I lingered a few days, marveling at its decrepitude, and then vowed to come back the following week. I had never seen anything like it. There was a high steel fence around the city center, and that part of Belfast was intact, because to enter it, one had to pass through a checkpoint — a turnstile for people, a barrier for cars and buses. More metal detectors, bag searches, and questions: lines of people waited to be examined so that they could shop, play bingo, or go to a movie.
There were still bombs. Just that week a new type of bomb had started to appear, a fire bomb made of explosive fluid and a small detonator; it exploded and the fiery fluid spread. And it was very easily disguised. These bombs had turned up in boxes of soap flakes and breakfast cereal and pounds of chocolates. One in a tiny bag had been left on a bus, and ten passengers had been burned and the bus destroyed. That was my first day in Belfast: DRIVER STEERS THROUGH BLAZE HELL TO SAVE LIVES displaced the Falklands news.
THREATS was a headline in every newspaper, with this message: If you know anything about terrorist activities — threats, murders, or explosions — please speak now to the Confidential Telephone — Belfast 652155.
I called the number, just to inquire how busy they were. But it was an answering machine, asking me for information about bombs and murder.
***
On the way to Coleraine and the coast I was in a train with about ten other people, two in each car — and some got out at Botanic Station, a mile from Central. I had never imagined Europe could look so threadbare — such empty trains, such blackened buildings, such recent ruins: DANGEROUS BUILDING — KEEP CLEAR. And bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery, and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children — it looked like the past in an old picture. And a crucifix like a dagger in one brute's lapel, and an Orange Lodge Widows' Fund badge in another's. They said that Ulster people were reticent. It seemed to me they did nothing but advertise, GOD SAVE THE POPE painted on one ruin, and on another, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. And at Lisburn a large sign by the tracks said, WELCOME TO PROVOLAND. Everybody advertised, even urban guerrillas.
Fifteen minutes outside of Belfast we were in open country: pleasant pastures, narrow lanes, cracked farmhouses. But in such a place as Ulster the countryside could seem sinister and more dangerous than a crowded city, since every person on the move was exposed in a meadow or a road. The old houses all stuck up like targets, and it was hard to see a tree or a stone wall and not think of an ambush.
NO SURRENDER it said on the bridge at Crumlin. That town was-a low wet rabbit warren set amid cow parsley and wet fields. And then Lough Neagh, one of Ulster's great lakes, and the town of Antrim. Now the train had a few more sullen skinny faces on board. The towns were no more than labor depots, factory sites surrounded by the small houses of workers. But the factories were shut, the markets were empty, and the farmland looked flooded and useless. We came to Ballymena. I asked a man in the car if it was true that in Slemish near here ("where St. Patrick herded his sheep") children used to be kept in barrels to prevent them from fighting.
He said he did not know about that. His name was Desmond Corkery, and he guessed I was from the United States. He wished he were there himself, he did. He was after coming from Belfast, he was, and was there a more bloody miserable place in the whole of creation? And dangerous? Policemen and soldiers everywhere — and they talked about Lebanon and the flaming Falklands!
I guessed that Corkery was a Catholic. I asked him my usual question: How do you tell a Protestant from a Catholic? He said it was easy — it was the way a Protestant talked; he was better educated. "If he's using fancy words, you can be sure—"
And then Corkery became reflective and said, "Ah, but you're never really safe. You go into a bar, and you don't know whether it's a Protestant or Catholic bar. It can be frightening, it can, sure. You don't say anything. You call for your beer and you keep your mouth shut, and then you go."
But I began to think that it was an advantage to be a stranger here, not English, not Irish; and it was a great advantage to be an American. I never felt the Ulster people to be reticent or suspicious — on the contrary, it was hard to shut them up.
"And it was around here," Desmond Corkery was saying — we were past Ballymoney and headed into Coleraine; I had been encouraging Corkery to tell me a story of religious persecution—"just about here, that a bloody great team of footballers started to walk up and down the train. They were drinking beer and shouting, 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Up and down the train. 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Looking for Catholics, they were. One comes up to me and says straight out, 'You're a bloody Fenian bastard!'"
I shook my head. I said it was terrible. I asked him what he did then.
"I said no." Corkery looked grim.
"You told him you weren't a Catholic?"
"Sure I had to."
"Did he believe you?"
"I suppose he did," Corkery said. "He slammed the door and went roaring off."
We traveled in silence along the River Bann, and I thought how that denial must have hurt his pride, and it seemed to me that it was this sort of humiliation that made the troubles in Ulster a routine of bullying cowardice. It was all old grievances, and vengeance in the dark. That was why the ambush was popular, and the car bomb, and the exploding soap box, and the letter bomb. The idea was to deny what you stood for and then wait until dark to get even with the bugger who made you deny it.
***
It was drizzling at Coleraine, where I boarded a two-coach train to Portrush, a small seaside resort, emptier than any I had so far seen in Britain. But emptiness had given the place its dignity back: Portrush was rainswept and poor, and part of it was on a narrow peninsula with waves breaking on three sides.
The rain intimidated me for an hour or so. I had lunch with a man named Tubby Graham — there were only the two of us in the restaurant. Tubby was seventy and from Bangor. He liked motoring around, he said. "But I stay out of those ghetto places. Bushmills, for example — that's a completely Protestant town. And Derry's a Catholic one." He recommended Magilligan Point. Did I want a lift?
I said I had other plans, and when he was gone I sneaked down the beach and started walking toward Bushmills to see what a Protestant ghetto looked like. It was still raining, but I thought that if I kept walking, it might stop; and so it did, by the time I reached Dunluce Castle, three miles away. I walked along the sandy beach — not a soul in sight. And the cliffs were like battlements, made of white chalk with flint embedded in it. The only sounds were the gulls and the wind.
Farther on I climbed the cliff and walked through the wet grass to Bushmills. The more prosperous a place was in Ulster, the sterner and more forbidding it looked. Bushmills, rich on whiskey, was made of flat rocks and black slates and was cemented to the edges of straight roads. And now I saw what Tubby meant: the Orange Hall was large enough to hold every man in town.
I began to develop a habit of asking directions, for the pleasure of listening to them.