While attending the
University of Ulster I lived for a year in the pleasant seaside town of
Portstewart on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, across from Co. Donegal
in the Republic (placing the northernmost point of Ireland in the South: how
very Irish). The Scottish islands of Eigg, Mull, and Rhum were visible on the
horizon on clear days. The picture above shows the town in the 1960s; it had
changed little when I arrived in 1971. I shared a bungalow with three Catholic
rebels, one of whom may or may not have had real ties to the IRA;
unsurprisingly, I never found out, only suspected (and still do). The bungalow
was spacious and new but unheated except by gas meter and, in the boreal winds
of Ireland’s northern coast, as cold as an igloo. It was drafty, too; and
having been raised in Greater France, where a draft is the devil’s own work, I
dreaded the fell effects of the courant d’air
and went about during the winter months wrapped in a blanket, like a Sioux
chief. To keep warm, we burned great stacks of peat bricks in the tiny
fireplace, in the manner of our Erse ancestors of old. (More of this in due
course, when the memoir catches up.)
