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PARTISAN REVIEW
called it
Warrenpoint
because I lived there, a small town in Northern
Ireland, just across the border between North and South, or rather
between Northern Ireland and the Irish free State, as it was in
1928
when I was born. Some of you may know the town-it's not remarkable
from any consideration. You will find it on the largest maps; it's imme–
diately over the border into County Down; it lies along Carlingford
Loch, and was in my time and, as far as I know, still is a town of about
two thousand people. It's also relevant to what I'll have to say that in
my time the population consisted of about a thousand Roman Catholics
and a thousand Protestants, but I'll explicate that perhaps obnoxious
remark as I go along.
My father was sergeant-in-charge of the Royal Ulster Constabulary
in Warrenpoint, so we lived in the part of the barracks that was called
"married quarters. " We were seven,
to
begin with: father Denis, mother
Johanna, sisters Kathleen and May, brothers Tim and John (the baby ),
and
I.
John died on December
2H, 1932
in the usual Irish way of pneu–
monia at the age of fourteen months.
It
was an uncomfortable station in the sense that we were very much
aware that we were a Roman Catholic family living and participating in
what was distinctly a Protestant or, as we would now call it, a Loyalist
institution. And this, while it had its piquancies in certain respects,
made my life somewhat uncomfortable. One of its consequences was
that the prevalence of silence in the family became almost continuous
and universal. Warrenpoint being what it was, and our lives being as
they were, there were certain topics which could not be discussed, and
these were religion and politics. My father was never heard to speak on
these matters, nor indeed my mother.
This has some bearing because it refers to the sense of my growing
up, and my relation to my father and my mother. I should say, by the
way, especially in this setting, that I grew up as a Roman Catholic, and
indeed in every old-fashioned sense an Irish
ationalist. That is, I
believed that the border should not have happened. I believe that North–
ern Ireland should not exist as a political entity within the British
Empire; I am nostalgic for the vision or the memory or the thought of
Ireland being whole and undivided. I rema in a Nationalist. These are
my sentiments, and I doubt if I intend changing them.
We lived in the barracks until my father retired from the R.U.C. in
September
1946
and the family left Warrenpoint because we had no
compelling reason to stay. May went
to
Belfast to become a pharmacist,
Kathleen to University College, Galway to become a secondary school
teacher, Tim to Tullow-where I was born-to open a shop for the sale
