I WAS walking down O’Connell Street the other day when I had a remarkable experience. I heard some people speaking English.
This set me thinking about the first foreigner I ever met in this once monolingual (all right, bilingual) island. I believe the first aliens I may have seen, as opposed to met, were, of all things, Gibraltarians. Near the start of the second World War the citizens of the Rock were evacuated and dispersed to refugee camps in England, Jamaica and Madeira. In 1944 some 5,000 of them were further evacuated to Northern Ireland, and 1,500 of those were housed in no fewer than eight Nissen hut encampments in the vicinity of Ballymena, my ville natale, until 1948 when they were able to return to their home place. Meanwhile, they had to get their Mediterranean tongues round the names of Tannybrake, Moorfields, Castlegore, Dunaird, Drummack, Aughacully, Brekagh Bridge and Corby Bridge, where they lived.
If you could call it living. For those years were no picnic for the Gibs (as they were, not unaffectionately, dubbed). In July 1944, Lady Sylvia O’Neill wrote from Cleggan Lodge, near Ballymena, an irate letter to the Belfast Weekly Telegraph: “These camps are quite unsuitable for people used to a warm climate. At present they are seas of mud. There is no electric light and the sanitation is of the most primitive kind. The evacuees’ clothes and shoes are most inadequate, and many of them have not the means to purchase more.
“The worst aspect, to my mind, of the whole affair, is that it is impossible for them to find work, and it is soul-destroying for people, especially those, many of them who are young, to spend weeks and months with no work and very little amusement.
“We are a purely agricultural community, nearly all family farms. During the harvest some of the men were employed, but the Gibraltarian is not an agricultural worker. A few have found work in Ballymena, six miles away.”
The Gibs apparently didn’t hold a long-term grudge. Ballymena is now twinned with the Rock, reciprocal official visits are exchanged, and there is even a block of flats in Gibraltar called Ballymena House.
I can’t really pretend to a visual memory of these incomers, with their swarthy strangeness, but, at the age of three or so, with my precocious – I might almost dare to say, Joycean – gift for wordplay, I’m told that I referred to them as “Gibralterriers”.
However, the first real non-national I ever actually met was, just as improbably for the Northern Ireland of those days, a Czech.
In 1939 some brothers from Prague by the name of Utitz had opened a small fine-leather tannery in the hamlet of Shrigley, a satellite of the village of Killyleagh in Co Down. Don’t ask me why, but they did, and grateful were the locals for the employment.
The managing director was also Czech, a certain Mr Horenovsky. Now my aunt Eva was at the time (1950s) postmistress in Killyleagh. Mr Horenovsky came in regularly with the company’s mail, and he and my aunt became friends.
Mr Horenovsky had a dog, a pedigree Airedale, that he liked to enter for the local shows. The annual agricultural show in Ballymena was a big occasion for us dazzling young urbanites, where we would compete to see who could scoop up the most free literature about combine harvesters and Ferguson tractors and stick our fingers into the soft rubbery suck of the nozzles on the Alfa-Laval milking-machines.
Mr Horenovsky wanted to try his hand, or the dog’s paw, at the Ballymena show, and my aunt asked my parents to put him up overnight. So my family’s roof-tree, undoubtedly for the only time in its history, gave shelter to a man from a far-away country of which we knew little (let’s be honest, of which we knew nothing). I doubt that there was much discussion that evening about the Battle of White Mountain or the foreign policy of Edvard Beneš.
Afterwards, by way of thanks, Mr Horenovsky sent my brother and me two fine books of derring-do. I can still recall their titles: Adventure and Discovery and Discovery and Romance. One had red boards and the other green. (The dog didn’t win anything, by the way, and Mr Horenovsky returned to his Morocco, nubuck and glacé kid).
I see there are still Horenovskys in the Czech Republic. And in Colorado Springs and Boulder and Darmstadt, Germany, too. But the tannery in Shrigley has long gone, and so have the Nissen huts of Tannybrake, Moorfields, Castlegore, Dunaird, Drummack, Aughacully, Brekagh Bridge and Corby Bridge.