"Just a munnut," a man in Bushmills said. His name was Emmett; he was about sixty-odd and wore an old coat. He had a pound of bacon in his hand, and pressing the bacon to the side of his head in a reflective way, he went on.
"Der's a wee wudden brudge under the car park. And der's a bug one farder on — a brudge for trums. Aw, der used to be trums up and down! Aw, but they is sore on money and unded it. Lussun, ye kyan poss along da strond if the tide is dine. But walk on da odder side whar der's graws." He moved the bacon to his cheek. "But it might be weyat!"
"What might be wet?"
"Da graws," Mr. Emmett said.
"Long grass?"
"In its notral styat."
This baffled me for a while— notral styat — and then I thought: Of course, in its natural state!
Kicking through bracken, I pushed on and decided to head for the Giant's Causeway.
BOSWELL
: Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing?
JOHNSON
: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
I stayed on the coastal cliffs and then took a short cut behind a coastal cottage, where I was startled by a big square-faced dog. The hairy thing growled at me and I leaped to get away, but I tripped and fell forward into a bed of nettles. My hands stung for six hours.
The Giant's Causeway was a spectacular set of headlands made of petrified boilings and natural columns and upright pipe-shaped rocks. Every crack and boulder and contour had a fanciful name. This massive coastal oddity had been caused by the cooling of lava when this part of Ireland had oozed during a period of vulcanism. I walked along it, to and from Dunseverick Castle—"once the home of a man who saw the Crucifixion" (supposed to be Conal Cearnach, a roving Irish wrestler who happened to be in a wrestling match in Jerusalem the day Christ was crucified).
The basalt cliffs were covered with black slugs and jackdaws, and at seven in the evening the sun broke through the clouds as powerfully as a sunrise, striping the sea in pink. It was very quiet. The wind had dropped. No insects, no cars, no planes — only a flock of sheep baaing in a meadow on a nearby hilltop. The coves and bays were crowded with diving gulls and fulmars, but the cliffs were so deep, they contained the birds' squawks. The sun gleamed on the still sea, and in the west above Inishowen Head I could spy the blue heights of Crocknasmug. Yes, the Giant's Causeway was worth going to see.
It had been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years. Every traveler to Britain had come here to size it up. There had been tram lines out to it, as Mr. Emmett had told me in Bushmills. But the troubles had put an end to this, and now the coast had regained a rough primeval look — just one stall selling postcards, where there had been throngs of noisy shops.
This landscape had shaped the Irish mind and influenced Irish beliefs. It was easy to see these headlands and believe in giants. And now with people too afraid to travel much, the landscape had become monumental once again in its emptiness.
In pagan Ireland cromlechs had been regarded as giants' graves, and people looked closely at the land, never finding it neutral but always a worry or a reassurance. Hereabouts, there were caves that had been the homes of troglodytes. And it seemed to me that there was something in the present desolation that had made the landscape important again. So the Irish had been returned to themselves in this interval, and their fears restored to them, for how could they stand amid all this towering beauty and not feel puny?
Enough of these natural wonders, I thought, and at the hotel that night I buttonholed Mr. McClune from Ballywalter. "Oh, I like Ballywalter! Oh, yes, Ballywalter's pleasant, it is! We only get the odd bomb in Ballywalter!"
But he was worried about his sister.
"My suster is going down to Cavan this weekend. I don't unvy her. She's a Protestant girl, you see."
"Where is Cavan exactly?"
"In the Free State," Mr. McClune said.
I smiled; it was like calling Thailand "Siam," or Iran "Persia."
"A pig farm," he explained. "I mean to say, that's where my suster's staying. Now at this piggery there's a foreman. He is a member of the IRA."
"I see why you're worried," I said.
"But that could be a good thing, couldn't it?" he said. "It could keep her safe."
He meant that no one from the IRA would murder his sister, because a man from the IRA was employed by his sister's friends.
"We'll see what hoppens," he said.
We were having coffee at the Causeway Hotel, sitting in front of the fire. We were the only two guests. An Ulster conversation could be very restful. I was never asked personal questions. People talked, in general, on harmless subjects, unless I took the plunge. Mr. McClune, who was seventy-three and very wealthy — he had a Jaguar out front — said he had been to Australia and Canada and California.
"But I've never set futt on the continent of Europe," he said. "And I've got no desire to."
I said I was going to Londonderry.
"I haven't been to Derry for thirty-three years."
The next morning I walked back to Portrush. I passed a signboard indicating the way to Blagh. It was eight-fifteen and there were no cars on the road, and very quiet except for the birds — crows and finches. I kept walking, toward the train. It was green as far as I could see, and I could see twenty miles up the lovely coast.
16. The 10:23 to Londonderry
THE "TROUBLES" — that quaint Ultonian word for murder and mayhem — had something to do with the Irish differences between men and women here, I was sure. Why, look at this train to Derry. Nearly all the passengers were women, talking in normal voices. The few men on board were either shouting or whispering. The women were neither demure nor brassy; they were plain, frank, and a bit careworn. The men by contrast looked both jaunty and evasive, and they seemed to have nothing whatever to do. Women and men; duty and dereliction. Usually, though, there were only women around, and it seemed all the men had gone away to war — which in a sense was true.
There were always women and girls waiting for buses at crossroads. They were early risers — they walked, they even hitchhiked. I saw them along the coast of Londonderry, the shore of Lough Foyle, from Bellarena to Waterside. It was a country of active women, going shopping or to work, shoveling manure, driving tractors, riding trains.
People in Ulster traveled only when absolutely necessary, so it was significant that women traveled much more than men. Very often the only man on an Ulster bus was the driver. The wife was frequently the breadwinner, particularly in Derry: she was cheaper to employ and more dependable. I was never frightened in a train or a bus. They were seldom attacked, because they were full of women and children. The children could seem almost demented — nowhere in my life had I seen such excitable rowdy kids — but the women were noticeably friendly.
Women had assumed so many domestic and social duties here that a situation had arisen in which the men had no responsibilities. It was idleness as much as religion that made Ulstermen fighting mad. The proof that they were demoralized was the self-hatred in Ulster aggression. What was more self-destructive than a hunger strike? And wasn't it peculiar that the hunger strikers, far from being pacifists, were often very violent men who ought to have known that their captors were eager to be rid of them?
LET THEM DIE was scrawled on the bricks all over Orange Antrim, and ten hunger strikers had recently fasted until death in the Maze Prison. Then there was the so-called Dirty Protest. I could not imagine a preoccupied and overworked Irishwoman dreaming up this loony tactic. But it was easy to see how a maddened and self-hating Irishman might decide to act out his frustration by smearing the walls of his prison cell with his own shit, and refusing to wear clothes or have a bath or a haircut. "Take that!" they cried, and pigged it in those cells for months, innocently believing they were getting even with the British government by stinking to heaven.