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1974, Anniversaries, Bloody Sunday, Enniskillen, Greill Marcus, Halloween, Hurricane Sandy, May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind To Belfast, Memoir, Memory, Nelly's Garden, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Peace, Quinn Brothers, Ritual, UWC Strike, Van Morrison
Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.
~ Roger Shattuck 1958 (Source: Listening to Van Morrison, Neill Marcus).
It’s Halloween. Where I’m from, the holiday derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain, that time of year when, on the cusp of winter, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, the souls of our long-dead ancestors emerging through it, seeking warmth and communion with us.
Trick or treating has its origins in the ancient holiday too. Legend has it that Stingy Jack, sentenced by the devil to roam the earth for eternity, his path lit by a burning coal inside the carved-out turnip he carried. To scare Jack away and any other wandering evil spirits, people eventually fashioned their own versions of his lantern, carving ghoulish faces into turnips and placing them in windows. When Irish immigrants arrived in America with their jack-0′-lantern tradition, they discovered that pumpkins made the perfect Halloween lantern.
Growing up in Northern Ireland, Halloween was very different from the holiday I eventually embraced in the United States. There were no expensive costumes and no elaborately carved pumpkins. There were no pumpkins. If our mothers were feeling creative, some of us went out dressed in a white sheet with holes cut out for our eyes – or a black bin bag. But mostly, we were wrapped up in our duffel coats – our only disguise a hard plastic ‘false face’ attached to our real faces with a thin elastic band and through which it was almost impossible to breathe. For those of us who didn’t want to make any effort at all, we just pulled our sweaters up over our heads. We carried a plastic bag from the Spar or a pillowcase that would be filled to the brim with sweets. Somebody always thought to bring a torch to light our way. We thought we were menacing.
To be clear, this was not “trick or treating.” We knocked on doors or rang doorbells and sang at the top of our lungs:
Halloween’s coming on and the goose is getting fat,
Would you please put a penny in the old mans hat,
If you haven’t got a penny a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny then god bless you
In 1970s Northern Ireland, the grown ups I knew never dressed up. Never. They stayed at home and watched telly, while we roamed the housing estate, sweating under false faces. If we were lucky – somebody would give us sparklers (all the more exciting because fireworks had been banned). At the time, fireworks were outlawed in Northern Ireland due to fears that the noise they made might be confused with the sound of bombs or gunfire. There were also concerns that they would be used to make bombs or weapons. This was 1970s Northern Ireland.
With all this behind me by the time I became a mother – in America – I had embraced Halloween in all its commercialized glory. Every year, my husband dutifully lit candles inside the pumpkins I made him carve with our daughter the day before Halloween. We would fill the biggest bowl in the house with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Between us, we always took turns handing out the candy, but my preference was always to join the merry band of trick-or-treaters that strolled our street, stopping only a few paces behind to wait while my miniature make-believe princess knocked on the doors of strangers. This annual trek through the neighborhood ceremoniously ended with a sprint to our front door, where she would ring the doorbell and call out “Trick or treat!” Feigning surprise, her daddy would fling the door wide and fill her plastic pumpkin basket with chocolate and sweets. For this reason, I have always attributed to Halloween her sweet tooth.
There was never a trick – always a treat for her and the scores of children who walked the path to our door over the years, reminiscent of that wonderful scene in E.T., tiny versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Tinkerbell, Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Pikachu, and even the sitting President of the United States. On our last Halloween as a family, I remember it was our teenage daughter’s turn to dole out candy. Sporting ears of a fictional Japanese cat and a black tail, both hand-sewn by her best friend, she took great delight in the younger children who couldn’t wait to be scared by the pale and howling motion-sensitive ghost that hung above the doorway.
We knew it would be a quiet Halloween, falling on a week-night, the Wednesday before the 2012 General Election. Naturally, there was homework for voters, with a plethora of Propositions to study and decisions to make over who would be sent to Washington. It didn’t feel like Hallowe’en with November just hours away and the night air hanging warm at almost 80 degrees. Nonetheless, at sunset, the ritual began.
Behind the scenes, I was restless. Paying bills, scrolling through the work emails I didn’t have time to read at work, and following, in disbelief, the devastation and the rising death-toll of Hurricane Sandy. I was also listening to a voice from home, Van Morrison, a voice that has disappointed me in the last couple of years, as it has raved madly on conspiracy theories around COVID-19. But on this Halloween, the singer repeating the ritual of nights spent “spinning and turning in the alley like a whirling dervish,” I feel a deep nostalgia, the kind Greill Marcus describes in his brilliant book Listening to Van Morrison. The space between the relentlessly repetitive words, is where I still find the themes of home, of memory and ritual.
“Behind the Ritual” still takes me back home to County Antrim, into the lives of two sisters I have never met. The first, Mary, had stumbled upon something I had written in this online space and left a comment that forever connected us, as is the way of the virtual world where we search for one thing and find another that renders the first forgotten. Within this shrinking world, I learned that her cousin had been my hairdresser some 40 years ago. Every time I visited Pauline for a trim or carefully placed auburn highlights, there was always a moment, a ritual, when I considered, silently, the pub across the road. The Wayside Halt stands, almost stoic, on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. It was and remains the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look. Unremarkable, except for those that know of the horror that visited Byrne’s pub on May 24, 1974. And every time I sank into Pauline’s hairdresser’s chair, I thought about it. We never talked about it.
Until about a decade ago, I only knew what I had remembered from the newspaper stories, until my father told me his story of the night one of his friends had suggested they call into the Wayside Halt for a quick pint since it was on the road home. Knowing the unlikelihood of a “quick pint” and because he had been in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark, daddy declined. But before reaching Randalstown not an hour later, the harrowing word had arrived that Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, Mary’s uncles – Shaun Byrne and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked too, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.
Shaun and Brendan Byrne were executed while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture Mary sent me, the only child not home that evening was the little girl at her father’s right shoulder.
Because it is Halloween, and because she is Mary’s sister, I am compelled to share again Anne’s recollection of Hallowe’en, first posted on online on November 1, 2005. Like Mary, she had left a comment for me, and the world contracts once more:
Uncle Brendan and the Hallowe’en Parties
I loved Hallowe’en when I was wee, except it was called Holloween in those days. Next to Christmas, it was the best holiday of the year. It was also mid-term break. Holloween was always celebrated in our house. When we were very small my mother would make a lantern from a turnip she’d scobe out with a knife which, if you’ve ever tried to do it, is bloody hard work. The next oldest sister to me was very keen on traditions even ones she’d made up herself. When she was around eight she decided that every year she and I would make witches’ hats out of newspapers rolled into cones and blackened with shoe polish. So we did this for at least 3 or 4 years. We’d run around the yard with the pointy, floppy hats falling down over our eyes, our faces and hair stained with polish, singing:
I’m Winnie the Witch, Witches can fly and so can I, I’m Winnie the Witch’
I have no idea where this came from.
In the evening we would tie apples from a string attached to the ceiling and try to bite lumps out of them or duck for apples in a basin of water set on the kitchen floor. This involved much splashing on the quarry tiles and younger siblings spluttering and snottering into the water. I was pretty crap at it but my brother would have drowned himself rather than admit defeat. He would suddenly rear out of the water, his whole upper body soaked, grinning so widely that he was in danger of dropping his prize. Later we’d have apple tart with hidden money in it wrapped up in silver paper.
When we all got to be a bit older my aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own, held a party each Hallowe’en. They only invited our family and one set of cousins which meant they had 15 children in attendance. There was always a bonfire and sparklers but no fireworks as they were banned in Northern Ireland.In the middle of the party there would be a loud clatter on the door and my uncle would go and investigate. Without fail he would return with a scary stranger with a stick, wearing a thick coat and a scarf wrapped round his face. Usually the stranger did a lot of muttering and, more often than not, he’d use his stick to take a swing at you if you came too close. As the evening progressed and we worked ourselves up into a frenzy the stranger would suddenly reveal themselves to be the man who lived next door or even occasionally our Aunt Mary. Presumably she got drafted in by my uncle in the years when he couldn’t persuade any of the neighbors to come and scare us half to death. I think the parties started coming to an end when I was in my early teens but by then I’d grown out of them.
I always think of my uncle at this time of year. He was murdered, along with his brother, in the mid 70s but in Spring not October. The scary, masked strangers who came to the door that night didn’t reveal themselves to be friends or family.
All this happened a long time ago and besides, the past is a different country – but it has been haunting me lately.
