The Yard

The Yard

Synopsis

Wilson John Haire entered the Belfast shipyard as an office boy at fourteen. Brought up mainly in rural areas, he was suddenly thrown into the world's biggest shipyard, a huge cauldron of twisted metal, great baulks of timber, the freezing sea, death and terrible injuries, where the day-to-day philosophy was fatalism. At sixteen he became an apprentice joiner, working with men who had been born in the nineteenth century and had worked on building the Titanic, had fought in the 1914-18 war and were still working after the Second World War. The rural world he continued living in while working at the yard was one of unimaginable cruelty towards human beings and animals. He writes of witnessing this brutality as a child and thinking of himself as not being cruel and brutal enough. Despite the hardship and conflict that are so vividly evoked, there is laughter and people's spirits are lifted in the most unexpected circumstances. He leaves the shipyard to become a bouncer, and experiences the contrast between life in the yard and the make-believe world of the ballroom, while at the same time encountering the first terrible pain of rejected love. This remarkable book memorably evokes several worlds which lie only miles apart; strongly realist, yet trembling on the edge of fantasy,. The Yard is unusually haunting and compelling fiction.

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