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

He said he did not know about that. His name was Desmond Corkery, and he guessed I was from the United States. He wished he were there himself, he did. He was after coming from Belfast, he was, and was there a more bloody miserable place in the whole of creation? And dangerous? Policemen and soldiers everywhere — and they talked about Lebanon and the flaming Falklands!

I guessed that Corkery was a Catholic. I asked him my usual question: How do you tell a Protestant from a Catholic? He said it was easy — it was the way a Protestant talked; he was better educated. "If he's using fancy words, you can be sure—"

And then Corkery became reflective and said, "Ah, but you're never really safe. You go into a bar, and you don't know whether it's a Protestant or Catholic bar. It can be frightening, it can, sure. You don't say anything. You call for your beer and you keep your mouth shut, and then you go."

But I began to think that it was an advantage to be a stranger here, not English, not Irish; and it was a great advantage to be an American. I never felt the Ulster people to be reticent or suspicious — on the contrary, it was hard to shut them up.

"And it was around here," Desmond Corkery was saying — we were past Ballymoney and headed into Coleraine; I had been encouraging Corkery to tell me a story of religious persecution—"just about here, that a bloody great team of footballers started to walk up and down the train. They were drinking beer and shouting, 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Up and down the train. 'Bloody Fenian bastards!' Looking for Catholics, they were. One comes up to me and says straight out, 'You're a bloody Fenian bastard!'"

I shook my head. I said it was terrible. I asked him what he did then.

"I said no." Corkery looked grim.

"You told him you weren't a Catholic?"

"Sure I had to."

"Did he believe you?"

"I suppose he did," Corkery said. "He slammed the door and went roaring off."

We traveled in silence along the River Bann, and I thought how that denial must have hurt his pride, and it seemed to me that it was this sort of humiliation that made the troubles in Ulster a routine of bullying cowardice. It was all old grievances, and vengeance in the dark. That was why the ambush was popular, and the car bomb, and the exploding soap box, and the letter bomb. The idea was to deny what you stood for and then wait until dark to get even with the bugger who made you deny it.

***

It was drizzling at Coleraine, where I boarded a two-coach train to Portrush, a small seaside resort, emptier than any I had so far seen in Britain. But emptiness had given the place its dignity back: Portrush was rainswept and poor, and part of it was on a narrow peninsula with waves breaking on three sides.

The rain intimidated me for an hour or so. I had lunch with a man named Tubby Graham — there were only the two of us in the restaurant. Tubby was seventy and from Bangor. He liked motoring around, he said. "But I stay out of those ghetto places. Bushmills, for example — that's a completely Protestant town. And Derry's a Catholic one." He recommended Magilligan Point. Did I want a lift?

I said I had other plans, and when he was gone I sneaked down the beach and started walking toward Bushmills to see what a Protestant ghetto looked like. It was still raining, but I thought that if I kept walking, it might stop; and so it did, by the time I reached Dunluce Castle, three miles away. I walked along the sandy beach — not a soul in sight. And the cliffs were like battlements, made of white chalk with flint embedded in it. The only sounds were the gulls and the wind.

Farther on I climbed the cliff and walked through the wet grass to Bushmills. The more prosperous a place was in Ulster, the sterner and more forbidding it looked. Bushmills, rich on whiskey, was made of flat rocks and black slates and was cemented to the edges of straight roads. And now I saw what Tubby meant: the Orange Hall was large enough to hold every man in town.

I began to develop a habit of asking directions, for the pleasure of listening to them.

"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!"