Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

It was the setting that was solemn, not the people. (But solemn was an understatement; Ulster looked black and devastated.) The people were curious — they stared, they smiled, they talked loud and still managed to be polite. The women, most of all, seemed to me remarkable — just the way they stood and spoke, their decisive gestures, their spirit. It was true of girls, as well. They seemed bold and friendly and able to take care of themselves.

These were judgments I made on the train from Lame to Belfast. It was a warm and rattly branch-line train, with bushes on the embankment beating against the door handles, and bog ferns sliding across the wet windows.

I was talking to Dick Flattery. "It's not a civil war," he was saying. "The Catholics and Protestants kill each other, but they haven't actually fought each other—"

Now who would have thought you could make such useful distinctions between "fight" and "kill"?

"— they kill each other singly," he went on, "but they fight the army and the police."

Flattery seemed intelligent and detached. He had left Belfast seven years before, for good; he was returning now only because his father was ill. He wasn't planning to stay. He was frightened by the violence.

"It started as a civil rights issue, ten or eleven years ago" — he meant the marches, the first one in Londonderry in 1969—"and then it got violent. No one talks about civil rights anymore."

He swiftly referred to Catholics as "they," and I knew he must be a Protestant. I asked him whether he could tell a Catholic from a Protestant.

"The Protestants are from Scottish stock," Flattery said. "They look Scottish."

We were traveling along Larne Lough — dark water, dark banks, and the dark rain falling fast. We were talking about poverty.

"There's always been unemployment here," he said. "There's not the same stigma attached to it that you find in England. People here aren't lost when they're on the dole. It's really a kind of chronic condition — groups of men standing on the street, doing nothing." He looked out the window. "God, I hate this place."

Now we were smack on the coast, leaving Whitehaven and swaying toward Carrickfergus on a narrow shelf just above the sea, and then,

The little boats beneath the Norman castle

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind

and the halt.

Louis MacNeice grew up in Carrickfergus, but it was not only his poem about that town that seemed to me clear-sighted — all his Ulster poems were vivid and true. And he wrote so well about the sea, sometimes as a tumultuous thing ("Upon this beach the falling wall of the sea…") and sometimes as a fussbudget ("That never-satisfied old maid, the sea / Rehangs her white lace curtains ceaselessly"), and ultimately in its cosmic and thalassic sense ("By a high star our course is set, / Our end is life. Put out to sea").

He had looked out to sea here, beyond Belfast Lough into the North Channel, and he had certainly been on this train, or else he could not have written, "Like crucifixes the gantries stand," seeing the shipyard at Belfast.

I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face — moldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences. Every building that was worth blowing up was guarded by a man with a metal detector who frisked people entering and checked their bags. It happened everywhere, even at dingy entrances, at buildings that were not worth blowing up, and, again and again, at the bus station, the railway station. Like the bombs themselves, the routine was frightening, then fascinating, then maddening, and then a bore — but it went on and became a part of the great waste motion of Ulster life. And security looked like parody, because the whole place was already scorched and broken with bomb blasts.

It was so awful, I wanted to stay. It was a city which was so demented and sick that some aliens mistook its desperate frenzy for a sign of health, never knowing it was a death agony. It had always been a hated city. "There is no aristocracy — no culture — no grace — no leisure worthy of the name," Sean O'Faolain wrote in his Irish Journey. "It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor." But if what people said was true, that it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?

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.