Yellow Dog Democrat

16 June 2007

My mother was a Roosevelt Democrat in the 1930s and a Roosevelt Democrat the day she died. They used to be known as Yellow Dog Democrats because, so it was thought, that they would vote for a yellow dog if it was running on a Democratic ticket. Her mother before her was a yellow dog Democrat, married to a small farmer who was as stauchly Republican as it was possible to be. Even when the policies of Herbert Hoover ("You don't work, you don't eat") drove him to lose his farm and eventually forced him to work in a GM factory, he remained as Republican, hating the United Auto Workers union with a vicious passion and fervently believing that what was good for General Motors was good for the country. God knows how they stayed married.

Fortunately, my grandmother was a lot smarter than her husband, and managed to perpetuate a matriarchal dynasty in the family that started with my great-grandmother who was widowed at the age of thirty, and continuing through to my mother who, as a single mom, called the shots in our family. It never occurred to me that there were things women couldn't do simply because they were women, with the exception standing up to pee. (I still wish I could do that though. It would save a lot of time in public restrooms! And what about the ease with which men can pee at the side of a country road without drawing attention to themselves while a woman has to simply hold on or suffer the indignity of a highly noticeable squat? God is indeed a man.)

I grew up in a world where the fear of communism was all pervasive. Athough the infamous McCarthy hearings took place before I was born, there was a terrible sense that, at any time, soldiers might storm the Nubel movie theatre in downtown Bellflower and make us all learn Russian. The nuns told us horror stories of how, in communist countries, there were no crucifixes hung in classrooms! (Of course, there were no crucifixes hung in American pubic schools either, but let's not let facts get in the way of a good story!) We we were told that in Russia children are abducted from their parents and brainwashed and forced to spy on their parents. (I never got that one. How did they spy on their parents when they had been abducted and never saw them again?) Every time I heard an airplane flying overhead I was reminded of the countless war movies I'd seen; and I was sure we were about to be bombed. Once a month, on a Friday, the Civil Defence siren would go off and we had to rehearse for a nuclear attack at school by dropping under our desks and curling into a ball with our hands on our heads. (I'm still not sure how this was going to protect us from a nuclear strike.) Because most of all, we were terrified of World War Three. Nuclear War.

When I was eight years old we were told that the "drop drills" that we had rehearsed all those monthly Fridays, might at last be due for a live performance. It was high noon. A showdown with the Russians ninety miles from the US coastline was in progress, and Nikita Krushchev and President Kennedy were standing in a sun-baked street, staring into each others' eyes, hands ready to draw and shoot, resulting in the annihilation of the human race.

Now I thought this was unlikely, probably because my brain could not take in something as catastrophic as a nuclear war, but plenty of other people thought it very likely indeed. Our parish church was full of people who I'd never seen at Mass before. On weekdays even! People were belatedly building shelters in their backyards. The shelves of the grocery stores were being stripped of canned goods (and I thought how funny it would be if they, in their hysteria, forgot to pack a can opener) and enormous supplies of peanut butter. Now, much as I loved peanut butter, I did think being down in a hole in the backyard eating copious amounts of it might be worse than just being annihilated. But the Russians turned their ships around, the churches became pretty empty again and hundreds of thousands of people wondered what they were going to do with all that peanut butter.

That climate of fear permeated everything when I was a kid, and dissent, which I had learned in school was the Constitutional right of every American, was at every turn associated with the communists. Opponents to a war that was going on far away in a place called Vietnam were communists. The Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement's voter registration campaign were communists. Gay Liberationists were communists trying to bring down the family. Martin Luther King was a communist. Women agitating for equal pay were communists. I did think that, with all those communists everywhere, they must be pretty inept to not have ensured we were all speaking Russian by now.

My mother never set out to be a campaigner against injustice. I think in an ideal world she would have stayed home, baked cookies and looked after her kids while worrying about what washing powder would get her whites really white. But when she had to go out to work to support a household of seven, injustice kind of found her. She got a job as an accountant in a big company, with access to all the company's books. She had been an innocent in the real world, and when she discovered that the starting wage for men doing the same job as she was doing was the top wage for women, she assumed (in her innocence) that this was a mistake. So she brought it to the attention of her boss who told her that this was the way of the world.

"Why..?" my mother asked.
"Because women don't have families to support," he replied.
"But I have four children and two dependent adults to support!"
"Yes, but generally women don't."
"But I'm not 'generally'" she insisted, "I really do have six people to support!"

My mother got nowhere, of course, and went on earning less than a man and burning with injustice.

She was an odd "campaigner". She was fairly quiet usually. Not at all strident. But had a natural aversion to privilege which made all rich people suspect until proven innocent. Her passion about injustice became part of our lives as a family. I came to never argue politics with my mother because she always won. She simply knew more about any subject you want to name than I did. As a teenager, it infuriated me! Who wants their Mom to win an argument?

She was a pacifist (who nevertheless supported the aims of the Second World War) and one of the bitter ironies of her life was that she unknowingly worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge Tennessee during the war, assiting the top secret develpment of the atomic bomb. When she worked for North American Aviation, she asked to be transferred from working on the Hound Dog Missile project and joined the team working on the space program which she was convinced had only peaceful purposes.

She opposed the war in Vietnam and turned a blind eye when my brother's draft dodger and deserter friends slept on our couch on their way to Canada. She agitated for equal pay as the Women's Representative at North American. Both she and my grandmother were ardent supporters of the civil rights movement. And as the gay liberation movement sarted to gather pace and I told my her that I thought that homosexuals were sick, she drawled thoughtfully, "You know, I think the only really sick people are those who can't love anyone."

The kids in my family were raised, without our really knowing it at the time - the way kids always think their own experience is typical - to be passionate about injustice, and that is how we still are. My husband says we are the only family he's ever seen who can shout while agreeing with each other.

She was shrewd and wise and knowledgeable and articulate and never cared if anyone thought she was a communist or a communist dupe or a communist sympathiser. She was a Roosevelt Democrat in the 1930s and a Roosevelt Democrat the day she died. And I miss her.

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Ian Paisley and Me

10 August 2007

In June of 1972 I got on an airplane in Los Angeles and flew to Dublin, and then took a train to Belfast. I walked from the station to a small alleyway off a busy street in the centre of the city and rang the bell at Number 2, Marquis Street. The door was opened and I walked up two flights of bare, ageing stairs, passing two floors of light manufacturing workshops. On the top floor, I walked into a seedy office. The carpet was an indeterminate colour and was worn through in patches. A man called Kevin McCorry got up and asked me what I wanted.

“I want to volunteer,” I said. He looked at me, not knowing what to make of this slight American girl, so determined to join the struggle. We talked for a bit and I told him what I felt I had to give to the organisation – mainly my willingness to do the donkey work.

“Do you want to start right now?” he asked me. And that is how I ended up working for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association that summer.

I was studying sociology at UCLA and the field I had decided to concentrate on was Irish social history and politics. I had got quite a lot of help from a graduate student at the university called Seamus Thompson, who was from Belfast and who suggested that the best way to get to know the place was to go there. So I did.

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) put me to work typing up reports and press releases, filing and doing errands. It didn’t matter to me that I could have been doing that kind of work in any office anywhere. It wasn’t any office anywhere. I was in the presence of History in the Making.

When I first arrived in Belfast, I stayed with Seamus Thompson and his parents. He was spending the summer doing research on his doctoral dissertation about the Protestant community of Northern Ireland.

He was a Protestant himself. His real name was Lawrence, but, as he had been born in the Republic of Ireland, the kids at his school gave him an Irish nickname that stuck. Anyone who knows anything about Northern Ireland knows that Protestants are not called Seamus (which is as Irish Catholic a name as you could imagine); and Catholics are not called Lawrence. I guess these conventions make it easier to know who to hate.

Seamus’s father was a retired minister, and he and his wife lived in a leafy upper middle-class area of the city across from Ormeau Park, just a short walk from Ian Paisley’s church. He was a quietly spoken man who was just that bit eccentric under his conventional veneer.

Every day at breakfast there would inevitably be one tomato or rasher of bacon or piece of toast left over.

“Does anyone want that tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast?” he would ask. We all would say no, but this was never the end of it. He would turn to me, “Won’t you have this tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast? Please do have it! Don’t you want it? No?” Then he would turn to Seamus. “You’ll have this tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast, won’t you? There’s only the one left! Are you sure you don’t want it? Sure? No?” Then he’d turn to his wife. “How about you? Won’t you have the last tomato/rasher of bacon/piece of toast? Do have it! Don’t you want it? No? Are you sure?” Eventually he would be convinced that no one else wanted it. “Well, if no one else wants it, I suppose I’ll have it!” he would say. And you could tell by the way he tucked into it that he had wanted it all along. This happened every morning. It was a ritual. If I was his wife I would have throttled him.

His mild, deferential nature extended to his politics as well as his breakfasts. He was a member of the then newly formed Alliance Party. It was composed of moderate unionists who sought to attract Catholics who were happy to remain in the United Kingdom, and Unionists who were happy to accommodate the civil rights demands of Nationalists. It went the way of all the moderate parties over the coming years. It sank without trace.

He was an innocent who couldn’t really take in the horror that was around him daily. He was only mildly annoyed that car theft had become so common that, as he didn’t have a garage at his house, he had had to rent one that was a full ten minute walk away. He owned a Ford Cortina and this made him particularly vulnerable, he was told, because Cortinas were the cars most often hijacked by the IRA for use as car bombs. Seamus’s father wondered why this should be so. “It’s probably because they’re so easy to service,” he reasoned.

Seamus dissolved into fits of derisory laughter. “Easy to service??” he practically shrieked, “I can picture it now! A terrorist cell emerges from the shadows, swoops down on the Ford Cortina! Lifts the bonnet! Checks the filters! Checks the points! Changes the spark plugs! Fills it full of Semtex! And then blows it up!”

His dad dismissed this. Seamus obviously just didn’t know about cars.

Nonetheless, the horror was there. Seamus took me with him to talk to his auntie who lived in the Unionist Protestant neighbourhood of Chief Street. A Peace Wall had been erected across it. The wall was an impressive brick and concrete barrier topped with barbed wire which closed off Chief Street and separated it from the Catholic Nationalist neighbourhood of Ardoyne. Every house between the Peace Wall and Seamus’s auntie’s had been burned out.

Chief Street was a stronghold of the Protestant paramilitary UVF and Seamus told me I must under any no circumstances call him anything but Lawrence. I was so terrified of blowing the gaffe, I hardly said a word while we were there. Seamus’s auntie must have thought I was simple.

Nevertheless, she was incredibly hospitable, as almost everyone I met there was; and she made tea and served it with biscuits (cookies) on delicate china with doilies on the tray and a lace tea cosy on the pot. She talked about the terrible times of the past few years; how she had always had Catholic neighbours, many of them friends, all the way down the street; and it had never been a problem. With the onset of the Troubles, and sectarian riots, her Catholic neighbours has fled Chief Street and her Protestant ones had fled the Ardoyne. She didn’t know how it was all going to end. Half the street, she told me, were “taking tablets for their nerves".

While we were talking I glanced out the lace curtained window. Three men drove up in a battered white van and stopped in front of a burned out and boarded up house. They took a ladder out of the back, looking for all the world like builders about to start a job. They put the ladder up against the wall to get access to the upper floor window. One of the men climbed up and went inside through the window. Another man stood at the bottom. A third man went to the back of the van and started to unload arms and ammunition, handing them to the man at the bottom of the ladder, who ferried them up to the window, where they were taken inside. Having discharged their load, the ladder was put away and the van drove off again.

The conversation over the china tea cups with custard cream biscuits had continued throughout as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening which – for Seamus’s auntie at least – was probably true.

On our way back to the car Seamus said to me quietly, “There are a lot of people who would cheerfully kill you to know what you know right now. Never mention it to anyone. Not anyone.” I didn’t.

Meanwhile, I had been busy typing up reports and press releases for NICRA, who were engaged in campaigns against Internment without Trial, the issue at the heart of the protest on Bloody Sunday six months before, when fourteen unarmed civilians were killed by the British Army; against the Widgery Report which exonerated the soldiers that had done it; and against the ongoing casual discrimination against Catholics that had given rise to the Civil Rights Movement in the first place.

I was typing up some statistics when I discovered that Catholics suffered 25% unemployment as against nearly 12% for Protestants. And that 19% of Catholics were living in sub-standard housing compared to about 10% of Protestants. And the penny dropped for me.

If my community was suffering 12% unemployment, and if 10% of them were in substandard housing, I would be terrified of any group whose demands for parity seemed to threaten that already meagre piece of the pie. Surely it would be better to fight for a bigger pie? But the bakers were off sprinkling salmonella into the metaphorical eggs. And one of the bakers was Ian Paisley.

Ian Paisley fascinated Seamus and he was keen to analyse the political content of some of the Reverend’s sermons as part of his research. The only problem was that he would need to go to the church and record them, and he had no idea how the hell he was going to smuggle a cassette recorder in to do it. But necessity is, I guess, the mother of invention and Seamus’s audacity and courage in the cause of academic research knew no bounds. So he got me to do it.

Now, when you are eighteen years old, which I was then, you have no sense of danger; you really just don’t believe anything too bad is going to happen to you. So I was happy to agree to it. It seemed like an exciting thing to do in fact. The plan was for me to go to the church with Seamus with the cassette recorder concealed in my handbag. So Seamus’s mother, always keen to support her lad in whatever daft thing he thought of doing, cheerfully went to fetch a few of her handbags to find out which one would be most appropriate for this purpose.

I had never been in a Protestant church in my life. It used to be a mortal sin for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and, being a good Catholic who wanted to stay out of hell, I had always obliged God on this issue. (Now that it’s not a mortal sin, what happened to all the people who attended a Protestant service and died before going to Confession?) Seamus told me I would be alright as long as I said absolutely nothing and did exactly what he did.

His minister father was known to the elders of the church, so our arrival aroused no suspicion. We were greeted at the door by someone who knew Seamus, and who shook his hand warmly, asking how he was getting on with his studies out in California. It was going well.

They exchanged a bit of chit-chat. Seamus introduced me as his American cousin (I smiled, shook his hand, said nothing). We were handed the Order of Service or somesuch bit of paper. And we proceeded into the church. I followed him down the aisle until he came to a pew close enough to record from, but not so busy we could be too keenly observed. As he turned to go into the pew a strange and almost irresistible compulsion came over me that I was only able to fight back in the last split second.

I came and sat next to him. He bowed his head and covered his face with his hand as if in prayer. I did the same.

“Jesus Christ!” I whispered. “I nearly genuflected!” Seamus covered his face with both hands.

The Big Man came on. The service began. I have to say I got into it after a while, and quite enjoyed the intense ritual of Protestant praying. But then the Reverend Paisley got each and every one of us to bow our heads and pray very, very hard to discover which of us God was going to save today. We all had to keep our heads bowed and our eyes squeezed shut while he waited for someone to be moved to stand up and ask to be saved. The wait went on and on. And I realised to my horror, that we were not going to be allowed to leave the church that day until someone owned up and asked to be saved.

After a very long time, I sneaked a peek to see if anyone had cracked yet. But the congregation was a sea of bowed heads. Ian Paisley’s continued exhortations for someone to ask to be saved began to have a hypnotic effect on me. Someone needed to do it. Someone needed to be saved. All I had to do was stand. All I had to do was stand…

Seamus had his eyes open too and was staring at me, a strange kind of terror in his eyes. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

So I didn’t. But someone else did, and we were finally allowed to go home.

I had recorded the Reverend Paisley’s sermon without a hitch, but it turned out to be pretty boring in the end. The only controversial bits were a few barbed jibes aimed at the Pope. Big deal. Had I really risk being hung, drawn and quartered as a heretic for that?

One day this demagogue, who had held us all hostage that day, would be First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Other demagogues and hostage-takers would sit down with him in an uneasy peace. But before that would happen, decades of blood would be spilt.

Seamus never asked me to go back with him to Ian Paisley’s church. I don't think he wanted to risk me reaching for the holy water fountain next time. And I probably would have.


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A Soldier in Marquis Street

18 August 2007

When I came to Belfast in the summer of 1972 I told my mother I was going to Dublin. I wrote quite involved works of fiction about my exploits there, put them in envelopes addressed to her, and then sent them on to a friend in Dublin who sent them on to my mother who was reassured by the Dublin postmark. My mother always underestimated just how sneaky and underhand I was. Which, in this case, was just as well.

1972, though no one knew it yet, was to be the bloodiest year of the conflict in Northern Ireland. It’s hard to remember, when we look back, that it had started with a civil rights movement. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) had modelled itself on the struggle by black Americans for civil rights in the 1960s, just as surely as the Unionist government of Northern Ireland, had modelled itself on the government of America’s Deep South. Catholics were discriminated against in employment and housing, and were disenfranchised by clever gerrymandering and by outright corruption. By 1972, however, the peaceful campaign for civil rights was degenerating into civil was.

Though it was a campaign that was rapidly being overtaken by events, I can at least say I played my part in it. I filed things. I proofread stuff. I did a lot of typing. (No word processors back then, just Tippex. And, with my terrible typing, my copy often looked a bit like Jackson Pollack in white. I would have been fired me had I not been working for free.)

I found a place to stay for the summer in a student house on Stranmillis Road near Queen University . It was only a fairly pleasant twenty-five minute walk to the NICRA office in the city centre, which passed the heavily fortified Europa Hotel. Until Sarajevo, it was the most bombed hotel in Europe.

NICRA were then heavily involved in the anti-internment campaign, in protesting against the Widgery Report about Bloody Sunday which they considered a whitewash (which, most of us would now agree, it was) and in following up complaints of ill treatment by British Army soldiers. These incidents had become all too frequent since the days when the British Army had been first been deployed there to stop sectarian attacks on the Nationalist population. In 1969 they had been welcomed with cups of tea by the besieged and grateful residents. Now “No Tea for Toy Soldiers” was graffitied onto crumbling walls all over the city. Battle lines had been drawn.

So many complaints were now flooding in about the army’s behaviour that NICRA was often overwhelmed. In light of this, they took the rash decision to take me off typing duties (I think they must have got exasperated with all those layers of Tippex) and sent me out “in the field” to find cases suitable for a publication they were preparing o=on abuses by the army.

My first assignment was in the bleak ghetto of Andersonstown where I was sent to interview a woman whose husband was “on the run” (wanted by the army). The army had come in the early hours of that morning to search her house for guns.

By the look of it, they had been very thorough. The house looked like it was in the early stages of industrial demolition. The floorboards had been ripped up. The carpets were in shreds. The beds and all the soft furnishings had been slashed open and the stuffing pulled out. The bathroom basin and the toilet had been smashed to pieces. (I did wonder how guns could be concealed in a toilet bowl.) And in two of the rooms the walls had been pissed on. (Well, if there’s no toilet, what are they supposed to do, I guess.)

I was appalled of course and rushed back to the office to tell everyone what I had seen, sure that this was exactly the kind of thing that should go in their report. Kevim McCorry, the director of NICRA looked at me and shook his head.

“This is small stuff,” he told me. “This kind of thing happens every day here.” Every day, I thought? “The army will just say she did the damage herself to discredit the soldiers.” (How, I wondered, would they explain the piss up the wall though?) He shrugged and walked back into his office.

My next assignment was to interview a woman in Ballymurphy, an equally deprived and depressing ghetto.

When I got off the bus, I saw young kids playing in the street, as kids do just about everywhere I guess. They used to play football, but had to stop because they kept losing their ball every time it was accidentally kicked over the fence into the army barracks. The soldiers always refused to return the ball.

“You’re not satisfied with eight hundred years of plunder?” a ten-year old had once cried angrily. “You want a bloody ball as well?”

So, they had had to invent a new game called “Barricades”. They built a (rather pathetic) little “barricade” of sticks and rubbish and abandoned car parts, and then waited for a Saracen (an army armoured car) to come along and run over it with no trouble at all, and move on without stopping. The boys would then run out, rebuild it and wait for the next Saracen. During riots, they told me, they would dive around collecting rubber bullets, which they sold to their many journalist and cameraman customers for four pounds. It was very lucrative apparently.

Rubber bullets, which were then liberally used to control riots, were the shape and size of the average erect penis (according to Masters and Johnson) only quite a bit harder. (Apologies to any men reading this who are insulted by that; but I have never actually got bruises from being hit by an erect penis.) Because of their shape there were a lot of bawdy songs and jokes about women using them for “comfort” when their men were on the run or when they were under house arrest. But the damage they could do was no joke.

The stated use for rubber bullets was to disable rioters. They were intended to be shot at the legs of “ringleaders” so that they could be arrested. In practice it was a bit different.

I knocked on the door of a woman in her mid-sixties. She hobbled to the door to let me in, then hobbled back to the couch where she lay under a blanket as she spoke to me.

She was the archetypal cranky neighbour; the kind who complains about the noisy kids on the stairs, the people who forget to put the lids on their bins, the young guy upstairs with his heavy metal music and the half-deaf old dear next door with her radio and TV turned up too loud. So it was hardly surprising that, when she heard some soldiers in the street outside playing five-a-side football at two o-clock in the morning, she decided to come downstairs in her nightie and object to this very strenuously and in no uncertain terms. This football team, however, were well armed.

“Get away!” she had screamed at them, . “Get away from my door!” They had gathered around her, as annoyed as anyone ever is with a cranky neighbour.

“Get back in your fucking door, you Irish bastard!” said one of them, shoving her back through her doorway with his rubber bullet gun. The woman was incensed.

“Don’t you dare swear at me!” she admonished, advancing on him, her finger wagging furiously. And that was when he fired a rubber bullet into her gut at point blank range.

The woman lifted her nightie to show me her stomach. It was the largest bruise I had ever seen; spreading, in florid blacks, yellows and blues, right across her middle and from the bottom of her breastbone to under her navel.

When I came back to the NICRA office, Kevin McCorry told me I could write this one up. “They can’t say she did this one to herself!” I insisted.

“No,” he replied, “They’ll say she threatened them with a gun.” He had the weary air of someone who had seen all this before.

I spent the rest of the summer “in the field” for NICRA, while also doing all that invaluable typing, filing and proof-reading (at least they told me it was invaluable). I spent a lot of time in the Divis Flats area of the city, where I was always made welcome with cups of tea served in china cups with a plate of biscuits. And in every house I went to, or so it seemed to me, there was a hand carved miniature wooden harp proudly displayed in their knick-knack cupboard.

The harp is the symbol of Ireland, and Republican detainees in the infamous Long Kesh Internment Camp would churn these out for their friends and relatives to relieve the boredom of their incarceration. Everyone knew someone who was detained so there were a lot of them about. One woman I interviewed, whose son was interned at Long Kesh, took one out of her cupboard and gave it to me.

“Here,” she said, “You take it with you back to America.”

“I couldn’t possibly take it!” I protested, “It must be so precious to you.”

“Precious?” she said, “I’ve got these coming out of my ears! I wish my boy would learn to carve something else for a change. Like a statue of the Virgin Mary or a lamp stand!” So she wrapped up the harp and insisted, rather overenthusiastically I thought, that I take it with me.

One day a call came in to NICRA about a shooting in the Divis Flats area – something that wasn’t all that uncommon in those days – and I went out to interview a woman in one of the tower blocks who’d witnessed it.

She was in her mid-thirties, delicate looking, nervous and very quietly spoken. She invited me in for the inevitable tea and biscuits, and I turned on my tape recorder.

“There was a lot of shooting that day,” she said. “There were army snipers on the roofs of the flats. I’d gone out to do my shopping, but when I was walking back, I was told not to go on because there’d been a lot of gunfire. So I waited. After a while it died down and someone said I could probably go on home now; but that I should walk on the far side of the street so the army could see I was a woman.”

She had started to walk along the street when she heard the crackle of gunfire. A boy “of about twelve”, she said, stumbled into her path.

“Help me missus!” he’d cried, “I’m shot!” He’d seemed fine. There was no blood, though he seemed to be in shock.

“Ach, you’re not,” she told him.

“Help me,” he said again.

“You’re alright,” she reassured him.

He fell then, onto his knees and then onto the ground. He rolled on his side. He was wearing a bomber jacket, she remembered, and as he rolled she saw that the back of it was soaked in blood.

“His back was in pieces,” she said. An ambulance was called and she held his hand until it came.

“Am I dying?” he asked her.

“Ach, of course you’re not,” she assured him.

“I think I’m dying.”

“Ach, you’re not. You’ll be alright.”

But he wasn’t. He died before the ambulance got there.

“Was he armed?” I had to ask.

“No,” she said, thinking this a very odd question, “He was a boy. Maybe twelve years old.” But the army would say he was.

I still have the tape of that conversation. But I haven’t been able to bear listening to it for thirty-five years.

By the time I’d finished my tea, gunfire had started to crackle outside. “I’ll make another pot of tea,” she said quietly, “I don’t think you should go out till that stops.” So we had another cup of tea. And then another.

By the time I got back to the NICRA office it was closed and I knew I’d have to use the key they’d given me. When I turned the corner into Marquis Street, there was an army foot patrol there: soldiers standing, as always, with fingers on the triggers of their SLRs . I felt decidedly nervous, something I’d never felt before, given the ubiquity of troops on the streets.

I went to the door and put the key in the lock, anxious to get in as quickly as I could. But, it was a tricky lock at the best of times and I just couldn’t get it open.

After awhile, one of the soldiers came over and offered to help me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I let him. I found myself looking into his face, seeing something other than a gun and a flak jacket for the first time. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, the same age I was. He might have had to run a razor over his upper lip and chin a few times a week, but his jaw line and cheeks were virgin territory. He even had a few teenage pimples and his face seemed strangely soft.

Why are you here? I wanted to ask. I was mystified. Why aren’t you back in your hometown trying to meet the eye of a girl you fancy across a crowded disco? Getting too drunk on a Saturday night and ending up waking up on the park bench where your mates left you? Sweating over some exam or learning a trade? Falling in love?

He got the door open and handed me the key.

“Thank you,” I said. He smiled and looked away, almost shy. I went inside. And bolted the door.


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