BELFAST is one of the world’s great port cities, all its children are quick to say. Belfast is situated at the mouth of the Lagan River, and often those same children add a legendary comparison: The city resembles a lobster, with claws holding tight to a lough — and beyond, the sea. But only Catholic children (and by no means a majority of them) are likely to remind a visitor that the city bears a Gaelic name: “the approach to the sandbank.” Long before the seventeenth century, when English settlers began to build in earnest, Irish people had given a name to the place — land and water especially well joined. A Protestant teacher who dipped into that bit of pre-Norman factuality in 1976 found herself heckled roundly by a classroom of twelve-year-old children, all Protestants themselves. She has never chosen since to go quite so far back into her native city’s maritime cultural history.
The history has been set down in dozens of books and hundreds of articles1 — the continuing religious strife, the ancient royal confrontations, the various battles won and lost, the ethnic suspicions and antagonisms, the economic and social history, the ups and downs of a struggle waged by some for independence, by others for loyalty, above all loyalty: “The U.K., hey hey, let’s stay.” Those words were assembled by some Protestant children from the Shankill area, a Belfast working-class neighborhood where Catholics are feared and hated. It was not a very good slogan, the boys who coined it decided; they abandoned it. Why not get to the heart of the matter with a few familiar swears — “dirty Taigs,” or “filthy Fenians”?
As for the object of these slurs, Catholic children were not without their own epithets: “Orangies” or “Huns” or “lousy Prods.” Any reader who wants to understand what both Catholics and Protestants of Ulster call “the Troubles” must know the etymology of such swears, which remind us of William III of Orange and his victory (in the Battle of the Boyne) over the Catholic King James II (1690). The same articles and books tell about the Irish Republican Brotherhood, otherwise called Fenians, and their long, painful struggle against the Crown. The expression “Taig” is less likely to be a subject for written explication, but there are knowing “Prod” children who can detail a derivation: Tadgh is the Gaelic form of Teddy, and it’s a common name among the Catholics of Ireland, North and South.
The North — Ulster — was born late in 1920, when England’s rulers decided to yield to the Irish Protestant (Unionist) demand for continuing citizenship in Great Britain.2 The Parliament building for that new principality of the United Kingdom soon took on the name of its location — Stormont — and no Belfast child seems without an opinion of the place. For some, Stormont is the lovely spot where an executive and legislative body rightfully dominated not only a view but the whole six-county area, which was thereby “saved” from a foreign country (often called “Dublin”), not to mention from something abstractly called “popery.” For others, the word “Stormont” tells of British scheming, of divide and conquer, of a relentless bigotry that has not only a religious but an economic side, providing power and money and jobs for Protestants, a life of poverty and subservience for Catholics.
Since 1968, Stormont has existed only in political memory. Britain returned to Ulster in 1968 because Ulster split in two. Sometimes, to hear Belfast children talk, the only neutral ground left in the city is to be found on the higher slopes of Cave Hill, the public grounds to which both Catholic and Protestant children are often brought for frolic, for games of luck or strength or canniness.
No one can give us examples of good cheer and harmonious play, among Ulster’s children, across religious lines. War, violence, hatred generate their own literature. A moment of relaxed time for young people of both religious backgrounds is impossible to conceive — a dream of hopeful philosophers, naive social planners, or romantic poets. One summer, I boarded a bus each day with two adults, one a Belfast Catholic, the other a Belfast Protestant, counselors in a summer program aimed at bringing together children from both Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. As the bus gradually filled with first Protestant and then Catholic children, the historical and sociological explanations of religious rancor and loathing would come repeatedly to mind. Every morning, all the way to Cave Hill, insults filled the air. On the way back, however, there was invariably a considerable spell of silence; only as the bus gained proximity to the Shankill, and to the Ardoyne, a Catholic neighborhood where unemployment is endemic, did the scolding and revilement and invective assault the ears again: the high-pitched, singsong, preadolescent noise — a brutal legacy claimed without embarrassment or shame by minors now glad to reaffirm an old enmity.
But why the silence — so long, it would always seem until abruptly terminated by the first catcall or slogan? In fact, the silence that entered the bus with the children had been earned by a day of activity. When the boys and girls got off the bus in the morning they soon enough found things to do, or responded to our initiatives: games and walks and races and hunts and picnics and explorations. Such cliques as there were usually had to do with sex rather than creed. At lunch, when one might expect a lifetime’s sentiments and experiences to assert themselves in fresh antagonism, the children remained at ease, grouped according to one or another “activity.” This was our banal, self-important word, but suddenly “activity” possessed a mysterious magic: the power to dissolve the nastiest of misgivings, connected to one of the most lasting of historical fights.
Because we went, at first, only to Cave Hill, I began to invest the place itself with a mysterious, healing authority — grounded in the city’s past. Below the public playgrounds, the lower seaward slopes of this hill have been inhabited for generations. Well-to-do merchants long ago staked out a “park” here or there, and now the “parks” are collections of red-brick houses, the suburban residences of middle-income or comfortable working-class people, mostly Protestant. To them and their children, Cave Hill represents the enterprise and prosperity of Protestant Englishmen. But Cave Hill has meaning for Catholic children as well. They conjure up a time of fishermen and fowlers, imagine Gaelic nomads putting burial cairns atop the remains of their dead, or shouting in triumph at the discovery of good cutting stones. Those same children know that the caves of Cave Hill sheltered the native Irish from the insistent intrusions of the Vikings and the Anglo-Normans. They know the hill as a source of peat, and as a place of outdoor prayer on Christian holy days.
Its double past seemed to grant Cave Hill a moot neutrality — hence (I reasoned) the children’s ability to shed years of animosities there and play together. But we tried other places, and those trips (over to Bangor, down to Newcastle, up to Ballyclare, and thence to Larne) were no less amicable. The bad language stopped, we discovered, not only when we got off the bus at Cave Hill, but in the countryside beyond Belfast, or along the shore, once the great port city was no longer in sight. No place, though, however attractive and pleasure-giving for the day, could prevent that final burst of bad blood upon our return to the two neighborhoods. When I asked a Catholic child or a Protestant child for an explanation; when I pointed out what I’d seen and heard, and then asked why, I was always treated to this: “Well, now, we’re going home, aren’t we!” In order to understand why a child will, under some circumstances, suspend his or her truculence and antipathy, one has to hear the child out, learn the specifics of what seems to be an enduring prejudice, and thereby the possible grounds of hope that a change of behavior, if not a change of mind and heart, might happen.
Tony, for example, is a ten-year-old boy who lives in the Ardoyne. His father has been jobless for three years and is on the dole — yet another poor Catholic who finds himself to be an ironic beneficiary of the British welfare system. As a young man, he worked in construction, but there is precious little of that in Belfast these days. His son is well versed in the economic aspects of the Troubles; over the months I talked with him the youngster gave me a full account of what it is like for a Catholic man — what it will one day be like for Tony and others like him unless a great many political and economic reforms take place. “There’s no future for us, unless we get our rights. The way it is now, Belfast is run by the Brits, and it’s the Prods who own everything. The owners of the stores or the factories don’t like us, because we’re Catholic. The union people, they’re against us for the same reason. My father tried to find work for a year, then he gave up. He got sick; his stomach went sour. It’s in his head, my mother says. When he was a boy, he wanted to work in a cigarette factory, but they told him he could sign on their waiting list, to clean the floors. No Catholic makes the cigarettes! They never called him. He says he hates the dole, but what can you do? If it was fair here, he’d stand a chance of finding a job. Our priest says we shouldn’t lower our heads; we should be proud, and remember that they owe it to us, the money — England and the Prods here — for all they’ve done to us.
“The soldiers drive by and they call us ‘dirty Fenians,’ and they say we’re pigs, and we should go south. We wave our Irish flag at them! We have to use our heads; they’re waiting for us to make mistakes. They’d like an excuse to be rid of us. They’d as soon kill us. They’d as soon drive us across the border to the Irish Free State. They want no part of us, nor we of them; that’s how it is, and it’s been like that since so long that you might as well say forever. This is one island, and it should be one country. But England made sure we’d be split, and there’s been trouble here in Belfast ever since, and no one has an answer.”
Not one speech that; I have pulled together remarks made over several weeks. Tony is a bright lad, but the teachers despair for him, and others like him. He lacks “motivation,” for reasons he himself mentions — a shrewd appraisal of his likely prospects. When asked about hopes, wishes, the future, Tony remains silent. When asked again, he replies tersely: “The IRA [Irish Republican Army]; I’ll not be a stooge or a slave.” A feisty boy, not yet adolescent, indifferent to education though possessed of sharp intelligence, ready moral indignation. At age seven he began carrying messages from one house to another in the service of resistance to both civilian and military authority. Ulster for him means a hostile Protestant majority, determined to stay part of an empire that only sixty years ago granted another part of Ireland independence. He can’t forget the low esteem those Protestants have for his people — a fearful arrogance and condescension he’s heard described by parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, priests and nuns, neighborhood adults and a host of friends his age, older, and younger. Every day, moreover, he sees his father idle, watching the telly or standing outside and talking with others like him: men without work; men angry and confused and resentful about the way their time on this earth is being spent.
One day Tony took crayons in hand and made a picture of the Ardoyne. (Figure 2.) We had been talking about what he’d like to see happen — a notion of a better life. He wanted to let me know what had to come first, the essentials of a transformation. He drew for me a vicious battle scene. He posed the Irish against the British and declared his Catholic Church (however imposingly drawn) essentially off limits, hence irrelevant to the street encounter that meant so much to his future and that of his people, so he firmly believed. A grim, dark, terribly bloody scene; and one in which he himself figured — a tall, red-headed soldier, wounded, yet still firing away. For flag (Irish) and for Church, one gladly risks death. As for the Orangies, they are no less inclined to do the same, he stresses. It is a fight to the finish, the boy declares afterward; and he feels no sympathy for England, the Protestant minister Ian Paisley, or “them over in the Shankill.” But he has an afterthought: “If only some kids my age, Orangies, could be told the truth!” Meanwhile, death utterly dominates a drawing.
Still, in this bleakness there are qualifications. The Church does require at least a nod to charity. And of some, maybe passing, influence is a child’s capacity to dream, to imagine persuasion at work (even as he has been, himself, won over, day after day, to a cause by the talk of others). When Tony met his Protestant counterparts from the Shankill, he was stunned: there they were, on the same bus, and ahead stretched a whole day’s activities, all to be shared. He was able to give a charming and instructive account of what crossed his mind: “The Devil come down to earth! I’d seen them from a distance. I’d walked the Shankill Road! We try to stay clear of them. We have all we can do to fight the Brits. On the bus they swore first; but if they hadn’t, I’m sure we would have started! We may be outnumbered in Belfast, but we aren’t going to lie down and wait for people to step on us. When we got up the mountain, we left the bus, and the counselors had us playing, and everyone forgot the Troubles, and we wanted to win the game, and they split us, so we weren’t Catholics against Protestants, you know. So we had to forget everything for a while. Then, you’re back on the bus, and you remember. My mother asked me if I ever talked with any of them, about the Troubles. No. They don’t like us any more than we like them. But if we had it fair in Belfast, we could live with them, like we played with them this summer.”
A Protestant boy from the Shankill, George by name, eleven, has his own way of describing and picturing with crayons what is happening in Belfast, and what took place that summer up in Cave Hill and elsewhere. “We have a big problem here in Ulster: the Catholics. They’re all Fenians; they want to drag us down. If we didn’t keep them in their streets, and watch them, they’d try to take over the city, and those six counties would be owned by Dublin and the Pope of Rome. We’d be living like pig farmers. We built up Belfast; it’s our doing. We built the ships and the factories. They don’t have the mind, my dad says; they drink and they have ten kids to a family, and even more. Then they shout ‘poor’ and ‘unfair.’ If we left it to them, there’d be us, doing all the work, trying to keep our streets clean, and inside, our houses clean — and then there’d be all of them, more and more and more of them. We’d have to leave, or settle for the Mystery Shop running things.”
He pauses for a minute; he is asked to explain that last reference. The Catholic Church, he willingly insists, is full of “mumbo jumbo.” His grandfather tells him every day that Catholics are “superstitious,” and that inside a Catholic church one finds “a zoo.” The boy doesn’t want to explain, he wants to declare. He hasn’t actually been inside one of those churches; he never will find himself in a sufficiently curious mood to take the necessary steps — but his grandfather did, once, and the boy tells about what was seen and heard: “They were falling down and they had candles, and there was a funny smell, and they didn’t know what was going on, and they swallowed stuff, and they went and talked with the priests, and they were told what to do and what not to do, and there were the nuns, wearing those robes. They’re not like us, not in the church, and not in the way they live, and they will breed and breed, and one day, Ulster will have a bigger problem than now. We think the Fenians should go south. They should be with their own, and we should be with our own.”
There is no more to say on that score. But George is willing to draw a statement that conveys his ideas, his worries, his notion of what ought to obtain in Belfast. It is an us-against-them scenario, grimly presented, even extended to an apocalyptic warning. Like Tony, George can use the foul language of bias with no apparent scruples. Like Tony, George can present himself as a ruthless warrior, a tall and gun-wielding defender of Queen and country. In George’s picture (Figure 3), the Shankill is a place besieged by the dregs of society. Catholics are messy, scattered, ratlike. Protestants are stoic, clean, neatly arranged. Armageddon would appear to be the razed, rubble-strewn no-man’s-land between any Protestant part of Belfast and its nearest Catholic center of population. A high red-brick wall should separate all such neighborhoods, the child insists — and does so with a red crayon.
Yet Cave Hill worked a bit of magic on George, too. He explains why, and so doing, reveals a side of his thinking hitherto not put into words, or drawn with crayons: “On the mountain we had some good times. I wish we could live there. I told my mother, and she said we can’t leave here; my father doesn’t make enough money. He’s lucky to have a job. He works in a store, and when he comes home, he’s tired of being nice to customers. The owner lives in Waterloo Park, up toward Cave Hill. When my father has a drink he says we’re never going to see an end to the Troubles, and a lot will die, and you can be sure it’s going to be the poor Protestants and the poor Fenians who’ll do the dying. There are some rich Fenians, and they drink a bottle to every glass our people take, and they don’t lose a man in a fight. We do, and the poor Fenians do. We have our rich; they live up on hills, and they have big homes. In Lisburn there are fine homes; my father has seen them. He had to deliver to a relative of the owner. We were glad as the Fenian kids to be up there on the hill, and see the city below. ‘God save the Queen,’ my friend said; ‘God save Belfast,’ a Fenian said, and I told him he was right, and I hope he was right, and I hope God does!”
Ulster populism, or at least a thread of it:3 a boy’s struggle to make sense of social and economic inequalities as well as the learned assumptions of religious intolerance. George has not forgotten what apparently it takes a little liquor to make his father remember and repeat: that the issue is not only the Pope and England’s Royal Family and pride in Scottish ancestry and pride in Irish ancestry, but the matter of money, with all the consequences that go with its abundance or scarcity. Protestants who live in the Shankill are having a rough time of it. Many are jobless; no luckier, when it comes to facing bill collectors, than the Catholics of the Ardoyne. Indeed, one often hears a sense of failure deviously acknowledged among some in the Shankill and other relatively impoverished neighborhoods. Outbursts of pride in the past, exclamations of a glorious tradition, can cover an abiding doubt about a social predicament — so George’s father, and George too, seems to know, at least sometimes.
Perhaps desperation prompts me to mention the effect those daily Cave Hill expeditions had, at least temporarily, on a busful of children. There is no question at all that many of Ulster’s children, responding to the grown-ups around them, are full of wrath. After my talks with child after child in home after home, the all-around soreness, the endless name-calling, begins to wear on the listener. Belfast offers continual support to Freud’s emphasis on “aggression” as an inevitable psychological element in childhood, to say nothing of the “adult personality.” These are children who have been encouraged to say nasty things about others. Moreover, these are children who go well beyond words. All the time one witnesses boys and girls caught up in street violence. They imitate their elders, curse enemies, pretend to shoot them, crow merrily over imagined victories. They light fires, throw detested flags into the flames. They spot a person who is a stranger, who looks a bit different, who may be known as one of “them,” and in a flash ranting, heckling, physical assaults take over. They assemble and march, like their elders — combatants eager to display their devotion to a cause. They watch the telly, gloat at successes, get glum over defeats, savor some deaths and mourn others with an intensity that reveals how intimately the Troubles have worked their way into the emotional fabric of the young.
True, children everywhere pretend at cowboys and Indians or war or cops and robbers. But occasional games, connected to imaginary events, or distant historical ones, or those enacted on television or in movies, are not to be confused with games that are meant to copy an immediate life. Nor is that distinction, alas, the only one. In dozens of instances, almost daily during periods of unrest, Belfast children actively assist Protestant and Catholic paramilitary groups, the IRA on the Catholic side, and the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) on the Protestant. I have seen children throw rocks not in play but in dead earnest — at British soldiers, at shop windows or house windows, or at individuals. I have seen children carry messages, run interference, try to be objects of distraction, set fires, stand as lookouts, reconnoiter and spy, and send danger or safety signals of various kinds. I have even seen children wield guns, use knives.
Not a list of activities likely to be recommended by specialists in what is called “mental hygiene,” and without question a child psychiatrist eager to document psychological disturbances in children will find plenty of evidence in the Ardoyne and the Shankill and elsewhere in Belfast. A Belfast pediatrician who has worked in England and America on research stints tells me this: “It is true, we see plenty of trouble here — especially symptoms of anxiety: fast breathing, squinting eyes, hives, indigestion, a lot of crying and scratching of skin and temper outbursts. We see phobias — if you can call them that: youngsters who worry they won’t survive the week, or have to touch every other lamppost, lest some bombs go off! But I’m not sure most of the children here don’t manage, on the whole. And what strikes me is not only their seriousness (I suppose you psychiatrist chaps may find that worrisome!) but their consideration for others. These are thoughtful children: they have seen people struggling and dying for something they very much believe in.
“The other day, I saw a girl who lost her brother to the IRA. He was shot dead as an act of revenge, in full view of his entire family. The child was upset, tearful; she’d been repeatedly vomiting, had her parents in a bad state on her account. They thought she had appendicitis; a few years earlier they’d almost lost a son to peritonitis secondary to appendicitis that had been ignored too long. Later they lost him after all — to the guns of the IRA. I examined the girl and I told her she was all right. She quieted down and she was a dear child. She thanked me. She said she wished her brother was alive, but she knew he died ‘a good person.’ I was struck by that phrase. I asked her what she meant. She said that the lad believed in Jesus Christ, and was a loyal subject of the Queen, and tried to be helpful to their parents, and every day visited both sets of their grandparents, who lived nearby in the Shankill. And then she added, as if I might have some doubts: ‘Billy even felt sorry for the Fenians. He said they belong to Jesus too.’ I couldn’t help it; I had to question her further: I asked her what she thought her brother meant by that statement. She didn’t pause for two seconds: ‘Billy meant that the Lord creates all of us, and we may fight, but we should pray for those we fight with, and if we don’t, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble when we meet Him.’
“I call that remarkable — a girl of only nine, and with a lot of cause to be full of vengeance. She loved her brother, and she mourned him. She loved Jesus, though, and remembered his teachings. These can be pensive lads and lasses, even the wee ones of five or six. They ask me tough questions for which I’m not sure Socrates would have easy replies.
“A Catholic boy, only eight, asked me one day why the Prince of Peace didn’t come and make peace, just like that — and the child snapped his fingers. I told him I didn’t know, but I wished He would. The boy promptly said that maybe God can’t do all He’d like to do! I believe theologians are still sweating over that one! I turned to him, and wondered where he’d heard that — at Sunday school, maybe? Or in the regular church school he attends? No, the lad said he and his brother, a year older, saw a cousin of theirs, older and about to go off and become a nun, get killed by a stray bullet. The two boys decided, right then and there, that God had seen the tragedy (because He sees everything) and must be crying and was helpless. They told a priest what they’d concluded, and he told them to stop being so ‘thoughtful.’ That’s the word he used; the boy told me. On the way out, as I was dispensing some cough syrup and an antihistamine, the boy stunned me: ‘Do you think, maybe, there are two Gods, one for the Catholics and one for the Protestants?’
“I told him I didn’t think so. (I didn’t dare tell him that I am not altogether sure there is even one!) I told him he was ‘thoughtful,’ and his brother, too. Well, such a modest child, such a gentleman: He thanked me, and said that he wasn’t the only one who had such ideas; he’d heard others come up with similar speculations. You’d best be careful when you feel sorry for that boy and his brother, and their friends; or for the others over the line of faith, in the Shankill. Don’t go back to the States and have everyone crying for these wee ones! I saw plenty of children there in America who never saw a soldier shoot a gun, a tank rumble down a street, a bomb go off, a loved one injured or killed — and who didn’t strike me as the finest souls this earth has seen.”
A banality, maybe — that neither hardship nor its opposite necessarily makes for the development of virtue. Even happiness, Freud kept emphasizing in Civilization and Its Discontents, is an entirely subjective matter, hence not something an observer can correlate with scores on a socioeconomic scale. The residents of the Ardoyne and the Shankill are not people to complain of their impoverished situation; and in fact, many of the families of both neighborhoods seem ablaze with both fanaticism and, as indicated, an abiding sense of purpose. It is possible, I suppose, to regard such individuals as strangely in luck — able to distract themselves from the objective misery of their situation by the diversions of a religious and military struggle. Apathy and self-pity yield to the excited flush of fighting enemies to the death. A strong sense of history, a fervent religious commitment, an attachment to neighborhood and to nation (be it Britain or the Irish Free State), all combine to make individuality less prominent. Among children, pictures of the self are painted with great reluctance; among adults, egoistic display is rare. These are people who feel solidarity with certain others, and have an enemy to help define who is a friend.
All this distraction from the self is no small psychological asset, as a Catholic mother surely knew when she offered these comments about her children: “They don’t have the best life. If we’d emigrated, like my cousin, to the States, to New Jersey, I know we’d have more — a car, a washing machine, better food. But she has a lad of sixteen, and he got arrested for speeding, and they found drugs in the car, and he doesn’t want to do anything but own a motorcycle; that’s his goal in life. I told my son, and he’s the same age, and he said he’s glad we’re here, and we have the Orangies to stand up to! I asked my children once if they thought we should leave here. All the pain, the Brits and their guns, the Prods and their terrible hate of us, the fighting, every day the fighting — should we kiss it all goodbye? No! said all of them in chorus. No, they said over and over — not for American porridge, and not even for a motorcycle. We’re not a spoiled people; and our children aren’t spoiled. They may swear a lot at the Orangies, and they may be tough, even with each other; but they’re not brats, they’re not out for themselves, each for himself. They’re for each other, for the Ardoyne, and for a united Ireland!”
The politics of the nursery, the sociology of the playground, the psychology of the family — these are not at all beyond the ken of a six- or ten-year-old, even a four-year-old. But we are rather more grudging and skeptical about other kinds of judgments. A child’s moral life is stereotyped, dominated by reflexes, derivative, imitative, various social scientists insist — as if the ego can be endlessly manipulative (the suave, knowing negotiator), and the id cleverly insistent, unashamedly sure of what it wants, and what it will, at all costs, manage to get, whereas the superego is doomed to be a mere dangling object, its motions and purposes blindly responsive to particular parental voices. I do not believe psychiatric theorists have done even conceptual justice to the operations of our consciences; and I believe a place such as Ulster offers the empirical evidence that ought to help us understand better how our children learn what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is believable and what is absurd, even dangerous, and not least, what they will stand by, even fight and die for, and what they will never be willing to embrace, no matter what constraints are imposed upon them.
During the years of my visits to Ulster, for instance, I was constantly told by both Catholic and Protestant children — sometimes as young as four or five years old — that they could always tell their “enemy” among their own generation. How can that be? I wondered and asked. Gradually I began to get answers. I was being educated by boys and girls — lessons in sociology and anthropology and history, lessons as well in moral values, in one or another philosophical point of view. Now I know that Catholics play hurling, with a hurley stick, and Gaelic football, whereas Protestants play hockey and soccer; that “bat” is an English word, not used in any Irish sport; that in Belfast the Irish News is a Catholic newspaper, the News Letter is a Protestant one, and the Telegraph acceptable, mostly, to both sides; that clothes tell the man, so to speak — plaids or tartans of green and brown for Catholics, red, white, and blue for Protestants; that names bespeak creeds — Seamus as against James, Sean as against John, Cathal, pronounced “Cahal,” as against Charles; that pins on a lapel are a giveaway — Gaelic clubs, religious medals, as against (for the Protestants, of course) the crown in miniature, or the red hand of Ulster, harking back to a historic migration from Scotland.
It was a nine-year-old girl in Derry who first let me know, defiantly, that citizens of Northern Ireland can hold either Irish or British passports; that Catholics choose, most of the time, Irish passports; and that no one in Ulster need serve in the British Army, in accordance with an agreement made in 1920 at the time of Partition. It was a seven-year-old boy in Belfast, Protestant, who quickly let me know that Catholics are excluded from entire factories; that the two religious groups have quite separate and distinct musical traditions, different folksongs as well as different military ones; that the schools are thoroughly segregated, and that he could tell in an instant whether a home is Catholic or Protestant. On what street is the building located, and inside, is there a “bleeding heart” or are there “crucifixes and statues,” or is there a picture of the Queen?
In Derry (as Catholics call it; Protestants prefer the full name, Londonderry), I was given a tough, vivid lecture by a seven-year-old Catholic girl, Nora: “Never say Londonderry here in the Bog-side. You’ll be killed! Everyone will think you’re an Orangie. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll hear you say a few words, and they’ll know you’re an American; but if they don’t spot your accent, you’ll be wiped out!” A pause. Her naive, proudly open-minded and even-handed listener wants to know why the vehemence, if not murderous venom. She lets loose a blast of historical references: “You see that wall over there? It was built in 1618. The English came here, businessmen from London. They named the city after their capital. They used to stand on that wall and call us ‘croppies,’ and throw pennies at us. They called us pigs. They said we belonged in huts, and we should do their dirty work, and be honored we had the chance. The bog — they said that’s where we belong! Well, let them chase us out of the bog now. This is Free Ireland!”
A child mixes history, specific nationalist confrontations, geographic significations, into a passionately espoused moral statement. Are we to dismiss such remarks as mere rhetoric, memorized at the knees of parents, or learned by rote in an elementary school classroom? Are we to insist that these are declarations of a child cowering in fear at the hands of adult authority, and so ready to say anything and everything, so long as what is spoken meets with the approval of emotionally significant grown-ups? Maybe all that is true; but true for us, even when we become eighty or ninety. The unconscious is timeless, including that part of it we call our “conscience.” Voices of approval and disapproval are lifelong companions.
Many of us psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists emphasize in our discussions of children the relentlessly punitive, demanding side of the superego, and some cognitive psychologists hand out questionnaires or make experiments in offices or laboratories, and then talk of a “preconventional” or “conventional” stage in children, wherein they do what serves their (“hedonistic”) purposes, or what will obviate punishment, or gain the sanctioning nod of a mother, a father. Those same theorists, however, deny that children undergo the subtler, more compassionate, more ethically reflective “stages” of moral development — indeed, they deny such personal, ethical, psychological, and intellectual progress to many adults as well. Only a handful, we have been told, an ethical elite (Herbert Marcuse’s “advancing edge of history,” for instance) can free itself of the individual (emotional) and the socially or culturally enforced constraints that blind a truly “mature” ethical awareness. Knowing the vicious persecutory “morality” that has come out of various sectors of the twentieth century’s “advancing edge,” one wonders what children in Belfast or Derry really have to look forward to possessing, morally, when they become older and, if lucky, more privileged, socially and educationally. In any event, as we wait for that millennium to arrive, boys and girls the world over may not be fashioning psychological concepts, but they are, it seems, struggling hard and long to construct a moral life for themselves.
Here is a Derry mother, a Bogside mother, describing her nine-year-old daughter’s confusing behavior: “Cathy teases the Brits. They come on their patrols, and she asks them what they’re afraid of. She says: ‘We have no guns, and you have so many!’ They glare at her. She smiles back! She tries to talk with them; she starts talking about her father, and how he was fired by a Protestant, because he wanted no Catholics in his place, even to do the dirty work. She shouts that ‘Catholics are poor, and Protestants rich,’ and she asks them is that fair? She got one soldier to argue with her, and he told her, after a while, that she belonged in the House of Commons! No, she said, she’ll go to Dublin if she has to leave, but she wants to stay with us!
“I don’t know where children get the ideas they do! Sometimes I look at Cathy, and I remind myself she’s only a little bigger than a wee baby. But she stands there and tells the Brits that they can point guns at us, and pull the triggers, even, but that won’t win for them, because we’re right and they’re wrong — the Prods, and the Brits. The other day she got another Brit to talk with her. He was a Paki [Pakistani]. Cathy asked him why he was over here, fighting for the old lady Queen, and for Paisley and his gang. Then she reminded him that if he got killed, what about his family, they’d miss him. I told her to hush up. She kept going, though — and he came over and told her she had a sassy mouth. He pulled out some candy, and told her to take it, and maybe it would sweeten her. She did; she chewed on the caramel, and she said thank you, and she gave him a big smile, like she does to her father when she wants to cuddle up to him.
“Next thing I knew, she was telling him she wasn’t against him, no matter that his skin was dark, and she wished he lived through his tour here, and got back home safe. He thanked her, and the following day they had a longer talk, and they became friends. He told me I had a nice girl, and I said that I know I do! When Cathy said her prayers, she asked God to spare her Paki friend. Then she decided, one day, that it isn’t the individual Brits here who are the enemy — it’s the rich Prods, and it’s England and the way the English government treated our people. She’s always having these long talks with God! And with the priest! Father would say Cathy is truly a Christian. He says in his sermons that our children are close to Jesus, just like He said they were when He came down to us.”
One afternoon Cathy came home with a less religious or philosophical line of thinking. Her British-soldier friend had drawn upon his personal life in an intriguing way. Cathy gave her mother the gist of the observation, and the latter, in turn, offered it to me the next day: “The Paki told Cathy he had the answer to our problems in Derry. He said that if a few hundred of his people were brought here, then all the Catholics and Protestants would unite — and hate the Paki people! Cathy said no. I did, too. But at night, cleaning up and talking with my husband, I changed my mind. I think we’d have a lot of unhappy people in Derry, if there was a district filled with colored families. I admitted as much to Cathy, and she asked, ‘Mummy, do you mean that the only way we can be nice to each other is to have people around we can point at and not be nice to?’ I told Father, and he said Jesus was crucified because no matter who the person was, no matter how unpopular, our Lord stood up for him.
“I asked Father about the Prods. Would Jesus stand up for them today? They’ve been bad to us, and they still are; we’re ‘pigs’ to them, and they say so, and we are poor, and they own everything. Father said, ‘True,’ the way he always does, but he said, ‘Hate feeds on hate,’ and someone has to break the circle, and Christ did that, and if we could only be Christians, we would, too. Of course, I do believe Father wants us to keep fighting for our rights; I know he doesn’t want us to surrender. He wants us to stand up for ourselves as Christians, and not stoop to the level of those who’ve been so bad to us. But that is hard to do, very hard! We’re only human; we’re not gods!”
No great wisdom there. The everyday speech of common people, uneducated and thoroughly impoverished. Trite remarks, perhaps meant to serve the purposes of self-justification. As for the Pakistani, a British subject serving Her Royal Highness, he has no college education, either. His family took advantage of their Commonwealth status, migrated to London after World War II — another partition the English engineered as they extricated themselves, yet again, from part of the Empire’s swollen territory. Did Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, say any more than that Pakistani soldier? “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” As for “moral maturity,” one wonders how many of us who are full-grown, college-educated, and versed, even, in the intricacies of ethics, philosophy, political or economic history, would do much better than “wee Cathy” in her real-life situation.
I remember another girl of the same age. American and black, struggling against mobs in New Orleans during the integration struggle that dominated that city’s life in the early 1960s. (She figures also in this book’s companion, The Moral Life of Children.) This child, only six, of humble and illiterate background, prayed at night for her white tormenters. I was sure she had “other feelings” — located (where else?) “underneath.” My wife asked me one afternoon whether many of those who knew the workings of history’s dialectic, or were versed rigorously in one or another philosophical “system,” would ever have survived the mob harassment, let alone implored the Lord on behalf of the bewildered and the pitiable (white) men and women who assembled every day to threaten those who defied their sense of what ought to be. “Maybe,” she pointed out, “more sophisticated people might have found ‘good reasons’ to pull out, save their necks.” Poor Ruby, all she knew was standing firm during the day, and praying to God at night! “And,” my wife asked, “why keep pointing out the obvious, that Ruby is ‘really’ scared? Don’t you think she knows that you want her to ‘talk about it’? Maybe her only chance is to keep quiet — hold on to herself. Why should people say what is on their minds all the time?”
Condescension is a constant danger to people bent on finding things out, wrapping the world up in wordy formulations, explanations. A clever mind, stuffed with facts and buttressed by theoretical underpinnings, can miss the very essence of a people’s situation, their sense, quite well known by children, of what must at all costs be done. For Cathy, a child of Derry’s Bogside, distrust and animosity were qualified by a capacity to stop and reflect — even cast doubt on her own passions.
One cannot, unfortunately, attribute Cathy’s perceptiveness to her schooling. She herself chafes at the narrowness of the nuns she knows: “They’ll not let us say what we think!” As for Ulster’s Protestant children, they read references in textbooks (for example, Britain 1714-1851, by Denis Richards and Anthony Quick) to “unambitious Irishmen.”4 True, the young people also learn that the rents people paid “went in all too many cases to England to keep absentee landlords in luxury.” But moral judgments are being made in these texts, if one follows their associational thrust: “Those who could not pay their rent were evicted, and Ireland was notorious for thousands of wandering beggars who had given up hope of regular work and spent many of their nights in the open. This was the general countryside scene over much of Ireland. In Ulster, however, there was some prosperity. Here the population was Protestant, with many of Scottish descent.”
What in God’s name will be the end of it all? The phrasing is Irish, and whether Catholic or Protestant, the Ulster men and women and their children ask the question. A million Protestant people who consider their religion and their connection to Great Britain an extremely important part of themselves do not want the island to be one country, with Dublin its capital. Half a million Catholics loyal to another religion, and with quite a different attitude toward Great Britain, want precisely that — the “last” six counties returned to the Irish Free State. The library shelves contain millions of published words — the sum of which tells how those ancient animosities persist with undiminished intensity. If ever Freud’s phrase “narcissism of small differences” applies, it is in Ulster, where people have learned to look hard in order to find a distinguishing blemish in their neighbor — his or her name or way of speaking or, of course, manner of worshipping Jesus Christ, supposedly the Lord of both Ian Paisley and his paramilitary supporters and of members of the IRA.
The issue in Ulster is not only religion; the issue is class — the poor fighting the poor, and neither getting much for all the anguish endured. In the more comfortable parts of Belfast, near Queen’s University, or in the suburban towns, such as Lisburn, one finds Catholics and Protestants able to live quietly — maybe not with great affection, but without the kind of brutish everyday violence one sees in the poorer sections. In some of the rural parts of Ulster, even now, for all the religious polarization of the past decade, farm families or small-town families of both creeds manage to get together. The explosions of religious hate have been fueled by a deteriorating economy and a sharpened sense of inequality, not only between the two main religious groups, but within them as well.
“It is a consolation, the meanness our children learn,” a Catholic great-grandmother of eighty bitterly, proudly told my stunned children. She has lost one son and two grandsons to the thrill of dynamite and bullets. She knows their futility — and yet; one has to add that qualifying phrase. In his memorable documentary film on Ulster’s Troubles (A Sense of Loss), done almost ten years ago, Marcel Ophuls gives us Conor Cruise O’Brien’s explanation, hardly prompted by affection, of the strange hold the IRA has on people in Ulster, in the Republic of Ireland, in America. When everything seems hopelessly muddled, endlessly complicated, thoroughly bogged in the futility of a political stalemate, the smell of gunpowder offers a lure, even to those who customarily shun the call of rebellion by force.
Nor is it fair to denounce the IRA single-mindedly. The violence of a social and economic order is often not dramatically visible, but is no less insistent in its day-to-day presence — as all who challenge, in desperation, a political authority come to realize: our own colonial forebears in the eighteenth century; the labor organizers of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth; the civil rights activists of more recent times. Demagogues are everywhere, waiting their chance, like bacilli: the mischievous, porcine, hysterically foul-mouthed brawler Paisley and his ilk on the one hand; on the other, many thugs in the ranks of the IRA — individuals who blackmail and terrorize their own people, as well as others, and who mouth twisted ideological fantasies as unreal and self-serving and mean-spirited as any dished out years earlier in the name of Stormont, the Royal Throne, and Free Presbyterianism.
Sometimes, in an off moment, one hears, even from street fighters ready to die for a cause, a few words that connect their exceptional circumstances to those of our own. The elderly lady mentioned a few paragraphs back was heard to ask her son, a member of the IRA: “What would we all do without you people?” Then she explained her line of reasoning: “It would be an even sadder life. We’d sit and stare out the window, and wait for the excitement of a bad storm!” One remembers that comment as one watches Mr. Paisley scream at, hector, implore, and admonish his Sunday flock — offer them the bewitching, enormously satisfying illusion that they are combatants in an apocalyptic confrontation worthy of the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of St. John the Divine. “I go to hear him [Paisley] and I come back and feel I can go on another week. He makes us feel there’s something to live for — and there’s an important fight going on, and it’s ours, and we’d better take care to be the winners!” The words of a carpenter, proud of his old brick Victorian home, spotless and a touch austere — all he wants, all he ever wanted, and threatened, he is sure, by a swirling, grasping, uncontained, and vengeful horde: the eternal “them,” the disowned “I” each of us tries to be rid of, though some have lives that equip them to do so more gracefully and privately.
Something to live for; one doesn’t forget those words in Ulster. As often happens where there is a worrying social climate, gifted individuals respond to it — reflect in their poems and stories, show on their canvasses the same sense of irony and ambiguity, the same quizzical apprehension as an old Catholic lady, or a Protestant artisan, keeps on transmitting. Ulster, in this century, has given us C. S. Lewis and Louis MacNeice, and Forrest Reid and Joyce Cary and Brian Moore and Benedict Kiely and Michael McLaverty and that great bard of our time, Seamus Heaney.5 Ulster has given us a notable artistic tradition: William Conner’s shawled mill girls, the street pageantry, the slightly rebellious children; James Craig’s evocation of a pastoral life, sweeter than the one portrayed by the great nineteenth-century Irish novelist William Carleton, but not without a reminder or two that calm country surfaces can all of a sudden become menacingly troubled; and Frank McKelvey, and Colin Middleton, and in recent years the artists who have used aerosol as well as ink or paint — the graffiti, the handbills, the cartoons that make up a war’s propaganda, as well as the satire or melancholy response of watercolorists (George Campbell), painters (Joe McWilliams, Brendan Ellis), and sculptors (F. E. McWilliams).
In the poem “Belfast,” published a half-century ago (September 1931), Louis MacNeice6 sang of “The hard cold fire in his basalt.” In his mind’s eye the poet seemed to be glimpsing the Lagan River from the vantage point of Cave Hill: “Down there at the end of the melancholy lough / Against the lurid sky over the stained water.” He knew that he had to make reference to Catholic life, the moments of superstitious desperation: “In the porch of the chapel before the garish Virgin”; and to Protestant life, its moments of extravagant, bullying pride: “The sun goes down with a banging of Orange drums.” But in Belfast, among the anonymous people of those flats, inside rows and rows of red-brick homes, separated by thin, cluttered concrete alleys, is a far less eloquent but not unknowing vision, worthy of the one MacNeice tried to offer in “Day of Returning”: “They call me crafty, I robbed my brother, / Hoaxed my father, I am most practical, / Yet in my time have had my visions, / Have seen a ladder that reached the sky.” A Belfast girl, not yet ten, stunned her Protestant teacher, and parents, by drawing a boat (an ark, of course), putting “everyone” on it, then announcing that “all Catholics and all Protestants are sinners”; she added that “we’d better well board this boat and pray that we are taken to Him, because God’s love is our only hope.”
Meanwhile new political episodes in this endless and savage struggle suddenly appear — and the children are always watching. In 1981, the lives of many of Belfast’s children were touched significantly by the hunger strike at Maze Prison.7 I heard Belfast’s eight-and-ten-year-old Catholic children asking mothers and fathers if they might begin a sympathetic fast. One candy-store owner (in England and Ireland, places like his are very special institutions where families gather to talk and exchange news as well as to eat) told me about it: “The poor little ones come here more often than usual. They always love sweets, of course; but now a lot of them are hungry, rather than here to have extra dessert. They’ve tried to show their mums, at mealtime, how loyal they are to the men in prison. I’ve had a few mums come in and tell me to feed them extra, even if their children lack the money, and they’ll pay later. I asked one boy — he’s ten or eleven — what good it will do, for him to eat less. He gave me a cross look. Then he eyed me as if I might be the enemy! I’ve never seen the people here so hurt. The reporters measure by crowds and noise and violence. The police do, too. They’re all wrong. It’s the quiet that I find strange. There is a hush over the families, a serious look I’ll even see in a lot of our wee ones — as though we’re all feeling a terrible sadness inside our stomachs, while the men die in that prison: one, then the next, and then the next, skin and bones. I’ve never seen anything like it here, and I’m over two-thirds of the way to my first century of life!”
Among the younger children in the Ardoyne, the Catholic neighborhood of Belfast I know best, questions about the hunger strikes abounded. Boys wanted to know the biological and medical facts: what happens, as willful abstinence yields to malnutrition, then the awful wasting away, the deterioration of first one bodily function, then another. Boys also mentioned, again and again, how much determination is required to complete a fast to the end. During those months ten-year-old Jimmy Foley had been more serious than his parents or relatives have ever seen him: “If you’re in a battle, you hold your gun tight, and keep firing. You have to be brave. But if you are lying on your bed, and you are hungry, and they bring you food, and you say no to them, then you must be tougher, even, than the soldiers in a bloody, bloody war. I’d want to steal me a bite; I’m afraid that would happen. Then I’d be ashamed. I might cry. In the movies you see soldiers cry. But I’ll bet not one of our men has cried, even if his stomach hurts, and he knows he’s going to starve unless he takes the food.”
The girls seemed more horrified — almost as if the laws of nature were being challenged. They were asking the old existentialist questions, which children have always asked during moments of danger or confusion. Jimmy’s cousin Maureen was born exactly two weeks before he was. She didn’t quite keen over the ten dead, whom she often referred to as “lost to us.” But she spoke with decided earnestness, and she kept brushing her hair away from her forehead. Her mother said: “The girl is truly upset. She’s taken to pushing her hair away from her eyes, but I’m afraid she still can’t make much sense of all this suffering.”
In fact, Maureen’s eyes were by no means clouded. She looked intently at the telly as it brought news of the latest death by starvation. She looked at the freckles on her arms. Suddenly she said: “I remember my old aunt [great aunt] telling me that I have the freckles of her father, and he was the most kind, the most very kind man in all Belfast. If he saw someone in trouble, he’d go and help; but he died crossing the street to reach a woman. She’d fallen down. But a car struck him, and he never made it alive to the hospital. My aunt said the last thing she looked at, before they closed the coffin, was his freckles.
“If I was in the prison taking no food, I’d keep looking at my freckles, and I’d think of my aunt and her father! My mother wonders, ‘Where do those men get their strength?’ My father says, ‘They’ve got purpose in them — more purpose than the Brits thought.’ My mother says, ‘More purpose than we thought!’ I ask all the grown-up people we know where you get that purpose from. They shake their heads. Even the priest shakes his head. He says we must pray hard for the men. My best friend and I, we both asked him if God will take all our men right to His heart. When I eat now, I think of our men starving themselves, and then I ask God to take them to His heart. We have a picture of His heart here, in our front room [titled “The Bleeding Heart of Jesus”], and I look at it more than I used to. When will God decide to stop all the Troubles, and make everyone good, not just some people? That’s my question!”
Some of her friends wondered aloud, as she has upon occasion, whether they might try a “bit of starvation” themselves. They did not mean to sound self-centered or vain or frivolously personal; they surely didn’t mean to mock the dying prisoners. They were doing what we all do, connecting the personal and the everyday with life’s “bigger” issues, so-called — social and political matters: “It’s good to lose weight, but it’s hard,” one of those friends observed. Then she continued: “My mother always is slimming, but she doesn’t lose much. When she does, she is happy; but she’s back up again a few weeks later! Now she talks with her friends, and they all say we could do with a little of the discipline our men in prison have! I’ve tried skipping a meal. I wouldn’t mind slimming down myself. But I get so hungry, I eat two meals in one when I go to the table and start eating again. I pray for the will, but so far I don’t have it.
“I think of the prisoners all the time. One day I’ll hope to have their purpose. Some girls, some women should show they can help. I asked my mother what would happen if all of us stopped eating, just like our men in the Maze. She said, ‘Wouldn’t that shake the whole world!’ My father says he’s not sure what would make the Brits budge. But if everyone took no food, and got weak, I think we’d show we’re the equal of all the guns the Brits have.”
Such speculations were not confined to the Catholic population. In the Shankill, a working-class Protestant neighborhood, the anger and contempt directed at the IRA in general (and at the dying, and dead prisoners) was unsurprising. Yet in many homes one could feel other emotions: apprehension, surprise, consternation, the creeps, the jitters. And the questions from children and parents alike suggested to me that, ironically, the struggle had inspired a similar response in many, on both sides: a unifying, if episodic shudder. In the Ardoyne, in the Shankill, the question was the same: “How can people do that?”
Every day one heard Protestant parents asking that question — often with disdain, but with genuine curiosity as well. Protestant children followed their parents in paying close attention to the news from Maze Prison, in going through the motions of denunciation, but in showing alarm, skepticism, incredulity. Young Peter Allen was tall for a twelve-year-old (a boastful five feet three inches) and an avid follower of the BBC reports of Ulster’s summer crisis. He was ready to fight, when grown up, for continuing allegiance to the Crown. He insisted the matter was one of life and death. But variations on that last phrase were used by him in a quite specific way: “Those men choose to die. They’d rather die than live, and that’s proof they’re not very smart people. They’re being used. They’re like sheep, being led by dogs. I can’t imagine going with no breakfast, and then no lunch, and no supper, either! If I miss one meal, I’m in a bad state. I want my food! It makes you wonder — ten of them!
“At first we thought they were putting on an act; but they’re serious. It’s death for them! Well, we’re rid of them. But new men step in. We’ll have more and more trouble if we don’t stop them. How, though? My father says they’re not behaving like human beings.”
On both sides, initial disbelief soon gave way to thinly disguised fascination: “How long will it last?” Another question: “How many men will hold fast?” Hold fast: an expression that lends itself to both a literal and a symbolic approximation of what Ulster’s people continue to ask, because it was a will that struck admiration or fear in men, women, and children — a voluntary assertion of self-control that seemed to defy comprehension and made ten or so men appear above (or below) their fellow creatures. No wonder so many Catholic children looked at those familiar (and heretofore generally ignored) pictures of the Last Supper in their homes with special regard — no wonder so many Protestant children responded to the Reverend Ian Paisley’s talk of the Devil, of Satan, with special enthusiasm; it was a common inclination to seek Biblical imagery, a common feeling that normal human limits had been transcended. A Catholic teacher, no friend of the IRA, found himself perplexed and amazed, pointing out that “even Gandhi never went the whole route, and now we’re to have a dozen, maybe two dozen, doing so.”
A painfully haunting quality to this prison drama strongly affected the region’s political life, and, very important, its social and psychological climate. One kept expecting the hunger strike to falter and end. The families of four men had second thoughts, but others seemed implacably set to die, or to watch their sons, their husbands, their brothers die. No matter what the past legal (or criminal) record of the suicides, no matter what the methods or designs of the IRA as an organization, a dramatically unsettling, even eerie selflessness was at work. These men were proving their point: they were indeed different from others confined to Maze Prison — willing and able to demonstrate a perseverance that tests and stimulates everyone’s thinking. And their potential suicides had given children and adults alike cause to stop and think — had given yet another boost of moral meaning to lives often sad and burdensome. Then, suddenly, the fasting ended. One man, then another, chose life — no matter how unyielding the British continued to be. Again and again I heard children ask this question: “Can you blame them?” No one did — not even the IRA people in the Ardoyne.
Sometimes those children did blame themselves, however. It was a dramatic example of the manner in which the energy that religious faith supplies to a child’s conscience can prompt that conscience, though preoccupied with nationalist enthusiasms and mandates, to turn against its possessor with lacerating vengeance. Take the response of Kerry, a Catholic lass aged thirteen, to the decision of those in the Maze to end their hunger strike. They had the “right” so to decide, she kept telling her friends, but she wasn’t at all willing to be so understanding toward herself: “Maybe if we’d prayed harder! I asked one of the nuns if our prayers might have given the men more strength — if we’d said them more often than we did. She said she didn’t know; she said it’s all in God’s hands. My friend Mary said it’s in our hands, too, because we’re supposed to pray a lot, and then He hears you, Jesus, and His mother The nun heard Mary and she told her to pray, but not to be fresh, and she looked real cross at her and said if she talks back and disagrees with a sister, God will hear that, all right!
“My brother Tim thinks the only thing we can do is get guns and fight; but he is the littlest one of seven, and he doesn’t know that it’s the Brits who have their jet planes and atomic bombs. My father says they could wipe out all of Belfast! That means us! I pray every night to dear Jesus; I tell him what’s happening, and I say we don’t have the planes and the big bombs, but we’re on His side, and we just hope He’s hearing the right story. Our sister teaching us religion said we must never forget that the Prods are going to school, and they’re praying to Jesus, just as we are, and so it’s up to us if Jesus is going to help us out, and if we fail Him, and say a quick prayer, and go on to chewing gum and watching the telly, then He’ll not be with us; He’ll turn to the others — and then we’ll be in a bad mood, and it’ll serve us right! So, I keep saying my prayers, and my Hail Marys, and I think He is hearing, because I can feel Him in my head, I really can. I don’t know how to say it, but He’s there. I can’t see Him, and I can’t hear Him, but He’s with you, He’s with me, and I feel Him, I sense Him near me.
“I think He must have decided to keep our men in the Maze alive because they might have some more work to do one of these days. Why else would He let them start taking the Brits’ food? Mary says she’d never take their food; she says she’d die rather than eat what they served. But that’s ‘talk on the cheap,’ my mother says. My mother wished we’d find a way to leave Belfast. She has a sister in the States, in Rhode Island, the smallest one of all of them, and they call us two or three times a year, and when all this prison trouble started a few months ago, they called, and they said we should just get away, as fast as we can, because it’s getting worse and worse and worse. But it’s not — it’s the same. If the men had died, all of them, then maybe the Brits would close the prison, my mother says, but there won’t be a change until the Brits pull out, and they won’t let our starving prisoners push them out.
“But if God wanted, He could change the Brits. He could make them do what He wants. That’s why it’s too bad our men didn’t hold out longer. No one can blame them, but you can picture yourself there, and wish it had been you. I wish it had been me! I heard our IRA people saying that: If only it had been me! But someone said ‘you never know,’ and my mother got upset, and she scolded them, and said ‘you bet you never know,’ and we shouldn’t be talking as if we do know! I never told her that I didn’t eat my lunch. I gave it away to others. I pretended I was sick at supper. Everyone said I was losing weight. But I said no, I wasn’t. I said they had the men in the Maze, and their hunger strike, on the brain! But I thought if I could lose weight, then the men in prison would get some strength from me. I thought God would know I was going down on the scale, and He’d tell them, and they’d say that if the girl over there in the Ardoyne can do it, then so can they, and they’d keep up their courage, and never, ever give in. That’s what Mary hoped, too.”
Mary was at the time her closest friend — the same age, a neighbor, too: “three doors down” on a street of row houses. I had best present some of Mary’s statements on the same subject, condensed (as Kerry’s are) from a summer’s many conversations: “I told Kerry we should try to get God to pay attention to our prisoners; we should pray as soon as we get up, and pray during the day, and pray the last thing — before we go to sleep. My father says you don’t have to pray, because He knows what’s happening, God does; but He can’t keep watching everything going on, even if He is the Almighty. Besides, there’s talk of a women’s IRA, and I’d like to be a member! Besides, I can’t just eat and eat, and think of my cousin [one of the prisoners] sitting in that Maze, and turning his face, every time a dirty, dirty Brit comes with a tray of their dirty, dirty food. Besides, if I was in that place, and saw myself getting weaker and weaker, and losing my muscles, I’d sure like to know that there was at least one person there, in Belfast, who was with me all the way, until death takes both of us — that’s how I’d feel.
“I get sick when I see people stuffing food into their big mouths these days. My mother is fat; she’s so fat that she could stop eating for a year, and she’d still be fat. I know, I know — it’s not true! But when I see her frying all the potatoes, and I know there will be leftovers, and she’ll eat them all, and then blame us because we won’t ‘save her’ by eating everything she cooks, even though she knows she’s cooked too much; and when I see her eyes glued to our plates, just waiting for us to get up and put half of what she’s dished out to us on the counter; and when I think of my cousin, and of his friends in that Maze — then I want to take all the food we have in our kitchen (the food my mother hasn’t cooked) and throw it to the dogs, or throw it in the faces of those Brits when they’re on patrol here. Let them shoot us for messing them up with our fried potatoes and our buttered bread.
“When they gave in, our men in the Maze, I felt my stomach burn. I wish I could shoot a gun! I wish I knew how to aim, so that when I pulled the trigger, the bullet would go right where I want it to go! I went outside when I heard the news on the radio, and I walked and I walked — until I realized I was getting near the Prods, and I thought to myself: If I had a gun, I could open fire, and I’d take five or ten of them before they got me!
“Yes, yes, I’m just unloading the garbage in my head. Kerry said I have a bad case of the nerves, and I should go to the infirmary and rest! I’d like to go to Maze Prison and rest! I’d like to go there and sit and stare at the Brits and dare them to try to make me eat. If they put needles in me, and tried to feed me that way, through my veins, I’d pull the needles out. I’d cut the vein with a knife. If I had no knife? I’d use my fingernails! I’d push them into my skin. It sounds as if I’m upset, I know; and Kerry has told me I’m headed for a real bout in bed. But I’ve decided I don’t want to grow up and be like my mother; she smiles at the Brits, and they like her, and they’ve even given her some of the food they took from the IRA people. I know it was their doing; it was left at our door, and I told my mother she’s not fooling me. She says it was owed her by her sister; but my aunt said my mother uses her ‘as an excuse.’ My aunt won’t go further, but I know. My mother was always telling us when we were kids to forget all the politics of Belfast — but we never obeyed her. Our father was our hero; he said the truth all the time! He fought the Brits all the time. Then he got run down by a bus. It was driven by one of Paisley’s people. He said it was an accident. He was a liar! They all lie, all the Prods. Now, my mother has been without him for three years, and she’s forgotten him, I know. All she has her mind on is money and food and getting a nice dress. I think she’d take up with one of the Brits, if she could. She knows the IRA would kill her — right away they would. So, she flirts, and only we see her flirting. Some days, I’m ready to turn her in myself. But I worry what would happen to my small brother.”
These are terribly sad and unnerving excerpts, and I present them at length because they enable us to see in the expressed worries or sympathies, the angers and boiling rages of these children, so political in content, an astonishing self-arraignment, an intensity of self-laceration, that makes the word “masochism” seem frail. I have not heard one boy talk in quite this way, so conscious of food — even though it was men who were on a hunger strike in 1981. I do not claim to have seen a wave of anorexia among the preadolescent and early adolescent girls I knew in Belfast, but I did watch a substantial number of them become enormously preoccupied with their eating habits in response to the Maze Prison episode.
The pediatrician I have mentioned reported similar experiences to me — “a bit of hysteria, mini-hysteria,” he described it. Because I knew Kerry and Mary rather well, I pursued with them intensively their ideas and plans — so that I was getting to be as informed about their mental life, I would estimate, as I’d ever been with the children I’ve treated at Boston hospitals and clinics. Not that these girls were hospital patients — or striking others as in need of “treatment.” They were members of a community thoroughly aroused and agitated by one phase of a long struggle with others of Northern Ireland, not to mention an occupying army of young men, constantly marching up and down the street with guns, or driving by. Perhaps the entire community might be described as subject to hysteria, or pathologically obsessed by religious and nationalist ideas, values, expectations, anxieties. For one talking with a Mary, however, or a Kerry, the issue comes to this — stated by the Belfast doctor I’ve been mentioning: “I don’t know what to say, but that every community has its standards of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ and so does this one; and the IRA might well be regarded by you or me as a collection of psychopathic individuals, or madmen, but that is not how they are seen here, even by many who disapprove of their methods, so it’s hard to know what to think and how to characterize these young ones, when you hear what’s on the top of their minds!”
On the bottom of those minds, too — I replied immediately to my colleague, and then played some grim excerpts on tape and followed that listening session with some striking drawings and paintings by children. Mary’s drawings were especially dramatic, fiercely determined. Had I not known her for five years I would have immediately declared them to be worrisome, indeed. In one (Figure 4) she is a modern Joan of Arc, waving a rifle as she singlehandedly assaults a building that houses a British Army barracks. Her goal, she announces when she is almost through with the drawing, is the flag she had put on top of the building. She has worked long and hard on the building, and particularly, the flagpole, the flag. I am, frankly, curious, even a bit amused, as I notice this patience, this care extended Her Majesty’s outpost. Finally, I try to broach the subject — the irony, I guess: “Mary, I’ve seen you draw flags before, but this one has really challenged you.”
She looks at what she has done, then gives me a quick, knowing glance — as if to let me know that she’s quite able to pick up my cleverly evasive and provocative comment and needs a few seconds to come right back, as she surely does: “Well, those flags I drew were for your collection of flags. This is the Brit flag on the Brit headquarters, and I’m trying to get to the cursed building so I can tear the dirty thing into tiny pieces. God save the Queen when I get my hands on her bloody red, white, and blue dishrag — there’ll be nothing left of it before you can say ‘Orangie.’ And if any Brit tries to stop us, we’ll fire away. They all belong back in their London.”
It is hard to see where the red of her Royal Highness’s flag ends, and the blood of her subjects, the British soldiers, begins; or for that matter, the blood of Mary and her far less distinct followers also begins. She is, quite evidently, leading a bold insurrectionary assault upon firmly entrenched police power, a visible bastion of an alien political power. So doing, she is willing to die; and she is far from reluctant to take others with her to the grave. The scene is not only full of violence and death, it lacks even the slightest pinch of pictorial hope: no sun, no blue sky — no sky at all — and no grass or trees or flowers or watching animals. The girl who drew this has a charming lilt to her voice, and is still a child rather than a young woman in her body; she hasn’t relinquished her collection of small dolls and a miniature house near which she keeps them, and books about horses, Irish workhorses and racing horses and ponies. This lass loves making cookies, and eating cookies, and digging up new recipes for cookies. For years she has told me she would like to be a nurse, would like to nurse sick children, not to mention the five children she wants, one for each finger of her right hand, she jokingly announces, three girls and two boys, whom she’ll “love all the same,” with no preference as to sex or order of birth, and feed with “the best of food,” if she has to “beg for it” from the nearby grocer. This girl loves to say her prayers, and has wondered what Mary, “mother of God,” felt “when she saw her only begotten son, our Lord, nailed to the Cross.” She knew that Mary “must have cried and cried, and wished people would stop being so mean,” and she has impressed her nun teachers by her “sweetness” (they describe it). But she is the one, here, who has a “stomach for murder.”
When I heard her say that, I asked her, please, to repeat what she’d said. I claimed I’d not heard her. She knew better. She didn’t raise her voice (a sign of belief), but rather, lowered it a notch, I thought: “They have a stomach for murder. They don’t want to sit around in the pubs any more, wishing the Brits would get out someday. They don’t want to go hiding from the Brit tanks, and from the Brit friends, the Prods. They don’t want to sit and talk and get soaked with beer, and give in to them. They want to fight, and they want to win — and it means shoot to kill. There’s no other way. The only chance we have is to go on the attack. The Brits suck up to American guns, and too many of us in Belfast, the Irish people — we suck up to the guns of the Brits. Let the Prods do that! I’ll march on them, and if they kill me, that’s the price you pay if you’re a soldier. I know three of our best boys who got shot and killed fighting them, and I hope I get a chance to show them what we can do. My mother can’t have it her way, because we’re going to be different, and the Brits will be scared. They’ll leave. We’ll show that Mrs. Thatcher!”
There was a faint smile on the child’s face — for which I felt grateful, considerably relieved. I’d begun to worry as I saw the anger build up on the drawing, and in her comments. Mary seemed about to go through a psychological transformation: from childhood to adulthood in one fell swoop — to become a military leader eager to kill, willing if not eager, one gathered, to lose her own life. Her smile acknowledged that she was not yet the formidable prime minister’s equal, but it reminded me (who needed the reminder) that a substantial “reality” colored these extravagantly stormy, riotous, and rather gory drawings she had been doing, reaching a climax in this one. I think I turned less pale. She relaxed, as she made her first concession to humor in an hour or so with the charming announcement: “Well, it’s intermission time.” She put down her red crayon; set all the crayons aside, picked up the drawing and put it, also, very much aside (on top of a bureau) and then asked me what I thought of Mrs. Thatcher.
As I fidgeted, she easily read my mind, saved me from making one of my all-too-predictable rejoinders, told me what I wanted to hear —her candid appraisal of an enemy who was also, in a way, a bit of an inspiration: “She doesn’t care about anyone but the Queen and the Royal Family. People like that, at least the top dogs in England do. She wasn’t a top dog when she was my age; she was just anyone you’d see on the street, but she was star-struck, our teacher said: She wanted to mix with the rich, and you do that by becoming rich yourself, or you win the election, and then you rule everyone, even the rich people. She’s a smart one. She’s perky. She knows who butters her bread, but she won’t get down on her knees for you and me, just for the Queen. I’d like to have a pistol nearby, if I was bargaining with her! But she’ll fool herself one day, because she’s thick with the worst people in the world, the rich snobbish ones, and they’ll sink her, somehow they will.
“I hope she takes a lot of that royalty down with her: I hope when there’s a shoot-out that she isn’t killed until some of those English Lords and Ladies get popped off. If I was going into a battle with her, I’d offer her a chance: surrender and be with us. You’re not so bad you can’t join us! I’d tell her that. My uncle says he has no time for politics, but he thinks Thatcher is better than most English politicians. He thinks she’s tougher, and she’d kill her best friend if she had to — she’d throw in her husband and her son, too. You know where you stand with her! She doesn’t talk one line, then another. She’s just our big enemy, and no fooling! I’d not want her shot by us [the IRA]. There’d be too many tears in England, and we’d be in big trouble here; they’d arrest everyone, and they’d kill us on the street, and blame us for starting trouble. We have to figure a way to get Mrs. Thatcher to say she’s tired of us. She’d order all her men home, if she had to send them someplace else!”
This extended fantasy of sorts, interrupted in the telling by the eating of crackers, the watching of a telly news broadcast, and some inconsequential asides (neighborhood gossip, and a coming sports match), offered yet one more reminder that at least some of Belfast’s children are not only intensely, shrewdly, and forcefully political, but also much drawn to the political side of life as a means of settling all sorts of personal and familial scores. Mary rarely mentioned her father, dead three years before, and I had met him only two or three times in all the years of visits to their home. He had held down a job at a pub, sweeping floors and clearing tables. He was an alcoholic. Mary loved him very much, she told me often — and I fear she romanticized his drinking — but usually she shunned even an indirect reference to him. She spoke all too eagerly about her mother — with the relentlessly critical eye (at twelve and thirteen and fourteen!) of a self-styled revolutionary leader. At ten, Mary had already told me she couldn’t abide the complacency of her mother, who was (I couldn’t help but notice) a thoroughly devoted parent, trying to care for seven children, of whom Mary was next to the oldest. (Mary’s older brother had little interest in politics, and instead was a champion runner. He dreamed of migrating to America, of working as an athlete, then becoming an athletic instructor in a school — like her hero, his coach.)
One day, when Mary was only nine, we talked about families — mine, Kerry’s, then hers. I pull her lament together here from remarks more rambling than usual: “He isn’t alive much, our father. He is so upset at what is happening here, that he drinks a lot, a whole lot. He cries. I hear him coming home, and it’s late, and he cries a lot when he comes into the house. Our mother won’t even go to meet him. She sleeps through the night, and when we ask her if he’s come home, father, she says: ‘go and look, then come tell me.’ I hate her when she talks like that. I hate her. He must hate her, too. She cares about bread and milk and cheese and eggs for us — and my father would be starving for the boys in the Maze, if it would do them any good at all. He wanted to fight the Brits when he was young, I know he did. Then he just gave up, and that’s when he started drinking too much. I only wish the IRA could find something for him to do. If I was drinking that much, I’d get some dynamite, or a bomb, and I’d use it. I’d tie it to myself; I’d sacrifice myself. The sisters told us people have done that. They say in the States people were so upset about a war America was fighting — in Asia someplace — that they burned themselves to death. I’ve wondered if there might be some way for Kerry and me to do that. Kerry thinks I’m fooling, but I’m not. I’ve wondered if my father would want to do that. He’d never let me do it with him, but I would. We could show those Brits! We will, someday!”
Such talk is not easy to hear for a doctor familiar with symbolic “associations” in his patients — not without feeling his brow furrow, his eyes widen. One takes new stock of the child, then remembers that a cousin of hers (true, a boy) died hurling a firebomb at a British patrol. He was a runner for the IRA — a tough street fighter on its behalf. He was fourteen. He’d been throwing fire, literally, at others for a year or two. He died when others fired back — and Mary actually claimed to rejoice in his death: “It’s better you die fighting them, than live and become a coward who kisses the ground they walk on.”
She’d picked up that kind of talk, those phrases, from her IRA friends and mentors — an important fact for me to know, lest I attribute such a vivid and unsettling image exclusively to the exertions of her own mind. Mary has constantly heard talk of murder, self-imposed starvation, arson: stories or plots, and not least, assassinations in which a member of a family pays for wrongs he or she has done, or pays for wrongs done by others. Anyone who knows the Ardoyne, and other such neighborhoods in Ulster, knows of such intrigues, all with murderous consequences; knows, too, that such acts are constantly being discussed in front of children, submitted to their muster prior to the making of decisions: “What do you think?” That’s the question Mary knew her cousin was asked just before he and others resolved to “go ahead”; and so, no wonder she, next in line by age, and dreaming of being next in line as an activist, was herself ready, in an instant, to say yes, without qualifications, yes: “If they came to me and said ‘Now, Mary, will you help us?’ I’d jump and say yes, and I wouldn’t even want to hear what they’re asking me to do. No, we must all join in the fight. The sisters say to pray, and my mother says to get by the best you can, and keep your friends everywhere, and my father is gone, but not my cousin and not me and not Kerry. She is still scared, but she’d be a brave soldier, if it came to her being needed — if it all depended on what she had to do. I hope I’ll be brave, when the right time comes!”
A year later, at fourteen, she was not quite the Mary who spoke the words quoted above. Her mother took ill with cancer of the breast, and Mary learned that the mother had known she’d been ill for some time, but had refused to go see a doctor. Her bachelor uncle, a heavy drinker, who lived with his widowed sister and her children, drank even more when he learned this news, and became violent at home — breaking glasses, kicking the family’s small dog in the early hours of the morning. Mary went through highly emotional conversations with her mother — one after another “heart-to-heart” — and with each exchange her political interests, her fiery nationalism, diminished noticeably. She became, now, interested in her younger brothers and sisters. She learned how to cook — in her words, “at last.” She began to worry about how she looked to others, and wore (more and more) dresses rather than dungarees. She spoke out, tentatively at first, against the IRA’s recruitment of young people, such as herself: “Let them fight, the older ones, and let us be left alone! It’s not fair that little boys and girls be left without their fathers and mothers — all the murdered people we’ve known here, and all the funerals we’ve gone to, and all the tears!” Even as I write these words I know her to be a young woman (we’d call her an “adolescent”) who has bravely stood in her recently dead mother’s shoes, wanting to help those more vulnerable than herself grow up with some sense of a family’s psychological stability. “I dream of peace here,” Mary told me on my most recent visit to Belfast (1984); and she meant, by “here,” the noisy kitchen, where children had their usual “upsets,’ and where her uncle (four months sober) sat all too glumly and silently, sipping tea endlessly, smoking endlessly, eating nothing, losing weight. “A pity, the thinness in him nowadays,” she remarked — and I couldn’t help thinking back four years to the days of Maze Prison and a younger Mary’s yearning to shed pounds on behalf of a united Ireland, free at last of Brits and no longer in fear of the oratory of Ian Paisley.
As for Kerry, she moved with her parents to Dublin, where an uncle lived (and had a good job as a waiter in an up-and-coming restaurant). But I got to know another friend of Mary’s named Kate, and though the two were “ne’er as close” as Kerry and Mary had been, there was a strong bond of respect and affection between them — one that grew stronger as Mary came to realize all that Kate had endured as a child. They were the same age, went to the same Catholic School, shared the same IRA politics. But Kate was bolder, sassier at, say, ten or eleven, and had twice been taken into custody by the British during the summer of 1981 for teasing British soldiers, for “disturbing the peace” of a city’s street, for speaking “swearing words, in a fresh and vulgar manner” to the local constabulary. What Mary dreamed of doing, thought about doing as she talked or drew and painted, Kate actually did.
She was, at twelve, tall for her age, with lanky legs and utterly straight brown hair, with a slight hint of red. The hair came down almost to her shoulders. When she got anxious or angry, she put her hands through her hair repeatedly, or lowered her head abruptly, so that the hair suddenly all came forward, covering much of her face. She wore a crucifix on a chain around her neck, and often played with it, sometimes stopping to look down intently at it. She was “deeply religious,” the sisters told me: “Kate might become one of us when she’s older, for all we know. She may have a vocation. She may!”
As for Kate’s idea, at twelve, of her vocation, it went like this: “If I could choose what I’d be, I’d be a surgeon! I’d be in a hospital someplace in Belfast, and I could help take care of our men, who get hurt. If I went with them, to fight the Brits, I could sew anyone up, who got hurt. If I saw a Brit, and he needed to be sewed up, I’d just walk away. I’d never give any of them help! They look down on us, and they never listen to what we say. If I could really have my choice, I’d be a soldier! I’d be in the Irish Army [that of the Republic, not the IRA], and we’d cross the border and fight the Brits and beat them. Then we could tell the Orangies: Stay here, and we’ll be nice to you — nicer than you’ve been to us — or go back to your Scotland, if it means all that much to you! They’ve taken me in for being a ‘public tease’ to their soldiers, but if I was a soldier, I’d not get upset when some kid, a girl like me, starts saying what I said. I’d stop and listen to her! I’d ask my friends to listen.”
She stops there. She has begun to notice my incredulity — and maybe her own. She pulls back somewhat, acknowledges that it would be an exceptional soldier who would be that honest and open — even to a child. Anyway, she admits, she isn’t exactly a child: “The Brits say we’re all grown up — that’s what they say when they arrest us! They told me I’d go to jail next time, and it wouldn’t be a camp for little girls; it would be a jail, and I could spend my time talking with crooks — women who killed, too. The men [of the IRA] told me I could learn a few good tricks, and they thought I could break out easy, real easy. To escape from prison for men is much harder.”
She doesn’t intend to go to prison, though. She is a very bright and able student; the nuns constantly encourage her to work hard — thereby to get a good chance at university education. She is not incapable, even at twelve and thirteen, of severe moral and political anguish, as I began to realize first when I heard her talking about her people’s struggles, and later when I condensed her statements into the following excerpts. How sensitive and thoughtful children can be! How alert to ethical issues, to matters of contemporary social significance, to the political conflicts taking place around them, and to religious values they may have heard espoused, at home or at school, by their friends and their neighbors. Kate will always remain for my wife and me, for our sons, a vibrant spokesperson of young political and moral intelligence at work: “I don’t want to be knocked around by the Brits all my life, and I’m sure I will be unless we all teach the Brits one big lesson, that they can’t treat us as if we’re dirt, for their boots to push here and push there. I try to shout at them. I hope just one or two will hear me. My sister says they won’t, and she’s fifteen, and she used to shout, like I do, and then one day she just gave up. I remember; I was eleven, just over my birthday a week before. Maggie came home, and she was hoarse. She said her throat really hurt. Mum told her to take a candy, a mint, and to take lots of water. Then Maggie started crying, and mum sat down with her, and then Mum started crying, and then I did. Maggie was upset because two of the Brits stopped and they listened to her; they did. They argued with her. She thought she had a chance to win them over. But they argued with her hard, and she said she couldn’t do anything but stop talking; and then she came home. Mum told her she was wasting her good head, and she should study in school and learn the best answers for any Brit who comes to Belfast, and that’s what Maggie has been doing this past year.
“I want to be like her. I feel dumb out there shouting at the soldiers. But the [IRA] people think we should, and they’re the ones standing up for us. They say when I get bigger I can stop — but for us smaller kids to shout at the Brits is important, especially if a reporter comes here, or one of the telly men. I know we’re being a help somehow, but there are days when I just want to go home and watch the telly, and not stand there hoping to be seen on it! My mother says she prays that those two Brit soldiers will argue me down, the way they did with Maggie.
“I feel a little sorry for those soldiers. I hate to admit it, but I do. They looked scared to me. I told one of the [IRA] men what I thought, and he said no, they’re not scared, and that’s why we have to fight harder, to make them scared. The good Lord, He must have made them, as He made us. He must be upset by the ‘Troubles’ we have here, and He must wonder how we all got to be such enemies! I’ve read the history books they give us in school, but I still don’t see why we’re ready to kill each other — now! God won’t interfere with us, the sisters say; but He must be very upset with us, and He must be trying to figure out if there isn’t something He can do to stop this. I believe the IRA men when I hear them talk, but then I remember the parts of the Bible the sisters have us memorize, and I just know our Jesus wouldn’t want us to be killing each other, and He probably will be very upset with me, for all I’ve said to those Brits, when I go to meet Him.
“My favorite sister says you have to be loyal to God, but what country you live in — that’s not important. But it was the Roman Empire that put Jesus to death, we learned, and so it was important — even for Him. I told this to the sister — my opinion! — and she said I was being ‘a bit too clever.’ She asked if I’d got my ideas from the IRA. I told her I said the truth — not an ‘idea’! She smiled and told me I may have a vocation to be a teacher! It was the same afternoon that I tried to be friendlier with the Brits when I talked to them on the street near the stores. I told them we weren’t put here by God to hate each other! One of them stopped (the first time that happened) and said you’re right, girlie.’ I didn’t like the way he called me ‘girlie,’ but I thanked him. Then he wanted to give me a stick of his gum! He reached into his pocket and took it out, and he handed it to me, and I couldn’t take it. I could feel myself getting red. My friend said later I was as red as the red on the Brits’ flag! I kept my hands to my side. The soldier took back his gum, and he told me I should listen to my own words, and not preach to him. Then he left us, he and his buddy, and they both were laughing. I decided I should have taken his gum and kept talking with him, but I wasn’t sure what to do, and what more I should say — and I was scared, real scared. If the [IRA] men saw us, they might be very angry. My friend said we should ask them what to do. I think I may stop helping them [the IRA], and let some of the younger kids go after the soldiers.”
She heeded her own words, thereafter. She was summoned by older children, by some of those “IRA people” she often mentioned, to a meeting, and asked why she had withdrawn from her “station.” She was silent for a while. They told her they wanted her continuing help. She said yes, she would gladly offer that — “but not with the Brits on the street.” Why? She replied that she felt herself unable to get their attention. That didn’t bother her interrogators. Finally, she succumbed to tears. They told her she would hear from them. She went home frightened, disappointed in herself — and strangely unable to forget that soldier, his gum, and not least, her own persuasive admonitory and morally urgent message.
She told her mother, days later, that she’d been having dreams in which the soldier figured. The mother told her to forget the soldier, forget the dreams, too, and above all, forget the IRA and its street activity. Kate wanted to comply with her mother’s suggestion, but she also missed her chance to exhort others. Her dream in which the soldier appeared was a momentary, nighttime chance to have her say, and listen to herself. When she had told me of her dream, she was quite willing to explain it, in her own way — as if the significance of dreams was something she had a sovereign emotional and intellectual right to pursue. There was, in fact, no one dream, she pointed out to me, simply a recurrent theme in many dreams: “I won’t always remember the dreams I have, but lately, when I’ve had the one with the Brit in it, that soldier, I know as soon as I’ve waked up that he’s been in a dream, and I’ve had another argument with him! I’ve wondered if he ever dreams about me! Probably not! I’m not sure why I can’t get him out of my mind! I don’t usually think of him in the daytime. He may be ‘a friend in disguise’! There was a story the nun read to us a few years ago — I forget most of it — but I remember the nun telling us one person in the story, he was a friend in disguise.’ She said that God sends messages to us through the people we meet, and that’s when they become ‘a friend in disguise’ to us. After a few dreams with that same Brit trying to be nice to me, I decided he was my ‘friend in disguise’! I told the sister who’s my favorite in school about my dream, and she smiled and said that ‘God has his mysterious ways with all of us.’
“I began to think He might be sending the soldier to win me over to the Brits’ side! But I know God would not get Himself into our ‘Troubles’; He must be so smart He can see way in advance why He should stay clear of them! In my dream the Brit tells me I should practice what I preach; he says that — ‘Kate, practice what you preach.’ Then I take his gum, but I don’t open it and use it, because I’m scared if they should see me, the men who spy for the IRA. Each time it’s the same; I’m walking down the street, and I stop and try to get some soda pop, but I don’t have the time, because I’m to be at that corner, and start teasing the Brits. So, I run. Then I’m there, and I see smoke, and that means we’ve planted another bomb, and it’s gone off. Then I see the soldiers coming, and they’re rushing to the place where the bomb has gone off, but this one Brit stops, and it’s him (my friend!) and I’m starting to talk with him, and I tell him this is a place that God must not like, because of all our fighting here, and he smiles and tells me I’m a ‘wise one,’ just like the sisters will tell you sometimes, if you say good things in your composition. Then he does it; he says, ‘let’s you and I change it all here.’ I don’t know what he means — what that’s supposed to mean. But he says that if he could trust me and I could trust him, that would be a start, and it’s then he gives me some gum — asks me if I want some; and it’s then that I get nervous, and I always wake up then. It’s as though the IRA is watching me in my sleep, but so are the nuns, because when I wake up I think of them first thing.”
I suppose she has yet to join us who conceptualize experience, who move from words such as hers to others: a girl with split conscience, struggling to reconcile conflicting religious and political mandates, and perhaps negotiating between a sternly commanding superego and the beckoning nod of the ego ideal, that morally refined part of many lives which occasionally influences them. But she knows the tug going on as she sleeps, knows the meaning of her slightly excited, even feverish feeling in the early hours of the Belfast morning, as the light summons her to another day. Sometimes, when I am asked what children of ten or twelve or fourteen “really” know about a subject such as “religion and nationalism,” I think of Kate, her street confrontation, her chosen withdrawal from further street activity, her dreams, her thoughts about those dreams — and wonder what more we might ask of ourselves in the way of political knowledge or religious introspection. But Kate would not want herself to be used in this way — as a (faintly disguised) scold. When she was a bit older, just turned fifteen, she was so “confused” she thought of migrating — not to the Republic of Ireland, not to England, not even to the United States of America: “I’d like to go where there aren’t any of us Irish living — not the Prods, and not us, either! Not the English — we’ve had enough of them! I’ve never been out of Belfast very far, a few miles, so I don’t know where to go. One sister at school said she thought the place for me would be Italy. I’d be near the Pope then. But I’ll bet a lot of Irish people come to see him!” But she never left Belfast, and in 1984, at age seventeen, saw little likelihood of ever seeing the Pope.
In fact, when Kate became fifteen, she began to lose all interest in politics — not an unusual transformation in Belfast, but one that contrasts sharply with the “political socialization” of children in the United States, where in late adolescence interest in politics is often just beginning. Kate was now able to look back with some amusement at her earlier recurrent dream. The soldier was “a handsome devil,” she came to say when she was sixteen and going out steadily with a young man of nineteen who lived not far from her. This young man was ambitious intellectually, hoped to go to Queen’s University in Belfast on scholarship, hoped to be a teacher. Kate had every intention of working on his behalf, if she could get a job. It was on such matters that her mind concentrated, though she was obliging enough to look back: “It all seems so long ago, that I was on the street shouting at those soldiers. Some of my old girlfriends are still with them, the IRA, but a lot of us just got tired of them and of all the fighting. I will admit that if that one Brit showed up here today, right now, I could pick him out of a crowd, I’d have no trouble doing it; I still see his face when I think of him, and I now realize he was a pretty handsome fellow! No wonder I was having those dreams! But I’m not doing bad, thank you, with my Gerry; he’s a real sporting man, and he’s smart, and if anyone will make it out of this street, he will be the one and I’ll be there with him, you bet! If he and I had our way we’d never once think of our ‘Troubles’ again. I hate to say it, but I think Jesus Christ must be wishing He’d never let these churches get going in His name — all those Prod churches, and our Catholic one. There are Sundays when Gerry and I don’t even want to go to church. We hate any news on the telly about the ‘Troubles,’ and we won’t read the news stories, and when I hear the priest talking, and he’s getting us all going, with his tough speech, I want to leave. I want to pray to Jesus Christ all by myself — I mean, just Gerry and me, and in his parents’ home or mine. Lately, we’ve been going on weekend picnics, and we’re never happier than when we’re away from the streets here!”
So went the swift midadolescent evolution of a one-time warrior into a youth with high personal hopes for herself and for her boyfriend. She can’t be considered “typical”; few in the Ardoyne even aspire to college, or become girlfriends or boyfriends of those who do. But I have talked with a number of children (about a quarter of those I’ve followed) who do gradually, in their teens, lose interest in the urgency of Belfast’s religious nationalism. Perhaps they become exhausted, and “burnt out” — can’t indefinitely submit to the constant, wearying stimulation of rage. I went to Belfast in order to learn whether children do become knowing about, attentive to a political scene. Yes, one learns conclusively, they certainly do become decidedly political children — but some of them go full circle, turn into exceedingly apolitical youths. Kate, speaking not only of herself, but others she knows well, described this psychological turn briefly, pointedly: “You can live your whole life here within a few months, or a year or two. You start out like a baby, then you learn everything; you see people you know — you see someone in your own family — die. You become a soldier. You’re willing to die yourself. If you don’t, you may keep fighting; and because jobs are so scarce here, there’s not much else to do! Or you may just decide one day that something in you has died, but you’re still alive. So, you start living, but it’s not the same life as before.”
Such a youth has not lost her political knowledge, or for that matter, her political interests; she has withdrawn from a political life, perhaps sacrificed it. Others of her background and age don’t. In the Shankill I spent the same number of years I’d given over to the Ardoyne watching Protestant children assume their political birthright. Anyone who has attended one of the Reverend Ian Paisley’s Sunday church services knows what that means — a thorough mixture, indeed, of urgent Biblical assertiveness and militant nationalist sentiment. Alice, at only eight, had committed most of the Reverend Paisley’s terser pronouncements to memory — I often wondered whether she had even the slightest comprehension of what her voice kept uttering. But as I questioned her further, hoping to hear her view of things, not a word-for-word acknowledgment of what she’d heard in Sunday School, I began to realize how earnestly (and sometimes, ingeniously) children can make the pronouncements of the adult world very much their own.
In Alice’s case a congenital defect aided such a psychological development. She was born with a left hip and leg destined never to be normal, so that her right leg not only carried the major burden of her gait, but was noticeably longer and sturdier. “We took her to the doctor when she was small,” Alice’s mother explained to me, “and the doctor said there was something wrong with the ‘growth centers’ in the leg, and she didn’t even have all the muscles she needed — they just weren’t part of the body the Lord sent us.” Not every parent, needless to say, would phrase this child’s medical difficulty in such a manner. Nor do other children choose to think about their situation quite as Alice did at eight years, six months: “I go to the doctor, yes; he’s a nice man. But he says there’s not much they can do. If I went to London or to America they might be able to change my leg around — I mean, do an operation that would make it stronger. But it’s ‘only a maybe,’ he says, and we’d have to be rich, and we’re never going to have much money. My father says that even if he worked twenty-four hours, day and night, every day and every night, we’d never be able to get together enough money to travel all over the world, and see those doctors. Besides, there’s one doctor who’s the best doctor in the world, and He’s the only doctor who never has died, and He never will, and if you trust Him, then you know there’s nothing that happens, no sir, nothing, that isn’t meant to be. My Granny, she’s told me that God is watching us from the first second we’re born, and He has a plan for us, a separate plan for each of us; and you never know what the plan is, the whole plan, until the last second of your life. What’s meant to be will be, and He’s the one who knows what’s meant to be — that’s what Granny says.
“My father says Granny has a ‘talk’ with God twice a day. As soon as she wakes up, she kneels by the side of her bed, and asks Him to do what He wants with her for the rest of the day. Then, when she’s ready to go to bed, at night, she thanks Him for ‘giving her the day.’ She always says to me: ‘Thank God for giving you the day’! I try to remember to do just what she does. I forget a lot; but I’m getting better — my father says ‘much better.’ Granny says my bad leg will become my good leg! She says: ‘Alice, you’ll see.’ She says: ‘Wait until you’re as old as I am, and then you’ll know about God’s plan.’ Sometimes I wish I could see way ahead, and His plan would be there, and I could find out what it is, so I’ll know. But a lot of the time, I forget all about my bad leg; I do what everyone else does. I go to school, and I try to help my parents, and I mind my little brother and my sister, and I go to church, and I help my mum with the shopping. But after that bombing, mum gets nervous before she goes to market.”
A year later this girl was herself a bit “nervous,” but not because she was afraid that a bomb might explode as she was helping her mother choose vegetables or meat at a store. She had become a not-so-unwitting “messenger” for a Protestant paramilitary group — specifically chosen, I would eventually learn, because her limp, her obvious vulnerability and fragility, made her the least likely subject of suspicion. Not that she did anything illegal. She carried envelopes, with pieces of paper inside them, from one person to another. That is all she did, and at the start of this career, she knew little of what she was doing, or why she was doing it. In time she became outspokenly proud of her job, and by no means reluctant to explain to anyone her sense of her own place in the complex mosaic of nationalism: “You have to help your people, when they’re being attacked. If we don’t fight for our streets, the Pope will come here, and he’ll have all the people from Dublin up here, cheering him, and they’ll push us out, and we can t go anywhere. We’re here, and we’re going to stay here! My Granny says she’ll go and fight with us, if the Fenians show up. She says she can pull a trigger, even if her arthritis is bad. Her eyes are in good condition; she says she can see a long way into the distance. It’s only reading that gives her trouble. If the Fenians get that close, she said she’d pick up the biggest rock she could find and throw it at them.
“They asked me last year to help carry letters ‘back and forth.’ They said they don’t trust the telephone. I said I’d be glad to help them. I never asked them anything, no. I know the people; one man is my uncle. He’s a very nice uncle, too. He always gives me a big, big birthday present. He’s the one who told the people that I could help out. I told him it takes a lot more time for me to walk than some kids I know; they can run so fast they’re in your sight then out of sight in ten seconds flat. But my Uncle Rod [Roderick] said that’s just perfect — they want a slow, slow walker, and I’m the one. So, I said yes.
“I do know more than I did last year — I mean, I’ve heard everyone talk, since ‘the Troubles’ here got worse, and I hear the men talk, while I wait to get their letters. Even if I wasn’t carrying anything for them, I’d be hearing my father and my mum talk, and all her neighbors; and I’d hear in church what’s happening, and how we could get wiped out, that’s how bad it’s got, this last year or two, Mr. Paisley says. He’s very worried, Mr. Paisley is, my father says, and Mr. Paisley is the one who knows everything about our bad, bad ‘Troubles’ here, and if you don’t listen to him, you’re putting a cloth over your eyes, and you’re blind!”
She makes an illustrative gesture with her handkerchief, takes it out of her skirt’s pocket, puts it up over her face, the upper half. Quickly she pushes the handkerchief back in her pocket, then she begins to talk louder, even as she is emphasizing the strength a one-time weakness has come to be: “We’ve all waked up. Granny says when she was my age she was asleep; she didn’t know what the Fenians were doing — having their huge families, and trying to get all the people they knew from Dublin to come up here, and to push us, so we’d surrender. They want us to give them everything! They want us to join the Irish, be part of Ireland, that country. No sir, never; we are the Queen’s subjects, and we’ll fight for her to be our sovereign. The Queen is our sovereign, Granny says, and my father says she always will be.”
A complete stop in that train of thought; accordingly, I begin to phrase a new question or two. Suddenly there is this afterword: “My mum says she thinks we should sit down with them, and have a big argument, and then sign some agreement — but she knows they won’t be fair. She says they’re not very smart people, and you have to be charitable. But she says they’ve done so many bad things — it’s just too many for us to forget: the bombs, you know, and the shootings, and the fires they set. She agrees with Mr. Paisley, that you have to pray to God to protect us from them, or we’ll lose everything. But she thinks some of them aren’t so bad. She knows a butcher, and he’s a Fenian, but he married someone my mother knew when she was a girl, my age, and she’s one of our people, and she’s very nice, and he converted from the Catholic Church, and he’s all right, mum says. She thinks he didn’t get a very good education, and his speech isn’t good, but he is polite, and he’ll give you a little extra meat, if he knows you, and he’ll never forget to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”
She has noticed over the years that children and grown-ups alike are friendly to her, and exceedingly polite. She hears others experience rudeness (and, of course, display it); often under such circumstances she stops and wonders why she has immunity from similar lapses in civility. But she also reminds herself of the truly awful, even frightening insults she has heard. Her Granny, who in a way is her confidante, her best friend, has discussed this puzzling phenomenon with her, tried to explain what might be at work: “If Granny is right (and I think she always is!), the people who are very nice to me feel sorry for me; and the people who say bad things, they’re just bad people. Most of the people here in the Shankill are good people; they stand together, and they’ll fight together. There are some rotten eggs in our basket, though; Granny knows a few, and she says they should be sent to live in Ireland and leave our church. Remember — Jesus was betrayed by a man who was one of his closest friends. You can’t think everyone you’ve known all your life and thought was a good fellow is going to turn out to be a good fellow all the time. Sometimes people get caught by the Devil. Mr. Paisley, we hear him tell of the Devil, and all the people the Devil owns. The Devil owns them the way someone does a house, or a store. So you don’t hear him, and you don’t see that he’s been here, but he has. The Fenians are a sneaky lot, my father says, and he knows; he watches them when he’s downtown, and they steal a lot from the stores, he’s sure. They have their arms full of things, and they take those taxis of theirs back to where they live. We don’t know how to be rid of them!”
On occasion she has wished she were “all better” — and she has corrected herself, usually, when she uses that phrase: “I mean, not chosen by God to have this trouble.” Mostly, such a qualification heralds a spell of emphatically stated thankfulness; God has selected her, out of all the others He might have chosen, for a quite unusual fate, and she ought to say hallelujah now and then, rather than singling herself out for pity. But we do forget ourselves — human, all too human. Soon we remember, though. Once we have remembered, we become joyous, and we think of what might well be, someday — surprises, excitements, bonuses, rewards, awards. Who can know? Ours but to wait — and always, have trust in Him, thank Him for that most important of all gifts, to be a member of His flock. Saved — that is it, this is what counts: to have been saved. And above all, saved from that Devil: “If I catch myself with a tear in my eye, no matter why, I stop myself and pull out the handkerchief, real quick. Dry your tears, Granny says; and she dries her own, she tells me a lot. Think of Jesus on the Cross. He died so we can smile. You can’t forget Him and think only of yourself. If He didn’t like you, He’d have sent you here to be a Fenian, and you’d be living with them and the Pope would have you in his hand, and whatever he told you to think, you’d think, and whatever he told you to say, you’d say. That’s what Granny knows, from being told by Jesus to stay here and teach us all she’s learned from Mr. Paisley and from others she’s heard preach God’s true words.”
Such sustained arias of gratitude do not always follow the laments of a girl who (for instance, at age ten) had seen her friends take part in a bicycle race, and be rewarded with “sweets.” She knew that “sweets” were always available to her — that, in fact, the man who ran the bakery, and the man who ran the confectionery shop were always eager to give her “a little something extra.” Usually, she declined to respond to those offers — simply shook her head with the confident no of the well-fed girl she was. (Her father was a clerk in a downtown department store.) But that day she’d been seized by her “sweet tooth” even before the race had begun, and had, in fact, fairly gorged herself during the race. When it was over, she’d felt “sick” — quite ill enough to go home immediately: “I was sick to my stomach.” She knew that she should acknowledge her own complicity: “I ought never to have eaten all those candies.” She also knew enough to connect the race with her own condition: “I kept looking at my leg, the bad one, while I was there; and I should have been watching the race, instead. I was feeling sorry for myself, and that’s a very bad idea, my Granny says. But you can’t be perfect! She says that, too! I always remember her saying that when I know I’ve done something I shouldn’t do. It’s just — well, it’s just that I get tired of this old leg of mine some days, and I wish I didn’t have it. I told my mum once that I’d be better off if the leg was just taken away from me. Then I wouldn’t try to forget it, and try to be like everyone else, and try to hope for the best to happen every day.
“Usually nothing happens! I don’t tell Granny that! She can always sit me down, and by the time she’s finished her questions, she’s found something that’s happened — a good sign of God’s smile, she says. Even if I’m not sure she’s one-hundred percent right, I know it’s best to agree. She’s old, and she gets cross if you argue with her. But later, I’m not feeling so good, and I talk with my mum, and she says if you don’t feel good, you should not feel good, and why should you whistle in the dark, if you want to stop and cry? So, I do! The other day I saw on the telly a boy, he was just born, and they said he’d need an operation, and they’d take him to London, and they might make him better, there. I was ready to cry then, too. But I heard he was from the Falls Road, a Catholic baby, and I thought: He’ll have a lot of trouble, anyway, even if they do fix him up, those doctors in London.
“I asked my father if an English doctor would agree to see a Fenian from Belfast. He said probably, yes; the English have forgotten what the Fenians are really like. But my mum said a doctor should see anyone, and it doesn’t matter, the religion of the patient. I know they don’t agree sometimes, mum and my father. If I was the doctor I’d see the baby, even if he was a Papist. A baby isn’t to blame for the mistakes of the parents! When you get to be older, then it’s your fault. I’ve seen the Fenians, and all the trouble they’ve given us. Mr. Paisley says: You reach the ‘age of reason’ and you’ve got to stand up and ask God to bless you! So, we do! I’ve got over the ‘age of reason.’ It’s seven, I think, or eight! But when I was a baby, I didn’t know anything. Maybe if my mum had taken me to London, they’d have tried to fix my leg. Maybe there’s a doctor someplace who can do something. The Fenians believe in all these bad superstitions, Granny says. But what if there was a doctor, and he was a Fenian, and he was the one who knew the most about a bad leg like mine? I think he’d see me and try to help. I think that many of the Fenians, they don’t know better, but they’re not as bad as the IRA, those murderers. The Fenians should leave Belfast; they should go to Ireland, and they’d be happier. They wouldn’t live the way they do here. They’d probably take better care of their houses. We’d have peace then, and none of our ‘Troubles.’ Everyone would feel safer here. The Fenians would feel safer, too. They wouldn’t always be complaining that we treat them bad; that’s what they say on the telly. They say they want to be equal with us. But if you’re not equal, you can’t be equal. You can wish and pray, but if there’s no miracle, there’s no miracle.”
Then Alice (just turned eleven) changed her slightly rambling train of thought abruptly. I’d been saying things, as she talked: minor phrases of agreement, or words meant to help her (I believed) to explain what she clearly was trying to explain — to herself, I couldn’t help but think, as well as me. I think I wanted to push her a bit further, prod her to make connections I thought she had made a bit below the surface of her mind. She ignored my nudges, however. She wasn’t willing at all to be hurried by me toward — well, her ‘Troubles.’ Instead, she would approach her own difficulties, then veer toward the Troubles of Belfast, of which she spoke easily, and sometimes, with a child’s all-too-ready sarcasm, learned well from the grown-ups.
Finally, Alice eyed my red shoulder pack, where (she knew well) I kept my crayons, paints, drawing paper. She asked me how I’d been doing at the school I’d been visiting, and as I heard myself giving her an account of it, I began to realize I’d not, in fact, “heard” her — not picked up her inclination, at that moment, to move beyond words. Tardily, I began to move in my mind toward the desirability of having a drawing session, not our first. But she was the one to ask: might she “try painting”? She’d never before used paints, had claimed them to be foreign to her experience: “We only use crayons or colored pencils in school.” Now, she was venturesome — and set to work.
A half hour later we could both view her first painting (Figure 5). She had been very busy. She had taken obvious delight in using paintbrushes, paints of various colors. Part of the scene was a pastoral landscape; but abruptly, city buildings appear, and as the eye moves from left to right the character of the buildings changes: at first, flimsy housing, all of a piece, and clearly inadequate, if not squalid, then individual homes, neatly arranged, of obvious individual dignity. In between is the dividing line or Wall — Belfast’s separate neighborhoods, obviously, with their intermediate zones of barrenness or corrugated metal or abandoned dwellings, their windows and doors all cemented, a testimony to people split decisively from each other. But the artist wants to populate her carefully wrought world, and does. In the humble section of the city are to be found small people, whose features are not distinct. Their hair is uniformly dark — as is Alice’s. One or two have a missing arm, a missing leg — as if the author had hurried too much, or wanted to indicate that these individuals may not be fully formed, may blur into one another: a social group collectively malformed. No flowers or trees are anywhere in sight.
In the other street or neighborhood, grass is really abundant, as are flowers and trees — the interrupted continuation, really, of the rural countryside to the far left. The sky that has clouds only where the less impressive dwellings are found now resumes its former bright blue, sun-suffused presence. The men and women here are distinct individuals, brightly dressed, and with no apparent infirmities. They have red hair, blond hair. The title of this painting: “A City.”
When Alice has finished her project, she puts it down on a table between us, does not hand it to me, as she often has the drawings she has done — of herself, her Granny, her school, her favorite playground. I ask her if I may come and take a look. She says yes, and I do. “Which city is this?” I ask. I am sure I know the answer, and I wonder why she hasn’t provided it more explicitly for the viewer, why she chooses to put the evasive article “a” before the word “city.” After a silence of about ten seconds — as long as I could stand without discomfort — I ask another question, entirely suggestive: “Is this Belfast?” More silence, until our eyes meet, and then from Alice a thin, wan smile: “Well, sort of.” I’m not quite sure what to make of that comment. I scurry around, mentally, for some further (leading, prodding) question. I wonder about a sudden, quite new psychological quality in this girl I’ve known several years — coyness, evasiveness. Then, she ends another silence herself: “I guess I got the idea from living here in Belfast, but it could be other cities, too.”
I await her amplification. Surely she has something in mind. She seems to be struggling for words and so I make an effort to restrain my intrusiveness. Finally I am told this: “Mr. Paisley said last Sunday that there are the saved and the damned. He said God knows who’s who, but we have to wait to find out. Then in Sunday school they read from the Bible, and I kept remembering that the first will be the last, and the last first — it says in the Bible. You have to watch out, or you’ll be way on top, but you’ll lose your way and get in trouble. Mr. Paisley thinks the British government, a lot of people in it, have gotten lost. They’re ‘on their knees before the Pope of Rome,’ he said. And the only thing that will save us, he said, is ourselves — even if we’re not in London, running the government for Her Majesty the Queen. But what if God came here, and He looked around, and He saw some people who live in good homes, and they are strong and have everything, and He saw other people, and they are in trouble — then what? A kid asked our Sunday school teacher that question, and he said God knows who’s worth saving and who isn’t. The kid still wasn’t sure what the answer to his question should be, and so he asked it again, and the teacher told him to stop bothering us. When the boy said he only wanted to know, the teacher warned him of the Anti-Christ — that he could come and claim any of us anytime. So, we all bowed our heads and we prayed hard. Granny worries about the Anti-Christ. My father says he’s not sure who the Anti-Christ is; and mum says Jesus was a good, good Lord, and He won in the battle with the Anti-Christ, so we all can be saved. But I told her Mr. Paisley said there are the people who are damned, and she said yes, she forgot. Then, she had to go shopping. Before she left she said prices have gone so high this last year, she’s sure the Anti-Christ may be the people who own the shops where we get our food and our clothes!”
Other such comments followed, vivid in their theological suggestiveness, and reminders that not only Alice is “evasive,” the word I’d used earlier in thinking of her. As for me, I began to realize that sometimes it is my mind that is “evasive” in its own way — unwilling to settle for a complexity, a thickness of psychological texture, eager to utilize a more categorical mode of analysis: this means that, and that means this, and no blurring. Meanwhile young Alice, just set to enter adolescence, had reminded me that for her the city of Belfast, its nationalist and religious confrontations, was not a single-minded obsession, but related to other confounding matters. Why the suffering of Belfast, and why the kind she had personally experienced? Why, too, the Bible’s reminder that lowly, pain-afflicted people may attain the top rung of the spiritual ladder, and that fit, affluent people may be in for a great fall? Moreover, as one waits for that day of judgment, so commonly mentioned in church, what does one do — try to displace those who are poor, weak, infirm, and hurting, in hopes of a future inheritance of bliss? Try to convince oneself that even if the neighborhood one claims as one’s own is rather nice, this relatively comfortable life is a measure of one’s proven humility, one’s clear-cut spiritual worth? If, too, one has a bit of lameness — what then does one do: claim on its account a destiny of heaven, because Christ so obviously ministered to, cared for the lame, the halt, the blind? But how does one do so, and avoid pondering the judgments accorded the Fenians — whose down-and-out status is declared by one’s family as prima facie evidence of deserved damnation, rather than a sign of an auspicious future?
Alice was not one to answer such questions, and she has learned to be wary of her own natural, impulsive curiosity. The last time I met her, when she was sixteen, and a bright, able student who dreamed of becoming a doctor one day (“I’ve known so many, and they have been nice to me”), I noticed no diminution of that curiosity, though it was, as always, kept under careful wraps. She never forgot that one painting she had done, and told me this about her present thoughts about it: “I still don’t know whether you stay as you are, or you change a lot — when the next life comes. Granny told me before she died [a year earlier] that she’d soon be ‘in God’s presence,’ and there’s His city, she said, a city where we go. I wondered if it’s like Belfast. I guess we’ll only know when we get there!”
I recall hearing, in that statement, the phrase “a city.” When I did I thought back to that painting, and back also to my impatience with a younger Alice. Now I began to realize that yet another “child” had been yet another teacher to me. Our “a city” had been rendered in paint, by a knowing observer of this world’s ambiguities. She quite properly has abstained from the clear-cut certitudes pressed upon her endlessly at her home, in her church, in one part of “a city” (Belfast) that is, in turn, a small part of yet another, larger “city” (the world). Why shouldn’t a child exposed to a physical impairment that puts its mark on her, and to an arbitrarily and passionately and murderously divided community, and to a religious faith that emphasizes a someday cleavage of good and bad — why shouldn’t she settle for “a city” and leave the question of which city up to time itself, and her mind’s eventual, further effort at reflection, rather than the whim of a doctor who wanted to press her, then and there, for an unequivocal interpretation, a conclusive designation?
On days when I want that inclination of mine appeased, however — going for the jugular of the absolutely definite, precise, unqualified — I think of a girl I also met in the Shankill, Bea (Beatrice) by name, the oldest daughter of a former athlete and soldier who had struggled for years with a severe drinking problem, and of a former schoolteacher who has described herself, rather often, as “English,” thereby distancing herself not only from Belfast’s Catholics, but from its Protestants as well. When Bea was thirteen she explained to me, during many talks, her complex family background — and the way in which her religious life mixed with her nationalist sentiments, loyalties, antagonisms: “My mother was born in Yorkshire, and her father was a minister in the Church of England. He met King George VI and our Queen Mother. She is the most wonderful person in the whole world; she’s over eighty, and she still makes you feel so proud to be one of her subjects, when she waves and smiles. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, ran a tea shop for a while. She was a schoolteacher, too, like my mummie. They both taught English history. My grandmother died many years ago, and mummie doesn’t teach now — except us: she says we’re her ‘class,’ my brother and me.
“Mummie has a lot of trouble with daddy’s drinking, but it’s much better now. They met in England; he’s from Belfast, and he was a soccer player. His family is from Scotland; they’re Presbyterians, but they don’t go to church much. Daddy had terrible fights with his daddy when he was growing up. My grandfather was the treasurer of a cigarette company here, and for a long while they had plenty of money and they lived in a nice part of the city, near the [Queens] University. But Grand-daddy got very sick, and he died. He had a bad time with gambling, my daddy says. He left the church because he was ashamed of himself. My daddy ran away to England, to play soccer and go to school and try to be happy. It was very sad at home, with his father so sick, and in big debt. I guess he swept my mother off her feet, when they met: he’s always been a good looker, and he had ‘charm’ then, mummie says; and he still does. He can whistle, and the birds come running! But mummie’s family knew he wouldn’t amount to much, but even so, she stuck by him. She says if she had it over, she’d marry him, still, even with all the heartache. Even with our troubles over money: Daddy has lost a lot of jobs in his life! But he’s been trying lately; he’s really been trying!
“Mummie takes us to the Cathedral [of the Church of England, in downtown Belfast] and she says it’s like going home, every Sunday. Sometimes she cries a little during the service. She says she has her ‘memories.’ Daddy never goes. He says he’s a Protestant, but he’s not fit for church yet — until he ‘licks liquor’! He says the Church of England is ‘too much’ for him, anyway. He says ‘big shots’ go there, or the people who want to be ‘big shots.’ His drinking friends were always talking about ‘big shots’ who have moved out of the Shankill. One is an American who was from here and has come back, and he’s the one who thinks all the Anglican types are ‘big shots’ or ‘four-flushers,’ daddy says: putting on the dog! Mummie laughs, but she doesn’t mind being called ‘the Queen’ or ‘her Highness’ by daddy. She loves the Royal Family; that’s why we have so many pictures of them all over. Mummie has a brother and he works in the Morgan Bank in London, and when we’re in a slump, Uncle Jimmie wires us enough to tide us over. It may sound ‘bold and brassy’ of me, but I’d like to go to London and work in that bank. My uncle could train me, maybe. I’d be much happier in London than in Belfast. I just wish daddy would say, one day, that he’s had enough of living in the Shankill, and fighting with his ‘temptation to drink,’ and enough of all these dirty Irish people, and their bad habits, and he’s ready to leave. Mummie believes daddy ‘caught’ his drinking troubles from the Irish, the Papists here. They all drink as though beer and whiskey are pure water or the milk from the cow in a pasture nearby! If you live near people, too close, you’ll catch all their bad habits and diseases, even if you start out good and strong, unless you have the most terrific willpower in the world, and not everyone does!
“If I get to England, to live there, I’ll be back with my proper ancestors. It’ll be like a big escape, my uncle says; he thinks we’ve all been pulled down by the Irish. Here in the Shankill the people are Protestant and they love the Royal Family; but it’s not England. The Catholics are the worst people; they have no manners, and they don’t know what the word ‘clean’ even means. The biggest thing in your life is your country. If you’re Irish, you belong to a poor country that’s never done anything but send people to other countries, Mummie always says when they’re talking about ‘the Troubles’ here on the telly. If you’re stuck here in Belfast, but you’re from England originally, then you’re like a fish out of water; you’re not where you belong, and that’s the worst, the absolute worst that can happen to you. Mummie should have got daddy to go with her to England. If she’d put her foot down, he’d have come. She’s too ‘soft,’ my Uncle Jimmie says. He’s a great man: He makes lots of deals, I think. He’s not way up top at that bank, but he’s a banker, and he lives in London, and that’s the best life in the world, to be English and have a good job. It’s not far from his bank to Buckingham Palace! I’ll be visiting there again, one day, and a whole week before we go I won’t be able to sleep, just like the last time; I know it’ll happen. When I saw the guard change at the Palace I wanted to cry. I told my brother, if I was him, I’d want to be a guardsman for a while, and then get a job like Uncle Jimmie has. What luck, to live on the other side of the Irish Sea! What bad luck for us, my daddy’s troubles!”
Even this would-be English lady of manners and means, of Anglican worship and monarchist sympathy, has to stoop to the same inclination other Belfast children have — to connect Belfast’s “Troubles” with their troubles. Even as Alice, physically somewhat vulnerable, struggles with an underlying compassion for other vulnerable souls, so too Bea, whose overriding passion is migration to a maternal homeland, connects her “troubles” (meaning exile and all it entails in her mind) with Belfast’s “Troubles.” For Bea a people (the Irish) and a city, a country (Belfast, Northern Ireland) are a nemesis. Whenever Bea talked about the friction between the Catholics and Protestants of Belfast, her own family’s discontents surfaced soon thereafter. For her, Ulster means the sorry state of a family’s social and economic life; England means promise — even a proper pride. I do not think Bea will, in future years, be much drawn to the kind of self-criticism that such church fathers as St. Augustine found necessary.
I find myself doing her an injustice, maybe. She has always been an outspoken, forthright girl — however pretentious some might find her social and religious and nationalist views to be. In fact, she impressed my wife and children as quite the bluntest child we met in Belfast, and a candidate for the title of bluntest child we’d met anywhere on this planet! She had none of the (manipulative? ostentatious? deflecting?) guilt one sometimes hears from children as they share their ambitions and prejudices with a friend, visitor, inquiring foreigner — the mode of self-representation that couches one’s wants in the masking language of self-effacement, or in asides meant to ensure one’s status as an egalitarian, or a Bible-reading Christian. “Bea wears her heart on her sleeve,” her mother once told us, and she was, surely, quite correct.
No one could meet this girl (we first met her when she was ten) and not see the meaning for her of the Queen Mother and the English flag and the Anglican church service and England’s history — its battles, its empire, its institutions. Hers was a passionate nationalism, religiously sanctioned, which enabled her to feel strong and optimistic enough to face down serious, even quite ominous family difficulties, not to mention the everyday struggle her neighborhood waged in an economy plagued by recession and unemployment. Many in the Shankill find great consolation in the conviction that the one irreplaceable virtue is a Protestant heritage. When all else fails, that remains. Such a heritage also invokes England as its source, its protector. But many in the Shankill, like Bea’s father, and the Reverend Paisley, also feel betrayed or scorned by England, or inferior to its people, by virtue of what Ulster means, they think, to those very English whom they admire. And so, finally, what can Ulster mean to the so-called Ulsterman? This continuing and seemingly endless dilemma — the symbolic meaning that nationalist affiliations take on in the minds of young and old alike — was not lost on Bea, who said to my wife: “I’d like to flee Belfast so I can forget all the flags fighting the other flags and cozy up to one flag, and know it’s mine, and like the rector says, ‘no ifs and buts.’ “Her nationalist longing connects with her effort to find out which set of parental ties and commitments matter: the flag or the nation as sources of energy in a child’s analysis of her past, as explanations of her present, as a means of anticipating her future.