Читать книгу The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions - Ruth Edwards Dudley - Страница 13

‘Like migratory birds, we return to the same scene every year,’ said Henry, as we headed towards his Orange Lodge’s annual service. ‘Whole families come together from elsewhere in the province or overseas. Like Christmas, it’s a time for family bonding. We tread well-trodden roads that our own blood have walked for many generations, be it to a country lane, to a rural church or through a little village or down a main thoroughfare into a town.’

Of all my Northern Irish friends, Catholic or Protestant, Henry has the greatest sense of place. A farmer who believes in working with rather than against nature, he has a view of the land that takes account of beauty as well as utility. Because he spends so much of his life in physical labour, his mind and his imagination have plenty of time to roam free and much of his intellectual energy is devoted to devising ways of making his people comprehensible to the modern world. A typical phone call from Henry will begin: ‘As I was graiping the silage this morning, I was thinking that another thing that makes my lot [i.e. his people] so cussed is …’ Or he might be in fatalistic mood: ‘Well, don’t worry about it: whatever we do, the rivers of destiny will find their own way into the sea of history.’

Henry had decided it was time I engaged with a past not focused on King Billy or the siege of Derry. ‘We’re going to where my family come from, where my blood flows, and to the burial ground of my people, Presbyterians all,’ he said, as we drove along the Clogher Valley. ‘Look at it. Picturesque, quiet, typical south Tyrone countryside, with its rolling hills and green grass.’

Of Scots planter stock on both sides, Henry’s lines can be traced back in Ulster to the late 1700s. He stopped to point upwards. ‘At the top of that hill, that’s where my great-grandmother McMaster was reared, looking on to the Clogher Valley. This water here goes into the Blackwater system which runs into Lough Neagh: the Blackwater is very fertile, warm ground. The bottom end of the Foyle is good ground too, which is why in Derry there are so many Presbyterian churches along its banks. As the seagull follows the plough, the Presbyterian follows the good land. Not that my people were gifted with the best of fertile land, but slowly we kept labouring on, always trying to improve ourselves.’

A few miles down the road he had shown me, with unconcealed emotion, the remains of a small building in a tiny overgrown patch of green, which once had been a thatched house. It was there that Henry’s paternal grandfather and at least seven siblings were born between 1880 and 1890. Two boys became farmers, one boy joined the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the girl married. And like so many Ulster Protestants before and after them, three of the boys emigrated, one to Canada and two to the United States.

In 1932, Henry’s grandfather had taken a huge risk. He had sold this 17-acre small farm to a Catholic neighbour and bought a 120-acre farm near Omagh, twenty miles north, which had been in the hands of a bank for five years. In 1923, it had been sold for £3,500, but farm values had been plummeting and the bank ended up repossessing it. ‘Grandfather gave £1,050 for it – huge money for him – and since an earlier owner had bought it from a landlord under a government purchase act, there was an annuity of £50 a year due on it too. The house was in rotten condition, with rushes six feet high, but grandfather was strong, gutsy and determined.’

Henry’s maternal grandfather took an equal risk. Descended from a family of small farmers who came from Ayrshire in the 1600s, he moved from Keady in County Armagh, intended by his father to buy a particular sensible property, ‘but he took a shine to a place no one else would take. His father was annoyed and wouldn’t give him any financial help. But he bought the place anyway, stayed there alone for years before he married, farming, making his own bread, washing his own clothes and hanging food off the rafters at night so the rats couldn’t get it.’

The Second World War put farmers on their feet, so both grandfathers prospered. The maternal grandfather wasn’t as physically strong as the paternal, but he had a gift for figures, so he branched out. ‘He always did his sums first before he attempted anything.’ On retirement at seventy he had a lot more land as well as other businesses. We saw the farms of Henry’s aunt and Henry’s cousin and the house his maternal grandfather was supposed in the first place to buy but had ‘taken umbrage against’. Henry knew every twist in the road. ‘This is home. Even if you had no blood connections to Clogher Valley, you’d feel attached to it: it’s homely. It’s always good to come back to it, irregardless of how far you go in the world. And the fact that it’s green, deep land and that most of your blood comes from it, I suppose is something that endears it to you as well.’

Then in front of us was Glenhoy church. ‘When Presbyterians were eventually given permission to build meeting houses, there wasn’t much good land left. When we got round to getting our own piece of land around here we drew the short straw. It’s damnable to dig graves here because it’s pure rock a foot down: they have to bring in compressors to bust it.

‘My paternal ancestors lie here. And they were all in my Orange Lodge, LOL 908. And there’s the new hall we built last year.’ He stopped at the top of a hill and pointed down. ‘If you stepped back to 1848 (the year the church was built) you would find my great-great-grandfather walking in procession on the same country lane I now walk in one of the glens of the Clogher Valley to our little kirk on the hill. It’s in the blood and calls from deep within us, our little ritual to let the outside world know we’re still here.’

We were late, too late for Henry to join the assembly a mile down the road and parade like his great-great-grandfather up to the church. But as we waited he talked more about the Clogher Valley and how even though his paternal grandfather had moved away from that area he would always come back to this lodge. One of Henry’s two brothers would be here today. His father would have been along too but he had to attend another Orange service elsewhere.

Henry’s forebears achieved high office in the Orange Order: his father, grandfathers and great-grandfather were variously Worshipful Masters of lodges and districts and even the county. Henry confined himself to being lodge treasurer for a few years, an office which he said was undemanding: he took the extreme modernizing step of opening a bank account, he collected the dues and kept the very simple books. Although he has an intense emotional attachment to his lodge, which he had joined as a junior, he has no interest in holding office again. This is a sign of the times that in some ways worries him: ‘A hundred years ago, high offices would have tended to be held by Church of Ireland clergy right up to bishops, as well as by the old gentry. Some of those lads had a lot of backbone as well as standing – and some of them were cranky and mad as hell.’

Henry told me the story of a County Grand Master of Tyrone. The improbably named Anketell Moutray was kidnapped by the IRA in 1922 with forty others and taken across the border to be used as bargaining counters for eleven IRA men from County Monaghan, who had been arrested in Northern Ireland. Moutray, who was eighty, drove his captors crazy by incessantly singing in a cracked voice penitential psalms and ‘God Save the King’.

Henry talked of how the gentry began to disappear: compulsory purchase legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had required many to sell their farms and two world wars had killed off many more. The leadership of the Orange became dominated by the business and professional classes, people like his grandparents. But in Henry’s generation, people like that are busier than in the past and less able to give their time and their effort to what are often the mundane details of lodge work. ‘It’s not that I work physically harder than my ancestors, but life has become more demanding. For instance, they didn’t have to spent their evenings bogged down in paperwork.’ And at higher levels within the loyal institutions, where there are endless meetings, these days people with small businesses are in danger of going to the wall.

There were very few people in the hamlet, just a few cars, a handful of wives and maybe ten or twelve children. It was a nice day and there was a silver band and it was pleasant to hear the strains of hymn music wafting up the hill and seeing in the distance the advancing procession of Orangemen, many of whom, when they finally arrived, had faces so weather-beaten that not even a townee like me could doubt their occupation.

There were only about fifty people present. The lodge has only forty brethren, of whom just over half were there and then there were guest Orangemen and other visitors. There was a pause for a chat with families, friends and acquaintances and then it was time to reassemble to walk in formation into the church. With the other non-processors, I followed them in and sat at the back of the little church in a right-hand pew along with women and children: across the aisle was the band.

The young Presbyterian minister wasn’t an Orangeman. Only about 12 per cent of them are, Henry told me afterwards, because, particularly in the rural parts, it was so much a family thing; this minister had no such connections. The service was the usual mixture of hymns and prayers but I was pretty rocked by the sermon, particularly since I knew the guest preacher to be a member of the Church of Ireland. One of the twentieth-century assumptions I have learned to jettison since I started consorting with evangelical Protestants is that Presbyterians are necessarily more extreme than Anglicans. Certainly the Church of England is notoriously woolly and the Church of Ireland in the Republic is self-consciously liberal, but the circumstances of life in Northern Ireland are such that Protestants of all denominations are tougher, more evangelical, less ecumenical and inevitably more political than their counterparts elsewhere. What was on the mind of the Reverend William Hoey (who was later identified to me as the minister who had called Cardinal Daly ‘a red-hatted weasel’)^* was Drumcree, which, being only three weeks away, was on the minds of most people in Northern Ireland.

Reverend Hoey was certainly a lively and opinionated speaker, lukewarm only in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who at the time were uttering various threats. In the Foreign-Officespeak that has been adopted and popularized by Sinn Féin and their counterparts in the Progressive Unionist Party, he said they weren’t ‘helpful’. He then reverted to Old-Testamentspeak and got stuck into the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who set up a golden image which all had to worship on pain of being cast into a fiery furnace; this appeared to be a metaphor for Drumcree. What bothered me slightly was that while Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged from the furnace unscathed, as an unbeliever I wasn’t convinced that following the Reverend Hoey’s recommendation to trust in the Lord was going to be enough to extract the Orange Order unscathed from Drumcree. However, the preacher wasn’t worrying his congregation that much: at least four or five of the bandsmen had fallen asleep. Sunday afternoon following a large lunch is normally a time for hard-working countrymen to have a rest.

We sang our hymns and said our prayers and emerged into the sunshine. After some more chatting with ministers and friends, the men reassembled. A familiar face to which I couldn’t put a name smiled at me: I learned later he was a member of my Black Lodge. The silver band struck up a hymn and along with a few children I followed the Orangemen down the hill. We passed perhaps four houses on the way; the inhabitants were sitting in their gardens looking mildly interested. The only residents we upset were a collection of sheep who ran in panic to the opposite end of their field. After a mile or so the procession stopped, the Orangemen turned to face across the fields, the band struck up and we all sang the national anthem. Men resumed chatting for a while and then took off in their cars for home.

Henry and I walked back up the hill to where he had parked. ‘Forty years ago,’ he said, ‘this is what Drumcree was like. That’s what they don’t understand. We don’t need anybody to see us parading.’ ‘A woman rang up the David Dunseith phone-in programme on the BBC the other day,’ he added, ‘and said “The trouble over parade routes only comes when these so-called nationalists move into these areas”. It was unfortunately a very logical statement which would strike a chord with every Protestant in Portadown.

‘What have you got here? Four houses in a little over half a mile and only a few black cows and a few horny sheep to contend with. There are hundreds of parades like this. At Drumcree, the point of view of the Portadown man is: “My father and my grandfather walked through that way. Why should I change?” ‘ For inarticulate and threatened people, walking the territory is their way of expressing their link with the past.

When we got home, he showed me ‘Title Deeds’,^* a poem that to Henry best describes the passion of the Scots-Irish dissenters for the land they have tilled for centuries, which is understood by so few outside their community, especially those who still see them as foreigners and usurpers. Its inspiration was Genesis 23:20: ‘And the field and the cave that is therein were made sure unto Abraham for a possession.’

Grey, twisted stones, half hid in careless grass,

Scribed with faint names of those who sleep below,

Who once saw winter into summer pass,

Felt dawn in Ulster, watched her sunset glow

O’er every hill they furrowed with the plough,

On the white walls of homestead and of byre

Loved beyond death, even as men love them now,

With a devotion burning like a fire.

Graves of the men of Ulster, who came forth

To seek a better country than their own,

As Abraham from Ur once quested north

Obedient to the faith which led him on.

Obedient down the wandering of the years

Through many a hope deferred, a plan delayed,

Claiming the land for ever by his tears Shed at

the grave where his dear dust was laid.

So by these graves we claim the country still,

This land made rich by sacrifice and tears,

Held with such passionate love, such stubborn will, Tom from the people oft down bitter years,

Spoiled by the hirelings of a servile court,

Harried by prelates of a faith denied.

The rebels’ plunder and the landlords’ sport,

Yet loved of those who tilled her fields, and died,

And dying passed into her kindly mould

To sanctify for us each kirkyard green,

Each sheltered vale and every hillside cold,

And little highways where their feet have been.

Thus do we claim our country from the lord

As Abraham claimed his at Machpelah’s cave,

From age to age still runs the changeless word,

‘The land is his who claims it by a grave.’

It came as no surprise that such an anti-Episcopalian poem had been written by a Presbyterian minister. What was more surprising was that he was a distant kinsman of Henry’s, for I had thought all of his blood were farmers or businessmen apart from the odd engineer. And Henry was able to tell me the story that had inspired such ardent love of Ulster and such bitter denunciation of his ancestors’ persecutors.

The paternal family of the poet, John Worthington Johnston, had farmed south of the border in County Monaghan from King William’s time until, in the 1860s, as a result of some skulduggery by the landlord and his steward, who wanted the prosperous farm for himself, they had to move. In the Clogher Valley, Johnston’s grandfather started afresh and turned unproductive land into a fertile farm; he had seven children, including one who became Henry’s great-grandmother. When Johnston died at fifty-one, his eldest son took over, ran the farm and then became a Presbyterian minister. He had a church in County Antrim and then for a long time served in Dublin. His son John, who was born south of Dublin, was only twelve when his father’s church, the Abbey, was burned down during the 1916 Easter Rising.

John Johnston graduated from Trinity College Dublin with first-class honours in Classics and from Cambridge University with a first in Theology and then, like his father before him, became a minister in County Antrim. In October 1942 he joined the 1st Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, in the 6th Airborne Division, and served as one of the small number of ‘parachute padres’ until invalided out in 1945 after a parachute jump that went wrong. Of his three daughters, one became a distinguished historian and the other two senior civil servants, one of whom later became, like her father and grandfather, a Presbyterian minister.

The story of the Johnstons is an illustration of how, until very recently, almost the only acceptable way for any rural Presbyterian to follow an intellectual route was through the ministry. And equally graphically, his poem shows how even one of the loftier intellects among Presbyterian ministers kept true to his roots. Being elected by the members of their congregation, and running their kirk hand-in-hand with their elders, keep ministers humble and in touch with reality.

In his book on Presbyterians, the Reverend John Dunlop described the Bible as ‘the book of a pilgrim people’, which goes a long way towards explaining why they identify so much with the Israelites of the Old Testament, an aspect of their collective psyche represented throughout the rituals of the Orange and Black institutions. There was not a man walking in an Orange collarette down that hill from Glenageeragh, thinking about Drumcree, in whom Johnston’s poem would not have struck a deep chord.