.....on the road not taken
W ELCOME TO to this special Northern Ireland edition of the magazine. In keeping with our celebration of all things Norn Iron I thought it would be fitting to get Queenie, Portadown’s most prominent mother-in-law-in-waiting and assiduous stockpiler of bleach, to write the column for me.
The actual Queen might have been on a handshaking odyssey in the North this week but I know on which side my royal bread is buttered. Unfortunately, Queenie declined saying she wasn’t “intellectual” enough. I pointed out that this column has been accused of a lot of things over the years, none of them involving the word intellectual.
But the woman who would be a shoo-in to represent Northern Ireland in any chat-related events at the Olympics claimed she had nothing to say . . . except that we are really friendly in the North and have better cakes”. Which was fine except that only got me to the end of the first paragraph so I started thinking about another subject entirely which might not, at first, seem as though it has anything to do with Northern Ireland.
A couple of months ago I wrote an introduction for Gill Macmillan’s imminent reissue of Exploring English 3, a book of Inter Cert poetry.
Flicking through it I had a revelation about the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken. Not being an intellectual I had spent a lifetime believing the poem was about taking the road “less travelled” which I took to mean being courageous enough in life not to follow a well-worn path but to go boldly where nobody has gone before. Reading it again more closely though I noticed for the first time that, superficially at least, there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths Frost was choosing between, in fact one of the paths was only, slightly, less travelled than the other: “Though as for that the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same/ And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black.” For the first time I realised that taking the road “less travelled” wasn’t the point. The poem encapsulates a Sliding Doors scenario, where the entire direction of a life changes because one path is taken instead of another.
And so to Northern Ireland. On the evening of July 11th in the year 2000 my boyfriend, Queenie’s beloved second son, had one of those Sliding Doors moments which involved an actual door. I had met him for the first time earlier that day in Portadown in the middle of a riot. I was reporting for this newspaper on the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road events and he was out for a walk having been given the day off from his job in the civil service because of the protests.
We got talking and I asked him to take me to the Protestant side of Drumcree Hill so that I could write a story about what was going on there but really I just fancied him and figured a walk on the Hill would make as good a first date as any.
Unaware of my romantic intentions he picked me up at the Seagoe Hotel in Portadown that evening but understandably got cold feet when a protective Irish Times colleague wanted to accompany us to the hill.
Sitting in his car I realised it was unfair of me to put this nice person under such pressure just because I quite liked the idea of kissing him. So I opened the car door to go back into the hotel. Then, for a reason he still can’t fathom, he leaned across me, slammed the car door shut and drove me to Drumcree Hill.
We were talking the other day about what might have transpired in that other life of his. The version of his life where I get out of the car, he drives home and we never see each other again.
We wondered where he would be now. Or at least I wondered. For his part he seemed pretty certain about the details of his other parallel universe. He is still an Orange man, at officer level by now, a treasurer maybe. He is still a valued member of the Black Preceptory, getting ready for the 12th celebrations when he will wear a sash and walk with his father in a couple of weeks time. He is still vaguely suspicious of people from the South and feels a deep sense of injustice about his civil and religious liberties being curtailed because the Orangemen aren’t allowed to march down the Garvaghy Road.
In this other world, he is still in the civil service and married to a well-groomed greyhound of a girl from Portadown or surrounds who keeps the house nice and Protestant looking. They attend church together every Sunday and their children go to Sunday school. He can’t cook and does approximately 90 per cent less housework than he does now. I ask him whether in this other universe he is happy. He thinks for a bit and says “yes”, in the manner of people who remain in their comfort zone, never venturing beyond what is safe and familiar. Yes, he is happy, “just in a narrower kind of way”. He thinks he might have felt stuck in this parallel place.
But while we can guess at the details of those other universes they will always remain a mystery. One night 12 years ago he leaned across me to slam a car door shut. And, for better or worse, that has made all the difference.
In other news . . . Never mind baked goods, some of the finest playgrounds can also be found north of the border. They don’t do them any better than in the Newry Mourne district where the Slieve Gullion Forest Adventure Park in Co Armagh has just opened with plenty to please small children and teenagers plus a scenic fitness trail for bigger adventurers