‘Duck heaven’
William Leslie, Alice’s father built two joined cottages on the Pigeonstown Road beside the railway bridge, which were covered in roses, planted and nurtured by Alice’s mother, Ellen. The scent of these could be smelled 25 yards away, on approaching the house. William, Ellen and their daughter Alice lived in one of the cottages and William’s brother Robert, lived in the other.
William vowed that Robert would live there unmolested until he died, regardless of what social changes came about. As a child I was fascinated by Robert – looking or rather trying to look into his windows that were internally obscured by cobwebbed bottles and jars filled with fungal, atrophied and unspeakable excretions. I was totally convinced he was a witch or a Shaman, making up spells! At the back of his cottage was an agglomeration of riddles cutting and measuring devices and old rusting devices which defied description as recognisable tools.
I was always wary of him for he appeared a dour insular man, with little affection for folk in general but certainly none for children. He always told me to ‘clear off!’ My father told me when asked about Robert that he was quite a bit in demand by local farmers and those further afield. He was an herbalist and effected many cures for ailing animals. He was also an authority on diseases of fruit trees and bushes. Alice told he offered remedies to some of the country folk for warts, boils, rashes verrukas and bunions.
He was a stalwart of the Black Preceptory and during one of their outings on a very hot day the Lodge was taking refreshments in a country pub. Robert came out hot and sweating and sat on the road with his back against the back of the bus, the driver came out and started the bus to turn it around and reversed over Robert.
A black day for The Black you could say!
Contemplative haven
I loved Glenavy for me it was a quiet contemplative haven, away from Belfast streets. The loudest noises were the gurgle of the river and the incessant hum of insects – bumble bees in particular. I used to watch the fish jumping to catch flies. My father introduced me to The Dells which we would approach by climbing the embankment beside the Leslie cottage and walk along the railway lines eating dog vetches (small wild peas which grew along the railway tracks in abundance.) The Dells was a place of wonder to me that I never lost. There were little hillocks covered in primroses, an area of sweet smelling bluebells, a marshy area filled with wide-leafed blue irises and the river flowing through it at the bottom.
Alice told me she and Willie Lavery used to go there in the morning on the way to school, to watch the kingfishers diving into the small river to catch fish. She used to go and read books there and on one of these occasions, fell asleep and when she awoke there were a lot of newts resting on her skirt.
She said she ‘screamed the Dells down’ (her words).
In my teens I would visit Glenavy often, taking pals with me and on one trip I found embedded in the soft mud a cylindrical object about a foot long with small fins on the non-pointed end – what a prize! When we boarded the bus for the homeward journey the sharp-eyed conductor spotted my prize and said ‘What have you got there lad?’ He asked to see it, examined it, jumped off the bus with it and threw it into the river. “Sorry son but that was an incendiary bomb and it might still be active.”
A night in the air raid shelter
I can still recall the blitz in Belfast. I remember one particular night of many bangs and the vibration making my mother’s cabinet jump about and resettle. I remember spending a night in the air-raid shelter across the street belonging the Millar’s jam factory and watching cartoons projected on to one of the shelter’s walls and someone playing a ukulele and some of the people singing. As I was carried up to bed one other night I recall a bright light (like a fallen star). I remember my parents’ anxiety because it was a flare, dropped to illuminate a target for bombers.
Yet another day, one Saturday morning, my father was in the garden around 10 am and come running in to panic us all by saying we have to leave NOW! At the door he pointed out what looked like a parachutist coming down high up above the street. “That’s a German landmine. One came down in ‘the Yard’ (shipyard) last week and a bunch of men rushed along the dock thinking it was a German pilot and intending to seize him, saw at the last moment what looked to be an oxygen cylinder and turned to run: when it exploded it blew a bunch of them into the Lagan.”
My father alerted the street and everyone got out, but a strong wind blew the parachute away from our area where about 2 pm it landed in the duck pond in the Ormeau Park and blew the ducks to ‘duck heaven’. Looking at the crater the following day with my sister Helen there was this tremendous hole around which whole trees were scattered like leeks that were pulled up by the roots.
Shrapnel souvenirs
My brother Raymond loved it all, such excitement after rural Donegal. All the boys of his age group were collecting shrapnel as souvenirs and he had a box of it. He used to trade things for others that held more of a current interest for him. He traded the shrapnel and old tracer bullet shells to a boy up the street for a set of cigarette cards. However, among this was a live shotgun shell. Up the street the boy’s mother was rushing to go out to the cinema and having done a quick tidy-up, came across the shotgun shell, and threw it on the banked-up fire. In comes the father and while he was reading the paper, ‘bang’. Half the fire blew across the room setting the curtains on fire. Luckily he was unhurt.
All my cousins (from my mother’s side) who were in the forces the ATS, WRAF, the army and the navy would call for tea at our house. Their tales of their experiences would make me restless and anxious to be in the thick of it. We collected books for the war effort and took them to Harding school while girls like my sister Helen made toys to sell to make money for the troops. But an unexploded bomb embedded in the school playground a couple of weeks before the school holidays so there was an extended holiday.
On odd Sundays my father and I would take the bus from Smithfield out to filter beds and walk along the road to Rose Lane Ends to the sighing sough of Lough Neagh. I wrote these few lines as a remembrance of those days.
Sunday walks
The Sunday bells that gathered ears to God
Outdid each other in cacophonies of sound
The Catholic vying with the Protestant
Reverberating round and round the town.
Sounding like tongues, impatient to be heard
each and every one had, had their say
all around Belfast, every Sunday morning
Taking turn, like a rooster’s roundelay.
The single-decker, green and yellow bus
Climbing the rising bends reliable and slow
A petrol-driven-asthmatic, wheezing to the top
With churches and people diminished far below.
At Filterbeds, we shuddered to a halt
Carrying our jackets, my dad and I got down
Into a world of scolding rooks and melting tar
To walk the sticky narrow road to Pigeonstown.
Me with a stick in the hawthorn hedges
Slashing at puffballs, thistles and docks,
Which silenced all the grasshoppers and crickets
Ticking in the grasses like a barrage of clocks.
Dad with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat
Hat pushed back and slightly to one side
Swaggering like a man who owned the country
His shadow and I behind him, aping his stride.
The roads have all been widened since
And that old ancient bus no longer climbs
Gasping up the hills to Filterbeds
And Dad’s been dead since nineteen sixty nine.
Everything is changing for the best – we’re told.
Old outmoded ways are past and dead.
But Dad and I still walk that narrow road to Pigeonstown
Untouched by so-called progress ……..in my head.
Ernest Lavery.
