The most popular page at Mrs. McCreadie's was the one — or sometimes two — that contained the In Memoriams. It made me think that there was a sort of cult of death in Ulster. There certainly was one in Derry. It was not merely a list of obituaries, saying "So-and-so died yesterday"; it was a sheaf of tributes to people who had died years ago. "nth Anniversary," one read, and another, "15th Anniversary," and I saw one that commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of a parent's death. And with each tribute was a poem:
The mother is someone special, patient, kind and true,
No other friend in all the world will be the same as you.
Or,
Sweet are those memories, silently kept,
Of a mother I loved and will never forget.
Or,
We never fail to think of you
We never cease to care
We only wish we could go home
And find you sitting there.
There were hundreds of these in the paper every day, often a dozen or so to the same person, invoking the prayers of St. Columba — the sixth-century Irish missionary — and "Mary, Queen of Ireland." The Virgin Mary had been elevated to the Irish throne. Mothera God, as Mrs. McCreadie said.
There were always tributes to men who had been killed in the Irish cause. This one was typicaclass="underline"
4th Anniversary
Vol. Dennis Heaney
Shot dead by'S.A.S. on 10th June, 1978
"Life springs from death; and from the graves
of patriot men and women spring living nations."
Proudly remembered by [a long list of names]
Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him
St. Columba, pray for him
Mary Queen of Ireland, pray for us
One day I left Mrs. McCreadie's and kept walking. It was a lovely morning — clear skies and warm sunshine. I walked on a boggy path along the River Mourne, which was the border between Eire and Ulster — though you would never have known it. The grass was just as spectacularly green on this bank as on that one. I walked ten miles, and the weather changed. The rain came down, flattening the buttercups in the fields. So I caught a bus into Strabane.
Strabane was said to be the poorest town in Europe — it had the highest murder rate for its size, and the highest unemployment rate, and the fewest pigs, and the dimmest prospects. It was smack on the border, and it had the curiously unfinished look of a frontier town — like a house with one wall missing. It was sorry-looking, with men propped against storefronts, whistling, and a number of cracked windows. But it was not noticeably more decrepit than other towns I had seen in Ulster. I considered staying the night, but the Control Zone and all the soldiers and police complicated the mildest stroll. And when I thought it over, I decided that I had seen few places on earth more depressing than Strabane in the rain.
The day after I left Strabane a man walked out of a motor accessory shop where he worked. He was thirty-nine, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment — a hated paramilitary force that had come into existence when the Protestant B-Specials were disbanded. A car drew up; the man was shot four times; the car sped away. The man died immediately. He was the one hundred and twenty-third UDR man to be gunned down since the regiment was formed ten years before.
Every town and village was deserted by six or six-thirty, and it was eerie, because the summer evenings were often sunlit and long, and the desertion was obvious.
"There's a dread of trouble," Sean McLaughlin said. He lived in Omagh, where I went after Strabane. Omagh was also funereal. But Sean's solution was to get out of town on a bus to Belcoo, on the border of Eire. There was a fleadhceoil being held there that weekend — a "flah," he called it — a festival of fiddles and flutes and concertinas. Sean got on the bus, with only his fiddle for baggage. He said that three days of drinking and singing in Belcoo would put him right.
That was the real paradox of Ireland. The dimple-chinned fiddler heading down the road to the "flah" at Belcoo — as warm-hearted and unsuspicious an Irishman as ever plucked a shamrock; and on the same bus as Sean (though I did not speak to him until we got to Enniskillen), the gray-browed Morris Grady Smith, who also knew Belcoo.
"I was driving out of Belcoo towards Garrison in the van." (Morris worked for the Public Works Department in Enniskillen.) "There were eight of us in the van, and I was at the wheel as usual. Suddenly there was a blue flash right in front of me. The windscreen burst open and all the glass fell on me. It was an explosion, and then there was shots! I kept driving, though I felt some pain in my arm. I was shot seven times, but the bullets just passed through my arm — not one of them struck a bone!"
He offered to show me his scars, but I said that I believed his story. He kept talking.
"Three of my men were dead — hit with small slugs from an M-Sixty rifle. One of the men was a Catholic. See, they were shooting across the border — that Belcoo-to-Garrison road passes right along the border. They must have mistook our van for an army vehicle and thought we were soldiers. We were just men with shovels, fixing the potholes in the road."
***
Someday all cities will look like this, I had thought in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a Control Zone, with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the Control Zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large Control Zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.
In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the Bomb Squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens — an appropriate Gaelic word — but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car seemed to have a person in it: How were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?
Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately — no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.
"What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him."
He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families — the wife and children watching.
I asked him how he felt about it.
He said in the same even voice, "Why, you wouldn't do it to a dog."
"So what do you think of these gunmen?"
"I hate them," he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were taken for granted.