Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Read online

  I expect it would have been the cousins who put all this about the devil in my head.

  The cousins were the rogue beasts of the farm holidays. One set in particular. The loud, fearless offspring of my mother’s eldest brother, Joe. These children multiplied every year, were good at everything and referred to us as ‘the English cousins’.

  It soon became clear that being English meant we always fell in the mud on any adventure, cried and bruised the most easily and had the imaginations of stones.

  Sporadically, in small hunting packs, the cousins might appear for an afternoon at Granny’s, but the real onslaughts came when the family drove up through Derry, crossed the border and converged on the Donegal coast, in the town of Buncrana.

  We’d stay in a sedate guest house. Uncle Joe rented a glorious ramshackle Georgian house that rapidly filled to the ceiling with his children and their friends, once they’d burst out of small, hot cars.

  Perhaps there was a phase in the sixties where small red cars were a sign of something. We had our small red Hillman; Uncle Joe and his wife Helen had a bright red Volkswagen Beetle each. Somewhere in these Beetles they’d put eight children; two grandparents; a dog; groceries; bedding; towels; clothes; buckets; spades; beach balls – and usually assorted extra children belonging to neighbours or other relatives.

  Once everyone had run about their house refusing to share rooms with brothers who bit, or sisters who’d stolen a cardigan, imagining where a ghost might be, or a secret passage full of dead nuns, someone would shout: ‘You children get out of the house!’

  My parents would sit drinking tea and playing cards with the other adults, paying no attention to pleas that it was raining, or we wanted to watch television – we were driven out to roam the town and beaches with the cousins.

  Being children from a danger-seething city, we weren’t used to being left to our own devices from dawn to way after dusk. There were only three of us English weaklings, so any opinion we might have about time to go home had little influence. We didn’t like it when it was getting dark; we tired quickly and most bizarrely, in the eyes of our uncle’s independent children, we wanted to see our parents.

  This most frightening family of cousins were fast-moving natural leaders, with athletic strength and sarcastic wit. Their favourite place was the scrappy fairground on the sea front, haunted by the kind of leather-jacketed young men that babysitters would snog and children who looked like the kind who went to the other school in North London, kids who had all their parents in prison and would raid our school with sticks.

  The cousins would always defend us if fairground children mimicked our English accents. Stones would be thrown, insults screamed and jumpers pulled. But left looking at us when there was no outside threat to us, the cousins found us very poor specimens.

  Our main interests were television and food, with my sister and I making an occasional reckless diversion to play with dolls. The cousins did things like swim in the Atlantic every day, regardless of the weather – frequently bad in Donegal – just because they wanted to be able to finish their holiday saying they’d swum every day. Say it truthfully. They were big on truthfully whereas we… Well, some kind of shadiness must have crept into us over the water because we saw no harm in a lie about a thing like that. So what if they skipped the day when hailstones swept out of the mountains? Who would know? They didn’t follow the twisted logic of this. They always had to climb the highest, jump the furthest, spin fastest on the waltzers and even pray the longest at mass. They seemed to be born with a sense they couldn’t rest easy, that there was a long competitive haul ahead and you had to be strong enough for it. Somehow we were raised to feel that we’d already made it, we had a middle-class English life, and it would probably carry on that way. We didn’t think there was any problem that couldn’t be solved by crying and telling our parents.

  Cousin fear made me quite glad when the Buncrana days ended and we could return to Granny’s exclusive attention back over the border on the farm. She’d fuss over us warmly, although attempts at rebellion were crushed with shaming references to the cousins’ admirable extrovert qualities and religious fervour. Apparently she’d do the same to them – why couldn’t they sit quietly, dress neatly, talk elegantly? To us the cousins were eager, brave angels; to them, we were little foreign gentry. Granny kept us all in line with our desperation to be her favourites.

  The little foreign gentry had their holiday cut short in the late 1960s. There were people on the television throwing things, breaking windows and yelling in Strabane, a sleepy market town, three miles down the road. A few more miles down the road, in Derry, there were cars on fire, people flinging flaming milk bottles, men with bleeding heads reeling into doorways…

  Bimpa, Granny and my parents stared at the television.

  Bimpa gave out about someone called Bernadette Devlin, who was shouting at the camera.

  The television showed Belfast – fire and blood – then back to a car on fire in the evening streets of Strabane.

  The next morning I went up to Strabane with Granny – she said there was a prescription to collect, but she wanted to hear the news first hand. On the main street, the man with the chemist shop was sweeping up broken glass and putting wooden boards on his windows. He said that there’d be no stopping them now. Whoever they were. He too seemed to blame Bernadette Devlin.

  ‘That stupid loudmouth wee girl. Haven’t we always got on fine here?’ he said to Granny. She didn’t answer.

  ‘Mind the glass,’ she said to me. As she walked away, stiffened.

  In a few days there were other things on television. Men in suits talking, talking… Then pictures of British soldiers spreading out over the bridge into the city of Derry. My mother pointed at the screen when it showed pictures of a barricaded side-street and said, ‘Would you look at the Bogside.’

  The Bogside, like Bernadette, was somehow responsible for what was going wrong. So, apparently, were the soldiers – my father said several times that they were ‘a big mistake’.

  Peculiar, because wasn’t someone in the RAF almost the same as a soldier? Maybe he should be down on the bridge instead of watching television at Granny’s.

  Bimpa was shouting at someone else on the television now… Now a fat man called Paisley was to blame. There were more pictures of cars on fire in Derry, soldiers running and boys were throwing stones in the Bogside. Near the chemist shop in Strabane, more boys were on television, running away from something.

  ‘That’ll be Duncan the Orangeman with his windows broken again,’ Granny remarked flatly.

  It turned out my father wasn’t supposed to be on the bridge with the soldiers but he wasn’t supposed to be on holiday any more either. We had to leave early and had a week in a hotel in Clacton-on-Sea to calm us down after the upset. I wasn’t too upset. There was a shiny new fairground and no cousins to make us swim when it was raining.

  I didn’t know that this early exodus from the summer holiday was the real leaving of Northern Ireland for us, the one that made the difference. There were no more long summer months on Granny’s farm near Strabane, passing through Derry to Buncrana. The place names in the geography of our holiday roamings had taken on meanings way beyond family connections.

  Strabane seemed to add prefixes to its name: ‘Volatile Border Town Strabane’, or ‘Heavily Nationalist Strabane’.

  Derry and Belfast seemed to be full of death. Buncrana became a haven for IRA men to rest and hide themselves in.

  My father wasn’t allowed to go back unless it was on ‘strict personal business’. If someone was sick or dying, not if he felt like a holiday.

  My parents’ accent was suddenly very familiar to people in London. No more being mistaken for Germans. Everyone in England knew what a Northern Irish accent sounded like. It sounded like a threat.

  I learnt that the words Catholic and Protestant were about something more elusive than who had to go to mass and who got to skive.

  I noticed my m
other would never watch the news; my father would watch, then come into the kitchen to tell her what had happened in Northern Ireland that day.

  ‘God,’ she’d say quietly.

  The events that had interrupted our holiday became a dark anxiety in the background to my mother’s life. Not so much for my father, not directly. Belfast Grandma had retreated south to the sweetshop. She lived over it, in a tall house in Tipperary, with her sister and two brothers. They formed an eccentric ménage of people who all seemed to get on each other’s nerves; they were irritated but they were safe.

  My father didn’t sit at ease in front of the news. Now he talked to the television. He grieved over Belfast streets he recognized, where houses burnt and people wept to camera. He cursed politicians and pundits who voiced opinions on Northern Ireland. Whatever they were saying, I understood it was more seriously offensive than Cassius Clay changing his name, or George Best doing something silly with a girl.

  If my mother, by accident or the suddenness of a news flash, caught sight of a familiar location in a report of a shooting, bombing or riot, she’d freeze. She’d close her eyes and wait for it to be over.

  Geography. The world goes round, people move around and before they know it, time has passed and the place they left may no longer be a place they can go back to. Even a small place like Northern Ireland doesn’t sit quiet on the map; it disgraces itself, draws as much attention to itself as huge places like America and confuses people who’ve never even been there when they think about it. I showed a friend of mine a large-scale map of Northern Ireland. He touched it and looked surprised.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s all seasides and lakes.’

  I said of course it was. The seasides and lakes were the things I remembered the most.

  ‘It’s not the geography I imagine,’ my friend said. ‘You know, from the news, you think it’s all streets. Urban.’

  I didn’t know how much more knowledgeable I was about Northern Ireland – and I had relations there, dozens of them.

  I did know another thing about the geography. Northern Ireland was a really small country. And the odds, as years of news turned into decades, that death and injury wouldn’t strike close to my family seemed to become very poor indeed.

  I remembered seasides. Lakes, summer farmland and rolling gorse-covered mountains. I knew cousins, aunts and uncles who were funny, smart, easy-going – displaying none of the characteristics of Northern Irish people discussed by politicians and news pundits. I didn’t think I was wrong. I didn’t think the news was wrong – not the basic facts of bombs, burnt houses, dead people, and then the painful wrangling of something called a peace process. But the two views of the country didn’t seem to make a full picture.

  I wanted to go back to see where news and memory met or diverged and to see what on earth sort of place it was I thought I came from.

  ‘Well, I’m sure this is a project to be encouraged,’ my uncle Joe said when I called. ‘But there’s a drastic crisis in a golf match on television, distracting me from my normally heartfelt enthusiasm for long-lost nieces. You’ll get a more sensible conversation if I call your aunt Helen to the phone…’

  2. Location, Location…

  ‘Imagine if Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen bought that house and said, “You need to knock it all through and have a big living room, and that thing has just got to go, paint it over and put in a big picture window.”’

  Mikey and I squealed at the idea. We knew how to entertain each other, had struck up a rapport within minutes. He was one of my cousin Veronica’s children; on our last meeting he’d thrown a toy at me, but that was probably a three-year-olds notion of rapport. At fifteen he was emerging gloriously himself, interested in fashion, style, a career as a celebrity hairdresser – and to the devil of dullness with Northern Irish politics.

  That Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would be buying a house on a Loyalist estate in Portadown was as unlikely as his surviving the first brushstroke of painting over ‘that thing’ – a giant mural on the gable end of a house commemorating deceased local charmer Billy Wright.

  Billy Wright faced the road, it was impossible to avoid seeing him, just as it would have been impossible for Mikey to grow up in this area and not know who the man was. Never mind that Mikey would rather have seen a mural of Beyonce and would have been overjoyed to see someone as flamboyant as Llewelyn-Bowen move into the neighbourhood – Billy Wright had been the local celebrity he’d had to grow up with.

  Billy Wright’s nickname was ‘King Rat’. He’d been assassinated in the Maze prison in 1997 by the INLA. Some said it was by another Loyalist faction – whatever, he was dead now. Previously his career had included rabble-rousing at Orange marches through Catholic areas of Portadown; leadership of the hard-line Loyalist Volunteer Force; intimidation of softer-spirited local Protestants; drug-dealing and organizing the assassination of local Republicans. There is much evidence to suggest that Billy Wright considered anyone of the Catholic faith to be a Republican and dealt death indiscriminately.

  Never mind him, my aunt Helen was in trouble in the back of the car.

  ‘I just pulled this to see what it was and it won’t go back now. Is it broken? I think it’s broken.’

  We pulled over so Mikey and I could attend to the emergency. I’d hired a car with such a ridiculous number of fancy features that you only had to touch a button and all manner of unexpectedness sprang out of dashboards and seatbacks. My aunt had found that at a press of a lever she had a tray table and cup holder in front of her, but the unexpected ensemble refused to spring back from whence it had sprung. It took the three of us shoving to put it back in place.

  ‘I love this car,’ Mikey said as we continued our journey. ‘It knows automatically when to turn the headlights on. It knows when it’s raining. And look at these…’

  Under our feet were secret compartments. Lifting a tag in the carpet revealed an odd-shaped space in which to hide things – I don’t know what – your lunch, your wallet…?

  ‘Very handy for smuggling,’ Mikey said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If we pick up any drugs or guns on the journey, we’ll put them in there.’

  Mikey looked at me, a pretence of shock.

  ‘Guns and drugs? I was thinking eggs.’

  My aunt laughed. ‘God bless you child for your innocence.’

  Later, this story was passed around the family to great amusement – the wild ideas of the cousin from England and the more likely reality. Drugs and guns would be way outside my family’s understanding, but impish, innocent smuggling was such common practice only the very holy and law-abiding regarded it as an offence.

  What went on in innocent smuggling varied. These days, you would probably bring petrol or farm produce from the South to the North. When we’d crossed the border in my childhood we’d taken groceries and dairy produce from the North to the South because, as Granny said, ‘You can understand why an English thing like cornflakes would be more expensive in the South, but that the butter they sell in the North comes from the South to be packed and gets sent back to the South costing more, well there’s a hen’s logic in that.’

  So Granny involved us in small crimes on our holidays, passing by a police and customs hut in a lather of excitement, as the couple of men on duty stopped the car and asked if we’d anything to declare. On hot days I’d panic – what if the butter was melting, dripping out of the boot of the car, and we all had to go to gaol for ever?

  Luckily we were never made to pay for these crimes.

  Crossing the border had been easy in Granny’s day, now it was easy again. In the Troubles, the roads were gun, concrete and metal sheet blocked. You weren’t so much worried about your butter melting as a British soldier holding you too long in conversation. You didn’t want to be sitting there, talking about where in London you were from with a lonely teenager from Tottenham, when you knew border posts were targets. You didn’t even have to be that edgy; talking to a boy with a gun, other armed boys behin
d him, when you were just trying to visit your relatives, was seldom a comfortable moment.

  All over the roads in Northern Ireland, the boys with guns would appear from nowhere and ask you where you were going. Jarring your nerves and wasting your time. You’d have the scary thought that the one who’d stopped you might be the soldier who’d just lost his head with the tension of patrolling Northern Ireland and misunderstand some sudden movement you made for your driving licence…

  Aunt Helen ran a constant restrained resistance to this. Some morning in the late eighties we’d been stopped by soldiers – we were on a two-mile journey to visit a cousin who’d just had a baby, possibly Mikey had been the baby… The young soldier asked Aunt Helen where she was going and where she’d come from.

  ‘Will it really mean anything to you,’ she sighed, ‘if I tell you the name of the wee townland I’ve left and the wee townland I’m going to? Will you see them in your mind’s eye?’

  The soldier looked like he’d cry with his actual eyes.

  ‘I have to ask while we note your number plate.’

  ‘Do you have a grandmother?’ my aunt asked him.

  He nodded, glancing to see where his companions were.

  ‘Does she drive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I expect she takes a bus then, takes a bus to wherever she’s going about her business, the sort of harmless business a grandmother like her and myself would be going about.’

  ‘I have to ask,’ the soldier said. ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Well, a job’s a job, I daresay.’

  Aunt Helen sighed and told him where she was going.

  He said, ‘Right then, off you go, sorry to trouble you.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about it as well,’ my aunt said politely. Then she made an impatient ‘tut’ as she sped out of his hearing. ‘They’re only wee boys. I do feel sorry for them, but still… How would he like his granny stopped by a gun?’