Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(54)

We poked fun at people like Ron, but at a young age he had watched neighbourhood children, some of whom were family and close friends, killed by soldiers who never faced any consequences for their actions, and who were still present on his streets decades later. Any modern analysis would say Ron and large portions of the city were going through a mass bout of post-traumatic stress disorder. Since this was years before PTSD was effectively treated, and decades before it became a household word, many Northern Irish people remained untouched by counselling or medication. It was easier to throw stones at police or redirect your negative energy at a formless, shapeless approximation of Britain. Even to me, who had been sheltered from so much, it was patently obvious that we were the good guys and the British were the evil empire, a contention backed up by pretty much all Irish, British and American films and television programmes we watched; in fact, by any content that wasn’t made specifically by Northern Irish unionists. That said, some of the hatred was so confused as to be hilarious. The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ was once booed in the Gweedore pub, presumably because people had heard the first four words of the song and misinterpreted it as a sincere paean to Elizabeth II.

For years, Reebok Classics that were extremely sought after everywhere else in the UK were sold in Derry at a loss, since each pair came with a small, but unmistakable, Union flag just below the tongue. To sneaker aficionados elsewhere, this was a mark of quality, but to Derry folk they might as well have been pre-soiled with dogshit.

My parents did an incredible job of guiding us away from hatred and horror, but there were certain things from which they couldn’t protect us, or to which they had simply become so inured it would never have occurred to them to do so. They had both experienced discrimination as very visible Catholics, but never became bitter or fearful. I could see the tension in my father when we were barked at by soldiers, had to go through checkpoints, or when we might pass an ‘incident’ wreathed by police tape and held down by armoured cars. And these things were pretty common. Of all my memories of my mother, the only one with a feeling attached is that of the bomb scare on that bus near Moore Walk – not just the look on my mother’s face, but the squeeze of her fist around mine, her clammy hand and hurried breath. I remember that she never said the words ‘bomb scare’ but I heard them from the other passengers, who said them not with terror but the sort of low-grade annoyance you get when a self-service checkout says ‘unexpected item’ and you have to go through the indignity of summoning a distant Sainsbury’s checkout assistant as if asking the teacher if you can go to the toilet.

Living under a cloud of bomb threats and extrajudicial murder doesn’t necessarily leave you in a state of constant fear. What can break your spirit is the deadening trudge of small humiliations and the steady expectation of petty inconvenience. It’s life being interrupted by a hundred things outside your control. These were things that parents – our parents – tried to hurry past without mentioning to us. Subjects were changed and plans for the day amended. Everyone in my class had a story of their mum rapidly abandoning some expedition and being really nice all of a sudden. Yes, they’d say, we were supposed to be going to the swimming baths. Yes, we’re going a different way now. Yes, we can stop for a treat on the way. Certainly, these ‘incidents’ increased immeasurably the prospect of us getting ice cream or a Lucky Bag for no reason. For those sugary treats and cheap plastic toys, we all had the Provisional IRA to thank.


There were other things about that time which I don’t think my parents could have known were wrinkling my little brain, and certainly weren’t countered with restorative balms of junk food or Lucky Bags. The news my father listened to each morning, with its daily metronome of murder announcements, terror attacks and notable explosions, was all the more horrifying for the blankness with which they were issued. Its delineations of Northern Ireland’s communities, too, were less black and white than those of Ron Duddy, but not by much. They still reflected and endorsed the same separation, the cataloguing of people by tribe. Any death reported was tagged with the victim’s religious affiliation, in a manner that was doubtless ethnographically useful but also diminutive and absurd.

‘Samuel Marshall, Catholic’, ‘James and Ellen Sefton, both Protestant’.

Again, it’s hard to think of another way they could have done it, since this was a time when tit-for-tat killings were commonplace and entirely innocent people all over Northern Ireland were being murdered by paramilitaries simply because an opposing faction had murdered one of ‘their’ side the day before. These people were not targeted for their involvement in politics or activism, but merely to spread terror through the enemy: that any of ‘you’ could be got, no matter your actual beliefs or political activity. This was the motive for hundreds of murders, meaning it was, in a real sense, relevant that things be recorded in this manner, while simultaneously being oddly impersonal and dehumanising when they were. Leaving aside the sense it gave of some great big score card in the sky, it reduced the sole piece of identifying information to the religion foisted upon the victims by their parents, which, odds were, meant little to them other than the fact it was reason enough to be killed by the roaming death cults that blighted Northern Ireland at the time. If you’d never been to church in your life and were murdered in your home, your birth religion would be mentioned before your name in the headlines, especially if you had the indignity to be killed as part of a group.