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

***

There was an army checkpoint down the road at Derrylin. On the way to see it I stopped in local inns, in villages so small they were not on any map. The inns were full of men and boys, and on summer evenings places like Crocknacreevy looked and smelled like Rhodesia, a tough and beautiful colony in the dust.

"They're not farmers," an innkeeper told me. "They're all on the dole. They're not bad, but they've been brought up to behave like cretins. They chuck their cigarette ends on the carpet and grind them in with their boot heels. Farmers don't stay up until all hours drinking. They work hard for their money, so they save it."

The army checkpoint was just a barrier manned by six soldiers, but this road went straight to the border. The soldiers would not talk to me.

Don't talk politics, don't talk religion, people said; but I thought: Ridiculous! What was the point in traveling around Ulster if you avoided those two subjects?

A Protestant named Mortimer gave me a lift and said, "The army are very rough when they first arrive in an area. Those men you saw are paratroopers. They've just got here — that's why they look so nasty. After three or four weeks they'll be a bit more polite."

I asked him whether they harassed people, as the papers reported.

"Aye. They do. Especially if you have some connection with Irish politics — or if they think you have. They come to your house at six in the morning. They don't knock you up — they kick your door off its hinges. Sometimes they tear the place apart."

I said it sounded fairly severe.

He smiled. "It's worse when they take you in. There are lots of stories. Even if they're half-true, they're very bad."

"Have you been arrested?" I asked.

"They don't have to arrest you," Mortimer said. "They take you in."

"And then?"

"Beat you up."

I said, "Maybe you'd be better off without the army?"

"I wouldn't say that. But it can be pretty rough with them." He thought a moment and said, "We get more trouble from the UDR than the army."

"Who's 'we'?"

He said, "Everyone."

I took a bus in an easterly direction to Dungannon. The hills were steep and green and very close together in this part of Tyrone, and in the small town of Clogher they were like green wrinkles on the face of the earth, the ridges of hills, one after another.

Every town looked as though it was expecting trouble at any moment. All the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were armed and alert and seemed nervous. They knew that the suddenness of violence was peculiar to this sort of piecemeal siege: everything happened in seconds.

I made the mistake in Dungannon of going repeatedly through the same checkpoint turnstile. "You again," the policeman's expression said. "Make up your mind — stay in or stay out." He seemed irritated, like a man who has to keep getting up to unlock a door. The town center was completely sealed off and surrounded by police marksmen with automatic rifles.

On the way to Portadown in North Armagh I sat in a bus filled with women and children. It was always the case. The children were hyperactive, jumping on the seats and yelling. One kicked at the window.

"Missus," the driver kept saying, "take that chayld awee from that wunder."

The villages all followed the same pattern: a church, a post office, a manor house, an Orange Hall, a cluster of tiny cottages. There were no strangers here, no city slickers moving in and fixing up the cottages, as they did in Dorset and Devon; and no people who had come here to retire and grow roses, as they did in Sussex and Kent. The old people in Ulster villages had been born in those same villages. They did not move to the coast. They did not move at all. This was a society in which everyone stayed put.

***

Where was the railway station? I asked people in Portadown. They said: Over there, over there. But there was no station; I couldn't see it. Over there, they said. Then Mr. Cleary said, "It's right here."

I could not see it, I said.

"Aye," he said. "It got blew up four months ago. But this is where it used to be."

It had been bombed one Sunday night. Mr. Cleary had heard the explosion himself in his kitchen. He asked where I was going.

"Newry," I said.

"Ah, that's all right then. The train doesn't go to Newry."

He meant I need not have troubled myself. Anyway, the train was gone. It went to Dundalk in the Republic: it didn't stop for twenty-five miles.

Why didn't the train stop anywhere? I asked.

"No necessity. No one goes to Newry."

Sean O'Faolain had written of being in Portadown in the 1940s and asking a man, "What is the outstanding characteristic of this town — a typical Ulster town — compared with any typical southern town?" And the man had replied, "I'll tull ye. No Jew ever made a living here or in Ballymena."

I told this to Mr. Cleary and he said, "Aye. That's true, right enough."

There was no quick way out of Portadown, and it was a dreary place. I wanted to go to Newry and then Kilkeel and continue up the coast. People said: Don't go to Newry — it's bandit country there, sure it is. I'm after coming there meself and I'm surprised I'm still alive, like.

"Aw, if they'd listened to Joe Gibson we'd still have a railway station," a man named McGrane told me. "But they didn't believe him. He's daft, see. 'I seen the kyar!' he says. He was trying to warn them. But he's sort of screwy. They just laughed, and then bang! "

"Who did it?" I said.

"No one took credit for it. Could have been anyone," McGrane said. "Take your pick. We've got the IRA, the Provos, the INLA, and Provisional Sinn Fein. There's the UDA, the UVF, the UFF, the Tartan Army, and Paisley's Third Force. There's also common criminals. There's people cashing in on the violence. There's bloody kids. There's too many, if you ask me."

McGrane was against union with the Republic: "If a woman don't want any more kids, the priest will come round and tell her not to take any conthra-conthra-conthrathep—" He winced, trying to say the word.

I said, "I get the point."

Thomas B. Mules was very fat and had small close-set eyes. He had stopped smoking only a few months before, because he could no longer afford it. He had gained forty pounds and now weighed two hundred and thirty.

Mr. Mules said, "Don't go to Newry."

"Why not?"

"Tis a Provo town," he whispered, edging nearer.

"So?"

"Talking English," he said. "Asking questions," he said. "Dey'll take ye for an SAS man," he said. "Dey'll cull ye."

"Cull" seemed somehow worse than "kill." It was like being noiselessly dispatched forever.

Mr. Mules said, "Go to Newcastle."

So I went to Newcastle, via Gilford and Banbridge, on more country buses ("Missus, please take yer chayld…").

All municipal buildings were protected in an unusual way. They were not merely fenced in — they were enclosed in cages that occasionally rose over the top of the buildings. They had elaborate gates and barbed wire, and the mesh was very fine. They made the police stations and telephone exchanges and all the other likely targets bombproof. It was strange to see such heavy security in what were otherwise sleepy country towns, and also strange — in the face of such ugly fortifications — to be told "Aye, but it's very quiet here, really."

In Banbridge I wrote in my diary: Over a week in N. Ireland pestering people with questions and I still haven't met a real bigot.

Because Banbridge was on the main road from Eire to Belfast, there were a number of checkpoints just south of town. Some were manned by the jug-eared volunteers of the Ulster Defence Regiment ("Open yer boot—") and some by the Royal Ulster Constabulary ("Have you ever been in the North before?"), and some by British soldiers ("Carrying a gun?").