"None of them live here," they said, "Nobody along this road wants them. They can march around their own part of town, but they will never walk over us again." Look at what happened last year, says Evelyn White - a taxi driver shot dead by loyalist vigilantes and a lad crushed under the wheels of a Saracen when security moved in to open the road That's why they are here today. "They hate us," said a women named Eileen, whose beleaguered house was visible in the middle distance. "All terror and intimidation comes from the other side, we are the victims of our enemy's evil."As for the Orange march, the women sentries were having none of it. Just a month ago, a young Catholic lad was kicked to death by loyalist thugs on the High Street. A mother of nine and a staunch nationalist, Mrs White is treasurer of the Garvaghy Coalition orchestrating resistance to the march.
She and a band of young nationalist mothers had been holding a 24-hour vigil since mid-week, regaling visiting journalists with cups of tea and their side of the story.In Portadown Catholics live in fear, they said. Every flight out of Belfast was booked, reported the Portadown Times under the headline "Last minute scramble for foreign holidays". Those who stayed were said to be barricading themselves in their homes with enough groceries to survive a siege.Mrs Evelyn White on the other hand, was camping out on a grassy knoll alongside the Garvaghy Road parade route. There's black and there's white but there is a great huge blank area in this town. I'd say 80 per cent of us don't want trouble."He was a Catholic, it turned out, but that was the general consensus - a vast majority holding their breath and wishing it would all go away, while a minority on either side plotted violence, and the middle class ran away. He smiled and offered to guide me, "Don't ask me what's going on," he said "I've been here all my life and I still have no idea I'll tell you one thing, though. And now they want us to back down completely." Such a humiliation would be too much to bear, he said, especially with the whole world watching.Later, I stopped a man on the street and asked for directions.
"They said it was triumphalism they didn't like, so we said we will march in silence. They said we would turn it into a political circus so we said fine, it shall only be us locals - no Paisley, no Trimble, no politicians. The chap next to me snorted into his beer: "It's we who must show flexibility? Fuck you, madam." He went on to detail the concessions the Orangemen had offered already. The grand masters of the Orange Order were showing flexibility, she said, but their followers in Portadown were being difficult. Meanwhile, the nationalists appeared to be winning the war of perception, judging by the bar-room reaction to Ms Mowlam's appearance on TV on Friday evening. Everybody was "praying for peace" and calling for compromise, but nobody was willing to do the necessary. Talks were under way, but appeared to be floundering on the rocks of sociobiological imperatives.
There is nothing we can do to defend ourselves."Worse is to come, by the look of things. Convoys of Saracens were moving into Portadown, police setting up check-points and machine-gun emplacements. They sit on that wee rise in the park and put their fingers up and shout 'F- this' and 'B-that' And we are all senior citizens in this row. After last summer's Drumcree fiasco, the last Protestant pulled out from the far side of the park, and Mrs Smith and her neighbours found themselves on the front line."I was watering my flowers one day when a crowd started shouting 'Orange bastards, we'll break your windows and burn you out.' These were young fellows of 18 to 20." How often was there trouble? "Och, every day. Protestants began to leave the area, some pushed out by marching seasons and petrol-bombers.
Like most Northern Irish, Mrs Smith has local memories of "lovely neighbours" who got along well until the troubles took a turn for the worst in the Eighties. Aged 74, she moved into her house eight years ago, at a time when Whitten Close and surrounding streets were entirely Protestant, and the nearest Catholics were about 500 yards up the Garvaghy Road. Either way, trouble seems inevitable, with the security forces of Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State, likely to be consumed by violence whatever she decides.As for Mrs Smith, she is beyond caring; she has been living in a virtual war-zone for almost a year. It had also erected a 15ft fence three weeks ago to shield her from the war-like tribe on the far side of the park. This was the border now. Mrs Smith has never heard of Professor Wilson but she would not contest his speculative conclusion: "Our species is hard-wired to co-operate with our own kind and show hostility towards 'the others'." Whatever you think of sociobiology, that is possibly the only explanation for life on Whitten Close, 50 yards off the route of the Orange Order parade that threatens to plunge Ulster into a tribalistic dog-fight this morning.As I write, hard-line loyalists are threatening to tear the province apart if the march is banned, while hard-line nationalists natter about uncontrollable rioting if the Orangemen's right to march is enforced at gunpoint. There was a Tennants lager bottle and shards of several others that had broken on impact.