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

"There's a dread of trouble," Sean McLaughlin said. He lived in Omagh, where I went after Strabane. Omagh was also funereal. But Sean's solution was to get out of town on a bus to Belcoo, on the border of Eire. There was a fleadhceoil being held there that weekend — a "flah," he called it — a festival of fiddles and flutes and concertinas. Sean got on the bus, with only his fiddle for baggage. He said that three days of drinking and singing in Belcoo would put him right.

That was the real paradox of Ireland. The dimple-chinned fiddler heading down the road to the "flah" at Belcoo — as warm-hearted and unsuspicious an Irishman as ever plucked a shamrock; and on the same bus as Sean (though I did not speak to him until we got to Enniskillen), the gray-browed Morris Grady Smith, who also knew Belcoo.

"I was driving out of Belcoo towards Garrison in the van." (Morris worked for the Public Works Department in Enniskillen.) "There were eight of us in the van, and I was at the wheel as usual. Suddenly there was a blue flash right in front of me. The windscreen burst open and all the glass fell on me. It was an explosion, and then there was shots! I kept driving, though I felt some pain in my arm. I was shot seven times, but the bullets just passed through my arm — not one of them struck a bone!"

He offered to show me his scars, but I said that I believed his story. He kept talking.

"Three of my men were dead — hit with small slugs from an M-Sixty rifle. One of the men was a Catholic. See, they were shooting across the border — that Belcoo-to-Garrison road passes right along the border. They must have mistook our van for an army vehicle and thought we were soldiers. We were just men with shovels, fixing the potholes in the road."

***

Someday all cities will look like this, I had thought in Belfast; and the same thought occurred to me in Derry and now in Enniskillen. The center of these places was a Control Zone, with an entrance and exit. All cars and all people were examined for weapons or bombs, and the tight security meant that inside the Control Zone life was fairly peaceful and the buildings generally undamaged. It was possible to control the flow of traffic and even to prevent too many people from entering. It was conceivable that this system would in time be adapted to cities that were otherwise uncontrollable. It was not hard to imagine Manhattan Island as one large Control Zone, with various entrances and exits; Ulster suggested to me the likely eventuality of sealed cities in the future.

In Enniskillen each car in the control zone was required to have at least one person in it. If a car was left empty or unattended, a warning siren was sounded and the town center cleared. If the driver was found, he was given a stiff fine; if no driver claimed the car, the Bomb Squad moved in. This system had greatly reduced the number of car bombs in Enniskillen (only ten miles from the border). The last car bomb had gone off two years ago. The nicer part of Church Street was blown to smithereens — an appropriate Gaelic word — but it was a pardonable lapse, the soldiers said. That wired-up car seemed to have a person in it: How were they to recognize the difference between an Ulsterman and a dummy?

Willie McComiskey, who described himself as a fruiterer, told me that Enniskillen had been pretty quiet lately — no bombs, not many fires, only a few ambushed cars.

"What they do, see, is they go to isolated farms near the border. They take the farmer and stand him up and shoot him."

He seemed rather emotionless as he spoke, and he described how the men were sometimes murdered in front of their families — the wife and children watching.

I asked him how he felt about it.

He said in the same even voice, "Why, you wouldn't do it to a dog."

"So what do you think of these gunmen?"

"I hate them," he said. He began to smile. What absurd questions I was asking! But he was uncomfortable stating the obvious. Here, such attitudes were taken for granted.

He said, "We're eighty percent British here. We couldn't have union with southern Ireland. A Protestant would have no chance. He wouldn't get a job."

So McComiskey was a Protestant; that was his emphasis.

"But I don't think the IRA want union now. They don't know what they do want."

From Enniskillen I walked south to Upper Lough Erne, one of the two enormous lakes here in County Fermanagh. The sun came out as I walked, and a milkman I met said, "The weather's being kind to us." There was no sound on these country lanes except the odd squawk of a crow. I found a hotel near the village of Bellanaleck, and now the sun was shining on the green woods and the lake. It was a sixty-room hotel. I thought I was the only guest, but the next day at breakfast I saw two Frenchmen in rubber waders — fishermen.

"I have to check you for bombs," Alice, the room girl, said.

She followed me to my room and then peered uneasily into my knapsack.

"I'm not sure what a bomb looks like," she said.

"You won't find one in there," I said. "It's just old clothes—"

"And books," she said. "And letters."

"No letter bombs."

She said, "I have to check all the same."

I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.

"The English started to believe what they saw on television," Bob Ewart said. "They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!"

He himself was from Nottingham.

"I've lived here fourteen years and I've yet to see an angry man."

That night the movie on television was The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous — like someone saying "Boo!" The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, peoples' hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth — unlike the Hollywood monster movie — it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.

And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas — cattle-maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows' udders.

***

On my map of Lough Erne I saw there was a hotel at Carrybridge, about four miles away by water. The man who let me have a rowboat said, "It's a fair old pull. Your arms are going to be screaming." This was John Joseph Skerry, who hadn't rented out a rowboat for years. He waved to me as I rowed away, down the narrow lake, to have lunch at Carrybridge. I saw herons and terns and curlews and a circling flock of swans. My boat was a shallow dinghy — two hours it took me to row the four miles, and I arrived at the hotel at about three o'clock. "We just closed," the girl at the bar said as I entered. "I can't sell you anything." But I was glad to have a chair. I went into the lounge, where a television was on — a tennis match. "You can't sit here if you're not a resident," a young man said. "You'll have to leave." I went outside and saw that the hotel was the whole of Carrybridge. This was the middle of nowhere, on the lake! It was beautiful, but I was hungry. Then it started to rain. And there among the yellow irises and the cows, on the bridge at Carrybridge, it said, no surrender—1690 and on a pillar, no pope here. I cast off and rowed four miles back, thinking: This is just a row on an Irish lake for me, but it's their whole life.