from the direction of the Shankill.
You were seen coming from the Shankill.
Why did you make a U-turn?
Who are you?...
You were seen. You were seen.
Coming from the Shankill.
Where are you from?...
What’s the next street down from Raglan Street?
Coming from the Shankill ...
Carson had innocently embarked on a cycle ride through his childhood haunts which included the Shankill Road library with its stock of Biggles books. But that was a different time. The world is now inhabited by vigilantes who perceive any incursion into their territory as a threat. ‘Coming from the Shankill’ denotes a sinister intent. ‘The questions are snapped at me like photographs.’ But for Ciaran Carson, an Irish-speaker born in Raglan Street on the Falls, the answers are child’s play. (His Orange great-grandfather he keeps under his hat.) Yes, he knows what street was next to Cape Street, and the names of the people who lived there. Yes, he can tell exactly the relation between Stockman’s Lane and Casement Park. He’s not, after all, a suitable target for assault.
I am released. I stumble across the road and look back. ... I get on my bike, and turn, and go down the Falls ... feeling shaky, nervous, remembering how a few moments ago I was there, in my mind’s eye, one foot in the grave of that Falls Road of thirty years ago, inhaling its gritty smoggy air as I lolled outside the door of 100 Raglan Street, staring down through the comforting gloom to the soot-encrusted spires of St Peter’s, or gazing at the blank brick gable walls of Balaklava Street, Cape Street, Frere Street, Milton Street, saying their names over to myself.
Chapter 9 – ‘Things Were Bad for a Long While But Now We’ve Turned a Corner’
Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into
And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?
Seamus Heaney, from ‘A Herbal’
The mad, bad times began in earnest in 1969. But things had already been simmering away for five decades and more, while active insubordination on the part of northern nationalists waxed and waned. With the civil rights movement and People’s Democracy idealism of the mid 1960s, an interlude of hopefulness occurred. ‘And the next thing, suddenly, this change of mood,’ wrote Seamus Heaney in his poem ‘From the Canton of Expectation’. An exhilarating exercise in social observation, this poem encompasses a new purposefulness which is overtaking the old subdued state of subterranean affiliations and kinship of the disaffected.
Once a year we gathered in a field
Of dance platforms and tents where children sang
Songs they had learned by rote in the old language.
There’s a photograph in the Bigger collection at the Ulster Museum of a feis in Glenarm in 1904 which is an exact visual equivalent of these lines; Heaney, as ever, is spot on. He is also, at the same time, harking back to that ‘hidden Ireland’ of the eighteenth century postulated by Daniel Corkery – the concept of a vanquished people holding on to their cultural resources in their own language, and indeed glorying in the sense of invisibility, or at least inaccessibility, this confers on them, rather like Mary Norton’s Borrowers: tiny people living side by side with those of a normal size, and going about their business almost completely undetected by them. The ‘subject people stuff’ (to quote another phrase of Heaney’s) does indeed contain a large element of resignation, or at best a muted defiance, and it’s this sense of demoralisation that’s about to be dispelled, according to the poem ‘From the Canton of Expectation’. It’s goodbye, all at once, to ‘the guardian angel of passivity’, as an age of assertiveness, with demands for fair play, is ushered in. Aside from its universal application, which enables it to be read on more than one level, I take it that this poem has a specific point of reference: to the 1947 Education Act,2 and the confidence and articulacy it bestowed on many of its beneficiaries. Readers alive to the Northern Irish context to the poem won’t be slow to pick up its pungent allusions.
I’m not sure exactly when it was that the opinion first began to circulate about the civil rights movement having its origin in the enhanced political know-how of the first eleven-plus generation. But before long this reading of the situation had become a commonplace among social historians. Ideally (if rarely in practice) education entails exposure to liberal ideas, and a natural corollary of this is commitment to justice in the social sphere – and would-be ameliorators in Northern Ireland in the late 1950s and early ’60s didn’t have to look too hard at the society they inhabited to identify its more egregious biases and disgraces. Decades of discrimination, the misuse of power, ingrained bigotries: if you possessed the smallest degree of consciousness, these couldn’t help but hit you in the face. One of the earliest effects of widespread education was to foster a critical attitude to such enormities, once they were perceived as such, along with the will to do something about them. To place yourself on the side of the angels, you had to be committed to freedom and democracy (however you chose to define these concepts).
It wasn’t long before a catalytic alienation, an honourable outrage, was brewing at Queen’s University – and spiralling out into the community at large to generate a kind of buoyancy, an anti-sectarian optimism the likes of which had not been seen in the North since the 1790s (though that particular eighteenth-century ‘dream of grace and reason’3 came to a bad end also, as we know). Education, albeit on a smaller scale, was at the bottom of United Irish agitation: the following are the words of the satirist James Porter’s4 ‘Squire Firebrand’, in a Northern Star of 1796:
O! How times are changed and all for the worse. Your Catholic emancipation – your Sunday Schools – your Charter schools – your book societies – your Pamphlets, and your books, and your one hell or another are all turning the people’s heads, and setting them a-thinking abou
t this, that, and t’other.
Thinking about this, that, and t’other is the first stage in devising a programme for reform, and the better trained and informed the thinking activist is, the more forceful and overpowering will that programme be. Among those people conscious of being in a socially disadvantaged position, and not handicapped by any deficiency of intellect, the drive to obtain an education has always been strong – this was as true of bookish English labourers, artisans and the like, as it was of those eighteenth-century Irish pupils coming in winter clutching their sods of turf to keep a fire going as they crowded into one hedge-, barn- or makeshift schoolroom after another; though the latter contingent, no doubt, had the sense of acting in defiance of an unjust authority to bolster them up. If you, as a social group, are actually forbidden an education through an iniquitous edict from above, your natural inclination, if you have any spunk at all, will be to seek one out as assiduously as possible. Hence the innumerable sites of hedge schools all over the Clogher Valley (for instance), dating from Carleton’s day – hence too all the classical allusions inserted into Irish-language poems of the eighteenth century: ‘... Are you Helen for whom many were destroyed, / Or are you one of Parnassus’ nine fair maids ...?’ etc. Learning so hard-won simply cried out for some form of expression.
Move forward a couple of centuries, and – all over the United Kingdom – hordes of scholarship pupils (myself included) are gaining whatever advantages a grammar-school education can provide. In England, the process contributed to the making of many a socialist and free-thinker; but in the peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland, with denominational disabilities imposed alongside those of class, the position was rather more complicated. But the upshot in one area, as I’ve indicated, was a burgeoning radicalism at Queen’s University, as eloquent student-protesters-against-the-system, such as Eamonn McCann, Bernadette Devlin, Michael Farrell, John Hume, Austin Currie and others, rose from the ranks. They had all arrived at Queen’s via the eleven-plus/university scholarship route.5
A Twisted Root Page 31