Borderland

By Hugh Vaughan

Borderland is a historical memoir. The borderland region is in the north-west of Ireland. There are childhood stories that includes the history of Ireland and the towns of Derry, Strabane, and Lifford. The Troubles were not too far away and the history of the region is recounted. The Borderland towns are very interconnected with family bonds. Indeed many from Donegal settled in the counties of Tyrone and Derry. My mother came out of Lifford, Donegal to marry my father in 1946, who was born in Derry, lived in Strabane, but his father lived in Donegal and was born in Tyrone to a RIC member. They owned a pub in Castlefinn, Co Donegal. The Derry Journal has also written about those bonds since the centenary of the partition of Northern Ireland, in 1922: “For the past 100 years people have lived under different laws, operated under different education, health and social welfare systems. Generally speaking, the Troubles became a daily reality for those living north of the border, but the Troubles were not a remote and alien feature of life for people in Donegal, and despite all the differences, partition and the border has never managed to completely take root in the mindsets of people in the north-west the way it has done elsewhere.” Thousands cross the border every day.

Throughout the book, the author explores the concept of memory from playing in the street, living with his family and using his imagination to carry the reader on an emotional jaunt. A trip for eggs in Donegal on a Friday night is such anecdote. The powerful memory of Christmas in winter is retold. Of course, there were the long summer holidays roaming from dawn to dusk, only returning for dinner. The reader is taken on a gamut of emotions in this rich and amusing journey, reflecting an observant child in Ireland.Television dominated his indoor recreation time. School and church feature in between. The excitement of an armed robbery close by.

The move to the city of Derry and attending the Christian Brothers School with the ever present Troubles, intertwined with his life. One routine day at school, the school is caught in the crossfire, as told in the story, “Did you see the soccer last night?” My book, Cillefoyle Park: Secret Negotiations for a Ceasefire is about a social activist, torn between the possibility of politics and the violence exploding on the streets of Derry at the height of The Troubles in the mid 1970’s. Cillefoyle Park (the church by the Foyle) is based on Brendan Duddy’s peace-making attempts and my fictional book was the result of my research into this process. The BBC reporter, Peter Taylor, revealed Brendan Duddy as the back-channel intermediary between Martin McGuinness and the British Government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Vaughan
• Release date: May 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215842225

Hugh Vaughan

Hugh Vaughan was born in Ireland and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He lectured and worked in Information Technology in Northern Ireland, Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney & Melbourne, Australia

Book preview

Borderland

By Hugh M Vaughan

The greatest thing in this world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Michel de Montaigne, French writer.

The measure of a writer isn’t success, but how hard he tried to do what he knew he couldn’t do. William Faulkner, American writer.

© Hugh Vaughan 2023

Introduction

I grew up in the border towns of Northern Ireland: Strabane, Derry and Lifford. Borderland is a historical memoir. It is in the north-west of Northern Ireland. There is a map on my website that shows the region – www. hmvaughan.com. This memoir digs into my childhood, and the more formative teenage years and onto my early 20s, and the times around those years. On 15 September 1993 at 2 pm was the precise time and day I started digging into my memories. I had a chat with Great Aunt Priscilla in the Warrenpoint Nursing Home, a lovely lady, who was nearly 100 years old. These potent memories are all explored, they permeate throughout all my books, and indeed my entire life. Digging, sometimes with a needle. Seamus Heaney, a Northern Irish poet, in his poem, Digging explores the relationship between three generations, himself, his father, and his grandfather. I too, explore the relationships of my forebears. Heaney, like me, was schooled in Derry and we lived a very different life from the previous generations. He was a writer, whereas his father and grandfather were farmers and dug with spades. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past. The poet in the poem, Digging, the digging was done with a squat pen, whereas my digging was done with a keyboard.

"Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down."

Michael McLaverty, another Irish writer, advises to go for the personal and the local. I understand that. However, the good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has an eye on the thread of the universe which runs through himself and all things, advised Ralph Waldo Emerson. I hope that thread of the universe runs through everything personal and local that I have written. Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, reflects on the weight of literature, an inward gaze at words, believing inspiration comes when most lonely, and hopeless. For any contemporary Irish writer, there is the weight of the iconic Irish writers. I am not Orhan with his fear of being too happy, his worry of not taking literature seriously enough, or fear for his authenticity, as he explores the wounds deep inside. Most people start with childish certainty but often end up with insecurity and hopelessness. But he and I agree, we understand that this is the same for all humanity. Many are stubborn and simply endure.

Start with something local, as McLaverty advises, something that made one stop and look and ponder, something that struck one’s imagination. Like the saddle maker, I passed every day after school. The smell of sawdust and leather intertwined from his open door. Seamus Heaney describes McLaverty’s love of the universal, the worn grain of unspectacular experience, the well-turned grain of language itself, this, too, was part of my endeavour. As the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh says the challenge is to try to make greatness wherever one finds oneself, even in a wee town, on the edge of Europe. How do they do that? Many people, in many countries, in my experience praise their potato-patch as the ultimate. How do they know? You have got to do the walking or the reading or both. Again, Kavanagh and the famous Irish writer James Joyce have said we should wallow in the habitual, the banal, and enjoy it. Sure why not? I will attempt to forge my experiences of the local in this memoir. The initial stories capture my earliest childhood in all its simplicity during the 1960s and moves swiftly through the 1970s with the ever-present Troubles. With creative imagination, a magical world may open up beyond the local. The power of the imagination is not to be underestimated; James Joyce, William Blake, JG Ballard, Seamus Heaney and even Einstein are only a few that speak of its importance.

What is truth? What are real memories? Are my memories, figments of my imagination? Who knows what tricks the memory plays? By reminiscing about our experiences with others, we also share parts of ourselves. Core memories are important life events and are kept in our long-term memory, an enormous memory store with no known limits on size or capacity. There is an idea that some of these specific events are so important, experiencing them instantly shapes your personality, behaviours and sense of self. Typically, they have a strong element of nostalgia and focus on small moments: watching Saturday morning cartoons, holding hands with a school yard crush, or splashing through the rain.

Most first novels are disguised autobiographies, to paraphrase Clive James, writer, poet and television presenter. Childhood is such a powerful pull, that deep well of emotions. James, has said, do not underestimate the power of forgetting. Some things one will want to forget. So these memoirs are an attempt at un-forgetting, I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be, and by making it truer is what makes all good books alike, suggests Ernest Hemingway. Robert Frost, the poet, reminds us, most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favour, so apt for life at any age.

Much of the research and writing for this book was done years ago and the result was a book called A Bump on the Road. It was a creative memoir of my childhood experiences in the borderland area of the north-west of Ireland. Frank O’Connor, an Irish short story writer talks about rewriting his stories that have been published, reworking them maybe fifty times. This book is a reworking of A Bump on the Road, focussing on the Borderland area and contains much more of the history of the area, the Troubles, the bonds of the people alongside the border and the Catholic and Protestant divide. The history of Ireland cannot ignore migration and the legacy of clergy child abuse. I started during the Covid pandemic, so I was in no hurry and neither was the pandemic. It raged throughout the world as I rewrote and researched, for four or five hours a day, on a cafe terrace overlooking the deep blue Mediterranean. The White Sea is the Arabic translation of Mediterranean Sea. The Playa del Postiguet lay below, though from my seat I saw mostly the sea. Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl was the result. However, since returning to Australia, Fragments was reworked again, forming two books, Borderland, the childhood historical memoir, and An Analytic Pub Crawl, Wanderings and Observations, a series of essays. The topics in the essays include interests of mine: health, reading and writing, positive psychology and life skills, psychogeography, emigration, the IT revolution, urban design and liveability.

If you are going to write, you had better come from somewhere, someone suggested. I did come from somewhere, Ireland, birthplace of myths and literary giants but it was also a colonised country that had many violent and distressing periods in its history. Borderlands covers two decades, the 1960s and the 1970s. The first decade, my childhood in Strabane and the second explores my teenage years and beyond into the world of teaching, finishing in 1981 when I left the city. The book digs into topics that interested me, at the time and on reflection, the history of the Borderland region like Derry’s huge shirt factories. Ireland is where I came from so significant topics like emigration, the church, the economy and the Troubles. Off-beat interests like the Spanish Armada or the U-boat surrender on the River Foyle enter the frame. Live music was always part of my life. In the early 1970s, regularly on a Friday night, we travelled by bus, to a dance hall called Borderland. There, we caught the demise of the Irish showband scene and the rise of Horslips, but in other musical venues, we encountered Irish Traditional and Punk rock. This all took place against a backdrop of the Troubles, a violent insurrection against the state of Northern Ireland.

Looking at traces of the past in an urban landscape is the concept of psychogeography, but these traces could be in any landscape, imagined or otherwise, and is a terrific metaphor for a life’s journey. Obviously, the concept was unknown to me as a child in Ireland but this book is the result of an observant child and then a young adult. Weaving throughout all these stories, like an ambulatory time traveller, is the author, drifting, looking from afar, absorbing and reacting.

There are many who have helped me at different times with this book but most thanks goes to Rosemary, my wife, who stayed the course, and Ron West, who put in a sterling effort as friend, mentor and editor, often confused by my Northern Irish ways. Elma, my sister, who read the first draft and gave helpful nuggets on our childhood. For further information on my books and photographs related to all the stories, have a look at my website. It will be updated – www.hmvaughan.com.

© Hugh Vaughan 2023

Borderland

The actual border between the two countries, is in the middle of the River Foyle (from Irish: An Feabhal) and flows into Lough Foyle. The river separating the two countries of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Strabane is in County Tyrone, Derry, in County Derry, and Lifford in County Donegal which is in the Republic of Ireland. This border runs for almost 500 km, stretching from the lough in the north-west of Ireland to Carlingford Lough in the north-east of Ireland. The Irish border, as it is known, has one of the densest road networks in Europe and meanders through towns, townlands, mountains, loughs, bogs, fields, farms and even houses, with hundreds of crossing points.

I was born in Strabane, my mother in Lifford and my father in Derry. Derry City was famous for being the shirt-making capital of the UK but in 1910 it was also the staple industry in Strabane, with a population of 5033 and Lifford, too, whose population was 446.

Strabane, in Irish, an Srath Bán, meaning the white river or river valley. Its river, the Mourne, where the locals fished for salmon and trout. On an odd dark night, a relative arrived at our home in Strabane with an illegally caught salmon! The River Mourne is formed by two rivers, the River Derg, which rises in Donegal, and the River Strule in Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. The River Finn meets the River Mourne, rising in Lough Finn in County Donegal and flows between two countries. Where the Rivers Mourne and Finn meet, they form the River Foyle. The interconnectedness of the rivers mirrors the complex and overlapping history of this area and these three towns. A railway line ran between Derry and Strabane, the latter of which had a railway before Belfast, reaching the town in 1845, from Derry. It was the largest rail junction in Ireland during the first half of the 20th century. Strabane catered for four different railway companies: Great Northern Railway, which was broad gauge and County Donegal Railways, the Strabane and Letterkenny Railway and the line to the Victoria Road, Derry, which were all narrow gauge.

Dougie’s Borderland

Dougie’s Borderland was the same geographical area as outlined in this book. Dougie is the nickname of my father, Hugh. It was given to him by his family and he was known by that name around Strabane and Derry. After we left Derry in 1998 for Australia, he sent diary-type letters to me for many years, outlining his journeys and trips around the borderland area. A few letters I sent from Wellington, NZ, dated 1986 to 1989, outlining our pleasant settlement after emigration were found among his letters. Almost daily, he ventured into Donegal for his breakfast or a scone and tea, passing through Lifford, and visiting his brother-in-law Billy. Then, onto Marian, his daughter, providing tales of her holidays, her children’s exploits in education or hobbies or he might visit his sister, Sarah. As I write, she is 99 years old and still playing the piano. His 25 grandchildren in Derry, Strabane and elsewhere were featured in every letter. He was very proud of their achievements. Dougie, featured in the Strabane Chronicle in the Fifty Years Ago column of 12 March, 1949. It tells of his achievement, being the first out of forty candidates to sit a Northern Irish civil service examination.

Continuing with his ventures in the Borderland, not only does he mention his grandchildren but also his children’s trials and tribulations. There is an irritable tone when his three daughters comment on his appearance and keeping his home in order and refreshed with new flooring, blinds or painting. His fondness for food is clear, retelling of his many meals received. Accounts of attending funerals of his peers abound and the sadness of youth suicide. He was the religious partner of the marriage, attending mass, and visiting churches to say his prayers and rosaries. He mentions Mum, who died in 1990, in one comment, she would have loved shops to have been opened on Sunday! His pastimes are reading, football-watching, and on Sunday, he gets football and dinner with his son, Danny. Frequent visits to the swimming pool and the bookies. He always refers to what he had won, not what he had lost. His other hobby was driving around the borderland area of Derry, Strabane and Lifford, visiting, and in search of food.

The richest well to draw from is childhood.

The richest well to draw from is childhood. Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, agrees with this statement and with the Turkish saying, Dig that well with a needle. What was real and concrete? The earliest memories, traces of my past, roots that spiral to the present. Childhood memories metamorphose as they become susceptible to the passing of time and mood or reality. Did it happen? Did it happen like that? Does it really matter? Emotions flow from those early days.

Our earliest memories often date from three or four years of age. The number of events we remember remains low across the primary school years. In contrast, most of our salient and important memories tend to cluster in our early adulthood. This phenomenon is known as a reminiscence bump. Our most formative experiences happen in late adolescence and early adulthood as our sense of self stabilises. Of course, we do often develop nostalgia for our earlier lives: a bittersweet longing for the past. The core memory trend likely picks up on this nostalgia.

Because we remember emotional events more easily than neutral events, we don’t get to choose our memories. This means it isn’t possible to predict what events we will recall later and what we will forget, also, different memories may come to have different meanings at different stages of our lives. The memories we have are prone to change, forgetting, and errors in minor details, even when they are significant. Every time we recall an event, we have the potential to change details, introduce some new emotions, and reinterpret an event’s meaning.

There are three key functions for memories. The self function, we know who we are because of our past experiences. The social function, telling memory stories helps us to socialise and bond with others. Finally, according to the directive function, our memories help us learn lessons from the past and solve problems into the future.

Even Michael Longley, a Northern Irish poet and winner of the Feltrinelli Poetry Prize, says he is still haunted by themes and images from his earliest days, and that the well still runs deep. Memories and dreams collide in a fusion of unreality, yet were real, ever-present in my memory as if some of them happened recently. Small touchstones. Flashes of memory, of tangible embrace, such as the vibrating metal against my skin of the twin-tub washing machine, a sensual emotion projecting through time, holding me with trance-like immediacy, a meditation that is transient and momentary.

34 Knockavoe Crescent, Strabane was my first home, a housing development that was built after the Second World War. In the nearby Knockavoe Hill, meaning hill of the cows, lived Cecil Frances Alexander, that hill is said to have inspired the poem, There is a Green Hill Far Away and the more famous hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful. The Battle of Knockavoe was fought in 1522 between the clans, O’Donnells against the O’Neills, in which the O’Neills and their supporters were surprised and routed. To this day, they say bones are still appearing at the site, as they lie close to the surface.

Knockavoe was a street where most houses had a front door which rarely opened and a back door which rarely shut. It was in these streets I played, kicking a ball, or simply flicking the dirt at the side of the kerb using a lolly pop stick but also playing Cowboys and Indians in the fields. These first six years of my life are the floating images of chilly idleness, that gather and fragment. Even though I was the second-youngest, with three brothers and three sisters, it never seemed crowded.

My earliest memories in my first home - sleeping with my sister, getting a cone of chips from my next-door neighbour, flopping down the stairs on my stomach, combing my Brylcreemed Dad’s hair but mostly I remember everything clean and shining. My mother was very house-proud, especially the good room, the front sitting room, always ready to receive visitors. Most homes had a good room in those days. A private, secluded room from a prying world, even from us, reserved for the visitors - priests, doctors, relatives, neighbours - the various dignitaries of my childhood. It was a dusky mottled place with a heavily laced window, containing a three-piece sculptured suite, a glass cabinet displaying wedding present china, ornaments of various hues and a dead fireplace, lit only on special occasions. Brass ornaments lined the mantelpiece. Elma, my sister said a piano resided there too but I don’t remember that. To the right of the fireplace, were ten wine-coloured volumes of The Children’s Encyclopedia, by Arthur Mee. It was published from 1908 to 1964 and extolled the virtues of Great Britain, its empire, and Christianity - the Europeans were clearly the most advanced peoples. I looked at them from cover to cover though I studied the pictures more. They held such a tangible embrace of my childhood, that I bought a set when I moved to Melbourne. My poor children and I carried them back to our rented house. I sold them in Melbourne too.

A small working kitchen, wallpapered with kitchen implements, was at the rear of the house. There, a gas cooker and jaw box, known as a Belfast Sink was in constant use, often used as a bath for us wee ones. In the kitchen was the twin-tub. It swished and swung on wash-day often on a Monday. As I helped with the washing, I loved holding my body against the vibrating spin drier, frequently necessitating the emptying of my bladder. The water darkened to a dull grey, and the timer pinged. I pulled wet, twisted clothes into the spin drier. When it became unbalanced, I needed to free the offending items and extract the liquid by hand. After each spin, I carried the damp clothes to the outside line for drying, freshened in the cool northerly wind. If they were left out in winter, they would freeze like body-less ghosts, encrusted with a smattering of shining frost. Clothes were brought in before nightfall as we had our fair share of spiders and earwigs in the house already, and to avoid the knicker thief! The clothesline stretched from one end of the long, narrow back garden to the other, meeting at a point, where a pole or two supported the line. Running through the sheets that were hung on the line, I pretended to charge the infidels using the support pole as my lance, riding my white horse, a crusading Christian knight serving God and Country. The knickers thief, a more mysterious hazard who came in the night and delicious fodder for neighbour’s gossip. As for the knickers thief, I don’t think he was ever caught.

Next to the kitchen was the back sitting room, with a fire, that was the only source of heat. It was lit for family evenings and cool days, in the winter it was kept on 24/7. After the weekly Saturday bath for the children, the family gathered in front of the fire to watch the telly. One night, I was about 3 or 4, I stood too close and my dressing gown was engulfed in flames. Swift-acting Elma, rolled me immediately and no damage was done, except to the gown.

Fire was so important for heat and light to the people living in our Northern world and coal was the main source of heat. The back boiler in the fireplace provided the hot water for the Saturday night bath when clean pyjamaed children glowed. Keeping the heat in the living room echoed in our ears, with Close that door, or the Irish version dhún an doras, or keep the heat in, or were you born in a field? are other examples. The sheds in the backyard were filled with coal all the year-round, simply stocking up for winter, to ensure our supply of heat and hot water. It was much cheaper than electricity. Is the immersion heater off? was another utterance