Adventures in Belfast: Northern Irish Life After the Peace Agreement by Ryan Caroline Oceana

Author:Ryan, Caroline Oceana [Ryan, Caroline Oceana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ascension Times Publishing
Published: 2014-02-03T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

The Rising of the Moon

The truth is the cloaths of friends and foes are soe much alike.

- From a letter quoting King William of Orange as he tried to prevent a revolt by his local army, Battle of the Boyne, July 1690[45]

Visiting Jamie for a few days before I left Ireland again in March 2004, I saw a baby bull being born. We’d gone down to the farm for dinner and found his mum and dad in the small “maternity ward” cattle house with a cow who was having a rough birth.

The calf stuck first one hoof out of the womb, then his nose. Jamie and his dad then pushed the head back in so they could grab two legs and then the head, and “pull him out that road.” Jamie used a sort of two-bar clamp that isolates the calf, pushing it further out of the womb. A tougher situation, he’d told me once, was isolating what hoof belonged to whom in a ewe’s multiple birth, as lambs usually come in twos and threes. You had to stick your arm in and figure out which legs belonged to which lamb before pulling the babies out one at a time.

I stood on a bale of hay and held up the IV bottle of magnesium while Jamie and his dad pulled the calf out once his head was out far enough to do so. Once the bundle was out of the womb, the cow, panting and wide-eyed, licked her baby clean. At one point as both mother and baby were crying out, animals in the nearby fields and cattle houses called out in the same way. I asked Jamie about this.

“They’re speakin’ their language,” he smiled.

As it was spring, there were births all over. The night before I’d held a wee lamb, after some chasing.

“Run after it quicklike!” Jamie called out, as the lambs scurried away from me, retreating to their safe haven by the side of his house. I petted the thick wool of the lamb’s fleece while its mother glared at me with a Northern threat in her eye, ordering me to put the baby down with her loud baying. They had to be kept near the house, and fenced in, “or else the foxes get ’em.” I was frightened for them when I heard this.

“That’s life,” Jamie shrugged.

Things had somehow fallen into place between Jamie and me. Without my having to actually come out and say so, he had understood and accepted that we were only friends now, though I knew that for him that didn’t mean the romance was over. I had assumed he’d be hurt and not want to see me any more if I told him that I was in a place now where I didn’t want to be a girlfriend any more than I wanted to be a wife. As with many men, the desire for freedom and the desire for security ran neck and neck with him, but happily in this case, freedom won by a few lengths.

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