After Daddy had his leg cut off, I didn’t see him laugh again until the pope died. Not that the expiry of His Holiness was, in and of itself, hilarious. It was just that Robert Dalton told him that Reservoir Meats, the meat-packing plant about a mile from our house, ended up briefly closing because of it, which reduced Daddy to tears of ungovernable laughter, while the bandages were still wet in his hospital bed. Robert – the kindly farmer who was good enough to take me out for a day on his tractor when I was six – was a very dear friend of my father. As well as farming, he had a job as the local meat inspector, surveying the premises of slaughterhouses, packing plants and abattoirs, making sure they stood up to government code, which placed him in that rare bracket of health and safety officers who might mark down your workplace if it had insufficient sharp objects and too few vats of animal blood. Most of his time was taken up, I gather, scrutinising the cleanliness and work practices of large blood-stained buildings in Derry and the north-west, making sure people weren’t licking the carcasses or incorrectly storing barrels filled with hooves.
Reservoir Meats was something of a community success. Many Northern Ireland businesses don’t have mixed workforces of Catholics and Protestants, even today. Sometimes this is a function of geography, but it’s also a legacy of sectarian hiring practices that worked as a barrier for Catholics. For decades it was, for example, prohibitively difficult for a Catholic to work in Belfast’s shipyards or gain entrance to trades through apprenticeships, as these were often closed to papists. Reservoir Meats was, by contrast, an egalitarian employer, one in which working-class Catholics and Protestants sat side by side all day, chopping up animal cadavers with giant cleavers, passing their time in an atmosphere that bordered on bonhomie.
This was despite, or perhaps because of, a culture of bristlingly offensive discourse between groups. Where other workforces might slag off each other’s chosen football team or questionable fashion choices, here the jokes threw off references to punishment beatings, political murders and tit-for-tat killings amid a demographic of people who more than likely had direct experience of one or more in their own immediate families. Both of my brothers would come home from their shifts, white-faced and staring, having spent eight hours squeezed between huge men with hands like shovels, their own willowy, teenaged forms almost comically tiny and mute compared to their beefy neighbours with scarred knuckles and paramilitary tattoos, tearing meat apart as they traded withering barbs.
‘Is your cousin still missing, Gerry?’ one might say to his opposite, provoking laughter from the whole room and from Gerry himself, suggesting that the abduction and murder of a family member was not just an allowable subject for humour, but one even its target had to agree was, at the end of the day, hilarious. All such jibes were taken in good humour, or rather something like the blithe nihilism that becomes general in any place where people have lived through thirty years of violent conflict and now dismantle animal corpses for a living. These were men who might, at one time, have been at war with each other. Now they sat together pulling raw beef from leg joints and shoulder sockets all day, and would drink, bet and play darts with each other afterwards. This was some strange, blood-splattered version of peace in our time, so what harm was there in throwing off a joke about your disappeared cousin?
In comparison, ridiculing the pope’s death should have been small potatoes. Given John Paul II’s declining health over that year, it was entirely predictable. The Protestant workers’ most waggish contingent had already been singing mock Latin when news had come in that Il Papa was too weak to give Easter Mass. By the time he died, and they showed up wearing black armbands, Robert told us it was received with relative equanimity by the other side, except for one particular group: the plant’s thirty Polish workers, who, quite aside from being ardent Catholics, were particularly invested in the first-ever Polish pope. It appears likely that the everyday jibes had passed them by, since they so often centred on local politics and personal histories and were delivered in that machine-gun Derry accent that’s only variably comprehensible to people from Northern Ireland, let alone the Baltic states. During the minute’s silence that was held, it was harder for the Poles to ignore their workmates’ jeering shouts of ‘fuck the pope’ and ‘dirty Polish bastard’. Quite rightly horrified, the Poles went on strike, grinding the plant to a halt for days, interrupting the meat supply to the region and putting the entire business in jeopardy.
It was this story, delivered in Robert’s signature south Derry monotone, that had my dad in literal and figurative stitches in the amputation ward. Despite being a Catholic who loved and admired Pope John Paul II, who had even sent two of his daughters to sing for the man, my dad found the whole thing unaccountably hilarious for exactly the same reason I did: so many horrific, depressing and awful things have happened in Northern Ireland in his lifetime that whatever joy can be taken from incidents in which no one was physically harmed will be seized with both hands.
Contradictions like this – my extremely Catholic father laughing his head off in a hospital bed at news of Protestant slaughtermen mocking the pope’s death – are hard to explain to people who aren’t from Northern Ireland. There’s a gallows humour that freaks them out, and they don’t know how they should react. Sometimes I think the only good thing about being from Northern Ireland is that, unlike people from everywhere else, I’m not inherently scared of Northern Irish people. We are the coeliac vegans of the UK and Ireland; whatever you offer, we might take offence. Part of it is due to people’s perception of us as either humourless, recreationally offended victims, or violent psychopaths incapable of getting along with each other.
Robert, while a dear friend of my father’s, was also a committed loyalist who belonged to the Apprentice Boys of Derry, a Protestant fraternal organisation similar to the Orange Order. They march through Derry every year to commemorate the 1689 siege in which the Protestant inhabitants of the city’s walled section successfully repelled the Catholic forces of King James, keeping it Protestant in the process. The Apprentice Boys have traditionally been regarded with resentment and hatred by the city’s Catholic majority, since they celebrate the imposition of centuries of religious suppression. The ideals of Protestant supremacy espoused by such orders were effectively the law in Northern Ireland well into my father’s lifetime, barring Catholics from prominent positions and trades, and withholding civil and political rights. Housing provision for Catholics was infamously appalling, and since only property owners could vote in local elections, the entire Catholic population of Derry was effectively disenfranchised until the late sixties.
My father didn’t have an inalienable right to vote until he was very nearly thirty, while my mother’s parents, who never owned a house in their entire lives, were in their late fifties by the time they cast their first local ballot. The Apprentice Boys’ own marches, once highly contentious in Derry, have become less so of late, although there’s really little to be said in defence of an organisation that still doesn’t admit Catholics and bars its members from attending Catholic services or events. Despite all this, my father refused to judge Robert, or anyone else, based on their membership of this or that organisation, in a belief that life was too short to start pulling at these threads, since such things were as much grounded in circumstance, parentage and tradition as hard-felt convictions one way or the other. For me, and people of my generation, this stance was simultaneously weirdly admirable and maddeningly complacent. For my father it was nothing more complicated than knowing a person by their deeds rather than their political stripe.
Tuesday 30 August 1988
WEEKEND OF CHAOS
Derry was returning to near normality yesterday after one of the worst weekends of violence in recent years. During the widespread disturbances a RUC man was injured, a customs post was destroyed, seven houses were badly damaged and 21 stained glass windows were destroyed in St Columb’s Cathedral by an IRA bomb, and Derry City centre was thrown into chaos by a series of bomb scares and hijackings… on Friday night a masked man in a black Mazda car drove into a filling station on the Northern side of the border at Molenan Road and fired four to five shots into the air shouting bomb warnings at two border customs posts before driving back into Donegal.
About an hour later a loud explosion was heard in the Letterkenny Road area. The area was sealed off on both sides of the border by RUC and Garda personnel and on Saturday morning it was discovered that the unmanned British customs post at Molenan had been destroyed.
The IRA claimed responsibility for both explosions.
When the IRA detonated a bomb at the top of our road on 27 August 1988, it wasn’t particularly big news. Not to me, certainly, since I was just shy of my third birthday, but neither to the watching world. The above snippet from our local paper came out four days later, and limited the mention of the ‘Molenan Road’ explosion – our explosion – to about fifty words, sandwiched in between other, more notable incidents from ‘one of the worst weekends of violence in recent years’. As someone who spent so much of his life struggling for the praise, adulation and attention I deserved, I find it typical that even the IRA bomb that damaged my house was considered insignificant in comparison to other more impressive bombs with which it had to share its moment. I hear you, plucky little bomb. It’s also typical that the only thing my dad deemed worthy of comment when I dug up this article was the fact they misspelled the name of our street, Mullennan Road.
The explosion took apart the customs post which was, in reality, little more than a prefabricated hut that you could have talked into coming down. Maybe that’s what the ‘shouted bomb warnings’ were an actual attempt at achieving. Since the building had the structural density of a pack of Super Noodles, the explosion ejected quite a spectacular amount of debris, and bits of badly made building flew into our field. These included, most pleasingly of all, a wall that had a lavatory sink still attached. We were home at the time, although our three eldest were holidaying in Wicklow with Mammy’s friend Patricia. The army cordoned off the area and, fearing that unexploded ordnance might still be nearby, evacuated our house. We spent the next few days at my grandfather’s in Fermanagh, expanding the population of his small council house – two elderly people – to eleven and a half, with the addition of seven children under ten, plus Daddy, and Mammy, who was just recently recovering from cancer treatment and also seven months pregnant with Conall.
This was all deemed so uninteresting that I wasn’t even told about it until my dad mentioned it well into my twenties, in the sort of offhand way you might tell someone who was sure they’d never ridden a donkey that they had, in fact, ridden a donkey, but when they were too young to remember it. Even Shane was unimpressed when Mammy rang Patricia to tell her about it, to the extent that he tried to one-up her news by telling her Patricia added fresh bananas to the Weetabix every morning, a worldly affectation that was quite exotic to us; certainly more so than some bomb or other going off.
We were, of course, more worldly than we realised, despite my parents’ best efforts to shield us. A good Catholic was to be in this world but not of it. For some that meant totally swearing off all temptations of the modern world, but for us it meant little more than restricted access to cartoons. My dad hadn’t accounted for me getting up two or three hours before him each morning to gorge on them. For years, I would wake up in the small hours and assemble a ramshackle fort by the TV in the kitchen. This was achieved by the time-honoured route of sticking two chairs front to front and stretching a duvet over both in such a way that I was covered but could still view the children’s programming that began around 6 a.m. This was the only way of getting TV into my system each morning, since Daddy’s loyalty was to the homespun, newsy charm of BBC Radio Foyle. Mornings in our house began with a roar from my father to get up and then the radio in the kitchen filtering through the house at factory-floor volume. This dispensed a steady drone of traffic reports from hilly back roads, cheerless pronouncements by local politicians and the dispiritingly regular death notices that proliferated through my childhood. Here, each freshly ended life, along with the killing’s location – ‘outside his home’, ‘while on holiday’, ‘on the Lisburn Road’ – would be recited without emotion. It’s odd to look back and consider that this litany of death was considered somehow more age-appropriate and wholesome than cartoons in which toys beat each other up.
Where we were raised, in the countryside, Protestants and Catholics got along, and in our spare time we participated regularly in ecumenical activities: school trips and deliberately mixed social events. Our whole family attended cross-community summer camps in Corrymeela, a community hub in Ballycastle where mixed religious services were held and people gathered in big tents for events and talks that went heavy with words like ‘reconciliation’ and ‘dialogue’. Here you might hear reformed paramilitaries sharing their stories, preaching forgiveness and embracing each other on stage as if they were competing city contractors who’d put aside their differences to launch a shopping centre rather than men who’d spent decades placing increasingly large explosive devices near each other’s heads. It was moving, and formative in a way that I couldn’t then comprehend. Not just the big-ticket moments of on-stage redemption, but simpler things like playing football or doing arts and crafts courses with Alistairs and Margarets and Gregorys who might otherwise have grown up twenty minutes from our house without ever talking to a Séamas or a Caoimhe.
Even now, these sound like asinine and self-congratulatory platitudes. It seems bland and obvious to say, ‘Wow, we’re all the same when you think about it.’ It’s the sort of hackneyed, government-issue reconciliation twaddle that would be on the nose if it were painted on the side of a youth centre. But it’s also true. These mundane experiences, and the quiet revelations we gained from them, were rare at the time. They for ever affirmed the falseness of those arbitrary separations that were said to exist between our communities. They emphasised the banal uniformity of our upbringings and the contrivance of those differences held up even by sober and responsible referees as something in-bred, deeply held and fiercely owned. Four days later I’d be back in school, where I might well have been the only seven-year-old in my class who had Protestant friends.
Derry city itself, where we all went to school, was a bit less kumbaya about ‘the other side’. Direct, unalloyed sectarianism was pretty much everywhere. A breezily casual hatred for the British in particular, and Protestantism in general, was like a constant white noise that accompanied daily life. Bartie Harkin and Con Huckstable were both given notes from their parents stating that they wished their child be withdrawn from PE if rugby or cricket were to be played. (Football, though every bit as British, was excepted from this because it was a sport that Catholics liked.) Euclid Duddy was so republican his family banned his sisters from listening to the Spice Girls after Geri wore the Union Jack dress. I once attended a birthday party at his house, and his dad, Ron, took each of us aside at different points and gave us an increasingly sozzled blow-by-blow account of the events of Bloody Sunday.
Ron Duddy was the sort of man who got up at dawn so he could hate the Brits that bit longer each day. He told me they killed Kennedy to stop an Irish Catholic having his day in the sun, and banned the family from using any laundry service in the Bogside because he’d heard the washing machines were fitted with chemical analysers that would detect explosives on your clothes and arrest you on the spot. It was left to you – a child attending his son’s ninth birthday party – to speculate as to how much explosive residue his clothes may have contained. He had steeped his son in such a rich stew of paranoid republicanism that Euclid would often boast that he’d never met a Protestant. These were the extremes, but there was everywhere the sort of quotidian anti-British sentiment that hung around like fog, or the acrid smoke of rifles emptied into defenceless teenagers.
We poked fun at people like Ron, but at a young age he had watched neighbourhood children, some of whom were family and close friends, killed by soldiers who never faced any consequences for their actions, and who were still present on his streets decades later. Any modern analysis would say Ron and large portions of the city were going through a mass bout of post-traumatic stress disorder. Since this was years before PTSD was effectively treated, and decades before it became a household word, many Northern Irish people remained untouched by counselling or medication. It was easier to throw stones at police or redirect your negative energy at a formless, shapeless approximation of Britain. Even to me, who had been sheltered from so much, it was patently obvious that we were the good guys and the British were the evil empire, a contention backed up by pretty much all Irish, British and American films and television programmes we watched; in fact, by any content that wasn’t made specifically by Northern Irish unionists. That said, some of the hatred was so confused as to be hilarious. The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ was once booed in the Gweedore pub, presumably because people had heard the first four words of the song and misinterpreted it as a sincere paean to Elizabeth II.
For years, Reebok Classics that were extremely sought after everywhere else in the UK were sold in Derry at a loss, since each pair came with a small, but unmistakable, Union flag just below the tongue. To sneaker aficionados elsewhere, this was a mark of quality, but to Derry folk they might as well have been pre-soiled with dogshit.
My parents did an incredible job of guiding us away from hatred and horror, but there were certain things from which they couldn’t protect us, or to which they had simply become so inured it would never have occurred to them to do so. They had both experienced discrimination as very visible Catholics, but never became bitter or fearful. I could see the tension in my father when we were barked at by soldiers, had to go through checkpoints, or when we might pass an ‘incident’ wreathed by police tape and held down by armoured cars. And these things were pretty common. Of all my memories of my mother, the only one with a feeling attached is that of the bomb scare on that bus near Moore Walk – not just the look on my mother’s face, but the squeeze of her fist around mine, her clammy hand and hurried breath. I remember that she never said the words ‘bomb scare’ but I heard them from the other passengers, who said them not with terror but the sort of low-grade annoyance you get when a self-service checkout says ‘unexpected item’ and you have to go through the indignity of summoning a distant Sainsbury’s checkout assistant as if asking the teacher if you can go to the toilet.
Living under a cloud of bomb threats and extrajudicial murder doesn’t necessarily leave you in a state of constant fear. What can break your spirit is the deadening trudge of small humiliations and the steady expectation of petty inconvenience. It’s life being interrupted by a hundred things outside your control. These were things that parents – our parents – tried to hurry past without mentioning to us. Subjects were changed and plans for the day amended. Everyone in my class had a story of their mum rapidly abandoning some expedition and being really nice all of a sudden. Yes, they’d say, we were supposed to be going to the swimming baths. Yes, we’re going a different way now. Yes, we can stop for a treat on the way. Certainly, these ‘incidents’ increased immeasurably the prospect of us getting ice cream or a Lucky Bag for no reason. For those sugary treats and cheap plastic toys, we all had the Provisional IRA to thank.
There were other things about that time which I don’t think my parents could have known were wrinkling my little brain, and certainly weren’t countered with restorative balms of junk food or Lucky Bags. The news my father listened to each morning, with its daily metronome of murder announcements, terror attacks and notable explosions, was all the more horrifying for the blankness with which they were issued. Its delineations of Northern Ireland’s communities, too, were less black and white than those of Ron Duddy, but not by much. They still reflected and endorsed the same separation, the cataloguing of people by tribe. Any death reported was tagged with the victim’s religious affiliation, in a manner that was doubtless ethnographically useful but also diminutive and absurd.
‘Samuel Marshall, Catholic’, ‘James and Ellen Sefton, both Protestant’.
Again, it’s hard to think of another way they could have done it, since this was a time when tit-for-tat killings were commonplace and entirely innocent people all over Northern Ireland were being murdered by paramilitaries simply because an opposing faction had murdered one of ‘their’ side the day before. These people were not targeted for their involvement in politics or activism, but merely to spread terror through the enemy: that any of ‘you’ could be got, no matter your actual beliefs or political activity. This was the motive for hundreds of murders, meaning it was, in a real sense, relevant that things be recorded in this manner, while simultaneously being oddly impersonal and dehumanising when they were. Leaving aside the sense it gave of some great big score card in the sky, it reduced the sole piece of identifying information to the religion foisted upon the victims by their parents, which, odds were, meant little to them other than the fact it was reason enough to be killed by the roaming death cults that blighted Northern Ireland at the time. If you’d never been to church in your life and were murdered in your home, your birth religion would be mentioned before your name in the headlines, especially if you had the indignity to be killed as part of a group.
‘4 Catholics Shot Dead on the Ormeau Road’ or ‘The RUC are appealing for information, regarding the murders of 3 Protestant men near the Glenshane Pass this morning’.
You could have spent your life curing polio or inventing the Harrier jet, but as long as you were a non-famous Northern Irish person murdered by paramilitaries, your childhood attendance of a Church of Ireland school was paramount. Only in other cases – weird cases, involving non-Northern Irish casualties – would something like normal reportage prevail. When the IRA killed two Australian lawyers in the Netherlands, in the mistaken belief that they were off-duty British soldiers, it made no sense to report those people’s religions; unlike me and my family, they hadn’t been stupid enough to be born in Northern Ireland and thus had not, at birth, been signed up for the whole bizarre charade.
Robert was a good friend to us, even those of us who weren’t gifted young farmers. When my mother died, he came to the funeral even though the rules of his organisation expressly forbade attendance at any Catholic event. This sounds like a commonplace act of decency, but my father was immeasurably touched by it, and touched too by the work friends and neighbours of that persuasion who, though refusing to enter the church itself, stood vigil outside the building for the duration and re-joined the cortège thereafter. Their friendship naturally extended to Robert’s being at my father’s bedside in hospital, just in time to tell him about the goings-on in Reservoir Meats.
My father’s diabetes should have been spotted earlier, since his diet had been pretty bad for a while. Never particularly keen to begin with, he’d started swearing off vegetables entirely, declaring that he’d only ever eaten them so that we would. To this day he can’t say the word broccoli without mock retching. Brussels sprouts he calls ‘wee green round bastards’. Throughout my childhood, he insisted on a forensic examination of Christmas puddings every year, eating a different one each Sunday in the weeks and months running up to the big day, recording his findings and debating their qualities with us, so that through this exacting process we could crown a winner. We eventually noticed that this tournament was starting earlier and earlier each year, with preliminary rounds beginning in September and even August. By the time of my brother Shane’s wedding, he’d taken to keeping a stash of fizzy drinks in his bedroom, hidden in a wardrobe as if they were heroin or plastic explosives. He had, paradoxically, lost a lot of weight, and his circulation had clearly deteriorated. At the ceremony I noticed a cut on his hand from fixing a mower at home. By the time Shane and Becky had returned from honeymoon several weeks later it hadn’t healed.
Things progressed from there. I was at university in Dublin when I heard a cut on his foot had become severely infected and the toe would need to be removed, then several toes, then the whole foot and then further and further up. The entire saga was obviously a huge shock to my dad, who had not been aware of the seriousness of his condition, but, losing time to the spread of infection, it was he who said he was prepared to get ahead of the problem by having the surgeons cut just below his right knee. There would be a long hard road from there on out, with the physical and emotional strains of recovery, rehab and adaptation to his prosthesis, but he attacked it with the same unshowy stoicism with which he’d tackled everything else, barring broccoli, the death of Joe Dolan or the four out of ten I once gave a Tesco Finest Melt-in-the-Middle Chocolate and Salted Caramel Christmas Pudding for Six.
In the immediate aftermath of the surgery he was bullish and confident, although a lot of that might have been the effects of shock and/or morphine. There was also the sense of what could have gone wrong, since the amputation had, after all, averted possible death. When I came home to see him I was a complete wreck, and quizzed my brother Shane through nervy tears.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s grand,’ breezed Shane, before adding with a beam, ‘He wants the other leg off!’
This was the first time I had laughed since hearing the news, but it took Robert to get the first laugh out of Daddy. For the most part, people were extremely nervous around him, scared of how serious the problem had been, and perhaps of the physical horror of amputation. My dad had hated pity as a widower and now hated it as an amputee, and so insisted on thrusting his stump out of the sheets and into full view of any person who walked in with their sheepish mouth and trembling hands. Once you’d been through it, it was fun to watch others be subjected to the same. This was his own version of slaughterhouse wit, the gallows humour that kept the horror at bay.
It was immediately apparent just how many phrases and aphorisms revolve around feet, as when my sister Maeve made reference to the staff nurse keeping Daddy ‘on his toes’ and making sure he ‘toed the line’, two phrases I can’t imagine her using in any other circumstance. The delightful Sister Francistine, the nun who was the principal of our primary school, came to counsel my father and ended her visit by agreeing it was no use being negative. ‘You just have to take each day as it comes,’ she said, ‘and put your best… face… forward.’ We said nothing. ‘Um,’ she added so quietly it was hard not to laugh in her face, ‘is that the phrase?’ Whether it was before, it certainly was after, and has been a favourite in our family ever since.
My dad’s resilience was remarkable, and within a few weeks of coming home from hospital he had mastered his prosthesis to the point where he could ride a bike fairly easily. This was particularly surprising to us, since he hadn’t been seen on a bike for maybe upwards of a decade and hasn’t been seen on one since. When he returned to work, he didn’t make a big fuss about what had happened, and didn’t bother telling his more casual acquaintances, who often had no idea about the prosthesis and presumed he just had a slight limp. This led to complications once, when he slipped and fell on an office visit to Belfast. It was, luckily, a minor fall, more embarrassing than anything else, although it momentarily dislodged his prosthetic leg. As he winced on the floor, pride dented but physically unharmed, a colleague took him by the hand and looked in horror at the unwelcome right angle that had formed in my father’s trouser leg. ‘Jesus!’ he said, thinking my father hadn’t yet noticed his shinbone snapping in two. ‘It’s a bad fall, Joe.’ You might not find that story funny, but when I tell it to Northern Irish people, it kills.
The aftercare my father received from the hospital included offers of meetings, rehab activity programmes and support groups for people dealing with amputations, all of which he declined. I’d say it was because he wanted to move on, or because he didn’t want to be defined by his disability, but it’s more likely he simply couldn’t be arsed. He had spent so much time in hospital that he had no interest in going back for non-essential purposes, let alone hanging out with loads of new people into the bargain. In the first few weeks after the amputation, I noted the stack of unread pamphlets he’d been sent, advertising local get-togethers and sporting events for the benefit and interest of Northern Irish amputees. We laughed bleakly, unforgivably, as we saw that the legacy of the Troubles had monopolised even these, and that 90 per cent of the people featured in their articles were people who’d been injured in sectarian fighting, not those who stashed Fanta and organised annual world cups of rich, sweet desserts.
‘I could go with you,’ I said, ‘and tell them you lost the leg when the customs hut was destroyed. Taken out by a flying sink, maybe. That way you won’t lose feet– I mean face. Is that the phrase?’ We drove to the hospital, finding comfort in the laughter of the slaughterhouse, and through tears he told me just how awful I was.