Silence reigned.

I sat there, pretty sure that I was not going to be welcome anymore. I was right. I got up my courage to go to the next class. No one made eye contact with me. Of course, I should have stayed quiet. I was, at best, a blundering American, at worst, probably rude given the makeup of the class. I didn’t go back anymore. It would not have worked. I could have apologized, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have?
Instead I concentrated on the everyday which took plenty of time: making forays to get potatoes, cabbage and carrots. (Pretty much what we lived on) First you had to figure out where you were comfortable walking and shopping. That always caused me grief. I never could take a blithe, “what will be, will be” attitude.

And then there was the actual shopping itself.

It was nothing at all like shopping in the States, just picking what you wanted and putting cash on the counter. Oh, no! There was, I learned, an art to getting potatoes that were not sprouting, carrots that didn’t have soft spots and cabbage that wasn’t overdue for a compost heap.
First you had to approach the greengrocer as a friend, but you needed degree of certain meekness.
What did he suggest? Asking was always the best approach. It showed respect for his trade. He’d sit on a sack of potatoes and think. When he spoke I strained to understand his heavy Ulster accent. He’d get irritated by this and motion for me to follow him. The cabbages were in a heap in the back room. He rooted around and produced one for me. I smiled and asked for the potatoes and carrots. Somedays, he seemed so irritated by my lack of understanding his speech (in the beginning) that I wondered whether or not he’d even sell me the things I needed. It wasn’t as if I had many places to choose from. But, over time, I understood him and when I came in one day and offered him a slice of homemade apple pie, we became fast friends. My greengrocer. He always sat on the sack of potatoes and the women (never men) waited in line to get his attention. He smoked a pipe and never, in the year that I was there, did I ever see him hurry. His time was his own.

I was still frustrated at the lack of social interaction we had.

The Irish, by and large, did not invite us into their homes. It wasn’t all that unusual. If you wanted to socialize, you went to a pub. Well, okay, but pubs were getting blown up. I wasn’t eager to go to a pub.

I became brave.

We had had Ken’s friend Peter and his wife Briad over for tea, a tea that included sandwiches and cakes and scones. They were clearly surprised by this, but they seemed to like it and invited us over for the next Saturday night.

I was excited. I’d be in a real Irish home!

Peter liked games so he suggested beforehand that we plan to play the game called RISK. You know it, I am sure. The game of global domination, armies, strategy.

A perfect game to be playing in Belfast at that time.

Their house was about a mile’s walk away and it was a fair night, no rain. So, we walked. They lived in a row house that I found fascinating because the house stretched back, not out. All the room were off a central hallway that led to the kitchen in the back of the house. Understand, these were not New York upscale row houses. These were okay, but not at all fancy. They were basic, one next to the other with little room for light to come in. The baby played on the floor.
Briad and I played with Ken and Peter for awhile. But, we grew tired of the game long before they did. I helped Briad put the baby to bed and we made another pot of tea. She talked about life with “the troubles,” how she worried about Peter because he spoke so openly in favor of the IRA. How he went to meetings that made her nervous. “He’s a dad now,” she said,

“He needs to think about what it would mean if he went to jail. Or worse.”

I gulped and nodded. I hadn’t really thought about Peter being involved in a way that could land him in jail, or worse. And how much was he involved? The paper had just printed the ruling that anyone who even knew someone was involved and didn’t report it could be held. Whew!
Well, we liked the two of them, no matter what. (Did Peter own a gun? Did he participate in the worst of things, the bombings?) I looked over at the two of them, Ken and Peter, both of them intent on global domination. I didn’t like the game at all. I caught Ken’s eye and cocked my head. It was late. Eleven. Long past the time when it was smart to be out on the streets.

But, Ken didn’t or wouldn’t get the message.

The two of them played on and on. Briad nodded off in the chair. Eleven turned to twelve then twelve thirty. When it dragged on to one, I finally said, with a degree of ill grace, “Ken. I am falling asleep here. I need to go home.”
“Okay,” he said. Not a bit flustered.
And here’s where Risk entered, not global domination. Just survival.
We left the house which was in a Catholic district and walked toward home. Our house was located near the university in a Protestant district. So, we had to cross territories.

We had to walk past real armies.

We talked. Well, actually, I ranted. I want to go home! I had wanted to leave hours ago. My worry was that a bomb would go off somewhere. We’d be blown to bits.
That did not happen.

What happened was that we had to pass a barricade.

They were all over on street corners and in alleys. British soldiers hunkered down behind sandbags.

Young kids. Scared kids.

When we passed, they were standing there, with their guns pointed at us. I could see the barrels from the corner of my eye. This was not good. I forced myself to talk to Ken so that maybe they’d hear my accent and let us live.

I heard the guns click open ready to fire.

Click. Then silence. It seemed a long way past that barricade.

“If we get killed because you played RISK so damn long I will be really mad.”

‘Keep walking” he said. “Just keep walking.”
We walked. We made it past the barricade, past the closed pubs and home. I shivered under the sheets, too angry with Ken to burrow next to him. I shivered for a long time until Ken moved over next to me. He was still reluctant to acknowledge the possible danger we had been in. “We didn’t get shot” he said. “They were just taking precautions. They didn’t shoot us. They were ready just in case we’d try to toss a bomb.”
Sure. Sure he was right. We didn’t get shot. The soldiers were taking precautions. But it made no difference to me. I didn’t know how to live in that world and I didn’t want to learn.

I know what the click of a gun sounds like when the person’s ready to fire.

I know what the breathing of a scared soldier sounds like.
And, I made it clear lying there in the dark with Ken that the risk wasn’t worth it. I started thinking of how to go back home.

I didn’t want to play Risk ever again.

Photo Credit: Flashbak.com

Of course not much of that happened.

Not only was the class multi graded (grades one through three,) students brought their younger siblings to class if they needed taking care of. That was normal. All the regular teachers just managed it. Well I sort of managed, but some days were pure chaos. The youngest kids demanded attention while the regular kids only half-listened to the lesson.

But I loved all of them.

They were so easy to love. “Oh, teacher, I could listen all day to the way you talk,” the girls would say. Kids from other classrooms would come in to borrow chalk or paper. They wanted to hear and see the American. I was an instant celebrity! (Ha!)
There was a major problem though. What I needed to learn and had no way of learning in the time I had was how to knit. I was supposed to teach knitting the next day. Knitting? I had no idea knitting could be part of a school curriculum. But there it was, knitting on Tuesday and Thursday.

What was I going to do?

I explained to the principal that I could not knit. He was astonished, but amiable. Nothing much confounded him. He suggested I hand the lesson over to one of the older girls. I felt sheepish and pretty lame, but what else could I do? She taught them (and me) how to knit scarves.
The school was great. The children were wonderful.

There were two tea breaks

(Mid morning and mid afternoon) and one lunch break. Time was easy. No American school would follow that routine. There were no bells, no only one hallway to the upper grades and the sheep next door often wandered over to look in the window.
Of course there were some downsides. There was no running water, so the children would go next door to fill the kettle. Also, no running water meant the obvious. Teachers took it in turn to make tea and supervise the use of the outhouses, one for the boys and one for the girls.
The teachers went next door to use the “inside loo.” Of course, this was in the seventies. The school has long since changed. It has water and inside loos and they only teach knitting once a week.
We went through the routine things, math, language, and social studies. I wasn’t at all sure if I was doing a good job. Were they learning? They came to school eagerly enough, but was that perhaps because I was strange? The kids seemed to think I was out of the norm for sure. It doesn’t take much with kids, clothes that are slightly different, a backpack instead of a purse. They eyed all of it and made note.
One day a student’s mother showed up to see me. “ I want to see this item Briad talks about, the back pack.” I showed her. “ Well, that’s a lot of fuss about nothing, “ she said. I agreed with her. “You do sound different though. Myself, I would have a hard time listening to you all day. It would make my head hurt.” So much for the American!
On Monday and Wednesday we were supposed to teach singing, Irish folk songs. I didn’t know any Irish folk songs aside from Danny Boy and did that even count?
Then I had a stroke of luck. I was American. The kids in my room were getting some small bit of cross-cultural education. I could learn Irish folk songs and they could learn some American folk songs. If I started with American folk songs, I’d have time to learn the Irish tunes.
“Okay, I said to them one Monday. “ You are going to learn something from America.
I’ll teach you a folk song. I did not play the fiddle, but I could strum a bit on a battered guitar we had toted along with us. I started strumming and singing Clementine. They loved it. They got up and danced around the room. The principal heard the ruckus and came in. Was I in trouble? Not a bit. He joined in. Triumph.

I always felt as if the other teachers were a bit wary of me.

Why shouldn’t they be? I wasn’t doing everything they did, certainly not in the usual way. But when I left for home at night, I turned back to look at the whitewashed building, the teachers leaving school to walk down the road to home. The school itself, a small thing among the sheep and cows out there in the country. The children who would likely grow up to manage those sheep and cows.
The girls would manage children. Maybe if the school survived, they would send their youngest along with the older child one day while they went to market. That wouldn’t be so terrible.

I taught for three months.

When I left, the children gave great hugs and said they would come and visit me. I bought an electric kettle so the fire would not need to be stoked to make the tea. Whether that was a success or not, I don’t know.
But there was this, as I left, the children came out and stood in the lane and they sang Clementine. “Ach,” the principal said, “you put some life into the place.”
I smiled. I wondered what the returning teacher would say when she saw that not one student had finished their required scarf.

I knew Malaysia was disappearing.

“Ireland,” he said. “There’s a two year Post Doc position in Ireland. and they want me.” Now when you think of Ireland, it’s almost a given that you think of southern Ireland. You know, all that green and sheep and happy Irish people singing in pubs. I certainly did. That sounded okay, more than okay. I pictured living in a thatched cottage outside of Dublin. He must have applied to Trinity, I thought.
Nope. He had NOT applied to Trinity.
He had heard about a position at Queens University in Northern Ireland. In Belfast to be exact. Who would apply to Belfast?
“Are you crazy?” I said. At that time, in the seventies, Belfast was NOT a tourist destination. It was a dangerous place. People were getting killed, not every day, but often enough. Who would apply to go there?

“Mary, we’ll be fine. We’ll be at the university and we aren’t likely to be a target since we aren’t even Irish.” I was not convinced. But, Ireland it was.
The family was, as you might guess, not enthusiastic. But they held a farewell party and said they’d come to visit (if the situation improved). I teared up. Then I sobbed.
The pictures I had seen of Belfast (sitting on the floor of the library, frantically searching travel guides and newspapers) showed shipyards and gray buildings. There were people tossing rocks at each other. Not happy Irish people raising glasses in a pub. These people were angry.

They were exploding bombs. In Pubs!

Nobody would come to see us! They would be crazy to risk it. Still implacable Ken remained calm. He assured me that we would be fine. He pointed out that his position in Belfast was at Queen’s University. It did not place him in danger. The whole thing was overplayed for the news. I was unconvinced and he knew that, but I would go almost anywhere with him even though Belfast was pushing the limits.
We flew over the Atlantic. Ken drank a Guinness. He didn’t like it, said it took getting used to, but he downed it.”Gotta get in the mode,” he said. I drank ginger ale to calm my stomach. We landed at Shannon Airport. “Oh, I thought, I wish we could get out here.” But noooo. We changed to a smaller shuttle to go north, the troubled place.
For the first few days, the weather was great, sunny and warm. It was May, so I just assumed it would stay like that, a nice balmy seventy-two. But when the local paper used the weather as a headline and warned people to refrigerate their milk and butter, I suspected the weather was not the norm. Soon enough it went back to sixty, sometimes below sixty. It stayed there and the skies clouded over. I pictured people back home walking the streets in shorts, while I wore my coat when I went out.

We found a brick cottage at 10 Cloreen Park.

It looks charming in the photo. It WAS charming, But, there was no need to refrigerate the butter. (We didn’t have a refrigerator anyway. Lots of people in Belfast didn’t back then.) There was no central heating and the house was frigid. It was also damp. The cupboards harbored mildew, no matter how often I wiped them down. I knew I had to make the best of things, so I put on two sweaters and got busy.
We bought some chairs and a table from a sweet young guy at a consignment shop. (He will be in the story later) We made fires of coal in the fireplaces huddled in front of the fire. The fires left a film of soot over almost everything and I understood better why maids were always dusting in 19th century novels. We worked to make a place for ourselves.
Three days after we arrived and settled in, Ken went off to work and I walked the neighborhoods scouting places to buy food. It was all so different! A shop might have potatoes and cabbage and apples. That was all. Lettuce was a rare treat. Often enough I couldn’t find it. Bread, delicious bread was sold only in bakeries.
So, I’d walk to Stranmillis road (pictured below) and buy our bread for the day. I learned to buy only enough for the day so food did not spoil. If I wanted meat, I went to a butcher shop where whole pigs and lambs and cow carcasses were hanging and the smell took getting used to. The butcher was nice and sympathetic to the strange American. He took his time in talking recognizing that I struggled with the Belfast accent. One day, he gave me a butcher apron blue and white striped, which I still have. The Grandkids put it on to make cookies. Things were going along okay from day to day.