Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  I ask Tommy whether he is coming to the Orange Ball the same evening. Tommy blushes and says he is off home. Tommy is a total abstainer in the true Orange tradition, though he admits temperance is an idea whose time has run out. Still, you stick with what you believe. He has church tomorrow, and he has no time for capering about. “Not my sort of thing,” he says, with a wink and a wave goodbye.

  When I get to the dance hall upstairs, I can see why Tommy took his leave. He wouldn’t like the country and western music they are playing on the stage decked with Union Jacks. He wouldn’t like the beer that is flowing from the pumps, or the way the men and women are dancing close. He wouldn’t like the language one drunk is using on me as he tries to force me to leave. “What the fuck are you doin’ here? Get off, get off out of it.” The barman pulls him off me, and while some of the middle-aged ladies even lead me onto the dance floor, the place has a Serbian air of paranoia and resentment. Tommy might be embarrassed, as I am, by the drunken desperation that comes to hang over the scene as the hours go by, how these God-loving Orangemen and -women start cursing and swaying from the drink, how at the end when everyone sings the Sash, they conga about the hall, waving the Union Jack, led by a man wearing nothing but a “No Surrender” baseball cap, his Union Jack singlet, and his Union Jack underpants.

  Later that week I attend the annual Orange service commemorating William’s victory at the Boyne. Several hundred middle-aged Orangemen and their wives, plus some marching bands, crowd into the Presbyterian Central Hall to hear a sermon on what the preacher calls that “great charter of Protestant freedom,” Saint Paul’s epistle to the Galatians: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”

  There is much talk of liberty in Ulster Protestantism, but service to His vision sounds more like a long, grim imprisonment. The Ulster obsession with loyalty and betrayal is rooted within the Protestant struggle of the spirit against the flesh. Luther and Calvin, and two centuries of hellfire preaching, have left Ulstermen in a state of suppressed rage at the irrepressible disloyalty of their own impulses. All this is kept under uneasy control by the decorum of Protestant worship, yet it finds ways to burst out, even at the Orange service of consecration. At the end, when the collection is taken and counted, it is discovered that it is short of last year’s total. In any other church I’ve been to, this would be a matter of silent regret. Not in Belfast. The disappointing result is publicly announced, the deficit enumerated down to the last pence to £126.35. “This is a disgrace,” the officiating Orangeman thunders, “a disgrace to Orangeism and its traditions.” Once again the flesh has triumphed. Once again the conscience has been found wanting before God, and on the most sacred day in the Orange calendar. The hall empties in chastened silence.

  THE LAMBEG DRUM

  There are two wars in Northern Ireland: a war between the Catholic and Protestant working classes of Belfast and Londonderry; and the war between the IRA and the Protestant farmers and townsfolk of the regions next to the border with the Republic. There is much loose talk about “ethnic cleansing” in the border regions, as Protestant farmers and their families are driven off the land by the shootings and kneecappings, the car and van bombs. The day before I drove through the lush green fields of County Armagh, the army had found a van loaded with two thousand pounds of agricultural fertilizer and two timers ready to explode, aimed at Markethill, a pretty farming village already once destroyed by a bomb.

  I went down to Markethill, an hour south of Belfast, to take a look at the border war and to meet a man I’d heard about, Dick Sterritt, who makes the Lambeg drum. Dick is a bear of a man in his late twenties, with a soft, lilting voice. The Lambeg drum is, he says, the “heartbeat of Ulster,” and the thunder that comes from its huge drumhead—three feet one inch wide—has been the sound of Protestantism on the march for three centuries. Dick will be marching with his Lambegs on the Twelfth of July at the Orange parade in Portadown, as he has done with his father, Ernie, ever since he was born.

  Dick spends his year making and repairing drums and entering drumming competitions at the Orange Lodges around the county. Dick takes me to one sponsored by the Orange Lodge in nearby Scarva. The competitors and bystanders stand around in a circle in the parking lot of the Lodge, and the drummers and their drums parade, one by one, like prize bulls in front of the judges. Three old men with score sheets bend and listen to the sound, listening for that sweet reverberating quality in a drum which the makers call “heart.” In any other drumming tradition—say, the Caribbean—the accent would have been on the drumming and the prize would have gone to the most exuberant and inventive beat. Not with the Lambeg. The rhythm is as unvarying as Ulster tradition itself: a sudden high-pitched explosion of sound which continues for several minutes while the drummer goes purple in the face with effort. Try as I may, I can’t tell which drum has more heart, and neither can the contestants. When the prizes are announced there is much good-natured bafflement at the decision. What seems to matter more than competition is the consumption of many glasses of Bushmill’s whiskey, and, needless to say, proceedings conclude with all present standing and singing “The Queen.” When it is all over, Dick whispers to me, “Our drumming wouldn’t be safe in the Republic, now would it?”

  The drums, like everything else in the Ulster tradition, came over with King William. They were kettledrums, played flat on either side of the saddle, and they have been the Ulsterman’s defender ever since the Battle of the Boyne itself. Dick likes to tell the fable about the morning of the battle, when the Protestants were still asleep on one side of the Boyne water, and James’s army was advancing to catch them by surprise. “And there was a jenny wren, a wee bird, that began tapping on the drums, and it woke the drummer boy, who sounded the alarm.” It’s a strange thing, he says with a wink, how the Catholics nowadays like shooting those wee birds.

  All of Dick’s drums are elaborately painted and decorated: beside the Cock of the North, with a splendid crowing rooster on the shell, there is one, nearly eighty years old, called the Orange Conqueror, with King William’s bewigged visage on it, and beside that a new one with a painstakingly painted picture of a young man with a pale pink face and red hair. He was a cousin of Dick’s, a reserve constable with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who died in 1991 when a land mine was detonated under his Land Rover as he was leaving Armagh barracks.

  “When I got the news, I went up to see my aunt, David’s mother. The very first words she said to me was that David and you will not be walking up Markethill Street together on the Twelfth of July ever again. And I said to her, ‘Auntie Ivy, I’ll always carry David on the Twelfth of July, because I’ll put him on a drum.’” Every year, Dick marches with David on his drum.

  Dick’s father, Ernie, a retired builder, listens gloomily. “The thing is,” he says in his low Armagh accent, “they’re selling us down the river. There shouldn’t be foreign powers telling us how to run things here.” He means not just Dublin but Westminster, too. “The British man will never understand how to govern us,” Dick says. “He doesn’t believe that we belong.”

  For Ernie Sterritt, mainland Britain is a disappointing place far away. “They used to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ in the picture house,” he muses. “Don’t suppose they do that over on the mainland.” He sighs. “It’s all slipping away. Sure it is.” Dick listens and then he muses. “They don’t seem to have any story to tell, any song to sing,” Dick says. “They don’t seem to know who they are.”

  Ernie shows me the Sterritt family tree, back to the seventeenth century, and Dick wants me to know that they are “blackmouths.” In the days of Queen Anne, Dick explains, dissenting sects like the Presbyterians were under a ban and had to educate their children in the fields, behind the blackberry hedges, so in the blackberrying season, the children’s lips and cheeks were stained black with the fruit. “That was our name and it has stuck with us,” Dick says. He remains as suspicious of the established Anglican Church of Ireland as
his blackmouth ancestors would have been. “Only a thin piece of paper separates them from the Church of Rome,” he says darkly. Dick knows full well that there were times when blackmouths felt closer kinship with the Catholics, also laboring under religious ban, than with the local Protestant landlord, Lord Gosford. The dissenting tradition’s abiding suspicion of the Anglican Establishment, in both its political and religious forms, adds another strain to Ulstermen’s combustible Loyalism. There is a suppressed democratic impulse here in the Ulsterman’s resentment of the mainland Establishment, suppressed because Loyalism never passes into a nationalism of its own, never detaches the Ulster people’s cause from the Establishment’s cause.

  Dick takes me out for a drive in his red Renault 4 van, which he calls the goat wagon because he uses it to scour the countryside in search of goats big enough to give him a thirty-seven-inch drum-skin. He gets some of his goats from the Catholic fellows around, but he always makes sure to call ahead, so that they can ring the spotter houses in the Catholic villages. That way his goat wagon won’t be held up by the “bandits.” That is how it is in bandit country. “You wouldn’t want to be out here at night,” he says, looking at the rolling fields with the Friesians chewing their cud by the gates. Some of the fence gates are booby-trapped by the Provies, and the copses will be full of British soldiers. Control over this county of Britain seems to sway back and forth between them. Every lane has a memory of that struggle. Dick passes one house and remembers a friend of his, a part-time soldier, who was kidnapped off his motorcycle while on his way home, tortured, shot, and dumped in the road in front of his house. The army, fearing that the corpse was booby-trapped, had to drag it out of the village behind a Land Rover, and his family had to watch it. “It makes you wonder,” he says softly, “what kind of a person would kill a man like that, knowing his family would have to see it.”

  He himself has been set upon, coming home from his pub on the Markethill High Street, by some local Catholic boys in balaclavas. “Now, you can’t have that kind of thing happening in your own hometown.” A neighbor told him which Catholics were responsible, and over the next year, he sorted them out, one by one. “Just taught them a lesson is all.”

  But Catholics are only one of Dick’s problems. He was on a bus with some Orangemen and a band heading for Londonderry, when some boys on board asked him to buy a raffle ticket for the benefit of Loyalist paramilitary prisoners. Dick refused, saying that if they were in jail, they deserved it. When he got off the bus that night, the boys set on him and beat him up, in full view of some constables, who pulled him out of the fight and asked him if he would prosecute. In the heat of his anger, Dick said he would, but the matter never came to trial, because he got a phone call saying he shouldn’t continue. “Call it intimidation if you like,” Dick admits.

  He has no time for the local paramilitaries, and he points out the houses where the UVF flags are flying, the blue ones which signify that the house stands for an independent Ulster, one with no ties to either Britain or the Republic. This strikes Dick as crazy politics. “They’re short of cards for a full deck,” he says, shaking his head. Besides, he says, “if the British weren’t here, where would the farmers go for their subsidy?”

  For all the trouble, he says, it’s the greatest wee country in the world and he wouldn’t live anywhere else. As we head down toward the border with “the Free State,” there are Friesians and Herefords in the steep, rolling pastures framed by holly and fuchsia hedges; white rose-bordered cottages; Union Jacks fluttering over the Church of Ireland steeples and Red Hand Ulster flags flying over the bell towers of the dissenting chapels and Orange Halls. Then with a bump and a twist in the road, and a quick dodge across a stream, we find ourselves face-to-face with a sign saying: “Welcome to County Monaghan, the Republic of Ireland.” No border checkpoints, no break in the lush green landscape, nothing to let you know that this is one of the most contended borders on earth.

  Dick is across it many times a year, for the race meetings. He loves a drink, a fine racehorse, and a good story, and he never has any trouble south of the border. Sometimes he brings his Catholic friend Kieran, from Markethill, when Kieran is in the money, which isn’t often. When he’s put a couple of Power’ses under his belt, Dick will love to sing, and most what he sings are rebel songs, the ones about breaking out of Omagh jail, about the girl with the black band in her hair, and the one about the nightingale’s lullaby. He’ll mix up the Fenian and the Loyalist, the Southern and the Northern songs one after another, till you can’t tell which is which, or until the boys at his local pub start shouting, half serious, half in jest, that he should lay off the rebel songs and give them all a rendition of the Sash, which he does, to keep them happy.

  I’ve come in search of what Britishness looks like in bandit country, and I find, of course, what I could never have expected: a man like Dick Sterritt, with his love of a drink and song and a story, quietly telling me that he will resist—he does not say fight—but resist till the end, so as not to become what he so obviously seems to be already: an Irishman.

  THE RATHCOOLE BOYS

  Back in Belfast, Marty, Sheeran, Deeky, Paul, and Mudd are painting the curbstones of the Rathcoole Estate red, white, and blue. In most of the Protestant housing projects, the curbs are painted around this time of year, as a preparation for the Twelfth. Painting the curbs is like putting up a wall mural of King Billy or of a Loyalist paramilitary, complete with Armalite and balaclava. It stakes out the territory. “They do the same over there,” Deeky says, gesturing at the Catholic project in the distance, only with the Catholics it is the Irish Tricolor and quotations from Bobby Sands, the hunger-striker hero.

  Until a few years ago, Rathcoole was the biggest public-housing project in Europe, and once upon a time it was mixed. Bobby Sands himself grew up there. Not anymore. Rathcoole is rock-solid Protestant working class. Behind the white lace curtains in the tower blocks, in those immaculate front rooms of the semidetached bungalows, with their three-piece suits and doilies on top of the television sets, there is the usual baffling Belfast mixture of decent, law-abiding people and paramilitary thugs who keep the local kids in order with an occasional kneecapping. Mudd, a fourteen-year-old glumly painting a curb, is due one himself, for stealing cars and joyriding around the Diamond, where the fish-and-chips shop and the dry cleaner and the youth club are located.

  The Diamond is not looking its best: during the rioting after Herbie McCallum’s funeral, the fish-and-chips shop was trashed, and so was the youth club, and there are fire marks on the road where the cars were set alight. The boys won’t say who was responsible, but they all cultivate a certain ambiguity about their involvement: they won’t say they were there, and they won’t say they weren’t.

  They couldn’t exactly say what they like about being British, though they’re applying the colors of the Union Jack to the curbstones with the ardor of true patriots. “It’s the football,” Paul ventures. “Yeah, Rangers, fantastic,” says Marty. Protestant Belfast worships the Glasgow Rangers, and Ranger scarves belong next to the Union Jack itself in Loyalist regalia. Few of the Rathcoole boys have ever been to mainland Britain, but they’ve heard that in the mainland projects no one would ever think of painting their curbs red, white, and blue. “They don’t have to, do they?” says Paul. “They’re not up against what we’re up against, now are they?”

  Marty’s view is that the mainland projects don’t paint their curbs because “they’re all mixed up over there, all them different races and everything.” Here, he says, “it’s just us and the Taigs. So we have to show our colors, don’t we?”

  Marty, Paul, Sheeran, Deeky, and Mudd don’t have much to say about anything—at least not when I’m about—but when they don the purple uniforms of the Whiteabbey Protestant Boys Marching Band, a change comes over them. Each of them knows at least a hundred tunes on the small black ebony flutes they pull from their back pockets and a dozen rhythms on the short snare drums. All year long they prac
tice in the gymnasium of the youth club, and in July during the marching season, there’s hardly a night when they are not out marching and playing on the streets of Rathcoole and nearby estates. The band is more than their club; the music is their speech. They may not be able to tell you, in so many words, what Britishness or Protestantism means, but when the big, pimply boy starts hitting the big bass drum, and Sheeran starts them marching to the beat of his snare, and Marty, Paul, Deeky, and Mudd take up the tune on the flute, they give a thundering account of who they are.

  I follow them through the rain, to the Orange Lodge, as the traffic comes to a halt, as couples pushing their children in strollers stop and applaud them on their way, as the army sentries take up position to protect them from attack by the Catholic boys in the project up the road. The drum brooks no argument; no wonder the Catholics call the marching bands the music of intimidation. But it has its own fierce beauty, and the boys will tell you there is nothing to equal the feeling you get when you’re marching in the downtown and the sound is echoing off the high-walled canyons of the city.

  THE DEE STREET BONFIRE

  On the stroke of midnight, as July 11 turns into the twelfth, Dee Street, like every Protestant street in the city, burns the Pope and the Irish Tricolor on top of its bonfire. For the past seventeen years, Mrs. L. has sewn the Dee Street Pope herself, with a doll’s head spray-painted green, white, and gold, crowned with a bishop’s miter. The Pope always wears red socks: indeed, the Reverend Ian Paisley has been known to call His Holiness Old Red Socks.

  In her immaculate front room, with its sideboard crowded with the trophies her family has won for pigeon racing, Mrs. L. also sews the Republican Tricolor from good silk she buys up at Crazy Prices. Her son, a spindly fourteen-year-old in a shell suit, takes the lead in collecting for the bonfire. He’s quite sure that this year Dee Street’s is going to be the biggest one in the city.