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

On the country bus to Newcastle I kept glimpsing the Mourae Mountains. They were sudden and unusual in the gentle landscape. Farther east the land was stony, and the mountains, which had looked blue from Katesbridge, were pale green, and bare, smooth, bulgy, and undulant, like a naked giantess lying in a green sleeping bag.

Newcastle lay beneath the high peak of Slieve Donard, and it was empty. In pretty places like this I got the full flavor of Ulster desolation: no one at the beach or in the park; no one promenading on the Promenade; no parked cars, because there was a bomb law against it; no one in the shops; and only one couple in the Chinese restaurant. Bright and bleak, the sunlit ghost towns of the Ulster coast!

Scrawled on a building in Newcastle was the slogan VIVA ARGENTINA. It was the first time in my traveling that I had seen a graffito in support of Argentina in the Falklands War. The irony was that the day I saw it was the day the British army entered Port Stanley, forcing the Argentines to surrender. The next morning's newspapers all had the same headline: VICTORY!

THE BRITISH VICTORY in the Falklands was not celebrated in County Down. The people I spoke to were perplexed and bitter. "Too many men had to die for that," Mr. Hackett told me in Newcastle. "Yes, I saw the papers," Constance Kelly said in Castlewellan, "but we're too busy with our own troubles to take an interest in that pile of rocks in the South Atlantic." And a man named Flannagan in Downpatrick said, "What about the lads getting killed here? There was a bomb in town not long ago, but none of the English papers printed a story saying, 'Tim Flannagan took a light head and is far from well at the moment.'"

I caught the school bus — it was the only one at that early hour — and went to Castlewellan with the yelling boys and the womanly girls of St. Malachy's. I was hardly thirty miles from Belfast, but instead of heading straight there, I took a roundabout route on the coastal side of the Ards Peninsula. I was making for Bangor and the train to Belfast. It was a June day of suffocating dampness, the brown sky like a mass of raveled wool, threatening rain.

Walking out of Downpatrick, where I had just met Tim Flannagan, I was thinking about the Falklands and the attitude here. What about us? the Ulstermen said. Catholic and Protestant alike objected to the attention given to the far-off Falklands and their seventeen hundred inhabitants (who, at that time, were not even full citizens of Britain). I came to a war memorial on the outskirts of the town, with a slab inscribed with the lines:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

What fascinated me was that the verse portrayed the advantage of dying young — being spared the fatigue and weakness of old age. The poet, Laurence Binyon, was English, but this was a very Irish sentiment. It seemed to me that the real problem in Ulster — and the reason there were so many bloody killings — was that everyone believed in an afterlife.

It was nine miles to Strangford. I walked to Milestone Seven, and then the rain started. I did not mind the rain, but the thunder growl worried me. I was on an open road between flat fields — no village, no trees, no shelter. I decided to hitchhike.

This was Ulster, and hitchhikers here often hijacked the car and kicked the driver into the road (the bombers and gunmen nearly always used stolen cars), and yet I got a ride from the second car that passed.

Mr. Hurley was a Strangford man. It was a mixed community, he said, and he was proud to say they all worked together.

"Of course, there's extremist groups operating in the area," Mr. Hurley said. "And there's political parties. And there's clubs and lodges. Now out of all that lot, you'd think one of them would reflect my thinking, wouldn't you? But none of them does. I think if we had better leadership we'd get somewhere."

He said he had worked in London as a plumber's mate.

"Three years in London and for the whole of that time no one asked me my religion. That's what I liked about London."

Strangford was about five streets — fifty families, no more — and a ferry landing. I crossed the harbor mouth on a ferry to the neat and rather formal village of Portaferry. It was unusual in Ulster to find a village with no graffiti, no bomb damage, no broken windows, no blasted buildings; and Portaferry was almost like that — the only sign of fanaticism was a blasted church.

"It's a wee pretty little town," a man said to me. "You should see it with the sun shining in the square."

It was still raining very hard. He said Portaferry was famous for its offshore whirlpools.

I said I was not staying here but was going on to Portavogie.

"I'm after coming from Portavogie meself," he said. "And how are ye getting there?"

I said I would either walk or hitchhike.

"I'll take ye," he said. "I have to go home for me lunch."

His name was Cosmo Shields, and he said his bus was just around the corner. I was surprised to see that this was no euphemism: a big empty bus was parked on the next road. This was his bus, he said. He had done his morning run from Newtonards and now he was going to lunch. He took the bus home, because he had an afternoon run up to Kirkcubbin and Belfast. Not long ago there had been sixteen buses on this peninsula, but as the drivers had died—"Most of them took heart attacks" — the buses were phased out.

It was not that people had cars nowadays, Cosmo Shields said. It was that they did not have any money and it was not safe to travel.

He had been lucky, he said. He had been driving for thirty-three years — he had driven double-deckers down these country lanes. But in all that time, making two trips a day into Belfast, he had had trouble only twice: both times he was stoned and the windows broken in the Short Strand district.

"Aye, but it wasn't me they was throwing stones at. They'd have thrown stones at the bus if you'd been driving it. It's the bus, see. Government property." He drove with his elbows on the wheel. He was a stocky man in his late fifties. He had not collected any fare from me. This was not a service run, he said. "Mind you, I've had plenty of trouble with drunks. And children."

I said, "The kids seem very jumpy."

"They're more destructful than ever they were!" Mr. Shields said. "They've got destruction in their heads. Aye, there's talk. People are worried about Ulster children nowadays." Mr. Shields swung his whole body over, and taking his eyes off the road for five dramatic seconds, he said, "Aye, the wee kids see what's going on."

We were just then entering Portavogie. It was attractive in the same way as Portaferry — no bomb craters, no hysteria, and an air of normality. High-sided trawlers were moored at the fish docks, discharging cratefuls of herrings and prawns.

Cosmo Shields was still grunting darkly. I guessed he was thinking about the destructive kids.

He said, "Aye, the way things are going, it'll hoppon soon, like."

"Pardon?"

"The end of the world." He was nodding with certainty now. "Aye, I reckon the end of the world is not far off"—

And in the same breath:

"— shall I take you up to Ballywalter?"

***

It was my walking and hitching up that coast to Bangor that made me modify my opinion of Ulster. Part of the society was wild, and religious mania only made that wildness worse — martyr-mad and eager to chant "Anti-Christ! Anti-Christ!" (as Doctor Paisley's congregation had done to the Pope in England just a few weeks before). It was an old society, with a long memory and no nose at all for the future—1690 was considered just yesterday by people who were not sure whether they had their busfare home tonight.