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

The bar at Mooney's was busy all night, filling the whole building with smoke and chatter.

"What time does the bar close?" I asked on my first night.

"October," a drinker told me, and laughed.

One day in Belfast I saw a poster advertising "the world première" of a play called The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty. It sounded political — that was promising; and the author, Martin Lynch, was a local man. It was being staged at the Lyric Players Theatre near the Botanical Gardens and Queens University. I splashed through the rain to buy a ticket — my shoes had been wet for three days! Rain was general all over Ireland, falling on every part of the dark central plain, softening the Bog of Allen and blackening Belfast still more.

It was still raining the night of the world première. But the play drew a good crowd, and I thought afterward I could not have seen a better play. It summed up the mood I had detected in Ulster — farce and tragedy, one turning into the other, one sometimes indistinguishable from the other.

Ambrose Fogarty, a Catholic from the Falls Road, is picked up on suspicion by a British soldier and taken to a police station for questioning. He is kept for three days and given the third degree. Fogarty is innocent; the British soldier is a lecherous, toffee-nosed brute who is contemptuous of Ulster and Ulstermen; two of the policemen are ineffectual; the rest are sadists and bigots. There is another suspect, Willy Lagan, but he is a fool — drunken, feeble-minded, and plucking a guitar; he is as comic as Fogarty is pious.

It was a play about persecution and torture. In places it was crudely written, but it seemed to confirm all the stories I had heard about the intimidation of suspects. Ambrose is asked to sign a confession that he is a member of the IRA and that he has taken part in an armed bank robbery. He refuses to sign — he denies everything. So he is threatened. He still refuses. At last, he is savagely beaten, kicked, choked, and his arm nearly twisted out of its socket. But all the police have succeeded in doing is giving a rather pleasant young man a grievance. The play ends with Fogarty political in a platitudinous way.

The violence was eased somewhat by the presence of the second suspect, Willy, who provided the comic relief by singing off key, appearing to cooperate and then collapsing, pulling faces, and saying everything twice. And he looked ridiculous: he was dressed in a zoot suit and a loud tie and had slicked-down hair — straight out of the American fifties. But he was too ridiculous, and really wasn't it all preposterous — Ambrose too innocent, Willy too bizarre?

"What do you think?" I was asked afterward by a lady in the foyer, as I was having a pint of Guinness.

I thought: It's loaded. And why were such plays always about innocent people? Why not make Fogarty an IRA man? After all, there were enough of them around, shooting people in the back and muttering Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone."

But I said, "Very interesting. But I'm an alien, so naturally I have a few questions."

"Why don't you ask them? The author's standing right behind you."

Martin Lynch was about thirty. I was immediately struck by his physical resemblance to his main character, Fogarty. I said that I had heard about such interrogations, but how true was his play?

"It's about me," he said. "I was arrested and held for three days. They beat me up. They tried to make me sign a confession. All that in the play — it's true."

"The Willy character is dramatically right, I think," I said; but I meant he was too convenient and preposterous.

"Want to meet him?" Lynch said. He called a man over.

This one was older and uglier than Willy Lagan, but there was no doubting that he was the original. He pulled a face, he winked at me, and started to sing. He wore a white satin necktie and a black shirt and a flashy zoot suit. He got onto his knees and made monkey noises; he snatched at my hand.

"We were in prison together," Lynch said, smiling at the man's antics. "Well, it's just like in the play. If he hadn't been there it would have been unbearable. I'm really grateful to him."

The man made affectionate monkey noises and rolled his eyes; and now it was impossible to tell at what point the play ended and the lives of these men began.

It seemed to me a healthy sign that there were such plays being produced, but it was a play about a deranged society. I kept wishing that it had been a play about a real bomber, because it was a society in which everyone talked about persecution but no one took any blame.

No one admitted to crime in Ulster. The most they said was "Look what they make us do!" It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag-waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders ("I've got something for your father") and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places — the shootings and house-burnings and the cattle-maiming — in the green hills, with the birds singing.

People said, "There's no solution… Ireland's always had troubles… Maybe it'll die out… I suppose we could emigrate…"

I kept thinking: This is Britain!

It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of "You started it!" and "He hit me!" And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days — I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.

But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.

I had been asked the question in England and Wales. "I'm in publishing," I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters. "I'm a writer" was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation-stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.

On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney's, talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—

"And what do you do?" Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.

Obviously I did something. I was an alien.

"I'm in publishing," I said.

Doran's face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.

"I'm working on a wee novel," Doran said, and ordered me another pint. "I've got about four hundred pages done — it's right in me room upstairs. Let's meet tomorrow and have another jar. I'll bring me novel with me. You'll love it. It's all about the troubles."

The next day I tiptoed past Doran's room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney's and shut the door on Ulster.

AFTER MY DAYS of being menaced by Belfast's ugly face, I went by boat and train to Glasgow and found it peaceful, even pretty. It had a bad name. "Gleska," people said, and mocked the toothless population and spoke of razor fights in the Gorbals, and made haggis jokes. Yet Glasgow was pleasant — not broken, but eroded. The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified — no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions. In Ireland I had felt as though I had been walking blindly into the dark. But Scotland made me hopeful. This sunny day stretched all the way to Oban, where I was headed.