Liam Carson - Call Mother a Lonely Field. Liam Carson

sanctuary

My father would often tell me his dark dreams. In them, I am always a little boy, and we are lost in a forest. It is night, and we cannot see where we are going. I fall into quicksand, I am trapped, I am sinking. My Da frantically tries to rescue me. He stretches his hand to me, but cannot reach me. After his death, my own dark dreams came.

I see myself sitting on the Black Mountain, gazing down on the city. Immediately behind the Black Mountain rises the summit of Divis Mountain, whose name comes from the Irish dubh ais or black place. I look out to Belfast Lough and there is a massive swell building near Helens Bay. A huge wave rises, a wall of sea rising like a dragon from the depths, a tsunami that will drown the whole of Belfast. And although I am on the mountain , I can also see into the kitchen in Mooreland as if it is only a couple of feet away. My Ma and Da are sitting down to tea, oblivious to the catastrophe hurtling towards them. I run down the hillside, but I know it is too late, I know I cannot save them.

I find my dream echoed in an old scal s, or fairy tale, from Donegal, called Na Tr Thonnathe three waves. It tells of a man and his son out fishing on the open sea. It is a quiet, calm day. Then three large waves rise behind them as they head for land. The first is big, the second larger, and the third is so massive, they fear they are about to be drowned. The father asks his son to cast a knife ins an tuath. Into the tuatha word that is difficult to translate. In Dinneens dictionary, it is defined as evoking the sinister: wrongness, goety or negative magic.

The son does his fathers bidding, hurling the knife into the heart of the demonic wave. Within the blink of an eye, the wave vanishes, and the men come safely to land. That night the son is visited by a man who tells him the knife is embedded in his daughters foreheadand that he must accompany him to remove the knife. He is taken to a fairy island and warned to refuse anything he is offered. He is brought to where the girl is stretched on a bed; he removes the knife, and she arises, safe and sound. The island people offer him all manner of things, but he refuses their gifts. The man tells the son he must forsake his native land. And so he does, heading for America, never to see his father again.

For my father, Liam Mac Carrin, Irish was a place of refuge. He was once interviewed for BBC Radio Ulsters Tearmannwhere guests were asked what gave them sanctuary in their lives. He chose the Irish language itself. He hid within and took comfort from words.

He arrived into this world as William Carson on 14 April 1916, only ten days before the Easter Rising. He spent his childhood i dteach bheag i srid bheagin a little house in a little street, not far from Clonard Monastery, just off the Lower Falls Road. There was one room downstairs, two upstairs, and an outdoor toilet. His father, Davy Carson, was a fitter for Harland and Wolffbut he lost that job on 21 July 1920, when he was forced out of the shipyard in an anti-Catholic and anti-socialist pogrom.

A contemporary account tells of the fear on that day:

The gates were smashed down with sledges, the vests and shirts of those at work were torn open to see if the men were wearing any Catholic emblems, and woe betide the man who was. One man was set upon, thrown into the dock, had to swim the Musgrave channel and, having been pelted with rivets, had to swim two or three miles, to emerge in streams of blood and rush to the police officer in a nude state.

My grandfather was lucky to escape a beating or worse. In the next few days, seven Catholics and six Protestants were shot dead in the conflict that spread throughout the city. In the period between July 1920 and June 1922, over 20,000 Catholics were driven from their homes; 9,000 men were forced out of their jobs; and nearly 500 people were killed in sectarian attacks in Belfast.

Davy Carson never regained a full-time job. For years he struggled to make ends meet. He would get temporary jobs from time to timeobair chrua mhaslach, as my father described itheavy, taxing work with a spade or pick in hand, often in the cruellest of weather. But as the 1920s drew to a close, and the depression of the 1930s loomed, the building work dried up. In 1928, he teamed up with some friends; they bought ladders, cloths and buckets, and set themselves up as window cleaners. It wasnt easy to make a living at first. Most of the local women could only afford to pay a few pennies, and even the pennies were hard to come by, money was that tight for the people of the Falls. But soon he was cleaning windows for the local shopkeepers , for offices, and even the local police station.