It used to be that you could predict the aftermath of Christmas: ‘How did your Christmas go?’ ‘Oh quiet, very quiet.’ There isn’t much predictable now, except that the sirens will blare out the old and blare in nothing very new. In some parts of the country they will have killed the wren on St Stephen’s Day. In some houses they will still be hoping for a first-footer to bring a change of luck.
‘The Group’: Honest Ulsterman, 1978; ‘Christmas, 1971’: Listener, 1971
Cessation 1994
The announcement by the Provisional IRA last Wednesday changed everything for the better. I listened to the radio all afternoon, hoping to hear words that would be up to the magnitude of what was happening. But while the political leaders and the commentators were (with predictable exceptions) elated, the sheer volume of the talk began to have an almost claustrophobic effect.
I went outside to try to recollect myself and suddenly a blind seemed to rise somewhere at the back of my mind and the light came flooding in. I felt twenty-five years younger. I remembered what things had felt like in those early days of political ferment in the late sixties. How we all were brought beyond our highly-developed caution to believe that the effort to create new movement and language in the Northern context was a viable project.
But as well as feeling freed up, I felt angry also. The quarter century we have lived through was a terrible black hole, and the inestimable suffering inflicted and endured by every party to the conflict has only brought the situation to a point that is politically less promising than things were in 1968.
At that time, there was energy and confidence on the nationalist side and a developing liberalism – as well as the usual obstinacy and reaction – on the unionist side. There was a general upswing in intellectual and social activity, the border was more pervious than it had been, the sectarian alignments less determining.
I remember in particular feeling empowered (although the word was not in vogue then) by a week on the road with David Hammond and Michael Longley in May 1968 when we brought a programme of songs and poems to schools and hotels and libraries in unionist and nationalist areas all over Northern Ireland.
The programme was called ‘Room to Rhyme’ and I thought about it again last Wednesday. The title was taken from the opening verse of a mummers’ play that went ‘Room, room, my gallant boys, and give us room to rhyme’, a line that expressed perfectly the eagerness and impatience that was in the air at the time. As a member of the 11-Plus generation of Catholic scholarship boys, just recently appointed to the faculty of Queens University, I knew myself to be symptomatic of a new confidence in the nationalist minority; and on this particular trip, sponsored by The Northern Ireland Arts Council, with David Hammond singing ‘The Boys of Mullaghbawn’ and Michael Longley writing about ‘Leaving Inishmore’ and myself reading ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, I was conscious that an Irish dimension was at last beginning to figure in the official life of the North.
Which is to say that ‘diversity’ was beginning to be recognized and to find its expression long before it became a buzz word. Small changes of attitude, small rapprochements and readjustments were being made. Minimal shifts in different areas – artistic, educational, political – were beginning to effect new contacts and concessions. The fact that I felt free to read a poem about the 1798 rebels to a rather staid audience of middle-class unionists was one such small symptom of a new tolerance.
In a few years’ time, of course, to have read ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ in such a venue would have been taken as a direct expression of support for the IRA’s campaign of violence. And this was only one tiny instance of the way in which, during the 1970s, artistic and cultural exercises got peeled away from the action of politics.
I remember, for example, in the early stages of the crisis, being invited to contribute a piece to Hibernia on poetry and the troubles, and writing instead about the contribution of John Hume. I had no qualms whatsoever that this might be a ‘dangerous intersection’, but as the years proceeded and the situation became more devastating, that kind of living exchange between the professional politicians and the cultural workers quickly became a thing of the past.
What I felt last Wednesday, however, was that there was now an opportunity for everybody to get involved again. The excitement being expressed about the new developments was more than hype. Even people on the unionist side were experiencing a fleeting temptation to credit the turn for the better. The DUP representatives were understandably downbeat, to say the least, and the citizens on the ground in loyalist areas could hardly be expected to clap their hands. But even so, there was enough positive response to suggest that the complete cessation of military activities by the Provos might result in at least a change of mood on that side also.
Not a great change of mood, of course. The refusal to consider any move that might erode the Britishness of the Ulster Protestant way of life is totally ingrained in the loyalist community, and after the past twenty-five years it would be stupid and insulting to expect them to renege on their sense of separate identity. But it is neither stupid nor insulting to ask them to consider consenting to some political adjustments that would give the nationalist minority equally undisputed rights to the grounds of their Irish identity.
The cessation of violence is an opportunity to open a space – and not just in the political arena but in the first level of each person’s consciousness – a space where hope can grow. And I mean hope in the sense that Vaclav Havel has defined it, because it seems to me that his definition has the kind of stoical clarity that should appeal to every realist in the north, Planter or Gael, Protestant or Catholic, optimist or pessimist.
Hope, according to Havel, is different from optimism. It is a state of the soul rather than a response to the evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out. Its deepest roots are in the transcendental, beyond the horizon. The self-evident truth of all this is surely something upon which a peace process might reasonably be grounded.
Sunday Tribune, September 1994
Something to Write Home About
The River Moyola flows south-east from a source in the Sperrin Mountains down through County Derry and enters Lough Neagh just a few miles from where I grew up. Over the years, the river has been deepened and straightened, but in the 1940s there was a ford at Lower Broagh and a trail of big stepping stones led across from one bank to the other, linking the townland of Broagh to the townland of Bellshill. We used to paddle around the gravel bed on the Broagh side and I always loved venturing out from one stepping stone to the next, right into the middle of the stream – for even though the river was narrow enough and shallow enough, there was a feeling of daring once you got out into the main flow of the current. Suddenly you were on your own. You were giddy and rooted to the spot at one and the same time. Your body stood stock still, like a milestone or a boundary mark, but your head would be light and swimming from the rush of the river at your feet and the big stately movement of the clouds in the sky above your head.
Nowadays when I think of that child rooted to the spot in midstream, I see a little version of the god the Romans called Terminus, the god of boundaries. The Romans kept an image of Terminus in the Temple of Jupiter on Capitol Hill and the interesting thing is that the roof above the place where the image sat was open to the sky, as if to say that a god of the boundaries and borders of the earth needed to have access to the boundless, the whole unlimited height and width and depth of the heavens themselves. As if to say that all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space. And it is that double capacity that we possess as human beings – the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us – it is this double capacity that poetry springs from and addresses. A good poem allows you to have
your feet on the ground and your head in the air simultaneously.
*
Terminus appears as tearmann in many Irish place-names, meaning the glebe land belonging to an abbey or a church, land that was specially marked off for ecclesiastical use; and even though there were no places called Termon in the Moyola district, I knew in my bones from very early on that the Moyola itself was a very definite terminus, a marker off of one place from another. I knew it when I stood on the stepping stone but also when I stood on the bridge that spanned the river at Castledawson. I loved to hang over the range wall and look directly down at the flow where the trout were darting about, and the riverweed waved like a streamer under the stream. On one side of me was the village of Castledawson, where my mother’s people lived in a terrace house, with a trellis of roses over the front pathway and a vegetable garden at the back. My grandparents’ house in Castledawson could have been in any spick-and-span English mill village, any working-class terrace where the factory workers came and went to the sound of the factory horn. In this case the factory was Clarke’s linen mill and the horn blew morning and evening, at eight and at six, first to call the hands in and then to let them go home. Home to New Row and Boyne Row and Station Road, up past the Orange Hall and the Protestant Church, up past the entrance to Moyola Park, where the Castledawson soccer team had its pitch, and Moyola Lodge, where the Chichester Clarkes lived their different life behind the walls of their demesne.
All that was mentally on one side of the river; on the other, there was the parish of Bellaghy, or Ballyscullion, where my father’s side of the family, the Heaneys and the Scullions, had lived for generations. Their dwellings were thatched rather than slated, their kitchens had open fires rather than polished stoves, the houses stood in the middle of the fields rather than in a terrace, and the people who lived in them listened to the cattle roaring rather than the horn blowing. Somehow, even at that early age, I knew the Bellaghy side of my life was not only in a different physical location but in a different cultural location as well. There was no pitch there for soccer, or English Association Football, as the game was more officially called. In my mind, Bellaghy belonged not only to Gaelic football, but to the much older Gaelic order of cattle herding and hill forts; the village, for instance, had a fair day on the first Monday of every month: the streets would be crammed with cows and heifers and bullocks, the whole place loud and stinking with the smells of the beasts and their dung. It was impossible to think of any such unruly activity happening on the main street of Castledawson. Castledawson was a far more official place altogether, more modern, more a part of the main drag. The very name of the place is from the orderly English world of the eighteenth century, whereas Bellaghy is from an older, more obscure origin in Irish. So, as I once said in a poem – a poem called ‘Terminus’ – I grew up in between.
*
I grew up between the predominantly Protestant and loyalist village of Castledawson and the generally Catholic and nationalist district of Bellaghy. In a house situated between a railway and a road. Between the old sounds of a trotting horse and the newer sounds of a shunting engine. On a border between townlands and languages, between accents at one end of the parish that reminded you of Antrim and Ayrshire and the Scottish speech I used to hear on the Fair Hill in Ballymena, and accents at the other end of the parish that reminded you of the different speech of Donegal, speech with the direct, clear ring of the Northern Irish I studied when I went to the Gaeltacht in Rannafast.
Naturally enough, some of what Philip Larkin would have called the ‘words of my inner mind’ come from that world back there between times and languages. A word like ‘hoke’, for example. When I hear somebody say hoke, I’m returned to the very first place in myself. It’s not a standard English word and it’s not an Irish-language word either, but it’s undislodgeably there, buried in the very foundations of my own speech. Under me like the floor of the house where I grew up. Something to write home about, as it were. The word means to root about and delve into and forage for and dig around, and that is precisely the kind of thing a poem does as well. A poem gets its nose to the ground and follows a trail and hokes its way by instinct towards the real centre of what concerns it. And in fact it was the word hoked itself that got me started on ‘Terminus’:
When I hoked there, I would find
An acorn and a rusted bolt.
If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney
And a dormant mountain.
If I listened, an engine shunting
And a trotting horse.
Is it any wonder when I thought
I would have second thoughts?
It’s hard to grow up in Northern Ireland and not be forced into second thoughts, sooner or later. With so much division around, people are forever encountering boundaries that bring them up short. Second thoughts are an acknowledgement that the truth is bounded by different tearmanns, that it has to take cognizance of opposing claims. If one person says that too many cooks spoil the broth, another maintains that many hands make light work. If one says a stitch in time saves nine, another says there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. Ulster is British, says one; Ulster is Uladh, an ancient province of Ireland, says the other. On one side of the march drain, you say potato. On the other side, I say potatto. Such contradictions are part of being alive as a member of the human species. But in Northern Ireland they have attained a special local intensity.
When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard
It shone like gifts at a nativity.
When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity
The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.
I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks
Suffering the limit of each claim.
The word ‘march’ was one that I used to hear again and again when I was a youngster – but not in the usual context of protest marches and Orange marches and Apprentice Boys marches. In those days, in that place, the marching season was every season because it was the land itself that did the marching. The verb meant to meet at the boundary, to be bordered by, to be matched up to and yet marked off from; one farm marched another farm; one field marched another field; and what divided them was the march drain or the march hedge. The word did not mean ‘walk in a military manner’, but to be close, to lie alongside, to border upon and be bordered upon. It was a word that acknowledged division but it contained a definite suggestion of solidarity as well. If my land marched your land, we were bound by that boundary as well as separated by it. If the whole of the liberating sky was over the head of the god Terminus, the whole of the solid earth was under what he stood for, the march hedge and the march drain.
*
In the kitchen of the house where I grew up there was a cement floor, and one of my first memories is the feel of its coldness and smoothness under my feet. I must have been only two or three at the time, because I was still in my cot and can remember taking the boards out of the bottom of it in order to step down to the actual floor. The boards were fitted in like slats but they hadn’t been nailed down, and this meant they could be lifted out one by one – because, I suppose, they needed to be removable for cleaning every time a child soiled them. At any rate, I’ll never forget that contact of warm skin and cold floor, the immediate sensation of surprise; and then something deeper, more gradual, a sensation of consolidation and familiarity, the whole reassuring foundation of the earth coming up into you through the soles of your feet. It was like a knowledge coming home to you. I was holding on to the rail of the cot but it could have been the deckrail of the world. I was in two places at once. One was a small square of kitchen floor and the other was a big knowledgeable space I had stepped into deep inside myself, a space I can still enter through the memory of my warm soles on the cold cement. When my feet touched the floor, I knew I was on my way somewhere, but at the time I could not have said exactly where. Nowadays I would say it was to poetic discovery. And I would quote what the seventeenth-c
entury Japanese poet, Bashō, had to say about the conduct of the poetic life. ‘What is important,’ Bashō wrote,
is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
Bashō makes the mind sound a bit like that Roman image of Terminus, earthbound and present in the here and now, and yet open also to what Bashō calls the everlasting self, the boundlessness of inner as well as outer space.
*
The Moyola wasn’t the only boundary that entered into me when I was a youngster. I used to carry a can of fresh milk in the evenings from our house to the next house down the road from us. This was – like our own – a thatched house, but unlike our house it was also a pub, and it is there still, more or less the same as it was in the 1940s, thatched and whitewashed, your typical picturesque roadside inn.
My journey from home to the back door of this house was short, no more than a couple of hundred yards, and yet in my child’s mind I covered a great distance every time, because between the two doorsteps I crossed the border between the ecclesiastical diocese of Derry and the diocese – or more properly, the archdiocese – of Armagh. The diocese of Derry stretched away to the north-west, into Inishowen and Donegal, and the archdiocese of Armagh stretched for nearly a hundred miles south-east to the River Boyne and the town of Drogheda on the edge of Meath in the Irish Republic; so while I felt safe and sound on that short stretch of the county road, I still experienced a slightly mysterious sense of distance and division.
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