She relates an anecdote. A fifteen-year-old girl on the way to a remand home is offered a cigarette by one of the so-called ‘ira women’. ‘But I’m a Protestant!’ the girl exclaims, reluctant to accept the gift under false pretences. Makes not a whit of difference, she’s assured, as she lights up reluctantly, still nervously anticipating some awful Fenian trick about to be played on her.
Go back nearly two hundred years, and you find Margaret’s ancestral connection William Blacker attending a different institution of Armagh – the Royal School, dubbed ‘the Eton of Ireland’ – and, in accordance with the current system of fagging, being appointed to the role of ‘slave or valet’ to the future Earl of Longford, then Tom Pakenham, whose shoes he has to keep polished to the nth degree. Polishing shoes, brushing trousers, burnishing buttons, preparing meals, smuggling in ale ... these schoolboy tasks, ‘purgatorial’ as they were, were nothing compared to a singular bit of horseplay devised by the aforesaid Pakenham and endured by the young Blacker. The former would oblige the latter to sit on the top stair of the main staircase, bind his wrists to his ankles, seize him by the feet and drag him downstairs, bump, bump, bump, step after step to the bottom, whereupon young Pakenham would laugh uproariously at young Blacker’s discomfort. A curious rite of passage – but never mind, William said wryly, looking back on those days in Armagh, such treatment toughened him up for life’s assaults and affrays (which would shortly include the famous affray at the Diamond). And, if the flaming ‘Orangeisms of after times’ were still largely a matter of amorphous stirrings, a distinct political style and anti-democratic bellicosity is getting drummed up at Armagh’s Royal School, where teenage William (elevated to head boy) is a leading light of the Loyalty Lads, a school society devoted to all the implications of its broad-orange-ribbon badge. ... A long, long, hell-bent march is getting initiated, and one of its ultimate destinations is a high ridge above the River Faughan near Dungiven in County Derry, where a line of rogue Orangemen, armed with sticks, boulders and nail-studded cudgels, waits to descend like cartoon savages on an unfortunate procession of civil rights upholders on the way to Derry. The date is 4 January 1969, the place Burntollet Bridge, and terrible scenes of mayhem and bloodshed are about to be enacted – all with the connivance of local B Specials and regular police.
The waylaid Derry marchers are battoned, slashed, kicked, pummelled, knocked unconscious and hurled unmercifully down the slope and into the shallow river. Those still on their feet scatter wildly in all directions trying to evade the onslaught. Frances Molloy, who was present at the time, later published a novel13 (engagingly written in a County Derry dialect) which includes an account of her own experience of Burntollet (via her narrator Ann McGlone):
As a was lyin’ there ... somebody that called me a fuckin’ Fenian bastard started te kick me an’ rain blows down on tap of me way some heavy implement that a could feel but didn’t risk lookin’ up at. ... Then somebody musta come te save me ... for a heard another voice, just as the blows stapped, sayin’, are ye tryin’ te murder hir, ye cowardly bastard ye, can’t ye see that she’s only a wain? Me attacker then set te the man that was tryin’ te save me, an’ the man that was tryin’ te save me said te me in a wile urgent kine of a voice, if ye can manage te stan’, get up now for god’s sake ... an’ get outta here quick.
She goes on, ‘It musta been a miracle, but nobody got killed that day an’ soon after we got across the bridge, cars an’ ambulances started arrivin’ from both directions te help the marchers an’ bring the badly injured te hospital.’ Nobody got killed, and nobody got arrested either. ‘The polis,’ says Frances Molloy, ‘knew damn well who the culprits were because they could be seen, laughin’ an’ chattin’ te many of them, on the very best of terms, while the ambush was on.’
The verdict on this memorable episode issued by Captain Terence O’Neill, still holding on as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, is as follows: ‘Some of the marchers and those who supported them in Londonderry itself have shown themselves to be mere hooligans, ready to attack the police and others.’ Whew!
The people carrying out the Burntollet ambush probably thought they were ingratiating themselves with their hero Paisley – if they thought at all – and also with one of Paisley’s henchmen, a Major Ronald Bunting, who stood behind, supported and directed the wreckers and stone-throwers as their vicious project got under way. There is, however, evidence to suggest that Major Bunting cleared a way for some of the injured marchers, once he understood the thing he’d helped to set up was liable to end in murder, and felt his humane instincts kick in, however late in the day. (Better for those to kick in, than brutal, ‘Papist-trampling’ boots.) Or it may have been thoughts of his son that came into his mind and checked his Protestant militarism, at this critical moment. I don’t know if Ronnie Bunting junior was actually among the Burntollet marchers,14 but he was, at Queen’s University, a prominent member of the People’s Democracy group; and his subsequent career would take him as far as possible from the loyalist precepts cherished by his father.
Yes, by one of those indigenous twists beloved of historians and others, the younger Bunting was a convert to socialism and republicanism who became a founder-member of the Irish National Liberation Army, and met a violent end in 1980 when a uda death squad was sent to his home in Turf Lodge, Belfast, to assassinate him. (He himself had been implicated in the London murder of Airey Neave.) He was thirty-two. He is listed on a roll of honour of republican dead in the Springfield Road, Belfast, one of a very small number of ‘Protestants’ to be so commemorated.15 But his father, Major Bunting, had him buried in the family burial plot, in a final gesture of paternal affirmation. Poles apart as they were in political orientation, it seems that each of them, father and son, accorded some respect to the principles the other chose to live by. Major Bunting said of his son, ‘I saw him as a man who was virtuous and high-minded, and who had a keen sense of social justice and who fought oppression and injustice wherever he saw it.’16
What happened at Burntollet Bridge shows sectarian rage running out of control. The Orange assailants – throwbacks – are, in their own view, defending ‘their’ territory against a flaunting invasion by a crowd of students, ‘Popeheads’, socialists and republicans. ‘Where’s your Pope now?’ they sneered. ‘Get your Pope now and he’ll help you.’ They believe their actions are justified – but it’s not the way the event is seen by the rest of the world, with photographic and eyewitness evidence testifying to an alarming propensity for stoning and beating on the part of certain scions of Protestant Ulster.17 It’s Benedict Kiely’s monster springing to life again. It’s the clearest possible indication that things will have to change, that abhorrent energies will have to be worked off, once and for all. Not that people really believed, in the midst of the cataclysm, that change would come, but come it did – though only after years of carnage and destruction on a scale unimagined by even the most pessimistic observers of the start of the Northern Irish Troubles.
My wonderfully sympathetic mother had scant cause to be grateful for many of the routes my life drifted into: unapproved byways, cliff-edge paths. If these were at odds with the comfortable and conventional circumstances she’d have ordained for me – if she could – not one word of criticism on account of my waywardness did I ever hear from her. She managed to accommodate, and even to relish, my vintage-clothes mania (‘Sure who’s like her ...’), my hennaed hair, even my freelance existence and consequent financial insecurity. (I was happy as an occasional author, book reviewer, and flea-market aficionado, and that was enough for her.) Not that anxiety on my behalf ever left her, and I’m now appalled that I didn’t take the trouble to present my daily doings as something more palatable than a source of maternal agitation. But one thing, at least, she must have been thankful for: that I was safely ensconced in London and well away from indigenous perils such as the Derry march and its Burntollet outcome. As a person susceptible to the socialist and radical excitements of the day, I mi
ght easily (in my mother’s view) have opted for any foolhardy and dangerous gesture available at any time to underscore a reformist point. She’d have dreaded to hear I was half-drowned and battered – like some of my acquaintance – or in Altnagelvin Hospital nursing a broken head.
Our house in the Donegall Road, however, was not at a satisfactory remove from riot and disorder. From a front bedroom window we witnessed scenes of disruption, my mother and father and I, as a bus blazed in the roadway before our eyes; as a commandeered car was rammed with shocking violence, back and forth, back and forth, into a factory wall a hundred yards away, until the wall began to collapse; as soldiers erupted on the scene, leaping from their armoured cars equipped with riot shields and tear gas; as all the inflamed of St James’s dispersed and regrouped, using local knowledge to good effect. It was early in the morning of Monday 9 August 1971, and we’d been roused from our sleep by an ominous noise: women parading the streets banging bin lids together to alert the neighbourhood to a state of emergency. Operation Internment was under way.
The day was strange. A minor riot continued to unfold on the patch of waste ground backed by the factory wall against which the reckless driver had smashed his stolen car. Unaccustomed noises filled the air: shouts, bangs, clashes, distant gunshots, stones hitting riot shields, pounding feet on asphalt pavements. Two of the last belonged to a young priest in a black soutane, holding up his skirts as he pelted up the road towards the junction with the Falls – ‘By jinkers, that fellow can run,’ my father exclaimed admiringly – a priest later shot dead in the act of administering the last rites to another victim of the turbulence. The day was strange, and a nervous apprehension held us in its grip as our once sedate neighbourhood succumbed to an access of anarchy. I thought of our quiet avenues, our old neighbours keeping themselves to themselves, cultivating tidy flower beds in their small gardens, library members, car owners, good housekeepers, emerging for Mass on Sunday mornings decently clad in old-fashioned dress. Where had it all gone?
I feel I am a part of the current exorbitant events, and also that I am not. I can watch and deplore the advent of uproar, outrage after outrage, from a good safe distance. Well out of it. Soon I am back in London, my summer holiday over, back with my Welsh-painter husband, my black cat, my stop-gap proofreading job, the Portobello Road, the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. My parents have no such escape route. They have another five years of being in the thick of it, bomb blast and murder and terror and savagery, five years before they will move to a quiet spot on the County Down coast and put a bit of distance between themselves and the maelstrom. And in the meantime, my mother’s teaching is constantly interrupted by factors unconnected with the classroom. Bomb scares abound. Large portions of the day (she tells me) are spent standing shivering in St James’s Road, as the school is evacuated yet again following another telephoned alert. Once, the army co-opts members of staff to scour the school for a putative explosive device. They’re set to searching lockers, cupboards and cloakrooms, not really knowing what they are looking for, or what action to take if they find it. Normal life has to be fitted in around abnormal circumstances. Two of my mother’s pupils blow themselves up in separate incidents, when their bomb-making skills prove lethally insufficient. Everyone’s nerves are kept at breaking point, with no respite. A car backfiring in the distance is enough to send the whole class diving for the floor, leaving the teacher standing at her rostrum facing rows of empty desks. Topical excuses for failures of diligence are the order of the day: ‘Miss, I couldn’t do my homework with the bullets whizzing up and down the hall.’
In the summer of 1999 we came to live in Antrim, transferring ourselves from pleasant Blackheath to a hundred-and-sixty-year-old, three-storey stone-built house with an overgrown garden. It was the month of the Long March – implacable Protestant Ulster on the move from Derry to Drumcree, in support of immemorial ‘civil and religious liberties’ which seemed in jeopardy once again, and in protest against continuing ira atrocities. On our first night in the empty house we heard, in the distance, the sound of Orange drums, conjuring up an ancient intransigence and history of bad blood. (Conjuring up for me, as well, at another level, an irresistible ancestral elation.) What had we come to? Just down the road, on the way into Antrim town, was the railway bridge where an earlier march, bound for Derry via Burntollet, was attacked, jeered at and jostled by stirred-up loyalists of the town. In the other direction lay Donegore Hill, an eldritch hill, once the rallying point for United Irish rebels heading for defeat (but what a storied defeat!) at the Battle of Antrim.
Drumcree, in County Armagh, the destination of the present ‘Long Marchers’, is rich in associations too. It contains a church at which one of those ubiquitous frock-coated overbearing Blackers once served as rector; and it’s the place where the notorious Garvaghy Road stand-off testifies to the persisting nature of the Northern Irish squabble. Teeth and claws perpetually at the ready. Orangemen might have agreed not to march down the Garvaghy Road to the annoyance of local residents; local nationalists might have agreed to let the Orangemen get on with it, in a spirit of goodwill. But neither of them does anything of the sort. A chance for the tonic gesture, bypassed yet again.
As I’ve said elsewhere,18 our house, Ashville House, was built for a minister of Antrim First Presbyterian Church, a Reverend Charles Morrison, Belfast- or Saintfield-born, Inst-educated, for whom Antrim did not prove a hospitable incumbency. Negative emotions, for the Morrison family, must have been attached to the town. The minister offended a portion of his flock through some unspecified misdoing (sexual or financial), and soon it became expedient for a move to be made. The Reverend Charles was appointed Principal of Arnold Theological College in Hackney, North London, and there, no doubt, life for the uprooted Morrisons assumed a settled and punctilious character, far from the stresses of dour Antrim town.
Back in Ireland, though, was the burial place of two young sons of the family, a circumstance no doubt adding to the country’s fraught associations. One of these boys died (here, in this house) in 1846, possibly from some Famine-related illness. Every part of Ireland has its Famine stories, its emblems of historical woe. I think of my infant great-grandmother, Ellen Jordan, wrapped in a shawl and carried in her mother’s arms for sustenance to an Armagh soup kitchen; I think of poor John Tipping dying of cholera in his Lurgan Workhouse bed. I think of all the Protestant dead of Tartaraghan. The children lying in the Antrim Presbyterian churchyard would have tethered the Morrisons to the town, whether they liked it or not. Whether the north of Ireland was, for them, a place of nostalgia or good riddance.
Five of the Morrison children survived into adulthood, and the youngest of these, Jane, born at Ashville in 1855, went on to marry, in England, an Andrew Davitt. In due course Jane Morrison became the grandmother of Donald Maclean of mid twentieth-century, Burgess-and-Maclean defector fame. I don’t think many people are aware that Donald Maclean’s great-grandfather was an Ulster Presbyterian minister who fell foul of his congregation – and I mention the fact simply because it adds a miniscule detail to the web of Northern Irish ironies and interconnections I’m constructing (those that have an oblique bearing on my own life, that is, or on matters that concern me here).
Everyone’s life contains copious stories and histories. Throughout this book I’ve tried to uncover a few from my own life, and tried, as well, to find ways of enlisting these in the service of a broader perspective, and in support of an integrationist overview. I’ve hoped, from time to time, to light on a true Ulster spirit, a spirit of benevolence and inclusiveness. I’d like to dispel the notions that some people have a better right than others to be in Northern Ireland, that some are native and some are not, or that an eternal opposition exists between two clear-cut sections of our society, with a licence conferred on each to be at the other’s throat ad nauseam. Because of our mixed inheritances, the battle of the ideologies boils down to a battle with the self, of which the only possible outcome is self-mutil
ation, or self-destruction. And so it proved. Anyone who spent any time in the North, in the 1970s or ’80s (say), would have witnessed desolation and devastation on a scale to daunt any ameliorative heart. Though many of its inhabitants never wavered in the belief that the north of Ireland is the most beautiful place on earth, they’d have had, with Derek Mahon, to add a rider to that assessment:
Portrush, Portstewart, Portballintrae,
Un beau pays mal habité.
Those among us distrustful of hopes for the future might continue to stress the mal habité side of things. They might point to sinister paramilitary images still disfiguring gable walls (bring back folksy King Billy on his white horse, please), to continuing sectarian murders and other outrages, to horrid habitations and other terrible edifices replacing incalculable losses by bomb, fire, rot and redevelopment. We all have to take responsibility for everything that’s happened. We are bound together by a common ancestry, and by our place in the world. Bound too by the whole pungent history of wrongs and suffering and bigotry and poetry and picturesqueness and notoriety and all our shared knowledge of secret local places. If each of us has to be classed under a divisive denominational label – which remains true to some extent, though it carries less weight than it did in the past – our entitlements, and our ghosts, are none the less interchangeable.
A Twisted Root Page 34