Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  IRISH BLOOD, ENGLISH HEART, ULSTER FRY

  As a stage and radio dramatist Annie Caulfield has won several awards, including a Race in the Media prize from the Commission for Racial Equality. Television work includes Grim Tales, This Life, New Soul Nation, Comic Relief, Bosom Pals and Voodoo Spice. She worked for many years as a scriptwriter for comedian Lenny Henry. She is also the author of Show Me the Magic: Travels Round Benin by Taxi. Annie Caulfield has written and broadcast about Australia, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Italy, Zanzibar… She thought it was time she went home.

  Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry

  Return Journeys to Ireland

  ANNIE CAULFIELD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published by Viking 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  1

  Copyright © Annie Caulfield, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN:978-0-14-193591-1

  For Martin McNamara – thank you

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1. George, Don’t Do That

  2. Location, Location…

  3. Shrapnel Jam

  4. The Heavens Are Closed

  5. Dogs Can Sing and Dogs Can Disappear

  6. One Way of Looking at Belfast

  7. Witches, Bitches and Fishwives

  8. Half Man, Half Bicycle

  9. Sodomy and Sailing

  10. Lions and Headhunters

  11. What People Really Want

  12. The Men of Crossmaglen

  13. Proud to Be a Prod

  14. Definitions of Success

  Acknowledgements

  With all my thanks to the following, in alphabetical but no other order: all of my family right down to the under-cousins; Kevin Anderson; Juliet Burton; William Conacher; Sarah Daniels; Derry City Tours; Ann and Tom Garry; Eleo Gordon; Peter Kavanagh; Eamon Kelly; Jean Kitson; Martin McCrossan; Mary McNamara; Jerry Mallet and family; Paddy Murphy; Jan Nugent; Woodrow Phoenix; Jon Rovira; Micheline Stienberg; Jenny Sykes; Diana Tyler; Mike Walker; Molly and Jasmine Warwick; and the Westway team for their tolerance.

  1. George, Don’t Do That

  The people we were related to seemed to be George Best, Sergeant Lynch in Z Cars and Cassius Clay. When these men appeared on television, my mother gave such a knowledgeable running commentary on their state of health and well being, they couldn’t possibly be strangers.

  My mother also knew them well enough to chide them if they were on television doing something she disapproved of: ‘George! You’re half asleep!’ ‘That’s enough chat, Cassius, thump him.’ ‘Bert Lynch, did you not see the poor man wasn’t wise?’

  Sergeant Bert Lynch, although making occasional errors of judgement, never provoked the hurt, rage and berating of the screen that erupted when George and Cassius finally went too far and she was done with them. George had been silly about girls and drink. Cassius had changed his name and turned – ‘Too full of himself, like a maniac.’

  Such high-level emotional involvement led me to conclude that not only did my mother know these men, they must be cousins or uncles. We had dozens of cousins and uncles, seldom seen in the flesh, but much talked about. There was a professional footballer, some of them were policemen – none of them had done anything as interesting as turn into maniacs, but I had high hopes of them.

  We didn’t see our relatives because we’d left them behind in another country. Northern Ireland. George Best and Sergeant Lynch talked like the relatives. They talked like us. Not many people in England did. Cassius Clay was the first black person I’d ever seen. He was something other, like us, so probably belonged to us.

  I was four when we moved from Northern Ireland. I was too young to think anything much about leaving, but England was a disappointment. For one thing, talk of England had all been a trick, because we seemed to be in Wales.

  Geography was one of many weak areas in my head when I was four years old, but I could tell the words weren’t the same: England, Wales. So they needn’t think I was fooled.

  I’d been hopeful of England because I had worked out that England was where cartoons happened. I knew cartoons didn’t happen in Northern Ireland, I could see that looking out the window, so I was sure that they must happen in that other place, the only other place I’d heard of, England. England would be bright coloured, teeming with talking bears, rabbits and exploding cats. Looking out the window in England would be as good as watching television.

  But North Wales looked like Northern Ireland. And cartoons, my father informed me as I wept on our new kitchen floor, happened in a place that was ‘not real’. Whatever that meant. Not only had we pitched up in a profoundly disappointing place, I had to start school among unintelligible children and learn songs in a whole new language. Songs about birds sitting on the roof of a house. Maybe it was just the one song that took a very long time to learn, or there’s a whole sub-section of traditional Welsh music devoted to the bird-on-house-plague that afflicted the place in some traditional-music-composing era. Whatever the reason, to this day I know the Welsh for ‘the bird is on the roof of the house’. I can’t say it’s stood me in good stead.

  We lived on an RAF base full of stranded English officers and their families – no real consolation for the sudden onset of school and the lack of cartoon animals outside the windows. My interest in the place rallied when new neighbours moved in. Black Americans. I immediately started stalking them.

  Despite me, the new neighbours became very friendly with my mother. Something about my mother’s rapid bonding with this family fuelled my suspicion that Cassius Clay was one of us.

  My mother and I started using American words for things – candies, the movies, the trunk of the car… The Americans gleefully copied my mother’s reverse-angle English: ‘Would you not have a cup of tea?’ We were always calling in and out of each other’s houses, swapping dishes of food and not behaving like the other officers’ politely boxed-in families.

  Too soon, the Americans moved away. This was worse than the whole trick about cartoons. Something of a drama queen of a child, I was again disapp
ointed to learn that lying on the kitchen floor and weeping loudly didn’t change the harsh realities of life.

  I persisted with the floor tantrums anyway, just to have something to do, now the Americans were gone. Close to the moment when I was going to drive her to have her own floor tantrums, my mother had a reprieve. We had replacement neighbours. New Americans. We were heading round with home-baked soda bread and welcomes right away…

  I balked at the sight of them and howled with rage. My mother had lied. These weren’t real Americans. They were putting on the accent but I could do that. Did they think I wouldn’t notice they were the wrong colour?

  As she apologized to the shocked couple from Texas and hauled me wailing home to bed, my mother told me that most Americans were white. I couldn’t understand why she was siding with the neighbours in the plot against me. But there it was, leaving Northern Ireland meant your father started raving about things being ‘not real’, and your own mother turned against you.

  The diversion to Wales lasted only six months, then we settled in London, England proper. By the time I was six, I’d grown hard and cynical and knew there was no point bothering myself with great expectations of the new country.

  My accent began to change; my younger brother and sister started speaking and sounded like they’d always been in England. It worried me that they didn’t have much to say other than ‘mine!’ Usually about something that was mine. But the siblings were small and could always be ignored. It was more worrying to discover that my job, as a child, was to keep learning things, with no resting in front of cartoons when I felt I knew quite enough about the world. And the things I had to learn changed all the time – just when I’d got done with shoelace tying, there was telling the time and plaiting my own hair. To add to the difficulty, I learnt that very little information could be trusted. Especially information that came from my parents. For example, as soon as I started to learn the book-reading business, I found stories that led me to suspect real Americans were probably not black or white, but red.

  As for the English, I’d learnt, so far, that they were the ones you needed to be like. Especially at school. Never mind multiculturalism, the dominant culture was white and cockney, jeering at parents whose accents were African, Greek, Italian, Eastern European, too obviously from the officers’ married quarters… or not recognized as Irish.

  ‘Your mum’s German,’ the boy who sat behind me kept insisting. There were worse things to be than a suspected German. This boy behind me, Glen Walker, had an older brother with a shaved head who talked about something called ‘paki-bashing’.

  I was nearly seven, I was flexible, I could float like a butterfly and avoid anyone bashing me. If only my parents would flex too. Not only did they insist on maintaining their unrecognized, guttural accent, my mother slapped me for saying ‘paki’ and, determined to show we were as good as anybody, she dressed us with a rigid elegance only the Queen bothered with in London. Dresses, coats and hats to match. I’d leave the house hoping to die.

  ‘You’re German and you’re posh,’ Glen Walker said on the way to school.

  I wasn’t sure what posh meant. I suspected it might be worse than the traitorous implications of German.

  The way we dressed didn’t seem to be from the same era as the miniskirts in the streets around us. Several times I’d mentioned wanting a miniskirt myself, but my mother dismissed the style as ‘immodest’.

  Our seventeen-year-old baby-sitter wore a minuscule miniskirt. She was vaguely related to an RAF neighbour. This had confused my mother because, as she later muttered, ‘It was obvious the sort of her from those skirts.’

  I liked the baby-sitter, she let us get out of bed in the night and smoke cigarettes with her. She also hung around with a boy at the end of the road who she told us she ‘snogged’. I knew to say nothing about the cigarettes, but didn’t know my mother would be so outraged by inquiries about the meaning of ‘snogged’, that the baby-sitter would be permanently replaced by a dour woman recommended by the parish priest.

  My mother’s involvement with priests, and my father’s lack of involvement, didn’t seem spiritually significant to me as a child. I thought it was a man thing, fuelling my creeping suspicion that if you grew up to be a man, life was generally better: you had your breakfast cooked, you asked people to bring you clean shirts and you didn’t have to go to mass. Or catechism. Or benediction, or the stations of the cross – or any of the hours of endless boredom being a Catholic involved.

  Having an accent also seemed to be something to do with being a Catholic. The priest was Italian and most of the congregation talked like my mother. No, not quite like her.

  ‘From the South of Ireland,’ she’d say of a fellow parishioner, as if they had some kind of handicap it wasn’t polite to notice.

  Which was a funny thing, because my father’s family lived in this South of Ireland place. And they had a sweetshop. What could be wrong with that?

  All my father’s family lived there except for his mother. She lived in North Belfast in a big old house full of lodgers. We’d pay short visits to her because the lodgers took up most of the room and she didn’t like us to discuss them, let alone speak to them. We’d stay long enough for me to notice that she went to mass. I didn’t know if her husband had got to skive mass like my father did. Her husband was dead.

  He had been a soldier, she’d told me, so I imagined some kind of heroic war death. If I kept asking her about it, looking for heroic tales, she changed the subject to complain of the big old house he’d left her to manage, with its back garden that would grow nothing but nettles.

  She did seem to manage, because she had money, folding paper money that she gave away to her grandchildren with endearing generosity. She’d hand out generous tokens because she couldn’t come any closer. She was mysterious, clever and bleak.

  I’d complain to myself that she was all very interesting but not even trying to be the cuddly kind of creature storybooks said a grandma should be. Sometimes she talked of leaving Belfast and going back to her people in the South; I encouraged this, of course, because I’d heard about the sweetshop. Surrounded by sweets, she was bound to get cuddly.

  Belfast Grandma, as we called her, was part of an annual pilgrimage back to the North. After Belfast, squashed in a small red Hillman, fighting and vomiting, we travelled on to my mother’s parents in County Tyrone. They lived on what everyone in our family called ‘Granny’s farm’. This was an intermittently cuddly Granny. She was a tall, charismatic, playful and forthright woman, who could probably have persuaded people that Tyrone was ‘Granny’s County’ because she had a gift for making people delighted to be alive if they’d pleased her and feel dead grey in the heart if she dismissed them as an annoyance.

  Granny was really a tenant in the farmhouse, or rather my grandfather was, with some low-rent arrangement because he was vaguely related to the landowner. We didn’t know or care about these indicators of economic status when we were children. We had free run of all the farmyard, the orchard and surrounding fields. The only taboo was the pig sheds, because, my grandfather said, ‘They’d trample a child to a pulp.’ The pigs were stinking, squealing, disgusting things, so no one was tempted to find out what it might be like to be a pulp.

  Otherwise we were in child paradise; straw bales to climb on; stray cats to chase; unripe fruit to test; slightly scary farm hands to follow about until they’d show us where there was a dead rat and make us retreat screaming, until we thought we’d quite like to be scared some more.

  Granny sang Frank Sinatra songs, kept hens and baked My grandfather grew vegetables, had a dog called Fury and watched television. Again, here was a man who never seemed to have anything to do with priests. When he went out on Sundays, dressed in his finest, he appeared to be going somewhere less boring than mass. He’d return cheerful, with fruit pastilles for the children, and the mysterious answer to questions on his whereabouts that he’d been ‘to see a man about a dog’.

  It
obviously wasn’t his own dog, as he’d left Fury at home. And if he was trying to acquire a new dog, he was taking his time about it.

  Once he came home from a Sunday excursion and showed us how to strangle a chicken. This wasn’t cuddly, but it was an impressive entertainment.

  He never repeated the legendary extrovert act of my mother’s childhood – banging two saucepan lids together to stop a baby uncle crying. It stopped the howling uncle so successfully that he started clapping his hands together, imitating the saucepan sound: ‘Bim pa! Bim pa!’ So memorable was this event that, from that day on, everyone called my grandfather ‘Bimpa’ and lived in hope of another such outburst of uncharacteristic frivolity.

  Bimpa skived priest involvement to do other things but he had turned his Protestant life upside down for priests. He was not only a Protestant by birth, he was in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as Protestant an organization as it could manage to be. To marry a Catholic he’d had to cause uproar among his colleagues and family – he’d had to convert. He did it, for love. Then, apart from weddings and christenings, he seemed to feel he’d done enough for the priests – they’d got his life, they weren’t getting all his Sundays as well.

  As if fearful he’d escape back out of the faith, Granny packed Bimpa’s home with statues of the Virgin Mary and pictures of the sanguineous Sacred Heart. My father, as a lackadaisical agnostic, obviously didn’t need so much hemming-in with threatening icons of what he was up against, because we’d no such rampant religious accessorizing in our house. And my mother had too much belief in tasteful home furnishings to allow enormous plaster Infants of Prague in the hallways – despite my floor-flinging insistence that we should get some, or the devil would have us.

  ‘Where did you get all this about the devil in your head from?’ my mother asked – a fairly disingenuous sort of question to a child brought up a Catholic. But in fairness my mother had always muttered more darkly about ‘immodesty’ and ‘idleness’ than about the devil himself.