Mountains, Christians and Sheep

All about growing up in Dungiven in Northern Ireland. Six years old  and prepared to take on anyone - where did she go to, that kid?  I have grown more cautious over the years and have begun to realise how little I know.  That is surely progress?

Mountains, Christians and Sheep

When my family came back to N. Ireland from Australia, I was only six, but had already acquired a strong Australian accent. My parents claim that I went off to play in our village, Dungiven and came back the same day with a Derry accent. It wasn’t the only thing I did on that first day in N.I. I also fought every girl on the street. Okay, I lost a few fights but overall I had felt good about the whole day. One had to settle in and it was best to test out one’s environment, early on. After all the pushing and sizing up had ended, one girl asked me, ‘Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?’ Hedging carefully so as not to appear stupid, I said, ‘which are you?’ She said she was Catholic and then persisted ‘What are you?’ Genuinely confused, I asked what a Catholic was. It was a religion, I was told. This I understood, and answered the original question, relieved at last to know the answer, ‘I’m a Christian’. This was met with much mirth. The girls who gathered around said that they were Christians too. I pointed out that they had said they were Catholic not Christian. It was then carefully explained that Catholics and Protestants were both Christian. This was news indeed, to me. I’d never heard of Catholics and Protestants and yet gathered that this matter was of considerable importance here, for some reason.

Later I asked my Father about it and he seemed very weary as he explained it all. From that day I understood about Catholics and Protestants. I lost my accent and discovered I was a Protestant. At that age you wanted to know such things; not knowing seemed much too vulnerable. As I grew up in Dungiven, I never felt a real Protestant. We never joined the young farmers club or the parades on the twelfth of July. Daddy seemed to have left all that stuff behind him when he emigrated, and didn’t really want to pick it up when he came home. He certainly didn’t seem to want to hand it all on to us kids and although we always felt outsiders to both sides of the community, it also gave us a funny sense of freedom as well. Religion isn’t about prejudices, or practices even, it’s about finding God. I remember every Sunday we would discuss religion at home. My eldest brother refused to go to church. He said God was a bit like climbing a mountain. There were loads of ways up, but the less things you tried to take with you, the quicker you got there. In his view joining a bunch of fellow climbers, i.e., a church, was fatal as instead of keeping your eye on the peak you kept noticing if you were higher or lower than those with you. Even worse, he said, was the way in which you could actually be lost, but follow sheep-like the flock for security. I liked the way he looked at things, thought things out, and the fact that he disagreed with everyone else on principle! When you are an outsider you can afford to be different and disagree; it’s one of the pluses. In a culture where everyone has a tendency to worry about what everyone else thinks of them, being out of it gives you an immense feeling of lightness. It’s as if everyone is carrying a load and each is checking everyone else’s load to see which side they are on. When you decide to chuck your load away, it’s such a relief. You see, thirty years on, I think when I was six I gave the right answer to that original question, but its taken a long time for me to realise it.