The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

by Glenn Patterson

  And sometimes she returned to the topics of our first walk together, which were, in brief, the multiple currents and crosswinds, blowing down decades and across continents, that had picked her up and set her down here in a tree on the north shore of Belfast Lough, talking to me.

  Her father had carried back with him to Poland the names that Wolfe Tone had recited of the people who so distinguished the town of Belfast and long afterwards was, in his turn, still able to recite them to his children. Maria had forgotten most of them during the years of his imprisonment (she had almost forgotten the sound of her father’s voice), but a few remained. McCracken was one, Barclay another. Why this last had lodged in Maria’s head she could not say – there was none of the glamour attached to it that attached to “McCracken” – any more than she could rationally account for the fact that on her arrival in the town almost the first person she spoke to, the housekeeper of a boarding house on Gamble Street, sent by her mistress to tell Maria there were no rooms, had used to work for Peggy of that name and her husband James, although that piece of information was not elicited then and there on the doorstep: that would have been too unsettling a coincidence. The housekeeper, rather, had taken pity on Maria and told her to come back later in the evening when her mistress was at her whist party and when a bed might be found for her for the night in among the servants.

  James Barclay, she discovered then, was many years dead, and the tavern that he and his wife had kept in the town – the tavern Wolfe Tone would have known, the Dr Franklin – had long since passed into other hands and suffered a change of name. The housekeeper, however, was able the next morning to direct Maria to the widow Barclay’s door (“find the shoreline, keep to it, believe me, you will not miss the sign”), where Maria, who had been on the road now the better part of a fortnight, promptly fell into a faint from which she did not rouse for three days.

  Another thing that had lodged in Maria’s head was Wolfe Tone’s dream of sailing into Belfast to stimulate the rebellion. Fate might still have intended a gallows somewhere for him to cheat, but to be able first to carry off that Grand Gesture . . . she could only imagine with him that it would have made a difference – a sigh almost as she said this – all the difference in the world.

  “Assuming” (was it possible to envy the dead?) “he could depend on the tide,” I said.

  In Belfast all things great and small came back to the tide.

  Besides the newsrooms, I had begun to frequent with a greater regularity in those weeks Bourdot and Galbraith’s in Castle Lane, where I would have my hair trimmed, with particular attention to the side-whiskers, and such beard as I had managed to grow since my last visit removed from my chin and upper lip. Bourdot was then, at a guess, in his sixtieth year, and so well established in the town as to have featured in one of the first jokes its children ever learned: “Have you heard, have you heard? Bourdot isn’t cutting hair any longer.” “No?” “No, he’s cutting it shorter.”

  His father had been ship’s barber with a French squadron – if three frigates add up to a squadron – that had landed at Carrickfergus, under the command of a Commodore Thurot, back in the mists of the Seven Years War. Thurot, who was either mad to begin with or turned that way by the calamities that had befallen him since leaving Dunkirk several months earlier (there had been five frigates then; there had been food), had demanded of Belfast a ransom of fifty thousand pounds, in addition to fifty hogsheads of claret, thirty pipes of brandy, twenty-five tons of bread and two tons of onions, in return for his not attacking it, and had got instead five thousand militiamen descending on him and causing him to put out to sea again – or at least to put out to the Lough, there to sit at anchor waiting for a tide in his favour.

  The tide, when it came, brought every English frigate within a hundred miles.

  They chased him as far as the Isle of Man, where battle was finally engaged. Thurot, leading from the front (courageous as well as crazed), was struck by a ball and almost instantly died, at which the remainder of the squadron lost heart and, within a very short time, surrendered.

  Several score of French, meanwhile, had been stranded in the hasty retreat from Carrickfergus and brought back as prisoners to Belfast where they were billeted for three months before being released. (We had nothing against the French uniform, only Irishmen in it.) In gratitude for the hospitality shown them, they requested, and were granted, permission to hold a ball in the Market House the night before their departure, to which more than two hundred townspeople came and danced and drank into the early hours. Some of the prisoners, indeed, were so grateful that they preferred not, when the moment came, to return home at all, but stayed to marry local girls, raise families, start businesses, or, as in the case of Bourdot père, dynasties.

  It was while sitting in his son’s chair that I heard it suggested that Lord Belfast had been responsible for one of the town’s more unusual spectacles. As Bourdot tilted my head forward, this particular morning, to “clean up” my neck, I heard the slap of wet feet on the pavement outside, and glancing, awkwardly, left, saw Tantra Barbus, the pedlar, pass in front of the window, water streaming from beneath his hat – which was, as was so often the case, the only dry thing about him – and the look on his face of a man set on drink. The gentleman in the chair beside me, to whose ear hair at that moment Mr Galbraith was bending his full attention, wondered aloud that Tantra was still alive. The gentleman was an infrequent visitor to Belfast these days, but once upon a time he had done a lot of business with McGarrigle on Custom House Quay. (Gone now, too, McGarrigle, he shouldn’t be surprised, though there was no one bigger then in barilla.) He remembered one day when he was coming away from the warehouse – he was going back fifteen years here, maybe more – happening upon a commotion at the foot of the Long Bridge. Through the gaps in the crowd of onlookers he could see Tantra Barbus (he did not know him yet by name, had never till that moment clapped eyes on him), knee-deep in the Lagan. He asked the man standing next to him what was going on and was told that young Lord Belfast and his friends – “that’s them at the front in the ‘toppers’” – had wagered the pedlar sixpence that he could not swim across the river. This Tantra had already done, there and back, and was boasting he could do again, even though he had already swallowed a quantity of gin by way of reward for the first swim, or reviver from it.

  “Here was Lord Belfast to him, ‘It can’t be done.’ Says Tantra, ‘Ho, can it not?’ And d— me if he didn’t dive back in,” the gentleman said and leaned a little towards me (Galbraith had moved on to his other ear). “He was like a porpoise. Under . . . then, just when you began to fear he was gone for good . . . up! He waved from the far bank before starting across again, could not have been more than half a minute getting his breath. When he arrived back he held out his hand and Lord Belfast put fivepence in it. ‘What’s this?’ says Tantra. ‘You gave me six the last time.’ And Lord Belfast said, ‘Yes, but last time it had the bonus of novelty.’”

  Bourdot had come to stand before me and was raising my chin on the point of his index finger to see that my side-whiskers were even.

  “Are you quite sure”, he said to the gentleman, directly into my face, “that was the first time?”

  “As sure as I am sitting here,” said the gentleman, and stood up, now that Galbraith had laid off his ears, to get his pipe from the shelf below the mirror.

  Bourdot frowned at me, turned my head to the left, to the right. “I suppose it is a fi’penny he still asks,” he said.

  “Enough,” said Galbraith, a man of fewer words than his partner, “for a half pint of gin.”

  “I am surprised he can command even that,” said the gentleman, who had settled himself again in anticipation of the Bay Rum. “There is surely not a person in Belfast who has not seen it done by now. Unless, given the age of him, they pay in hope of seeing him one of these days drown.”

  It was while sitting in Bourdot’s chair, too, on a morning early in June that I learned of the editorial
carried by the newest of our newspapers, the Northern Whig, raging against the Chichesters’ latest obstruction to the Harbour Bill. “Reformers of Belfast,” Bourdot himself read aloud, a trace in his accent all of a sudden of his father and the Seven Years War, “Lord Belfast has refused to present your Petition for reform; merchants and freeholders of Belfast, his papa has ordered him to oppose the very first Bill you apply for, to mend your quays and improve your harbour. However the whole procedure admirably illustrates the base and villainous corruption on which our present representative system is founded; and ought to urge us all the more strenuously to procure such a Reform as will extricate the people out of the hands of the Aristocracy.”

  Bourdot lowered the paper. “Well, that is one way to get your newspaper noticed,” he said.

  Two nights later a pane of glass was broken at the front of the Northern Whig building on Calendar Street. The night constables, responding to the sound, gave chase to two men whom they had seen running from the street, but who, when the constables finally caught up with them on Bank Lane, were found to be the father of a dangerously sick child and the doctor he had summoned to attend her; so that the constables were still making their apologies and bickering among themselves when, at the far end of High Street from Bank Lane, a window was smashed in the Ballast Office too. A page tied to the brick found on the floor of the Whig proclaimed the perpetrators “Friends of the True Friends of Belfast”. All we got was the brick. Bright, turning the missile over in his hands while I swept the debris from our desks, said he would bet his last farthing that these Friends of Friends were in fact lighter pilots whose trade to and from Garmoyle would be extinguished by an easier access to the town. Sir Clueless, he reminded us, had already had to deal with several delegations anxious for detail – not least of the amount of compensation proposed – and we could not, surely, have failed to notice ourselves a less than warm welcome these days in one or two of the taverns where we took our lunches, cheek by jowl with the boatmen. (If they had only known the part I had played in Mr Walker’s investigations the welcome might have been several degrees cooler again.) Ferris, however, was of the opinion that the Donegalls themselves, if not actually putting bricks into the vandals’ hands, had played an inciting role: witness the recent lavish dinner at Ormeau, to which certain only of the town’s merchants had been invited – as clear an attempt to create dissension as you could wish to see.

  “Or as obvious a means of gaining Lord Donegall a few more weeks’ grace from those gentlemen on his outstanding bills,” said Bright, whose radicalism seemed to have peaked with the outburst in my sickroom. He had arrived to work one Monday morning not long before in high excitement, having on the previous Saturday evening attended a magnificent cock-match in a pit at Hill Street. Over thirty pairs of birds had flown in the course of the night and the spectators numbered four or five times that. A group of students from the Academical Institution were there to cheer on their favourite, a Ginger – “Big Red” – owned by McAdam that had the farm at Woodstock. (“Of course, McAdam,” I said. “Never heard of him.” “Ha,” said Bright. “Ha and ha-ha.”) At some point, that particular match not going their favourite’s way, the students accused his adversary’s owner of fighting Big Red’s own blood against him. One of them, the worse for drink, leapt into the pit and in his confused state laid out McAdam’s man with a single punch, which was the signal for a couple of Brown’s Square boys to leap in and exact retribution and things might have gone very badly indeed for the student and his friends, who were threatening to call down the constabulary, had not Lord Belfast himself at that moment stepped forward from an alcove where he had been watching with friends of his own. No one present, he was sure, wanted to involve the police in this matter. No one, suddenly, did. He enquired of the rival cock’s owner whether there was any truth in the allegation made by Red’s supporters, which as all sportsmen knew was a very serious one. The man swore on his mother’s grave, his wife’s good name, his children’s eyes, that he would never wittingly fight blood against blood, to which Lord Belfast responded by asking the scholar if he would accept a fellow sportsman’s word of honour, and that he readily agreed to do, or as readily as anyone can whose lip is split and swollen and whose blood is running pure whiskey. Next, his lordship had the Brown’s Square boys shake the student’s hand – “Fair dos to you, Mucker,” said one (Bright overdid the accent), “you have some punch on you” – before finally he knelt by McAdam’s man to whom salts had been in the mean time administered. The man was soon on his feet again – positively sprang to them in his surprise at finding a Member of Parliament squinting down at him – and having received the thick-lipped apology of his assailant, pronounced himself fit to carry on. No sooner was the match resumed than Big Red flew, spurs up, at the other bird’s head, knocking him off his feet. In another minute Red had him finished off, to Lord Belfast’s evident satisfaction. He had stood to lose twenty-five guineas had the contest gone the other way.

  “A fly man and no mistake,” was Bright’s admiring verdict on the whole performance.

  Ferris was contemptuous. “I was only at one cockfight in my life. The spectators squawked worse than the chickens. And the stink of blood for days after . . .”

  “So speaks the man,” Bright retorted, “whose idea of sport is to blast duck and snipe to kingdom come with a blunderbuss.”

  “Fowling piece. And at least we hunters give the birds a chance; at least we have to exercise some skill. We are confined to barrels half the time, for goodness’ sake. The cocks are pure savagery. I am with the Prevention of Cruelty people on that.”

  The Society had made its first appearance in the town a year or two before (with too much to combat in the present – I am, in one sense only, glad to say – to be concerned with past misdeeds). Unless I was greatly mistaken, Miss McCracken was at the centre of it.

  “They were there, too, on Saturday,” said Bright, and tried to suppress a smile. “The students and the Brown’s Square boys chased them up Hill Street swinging the corpses of the vanquished by the feet.”

  He flapped his arms at Ferris, who recoiled. “Ugh!”

  “Lord Belfast,” I said to myself.

  “What about him?” asked Bright.

  “Lord Belfast,” I thought I said to myself.

  “He is a fortunate man,” said Ferris, “that wife . . .”

  “That temper!” said Bright.

  “That challenge!”

  And from here the conversation veered off again and my own blushes were spared at the expense of the women of Belfast, young and not so young.

  *

  In the wake of the glass-breaking, Sir Clueless gathered us all together one afternoon in the Ballast Office, masters, deputy masters, constable and clerks. Even the cat was there, at least in body. (From the twitches of its paws and whiskers, it seemed its sleeping soul was somewhere else entirely.) The higher-ups sat on chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of the desks, on which the lower-downs knelt, becoming for that briefest of interludes, and in that most meaningless of ways, the higher-ups themselves. My head – as the lowest and therefore the highest in the Office – was level with the top of the chart displaying the progress of the cholera. The day before I had been tasked with placing a pin next to the Russian port of Riga, from where, it was reported, sixty vessels had earlier in the week fled before they could be impounded. At least four of them were intent on Sunderland in the north-east of England, giving rise to calls for a general quarantine on all Baltic shipping.

  “Gentlemen,” Sir Clueless said, and applied his thumbs with vigour to his lapels. A few more such speeches and he would be right through to his shirt. “Feelings are running high in the town. I need not enumerate the reasons why. You will all undoubtedly have your own opinions on where we find ourselves at present, I would not want men here who did not, but it is not for us to become involved in debates or speculation.” (Bright, in front of me, nudged Ferris a moment before Ferris could nudge Brigh
t.) “Our duty is clear. We are to carry out the directions of the Board and, ultimately, of the Parliament. Both of these, I need hardly add, are subject to the change that all the institutions of Man are subject to.” A sound outside of a rope snapping quickly followed by a crash, the splintering of wood, all accompanied by a lexicon of curses. This sort of “violence”, at least, we were used to on the docks. The Master of all Ballast pitched his next line a fraction higher. “We have another duty, however, which is to the river and the quays, to maintain them for the use of generations yet to come. It is on this that we must concentrate our efforts. However ill advised we might in private think are the plans – any plans – we are asked to execute, we must execute them in such a way as causes the least injury. Let us . . .” he coughed. “Let us be the men for the small details.”

  Somewhere around “generations yet to come” he had exceeded in duration anything we had ever heard him say, even to the Sandy Row weavers. Still‚ we waited for him to exceed it in distinction, and when no more was forthcoming, bar another “Gentlemen” as he turned to climb the stairs again, the whole company of us, high and low, fell to debating and speculating. We carried it on into the tavern next door, entering more like a band of brothers – or at least of uncles and nephews – than a group of men assembled by the mere circumstance of employment for attention to small details: Now, who dares say anything agin us?

  My last memory is of singing “Sally in Our Alley” under a lamp near to Corn Market. Courtney, the north-side Harbour Master‚ had his arm around my shoulder, heavy as an anchor, his voice so far off-key as now and then to be approaching it again by the back door.

  “Of all the days that’s in the week, I dearly love but one day, and that’s the day that comes betwixt a Saturday and Monday . . .”

  I was woken in the dead of night by a hand on the same shoulder. I recoiled from the shock of it so that I would have tumbled out of bed on the other side had there been more than a foot between it and the wall. The new girl, Hannah, leaned over me shielding a candle.