Guest Author: Sharon Owens

Sharon Owens's debut novel, The Tea House on Mulberry Street, was a bestseller in her native Northern Ireland, and she soon landed an international publishing deal with Penguin Putnam that will bring two of her books to the United States in 2005. As an added incentive to readers, Putnam is releasing Tea House and its followup, The Ballroom on Magnolia Street, as $15 hardcovers. (If you're wondering whether you might like Owens, three of the blurbs on the dust jacket mention Maeve Binchy, with one adding Joanna Trollope into the mix, and Cecelia Ahern said the urge to keep reading "made me refuse nights out.") One comment Owen frequently gets from her fans is that they find it refreshing to see a novel set in Northern Ireland that doesn't dwell on the political and sectarian violence, a decision she explores in this essay written for Beatrice.

Why I Chose to Write About a Different Belfast
by Sharon Owens

When I moved from Omagh to Belfast in 1988, I was twenty years old. I was enrolled to study at the Art College on York Street, and I was terrified. All through my childhood, I'd seen terrible images of our capital city on the news: Bombs exploding, splinters of wood and debris falling like rain onto the road. Men and women screaming at the police, sometimes while carrying hysterical infants in their arms. Teenagers in tight jeans, brandishing automatic weapons in front of huge bonfires. I wanted to pass a degree in book illustration, but I thought I'd be shot dead before I had the time to fill one sketchbook. I was afraid someone would ask me about my religious background and then beat me up if I said the wrong one.

Instead, my experience turned out to be wonderful. I rented a room in a Victorian mansion in a genteel South Belfast neighbourhood of faded 18th century grandeur. It was only a twenty-minute walk from the city centre, but it was quiet, peaceful and pretty, with mature trees and iron railings and lace curtains on the windows. I drank tea from white china cups in the nearby coffee shops. My boyfriend, Dermot, and I occasionally ate an Italian meal, in a dark little restaurant full of Classic-style statuary, real candles and plastic grape-vines. We visited art galleries and the Ulster Museum and I collected Fine Art postcards to decorate my room with. There was a beautiful park and a rose garden nearby, where we strolled at weekends, making plans for the future, holding hands and enjoying being anonymous. I liked both of the city accents I encountered, the fancy twang of the wealthy people and the more colourful one of the working-classes. Within six months, I came to think of Belfast as home.

I suppose I grew up in Belfast. I learned to look after myself. I knew what to look out for; there were certain places and streets it was wise to avoid. I listened to local radio stations to check for security alerts, but I didn't become obsessed with politics. I made friends from "both sides of the community," and discovered we had much in common. We talked about art and design, music and gigs, relationships. We realised we were all just human beings, trying to make something of ourselves. It was unfashionable to talk about religion, so we didn't.

After five years in rented rooms, Dermot and I got married and went house-hunting in the areas we had lived in as students. We wanted a period house, with sash windows and stone carvings and marble fireplaces—a three-storey townhouse with a tiny front garden and a cement yard at the back. But they were way out of our price range, so we bought a new house with a nice garden five miles out in the suburbs. Our daughter Alice was born not long after in the Royal Victoria Hospital, and now we have lived in our modern three-bedroom semi-detached home for almost fifteen years. The Victorian houses we loved now cost half a million pounds, so there's no chance of getting one any time soon.

But we're content. We still go strolling in the park, holding hands. Nothing has changed, except Alice gets bored walking, and we have to promise her lunch out to get her to come with us. There are still moments of violence in the city, but the Belfast I know is not the one you see on the news. It's a dignified place, full of kind and thoughtful people embarrassed by The Troubles and weary of conflict. They walk their dogs and trim their gardens and buy newspapers at the corner shop. They're ordinary, and determined to remain ordinary. And that's why I love living here so much.

photo: VENTURE (of Lisburn)