It's freezing on Drumcree Hill. Thermal underwear weather. But still the cars keep coming. The drivers park halfway down the sloping country lane, just beyond the spires of the famous church. They are a short stroll from the small bridge. There, two RUC Land Rovers stand between them and the reason they have left their centrally heated homes to congregate in the darkness: the Garvaghy Road. Their holy grail.
Today marks the 1,000th day of the Orange Order protest. One thousand nights since July 1st, 1998, when the brethren of Portadown district were stopped from marching down the mainly Catholic Garvaghy Road. Each July since then, the world has become familiar with the turbulent scenes around Portadown and the rest of Northern Ireland as the protest reaches its annual climax.
What is not so familiar is the subdued protest that continues when the Buckfastswigging hordes, the picnicking families, the young men with scarves masking their faces, go home. Things are quieter here when the Saracens have trundled away and the army barricades are dismantled.
Arlene McKeown arrives each night at about 9 p.m. The 63-year-old housewife has gold earrings and demurely styled grey hair. She runs the Hillside Cafe, a makeshift hut on the hill that provides shelter for the faithful. At home, she has a parrot that can whistle The Sash My Father Wore. Seven nights a week, she leaves her Portadown housing estate to pull open the hut's metal shutters, boil kettles and lay out trays of neatly cut sandwiches and fancy buns. Then she waits for her customers to arrive.
Usually, the first trickle shows up at about 9.30 p.m., greeting Arlene like the old friend she has become. The talk is of the weather ("that's a fierce wind, Arlene") or the foot-and-mouth crisis, during which the protest has been temporarily scaled back (although small numbers have continued to protest informally at the hill), or the ever-watching RUC ("Do they not have better things to be doing?" they ask). The latter query could reasonably be put to everybody who passes through the hut's doors.
Arlene, who was successfully treated for cancer three years ago, says her husband is in the Orange Order and the Black Preceptory. She is here to support him.
"They have been walking that road for over 200 years," she says. It seems no further justification is required. Like everyone else you talk to, May McIldoon, who helps Arlene in the small kitchen, insists the stand-off is not sectarian. "Everyone gets a welcome here, no matter who they are," she says. Even before you ask, the protesters will confide about their "friends on both sides", many of whom they believe want the parade to go ahead but are too scared to say so. "We would love to go down the road before July, we really would. Nobody wants to live like this. Nobody. The people on the Garvaghy Road don't want to live like this either," says May.
Ethel Partridge (68) nods. She believes that if murdered LVF leader Billy Wright was still alive, the men would have walked down the road by now. She says he was a "respectable God-fearing person" whom she looked on as a protector. "He lived on my estate and told me: `If you ever need someone, just put a light in the window and I will come over and do what I can for you, night or day'," she says. "And I always felt safe because of it. When he was murdered, I thought now I have nobody to put the light in the window to."
Last July, when imprisoned UFF leader Johnny Adair visited the hut, Ethel gave him a hug because "he hadn't done any more than the rest of them". May says she shook his hand "on the spur of the moment", but afterwards wondered whether it was the right thing to do.
By 10 p.m., there are about 20 people huddled in the hut. They sit on old-fashioned bus seats. A Super-Ser emits a cosy glow in the centre of the shack, where a flowerbed used to be. There are biscuit tins for ashtrays and pieces of carpet on the sloping floor. The walls are plastered with letters of support, a picture of the Queen Mother, a poster for a "traditional cultural evening of drums and fife flutes. Music by the Hillbillies". The hut is a cross between a teenager's den and a poorly funded social club. You could spend hours trawling through the alternative wallpaper, where there are "It's Right to Say No" stickers, a poem about old age and The Orange Man's Prayer, a verse of which reads: Oh help keep us on the trot,/And all those residents bless them not,/For, Lord, to them we shall not talk/When Ulster's road we wish to walk.
Walter Boal comes two or three nights a week from Hillsborough with his wife and daughter. Sipping a mug of tea, he talks about the comradeship that has sprung up among the members of what he calls "the Drumcree community". The hut was erected in the winter of 1998; before that, refreshments were handed out from the back of a car and later from a market stall.
"This is fellowship and friendship at a deep level," he says. "The people I know are ones I would never have met if it wasn't for this one stand. I know Portadown now better than I know Hillsborough . . . You wouldn't get it anywhere else, it's a real family affair."
AS IF on cue, Walter's daughter, Karen (15), walks in. She has a blonde ponytail and wears a black puffa jacket to keep out the cold. It is Saturday night. Would she not prefer to be at a disco, a friend's house, doing something, anything, else?
"What could be better than standing up for your country?" she retorts, before launching into a passionate tirade that earns nods and cries of "hear, hear" from the mainly elderly group who sit in the hut.
"It is important because we need to get our civil and religious liberties restored, not just for Protestant people, but for everyone," she says. "Otherwise we will be into a united Ireland and we will have no quality of life whatsoever. Sinn Fein/IRA will trample us into the ground . . . We need to take a stand now and take this country back, make sure we are British and will stay British. And getting down the Garvaghy Road, well, really it will restore civil and religious liberty not just for Portadown Orangemen but for the whole of Northern Ireland," she says.
She cannot understand what the residents of Garvaghy Road are afraid of. For Karen, it is a matter of them "going in and shutting their windows for seven and a half minutes while the Orangemen go down the road, once every year".
The teenager says she would be willing to take up arms and to die for her country if it came to it. Walter is proud of her. "We all are," says one man. "She has got more guts than some of the men around this town; she'd put the whole lot of us to shame."
David Jones, spokesman for the Portadown Orangemen, estimates there are around 700 people who visit the hut once a fortnight and a core group of 200 regular protesters. These figures are disputed by nationalists, who claim the protest is confined to Sunday afternoons. "People are here of their own volition. We don't go around knocking on doors to get them out," Jones says. Come July, he concedes, there is a different atmosphere when the barbed wire and the army barricades go up. "But even then it is a minority who cause trouble. The majority who support us do not want to force their way down the road. We would have done that by now if that were the case," he says. One woman in the hut puts it this way: "If we wanted to get down that road, believe you me, no army would stop us, but we are too peaceful," she says.
Most Wednesday nights there is a singsong, with accordions and drums. There have been two engagements on the hill, with one young man getting down on his knees to propose just outside the hut. Everyone talks about the hut's characters: an old man who tells stories late into the night, a woman from Cookstown who takes three buses to keep vigil on the hill. Harold Gracey, the district master of Portadown Loyal Orange Lodge, has a mobile home behind Drumcree parish hall, but ill-health has kept him away in recent weeks.
The talk in the hut is not confined to the protest - there is a lively discussion about the drugs problem in Dublin and a few dodgy Viagra jokes. "We sit here putting the world to rights," says May. "The men only come to see Arlene and I . . . it's all good clean honest fun, but very serious when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it."
The walk down to the bridge, where the headlights of the RUC Land Rovers shine in the darkness, is a nightly ritual. The protesters stroll down and attempt to pass through in the direction of Garvaghy Road. Sometimes the RUC allows them to pass, on other nights they block the way. They have been told the RUC men make considerable money for their stint on the hill, "so we make them work for it". After fruitless verbal protest, the protesters turn around and go back up the hill. During the snowy weather in January, people on the hill claim that RUC men used their riotshields as sleighs. "But no one believes us," complains one man.
As the evenings brighten, the numbers will increase, with hundreds descending on Drumcree during the contentious July weeks. Some people, such as Joseph (75), sit outside the hut in their cars listening to music. "Sometimes I wonder what brings me here, but really it's the comradeship and the friends that come from far and wide," he says. A former RAF man, he says he has "no grievance" against Catholics.
His argument, the argument of all the "Hill" people, is the same: that the Orange Order has been walking the road for more than a century, that the residents used to watch the march and enjoy it.
Everything was all right until Brendan McKenna (they spit the words out and will not use the Irish spelling of the Garvaghy Road spokesman's name) became involved. They think the Parades Commission is a travesty. Why should they have to talk when they only want to walk? After a while, you don't have to ask any more questions. You know exactly what they are going to say.
Joseph listens to a cassette he made. He turns the sound up on The Wind Be- neath My Wings by Bette Midler. It is the only song on the tape. It reminds him of his time as a pilot, he says. Later he will go into the hut "for a bit of craic and a cup of tea".
The farming men come late at night, manure on their boots, mud on their overalls. One man dozes in the corner as Arlene's husband comes to take her home. It is after 1 a.m. before the shutters are pulled down. Throughout the night, members of different Orange lodges will come to protect the parish hall. From what? There is incredulous laughter. "From Republicanism," someone says.
When the Orangemen walk down Garvaghy Road (there is no "if" as far as the Drumcree community is concerned), the hut will be dismantled and Arlene and May and the rest of the faithful will find other things to do on chilly winter's evenings. "We will be in a state of deep depression, but we have arranged to have a reunion once a month," says May. "If you have a belief in your heart that you are doing right, you will succeed in the end."