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

But he was worried about his sister.

"My suster is going down to Cavan this weekend. I don't unvy her. She's a Protestant girl, you see."

"Where is Cavan exactly?"

"In the Free State," Mr. McClune said.

I smiled; it was like calling Thailand "Siam," or Iran "Persia."

"A pig farm," he explained. "I mean to say, that's where my suster's staying. Now at this piggery there's a foreman. He is a member of the IRA."

"I see why you're worried," I said.

"But that could be a good thing, couldn't it?" he said. "It could keep her safe."

He meant that no one from the IRA would murder his sister, because a man from the IRA was employed by his sister's friends.

"We'll see what hoppens," he said.

We were having coffee at the Causeway Hotel, sitting in front of the fire. We were the only two guests. An Ulster conversation could be very restful. I was never asked personal questions. People talked, in general, on harmless subjects, unless I took the plunge. Mr. McClune, who was seventy-three and very wealthy — he had a Jaguar out front — said he had been to Australia and Canada and California.

"But I've never set futt on the continent of Europe," he said. "And I've got no desire to."

I said I was going to Londonderry.

"I haven't been to Derry for thirty-three years."

The next morning I walked back to Portrush. I passed a signboard indicating the way to Blagh. It was eight-fifteen and there were no cars on the road, and very quiet except for the birds — crows and finches. I kept walking, toward the train. It was green as far as I could see, and I could see twenty miles up the lovely coast.

THE "TROUBLES" — that quaint Ultonian word for murder and mayhem — had something to do with the Irish differences between men and women here, I was sure. Why, look at this train to Derry. Nearly all the passengers were women, talking in normal voices. The few men on board were either shouting or whispering. The women were neither demure nor brassy; they were plain, frank, and a bit careworn. The men by contrast looked both jaunty and evasive, and they seemed to have nothing whatever to do. Women and men; duty and dereliction. Usually, though, there were only women around, and it seemed all the men had gone away to war — which in a sense was true.

There were always women and girls waiting for buses at crossroads. They were early risers — they walked, they even hitchhiked. I saw them along the coast of Londonderry, the shore of Lough Foyle, from Bellarena to Waterside. It was a country of active women, going shopping or to work, shoveling manure, driving tractors, riding trains.

People in Ulster traveled only when absolutely necessary, so it was significant that women traveled much more than men. Very often the only man on an Ulster bus was the driver. The wife was frequently the breadwinner, particularly in Derry: she was cheaper to employ and more dependable. I was never frightened in a train or a bus. They were seldom attacked, because they were full of women and children. The children could seem almost demented — nowhere in my life had I seen such excitable rowdy kids — but the women were noticeably friendly.

Women had assumed so many domestic and social duties here that a situation had arisen in which the men had no responsibilities. It was idleness as much as religion that made Ulstermen fighting mad. The proof that they were demoralized was the self-hatred in Ulster aggression. What was more self-destructive than a hunger strike? And wasn't it peculiar that the hunger strikers, far from being pacifists, were often very violent men who ought to have known that their captors were eager to be rid of them?

LET THEM DIE was scrawled on the bricks all over Orange Antrim, and ten hunger strikers had recently fasted until death in the Maze Prison. Then there was the so-called Dirty Protest. I could not imagine a preoccupied and overworked Irishwoman dreaming up this loony tactic. But it was easy to see how a maddened and self-hating Irishman might decide to act out his frustration by smearing the walls of his prison cell with his own shit, and refusing to wear clothes or have a bath or a haircut. "Take that!" they cried, and pigged it in those cells for months, innocently believing they were getting even with the British government by stinking to heaven.

I thought: This behavior is so strange, there's probably no name for it. But surely it was in a way profoundly childlike? This was how small children behaved when they felt angry and abandoned, when they wanted to be pitied.

At home these men were treated by their overworked womenfolk as if they were forever boys and burdens. The shame or guilt this dependency inspired made the men aggressive; but they had all the time in the world to ventilate their aggression. Religion was hardly a restraining force. Irish Catholicism was one long litany of mother imagery and mother worship, which only bolstered the odd family pattern; and Irish Protestantism seemed mainly to be based on a tribal memory of bloody battles, remembered with special relish in the all-male Orange Lodges.

I did not believe that it was religion as Christian doctrine that was at the bottom of it all. Ulster was a collection of secret societies, to which only men were admitted. The men dressed up, made rules, beat drums, swore oaths, invented handshakes and passwords, and crept into the dark and killed people. When they were done, they returned home to their women, like small children to their mothers.

Anyway, this was how it seemed to me in Londonderry.

***

From a distance, Derry was lovely and familiar. It looked like a mill town in Massachusetts — churches and factories piled up on both banks of a river, the same sort of tenements, the same sleepy air of bankruptcy. But up close, Derry was frightful.

Some Ulster towns inspired fear the way a man with an ugly face frightens a stranger: their scars implied violence. Derry was a scarred city of broken windows and barricades; it was patterned with danger zones, and every few blocks there was a frontier: the Waterside, the Bogside, the Creggan, and all the disputed territories among them. And it was possible to tell, from the damage and the slogans, that this was the principal killing ground of Ulster, FUCK THE POPE was scrawled at the Protestant end of the Craigavon Bridge, and at the Catholic end, FUCK THE QUEEN, and now and then corpses were found bobbing in the pretty River Foyle, which ran beneath the bridge. Derry was also the headquarters of the most violent of the nationalist factions, the Irish National Liberation Army. It made the IRA seem a party of dear old Paddys, twinkling and fiddling in the Celtic twilight. By contrast the INLA was heartless and unsentimental — eager to establish a reputation for cruel tenacity. It was always easy to spot an INLA slogan on a Derry wall: PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR FIREPOWER.

The geniality and filth of Derry, and its state of siege, made the city an interesting muddle. Here were old geezers being shifty and jaunty in an Irish way, and over there the British soldiers were tense and watchful and stiff with starch. They crouched in doorways, peering, rifles poised, while the women gathered at Foyle's Pork Store (nothing but sausages and hams) and the men strolled into the betting shop. The soldiers meant business. They wore helmets and face masks and they traveled in armored cars; they moved singly, covering each other; all their vehicles had wire skirts beneath the chassis so that fire bombs could not be rolled under them.

While I was in Derry the annual Foyle Festival was on. It was one of the paradoxes of Ulster that for many life continued as usual, and that everything happened at once — the festival concert and talent show and bicycle race and cooking exhibit, along with mass frisking, soldier patrols, bomb threats, and arrests. There was the traditional football game and a festival art exhibition; and on the opening day there was a grotesque killing.