The Plantin'

Irish Troubles and Bluebell Wood

THE PLANTIN’

            I remember a bluebell woods right opposite our house in County Tyrone.  What a magical place that was, the sea of blue and green.  They say that blue and green should never be seen except on an Irish Queen, and quite rightly so too.  To claim ownership of such a phenomenon is a heritage not to be scoffed at in any period of time.

            I loved that bluebell woods and the ancient trees of the ‘plantation’.  We called it The Plantin’.   There was an old gnarled very ordinary tree upon which we built a tree house, climbing precariously with sheets of corrugated zinc to lay down a floor and make a ceiling. 

            Further into the woodland, there was a holly tree, right by a lover’s footpath.  What fun to have a secret house in the bottom of the holly tree, conveniently hollow in the centre of all that prickly camouflage.  We hugged ourselves close to the roots and tried not to giggle when we peeked out and lovers sauntered by stopping for a snog. 

            We played Cowboys and Indians and Policemen and Robbers because those were the games children played.  There was a swing hanging from a large oak-tree.  The swing was on a very long rope so we could swing high into the sky, and troubles in Northern Ireland were forgotten in those woods.  We did not remember the shootings and bombings, the control zones in nearby towns, or the checkpoints.  We thought only of every inch of that woodland that was ours, not really ours because it belonged to a local farmer but he knew we were safe there and that we played there, because it was not safe to play tennis on the main road using the white lines as a net as many of us were wont to do.  The farmer lived in a huge house at the top of the hill behind the woods.

            There were hazel trees at the bottom of an incline, and one giant tree that stood tall, its bendy branches stretching right to the top of a hillock.  We discovered that we could stand at the top, hold on to the branch, throw ourselves out into the ether, and the obliging bendy branch took us to the bottom of the hillock where we bounced our feet off the tree trunk and that in turn would springboard us back to the top.  We never tired of this, and the branch miraculously never broke.  This sacred knowledge of the unbreakable tree was passed on to smaller siblings who continued the ritual.

            Who could ever think of troubles at times like this?  We did not see danger in the woods, climbing high to the tops of the trees where the crows came back to roost at night, hundreds of them, thousands of them in great black flapping clouds cawing raucously and making a racket that really was our alarm bell for bed-time.  The crows and us settled down at the same time each night.

            We had a henhouse in a big wire pen in the woods, the wire to keep the foxes out.   One time a fox burrowed in and killed lots of hens, not content to just take one.  My mother got a Rhode Island Red rooster and I don’t think that any fox would stand up to him.  He would light on our own dog in a minute and try to peck him.  I used to help my mother gather the eggs and clean them with dry salt, some to eat, some to go to the local shop.  Often, we

had to hunt for clocking hens that managed to escape the pen and make nests in the woods.  We had to find them because the fox would make short work of the hens, and weasels might eat the eggs.

            One day, our bus was diverted on the way to school.  There was a hole in the road.  We heard the bang.  We thought it was blasting from the quarry not far from Enniskillen.  Sometimes my brother and I would put our ears to the ground to hear the reverberation of the blasting from the quarry.  This was just another such bang.  But it wasn’t.  Some soldiers had been blown up.  The hole was gigantic, and we were diverted for weeks on our way to school.  We were told that fingers and toes had been found a mile away.  The troubles were getting closer.

            Monday nights were B-men nights, and they shot at targets behind the local Church Hall that was built on a natural break in the woods.  They left their old riddled targets behind the Hall, and we gathered them up as trophies for ourselves, these bendable plywood ‘men’ shapes that made great sleighs during the winters.  We carried them across fields to a suitable hill and rode two or three to a ‘man-sled’ down snow-covered hills, the leader holding on to the bent bullet-ridden head at the front of the sleds.  Worms of cold slush slipped through the holes of the body and soaked our backsides, making us cry later with ice-burns.  And still, we never thought about the ‘troubles’.  That was a grown-up thing.

            Tuesday nights were band-nights, when the local silver band, a trumpet band, practiced for hours.  My uncle always played The Last Post on his silver trombone on Remembrance Sunday.

            One Remembrance Sunday, the band played in Enniskillen, but my uncle did not go because he had been asked to play The Last Post somewhere else for the Bishop of Clogher.  The band was blown up in a Control Zone.  We heard terrible stories about this, hushed into the fringes of our minds, dreadful injuries that took years from which to recover.  A Fermanagh healer who had the ‘charm’ to stop internal bleeding helped at the scene.

            Then one day, the farmer who owned the woods died.  His widow told my mother that the loneliest sound of her life was her own footsteps the night she climbed her stairs to go to bed after the funeral.

            The troubles kept coming and people were frightened.  They did not want to be alone in their houses.  Someone we know was shot in their lorry two miles away and survived.  A schoolboy was shot at a bus-stop one mile away and was killed.  Our bus stop was the next one along.  Our houses were not close enough.  The house on the hill was hidden behind the woods, and the farmer’s wife could only see the spire of the church beside our village.  She could not see the lights of the village through the trees.  We heard of people being killed in their houses and it mattered not whether they were Protestant or Roman Catholic.  The only comfort was light, knowing that others were around, were close.  

            At first, only a few trees fell to the chainsaw, that screeching revving sound that tore through our sadness, making it worse.  A fence went up to

divide the woods.  My mother stopped keeping hens.  Cows were put to pasture there.  We could half-see the house on the hill.

            Then our tree house was gone, and there were no bluebells that year, the first time ever, but hardly anyone noticed.  The tree with the swing was gone.  The holly tree disappeared and decorated the church at Christmas.  Young people moved away, wanting to leave Ireland.  The secret of the woods was sealed, no siblings left to pass on the knowledge.  The crows left, looking for other places to do their roosting, and the silence was deafening.  The school playgrounds were oddly bare, only a handful of children to play.   Years have passed.  Last time I was back, I was told of the new plans. The field behind that last bit of wood, where the hazel trees grow, where the unbreakable tree stands tall, is to provide new houses in the village.  And they will grow trees again.  Who knows?  Maybe there are bluebells waiting.  Maybe it’s a new Plantin’.

© Dwina    

(First published in The Belfast Newsletter)