We were late, too late for Henry to join the assembly a mile down the road and parade like his great-great-grandfather up to the church. But as we waited he talked more about the Clogher Valley and how even though his paternal grandfather had moved away from that area he would always come back to this lodge. One of Henry’s two brothers would be here today. His father would have been along too but he had to attend another Orange service elsewhere.
Henry’s forebears achieved high office in the Orange Order: his father, grandfathers and great-grandfather were variously Worshipful Masters of lodges and districts and even the county. Henry confined himself to being lodge treasurer for a few years, an office which he said was undemanding: he took the extreme modernizing step of opening a bank account, he collected the dues and kept the very simple books. Although he has an intense emotional attachment to his lodge, which he had joined as a junior, he has no interest in holding office again. This is a sign of the times that in some ways worries him: ‘A hundred years ago, high offices would have tended to be held by Church of Ireland clergy right up to bishops, as well as by the old gentry. Some of those lads had a lot of backbone as well as standing – and some of them were cranky and mad as hell.’
Henry told me the story of a County Grand Master of Tyrone. The improbably named Anketell Moutray was kidnapped by the IRA in 1922 with forty others and taken across the border to be used as bargaining counters for eleven IRA men from County Monaghan, who had been arrested in Northern Ireland. Moutray, who was eighty, drove his captors crazy by incessantly singing in a cracked voice penitential psalms and ‘God Save the King’.
Henry talked of how the gentry began to disappear: compulsory purchase legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had required many to sell their farms and two world wars had killed off many more. The leadership of the Orange became dominated by the business and professional classes, people like his grandparents. But in Henry’s generation, people like that are busier than in the past and less able to give their time and their effort to what are often the mundane details of lodge work. ‘It’s not that I work physically harder than my ancestors, but life has become more demanding. For instance, they didn’t have to spent their evenings bogged down in paperwork.’ And at higher levels within the loyal institutions, where there are endless meetings, these days people with small businesses are in danger of going to the wall.
There were very few people in the hamlet, just a few cars, a handful of wives and maybe ten or twelve children. It was a nice day and there was a silver band and it was pleasant to hear the strains of hymn music wafting up the hill and seeing in the distance the advancing procession of Orangemen, many of whom, when they finally arrived, had faces so weather-beaten that not even a townee like me could doubt their occupation.
There were only about fifty people present. The lodge has only forty brethren, of whom just over half were there and then there were guest Orangemen and other visitors. There was a pause for a chat with families, friends and acquaintances and then it was time to reassemble to walk in formation into the church. With the other non-processors, I followed them in and sat at the back of the little church in a right-hand pew along with women and children: across the aisle was the band.
The young Presbyterian minister wasn’t an Orangeman. Only about 12 per cent of them are, Henry told me afterwards, because, particularly in the rural parts, it was so much a family thing; this minister had no such connections. The service was the usual mixture of hymns and prayers but I was pretty rocked by the sermon, particularly since I knew the guest preacher to be a member of the Church of Ireland. One of the twentieth-century assumptions I have learned to jettison since I started consorting with evangelical Protestants is that Presbyterians are necessarily more extreme than Anglicans. Certainly the Church of England is notoriously woolly and the Church of Ireland in the Republic is self-consciously liberal, but the circumstances of life in Northern Ireland are such that Protestants of all denominations are tougher, more evangelical, less ecumenical and inevitably more political than their counterparts elsewhere. What was on the mind of the Reverend William Hoey (who was later identified to me as the minister who had called Cardinal Daly ‘a red-hatted weasel’)* was Drumcree, which, being only three weeks away, was on the minds of most people in Northern Ireland.
Reverend Hoey was certainly a lively and opinionated speaker, lukewarm only in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who at the time were uttering various threats. In the Foreign-Officespeak that has been adopted and popularized by Sinn Féin and their counterparts in the Progressive Unionist Party, he said they weren’t ‘helpful’. He then reverted to Old-Testamentspeak and got stuck into the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who set up a golden image which all had to worship on pain of being cast into a fiery furnace; this appeared to be a metaphor for Drumcree. What bothered me slightly was that while Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged from the furnace unscathed, as an unbeliever I wasn’t convinced that following the Reverend Hoey’s recommendation to trust in the Lord was going to be enough to extract the Orange Order unscathed from Drumcree. However, the preacher wasn’t worrying his congregation that much: at least four or five of the bandsmen had fallen asleep. Sunday afternoon following a large lunch is normally a time for hard-working countrymen to have a rest.
We sang our hymns and said our prayers and emerged into the sunshine. After some more chatting with ministers and friends, the men reassembled. A familiar face to which I couldn’t put a name smiled at me: I learned later he was a member of my Black Lodge. The silver band struck up a hymn and along with a few children I followed the Orangemen down the hill. We passed perhaps four houses on the way; the inhabitants were sitting in their gardens looking mildly interested. The only residents we upset were a collection of sheep who ran in panic to the opposite end of their field. After a mile or so the procession stopped, the Orangemen turned to face across the fields, the band struck up and we all sang the national anthem. Men resumed chatting for a while and then took off in their cars for home.
Henry and I walked back up the hill to where he had parked. ‘Forty years ago,’ he said, ‘this is what Drumcree was like. That’s what they don’t understand. We don’t need anybody to see us parading.’ ‘A woman rang up the David Dunseith phone-in programme on the BBC the other day,’ he added, ‘and said “The trouble over parade routes only comes when these so-called nationalists move into these areas”. It was unfortunately a very logical statement which would strike a chord with every Protestant in Portadown.
‘What have you got here? Four houses in a little over half a mile and only a few black cows and a few horny sheep to contend with. There are hundreds of parades like this. At Drumcree, the point of view of the Portadown man is: “My father and my grandfather walked through that way. Why should I change?” ‘ For inarticulate and threatened people, walking the territory is their way of expressing their link with the past.
When we got home, he showed me ‘Title Deeds’,* a poem that to Henry best describes the passion of the Scots-Irish dissenters for the land they have tilled for centuries, which is understood by so few outside their community, especially those who still see them as foreigners and usurpers. Its inspiration was Genesis 23:20: ‘And the field and the cave that is therein were made sure unto Abraham for a possession.’
Grey, twisted stones, half hid in careless grass,
Scribed with faint names of those who sleep below, Who once saw winter into summer pass, Felt dawn in Ulster, watched her sunset glow
O’er every hill they furrowed with the plough,
On the white walls of homestead and of byre Loved beyond death, even as men love them now, With a devotion burning like a fire.
Graves of the men of Ulster, who came forth
To seek a better country than their own, As Abraham from Ur once quested north Obedient to the faith which led him on.
Obedient down the wandering of the years
Through many a hope deferred, a plan delayed, Claiming the land for ever by his tears Shed at the grave where his dear dust was laid.