Belfast Pedalabouts – Mostly Green

Imagine a London in which the inhabitants of Kensington are afraid to visit old friends in Chelsea; in which nobody from Camden Town dares to drink in Hampstead pubs; in which a youth from Wimbledon would be risking his life by strolling through Green Park; in which a change of taxis is sometimes necessary between Putney and Richmond because few drivers are willing to venture outside their native borough. A London suffering from an acute housing shortage though row after row of solid, spacious dwellings stand empty with bricked-up doors and windows. A London where policemen are likely to be shot dead within moments of entering certain districts – and so never do enter them – and where large buildings are frequently razed by uncontrollable swarms of small boys. A London in which only the West End is comparatively safe for all Londoners to shop in, because it has been securely barricaded off from the rest of the capital and is constantly patrolled by large numbers of heavily armed troops. Such a London could happen only in science fiction – we hope. Yet all the world knows that one city in the United Kingdom has been reduced during the past decade to this almost unimaginable way of life.

I did not choose the most auspicious season for my first visit to Belfast. All over Northern Ireland, but especially in the capital, communal relations deteriorate during the weeks before the Twelfth of July. Even in the country, Protestants who normally are well-disposed towards everybody won’t salute Catholics and Catholics know better than to approach Protestant neighbours for the sort of help that would gladly be given in March or October. To me this weird annual cycle is one of the most incomprehensible features of an often incomprehensible scene. Are Protestants afraid that without regular practice they might be unable to maintain the necessary (for tribal preservation) inner level of hostility towards Catholics? During the marching season Orangemen indulge in provocation of the most infantile sort. A good example is the butcher’s shop which advertised ‘Lourdes-cured ham’. This brand of wit is much relished by Protestants and in the peaceful old days was good-humouredly tolerated by Catholics. But the Taigs’ years of accepting jeers and sneers merely lowered them in the Orange estimation.

When I crossed the River Bann – broad and brown between flat banks – it seemed much more real, as a frontier, than the border between North and South. It divides the western, more Catholic and more economically underprivileged region of Northern Ireland from the predominantly Protestant counties of Antrim and Down. Antrim is Paisley country; when I stopped at a crossroads petrol station to ask the way a young attendant abruptly (and absurdly) said, ‘Don’t know.’ Further down the road two youths curtly gave directions while eyeing me with a mixture of suspicion and derision. On the outskirts of Ballymena I cycled between rows of preternaturally clean bungalows with shining windows, fresh paint, gleaming brass ornaments on gleaming tiled mantelpieces, washed and ironed curtains and not the tiniest weed visible in any garden. An hour later, on a quiet country road, an overtaking car slowed and began to follow me. My heart lurched, as it would not have done west of the Bann, and the next few minutes seemed long. When the ancient Mini overtook me the passenger door was opened by one of the two youths to whom I had spoken earlier and I was treated to an indecent gesture. This was such a relief, when I had been half-expecting a bullet, that I almost said ‘Thank you.’

Six miles short of the city I stopped at a new, opulent ‘inn’. It was fortified with a roof-high steel wire enclosure and had a car barrier and a ‘sentry-box’ in which a security man sat doing the pools. But as usual no attention was paid to Roz’s bulging saddle-bag. At the bar I got into conversation with two elderly friendly sisters who run a large café in central Belfast. One of their employees – a young man, recently married – had been blown to bits in a pub a few weeks previously. No one mentioned the three men who had been shot dead the evening before in a pub just down the road. Around Belfast there is a marked tendency not to discuss recent local tragedies.

I spent the next two nights with friends in a residential area which looked the epitome of tranquil respectability but had within the past fortnight suffered three sectarian murders. In one case a thirty-five-year-old Catholic pub owner was shot dead in his bed by a man on a ladder. This victim had allowed his bar staff to serve soldiers on patrol who slipped in through a back door for a quick pint during a heatwave. The Provos do not approve of pampering the Brits. As I went to bed on my first night it occurred to me that I might wake up dead. A gunman could break in and shoot me in my sleep, mistaking me for my brave host. A few weeks earlier he had risked his life on the Antrim Road to give aid to a soldier wounded by a sniper; meanwhile other members of the foot-patrol were firing in the sniper’s direction and eight people stood impassively in a nearby bus queue, pretending not to notice.

I was advised to study the religious geography of the city before cycling around it and a friend lent me his detailed British Army Tribal Map of Belfast, which marks the ghetto areas orange and green. Then my host introduced me to the Catholic ghettos. With a prominent doctor notice displayed on his windscreen he was less likely than other motorists to be delayed at security checkpoints, hijacked by bombers or stoned by gangs of bored boys who for the moment could find no more exciting target.

Perhaps because I never see television, and so was quite unprepared, those ghettos really shattered me. Yet I have known far worse slums in Asia. But Belfast is in affluent Europe and why should large areas of it be swarming with undernourished wild children and knee-deep in stinking litter, and strewn with broken glass glinting in hot sun under a blue sky – all on a summer’s day … So many bricked-up houses, reminding me of dead people with their eyes shut – some of them fine substantial buildings from which Protestants had had to flee in terror taking only their resentment with them. So many high brick, or corrugated iron, barricades between identical streets of little working-class homes, to prevent neighbours seeing and hearing each other, and so being provoked to hurt and kill each other. Sometimes, over the barricades, I could glimpse Union Jacks flying from upstairs windows. And I remembered a friend of mine in another part of the North – a retired naval officer – saying how much he resented the British flag being abused as a provocative sectarian symbol.

A filthy four- or five-year-old boy was playing all alone on a broken pavement with a length of stick; it was his gun and he was aiming at us. One wouldn’t even notice him in London or Dublin but in Belfast I wondered, ‘How soon will he have the real thing?’ Already, in his little mind, possession of a gun is equated with bravery and safety, with having the will and ability to defend his own territory against ‘the Oranges’. Around the next corner two slightly older children were carefully placing cardboard cartons in the middle of the narrow street. ‘Are these pretend bombs?’ I asked, appalled. ‘They might not be pretend,’ replied Jim, driving on to the pavement to avoid one. Even more appalled, I said nothing. Jim looked at me and laughed. ‘You’ll get used to it!’ he said. ‘Almost certainly they are pretend. But hereabouts sensible people don’t take chances.’

Everywhere stones and broken bricks were available to be thrown at passing army vehicles. Jagged broken bottles lay in gutters, flashing as they caught the strong sunlight. We passed an elaborately fortified barracks and then a famous ‘confrontation spot’. ‘In the afternoons,’ explained Jim, ‘you get the locals out here stoning the troops. And the same evening the same people will run across to the sentry-box and ask could they ever use the phone to ring the aunt in Armagh.’

When we took a wrong turning Jim became slightly tense. At the end of an artificial cul-de-sac – concrete-filled tar-barrels were blocking the road to motor traffic – he turned quickly. A group of gum-chewing youths came sauntering round a corner and jeered at the posh car on principle. ‘There’s a wee bit of trouble on the way,’ remarked Jim. ‘It’s funny, when you live here you develop a sixth sense – you always can tell when something’s brewing.’ He warned me then never to loiter when entering or leaving ghettos. Sectarian assassins do not always pick out individuals; often they just go to areas where they can be almost certain of their victim’s religion. But for them actually to enter a ghetto would be too dangerous. Everyday life in Belfast takes some getting used to, yet contrary to my expectations I found the city quite attractive.

Despite its population of 360,000 one never feels trapped in Belfast. On Roz, I could be away among green fields, or on a mountain, or by the sea, within half an hour of leaving the City Hall. And some of the most wretched areas are within sight of brilliantly fresh countryside – though this fact somehow made them seem even more tragic and squalid.

I parted from Jim a little apprehensively and cycled back to slumland to spend the rest of the day with Catholic families to whom I had been given introductions by a community worker. Outside a huge newish block of flats children swarmed raucously on wasteland while half-starved Alsatians snarled at each other; the lower walls of the building were daubed with exhortations to join the Provos, fuck the UVF and defend the Republic. ‘Best mind them dogs,’ said Tom, ‘they’d ate you.’

Tom and Maire are in their forties but look a lot older. Tom is small, slim and bearded – a professional cat-burglar who slipped when crossing a roof one night last year and broke his back. Now he is ‘out of work’ and has to use a complicated walking-machine provided by the NHS. I found his accent very difficult but Maire was quite comprehensible. With the end of her skirt she wiped bright yellow cake crumbs and a smear of tomato ketchup off the leatherette settee and invited me to be comfortable beside her. Then – sitting bolt upright with bony hands clasped tightly in her lap – she told me about her son. He was twenty-two when he was ‘executed’ last year as a punishment for deserting from the Stickies. (The Official IRA.) He had been married six months previously and his eighteen-year-old bride was with him when he was shot dead in the street. She was nearly three months pregnant and she lost the baby next day. I was shown the wedding photographs, snapshots already dog-eared, taken with a neighbour’s camera. His mother had begged him not to join the Stickies – to join the Provos if he must but never the Stickies. It was no good – he wouldn’t listen – he thought the Stickies could do more for the poor. ‘For the likes of us, who never had nothin’ but what we get from the Buroo [i.e. National Assistance] and maybe a bit extra when Tom could do an office – he never went near nobody’s house, I swear to God!’ But soon enough the young man repented his obstinacy, when he was ordered to shoot someone with whom he had grown up on the same street and gone to school. His mother advised him to say nothing but to get away quietly across the water. The snag was that he didn’t want to leave Belfast – he had no mind for travelling – he’d never in his life been out of the city except once to go on a football excursion to Dublin. And he was very fond of his parents – a bit spoiled – an only child. ‘Somethin’ went wrong the time he was born and I couldn’t have no more. There are days I’m terrible tempted to be bitter and to wish to see them dead that killed him. I know them, too. I know the very fella that fired the shot. I could tell you where he is this minute. Wouldn’t you feel the bitterness, if ’twas yourself? But I prays to God above not to be that way. What good would it do, to have another mother with all this sadness on her?’