The Kingdom by the Sea (34 page)

The mother is someone special, patient, kind and true,
No other friend in all the world will be the same as you.

Or,

Sweet are those memories, silently kept,
Of a mother I loved and will never forget.

Or,

We never fail to think of you
We never cease to care
We only wish we could go home
And find you sitting there.

There were hundreds of these in the paper every day, often a dozen or so to the same person, invoking the prayers of St. Columba—the sixth-century Irish missionary—and "Mary, Queen of Ireland." The Virgin Mary had been elevated to the Irish throne. Mothera God, as Mrs. McCreadie said.

There were always tributes to men who had been killed in the Irish cause. This one was typical:

4th Anniversary

Vol. Dennis Heaney

Shot dead by'S.A.S. on 10th June, 1978

"Life springs from death; and from the graves
of patriot men and women spring living nations."

Proudly remembered by [a long list of names]

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him
St. Columba, pray for him
Mary Queen of Ireland, pray for us

One day I left Mrs. McCreadie's and kept walking. It was a lovely morning—clear skies and warm sunshine. I walked on a boggy path along the River Mourne, which was the border between Eire and Ulster—though you would never have known it. The grass was just as spectacularly green on this bank as on that one. I walked ten miles, and the weather changed. The rain came down, flattening the buttercups in the fields. So I caught a bus into Strabane.

Strabane was said to be the poorest town in Europe—it had the highest murder rate for its size, and the highest unemployment rate, and the fewest pigs, and the dimmest prospects. It was smack on the border, and it had the curiously unfinished look of a frontier town—like a house with one wall missing. It was sorry-looking, with men propped against storefronts, whistling, and a number of cracked windows. But it was not noticeably more decrepit than other towns I had seen in Ulster. I considered staying the night, but the Control Zone and all the soldiers and police complicated the mildest stroll. And when I thought it over, I decided that I had seen few places on earth more depressing than Strabane in the rain.

The day after I left Strabane a man walked out of a motor accessory shop where he worked. He was thirty-nine, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment—a hated paramilitary force that had come into existence when the Protestant B-Specials were disbanded. A car drew up; the man was shot four times; the car sped away. The man died immediately. He was the one hundred and twenty-third UDR man to be gunned down since the regiment was formed ten years before.

Every town and village was deserted by six or six-thirty, and it was eerie, because the summer evenings were often sunlit and long, and the desertion was obvious.

"There's a dread of trouble," Sean McLaughlin said. He lived in Omagh, where I went after Strabane. Omagh was also funereal. But Sean's solution was to get out of town on a bus to Belcoo, on the border of Eire. There was a
fleadhceoil
being held there that weekend—a "flah," he called it—a festival of fiddles and flutes and concertinas. Sean got on the bus, with only his fiddle for baggage. He said that three days of drinking and singing in Belcoo would put him right.

That was the real paradox of Ireland. The dimple-chinned fiddler heading down the road to the "flah" at Belcoo—as warm-hearted and unsuspicious an Irishman as ever plucked a shamrock; and on the same bus as Sean (though I did not speak to him until we got to Enniskillen), the gray-browed Morris Grady Smith, who also knew Belcoo.

"I was driving out of Belcoo towards Garrison in the van." (Morris worked for the Public Works Department in Enniskillen.) "There were eight of us in the van, and I was at the wheel as usual. Suddenly there was a blue flash right in front of me. The windscreen burst open and all the glass fell on me. It was an explosion, and then there was shots! I kept driving, though I felt some pain in my arm. I was shot seven times, but the bullets just passed through my arm—not one of them struck a bone!"

He offered to show me his scars, but I said that I believed his story. He kept talking.

"Three of my men were dead—hit with small slugs from an M-Sixty rifle. One of the men was a Catholic. See, they were shooting across the border—that Belcoo-to-Garrison road passes right along the border. They must have mistook our van for an army vehicle and thought we were soldiers. We were just men with shovels, fixing the potholes in the road."

***

Someday all cities will look like this, I had thought in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a Control Zone, with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the Control Zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large Control Zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.

In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the Bomb Squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens—an appropriate Gaelic word—but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car
seemed
to have a person in it: How were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?

Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately—no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.

"What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him."

He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families—the wife and children watching.

I asked him how he felt about it.

He said in the same even voice, "Why, you wouldn't do it to a dog."

"So what do you think of these gunmen?"

"I hate them," he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were taken for granted.

He said, "We're eighty percent British here. We couldn't have union with southern Ireland. A Protestant would have no chance. He wouldn't get a job."

So McComiskey was a Protestant; that was his emphasis.

"But I don't think the IRA want union now. They don't know what they do want."

From Enniskillen I walked south to Upper Lough Erne, one of the two enormous lakes here in County Fermanagh. The sun came out as I walked, and a milkman I met said, "The weather's being kind to us." There was no sound on these country lanes except the odd squawk of a crow. I found a hotel near the village of Bellanaleck, and now the sun was shining on the green woods and the lake. It was a sixty-room hotel. I thought I was the only guest, but the next day at breakfast I saw two Frenchmen in rubber waders—fishermen.

"I have to check you for bombs," Alice, the room girl, said.

She followed me to my room and then peered uneasily into my knapsack.

"I'm not sure what a bomb looks like," she said.

"You won't find one in there," I said. "It's just old clothes—"

"And books," she said. "And letters."

"No letter bombs."

She said, "I have to check all the same."

I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.

"The English started to believe what they saw on television," Bob Ewart said. "They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!"

He himself was from Nottingham.

"I've lived here fourteen years and I've yet to see an angry man."

That night the movie on television was
The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.
I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous—like someone saying "Boo!" The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, peoples' hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth—unlike the Hollywood monster movie—it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.

And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas—cattle-maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows' udders.

***

On my map of Lough Erne I saw there was a hotel at Carrybridge, about four miles away by water. The man who let me have a rowboat said, "It's a fair old pull. Your arms are going to be screaming." This was John Joseph Skerry, who hadn't rented out a rowboat for years. He waved to me as I rowed away, down the narrow lake, to have lunch at Carrybridge. I saw herons and terns and curlews and a circling flock of swans. My boat was a shallow dinghy—two hours it took me to row the four miles, and I arrived at the hotel at about three o'clock. "We just closed," the girl at the bar said as I entered. "I can't sell you anything." But I was glad to have a chair. I went into the lounge, where a television was on—a tennis match. "You can't sit here if you're not a resident," a young man said. "You'll have to leave." I went outside and saw that the hotel was the whole of Carrybridge. This was the middle of nowhere, on the lake! It was beautiful, but I was hungry. Then it started to rain. And there among the yellow irises and the cows, on the bridge at Carrybridge, it said, no surrender—1690 and on a pillar, no pope here. I cast off and rowed four miles back, thinking: This is just a row on an Irish lake for me, but it's their whole life.

***

There was an army checkpoint down the road at Derrylin. On the way to see it I stopped in local inns, in villages so small they were not on any map. The inns were full of men and boys, and on summer evenings places like Crocknacreevy looked and smelled like Rhodesia, a tough and beautiful colony in the dust.

"They're not farmers," an innkeeper told me. "They're all on the dole. They're not bad, but they've been brought up to behave like cretins. They chuck their cigarette ends on the carpet and grind them in with their boot heels. Farmers don't stay up until all hours drinking. They work hard for their money, so they save it."

The army checkpoint was just a barrier manned by six soldiers, but this road went straight to the border. The soldiers would not talk to me.

Don't talk politics, don't talk religion, people said; but I thought: Ridiculous! What was the point in traveling around Ulster if you avoided those two subjects?

A Protestant named Mortimer gave me a lift and said, "The army are very rough when they first arrive in an area. Those men you saw are paratroopers. They've just got here—that's why they look so nasty. After three or four weeks they'll be a bit more polite."

I asked him whether they harassed people, as the papers reported.

"Aye. They do. Especially if you have some connection with Irish politics—or if they think you have. They come to your house at six in the morning. They don't knock you up—they kick your door off its hinges. Sometimes they tear the place apart."

I said it sounded fairly severe.

He smiled. "It's worse when they take you in. There are lots of stories. Even if they're half-true, they're very bad."

"Have you been arrested?" I asked.

"They don't have to arrest you," Mortimer said. "They take you in."

"And then?"

"Beat you up."

I said, "Maybe you'd be better off without the army?"

"I wouldn't say that. But it can be pretty rough with them." He thought a moment and said, "We get more trouble from the UDR than the army."

"Who's 'we'?"

He said, "Everyone."

I took a bus in an easterly direction to Dungannon. The hills were steep and green and very close together in this part of Tyrone, and in the small town of Clogher they were like green wrinkles on the face of the earth, the ridges of hills, one after another.

Every town looked as though it was expecting trouble at any moment. All the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were armed and alert and seemed nervous. They knew that the suddenness of violence was peculiar to this sort of piecemeal siege: everything happened in seconds.

I made the mistake in Dungannon of going repeatedly through the same checkpoint turnstile. "You again," the policeman's expression said. "Make up your mind—stay in or stay out." He seemed irritated, like a man who has to keep getting up to unlock a door. The town center was completely sealed off and surrounded by police marksmen with automatic rifles.

On the way to Portadown in North Armagh I sat in a bus filled with women and children. It was always the case. The children were hyperactive, jumping on the seats and yelling. One kicked at the window.

"Missus," the driver kept saying, "take that chayld awee from that wunder."

The villages all followed the same pattern: a church, a post office, a manor house, an Orange Hall, a cluster of tiny cottages. There were no strangers here, no city slickers moving in and fixing up the cottages, as they did in Dorset and Devon; and no people who had come here to retire and grow roses, as they did in Sussex and Kent. The old people in Ulster villages had been born in those same villages. They did not move to the coast. They did not move at all. This was a society in which everyone stayed put.