To the Ends of the Earth

“You won’t find one in there,” I said. “It’s just old clothes—”

“And books,” she said. “And letters.”

“No letter bombs.”

She said, “I have to check all the same.”

I went for a walk. This was deep country. The pair of lakes went halfway across this part of Ulster. People spent weeks on cabin cruisers; Germans mostly. There were no English tourists here anymore.

“The English started to believe what they saw on television,” Bob Ewart said. “They actually thought all that stuff about bombs and murders was true!”

He himself was from Nottingham.

“I’ve lived here fourteen years and I’ve yet to see an angry man.”

That night the movie on television was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I watched it with the Irish hotel workers. It was a horror movie about the world being taken over by alien germs. The Irishmen said it was frightening and of course went to bed happy. Then it struck me that a horror movie could enjoy a great popular success only if its frights were preposterous—like someone saying “Boo!” The ultimate horror was really what was happening in many Ulster towns: bombs, murders, people’s hands being hacksawed off, or men having their kneecaps shot off as a punishment for disloyalty, or the tar-and-feathering of young girls for socializing with soldiers. Because this was the truth—unlike the Hollywood monster movie—it was worse than frightening: it was unbearable.

And the next day a man named Guilfoyle told me there was quite a bit of rural crime in the border areas—cattle maiming. I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that to take revenge on farmers, some of the republican country folk sneaked into the pastures at night and knifed off the cows’ udders.

Mooney’s Hotel

IN BELFAST I STAYED IN A DIRTY HOTEL WITH A DAMP INTERIOR and wallpaper that smelled of tobacco smoke and beer and the breakfast grease. But there was no security check here. I had been searched in Enniskillen, a town that hadn’t had a bomb in years; and I would have been searched at the grand Europa Hotel in Belfast—it was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and had sentries and guard dogs. The tourists and journalists stayed at the Europa—it was a good target for bombs. But no one of any importance stayed at Mooney’s Hotel.

I called it Mooney’s because it greatly resembled Mrs. Mooney’s flophouse in James Joyce’s story “The Boarding House.” Our Mrs. Mooney also had an enormous florid face and fat arms and red hands, and she catered to traveling salesmen and drifters. The carpets were ragged, the wallpaper was peeling, there were nicks all over the woodwork. But I was free there, and I would not have been free in an expensive hotel; and I also thought that in this grubby place I was out of danger. It was Belfast logic, but it was also a pattern of life that I was sure would become more common in the cities of the future.

The bar at Mooney’s was busy all night, filling the whole building with smoke and chatter.

“What time does the bar close?” I asked on my first night.

“October,” a drinker told me, and laughed.

No one admitted to breaking the law in Ulster. The most they said was “Look what they make us do!” It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not a public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders (“I’ve got something for your father”) and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places—the shootings and house burnings and the cattle maiming—in the green hills, with the birds singing.

People said, “There’s no solution.… Ireland’s always had troubles.… Maybe it’ll die out.… I suppose we could emigrate.…”

I kept thinking: This is Britain!

It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of “You started it!” and “He hit me!” And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days—I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.

But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.