The Troubles with Us, page 2
Of course, neither side entered into a centuries-old dispute simply over incense and immaculate conception. The faith you were born into, whether you were religious or not, largely dictated your politics. When I was growing up, the majority of Catholics in Northern Ireland wanted to see a united Ireland, while most Protestants were hell-bent on remaining in the UK. Things are less clear-cut these days as the region’s post-Troubles generation tends to shun traditional labels. You’ve got Catholics who are happy with the status quo and Protestants who want reunification, and a big old chunk of the population who identify as neither Protestant nor Catholic, nationalist nor unionist. In short, it’s complicated.
But when the Troubles – the thirty-year civil conflict that cost the lives of over three thousand people in the region – kicked off in 1969, it wasn’t about belonging; it was about civil rights. Historically, Protestants had all the power. Local government electoral boundaries were drawn to favour unionist candidates, while the right to vote was restricted to ratepayers. As Protestants tended to own businesses and employ their own, Catholics were less likely to have a job, so were politically marginalised.
Northern Ireland is probably the only place where a mixed marriage is a union between two Christians. My grandma took to her bed for a week when Daddy’s sister Jacqueline brought home David, a colleague who ‘kicked with the other foot’. I don’t think her objections were political or even religious (which is pretty much the same thing where I come from) although naturally, she was sceptical of any belief that casts doubt on Our Lady’s virtue. She’d seen the fallout from interfaith marriages – young couples ostracised, families torn apart – and didn’t want that for her daughter, oblivious to the fact she was perpetuating the cycle of mistrust.
Daddy went to visit his mother, told her that she hadn’t raised them to be prejudiced, and that David was cool – for a Protestant.
A few days later, Auntie Jacqueline called him. ‘I don’t know what you said to Mummy, but thank you.’
David’s parents took longer to come around, refusing to attend the wedding or even acknowledge the birth of their first grandchild.
These days, no one really cares who you sleep with. When it comes to education, however, little has changed – 90-odd per cent of children in the region attend schools that identify with a single tradition.[1] It wasn’t until I moved to London in my mid-twenties that I started to question this segregation. And I often wonder, if I still lived in Belfast, would I send my children to one of its few integrated schools? I’d like to think so, but Northern Ireland is a funny place. Old prejudices die hard.
For all our faults, we’re a friendly bunch. Visit any restaurant and you’ll be invited to take a ‘wee seat’, have a ‘wee look at the menu there’ and when you’re done, ‘enter your wee PIN’ into the card machine. So much more than a linguistic tic, ‘wee’ softens blows, it tells the person you’re addressing you’re concerned for their comfort, makes the unpleasant palatable. ‘Now I’m just going to insert this speculum into your wee vagina and that’s your wee smear all done, alright?’
There were lots of wee bombs during my childhood. Like the coffee jar stuffed with Semtex and shrapnel that was abandoned in our garden by a rogue ’RA man as he was legging it from the police. It’s all good – we weren’t the targets of this inept attempt at terrorism. The would-be aggressor had intended on chucking the device at the Brits, and our front garden, about 10 feet above road level, provided the perfect vantage point for a surprise attack. Unfortunately for the chap in question, he was spotted by a soldier on foot patrol and had to abort his mission, escaping out the back of the house and leaving his handiwork in my mother’s prized rose bush.
We were heading back from Daddy Devlin’s when we saw our road cordoned off by the police. An officer told Mummy they were investigating a ‘situation’. (FYI, everything is a situation in Northern Ireland.) It was hours before we were allowed back home, not that Mummy was fazed. She parked the car outside Freddie’s Kitchen across the street and let us have sweet and sour chicken balls for tea while she caught up on the latest issue of Woman’s Own. A win for everyone.
I should probably explain, I spent the first eighteen years of my life on the Falls Road. Yep, that Falls Road. The one with the balaclava-ed youths you used to see on the six o’clock news hurling petrol bombs and guldering,[2] ‘Fuck off back home, ye British bastards!’ So really, the odd coffee-jar bomb wasn’t anything to get exercised about.
That. That last sentence, that casual dismissal of finding a bomb in your back garden as though it were perfectly normal – this is the result of spending your formative years in Belfast. It’s only now, at the grand old age of thirty-six, two children and three geographical moves later, that I’m starting to get it. How my childhood was anything but normal.
The Falls runs from Divis Street, in the city centre, to Andersonstown (or Andytown as the locals call it), in the suburbs of west Belfast. You might have heard of Divis Tower, back when Belfast dominated the headlines. Built in the 1960s, the 200-foot-tall concrete monolith housed not just working-class Catholics, but the British Army, who took over the top two floors as an observation post, accessible only by helicopter.
When the violence first erupted in 1969, nine-year-old Patrick Rooney became the first child to die in the Troubles after the Royal Ulster Constabulary, claiming it was coming under sniper attack from the tower, opened fire on the flats. (Nationalists generally regarded the RUC – now the more inclusively named Police Service of Northern Ireland – as an occupying force, a Protestant police for a Protestant people, in bed with the Brits. Up to a third of places in the force were initially reserved for Catholics, but in 1993 the take-up rate stood at just 7 per cent. According to the RUC, this figure rose to 25 per cent during the two IRA ceasefires in the years that followed.)
I went to school, primary and secondary, a short drive from Divis Tower, and if you headed further up the Falls to Andytown, you’d reach our house. From the age of seven, I lived with my family in an old manse that used to belong to the Presbyterian church when the area was nothing but countryside. As Belfast expanded and Catholics started moving in, the Prods cleared out and had long gone by the time my grandparents arrived from the Lower Falls, when Mummy was sixteen. Andytown was, and still is, staunchly republican.
We bought the house off Daddy Devlin when he upped sticks for the salubrious Malone Road with Gogi and Mummy’s youngest brother, John. The relocation was unfortunate for my sister and me. To our peers, west was best, full stop. You didn’t aspire to a less segregated existence no matter how well you’d done for yourself. No, a BT9 postcode meant only one thing – ‘snobby bastard’. In leafy south Belfast, there were no flags hanging from the lampposts, no pavement kerbs painted green, white and orange or red, white and blue. Monied Catholics were too preoccupied with their delis and their horse-riding lessons to bother about living next door to the other side. And Protestants knew any taig lucky enough to migrate south was unlikely to get all tiocfaidh ár lá[3] on them.
Even if my granddad had stayed local, we were snobby bastards anyway for living in a big house. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. It was just a fact. Like the fact Protestants had cleaner shoes and covered their toasters in clingfilm. (It solved the crumbs problem.)
The Manse was a far cry from Mummy’s childhood home. She spent her early years in a two-up two-down with an outside toilet on Durham Street, at the bottom of the Falls. My maternal granny, Mary or ‘Mummy Devlin’, God rest her (an expression I’ve picked up from my mother when referencing the dearly departed), scrubbed Mummy and her brothers once a week in a tin tub in front of the fire. They lived with Mummy Devlin’s blind mother, who was hooked on snuff. She used to keep a bag of coins under her pillow and ask Mummy to buy her a cone full of the ground tobacco leaves, giving her a ha’penny for her troubles. Mummy always spoke fondly of this period of her life. I think it was her happiest time. Before things got a bit mad.
Mummy Devlin had no time for gossips – and people frequently gossiped about our family – or prying into the lives of others. My mother once asked a pregnant neighbour on the bus when she was due. When they got home, Mummy Devlin smacked her across the back of the head with a leather glove over the intrusion. She was twenty-one at the time.
My childhood was accompanied by a soundtrack of Mummy Devlin-isms, arcane expressions Mummy insisted were in common usage in her mother’s day: ‘he was dressed to the air of Willy Riley’ (he looked smart); ‘that Áine has a quare leg for a button boot’ (Áine has slim calves); ‘I’m like an eatin’ house detective’ (I’m starving); and ‘yer man Liam isn’t worth the full of his arse roasted snow’ (‘I don’t have a great deal of time for that Liam fellow’). I’ve yet to find a single soul who can verify this last bizarre locution, but Mummy couldn’t give a ‘fiddler’s fart’ what anyone else says. The only saying that made any kind of sense was, ‘Are they putting bread on your table?’ a retort to those who felt compelled to interfere in our business. Never explain, never apologise – my mother has lived her life by these words.
Mummy Devlin took her daughter everywhere with her – to mass, bowling, more mass. She also encouraged her to go places by herself, live a little. Which is how Mummy ended up alone one Friday night at the hottest ticket in town, The Song of Bernadette, a local parish production about the apparition of the Virgin Mary to a teenage girl in Lourdes. The lead must have given a convincing performance: when Mummy got home that night to an empty house, she switched on all the lights and frantically checked under the beds for any sign of Herself. My grandfather found her two hours later standing on top of the Ercol two-seater.
‘What are you doing up there?’ he demanded.
‘I’m afraid Our Lady is going to appear to me from under the sofa.’
‘Anne, if Our Lady should come to Belfast, you’re the last person she’ll appear to. Now get down from there.’
Occasionally, she was persuaded by friends to engage in regular teenage activities. It was at her school’s sixth form dance that she met my father. He was dating Prudence, the glamorous daughter of an eminent Catholic heart surgeon from the Malone Road. (Snobby bastard, obviously.) Sadly, Mummy’s plus one was less in demand – years later, it emerged he was a paedophile. But the minute Daddy set eyes on my mum, it was game over for poor Prudence. Untameable eyebrows and a face defiantly bare of make-up, the 5-foot-1¾ (the ¾ is crucial) ball of energy on the dance floor was the girl he had to be with.
It was an unexpected match. Mummy was captain of her house, and hockey goalkeeper. She didn’t drink or smoke, and went to civil rights marches on her own. ‘She was different like that,’ Daddy told me when I asked him what life was like in the dark ages. ‘She would open doors for me – she never let me be the man – and if she didn’t get her own way, she’d stop in the middle of the street and press her nose up against a wall. I was scundered[4] all the time by her, but she was like no girl I’d ever met, and I loved that about her. Plus, she was hot.’
Daddy, meanwhile, was all fags and flares, and had zero interest in academia. He went to art college, the first in his family to make it to higher education. Any parental pride soon evaporated, however, when he was arrested in Florence for trying to steal a Vespa. Mummy was due to pick him up from the bus station on the Saturday, but Daddy was a no-show.
The following day, she got a call from her new boyfriend’s father. Sitting on the stairs in the hallway of the Manse, nervously wrapping the phone’s curly cord around her finger, Mummy asked after my grandma and made sure to mention she was just back in from mass.
But my grandfather was in no mood for pleasantries. ‘Hello, my dear. I believe you were waiting to pick my son up last night? Well, you’d have been waiting a long time. He’s in jail.’
For all his bad-boy antics, Daddy was resolutely against sex before marriage, much to Mummy’s horror.
‘Let me tell you, it wasn’t for want of trying on my part,’ she told me recently, apropos of nothing, in the middle of the M&S Foodhall on Donegall Place. ‘We went to London for a weekend when we were stepping out back in the seventies. I pushed the single beds together, but your father was having none of it.’
Daddy lived around the corner from Mummy in an ever-changing arrangement in a small three-bedroom semi. There were his parents, brother, four sisters, two aunts and paternal grandmother, Big Granny. (Ironically, they hadn’t enough room for Wee Granny.) At one stage, Daddy and my uncle Ted shared a single bed in their parents’ room, the grandmother and aunts cosied up and Daddy’s sisters had the box room. Big Granny died before Daddy started going out with Mummy, considerately freeing up some space.
Whenever Mummy would call round in the evenings, she’d have to wait in the kitchen while the family finished the rosary. They couldn’t go into town to socialise. It was too dangerous to leave the area, especially for young Catholic men, who were likely to be picked up by the soldiers.
The early 1970s were the worst years of the Troubles, when my parents’ generation was coming of age. Mummy, Daddy and their friends were around at the very beginning, witnessed the precise moment the shit hit the fan. I remember Daddy telling us about waiting for his best friend Big Sean to pick him up for mass when he was fifteen. It was 15 August 1969, the Feast of the Assumption. Days earlier, violence broke out in Derry between the RUC and the Catholic residents of the Bogside area. It was the first time in UK history that police fired tear gas at rioters. In support of the Bogsiders, nationalists across Northern Ireland held protests. Loyalists responded by attacking Catholic districts. Homes and businesses were burnt out, hundreds of Catholic families driven from their homes and seven people killed.
As Daddy looked out the window of his living room, he saw his friend on the back of a flatbed truck heading in the opposite direction from the chapel. He was coming back from his Aunt Sissy’s. Her house had been petrol bombed by loyalists from the Shankill[5] and Big Sean and his sister Maureen were moving Sissy and her belongings to safety. Daddy jumped on the back of the lorry to help, joining a caravan of trucks piled high with armchairs, statues of Our Lady and reproduction gilt-framed photos of JFK (almost as much of a pin-up as the Sacred Heart) as they made their way up the Falls past piles of smouldering rubble.
Days later, the British government launched Operation Banner, sending troops to Northern Ireland as a temporary fix to restore order. Peace lines, a series of walls separating Protestant and Catholic communities in interface areas, were built, and women, my grandmothers included, welcomed the soldiers with open arms and steaming mugs of tea. Even Gogi, coming home from the pub, would invite the boys in for a nightcap.
The Army maintained its hero status among Catholics until the Falls Curfew in 1970. My parents had just started going out when soldiers began searching the area for weapons and members of the IRA. Some kids threw stones and petrol bombs, and in response, the British released tear gas and sealed off homes as they put residents on a thirty-six-hour curfew. Four civilians died, seventy-eight were wounded. It was a turning point in the relationship, the moment Catholics lost faith in those who were meant to protect them. You didn’t dare so much as smile in a soldier’s direction after that, Mummy said. She’d gone to school with a girl who was punished by the IRA for ‘fraternising with the enemy’; her head was shaved and she was tarred, feathered and tied to a lamppost.
I remember Daddy telling us that in the weeks and months following the Falls Curfew, the IRA had no shortage of eager new recruits, though not everyone had the nous required to excel at the terrorism game.
‘To make a pipe bomb, right, you need a vice to squeeze the end of the pipe,’ he said, settling back into his chair. ‘This will keep it nice and tight. First, you drill a hole in the middle where the fuse will go, then you’re ready to stuff it with your explosive mixture. In those days, it was fertiliser and sugar.
‘Anyway, Jim Davey – he lived down the road from us – he didn’t have a vice, you see. So he hammered one end flat, threw in the explosives, then started beatin’ away at the other end. Lost a couple of fingers, the buck eejit.’
(At this juncture in the story, I feel it necessary to stress that for all my father’s talk of manning the barricades, Grandma would have taken her slipper – the Irish mother’s weapon of choice – to his backside had he come home a minute past 9 p.m. The closest he got to joining the revolution was writing ‘Up the ’RA’ on a wet cement wall during a daytrip to Portaferry.)
Daddy asked Mummy to marry him three times. But Mummy Devlin was ill. The doctor kept telling her she was fine, that it was all in her head. By the time they knew it was ovarian cancer, it was too late. Mummy quit her job as a primary school teacher to nurse her mother.
Despite his previous delinquencies, Daddy had grown on my grandmother and she encouraged Mummy to accept his proposal. One of the last things she did was buy her daughter her wedding dress, knowing she’d never see her in it. Mummy Devlin died at home on 23 December 1979. The next day, Christmas Eve, Mummy got up early. She glazed a ham and decorated the tree. Then she buried her mother. My parents got married the following year.
They moved five minutes away to the Glen Road – Mummy couldn’t go far with four younger siblings and Daddy Devlin to look after – and bought twenty-four chickens, two goats (Seamus and Elizabeth: the great Irish poet and the reigning monarch – how’s that for bridging the divide?) and a sweet shop, which they named after their sheepdog, Basil.
