They had arrived, some with no bother at all, others with more of a struggle as obstacles rose up to confound them along the way. Some, non-arrivals, fell foul of hidden social pressures geared to sabotage the scholarship scheme. If these weren’t hidden they were blatant, and might produce a discouraging or, on the other hand, a bracing effect. Defiance was as sterling a way as any of responding to denigration. The eleven-year-old Eamonn McCann, the minute he set foot in St Columb’s School in Derry, was cornered by an insolent priest and quizzed about his home address. ‘Where do you come from? Rossville Street? Oh yes, that’s where they wash once a month.’6 Seamus Deane, another of the brainy Bogsiders infiltrating St Columb’s, encountered a similar superciliousness at the school: ‘The welcome was not exactly stunning. I discovered that I was an Eleven-Plusser ... in the opinion of some teachers, a low type.’ These two stuck it out, but others, victims of St Columb’s ‘unofficial but widespread snobbery’, threw in the towel.
I was not a victim of snobbery, but of a churchly severity, as I’ve related in Asking for Trouble. Queen’s was the place for me, I thought in my eighteenth year; but instead I had been diverted to a different establishment: art college. As a field of study I had life-drawing, etching, illustration, in place of the more appropriate English or Irish studies. But was I downhearted? No. Somehow I adapted to the new routines; well, it was a relief to have done with school, at least a school as uncongenial as my last one had proved to be. And the slightly bohemian art college atmosphere was exhilarating, even if I didn’t participate in it fully. If I hankered after Queen’s, it was only a peripheral hankering. Art school had its own form of liberal thinking – though it had more to do with style and sex than sectarianism. If I went around asserting my Irishness in the intervals of applying paint to canvas, I don’t think too many people were impressed. (They weren’t impressed by the painting results either.) They’d have relegated me, on this account, to the fusty, rather than the avant-garde brigade.
I did get acquainted with some Queen’s students though, and briefly became a crusader for a type of socialism which seemed to offer a way out of the sectarian impasse we all deplored. Under the influence of Eamonn McCann, I went from door to door in east Belfast canvassing on behalf of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (without conspicuous success); and in his company too I visited the home of ex-shipyard-worker-turned-playwright, Sam Thompson, whose Over the Bridge, first performed in 1960, created such a significant brouhaha in Belfast. This play, described by its author as ‘a plea for tolerance’, was first accepted, and then rejected, by the Group Theatre, as the Group’s pusillanimous board succumbed to misgivings about the probable effect in Belfast of its controversial content. Over the Bridge concerns trade unionism and bigotry in the shipyards of Harland and Wolff. Bigotry, of course, was not confined to the shipyards, but by focusing on a particular setting, one he knew inside out, Sam Thompson was presenting in a nutshell the city’s outstanding defect. (We remember James Douglas renaming Belfast ‘Bigotsborough’.) It proved too much to stomach for people blind to its likeness to life. The Group Theatre washed its hands of it; and a spate of resignations followed as the play’s supporters got their backs up in their turn. Eventually, Over the Bridge was staged at the Empire Theatre, without its fundamental drift being watered down. It was directed by James Ellis, who also acted in the play; and one of the principal roles was taken by J.G. Devlin, father of my old schoolfriend Fiona Devlin (see Chapter 1). The entire cast of Over the Bridge, and everyone connected with it, Protestant, Catholic, Dissenter or whatever, could congratulate themselves on upholding the principles of tolerance, verisimilitude and freedom of expression. And, contrary to the Group Theatre’s dismal prediction, the play’s initial staging didn’t cause offence leading to chaos in Belfast. Instead, it proved a tremendous box-office success.
I was not seated in the audience at the Empire Theatre when Sam Thompson’s play set people a-thinking about this, that, and t’other. At the time I was in my last year at school, attending the Assumption Convent in Ballynahinch where I vacillated between different ways of promoting an equitable society, and chafed under the school regulation enforcing scraped-back hair. In my daily doings I assumed the cultural high ground by speaking Irish assiduously; at the school, I took on the mantle of a would-be rebel by earnestly discussing with one or two like-minded girls the possibility of setting up, among the fifth- and sixth-formers of Ballynahinch, a branch of Cumann na mBan (the female section of the ira). I rather lost heart for this enterprise on learning that my principal, indeed virtually my only, supporter in the plan, had gone away to be a nun. So the only outlet for my clandestine instincts was the collection box for the Political Prisoners’ Dependents Fund which I carried through the streets of drab Beechmount and drabber St James’s, as an adjunct to the above-board pools-collecting on behalf of Gael Linn, to which I was also committed. You will see that, despite my lack of a religious temperament, a lack I’d been aware of from an early age, I was living and moving and having my being in Catholic Belfast, with its rituals and rigmaroles, its delusions and exclusions and aggravations. I was vehemently on the side of all of us in an inferior position in the unionist state. I was also continuously undergoing chagrin at not being paid enough attention by whatever boy I wanted to pay attention to me at the time. It seemed being Catholic, and semi-fluent Irish-speaking, and up to the eyes in republican dissent, were fixed points in my otherwise fluctuating sense of identity. It took art school, I suppose, to liberalise my idea of liberalism. There was more than one way, it seemed – the Irish-Ireland way – of achieving an advanced persona for yourself. You could adjust your emphasis by going all out to shock hidebound Belfast (the student way), or by enmeshing yourself in international, not just national, causes (the ‘Ban-the-Bomb’ way). You could exhibit a proto-feminism by refusing to wash up the dishes in male student friends’ disgusting flats. You could involve yourself in enlarging the scope of Belfast politics by supporting the non-sectarian Labour Party. I did, as I say, briefly throw in my lot with the last; but it wasn’t, for me, a natural departure. The world of politics was not my sphere.
Sam Thompson. When Over the Bridge, that polemical play, ran into trouble with the Group Theatre in Belfast, the hero of the hour – one of the heroes of the hour – was actor/director James Ellis. He was there, a driving force, at every stage of the play’s rehabilitation. His support for Thompson was unwavering – and it continued after the playwright’s death in 1965 following a heart attack in the Northern Ireland Labour Party offices in Belfast. Both the author and the actor had placed themselves within a tradition of dissent in the North running against the sectarian grain. The Over the Bridge controversy, with its implications for the future, was a defining moment in the life of Ellis, no less than that of Sam Thompson.
The future. Here is a cemetery-set piece from 2010, which somehow embodies the confusions and crotchets, obstinacies and fiascos of Northern Irish affairs. Picture a pouring wet morning in late July, and a group of about fifty bystanders assembled in driblets under huge umbrellas at the top end of Belfast’s City Cemetery. The occasion is the rededication of Sam Thompson’s grave, with a new headstone ‘erected by his friends’, and inscribed with a line from Sam Hanna Bell, ‘His was the voice of many men’. Appropriately – as it seems – the now elderly Ellis has been invited over from England to perform the unveiling and deliver a short address applauding the achievement of his long-dead friend.
We are a motley lot, standing in our raincoats waiting for Ellis to arrive and the ceremony to begin. The Black Mountain looms over the scene, with mist swirling about its summit and the Hatchet Field looking within easy walking distance. Forrest Reid, in his novel of 1915, At the Door of the Gate, remarked the way the cemetery ground rose steeply, ‘its green surface broken by innumerable white and grey monuments, and threaded with dark trim paths’. He mentions how ‘the hard silhouettes of a few cypresses, and the softer outlines of the trees in the park alongside, sto
od out against a pale blue sky’. And beyond (he adds), ‘yet quite close, was a dark low range of hills, the air from which blew down, fresh and cold’. Today the sky is overcast, not pale blue, but otherwise the cemetery is much the same as it was in Forrest Reid’s day (as long as the late-twentieth-century housing developments remain out of sight). We have, as I say, arrived from all directions, and from all walks of society. Sinn Féin is represented by Danny Morrison who has organised the event as part of the West Belfast Festival, ex-Lord Mayor Tom Hartley, and Gerry Adams himself who draws up at the graveside in a swish black car, and proceeds to hand around sweets from a paper bag. The old Labour movement in Belfast gets a look-in in the person of Brian Garrett – solicitor and Sam Thompson’s literary executor – along with my friend Anne Devlin, daughter of Paddy Devlin the great Belfast socialist and trade union activist. If she’s here on behalf of her dead father, though, Anne is also present in her own right as an acclaimed short-story writer and playwright; along with her contemporary and fellow-playwright Martin Lynch, she imports into the gathering a touch of thespian glamour. My other Devlin friend – not related – now Fiona Coyle, also stands obliquely for the world of the theatre (via her father), and at the same time affirms the ethos of the burgeoning Irish-speaking population of Andersonstown. All of us, in our different ways, are here to honour the memory of Sam Thompson and the anti-sectarian ideal he stood for. Some of us are Catholic, by birth or conviction, some Protestant, and more, probably, subscribe to no religion at all.
Standing by the Thompson graveside with its pre-unveiling covering still in place, I’m struck by the way nearly all of the people present can be assigned to various ideological and cultural categories – allowing for overlap and interfusion, of course. And some of these categories are at odds with one another. Gaelic-socialist-republican-integrationist-theatrical-literary. ... The last brings me to the third Devlin present, Marie Heaney, who’s accompanied by her Nobel Laureate husband Seamus. The Heaneys are in Belfast because Seamus is performing at the West Belfast Festival later in the day, reading some poems and talking about the headmaster, Michael McLaverty, of the school he, Seamus, taught in, in the days before fame overtook him. And they, the Heaneys, like the rest of us, are in the City Cemetery defying the damp to pay tribute to the author of Over the Bridge. His ‘plea for tolerance’ is in the thoughts of all of us. ‘Shipwright, playwright and trade unionist’, Michael Longley wrote in his poem ‘The Poker’ (‘In memory of Sam Thompson’), ‘Old Decency’s philosopher ...’.
Another exponent of ‘old decency’ is James Ellis, who duly arrives at the microphone set up under a kind of makeshift tent affair. ‘I haven’t brought any notes or anything,’ he begins. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, this is just an impromptu speech. Off the cuff.’ Encouraging murmurs follow this announcement. ‘Good for you, Jimmy.’ ‘You’re all right, Jimmy.’ ‘Yes,’ the famous Belfast actor goes on, looking round with an unexpectedly blank expression on his face. ‘It’s great to be here among so many distinguished people. Especially Seamus Heaney.’
Well, fair enough, I think. Given the occasion, it was Sam Thompson’s due to be mentioned first; but clearly Ellis has caught sight of Seamus in the gathering and feels he has to acknowledge his presence. Now he’s got that out of the way, no doubt he will get to the point. But it doesn’t happen. Slight ripples of unease run through the crowd as we hear a strange assertion coming from the microphone, to the effect that it is an honour, ‘a great honour for me to be here unveiling the grave of this famous poet, a Nobel Laureate, the greatest poet Ireland has ever produced. A great prose writer as well ... great eloquence ... I have signed copies of all his books ... a great poet ... Seamus Heaney …’.
The acclaimed actor is in no danger of running out of words, but he seems to be attending a different ceremony to the rest of us. What is going on? We find out later that James Ellis has a mild condition requiring medication to keep him in a balanced state, and in the hustle and bustle of flying into Belfast that morning the medication was overlooked. Hence the unexpected oration which has us standing transfixed under our dripping umbrellas, torn between embarrassment, bemusement and an urge to burst out laughing (which no one does). Glances are exchanged denoting bewilderment and consternation. The only one who has the presence of mind to do something is Anne Devlin, who bravely steps across to James Ellis at the microphone, takes him by the elbow and apologises for butting in. ‘Tell us about Sam Thompson, Jimmy,’ she urges. ‘It’s important to remember that you are here today because you as an actor took Sam Thompson’s banned play Over the Bridge and fought to get it on. That showed such courage as an actor, to do that for a writer, for a play that was banned. And it inspired me as a playwright, because I learned that culture was a form of resistance. And that is why we are here today.’
She’s done her best, and more than any of us, but her intervention produces only a kind of benign puzzlement in the single-track speaker. It required a tremendous effort on the part of Anne to try to save the situation. (‘My legs are about to give way under me,’ she whispers, resuming her place in the crowd.) But no sooner has she left the enclosure than ‘Seamus Heaney’ starts up again. ‘A great honour ... the eloquence of this tremendous poet ... Seamus Heaney’s grave ...’. God knows what is going through the mind of poor Seamus as he stands there having to hear himself being consigned to a burial spot in the City Cemetery long before his time. He catches Anne Devlin’s eye and shakes his head. He tries to efface himself behind the broad back of Gerry Adams. Eventually, though, as the inapposite elegy rambles on, he sees there’s nothing for it but to intervene himself. He takes the microphone, thanks James Ellis for his comments, and wrenches the ceremony back on track with his customary grace and gumption. James Ellis, still looking not quite himself, apparently sees no discrepancy between the person standing beside him, alive and well, and the ‘great poet’ he’s had dead and buried a minute earlier. He just seems politely bewildered by all these interruptions. And when Heaney, composed as ever but no doubt disquieted by the occurrence, returns to his place in the audience, blow me if James Ellis doesn’t start up again. ‘Great honour ... the grave of this great poet ... Seamus Heaney ...’. (‘Jimmy was not to be diverted,’ observes Seamus ruefully, later.) At this point the organisers give up, the dogged Heaney devotee is led away, still muttering, ‘... great poet ... grave ...’, and the show is over. It’s not long, however, before Ellis’s usual civility and acumen are restored to him. The incident is just a blip in the long and productive association between actor and playwright. It’s been unnerving but with an edge of comedy. And the heroine of the hour is Anne Devlin.
Anne Devlin’s classic story ‘Naming the Names’ is the best account I know of the making of a terrorist. Her protagonist Finn (Finnuala) McQuillen belongs to the burnt-out people of the Falls, victims of an Orange onslaught in August 1969. Finn’s grandmother is rescued from her house in Conway Street off the Falls Road, carried to safety in the arms of a neighbour, while the houses of other neighbours blaze around her. Stones and bottles are hurled at fleeing ‘Fenians’ by a crowd of arsonists at the top of the street. Some time later, Finn walks into ‘a house in Andersonstown of a man I knew’ and asks if there is anything for her to do. ‘And that was how I became involved.’ Later again, following the murder of a judge’s son, Finn is arrested and interrogated in an interview room by members of the ruc. Asked incessantly for the names of her republican associates, she repeats like a mantra instead the street-names of the pungent old, disaffected Falls. ‘Conway and Cupar, David, Percy, Dover and Divis. Mary, Merrion, Milan, McDonnell, Osman, Raglan, Ross, Rumania, Serbia, Slate, Sorella, Sultan ...’
This deeply humane story carries considerable resonance. Obliterated streets, mutilated neighbourhoods, harm done, causes good and bad and inescapable, come within its parameters. Who could witness horrors inflicted on unoffending people and not wish to retaliate, as Finn does in the story? And once you’re committed, you’re commit
ted. Some distancing mechanism from evil effects takes over. ... Where did ‘Naming the Names’ come from? A work of fiction, it is very far from being Anne Devlin’s own story. In 1981, her family unwillingly abandoned the house in Andersonstown where they had lived for fifteen years. Their exodus was due to violence, or the threat of violence, from ruffian elements of the Provisional ira who disliked Anne’s father Paddy Devlin’s principled, and outspoken, refusal to condone the hunger strikers in the Maze prison. Hence some of the behind-the-scenes overlap and dissociation prevailing at the City Cemetery gathering, as indicated above.
However, as I’ve said, everyone attending the Thompson rededication could be classed as subscribing to liberal values, of whatever variety. And what the lot of us were up against, at the time we got going as would-be progressives, was the old inherited, ingrained and iniquitous ‘Bigotsborough’ mindset. And this mindset was embodied in a big way in an awful autochthonous figure. Here is an image from 1962. A current annoyance of one or two zealots is the notion that somehow the bbc in Belfast has become a hotbed of popeheads. Fuelled by the wrath of God, these religionists assemble in Ormeau Avenue wearing overcoats not designed for aesthetic appeal, and carrying placards alerting passers-by to the fact – which may have surprised them – that the bbc is the Voice of Popery. ‘We Protest Against Roman Catholicism in the bbc,’ thunders one of these placards, ‘In Ordering Refusal of Protestant Protests Against the bbc’s Submission to rome in ulster.’ I don’t know what brought on this particular choleric outbreak – not very succinctly, indeed tautologically, articulated; but it made an occasion for the Reverend Ian Paisley to leap on a soap-box outside the bbc, and go into denunciatory mode while emulating his roaring nineteenth-century predecessors such as the Reverend Henry Cooke (a bygone cleric every bit as black as he was painted).
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