The year of the crowning in Eden

The 'East of Eden' chronicles took an uncanny twist this week. I had just posted the last blog about Eric Glynn and myself exploring the cowboy territory around Dalway's Bawn in our Davy Crockett hats. Next stop, I thought, had to be Dobbs's Plantin - that wooded glen in the demesne of Castle Dobbs that was our Sherwood forest (with Robin Hood the role model rather than Davy Crockett). Or maybe the next port of call should be Kilroot Orange Hall (home of Kilroot True Blues LOL 1544, the Star of Eden Pipe Band and our 'juvenile' lodge). The Orange Hall was built in 1898 at the eastern end of Eden village on a plot donated by The Dobbs family of Castle Dobbs, and it sits immediately across the Copeland Water in Kilroot Parish.

So in the hunt for a suitable photo of Eden Pipe band, I stumbled on a picture - previously unknown to me - and I could hardly believe my eyes.

In 1953, on a summer Saturday at the coronation of Elizabeth II, two pipers from the Star of Eden Pipe band were preparing to lead a school parade from the front of Eden Primary School across to the Eden playing fields behind the Mission Hall. There we were, preparing to go to the celebrations Noah-style, two-by-two. First I spotted the McAllister twin girls in the front. They were in my class, and in later years became a formidable challenge to date as they were inseparable and identical. Then, beside our teacher Miss Kernoghan, there we were - Eric with the sandy hair and white shirt, and me in my Sunday shirt and jacket, heading up the boys. The memories this brought flooding back included us all getting a Coronation Mug in the 'field' and Eric winning a prize of a model 'golden' Coronation coach complete with footmen and six horses. That coach sat on display in the Glynn's house for years until they flitted to Ballyclare, and then I lost touch after they moved to Bangor, county Down.

I did bump into Eric at a big football match in Belfast when we were both in our 20s. He was wearing the scarf of the other team to mine, so I wasn't completely surprised when he turned down my offer of meeting up afterwards for a drink. "Why not?" I asked. "Well, I got saved", was his reply.

Last year I got news that Eric had died after 'a short illness'. Well, I'm glad I had that meeting in Belfast, for it was a different story back in those early days when we went to the 'Tuesday Night' meeting in the Wilson Memorial Hall in Eden and been spell-bound by the stories of the bravery of the African Missionaries. On the walk home after to Boneybefore I said to Eric, "If you got saved, would you go out thonder to die for Jesus?" He laughed and said, "Na".

I think that night was the first time I got saved myself, having backslid and gone forward again many times since. It has always bugged me a bit that I never had the flashing lights, but more a climbing, step-by-step process.

It might all be coincidence, but only a few months ago now I was talking with a friend who was in the terminal stages of cancer about this very issue. "Surely you can only get saved once", he insisted. "But if you can't give a time and a date like other folk?" I prodded, for I couldn't remember any time before those early primary-school and Mission Hall days in Eden. "It disnae matter if you can't," he said, "God minds the date".

When I look at that photo taken in 1953, I can't help thinking the Queen wasn't the only one to get a crown that year.

Dalway's Bawn and the Marshallstown cowboys

(This is the 1st of a series exploring the history of the Dalway cattle drove trail)

To find Dalways Bawn as I did as a boy, you would have to be wearing a Davy Crockett hat and be exploring the Copeland Water upstream in an attempt to find its source. The Copeland Water marks the eastern boundary of Eden village and the old medieval county of Carrickfergus. If you traced the river from Eden down towards the sea, it would take you to Swift's cottage after about 1/2 mile. But upstream, after more than a mile, another world is reached where Marshallstown, Dalways Bawn and Castle Dobbs together once defended the eastern approaches and cattle drove roads to and from Carrickfergus. If you want to reach the Bawn by road, take the main Larne Road from Carrickfergus, through Eden village and about 1/4 mile after you cross the Copeland Water, take a left turn up a road called 'Tongue Loanen'. This will take you straight past the front of Dalway's Bawn on the back road to Ballycarry.

When we first saw Dalways Bawn, we thought it looked like a wild west stockade, the sort we had seen Davy Crockett defend at the Alamo in Carrick picture-house, only this one was made of stone instead of timber. Well we weren't too far off the mark, for the scores of bawns built in the early 1600s during the Ulster Plantation were exactly that - cattle forts where the settlers could bring their cattle into when under attack from the native Irish (cattle-raids being the order of the day back then). The word 'bawn' is a corruption of the Irish bo-dun or 'cow-fort', and they were usually built with 4 corner towers as defensive 'flankers' and a dwelling house for the plantation landlord in the middle.

Dalway's Bawn was built in 1608 by John Dalway, although he had actually settled here some 30 years earlier. He first arrived in Ulster in 1573 along with Walter Devereaux, Earl of Essex, when Elizabeth's reputed 'favorite' attempted an early plantation in east Antrim. John Dalway married Jane MacBryan O'Neill a sister of the former local dynastic chief Shane MacBryan O'Neill. Their daughter Margaret Dalway then married John Dobbs, who had also come over with an Elizabethan English army in the 1590s and built the tower-house at Castle Dobbs just a few hundred yards away facing Dalways Bawn.

Both Dalways Bawn and Castle Dobbs were in Kilroot Parish - just east of the Copeland Water and the medieval County of Carrickfergus - for a very good reason. The land to the west of the river was not available for plantation as it had been in Anglo-Norman English hands since the 13th century! The 'Carrick' side of the Copeland Water at this point was - and is - known as 'Marshallstown'. In the 1600s it was held by Sir Baptist Jones, who is better known for his work as a Plantation land agent for the London Companies in Londonderry. His lease for Marshallstown showed that he also claimed a few hundred acres 'across the mearing' in Kilroot Parish. Today this is the tiny townland of 'Crossmary' between Dalways Bawn and Marshallstown.

Again, with our Davy Crockett hats on, we assumed that Marshallstown was where the 'Marshal' held out - after all Carrick had a Sheriff! Only in later years did I learn there was some truth in that too. In the 12th century an Anglo-Norman lord living in Carrickfergus was made 'Marshal' of the Earldom of Ulster. His name was Sir Roger de Copeland, and lands were set aside at the eastern end of the county by the town corporation for the support of his office. Not only was this the origin of Marshallstown, but he gave the Copeland Water its name too.

But the office of Marshall was no sinecure. The duties included securing the eastern boundaries, and controlling the cattle trade across it. Both these duties shifted to Dalways Bawn and Castle Dobbs in the 1600s when lowland Scots settlers poured into east Antrim.

And that is where the story comes down to my own family connections. My mother's family were 'Eslers' who had come over from Scotland in the 1600s as cattle and horse dealers, hill-farmers and cattle-drove 'facilitators'. It still is a fairly unusual name here and even by the 1860s, 90% of all the Eslers in Ireland lived in mid and east Antrim - on hill farms along the cattle drove routes to the port of Larne. Although I was born in Larne, our family moved near to Carrick when I was 2 years old. Recently I found a new 'branch' of these Eslers in Islandmagee, feeding the local cattle trade to Scotland from Portmuck. And then, to my amazement, I discovered a John Esler in 1860 as a tenant on a farm beside Dalways Bawn. Little did I think I was playing cowboys on the very lands where my mother's family had been acting out the real thing.

The farm on which John Esler lived at Dalways bawn belonged to an Alexander Hart, who then had lands in Crossmary and his main 'home farm' in 1860 was beside where I lived in Boneybefore. Victor and Ian Hart were at Eden Primary School with me, and I knew every field and hedge on their farm up 'Hart's Loanen'. But as that farm was not East of Eden, I'll leave that story for another day.

A postscript about the Davy Crockett hats. At Eden Primary school I sat beside Eric Glynn, who also lived beside me in Boneybefore. Eric had a kindly grannie known to us all as 'Grannie Hamilton'. Like all the old widows in those days she wore black from head to toe. But one of the kindliest acts I remember was in Eric's house playing an old 78 record with 'Davy Crockett' on one side and 'Robin Hood' on the other. Grannie Hamilton came into the room with a fox stole she had. She cut it in two and made two Davy Crockett hats for us. Eric of course got the one with the real fox's tail at the back, and I had only a fox leg with claw still attached on mine. All the same we really felt we had one up on the rest of the gang with their artificial shop-bought ones.

The original Yahoos at Kilroot

The 'Round House' in Kilroot, just a stone's throw east of Eden in county Antrim, was where Jonathan Swift is supposed to have lived when he was appointed by the established Church of Ireland to the Prebendary of Kilroot from 1695-1696.

From here he drafted his first satirical tirade against Scots and Presbyterians in his A Tale of a Tub, and where he gathered most of his ideas for Gulliver's Travels.

The problem for the young Anglo-Irishman was that when he was given his first charge after taking Holy Orders in Dublin, this Prebendary of Kilroot had only one 'working' church in the 3 parishes under his care. The parishes in question covered most of south-east Antrim, and were Kilroot, Islandmagee and Templecorran. The Templecorran church (now a ruin at Ballycarry) is the only one he is known to have attempted to hold services in. The story is told of how he found nobody at church on his first Sunday at Ballycarry, so went to the far end of the Main Street and stood like a statue until a crowd of curious inhabitants gathered round him. The he took ten giant strides forward, stopped and picked up a pebble from the street to put it in a bag, and then another ten, and so on - Pied Piper of Hamlyn style - until the crowd followed him up the churchyard and into the church. Then he bolted the door behind them and delivered his sermon. But brilliant story-teller as he was, a year later he still only had three or four Episcopalian families in as many parishes, with the remainder being almost entirely 'Scotch Dissenters' (Presbyterians).

Thus began Swift's obsession that religious and political conformity was divinely ordained - and that it was a principle more important than any detail of doctrine. A Tale of a Tub was a straight-forward satire against non-conformity. The survival of the ship of state (the state church - regardless of theology) was so important that when attacked by a whale (the devil), a tar-covered tub (non-conformist churches), had to be thrown overboard so that the whale would be diverted to play with the tub instead (and both Church and State saved). Swift wrote numerous pamphlets in support of the Religious Test Acts when they were first introduced in Ireland in 1703. These Test Acts denied Presbyterians the right to hold any public office without first taking the 'Sacramental Test' of receiving communion in the Established Church. Indeed, these Test Acts were to prove a significant stimulus for the massive migrations of Scotch-Irish to America in the early 1700s.

If A Tale of a Tub was fixated on the dissenter versus conformist debate in political and religious life, Gulliver's Travels gave vent to his other Anglo-Irish fixation: his feelings of superiority as an English 'giant' in Ireland, contrasting with his feelings of inferiority as an 'Irishman' in England. But in Gulliver's Travels, he still couldn't resist a poke at the terrible uncultured barbarians that were the bane of his life at Kilroot. 'Blefescu' that barbarian northern land was understood to be Belfast, for Wolfe Tone (leader of the United Irishmen in the 1798 rebellion) wrote "Thomas Paine's Right's of Man is now all the rage in Blefescu". Those strange people were the 'big-endians' who believed that a boiled egg should only be opened at the big end, and were blindly intolerant of those who believed otherwise. In the story, they were only to be outdone as uncouth Philistines by the Yahoos. The good folk of Kilroot knew exactly who Swift was labelling 'Yahoos'.

Now as a junior Yahoo in the 1950s, I, along with other Boney-boys, used to walk along the shore - or to be more accurate, the railway line - to Kilroot and explore the derelict 'Swift's Cottage'. No other house had rounded corners, and we were told that Dean Swift had built it like that so neither the devil nor Presbyterians could hide in the corners. I remember that the thatch was almost gone, for I could stick my head up through and gulder out at my mates in the garden - much to their shock, for they couldn't see where the noise was coming from.

The Round House was gutted by fire in 1959, and it (along with the adjacent Kilroot Railway Station) was knocked down shortly after to make way for the gigantic Kilroot Power Station. So what neither the devil nor the Presbyterians could shift, Ulster's biggest carbon-emitter could.

Eden re-visited

Sometimes going back to the the green, green grass of home is disturbing - especially if the grass has been covered in tarmac and concrete since. But unexpected reminders here and there can help you understand how much those lost ingredients shaped you way back then.

The 'bowl I was baked in' was the small village of Boneybefore in east Antrim. It had been by-passed by the new main road from Carrick to Larne, and so the world largely passed us by too. But just a short dander to the east loomed the next, slightly larger, village of Eden. Until we came into our teens, we 'Boney-boys' held Eden in awe - it had a pub, and everything else that was taboo. But it had better things too: a wide street and two-story houses (none of which were thatched), and a Post Office (with the only telephone box in the country outside).

There was a large house beside Eden Primary School with an orchard in its garden. Naturally, this was a big temptation and it became the crime scene of many a raid for apples, when lessons were done.

I went past the site recently and smiled to see that it has been re-developed for modern housing and re-named the 'Garden of Eden'.


Not only did I go to Eden Primary School on weekdays, but to the sweetie shops there on Saturdays - and even to a terrace house on the street there for my seasonal hair-cut. There was no barber's pole or sign, and the only way of knowing you were at the right house was a set of buffalo horns hanging in the porch inside the front door.

Eden Mission Hall was opposite the school, and when I was about 9 or 10 years old (in the 1950s) it was also used by the school as an overflow classroom. But from as early as I have memory of, Eden Mission Hall was also where I was taken twice on Sundays. Sunday-School was in the afternoon, and the church 'meeting' at 7 o'clock at night. I can still picture every nook and cranny, board and crack in that hall.

None of this involved any choices on my part - it's what I thought the entire human race's life experience was, and it was what everybody did as part of family life. I can't remember having any awareness that there were any other types of schooling or of churching.

But the 'Boney-boys' began to explore that outside world. I could get out of the Sunday night 'meeting' by going with five or six other escapees to a big church on Sunday morning. The 'big' church in question was a Presbyterian Church in the Scotch Quarter of Carrickfergus. It was a bit like going to a big football match when you had no real interest in, or understanding of, the sport. Six of us would squeeze into a pew in the gallery built for four. I remember little more, other than the occasional clutch of good-looking girls sitting opposite with straw hats on, and the walking there and home - about three miles round trip. In every sense (from a Boneybefore perspective), Carrick was way out west and on the other side of the world to Eden.

There were no 'big' churches in Eden, but another mission hall. It was called the 'Wilson Memorial Gospel Hall', and was a bit of a mystery. These Gospel Halls ran 'children's meetings' on a Tuesday night, and they were different. We Boney boys went there spasmodically of our own free will. Much foot-stamping choruses and sweeties thrown into whichever section of the crowd could find a bible passage first. I remember one evening there was a projector showing slides of a mission in Africa. One of the white missionaries had enormous swelling of the legs which the man said was 'ellyphantitus'. To me, then, I thought I could look across Belfast Lough from the shore at Boneybefore and see Africa on the other side. Now that I live across there in county Down, I can testify that there are no elephants spreading disease today on either side of Belfast Lough.

Running down alongside the Wilson Hall was a river at the far, eastern end of the village. This was the Copeland Water, which marked the boundary of the old medieval county of Carrickfergus. Parallel to the Copeland Water and just about 500 yards to the east, is the Kilroot River which runs from near Ballycarry, past Dalway's Bawn and Castle Dobbs (where it is known as the 'Muttonburn Stream') and out to the sea near the old house Dean Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels) is supposed to have lived.

East of Eden was a different country, as the folk song 'The Muttonburn Stream' hints.

CLIMBING DOWN FROM THE OLD ORANGE TREE

So the Old Orange Tree was published last year by the Ullans Press - with a change to the cover design as previously posted. This consisted of giving Eve a new tress of hair to satisfy the publisher's sensitivities! A bit daft methinks, as the original folk-art is from the banner of my brother's 'Black' preceptory in Carrickfergus - and it gets an annual public airing in the streets of respectable east Antrim towns without having had a single word of complaint in the past 200 years.

See USLS website for details: www.ulsterscotslanguage.com (that is for details of the book - not the 'Black' parades).

Well, what now? And apologies for the long silence! A 'wee scare' as we like to refer to cancer, followed by a 'wee procedure' (or rather two of them), are the reasons for my intervening silence. But now, with that and the subsequent treatment behind me for the time being, it is time to climb down from the Old Orange Tree and move on.

But to where?

Forthcoming: The Old Orange Tree (Preview, Ch. 1)

THE OLD ORANGE TREE

by

Philip Robinson

'Young Samuel Hamilton came from the north of Ireland and so did his wife. He was he son of small farmers, neither rich nor poor, who had lived on one landhold for many hundreds of years . Samuel and Liza Hamilton got all of their children raised and well towards adulthood before the turn of the century ... Samuel sunk well after well and could not find water on his own land.
'I'll dig your wells for you if I have to drive my rig to the black center of the earth. I'll squeeze water out like the juice of an orange.'

John Steinbeck: East of Eden, 1952.

Chapter 1: Next Stop China

‘The world’, said Esther Hamilton to her two youngest children, ‘isnae perfect roon, but mair the shape o’ an orange’. She held the treat in her hand up in front of their faces, knowing that a child always learns best when waiting like a clever pup for its reward. Still holding the orange up like a floating planet above the heads of her captivated audience, she produced a knitting needle from the knife box on the wall and plunged it through. ‘An’ if yer granda dug a wal, an’ kep’ on diggin’, - he would come oot the ither side o’ the world, like that!’

‘Naw if he dug himsel intae hell first’, said Samuel innocently.

‘Well, that’s enough o’ that’, said Esther, reaching again into the knife box for a sharp knife to cut the orange in two halves. Samuel’s sharp eyes picked out the bigger half, but his mother was ahead of him. She handed the big bit to Elsie and the other to Samuel.

‘What do you say, Samuel?’ she said, pulling it back out of his grabbing reach.

‘The world’, Samuel said, ‘is ill divid’.

On the other side of the world, Samuel Hamilton was to dig many a well in what became known as Steinbeck country, east of California’s Monterey, before he became a granda himself. That was all a hundred years or so back, but there are still traces of them (wells and Hamilton descendants), if you know where to look. One such well survives today in a long valley plain between the north Californian mountains ranges, its digger and its Scotch-Irish connections no longer minded. Without this well there would have been nothing built for three miles along the road into the nearest oasis town of Orange Grove. As it is, the only legacy is a shack in such bad repair that a single blow from a repairing hammer might easily flatten the lot, along with a stunted tree which at daybreak boasts a cock and roosts some chickens, and between and around them a scattering of clutter as a warning that the site isn’t completely abandoned.

The King homestead was in no imminent danger of repair, for Joseph King and his son Joel were a perfect match for each other and the shack. But they were out early this Monday morning from first light. They had settled back down from the exertions of getting out of their stinking warm beds into a roadside hut made of old fruit packing cases, waiting for any swirl of dust that might signal passing trade. Their only apparent source of income was a roadside fruit stall. The only apparent source of fruit was an old arthritic orange tree crouching motionless by the well.

A pick-up truck with dirt-covered writing on its side pulled off the road opposite and swung round to face back into Orange Grove. Nobody stirred from the shelter or from the truck until the dust settled. Then a tall man in rough working denims and clean, short-sleeved shirt jumped down from the driver’s seat, using the door as a swing and leaving it open behind him in the swelling heat. He walked over towards the house as if he owned the place. But he was too clean and full of purpose to look like he belonged. In the still rising heat, there wasn’t even a creak from the joints of the tree. A hen scraiched down from its branches and another ran out from under a make-shift nest box that had a car door for a roof.

‘She’ll be out in a minute’, a voice snarled from inside the roadside shelter, back near the fruit stall. Joseph King emerged from its shade and stood as a wolf might eye its prey, waiting for the man to come back towards him.

‘Eggs?’

Pat Mahood spoke with the confidence of a man that knew no fear. He could be just as curt and as hard as the next man. Joseph turned back and his son’s hand reached out a light brown re-used paper bag. ‘Four’, he replied without offering Pat the bag.

‘Gimme the lot, an’ three oranges’.

‘A dollar fifty’.

It was a ritual dance, for the both men knew that the last thing Pat Mahood needed to do was to drive out of Orange Grove to buy oranges, or fruit of any kind. And they both knew that none of the fruit on Joseph King’s stall came from the tree at the well. This exchange was a daily run out for Pat as he called for what he said was his mother’s crazy notion of fresh eggs. He put the bag in the truck and reached out another identical brown bag with the week-end’s unused bread in it. ‘For the hens’, he muttered as he handed it over to Joseph’s ungrateful snatch. They both knew the hens would probably be lucky to get even a few crusts, but the bread had to be treated as if it was waste. Joseph could only take it if it didn’t look like a hand-out, and he was doing the pest a favour even accepting it. And it had to be offered by Pat only after his money had been handed over for the eggs.

Anna came out from the house once she saw the transactions were complete. She was barely eighteen, but was rapidly becoming the double of her Mexican mother, just like she had looked when she died at the age of twenty seven. Pat didn’t acknowledge Anna when the young girl ran past behind him towards the truck with her head down.

‘Mind you an’ get back ‘fore six, Miss’, barked Joseph at his daughter as she climbed into the passenger seat. ‘Yes sir’, she said, keeping her head down.

Joseph spat crudely near Pat’s feet to remind him whose territory he was on. Pat ignored it, on the outside at least, and smiled as he nodded towards the shelter. ‘Joel want a ride into town too?’

‘Wanna hitch a ride into town, boy?’ Joseph said over is shoulder.

‘Naw’.

Joseph smiled scornfully out of one side of his mouth to register a small victory. Pat smiled back, shrugged his shoulders and left without a ‘thank-you’, a wave or a ‘have a nice day’ from either party.

Arriving at East of Eden

In the beginning, Steinbeck used 'The Salinas Valley' as the working title of East of Eden when he began to write it (simply 'S.V.' in his notes and letters to his friend and editor, Pascal Covici). His later idea of calling it 'Cain's Sign' was short-lived, but the reason he wanted a Biblical reference to Genesis in the title was fundamental to the story.

So the name of the book became a subject of correspondence with his editor "... you must know that I am stating my thesis and laying it out. And I am glad that I can use the oldest story in the world to be the design of the newest story for me".

Steinbeck said that this Genesis story was "the basis of all human neurosis - and if you take the fall along with it, you have the total of all the psychic troubles that can happen to a human".

When he wrote down the 16 verses of the story of Cain and Abel in his own hand, the title came to him along with a clearer vision of what he wanted to say.

"The story changes with flashing lights when you write it down. And I think I have a title at last, a beautiful title, EAST OF EDEN. And read the 16th verse to find it. And the Salinas Valley is surely East of Eden."

The next day the question was still burning on Steinbeck's mind:

"I have finally I think found the key to the story. The only one that has ever satisfied me ... my analysis which is going in [to the draft book] today should interest you. It should interest scholars and it should interest psychiatrists.

... The reader I want will find the whole book illuminated by the discussion: just as I am.
And if this were just a discussion of Biblical lore, I would throw it out but it is not. It is using the Biblical story as a measure of ourselves."

So East of Eden as a title was born, and the central metaphor of the story blossomed with a new life.