The Street and other stories

Willie Shannon was a quiet man. He lived with his sister, Catherine, in the house they had been born in. Willie was seventy-three; Catherine was seventy-five. Until their retirements they had worked for two of the bigger shops in downtown Belfast.

Willie had been a storeman in Woolworth’s, Catherine a buyer for one of Royal Avenue’s fashion stores. Catherine could have become the buyer for an entire floor, “Silks and Lace”—Mr Bradshaw himself had offered her the position. She had seriously considered accepting his offer but, as she would conclude primly to whomever she was addressing, it wasn’t to be. She also had at that time an enduring but temporary attachment to a young man who had moved to Belfast from Banbridge. He was a Protestant and boarded with friends of Willie and Catherine’s mother. He was a real gentleman, Catherine would recall, a little sadly perhaps, as she reflected on what might have been. She still had a photograph upstairs somewhere of herself and Ronnie, taken the day they had gone to the Glens of Antrim.

If Willie had tales of lost love he kept them to himself. He was fond of a drink. That was one of the legacies of Woolworth’s. He had learned to drink as part of his apprenticeship. At first it was a bottle of stout, carefully nursed for half an hour on paydays in one of the snugs in Kelly’s before he caught the bus home. Later, as he came out of his teens, he graduated to pints of porter and on
special occasions to a half-un of Bushmills. On those nights, in the beginning, dinner was delayed until Catherine bustled in to announce that there was “no point in waiting for our Willie. He’s with that crowd in the pub.”

Their mother would put Willie’s dinner in the oven or between two plates atop a pot of simmering water while Catherine served the rest of the family. There were two more in the family, James and Lily, who were younger than Catherine and Willie. James, to his father’s delight, won a place in St Malachy’s College. By this time Willie was three years in Woolworth’s, while Lily, the youngest, was still at St Mary’s Primary School for Girls.

Then their father died. He died slowly and painfully the year James started in St Malachy’s. In a way Willie became the father figure, the head of the family. He was twenty-three years old. After a while pay nights became his late nights. On those nights the family had their dinner at the normal time without him. When he returned later smelling of tobacco and Guinness and full of good humour, his mother fussed around him, serving a freshly cooked dinner on a tray instead of at the table. When he had eaten his fill Willie usually slipped young James and Lily their “pay” before presenting his mother with his weekly subscription to the family’s income.

“I’m away up for a wash, Ma,” Willie would say, “and then I’m off for a pint. I’ll be in early.”

“That’s all right, son,” Mrs Shannon would reply. “There’s a clean shirt over the chair in your room.”

Willie never gave her any trouble. On Saturdays if he wasn’t working he’d be off training or playing for the Rossa hurling club, then back home for a big fry of bacon, eggs, black pudding and sausages served up on a bed of soda and potato farls. If the evening was fine he and his cronies would dander up to Charlie Watter’s public house at Hannahstown on the shoulder of Black Mountain. Then, as the dusk slowly settled in on the city below them and sea mists smothered Belfast Lough, they strolled back again, yarning and boasting and laughing as young men do. Sundays
were family days. They went to early mass together. They ate well at noontime, a Sunday dinner which was prepared and served by Mrs Shannon and her daughters while Willie enjoyed a leisurely read of the
Sunday Press.
After dinner he and James washed up the dishes and they talked of hurling and football or Willie would quiz James good-humouredly about his schoolwork. Then Mrs Shannon and the girls went off visiting their Aunt Anne or cousin Mena, James settled down in the parlour to study and Willie strolled across to the Falls Park to meet his friends. In winter the routine was changed only to suit the weather.

It went on like that for years. In time James progressed through St Malachy’s and into teacher training. He got his first position as a trainee teacher in a small school outside Ardboe in County Tyrone. Two years later he married and he and his new wife moved to Strabane and from there to Glasgow in Scotland. Lily also married. She wed a schoolboy sweetheart who grew to abuse her. Their marriage soured as his drinking increased, and their relationship degenerated into a behind-doors hell for them both, especially for her. Only Willie and Catherine remained the same. Their neighbours and friends, their workmates, the Rossa team, even Willie’s drinking companions eventually settled into marriages, emigration and in one case the priesthood. Willie and Catherine and their mother persisted happily in routines which had constancy and reassurance, and when Mrs Shannon died Willie and Catherine carried on as they had when she was alive. They fitted into the rhythms of each other’s lives. In many ways they complemented one another’s lifestyles.

Willie was by now a senior storeman at Woolworth’s and a committeeman at the Rossa club. One of the highlights of his year was the All-Ireland Hurling Final in Dublin. He would spend the weekend there, boarding in a bed-and-breakfast house close to Mountjoy Square. It had been part of his annual pilgrimage for twenty years, and on the Saturday he went there straight from the early train. He was treated like a king and revelled in the attention he received. Then, with a jaunty air he was off to tea in Bewley’s,
a browse along the bookshops on the quays, a steak dinner in Wynn’s before strolling up to the GPO to meet the Rossa crowd at Nelson’s Pillar. They all adjourned for a few pints and a sing-song in their hotel. No matter who won the match the weekend was always a triumph, and Catherine got a full blow-by-blow account of the game for nights afterwards. She knew every ween and turn of Willie. Sometimes she would tease him gently as he enthused about a particular action on the field or as he berated some player’s incompetence. She, for her part, seemed content with her small circle of friends, an occasional small sherry and a regular trip to the theatre.

She went to the Lough Derg pilgrimage every year; that was her All-Ireland. In 1967 she retired from Bradshaw’s. After a month of boredom around the house, she got involved with the local Ladies’ Co-operative Guild. Soon she was enclosed in its circle of activities.

When Willie retired his workmates did a whip-round and presented him with one of the new black-and-white television sets. Willie was delighted. He spent the first few weeks of his retirement between the television set and the Falls Park. There was some sporadic trouble in Belfast city centre that year. Willie and Catherine paid little heed to it. Indeed, if they hadn’t had the television set they might not even have known about it. In the first week of October they went on a parish pilgrimage to Rome. It was there on the night of 6 October that Willie saw television coverage of the RUC’s attack on the civil rights march in Derry the previous day. He was in a small bar when the strangely familiar uniforms rioted across a news programme. He wasn’t sure what it was or where exactly in Ireland it happened. In fact, he was slightly puzzled and then embarrassed when the barman drew his attention to the television in the corner of the room. “You Irish, you zed?
Si?
Look!” he pointed excitedly at the screen. When Willie returned to their hotel the group was talking about the trouble. One woman had phoned her sister in Derry. Fr Crummey organised the phone call. The news wasn’t good, but the slight
shadow it cast over their visit evaporated the following morning in the Roman sunshine.

“Isn’t it wonderful how warm this place is on an autumn day?” Catherine remarked to Willie as they lunched in a small restaurant in the Via Flavia, a narrow street behind their hotel.

“Indeed it is,” Willie agreed. “The Falls Road was never like this.”

“You leave the Falls Road alone,” Catherine replied.

The slight hint of an edge on her voice puzzled him, but he took it in good part. Only when they were home again days later did he remember that little undercurrent of tension. It came back into her voice as they listened to a television debate between civil rights leaders and a Stormont government minister.

“I think they are only interested in creating trouble. Things aren’t as bad as all that,” she sniffed.

“Well, they’re not that great either,” Willie answered. “It’s good that somebody’s standing up for us.”

“They’re not standing up for me,” Catherine retorted. “I’m quite capable of doing that for myself, thank you very much. There’ll be no good come out of it. You mark my words. They are only in it for what they can get out of it for themselves. And the young people have no sense anyway. It’ll be long and many a day before I’d need any of that crowd to help me. There’ll be no good’ll come out of their rabble-rousing.”

Willie was surprised by her tone. They had never discussed politics before. He wasn’t sure if Catherine even bothered to vote. He always voted but more out of some sense of responsibility than any ideological commitment. Of course, he always voted anti-Unionist. And, he realised to his surprise as he reflected on Catherine’s outburst, he had never told anybody about his voting habits. Now, with time on his hands, he was discovering that his attitudes were more questioning than they had been before. There was so much happening every other day, between protests and counter-protests, statements and counter-statements, all transmitted on the black-and-white television or reported in the morning
paper. Willie found himself becoming absorbed in the political excitement of the period. At times he found it difficult to comprehend how Catherine avoided what was happening outside. Whenever he tried to talk to her about whatever issue was dominating that day’s headlines, she refused to be drawn into conversation. Things came to a head between them one morning. Aman had been killed in an RUC baton charge the night before. The first Willie knew of the incident was at breakfast when Catherine flung the
Irish News
across the table at him.

“I suppose you and your friends are satisfied now,” she cried at him.

He was dumbfounded at first, and then as he read the lead story anger replaced his bewilderment. Crumpling the paper in his hand he followed Catherine into the scullery where she had retreated after her outburst.

“What do you mean?” he confronted her. “What do you mean am I satisfied? Them bastards kill a man and you give off to me? What do you mean, woman? What’s in your head? I suppose it was that poor man’s fault that they killed him?”

Catherine said nothing. She turned her back to him and adjusted the heat under the teapot on the stove. He flung the newspaper at her in anger.

“Don’t ever say anything like that to me ever again as long as you live, Catherine. If that’s all you think about the situation then keep your thoughts to yourself. And don’t worry about breakfast for me. I’m going out!”

He didn’t return until nightfall, and although she had kept a nervous vigil at the parlour window awaiting his return, she said nothing as he stumbled his drunken, hurt, mumbling way upstairs to bed. The following day she told him that it might be better if they didn’t discuss politics in the house. He said nothing. The next morning he went to the funeral of the man who had been killed in the baton charge. He said nothing about this to Catherine, and soon things in the house returned to the way they had always been, as if nothing had happened. But as their effort to
avoid contentious topics of conversation intensified indoors, while the troubles outside continued to escalate, the relationship between brother and sister slowly turned into one of long, lonely silences. They were so much a part of each other’s routine that the rituals remained unchanged, but as the awkwardness between them grew, so did Willie’s feelings of resentment and Catherine’s sense of outrage. Gradually the warmth they felt for each other died. It was, as Willie remarked to himself one day, a bit like the cold war.

Yet he could not bring himself to make the peace: Catherine was demanding too high a price. He was prepared to compromise, to meet her halfway, but he was not prepared to surrender. It was she who was attacking him. Even a careless word from him about some incident or other was greeted by a scornful “You know I don’t want to know that” from Catherine. Wounded, he would withdraw and a long, brittle silence would follow.

When he got drunk, which was seldom enough, then the resentment flowed out of him in an ugly, frustrated and angry torrent. He’d arrive home late and stumble noisily and clumsily into the quiet, waiting house. At first she used to scold him, rising from the chair where she waited anxiously for him to return, but his fury was so intense that she became a little frightened of him. She still waited up but now she held her tongue. Even then, in his drunken slyness, he realised the power he had over her, and poured out his disgust at her, goaded to louder outbursts by her silent refusal to be drawn by his insults.

The next day he would be like a contrite child, and for a while it would be like old times as he tried to please her by doing little things about the house and she slowly thawed, despite herself, in the face of his charm. At these times even the television news failed to divide them as they made a special effort not to let outsiders destroy them; but such was the daily controversy which swirled all around and so entrenched were they both in their views that such respites were not only infrequent, they were also short-lived. It was during just such a period, as they sat beside a roaring
fire, watching the Sunday film on television, that a newsflash invaded their cosy contentment. Like the broadcast three years earlier in Rome, the news this time, at first vague but becoming clearer and more deadly by the hour, was also about Derry.

They sat, numbed as the enormity of it was broadcast into their sitting room. It was Catherine who eventually spoke.

“I’m sorry, Willie.”

He made no reply.

“Willie…”

“I’m surprised you’re not applauding,” he exclaimed savagely. The wounded shock on her face halted him for a second, but even then his pain was too great for him to contain.