Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(53)
This was all deemed so uninteresting that I wasn’t even told about it until my dad mentioned it well into my twenties, in the sort of offhand way you might tell someone who was sure they’d never ridden a donkey that they had, in fact, ridden a donkey, but when they were too young to remember it. Even Shane was unimpressed when Mammy rang Patricia to tell her about it, to the extent that he tried to one-up her news by telling her Patricia added fresh bananas to the Weetabix every morning, a worldly affectation that was quite exotic to us; certainly more so than some bomb or other going off.
We were, of course, more worldly than we realised, despite my parents’ best efforts to shield us. A good Catholic was to be in this world but not of it. For some that meant totally swearing off all temptations of the modern world, but for us it meant little more than restricted access to cartoons. My dad hadn’t accounted for me getting up two or three hours before him each morning to gorge on them. For years, I would wake up in the small hours and assemble a ramshackle fort by the TV in the kitchen. This was achieved by the time-honoured route of sticking two chairs front to front and stretching a duvet over both in such a way that I was covered but could still view the children’s programming that began around 6 a.m. This was the only way of getting TV into my system each morning, since Daddy’s loyalty was to the homespun, newsy charm of BBC Radio Foyle. Mornings in our house began with a roar from my father to get up and then the radio in the kitchen filtering through the house at factory-floor volume. This dispensed a steady drone of traffic reports from hilly back roads, cheerless pronouncements by local politicians and the dispiritingly regular death notices that proliferated through my childhood. Here, each freshly ended life, along with the killing’s location – ‘outside his home’, ‘while on holiday’, ‘on the Lisburn Road’ – would be recited without emotion. It’s odd to look back and consider that this litany of death was considered somehow more age-appropriate and wholesome than cartoons in which toys beat each other up.
Where we were raised, in the countryside, Protestants and Catholics got along, and in our spare time we participated regularly in ecumenical activities: school trips and deliberately mixed social events. Our whole family attended cross-community summer camps in Corrymeela, a community hub in Ballycastle where mixed religious services were held and people gathered in big tents for events and talks that went heavy with words like ‘reconciliation’ and ‘dialogue’. Here you might hear reformed paramilitaries sharing their stories, preaching forgiveness and embracing each other on stage as if they were competing city contractors who’d put aside their differences to launch a shopping centre rather than men who’d spent decades placing increasingly large explosive devices near each other’s heads. It was moving, and formative in a way that I couldn’t then comprehend. Not just the big-ticket moments of on-stage redemption, but simpler things like playing football or doing arts and crafts courses with Alistairs and Margarets and Gregorys who might otherwise have grown up twenty minutes from our house without ever talking to a Séamas or a Caoimhe.
Even now, these sound like asinine and self-congratulatory platitudes. It seems bland and obvious to say, ‘Wow, we’re all the same when you think about it.’ It’s the sort of hackneyed, government-issue reconciliation twaddle that would be on the nose if it were painted on the side of a youth centre. But it’s also true. These mundane experiences, and the quiet revelations we gained from them, were rare at the time. They for ever affirmed the falseness of those arbitrary separations that were said to exist between our communities. They emphasised the banal uniformity of our upbringings and the contrivance of those differences held up even by sober and responsible referees as something in-bred, deeply held and fiercely owned. Four days later I’d be back in school, where I might well have been the only seven-year-old in my class who had Protestant friends.
Derry city itself, where we all went to school, was a bit less kumbaya about ‘the other side’. Direct, unalloyed sectarianism was pretty much everywhere. A breezily casual hatred for the British in particular, and Protestantism in general, was like a constant white noise that accompanied daily life. Bartie Harkin and Con Huckstable were both given notes from their parents stating that they wished their child be withdrawn from PE if rugby or cricket were to be played. (Football, though every bit as British, was excepted from this because it was a sport that Catholics liked.) Euclid Duddy was so republican his family banned his sisters from listening to the Spice Girls after Geri wore the Union Jack dress. I once attended a birthday party at his house, and his dad, Ron, took each of us aside at different points and gave us an increasingly sozzled blow-by-blow account of the events of Bloody Sunday.
Ron Duddy was the sort of man who got up at dawn so he could hate the Brits that bit longer each day. He told me they killed Kennedy to stop an Irish Catholic having his day in the sun, and banned the family from using any laundry service in the Bogside because he’d heard the washing machines were fitted with chemical analysers that would detect explosives on your clothes and arrest you on the spot. It was left to you – a child attending his son’s ninth birthday party – to speculate as to how much explosive residue his clothes may have contained. He had steeped his son in such a rich stew of paranoid republicanism that Euclid would often boast that he’d never met a Protestant. These were the extremes, but there was everywhere the sort of quotidian anti-British sentiment that hung around like fog, or the acrid smoke of rifles emptied into defenceless teenagers.