Before the Dawn E-Book

Gerry Adams

• Herausgeber: Brandon
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The controversial autobiography of the man at the heart of Irish Republican politics. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams offers his own unique, intimate account of the early years of his career, from his childhood in working-class Belfast to the more turbulent years of social activism that followed. An engaging and revealing self-portrait. Born in West Belfast in 1948 into a family with close ties to both the trade union and republican movements, his childhood, despite its material poverty, he has described in glowing and humorous terms. For many years his voice was banned from radio and television by both the British and Irish governments, while commentators and politicians condemned him and all he stood for. But through those years Brandon published a succession of books which made an important contribution to an understanding of the true circumstances of life and politics in the north of Ireland. In his autobiography, Before the Dawn, Gerry Adams brings a unique perspective to the years of conflict, insurrection and bitter struggle which ensued when peaceful political agitation was met with hysterical reaction and the sectarian tinderbox of Britain's last colony erupted. From the pogroms of 1969 to the hunger strikes of 1981, from the streets of West Belfast to the cages of Long Kesh, his powerful memoir is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand modern Ireland.

Leseprobe

GERRY ADAMS

Before the Dawn

An Autobiography

Night is darkest just before the dawn From dissensions Ireland is reborn On the One Road

Contents

Title PageEpigraphForeword One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Epilogue Index About the Author Copyright

To the smoke clouds of Edwardian Belfast

Where in front of the new Portland-stone City Hall

The voluminous statue of Victoria

Sat pendulous-cheeked

Amongst municipal geraniums

And stone-frockcoated Victorian Economic Men

Waiting for new technological Fenians

With gelignite and petrol-bomb conflagrations

To shatter the thousand-windowed warehouses Thackeray noted

Or thin the forests of factory chimneys

Up in red-brick jungles labelled Shankill and Falls

Where to a sound of blast-bombs and Thompson machine-guns

The last red of imperial sunset

Flared behind the Black Mountain.

from ScenerySinceBloomsday by Denis Ireland

Foreword

I want to thank Michael O’Brien and The O’Brien Press for reprinting Before the Dawn. The original publication in 1996 owes much to the late Steve MacDonogh of Brandon Books, who was my publisher for almost thirty years. Steve died suddenly in November 2010. He was deeply committed to free speech and against censorship. He campaigned in support of Salman Rushdie on the one hand and against the secrecy of the British state on the other. He was also a fine writer himself, a very good poet, a keen photographer and a champion of the unique community and culture of the Dingle peninsula. His contribution to Ireland, the arts, and to the world of publishing and free speech was immense, and he is sadly missed. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

The end of 1995 was another of those crisis moments in the peace process. U.S. President Bill Clinton made his first visit to Ireland amid intense efforts to unlock the political impasse. In a small space in the midst of all the endless negotiations, I travelled to Steve’s home in County Kerry to complete the final draft of this book. His advice, and the peace and quiet of his isolated home – along with some very late-night sessions – ensured that I eventually finished it.

While the Epilogue in Before the Dawn (see p. 317) brings us to 2016 and the vote by Britain to leave the EU, the book itself ends with the trauma and heartbreak of the 1981 hunger strike. It is appropriate, therefore, that the republication of Before the Dawn comes just after the thirty-fifth anniversary of that momentous event, as well as the centenary of the 1916 Rising. The celebrations of the centenary of the Proclamation of the Republic were deeper, more popular and more meaningful than the Irish government initially intended. The courage of the men and women of that time was widely and proudly remembered. So was the unique historic and still relevant 1916 Proclamation.

For those of us who survived the decades of war, the hunger strikes of 1981 were our Easter 1916. It was a transformative, watershed moment in our lives, but also in the struggle for Irish freedom. Just like those who died in 1916 in that brief, epic Rising, or those who were executed afterward by the British government, the ten men who died on hunger strike in 1981 are heroes. In their painful deaths – watched daily by family and friends, and reported on by a generally hostile media – they defied the Thatcher government’s efforts to criminalise them and the struggle that they were proud to be part of.

When the hunger strikes ended in October 1981, it appeared that the prisoners had lost. But within a few short years, their demands were met. The hunger strike also internationalised the struggle in a way that nothing else had, and it saw a huge growth in the number of republican activists in Ireland. From the USA to France to South Africa to the Middle East and around the world, the name of Bobby Sands and the struggle of the prisoners was closely followed. On the day Bobby died, Nelson Mandela wrote in his prison calendar in his cell on Robben Island: ‘IRA Martyr Bobby Sands dies.’ The hunger strike also helped accelerate the acceptance by republicans of electoralism as part of strategy. All of this opened up significant new opportunities, including secret contacts with the British government – initially under Margaret Thatcher, and then John Major – and efforts by Sinn Féin to explore the potential for a peace process.

Before the Dawn tells the story of the years leading up to those events. It is my account of being a teenager and a young man growing up in the Ballymurphy area of west Belfast in the apartheid northern state – the Orange State. It tells of my political awakening – assisted in part by Ian Paisley’s reactionary and sectarian rhetoric and actions – and of some of the events during the 1960s and 1970s that shaped my life and the communities that live here.

It’s about the Belfast of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s – the music, going to school, spending time with family and friends, working as a barman and exploring the Belfast Hills.

I did consider rewriting or adding material about my family, particularly my father and brother Liam, but I decided against this because the original text, as reprinted here, reflects my feelings at the time of writing. If ever I write about my abusive father, it will take more time and consideration than I have now. It will also have to take account of the feelings of others; my family circle was deeply affected by the negative political and media focus that followed revelations of the sexual abuse of my niece Áine by her father, my brother Liam.

Before the Dawn is mostly about the nature of the northern state, the actions of the unionist regime, the oppression of nationalists and republicans and our response, and the first decade of conflict.

The Government of Ireland Act, imposed by the British in 1920, partitioned our island. It created two conservative, mean-spirited states. The unionist regime in the northern six counties depended upon sectarianism, the gerrymandering of local electoral boundaries, restrictions on the right to vote, and the imposition of a permanent state of emergency. Discrimination in employment and housing was endemic. It was an apartheid state.

It was little wonder that B.J. Vorster, the South African Minister for Justice in the apartheid regime, while introducing a new coercion bill in 1963 commented that he would ‘exchange all the legislation of that sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act’.

In the mid-1960s I joined Sinn Féin, which was then a banned party. To get around this, we established the Republican Clubs, which for a time were also banned. I was also active in housing action agitation and protests against apartheid and the war in Vietnam. Out of the efforts of civil rights advocates over several years, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was established in January 1967. I participated in the meeting that formally set it up.

The civil rights campaign was inspired by the American Civil Rights Movement and consciously fashioned itself on it. Irish rights activists identified with the plight of African Americans: we each were discriminated against in employment and housing and voting rights; and we each had to endure the physical and legislative oppression of special laws that banned music and literature and newspapers and peaceful protests.

The Orange state reacted violently to the peaceful protests of the civil rights movement. It employed its state police, the RUC, and its armed militia, the B Specials, to suppress peaceful demonstrations. Subsequently, in separate incidents, Francis McCloskey, Samuel Devenney and John Gallagher were killed. The Battle of the Bogside in August 1969, which began with a triumphalist Orange march along the walls of Derry, and the pogrom against Catholic working-class districts in Belfast, in which hundreds of homes were destroyed, set the scene for the decades of conflict that were to follow.

The unionist political leadership believed that repression was the answer to nationalist dissent and the demand for civil rights. It saw the nationalist demand for equality as an attack on the fabric of its apartheid state, and it looked to the British government to provide the military and political support needed to defeat this challenge.

From the perspective of unionism, this was understandable. Partition had reinforced unionism’s laager or siege mentality and the use of internment in every decade from partition, along with the Special Powers Act, and institutionalised and structured political and religious discrimination had successfully asserted unionist domination for fifty years. The British government tolerated and accommodated this, and the Irish government acquiesced to it. However, as the resistance to the Orange state grew, the politicians made a fatal mistake: they depended more and more on the British Army to do their ruling for them.

The 1970s were scarred with terrible events. The north was a battlefield. The techniques of counter-insurgency employed by successive British governments in dozens of colonial conflicts in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia in the decades after the Second World War were brought to bear in the six counties. That was no accident. Once politicians hand power over to the generals and the spooks and securocrats, there is an inevitability about greater confrontation, instability and violence.

Before the Dawn records those years, a decade that saw the widespread use by the British state of internment and torture in the interrogation centres; of shoot-to-kill actions; and of collusion between British state forces and unionist paramilitaries in the killing of political opponents and civilians. The IRA, which had been almost non-existent in 1969, re-emerged with greater levels of popular support than before.

Bloody Sunday, the Ballymurphy Massacre, the Springhill Massacre, Bloody Friday, the bomb outrage at McGurk’s Bar, La Mon and many more atrocities are all synonymous with this period of our history. So too was the killing of Sinn Féin party activists and family members. Twenty-one party members were killed, including our Vice President Maire Drumm and several elected representatives. Family members also were shot dead and injured by unionist death squads. Our homes and offices were bombed and shot up.

The trauma for families and communities – whether Irish or British, whether unionist or nationalist or republican – was the same. Dealing with the legacy issues arising from this decade and the subsequent years of war has proven difficult, given the British government’s refusal to honour commitments made during negotiations, and its obstructive approach to providing information or funding legacy inquests and investigations.

I spent half of the 1970s in a variety of British prisons. I was interned on the prison ship Maidstone in Belfast harbour and in the internment cages of Long Kesh. For attempting to escape from internment – I failed to do so on several occasions – I was sentenced by a Diplock non-jury court to five years in the cages holding sentenced prisoners. After my release in 1977, there was a failed attempt in 1978 to convict me of IRA membership. I spent some months in Crumlin Road prison and then in the H-Blocks.

After seven months on remand, the charges against me were dismissed and I was free. During my time in the H-Blocks, I met with some of the blanket prisoners in the visiting area. I was struck by their courage, but also by the horrendous conditions they were enduring and the brutalities they were suffering.

This was at the height of the campaign by the British government to ‘criminalise’ republican prisoners as part of the overall effort to criminalise the struggle. As part of this strategy to isolate and defeat republicans, the Labour government decided to label and treat republican political prisoners as criminals. From March 1st, 1976, any person convicted of an offence committed after that date would no longer have ‘special category’ or political status. Inside the prison, this led to the blanket protest. Kieran Nugent was the first person sentenced under this new regime. On September 14th, 1976, he refused to wear the prison uniform: ‘If they want me to wear a convict’s uniform, they’ll have to nail it to my back.’

The republican attitude to all of this is well captured in Francie Brolly’s song:

I’ll wear no convict’s uniform

Nor meekly serve my time

That England might

Brand Ireland’s fight

Eight hundred years of crime

After my release from prison I was elected one of Sinn Féin’s two Vice Presidents, and we began to reorganise our P.O.W. (Prisoner of War) department to take a more active role in the prison protest. Along with others in Sinn Féin, I also began to examine how best to develop a political alternative. As I explain in Before the Dawn, ‘the biggest weakness of Sinn Féin was our failure to build either alliances with the SDLP or a party political electoral alternative’.

But the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 are the end of this part of my story. Reflecting back on that period of my life, I still find it difficult to comprehend the enormous courage of the ten men who died. Some of them I knew from the internment cages. Others I met during my visit to the prison hospital on July 29th, 1981. By then, six of the hunger strikers had died:

Bobby Sands (26) died on May 5th, after sixty-six days

Francis Hughes (25) died on May 12th, after fifty-nine days

Raymond McCreesh (24) died on May 21st, after sixty-one days

Patsy O’Hara (23) died on May 21st, after sixty-one days

Joe McDonnell (30) died on July 8th, after sixty-one days

Martin Hurson (29) died on July 13th, after forty-six days

Bobby Sands was my friend. I met him in Cage Eleven when I was sentenced for trying to escape. I remember him as a keen sportsman who played soccer or Gaelic football whenever he got the chance. Like most of us at that time, he had long hair. He also had a great sense of humour and liked music. He was very good on the guitar.

It is in Bobby’s writings that the story of the H-Blocks is most hauntingly told. Pick up anything written by him and you will understand. Bobby lived and breathed and suffered in the H-Blocks. His smuggled comms-letters, poems, articles, creative pieces and stories – written on scraps of torn bible pages or cigarette papers using the infill of a biro, and all wrapped in cling film and hidden in his naked body – tell you more about the brutal reality of life for political prisoners and the nature of the northern state than anything I could write or say.

My visit on July 29th, 1981, to the prison hospital to brief the hunger strikers on developments will live with me forever. ‘The eyes of the blanket men, the hunger strikers, were the unshuttered, unveiled, curtainless windows through which one could see reflections of the intense cruelties they had endured.’

Their camaraderie, their concern for others – both inside and outside the prison – and their extraordinary courage and determination in the face of Thatcher’s intransigence were amazing.

I met Big Doc (Kieran Doherty) in his prison hospital room. By that stage in his hunger strike, he was blind. He told me, ‘We haven’t got our five demands, and that’s the only way I’m coming off. Too much suffered or too long, too many good men dead. Thatcher can’t break us. Lean ar aghaidh. I’m not a criminal.’

The trauma for the families was summed up for me by Kevin Lynch’s father, who I met in the prison hospital. Kevin himself was too ill for us to meet. ‘Kevin’s father, distraught at his son’s imminent death, told us of his anguish in the face of British intransigence. “To rear a son and see him die like this …”’

Kevin died four days later, on August 1st, after seventy-one days. Big Doc died the day after, on August 2nd, after seventy- three days. The last two hunger strikers, Tom McElwee (23) and Michael Devine (27) died on August 8th and August 20th, after sixty-two days and sixty days.

Before the Dawn is my story, my reflections on those dramatic and dangerous and difficult years. There are other narratives, of course; a complete sense of our history is only possible by putting all the narratives together and by accepting that others will have their own versions. That can be very challenging. Not just for republicans or nationalists, but particularly for unionist leaders and sections of the British and Irish establishments. Twenty years after the war, they continue to depict republicans as terrorists. Privately their position may be more magnanimous, but they find it difficult to face up to their responsibilities for what we have all come through. That will come in time.

Except for a minority of political dinosaurs, the vast majority of people have moved into a new space and are facing the future with a sense of hope and a firm commitment not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

There are many stories of how we got through the darkness to face forward into the dawn. This is mine.

Gerry Adams, 2016

One

I was born in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast on 6 October 1948. My father Gerry Adams, aged twenty-two, a building labourer, and my mother Annie Hannaway, a doffing mistress in a linen mill who was a year or two older than he, had been married early that same year, and they were living with my Granny Adams at 15 Abercorn Street North in the Falls area of West Belfast. Although it was only a small house, with two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs and a scullery in the back, I was joining quite a large family: in addition to my granny, and my mother and father, my uncles, Paddy, Seán and Frank, also lived in the house at the time. Conditions were cramped – even more so when my sister Margaret was born, a little over a year after me.

Both sides of my family had strong backgrounds in republican and working class politics. The year before I was born my father, a republican activist like his father before him, had been released after serving five years in jail. My mother, a tall, very attractive woman with black hair, was a staunch republican in her views, and her father had been a prominent trade union organiser.

The year I entered the world was a time of change internationally and in Ireland, but for the ruling powers in Belfast, it was a time of resistance to change. Belfast was the former centre of a thriving linen industry and home to the shipbuilders who had built the Titanic. The city’s economy had benefited from World War II: Harland & Wolff had been busy building warships, and 250,000 US troops stationed in the north during the war had contributed much additional income. However, large numbers of people had lost their homes in the bombing of Belfast, leaving a continuing housing crisis, with many still housed in temporary dwellings.

The British-controlled statelet created in the six north-easterncounties of Ireland was less than thirty years old, and the family and the community into which I was born opposed the very existence of ‘Northern Ireland’ as a separate entity under the British crown. South of the border Eamon de Valera lost a general election in 1948 after sixteen years as Taoiseach. In India, Gandhi died, just as British rule drew to a close; Britain departed, too, from Palestine as the state of Israel was proclaimed. If the times possessed a particular theme it was undoubtedly the post-war decline of the British Empire, a decline spelt out in India and Palestine, apparent in Africa, and palely reflected in the Republic of Ireland Act, whereby the twenty-six counties of Ireland left the British Commonwealth.

In 1950, when Margaret was still a babe in arms, we moved from Granny Adams’s to a single large room in a gloomy, decaying house at 726 Shore Road in Greencastle, on the side of Belfast Lough. The house belonged to an order of nuns, who had given it over to a housing agent to collect the rent, and our room on the ground floor was partitioned off into areas. Upstairs was a tap for water and a toilet, which were shared with many other families. Here my mother, an articulate and gentle woman, struggled heroically to rear a growing family on next to nothing, and here we stayed for four and a half years, during which time two more children, Paddy and Anne, were born. My father did his best as a building labourer to provide for his young family, but these were difficult times, and although he was a hard worker, work itself was hard to come by, especially as a former political prisoner. Whenever he was sent looking for a job by the employment exchange they informed his prospective employers of his record and status. For a time he and an old prison friend Jimmy Bannon travelled from door to door selling fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. It was the horse, Paddy Joe, who profited most from their partnership, for both my da and Jimmy found it difficult to refuse credit to friends and neighbours, and after some time the business folded.

My mother was never overly robust, yet in her struggle to rear us and care for us she was the pillar of the family, and she plotted escape from our miserable slum room into a real house. In addition to the conditions in which we were living, the social isolation of being in Greencastle was a constant problem, given the cost of bus fares to get to Leeson Street and Abercorn Street where there were family and friends. My Uncle Seán and his girlfriend Rita used to come by bicycle to visit, but because it was so far off the beaten track they and my Granny Adams were the only regular visitors.

There was an enormous demand for housing in Belfast: overcrowding was high in the city as a whole, but nearly twice as high in the Falls, the main centre of Catholic population. Of all the houses in the city, almost three-quarters required some form of repair; at least 200,000 new dwellings were estimated to be needed to meet even basic needs. Now Ballymurphy estate, planned in 1948 to meet part of the housing emergency, had started to be built, and my mother was trying her best to get us a house there.

I recall almost nothing of my life in Greencastle beyond a sense of the dark and gloomy house, and I remember nothing at all about my first school, Star of the Sea. But one of my earliest memories is of going with my mother to the house of Seamus McKearney, a local representative on Belfast Corporation whom she was lobbying in pursuit of a house. He lived close to Inkerman Street, home of the Hannaway family, and I accompanied my mother on a number of occasions when she went from Granny Hannaway’s to Mr McKearney’s. Even though I was very young, I recall the day when we eventually got word that there was a possibility of our being housed. I was standing on the pavement outside McKearney’s front door, while he and my mother were engrossed in conversation, he in the hall, she at the doorway.

Some time later she and my Granny Adams, my sister Margaret and I went up the Springfield Road on a journey which took us as far as the bus could go, right up on to the slopes of the Black and Divis Mountains. There we came to a huge building site in an area of green fields. We ploughed our way through the muck past heavy construction vehicles, cement mixers and lorries trundling back and forth.

My mother had a letter in her hand which she showed to one of the workmen.

‘That’s Divismore Park,’ he told her, and I could see that she was delighted, even though what he was pointing to was only a row of foundations.

My granny and my mammy counted down along the row until we got to number 11, which was little more than a big pile of sand; but we could see where pipes were going in, and the base had been laid.

‘That’s our house,’ my ma told us, her voice full of wonder. ‘That’s where we are going to live.’

Right through that summer she made her way up to Ballymurphy to watch number 11 grow slowly from the ground upwards, until eventually the day came when we were able to leave Greencastle and its dank tenement behind us. Almost twenty years later, in the wake of internment in 1971, my family was evicted by the British army from our home in ‘the Murph’, as we called it. Although she was in good houses after that, some in better condition, until she died in 1992 my mother never really settled. Number 11 Divismore Park was her home.

Ours was a gable house and had what appeared in my child vision to be a huge garden. It was the last house to be finished, its completion delayed when the gable wall collapsed three times during construction. There were three bedrooms: my mother and father were in the smallest, box room, Paddy and I were in the back and Margaret and Anne were in the front. We had a sheet over each mattress and a blanket on top; in the winter we pulled coats over us. We had escaped from Shore Road, and now enjoyed the untold luxury of a bathroom, but life at Divismore Park was hard enough as more children were born, more mouths to feed: Frances, Liam, Maura, Sean, Deirdre, Dominic. Soon myself, Paddy, Liam and Sean were all in the one bed sleeping two up, two down.

Ballymurphy was a place apart, a unique place to grow up in. As a new housing estate it lacked the roots that characterised the Falls, where people had lived in the same streets all their lives and everybody knew everybody else, where there were networks of families, cousins living in adjacent streets or down the same street. Neither did it possess the security of its own school, church, library and shops. It was badly built, badly planned and badly lacking in facilities, but it nonetheless possessed a wonderful sense of openness, there on the slopes of the mountain.

We were poor, but it didn’t matter, at least not to us children. We didn’t know any different, and we were too busy to notice. Besides, everyone else we knew was poor as well. The streets and the surrounding fields, the river, the brickyard and the mountain – especially the mountain – were our playground. All the families in Divismore Park had clutches of young children and we quickly made friends, girls and boys in separate peer groups, and throughout the summer months in particular our lives were lived outdoors. Everyone played skips and hopscotch and rally-oh and marleys (marbles) out in the street. Paddy and I were great ones for playing marleys out by the green box, as we called the electricity generator at the end of the street; we said it was our green box and tried to fight other kids off it.

At around the same time as we arrived in Ballymurphy, so too did the Magees, who came from the country, from Glenavy; they were two doors below us, and Joe Magee and I quickly became close friends. Joe and I, our Paddy, Jimmy Gillen, Frank and Harry Curran, the McManuses, the Irelands, the McKees, Dominic Grogan and Desi Carabine all knocked around together. My life really began on the slopes of Divis Mountain, roaming with our gang. But first we had to get past our mothers …

‘Don’t dare go out into the street with that piece in your hand.’

My mother looked at us from across the kitchen table. Paddy was halfway out the door already, but he stopped, turned and looked at me. I still had my hand in the wrapping of the loaf.

‘Finish your tea here!’ she commanded us.

‘Ah, Ma!’ we chorused.

‘No “Ah, Ma!” about it. Eat in the house, not out in the street.’

Our Liam shuffled up behind us, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at me with his large eyes.

‘I want the heel,’ he said.

‘Paddy’s got the heel,’ I told him. Paddy said nothing but bolted the bread and margarine into his mouth.

‘Stop squabbling,’ our mother shouted.

In the next room Margaret and Anne finished their tea. Margaret said something to my mother, and when she turned to reply, we three boys sneaked out the back door and across the fence into Glenalina Road.

Paddy gave Liam a bit of the heel of bread which he had clasped in his paw.

‘I want the straight side,’ demanded Liam.

‘You’ll get nothing,’ Paddy said, throwing a lump of bread to Rory who bounded along behind us. ‘Let’s go down to Joe Magee’s.’

‘He’s coming up,’ I said, and so he was, and Joe also had a large piece of bread and jam.

‘Let’s go to the river.’

We cut across Divismore Park, through an entry between the houses, and down beyond the back gardens through the river. It wasn’t a big river. It flowed off the mountain, meandered its way down through the back of Ballymurphy, on down and across the Whiterock Road, through the city cemetery and, as we discovered much later, through the Falls Park and then to the bog meadows. But it was our river. We could jump it. We could put up a swing, a rope, and, Tarzan-like, launch ourselves from bank to bank. We could go up towards a large bridge where it flowed below the Springfield Road, and paddle our way into the darkness, sending echoes of our passage reverberating below the road. Once we followed the river up as far as the rock dam on the lower slopes of the mountain. There were two dams, relics of a linen industry, the smaller one presumably where the flax was retted. Some people said the bigger one was bottomless, but once we went swimming there. The dams and the yellow house had been built by a mill owner from Barnsley in Yorkshire, who called his estate New Barnsley, and when houses were built up there they inherited that name.

Today we were going to catch rats up at the bridge, or so Frank Curran told us. I wasn’t too keen on the idea.

Frank and his brother Harry were waiting for us. So was Packy McKee, who had a hatchet, with which he had cut a number of shafts of fresh green branches about four foot long. He handed them out to us. Then, posting the spear carriers on the riverbank, he instructed me and our Paddy to follow him under the bridge to where there was a large drain.

‘We’ll throw stones at the drain,’ Packy said. ‘Then we’ll get out of the way, and when the rats run out, you spear them.’

‘I’m not going under there to throw stones,’ I objected. ‘The rats can kill you.’

‘The rats can kill you?’ Packy queried. ‘How could a rat kill you?’

‘Because it’s poisonous,’ I told him. ‘Rats have poison in their tails.’

‘So don’t touch their tails,’ said Packy.

‘I’m not going,’ I insisted.

‘Somebody’s gonna have to go,’ said Packy.

‘I’ll go,’ said our Liam.

‘You’re not allowed to go.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Packy. ‘Yous wanted to catch rats and now when we have the chance, yous won’t go. You’re an old Jenny-Anne.’

‘Who’s an old Jenny-Anne?’ our Paddy said.

‘Yous ’uns.’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t go,’ said Paddy.

‘Who didn’t say you wouldn’t go?’

It was getting a bit confusing.

‘I’m sick of this,’ said Joe, bouncing his spear up and down in the air.

‘Why don’t you go?’ I said. ‘I’ll take the spear.’

‘You couldn’t hit a rat,’ said Joe.

‘I couldn’t hit a rat? I could hit you!’

‘Ah, come on boys!’ Harry Curran shouted. ‘Are we doing it or are we not?’

‘Well, I’m doing it,’ Packy McKee said.

Packy was wearing plastic sandals. So were most of the rest of us, except our Paddy who was wearing baseball boots. We all wore short trousers and windcheaters or sloppy-joes. All of us were scrawny, browned by the sun, freckle-faced, muddy-kneed.

Packy McKee jumped into the river. It was only eight or nine inches deep, and the water squashed back on the rest of us. Our Paddy followed him. The rest fanned out, spears in hand, waiting for the rats, except for me and our Liam. We stood empty-handed.

The bridge wasn’t really very deep, and we could hear the two warriors splashing their way towards the rats’ drain, their voices bouncing back.

‘Oooiih!’ Packy shouted. We heard the stones bouncing off the drain and falling into the water. Seconds later Packy and Paddy came flying out, water splashing around them.

‘Get them! Get them! Get them!’ they shouted. We all whooped and yelled and hollered, but there were no rats.

‘Who do yous think yous are kiddin’,’ Frank Curran said. ‘Yous didn’t go near the drain.’

‘Oh, didn’t we? We went nearer to it than you,’ our Paddy said.

He was soaked from head to foot, his left knee was grazed and there was a cut on the back of his hand.

‘I saw one rat coming out behind me.’

‘You saw nothin’,’ I said.

‘I saw two,’ our Liam said.

‘There was no rats,’ said Frank Curran.

‘None at all,’ said Joe and Harry Curran. ‘Not one.’

Packy McKee pulled himself up on the bank. ‘I saw a rat. He came out and ran up that hill.’

‘There wasn’t a rat! Yous didn’t go near the drain. You went up a wee bit, threw your stones and ran back again. Yous are cowardly custard Jenny-Annes. Yous are yellow.’

‘Who’s yellow?’

‘You’re yellow.’

Just then, as our hunting expedition threatened to disintegrate, our Liam squealed.

‘What’s that?’ he shouted. We all turned to where he stood in slightly longer grass.

‘Look,’ he pointed again.

It was a frog. A large green frog. I caught hold of it, feeling it cold and clammy between my palms, its heartbeat against my fingers. Its legs squirmed as it struggled to be free.

‘Give it to me,’ said Frank Curran.

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘You can blow them up.’

‘What do you mean blow them up?’ I asked.

‘You can put a straw up its arse and blow it up,’ Frank said.

‘You’re not doing that,’ I said. ‘It’s not your frog, it’s mine!’

‘It’s not your frog,’ our Liam interrupted. ‘I saw it first.’

‘But I got it!’

‘I want to blow it up,’ said Frank. ‘You wouldn’t go under the bridge and you get the frog? That’s not fair. Give it over!’

‘It’s Gerry’s frog,’ said Joe Magee. ‘He got it. Finders is keepers.’

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing it getting blown up,’ said our Paddy.

‘You can make it so big it’s like the bladder of a football sometimes. You blow and blow and blow. And then the frog goes pop!’

They all looked at me and at the frog. The spear earners were especially interested.

‘Look!’ I shouted. ‘There’s a rat!’ For a second they turned around and away I ran from my erstwhile comrades.

One balmy summer day we were hunkered in against the shoulder of the Black Mountain.

Our Paddy was below us, hidden in a crease in the hillside, upwind and invisible in the dense green bracken. There were five of us, including Rory. He lay between my legs, his head cocked to one side, alert to a pesky halo of flies which surrounded his head. Occasionally he would snap at them before settling back resignedly, tail barely twitching against my thigh.

Beyond us the city of Belfast stretched out in one direction towards the lough and towards other more distant hills opposite us. The city was busy. Smoke curled lazily from factory chimneys, and small and bigger boats ploughed their ways up and down the lough. Directly below us on the slopes of the mountain, streets of homes were being shaped within a great ants’ hill of activity. The sounds of construction, the noise and clamour of the workmen drifted up to our vantage point, and we could see where the building site ate into green fields.

The entire vista basked in warm sunshine. It was cool where we lay half in the shade, luxuriating in the slight dampness of the peaty soil. We were waiting for our Paddy. Eventually he emerged from his hidden place. His voice rose easily and cheerfully to where we were.

In days of old

When knights were bold

And toilets weren’t invented,

They did a load

In the middle of the road

And went away contented.

His trousers were down around his ankles. He was cleaning his backside with a handful of grass and bracken.

‘G’wan, yi dirty baste!’ we screamed in unison. ‘You’re stinking.’

He turned and tried to run as we swooped towards him, whooping and hollering. His trousers cut off his escape and as we descended upon him he tripped. We all collapsed in a tangle of skinny green-stained legs and scrawny bodies, rolling and tumbling through the cool stalks of bracken which flattened under us.

‘Awh!’ our Paddy screamed. ‘You are killing me!’ He punched out blindly.

Our Liam caught a fist in the face. ‘Awhhhh,’ he wailed. Our Liam was the youngest.

Paddy continued to punch and kick wildly. His trousers sailed overhead as our scrum dissolved before his onslaught. He faced us defiantly, trouserless and with tears dripping down his face. Liam lay at our feet blubbering and sobbing and clutching his head. Rory danced around us, barking excitedly.

‘You’re too rough,’ Liam shouted.

‘And you’re like an oul’ doll. We should never have brought you.’

Someone tossed our Paddy his pants. He caught them with great dignity. Liam meanwhile clambered to his feet. Our Paddy ignored him. He addressed the rest of us.

‘You shouldn’t ’ve jumped me like that.’

Joe threw a clod of earth at him.

‘Your pants are torn,’ he said, and then all together we chanted, as Paddy gazed downwards in alarm.

I made you look,

I made you stare,

I made the barber

Cut your hair;

He cut it long,

He cut it short,

He cut it with

A knife and fork.

Our Paddy hitched his trousers up.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

‘Head ’em up, move ’em out,’ Joe hollered.

We climbed astride imaginary steeds and then, strung out in single file, we cantered across the flank of the mountain, Rory running ahead of us as we made our way towards the waterfall, the mountain loney and home.

At home my father was scraping muck off his boots.

‘Da,’ I said, ‘can I go down to Kennedy’s Bakery in the morning and get a pillow-slip of mixed-ups?’

My da was concentrating on his boots, which were caked with muck. Thick, red muck. There were even little stones embedded between the heel and the sole. He was scraping them with an old bread-knife and flicking or wiping the knife on a piece of paper which he had spread before him in front of the fire.

‘What?’ he said eventually.

‘Me and Joe Magee. We’re going to go down in the morning to the bakery. For about threepence you get a pillowslip of mixed-ups.’

‘What do you mean mixed-ups?’

‘Diamonds and snowballs and Paris buns and jam rolls. All the stuff that’s made early in the morning.’

‘What about bread?’

‘You can get bread as well, but that costs more. You can get baps, and you can get bannocks and you can get farls; you can get sliced bread and you can get plain bread.’

‘How do you know all this?’ my da said.

‘’Cause Packy McKee and them always go down, and Jimmy Gillen, he said he was going to go.’

‘I don’t know, son. What time is it at?’

‘About six o’clock in the morning.’

‘See your mother,’ my da said.

‘But Daddy!’

‘Am I talking to the wall?’ my da said. ‘Go and see your mammy.’

‘You are not under any circumstances going down to Kennedy’s Bakery,’ my mother told me. ‘The whole street will be talking about us.’

‘Ah, Ma,’ I said. ‘Everybody goes down. Everybody. I should be able to go down. Packy McKee is only seven.’

‘You’re not Packy McKee. You’re not going and that’s that.’

‘You’d never get up at that hour of the morning, anyway,’ our Margaret interjected.

‘Ah, shut up!’ I told her. ‘Who’s listening to you, wee doll,’ and I stamped out of the house.

Joe Magee was waiting outside. His face was glum.

‘Any luck?’ he asked.

‘Nawh,’ I said. ‘I’m working on it.’

‘My ma says I’m not allowed to go,’ he said.

‘Well so does mine,’ I said.

‘What about us going down anyway? Getting up nice and early. Then, when we come back, they’ll all be surprised.’

‘Where would you get the money?’ I said.

‘We could make sticks.’

‘What?’

‘We could chop up sticks and sell them to get the money.’

‘What?’

‘Are you going deaf or something?’ Joe said in exasperation. ‘We could chop up sticks for firewood, for people to light their fires with, and sell them around the doors. That way we’d get a few bob.’

‘I don’t think I’d be allowed to sell them around the doors.’

‘Who would know?’ said Joe. ‘We could sell them around the other streets.’

And so it was that we spent our time at the back of the river and over towards the pithead, dragging up pieces of discarded wood, lumps of timber and old doors and wooden boxes. Then for hours, we would chop and pull nails and tie together bundles of jagged-edged kindling. It took a week and then we had a sizeable pile.

‘What are those for?’ my da asked one night. He had one foot up on the fence as he undid his bootlace.

‘Well, we were gonna sell them.’

‘Good idea.’ He pulled his boot off. ‘Here, clean that up while you’re at it. Use one of them sticks and when you’re finished, if you put dubbin on it, I’ll give you your pay.’

The following day Joe and I got rid of our entire forest of firewood. It was easy enough. We went around the back of Ballymurphy Road into the side streets. All of our bundles were stacked up on his guider, a homemade four-wheeled buggy, and inside about two hours and four or five journeys back and forth we were three shillings the richer.

‘It will only cost about sixpence or even threepence down at the bakery,’ Joe told me. ‘We should go down very, very early.’

The next morning I sneaked out of bed, out of the warm crush of bodies bundled together in the double bed in our back room. Our Liam never stirred. Paddy mumbled a bit and Sean, who was the smallest, opened his eyes for a moment before going back into a deep sleep. It was chilly and I felt apprehensive as I made my way across the bare floors and downstairs in my socks. With two pillow-slips pressed under my arm, I went out through the front door and down to where Joe waited for me at the corner of Ballymurphy Drive below his house. Dawn was slowly shifting the darkness as we made our way, chattering noisily to each other, across the river, skirting around Westrock Bungalows, over the top of the pithead and down over the brickyard on to Beechmount Avenue. I was surprised when we arrived at Kennedy’s Bakery to find such a large queue of people lined up in the cobbled yard. A side door was open into which everyone piled, and behind the counter there were stacks and stacks of crates of fresh bread, still warm, baps and bannocks, farls, brown bread and white bread, and acres of buns. Apple cakes, diamonds, sore heads, snowballs, Paris buns, currant squares, flies’ graveyards, ice cakes, plain cakes, fruit cakes. Slowly the crowd made its way past where a cheerful assistant shoved small bread or cakes into pillow-slips. Soon it was our turn. Joe and I had two pillow-cases each – one for pastry and one for bread. For fourpence we left with a bag in each hand, our grip tight around the neck of each pillow-case in case it might slip from our grasp and spill its precious cargo. Proud as punch, we headed back slowly, up around Beechmount on the journey home. By now it was light.

‘Do you fancy a diamond?’ I enquired.

‘Maybe a custard,’ Joe said. ‘Just the one.’

We stopped to sample our wares. The custard buns were still warm. We had two each. And then a diamond and then a Paris bun.

‘Ah,’ said Joe, ‘we’d better hurry.’ And so we did. Back across the river, he sneaked into his house, I sneaked into ours. I put two or three buns to one side in a hidden place for our Paddy, Liam and Sean. The rest I arranged neatly on our dining-room table. A ticket of bread, five farls, six baps, some nice crusty rolls. And then, the pile of pastry. I shook the crumbs, coconut flake and crusts out of the pillow-slip for our Rory, patted him on the head and then padded my way upstairs back into bed.

Everybody was delighted when they got up later, though my ma gave off a wee bit.

‘I told you not to go down there,’ she scolded. But that was all.

When he came back that night my da said everybody on the building site was jealous of him. He was the only one who had buns. Even our Margaret was impressed. She said nothing, but I knew. After that, Joe and I went down to Kennedy’s every so often. But now my ma always gave me the money.

Two

Our neighbours in Divismore Park were good people. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Murph got the name of being a rough area, but it was an undeserved reputation. Ballymurphy was no better or no worse than any other poor working-class area anywhere in the world, though in the 1970s it was to prove itself a resilient, courageous and resourceful community. In the 1950s there was no evidence of any of this. Then Ballymurphy was yet another jerrybuilt dumping ground for the many young families who were delighted to leave slum accommodation or overcrowded parental homes for a place of their own. In my travels over the years, I have seen Ballymurphys everywhere. In Britain, across Europe, in cities throughout Ireland, in the USA and in South Africa. They all have one thing in common. Hardworking parents, even when unemployed, doing their best to give their children the best possible opportunities. Our house was one of these.