1984

It's a beautifully sunny December morning in Belfast, but I'm distracted, thinking back again and smiling at what I see.

I had short, layered hair with flicks at the sides. It was 1984, and wearing pastel coloured dungarees most of the time was considered normal. My turquoise glitter eyeliner sometimes got me into trouble at school. Most of my income, earned not very coolly by playing the organ in the little chapel of the local army barracks, was promptly spent on poorly made garments in Fresh Garbage or Miss Selfridge. If anyone had commented that I looked like the ill-conceived love-child of Princess Diana and "Borderline"-era Madonna, I would have been thrilled.

I was an unattractive mixture of genuine intellectual curiosity (I read all of George Eliot for fun and thought a lot of deep thoughts), considerable arrogance (I did know best, about everything) and undiscriminating pop culture love (the highlight of my week was the actually quite arduous task of taping the entire Top 40 by holding my cassette player up in front of the radio speakers).

It was time to apply for university. I could not wait to get out of Northern Ireland, and university would be my ticket to a bigger, more stylish life. More than anything, I wanted to be anonymous and independent. 

Coming from a big family, I had spent my life to date surrounded by aunties and great-uncles and family friends and acquaintances. Everything I did had been observed by people who knew me or my family and were liable to report back on anything problematic. My teacher was my cousins' auntie on the other side (which resulted in an embarrassing scene involving new glasses that I was supposed to wear to school but hid in my pocket each morning when I got to the end of the street). My headmaster went to school with my mum. Everybody new that I met was actually connected to me by a maximum of three degrees of separation. Their grandpa went to church with my next door neighbour. Or their mum worked with my uncle's friend. I lived in a giant spider's web of spies. Everybody knew everything about me already.

The answer was clearly to move to "the mainland" and start again, creating myself as I wanted to be seen. I applied to universities with that in mind. The local university was good. But it was about three miles away, and my dad worked there. And if I applied for a music degree, I'd probably know everybody else in the department already, from playing in orchestras and festivals with them for the last seven years.

And the city of Belfast was the least desirable place I could live. I still saw absolutely nothing appealing about it, felt no sense of belonging or pride or identity. 

All of that would be the case for many 18-year-olds, although at the time I thought I was quite unique. And there is much to be said for making a break from home at this age and setting out to be bold and independent. I was fortunate to be at this stage when university grants made it possible to study anywhere in the British Isles, if you were frugal and didn't expect too high a standard of living. It's different for the teenagers who pass through my sixth form classes now, often restricted in their choices by financial considerations.

But maybe coming from Belfast was different then. The Troubles still surrounded us. Northern Ireland was broken in half. There seemed only two identities available, and I didn't like the obvious one for me. Maybe it was because of my English dad. Maybe it was because of the tolerant, apolitical family of my County Down mum. And out of the country, whichever foot you kicked with, I knew that my accent would produce reactions of either pity or wariness. But it was out of the question that I would stay. Staying was keeping your feet in iron boots soldered to the pavement in Donegall Place. Leaving was the possibility of winged sandals.

I know Belfast looks good in these images. Did it look like this then? I don't know. As I wrote in my last post, it was always cool and beautiful. But perhaps, on the surface, it was grimier and more broken down. Perhaps the sun never shone like this on a December morning. Or perhaps we only see the beauty of a city we love.

Out of the question

Belfast is a cool and beautiful city. It always was, even back in the dark days.

I didn't know it then. The broken town of the 1970s made strangers of many of us. We did go into the city centre as teenagers. We queued at the Donegall Place check points where babies' prams were searched for bombs. We opened our proud new handbags as we entered every shop. It was vital to visit C&A's and Miss Selfridge and to check out the braver, punkier kids chilling in Corn Market.

But there was no freedom in our relationship with the city. Too many lovely Victorian streets were too close to danger. Once it was dark, it was definitely time to go home.

When I was eleven years old, my parents didn't want to take the risk of sending me to the university area school with which our family had been linked for generations. They had both gone there. So had aunts and uncles and grandparents.

But it was too dangerous for a child of my age to take buses across the city alone then. Out of the question. I was sent through safer suburbs to another school.

That necessary choice meant that during my teenage years I never wandered near the university, bought takeaways on the Lisburn Road, sat in the sun in Botanic Gardens. The danger became less urgent, but I never explored large parts of my own city. I had little sense of its history, beyond its recent infuriatingly troubled past. Belfast became, frankly, an embarrassment, somewhere I wanted to escape from as soon as I possibly could.

It was many years before I changed my mind.

Kilcloud: ten things and two creatures

When I close my eyes and recall Kilcloud a hundred years ago, these are the things I see.

Not so much the street and the roofs and the sky. More the things inside. Little things, like my mother's endless balls of wool. The precious clock on the mantelpiece. A piece of crockery, glaze worn with proud use. And things that turned out to be bigger, like the rectory bookshelf, with its complete set of Charles Dickens.

And it's always lit like this, shafts of cold sunlight in dark rooms. Dust motes despite the hours spent dusting. Sudden still lifes burning in memory with every stitch and wrinkle clear.

And Bridget and Betty.

Kilcloud, imagined village of the heart.

Morning

This morning at a quarter to eight I was bundling along High Street, wrapped for the Siberian weather. My Aran hat was angled for comfort rather than style, like Mary Ann McCracken's bonnet. I was wearing two scarves.

This was a triumph of self-discipline from a woman who prefers not to see daylight before nine, though she is forced to do so five days a week by the need to earn an honest living. But last night I attended a talk on the photography of Father Francis Browne, most famous for his images taken on board the Titanic. If Father Browne could sail on doomed ships, become the most decorated non-combatant in the First World War, fly planes as an old man and never complain about the lingering effects of mustard gas, all the while taking beautifully composed photographs of compelling social interest, perhaps I could rise from my blankets to shoot the city sunrise in the darkest quarter of the year.

I was half hoping I'd come upon something amazing. A picturesque old man in a hat emerging backlit from Crown Entry. A couple kissing under the skeleton trees on Donegall Street. A rufty-tufty little dog posing outside a mildly seedy shop in Smithfield. Some beautiful reward for my iron will, anyway.

Those things didn't happen.

The light, however, was worth the effort. The night-time lights, like the quadruplet faces of the Albert Clock, were pretty against the pale purple sky. The Cathedral Quarter warrens were dark but washed clean, with puffs of steam highlighting the brick walls. Then, passing the end of scruffy North Street, I saw the first glow of sunrise. And emerging onto Donegall Place, my heart lifted as the taller east-facing buildings were suddenly lit with pink and gold. The stopped clock of the Bank of Ireland glowed.

It didn't last. The rain come on, as it does here. 

The instrument store

Actually, I like playing scales. There's nothing like a nice long one to show off my delicately different shadings of timbre and phenomenal smoothness. I think we'd all agree that I have a very special lower range. But I had to suffer Shirley, Edna, Rodney, Roger, and Pauline before I got Caroline, who appreciated that. Sometimes she had Jackie magazine on the music stand as she practised, but I forgave her every time because I sounded so beautiful. 

The Carnival of the Animals.  Don't remind me. Betty Avery could only play in tune in first position, so when we got to the donkey section she just played the "Aws". Susan McMullan beside us was soaring away on the "Ees", E string, appropriately enough, high as anything. Mortifying.

Janet Osborne was sent into the store because she wouldn't stop laughing. Frankly, the laughing was fair enough. Had he even looked in a mirror that morning? She broke us off when she got bored. It was a bit of a relief. We had done one too many Grade Ones by that point.

Gillian Stanfield was my favourite. She kept me wrapped in a silk scarf and she always wiped the resin dust off.

I still feel bitter about Mrs Schulmeyer, who persuaded her to switch to the viola. I mean, the viola?

Please don't send me to be mended, unless Mr Broadway has retired now. Is there not something you could do with a cotton bud and some white spirit?

Everyone was in high spirits for that rehearsal. The concert was the next evening, and for once, for a school orchestra, it sounded, I suppose, acceptable. Malcolm Brown was showing off when he threw his mallet up in the air. Girls always seemed to go for percussion players, and he knew that all the fourth formers were watching. But his aim was terrible. I had never felt pain like that. You know what the worst thing was? Even Daisy laughed. Please don't photograph the scar.

He had his problems. OCD, certainly. Depression, probably. Possibly an undiagnosed alcoholic. We could see right through him. Anyone who spent that much time in the store?

14 March 1984, the best night of my life. We were playing the second part in the Bach double. The stars must have been specially aligned. Julie's right hand didn't shake, for once, and we blended together as smoothly as a dream.

When the movement ended, there was a moment of silence, like a sigh.

He was gathering his things together to go on the orchestra tour to Germany. That suitcase had taken all week to pack. For a boy, he certainly planned his outfits in detail. And I suppose the tour was successful on the romantic front. I hear they have a third baby on the way.

But he got into the car without me. They arrived back ten minutes later, laughing and joking about getting priorities straight and what would Mr Pugh say, and threw me in the back seat. That hurt.