I could not see it, I said.
"Aye," he said. "It got blew up four months ago. But this is where it used to be."
It had been bombed one Sunday night. Mr. Cleary had heard the explosion himself in his kitchen. He asked where I was going.
"Newry," I said.
"Ah, that's all right then. The train doesn't go to Newry."
He meant I need not have troubled myself. Anyway, the train was gone. It went to Dundalk in the Republic: it didn't stop for twenty-five miles.
Why didn't the train stop anywhere? I asked.
"No necessity. No one goes to Newry."
Sean O'Faolain had written of being in Portadown in the 1940s and asking a man, "What is the outstanding characteristic of this town — a typical Ulster town — compared with any typical southern town?" And the man had replied, "I'll tull ye. No Jew ever made a living here or in Ballymena."
I told this to Mr. Cleary and he said, "Aye. That's true, right enough."
There was no quick way out of Portadown, and it was a dreary place. I wanted to go to Newry and then Kilkeel and continue up the coast. People said: Don't go to Newry — it's bandit country there, sure it is. I'm after coming there meself and I'm surprised I'm still alive, like.
"Aw, if they'd listened to Joe Gibson we'd still have a railway station," a man named McGrane told me. "But they didn't believe him. He's daft, see. 'I seen the kyar!' he says. He was trying to warn them. But he's sort of screwy. They just laughed, and then bang!"
"Who did it?" I said.
"No one took credit for it. Could have been anyone," McGrane said. "Take your pick. We've got the IRA, the Provos, the INLA, and Provisional Sinn Fein. There's the UDA, the UVF, the UFF, the Tartan Army, and Paisley's Third Force. There's also common criminals. There's people cashing in on the violence. There's bloody kids. There's too many, if you ask me."
McGrane was against union with the Republic: "If a woman don't want any more kids, the priest will come round and tell her not to take any conthra-conthra-conthrathep—" He winced, trying to say the word.
I said, "I get the point."
Thomas B. Mules was very fat and had small close-set eyes. He had stopped smoking only a few months before, because he could no longer afford it. He had gained forty pounds and now weighed two hundred and thirty.
Mr. Mules said, "Don't go to Newry."
"Why not?"
"Tis a Provo town," he whispered, edging nearer.
"So?"
"Talking English," he said. "Asking questions," he said. "Dey'll take ye for an SAS man," he said. "Dey'll cull ye."
"Cull" seemed somehow worse than "kill." It was like being noiselessly dispatched forever.
Mr. Mules said, "Go to Newcastle."
So I went to Newcastle, via Gilford and Banbridge, on more country buses ("Missus, please take yer chayld…").
All municipal buildings were protected in an unusual way. They were not merely fenced in — they were enclosed in cages that occasionally rose over the top of the buildings. They had elaborate gates and barbed wire, and the mesh was very fine. They made the police stations and telephone exchanges and all the other likely targets bombproof. It was strange to see such heavy security in what were otherwise sleepy country towns, and also strange — in the face of such ugly fortifications — to be told "Aye, but it's very quiet here, really."
In Banbridge I wrote in my diary: Over a week in N. Ireland pestering people with questions and I still haven't met a real bigot.
Because Banbridge was on the main road from Eire to Belfast, there were a number of checkpoints just south of town. Some were manned by the jug-eared volunteers of the Ulster Defence Regiment ("Open yer boot—") and some by the Royal Ulster Constabulary ("Have you ever been in the North before?"), and some by British soldiers ("Carrying a gun?").
On the country bus to Newcastle I kept glimpsing the Mourae Mountains. They were sudden and unusual in the gentle landscape. Farther east the land was stony, and the mountains, which had looked blue from Katesbridge, were pale green, and bare, smooth, bulgy, and undulant, like a naked giantess lying in a green sleeping bag.
Newcastle lay beneath the high peak of Slieve Donard, and it was empty. In pretty places like this I got the full flavor of Ulster desolation: no one at the beach or in the park; no one promenading on the Promenade; no parked cars, because there was a bomb law against it; no one in the shops; and only one couple in the Chinese restaurant. Bright and bleak, the sunlit ghost towns of the Ulster coast!
Scrawled on a building in Newcastle was the slogan VIVA ARGENTINA. It was the first time in my traveling that I had seen a graffito in support of Argentina in the Falklands War. The irony was that the day I saw it was the day the British army entered Port Stanley, forcing the Argentines to surrender. The next morning's newspapers all had the same headline: VICTORY!
17. The 15:53 to Belfast
THE BRITISH VICTORY in the Falklands was not celebrated in County Down. The people I spoke to were perplexed and bitter. "Too many men had to die for that," Mr. Hackett told me in Newcastle. "Yes, I saw the papers," Constance Kelly said in Castlewellan, "but we're too busy with our own troubles to take an interest in that pile of rocks in the South Atlantic." And a man named Flannagan in Downpatrick said, "What about the lads getting killed here? There was a bomb in town not long ago, but none of the English papers printed a story saying, 'Tim Flannagan took a light head and is far from well at the moment.'"
I caught the school bus — it was the only one at that early hour — and went to Castlewellan with the yelling boys and the womanly girls of St. Malachy's. I was hardly thirty miles from Belfast, but instead of heading straight there, I took a roundabout route on the coastal side of the Ards Peninsula. I was making for Bangor and the train to Belfast. It was a June day of suffocating dampness, the brown sky like a mass of raveled wool, threatening rain.
Walking out of Downpatrick, where I had just met Tim Flannagan, I was thinking about the Falklands and the attitude here. What about us? the Ulstermen said. Catholic and Protestant alike objected to the attention given to the far-off Falklands and their seventeen hundred inhabitants (who, at that time, were not even full citizens of Britain). I came to a war memorial on the outskirts of the town, with a slab inscribed with the lines:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
What fascinated me was that the verse portrayed the advantage of dying young — being spared the fatigue and weakness of old age. The poet, Laurence Binyon, was English, but this was a very Irish sentiment. It seemed to me that the real problem in Ulster — and the reason there were so many bloody killings — was that everyone believed in an afterlife.
It was nine miles to Strangford. I walked to Milestone Seven, and then the rain started. I did not mind the rain, but the thunder growl worried me. I was on an open road between flat fields — no village, no trees, no shelter. I decided to hitchhike.
This was Ulster, and hitchhikers here often hijacked the car and kicked the driver into the road (the bombers and gunmen nearly always used stolen cars), and yet I got a ride from the second car that passed.
Mr. Hurley was a Strangford man. It was a mixed community, he said, and he was proud to say they all worked together.
"Of course, there's extremist groups operating in the area," Mr. Hurley said. "And there's political parties. And there's clubs and lodges. Now out of all that lot, you'd think one of them would reflect my thinking, wouldn't you? But none of them does. I think if we had better leadership we'd get somewhere."