H-Block, D-Block

It was a sign of some respectability to have a son attending St. Malachy’s College, and my parents let me know that they thought it wonderful for me to be going to such a prestigious college, a college where the priests and brothers and teachers could break down any good man and have the joiners and repairmen fashion a fine priest out of the shattered pieces. It mattered not a jot to them that I had barely scraped a pass in my exam to get into this prestigious college. I passed, and that is all that mattered, they said, and I was to be thankful to God above I was going to the place where they fashioned the good priests that would supply the whole of Ireland and the suffering Catholic countries filled with Black Babies. That was cause enough for a great deal of pride, they said. My sister had passed her 11-Plus exam also, and had made it into Dominican College, also in north Belfast, where nuns taught the good and the pure Catholic girls, photographs of whom would never appear on page three of any mass media publication, with the exception perhaps of The Universe, on bended knee kissing a Pontifical ring or accepting the Cleaner of The Year Award for doing good women’s work in the House of The Lord, and just you be happy with that, woman.

Catholics living in Carrickfergus really had only four choices when it came to going to a school that continued the teaching of the other supposed one true faith: you could go to Saint Malachy’s in Belfast, if you were a boy; Dominican College, if you were a girl; Saint Comgall’s in Larne or Saint Nicholas’s in Carrickfergus itself. There remained the possibility of going to Garron Tower, but of all the descriptions I ever heard of that place, I pictured it as remote and filled with the toughest priests and brothers in the land. And you had to board there, so you would be attending school without your brother and you knew you would miss the madness and the fun that filled your time together. No-one I knew had ever gone there, at least not a soul that had come back alive to tell the tales. Father McGarry had taught there once also, and he felt a great affinity with the place, and if a priest said it was good then it was good and that was that. No matter, I barely scraped a pass and my primary school friends Paul McKay, Robbie McKeown and Mark Reel persuaded me to go join them at the prestigious college at 36 Antrim Road, Belfast.

Mum spent the summer of 1981 trying to pull together the money to buy the Saint Malachy’s uniform: shirt; black trousers; grey or white socks; a white, green and black school tie; black, tie-up shoes. The whole ensemble was to be topped off with a black blazer, and on the blazer pocket on the upper left there was to be sewn the patch with the college coat of arms and its motto, Gloria Ab Intus. 

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Gloria Ab Intus, glory from within, glory from within,” said the grey-haired old master conducting the introductory pre-term lecture in the school’s main lecture theatre. He dallied on his first “glory,” waiting to exhale as his pointed finger came from the back of his head to end pointing straight into the audience. “Glory, ladies and gentlemen, young men.” It was mid-August, and the time between school years, but he took the parents and pupils gathered that day on a tour of the grounds and gave his lecture dressed in his black schoolmaster’s cloak. The cloak left me in no doubt that the business of learning never ended for the teachers of Saint Malachy’s College. Summers in Saint Malachy’s were for learning too, not for boyish fun and games and rites of passage.

“Glory from within the self, you young men, and glory from within the walls that surround this school, this place of learning,” he declared haughtily, his wizened face puckering under the weight of glasses thick in frame and heavy on correction. His lower lip disappeared under his nose, as if he had no teeth, and his pointed chin projected unnaturally beyond the furthest extent of the rest of his face. He stood in what I would come to know as the Learned Man’s Stance, his hands behind his back, swinging heel-to-toe, toe-to-heel, chest out, his hands swung occasionally to aid balance, and the ubiquitous scholar’s stare into nothingness to aid in the search for truth, knowledge, meaning, and wisdom. Mum sat beside me, a respectable distance from the front and from the back, just as we sat in church, a distance safe enough to ask questions in her quiet manner, or to blend into the air if necessary, if anyone dared seek answers. 

That day, in that lecture theatre, the old master told us about the history of the school; its rules and its punishments; the proud sporting history and academic record that were the very cornerstones of the glory that came from within the walls; how to dress, how not to dress, and the punishments meted out for contravening the dress code; the importance of religion in the school’s life; the buildings within the school grounds. 

“Saint Malachy’s is divided into blocks, and we, ladies and gentlemen…” The old master paused for effect and to allow a thin, almost imperceptible grin to develop over his face, “we are currently in D Block.” At that, a polite laugh went up, laughter of the type we heard in the old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower when the priests made jokes as the drums of Protestant pride beat loudly outside, and The Sash filled the holy air. 

“I know, I know,” said the old master, laughing now, and, in doing so, convincing me that he did in fact have teeth, upper ones, at least. “But we go only as far as E Block in here, you’ll be glad to know.” Another polite laugh.

Within the college walls over one thousand spotty boys dressed in black and sporting bad haircuts scurrying between Blocks A through E produced the Gloria Ab Intus. Outside the walls, on the streets of Northern Ireland, the only blocks that really mattered were the H Blocks, the impenetrable H-shaped accommodation used to house prisoners in Northern Ireland’s largest prisons. Since 1971 prisoners convicted of, or suspected of committing or planning, terrorist-related offences, languished behind the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, just outside of the town of Lisburn, ten miles south of Belfast. The government built the prison hurriedly in the early seventies to detain the suspicious men they removed from the streets of Northern Ireland, mostly Catholics as they were the enemies of Ulster, innocent or not, guilty or not, and guilt by association was often deemed guilt enough. They held suspects without trial, a tactic known as Internment, or so Radio Ulster and Downtown Radio told us anyway. The prisoners did their languishing in blocks of cells built in the shape of a giant H, when seen from above, with four wings in each block and an administration area connecting them all, the bar of the H. Since its construction HMP Maze had become a place of fervent Republican and Loyalist politics and thinking and thuggery and deals, and the men could reach out from behind its high walls to affect everyone in the country. In 1981 the prison was in the news again. Republican prisoners had gone on hunger strike as a campaign to win back special category status, a status that allowed them additional freedoms because, under that status, they were considered political prisoners, or prisoners of war. On the first day of March 1976 the British government abolished the special category status, and on the first day of March 1981 – exactly five years later - the leader of the IRA in the jail, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, refused food for the first time. Sixty-six days later, on 05 May, he died, making a martyr of himself and bringing the world’s attention to his Republican ideals. His funeral two days later attracted almost one hundred thousand mourners, a sign of the support his Republican ideals attracted in the fervently British colony. The streets of the country blew up in the face of the security forces and the rioting continued for many days after the funeral.

As we sat in the lecture theatre that day, learning of the mighty glory all around us, the hunger strike and the H-Blocks were alive and real in the minds of everyone sitting there, and in all Britain and Ireland. Ten days before I started school proper, on the first Tuesday in September 1981, the tenth hunger striker - twenty-seven year old Michael Devine - died. Other hunger strikers were ready to lay down their lives for God, Catholicism, the Pope and a reunified thirty-two county Ireland, but none did so before the strike ended on 03 October that year, broken as it was by Margaret Thatcher’s tough stance on everything from prisoners, to free school milk, to striking miners, to just how sharp her pencil must be. From the day the strike started to the day it ended, sixty-two men, women and children would die horrific deaths on the streets of Northern Ireland, not counting the ten who died in the hospital wing in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze. Of those deaths on the streets twenty-eight were Protestant, eight were British soldiers – as good a kill as any Protestant, even if Jew or Catholic - and twenty-six were Catholic. During my first three months in school, before the IRA called its annual Christmas ceasefire, there would be thirty-seven deaths in Northern Ireland, many near the rusty blue gates enclosing Saint Malachy’s College. The hallowed main gates of the college were on the Antrim Road, a road that formed one edge of the area that we would all eventually know as the Murder Mile.

Fire

The ebb and flow of students through the nearby Queen’s University meant that few got to know us and we got to know few, even if that few lived a floor’s distance from us in the same block of flats. We looked for second or third floor flats to avoid the rabble of students stumbling home drunk from the Empire Bar on Botanic Avenue, or Renshaws Hotel on University Street, or The M Club and Lavery’s on University Road. But even on the upper floors we could hear puke splat and bottles smash, the inept amorous advances, the fights and arguments. Living on upper floors meant also that we had time to do something to protect ourselves if someone, some proud soldier, ever did wish to take out two innocent Proud Catholics. They had two locked doors to get through, and every night we blocked the flimsy inside door to our flat with gym weights and an old ironing board wedged between the door and the hallway wall. We knew the measures we took were never going to stop a determined Proud Protestant terrorist for too long, but it would give us enough time to call the police, to let them know where they could find our cooling bodies.

I had little furniture of my own to move with, and so was glad that our flat rental agency furnished the flats, albeit basically. The furniture in the flat made the furniture in The Vatican look modern and luxurious, but I was most glad of the wardrobe they supplied. It was old, made from a hard wood, and it was heavy. I moved it to the wall of my bedroom adjoining the hallway, positioning it in line with the front door on the other side of the wall. It became my bulletproofing, strategically placed where it might afford some protection if someone decided to shoot indiscriminately through the front door. There is a door, a divider wall, my clothes and two thick pieces of wood for a bullet to pass through before it gets to me, I thought. It offered little comfort, and I had a recurring dream of bullets sparking off metal coat hangers or an ancient lock, exploding from the darkness of the wardrobe then plugging my head softly and silently to my pillow. The end. A good ending, quick and painless; no fight, no martyrdom, no songs dedicated to my bravery. He died a coward in his sleep, they would sing, a scared little shit hiding behind an ironing board and a wardrobe. I would know nothing about it because it would happen so fast, leaving my brother to call the police and watch over my corpse. I hoped I would never be murdered on a Thursday because that would mean that my funeral would be at noon on a Saturday, and Arsenal might be playing. I would want my brother at my funeral, and holding it at the same time as an Arsenal match would cause him a crisis of conscience.

The Proud Protestant soldiers would wait across the street. Eventually the flat would darken. They would laugh nervously. Things needed to settle a while.

“Let’s give it ten minutes or so. Then we’ll go. Get yourselves ready.”

“How many, Jonty?”

“Two, maybe. One anyway.”

“It’s fucking freezing. Put the bloody heater on, will ye?”

“Relax fellas, will youse?”

“I heard Steeky say earlier that he followed one of them Fenian fuckers home today. Says he didn’t leave. Could be two in there. Shit! It’s fuckin’ freezin’ in here.”

“Now gents, now gents. You’ll all be warm soon enough, so youse will. Tell you what, let’s stick the radio on, see what’s happening tonight.”

 “Well I’m ready.”

“Houl yer horses, lads. All in good time.”

They would wear leather jackets and rubber gloves. Their hair they would have slicked back with a heavy common gel, and before getting out of the car they would smear Vaseline over their eyebrows, in their ears and in their noses. They would get in somehow, run up the two flights of stairs, pull their weapons from under their coats, flick the safety off, fire. Our front door is powder. Powder rains, and the ironing board and weights spark and disintegrate. By then I would be lying in my usual first position, foetal, on my right side, my hands under my head palm-to-palm, as though in prayer. I might hear the door in the hallway creak open, and maybe the start of a bang or a ricochet off a lock. In a second the left side of my head would explode, the bullet pass through my head, through my hands, my pillow would turn scarlet and skull fragments would lodge in the left side of my brain and in the pillow behind my right ear, where the exit wound would blow my skull apart. 

Dead in a second. That is just how it would happen; this is how I would die if I was ever to die young and off-guard and asleep. The undertaker would be under strict instruction to place my hands by my sides, not over my chest, exposing the wounds in my palms. And the priests and the bishop concelebrating my funeral would take great mileage from my dying with the marks of Jesus on my hands, letting the gathered few know that I had been sacrificed for a reason that might never be understood by anyone other than God Himself, but that my stigmata guaranteed my place at His right hand, me and Him having suffered in the same way, see? Some might place their fingers in the holes. Most would just accept it.

There was one way into our flat and one way out, and that was how we liked it. A week after we moved in we considered contacting the landlord to have a fire escape installed at the back, but we knew that not having a fire escape was safer than having one: it was one less way for someone to get to us. This was how we lived, balancing risk. Fire could take us; Proud Protestants would have to fight to get at us. Life in The Hollies had prepared us well for living anywhere - we needed to be vigilant at all times, but, by then, that was second nature.

Meeting someone new was a game, the winner getting to know the loser before the loser got to know the winner. Friends of friends came under examination, particularly those Proud Protestant friends and Proud Catholic friends crashing at our place after drunken nights. 

“Who are your friends?”

“Them? Oh, just some friends of mine. Why?”

“Do you know them well?”

“Yeah, course I do. I wouldn’t…

“Where do they live?”

“Jeez. What is this? Twenty Questions? They’re just friends I know from the east of the city?

“What part? What are their names?” Names and locations were perfectly foolproof indicators of religious affiliation. Almost perfectly foolproof.

“Will you relax, for god’s sake? They’re alright, lads. I know not to bring anyone back here, so just youse calm yourselves.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re gonna fuck her make sure she’s not connected to anyone who is connected to anyone else. The last thing we need is… Well, anyway. You know.”

“Of course. Beer?”

“Sure.”

The rules were simple, and anyone bringing anyone back to the flat to sleep with them or party with them had to follow those rules. 

First Rule: If you’re gonna bring anyone back make sure you know them, and that they never get to know us, unless you know that person well and know they’re not connected. 

Second Rule: You can drink. You can fuck. You can party. Then you get them out. 

Third Rule: The sooner the better: if you can get them here, fuck them and get them away again while they’re still drunk, then do it. There’s less chance of them remembering anything of who we are or where they were. 

Fourth and Final Rule: Enjoy every fucking moment.

Colour and Liver Spots

The old Roman Catholic chapel in Carrickfergus was in its last days by the end of the 1970's, and boastful plans were already in place to build a new church, one that resembled an apple pie with a generous slice missing. The blueprint hung in the bemarbled church porch for us all to fawn over. The priests wanted this new design for the church, a design they said would take us into the twenty-first century, and, just like the Pope, they were infallible, so it was to be. Priests, we were told, always knew what was best for us, no matter what. Priests, we were told, knew us better than we knew ourselves.

The old walls of the church were failing: the failures lay hidden under thick, blistered and bubbled cream paint at least a century thick. The paint was so hard and dry that breaking a bubble with a young thumb produced a ragged circle of jagged paint thorns and a low cracking noise, and the breaking of a bubble took curious eyes back in time over a century, to the time between the laying of the stone behind the bubble and the first beautification of the church. But now, over a century later, each time a priest closed the tabernacle door a shower of plaster and dust fell from a circular enclosure high above the altar, above which, of a sunny afternoon, bloomed a beautiful and intricate stained-glass window. The heating system failed often, and the wooden floor rotted through in too many places for walking to be safe. A young, sharp fingernail could cut easily into the viscous, waxy polish on the pews, and a bit of wax sliced off and rolled continuously between a thumb and a forefinger could distract a child until the end of mass. The jagged slivers of wax turned smooth and round and malleable with heat and force before the priest invited us to declare ourselves unworthy to receive the body and blood of Christ, “ …but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Those sitting there before us had etched their names into the wax. They were almost invariably male names, or a boy name and a girl name enclosed in a rough-hewn heart, and we could see the darkness where a caretaker had applied a thicker coat of wax to rid Our Lord’s house of the aberration of graffiti.

Towering stained-glass windows adorned the failing walls, and as the sun rose above Belfast Lough on summer mornings, we could see sun-beaming images of saints, and people who should be saints sure enough, cut into the dusty inner. The deep blues, yellows, brown-reds and muffled opaque whites filled the warming air. If the roof of the chapel had ever been lifted, I fantasised, the lazy, brilliant, warm, swirling colour would surely have spilled over the tops of the walls, drenching the church and school grounds, and it would have come to rest serenely and beautifully over the town itself, a very grey town, a perfect canvas. The sun cast languidly on the far wall, and the thick melted-crayon light mingled with elaborately chiseled models of six of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, illuminating the truly devout at the foot of those Stations, the pious and all too often self-righteous women of the parish, usually. After every mass, a huddle of old women would “do the Stations,” making gallant efforts to genuflect at every captured moment of the journey from court to Calvary despite the years of rheumatism and gout they undoubtedly suffered gladly as a penance for a sin long since forgotten or never committed. Bony, liver-spotted fingers held the tops of pews - for balance, or to bring ease to a long suffering joint - and they let go only when it was time to move on or when it came time to bless themselves. A Rosary netted the other hand. Their long thick coats, their simple brown shoes and their colourful headscarves were the uniforms of holiness, and a simple sign of their continuing adherence to communion at least once every day and to confession at least once every week. The cherished Rosary beads with the vial of long-evaporated Lourdes water, and a family Bible a generation or two past sturdiness, they were the only tools necessary for holiness.

These same women kept the marble polished in the aisle and in the porch, and it may have been them that kept the pews deeply waxed and almost heart-free. They gave gladly of their time and good health to work hard for the Lord, to decorate and clean Our Lord’s home, and to buy their way into Heaven and the company of the Lord and all his angels and saints on the back of a mop and bucket, or a Hoover, or Mr. Sheen and a duster, or the brown paper and the heated iron they used to remove the candle-wax from the carpeted floors. 

Many were gentle - motherly, even - and they talked with hushed voices, through thin and hairy lips, for some a set of dentures filling their scarved heads. Others were pious, arrogant, older women, and they treated the church like it was their favourite room at home, the room to where visitors were escorted to be entertained before being rushed out for fear they might get too comfortable, the room with the nice china on show, the deepest, cleanest carpet and the furniture carved from soft, rust-coloured fallen clouds. How dare anyone change, move or otherwise spoil the good work the Lord gave the women of the parish the very breath in their bodies to do, but not the health to do it, and sure that was the very reason, wasn’t it, why they did it anyway, to suffer, to give? They gladly suffered on for His good. They smiled smiles all too brief and perfunctory, their hands too full with the tools and their heads too full with the excitement for the next cleaning job to let them stop for one polite moment. But for these women this was the highest station attainable in the church, the duty of cleaning, the duty to look after men – both earthly and heavenly - and they took it seriously. There was little room for joviality. 

180

The white-with-a-little-brown, right-angled streets that we knew so well in the days when we played hide-and-seek - when we believed one street was exactly like the other, and that it mirrored others - had become fearful places by the time of my eleventh birthday. We boys received regular and very stern warnings from our parents about us venturing out late at night, warned we should avoid dark alleys, warned not go into areas we did not know, and warned about being in the company of those we did not know.

“Boys, you’ll soon find out that there’s things that people don’t like about you. Especially you two, you boys. People don’t like Catholics around here.” Dad was serious, but he had no strange crease between his eyes or anger in them. He was sober and careful, insistent and wise. This was man talk. This was man-to-nearly-man talk. This was serious. 

“This could save you boys from getting a beating, or killed, so listen to what I’m telling youse,” pressed our father. Mum agreed, and urged us to stay close to the house, to venture not too far from the door of Number 43.

“Okay. Why?” we asked. Mum pleaded again for us to remain close by, not to wander too far, to be careful whom we chose as friends.

“Yeah, okay. But why?”

“Just listen to your mother, boys. If you don’t want to hear what we’re telling you then fine, on your own heads be it. But don’t come crying back here, to me and your mother, saying that we never told youse.”

With her forearm Mum swept an arc and in an instant the boundary of our nighttime play became the street directly outside the house and along the entry between the front and the back, if the eldest son and his boyos were elsewhere. During the day we could play in the fields and the garages, but no further than another couple of streets away unless we knew where we were going, or we were meeting someone we knew, and that we got there and back before it got dark. Being Catholic became even less fun than usual.

At night our parents would gather us round and lead us in prayer, our backs turned to Jesus and to Mary with Child. We prayed for the souls of the dead and the safety of the living, always ending our prayers with the chorus, “...and if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Before we knelt in prayer Mum or Dad would close the new living room curtains. Mum had bought heavy curtains for the upstairs and downstairs front of the house, and Dad forbade us to drag the sofa toward the hearth: it had to remain pushed tight against the wall, holding fast the curtains that we folded tightly one over the other. We closed the blinds ever earlier, regardless of the season. We were under strict instruction to put no lights on without first closing the blinds and curtains, and only our parents could answer the door after sunset. We stopped asking why and simply obeyed. As we prayed we could hear the eldest son and his friends in the alley, and we thanked our God that we were safe for now, in the house. Evel was returned to the safety of The Vatican. 

We began to feel fearful living in the house and walking on the streets, and the friends we dared visit were the ones we knew we could trust, even though we knew of no reason why we should not trust all and sundry in our Hollies world and beyond. We made no new friends in the street. We learned that the friends we could trust were those with whom we went to school, the ones with whom we made our First Confessions and Communions and Confirmations. They often were the friends who lived near the church we attended, Saint Nicholas’s Roman Catholic Church, or those who went to its school, Saint Nicholas’s Roman Catholic School, the same place our father attended after the dilapidated school in The Commons closed its sepia doors and ejected the dilapidated children, around the time the white and brittle spider webs finally cracked and splintered, loosing their hold, becoming only decorative and benign.  

Sometime after 1:45AM

It all felt wonderful. It felt wonderful at the end of the night to be strolling home drunk, with someone on your arm or in your company that you could fuck and forget, walking home in the safety of the streetlights and the bright, inhospitable Right-Folks!-Time-to-drink-up-and-go-gentlemen-please! lighting of the closing bars along the Golden Mile. Couples kissed on street corners, groped down dark alleys. Men and women pissed close by. We met Catholic friends, and we found ourselves in a cabal. We met Protestant friends, and we found ourselves in cahoots. People fought in the bars, people fought in the streets, and still others fought in the lines at take-away restaurants. There were the seas of puke, food and empty beer bottles to make the streets treacherous to your drunken foot. People chased other people, the one hoping to lose the other in the thousands-strong throng of bodies spewed out by the bars and the clubs, the crowd unceremonious and clumsy, potent, capricious and pugnacious. We had no need or intention of getting involved - strangers were killing other strangers, and why should we give a damn? - so we walked home over the dead bodies to drink another beer and to wait on others returning from wherever they had ended up. There were never enough beds for the bodies dragged to our home those nights, and many nights people - strangers, often - fucked on the hallway floor outside of my bedroom door, on the far side of my bullet-proof wardrobe. Most nights I slept through those moaned and sighed wishes and wants, those panted desires, those Protestant behaviours. 

Summer on The Green

Occasionally a lean and unshaven man with bushy hair crossed The Green. He never stopped. His was an urgent walk. His name was Gay Lawrence. It wasn’t the name he was born with, but that was the name he got as he walked.

After football one summer day the Americans came for the first time, and The Green filled with glamour and tallness and tans and white shirts and neat trousers and ties, their backpacks full of pamphlets and books and treats all the way from America, or maybe from Bell’s shop or from Sally Picken’s rich pickings. They told us their names were Starsky and Hutch, and we played football with them, listened to them, asked them about America, asked them why were they here in rainy Northern Ireland when the weather was always so much nicer back in America, wasn’t it? We loved the Americans. They were exotic. They were omnipotent. They were here, in Carrick, not going to the cinemas in New York or Chicago, or somewhere in Utah, somewhere over there where the other Starsky and Hutch lived, the older ones. Back home they drove black cars the length of our streets, they said, and they lived in cities the like of which no-one in Ireland could imagine, they said. They drove red cars with white stripes, and the police chased them in their cars with the exotic-sounding sirens blaring: only a child can feel that the siren they hear every day is just not as cool as the sirens on American TV shows. We should come with them some day, they said, and see America for ourselves, they said. Utah is a fine state, they said. Here, they said, here’s something for Mommy and Daddy to read, they said. We loved how they drawled that word, Mommy.

The Americans were kind and softly spoken men, with short hair, sharp features, and sharp skin many shades darker than even our own summer-baked skins. They played football with us - in their suits, minus their ties - and someone would always bring them home to have dinner or orange juice with their family. They walked off with them, to home, to Chicago and Utah and New York maybe, and to cars that were wide and black and long, for use on the wide and black and long streets. But Dad told us that we were never to bring them back with us for there were enough mouths to feed in this bloody house and we couldn’t go feeding the street when we had barely enough in the bloody larder to feed our own mouths, now could we? Yes, Dad.

When there was no play on The Green we avoided the cracks on the pavement, jumped the rainbow puddles before those alleys locked in darkness, we hid behind fences, hid in the shadow cast across half your own entry, climbed onto and jumped off roofs to prove ourselves, and waited for Dad to cycle home from work so that we could run at him as he cycled toward us, our arms high to the sky with the simple joy of his return. Sometimes he would bring us home treats he had bought at Todd’s shop, and usually that was Beta Bars. Sometimes he would change out of his working man’s clothes and summon us all to him, in a voice used only when someone had done something bad. His eyes would be dark, and he would move fast and furiously, and that always meant that something was wrong and he would be the one doing the righting of it, you can be sure of that, you lot.  

A Cheque Half-Written

Carrick is an ancient town, invaded time and again by Normans and Vikings and all comers, each bringing their own brands of raping and pillaging and government. A fortress town, and once the capital of Ireland, the Carrick of my life has been one of few surprises. The history of the town is the heart and breath of the town. For decades or centuries its economy has depended a great deal on the tourist industry, on the number of feet that walked under the portcullis in the Norman castle, or down the nave in the Norman church. Visitors came to view the town's ancient walled fortifications, or to walk its ancient streets in the footsteps, shadows and memories of some ancestor. Visitors, tourists, and day-trippers came to inhale the same salty air their parents and grandparents exhaled gladly generations afore; they came to view the archaeology unearthed in the eighties, showing the limits of the walled defences. It remains an ancient town for ancient people interested in ancient pursuits or the pursuit of ancient peoples. The Carrick I know wants everyone to be ancient, to abstain from the joys of youth and to indulge in the joys of history and archaeology and steadfastness in the face of all the change going on out there, beyond those fortified walls. 

For years the town elders insisted we needed an attraction that the youth also could enjoy, and so, very eventually - when the money was in - we sat two-by-two in their enormous Viking helmets, each rider a Viking ear, on the monorail high above in the Heritage Centre, and we took trips through the history of the town, yet again, snug in our helmets-made-for-two, the resonant tones of the actor Jimmy Ellis piped into our tight but comfy Viking worlds. There was pervading a hatred of youth in my youth. The Belfast Road play park disappeared under the marina, but that was no bad thing as the rides had rusted to a stiff silence. The rivets on the slide had popped and were missing from what was once its shiny surface. The swings had screeched to a halt in mid-air, a final giggle fallen into the seat, shattered. The leisure centre and the parks remained closed on the Lord’s day, but there were the preachers on the Castle Green if we wanted to wile away an hour or four in hymns and psalms and sermons and God and celebration of this seventh and very restful day.

Carrick likes to think of itself as homely, cosy, inviting, safe, familiar, a place where evil and change and catalysts and new dawns is good enough only for those beyond the ancient walls. There is danger beyond the Carrick walls, a danger that would pillage from us all our sense of time and place, they said. This place they defended had its heart somewhere back beyond the year 1180, when the foundations of the castle and town walls created fortress Carrickfergus. 

Carrickfergus has forever been a town of no surprises. There you can enter any shop with a cheque half-written. Someone called Stephen owned Stephen’s Barbers; Terry Windsor owned Windsor Electric; Jimmy McCullough owned McCullough’s Bakery in High Street; Derek Someone-Or-Other owned Derek’s Fashions; a McManus owned the butchers in West Street; Sally Picken owned, managed and worked in Picken’s, the newsagent nearest our house; and someone called Todd ran Todd’s newsagent in Ellis Street. Todd’s became Taylor’s when Mr. and Mrs. Taylor took it over. No surprises please.

Carrick is a town where you can get many things most of the time. You will have it handed to you rarely without some form of courtesy, wrapped up in history, sealed shut with a bang. Some hear a lock turn.

Industry, Or Not

The workers in the factory produced fabrics and dyes for fabrics, he said. The high steel perimeter gates were rusted brown by the sea air that fills every breath within a half mile of the shore at Belfast Lough. From the outside it looked like a place that made men of its workers. The incessant grey steel and the brick-built buildings fell and landed jaggedly as far off the Belfast Road as they did along it. The buildings beyond those gates were different colours, heights, and lengths, as if built in a hurry by brickies with some inkling of a plan, perhaps several. Two figure-of-eight chimneys threw a curve in the severe grey lines, and they spewed dirt into the salty air as grizzly men worked to a sweat to produce one part of something. Someone would add something else to that part of something; dip it, maybe, into some chemical or cleanser; send it on to someone else who would treat it or cut it down to the size of something else, something that those who worked on it would probably never recognise, and could probably never afford. 

The factory was vast and dirty, and those who worked there militant and unforgiving, as my father discovered that day he crossed the picket line to get into work during the Ulster Workers’ Council strike. The Council called the strike to protest the recently signed Sunningdale Agreement, an arrangement between the British and the Irish governments that allowed the government in the south some small say in the running of the six very troubled British-controlled counties in the north. The majority Protestant population saw it as a first step toward losing the sovereignty of Northern Ireland, a minor sharing of power that could never be too minor.