The Star Factory Read online

  It reminds me of the ancient magisterial importance of the chamberpot, where courtiers and Privy Counsellors await the outcome of His Majesty’s deliberations like a plot, and perfumes of Arabia are sprayed discreetly round the room from pomander bulbs squeezed by underpaid underlings. Or, one ponders the alternative hologram of the city described by its ubiquity of plumbing and its labyrinthine sewers, the underworld of culverts plunged in Stygian gloom. So, as children, we believed that sewer covers were the portals to a parallel sub-universe; embossed with arcane lettering and numerals, their enormous, thick, cast-iron discs proved impossible to lift. Sometimes, though, boiler-suited emissaries from the Corporation would materialize and insert long metal keys with T-shaped handles into the two slots of the submarine hatch and heave it trembling from its disturbed circumference of mossy dirt, and we would get a glimpse of ladder rungs descending into well-dark depths.

  For, although much of the world was withheld from us, we had premonitions of its depth and breadth from these occasional insights: squinting through the eye-knot of a creosoted pine fence, for instance, I can see the rusted strewn sculpture of abandoned factory machinery, all axles, counterweights and cogged wheels; or, passing by an open pub door in summer, the aroma of warm beer and porter emanates a palpable extension of its nicotined interior, where blurred men speak to mirrors in a tipsy babble. Sometimes the gates in factory porticos were opened to admit a Clydesdale-drawn cart, and the inner courtyard was revealed like that of a medieval castle, smelling of straw and dung. The rhythm of the horses clopping on the cobbles in their tasselled club-footed hooves rang out against the opaque noise that beat against the factory windows from within, where I’d imagine doffers slanging to each other in their language of mime, mouthing silently to back up this writing on the air. From here – The Milfort Weaving and Finishing Works – I’d walk on down Clonard Street on my way home from school, turn down Odessa Street and Sevastapol Street, to emerge at the impressive sandstone façade of the Falls Road branch of the Andrew Carnegie Library.

  Now I remember that ‘library’, in some households, was a euphemism for once-euphemisms like loo and water-closet: contemplating that last antique compound, I’d see water wobbling in the opened mirror door, and I’d step right through its trembling mercury to emerge reversed on the other side, like some ghost from the future who hover-glides invisibly through empty childhood streets just after dawn, following the jiggled tinkle of the milk-cart, or a postman coming home from night-shift, disembodied from his job of sorting letters into pigeon-holes. You could float on board a tram and doppelgänger its lone pilot as he exercised his minimal control of stops and starts within the predetermined iron parallels of time. In the still gaslit thoroughfare, fruitmongers were up early, with long poles already drawing out their awnings to shade their produce fresh and cool from that morning’s market.

  It has occurred to me, in these dreams, to visit my parents before I was born (meeting a younger self seemed too improbable), but the dream mechanism always manages to subvert this outcome, and I find myself, instead, back where I started, listening to my father in the dark of the ‘library’ of 100 Raglan Street. And as I write, in 12 Glandore Avenue, my toilet is a library: some years ago, I put up three mahogany-stained pine shelves on its back wall, and filled them with second-hand books that might have once resided in a public library:

  The Mason Wasps by J.H. Fabre

  British Ferns and their Allies by Thomas Moore

  Pharos the Egyptian by Guy Boothby

  Rovering to Success (Life-Sport for Young Men) by Lord Baden-Powell

  Kai Lung’s Golden Hours by Ernest Bramah

  The Life of the Fly by J.H. Fabre

  With Stanley on the Congo by M. Douglas

  Laughter and Wisdom by Stephen Leacock

  Biggles Flies West by Capt. W.E. Johns

  The Romance of Fish Life by W.A. Hunter

  I Said Oddly, Diddle I by Paul Jennings

  Electricians and their Marvels by Walter Jarrold

  More Hunting Wasps by J.H. Fabre

  – books chosen for a variety of reasons: for their titles or design; for their illustrations; for nostalgia; sometimes for their content. Sitting on the faux-Edwardian commode seat, the occupant is inclined to reach back for a volume, open it, and sniff it, thus releasing dormant pheromones of yellow-glued bindings and foxed paper. Sometimes a pressed flower flutters out, as if emerging from a pupa, and one imagines the nature rambles of long Victorian evenings, presided over by a Lewis Carroll figure; or recently, in the pages of the Complete Poetical Works of Robert Service, beautifully produced by Barse & Co., of New York, NY and Newark, NJ, I came across the visiting card of one The Reverend K.N.J. Loveless, complete with a coat-of-arms which bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Belfast, with his two rampant sea-horses to Belfast’s one. I can hear my father reciting Service’s ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ in the whispery dark of the outhouse:

  A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

  The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;

  Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,

  And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

  And, as I sniff again, the book hits me with a rush of brown lino smells that appertain to libraries and doctors’ surgeries, where you might see a print of Millet’s The Angelus hung above the waiting-room mantelpiece, and the dim bronze gongs of St Peter’s waft across the intervening time. I see its soot-encrusted twin spires, and all the other neo-Gothic campaniles of Belfast, ubiquitous as factories or barracks. Unbearably tall mill chimneys teetered against the Atlantic-grey sky, churning out thick ropes of smoke like fleets of armed destroyers.

  They bring me back to my mini-library, where, above the books, I’ve put a framed reproduction for Wills’ Woodbine cigarettes, featuring, ‘In the Dardanelles, the five-funnelled Russian destroyer, Askold, commonly known as the packet of Woodbines’. It reminds me that my father, when he wasn’t smoking Park Drive, would smoke Woodbines, which came in leaf-green art nouveau packets of five, ten or twenty. My father stopped smoking some years ago, but still carries, it seems to me, an aura of crumbled tobacco-dust. These days, when he comes to visit, he spends good half-hours in the library, browsing through its relics of an Empire. Sometimes he comes down with a book under his arm; often, it is the Belfast Street Directory of 1948, the year that I was born.

  FROM ABBEY ROAD TO ZETLAND STREET

  Pondering the tome of the Street Directory, I am reminded of the cabalistic or magical implications of the alphabet, which manifest themselves in a word like ‘abraxas’: according to Chambers Dictionary, ‘a mystic word, or a gem engraved therewith, often bearing a mystical figure of combined human and animal form, used as a charm … said to have been coined by the 2nd-cent. Egyptian Gnostic Basilides to express 365 by addition of the numerical values of the Greek letters’. A version, it would seem, but perhaps invented independently, of abracadabra, ‘a magic word, written in amulets … found in a 2nd-cent. poem by Q. Serenus Sammonicus’. Remembering chanting the alphabet by rote as a child, I visualize the names carved into the school desks, one on top of another, till they’re nearly indecipherable; I smell the colour blue in the speckled delph ink-wells, and hear the cursive scratch of a steel nib as I learn to write between the ruled lines of a copybook.

  As I look up my first Alma Mater, St Gall’s Public Elementary School, under Waterville Street (no. 2), I am reminded how the arbitrary power of the alphabet juxtaposes impossibly remote locations, as in the preceding entry, Waterproof Street, which runs from Fairfax Street to Byron Street, in East Belfast, some three miles away; then we have Watson Street, off Railway Street – slightly nearer, in the Sandy Row district, in the vicinity of Murray, Sons, & Co., tobacco and snuff manufacturers, whose heady aura could be detected sometimes in the school yard of St Gall’s, given a western breeze, like the way we could hear the roar of
the crowd at an international fixture in far-off Windsor Park.

  Similarly, streets named after places form exotic junctures not to be found on the map of the Empire: Balkan and Ballarat, Cambrai and Cambridge, Carlisle and Carlow, Lisbon and Lisburn, and so on, through Madras and Madrid, till we eventually arrive, by way of Yukon, at the isles of Zetland, whereupon we fall off the margins of the city.

  I am trying to think of myself as a bookworm, ruminating through the one thousand, five hundred and ninety-six pages of the Directory in teredo mode, following my non-linear dictates, as I make chambered spirals in my universe, performing parabolas by browsing letters and the blanks between them. I have never seen a bookworm, but I have often glimpsed a tiny lenticular blip of near-transparent yellow, which scuttles from the fold between two suddenly opened pages: this, possibly, is the booklouse, described in Macmillan’s Encyclopedia as ‘a soft-bodied wingless insect, also called the dustlouse, belonging to the order Pscoptera (about 1600 species). Booklice inhabit buildings, often feeding on old books, papers, and entomological collections.’

  The Directory, indeed, has been much distressed by my metaphorical bookworm expeditions into it over many years. I’ve repaired its cracked spine and rubbed edges with green carpet tape that in its turn is beginning to come apart. Nevertheless, it remains an impressive piece of book-production, measuring nine by five by three inches, and bearing embossed advertisements on its 4 mm thick boards. Even the page-edges of the closed volume carry ads; wondering how the concave surface was managed, I imagine teams of printer’s devils wielding big, convex rubber stamps with doorknob handles.

  One of these notices is for ‘John Ross & Co., Largest Auction Rooms in Ireland’, reminding me that I bought the Directory itself in the said Rooms, in a job lot consisting of some bric-à-brac, a Brownie box camera, and a sheaf of old postcards, two of which I am looking at right now, and whose juxtaposition, when I bought them, seemed to form some mysterious alliance. The first is postmarked ‘Belfast 3.30 p.m., SP 3, 13’, and bears the address ‘22 Raby St, Ormeau Rd., Belfast’. Its front is an elaborate colour production whose centrepiece is a retouched photograph of a man and a woman embracing, cheek by jowl, within a floral border; in the top left corner, a picture of an ocean liner, and in the top right, a steam train, both vehicles surmounted by shamrocks; below the couple, two disembodied hands – one wrist is lace-fringed, the other shirt-cuffed – emerge from bouquets to squeeze each other gently. At the tail of the card, a verse:

  UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN

  Parting darkens our sky – alas!

  But every cloud has a silver lining –

  Love will brighten the days, as they pass,

  And hope of re-union forbid our repining.

  The message on the back is written in a fine-nibbed, delicate hand:

  Dear Jim,

  How are you living the life on The Ocean Wave, have you any vacancy’s for a Galley Slave, if so I will go, how would you like that, (I Don’t Think) Mrs A Gourlays’ address is 66 Castlereagh Street, Mount Pottinger. Did you have time to see any of Russia at all what do you think of it, is it any better than Belfast. Mr W. Yeates took a Photo of mine, which I intended to send to you, so you can write and ask him for it, as he won’t give it to me, it is not a very good one, but it will do until I get a better one. (Was you ever out in a wee Boat or were you ever in Larne), lovely weather for Brown’s Bay, what do you say, we all rise in the morning to go for a Swim. This is all now Thanking you for PC’s received from Falkirk & Russia, Write soon, with Kind Regards, Gertie. (Please Excuse Card)

  I am somewhat flummoxed as to how this card reached its destination, since the Raby Street address appears to be that of the sender, and can only surmise that Jim – on The Ocean Wave – is in the navy, and that the card was forwarded by some special Forces mail. The second card bears neither stamp, date, nor address, but the evidence would suggest that it has been sent by someone serving in the Great War. The front is a conventional landscape scene in an oval frame; the back is printed ‘Luxographie A. Noyer, Paris No. 55 – Fabrication Francaise’ and bears the following message, written in indelible pencil:

  My dearest Gertie

  No letter today either but I dont think its your fault. I seen in the paper today that P. Barron and McManus of Ballyshannon were both wounded. When is it all going to end I get tired more & more every day I think its thinking of you what makes it worse. I hope that you wont be angry at getting a P.C. but onestly it holds more than I have to write Imagine this few lines to my own pet I cant think what else to write about Im sure pet all my letters must be just the same over & over again I cant help myself every day is the same old thing over again including Sunday I really dont know Sunday from any other day I often think is it going to last for ever This & you my little darling is all I can think of night & day I hope for your sake that when you get this … [here the ‘indelible’ pencil has been heavily rubbed, and is illegible] … mother I was asking for her with all my love from your very own Friend x x x children x x x

  It is difficult to imagine two messages more different in tone. Can these two Gerties be one and the same? I think it’s possible, but unlikely; nevertheless, their coinciding in the heterogenous jumble of an auction room gives me an eerie feeling, as if, in retrospect, they had been predestined to meet. It reminds us of the poignancy of auction rooms, of vacancy and death, as the contents of a house are held in limbo until sold in disparate lots, and the domiciled relationship they had is broken up: if furniture could speak, what tales might it not tell, when the whatnot is divested of its aspidistra, and the overmantel mirror loses the reflection of its parlour? For every stick and bit implies a narrative, and we ascribe their provenances.

  So the story goes, as the auctioneer, like a dominie or cleric, climbs into his box to open a new chapter. As a newcomer to auctions, I was fascinated by the skewed incremental scale of bidding: ‘Eighty? Sixty? Forty? I have thirty. Thirty-two. Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-two. Forty-five. Forty-seven. Fifty. Fifty-five. Sixty …’, going up in fives until it hit the eighty, and then proceeding in tens; and I admired the accuracy with which the porters could predict, if asked, at what time in the sale a certain lot would come up, and its going price. I am reminded of the importance of numbers in the Street Directory – ‘The Numbering of Tenements in the Streets of Belfast is not consecutive but alternative: one side is marked with ODD figures, 1, 3, 5, and so on; and the opposite with EVENS, as 2, 4, 6, etc.’, as a head-note has it; and now I remember the boy I once knew, who collected house numbers.

  Not for him the logistical and temporal complications of trainspotting, nor even the mindlessly simple pursuit of writing down automobile licence plate numbers, which I did myself for a while; a favourite venue was the front seat on the top deck of a trolley-bus, where one could simultaneously pretend to drive and note the passing of the desultory, mostly black traffic. This boy, Master X, had reduced male pre-adolescent hobby-mania to its essence, which is number, variety, and set: in this case, numbers are inherently variable, and any list of them will form a set; yet, presuming his numbers were set under street-names, apparently similar numbers were not identical, since 2 Waterproof Street, say, is manifestly not 2 Waterville Street; so, every number was coloured by its geographical location. Perhaps, in his book, numbers became things.

  Cigarette cards, bubble-gum wrappers, barbed wire, spark-plugs, hock, anything in the shape of a pig, gold ingots, pewter, traffic cones, beer cans, hypodermic syringes, clocks, rugs, rubber bands, dogs, Lagondas, penny-farthing bicycles, pennies, farthings, golf-balls, billiard-cues, Ming, stones, marbles, mirrors, Constables, accordions, pocket-watches, Dinky toys, Meccano, rope, tobacco tins, hotel-room sewing-kits, airline sick-bags, tulips, train-tickets, electric torches, books of matches, postcards, phonographs, ball-point pens, piranhas, dictionaries, hand-bells, thimbles, cameos, transistor radios, pressed flowers, Christmas cards, mangles, window-glass, initialled handkerchiefs, tiles, bricks, autographs, celluloid
film-stock, movie stills, paper, ink-wells, swords, pistols, anchors, fishing-rods, carp: all these, and many more things beyond my ken, have been collected.

  Having defined his set of operations, the apprentice collector, after some experience, will find that many sub-sets exist within the set; and if he is to continue his hobby with any seriousness, he must specialize. Within the vast realm of postage stamps, for example, one might make a thematic collection, like the simple concept of a ‘stamp menagerie’, which could include the Cod of Newfoundland, the Tapir of the State of North Borneo, the Gom-Pauw of South West Africa, and the Pigmy Hippo of Liberia; and one can see how a collector of barbed wire could spend a lifetime in the pursuit of deviant strands caused by a hitch or a snag in the production line; the tobacco-tin collector might confine himself to a particular company, or cut (twist, plug, shag and bird’s-eye come to mind). In this context, Master X’s operations had the virtue of clearly definable sub-sets, i.e., streets, though I do not know how far he set his limits within the city; and I do not believe that he possessed a map, so the whole process must have been one of constant exploration, as his notebook became a street directory devoid of residents.

  Returning to the Street Directory and Ross’s Auction Rooms, I note the various objects in the room where I am writing, which were purchased in auction rooms: the oak desk, the overmantel, the big deal table, the fire-screen, the Hohner melodeon, the anonymous ukelele, the daguerreotype of Brothers Water and Place Fell, the glazed chessboard set in a heavy moulded frame, the Lloyd Loom chair, the pair of cobra-shaped brass candlesticks, the mahogany-framed Edwardian sofa; and the model aeroplane of heavy brazed aluminium, which looks as if it might be an apprentice piece from Short Bros. aircraft factory, whose nose is the face of a clock. It is twin-engined, so that the hands of the clock are like a third, skewed prop, and it ticks away – ticks over – as, adjusting my rough scrawled holograph draft, I tick these words into the micro-chip self-justifying memory of my Sharp FW-560 Fontwriter Personal Wordprocessor, thinking of the boy-next-door who had so much pocket-money he could afford to burn his model aeroplanes.