Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Personally Speaking: The Comfort Zone Has GoneAuthor(s): Jane ThompsonSource: Fortnight, No. 380 (Sep., 1999), pp. 15-16Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25559746 .

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It's all Sunday best and hair

cropped yesterday

The comfort zone has gone An so many ways, it's like the Twelfths of our child

hoods, the way today's reality and the thirty-year-old memories synchronize?the

same hot, hot sunshine

making the tar melt on the road and stick to your

shoes, the same acres of white, female flab against

pastel blouses exposed in the sudden heat and red

dening into tonight's blisters, their owners eternally and inexorably surprised that they 'caught so much

sun'.

They need to be here, these women; try beating them away from supporting their menfolk on the

Twelfth. It's as natural as breathing. They're better

armed these days, though; they think of bringing

things like neat little fold-up chairs and cool-bags stuffed with sandwiches and drinks for the army of

irascible toddlers trailing in their wake. On a day like

this, if you're going to indoctrinate your children, the

process has got to be comfortable, or at least civilised.

That's O.K. for the mums and the grannies, but

where are all the babes in this colourful, ritualised

scenario? Where are all the twenty-somethings with

their pierced navels and to-die-for torsos?

In truth, there aren't many, and those that are

there are marching with the boys, oblivious of the

opprobrium meted out by the respectable thou

sands who refer to them as 'millies' and, therefore,

little better than whores.

Mosdy, they'rejustyoung, impressionable girls, desper ate for the attention of some skinny, terrified youth who

likes to give the impression that he's a real hard-nut,

who'd blow you away as quick as he'd look at you.

When you look closely, as they preen past, you can

see that they're not real, dyed-in-the-wool babes

anyway. They've had their ears pierced too many

times and they've been trying to wear cheap earrings

for months, while their reddened, fibrosed skin

screams: T need the genuine article if you want me

to heal. I need real gold or silver'. These girls can't

afford that. They're struggling, for the most part, on

part-time jobs or

trying to get through the last miser

able years of school, or else they're on Income

Support because they're qualified for nothing and

can' t see the point anyway. All they have is their looks

and they're doing a hatchetjob

on those, with make

up so thick, it looks as though they'll need a blow

torch to remove it, and hair so stripped of natural

pigmentation that you hope, sincerely, that you

don't ever meet them when they're forty. You won't see any Jimmy Choo shoes here either.

It's all Barratt's best and as high as you can go

without breaking your ankle, and still be able to walk.

It's one of today's main challenges in fact; the whole

business of trying to get the balance right between

keeping your shoulders back so you don't look as

though your Wonderbra has let you down badly, and

managing to put one foot past the other without

leaning as far forward as your shoes will throw you.

It's important, this, because you never know who

sees you in the massed crowds, even though you

mightn't see them.

It's easy to see why the middle classes, largely, leave

this festival to its own devices, for this is a very un-hip

Jane Thompson casts a

psychotherapist's eye over the stand-off

between Orangemen and the middle classes

SEPTEMBER 1999 FORTNIGHT 15

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day indeed. You could even hazard an educated

guess that the majority of the people here would say that they liked Country and Western music and not

be embarrassed to admit it.

There's a sticky little problem here, though, be

cause it would be very convenient for those who want

to disassociate themselves from this to be able to

regard everyone who supports the Orange Order as

uneducated, working class rabble, whose poverty limits their vision, and who, if they could extricate

themselves from their circumstances, would become

enlightened and reject it. Like them.

But it's not the case. Because this isn't about

wealth or the lack of it. It isn't even about intelli

gence. The Orange Order has its fair share of both.

This goes much deeper, to the realms of what a

person believes they are and what they are not, to the

soul of the individual. And herein, lies the greatest

paradox of all, and one that cuts cruelly on both

sides. For the contemptuous middle classes, the

Orangemen are a constant reminder of their own

alienation from the security of fundamental reli

gious belief, as they bathe their angst-ridden souls in

the material, or endure the pain of constant ques

tioning, envying the comfort of perceived certainty of identity in the Orangemen and, therefore wish

ing, unconsciously, to destroy what they do not

possess. So they criticise, pour scorn or simply ig nore. Anything to avoid confronting their own emp

tiness.

For the Orangemen themselves, the comfort zone

has gone, evaporated like the illusion it was anyway.

It means little to them that others perceive them as

secure, entrenched even, in the position they choose

to defend, for that is not how they feel anymore.

Verbal attacks rain down on them like missiles, not

only from the obvious enemy, but from their own

sort who once tolerated and sometimes quietly sup

ported them and, worst of all, even from within the

Order itself. This is no longer the temple of compla cent brotherhood of thirty or forty years ago, where

the most demanding issue of the day was whether big Desi could put his money where his mouth was and

carry the Lambeg drum on his own for the whole

parade with the sweat lashing off his huge, red face

and his belly nearly as big as the drum itself. Those

days are gone forever for these men, for this is front

line stuff now. This is newsworthy, especially if it falls

apart at the seams. And that makes the Orange

Order a pretty uncomfortable place to be.

You can almost smell the confusion as they

pour into this dry, shadeless field, to sit for the

next three hours eating rubbery ham sandwiches

and drinking the tea pressed on them by aged, fat

hands, while they smilingly acknowledge that 'it's

a great day for it altogether' and inwardly curse

the pitiless sun, knowing that they have to turn

round and do it all again before tea-time. This

could easily be your worst nightmare, if it wasn't

the Twelfth.

And so, on they come in their hundreds, rank

upon rank of men and boys and bands. So many,

many faces, so very many stories. There, in the lean,

tough features of the young ones lies the swaggering,

macho face of one part of Ulster's future; bravado

and beer sit easily together in one glass for these

chaps and you can brazen almost anything out when

you're nineteen and you've got all your mates round

you. Angst is for wimps.

Angst is certainly for the ones in their thirties and

forties. They wear it like crowns of thorns, especially the ones with intelligent faces. These are the men

with goodjobs, with families and responsibilities and

futures to think of. These are the ones who joined up with this as children at the age of six or seven,

carrying the strings of the banner, little hearts beat

ing with pride at being allowed to walk with the men.

They didn't think about what all this meant, what is

symbolised or why they were in it. They just enjoyed

it, year after year. It was what you did on the Twelfth

ofjuly, like everybody else. Anyway, you could always leave it if you wanted to. And when you got into

university and the world of work, you sometimes did

want to leave it, but you found that it had grown

round you like ivy on a tree. Its roots were your roots

and you couldn't find the end of either. So here you

are, in this invidious position, guilty as sin because

primitive and feral is stirred within you when you hear those Lambeg drums, something that you

wouldn't dare admit to your Catholic friends on a

Friday night in Belfast, but despising all of this too,

for its homespun tackiness, its parochiality and its

hypocritical respectability. And then, finally come the older men, the ones for

whom the pity and the contempt can be felt almost

exquisitely. There are some, it must be said, who

manage still to retain that jaunty, out-for-the-day air

of the old-style Orangeman, peering merrily at the

crowds for people they know, so that they can wave

at them as though they haven' t seen them for months.

A lot of these men are farmers; you can tell from

their ruddy complexions and the way they're turned

out. It's all Sunday best and hair cropped yesterday. So many of these good natured faces have a slightly dazed look now. It's as though someone has stepped out of the hedge and hit them with a frying pan and

they're trying to pretend it didn't happen because

they don't want to believe that it did. Maybe this is

the expression you're left with when something that

you've been part of all your life is not only attacked,

but is shown up as rather less wholesome than you'd

always assumed it was. That's part of the problem for

these old guys. There's no room for assumptions

anymore; you have to actually start thinking things

through now, and with a modicum of intelligence

too, or this brat pack of rebels and media boys will be

ready to cut you to shreds and eat you for dinner.

Some of these passing faces have accepted that,

but there's no joy in the acceptance. The old Protes

tant jaws are grim, determined and set. They're

ready, at the age of seventy, to do whatever is needed

to save their beloved province. Doomsday was always a dark promise, waiting in the wings.

It is possible to feel very sorry indeed for these

ordinary people, these decent individuals who never

asked to be born into this, but since they were, are,

for the most part, only asking to be allowed to

practice this ritual peacefully. It's just that, occasionally, as a whistle blows two or

three times to signal the end of a tune in one of the

bands, you wish, you really, really wish, that they'd break into a samba rhythm. 4

16 Fortnight September 1999

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