Fortnight Publications Ltd.

The CoastersAuthor(s): John HewittSource: Fortnight, No. 385, Supplement: Unacknowledged Legislators (May, 2000), pp. 7-8Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25559931 .

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UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS

with voices coming straight out of their boots, the voices heard in newsreels about coal or dockers newly dumped onto the dole after which the army's the next stop. One who's breakfasted on Brown Ale, cocks a nail-bitten, nicotined right thumb, and shoots

with loud saliva salvos a red fox parting the clean green blades of some new crop planted by farm families with old roots.

A card! The stewardesses almost throw it into our laps not wanting to come near to groping soldiers. We write each fact

we're required to enter 'The Act': profession; place of birth; purpose of visit. The rowdy squaddy, though he doesn't know it (and if he did he'd brand the freak as 'queer') is sitting next to one who enters 'poet'

where he puts 'Forces'. But what is it? My purpose? His? What are we doing here?

Being a photographer seems bad enough. God knows the catcalls that a poet would get! Newcastle-bound for leave the soldiers rag the press photographer about his bag and call him Gert or Daisy, and all laugh. They shout at him in accents they'd dub 'pouf' Yoo hoo, hinny! Like your handbag pet!

Though what he's snapped has made him just as tough and his handbag hardware could well photograph these laughing features when they're cold and set.

I don't like the thought of these lads manning blocks but saw them as you drove me to my flight, now khakied up, not kaylied but alert, their minds on something else than Scotch or skirt, their elbows bending now to cradle guns.

The road's through deep green fields and wheeling flocks of lapwings soaring, not the sort of sight the sentry looks for in his narrow box. 'Cursed by dullards whom no cannon stuns' I quote. They won't read what we three write.

They occupy NO SMOKING seats and smoke, commandos free a few days from command

which cries for licence and I watch them cram anything boozeable, Brown Ale to Babycham, into their hardened innards, and they drain

whisky/lemonade, Bacardi/ Coke, double after double, one in either hand, boys' drinks spirit-spiked for the real bloke! Neither passengers nor cabin crew complain as the squaddies keep on smoking as we land.

And as the morning Belfast plane descends on Newcastle and one soldier looks, with tears, on what he greets as 'Geordie grass' and rakes the airport terrace for 'wor lass' and another hollers to his noisy mates he's going to have before their short leave ends 'firkins of fucking FED, fantastic fucks!' I wish for you, my Ulster poet friends,

pleasures with no rough strife, no iron gates, and letter boxes wide enough for books.

Issue 250, April 1987

Windsurfers at Abbacy, summer of '86

Martin Mooney

Their empty cars lie parked up on the grass and near the roadside. Latecomers, one in a wetsuit, are tugging a sleek board to the shingle, its hinged mast a thin bone broken. Others

have already taken wing their sails triangular and taut as eardrums directed gingerly as radar through the small crises of the shallows towards the sunlight's morse, the deeper water.

Issue 252 June 1987

The coasters

John Hewitt

You coasted along to larger houses, gadgets, more machines, to golf and weekend bungalows, caravans when the children were small, the Mediterranean, later, with the wife.

You did not go to church often, weddings were special; but you kept your name on the books against eventualities; and the parson called, or the curate.

You showed a sense of responsibility, with subscriptions to worthwhile causes and service in voluntary organisations; and, anyhow, this did the business no harm, no harm at all. Relations were improving. A good useful life. You coasted along.

You even had a friend or two of the other sort, coasting too: your ways ran parallel. Their children and yours seldom met, though, being at different schools. You visited each other, decent folk with a sense of humour. Introduced, even, to one of their clergy. And then you smiled in the looking-glass, admiring, a little moved by, your broadmindedness.

Your father would never have known

FREE WITH FORTNIGHT 385 7

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UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS

one of them. Come to think of it, when you were young, your own home was never visited by one of the other sort.

Relations were improving. The annual processions began to look rather like folk-festivals.

When that noisy preacher started, he seemed old-fashioned, a survival. Later you remarked on his vehemence, a bit on the rough side. But you said, admit, you said in the club, 'You know, there's something in what he says'.

And you who seldom had time to read a book what with reports and the colour-supplements, denounced censorship. And you who never had an adventurous thought were positive that the church of the other sort vetoes thought. And you who simply put up with marriage for the children's sake, deplored the attitude of the other sort to divorce.

You coasted along. And all the time, though you never noticed, the old lies festered; the ignorant became more thoroughly infected; there were gains, of course; you never saw any go barefoot.

The government permanent, sustained by the regular plebiscites of loyalty. You always voted but never put a sticker on the car;

a card in the window would not have been seen from the street. Faces changed on the posters, names too, often, but the same families, the same class of people. A Minister once called you by your first name.

You coasted along and the sores suppurated and spread.

Now the fever is high and raging; who would have guessed it, coasting along? The ignorant-sick thresh about in delirium and tear at the scabs with dirty finger-nails. The cloud of infection hangs over the city, a quick change of wind and it

might spill over the leafy suburbs. You coasted too long.

Issue 254 September 1987

The Belfast urban area plan (revised)

Janet Shepperson

I dreamed I saw the City Hall subsiding

wavering like a drunk, its straight lines buckling, its grey hide wrinkling, all its legs giving way. till it sank down with a sigh like a cow in meadow

full of daisies. The air was heavy with humming, loud as a thousand bees. I passed the Lord Mayors, stiff on their pedestals, straight-faced under pigeon-shit, respectable as only dead men can be.

and Frederick Temple, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Canadian Governor General, Viceroy of India, his chest a tangle of tassels and medals that must be stunting his growth, the way ivy strangles a tree trunk...

When I rounded the corner, the ground was littered with fragments

like twigs, or prunings-smooth and grey and bulbous, and the humming was louder. Women in yellow helmets

were ignoring the trees, and having a go at the statues:

their chain-saw took a chunk out of a frock coat, buttons bounced on the grass, a stern beard juddered, went sailing through the air. "Stand clear," they told me, "This lot are all coming down. There exists a shortfall

of Recreational Space in the Inner City. Look at that fellow-you couldn't say he was exactly recreational. Besides, he's rotten inside, you hear him cracking when it's stormy.

-if he comes down on your head, you'll know all about it. We plan to plant small trees here, flexible enough to bend with the wind, they won't strike poses or preach or rant-the perfect Urban Forest."

The last I saw was Carson up at Stormont; his hand, that had pawed the air for decades, quivered as the hum of triumphant bees rose to a crescendo, and he dropped his fingers and clutched his plinth as

they came.

Issue 275 July/August 1989

Titim i nGra

Nuala Ni Dhomnaill

Titim i ngra gach aon bhliain ins an bhfomhar leis na braonaiocha baisti ar ghloine tosaigh an chair, leis an solas leicideach filiuiil ag dul thar f6ir na gcnoc ag for na sp6ire 6s mo chomhair. Le duille6ga dreoite a gcuacadh im' shli go cruiceach, le muisiriuiin, luibini diomais ar adhmad lofa,

titim i ngra fiu leis an gcre fIhuar is an bogach nuair a chuimhnim gurb e ata a thuar duinn f6s, a st6r.

Titim i ngra le gach a bhfuil ag dul as leis na pratai ag dubhadh is ag lobhadh istigh sa chlais,

leis na 'brussels sprouts' ag meirgiui ar na gais ruaite ag an mbleast seaca, searbh is tais.

Na ruitai airtisi6c a gcreimeadh ag an luch, na ruachain bodhar is doimhin sa ghaineamh fliuch, na grainni sil faoi iamh sa talamh, slan. Titim i ngra, beagAinin, leis an mbas.

Is ni hi an titim, na an t-eiri anios

8 FREE WITH FORTNIGHT 385

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