He said he had worked in London as a plumber's mate.
"Three years in London and for the whole of that time no one asked me my religion. That's what I liked about London."
Strangford was about five streets — fifty families, no more — and a ferry landing. I crossed the harbor mouth on a ferry to the neat and rather formal village of Portaferry. It was unusual in Ulster to find a village with no graffiti, no bomb damage, no broken windows, no blasted buildings; and Portaferry was almost like that — the only sign of fanaticism was a blasted church.
"It's a wee pretty little town," a man said to me. "You should see it with the sun shining in the square."
It was still raining very hard. He said Portaferry was famous for its offshore whirlpools.
I said I was not staying here but was going on to Portavogie.
"I'm after coming from Portavogie meself," he said. "And how are ye getting there?"
I said I would either walk or hitchhike.
"I'll take ye," he said. "I have to go home for me lunch."
His name was Cosmo Shields, and he said his bus was just around the corner. I was surprised to see that this was no euphemism: a big empty bus was parked on the next road. This was his bus, he said. He had done his morning run from Newtonards and now he was going to lunch. He took the bus home, because he had an afternoon run up to Kirkcubbin and Belfast. Not long ago there had been sixteen buses on this peninsula, but as the drivers had died—"Most of them took heart attacks" — the buses were phased out.
It was not that people had cars nowadays, Cosmo Shields said. It was that they did not have any money and it was not safe to travel.
He had been lucky, he said. He had been driving for thirty-three years — he had driven double-deckers down these country lanes. But in all that time, making two trips a day into Belfast, he had had trouble only twice: both times he was stoned and the windows broken in the Short Strand district.
"Aye, but it wasn't me they was throwing stones at. They'd have thrown stones at the bus if you'd been driving it. It's the bus, see. Government property." He drove with his elbows on the wheel. He was a stocky man in his late fifties. He had not collected any fare from me. This was not a service run, he said. "Mind you, I've had plenty of trouble with drunks. And children."
I said, "The kids seem very jumpy."
"They're more destructful than ever they were!" Mr. Shields said. "They've got destruction in their heads. Aye, there's talk. People are worried about Ulster children nowadays." Mr. Shields swung his whole body over, and taking his eyes off the road for five dramatic seconds, he said, "Aye, the wee kids see what's going on."
We were just then entering Portavogie. It was attractive in the same way as Portaferry — no bomb craters, no hysteria, and an air of normality. High-sided trawlers were moored at the fish docks, discharging cratefuls of herrings and prawns.
Cosmo Shields was still grunting darkly. I guessed he was thinking about the destructive kids.
He said, "Aye, the way things are going, it'll hoppon soon, like."
"Pardon?"
"The end of the world." He was nodding with certainty now. "Aye, I reckon the end of the world is not far off"—
And in the same breath:
"— shall I take you up to Ballywalter?"
***
It was my walking and hitching up that coast to Bangor that made me modify my opinion of Ulster. Part of the society was wild, and religious mania only made that wildness worse — martyr-mad and eager to chant "Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ!" (as Doctor Paisley's congregation had done to the Pope in England just a few weeks before). It was an old society, with a long memory and no nose at all for the future—1690 was considered just yesterday by people who were not sure whether they had their busfare home tonight.
I had no idea where the cruelty came from. Tennyson said that Irish cruelty was due to a lack of imagination, but other writers had put it down to a strain of anarchy and an evasion of moral worries. The Irish could be glad about the idea of Ireland, but Ulster was a nebulous thing — and wasn't it really nine counties and not six? The people of Ulster, neither Irish nor British, felt lonely and left behind.
It was a society of hard workers who were unemployed. It was a beautiful country that was impossible to live in. It was a society that still had real peasants and real skinflint duchesses, pig farmers, and dowager countesses. And, amazingly in a country where roots went very deep, it had the highest rate of emigration in the world — especially lately: almost 140,000 people had left Ulster in the ten years between 1971 and 1981. It was, most of all, a society with tribal instincts — tribal warfare, tribal kinships, and (common among tribal people) a sense of isolation that inspired both suspicion and generosity, particularly toward strangers. They said, "Fuss is better than loneliness."
When I hitchhiked, I was picked up. When I asked questions, they were nearly always answered. I saw signs of violence, but I never felt I was in physical danger. I liked the Ulster curiosity — so different from the English narrowness and fear. I was dressed like a tramp or a bandit, but I was made to feel welcome. "Come home with me and have some lunch!" It was not until I visited Ulster that I received that invitation. I made my way up the bouldery coast to Millisle and walked to Donaghadee, which was rainswept and empty. "You should have been here three weeks ago," I was told in Donaghadee. "The sun was shining. It was lovely and warm. Still. Not to worry. Come in and get your feet up. I'll put the kettle on."
Most of these coastal places were only incidentally seaside resorts. They were small towns with the Irish Sea splashing against them and taking the sewage away and drowning the odd cat. Down there was an empty amusement arcade, an empty café, a fish-and-chip shop, a few broken benches, and a rocky foreshore covered with black seaweed — maybe kelp, maybe tar: it made no difference; no one swam.
"Come back in a few weeks," I was told.
"Is that when the season starts?"
"No. Just the one day. Orange Day."
"I'll make a note in my diary," I said.
"The twalth."
***
I walked via Groomsport to Bangor. Bangor resembled a certain kind of English coastal town. It was a little like Bexhill and a little like Dawlish; it was elderly and respectable and cliffy, and in a tawdry-genteel way it had a comic air of pretension that was rare in Ulster. But that was at the better end of Bangor. At the other end it was just as desolate and friendly as everywhere else. Some of Bangor served as a refuge for the fairly well-off, the businessmen and professional people who worked in Belfast but could not bear to live there. So Bangor was safer but a great deal duller than any other town its size in Ulster, including Newcastle, which did no more than gape like an oyster.
It was a sign of Bangor's relative quietness that there was no security check at the railway station. I took the 15:53 one day — all the trains went west; Bangor was the end of the line — and after a few miles it was like any suburb in England with old and new semidetached houses, rose gardens, and high hostile fences. Now I was passing along the southern part of Belfast Lough, and at Carnalea I could see the towns of Carrickfergus and Whitehead across the bay. I had almost completed my circular tour of Ulster.
The rain came down. In places there were meadows to the sea. Helen's Bay railway station was designed by Lord Dufferin as a mock fortification, with arrow slits in the towers and castellated walls — the Irish aristocracy seemed to me more foolish and artless than the peasantry. It was here in Helen's Bay and farther on at Cultra and Marino that people said, "I've never seen a riot nor heard a bomb, and I don't think I ever shall."