ONE
TO AN ADULT, with the weariness of the world in his veins, the land is as detailed and defined as a ship in a bottle. Ireland is a small country, its northern province smaller still. Sea surrounds it and from the highest of its hills a man can see half its breadth at a glance.
But to a child the land is amorphous, vast, huge beyond measure—if anyone should need to do anything as absurd as measure it. It is a horizon of blue mountains on all sides, looming woods deep with secrets and running streams pouring out of ken to a distant and guessed-at sea. For the child a trip three fields away is an expedition, following a mile of stream akin to paddling the Amazon. A small land, then, but not for children. It is wide enough for fairy tales.
Deep as the peat, the history lies in layers. There are arms caches in desolate places, some forgotten for half a century, some slick with preserving grease and ripe for future murder. A flickering warfare has tilted to and fro across the meadows and woods, the streams and villages, for years beyond count. It is as ritualistic as the turning of the earth, a bloody libation to old, unsatisfied gods. It is a way of life.
Dredging the rivers turns up pale, Celtic gold or, even older, shaped flint, flaked to fit a hand gone to dust ten thousand years before. It is an old country, this Isle of Emerald, millennia in the shaping. War, famine and religion have marked it irrevocably, staining the minds of the people, filling the shadow of the standing stones, seeping into the peat for future fuel. It is his home.
He lives amid the acres his family has occupied for generations. They have multiplied through the years, growing from a single unit into a clan, a tribe. Sons have built houses and scraped together farms in their fathers' shadows. Daughters have married neighbours. Exiles have been and gone, have sailed away and returned to die where they were born. His family has roots here as old as the hill fort nestled on the highest of the pastures. They have possessed the land, raped it, nurtured it, cursed it and been enslaved by it.
His parents have been killed by it. He was orphaned by a bomb meant for someone else. A shopping trip to Belfast in the car his father had just bought and was so proud of...
He lives with his grandparents now, the memory a mere blur in his young mind. He does know that outside this world of his the larger world is growing darker, and in the discussions of grown-ups there is talk of rights, of equality. He does not know— nor does anyone—that in the next decade this quiet world will explode.
For the present, however, his grandparents' farm is the star his life circles. The farm is a scattered square of buildings, white-washed and red-roofed, thatch only recently replaced by the scarlet corrugated iron. There are small, forgotten sheds filled with fascinating rubbish, the jetsam of past seasons. There are lost corners, hidden nests, sudden smells, the stink of decay and fermentation, dung and hay, animals and humans.
The farm is a city in miniature, the citizens everything from the field mice in the dairy to the pigeons in the stables. There are chickens pecking in the stone-paved back yard, sly felines sleepy by day and psychopathic at night, barking collies trying to appear busy, calm-eyed horses unaware that their time of pulling and ploughing is over and that they are kept out of sentiment (though this is never admitted). There are sheep in the lower meadows, a rancid goat in the top paddock that was once a lawn, a heavily pregnant sow grunting happily to herself among the oaks and acorns of the bottom inch, and half a dozen kittens that no one has yet had the heart to drown.
But that is not all. Down by the river that cradles the farm there are water rats and voles by the score. Foxes slink across the fields at night, unnerving the chickens, and there are badger setts in the woods at the bottom of the hills. At least one kingfisher darts for stickleback, and minnow from the alders that overlook the riverbank, and curlews call constantly, arcing over the hills like arrows into the heart of the mountains in the west. The world is a busy place, thriving and writhing with activity, but for all that it is a quiet one. Horses on the roads are not yet uncommon, and cars are still a means to an end. The roads themselves are bad, potholed and crumbling, water-riven in winter and dust-baked in summer. It is two miles along them to the nearest village, which is itself nothing more than a hamlet with a public house and three churches. The town with the market that is visited once a week is eleven miles away.
Between the blunt peaks of the Sperrin mountains where the sun always sets, and the stony, gorseridden heights of the Antrim plateau to the east, the wide river valley of the Bann opens out for twenty miles, encompassing two counties. It is dark with woods and intaglioed with fields of barley and potato, kale and turnip, and the rich rolling pastures and meadows with their attendant hedges. Villages are spattered over all, islands in the green mantle of the world. There are no towns worth speaking of, and the sprawl of housing estates will not infect the land for another twenty years. It is a last breathing space, a final look around at the soon-to-be-felled woods, the rush-choked bottom meadows, the fields with the wild flowers that have seeded for a thousand years and which knew the feet of the Druids.