Blood and Belonging (36 page)

Dick is across it many times a year, for the race meetings. He loves a drink, a fine racehorse, and a good story, and he never has any trouble south of the border. Sometimes he brings his Catholic friend Kieran, from Markethill, when Kieran is in the money, which isn't often. When he's put a couple of Power'ses under his belt, Dick will love to sing,
and most what he sings are rebel songs, the ones about breaking out of Omagh jail, about the girl with the black band in her hair, and the one about the nightingale's lullaby. He'll mix up the Fenian and the Loyalist, the Southern and the Northern songs one after another, till you can't tell which is which, or until the boys at his local pub start shouting, half serious, half in jest, that he should lay off the rebel songs and give them all a rendition of the Sash, which he does, to keep them happy.

I've come in search of what Britishness looks like in bandit country, and I find, of course, what I could never have expected: a man like Dick Sterritt, with his love of a drink and song and a story, quietly telling me that he will resist—he does not say fight—but resist till the end, so as not to become what he so obviously seems to be already: an Irishman.

THE RATHCOOLE BOYS

Back in Belfast, Marty, Sheeran, Deeky, Paul, and Mudd are painting the curbstones of the Rathcoole Estate red, white, and blue. In most of the Protestant housing projects, the curbs are painted around this time of year, as a preparation for the Twelfth. Painting the curbs is like putting up a wall mural of King Billy or of a Loyalist paramilitary, complete with Armalite and balaclava. It stakes out the territory. “They do the same over there,” Deeky says, gesturing at the Catholic project in the distance, only with the Catholics it is the Irish Tricolor and quotations from Bobby Sands, the hunger-striker hero.

Until a few years ago, Rathcoole was the biggest public-housing project in Europe, and once upon a time it was mixed. Bobby Sands himself grew up there. Not anymore. Rathcoole
is rock-solid Protestant working class. Behind the white lace curtains in the tower blocks, in those immaculate front rooms of the semidetached bungalows, with their three-piece suits and doilies on top of the television sets, there is the usual baffling Belfast mixture of decent, law-abiding people and paramilitary thugs who keep the local kids in order with an occasional kneecapping. Mudd, a fourteen-year-old glumly painting a curb, is due one himself, for stealing cars and joyriding around the Diamond, where the fish-and-chips shop and the dry cleaner and the youth club are located.

The Diamond is not looking its best: during the rioting after Herbie McCallum's funeral, the fish-and-chips shop was trashed, and so was the youth club, and there are fire marks on the road where the cars were set alight. The boys won't say who was responsible, but they all cultivate a certain ambiguity about their involvement: they won't say they were there, and they won't say they weren't.

They couldn't exactly say what they like about being British, though they're applying the colors of the Union Jack to the curbstones with the ardor of true patriots. “It's the football,” Paul ventures. “Yeah, Rangers, fantastic,” says Marty. Protestant Belfast worships the Glasgow Rangers, and Ranger scarves belong next to the Union Jack itself in Loyalist regalia. Few of the Rathcoole boys have ever been to mainland Britain, but they've heard that in the mainland projects no one would ever think of painting their curbs red, white, and blue. “They don't have to, do they?” says Paul. “They're not up against what we're up against, now are they?”

Marty's view is that the mainland projects don't paint their curbs because “they're all mixed up over there, all them different races and everything.” Here, he says, “it's just us and the Taigs. So we have to show our colors, don't we?”

Marty, Paul, Sheeran, Deeky, and Mudd don't have much to say about anything—at least not when I'm about—but when they don the purple uniforms of the Whiteabbey Protestant Boys Marching Band, a change comes over them. Each of them knows at least a hundred tunes on the small black ebony flutes they pull from their back pockets and a dozen rhythms on the short snare drums. All year long they practice in the gymnasium of the youth club, and in July during the marching season, there's hardly a night when they are not out marching and playing on the streets of Rathcoole and nearby estates. The band is more than their club; the music is their speech. They may not be able to tell you, in so many words, what Britishness or Protestantism means, but when the big, pimply boy starts hitting the big bass drum, and Sheeran starts them marching to the beat of his snare, and Marty, Paul, Deeky, and Mudd take up the tune on the flute, they give a thundering account of who they are.

I follow them through the rain, to the Orange Lodge, as the traffic comes to a halt, as couples pushing their children in strollers stop and applaud them on their way, as the army sentries take up position to protect them from attack by the Catholic boys in the project up the road. The drum brooks no argument; no wonder the Catholics call the marching bands the music of intimidation. But it has its own fierce beauty, and the boys will tell you there is nothing to equal the feeling you get when you're marching in the downtown and the sound is echoing off the high-walled canyons of the city.

THE DEE STREET BONFIRE

On the stroke of midnight, as July 11 turns into the twelfth, Dee Street, like every Protestant street in the city, burns the
Pope and the Irish Tricolor on top of its bonfire. For the past seventeen years, Mrs. L. has sewn the Dee Street Pope herself, with a doll's head spray-painted green, white, and gold, crowned with a bishop's miter. The Pope always wears red socks: indeed, the Reverend Ian Paisley has been known to call His Holiness Old Red Socks.

In her immaculate front room, with its sideboard crowded with the trophies her family has won for pigeon racing, Mrs. L. also sews the Republican Tricolor from good silk she buys up at Crazy Prices. Her son, a spindly fourteen-year-old in a shell suit, takes the lead in collecting for the bonfire. He's quite sure that this year Dee Street's is going to be the biggest one in the city.

Dee Street is a narrow double row of two-up-two-downs built in the last century for shipyard workers in the shadow of the yellow cranes of the Harland & Wolff shipyard. On the bare walls of the roads that lead into it, there are painted slogans: “Ulster says NO!” “Dee Street says NO!” “Yukon Street says NO!” (When one of the local children paints me a picture of the street, the voice balloon he puts on one of the children says “NO!” too.)

All the front doors in Dee Street stay open, day and night, and kids wander in and out, from house to house. Unemployment is high and a lot of men in their twenties, heavily tattooed, hang around the front doors, drinking and watching for strangers. On the wall facing the bonfire at the end of the street there is a mural of three Protestant paramilitaries wearing balaclavas and pointing automatic weapons.

Almost everyone I meet in Dee Street has lived there all their lives. One man who tells me he is “a newcomer” finally admits that he has lived in the same house for twenty-five
years. He's only a newcomer compared to his wife, who was born in the street.

Dee Street has its wild men. There is Morris, who has tattoos up and down his arms and a heart tattooed on each earlobe, who wants to offer me his protection in return for a consideration. Then there is Lennox with his goatee, small narrow-set eyes, and shaven head. People in Dee Street will tell you he is “short of a slice for a sandwich.” He and Maddy, his girlfriend, had a child, and the mothers in the street offered to help them out, but the social services came and took the child away when Maddy was still in hospital. When Lennox found out, the neighbors came upon him storming up Dee Street with murder in his eye and a can of petrol in his hand, shouting as to how he was going to burn “the social” down to the ground.

Dee Street offers belonging with a vengeance—compassionate, warm, and welcoming to its own; as unyielding as a stone to its enemies. It takes me days to convince them I mean no harm. I tell them I've just come to talk to the boys about the bonfire, but Mrs. L. takes some persuading. Loyalists, like Serbs, brood on the way they are misunderstood.

Collecting for the bonfire begins in March. The Dee Street boys, ranging in age from seven to twenty-three, scour the streets, parking lots, and factories and drag their trophies back in supermarket trolleys. By early July the collection is so large that they have to camp out all night to keep it from being stolen by the bonfire boys in adjacent streets. By July 10, the Dee Street bonfire is an astonishing sixty-foot-high pile of cable drums, pallets and old sofas, boxes and barrels, railway sleepers and tires.

Like the Rathcoole boys, the Dee Street boys have only the haziest idea of what goes on in the British mainland.
Stewarty, who wears a Chicago Bears leather porkpie hat and a Rangers scarf, says he's heard of Guy Fawkes Night, but he couldn't tell you when it was. “We have our bonfires and they have theirs, like.” Stewarty's best memory of the mainland was of going to a Rangers game in Glasgow, and of how the Ulster chant “We are, we are, we are the Billy boys!” rang around the stadium. But the rest of Britain, at least to judge from a couple of visits, seemed strange to him. Everywhere he went “they called me a Paddy, as if I were Irish and responsible for all them bombings.”

Besides, he says, patting a neighbor's Rottweiler, which has come up and is nosing about in the garbage at the edge of the bonfire, the English projects seemed cold and unfriendly. “No kids playing out in the street, like here in Dee Street. Nothing going on, like.” To tell you the truth, Stewarty admits, “I get nostalgic three streets away in Belfast.” Dee Street is all he knows. He's got two children of his own, and he's never worked a day in his life. He couldn't anyway. If he did, the social might dock his “brew”—Belfast for unemployment benefit.

I ask him where the Catholics live and he points behind him up the road, about four hundred yards. What would happen if you went up there? I ask, and one of the other boys says quickly, “Kill you, sure.” And what happens if they come down? “They'd get a good hiding,” Stewarty says. It's just the way it is. They would do it to you if you were walking past. “A couple of them might start doing the heavy. So you have to do the same. If they came down here they'd get a terrible hiding, not to kill them, mind, but just so as he remembers.” None of this is said with any venom. Indeed, Stewarty seems a bit embarrassed by it all, and wants it known that it might all be different if you lived in a mixed area. But not in Dee Street.

And what about those men? I ask, gesturing to the paramilitary mural. A lot of the bonfire boys look away, uneasily, and one boy, the son of a British soldier, says quickly that they're illegal and you don't talk about them. But Stewarty says, digging at the ground with a stick, that they're there to punish “rogues and thieves.” As far as Dee Street is concerned, punishment should be kept in the family: the police, or the “peelers,” as they are called, should stay out. Like if you steal a car, or if you “do houses,” then you get what's coming to you. And what's that? A kneecapping. Are you scared of them, then? Stewarty looks at me shrewdly. “You wouldn't expect me to say I wasn't, now would you?”

I come back on the night of the eleventh to watch the Pope and the Tricolor being stuck on the top of the bonfire, and to watch the Dee Street boys marching up and down, with Lennox at the head, waving his Ulster flag like a madman and Mrs. L's boy, Alex, beating out the rhythm on a cracked snare with only one skin. But word has got back to Mrs. L. that I had been talking to the boys about Catholics and about paramilitaries, and she calls me into her sitting room. “They're just kids,” she says. “They'll say anything. But they don't necessarily mean it.” She'll have me know that she has to live here when I'm long gone, and it isn't easy. “Look, I do my shopping up the road at Crazy Prices. With the Catholics.” If they get word of Stewarty's talk about giving them a good “hiding,” who knows what'll happen? And as for the paramilitaries, she says, “I thought you were going to stay off politics.” We both know that if I don't get back in Mrs. L.'s good books, I won't be long at the bonfire. I do my best to make her feel easier and she hears me out, smoking cigarette after cigarette in her front room, her face drawn and thin. She forgives me eventually and the word gets passed to leave me
alone. At the stroke of midnight, the Dee Street boys' petrol bombs splatter against the pallets, and with a slowly gathering roar, the bonfire rises into flame. Lennox is waving the Red Hand flag, Morris is drinking from two cans of McEwan's at once, a huge crowd is eddying backward from the rising heat of the flames; two men are cheerfully swearing at me for working for “those faggot republicans in the flicking ITN [Independent Television News].” When the Pope catches fire and the Republican Tricolor pitches down into the flames, the crowd lets out a low, visceral roar. Oblivious to everything, serenely drunk, Mrs. L., surrounded by her kids, is last seen slowly circling the bonfire, twirling around with anyone who will dance with her, softly singing to herself:

It is old but it is beautiful, and its colours they are fine

It was worn at Derry Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne.

THE FIELD

“God is a Protestant,” the Ulstermen say, when explaining why weather on the annual Orange parade is usually clement. And so it is. The morning of the Twelfth of July dawns fair and bright. As the bands and lodge brethren gather in their thousands in front of the Central Lodge, Tommy Doyle is in fine fettle, greeting old friends and sipping a cup of tea. Eighty-five thousand Orangemen march across Northern Ireland on the Twelfth. Dick and Ernie Sterritt will be marching in Portadown. Actually, “marching” is the wrong word. “Walking” is the preferred Orange term, suggesting as it does the right flavor of decorum and decency. But “walking” is not how the Catholics see it. The thundering bands, the steady
tramp of feet, and the verse from the Billy Boys song telling about how they're “up to our necks in Fenian blood” are enough to keep most Catholics inside on parade day.