Across the Water
Throughout my childhood in Northern Ireland, the words ‘across the water’ were dropped into conversation by grown-ups to neatly describe goings-on in Great Britain. Those words also told of the new lives of compatriots who had fled to England or Scotland in search of money, love, or with a blind will to experience something — anything — different from the tedium of home. ‘He’s living the dream, across the water.’
The phrase gives central staging to the Irish Sea, the slither of ocean wedged between the land of my birth and the land whose history is so painfully intertwined with it. Just 12 miles wide at its narrowest point, the sea has stood as a convenient barrier between these neighbouring islands. Through the bleak years of The Troubles, when choices in Westminster often morphed into havoc in the Six Counties, there was a sea between us. While post-ceasefire Northern Ireland dropped its guns and apprehensively looked to a calmer future, the sea remained. Now, with Brexit threatening to tear open a new administrative and emotional divide along these waters, the sea is poised for one more starring role in our national conversation. I am one of those who lives across the water. And now it is time to go back.
When I emerged from Northern Ireland’s segregated education system as a fake Catholic at the age of 18, moving to England for university wasn’t so much a choice as an inevitability. My father, who runs the fish and chip shop my family has owned since 1952, had bluntly told me I’d be an idiot not to leave, to ‘make use of what’s between your ears’. I’ve been in England for ten years since, barring a short return and a stint in Belgium for work. I wish I could say that I’ve fully settled into an expat-lite existence in London, unburdened by the Catholic-infused guilt born from upending my roots and unconcerned by platitudes spoken at home attaching undue exoticism to my life abroad. The Troubles and its years of bloodshed and bullshit are gone, but the emotional warfare within Northern Ireland’s residents lingers. I am an Irishman, Irish, born and bred in the United Kingdom, a ceasefire baby, a Londoner, proud and eternally confused by where I’m from. The badges of this untidy identity are nestled in my pocket for the trip: my Irish and British passports.
Like millions of others, the coronavirus lockdown transformed my London flat into a compulsory retreat for six months. Initially, the enforced break from the city’s mania was a tonic. I joined the National Banana Bread Front and became a Joe Wicks cultist — all while watching the neighbourhood trees blossom in near slow-motion from my living room window. My girlfriend and I even got a dog. But as time trickled on, the isolation began to show its hand. I missed my family, painfully so, having not seen them since Christmas last year. As the Covid-19 statistics followed an upward curve again, so did my longing to return. Enniskillen, my hometown in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland’s most westerly county, became a utopia.
Yet my thoughts of crossing the Irish Sea remained doused in paranoia. With a pandemic whirling, even at half-speed, did I want to risk a journey through one of London’s airports and on to a crowded airplane before seeing my Scottish-Italian grandmother, who had been forced to shut herself away from the world to stay safe? Having written about Covid-19 as a journalist for a national newspaper since January, I was all too aware that it could not be gamed by sentiment. The virus thrives on chance.
As ever in a personal crisis, the solution turned up in mundane clothing. The teeny car that had served as a reliable companion through much of my twenties was in need of replacement, partly to accommodate my gigantic new hound. With a ready buyer in Northern Ireland, my outgoing vehicle suddenly landed itself one last trip as a border-hopping isolation chamber. The journey ahead was lengthy — 410 miles of tarmac through four countries either side of a ferry across the Irish Sea — but the guilt-free ferry ticket almost bought itself.
I leave on the first morning of autumn, a signpost of the natural world beginning its yearly retreat. Though the sleepy rows of Georgian houses already appear to be in hibernation, London’s old, narrow roads — undergoing a lockdown-inspired revamp — are busier than ever. The bings of doom begin soon after. And they won’t stop. My phone lights up with alerts telling me that English bars and restaurants have been slapped with a 10pm curfew, and that the Prime Minister has warned Covid-19 restrictions could last for six months. I push the pedal a little harder.
Rolling up the M4, revitalised from having finally escaped London, I’m reminded how weird this all is. Millions of Irish and British residents have symbiotically moved between the jurisdictions with minimal bureaucratic checks for decades under the Common Travel Area. On the day before my ferry ride, however, I’m asked to fill out a ‘Passenger Locator form’, which will be checked on arrival in the Republic of Ireland, requesting personal details and information about where I’ll be staying. It’s a small ask to fulfil a greater need, but a reminder that times are different, that walls are being raised.
Despite the frantic news cycle, those lucky enough to have evaded the worst of the pandemic’s brutal health and social impacts, like me, can still become swallowed by its invisibility. While quarantines for international travel have reinforced old borders, the ever-mutating social-distancing rules that govern everything from local lockdowns to the way we shop have created a system of new lines. We can’t often see them, but know not to cross. My journey involves transiting through at least four sets of rules. My brain is tired.
Clutching the steering wheel, England’s fields floating by, new questions of identity surface. My hands have grown used to the rawness of alcoholic sanitiser and my face accustomed to being locked behind a mask. Yet I wonder what those precautions are worth if I am carrying the virus to my family? I imagine myself being outed as a border-hopping ‘super spreader’ and hounded on social media. Loving son or public health risk? Never has the need for a hug felt so dangerous.
But driving along the M6 makes the swirling uncertainty on my news and social media feeds appear to be a sleight of hand. This artery through England is busy; not with stockpilers dashing for their nuclear bunkers, but with nonchalant families, workmen and commuters. Tom Petty’s nasal voice slinks out of my car speakers, yearning for an American Girl who ‘couldn’t help thinkin’ that there was a little more to life somewhere else’. The sentiment inspires me to play some of the records that opened my eyes to, as Petty puts it, ‘the great big world, with lots of places to run to’; music that transformed the childhood bedroom where I’ll be sleeping when I arrive.
By the time I reach Holyhead after more than six hours of driving, the Welsh port that serves as Great Britain’s main gateway to Ireland has been subsumed by a languorous grey. I’m irrationally expecting to be turned away, for officialdom to erect one last barrier between me and home. It’s almost underwhelming then when the Irish Ferries attendant waves me through with barely a cursory glance at a ticket on my phone. The lazy Irish Sea tickles the shore below, as it always will, unaware of its most recent main billing in the news. The Government’s antagonistic plan to break international law with its internal market bill served as a blunt reminder of the difficulties ahead when Brexit creates an invisible customs border along this expanse. After decades of creeping closer together, the imposition of new controls between Great Britain and Ireland — no matter how they are obscured— will mark a backwards step. As I wait to board, dozens upon dozens of lorries and cargo containers line up to join me in leaving British soil. The sea feels unpredictable.
I clamber out of my car for the first time in hours once inside the belly of the beast that is taking me to Dublin — aptly named Ulysses after James Joyce’s exploration of a day in the city. Although densely packed in the lower parking decks, the vessel’s upstairs lounges are funereal in their emptiness. Any romanticism I once attached to the crossing becomes yet another victim of the covid fug. When I last made this journey, two days before Christmas in 2018, travellers were channelling alcohol like teens on an Ayia Napa booze cruise. Now, the ferry’s gentle rocking is mirrored by the darting eyes of the few passengers who have strayed into the open. When an unmasked man unleashes a sneeze, sleeping eyelids spring open and gazes that were buried in books seek out the culprit. The eventual sight of Dublin comes as a reprieve and those aboard dash to the seclusion of their vehicles. Shortly after leaving Ulysses, my car is waved down by a Garda to check my coronavirus arrival form. I feel those jolts of irrational fear course through me again. “Grand,” he says nonchalantly, becoming the second person in the space of a few hours to be wholly disinterested in my paperwork. The sight of Dublin, a city that somehow felt otherworldly to my teenage self as I drifted there from 105 miles away with the music of U2 and Thin Lizzy, dances towards the port. It feels smaller now, but just as alien. I turn on to the road for home.
Travelling in darkness, I don’t even realise that I have crossed the border into Northern Ireland. When I was a child, breaching this invisible line routinely involved being questioned at military checkpoints. Staring out of the back window of my parents’ car on the way to Co. Donegal for weekends at the beach, the change in territory was marked by the meeting of my innocent eyes with the blank stare of a camouflaged soldier in the roadside ditch, automatic rifle in hand. As my father went through the motions with the questioning police officer, I’d wonder what the sniper was thinking looking back. The British Army towers have been removed, the rural hillsides on which they stood now more peaceful. There are no guns pointing out of the ditches. On this journey, the realisation that I have crossed a border is eventually revealed through the road signs, distances now denoted in miles, rather than kilometres. Progress in numbers.
Enniskillen greets me like it always has, its 17th century castle standing guard at the entrance to the island on which the town was originally built, the streets largely unchanged. In London, people of a certain age sometimes recoil when I reveal where I’m from, knowing it only for the IRA Remembrance Day bombing in 1987 that killed 11 people two days before I was born. The reaction and its implied unease always jars with the stillness this place gives me.
It’s 8:30pm when I arrive home. The squeal of excitement from my 15-year-old brother, who was unaware of my trip, flushes months of tension from my body. He dashes for a hug but I try to resist against all my instincts, social-distancing rules now dogma. Behind my smile I’m nervously staring inwards, hoping my super-spreader fears are unfounded. I inch a little further away. We soon gather in front of the television as a family to watch a recording of Boris Johnson’s latest televised address, uncertainty in the air. My mother breaks the silence. “At least he’s brushed his hair this time,” she says. And the last six months, the madness of the pandemic, suddenly all feels less severe. London, with its beautiful eccentricity and pretences, where I began the day, feels like just another place I fantasised about as a child. The four walls of my family home and the people within it have felt far away. But now they are here. Across the water.
