Those images that yet
On a sluggish summer afternoon after leaving art college I am sitting, barely awake, on a heavy white plastic chair in my girlfriend’s back garden. Together we are planted firmly into her middle-class Protestant world on the other side of Belfast. Behind tightly closed windows a Trimphone’s small bleats are struggling to cut through my stupor. When the back door opens I am told by the advancing mother of the house - a woman not noted for civility towards Catholics of any age, let alone those young enough to be pawing her daughter - that I am wanted on the phone. In the hall’s half gloom a woman’s voice greets me. She’s calling from the small publishing house where I had spent my month’s work placement the year before. Would I fancy illustrating a book? Brian Friel - Ireland’s Greatest Living Playwright - is editing. Famous Seamus - Ireland’s Greatest Living Poet - is doing the foreword. I’d do the cover and 18 illustrations in a black and white woodcut style that would compliment the treeless landscape of the rural Donegal memoirs it describes.
Fuck me. My first proper work, and I’ll be on my way. Walking back into the hazy garden I thought how nice that they had asked me. Especially when the ink resist technique they had seen me use had belonged not to me but to the Rayban girl, lying a few feet away on her mother’s sturdy Ulster orange sunlounger.
A 1960s new-build suburban boy, it had been the ripples of Belfast that had washed over me. My grandparents had swapped rural Armagh’s punitive towns for hard red-bricked lives in freezing houses off the Falls Road. Their youthful bucolic colour had long since been squeezed out by overused wringers in tiny lino-floored terraced kitchens at the back of their two-ups. And every Saturday we dutifully got a red bus into town and then a red bus out of town to share their thin and under-heated comforts and watch the wrestling on TV. Rural Ireland existed only as a view from my back window. Rolling hills stretched to the sea and then, wasting no time, popped back up 14 miles away in Scotland. Any direct contact with the soil was limited to crawling through a blackthorn hedgerow, a prickly Berlin wall of nature, which cut straight across the unfinished road at the top of the street. It was a gateway to a rusting world of an old and abandoned life. Collapsing corrugated sheds stood alone in huge sloped fields, long lost to thistles, nettles, tangled clumps of long grass and giant, crispy cow pats. There an occasional chomping beast would glance over at us young fools playing a very poor game of football. Soon enough those fields too would be smeared with more bungalows, identical to mine, as they ate their way up the side of the hill that overlooked Belfast.
I had as much feeling for Olde Ireland as I did for Culchie Ireland. So over the next few months I did what any reasonable chancer would do. I plundered every book in the small Irish section of the local library for photographs I could use - as my old art teacher would say - to pay homage to. I’d never thought about getting on a blue bus that would take me, and any other unsuspecting Big Smokers, out beyond the city boundaries to confront the damp emptiness that lay in wait there, in the back of beyond. First hand reference: so overrated, so time consuming.
The following June I’m standing anxiously under the heavy fluttering Loyalist flags that are aggressively strapped to every lamppost on the main road out of town. I’m waiting on a lift to the book launch across the border in Donegal. Eventually the publisher’s cramped car pulls up and I squeeze in beside the good natured and cheery souls. My bag sits on my lap. The boot is rammed with so many boxes of books - being smuggled across the border to avoid tax - that the car can’t overtake any other four or two-wheeled vehicle for the entire journey. I am cheered that their Arts Council grant is only the tip of that British taxpayer-funded iceberg. A few hours later I am behind a folded out plasterer’s table in an enormous village hall, at what feels like the biggest Irish wedding reception that has misplaced its bride and groom. To my left stands Brian Friel and to his left Seamus Heaney. My hair is gelled up in the gravity-defying manner of Eraserhead. I am wearing national health glasses and a psychedelically splattered pink shirt with some colours only visible to dogs. I have a black boxed jacket with shoulder pads that are later copied by David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. My heavy indigo jeans with turn-ups hang perfectly above some fabulous black suede Dr Martin buckled brothel creepers, complete with red plastic trim. Together they leave little room for mistaken identity as I stand alongside Ireland’s Greatest Living Playwright and Ireland’s Greatest Living Poet. The contraband books are piled high, the whole village is there and the free booze is flowing my way. We’re off.
Ah, you must be the artist then, a wayward-haired booklover says eagerly. Aye, and you must be Sherlock’s big brother, I almost reply. And who should I make the book out to then, I ask. Oh, just me mammy, he tells me. Well that’s the difference between you Culchies and us then, isn’t it big lad. Everyone in this room knows who your mammy is, and who everybody else’s mammy is as well, while we’re at it. Except the three people holding pens this side of the table. But as the drink kicks in and the night slips by the locals queue to tell me how well I’d captured the sense of otherness that makes Donegal Donegal. They refuse to believe I had never been a regular visitor. Or that the closest I’d been was drinking in Derry on the way to some football and later, a riot. I am afraid to let on that I hadn’t even made the effort to go into Belfast to look at the caged books - perhaps a forerunner of the H-Blocks and their erudite Republican pupils - in the revered Linenhall Library. How could I tell them that the heady combination of lethargy and playing snooker with barely employed pals had made me more than happy to go no further than a nondescript 1960s municipal building, which, while only having three books of use to me, at least had the decency to be just down the hill from the house. Then later at the bar in the nearby hotel I was lost in the shadows of the giants of Irish letters. But they couldn’t have been more civil. Heaney especially, with his head the size of a small planet and his hair one prolonged experiment inside a Van der Graaf generator. Here was a real son of the soil. His bulk, not least his hands, impressed. Those fingers, the size of an overgrown bunch of bananas, would once have been used to grip cement-encrusted wheelbarrows rebuilding post-war Britain or, like his father, for digging.
Digging. Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
About seven years later I’m back home from London. Some things have changed, some have not. The Troubles continue, but lurk further back in the daily routine than before. I’m no longer an illustrator and some, myself included, may say I never really was. I am married, though certainly not to any woman from my home town. My father has bought his first car and has learnt to drive at the age of 73 so he can take my mother to her ever-more frequent hospital appointments, and then as a distraction from those visits on trips to the sparsely stacked shelves of what once had been someone’s idea of a suburban shopping paradise, Crazy Prices. Their bungalow seems ever more full of the small and pointless diversions which the unhappy buy to line their nests with. But the bookshelves remain the same. Beside my father’s hardbacks of WWII tank landing craft, on which he served, and the occasional Irish cookery book sits a signed copy of the book I had illustrated. On the inside page Heaney’s fountain pen flows to wish me well before graciously adding
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget.
Oh little did he know, little did he know.
The next day we are standing in a cosy rural kitchen, where the heart of the house beats loudest, before we drive back to Belfast. I say to my aunt, who though really my cousin is so close in age to my mother that they grew up in the same house as sisters, that we must head off while we still have some light. We don’t want to get caught out again on the narrow winding road, and fly past the signpost for the turn off to Belfast. Hers is a house without a number. At the bottom of the drive is a road without a name, which is referred to in conversation as the street. High up in the glens of Tyrone, we are on the edge of land that can just still function as land. The small field at the back of what was once a poor and tiny farmhouse with outbuildings, but which has now become one enormous house - I’m sure you can get grants to get grants here – has a planted lawn and manicured hedges.
Beyond that on the other side of the barbed wire fence is bogland that quickly peters out to the moss-covered rocks that climb up the sparse hilltop.
We have spent a warm and generous tea-laden afternoon, as ever, in their company. Half an hour later we are still saying our goodbyes but at least we have moved to the other side of the kitchen window. There is little light left. When our small white hire car eventually rolls down the gravel and we turn left onto the tight road we know it will be dark before we get to the Belfast signpost. My parents are squashed in the back seats as ballast. I’m navigating, my English wife driving. The road dips, rises, twists and turns. Tight corners give little warning of any approaching locals busy racing to nowhere in particular, except occasionally the next life. Although we are yet to pass the peat bogs that Heaney’s father dug, we are in a similar landscape of the dispossessed. We gradually climb, past the oversized ranchero-themed houses firmly rooted in the middle of their own patch of nowhere. They are the perfect showcase for the gigantic wagon wheels displayed on their gable walls, under brightly painted Spanish balustrades that encircle the homestead.
Then there is a cluster of more recent pebble-dashed houses, squat and huddled around the old Catholic church. On a Sunday morning the men and women will enter to sit on opposite sides. That evening they will climb into their shared, but still sacred, matrimonial beds.
We scoot past the Catholic school, the Gaelic football pitch, the fluttering tricolours and the freshly defiant Republican graffiti. Below us we skirt the lush farming land that was given long ago as a reward, by those who never owned it, to the planters whose sons live there now. The townlands we are driving through are lands full of nothing but displacement and resentment. We are in a place at the edges of worth, where the natives are left to lead an existence that day after day reminds them not just who they are, but what they are. Despite a few garishly painted houses appearing to state otherwise, there is no reason for anyone to live here by choice. We have driven for ten minutes without seeing another car on the road. The hills to our left and across the river below are becoming silhouetted as the sun dips behind them.
Approaching a sharp corner that is overlooked by a small farmhouse I notice a narrow road that slopes quickly away behind us on my left. We are by it in a split second. As my wife slows to take the bend a car, sitting far back in the darkness, switches on its full beams and screeches out behind us. We are immediately caught by its sweeping headlights and the insistent squeal of its tyres. I glance across at her. We smile, at the Culchies and their cars. No one speaks as we tuck in and wait for them to overtake, as they surely will. But they don’t. Or more truthfully, won’t. And despite their initial urgency they are not in the hurry we thought they were in. As the darkness slowly wraps itself around us we drive more warily on the now not-so-solitary road. When we accelerate they accelerate, when we slow they slow. They are intent on doing only one thing. Staying close enough to follow us while also keeping far enough behind us to appear as if they aren’t. That is, to whoever would be watching. And although they are after us, it is not us they are hunting. But if we are not their prey, then who is?
But it doesn’t come. I know that we have gone too straight for too long and there is nowhere, and no way, to turn back. We keep going as evening becomes night.
Ahead we glimpse the first houses and streetlights. They are bungalows with low walls and shrubs and the road swings between them to turn right to the main road in the distance.
I look at my wife. ‘Don’t take the turn, keep going’.
Ahead is a dirt track that runs down the back of the houses.
‘Get off the road and go straight ahead, just go’.
While the furrowed track in front of us leads nowhere, the boys behind us are certainly going somewhere. They’ll stick to the turn in the road, be off our tails and then we can double back. But that somewhere is indeed after us, over the very same clumps of churned dry earth and into our total darkness. I had only one thought. Nothing that doesn’t end very badly here, with the brutal smell of cordite in the now chilled night air, makes any sense.
Coming up on our left are sturdy blackthorn bushes that twist around themselves as they crawl to the top of the dark and barren hillside. They are the only things fearless enough to grow here. Their hard beauty will see them made into shillelaghs; walking sticks which are also, with that sensitive Irish mixture of consideration and swift brutality, cudgels.
We take a sharp turn and cut across the field to follow the hedgerow up along the steep incline, going nowhere except away from everything.
And up and up we go until we can no longer see the car behind us as it continues along the back of the scattered buildings, its headlights fading gently into the pitch black of the night sky. My wife switches off the engine and we share the long uncertain quiet with the dark tangled thorns that are scraping against the car. With some skill she turns us to begin the cautious crawl back down to the small lights. We emerge slowly onto the illuminated tarmac and I instantly see the silhouetted muzzle of a rifle jutting out from behind the low corner wall. There, crouching, is a British soldier. He is motionless in the garden of the house that faces the road we had raced down. When our car moves out and past him the glare of the streetlights briefly catch the insignia on the berets of his three companions nearby, betraying their semi-dark hiding places.
Minutes ago they were not there: no one was. It wasn’t that we hadn’t spotted them, they just had not been there. But they were certainly there now, entrenched and focused. The only car on a deserted road I know they will step out to flag us down with their red torch. Yet they remain in their chosen darkness. Instead, as we carefully build up speed on the smooth straight road to Belfast, it becomes clear that they were there and set back from the road not to stop but to watch and to wait. Just as the car behind us had been. Those soldiers and that car were springs coiled in the expectation of a moment that they knew to expect. They were unclear as to what that moment would look like when it arrived, what form it would take. They knew only to watch and to wait for a sign, one that could either be a start or an end.
On that night it had been our lights that had come from the darkness of the watching hills and hedgerows around. To lead the waiting men speeding down from the boglands to ambush, or to be ambushed by, the camouflaged men now squatting in the flower beds of the Sunday night TV-watching locals.
Not a word was spoken. As we headed for the distant glow of Belfast the bonds between the soil and those who are of it grew ever more defined.
Digging. Between my finger and my thumb.
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
