Ireland may be my nation, but English is still my language

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS IN LONDON last week. On Tuesday morning, I sat on the judge's bench in a courthouse near King's Cross Road; a small oak-panelled room where Charles Dickens first imagined the story of Oliver Twist.

The Clink Courthouse is a youth hostel now, and the courtroom is an internet area. All around me, Chinese and Spanish teenagers were e-mailing Beijing and Barcelona. Life in the Clink has greatly changed since 1837.

I am a native English speaker and as Mullingar and London are both English-speaking towns, I feel reasonably at home in both. Ireland may be my nation, but no amount of Irish language road signs will undermine the fact that English is my language, and I love its clear and fluid irony and the clipped music of it, as sound as any bell.

It's not easy to say "good morning" in Irish without getting mired in theological debate. Almost every mundane salutation is imbued with an unreasonable confidence in far-fetched heavens, in Celtic mists or pagan gods.

Fortunately I grew up in Cavan and, from an early age, was exposed to agnostic shopkeepers who were fluent in the English tongue. When I was a child, bugle-eyed old men and slippered crones whispered delicious and gorgeous words into my ears, which echoed with the music of Shakespeare.

And in south Ulster, the Elizabethan period, with all its gore and blood-drenched vocabulary, endured until the latter half of the 20th century.

My Ulster was a place where men walked through fields in the dead of night, where husbands did things in the shadows that they kept hidden from their children, and where boys from Winchester and Devon shivered behind the ditch and cried for home as they waited to shoot at strangers. It was a place where women threw themselves into rivers, just to break the silence.

I remember using the bathroom of a middle-class house one evening and being startled by the green bulletproof window, and by the gun lying casually behind the toilet bowl. It seemed comic that someone might try to kill me as I evacuated my bowels.

There was a lot to hear and see in Ulster; I heard whispers about unfortunate folk who ended up in their own fridges. And I knew the schoolhouse where the master's head was almost severed in a wind of bullets that lashed his neck and shocked his little scholars into silence for many years to come.

That was a time when milkmen lumbered their own death about in creamery cans, and the evening news announced which neighbour ended his day in a field of blood, as men at the counter drank stout, and nodded with understated approval.

And every morning, innocent farmers walked out the door and wondered might they ever kiss their wives again, as they turned the ignition key of their big red tractors to begin a day of spreading muck.

I lived on the shores of Lough Erne where each field was a haven of yellow iris - a lovely land until one day someone looked me in the eye and said that I too was an enemy.

Mullingar is a long way from those juicy fields, and soldiers garrisoned here over the centuries were never quite as menacing as the active service units of the IRA or the UDR.

When Charles Dickens was a journalist in London, a young soldier stationed in Mullingar often spent his time around the town drawing sketches of civilians. He wanted to leave behind him an enlightened record of human life in a small Irish town.

I imagine him sitting on the steps of the old Masonic Hall in Church Street with paper and charcoal, making his sketches, during the elections of 1852.

The hall is derelict now; a crumbling house of blackened stone and broken windows, haunted by a few young Goths who congregate on its steps, as if the ancient shadows could offer refuge from the pink and plastic world of modern Ireland.

I sometimes stand there too, thinking of soldiers, and Dickens, and the gift of language. The only thing I miss about south Ulster is the English that was spoken there; that cunning poetry of tightly-twisted meanings, that dry humour and savage irony which could warp the mind as completely as Semtex once melted steel girders on the streets of Enniskillen.

[ mharding@irish-times.ie ]