Free Book Excerpts

Chronicling life in Belfast from 2000 to 2009, AN OLD CASTLE STANDING ON A FORD tells of the author’s encounters with Northern poets, healers, soldiers, myths, ghosts, and unexpected miracles.

Excerpt

from Chapter One – Ghostland

None of the ghosts are visible from the air.

You bump into them later, well after the approach by air to the greenest island in the North Atlantic, its fields bordered by trees and hedgerows and the occasional herd of cows or sheep.

Then you see the coastline, with jagged edges and sudden drops even more dramatic than England’s, as rugged as Scotland’s, and you begin to understand. You won’t be claiming any land here, Traveler. With a primal power, the land will be claiming you.

You touch down, but even before the brilliantly fresh Northern air reaches you, Northern voices do, ringing with tones influenced by centuries of Scots immigrating to the Northern counties of Ireland.

By the time I first arrived in Northern Ireland in September 2000, the Troubles had officially ended. The Good Friday Agreement had been signed two and a half years earlier in April 1998. The IRA was holding its ceasefire for the most part. A power-sharing coalition government had been installed in the Belfast Parliament building at Stormont, and was up and functioning.

All (mostly) quiet on the western front, except that peace being so new, it was still a bit hard to believe, to first-time travelers and Northerners alike.

A buzzer rang out loudly in the airport as my fellow passengers and I waited for our luggage to appear on the carousel, and I wasn’t the only one who froze and glanced nervously at the security guards.

Now that I was actually in Northern Ireland, I feared bombs, and bullets. Seven years in Los Angeles had taught me some familiarity with gangs, street violence and police helicopters hovering overhead. But at least the Northern Irish admitted to having a problem. Peacefulness was not what I’d been expecting: the way everyone had frozen at the loud buzzer, more like.

That had turned out to only be the signal that the luggage was about to be sent round on the carousel, which is why the security men didn’t even blink at it, though they were plainly in sight, watchful and aware.

It’s peaceful here now, I reminded myself. Perfectly fine, no reason to worry. Looks quite pleasant.

The politicians, the peacemakers, had finally worked it out so those Northerners who called themselves British and those who called themselves Irish could co-exist in peace, without people being shot or blown up to prove who really owned the land. Of course, no one thought about where to store the ghosts, but that bit comes in later. The day I arrived, the Northern sun was hiding behind dark clouds, creating a diffused light that left a strange glow around people and objects. Behind the clouds the sky was a strange, smoky blue I’d never seen before. Inside the once great linenmaking, shipbuilding city of Belfast, I watched the grand Victorian colleges, pubs and banks, interspersed with Euro-modern buildings, fl y past the cab window. Quiet and normalcy everywhere I looked.

So what was all the armed fuss about? I thought easily.

Then a small but definite click sounded from somewhere inside the cab, and the driver started nervously.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I dunno,” I shrugged, hoping my American accent would reassure him. The fact that Yanks are universally considered to be clueless can come in handy at times. And we are all Yanks to Europeans, regardless of what region of America we hail from. The cabby commented on a car going past whose driver was leaning on its horn.

“Oh, they do that in L.A. too,” I said cheerfully, “only they do it a lot more often.”

He chuckled and seemed to relax. I knew from my news reading prior to the trip that for years, cabbies were routinely shot in sectarian attacks. Most taxi firms hired either exclusively Protestant or Catholic drivers, so that the shooter was assured the right hit, usually made in retaliation for a killing by the other side.

We drove to the friend of a friend’s house where I’d be staying, in a leafy suburb south of the city. My plane had been hours late, and Anne came out of the house to greet me as soon as she saw me getting out of the cab, hugging me with relief and joking that she’d been hoping I hadn’t accidentally flown to Belfast, Maine. Jetlagged, my system was also in shock from taking in the bright clean County Antrim air after years of Los Angeles soot. I was also dazed by the grassy beauty of the surrounding hills.

Decades of bad press, unreal natural beauty, locals who actually like Americans.

What sort of a country is this? I wondered.

Before I drifted off to sleep that first night under a large down quilt, part of the comfort of Anne’s tastefully decorated new home, I remembered the first time I’d flown on my own. I was twenty-one and headed for London, from where I took the train to Oxford to live with an English family and study at a nearby college for a term. I felt the same sort of idealism upon arriving in Northern Ireland as I had years before in England, when I’d closed my eyes that first night in England, and the image of bright white clouds against brilliant blue outside the airplane window had come up again, vivid and reassuring, as if to tell me that I was more coming toward home than away from it.

A quiet September breeze rustled a few leaves outside the window, mixing with my mind’s recording of Northern voices. Then I remembered the cabby, and tears came up suddenly. I recognized his skittish reaction as something I understood. Here was someone who’d grown up afraid.

By morning the sunlight was pouring in the large windows, and my Yankee Writer Abroad adventure had officially begun. I began looking in the local paper for a place to live, at the moment losing all interest in feeling sad for the Northern Irish, who lived in this stunning green place and grew up sounding so brilliantly musical while we Yanks only whined and droned in comparison. I took a bus into the city centre, where even more surprises lay in store.

For one, whenever I rang a place to ask about accommodation, I was told I would have to move quickly. “The students are returning soon now, so they are.” By the fifth time of hearing this I wanted to reply, “Yes, yes, students! Lots of them!” I hadn’t realized Belfast was so full of college kids, though a friend in L.A., the playwright and screenwriter Patricia Mahon, had told me before I’d left that she’d liked Belfast, and that it was a college town. “I remember a stop in Belfast on the way up to Coleraine and Portrush from Trinity College back in the 1980s,” she told me once.

Trish had been surprised to find Belfast clean and modern. “It had a youthful energy about it that was far different from the poverty and the protests being reported back in New York. When we crossed the border, the roads suddenly got better and the shops were brighter. Things seemed calm, aside from the infectious energy of the place. Regardless of what was afflicting Belfast, she didn’t show it. Life moved on and did so quite beautifully.”

I had to agree that the town felt full of youthful optimism. The most prominent college was Queen’s University, whose neo-Gothic structures sat among spacious lawns and gardens facing the University Road. On seeing its stately beauty, I was relieved that it had survived the thirty-year firestorm well intact.

Within a few days, I’d rented a room at the top of a renovated, four-story Victorian row house in a south Belfast neighborhood near Queen’s University. I was sent off to see the property simply with directions and a key from the landlord – not a good sign, I knew, but I was too charmed by this new country to care. I walked through the city centre under the light blue skies, through the main shopping center full of kids, mums and office workers, the large proud face of City Hall rising straight ahead as soon as I turned up Royal Avenue.

The landmark building fills the center of Donegal Square, predominating the city centre. It is close in architectural style to an American capital building, but pledges itself to Britain via the Union Jack flying high above it, and a large stone figure of Queen Victoria standing squarely before it. Not that any of the teenagers lounging and chatting on the lawns around her ever give her much notice. I carried on through the Square and further out, onto the Dublin Road, past pubs and restaurants, neon-signed pizza places and a multiplex cinema, then further south to Botanic Avenue near Queen’s University, lined with Euro-mod cafés and shops, then east to the Ormeau Road and into south Belfast. I found the house on a quiet tree-lined street off the Ormeau Road and rang the bell.

The door was opened by a young man in his early twenties, the only lodger living there so far. He had the common Northern combination of blue eyes under straight dark brows, fine features and dark hair. Even more distractingly, he seemed familiar, in that strange way that you recognize a stranger though you can’t place where from. A sort of reverse ghost, I thought later.

The room was on the fourth floor, medium-sized with a bed, bureau dresser and small sink, wide-planked wooden floors and a low rent of £140 ($200) a month. But it was the skylight on the slanted ceiling that won me over.

The next day I dragged my large suitcase up to my fourth floor room and settled in, still feeling a bit strange and unsure about this new place, but liking it. I spent the next few weeks wandering the town in search of art galleries, bookshops, writers’ groups, interesting pubs, asking small questions of the citizens and delighting in the fact that bizarrely, nobody minded my Americanness.

The reaction to my accent was invariably a smile, and if they had time to ask, “Where ’bouts yew frum in the Stee-ayts?” as if I was a long lost cousin who’d finally decided to visit after all. In the weeks before I needed to find a part-time job – as no one was financing this little venture but me – I took time to explore the town, to pretend to paint with watercolors, and to write, the last proving harder than it sounds due to the noise in the house.

Within a few weeks I found I was living with six joyfully loud, messy university students – three women and one “fella,” as the Irish say – who took me under their wings, foreign and old (over thirty) that I was. Their noisiness alone could have sunk the Titanic. But their friendships became irreplaceable. Though I could never keep up with their drinking and late nights, I was consistently impressed with their clever humor, their fashion sense, their intelligence, their knowledge of every new technological gadget under the sun, and their willingness to share their culture and ideas with anyone wanting to hear.

My new friends’ dialects eluded me at first, but they were patient with my attempts at learning the language. Proper names also took some practice: my housemates Caoimhe [pron. KEEV-ah], Tara, Alannah, and Aidan would mention names that had me stumped when I saw them spelled out: the town of Craigavon [pron. Craig-AH-von] for one, or girls’ names such as Niamh [pron. NEE-iv] or Roisin [pron. Roh-SHEEN].

I soon learned that Northern speech has been heavily politicized over the centuries. In writing the Good Friday peace agreement, the pro-British unionist parties required that the Ulster Scots dialect be designated an official language in Northern Ireland alongside English and the language of the South of Ireland – and of the Irish republican movement – Irish Gaelic.

Of course none of this helps the newcomer decipher what the hell these people are saying. Some local phrases are easy: “Oh that’s clahss, that is!” is a compliment. “Goin’ fer a jar,” is going out for a drink. Others I had to learn in context. “Great craic,” an Irish word [pron. like "crack"], is “great fun.” “He’s only jest ah-fter” doing something is “He’s just now come back” from doing it. “Yer mahn” didn’t signify ownership of a particular man, but simply “that guy over there.” Another ubiquitous phrase is “so it is” or “so I did,” tacked on to the end of a sentence to reaffirm whatever the speaker’s just stated. Occasionally I noticed, when I didn’t end a sentence with “so it is,” the other person would add it for me.

It had been seven years since I’d last lived in London, and I was out of practice with even basic UK slang at first. When I mentioned to Aidan and his friend Joe one day, “We need to get a scrubber for the kitchen,” they smiled happily.

“Could we get one for my room, too?” Joe asked, “scrubber” being slang for “prostitute.” (The confusion doesn’t finish itself in a few months’ time, either. One day – after I’d lived in Belfast no less than three times – I only just stopped myself from innocently asking a male friend “So how’s your little man?” meaning his young son.

Though that is not unheard of, I’m positive that he’d have had a plenty good laugh on me for that, taking it that I’d just inquired after the health of his “whatsit” as the English used to say.)

Not to be attempted till you get a feel for the place, Traveler, but when yer ready like, if there’s one thing you want the upper hand on in Belfast, it’s the “slaggin’,” the contest of making fun of the other fella before his or her wit can sting you. The women may show some mercy here, the men never do.

So quick a job it is too, that you may not even know you’ve been stung at first, till you realize a new King Wit sits at the head of the table, smiling down upon ye. So keep your wit rapier sharp and at the ready when out for the evening, at least till everyone’s reflexes are dulled by drink. And don’t be handing anybody any free gifts like “little man.”

My confusion only got worse before it got better. Squinting with befuddlement, I would ask people to repeat themselves, to which they would only say the same thing more loudly. Then I began to hear something not at all foreign, mirrored back to me from across the centuries, some of it almost Shakespearean.

As it was settled by Scottish-Irish frontier folk, the Appalachian mountain region is full of much the same dialect as found in the North, preserved from the eighteenth century, recognizable even to Americans who have never traveled to Tennessee or Kentucky. In the North, as in parts of America, “your” is “yer,” “can” is “kin,” “hair” is “harr,” “poor” is “per,” “day” is “deeay” and “yes” is “Oh, aye!”

And never mind our straight down-to-business U.S. modernisms; the American “OK – I’m headin’ out now,” would in Belfast be, “Ahll the bay-est, people!” or “I’m awaey hoome now, so I ahm.” I checked my watch. Yes, still the twenty-first century. But somehow, amid all the noise, pollution and gadgetry of modern life, the Northern Irish had saved the poetry in their speech.

Northern names brought even more confusion. Catholic names, as they’re called in the North, are often traditional Irish (Gaelic) ones, many of which were foreign to me. But spoken in the local accent, even the Anglo-Protestant names eluded me. So at first I mistook Jane for Jean, Aislinn [pron. Ash-LEEN] for Ashley, Cormac [pron. CORR-mack] as Cormick mispronounced, Padraig [pron. PARR-ick] as Patrick spelled oddly, and so on.

My own name was rebirthed as CARR-Line. Hearing this for the first time had a strange effect on me. I felt as if I’d been let in through a low wooden door in a high stone wall, into an enclosed garden, out of the shallow tentativeness of modern travel and into some elusive Narnian country I had only read or dreamt about. From this sacred place I had many questions to ask.

I wanted to stop every other person on the street and ask, How did you make it through the Troubles? Tell me what happened to you. In fact I never raised the issue even with the people I lived with, out of fear someone might look at me as if I were the most intrusively ignorant Yank they’d ever met – quite a distinction considering the American reputation. But if some comment about the Troubles surfaced in conversation, I listened eagerly. I noticed that this information was almost always volunteered by a man, while one of the women invariably asked tensely, “Can we talk about something else?”

In time I would have questions about things that last far longer than war – Northern Irish myth, legend, music, poetry, community and family. Including how the Irish/Ulster Scots had preserved some of their ancient and medieval traditions as effortlessly as any people I’d ever seen who’d managed not to be wiped out or rewritten by a colonizing force. But for now, I was too distracted by the thought of the recently ended Troubles, the larger themes of which played quietly in the background.

Copyright 2010 Caroline Oceana Ryan. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.