IT SOUNDS LIKE an Irish story.
I was born and lived in the village of Ballystewart in the last of a short row of two-storey terrace houses. Like all the others, it was whitewashed. It had a green door, bottle green and glossy and I can only remember it freshly painted, though I should assume it wasn’t always. I was there almost nine years, and can remember most of them.
We were within spitting distance of the Irish Sea, my mother would tell people later and, from my bedroom window with the right wind, it’s possible that we actually were. Within spitting distance of the Irish Sea, a stone’s throw from Millisle and Donaghadee, on the same stretch of coastline as Ballywalter and Ballyhalbert. All of these are names that aren’t much known to the outside world, at least not the parts of it where I’ve been.
From my window I looked out to the grey sea in the distance, and to our garden with its wide flowering laburnum, its two apple trees, some rose bushes that never did well, a trellis of sweet peas and a back lane that curved behind the hedge, then curved again and led to the Donaghadee road. There were two hives in which someone had once kept bees, but they weren’t used in our time.
We’d go to Donaghadee to do the banking. I remember my mother queueing at the tellers but I was never high enough to see over the counter, so my strongest memory is of the lifeboat over near the far wall. It was a model, but a huge one, and there was a collection box which always had money in it. My mother often added some.
When I could read enough I read the signs that went with it, about a lifeboat that went down in a storm with lives lost. My mother helped me with the harder words. I read each sign aloud to the end, my mother sounding out the longer words with me and explaining any I didn’t know. When we’d finished I knew the whole story, and the model boat couldn’t be the same again. Before then, it was like a great toy gone astray in the bank and, if you put money in, maybe they’d get more of them.
All of a sudden it was about people gone down in a lifeboat, and I’d thought lifeboats couldn’t sink. If lifeboats could sink, what could save you? So every sea shanty about drowning might be true, and the sea was right there. The harbour was just across the road, with the lifeboats, not as safe as I’d thought. I wondered why that had never been explained to me, and I read every sign I could from then on.
My mother wouldn’t remember it that way, I’m sure she wouldn’t. That would apply to a lot of things.
I know it’s the case because of what’s been said since, and because it’s how memory goes, how it must go as time passes. We’d remember it differently because we saw it with different eyes, but also because all things remembered are to some degree imagined. Recollection has an irresistible urge to tell a story and is more likely to fill gaps than to leave them, if you work at it.
But I can’t be persuaded that I didn’t see the things I saw, and that I didn’t do the things I did. And no one would call me on the bubbles in the whitewash or how the sky looked from my window, though they’d say I was wrong in some areas. They’d say I was eight and I wouldn’t know, not really.
The politics, for instance. My parents would say my memories were wrong, but they aren’t. They’re right, they’re sharp. My story is not their story, but it’s not less real just because I was eight.
At eight you can be just old enough to know quite a lot and to keep it in your head. You have your own life then, or at least you’re starting to. You have some sense of yourself, some sense of your own of the world you’re in, and you learn that your parents’ protection is not absolute. You learn that there are limits to what they know, and what they can control. Despite them, people are killing and being killed. There are bad people out there, going out with bombs and guns and killing on their minds, and they can be very hard to stop. You learn that because it happens and it makes the news.
They can come to your door in the night, and sometimes they don’t even knock.
My mother and I read the lifeboat signs, and then we went for ice-cream. It was a clear day in early summer with a flat sea. She held my hand when we walked near the harbour, but we didn’t talk about what the lifeboat signs had said. My father worked at a harbour, though not that one. I was quite afraid, but I didn’t let my mother know it. Every night, the lighthouse beam swung over our house, hoping to keep boats from the rocks.
My parents had a context for what happened in Northern Ireland when I was young. They were in their thirties when I was born, and both of them over forty by 1972. They had lived both young and adult lives already, and every new development could be tested against what they already knew.
I had only the context I was putting together at the time. That was my entire frame of reference. On one day in early 1972, I walked in the woods with my father, I read Enid Blyton, I stood still while my mother held the pinned-together pieces of a dress against me and said I’d grow into it, and I watched Bloody Sunday on the evening news. If that’s life no one can change it, and no one can tell you that it’s not how life is. At eight, if you’ve got all those things in your day, then that’s how it is.
I’m hazy on the Bloody Sunday details though, and more certain of the things we found in the woods. Perhaps my parents steered me away from some of the TV coverage.
I’ve stayed away. I couldn’t see the movie, though people told me it was good once you adjusted to the accents. I still don’t know how many people got shot by soldiers, or why.
Looking back on it now, I had a Famous Five childhood in many respects, but it developed an edge to it. I did all the things they did, but I did more. They never seemed to watch the news. They never had their car searched by the army.
My life was mostly like theirs, though, and close to perfect in those respects. My parents were very much in favour of blowing the cobwebs away on any clear day, so I spent a lot of time outside with my friends, at each other’s houses or in the woods.
At harvest time, we’d build forts in the fields out of hay bales and no one ever stopped us. In the woods we’d see ghosts and terrify each other and run like hell. And we’d clamber over the lorries in the McKendrys’ field, coming to grief repeatedly in there. There was plenty to fall from and to fall onto, but again no one told us not to climb the way we did, though they did tell us to be careful.
We’d find ways to get around in there that we were sure no one knew, and we’d give them coded names. If anyone came after us, that was where we’d escape them. We’d lose them in the McKendrys’ field. We knew the quick ways through, and the dead ends, and where to hide. I don’t know how many lorries there were but there must have been at least dozens, and tractors and other broken-down equipment. I don’t know why. Nothing ever seemed to leave. No adult seemed to go in there, and everything in the field seemed long past salvaging.
So there it was, an entire field of rusting vehicles at one edge of a farm, and I never thought to ask what they were there for.
I went to school with Sammy McKendry, one of the sons of Sam McKendry the farmer. He and I and a couple of others spent a lot of afternoons in the field, and there was endless scope for an eight-year-old’s imagination there.
We once found a pile of smashed windscreen glass that we called diamonds, and we kept it in an old leather glove that Sammy had noticed under the seat of one of the lorries. It was a big man’s glove, with quite a capacity for diamonds. We shook them down into the fingers and filled the palm and called ourselves a country, or a band of pirates, depending on how we were feeling. We had the wealth of a country, surely, but we were pirates at least as often, and we’d found the diamonds at the bottom of the ocean or taken them from worse brigands than ourselves.
We hid them in a glove box in a particular broken-down Bedford – whatever the story, that was constant – and we swore each other to secrecy. Even if they came at night and got us, we had to keep the secret. Deny the diamonds, deny we’d ever seen them.
One day, we’d buy an island with them, or fast cars. Later it was guns, maybe a tank or a helicopter, green with a gun either side.