Tags
Halloween, Northern Ireland Troubles, Storytelling for Peace, The Wayside Halt, United Workers Council Strike 1974, Van Morrison
This weekend, inspired by an Instagram post about a perfect Fall appetizer, I bought a pumpkin. Looking at it taking up too much space on the kitchen counter, it occurs to me that it’s too big for the Hot Honey Pumpkin Baked Brie I planned. It will be better as a jack-o’-lantern by the front door. This leads me to Halloweens past and a story you should know.
Where I’m from, there’s some debate about Halloween, with some saying it’s derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain and others that it started out as Hallows’ Eve, the day before All Saints’ Day. Whatever it is, it remains my favorite 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.
Halloween in 1970s Northern Ireland was 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. Wrapped up in our duffel coats, “disguised” in hard plastic ‘false faces’ attached to our real faces with a thin elastic band and through which it was almost impossible to breathe we roamed the estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:
We roamed the housing estate, ringing doorbells and singing at the top of our lungs:
Halloween is coming 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
Somebody always thought to bring a torch to light up our faces. Sweating under our false faces, I suppose we thought we looked menacing. Meanwhile, our parents stayed at home and watched television. If we were lucky, somebody gave us sparklers which was very exciting because fireworks had been banned—outlawed due to fears that they might sound like bomb blasts or gunfire. I suppose there were also concerns that they might be used to make bombs or weapons.
With this behind me by the time I became a mother in the United States, I embraced Halloween in all its commercialized glory, unaware of its origins in my native land. I didn’t know until recently the legend of Stingy Jack who had been 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 away Jack and any other wandering evil spirits, Irish people eventually made their own versions of his lantern, carving ghoulish faces into turnips placed in windows. When Irish immigrants arrived in America with their jack-o′-lantern tradition, they discovered that pumpkins made the perfect Halloween lantern. Indeed they do.
Every year, we’d go to the nearest pumpkin patch for three perfect pumpkins which would be carved and decorated, and when the sun went down on Halloween, my husband lit candles inside them to welcome the scores of children who walked to our door over the years. It always reminded me of that whimsical scene in E.T., tiny versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Tinkerbell, Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Pikachu, even the sitting President of the United States.
There was never a trick, always a treat from a big popcorn bowl filled with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and full-size Snickers bars. Word on the street was that all the good candy was at our house. Between us, we took turns handing out the candy, but I preferred to be with the merry band of trick-or-treaters, strolling along Montebello Avenue, 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 always ended with her sprinting to our front door, where she rang the doorbell and called out “Trick or treat!” Feigning surprise, her daddy would fling the door open and fill her plastic pumpkin basket to the brim.
Our last family Halloween was quiet. It was a school night, the Wednesday before the 2012 General Election. Not yet a United States citizen, I couldn’t vote, but I nonetheless studied the pamphlet of Arizona Propositions on our kitchen table, and my husband let me fill in the bubbles on his ballot. I remember promising him I would become a citizen in time for the next presidential election.
When I voted early last week, I imagined him smiling down at me. Imagine. Me, early.
That particular Halloween didn’t feel right, with November just hours away and the night air still hovering around 80 degrees. Nonetheless, when the sun went down, our ritual began. We lit the candles in the pumpkins, and Sophie decided it was her turn to dole out the Halloween 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 motion-sensitive ghost howling above our door.
I remember I was preoccupied, sitting at my computer paying bills for the breast cancer treatment that had dominated our lives that year, scrolling through work emails I hadn’t found time to read at work, and following news of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. I was also half-listening to Van Morrison playing in the background, and as he repeated the ritual of nights spent “spinning and turning in the alley like a whirling dervish,” I remember feeling a strong pull to days gone by. Surreal and visceral, maybe the kind of moment Greill Marcus described in his Listening to 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.
In an instant, Van Morrison takes me back to County Antrim and into the lives of two sisters I have yet to meet in real life. The first, Mary, had once stumbled upon something I had written online and left a comment that forever connected us, as is the way of the virtual world. You know how it goes—we search for one thing and find another that renders the first forgotten. Within this much smaller world, I learned that her cousin, Pauline, had been my hairdresser in the 1980s.
Every time I visited her for bigger hair or more highlights, there was always a moment—a ritual— when I considered silently, the family pub across the road. The Wayside Halt stood on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena. Nondescript, it was the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look, unremarkable except to those of us who knew about the horror that had visited on May 24, 1974. When I sank into Pauline’s hairdresser’s chair, I thought about it.
It wasn’t until one night years after I had left Northern Ireland, that I learned more about what had happened at The Wayside Halt. I don’t remember how the subject came up—my father was maybe trying to explain The Troubles to my American husband, and the ways in which we were all impacted by those years. He recalled for us that evening, when 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 was in a rush to complete bread deliveries before dark, my father declined.
Even in the days before cell phones, news in our place always traveled fast. Before daddy reached Randalstown not an hour later, the harrowing word had arrived that a mob of 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 remained open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974 a seminal two weeks in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles.’ Just a child at the time, I remember the rolling electricity blackouts—the “power cuts” that meant candle light and dinners cooked on a camping stove to cook. In my naivete, I didn’t know I had any reason to be afraid.
Shaun and his brother Brendan 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.
Eight fatherless children. Two widows. A community devastated.
The Byrne Brothers.
The Quinn brothers – Richard, Mark, and Jason – three little boys burned to death on July 12, 1998. Just eleven, nine, and seven years old, they had been asleep when a petrol bomb was thrown through their bedroom window. In our small world, their grandmother was the subject of my brother’s first interview as he started a career in journalism covering the kinds of atrocities that should only have happened once.
Bloody Sunday, La Mon Restaurant, Crossmaglen, The Miami Showband Massacre, Kingsmills, Internment, the bombing of Omagh and Enniskillen, Greysteel, Frizzell’s fish shop.
The list goes on, hearts grows numb …
Physically untouched by this string of horrors, but changed nonetheless, the images are indelible in the storehouse of my memory. Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief; the blood on Market Street in the heart of Omagh’s little market town; the platform boot on the side of the road near Banbridge; mourners at the Ballymurphy funeral on a little black and white television.
So many names.
Too many ghosts among us.
This is Anne Byrne’s Halloween story first posted on November 1, 2005. Like her sister Mary, she had left a comment for me. 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.
