Two Derry Dances

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This chapter is another from The Poets’ Stairwell, a picaresque novel-in-progress.

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Boon and Henry are young Australian poets on the road in search of their muses and, in this chapter, have reached Londonderry after a peculiar and nervous encounter with a gunman called Titus.

Eva Swart and Beamish are two Australian acquaintances of Boon and Henry who reappear from time to time in the story, bringing trouble.

Another excerpt from The Poets’ Stairwell appeared in the July-August 2009 issue.

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Two Derry Dances

We tramped the remaining miles into Londonderry, passed under the old town walls where the muzzles of cannon pointed out across the Catholic suburbs. “No surrender” read some spraycan graffiti at a house-end. On our ascent to The Diamond we passed a bookshop selling off bomb-damaged stock. Henry bought an Apollinaire while I found a Keith Douglas—soldier poets both. 

The soldiers were everywhere. They rummaged our packs at the checkpoints. A helicopter banged overhead. Squads passed us, single-file, weapons cradled, a radio antenna flicking back and forth in time with their deliberate gait. At exact intervals the tail-end man would perform a choreographed about turn, north, east, south, west, and Henry found the sight of this hilarious.

“You’re wrong to laugh,” I said.

But he couldn’t see it, and continued to hoot.

“Look at their drill from their point of view,” I tried next, for I was moved by the almost-dance deliberation of their march. 

“Why on earth should I do that?”

“Because it has to do with the sniper behind the lace curtains up there,” I pointed to a window, “or this blue car that is now approaching us with a gunman in the backseat. Their drill is a dance that helps to keep them safe…”

“The world is stupid,” Henry interjected. 

“…as they try to deal with murder and misrule.”

“What has military drill got to do with poetry?”

I thought for a few moments, the tramp of the squad’s boots receding from us, and then replied, “Quite a lot, I reckon.” 

But I could not account for why I believed this, so I gave up my defence of military procedures. We walked in silence until we located the hostel in Great James Street mentioned by our Frommer, where we dumped our bags and went out for a meal. This was a rather glum affair, as I pondered whether I should have gone with Eva and Beamish, abandoning Henry Churl in his cubicle outside town. Had I begun to mistrust my brilliant companion-poet? If the business of making poems was not concerned with playing fair with the world as it unfolded before the eye, then I knew it could not interest me. Henry seemed to scorn this idea in favour of something more austere, more thoroughly imbued by the pure substance, poetry, itself. Yes, I thought, as we sat with our soup and our beer, it was mistrust that I now felt. There was some negligence in him I could not pardon. Ridiculous it should arise from our different reactions to the gait of soldiers on a street, which, he was right, were comical, in a way.

“I’m going for a stroll.”

He shrugged and I left him. 

Being Saturday night there were people about, which did not lessen the stop-start of being searched, the genial, superior warnings from the squaddies to a visiting Australian of guns and bombs. So, when I heard fiddle music, the tattoo of feet on boards, and someone calling directions over a microphone, I went in search of the rumpus.

It issued from a church hall where a dance class was in progress. Chairs had been stacked against the walls, and in the open space perhaps a hundred folk from children to the elderly, were formed in several rows and going through the dance-steps as they were called by the dance master. This gentleman, flamboyant in bowler hat and braces, leaned on a brass eagle biblestand in front of the musicians who comprised an accordionist, fiddler and cymbalist. 

Almost immediately I spied Eva. She stood against the opposite wall with other non-dancers, listening intently to the calling of the dance and the curlicues of melody that came from the musicians.

“We meet again!” I called, and she glanced at me, not altogether pleased by my intrusion. “What have you done with The Yank?”

“Beamish dobbed him,” she said, not taking her eyes off the dancers. “They’re both down there being grilled by Security right now.”

“Titus was not without charm. Why dob him?”

“Wrong kind of Yank.”

“I thought you and Beamish had the ferry to catch?”

“We do.” She frowned at me. “Look, right now I’m concentrating…”

“I saw.”

“So go away. I’ll tell you about Beamish after.”

Stung by her shortness, I withdrew to a table where orange juice was for sale, but continued to watch her. Radical Marxist Jewess in an Ulster Protestant church hall, this really was an unusual place to find Eva Swart. Moreover, I recalled that Eva had never been one for the Irish dancing back in the Arden Student Union. Hers was the creative side of dance, and I might have expected her to dismiss the activity here as pedestrian, in the same way Henry dismissed the versifications of Longfellow or Betjeman. But my expectations were to be confounded. 

For she had drawn her person into a great concentration. Her head was alert as a heron’s. Made fidgety by my intrusion, I saw how she restored her calm under the influence of the clacketty-clack of shoes on boards, the ribbons of music, and the rhythmic chant of the dance master.

Then she moved out to join the dancers, now arranged in several circles, placed herself between a small boy with silky fair hair and a plump fellow with black eyebrows who accepted her presence immediately. Their expressions had the blithe serenity of folk who knew the steps. Eva’s look, by contrast was acutely alert as, hesitantly at first, and then with more confidence, she imitated the motions of those around her. Clockwise skip, anti-clockwise skip, contract to the middle, expand outward like so many petals on a sunflower, perform a garland with ladies twirling partners to the right, gents to the left. And when this was completed, form two lines, peel off, form a bridge, bow under and begin again, always with the tattoo of feet on the boards, the fiddle flinging out its melody, the cymbal tracking the footsteps.

I watched the dance, but more, I watched Eva acquire the dance. For she was so evidently special in this company, at once the most inexpert and the most natural of them. In her carriage, she held herself with the lithe pride of the born dancer, her eyes now enlivened by the merriment of the thing. And yet in her attention to how her fellow dancers went through the rigmarole of the dance itself, she was humble. 

Humble! I could not take my eyes off her. Here was Eva Swart finding her way into a kind of dancing, formal, communal, gay, yet utterly outside her previous interests. Yes, to put it plainly, I was once more unexpectedly moved by her contrary being. She held her trim figure with such poise among the old and the children, the shapely and misshapen, and it might have been so superior to them, but did not seek this. And as she grew competent in the dance steps and the dance geometry, she could have flaunted her aptitude for dance, but did not. Rather she sought to be at one with her group. And Yeats” wonderful couplet was in my head.

O body swayed to music, O brightening chance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance.

The music stopped, the dancers dispersed to the side and there was a brisk trade in orange juice. I saw Eva on her own, a little lost among the families now the dance was over. But I would let her choose when she wished to resume her chat with me. 

The interval was prolonged and I saw our dance-master had gone over to the church piano and begun tinkering on it, a melody, another melody. And then, languidly at first, but gathering pace, I recognised the fellow was playing Percy Granger’s merry tune, “Molly On The Shore”. As he rocked back and forth in his braces and bowler hat, he was so evidently enjoying himself, and as the gusto of his playing increased, there was Eva again, mid-floor.

In the next few minutes she brought Molly and her shore to vibrant life as she found her own steps for that lovely tune.

Di-dum-di-da, didum-di-da, di-dum-di-didi-didi-dum-di–da. 

The hubbub of conversation around the hall gradually ceased as people became aware of her, and the pianist went to his playing with a new insouciance. The dance Eva invented here drew from what she had only just learned of Irish dance, quick little steps, back and forth, hands daintily lifting her skirt to give her knees more freedom, her head with its concentrated expression—almost a frown – cast left and right. She was magnificent in how she let the dance take her, and it was as if I was watching some kind of shimmer along the centuries, some genius of dance with its remote origins on the shores of North Africa, brought along the coasts of Europe to here. In the tattoo of her feet, and the interleaving of the piano, of course she seemed so very of the present moment. Yet she seemed ancient as the painted creatures a-dance on cave-walls. And by the time the pianist stopped she had the room spellbound. 

“O she’s a sweetie, that one,” said a woman beside me, as Eva, with a glance all around that was odd for its suggestion of apology, left the floor.

The dance class resumed, and Eva came over to me. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

We went out, and followed a downhill path toward the river. There was a slight drizzle and the headlights of cars created needles of light.

“I could not take my eyes off you.” I told her. 

“That was foolish of you.”

“I saw you take in three thousand years of dance in twenty minutes, then make it into something breathtaking.”

She shrugged away the compliment. Now the music and the movement had ended she seemed a little downcast. I was tempted to say I could guess why she was sometimes so fierce, but feared she would tell me to mind my own business. We came down to the Foyle Embankment and the fine rain filmed our faces. I found she had put her arm through mine.

“Why was Titus the wrong sort of Yank?” I asked.

“O, the whole thing has more to do with Beamish’s devilry than the Yank’s,” she confided. “While we waited for your poultry mate to emerge from the gents Beamish asked me if I was up to sampling the RUC interrogation techniques as a part of our political tourism. We’d dob Titus, be taken for accessories, get grilled and still be in time for the ferry.”

“That’s lunatic.”

“I told him I preferred to wander round Derry.”

“Does a rigorous grilling suit his PhD thesis topic?”

“Probably.” We stopped and gazed down at the dark Foyle waters. “He said he wanted to hear Titus plead his rights under the Second Amendment.”

“For the stir?”

“For the stir.”

“Are you very fond of him?”

“He’s a raving maniac,” she evaded.

“What will you do if the cops hang on to him?”

“I doubt they will. At Arden whenever Australian cops picked him up, he told them his dad was a TV Quiz champion and had made a mint from it. This never failed to impress them. They’d get so interested in how someone could make fast money from answering idiot questions they would forget about the charges and let Beamish go with a caution. That’s capitalist greed for you.”

“He wouldn’t get away with the thing we saw him do in Leeds.”

“True.”

“Is it a fact, about his father?”

“As it happens.” Then she turned to me and said she had better go to the police station and take charge of Beamish and the kombi. She asked me my own plans. 

I told her Henry planned to return to London to sit for an interview for some postgrad scholarship he was applying for in America, and I was going to check some of the garrisons where I had lived as a child, knock around the south west of Ireland some more, then take a ferry across to Cherbourg and meet Henry in Paris in a week. “We may not see each other for a while, you and I.”

“Well,” she hesitated, then said, “Boony!” She took my head and kissed it in various places, quite savagely. “I think I’ll drop that Lavafield stuff.” She began walking away, and as she did so, I recalled a further snatch of poetry from my undergraduate degree and called after her.

Ich am of Irlaunde,

And of the holy londe

Of Irlande.

Gode sire, pray ich thee,

For of sainte charite,

Come and daunce wit me

In Irlaunde.

“What’s that?” she paused and looked at me, puzzled.

“Some paltry,” I said.

She smiled and seemed pleased I could be a poet and go along with her put-down of poetry. “Stay safe,” she called, and disappeared into the sectarian town. 

*

When I woke in the morning Henry had already been out, and greeted me cheerfully.

“Berkeley was dean at the cathedral here! Berkeley! I’ve stood in the pulpit where he preached.” His pleasure in this discovery really was infectious, and in all the years I knew him I was always taken aback by how he could recover his mood.

“Berkeley?” 

To my shame, I needed reminding how Berkeley was the philosopher-bishop who denied the existence of the material world, prompting Samuel Johnson to kick a stone and proclaim, I disprove him thus.

“Which is Sam being too clever by half,” Henry gave his view on the old controversy. “Berkeley is taking pains to refute Locke. Locke has reduced the world to material explanation. We’ve got here the old Idealist versus Reductionist chestnut.” His face was animated, his body tensed for engagement with the topic.

“Shall we get breakfast,” I suggested.