The Kingdom by the Sea (33 page)

It had been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years. Every traveler to Britain had come here to size it up. There had been tram lines out to it, as Mr. Emmett had told me in Bushmills. But the troubles had put an end to this, and now the coast had regained a rough primeval look—just one stall selling postcards, where there had been throngs of noisy shops.

This landscape had shaped the Irish mind and influenced Irish beliefs. It was easy to see these headlands and believe in giants. And now with people too afraid to travel much, the landscape had become monumental once again in its emptiness.

In pagan Ireland cromlechs had been regarded as giants' graves, and people looked closely at the land, never finding it neutral but always a worry or a reassurance. Hereabouts, there were caves that had been the homes of troglodytes. And it seemed to me that there was something in the present desolation that had made the landscape important again. So the Irish had been returned to themselves in this interval, and their fears restored to them, for how could they stand amid all this towering beauty and not feel puny?

Enough of these natural wonders, I thought, and at the hotel that night I buttonholed Mr. McClune from Ballywalter. "Oh, I like Ballywalter! Oh, yes, Ballywalter's pleasant, it is! We only get the odd bomb in Ballywalter!"

But he was worried about his sister.

"My suster is going down to Cavan this weekend. I don't unvy her. She's a Protestant girl, you see."

"Where is Cavan exactly?"

"In the Free State," Mr. McClune said.

I smiled; it was like calling Thailand "Siam," or Iran "Persia."

"A pig farm," he explained. "I mean to say, that's where my suster's staying. Now at this piggery there's a foreman. He is a member of the IRA."

"I see why you're worried," I said.

"But that could be a good thing, couldn't it?" he said. "It could keep her safe."

He meant that no one from the IRA would murder his sister, because a man from the IRA was employed by his sister's friends.

"We'll see what hoppens," he said.

We were having coffee at the Causeway Hotel, sitting in front of the fire. We were the only two guests. An Ulster conversation could be very restful. I was never asked personal questions. People talked, in general, on harmless subjects, unless I took the plunge. Mr. McClune, who was seventy-three and very wealthy—he had a Jaguar out front—said he had been to Australia and Canada and California.

"But I've never set futt on the continent of Europe," he said. "And I've got no desire to."

I said I was going to Londonderry.

"I haven't been to Derry for thirty-three years."

The next morning I walked back to Portrush. I passed a signboard indicating the way to Blagh. It was eight-fifteen and there were no cars on the road, and very quiet except for the birds—crows and finches. I kept walking, toward the train. It was green as far as I could see, and I could see twenty miles up the lovely coast.

T
HE "TROUBLES
"—that quaint Ultonian word for murder and mayhem—had something to do with the Irish differences between men and women here, I was sure. Why, look at this train to Derry. Nearly all the passengers were women, talking in normal voices. The few men on board were either shouting or whispering. The women were neither demure nor brassy; they were plain, frank, and a bit careworn. The men by contrast looked both jaunty and evasive, and they seemed to have nothing whatever to do. Women and men; duty and dereliction. Usually, though, there were only women around, and it seemed all the men had gone away to war—which in a sense was true.

There were always women and girls waiting for buses at crossroads. They were early risers—they walked, they even hitchhiked. I saw them along the coast of Londonderry, the shore of Lough Foyle, from Bellarena to Waterside. It was a country of active women, going shopping or to work, shoveling manure, driving tractors, riding trains.

People in Ulster traveled only when absolutely necessary, so it was significant that women traveled much more than men. Very often the only man on an Ulster bus was the driver. The wife was frequently the breadwinner, particularly in Derry: she was cheaper to employ and more dependable. I was never frightened in a train or a bus. They were seldom attacked, because they were full of women and children. The children could seem almost demented—nowhere in my life had I seen such excitable rowdy kids—but the women were noticeably friendly.

Women had assumed so many domestic and social duties here that a situation had arisen in which the men had no responsibilities. It was idleness as much as religion that made Ulstermen fighting mad. The proof that they were demoralized was the self-hatred in Ulster aggression. What was more self-destructive than a hunger strike? And wasn't it peculiar that the hunger strikers, far from being pacifists, were often very violent men who ought to have known that their captors were eager to be rid of them?

LET THEM DIE
was scrawled on the bricks all over Orange Antrim, and ten hunger strikers had recently fasted until death in the Maze Prison. Then there was the so-called Dirty Protest. I could not imagine a preoccupied and overworked Irishwoman dreaming up this loony tactic. But it was easy to see how a maddened and self-hating Irishman might decide to act out his frustration by smearing the walls of his prison cell with his own shit, and refusing to wear clothes or have a bath or a haircut. "Take that!" they cried, and pigged it in those cells for months, innocently believing they were getting even with the British government by stinking to heaven.

I thought: This behavior is so strange, there's probably no name for it. But surely it was in a way profoundly childlike? This was how small children behaved when they felt angry and abandoned, when they wanted to be pitied.

At home these men were treated by their overworked womenfolk as if they were forever boys and burdens. The shame or guilt this dependency inspired made the men aggressive; but they had all the time in the world to ventilate their aggression. Religion was hardly a restraining force. Irish Catholicism was one long litany of mother imagery and mother worship, which only bolstered the odd family pattern; and Irish Protestantism seemed mainly to be based on a tribal memory of bloody battles, remembered with special relish in the all-male Orange Lodges.

I did not believe that it was religion as Christian doctrine that was at the bottom of it all. Ulster was a collection of secret societies, to which only men were admitted. The men dressed up, made rules, beat drums, swore oaths, invented handshakes and passwords, and crept into the dark and killed people. When they were done, they returned home to their women, like small children to their mothers.

Anyway, this was how it seemed to me in Londonderry.

***

From a distance, Derry was lovely and familiar. It looked like a mill town in Massachusetts—churches and factories piled up on both banks of a river, the same sort of tenements, the same sleepy air of bankruptcy. But up close, Derry was frightful.

Some Ulster towns inspired fear the way a man with an ugly face frightens a stranger: their scars implied violence. Derry was a scarred city of broken windows and barricades; it was patterned with danger zones, and every few blocks there was a frontier: the Waterside, the Bogside, the Creggan, and all the disputed territories among them. And it was possible to tell, from the damage and the slogans, that this was the principal killing ground of Ulster,
FUCK THE POPE
was scrawled at the Protestant end of the Craigavon Bridge, and at the Catholic end,
FUCK THE QUEEN
, and now and then corpses were found bobbing in the pretty River Foyle, which ran beneath the bridge. Derry was also the headquarters of the most violent of the nationalist factions, the Irish National Liberation Army. It made the IRA seem a party of dear old Paddys, twinkling and fiddling in the Celtic twilight. By contrast the INLA was heartless and unsentimental—eager to establish a reputation for cruel tenacity. It was always easy to spot an INLA slogan on a Derry wall:
PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER.

The geniality and filth of Derry, and its state of siege, made the city an interesting muddle. Here were old geezers being shifty and jaunty in an Irish way, and over there the British soldiers were tense and watchful and stiff with starch. They crouched in doorways, peering, rifles poised, while the women gathered at Foyle's Pork Store (nothing but sausages and hams) and the men strolled into the betting shop. The soldiers meant business. They wore helmets and face masks and they traveled in armored cars; they moved singly, covering each other; all their vehicles had wire skirts beneath the chassis so that fire bombs could not be rolled under them.

While I was in Derry the annual Foyle Festival was on. It was one of the paradoxes of Ulster that for many life continued as usual, and that everything happened at once—the festival concert and talent show and bicycle race and cooking exhibit, along with mass frisking, soldier patrols, bomb threats, and arrests. There was the traditional football game and a festival art exhibition; and on the opening day there was a grotesque killing.

It was a typical Derry murder, the Derry men said: A phone call reported a cache of stolen goods; the policemen arrived and examined the stuff—a television, a fur coat, clocks, radios. One man lifted the television, and it blew up. It had been booby-trapped—the policeman was torn apart. "They was pieces of the bugger all over the place." Two other policemen were badly injured, one blinded. Then a mob gathered. The mob was hostile. They howled at the injured men, they jeered at the corpse. They obstructed the ambulance and booed when it broke through. And while the men were put onto stretchers, the screams were "Let the bastards die!"

Two men described this to me with approval—it was not an atrocity story to them; it was a success story. Their attitude was "Look at the horrible things they make us do to them—sure, it's tragic, but it's their fault. Won't they ever learn?"

Those same men, Tim Cronin and Denny McGaw, urged me to go to Donegal.

"Ah, Donegal's a lovely place, like," Cronin said. He was seventy-five years old, as white-faced as Yeats and with the same black-rimmed glasses. And he boasted, "Sure, I've been there almost a dozen times."

He was speaking of County Donegal, four miles from where we stood.

"So it's not violent, like Derry?" I said. Call it Londonderry and they thump you for being English.

"Derry's not violent," Mr. McGaw said. "Belfast—that's the violent place. They fight each other there. Aw, Derry's a lovely old town. Have you seen the fine walls?"

"But the police," I started to say.

McGaw pointed behind me. "A policeman was killed as he stood right there, not two weeks ago. Two men in a van came up that hill and shot him and rode on."

"So people do get killed?"

"Policemen and soldiers get shot, no doubt about it," Cronin said. "But we don't shoot each other. Ah, sure, stay out of Belfast—that's a bad place!"

Many people called Eire "the Free State," but they were not particularly sentimental about it. The IRA was of course banned in Eire, and Irish soldiers at the border post had a reputation for harassing Ulstermen, getting them to empty their pockets and turn out their suitcases. But that was not the main grievance Ulstermen had with Eire: the main grievance was money.

In a high-pitched voice of complaint, Paddy Dineen said, "Do you know what a beer costs in the Free State? Twenty-two shillings in the old money. Twenty-two shillings for a pint of beer!"

I said, "Is that an argument for staying British?"

"It is!" he said. "You can get a beer for half of that in Derry."

So much for Irish unity. But the notion of unity was very blurred by all the contending groups. In fact, the most nationalistic ones, like the IRA and the INLA, seemed to want to sweep both the British government and the Irish government away, and start all over again with the People's Republic of Ireland.

***

The hatred for British soldiers in Derry was extraordinary. Soldiers raided houses and, searching for guns, tore up floors and broke cupboards—they were vandals. Soldiers took money and personal effects, and did not give them back—they were thieves. Soldiers drove through the streets in Land-Rovers, shouting abuse at women and children—they were brutes. Soldiers timed their visits to Catholic areas to coincide with children getting out of school, in order to coax them into starting riots—they were criminal-minded. Soldiers shot innocent men—they were murderers.

This was how the
Derry Journal
portrayed the soldiers. And one day the paper announced, "The Army are now adopting Cromwellian tactics—destroying Catholic homes."

I stayed in a boarding house in Derry that was the Catholic counterpart to Mrs. Fraser Wheeney's pokerwork paradise in Lame. Instead of Bible mottos, Mrs. McCreadie had portraits of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and statuettes, too, the shape and size of Oscars. "Mothera God," Mrs. McCreadie was always saying while Joe, her only other lodger, told her what terrible things he had seen the night before in the Bogside.

They were great readers of the newspaper, these two. It was not the Falklands news. They were ignorant of the fact that British soldiers seemed about to recapture Port Stanley; but they knew every bit of the Ulster news, because the Ulster newspapers printed everything—rumors, hearsay, gossip, "witnesses saw," "it is believed," and sentences like "He alleged that the soldiers called him a 'Fenian bastard.'"

The most popular page at Mrs. McCreadie's was the one—or sometimes two—that contained the
In Memoriams.
It made me think that there was a sort of cult of death in Ulster. There certainly was one in Derry. It was not merely a list of obituaries, saying "So-and-so died yesterday"; it was a sheaf of tributes to people who had died years ago. "nth Anniversary," one read, and another, "15th Anniversary," and I saw one that commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of a parent's death. And with each tribute was a poem: