The large, white, five-bedroom bungalow in which I was raised was sometimes called the Forge by my father, and literally no one else. This soubriquet is lovingly rendered on letters my dad sends to relatives, conferring a certain elegance of standing. The Forge could be a fancy B&B, the summer residence of a timber baron, or a stately home that’s been converted into a rehab centre for celebrity drug addicts.
It actually takes its name from its being set on a plot of land once used by a blacksmith, a fact pleasingly confirmed if you dig a hole anywhere around our garage, where you will find all manner of shrapnel, pig iron and horse shoes. The field behind the house once verged on the UK customs checkpoint, but after the demilitarisation of the border that was shut down and the land, together with the top bit of our field, was sold to build a family home for some new neighbours. My father planted trees to provide a barrier, as he did along two hundred metres stretching from the garage to the slope at the front of the house that has farmland on both sides. This second line of trees was essentially planted to keep the horse in Toland’s field from eating my dad’s flowers but, in the age of Brexit, it has now risen to the exalted position of being fully 0.04 per cent of the United Kingdom’s border with the European Union. Such a promotion might seem slightly above the paygrade of some mottled conifers and a fence you could knock over with a few harsh words. And if you ask that horse if it’s a solid barrier, he’ll tell you no. He may even do so from my dad’s flower beds, in between bites of nasturtium.
So, my family home is not merely on the border, it is a structural part of it, but none of that was of interest during my childhood because it was just my house and, for the most part, the border thing was largely irrelevant.
The land around the house is uncommonly pleasant: rolling hills, fields and open farmland pretty much as far as the eye can see. The hills in the distance are actually across the River Foyle, which itself isn’t visible from my home, although if you were to walk the short road down to Balloughry it’s so quiet you can hear the noise of the traffic as it passes along the far side. There’s wildlife here: wood pigeons, pheasant, large game birds and mid-sized raptors, along with the usual but slightly less commonly sighted owls, foxes and badgers. There are cows in the fields perhaps half the year, and a thin, scraggly electric wire separates their parish from ours where the slope meets the fence and our land terminates. The wire gives a faint electric shock that is barely painful, but enough to alarm cattle into thinking twice about ascending onto our property, and for the most part they seem to take no interest in us at all. Sometimes, however, the cows spontaneously develop some irresistible, albeit temporary, obsession with us, and congregate right at that fence. One or two mornings a year we’d throw back the living-room curtains to find forty-five cows staring with listless attention, like world-weary reporters summoned to a press conference about council tax increases.
Once or twice they’ve ventured further and have, in confused ebullience, stormed the fence and run around our house in a spiral of panic, perhaps in some thirst for the freedom of gravel and pebbledash denied to them in the field. To look out of our kitchen window and see a churning mass of dead-eyed cattle circling the house is thrilling. I’ve never forgotten my sister Caoimhe loudly screaming at me to close the door. This I did, but not before imagining – with delight – dirty-hooved cows storming into our house and running around for no reason. Thankfully/alas, this never happened, and any time they did break through the perimeter we would just ring the farmer and he’d come and apologise and I’d get to watch as he shooed them back down to their field with some uncanny authority that our own screams somehow lacked.
Where I grew up is, in short, the kind of place you might see on Grand Designs before a really annoying couple erect a black cement monstrosity their neighbours will hate, complete with arty windows made specially in Germany that arrive two months late and way over budget. The view from the back of our house is dotted with distant houses and tall windmills that look down over the north-eastern banks of the Foyle. It’s gloriously picturesque, giving the scene from our living-room window the near-perfect charm of a Windows Desktop wallpaper. As a child, of course, all of this was lost on me, since I had about as much interest in scenery as I had in BBC Parliament. When I’m back home these days I can barely keep my eyes off the landscape, stunned into slack-jawed amazement, not just at the view itself, but at the fact I lived within it for most of my childhood and didn’t give it a second thought.
Most but not all of my childhood, that is. I was once an avid agriculturalist. Aged six, a short while after my mother’s death, I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a farmer. I was in it for the machines and was besotted with tractors most of all. I had several myself, all different sizes, as if caught at different stages of their life cycle. I had very small ones that I could plot on little model farmyards of various scales, then I had slightly larger ones with moving trailers and attachments, which I could push by hand. I then had big ones, in which I could sit and pedal myself around, usually still holding a good selection of those other tractors in my lap, just in case at any point while riding round on my tractor I needed a quick reminder of just how much I loved tractors. I wore wellies, quilted gilets and flat caps while driving around pointing at things I wanted to farm. What exactly constituted farming was, to me, somewhat hazy, but I guessed it was basically riding on my tractor while saying ‘ey up’ to dogs and nudging everything I saw with the digger attachment. Long days of this grew tiring for both me and the people and things I was trying to farm out of the way, but the life of a farmer is not for the faint hearted. And so, the dog was farmed, my siblings were farmed, and any random objects that I encountered also farmed. I received tractor calendars for Christmas and would turn the pages excitedly on the first morning of every month, delighted to find whatever new model was there waiting for me. It bothered me that these calendars were invariably sold by the manufacturers themselves, and so would only show makes from said manufacturer. Brand loyalty meant less to me than variety. Craving a mix of tractors each month, I soon had a John Deere calendar and a Massey Ferguson one, hung side by side, so as to give me the broad diet I deserved.