Changing Winds

Unionist neighbours who, so he said, were far more loyal to England than England quite liked. He hated the English accent ... "fin

uage, but they haven't the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his o

y when people charged him with being a Home Ruler. The motive of his Unionism, however, was neither loyalty to England nor terror of Rome: it was wholly and unashamedly a matter of commerce. "The English bled us for centuries," he would say, "an' it's only fair we should bleed them. We've got our teeth in their skins, an' they're shellin' ou

this civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more se

ing himself, "we all know what the

. He had questioned Henry on the history and geography of Ireland one day, and had found to his horror that while Henry could tell him exactly where Popocatepetl was to be found, and knew that Mount Everest was 29,002 feet high, and could name the kings of England and the dates of their accession as easily as he could recite the Lord's

atepetl," Mr. Quinn shouted at him, "when you do

est mountain in the world; and so he descended upon the master of the school, a dreepy individual with a tendency to lament the errors of Rome, and damned him from tip to toe so effectually that the alarmed

Cockney," he said to his son as he bade go

olidays, Mr. Quinn would spen

ntrol of the English language. "If you were to listen to an Englishman talkin' on the telephone, you'd hear him yelpin'

"Are you there, fa

ing rs. "Always sound your rs whatever you do. I'll not own you if you come h

, fa

you on the hs. Are you as steady on the

would say, "they don't all drop their hs.

d become money-grubbers. "The English," he said, lying back in his chair and delivering his sentences as if he were a monarch pronouncing decrees, "ceased to be gentlemen on the day that Hargreaves invented the spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He s

r his father, replacing the oracular banter with which he ha

d, "you aren't agains

m of his chair with his fist. "I'd smash every

r. I mean, what would

fore. He sat forward, gazing intently at his son, and spoke with a curious passion such as Henry had never heard him use before. "Look here, Henry!" he said, "there was a girl in the village once called Lizzie McCamley ... a fine bit of a girl, too, big and strong, an' full of fun, an' she got tired of the village. Her father was a labourer, an' all she could see in front of her was the life of a labourer's wife. Well, it isn't much of a life, that, an' Lizzie's mothe

hy, fa

izzie McCamley left this village ... left work in the fields there to go up to Belfast an' work in that for ten shillin's a week! An' that's what people calls progress! I wish you could see her now-half rotten with disease, her that was the healthiest girl in the place before she went away. She's always sick, that girl, an' she can't eat anythin' unless her appetite is stimulated with stuff like pickles. She's an?mic an' debilitated, an' the last tim

nd that he was being infected by his father's passion. But he had been taught at Rumpell's to believe in Invention, i

ur notion of progress, Henry! Makin

of course n

he said, and they walked across the room together. "Look out there," he said, pointing towa

e fields of corn and clover and the pastures where the silken-s

dly. "You can do without machines in the