I had joined the train at Carlisle. I expected to see either drunks or sleepers — it was midafternoon. But the passengers sat silently, holding their sallow faces in their hands, and they became gloomier as we progressed through the long Scottish hills of the border — Dumfries and Galloway. They were the sad-faced people in the wind at gray Stranraer.
By then the Scots had got off the train — the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags; the poor stinking trampled terriers and their defiant owners; and the children screeching, "How much farva!" and "I can hear funda!" No trains got more befouled than the ones to Scotland, but this boat train was mostly empty by the time it reached Kilmarnock, and so on the last stage of its journey, along the Firth of Clyde, it looked wrecked and abandoned, the beer cans clanking and the bottles rolling on the floor, and an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke.
But I liked the hills and I was relieved once again to be near the shore. It was green countryside on a granite sea. Some of the coast was bare; in places there were forests, and hidden in deep lovely valleys there were baronial houses. The gray town of Girvan, with stone houses and squinting windows, had its back turned to the water and wind. At Glenwhilly there were crimson poppies beside the track.
It was here, just before arriving, that the returning Ulster people became very irritable.
"Go and sit dine!"
"I'm tulling ya fer the last time!"
"I says go and find your suster!"
"Don't look so surpraised!"
The Ulster accent is disliked in England, where it is regarded as a harsh, bastard, Lowland Scots with a Glaswegian glottal stop. It is a blustering accent, and just as Welsh people seem permanently conciliatory in the way they speak, so the gabbling Ulster folk seem forever on the boil, trying to swallow and be cruel at the same time. The accent seems full of strain and greed, and yet the people are relaxed and friendly. A linguistic quirk makes them seem angry; it is as odd and as fascinating as the national lisp in Spain. Each time I heard an Ulsterman open his mouth, I reached for my pen, like a missionary learning a tribal language and imagining a vernacular Bible or a dictionary.
Stranraer, in Loch Ryan, on the sea, was the main town on a peninsula shaped like a hammerhead. The ferry Galloway Princess was at the quayside, waiting for the arrival of the boat-train passengers to Larne. There were not many of us, but everyone was searched, including the children — and the officers groped even in the infants' clothes. I was frisked, and then my knapsack was sifted through. They found my sheaf of maps, my binoculars, my notebook, my switchblade knife.
"And what's your purpose in going to Northern Ireland?" the policeman asked. This was Constable Wallace. Crumbs, the things he'd seen!
"Just looking around," I said. "A little business, a little pleasure. I might do a spot of bird-watching."
"Carry on then," Officer Wallace said, and handing me my knife, he turned to his mate and said, "A spot of bird-watching."
There was a sign at the ferry entrance listing the various people who would not be allowed on board the Galloway Princess: rowdy people, drunks, and "football supporters… displaying their club 'favors' in any shape or form."
Over dinner, Jack Mehaffy said, "It's because the football clubs are one religion or another, and if you wear a certain color scarf you're a Catholic or you're a Protestant. It causes friction. They don't want trouble on this boat."
We met by chance: we were each dining alone and so were asked to sit at the same table. The conversation got off to a slow start. Later, Mehaffy said, "You don't talk too much unless you know who you're talking to. No one in Northern Ireland expresses opinions of any kind to strangers until he's very sure his listeners will be sumpathetic. If not, they'll puck a fight."
Perhaps our conversation was typical. It took us forty-five minutes to get to religion and another hour before Mehaffy volunteered that he was a Protestant. By then it would have been too late to quarrel about Irish politics. We were friends.
He had not stated his religion. He had said in a challenging way, "I'm British." But that meant the same thing as Protestant. He was in the tailoring business and he told me how, very soon, most tailoring would be done automatically by sewing machines operated by microchips. This was bad news for Ulster, where shirt factories employed large numbers of people. Mehaffy said many were being closed down — he had shut a number of them himself.
He had grown up in a neighborhood in County Down with Protestants and Catholics. "We didn't have much money, and when we were short it was the Catholics who helped us out, not the Loyalists, who were always running the Union Jack up the flagpole. We're still friendly with those Catholic families."
He told me about his being a scoutmaster and how he always had Catholic boys in his troop. He asked the local priest's permission to include those boys, and the priest said, "Yes, me only regret is that you're doing something I wish I were doing meself."
"I liked him for saying that," Mehaffy said.
We talked about tailoring, about unemployment, about strife, and that was when he said, "I'm British. But I'm also Irish. I mean, culturally I'm British, but I was born in Ireland, so I'm Irish too."
"Do you feel an affinity with the Republic?"
"No, no. The south is different. They have a different tradition there. Funnily enough, at one time I could actually see union with the Republic — a united Ireland. But now it's less and less a possibility."
He was reluctant to explain why, but then said, "The influence of the church is too strong there. Do you think any Ulsterman would accept the infallibility of the Pope?"
I said, "But they accept the infallibility of the Queen."
He laughed. He said, "And contraceptives on prescription! We'd never accept it."
Whenever the issue of union was raised, Ulstermen mentioned contraceptives.
"And there's the tribalism," Mehaffy said. "The tribalism starts in July, with the Orange parades. The Catholic parades are in August. And then, people who are the best of friends all year won't speak to each other. There's a lot of suspicion in the summer — a lot of tribal feeling — between Catholic and Protestant."
I said, "Is it possible to tell them apart?"
"There are people who say it is," Mehaffy said, and pointing to his eyes he went on, "For one thing, a Catholic's eyes are closer together."
We went out on deck and watched the cluster of lights at Larne drawing near. The mist liquefied the lights and made the harbor entrance dramatic. Mehaffy said that Ulstermen worked hard and had pride in their country. They hated people who tried to make jokes out of bombings and killings. This was while the ferry was making its way into Larne Harbour, and the lights were piercing the mist and illuminating the dark brown waterfront, the gleaming slates on the roofs, the oily lough to port. The wind groaned among the dockside cranes. Mehaffy said it never stopped raining here. The returning Ulster people who had been on the boat train stood silently at the rail, gazing upon Larne like mourners. Mehaffy said the trouble was, there was only one bloody topic of conversation, and who was really interested in that? The ferry horn echoed all over the harbor and lough, as if from a thousand empty holes in the night.
"I'm thinking of moving to England," Mehaffy finally said.
His tone was confessional, his voice a whisper. I was still staring at Larne and did not know what to say.
"I've got two kids," he said. "They're still young. They'll have a better chance there."