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- Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Tyrone Meehan, damned as an informer, ekes out his days in Donegal, awaiting his killers. Now that everything is out in the open, they will all speak in my place - the ira, the British, my family, my close friends, journalists I've never even met. Some of them will go so far as to explain how and why I ended up a traitor ... Do not trust my enemies, and even less my friends. Ignore those who will say they knew me. Nobody has ever walked in my shoes, nobody. The only reason'I'm talking today is because I am the only one who can tell the truth. Because after I'm gone, I hope for silence. Return to Killybegs is the story of a traitor to Belfast's Catholic community, emerging from the white heat of a prolonged war during the 197os and 198os in Northern Ireland. This powerful work, lauded by critics, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and awarded the Grand Prix de Roman de l'Académie Française, deals with a subject that touches a nerve for most Irish people: the all- too-human circumstances of betrayal and survival. It is an extraordinary read. Sorj Chalandon is a novelist who spent formative years on assignment in Northern Ireland as a reporter for Libération during the Troubles. He is the author of two works: My Traitor was first published to acclaim in France in 2007 and winner of the Prix Joseph Kessel and the Prix Jean Freustié. Return to Killybegs was originally published in France in 2011.
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THE LILLIPUT PRESS
DUBLIN
Prologue
Now that everything is out in the open, they will all speak in my place – the IRA, the British, my family, my close friends, journalists I’ve never even met. Some of them will go so far as to explain how and why I ended up a traitor. It incenses me that books may well be written about me. Do not listen to any of their claims. Do not trust my enemies, and even less my friends. Ignore those who will say they knew me. Nobody has ever walked in my shoes, nobody. The only reason I am speaking out now is because I am the only one who can tell the truth. After I’m gone, I hope for silence.
Killybegs, 24 December 2006
Tyrone Meehan
1
When my father beat me he’d shout in English, as if he didn’t want his language mixed up in that. He’d strike with his mouth twisted, yelling like a soldier in combat. When my father beat me he was no longer my father, just Padraig Meehan. War-wounded, stony-faced, Meehan the ill wind people crossed the street to avoid. When my father had been drinking he’d batter the ground; shatter the air. When he’d come into my room, the night would shift. He wouldn’t light the candle. He’d breathe like an old animal and I’d wait for the blows.
When my father had been drinking he’d occupy Ireland the way our enemy had. His hostility was widespread. It extended from under our roof, across his threshold, along the lanes of Killybegs, over the bog and the edge of the forest, covering day and night. Far and wide, he’d take over areas with sudden advances. You’d see him from a long way off. You’d hear him from a long way off. He’d trip over his words and movements. In Mullin’s, the village pub, he’d slide from his barstool, approach tables and slam his hands down flat between the glasses. That was his response when he didn’t agree with someone. No words, his fingers in the spilt beer and that look of his. The others would fall silent, caps lowered and eyes hidden. Then he’d stand up straight again, challenging the room with arms crossed, waiting for a response. When my father had been drinking he’d frighten people.
One day, on the lane down to the port, he punched George, old McGarrigle’s mule. The coalman had named his animal after the king of England so he’d be able to boot him up the backside. I was there, following my father. Still intoxicated from the previous night, he walked with jerky, staggering steps and I scurried along in his wake. On a street corner, opposite the church, old McGarrigle was struggling. He pulled at his motionless donkey, one hand on the saddle, the other on the halter, and threatened him, calling him every name under the sun. My father stopped. He watched the old man with his baulking animal, the distress of one, the obstinacy of the other, and he crossed the street. He pushed McGarrigle aside and stood facing the donkey, talking to him roughly, as though speaking with the British sovereign. He asked him whether he knew who Padraig Meehan was, if he’d any idea who he was dealing with. He was bent over him, forehead to forehead, menacing, waiting for a response from the animal, a movement, surrender. And then he struck, a terrible blow between the eye and nostril. George swayed and keeled over on his flank. The cart tipped out its pieces of coal.
—Éirinn go Brách!shouted my father. Then he pulled me by the arm. Speaking Irish is resisting, he murmured once more. And we continued on our way.
As a child, my mother used to send me to fetch him home from the pub. It would be dark out. I’d be too afraid to go in so I’d wander back and forth in front of the pub’sfrosted door and its windows with their curtains drawn. I’d wait for a man to emerge so I could slip in to the odour of sour beer, sweat, damp overcoats and cold tobacco.
—Looks like you’d best go home for your tea, Pat, my father’s friends would joke.
He’d raise his hand to me behind closed doors, but when I entered his world he’d welcome me with open arms. I was seven. I’d lower my head and stay standing against the bar while he finished his song. His eyes would be closed, one hand on his heart; he’d mourn his divided country, his dead heroes, his lost war; he’d beseech the Great Legends, the 1916 rebels, the funereal cohort of our defeated and all those who came before, the chiefs of the great Gaelic clans and Saint Patrick to boot, with his curved staff for driving out the English snake. And I’d watch him from below. I’d listen to him. Observing the other men’s silence, I was proud of him in spite of everything. Proud of Pat Meehan, proud of that father, despite the marks from his brown belt across my back and my hair torn out by the fistful; when he’d sing about our land, heads were held high and eyes filled with tears. Before becoming mean, my father was an Irish poet and I was welcomed as that man’s son. As soon as I came through the door I felt the warmth, too. Hands on my back, a squeeze of the shoulder, a man-to-man wink though I was only a child. Someone would let me sip the ochre froth of a Guinness. That’s where my bitterness began, and I had a taste for it. I drank that mixture of earth and blood, the thick blackness that would become my eau de vie.
—We drink our earth. We are no longer men. We are trees, my father would sing when he was happy.
The others would leave the pub, putting their glasses down and their caps on their heads. Not him, though. Before passing through the door, he’d always tell a story. He’d capture their attention one last time. He’d get up, slip his coat on.
Then, we’d go home, he and I. Him staggering, me telling myself I was supporting him. He’d point out the moon, its light on the path.
—It’s the light of the dead, he’d say.
Under its pale beams we already looked like ghosts. One foggy night, he took me by the shoulder. Before the swirling mists he promised me that after life everything would be like this, calm and beautiful. He swore to me that I’d no longer have to fear a thing. Passing in front of the crossed-out sign, ‘NA CEALLA BEAGA’, which marked the edge of our village, he assured me that they spoke Irish in paradise. And that the rain there was soft like this evening, but warm and tasting of honey. He laughed and pulled up the collar of my jacket to protect me from the cold. Once on the way home he even took my hand. I felt ill, knowing that this hand would become a fist again, would soon change from tenderness to metal. In an hour’s time or tomorrow and without my knowing why. Out of malice, pride, fury, out of habit. I was a prisoner of my father’s hand. But that night, with my fingers curled into his, I made the most of his warmth.
My father belonged to the Irish Republican Army. He was a volunteer,óglachin Irish, a simple soldier of the Donegal Brigade of the IRA. In 1921, he and several comrades opposed the ceasefire negotiated with the British. He refused to accept the border, the creation of Northern Ireland, the tearing in half of our homeland. He wanted to drive the British from the whole country, fight to the last bullet. After the War of Independence against the British, we had the Civil War amongst ourselves.
—The traitors, the cowards, the sell-outs! my father would hiss when he’d talk about his former brothers in arms who had supported the truce.
These felons were armed by the British and dressed by the British. They opened fire on their comrades. The only thing Irish about them was our blood on their hands.
My father had been interned without charge by the British, sentenced to death and pardoned. In 1922 he was arrested once more, this time by the Irish who had chosen the compromise camp. He never told me about it, but I knew. After six years he found himself back in the same prison, the same cell. After mistreatment by the enemy he received the same from former comrades. He was knocked about for a week. The soldiers of the new Irish Free State wanted to know the whereabouts of the last IRA combatants, the insubordinates, the dissenters. They wanted to find the rebel arms caches. During hours, days and nights of violence, those sons of bitches tortured my father in English. They steeled their voices with the enemy tongue.
—Are you English? an old American asked my father one day.
—No, the opposite, my father replied.
When my father beat me, he was his own opposite.
In May 1923, the last of the IRAóglaighlaid down their weapons and my old man grew even older. Our people were divided. Ireland was cut in two. Pat Meehan had lost the war. He was no longer a man but a failure. He began drinking a lot, roaring a lot, fighting. Beating his children. He had had three of them when his army surrendered. On 8 March 1925, I joined Seánie, Róisín and Mary, all of us crammed together like sardines in the big bed. Seven others were still to emerge from my mother’s belly. Two wouldn’t survive.
I witnessed my father’s courage one last time in November 1936. He was coming back from Sligo. He and some old IRA members had attacked a public meeting of Blueshirts, the Irish fascists, who were going to fight in Spain under General Franco. After the pitched battle of bare fists and broken chairs, my father and his comrades had decided to join the Spanish Republican cause. For several days, he talked of nothing but leaving for combat. He was handsome, standing tall, feverish, marching around our kitchen with great soldier’s strides. He wanted to rally the men of the Connolly Column of the International Brigades. He said that Ireland had lost a battle and that the war was still being played out over there. My father wasn’t just a Republican: Catholic by happenstance, he had fought his whole life for the social revolution. He believed the IRA ought to be a revolutionary army. He revered our national flag but admired the red of the workers’ struggle.
He was forty-one, I was eleven. He had packed his bag for Madrid. I remember that morning. My mother was in the kitchen; they had been talking all night. She had cried. He had his face of stone on. She was peeling potatoes and saying our names one after the other, whispering them. It was a prayer, a sorrowful litany. She was there, at the table, her body gently moving back and forth, reciting us like the beads of a rosary. ‘Tyrone ... Kevin ... Áine ... Brian ... Niall ...’ My father stood at the front door with his back turned to her, his forehead pressed against the wood. She told him that if he left we would go hungry. That she’d never be able to look after us all. She told him that without her man, the earth would no longer provide for us. People’s eyes would turn when we passed. She told him the Sisters of Notre Dame of the Compassion would take us away. That we’d be sent to Quebec or Australia on Father Nugent’s boats, along with the street children. She told him that she’d be alone, would let herself fade away. And that he would die, would never come back. And that Spain may as well be farther away than hell itself. I remember my father’s movement. He punched the door, just once, as if calling on the fallen angel. He turned around slowly and looked at my mother with her lips shut tight, at the table covered in peelings. He took up the bag he’d made ready for the next day and hurled it across the room, into the fireplace. The fire itself seemed surprised. It drew back under the blast of air, and then the blue flames enveloped the cloth pouch and you could smell the peat and the fabric.
My father was transfixed. He sometimes lashed out like that, without grasping the meaning of what he was doing. One day he kicked me in the small of my back and then looked at me lying on my stomach, my arms folded under me, not comprehending what I was doing on the ground. He set me back on my feet, brushed down my legs grazed with gravel. He took me in his arms, telling me he was sorry, but that everything was my fault all the same, that I shouldn’t have looked at him with a challenge in my eyes and that smile on my face. But that he loved me. That he loved me as best he could. Another time, he saw blood in my mouth. I recognized the acrid taste and let it run down my chin and made my eyes roll like someone about to pass out. I think he was scared. He wiped my lips and neck with his open hand. He repeated ‘My God!’ over and over, as if someone other than him had just hit me. Sometimes, in the darkness, after having struck me, he’d run his fingers under my eyes. He wanted to check whether I was crying. I knew he’d do this. From the first blows, I’d know it. He’d always conclude his punishments by ascertaining my grief. But I didn’t cry. I never cried. ‘But cry, why don’t you?!’ my mother would beg. While I protected my face, I’d slide my fingers into my mouth, wet them with saliva and smear my cheeks. Then he’d take my spittle for tears, sure that his devil of a son had finally learned his lesson.
That morning in front of the hearth he had that same surprised look on his face. He didn’t understood what he’d just done. He looked at his bag, all his belongings, his life. His trousers, his collarless shirts, his two cardigans, his spare pipe. It was an abrupt inferno. The bag was smothered by the flames. Spain burned, along with his hopes of revenge and his dreams of honour. My mother didn’t move, didn’t say another word. Silence. Just the sound of my father’s shoes crackling like wood. And his Bible, which gave off a very blue flame.
My father took me by the arm and pulled me out of the house by force. He dragged me along like that as far as the lane and then let me go. He walked, and I followed him in silence. We headed towards the port. His eyes were nearly closed. When we came across McGarrigle and George the donkey, my father spat on the ground. The animal was braying under the old coalman’s shoves.
—Éirinn go Brách!my father roared after hitting the creature. ‘Ireland Forever!’ The war cry of the United Irishmen, the sacred phrase decorating their green flag with its golden harp. It was Friday, 9 November 1936. Padraig Meehan had just raised his hand to an ass, and I had simultaneously lost a father and a hero.
In Killybegs, my father ended up ‘the bastard’, a nickname whispered when his back was turned. The senior IRA member, the legendary veteran, the magnificent orator, the evening storyteller, the pub singer, the hurler, the greatest stout drinker ever born on this Donegal soil. He, Padraig Meehan, had become a feared man, avoided in the street, ignored in the pub, abandoned to his forgotten corner between the dartboard and the men’s toilets. He had become a bastard, that is to say, in the end, a man of no importance.
Pat Meehan died with his pockets full of stones. That’s how they knew he wanted to end his life. He left us alone in December 1940. He dressed in his Sunday clothes under one of my mother’s endless silences. He left the house one morning to sit in his spot in Mullin’s. He drank as he did every day, a lot, and wouldn’t let anyone clear away his empty glasses. He wanted them to pile up, packed together on the table to show what he was capable of. He drank alone, didn’t read, spoke to nobody. That night, we waited for him.
At dawn, my mother wrapped herself in her shawl to protect baby Sara asleep in her belly. She searched the deserted village for her husband. I went to the pub. The barman was rolling beer barrels along the pavement with his hands. My father had left the pub towards one in the morning, one of the last. Just before closing, he had wandered between the tables, trying to catch someone’s eye. Nobody would look at him. The owner showed him the door with a tilt of his chin. When he went out, he turned left, headed towards the port. He bumped against the walls of his village as he walked. Two witnesses saw him bend down close to the quarry and pick up something from the roadside. It was very cold. They found him on the village outskirts in the early hours, on a road leading to the sea. He was grey, lying on the frozen ground, ice for blood. His left arm was raised, fist clenched as if he’d been fighting with an angel. Before moving him, the gardaí thought his death an accident. Drunk, fallen over, unable to get up again, sleeping it off till morning arrived.
It was only when they turned the body over that they understood. My father had died on his way to death. He had filled his pockets with rocks. They filled his trousers, his cardigan, his jacket, his blue woollen overcoat. He’d even slipped stones into his cap. These were the shards of rock he was gathering the night before in the quarry. He was walking towards his end when his heart had stopped. He wanted to die like the ordinary men of Donegal, to walk into the sea until the water took him. He was leaving, stuffed with his earth, without a word, without a tear. Just the wind, the waves and the light of the dead. Padraig Meehan wanted this legendary end. My father left the world a poor wreck, his face pressed against the frost, and his rocks, for nothing.
2
When my father died, people turned away. Misery was contagious. It was bad luck to watch us walk by. We were no longer a family but a pale, straggly herd. My brothers, sisters and I made a pitiful troupe, led by a she-wolf on the brink of madness. We’d walk in single file, each of us holding on to the next by the end of a coat. For three months we lived on charity. In exchange for cabbages and potatoes, we helped out at the presbytery. Róisín and Mary used to scrub the floors of the corridors on their knees. Seánie, wee Kevin and myself used to wash windows by the dozen. Áine, Brian and Niall would help in the refectory and my mother would sit on a bench in the corridor, baby Sara nestled against her, hidden between shawl and breast. I wasn’t miserable, or even sad, or envious of anything. We lived off the little we got. In the evenings, my brothers and I used to fight the gang led by Timmy Gormley, the self-titled ‘king of the quays’. A dozen young lads, broken like us, pieced together. They were nasty, hot-tempered, and about as tough as toy soldiers, shocked when their noses would bleed. They called us ‘the Meehan gang’. Father Donoghue used to break us apart with a hazel rod. He had no time for our laughter and was even less tolerant of our after-dark shenanigans.
In the winter of 1940, I went to work on the bog with Seánie. Every day for two months. We used to help cut the turf with a spade and load the mules in spring and at Halloween, but this was the first time we had worked in the cold. The farmer needed extra hands for bringing in the harvest. The mud no longer sucked our shoes off but the cold water and ice turned them into cardboard. There were about twenty of us young lads in the ditches. The farmer called us his ‘hired hands’. It was nicer than calling us his orphans. We were frozen and shaking, our sods heaped up in our arms, heavy as a dead friend. In return for the work, the boss would give us some turf, bacon and milk. No money. He said that money was for men and we had no need to be drinking or smoking.
Joseph ‘Josh’ Byrne was the bravest of us all and the youngest, barely six years old. For nine hours a day, he carefully piled up his frozen sods and then ballasted the tarpaulin that protected them. And he sang, too. He gave us a little bit of heaven. With his singing we became sailors, our hands working with his voice, cutting the earth as we would have hoisted the sail. He sang in step with arms crossed, under the rain, in the wind, in Irish, in English. He sang while tapping the ground with his foot. He hadn’t yet learned how to read or write, so his words would stray at times. He’d invent rhymes and words and make us laugh.
His father had run off and his mother was dead. Josh had been raised by his sisters, the only boy amongst muddy skirts and greasy aprons. He wanted to be a soldier, or a priest, something that would be useful to men. He was frail and needed glasses: he’d be a priest.
When he wasn’t singing, he was praying for us. Out loud, at the edge of the ditch, as though standing beside a grave. In the morning, before taking up the shovels, we would listen to him on our knees. In the evening, when the Angelus rang at St Bridget’s, he used to say the Hail Mary, his eyes wide with shock if our lips remained closed. Father Donoghue was fond of him. He called him ‘the angel’. Josh was his altar boy and despite his age, unsightly face, lumpy chalk-coloured skin, horse hair, crossed eyes and enormous ears, he was respected. The women used to say that a spirit had taken over his body. Mother saw him as a leprechaun or an elf, a pixie from our forests. One day, Tim Gormley swore God had afflicted him so he’d be made a saint.
—What a pity! I hope not, Josh had quietly replied.
And Gormley was left with his nasty remark, not knowing quite what to do with it, surrounded by his hyenas of brothers.
We left Ireland because of the Gormleys. Their cruelty was the final straw for our family. One evening in February Timmy and Brian cornered wee Kevin on his way home. My brother was carrying milk from the farmer to the house. He swung his milk can about him, spitting at the same time. Wee Kevin had always done that. When he was frightened or angry, or when his silence was disturbed, he’d bristle like a cat. With his red hair in his eyes, his lip curled, his black teeth, he would slaver down his chin and spit. This time the Gormleys didn’t back off. Timmy whacked my brother’s legs with a hurley. Brian smacked his ear with a closed fist. Wee Kevin dented the aluminium milk can against the low wall as he spat on the shadows.
My brother was limping and in tears when he got home. He was gripping the handle of the can, which had fallen to the pavement. Nobody told him off. My mother looked out the window. She was afraid the gang might have followed him. Seánie and I tore out the door, the taste of blood and milk in our mouths. Wee Kevin was drenched in urine. Those dogs had pissed all over him. We scoured the village, roaring out Timmy Gormley’s cursed name. Seánie smashed a rock through the window of the grocery where his mother worked. We killed no one. We gave up. We went home.
My mother was waiting for us at the door, her shawl over her head. Her brother, Lawrence Finnegan, had made her an offer she’d accepted. We could no longer continue to live in Killybegs, between the humiliation, the damp and the fighting. She was leaving, we were following. We were going to leave our Ireland, the land of my father. We were going elsewhere, to the other side, we were going to cross the border towards war.
—As long as I’m alive, my children will never see a British flag, my father used to say when he was drunk.
He was dead. His word had died with him.
Mother had decided to sell my father’s house. For weeks the blue and yellow sign remained stuck in the gravel of our path. But that dreary pile of stones was of no interest to anyone. Too cramped, too far from everything. And then death was prowling around there, misery, the grief of that widow with her rosary beads who spoke to Jesus as though giving her husband a piece of her mind.
One morning, very early, Uncle Lawrence came with his chimney sweep’s truck. It was 15 April 1941, two days after Easter. My mother had said we would go to Mass in Belfast the following day.
Belfast. I was frightened by that big city, that other country. Lawrence was like Mother, but with a coarse voice. A harder expression, too. But what stood out most was how silently he lived. He rarely spoke, never swore, didn’t sing. Lips, for him, were the doorway to prayer.
He counted my brothers and sisters as though listing off sheep to the buyer at market. It was a beautiful day, it wasn’t raining, there wasn’t even a threat of rain. The sea breeze came gusting into the house. We barely took anything with us. Not the table, the bench or the dresser, but we had the soup tureen from Galway that my grandmother had given to my mother. The mattresses were piled under the tarpaulin. Seánie, my mother and baby Sara were sitting up beside Lawrence, and the rest of us were crammed in the back, squabbling. An unsettling moment stuck in my memory. Mother was crying. She had closed the door and given it a kick. Then she asked her brother to make a detour so she could say goodbye to her husband.
We drove through the village. A woman crossed herself when we passed. Many others just kept walking. No friends or enemies, there was nobody to mourn or curse us. We were leaving our homeland and the homeland didn’t give a damn.
At the cemetery, our uncle dropped the truck’s tailgate. We walked towards the grave together, except for Sara who was left sleeping and Lawrence who stayed behind the wheel. Mother made us kneel down in front of the cross. And then she told my father that everything was his fault. That we’d never again have a roof over our heads or bread on the table. That she’d get sick and we were going to die one after the other, under the German bombs or the English bayonets. That she was truly suffering, that our cheeks were hollow and the edges of our eyes nearly black. She called on a woman smoothing gravel over her husband’s grave to witness.
—Do you see this, do you? Have you counted them? Nine! There are nine of them and I’m alone with the nine and not a soul to help me!
The woman cast her eye over our rabble and then she nodded in silence. I remember that moment because a seagull screeched. It was balancing in the wind above our heads, and it laughed at us.
I’d never seen an English uniform other than through my father’s hateful descriptions. The number of those soldiers he claimed to have taken by the scruff of the neck! To hear him tell it, half the king’s army had returned home with the mud from my father’s boot sole on their arses.
On the border with Northern Ireland, the British made us get out of the truck. I still didn’t know how to tell the Ulster Defence Volunteers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the Ulster Special Constabulary, those ‘B-Specials’ so loathed by my people. Lawrence didn’t utter a word, nor did my mother, as though some secret order forbade a Meehan or a Finnegan from addressing them. They were helmeted, their bunched-up trousers over their war boots.
The one who searched us had his shirt buttoned right up to the collar, a flattened helmet, a pack on his chest, his gun slung on his back and the bayonet my mother feared. It was the second time in my life seeing a British flag.
The first was 12 June 1930 in the port at Killybegs. TheGo Ahead, an English steam trawler, made a stopover to repair some damage to the engine. It had two masts, dark-red sails and its chimney was belching black fumes. In under an hour, half the village was on the pier. I was five years old. I was holding Seánie’s hand, and my father was there, too. While the sailors lowered the gangplank, my brother made me read the boat’s registration, painted in white on the stern. I recognized the figures and I was proud. For a long time afterwards I even remembered the number – LT 534 – which I wrote down with Mother when we got home. Two harbour police went aboard carrying an Irish flag. The courtesy flag the captain had raised was stained and torn. So Killybegs offered them a brand-new Irish flag. It was hoisted on the front mast of the starboard. The police saluted the tricolour’s ascent. The crowd applauded noisily. Leaning against the bulwark, the English sailors smoked in silence. Their flag hung huge and lifeless behind, wrapped around its mast by our wind.
A long time ago, my father and his friends had burnt a Union Jack in our village square to celebrate the 1916 Rising. They had gathered in front of Mullin’s one Easter in honour of James Connolly, Patrick Pearse and all those who were shot. It had stopped raining. My father had given a speech, standing on a beer barrel with the furrowed brow and raised arms of an orator. He recalled the sacrifice our patriots had made and asked for a moment’s silence. Afterwards, a guy emerged from the crowd. He pulled a British flag from his jacket and my father set it alight with his lighter. It wasn’t a real flag. Not a flag made in England by the English. Ours was badly painted on the back of a white coat. The colour was running and spreading over the cross, but you could see what it was all the same. When it caught fire, everyone applauded. I was there. I was proud. I hit my hands together, imitating the crowd’s clapping. There were about fifty of us, and two gardaí who were keeping an eye on the gathering.
—For Christ’s sake! Don’t do that, Pat Meehan! Not their fucking flag! shouted the oldest man when my father set the fire.
—We’ll have trouble over this! someone else implored.
Ireland had been a free state for fifteen years, but people still thought the British army could come back over the border seeking vengeance.
The two guards ran across the square. My father and his friends shouted, ‘Grab the traitors!’ They were prepared to fight to defend the flaming flag. The women yelled and grabbed their children. And then Cathy Malone had a great idea. She took off her shawl, raised her head with brow bared, closed her eyes and launched into ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’, her fists pressed against her dress. Da and the others took off their caps, old soldiers standing to attention. The guards were flabbergasted. Stopped in their tracks by the first notes, they pulled themselves together as though summoned by a whistle. Stationary, side by side, they adjusted their belts with a thumb and lifted their fingers to the peaks of their caps. Not a sound could be heard: just our national anthem, our crystal pride, and Cathy Malone bawling her eyes out. The enemy flag was burning where it had fallen on the damp street, defied by a handful of patriots, a few women wrapped in shawls, ten children with grazed knees, and two gardaí in uniform. In my entire life, with all the huge commemorations and grandiose celebrations, I’ve never really recaptured the crude beauty and joy of that moment.
At the border, their flag was very small and worn. It was at half-mast, like washing hung out to dry. But this time it was a real one. And real British men. I had the impression that they were more smartly dressed than our soldiers. That might have been because they frightened me. Mother had told us to lower our eyes when they spoke to us, but I looked directly at them.
—Have you come to fight the Jerries? asked the soldier searching me.
—The what?
The fellow gave me a strange look. He had a weird accent, the same as Lawrence’s. He was a Northern Irishman slipped inside a British uniform. There was an insignia on his jacket, a harp surmounted by a crown.
—The Jerries? You know ... the Krauts, the Fritz, time to wake up, sonny!
—The Germans, my uncle whispered.
The soldier patted down my back, between my thighs and under my arms, which were stretched out on either side of me.
—Don’t you know we’re at war?
—Yes, I know that.
He opened my bag and stuck his hand inside as though it were his own.
—No, you don’t. You know nothing, you Irish. Not a bloody thing! spat the soldier who was searching the truck.
He was the real thing. An Englishman from England. My father often used to imitate their way of speaking, upper lip stuck to his teeth and the same ridiculous intonation as the men on the radio.
—Don’t look me in the eye, you cheeky Irish brat! Turn around. Turn around all of you, hands in the air and face against the tarpaulin!
My uncle forced me to turn around. We put our hands up.
—Your thing is shooting us in the back, isn’t that it?
I sensed him behind me.
—Bet you were delighted when those IRA bastards declared war last year?
I didn’t reply.
—You know they plant bombs in cinemas in London, in Manchester? In post offices? At train stations? Have you heard about that? What do you think of that, you Irish?
—He’s only sixteen, my mother let out.
—Shut up, you! I’m talking to the little snot here.
—Let it go, the other soldier murmured quietly.
He made me turn around again, lower my arms. He gave me back my messed-up bag.
—You’re coming to help us win the war, is that it, snot-nose?
I looked at his muddy shoes. I thought hard of my father.
—Because if not, there’s nothing to see over this side.
I met his eyes again.
—Traitors are hanged. We’ve enough to be doing with Hitler, got it?
He raised his voice.
—Right! Listen to me. You’re entering the United Kingdom. There’s no de Valera here, no neutrality, none of your papist bullshit. If you don’t agree you can just turn right around now!
I met Lawrence’s silent look. It warned me to keep my mouth shut, forehead still pressed against the tarp, arms still raised.
So I lowered my head, like him, like Mother, like my brothers and sisters. Like all the Irish waiting on the roadside.
My uncle lived close to Cliftonville in the north of Belfast city. It was a Catholic ghetto, a nationalist bastion surrounded by neighbourhoods full of Protestants loyal to the British monarch. He was a childless widower and owned two houses next door to each other with an adjoining yard. The first was his chimney-sweep workshop and he lived in the second. I’d never seen streets as narrow, or such bleak, straight, endless rows of brick. Each family had its shoebox, strictly identical. A front door, two windows at street level, two on the first floor, a slate roof and a tall chimney. There were none of the coloured facades you’d see at home in those striking greens, yellows or blues. Just dark Belfast brick, dirty red in colour, and the window curtains that were the only friendly feature. Even the Virgins praying against the panes were the same in every house, blue and white plaster and bought from Hanlon’s, the local grocery.
We lived at 19 Sandy Street. My mother settled in with Róisín, Mary, Áine and baby Sara in one of the upstairs rooms. Wee Kevin, Brian and Niall took the other one, with the window overlooking the yard. Seánie and I had placed our mattresses in the living room on the ground floor. We tore up and down the narrow stairway, laughing, we took over the space. The glass was missing from the kitchen window and had been replaced with a piece of wood. Everything was damp, the wallpaper was peeling, the chimney drew poorly, but we had a roof over our heads.
For our first evening in Belfast, Lawrence had made a mutton and cabbage stew. From now on he’d stay in his workshop but would keep our key. People locked their doors in Belfast. We sat down on the floor, on the mattresses, in the armchair and on the couch, our plates on our knees. I was hungry. My uncle said grace in his own way.
—My Lord, let our plates be always full, and our glasses always topped up. May the roof over our heads remain solid enough. And may we get to heaven a wee half-hour before the devil learns we’re dead. Amen.
Mother raised her eyes to heaven. She didn’t like anyone joking about hell. We blessed ourselves. I immediately liked this man. He cut the bread and shared it out fairly.
—Thank Uncle Lawrence, Mother said as she cleared away our plates.
—Thank you, Uncle Lawrence!
He didn’t reply. He rarely replied. Wee Kevin asked him one day if his lips were glued together. I think he smiled.
Seánie wanted to go out but Mother asked him to stay in front of the house. I went with him. It was almost a soft evening, only a light drizzle. Groups of men stood talking, dotted all over the street, leaning against the walls. Every time someone passed, the others would greet him. They all addressed one another by their first names. It was the same in our village.
I’d just turned sixteen. And that evening, the first of my new life, in an Ireland that still wasn’t mine, I met Sheila Costello. She was fourteen and lived in the house to the left of ours heading up the street. She was tall. She had short, black hair, liquid-green eyes and that smile. For a few bob my sister Mary would soon be minding her sister in the evenings when their parents went to the pub. I kissed Sheila a few days later, one Sunday, in the dark, just after the Angelus. She had bent her head slightly so our lips could meet. She told me that a kiss was nothing, that you shouldn’t do it again or go any further. And then she called me ‘wee man’. That’s how she became my wife.
—Don’t you know we’re at war? the Englishman had asked me.
That evening, 15 April 1941, we learned it.
We had just gone to bed. Sheila’s image was flashing behind my eyelids when I closed my eyes. She said I had a ‘country’ accent. I wanted to try my best to imitate hers. I was sinking into my night, Seánie’s back against mine, pushing away his cold leg. Suddenly everything shook. There was an unholy din, a crash of steel, of smashed metal, very low above the houses.
—Fuck, those are planes! my brother said.
He got up, looked at the ceiling. He switched on the light. We could hear the screech of sirens. Panic on the stairs. A terrified rabble. Mother was grey, baby Sara in tears, my sisters in their night faces. Wee Kevin’s mouth hung open, Niall had a crazed look. Uncle Lawrence came in and asked us to get dressed quickly. The first bomb knocked Brian to the floor, just the noise. My brother fell flat on his back, his eyes rolled back in his head. Lawrence gathered him up in his arms. He spoke loudly and rapidly. He said we had nothing to fear. That the German planes had already come but that they didn’t bomb our neighbourhoods, that they attacked the city centre, the port, the stations, the barracks, the rich but not the destitute.
—Not the poor! Don’t kill the poor! my mother prayed, going out to the street.
We had reformed our pathetic caterpillar, each of us clinging to the other by the corner of a garment. Lawrence was at the head of the line. Families were spilling out, leaving their doors open. Fear distorted their faces. It was almost midnight. The moon was full, the clear sky had stripped the city. The planes were above us, below us, overwhelming our senses, roaring right inside our bellies. We didn’t dare look at them. We lowered our heads for fear of being struck by their wings. The city was burning in the distance, but none of our houses was alight.
—Lord spare us! my mother cried, pressing her cheek against baby Sara’s.
At the end of the street there was a huge explosion, a white burst of flame flowered in the chapel where we were going to take shelter. The sound of war. Real, staggering. The storm of men. The crowd was in chaos, suddenly on the ground, thrown, knocked down, heaped in screaming disorder along the walls. Some of them died where they stood, open-mouthed. Others collapsed helplessly.
We formed a ring of fear, our backs to the danger. Lawrence knelt down, Mother and the wee ones in the centre. Seánie, Róisín, Mary, my uncle and I were protecting them. We were wrapped around one another, heads pressed together and eyes closed.
—Don’t look at the flashes, they’ll blind you! screamed a woman.
We repeated the Hail Mary, faster and faster, tearing through the words. We were repenting. Mother was no longer praying, she had abandoned that familiar peace. Rosary wrapped around her wrist, a bracelet of beads, she was screaming at Mary the way you howl at the moon. She was calling out for her to protect us in the middle of the inferno.
We were never able to reach the O’Neill factory with its enormous basement. We stayed where we were until the war grew weary. The planes went away, disappeared behind the black mountains. And we returned amid the rubble. Our street was intact. Houses were burning just behind it. The entire northern section of the city had been demolished.
—The Protestants got what they deserved, growled a guy as he looked at the red and black sky above York Street.
—You think the Jerries can tell the difference? a neighbour asked.
The guy looked at him angrily.
—What’s bad for the Brits is good for us!
It was four in the morning. Everything stank of acrid fire. With the help of the Blessed Virgin, Mother put her wee ones to bed. She was speaking to her, thanking her in a low voice. My mother’s face: dreadful tears, smeared with snot and foamy saliva, hair tumbling. She pleaded with her. She should no longer turn away from our family. She needed to be there, always. Okay? Promise? Promise me, Mary! Promise me!
Lawrence took his trembling sister by the shoulders and folded her into his chest.
In the morning, I walked with Seánie and my uncle through Belfast for the first time in my life. The silence was shattered, the city turned upside down. All around you could hear the sound of glass, of shifting steel, fallen rubble. We stumbled amongst the blocks, the piles of bricks, the wood ripped away from timber structures. Beams blocked off avenues, lying between electricity poles and tram cables. The post-catastrophe dust lay over everything. White and grey smoke, fire flickering beneath the ruins. At the centre of vacant lots, bombs had hollowed out craters that were now filled with muddy water. We came across a car engulfed by a fountain of street. Men were wandering around, hands black, sooty faces, trousers and coats covered in ash. Others were standing at crossroads, beyond alone, speechless, their gaze devastated. There were very few women about. We heard the occasional uneven clopping of a horse passing, or a wheelbarrow. The locals clattered along on bicycles, matching the rhythm of the surrounding cacophony. Some students were standing in front of a building whose facade was missing, shovels in their hands. Four of them in medical-faculty uniform were carrying a wounded person.
And then I saw my first casualty of war, a few feet away. One arm was sticking out from under a blanket on a stretcher that lay on the ground. A woman’s arm, her nightdress melted onto her flesh. Seánie put a hand over my eyes. I shook him off.
—Let him look, my uncle told him.
I looked. The arm of the woman, her hand with its painted nails, skin hanging from the elbow to the wrist like a torn sleeve. We passed very close to her. The shape of the head underneath the fabric, her chest and then nothing, the blanket sagged from around the level of her waist. No legs left. In the street a newspaper vendor was selling theBelfast Telegraph. He was yelling about the hundreds dead, the thousand wounded. As for me, I saw an arm. I didn’t cry. I did the same as everyone else who passed. I touched my index and middle fingers to my forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. In the name of the Father and all the others. I decided to no longer be a child.
On Jennymount Street there was a man playing the piano, sitting on a wooden chair. The instrument had been rescued from the blaze and pulled outside, with its film of ash and debris. A few children had drawn near, their mothers with them, and some soldiers, too. I knew that song. I’d often heard it on Irish radio. ‘Guilty’, a love song.
If it’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you ...
The musician was making faces. Winking. He was imitating Al Bowlly, the Killybegs girls’ favourite singer.
—Pity he isn’t Irish, my mother had said one day.
