CARRICKFERGUS I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams: Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams The little boats beneath the Norman castle, The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt; The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt. The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine, The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon; Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon. The Norman walled this town against the country To stop his ears to the yelping of the slave And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave. I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order, Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor; The Chicesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure. The war came and a huge camp of soldiers Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long; A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront: Marching at ease and singing 'Who Killed Cock Robin?' The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front. The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England -- Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train; I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar Be always rationed and that never again Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags And my governess not make bandages from moss And people not have maps above the fireplace With flags on pins moving across and across -- Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles, Flares across the night, Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans, A cage across their sight. I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents Contracted into a puppet world of sons Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines And the soldiers with their guns. -- Louis MacNeice's father was rector in Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland. MacNeice was born in Belfast, educated in England, and settled in London, where he was part of the great poetic group of the thirties with W. H. Auden.