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THE CASE OF THE FARCE AT THE BARRIER One day in the 70’s I was faced with yet another typically Irish question, equally stupid, but highly charged, It was at the height of the bombing campaign by the IRA. I was telephoned from Head Office to be told that bombs were ‘on all the bridges’. This was referred to road bridges over the River Lagan. What I and my colleague did not realise was that applied to all the bridges, over culverts, and the railway The site was closed down to facilitate people making their way home and I decided on a route round the outskirts of the city. At every turn I was frustrated and slowly found myself herded by circumstance into what was then thought of as ‘no-go’ areas. At one point soldiers appeared from behind a hedge and held me at gun point until they were satisfied I was bona fide. I then had to decide whether to either drive through a certain UDA (Protestant militant) barrier or possibly one set by the IRA. I chose the former. I found rails driven into the roadway at junctions by the UDA to stop speeding bombers, and was brought up short at a barrier with no escape route I locked all the doors of the car and put the car into reverse with the clutch out and the engine running, and while I was deciding what to do, a young thug dressed in camouflaged army surplus, with a bush-hat over his eyes, swaggered over to the car and knocked on the window.
“Show me your licence,” he said parroting the police and military in similar circumstances.
“I will not. “I said, firmly. I resented these vigilante groups. “You’ve no right to ask.” I added. This conversation went on its boring and repetitive way until finally I became fed up and said, ” you might as well let me through, because I’m not giving you my licence.” The irony and indeed stupidity of the whole performance was that when I was stopped by the barrier, I was leaving the area they were supervising, not entering,A large man in his forties appeared, clearly a man to be reckoned with. His gait was steady if slow and his face expressionless. By this time, while outwardly calm, I was in a state of high tension. Alone, with no witnesses, completely vulnerable to say the least, I had made a stand and now was not the time to capitulate. There ensued a question and answer session between the two men and older man asked me if I had any other means of identification. I showed a pass through the window.. This seemed acceptable, and I was about to put the car into forward gear, preparatory to departure when the man said, “Get out and open the boot.” It caught me off balance so I said the first thing which came into my head
“If you intend stealing the car,” (a common occurrence at that time), “you’ll have to steal me with it, I’m not giving it up.” In truth I was incensed, although I immediately saw how ridiculous the threat was.
“No,” the man said, “I just want to see into your boot.”
“I suppose I have to trust you,” I said, he played along and nodded, and I duly got out of the car and opened the boot.
Inside was a set of golf clubs belonging to a professional, circuit golfer, each club chosen and modified to suit, the whole set representing his livelihood. I could see the interest shown by the man and worried whether I would lose them to him, it would not be the first time things were ‘liberated’
“A golfer,” he said, smiling broadly, “what’s your handicap?”
The sudden volte face, the drop in tension, the banality of the words in this charged situation were nearly my undoing. Up until that moment I had been prepared for anything and was playing it by ear , but that final remark left me weak.
I silently got back into the car, the barrier was removed and I drove round the corner for a hundred yards; I could go no further. The tension, the build up of adrenaline in the system and then the sudden release had produced a pain in my back of paralysing proportions. For a while all I could do was sit there and wait for it to disperse, my brain in limbo.
A few minutes later I was sufficiently recovered to start to drive home and as I drove I was astounded, not only at the bland stupidity of the whole exercise, but the total ignorance of these people of the effects their charade could have on a law abiding citizen.
The rider to this story took place a couple of nights later when Soph and I were visiting friends and I was relating the experience. I was explaining how I felt strongly about handing over my car to these people who appeared from nowhere and demanded a car at gun-point. I was heard to say, “I wouldn’t give them the car unless Soph was in it.”

ANOTHER IRISH QUESTION
In the 40’s, you would have thought Ireland was nearer Australia than Britain for all the majority of the residents of Britain knew about the place and, I’m afraid, I fell squarely into that category too, when I was dispatched there by the Navy in ’42. In fact I knew more about France, which is about the same distance off-shore, than I did of Ireland. When I was sent, I had some vague idea I was going to the green and pleasant land I had seen depicted in the cinema.
One person who had helped to confirm the British concept of Ireland was Barry Fitzgerald with his portrayal of the Irish as slightly oily, very obsequious, forelock tugging, guileful little folk, who, in a minute, would bite the hand that fed them while smiling into the other’s eyes, or perhaps, dotty eccentrics. The myths, too, perpetuated in song and on canvas, of thatched cottages and donkeys with their panniers in the peat cuttings, of this nirvana across the pond with its 4 million population, have been fostered in the minds of its 50 million ex-pats in the USA. In actual fact one has to search the wilder extremes of the country to find this idyll, which ironically is shrinking with every pound or punt poured in by the same ex-pats..
Now of course, the media reports during the seventies, eighties and nineties, of the internecine war, so euphemistically referred to as ‘The Troubles’, have changed all that, but only marginally. The real Ireland is none of these, it is better and it is worse, it is beautiful beyond belief and in places it is an anachronism, held solid in the aspic of its own myths and prejudices; but above all it is a contradiction.
To make the point, take the phrase itself, ‘The Troubles’, a euphemism if there ever was one, and so at odds with what the ‘Troubles’ really represent. It is certainly an interesting reflection on an absurd sense of propriety when one considers that working class women used to refer to their gynaecological ills in the same terms, perhaps they still do – the comedian, the late Les Dawson, used to make great play of womens’ ‘troubles’ in his Northern sketches.
When one lives in Northern Ireland, in spite of every attempt to be liberal and non-biased, one soaks up the political atmosphere unknowingly because it enters the pores, like the sun on a Costa beach, until the whole of one’s perceptions become coloured. It may not affect one’s outlook, nor one’s attitudes to individuals, but it is there, like a third eye peering over the shoulder, looking for the bias in others and mentally countering every statement with the question, ‘is that really so?’ This conditioning starts the day one arrives and continues from then on.

SMOKE TEST No 1 There had been a complaint of rats in the lower part of the Ormeau Road area in Belfast and it was laid squarely at the door of the Sewerage Section. Sam, a plumber, was sent to investigate and decided that he needed a smoke test.
I have always found it strange that smoke really does issue from a sewer up through the earth and travels quite long distances through cracks in pipes and the ground. This feature of smoke was used to assess whether a sewer pipe had been breached or was leaking. Something much more scientific is used today.
Theoretically every pipe leading to a sewer is trapped with a water trap, so there should be no risk of smoke entering a house. To carry out the test the operator closes the end of the pipe, or puts a temporary block at some point. At the other end he attaches a box, which is really only a source of smoke, and the bellows will force it through the pipe. He puts a rag, heavily impregnated with oil, inside the box, lights it, and then, using the bellows, pumps the smoke into the pipe until it is seen issuing out through a small hole in the block at the far end. If it issues from nowhere else it is assumed that the pipe is tight and has no leaks.
In Sam’s case this was not quite what happened. In the first instance someone shouted that smoke was issuing from the lamp standards, and as these were gas lamps panic ensued until he managed to explain what was happening. Next he heard screams coming from the back-yard of one of the houses. The sewer in question ran between the backs of two rows of houses and at that time, those houses only had outside toilets in the yard. Apparently a householder had been in one when she found smoke, firstly coming up round her feet, and then all round her; her plight was understandable. Finally he had to pacify the fire brigade who had been called with a 999 call from someone further- afield who had found smoke coming up through the floor boards.
The theory that the sewer was at fault, seemed to be thoroughly confirmed.
SMOKE TEST NO 2This test took place on a Saturday morning when I was working for the contractor. The sewer we were laying was in running sand, a very unstable material and we did not want the trench lying open over the weekend as the results of a possible slip could have been dangerous and expensive, added to which if a smoke test failed then we might have had to carry out a water test which can take hours.
We were dealing with a very fussy Clerk of Works who liked his authority and enjoyed wielding it. He knew as well as we did that there was nothing wrong with the pipe, he had seen every joint made, but the book said smoke test before passing the work, so smoke test we did. We set it up, put in the disk at the end of the pipe with the one-inch hole to show the smoke had gone the whole way through the pipe, and then tea was up. Well it was up for the Clerk of Works, it was up for the men, but not for the foreman and not for me, we were pumping the smoke for all we were worth and it was not reaching the other end. The Foreman said to me, “You go and join the Clerk of Works and I’ll have it fixed in the mean time, no sense both of us being here.” I followed his advice.
About ten minutes later he stuck his head into the hut and said all was ready for testing and when the Clerk of Works and I went to the other end, there , sure enough, there was the smoke puffing out in spurts in time with the pumping of the man at the other end. Honour had been satisfied and come twelve o’clock we would all be going home.
When I was out of earshot of the Clerk of Works I said to the foreman that I was surprised at the amount of smoke issuing, considering the length of the pipe, usually there is dilution by the air within the pipe for some time, and it seemed to me the smoke was denser than I would have expected.
He smiled. “I helped it on a bit,” he said. ” I thought it could do with another smoking rag so I put it in the other end, I knew he’d never guess, he’s all talk and no experience.”
This accounted for what I had seen. The foreman, unknown to me and the Clerk of Works had inserted a piece of burning rag at the other end of the pipe from the bellows and the air within the pipe was being pushed by the bellows to make the smoke from the second rag issue from the small hole. Instead of the pipe being full of smoke as it seemed, it was probably partly full of air.
For all of ten seconds I wondered what to do, and then for another ten seconds I suppressed my conscience with the thought that, firstly, knew the pipe was secure, and, secondly, I saw the Clerk of Works from time to time, I saw the foreman daily.

A real event – dramatised
I ‘m a bricklayer who has been instructed to examine the main drainage culvert beneath the quiet dark streets of our sleeping city. All afternoon a joiner and two men have been erecting a temporary sluice gate they call a stank to hold back the waters of the whole city which will be collecting as I work. We have chosen to work at night because, apart from the effects of heavy rain, that is when the flows are low.
Now the heavy timbers are in place it is time for me to put on my thigh boots and make my way over to the others standing at the gaping manhole in the bright circle of the arc lights. The men look up as I approach and one steps aside to allow a late traveller to pass quietly by, the black round curves of the car momentarily reflecting the gentle activity, before being swallowed up in the rising mist. Natt steps forward with the lifeline, harness and lamp and tells me that the sewer has been tested for gas, methane, the killer. Only a few weeks previously a man had passed out at the bottom of a manhole and his friend and colleague who had then gone down to rescue him had died with him. We were now being extra careful.
The tightness of the harness gives me confidence like a warm comforting arm around my waist, and with my hammer, chisel and lamp I descend the old, dirty and rusty, wrought-iron ladder to the bottom of the shaft. I am familiar with the tarry smell of sewers but I have never become accustomed to the loneliness and severance from those above. I stand on the concrete shelf and shine my torch at the almost still grey waters at my feet. A bubble of gas rises to the surface in the light of my lamp to form a grey sinister bulging eye in the viscous liquid and then, after surveying sightlessly the round red brick tube that is garlanded at every projection with the bunting of refuse, bursts silently as it passes down stream.
I wade through the sticky silt towards the sluice that is holding in check tons of water, slowly rising, behind the timbers, like the shadow of an evil gene. It must not rain.
I have been down here some time now and I’m tired through the effort of lifting my legs in the sludge of years. I stop again and listen to the steady trickle of water through the joints in the temporary barrage. Has the noise increased? No! There are two noises. It must be the small pipe discharging as well. Perhaps it has started to rain after all. I stop and watch the level of water against the culvert wall with the bricks acting as a gauge, it is not rising. On I go again, tapping to see if the joints are sound, to see if the steel beams are still strong, to guess how long it will be before another inspection will be necessary, lifting each heavy leg from the clinging slime, easing my bent and aching back, surveying as I go, but all the time keeping an ear attuned to the trickling water.
What was that? It was at my ear. I turn my torch and two beady eyes peer at me from a small pipe at face level. A rat. I have a childish fear of the creatures, bred of old wives’ tales. A rat in a field; a rat, dead on a railway line means no more to me than a sparrow on a pavement; but this intruder is assuming the proportions of a black panther. I clap my hands and struggle to hurry on. There is no one here to se my callow fear.
I think I hear a creak. My pulse is beating. I must control my imagination. The rat has shaken my confidence. Is the gushing louder?. Before I can reassess the sound, a thunder clap reverberates along the tunnel like a charge along the barrel of a gun and as I stand dumbfounded, for a brief second I hear the torrential rushing of the angry waters freed from their imprisonment. The timbers have cracked. The sluice can no longer hold the water in check. I turn and drop my tools in frantic flight. I tug the rope, all signals forgotten and feel the tension taken from above. I cannot run, I can barely walk. I can but flounder like a fly held in illicit jam. In my haste I splash but I care little if I mouth the water which is rising round my knees. I must take off my boots, but how? Is there time? Now in my haste I have fallen, my torch is lost.
Dragged by the rope through the stinking blackness I lose my breath. I struggle once more but now the rushing waters carry me on as the rope never could and tiredness and exhaustion have seeped my will to fight. All is going black. Thank God!

WHAT GOES ON BENEATH OUR FEETGoing up pipes, down manholes, through tunnels and into dark dank corners, beneath the sea, beneath the earth, deep or shallow, in compressed air or in sludge, was ever the lot of the inspection engineer. Fear of being faced by a mother rat the size of a cat, protecting her brood, was always something I was paranoid about, but as the show must go on, there was no use thinking about it.A friend and colleague, had thoughtfully put down a length of steel pipe where a flyover was to be built, well in advance of the work, just in case the long planned, but often shelved scheme for the sewage works and attendant pipeline ever came to life, which it did under my hand. By this time the flyover had been operating for some ten years.
I had to find out whether the pipe was still viable, that meant seeing for myself. Holes were opened to air the pipe, a trolley was made so I could push my way up as arthritis and height made the procedure more difficult and off I set on my solitary journey, tied to a safety line, in total darkness, illuminated only by a hand-held inspection lamp and anticipating the red eyes of Mama Rat facing me like the headlights of a car. Of course there was no rat, I hadn’t really expected there would be, it didn’t make sense, there was no food, well not right inside the pipe, why would she choose to live in a big wide steel pipe? – nice and cosy, with room to manoeuvre, room to escape danger? – Ah! – Just a thought!
Years later I wrote a piece based upon another experience when I really did think I might drown, when the stanks holding back the city’s water eased with a frightening groan, although the writing is more dramatic than the experience. I wrote it in honour of those unsung heroes who risk their health and their lives beneath our feet, people we give little or no thought to, who spend hours in the fetid smell of the sewers, a place I learned to know well. Some even die there, overcome by the gas. I worked with a bricklayer when this near disaster happened and since then safety measures have been extended and tightened.

WORKING FOR THE COUNCIL I am firmly of the opinion, in spite of all that is said and apparently proven to the contrary, that a well run Council beats Central Government hands down for efficiency, economy and compassion. You may laugh, especially when I am using my experience in the much-maligned Belfast City Council as an example.
OK, so a senior member of staff did canvass the lift man when he was looking for promotion because the lift man had pull with the local politicos.
OK, so I did keep having to leave the site office when I was a student because the Clerk of Works was also a mover and shaker in the Orange Order – and at the time I was very critical. I thought the whole business ludicrous, but then I had not been a senior civil servant. Gerrymandering is objectionable, but that is in a perfect world and this one ain’t. A little gerrymandering, believe me, is preferable to the massive stupidities of the greater bureaucratic machine.
In Local Government, if something is or appears to be wrong, if something untoward happens, if you are not satisfied with something, you only have to go down the corridor or down the stairs to find someone and discover the reason for your disquiet. People don’t shift the goal posts, it is all a bit like the Navy, things have moved on little since the Council was set up and everyone knows everyone they might need to know, even in a big Council. There are no faceless mandarins sending memos, whose claim to fame is a degree in the Arts and how to buy pencils, but who are of the opinion that anyone in any other section of the Civil Service is bound to be less well qualified to make a decision.
When we were taken over by the Civil Service in 1973 we lost more than our seat in the City Hall, we lost valuable records which went back for generations, we lost the intimacy which made the whole system tick, we lost that degree of autonomy which speeds thing along in the face of difficulties and gives room for ingenuity and also compassion.
I remember when I worked for the Council and went to parties, people used to make tired jokes about my colleagues, meaning labourers on the street gangs, leaning on their shovels. I used to reply that Council workers from top to bottom were never paid as much as those elsewhere in similar jobs, but we did offer jobs to those who, while they might not actually be unemployable, would not have been taken on by industrialists. It was our civic duty to give the people of our community, where possible, the dignity of employment and to try to accommodate their meagre skills, I have never understood why that policy has been abandoned.
Still it was not all doom and gloom, in fact I believe those years and the several which followed, through the work involved starting in the Council, were the working years I enjoyed most, not least because of some of the characters I came across.

I later joined the Housing Trust, which is now called the Housing Executive, I joined what could only be described as a happy band. Like all offices there were minor frictions, departments were often at loggerheads and there were the usual petty office jealousies, but by and large I looked forward to going to work. The work was varied and interesting and because the sites we worked on were situated the length and breadth of the Province, one was never bored.
There were a number of eccentrics there and we came across some strange customs. One of our bosses had the ingrained theory that everyone made at least one mistake in anything they did, so when we gave him a sheaf of drawings to check over and approve, he would look at every one of them until he found a mistake, which was not blatant. It could take hours. I must admit it was sometime before I was let into the secret of how to combat this and get the drawings back more quickly, even if it might prove that one was less than perfect – it was the intentional mistake. Subtly one was put in, not too blatant and not too difficult to find. Everyone was then satisfied.
Among our eccentrics we also had a couple of permanent chainmen. Any more which were needed were taken on locally or borrowed from some other authority.
Dan.
Dan was sandy haired, short, tough and generally smiling. He dressed like a country squire, with a hound’s tooth, vented jacket, fawn trousers, punched brogues and a flat cap which would have graced most saddling enclosures. In fact he looked so smart there was a story going the rounds that the Chief Engineer, who was descending the stairs to meet an influential guest, was totally ignored by the guest as he rushed past to shake Sam’s hand and to say how glad he was to meet him. This did not endear Dan to Authority, but it did to us.
Dan was a country boy from near Ballymena, and not all his habits were in keeping with his dress. Using the pool cars, I would let him drive most of the time, it gave me time to decide what we would be doing when we arrived and I noticed that, in heavy traffic, Dan had a habit of rubbing his knee with his left hand, as if frustrated. He also had another habit, less acceptable. At times of stress he liked to expectorate through the driver’s window, which he mostly kept open, but there were occasions when he forgot it was closed.
We, Dan, another engineer and his chainman and I, were surveying a large housing site at the back of Larne, in Country Antrim, preparatory to designing the roads and sewers. It was raining heavily. We took shelter in the empty barns belonging to a farm which formed part of the site. We sat about, ate our lunch early so we could work through, once the rain stopped, we had a desultory conversation and then Dan introduced the subject of hypnotism as applied to chickens. He said he could place a chicken with its beak on a chalk line and it would not move off the line even if you walked right up to the bird and what was more he had ten shillings which said he could do it. Ten bob was ten bob, so we tried to get him to demonstrate without a wager but without success. In the end we pooled, we knew he could do it, Dan never made a bet unless he had a more than an even chance of winning, but we were curious to see how he did it
The first thing he did was to draw a straight line on the concrete floor in chalk. Next he went in search of a chicken, we had seen some roaming round the place. When he came back he had hold of one by the body with the wings clamped below his hands, and its beak facing away from him. His next act was to swing the chicken round and round in a wide flat circle at waist height and then, shifting his grip so he had the chicken clamped in the palm of one hand and the other holding its head with his forefinger firmly along the line of the top of the beak, he put the beak on the line, set the chicken’s feet across the line and held the bird like that for about ten to fifteen seconds. When he straightened, the bird remained and we walked round it, looked at it, and until he took it off the line, there it remained.
THE DOLMAN AND THE FAIRY TREE
The sites we, were green field sites, farms which had been in families for generations. Ireland is a country with more than its fair share of myth and legend. Articles, with mystical connotations, or connected in any way with necromancy get a wide berth when it comes to disruption.
On one site there was a dolman in the middle of the field. For days the engineer responsible for the site could get no work done on that part of the job because a road was proposed where the dolman stood. The contractor told the Housing Engineer that there was not a man on his payroll who would shift it, could the road not be diverted? The answer to that was an unequivocal ‘No’, even if for no other reason than the ridicule he would receive back in the office in Belfast. Stalemate.
Then up spoke an Englishman labouring on the site. He would shift it, and he did, on his own. Whether true or inevitably made up to prove a point we never knew, but the story goes, that when the man returned to England he took ill and never worked again. We had the same trouble with Fairy Trees, those stumpy hawthorns one finds leading a lonely life somewhere in a field, which have survived because no one has had the temerity to dig them out and make ploughing or hay-cutting so much easier.