The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty

to think, things I did now that I couldn’t do before.

      I hadn’t noticed before how different Ben’s way of thinking about life was from George’s. I wondered if I would have noticed the difference had I not been sitting in the sun, in an abandoned quarry, over two hundred miles away from the low, red brick wall where I’d bumped into the two of them on a bright, spring morning that now seemed a very long time ago.

       Chapter 5

      ‘Hallo, Elizabeth, I heerd you was here. Will ye come with me to the dense tonight? Me cousin Brendan has the van from his work an’ he says there’s room for wan more.’

      As I stepped through the door of the cottage, a red-haired girl of about my own age hailed me cheerfully.

      ‘Ah, shure do, Elizabeth, do,’ urged Mary. ‘Go to the dense with Bridget. ’Twill be company for her and it’ll do you good. Ye can’t be working all the time. There’ll be a great crowd.’

      ‘The dense is great gas, Elizabeth,’ Bridget went on, tossing her short, coppery curls. ‘Isn’t the band down all the way from Belfast itself. They must have knowed you were here!’

      It was a long time since I’d been to a dance without George, I was tired and I couldn’t think what I’d wear, but because I liked her immediately, I let Bridget persuade me. There weren’t many people I knew who’d walk two miles to offer a complete stranger a lift to a dance.

      When Brendan’s van started bumping its way round a huge, crowded car park full of buses and minibuses, cars and taxis, vans, tractors, motorcycles and bicycles, I could hardly believe that the long, low building ahead of us was a ballroom. With its rusting corrugated roof and boarded up windows it looked more like a warehouse or a battery chicken unit. Its breeze-block walls were plastered with the tattered remains of posters and flourishing nettles sprang from its concrete base but as I peered out into the darkness I saw a long line of people queueing up at its entrance and a tail-back of vehicles spilling out into the road behind us.

      It was some time before we got inside. Only one half of the building’s double doors was open and once over the threshold the four large men who were supervising the payment of seven and sixpences created a further bottleneck. Beyond them a wide, empty corridor led to the darkened ballroom itself. We were greeted by a solid line of backs.

      ‘’Tis the season,’ Bridget explained, as we struggled through the press of bodies towards the dance floor. ‘They come from all over in the season. And there’s visitors forby.’

      I felt a touch on my shoulder. Bridget winked at me and as I turned round, a young man asked me to dance. He put his arm firmly round me and energetically shouldered our way to the dance floor.

      Despite the noise of the band and the speed of the quickstep, he asked me where I came from, what I was doing here, and whether I liked farming. Then, I danced with a farmer from near Ennis. He too asked me where I came from, what I was doing here, and whether I liked farming.

      A few more partners and I was able to predict the questions. What was more I heard the odd snatch of other conversations. The same thing was going on all around me.

      About eleven o’clock, I looked around for Bridget and couldn’t see her anywhere. Probably Danny had arrived and they were settled in the back of Brendan’s van for a while. No matter. As long as they turned up to take me home, I could look after myself. I manoeuvred my way towards the back of the hall and plumped down gratefully on the narrow bench next to an emergency exit, firmly locked and barred against gatecrashers. I wiggled my aching feet inside my high-heeled sandals and looked about me.

      The dancers divided into two camps, women on one side, men on the other. Up by the stage, their ranks were six or seven deep. Down here, beyond the range of the beacon that bathed the dancers with alternate garish hues, they thinned out into a single line. On the men’s side there was an intense scrutiny of the opposite camp. The women’s scrutiny was just as intense, but they covered it by talking to each other and feigned indifference. Their eyes moved around just as much.

      As the band started up again the dark wall of suits crumbled at its edge. The women held their ground as if nothing were happening and looked surprised or even bored as they were led onto the floor.

      From time to time, a couple detached themselves from the moving mass of dancers and came and stood only a little way from where I sat. Not romantic encounters these. No affectionate gestures, not even the touch of hands. The faces were far too intent for it to be any kind of chatting up that was going on. I watched cautiously and saw that as each dance ended, the couples who’d been engaged face to face would either return to the dance floor together, or turn their backs on each other and rejoin their respective camps.

      ‘Ah, sure many’s the bottle of whiskey I’ve had, Elizabeth, for the making of a match. But sure, nowadays, the young people see to it themselves and save the expense of a matchmaker, more’s the pity.’

      Paddy had talked at length about the custom of matchmaking. I’d listened to every word, intrigued and fascinated by what he’d said. What I hadn’t expected was to see it actually going on around me.

      ‘I think the hardest match atall is when the family has no money and the daughter is ill-favoured forby. There’s a lot of work and if no good comes of it the matchmaker gets the blame from both sides,’ he’d said ruefully. ‘Another hard one is when there’s a love match. The boy and girl have their minds set on each other but maybe one of the families is hoping to gain by the match and they think they’re losing a great opportunity.’

      What was clear to me from all Paddy had said was how good he was at the job and how much he enjoyed it.

      ‘Ah well,’ he reminded me, his eyes twinkling. ‘There’s a lot of grand eating and drinking at the expense of both sides while the negotiations are going on. An’ many’s the bottle of whiskey I’ve had if it came out right.’

      Some of the women I could see were as young as fifteen or sixteen, others were years older than I was and some few were in their thirties. Small and fragile, large and matronly, warm and homely, large-boned and gingery, they were dressed in a variety of ways, everything from the latest fashion in bridesmaid’s dresses to T-shirts and jeans.

      I wriggled uncomfortably on the hard bench. It was one thing reading up the marriage customs of the Nootka or the Inuit and quite another to observe the customs in action. It didn’t look to me as if ‘love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage’ as the song would have it.

      Whatever I might like to think about how people behaved in 1960, the evidence was that out on that crowded floor young men were looking for a woman who would cook and clean for them, help with the farmwork and bear sons to carry on the work on the land as they themselves grew older.

      ‘And the women? What about the women?’ I said quietly to myself.

      It looked as if they were just as hard-headed as the men. They had to be. What they wanted was a man to give them a place of their own, children and their status as a married woman. Until they acquired that status, be they fifteen or fifty, they would still be a ‘girl’. And a ‘girl’ had no rights. She was someone who stayed at home, had no life of her own, did always what others told her to do, someone who could end up spending her whole life looking after aged parents or unmarried brothers.

      Suddenly, I thought of my own Aunt Minnie, my mother’s youngest sister, a tiny wisp of a woman married to a large, loud-mouthed man I’d never managed to like. Uncle Charlie was a greaser in the ropeworks, his hobbies were drinking, betting on greyhounds and sitting in front of the television in his vest. He and Minnie didn’t get on. Often, they didn’t speak to each other for days and when they did, it was only to complain.

      ‘Yer Uncle Charlie’s a dead loss,’ she would say to me, shaking her head, when I went over to visit her in Short Strand. ‘Yer grandfether warned me. “Minnie,” he sez, “if ye marry thon pahel of a man ye’ll have neither in ye nor on