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(RUBY MURRAY) ♪ Softly, softly ♪
♪ come to me ♪
♪ Touch my lips so tenderly ♪
♪ Softly, softly ♪
♪ come to me ♪
♪ Touch my lips so tenderly ♪
♪ Softly, softly ♪
♪ turn the key ♪
♪ And open up my heart ♪
♪ Softly, softly ♪
♪ turn the key ♪
♪ And open up ♪
♪ my heart ♪
(MARK COUSINS) I met a woman.
She said that she is Belfast,
the city in Northern Ireland where I grew up.
The woman said that she's as old as the city.
As she talked, I got drawn in.
She had a way of seeing,
a way of talking and hoping.
And, so, I listened.
(BELFAST) I'm glad you listened.
You didn't have to.
You've been away so long.
I didn't need to tell you my stories.
(COUSINS) Oh, I know.
BELFAST} You came back to Belfast,
like so many travelers went there.
Belfast's a port, a harbor.
We made the world's linen.
And ships for the seven seas.
(COUSINS) That's me, in the van on the bridge,
on my way home.
(BELFAST) You're a wee speck in the landscape.
I am the landscape.
When I say that I am Belfast,
I don't mean that I lived there,
or feel that I'm the place.
I am the place!
I'm ten thousand years old.
I'm from the time before.
You come from Belfast,
but do you know me?
My dream life?
I've had quite a dream life.
Can I tell you about it?
(COUSINS) I can see that you're going to.
(BELFAST) I know where to start.
Somewhere you won't know.
Let's fall to Earth.
Here.
Where's this?
Are we at the North Pole?
Or in the clouds?
Or on an ice planet?
This place could sink a ship.
But do you recognise that chimney stack?
We're home.
Me!
That's the Shore Road mill.
Belfast is hiding behind this hill.
A salt hill.
What a morning.
Let's look at it together.
I'll take your hand.
(COUSINS) Okay.
BELFAST} Your hands are cold.
I'll tell you the story of Belfast.
Not the whole story, that would take years.
Just bits. Like scenes from movies.
(COUSINS) I like movies.
(BELFAST) Sure, don 't I know!
Come with me.
Let's get lost.
Somebody painted a wall golden, so I go to it.
The warm morning sun on my face,
and on the back of my neck.
The wall reflects it.
It's so nice here.
Let's wait a bit.
And listen.
Let's listen first,
and then look,
and then walk.
(MAN) She was coming down the Shankill,
hanging on to him like a bucket 0' skins.
(W OMAN) It's wonderful, it's marvelous.
So all the songs say, anyway.
I think it is, yes. Love's great.
(MAN) Well, the definition of love when we were children was...
It was jam rolling down your back and you couldn't get round to lick it!
(W ELL-TO-DO MAN'; And you will find
that here in this small community you love people, just like yourselves.
(BABY CRIES)
(W OMAN) "Barney Hughes' bread sticks to your belly like lead.“
We played KDRF - Kick Doors, Run Fast-
which was terrible.
Looking back I regret it.
(MAN) A hardy, varied, self- reliant, individualistic wit.
(WOMAN) 'Fornenst' means in front of.
If somebody's sittin' fornenst me,
they're sittin' over there, just facing me.
(MAN) The men are great men.
The women are some of the best-looking women in the world.
(W OMAN) I always wanted to be a points peeler when I was a kid.
We had a great laugh before the fellas came in.
The girls would get up together and dance.
You know, if you're 'rightly' you're...
pretty stocious, like.
You're pretty drunk.
You never really looked at yourself much in the mirror
to see if you were big or small or anything.
(TRAFFIC NOISE)
(DOG BARKS)
(STREET NOISES)
(SILENCE)
(BELFAST) That's a good starting point, isn't it,
what that wee Belfast man said about love?
I was beautiful once.
But I wonder if I became ugly.
And if so, what made me ugly?
Can you guess?
(COUSINS) Maybe.
(BELFAST) I get the sweetest feeling.
Well, the definition of love when we were children was...
It was jam rolling down your back and you couldn't get round to lick it!
(COUSINS) See that wee man that compares love to jam?
Where else would you hear something that?
(BELFAST) Are you saying that Belfast's special?
(COUSINS) I dunno, I only lived here for twenty years.
(BELFAST) The older you get,
the harder it is to look in the mirror.
I've just had a cataract operation.
MY eyes got bad.
Cloudy and blurry.
So I read about people who used to be blind
and then had operations to see.
One wee girl thought lemonade would be square,
Because it pierced her tongue like the edge of a square.
Another blind person first saw her mother far away,
so thought she was just an inch tall.
People see me, Belfast, from far away, and think I'm an inch tall.
I can see more clearly now.
So, what are the first things about me that my new eyes see this morning
as we begin our journey?
A filament.
An incandescent place.
Seeing is just a kind of brightness.
Newly-sighted people see color patches
but are amazed that they can move past them,
that there are more color patches behind them.
When I now look at myself, I see color.
A riot of color.
A Rothko painting on the Shankill.
The painter Van Gogh once did a picture of flowers in a vase.
But he didn't call it Flowers in a Vase,
He called it Color Study.
This is a color study.
Steel-gray and purple.
A plan for a painting of Belfast.
Of me!
A self-portrait.
And if you think this talk of color in Belfast is too fancy,
look at this.
It's the old mill building we saw from the salt hill.
A study in brick-red and white.
And, in case we didn't notice its color,
workmen have left their tin hut in front of it.
Which is painted in the same white and orange.
A color study.
The sculpted heads on the building are of William Wordsworth,
Christopher Columbus, Isaac Newton, Galileo.
All of whom I knew.
Only joking-
I only knew two of them!
And kissed one.
It's the Jennymount Mill.
An Italian palazzo, built in the late 1800s.
We made more linen than anywhere in the world.
Mostly women worked here.
The supervisors were men.
There were kids as young as eight.
The workers stood in water in their bare feet.
Rats ran around them.
It was so noisy that the women became lip readers.
Let's walk on.
Look at this lovely turquoise building.
Touches of orange in the wood in its windows.
What would make this image perfect is
if someone dressed in orange would walk past it.
And look at these colors.
An autumn riot.
You only need a touch of yellow.
That's better.
Am I magicing these things?
(COUSINS) Are you?
Did you arrange that?
(BELFAST) What do you think?
And also with my new eyes
I notice how theatrical we are.
Boy, do we put on a show!
This is a proscenium.
A stage.
So much of what I, Belfast, am is a stage.
Or a frame.
I look at myself today, and see that Elvis is in the building.
We're very good at framing ourselves, aren't we?
The old cranes were only built since Ruby Murray sang 'Softly, Softly'.
But they're always somewhere.
Looking over the stage,
like an impresario.
"Softer than satin was the light."
Crime could happen here.
Love might happen here.
The light flickers
like it's screaming.
Like it's warning.
Like a hummingbird's wings.
"Misty watercolor memories of the way we were."
A crime scene.
A rhyme scene.
A time scene.
I hope you're enjoying this walking, this looking.
(COUSINS) I am, you're my kind of girl.
(BELFAST LAUGHS)
(BELFAST) Waking up.
Walls have eyes.
De Chirico.
A touch of Hitchcock's Marnie.
Shadowlands.
A mum and child's shadows.
Birds. Hitchcock birds.
A head pops out.
A dreamscape.
This boy became a boxing trainer.
Can I tell you where I began?
How did Belfast start?
Can we flashback?
When you're old, that's how your mind works.
Something now reminds you of something then.
The name of one of my rivers means "where the sweet water meets the salt".
That's how I started.
Here.
Where the river meets the sea.
Sweet meets salt.
Is that what I am?
Is that what we are?
Salt and sweet?
Like hard and soft.
Look at these two guys walking towards each other.
Salt and sweet.
Do they look each other in the eye?
If so, what do they see?
The same type of creature, or an alien?
What's that word in white on the wall between them?
Is it 'fetid'?
'Forbid'?
'Flaccid'?
Will one of them pull a knife?
Or will they shake hands?
Or say, “what about ya?”
Or try to kiss the other?
Or bow their head and walk past?
Oh God, we've only been here half a day
and I'm already on salt and sweet.
And this place built on mud and sand, salt and sweet, is a small place, isn't it?
(COUSINS) Yeah, when you've been away it feels small.
The way we say 'wee' all the time: "A wee cuppa tea", "A wee minute".
BELFAST} Back where the Rothko mural is,
Eleanor Roosevelt talks about smallness.
What a thing to write on a wall!
That universal rights start in small places.
There's plenty of reading here.
You could read me like a book.
It's time to think about the people who entered the land of salt and sweet.
They played-
Grew up.
Came and went.
Made mistakes.
Buggered off to pastures new.
Had opinions.
Put on masks.
Loved and hated.
Worshipped gods.
Knew what they were doing and hadn't a clue.
And we thought.
Right here, in 1792,
we paraded to support the French Revolution,
the fail of the Bastille, and Poland's resistance against Russia.
(COUSINS) We 're quite good at parades.
(BELFAST) Resolutions were passed by a lawyer called Theobald Wolfe Tone.
We drank to political solidarity between Catholics and Protestants.
To universal suffrage.
The influence of Thomas Paine, whom I knew.
Those were the days, my friend.
And we had our own language.
When we said "do you mind?"
we meant both “do you care?” and “do you remember?”
I became a world.
A place where people moved in all directions.
I felt like a points peeler.
Do you know what a points peeler is?
(COUSINS) No.
(BELFAST) Suppose you're too young.
I'll tell you later.
When I looked at myself in the mirror back then, what did I see?
A city that was brilliant, friendly,
volcanic, inward, outward,
homophobic, creative, loquacious,
feminine, déclassé, romantic,
sentimental, pious
and edgy
(COUSINS) I’m out of breath, running around you.
BELFAST} I'm sure you are!
And have you ever noticed that we're surreal, too?
Like this place.
It's afternoon.
Where are we now?
Jurassic Park?
This is where the Co-op was.
In 1888 it had 200 members.
80 years later, it had 192,000.
We knew how to co-operate.
Work together.
We got things on credit for three month here,
then paid the bill off, four times a year.
We called it the co-quarter.
Everybody was broke at the co-quarter.
Pockets were empty.
At Christmas, all the kids visited Santa's grotto here.
Now, these yellow dinosaurs munch here.
We sang, of course.
Ho-ho, did we sing!
And we drank.
And combined the two.
(DICKIE ROCK) ♪ We'll walk ♪
♪ the road of life together ♪
♪ day by day ♪
♪ And I will love you ♪
♪ every step of the way ♪
♪ The road may wind ♪
♪ beneath the sky of blue or gray ♪
♪ And I will love you ♪
♪ every step of the way ♪
♪ So only love me ♪
♪ and love me only ♪
♪ And we will never walk with loneliness ♪
♪ For just as sure as every April turns to May ♪
♪ So will I love you ♪
♪ every step of the way ♪
(BELFAST) And, by the way, this is a points pee/er.
And time passed, and the Earth turned, in this center of nowhere.
And the rain came.
♪ ...as every April turns to May ♪
♪ So will I love you ♪
♪ every step of the way ♪
(BELFAST) And then shadows.
♪ I'll only love you ♪
♪ every step ♪
♪ of the way ♪
(SILENCE)
(BELFAST) And then, like a tracking shot, the iceberg hit.
We fought each other.
Is now a good time to talk about it?
Is it ever a good time?
(COUSINS) You decide.
(BELFAST) I'd prefer not to.
(COUSINS) But you have to.
(BELFAST) Did we judder to the Troubles?
To our latest war, which still troubles us?
Or do we glide there?
Over decades or days, for good reasons and bad,
we peered over the top of things, and down into the depths.
Salt and sweet.
Nationalist and Unionist.
The two sides in our war went wild.
('THE SOLDIER'S SONG' CLASHES WITH 'THE SASH MY FATHER WORE')
(BELFAST) People like us came here, like they did in the 1600s.
They came with guns and accents.
They were new blood.
There was a lot of walking.
And salt and sweet forced each other apart.
In a few months, in one area alone,
1,505 Catholic
and 315 Protestant families were made to move.
The largest enforced movement of people since World War Two.
Are you too young to remember this?
(COUSINS) I remember feelings, not facts.
I remember the nervousness.
(BELFAST) Do you want me to stop?
(COUSINS) Yes and no.
I want to know, and don't.
(BELFAST) I could soften the story.
(COUSINS) Don't soften the story.
(BELFAST) Okay.
Our buses became skeletons.
Soon, CS gas canisters were used in my streets.
Soldiers raided houses on the Falls Road, and then blockaded the area.
Their commanders had told them that there were republican combatants there.
Get her!
(WOMEN SHOUTING)
(SOLDIER) Watch your backs!
Get that cannon over here.
There!
(BELFAST) The people who lived in the area quickly ran out of food.
So, a thousand women who lived up the hill, here in the Ardoyne,
filled their children's prams with bread and milk and wheeled them down.
More walking.
An armada of walking.
The army opened the blockade,
the siege,
for two hours, to let them in.
Things that couldn't happen, did.
Cave Hill, the mountain behind me, where people had lived from the Iron Age,
where Charles Dickens walked when he visited Belfast, turned on its head.
On the 10th of March 1971,
three Scottish soldiers were drinking in a bar in town.
They were grabbed and taken up the hill.
Maybe they walked the same route as Dickens had, 113 years earlier.
Whilst they were having a piss, the soldiers were shot in the head.
They spouted two liquids, blood and piss, at the same time.
Do you continue to piss when a hole has been blown in your brain?
The soldiers were 17, 18 and 25.
Two days later, 4,000 dockers downed their tools in the shipyards
and marched in protest.
And there's something I didn't tell you about this place
with the salt and sweet guys.
They walk on.
One passes McGurk's bar.
On the evening of the 4th of December 1971, it was busy.
Christmas was coming.
The bar's owner, Paddy McGurk, was serving drinks.
He was proud of his place.
He didn't allow swearing.
There was a swear box on the counter.
At 8:45pm, a bomb exploded in the bar,
killing 15 people, and wounding 17 more.
MuGurk's wife and daughter both died, and he and his three sons were injured.
A few hours later, he went on TV
to say that he prayed for the bombers
and asking that his family's deaths should not be avenged.
Many of the bodies were unrecognizable,
but when one young man opened his father's coffin,
he saw that the remains had ten fingers.
His father had lost a finger in a work accident, so had only nine.
So, the young man had to go around the houses of the other bereaved families
and look in the other coffins to find his father's actual remains.
The victims were all Catholics,
but one soldier sent a wreath to their funerals.
The song 'Bits and Pieces', by the Dave Clark Five,
was in the pop charts at the time.
Some observers, from the opposite side of the religious divide,
sang it as the coffins carrying the body parts were carried to their graves.
The pub was destroyed, yet it's visually here.
Local people have painted the likeness of it on this underpass, where it once was.
A trompe I'oeil.
A creative response to destruction.
Seven months later.
It's Friday the 21st of July 1972.
A hot summer day.
Seagulls are flying around me.
The bomb goes off.
People run away from it.
Then another goes off.
And another.
26 in just over an hour.
The bombers said they wanted to make of me “a commercial desert”.
11 people die and 130 are injured.
Body parts are scattered all over me.
The seagulls dive into the bodies and eat.
The people who see this are disgusted.
Shocked.
I had a dream about it.
Have you ever dreamt about the Troubles?
(COUSINS) Of course
BELFAST} I dream that I'm flying over Belfast, like a seagull.
I look down at myself.
In my dream, it's that day.
I see clouds of smoke
and dive and eat.
We were just food for the seagulls. Just meat.
Were we also just meat for each other?
In all our fighting, have we scavenged on each other?
The seagulls knew no better.
Do we?
Are we that detached?
That aloft?
There's an old silent film, colored and flickering,
in which the dead of World War One
stand up from their graves and go back to their village
to see if their murder had changed anything.
Ominous skies,
pink light.
It was shocking for its time. A moral challenge.
If our dead, from that July day, had come back
would they have found us changed?
Shocked?
Chastened?
God, such stories.
I feel safe back here at my salt hill.
Such dreams unsettle me.
I want to hide from them.
Did I become ugly? Of course I did!
From 1971 to 1991,
the population of Belfast dropped from 400,000 to just 281,000.
119,000 people gave up on me.
(COUSINS) I was one of them.
(BELFAST) Quite right.
If I could have run, I would have run.
But things got better.
At our listening walls, our wailing walls, we heard news.
(REPORTER 1) It's just been announced that...
(REPORTER 2) At a few minutes past 11am the waiting and the speculation ended...
(REPORTER 1) As of midnight, August the 31st...
(REPORTER 2) A statement from the IRA leadership had finally materialized,
and its key clause read: "The leadership of the IRA
"have decided that, as of midnight, August 31 st,
"there will be a complete cessation of military operations."
(GUSTY SPENCE) In all sincerity, in all sincerity,
we offer to the loved ones
of all innocent victims over the past 25 years
abject and true remorse.
No words of ours will compensate for the intolerable suffering
they have undergone during this conflict.
Let us firmly resolve, therefore, to respect our differing views
of freedom, culture and aspiration,
and never again permit our political circumstances
to degenerate into bloody warfare.
(BELFAST) "Abject and true remorse."
What words!
It's like we woke up!
What did we see when the storm passed?
We saw that we'd been blasted sideways.
We saw good things.
Shops came to Belfast, and cafés.
(COUSINS) And cross-community initiatives and agencies.
(BELFAST) People from other countries.
(COUSINS) And glass buildings.
BELFAST} And penthouses, and a waterfront
and a cathedral quarter.
After the war, we had hope.
Jam was running down our backs, and we licked it and licked it.
(COUSINS) And licked it.
(BELFAST) And on sunny days, doors darted light beams.
That old luminosity was still there.
In old streets that we always called the Holy Land,
Palestine Street, Jerusalem Street,
people from Asia and the Middle East moved in
and lived their lives their ways.
Let's go back to where the Rothko painting was.
Where Eleanor Roosevelt talked of smallness.
The place is called Hopewell.
That's what we're doing, hoping well.
Somebody's turning lights on and off.
It says in the papers that less than 1% of people
who live here get to go to higher education.
And that there are high levels of mental health problems.
And so they hope well.
And look,
these geese have never been here before.
Nearby, the old court is like Miss Havisham.
Charlie Dickens, up in the hills, would have loved it.
And there were other good things.
Let's stop at this famous place.
The New Lodge.
Built, not very well, to house as many people as possible.
But they were poor people, so they didn't matter.
There's what you'd expect:
razor wire on the bottom right;
messages about the IRA hunger strikers on the top of the flats.
Because of drive by-shootings, and other things,
this was the most dangerous place to stand during the Troubles.
Yet, look, there's magic here.
Suddenly, I'm on this crane.
It rises.
I'm like a seagull flying up around the flats.
I'm a camera on a crane, in a Hollywood movie,
filming a dance routine.
(COUSINS) Maybe Gene Kelly?
(BELFAST) Or Fred Astaire? Or Ginger Rodgers?
Shall we make a musical about the New Lodge?
Someone coming to live here,
from Poland or Lithuania?
And, after the storm passed, we noticed other good things.
We made ships, and linen, and music, and war, and peace here.
But, people, too.
People from Hopewell and the New Lodge,
the Antrim Road and the Holy Land,
the Ormeau and Orangefield.
A man's lying in the hot afternoon sun today.
A pieté.
He's going to burn.
He's us. He's me.
Two women see him.
The one in turquoise tells her friend to leave him alone.
But the one in black can't help herself. She has to help.
More people.
Four now.
You can't just leave a guy like that.
In Belfast, you can't.
Or can you?
Yes.
No.
That's what hope looks like.
And have you heard of Rosie and Maud?
(COUSINS) No.
BELFAST} Oh, you have to meet Rosie and Maud.
They're in this café behind me.
In you go!
(MAUD) Yes, so "hi". Go on, love
(COUSINS) How long have you known each other?
- (ROSIE) About 7 years. - Oh fuck, 7 or 8 years, love.
Fuck, it's been mustard, too, like. You know what I mean, but.
(ROSIE) We've had good times and bad times, but.
(COUSINS) So did you click at once?
- (ROSIE) Oh, aye! - Oh, fuck, aye!
- Fucking right. - (ROSIE) We clicked at once, yes, yes.
(COUSINS) Why did you click?
She said something to me and I answered her fucking back.
I said "fuck" something to her.
- And I answered her back: "Fuck off!" - And she said "fuck" something back.
(ROSE) I was engaged at 16, married 19.
- (COUSINS) 16? - (ROSIE) Aye.
And we're 51 years together, this year.
(MAUD) And I was never married.
Mine was a common law marriage.
She has four children but she's never lost her virginity.
And I still haven't.
- (COUSINS) That's... that's... - Isn't that great?
(COUSINS) That's a miracle.
- I loved Elvis. Oh! - (MAUD) I don't like Elvis.
(COUSINS) Did you like the slower Elvis,
- or the fast ones? - Yes!
See his first film, Flaming Star'? I still have it.
Yeah, 'Love Me Tender' and all them.
The only reason a married me aul' lad, 'cause he'd black hair.
(MAUD LAUGHS)
I swear to God, I'll show you a photo of me and him on my wedding day.
And here's me: "Fuck, he's a wee bit like Elvis," like.
- And the Yanks were always in. - (COUSINS) The Yanks?
Tell him about the Texan you met, love.
That wasn't a Texan, he was a fucking Yank, you!
And she met him in The Plaza.
And you know what you called him? Fucking Jesse James!
- That's true. - Swear to fuck! Jesse James!
- And he left her home. - And he got me drunk!
And when I got to the door,
I fell out of the fucking taxi.
Onto my box of chocolates!
- And my ma was an aul' targer. - That's true!
She came out of the fucking house and was beating the fucking head of me,
and says to my brother: "Get her fucking in there."
And here's me: "Oh, please ma, please. I'm all right, I'm all right."
And I got in and she wouldn't let me go out to see the fucking Yank again!
(ROSE) I didn't like The Beatles. Nah, they annoyed me.
Oh, for fuck's sake! They were ugly-looking.
Didn't like the Rolling Stones because of his mouth.
His foot-long mouth of his! Jesus Christ!
(MAUD) His lips was ten size of mine, for fuck's sake!
- Out to there - Uugghh!
Sure, look at Jim Reeves and all, you know.
I was very romantic, were you not?
Course I fucking was!
(ROSE) I walked from The Plaza,
up through Sandy Row, up the Donegal Road, and into my house
and people would have stood at the door and said "hello" to me.
We walked home with a crowd, half went to Sandy Row, half went to the Botanic.
All mixed religions, and yet we all went out together.
(MAUD) We did, like. There was nothing bad in them fucking days.
And the day I got married, there was five people,
four from the Shankill and two from Sandy Row, at my wedding.
(MAUD) Aye, and there was nobody at mine.
Fuck, you didn't have a fucking wedding, Maud. You weren't married!
I fucking know I wasn't married, it was a common law marriage.
It may as well have been a fucking marriage
because he beat the fucking crap out of me anyway.
- Did you not have a honeymoon? - Yes, of course I did, yeah.
Fine, you were fucking married then.
See I told you, fuck's sake. Fucking hell, am I married?
Fuck's sake.
You know what I say to God?
"Please forgive me."
(ROSIE) For how many times she said "fuck".
I said "fuck" a couple of times.
And here's me: "Oh, God, I didn't mean that."
Here's me: "Forgive me."
And then I just go to fucking sleep afterwards.
He probably knows what I'm like anyway.
The only thing we haven't lost right now is our virginity.
We've lost every ha'penny we ever earned.
Have you got yours, love?
(COUSINS) Still intact.
- Oooooh! - Have you? Fuck, that's great!
Oh fuck, you'll do me lovely.
Oh, here, fuck. Isn't that great?
C'mon over here, love. C'mon.
It'll only take five minutes, believe you me, we're quick!
We don't need a cover or anything, you know what I mean.
No, well, when you hear of anything, you can come and visit us half the day.
Yes, uh-huh, you don't need your umbrella on the day.
C'mon, love.
Ah, c'mon, for fuck's sake. Stop teasing people.
We're not that bad, you know what I mean, love. We're not really.
(COUSINS) Thelma and Louise.
(BELFAST) Exactly.
Somebody should write a country song.
'The Ballad of Rosie and Maud: A Catholic and a Protestant'.
Tell me theirs isn't lovely talk.
Tell me they aren't diamonds.
I wish the rest of my story could be full of diamonds, but it can't.
When the storm cleared
it also left something bad.
Walls.
Our Berlin Walls.
Today, we've more walls keeping salt and sweet apart than I can ever remember.
Want to see them?
(COUSINS) Yeah.
(BELFAST) You sure?
(COUSINS) They're there aren't they?
(BELFAST) Okay.
Here's one in the East.
Triple height for full effect.
Brick, then iron, then mesh.
Then fluttering above it all, the flag that the Unionists love.
High enough to be seen from the other side.
For maximum annoyance and pride.
And jump to here. To a Catholic road. Or what used to be a road.
Now it's a blind alley.
Waves of salt and sweet can crash against this peace wall,
this sea wall covered in seaweed,
but they don't get through.
Five types of fence in this one place alone.
Walk up to the top of the street, to this corner.
The silver car turns down the Catholic hill.
The road to the left is Protestant.
The house in the middle has iron railings on its windows
to stop them being broken by bricks.
Above the house, we can just see the top of the peace line.
The house to its left has had white paint thrown at it.
Look at the pavement.
It goes from Catholic, with no paint on its kerb,
to red and white, the beginning of the Protestant kerb.
Fornenst each other.
This split in me seems as solid as concrete, as tarmac.
I wish it were shadow play.
I wish my walls had electric shadows on them, or movies.
Morning sun on cars commuting
or speeding to the Mourne mountains,
so that their drivers can walk and sing in the mountains
like Julie Andrews or Ruby Murray.
I wish my walls grew things.
I wish those things -ivy, wall flowers -would break open the walls.
I wish our walls were gold.
Like Johnny Cash,
to end this trip
I walk the line.
A yellow brick road.
Autumn's lines.
A thin blue line.
Sometimes there's a lovely line.
Like this, down by the docks.
A snail's silver trail.
Its morse code took it to the road
and then back home, safe.
How often will I walk this town?
For how many more years?
Will I always have to walk straight lines?
(COUSINS) Berlin Wall's down.
Our walls need to come down.
(BELFAST) Or just blur.
Blurring's good.
It means something different here.
Sometimes we've been great at blurred lines.
At being two things at once.
Before your time, one of our comedians,
James Young, was a man but played a woman.
I can still see his sketches.
Like the one about why we would never go on holidays abroad...
Yes, we never go abroad. I wouldn't be bothered with that
because my maw has a wee cottage at Bally-Go-Bent.
It's down on the coast road.
And we would go down there of a set time.
My man always takes the twelfth fortnight because the factory
he works at night closes down for the twelfth fortnight.
And he hasn't been well hisself all winter.
My nerves are away to bits.
I underwent a very serious operation.
And he always takes the twelfth fortnight. So I said to him,
"Tommy," I says, "this year," I says, "just take three weeks."
He says, "'l will not, indeed," he says, "because if I took an extra week
"and the place was open they would find out that I do nothing anyway
"and I might have no job left."
It's awful what people have to go through, twelfth week and all.
And even some of our hard men blurred lines
by having a touch of girl about them.
One member of the Ulster Defence Association,
Sammy Duddy,
was also known as Samantha,
a drag artist and the Dolly Parton of Belfast.
On one attempt to murder him, he escaped,
but his pet Chihuahua, Bambi, was killed instead.
And what about Lord Arthur Chichester,
who sort of founded me, Belfast?
Or so the history books say, in the 1600s.
Look at his eyebrows!
Marlene Dietrich eyebrows.
Salt and sweet,
man and woman,
day and night.
They should all merge.
That's what I want to say to you.
Don't just look at Belfast, imagine Belfast.
Me!
That's what the painter of this mural did.
It's a dreamscape.
The Giant's Causeway, on the left.
Titanic.
The cranes, all coming out of the water.
The real world, pushed to the far right.
And then this man in blue.
The things his eyes have seen.
Has he cataracts now?
Maybe cataracts come if you see too much.
Eyes cloud over.
He's old enough to have worked in the docks.
Can you imagine what it's like to be him?
What would be his favourite song?
"Chantily lace with a pretty face"?
Has he gout from too much booze?
Did he paint this picture?
Is this his inner Belfast?
Are we going deeper?
(COUSINS) I see images of the Titanic everywhere now in Belfast.
The Hollywood movie brought them back.
The tourists wanna see where it was made.
That old joke: “It was fine when it left here.”
(BELFAST) God, it was gorgeous.
It was like New York when it went.
And then it sank, and we hardly spoke about it.
Like a taboo, like a war.
And now it's back and we talk about it a lot.
Things that are held down come up again.
Hope is a release.
It releases fears and dreams.
(COUSINS) My friends and I talk about the Troubles sometimes.
One night we got drunk and cried.
(BELFAST) You cried about what's beneath the surface.
Hope releases monsters.
(COUSINS) Like the creature from the black lagoon.
In that old B-movie, he symbolized unconscious things too.
(BELFAST) Yes.
Now that it's over, we're shocked by what we did.
Underwater Belfast can surface again, into the daylight.
In his cheap 1950s rubber suit, the creature swims through reeds,
through dark water.
She's filmed above him, in the light, like desire.
She's me.
(COUSINS) And me.
BELFAST} He's like her bad memories.
Grabbing at her.
He's our nightmare.
He'll be down there for years.
I wish I could turn the clock back.
Make the bad stuff unhappen.
Like in that poem by Alan Gillis.
"They say that for years Belfast was backwards
"and it's great now to see some progress.
"So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
"from the earth. I guess that ambulances
"will leave the dying back amidsth the rubble
"to be explosively healed. Given time,
"one hundred thousand particles of glass
"will create impossible patterns in the air
"before coalescing into the clarity
"of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
"will look out and admire the shy young man
"taking his bomb from the building and driving home."
But as well as imagining rewinding to a better past
we can imagine a better future, can't we?
A time without bigotry.
I can.
Imagine
some October morning in the future
when the walls are down
and the creature from the black lagoon has gone.
Imagine that there's only one bigot left.
He's an old man.
And then he dies.
Imagine his funeral.
(DEAD BIGOT) I didn't know it would feel so good,
this wooden overcoat.
I didn't know you'd hold me high up on your shoulder blades.
The crowds are like an ocean here, and I am like a boat
sailing on a sea of love, a threnody parade.
I must have done all right in life, these last one hundred years,
I must have - what's the word? - inspired or reconciled those things,
love, job, mates and church,
beyond what disappears, or else you'd stay at home today
and not come all attired.
But hold on, what's that on that flag?
"Thank God he's dead"?
Thank God he's dead!
Hey, what?
"The only bigot left alive has finally gone and died"?
Wait. What? No.
You're not here to watch me start to rot!
Tell me, please God tell me that your eyes are open wide
to stop the grief, not start the world again
now that my years have ended, half forgotten,
and the air is brisk and clear.
Why can't you start to sing a hymn?
And now, with me, abide.
I didn't know it would feel so bad, this wooden overcoat.
I didn't know you'd hold me shoulder high
and try to make a mockery of all I learnt by rote
and didn't fake the beauty of my creed
that we are right and they are not.
How could we not be right?
My mother cried for all those things.
Our language, flag and songs are like her tears,
her years, her fears, so intimate accrued, imbued.
the thing in me that sings, that yells, still now, in death,
above the other side's shrill jeers.
I wish I could still breathe and smell the whiskey
on the breath of those I stood up close to
but a thousand miles away.
I looked into their eyes and all I saw was fading death
of me and mine, of God and wine,
and all that we purveyed.
And so I knew, their eyes told me,
the engine of my days, a Braveheart locomotive
that set our pulses racing,
that showed that blood and soil are never self-effacing,
that anger, power and loyalty are the duty of our days.
So, bury me today
and, with me, what kept us apart.
And sing your song of harmony
for all you like, and from the heart.
I was the Belfast you all knew,
and with me that's now dying
something new is born today.
A transgression.
A trying-
(RUBY MURRAY) ♪ Good luck, ♪
♪ good health, ♪
♪ God bless you ♪
♪ And guide you on your way ♪
(MICHAEL HOLLIDAY) ♪ Good luck, ♪
♪ Good health, ♪
♪ God bless you and keep you ♪
(RUBY MURRAY) ♪ And keep me still in your heart ♪
(MURRAY AND HOLLIDAY DUET) ♪ Good luck, ♪
♪ Good health, ♪
♪ God bless you ♪
♪ And guide you on your way ♪
(HOLLIDAY) ♪ No matter where you wander ♪
(MURRAY) ♪ As long as we're apart ♪
(DUET) ♪ Good luck, ♪
♪ good health, ♪
♪ God bless you and keep you ♪
♪ And keep me still in your heart ♪
(COUSINS) I hope I'll be there, carrying the coffin.
(BELFAST) And, you know,
the bigot's also me.
Have you time for one last story?
A true story.
(COUSINS) Of course.
(BELFAST) It happened on Tuesday, two days ago.
It's a tiny story.
A zoom-in on this place.
But it tells me more about Belfast than winding back or looking forward.
It happened here.
At half past three.
A woman, Betty, was waiting for a bus.
It arrived and she got on.
But she'd left her shopping behind.
(VAN MORRISON) ♪ If it matters ♪
♪ how you do it ♪
♪ And how you do it ♪
♪ is your thing ♪
♪ If it matters ♪
♪ which way you go ♪
♪ That's your way to go ♪
♪ And if you get it like that ♪
(BELFAST) But then...
Oh, Mister. Mister, I've left my shopping behind me!
♪ 'Cause you get it like that when you want to ♪
♪ be that way ♪
♪ When you wanna be that way ♪
This wee woman left her shopping back at the bus stop.
Do any of you's mind if we drive back and get it?
♪ It's all right ♪
♪ Now what you try to do to me ♪
♪ Out there a-walking doesn't matter, baby ♪
♪ Ain't no question, ♪
♪ no suggestion ♪
♪ Nothing in my mind that can't be ♪
♪ Shut out when I want it to be ♪
♪ Nothing in yours that can't be kept in ♪
♪ When you open it up and use it ♪
♪ And nothing you can't let out ♪
♪ If it's gotta be let out, just let it out ♪
♪ And don't worry which way it goes ♪
♪ It's all right ♪
♪ Now how can I tell you that I love you? ♪
♪ How can I say so many words and so many syllables ♪
♪ In such a short space of time as this? ♪
♪ Just turn it on and soak it in ♪
♪ And let it run off the walls ♪
♪ And let it down, with you ♪
♪ Keep it ♪
♪ and don't lose it ♪
♪ or confuse it ♪
♪ It's just right there laying open ♪
♪ Completely open for everybody to see ♪
(CHOIR) ♪ It's all right ♪
(MORRISON) ♪ You got it ♪
♪ It's all right X
(BELFAST) Multiply that story by a thousand
and you've got Belfast.
Me.
You can see yourself in me, can't you?
And in Rosie and Maud?
And the guy lying on the steps?
And the last bigot?
Look at my face.
It's your face.
We all have our icebergs.
(COUSINS) And with that, she was gone.
I looked for her, but couldn't find her.
Maybe she ran out of stories.
I asked around.
One old man said he'd seen her recently.
But he couldn't mind where.
“You know she went blind,” he said.
“Blind?” I said.
“Well almost,” he said.
"It happened years ago, in the 1950s.
"She could only see blurs.
"But what blurs!"
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