As our black Ford Prefect rumbled from Stranmillis to the Braniel
on Saturday nights in winter, I looked from the back seat
at young trees in the dark, sodium lights, Belisha beacons
passing behind us through the brightened, sideways rain,
and sometimes caught sight of a solitary night-watchman
in his hut beside roadworks; I even glimpsed his face
glowing from the brazier, red cigarette and kettle
visible for a moment, thin steam from his mug of tea.
You had some name for him, a name that I repeated
with my other chant, We’re nearly home, we’re nearly home,
that lonely man who sat all night by a few coals,
watching, and breaking the dark; a name that I’ve forgotten,
but get back, nearly, sometimes – like today, when I
pictured a beaming face, all eyes, and called it Torchy.
The first time I ever saw a man riding a horse
was when the farmer with a red face and a wig
came swaying on his saddle up the Gilnahirk Road,
beneath him the enormous white and grey creature
and coming behind him a fife band, playing Dolly’s Brae:
I remember his drinker’s nose, as well as the bright graffiti
of broken veins scribbling his cheeks, his false
curls of black hair, and the sword upright in front of him.
Aunt Ruby held my hand as we looked down from the garden
where I was frightened and agog, too small to know
that this armed man was not the actual King Billy
riding up to Mann’s Corner to claim his own, or that
he would not appear after tea, huge at the parlour door,
when my uncle James recited The Orange ABC.
It was a good half-century after the battle
that my great uncle Archie, bedridden, propped-up
to talk to the boy, took one look at my model soldiers
and asked about the shiny, field-grey, moulded man
who lay flat on his stomach, with a rifle levelled
in front of him, taking aim: when I explained he was
a German sniper, Archie held him up, then laughed
and offered only, ‘Aye, the snipers, they’re the boys!’
I have his pocket-book, embossed A.G., inside it
an old pound note; his childhood copy of Robert Burns;
a swagger-stick, topped with silver, he had in the army,
and a brass cartridge case, the handle for a paper-knife,
marked Souvenir d’Ypres: that’s all of him, flat out,
smiling, with his bare feet poking from the blanket.
Power-cuts in the strike added a new dimension
to the games I was playing with plastic soldiers and tanks
at the back of the sitting-room: now, in the dark,
stealthy commandos started on their midnight raid
to disable a German Panzer and a gun emplacement
under the full moon of a propped electric torch
that shone from high on the settee down to the floor,
lighting up brittle artillery and carpet pile.
Further back, the rest of the furniture was edged
with a penumbra of torchlight – the weakest shine
on a table top, the reflection of a reflection
on curving glass in the dead television screen:
shadows regrouped and shifted, as I crept to war
with the eye of a burning torch burning in my eye.
It must be warm weather, for the front door and the hall
are both open, and I am sitting on the path
watching crowds in a field above the high Braniel
who are themselves listening to an amplified roar
that is Paisley’s, unmistakably, and echoes down
this far to Woodview Drive, although his words are lost
in their own noise, and only the outrage and the scorn
come through intact on lazy, slow-dancing thermals.
I start to look instead at an almost cloudless sky,
a blue sky in fact, and I tune the new transistor
to a mixture of midsummer babble and pop music,
cushioned, buoyed up, and floating over the big noises
to See my Baby Jive and Summer (The First Time)
long after the audience has trickled from the hill.
I didn’t see it, although I heard about it later,
the little gift that entered straight through the front door
early one evening, when everybody was out,
and broke on the cold floor-tiles, the ox-blood tiles,
igniting in the dark for maybe a few seconds
then burning low, then fading completely away
to be found later: scattered bits of a milk-bottle,
heat-stains beneath them; the burned rag, and the smell.
I had to imagine the light it must have given out
as it spurted briefly up the flight of concrete steps
and slapped the walls and sank, then bubbled up again,
coating the red-brown floor with shapes of amber and orange
that sloped and lingered most when I would close my eyes
to press the eyelids with my fingers, all that year.
One February night, my father came home shaking
with his face blank, and cold hands, not really speaking,
and although ours was a house that never kept strong drink
he needed more than water to steady him that Monday
after he’d driven from the top of the Castlereagh Road
on to the dual carriageway, where what he saw
was the bombers’ car in fragments, then the four of them
scattered in lumps, being scraped up from the pavement.
A little crowd had recourse to the Dave Clark Five
as it chanted at the ambulances and fire engines
over and over the chorus from Bits and Pieces, while
by the garage forecourt policemen gleaned the mortal
remains of Steele and Bell, Magee and Dorrian
expertly, having done this kind of thing before.
On his annual visits from Stranraer, my uncle Tom
(a great-uncle, tall and blind, unstoppable)
would put me to the test: first, it was Bible-stories,
then my catechism, and finally, when I
somehow was learning Greek, my ho, he, to,
known from his training days, like the boys’ chorus
in the tenements of Maw, throw us a jeely piece
that he would bellow, laughing, decades and decades on.
He wore the collar everywhere: once, it had saved
his skin when, with his height and his bare fists,
he stopped the shipyard men lynching a Catholic;
now it got him a good seat in the Martyrs’ Memorial
where he said the famous preacher spoke well, but forgot
the imperative, to hate the sin and love the sinner.
My grandmother’s grave is heaped with roses and carnations
on a dark afternoon in my first flash-photograph,
and behind it, in the drizzle, Mrs Kyle is standing
with her hanky in her hand, friendless, not going home –
home where her son Kenneth might or might not be,
dapper even in his middle years, my father’s best man
and like him well turned-out, a touch fastidious
although his good clothes have about them the sheen of age.
As it happens, Kenneth outlives his own mother
by only a year or two: he has fed on whisky
for so long, at the end it sweats from his every pore
and he never comes out. Mrs Kyle grips her handbag
as a flashbulb in its plastic cube erupts and blisters,
coating with light the flowers and their wet cellophane.
Across the Lisburn Road, every other wall was marked
with big initials, FTP or UVF,
beneath the billboard adverts for Harp, Old Spice: The Mark
of a Man, or the Confidential Telephone,
and by eight on that hot evening, all the cars
had gone away, leaving a dog or two, and drinkers
quietly threading a course from lounge bar to lounge bar
while down the sidestreets footballs smacked on gable walls.
Messenia was Bradbury Place, and Thermopylae
the narrow cut outside Taughmonagh’s tintown
for the Tartan gang who changed themselves from LRT
and crossed over that night as the Lisburn Road Spartans,
surrounding the hall, kicking a door in, breaking
the boy’s legs like sticks, and carving his neck with LRS.
We would leave the band practising noisily at school
and take the long walk down Great Victoria Street
where records might be bought, or looked over, thought about;
then a longer walk, through town, in through the barriers,
having our pockets searched, searching our pockets for change,
and striking out that day to what was left of Smithfield
to pick up some bargain Stevie had got word of:
with nothing for the bus, we trailed back the way we came.
Some RUC men gave us a lift in their armoured car
after the boys at head-level on a parapet
aimed half a dozen kicks, though none of them at me –
at Stevie, with the blood pouring from both nostrils
on his steady walk, and his head still full of music,
cradling a bag of singles as he weighed up the damage.
He would see you coming half-way up Dunluce Avenue,
and specialised in a long-range, drawn-out ‘Well?’,
to answer which you had to approach, and go with him
at a painful crawl all the way to the Lisburn Road, where
your two paths could decently diverge; Tommy looked
much older than he was, but there was nothing of him –
unwashed and unshaven, crippled with something, his only
ports of call by then the post-office and the pub.
He stuck to the wrong names for everyone, and he crooned
impenetrable songs to himself; when he died
alone, and the tiny house was cleared then cleaned out,
for months I would still avoid him, see a filthy coat
propped up over a stick, moving, and hear him greet
my mother from a distance with ‘Well, Mrs Donnelly?’