***
I expected formalities — customs and immigration — Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying vacancies. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.
"Just off the ferry?" It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup — pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork, Rejoice in the Lord Alway, waiting for the doorbell to ring. "Twenty-one-fifteen it came in — been looking around town?"
Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort — oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they'd done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind — the wild storm last night.
"Thonder!" she thundered. "It opened up me hud!"
We were walking upstairs under a large motto— For God So Loved the World, and so forth.
"It gave me huddicks!"
The house was full of furniture, and how many floors? Four or five anyway, and pianos on some of them, and there was an ottoman, and a wing chair, and pokerwork scenes from the Old Testament, Noah possibly, and was that Abraham and Isaac? The whole house was dark and varnished and gleaming — the smell of varnish still powerful, with the sizzle of a coal fire. It was June in Northern Ireland, so only one room had a fire trembling in the grate.
"And it went through me neighbor's roof," she said, still talking about the storm, the thunder and lightning.
Another flight of stairs, heavy carpet, more Bible mottos, an armchair on the landing.
"Just one more," Mrs. Wheeney said. "This is how I get me exercise. Oh, it was turrible. One of me people was crying—"
Mirrors and antlers and more mottos and wood paneling, and now I noticed that Mrs. Wheeney had a mustache. She was talking about the reeyun — how hard it was; about breakfast at eeyut— but she would be up at sux; and what a dangerous suttee Belfast was.
Christ Jesus Came Into the World to Save Sinners was the motto over my bedstead, in this enormous drafty room, and the bed was a great slumping trampoline. Mrs. Wheeney was saying that she had not slept a wink all the previous night. It was the thunder and the poor soul in number eight, who was scared to death.
"It's funny how tired you get when you miss a night's sleep," she said. "Now me, I'm looking forward to going to bed. Don't worry about the money. You can give me the five pounds tomorrow."
The rain had started again and was hitting the window with a swishlike sleet. It was like being among the Jumblies, on a dark and rainy coast. They were glad to see aliens here, and I was happy among these strangers.
***
That first morning in Larne I discovered everything there was to know about Ulster rain — how it bucketed down from a sky no higher than a two-story house; how it was never the quicksilver of the Channel rain but always dark, striking at such a merciless slant that it penetrated everything; how it was cold and noisy and how it could be sharp enough to sting; how it never cleansed but rather blackened everything it struck. And no matter how often it rained, it was always so surprisingly cruel that everyone mentioned it. It was impossible to ignore. In this solemn rain-darkened place people regarded the rain as unfair.
It was the setting that was solemn, not the people. (But solemn was an understatement; Ulster looked black and devastated.) The people were curious — they stared, they smiled, they talked loud and still managed to be polite. The women, most of all, seemed to me remarkable — just the way they stood and spoke, their decisive gestures, their spirit. It was true of girls, as well. They seemed bold and friendly and able to take care of themselves.
These were judgments I made on the train from Lame to Belfast. It was a warm and rattly branch-line train, with bushes on the embankment beating against the door handles, and bog ferns sliding across the wet windows.
I was talking to Dick Flattery. "It's not a civil war," he was saying. "The Catholics and Protestants kill each other, but they haven't actually fought each other—"
Now who would have thought you could make such useful distinctions between "fight" and "kill"?
"— they kill each other singly," he went on, "but they fight the army and the police."
Flattery seemed intelligent and detached. He had left Belfast seven years before, for good; he was returning now only because his father was ill. He wasn't planning to stay. He was frightened by the violence.
"It started as a civil rights issue, ten or eleven years ago" — he meant the marches, the first one in Londonderry in 1969—"and then it got violent. No one talks about civil rights anymore."
He swiftly referred to Catholics as "they," and I knew he must be a Protestant. I asked him whether he could tell a Catholic from a Protestant.
"The Protestants are from Scottish stock," Flattery said. "They look Scottish."
We were traveling along Larne Lough — dark water, dark banks, and the dark rain falling fast. We were talking about poverty.
"There's always been unemployment here," he said. "There's not the same stigma attached to it that you find in England. People here aren't lost when they're on the dole. It's really a kind of chronic condition — groups of men standing on the street, doing nothing." He looked out the window. "God, I hate this place."
Now we were smack on the coast, leaving Whitehaven and swaying toward Carrickfergus on a narrow shelf just above the sea, and then,
The little boats beneath the Norman castle
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind
and the halt.
Louis MacNeice grew up in Carrickfergus, but it was not only his poem about that town that seemed to me clear-sighted — all his Ulster poems were vivid and true. And he wrote so well about the sea, sometimes as a tumultuous thing ("Upon this beach the falling wall of the sea…") and sometimes as a fussbudget ("That never-satisfied old maid, the sea / Rehangs her white lace curtains ceaselessly"), and ultimately in its cosmic and thalassic sense ("By a high star our course is set, / Our end is life. Put out to sea").
He had looked out to sea here, beyond Belfast Lough into the North Channel, and he had certainly been on this train, or else he could not have written, "Like crucifixes the gantries stand," seeing the shipyard at Belfast.
I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face — moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore — but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.
It was so awful, I wanted to stay. It was a city which was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. "There is no aristocracy — no culture — no grace — no leisure worthy of the name," Sean O'Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. "It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor." But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?