What members of the Northern Irish loyal institutions go home to after meetings of their lodges, chapters, preceptories and clubs
‘Their houses are like little palaces,’ used to be said of the Belfast Protestant working class. Protestants said it with pride; Catholics with a kind of patronizing contempt. Certainly, if you had no other clues, you could tell a Protestant from a Catholic street by the state of most of the gardens and what is visible of the front room, as you can tell which church they are going to from the neatness and formality of their Sunday-morning clothing.
A passion for cleanliness as an adjunct of godliness is as strange to my culture as our cheery indifference is to theirs. To the most bigoted Protestants, Catholics are dirty and untidy; to bigoted Catholics, Protestants are obsessively house-proud and fail to understand that life is for living and that it is more important to have fun with your friends than to polish the furniture. And if both the stereotypes are uncharitable in their application, there is nevertheless a lot of truth in them. Since I began to stay in Ulster Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, homes, I look about my house with a new and rather depressed eye.
The sheer fact of cultural separation means that differences in living conditions are so great as to provide a culture shock. ‘George is going over to London,’ observed my friend Henry to me a few months ago, assuming, I realized, that I would offer a bed if one were free. I decided to confront the matter head on. ‘Henry,’ I said, ‘I’ll get him a bed but, as things stand, I can have no Presbyterians in my house. He’d die of shock.’ ‘But he’s a lax Presbyterian,’ said Henry. ‘Not when it comes to houses, he isn’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to his, and it’s as clean as everyone else’s.’ So as I do with all bedless Presbyterians, I found George quarters with an English friend whose house would not frighten him and I continue to invite to my disorganized and dusty house only Irish Catholics and assorted bohemians.
There is a certain uniformity about the Presbyterian home. I’ve never been in one without being reminded of the centrality of family life, of ordered relationships, of industry and of thriftiness – which is, however, tempered by tremendous generosity and hospitality. The people of Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and unionist, republican and loyalist, have many characteristics in common, of which the most agreeable is tremendous warmth and kindness to any stranger who is not thought to be the enemy.
There is a difference of degree about the generosity. My mother, who grew up in the south of Ireland as a game-keeper’s daughter on an Anglo-Irish estate, was an inveterate observer of cultural differences between southern Protestants and Catholics. ‘You go into hospital,’ I remember her explaining, ‘and a Catholic friend will arrive laden with grapes and chocolates and flowers and spend an hour with you and never come back because she has run out of money and is ashamed to return empty-handed. The Protestant, on the other hand, will come in bearing a modest gift, will stay for twenty minutes or so and will then come back regularly.’
Presbyterian houses tend to be neat and spotless but cosy, the kind of home where people have slippers and candlewick dressing-gowns; if you go out infrequently and work hard you want to be comfortable at home. In addition to a three-piece suite, the most striking object in the living-room will be the enlarged, framed photographs on the windowsills, the table and the wall – the wedding photograph of the owners of the house, photographs of their parents, their siblings and their children, of big family groups and of their own children and grandchildren at various stages of development and at key moments like graduation and marriage. No child growing up in a house like that can think other than that he is the centre of his parents’ lives. It is that same family-orientation that makes so many Orange parades a happy family event.
Books, other than the Bible, are uncommon except in the houses of ministers and of teachers, but even there they will tend to be tucked away in a separate study. There is no clutter of papers or newspapers and few, sometimes no, objects. There might in some houses be a glass bookcase for treasures, with a heavy emphasis on Tyrone crystal wedding gifts too special to be used. (In the other community you’re more likely to have most of your fragile wedding gifts broken within a year or so of marriage courtesy of the exuberant clumsiness of yourself or your guests.) There will be a plethora of little tables so placed to ensure every person sitting in that living-room can eat and drink comfortably, for from the moment you come through the door, the lady of the house is preparing a tray full of food and drink: tea or coffee, two or three kinds of biscuits and home-made cake.
If you are there at a meal time you’ll be offered meat and potatoes and two kinds of sweet. If it’s not a meal time and they discover that you’ve missed your dinner (one o’clock) or your tea (six o’clock), your hostess will race to the kitchen to make piles of sandwiches, and fetch the home-made apple pie or whatever else is necessary to save you from starvation. Ulster Protestants are terrified lest their guests die of hunger; Ulster Catholics lest they die of thirst. Mind you, while drink is rarely on offer in a Protestant home as a part of normal hospitality, the occasional host might offer whiskey. And if you ever find yourself in a pub with a drinking Protestant, they are as lavish as any of their Catholic counterparts.
By any standards, the kindness is stunning. Arrive at a stranger’s house for a night with no luggage, as I have done, and slippers and a cosy dressing-gown and spare toothbrushes and toiletries are pressed upon you with enthusiasm and efficiency. And people will put themselves out for you to an extraordinary degree. They think nothing of going thirty miles out of their way to pick you up or drive you somewhere. It’s as if the sheer order and routine of their lives makes it possible for you to be accommodated however demanding are your needs.
The perception of Ulster Protestants as dour and taciturn does not long survive spending time in their houses, for they absolutely love talking and stay up late with any visitor. I’ve sat up till two in the morning and later having thoroughly enjoyable conversations with the most upright, temperate and even teetotal of citizens.
Orange, Black or Apprentice Boy meetings can be fitted into an orderly existence. The wives know when the husbands are going out, where they’re going and who they will be with. Reactions to these activities go across the spectrum from an old-fashioned reverence for the man’s important business to a genial acceptance that they’re making a mystery out of a simple get-together. And in the rural areas at least, sanity and tolerance dominate the women’s reaction to their men’s activity; it is understood that men want to be together and that this provides an excuse. ‘How have you stood it?’ I asked one woman whose husband was so heavily involved in the Freemasons, the Orange and the Black that he was frequently out four to five evenings a week. ‘I know he’ll never come back drunk,’ she said.
* This is a serious cultural contrast with Irish Catholics, who blaspheme eloquently, imaginatively, profusely, unselfconsciously and with no intention whatever of giving offence. My language improves out of all recognition when I associate with most Orangemen. However, my brother points out that Protestants and Catholics are as bad as each other when it comes to claiming blasphemously that God is on their side.
* It is insufficiently appreciated in the Republic of Ireland that while the vast majority of Catholics refused to give their loyalty to the Northern Ireland state, most of those Protestants, including Orangemen, who found themselves on the wrong side of the border after Partition were never disloyal to the new state. I’ve seen on Orange parades in Northern Ireland those brave little contingents from Cavan or Monaghan or Donegal, still stoutly demonstrating their pride in their religion and their affection for the crown, before going home to the state which they have served loyally. Unlike most nationalists in Northern Ireland, southern Orangemen were good losers.