Bringing it all back home with Seamus Heaney

"Perhaps if I'd stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home."
Derek Mahon

Were I to draw a map of the child-world that fed my daydreams, I would mark on it the places of Seamus Heaney’s poems, their pronunciation “difficult to manage” with handfuls of craftily placed consonants and vowels at once keeping strangers apart from and a part of the Moyola River and Magherafelt, of Anahorish, Bellaghy and Broagh, where my mother grew up.

One of seven children, my mother grew up on a farm not far from the Heaneys and recalls Paddy, the man Seamus immortalised in Digging, trading cattle at the local fair in his yellow boots and a heavy coat. Also our poet, not as Nobel Laureate but as a “young cub”, a few months younger than she, riding a bicycle into Castledawson, face to the wind, his sandy hair flying behind him.

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Sandy Loaning, Co Derry

Although neighbours, Heaney would have signified to my mother a world beyond reach, having passed the 11-plus “qualifying” exam which gained him a place in St Columb’s College, which would lead to university; a road unfamiliar to her. Heaney explained this environment in his book-length series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones.

“Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.”

For my mother, America was more accessible than a formal education in Derry or Belfast, her parents having emigrated there in the 1920s. Full of hope, they had settled in Connecticut, but a steady flow of letters from home, heavy with reminders of familial obligation, pulled them back to Broagh, with their American-born children – four little boys and a daughter. Resigned, they fell back into the known and expected ways of the townland, forced to abandon forever the unfulfilled promise of America. By 1938, the family was complete with the arrival of my mother.

There was no money. As a matter of economic necessity and from an early age, my mother and her brothers and sisters learned to be “good with their hands” and frugal too. Like their neighbours who move within and about Heaney’s poems, they were off the grid, resigned to hard work – the compulsory craft – thatching and churning, divining and digging. In the background, there would have been an awareness of the importance of education, but it was not enforced beyond my grandmother’s mantra that “a pen was easier handled than a spade”. Uninspired and without more tangible encouragements, my mother attended the technical school in Magherafelt, an anathema on which she could barely wait to turn her back.

I imagine her waiting for the bus at the end of the lane every morning, knowing that when it stops for her, it will be already packed with students from Maghera, and her wishing for a day different from the one that preceded it, for the bus-driver to surprise his desultory young passengers with a detour, on past Magherafelt to Cookstown or farther still to the sandy edges of Co Antrim, to the place where, like Heaney, my mother first encountered the Atlantic Ocean – the Strand Beach, at Portstewart: “. . . a mighty curve of sand and dunes running for a mile and more. It retains for me the aura of original wonder and, of course, there was the mystery of the courting couples in the dunes.”

Down to earth again, and perhaps too soon, she started her first job in Castledawson at Crawford’s shop where she learned, among other things, how to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. As she had learned to bake and sew and make do by watching my grandmother, she observed Jim Crawford make parcels of groceries for his customers. Soon she was expertly packaging sweets and biscuits – Rich Tea or Arrowroot – that would deliver a taste of home to neighbours further afield, like Mrs O’Connor’s daughter across the water in England. Always efficient, Jim Crawford had even devised a method of tying newspapers with string so news could travel easily to relatives in America or Australia. My mother still has the knack for it, and I cannot bring myself to open these Mid-Ulster dispatches that remain in a drawer in my Phoenix kitchen – preserved ordinariness, a tribute to my mother’s heart and craft.

As a young mother in the early 1960s, she frequently took me “up home” to Broagh to see my grandparents. We took the Route 110 bus from Antrim, which made an adventure out of it, me forcing my tiny self to quieten the fear that waited at the Hillhead bus stop from which we began our walk to my grandparents’ house. On the alert, my hand in my mother’s, I was afraid of what hid in the dark spaces in the canopy of beech and alder that hung over us. Scared, but buoyed by bluebells and foxgloves winking at me from the grassy edges of the road and rustic noises of men cutting turf or baling hay, I kept going, knowing that soon I would be in my grandmother’s arms. Heartsome, with a big indulgent smile for me, in her cardigan the colour of buttercups and a flowery apron, she let me help her fill an enamel bucket with water from the pump, and together we would carry milky tea to the men out in the fields. How she loved me. What was there to fear?

[ A slideshow by Yyonne Watterson of Heaney country ]

Anything can happen.

When did this foreboding settle in me? Perhaps when I first became aware of the Troubles as they were revealed on our television set. From the grainy black and white images that flicker still in my memory – women on their knees banging bin-lids, young soldiers on street corners, smoke and ash where bombed-out shops used to stand, panic-stricken faces of families forced out of their homes. From the distressing conflation of a school report delivered on the same day as a radio report of a young Catholic women tarred and feathered, publicly humiliated for having loved a British soldier. Or perhaps from the questions of British soldiers “all camouflaged with broken alder branches” at a security checkpoint on Route 110 outside Toomebridge, an in-between place on the border between Co Antrim and Co Derry. I recall my mother and I on an autumn evening, when we were no longer bus passengers, but seated with my brother in my father’s car. Da, the head of our house, obedient, dimming his lights and answering like a schoolboy before being released back onto the road that we knew belonged to us.

We kept the fear at bay in this place that shaped and divided us. Like a catechism, we learned the lexicon of the Troubles, each of us increasingly adept at the subtle and more overt ways of using language to determine one’s religion – one’s fate. In his interviews with the people who lived there in the early 1980s, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, from the start, the particulars of a person’s background, so they can carry on in the conversation, maybe take it further into a friendship, a marriage, a lasting relationship, without ever saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word”. The schools we attended, our last names, the way we pronounce an “H” all provide critical clues to help us establish “who we are”. “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle” or “the Irish Question”, “Ulster” or “The Six Counties”? We are well practiced in the dance-steps Heaney explains in Whatever You Say, Say Nothing:

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap.

Thus we kept our distance in a crucible of doubt and suspicion. The glass was half-empty, and we anticipated the worst because we had seen it happen to people just like us, and to our little towns where there were gaping spaces where shops had been blown to bits. Although maddened by the bombs and bullets, the brutality and barbarism on all sides, we were also resigned to it. We were cautious, but not all the time. Sometimes, we were casual about the swirling sectarianism around us, hearing it at an “acceptable pitch” – the sirens and smoke, booby traps and barricades, incendiary devices and legitimate targets. These things were all part of us, stitched into our remembrances of ordinary trips to the shops or to school or to the pub on a Friday night.

Then the inevitable jolts to the psyche when it happened again, and it always happened again. From far away in America, I had distanced myself from it, until it was “too close to home”, too close to the places that had formed me, to the landscape of childhood from which Edna O’Brien maintains we can never escape – “many and terrible are the roads to home”. In May 1993 the IRA renewed its bombing campaign with four car-bombings in as many days. On May 23rd, they packed 500lbs of explosives in a van and abandoned it outside the Ulsterbus depot on Broad St in Magherafelt. They called in a warning and detonated the bomb only 20 minutes later, the explosion flattening the bus station and damaging three out of every four shops.

Far away in the desert southwest of the United States, in the days before Skype and social media, I got word on the phone. No one was badly hurt, and business as usual signs were posted on boarded up windows. The local community – Catholic and Protestant – unified in their shock and their commitment to keep going, but in my mother’s voice I heard a familiar pain, sorrow for a place that from then on would only be accessed by memory. Magherafelt was without its bus station, the place where once she took shelter, waiting for the bus home from the school that did not serve her, the place where Seamus Heaney’s mother once waited for him to return from boarding school in Derry. More than a set of co-ordinates, this bus depot, and more than “a legitimate target”. Every bombed place in Northern Ireland is a part of someone’s personal pain and drama.

In his conversation with O’Driscoll, Heaney recalls with tenderness a Halloween when he took the private bus home from Derry to Magherafelt. At the bus station, he found his mother in the waiting room, there “for the service bus” that they needed to take to complete the journey home. At the time, he believed it to be a coincidence, but years later, he realised that “she must have planned it, in order to be first to see me and to have that little while on our own together”.

Heaney’s Two Lorries was published three years after the Magherafelt bombing, long after he had moved away from Northern Ireland. Its mundane title belies the complexity of its form, a sestina, in which he juxtaposes a memory of his mother and a flirtatious coalman in the 1940s and that of the chilling choreography behind the bombing of the bus station in 1993. It opens with a recollection of a coal delivery to his home in 1940s, but by the end of the first line our thoughts drift to Ulysses, to an anguished Stephen Dedalus whose dead mother has appeared to him in a dream, “giving off an odour of wetted ashes”. In Magherafelt, too, it is also raining, “on black coal and warm wet ashes”, with a young Heaney observing Agnew, the coal man from the city, flirt with his mother, “With his Belfast accent sweet-talking my mother/ Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?” Heaney’s reading adds a playful Belfast accent – there is no harm in this innocent flirtation. His mother is is flattered as she returns to her work with dreams of “red plush and a city coalman”. We are propelled then, quickly, to modern-day Magherafelt and the second lorry on its approach to the town, bearing a deadly load that will “blow the bus station to dust and ashes”.

Unable to look away as this old black-and-white movie unfolds, we are with Heaney in a flashback to a scene in which his mother is waiting for him again at the bus-station. Nightmarish, her bags are filled not with groceries, but with shovelfuls of ashes. Agnew has returned too, death personified, no longer folding empty coal sacks but refolding “empty upon empty” body bags. Heaney asks the frightened, harrowing question, “but which/ lorry was it now?” A boy again, momentarily caught between Magherafelt’s past and present, between boarding school and home, between the nightmare of Northern Ireland and the nightmare of losing his mother, between reality and a daydream, between the coal dust and the smouldering ash of a detonated bomb. Transcending it all, beautiful, and immortal – the coalman and his old lorry: “Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s/Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.”

The tragedy and the beauty of the Northern Ireland that shaped me lies within Two Lorries – the ashes of a devastating bomb sharing the same lyrical space as the ashes of a coal-fire such as that my father regularly built to keep our house warm. Two Lorries brings me back home, to Heaney country, to Castledawson, and to men like my father at work, digging potato drills, “purdy drills”, the sound of a spade slicing through the dirt – sure and steady – or the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel sharpening a dull knife, the long metallic strokes on each side ensuring a blade sharp enough to carve a Sunday roast or a Christmas turkey.

My father is a maker of things with the “Midas touch” of the thatcher and the grasp of the diviner. Once, I observed, awestruck, as he “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands, bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations”.

Like my mother, he had no formal education. I rarely saw him read anything other than the daily newspapers, but somehow within the spare and uncompromising context of rural south Derry he encountered the poetry of Robert Service and learned it by heart. I recall impromptu recitations of The Cremation of Sam McGee or The Shooting of Dan McGrew and Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils” in response to the opening bulbs along the lane. Listening to Heaney recite poetry, I am immediately drawn back to my father’s random service workshops and wonder what he would have made of his life if the opportunity for an education had been available to him.

I recall a Christmas evening when I noticed my father engrossed in a red leather-bound book Santa Claus had left for me – The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. I suppose my father would have wanted to “fix things” for orphaned Nell, even the unfixable. I suppose all parents want to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience the pain of losing us. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. Maybe we should heed Heaney’s advice, which now stands as the epitaph on his gravestone: “So walk on air against your better judgment”.

So many minutes and miles between us, I have missed the rhythm of everyday conversations over cups of strong tea, quotidian bits and pieces of homespun wisdom from the heart of rural Derry, the gardening tips and home improvement projects that would have coloured our lives had we lived just up the road. From too far away, we have held on to each other through photographs, phone calls and brown paper packages. My father has grown to appreciate “new-fangled” social media that allows him to read a favourite passage from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or to Google answers to questions about the Japanese maple trees he tends in his garden. Our virtual connection softens the blow of time and distance for us. We are back home together again.

[ Reading Ireland ]