I remember. I remember my first months in Belfast. In the summer of 1980 Belfast was beginning to emerge from the traumas of the 1970s. Much of the bomb damage in the city centre had been repaired and security measures were keeping it at bay. But it was not a normal city, bollards and wire screens kept vehicles from getting too close to key buildings, from my living room windows I looked out on huge whitewashed boulders that fenced off waste ground beside Cooke Street. On about my second night in the flat I was wakened by noise from McClure Street. A group of young men were rolling tyres down the road, they had stolen them from a depot near the top of Sandy Row to put on their bonfire for the anniversary of Interment. While working on cleaning and decorating my flat I realised that my summers would be punctuated by the Orange walks that still marched down the Lower Ormeau, despite the change in its demography. This was a useful experience, because I no longer had to choose between two narratives about these events. Republicans said they were large, offensive and disruptive, the Orangemen said they were small and low key, playing inoffensive hymn tunes. They were both telling the truth, but about different occasions. Every other Sunday there would be a small church parade which passed through without bother, the locals treated them as a welcome diversion. But there were three or four large processions in the year, the police would seal of the ends of the streets and prevent any movement in or out. The marchers themselves were usually well behaved but they were accompanied on the pavements by crowds of yelling supporters who frequently taunted the locals and sang sectarian songs. I remember being spotted as I looked down from my window and being treated to obscene gestures and contorted faces. In the dim glow of the brains of the Orange leaders this seemed to have nothing to do with them and the tax payer had to stump up for the police overtime. The first sign that life was returning to the city centre was the re-opening of the Grand Opera House. It was there that I saw the first production of Brian Friel’s “Translations”, coming direct from its premiere in Derry’s Guild Hall. Two young actors, then unknown, shone out. Liam Neeson bounding on stage like a large energetic Labrador, Stephen Rea’s understated performance as the translator who turns the authoritarian commands of the English officer into terms the Irish country people could understand. I will never forget the scene between the English lieutenant and the local girl in which they express their love in their own languages. The brilliance of the play was to present all the speech in English, but to convince the audience that some of the characters were speaking Irish. It was superb theatre by a master playwright. There is a huge difference between visiting a city regularly and actually living there. Absorbing the local news I got a much more nuanced understanding of the place. I realised that there were crucial differences between the life lived in one part of Belfast and another, I grasped the differences between the towns, particularly how the sectarian balance affected community relations. Where either Protestants or Catholics were the overwhelming majority relations were good, where there was a more even balance, especially if it was one that might tip over, there was bitterness and suspicion. Radio Éireann tuned me in to Ireland. Gay Byrne’s morning show was window onto the changing society in the Republic. On Sunday mornings there was a programme of traditional Irish music, Mo Cheol Thú, with the warm voice of Ciarán Mac Mathúna. It was followed by Sunday Miscellany a sequence of short talks interspersed with music. It was there that I first heard Patrick Cavanagh’s “On Raglan Road”, a profoundly Catholic song about the temptations of love. Sam McAughtry was a regular, with his stories about growing up in a large, tempestuous, Protestant family in Tiger’s Bay, near the Belfast docks. He told us about a sectarian society without having any trace of sectarianism in himself, in fact he was appointed a Senator in the Dublin parliament. I got to know him later through our mutual friendship with the late Paddy Devlin. I loved his good nature, his distinctive light voice and his rich Belfast working class dialect. On Radio Ulster I sometimes listened to “Sunday Sequence” and was interested to learn that, despite all the divisions caused by some Christians, the most clear sighted and indefatigable workers for peace were often Christians who read the Gospel in a different way. That Autumn I got part time teaching from the Workers’ Educational Association. It was a class on Irish Labour History in Newry, I liked Newry where the whole town seemed simultaneously to join in some pursuit together, at one time it was marathons at another pub quizzes. I would travel down by train and stay the night in the home of a WEA supporter who lived in Camlough in South Armagh. On the way to his house we would to pass a mural which read, “GOD MADE THE CATHOLICS. THE ARMALITE MADE THEM EQUAL.” Once we were stopped by a patrol of red bereted Paratroops. My friend was asked for his driving licence and said he had left it behind, they were satisfied by his credentials as a local government official. As we drove away he explained that if they had phoned in his licence details we would have been hauled in for questioning, the computer would have revealed that his brother was a leading member of the Provisional IRA. He himself was in the Workers Party, formerly Official Sinn Féin, and he was committed to entirely peaceful politics. A number of my students were in the Workers Party and had rather stereotyped views about the history I was teaching them. But I found that if I got behind their preconceptions and helped them to see the complexities of the past they would be hooked by the excitement of real history. I would talk about the vivid stories of the Irish Labour pioneers, but I was astounded to be challenged after a lecture on James Larkin by a German woman, who denounced my concentration on his personality as unMarxist. I mildly explained that I wasn’t a Marxist and I was trying to make it interesting. She later moved to Belfast and we became friends. She was an active member of the Communist Party of Ireland, but impatient with their undisciplined ways. That didn’t mean she was not ready for a long evening’s craic at any time. After a few years she went back to Germany and I lost contact with her. She must have been very unhappy when the Wall came down, while Ireland remained partitioned. My Labour History classes coincided with a class on Irish traditional music and afterwards the two groups would get together for a session of music and song. I sang them Scottish songs like “Bogie’s Bonny Belle” or “The Flooer o Northumberland”, they appreciated learning from my pronunciation of these songs which they knew well, and tolerated my singing. One of the guys had a very sweet voice, despite having two .22 bullets lodged in his throat. This had nothing to do with the Troubles, he and his friends had got rifles as teenagers, to shoot rabbits and once they had had messed about a bit too irresponsibly. He told me that his bedroom window used to be in direct line of the belfry of the local Church of Ireland, he would wait until their service began and shoot at the bell, the poor Anglicans were unable to understand these apparently spontaneous clangs. Towards the end of the year there was the first Hunger Strike in Long Kesh. However it was soon called off and when I went home to Kirkcaldy for Christmas and the New Year I was able, sincerely, to reassure my parents that things were settling down. I didn’t tell them how difficult it was to keep warm in my unheated flat in wintertime and I didn’t guess how hard my life was going to be for the next few years.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 20:46:27 +0000
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