The Story of Ballyferris. Chapter Fifteen. Donaghadee.

 Donaghadee

Pearl of the Ards Peninsula

Long long before Belfast became a city...before Samson and Goliath, the giants of Harland and Wolff's cranes towered over the houses in that city, Donaghadee was the main port on the east coast of Ulster carrying out business with the ports of Scotland and England. It is the closest point to Scotland and was the landing place for the Ulster Scots who settled in the north of Ireland travelling from Port Patrick in Wigtonshire. 

My paternal family left the Scottish borderlands in the mid 17thc to eventually settle in County Armagh, and my storytelling mind has left me imagining that they may have landed at the old harbour in Donaghadee. I like that thought! The sea route between Larne and Stranraer came much later.

Our route from the caravan to the Dee, as we all called the town, took us past the little shop at Ballywhisken, and on through Millisle and the icecream vendor's place where a filled ice cream cone could be dipped into melting chocolate. What a joy! Dad often stopped  and treated us as a start to our holidays.

And so on to the town of Donaghadee.

In the early 50s, before dad bought the old black Austin that later took us to the caravan at Ballyferris...kitchen sink...grandfather clock... et al... we were often thankful for a lift to Donaghadee from Wully Hope. If I remember correctly he too had an Austin, but this was a little two door version. How we all fitted in can only be imagined. Dad in the front with Mr. Hope, mum in the back with Rosie still a baby, on her knee and Ian and myself squashed in as best we could.  Ian was by then at least 13 years old so no skinny kid! I was only eight or nine. Of course there were no safety car belts in those days...so perhaps that made it easier to fit us all in. 

Once parked,  the first thing to do was to take a walk down the harbour to the lighthouse. Stop at the deep end, gaze out to sea to the Copeland Islands and then walk around it and back into the town. We still do that every time we visit. It feels right and you just never know who you might meet.

 The next best place to go was always The Cabin icecream parlour and cafe. 

Up the little wooden stairs we would trundle and find a table big enough to take all five of the McClellands. Then a young local girl dressed in traditional cafe, black dress with white pinny would arrive to write down our order. Dad would josh...joke...with her and she would blush as she wrote down our desires for tea and cake and usually an ice cream in a glass bowl for each of us. And if there were any other tables occupied there might be a bit of chat and banter from dad ....much to my embarassment....me wanting to appear sophisticated even then and pretend that this was normal and not as dad said "a special treat".

I doubt that the tables and chairs have changed in any way over the 60 years and more since we went to eat at The Cabin....this photograph was taken recently and they are still just as I remember them. Wonderful! 

Below is a glass cabinet in the cafe with momentoes and memories of the years that the Cabin has been serving the people of the Dee.

...and on the wall are these three historic photographs of some RNLI men who volunteered for service on the Donaghadee lifeboat.

The seas at this part of the coast are known to be very dangerous. On the 31st January 1953 the MV Princess Victoria sank in a fierce storm. We were already caravanning at Ballyferris and even though I was young the sinking stayed in my memory and worried me when from time to time I took the Liverpool Boat back home to Belfast to visit family. Again in the early days of the caravan, when we were all sitting in the early afternoon, mum remarked that the little fishing boat in our view had disappeared. The men on it had gone down immediately...the story is that they never learnt to swim and always wore heavy rubber boots... theory being best to go down quickly... and even though the rescuers came as fast as they possibly could...no remains were ever found as far as I know. A lifeboat station was set up in 1910 and as with all RNLI boats local people manage it as volunteers.

We grew up and made it to the town ourselves often hitching rides or managing to get a lift from the older members of the caravanners. Derek Cathcart or maybe June McKee. With a newspaper steaming with the treat of delicious chips...seldom could I afford fish as well...or an icecream poke...yes that's what a cone gets called in Ireland!...we sat on the wall together or lounged in the amusement arcade where we offered our pennies into the one-arm bandits. Noone asked our ages...and anyway there were maybe only a few machines in the small room opposite the wall. June was an adult by then and had made friends with the lads who owned the fishing boat called "The Brothers". So if business was a bit quiet with them, then for a small nominal amount, as we knew June, we got to go out mackerel fishing by the Copeland Islands. I tried to be brave if I managed to catch a fish but I was always thankful for the fishermen who helped me to take the squirming fish off the hook. Mum refused to accept my catch when I proudly brought it back to her as she scoffed at mackerel telling me they were the bins of the ocean and who knows what they had eaten. I'm very fond of a mackerel now though I have recently read that they too are becoming scarce.

This is the boat called "The Brothers" still to be seen in the harbour.You know how things can seem enormous when you are young...like the size of your bedroom..or the back garden at home...well that is how I thought of the boat called "The Brothers". I thought it was really big! Once when Rosie and me were in the Dee alone we decided to go out on a trip in it and land on one of the Copeland islands. Being adventurous we set off to walk the whole shore around it. It was a special site for terns that we chose and it happened to be the prime breeding time. As we walked we started to be attacked by the worried birds. We ran for the safe shore and made it to the boat unharmed ...apart from our pride. Terns are also now on the decrease..whether or not on the Copelands I'm not sure. There is a story that Dean Swift who wrote Gulliver's Travels took the idea for the islands from the Copelands. It may be so as he lived locally and took the hill outside Belfast we called Napoleon's Head as the thought behind his giant. And mum used the Lilliput Laundry in Belfast which was on Lilliput Street....not named after Swift's book! 

 

Finally...The Warren..a rabbity land south of the main town which was another wonderful place to walk where there were swings and pitch and putt and benches to sit and do nothing more but dream ...

..and on the way there maybe stop and buy a bag of dulse from the garden behind the whitewashed wall with the red gates and the notice..."Dulse for sale." Hard to believe now that a bag of dulse....seaweed found all the way along the coast and dried in the sun...could be thought of as a treat when you were only eight years of age in the 1950s. But I still keep a bag of it in my food cupboard..very tasty fried for a minute or two in some butter.

 I was reminded recently that the little end cottage to the left of the lane leading down to the beach was lived in by a local man who collected dulse each morning at low tide and dried it in the yard at the back of the cottage, and then bagged it up to be sold in the town. ...memories.

...oh!...that could be the potter on that swing...early days at Donaghadee.

The Story of Ballyferris. Chapter 3... The Road

Chapter Three

The Road Taken

                               
Journeys nowadays are speedy affairs... well that is if the traffic isn’t too jammed up... or the road works aren’t bringing us all down to one lane . But in these days that I write about, there were no bypasses or dual carriageways, so every trip was a major undertaking.
Which of course made it all the more exciting.

There was one special road that led to Newtownards. We called it, “The Switchback”.
It had no bends in it at all ... it was simply a dead straight road going up and down and over the hills. .The alternative road...the wider road was more regular, and thus deemed boring. So the cry went up from the kids on the back seat, “Dad, please take the hilly route!”.
As far as I can remember nobody was car-sick, but that may be because I didn’t want to admit to such feelings. Hauling your stomach back inside you as the car bounced over the top of the hills time after time, with Ian shouting “faster, faster dad!”, meant that I couldn’t let myself down by admitting to nausea.
Through Newtownards and the road edged along Strangford Lough, eventually turning left towards the village of Carrowdore. Isn’t it odd the feelings you get on some roads? It seemed to me that it was out in the wilds and had a wild west deserted look to it. Thinking back, farming wasn’t the pretty, crafty place that a lot of it seems in the fashionable magazines today...and the people were possibly poor cottage farmers....I'm not sure. Or maybe it’s just another example of my insatiable imagination!
 Right turn at the end of the village and we’re almost at the field, the farm, the caravan,
                                                             
                                                                     Ballyferris.

. Ah! Ballyferris! What magic is conjured up even at the mention of the name. As we come over the last hill the competition is on to be the first to shout out...“I see the sea”. ?
 I really, really want it to be me. …but usually it was my big brother Ian, Iupy ...the son‘n’heir.
Now and again we journeyed down by a different road, driving past the old windmill at Millisle, before turning right to join the coast road again. That was always a great route because dad really loved icecream, and there was a wonderful shop in Millisle selling cream ice in a poke (that’s a cone to you!) ...which was then dipped into melted chocolate and the joy as you crunched through the hard shell of the chocolate made a memory never to be forgotten.. So we were happy bunnies when we reached the field...........

 

..if also rather sick!

The Story of Ballyferris....Chapter Eight...The Beach

The Beach

The name... Ballyferris...  is enough to set me off on a sweet daydream.

Growing up in the suburbs of Belfast city... life lived by the Co. Down coast meant freedom.

 The flat landscape, the open skies, the ever present blue-grey Irish Sea, became a raison d'etre for living ...yes I think it's not going too far so say that this became a truth for me .....and the main reason for this obsession was definitely the beach.

 Nowadays, with cheap air travel we  have a greater knowledge of beautiful expanses of golden sand and turquoise sea, from Portrush to Portugal, India and beyond..at least on the internet!!

But nothing can compare with early memories, and mine are of the beach at Ballyferris.

 Waking up to the smell of an Irish fry, bacon,eggs, mushrooms and toast. Knowing that a whole day and the exploration of the beach was ahead of me. No homework, no responsibilities,this was tantamount to heaven. I didn’t analyse it then, and it’s taken me a lifetime to work out even a little of why I loved it so much.

Come with me, as we walk over the little grassy ridge at the coast edge of the field.  Come down to the beach, there you will find yourself treading the worn path that many have taken before. Around you, the smell of  beach daisies.... a type of camomile. My love for these innocent flowers  has stayed with me since.( I even wrote a song about them once... “I love the flowers, I love the trees, but most of all I love daises.” ...not exactly  Larkin or Heaney!...)

When I walk on other beaches, Morecambe, Southwold, Portrush or Brighton... I strip some seeds from the abundance of the seedheads, to drop on coastal areas bare of daisies.

 Rarely did I return to the caravan without a bunch of these flowers for mum.

So, on past the daisy strip, which by the way could take any thing up to an hour, on down the beach, heading to the sea.

If the tide was out , I squelched my way over a mound of sticky brown seaweed, treading lightly in my bare feet, for fear of some squirming creature having been caught there, left by the receding tide. The hard sand was cold beneath my feet.Truth is it was very cold, and this was probably why my patient mum always shouted after me to put on wellington boots ...as I ran off from the caravan. Clothes for Ballyferris were basic.... a t-shirt or at the most a felted woolly jumper, a pair of cotton shorts and bare feet. I’m convinced,  this is one of the reasons why I still have fairly healthy... if rather large feet! Reach the water and take a tentative dabble at the edge with toes in, before running  back up the beach to warmer sand.

At the end of the summer the sand at the top of the beach had dried up in the sun and shone like silver dust. It was very fine and a joy to scrunch under your feet until they were covered by the earthy warmth.

This poem below was on a post by Anthony Wilson ...writer , poet and blogger...

and reminded me of that girl and the freedom she had in those days...

Who?

Who is that child I see wandering, wandering
down by the side of the quivering stream?
Why does she seem not to hear, though I call to her?
Where does she come from, and what is her name?

Why do I see her at sunrise and sunset
taking, in old-fashioned clothes, the same track?
Why, when she walks, does she cast not a shadow
though the sun rises and falls at her back?

Why does the dust lie so thick on the hedgerow
by the great field where a horse pulls the plough?
Why do I see only meadows, where houses
stand in a line by the waterside now?

Why does she move like a wraith by the water,
soft as the thistledown on the breeze blown?
When I draw near her so that I may hear her,
why does she say that her name is my own?

Charles Causley, from The Collected Poems for Children  

Winner!!

I can't believe that I have been picked to win a necklace from the beachshackproject.blogspot.co.ukwhose blog I follow!

I just don't win things!

Well actually...now it seems I do.

I love the stuff that they make. It's all made from sea glass and other beach cast-ups. Something I love anyway and have collected myself since the Ballyferris days of my youth.

Hurray!!

A Poem for Thursday.

The Outing to Dungeness

Prospect Cottage

Basically it was just a hut
A fisherman’s hut
Along with all the other huts
Now I love a hut
I would like a hut by the sea
Not too much to keep tidy
And the sound and smell of it all…


Basically it was not really a garden
Just the way you collect bits of plants along the beach
And hope that they might take root
And help you to remember that day
By the sea on the beach
In the shingle…

Really it was not sculpture
Not what those earnest artists
Like Andy or the Welsh man would think of as sculpture
More like me when I walked the sands at Ballyferris
And picked up the rubbish that the others had dropped
Well I say the rubbish
I never actually thought of it that way…


Really I wasn’t too sure about the yellow windows
And the writing on the end wall
All about the sun
Though the mist obscured it that day
And the words were a bit small
Now that my eyesight is not what it was…


So what made me cry?
For it was only a fisherman’s hut
It was only the shingle all around it by the road
It was only railway sleepers upended
Standing like a modern Stonehenge
And the perfume of the gorse
And the yellow horned poppies…

No really …there was not much there you know.


[This was the day that we went looking for Derek Jarman's house on the shingle in that magic spot called Dungeness. The brochure say the largest area of shingle in Europe. Full of wild sea flowers, protected by the local authorities....mysteriously beautiful.]

The Story of Ballyferris....and all that Jazz.

Here comes another chapter of the ongoing story of a nowhere place of great significance.

Otilie Patterson and Derek Cathcart.

I was always encouraged by Derek Cathcart to sing. I was a young teenager sitting at the back of his tiny caravan in the coastal district of Ballyferris ,Co Down.
He sang the blues and black American Gospel to a tinny old guitar.
He was the sophisticated older member of that early seaside gang, who sang in the local pubs and bars... a thing unimaginable to me and my strict church upbringing...and therefore for me, all the more exotic and unattainable .
I mostly remember blues like ...Beale street ,St. Louis Blues or St James's Infirmary. Or country and western songs which are always very popular in Ireland.
I pestered mum and dad for a guitar of my own. I left adverts sitting around on the mantlepiece and the breakfast table.
"Almost new guitar for sale...very resonably priced".
 So it was with great rejoicings and merrymakings that I got my first guitar on my thirteenth birthday.
It's not hard to learn three chords from each of the major keys! So that's what I did... and not much more. But I got the reputation for entertaining my friends when we got together in our family caravan as the teenage years went by.
I don't know what happened to Derek...I lost touch with most of them from the smokey caravan. But I loved the music that he had introduced me to and when the other friends were revelling in Elvis, The Beatles and The Stones...I was listening to late night jazz and buying up Billy Holliday and Peggy Lee records.
I dabbled a bit in the university clubs and sang at some of the student balls and rag concerts and on one occasion was at the same glee club at Queen's in the 60s, as an older singer called Ottilie Patterson took the stage. Being young and arrogant , I can remember being quite scathing about her singing.
....Oh the foolishness of youth!
When she died last year, and I read through the obituary, it hit me like a ton of bricks....she was the inspiration for Derek and therefore myself all those years before in the late 50s.
She was born in Comber...and that's just a spit away from Ballyferris and the caravan. So I realised that Derek must have been following her and listening to her in the early 50s in the pubs and clubs where he himself then used to perform.
She married Chris Barber and sang with his band...but like so many singers, (including Adele) she struggled with a throat problem and eventually disappeared from the scene.

Chris Barber, centre, and his band in 1962, with Patterson, and Ian Wheeler on clarinet.

Thanks Otilie....thanks Derek...thanks for the memory....
...oh that could be a good song title....stop being silly Geraldine!

The End of The Line

I'm reposting this poem for dVerse Open link night week 41.

It's one that I like reading myself...if that's not too arrogant!

Also it takes me to a place that I love to go...the seaside!

I'm really only just getting into linking to all of these wonderful sites.

So a big thankyou to dVerse for the opportunity to get my stuff...out there!

The End of the Line

Let’s go and live at the end of the line.
Where breakers fall over rolling stones.
We’ll board the train that we rode when young,
Watch how the steam mists our view of the sea
As it hisses and cools on the iron and the brass.
And the cry of the gulls as they dive, as they soar
Will welcome us back
Will welcome us back.

Let’s board the train that we rode long ago,
Where the end of the line will have water and sand.
We’ll be welcomed again by the crying of gulls
The smell of spun sugar and hot lardy chips.
There, will be space enough for our thoughts
And salt winds that blow away stale urban fog.
To welcome us back,
To welcome us back.

They say that the crust is beginning to crack.
That the cold winds of change are blowing our way.
Yet when I take the journey again to the end
Of the line, where the seagulls are soaring above
To the edge of the tide, to the line in the sand.
The memory of all of things, of all being well
Embraces me back
Embraces me back.

Ballyferris Memories

I've written in the past about the shell collecting expeditions that I undertook on Ballyferris beach, with the friend of my teenage years...the lovely Victoria.

These were serious affairs!
No simple beach combing these...rather, contests of who could claim the quickest eye and the best cherry-picking in Ballyferris.
Please let me hasten to reassure anyone reading this, that I had no desire to enter competion with Victoria.....no! no!... my wish was merely to be amazed at the beauty of the treasure that I was able to discover on that windswept shore of Co Down.  But no was not a word to offer this companion of my puberty! and into battle I would go with her.

So to be ambling along on Thursday with one of the grandgirls on the town beach by Morecambe Bay, with nary a care or glare to do better or to hurry up...ahhhh! joy!

See here what a rainbow of colour we managed to winkle out of the sand and stones on that grey, misty afternoon. And how they shone after a good washing down in the old sink back at the house.

Heart of my heart...we sang that way back then...but this is how it feels now.

The Story of Ballyferris. Music at the Caravan.

Music at the Caravan

When we were all rather young, that is, before we became teenagers, a barn was set aside at Turkington’s caravan site, ( the one on the Millisle side of Hope’s) in which  caravanners could gather,  to have a bit of a concert . Well that was always such a good old sing song, and in the inimitable Irish way if you felt like it, you could get up and strut your stuff musically!. Noone  minded... if you got all  the notes ...even if they were not exactly in the right places!

I remember one of the regular favourites was... “Look over your shoulder, I’m walking behind”……now who on earth sang that? Does anyone remember?

Google tells me it was Eddie Fisher !

In the fifties in Ireland I don't remember singing many national folk songs. You would be more likely to hear a country and western being rendered..or mangled, depending on how it came out. But the enthusiasm was boundless.In fact my drama teacher was surprised when upon winning a prize at school I opted for a book of Irish "come-all-yees"...dad's name for Irish songs.

This was at the end of the fifties when Elvis broke into our world and thrilled us with songs such as   “ Teddy Bear” and “ Jail House Rock” and you know…. we kids wanted to rock it up in the Barn.
 I remember one day in particular... at the swings in Turkington's yard with Vicky another caravanner and close school friend....when we must have sung "Teddy bear" constantly all afternoon...and I mean...all afternoon!!

In  Ballywalter... in Lemon’s Café and Fish and Chip emporium..., we often gathered in the store room at the back of the shop to feed our money into their exotic juke box. Bill Haley, Little Richard and The Big Bopper fed our fertile minds and brought us dreams of faraway places and possibilities in distant lands. Could that be one of the reasons why so many  left Ireland for distant shores, as soon as  teenage years were behind them?

For me, even more important than all of this, was the scruffy caravan in Hope’s second field. A musical cooking pot full of enormous significance for my young enquiring soul.

The van was owned by Derek Cathcart.

He was much older that me, and in my young eyes... very worldly-wise. He played guitar and more than that,  played and sang regularly in local pubs. A fount of musical knowledge of a genre  I had never heard before.

I often waited until the other "van" kids were in his scruffy abode some early evening... before he sallied forth to the bright lights of Donaghadee, Millisle or even Ballywalter...and creep in to sit  at the back of the caravan... near the door. A thick smokey fug filled the space and  meant that you could hardly see to the opposite end... and I’m sure more than contributed to his throaty singing voice.

He sang the usual country and western songs of those days. Do you remember..."It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels" ? or Jim Reeves and "He'll have to go"? Oh my ...you  and I are old!!
More important to me however was the jazz that he sang... and in particular the blues  I heard for the first time in my life.

From Derek I learnt to sing "Beale Street Blues, St Louis Blues" and many many more.

One song in particular that I loved to hear him sing, was his rendition of "Miss Otis Regrets".
..I still sing it today.

I was probably only ten or twelve at the most when I first sat in that caravan, and I had already had quite a few years studying drama and music, but this new sound was something that entered my soul and  stayed with me ever since.

Though a  rough diamond, he was kindly. He seemed to recognise something in me and encouraged me to sing. I found that I had a natural inclination to harmonise and so when he launched into some blues piece, I would quietly sing along  absorbed in this wonderful world of music. More often than not I received an encouraging word  from him at the end. That did more for my confidence than all of the scales and classical pieces given to me by my singing teacher .

 I have a memory that once, in a lesson, she informed me that if I continued to sing in the lower register I would absolutely ruin my voice. Ooops!

Ah me what a great memory. Who could better that instruction with so much fun thown in. It was many years before I met any one else who had such confidence in my vocal abilities.

Thankyou Mr. Cathcart wherever you are.