Going North: the Other Ireland by Maxine Jones

An e-mail I sent one evening to a forest park manager in the Mourne mountains was replied to at 8.30am the following day. He directed me to the person who would best be able to help. On the dot of nine, I received a phone call from a Northern Irish woman who administered a photographic library, responding to a query I had left on her answer phone the night before. She would be able to help me when I had acquired and filled in the appropriate form. Promptness and efficiency, dogged by a zeal for precision and protocol seemed to be a Northern Irish trait.

I’d just finished reading Dervla Murphy’s ‘A Place Apart’ about her travels in the North at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s. She found herself able to pick out Northern Irish faces. I once had a row with a friend because she denied that national traits existed. We’re all human, we’re all the same, was her argument. She is right, of course. But there is a superficial level at which national characteristics do come into play - different mannerisms and habits, which would affect something like whether you would acknowledge strangers in the street or not.

It was the week leading up to Hallowe’en and I’d decided to take my sons, Conor, Marcus and Tiernan, up to the North for a couple of days - their first visit. Marcus backs out with the excuse that he thinks he’ll get blown up. I try to entice him with the biggest hedge maze in the world and a seal sanctuary but he will have none of it. I don’t know what the problem is, but suspect he’s feeling picked on by his brothers. Or it could be his father’s aversion to the North. He has been there once, for a wedding, in a lifetime of living in the South. We’re going over a weekend so Marcus can stay with his father if he doesn’t come. He changes his mind - he will come. Then changes it back. I give up and let him stay. He orders us to bring back fireworks, banned here in the South.

Conor and Tiernan are intrigued to see Northern Ireland, or Norn Iron as they pronounce it, mimicking a northern accent. The border is so close with the new motorway - the van takes only one and a quarter hours. There’s no border as such, just signs saying Money Changed and Fireworks. I stop to get sterling with my visa, but this isn’t allowed. Only cash will be changed. The change booths have a seedy atmosphere, like a betting office or casino. The accent is strikingly different. I find it attractive. There is a sense of distrust, of being among strangers - the same feeling that pervades in England, but stronger. We buy some things in the shop next door - prices are in sterling but they accept euro. By the time I’ve chatted inanely for a few minutes the young girl at the till thaws and smiles at me and the boys. I said how we weren’t sure whether we were in the North or not and the boys were excited about coming here. ‘Och, youse are in the North all right,’ she said. ‘That blue and white building, that’s the border.’ She pointed out a nondescript building a couple of hundred yards away.

We queue for the one toilet. Three small children going down in size wait ahead of us. The smallest boy at the end is about six. He is wearing a green Ireland football jersey. ‘Are you on your holidays?’ I ask them. ‘Yes,’ says the middle child, the only girl, with a sweet face and long straight black hair and missing front teeth.

‘Have you come far?’

‘From Cork.’

‘You must have been up early.’

‘We left at 8 o’clock,’ she tells me. It’s now about one. The person in the toilet is taking ages and the littlest boy is hopping from foot to foot.

‘And where will you be staying?’

‘In Tyrone,’ the little girl answers. ‘With our granny.’

I wondered whether the little boy’s green shirt would cause any offence. I had wondered something similar when Tiernan had brought out his duvet to pack in the back of the van. It was covered in tricolors celebrating Ireland’s 2002 World Cup effort. Aware that the Republic’s flag so visible through the back window might be misconstrued, I switched it for another duvet, saying he might be warmer if he took a double duvet. Tiernan had earlier asked whether we should take off the IRL sticker from the van and I had laughed, saying, ‘Don’t be silly.’

At Newry we took the A25 which led to our destination, Castlewellan Forest Park. The road went up and down and twisted and turned. Local traffic treated the road like a racetrack. The views were striking, with the Mountains of Mourne on our right and, just after Kilcoo, the placid waters of Lough Island Reavy on our left. In some of the villages Union Jacks and the red hand of Ulster fluttered on lampposts. The campsite was within the gates of the forest park, which opened onto Castlewellan’s quite pretty main street, so we had the wilds of an extensive estate at our disposal as well as pubs, shops and restaurants within walking distance.

The caravan park only takes up a small part of the estate, which, as well as the maze, called the Peace Maze and constructed in 2000, has a large lake, stately home, sculpture trail, arboretum, glasshouses and walled gardens. While Tiernan and Conor made several circuits of the maze without ever managing to reach the centre, I strolled the parkland, elegantly laid out with sweeping views and ancient trees, a manicured wilderness.

There was only a small scatter of other caravans and motorhomes when we arrived and we had to immediately call on the help of our nearest neighbour when I overshot the hard stand and a back wheel sank deep in mud. It had rained continuously for the previous two days, but the sun was out now and the forecast good. He ambled over, a scruffy man in his sixties with three dogs on leads and a cigarette dangling from his lip. He was in a caravan with an awning and had a four-wheel truck with fake Alabama and Georgia license plates alongside the Northern Irish one. ‘Could happen to anyone,’ he said, through brown teeth. ‘I’ll soon have youse out.’ Chatty, in the way I am when I arrive somewhere new, I explained how a third brother had stayed behind with his father, afraid of bombs.

‘Och, we meet all sorts on caravan parks,’ he said. ‘Yous’ll never guess who I met here once. People from Holland. Holland!’ he repeated. I tried to look impressed. ‘I’ve worked all over the world and wherever you go they just see you as a Paddy. They make no difference between North and South. I’m a Paddy to them.’ He told me he was a mechanic from Belfast and often stayed at this site and at Castle Ward.

Towards evening we walked across the grounds to the gates of the park and the village. It was soon obvious that we’d need to use our torches to find our way back and we called into a Spar for fresh batteries. I asked the middle-aged woman serving us to recommend a pub where we could eat. She pointed down the hill. There were two pubs on the same side of the road as the Spar. I went back in to ask her which one. At first I couldn’t recognise the woman as another assistant looked similar - same pointed features and short hair cut. ‘Not the first,’ she said, pulling a face.

The first pub didn’t look great from the outside. But the second, when we went in, was no more welcoming. We decided to try the one on the other side of the road, which the shop assistant hadn’t mentioned. Inside was a non-smoking restaurant area. Irish songs played and a typical colleen - long dark hair and milky skin - gave us the menu. Our meals were double portions, chips piled high, followed by massive bowls of home-made apple crumble and custard. On the radio was a documentary about Lady Gregory, founder of the Abbey Theatre. The talk was interspersed with songs such as Liverpool Lou and the Sally Gardens.

Tiernan asked me if the Irish spoken in the North would be the same as the Irish spoken in the South. A pretty, full-figured woman with long blond hair had just arrived with the desserts.

‘Oh, aye. Our accents are much different here,’ she said. She thought I was talking about the English language.

‘But do you speak Irish here?’ I asked. ‘These boys learn it at school and wondered if it was the same Irish here.’

She didn’t really know but told us that they learnt Irish here in secondary school, ‘but only the clever ones in the top stream. I don’t think that’s fair. I think they should all get to learn it,’ she said.

‘Can you speak it?’ I asked.

‘My mother, she’s 77 now, she used to go to Mass in Irish. I can bless myself in Irish. My mother taught me. And I can say the Hail Mary and Our Father.’

‘We bless ourselves in Irish at school every day,’ Tiernan said.

‘Do you?’ I said. ‘Let’s see if it’s the same Irish, then.’ I asked the waitress to say her version. She did, shyly. The boys said it was more or less what they said. The waitress went away smiling.

In a bright spacious back room there was a juke box and snooker table and a few young children playing. Older teenagers sat around with pints, swearing. Tiernan and Marcus had a game of snooker and then we headed into the darkness of the forest park. Our thin torchlights were all we had to see the puddles by and find our way back to the camping area.

The next day was sunny and the boys ran back to the maze. I took photographs of the sun on the lake and the red and golden leaves. At midday we moved north, to the ferry at Strangford, passing the entrance to Castle Ward, where we decided to come back and stay that night.

Exploris Aquarium on the other side of the narrow entrance to Strangford Lough kept me and the children entertained for four hours. The dry-humoured broad-accented man who gave the Touch Tank demonstration taught us about sharks (friendly), starfish (cannibals, eyes at end of legs, grow new legs if lose one and a lost leg will grow a whole new body), scallops (can be used as water pistols). We ate in the cafe there, the children painted Hallowe’en pictures in the ‘colouring-in room’ and we watched the cartoon-like seal pups being fed. On the ferry coming over a similar van to ours was parked next to us, with a handsome couple and three pretty daughters. The littlest stuck her tongue out at my two. They pulled into the Aquarium car park alongside us. Had Marcus been with us I would have had the male equivalent of the three daughters. The children eyed each other and I smiled at the mother but none of us started up a conversation, though the vans would have been a starting point.

We were the only campers at Castle Ward, and parked close to the toilets for comfort. We slept well and paid a warden who appeared in the morning to clean out the perfectly clean showers and toilets. We toured the grounds, which had views out over Strangford Lough. The boys had a state-of-the-art adventure playground to themselves, where I couldn’t resist having a go, in the interests of weight loss.

Coming back through Downpatrick, we looked out for the camper van of a couple we’d met in La Rochelle over the summer. When they told me where they lived I had no idea where Downpatrick was, and it pleased me that now I had a passing acquaintance with the place.

We took the coastal A2 and stopped at a picturesque picnic spot by Murlough sand dunes in Dundrum Bay. The sun was out and the wind was strong, sending up a spray from the waves. Here we saw the Mountains of Mourne sweeping down to the sea and the effect, among these 6,000-year-old dunes with their rare plant life and wild scrubland, habitat to almost extinct butterflies, was magical. Made up of shingle and hard, flat sand, the beach here is magnificent and the boys didn’t want to leave. Tiernan wrote ‘we come in peace’ in the sand.

We passed through Newcastle, which the boys wanted to come back to in summer, as it seemed that kind of place - amusements and waterslides, like Bray or Courtown. Kilkeel had a decidedly less playful feel. Union Jacks flew everywhere, even over the beautiful ruins of an old church. Warrenpoint had a large square car park on the edge of Carlingford Lough, surrounded by shops and pubs. We called into a pub which offered, incongruously, Chinese food. Irish music was playing and the friendly redfaced barman came over to us when we opened the door. ‘Is it food you’re after?’ he said. ‘I’ll go and see,’ and he ran up the stairs and came back a little later to tell us they’d gone - they presumably being the enterprising Chinese, but they’d be back at five. He directed us instead to the Diamond Restaurant.

The Diamond Restaurant was doing a roaring trade. Plastic ‘diamonds’ were encrusted in the brown plastic seats. A young English woman with a bulging spare tyre under a tight sweater was complaining to a thin, pinched older woman, who didn’t say a word, about a colleague. A wiry young man sat alone to our right wolfing down a mountainous desert piled high with whipped cream. A waitress walked past carrrying an old-fashioned tiered cake holder piled with iced cakes and chocolate bars, which she set down at a table. At another table four fat middle-aged women were served foot-high chocolate sundaes.

I ordered a vegetable curry. ‘Do you want half and half?’ the waitress asked, meaning half chips, half rice.

We remembered our promise to Marcus, and I hoped to avoid the suspicious-looking factories on the border by buying some fireworks in a newsagent. A headline on the Daily Mirror screamed: ‘Firework Madness. Police crack down as Ulster goes crackers.’ I asked the newsagent, a thin woman with bleached blond hair, what the story was. ‘You need a license to buy them and a license to sell them,’ she told me. ‘It’s not worth the bother.’

We bought masks and a few sparklers instead. I told her we were from Dublin. ‘Down Mexico way,’ she said.

On the same day that Lord Mountbatten was killed by the IRA in 1979, 18 British soldiers were blown up in Warrenpoint. One bomb destroyed a truck carrying troops, and the other went off in a ruined church where the survivors took cover. A friend in Dublin told me a story of a friend of hers who’d been stopped at the spot where it happened and asked for identity papers. By a ghost, it transpired. No doubt an apocryphal tale.

From Newry to Dundalk we crawled along in nose-to-tail traffic, then, after filling up with diesel (much cheaper in the south) made a brisk (for us) run down the motorway, admiring the new bridge over the Boyne lit up in blue laser lights. Before we knew it we were off the M50 and home. We felt we’d been away much longer than two days.

‘Did it seem like another country to you?’ I asked the boys.

‘Not really,’ said Conor, ‘Though the people are friendlier here.’