Where do I stand on Ireland? That’s a difficult question

Arriving at Heathrow from Belfast a couple of years ago, an entire planeload of us were mistakenly directed to international arrivals. When we realised the mistake and turned to step back through and collect our bags, we were barred by a distressed official. The trouble was, he said, we had now left the country. We couldn’t just wander back in.

So there we stood, for most of an hour, watching through the open door as our bags trundled mournfully around on the carousel, while the staff tracked down an immigration officer to set up a temporary border post and let us back into the UK. And much as I scowled and fumed, it never occurred to me to ignore this jobsworth and step back home through that open door. I totally got it. The invisible border he had conjured out of nothing was absolutely real to me.

When people ask where in Northern Ireland I grew up, I usually just say “the border”, as though that’s a place in itself. Maybe it is. If I get the feeling they’re struggling to find it on their mental map, I might say: “Halfway between Belfast and Dublin”, which usually satisfies. And while that’s pretty sketchy as geography, it’s a fair summing up of the politics and the history of that peculiar in-between zone.

This is a place where paradox thrives. I’ve always relished the irony that one of the most infamous local smugglers was alleged to be a senior figure in the IRA, utterly committed to destroying the one thing that made him his considerable fortune.

But among respectable citizens too, the culture of the place was suspicious of anyone from beyond who tried to tell you the lie of your own land. There’s an old family story about a group of young women returning from a pilgrimage to Lourdes. They got a bus from Dublin as far as the border, where they knew they’d have to declare the gifts they’d brought back and risk having them confiscated. So they hatched a plan. They hid the bags under a tarp in the back of the customs man’s truck and then asked him for a lift to the family home of one, where he was a lodger. Once he was in the house, they retrieved the stuff he had inadvertently smuggled for them.

Even at the height of the conflict, the crossing itself wasn’t always taken seriously. A few miles from our front door was a wooden sign in the middle of the road, the instruction “Stad” in Gaelic script the first indication there was another country around the corner. Typically for the place, I don’t remember us ever obeying the instruction to stop. My father slowed the car as we passed and the guys in the customs post waved him through with hardly a glance.

On the other side, the differences were subtle: the money, the road markings, a shift in the local accent. Most of all, I remember the terrible state of the roads themselves, especially on our annual holiday to Donegal, where we crossed at the twin towns of Strabane in the north and Lifford in the south. Once over the border, we started bouncing so frantically on the bumps and the potholes that my mother told us cars in the south ran on kangaroo petrol.

That same border ran through my national identity, pushing me to stand on one side or the other. A defiantly apolitical teenager, I always tried to refuse. I was once summoned to see the school vice-principal to explain my university application form, where I had completed the nationality box with “Northern Irish”. He firmly told me there was no such thing. And in a way, he was right. One of the quirks of local politics is that everyone born in Northern Ireland is entitled to either passport, or to both, as I have. But even so, on every journey I have to choose to take one or the other, to declare which side is home.

It’s not a hard choice these days. I live in suburban London and my wife and children are English. But however often I produce my British passport, I know it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Neither would the Irish one. Perhaps my home place really is the border itself, hanging around on the threshold, slipping easily over and back, tucked in under the tarp in the truck, bouncing along full of kangaroo petrol.

Michael Hughes is a novelist. His new novel Country is published in August