Fifty Dead Men Walking

by McGartland, Martin

  © Martin McGartland

  FIFTY DEAD MEN WALKING

  By

  Martin McGartland

  ‘To my family and friends whom I can never see again.’

  Martin McGartland

  ‘At least fifty men are still walking the streets of Northern Ireland today, thanks to the heroic work of Martin McGartland. They will never know that but for the work of this young man, their lives would have been ended by IRA gunmen and bombers.’

  A Senior Intelligence Officer, London 1997

  BROUGHT TO YOU BY KeVkRaY

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN THE BEGINNING THERE WERE THE FIFES AND DRUMS. The noise rose into the sky, over the houses and along the streets to where I was playing with my friends. I heard the high-pitched whistle of the fifes and the incessant roll of the drums and turned towards the noise. Curious, I followed the stream of older boys and girls, and the closer I came to the source of the noise, the more excited I became. Then we were all running down the street, across the patch of dark earth that was our playground and up on the hill eager to be part of the noise.

  It was the first time that I responded to the exhilarating sound of the bands that parade through the towns and villages of Northern Ireland during the summer months.

  Throughout my childhood and beyond, I would stop and listen to those bands which, without fail, would awaken historical scars and wounds, instilling fear and hatred in some and a triumphant passion and pride in others.

  That first answer to the band’s magical call would,

  However, cause my mother anxiety and consternation. It was July 1974, and I was four years old.

  I had been playing with other children in the street when my mother realised I was missing. Other Catholic mothers in the neighbourhood had hurriedly collected their young children and taken them indoors when they first heard the distant sound of the drums. But no one had noticed me run off, following the older children. My mother went from house to house, calling my name, hoping to find me playing with some of the other toddlers. But in vain. Friends and neighbours on the estate joined the search but no one had seen me.

  She could hear the loyalist band proudly practising The Sash My Father Wore, one of their great traditional tunes, as they marched down the Springmartin Road about 600 yards from our house. She looked across the open spaces but dismissed the idea that her little Marty could be there.

  And yet, because there seemed nowhere else to search, she began to walk towards the beating drums, wondering if perhaps her lad could have made his way to the noise, attracted by the music. As she walked briskly towards the crowds gathered either side of the road, cheering and clapping the bandsmen in their grey suits, some with their orange sashes across their bodies and their campaign medals proudly decorating their chests, a friend ran towards her.

  ‘Kate,’ the woman yelled above the noise of the crowd and the bandsmen banging and whistling away, ‘have you got Marty with you?’

  ‘No, he’s missing,’ my mother shouted. ‘I can’t find him anywhere.’

  ‘I think he might be with the band,’ she called back. ‘I saw a little lad with red hair marching with them. It could have been your Marty.’

  ‘Please God,’ replied my mother, running towards the front of the band now half a mile away.

  My mother, Kate McGartland, was well known in the area – a striking, slim, young woman with shoulder-length fair hair, green eyes and a strong personality who was never frightened to speak her mind. She had been brought up in a strong republican tradition and, as a teenager, took part in civil rights demonstrations during the 1960s. She followed in the footsteps of her mother and became a powerful personality, both inside and outside the home.

  As my mother ran along the street, darting among the crowds on the pavement, searching for her son, loyalist women called out, taunting her, ‘Keep running, you Finian bitch.’ Others shouted ‘Papist whore’ as my mother scanned the crowds in desperation, ignoring the catcalls.

  Years later, my mother told me, ‘I took no notice of their insults; I hardly noticed their obscenities. All I could think of was you, Marty, and what they might do to you.’

  My mother found me happily walking and skipping along with the other children at the head of the band, without a care in the world. She noticed my red hair first and instinctively knew it was me, before she actually saw my proud, smiling face, excited by the music and the adventure.

  She scooped me into her arms and cried as she carried me back home, one minute scolding me for running off, threatening to give me a good smacking; another, cradling me in her arms, kissing me, with the tears of relief streaming down her cheeks.

  She told me all this when, many years later, she talked to me of her life and the hardship generations of her family had known; some moved around Ireland in Search of an honest day’s work, while others had emigrated to America in search of a new life in a new country.

  My parents had met when they were teenagers and their first child, Catherine, was born in 1962. Catherine, however, died at the age of eleven when she fell through a skylight at the local school. The second child, Elizabeth was born in 1963 but my parents separated and my mother never re-married, although she kept her married name of McGartland.

  Six months after I was born, we moved from the council flat where we lived in Moyard Crescent to a lovely, three-bedroom council house, with an immaculate little garden, just 200 yards from our block of flats.

  At that time, both Catholics and Protestants lived side by side on the Ballymurphy Estate of West Belfast, as they had done for generations. But the troubles, which had exploded across Northern Ireland in 1969, caused the two communities to become openly suspicious of each other. As demonstrations became more fiercely sectarian and violence erupted on the estate, the Protestant families decided to leave the area and accommodation was found for them elsewhere in Belfast. During one weekend in August 1970, 320 Protestant families were moved from the estate to safer housing.

  My mother told me, ‘We were very lucky. I was a young mother with three children and I had known this lovely protestant widow who was in her eighties who had lived on the estate for years. When I heard that Protestant families were moving out, I went to see her and asked if I could move into her house if she ever decided to leave. The night before she was due to move, she sent a message to me and I immediately went to see

  her. She invited me to stay the night, telling me she would leave early the following morning. The next day I helped her pack and made her a cup of tea.

  We kissed each other goodbye and I thanked her. She told me that she had been very happy in the house and wished me luck. She also asked me to take care of the garden for it had been her pride and joy.’

  I would never know my father because he moved away from Ireland and settled in the north of England. For a couple of years after their separation he would return to Belfast to see the family, but his visits became less frequent and, when my mother met another man, he would never return.

  During much of my childhood, however, my mother lived on her own with my two sisters and me in the smart new council house. But, on a number of occasions from 1974 to 1978, we had unwelcome visitors disturbing our sleep and wrecking our home.

  The British Army, backed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, would descend in force on the estate and select a number of houses to search, looking for arms and explosives.

  I would often awake to a loud knocking at the front door and my mother shouting, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming. Wait a moment; wait a moment.’

  Sometimes the soldiers wouldn’t wait, though, and I would hear the terrifying banging, then the smashing and splintering of wood as they broke down the front door, forcing their way in
to the hall. I would lie in bed, hiding under the blankets, too frightened to move and the soldiers with their guns and helmets would crash open my bedroom door and snatch away the bedclothes.

  ‘Get out! Get out!’ they would shout at me.

  My mother would come in, grabbing hold of me as she shouted abuse at the soldiers who pulled out all the drawers from the chest, opened the wardrobe, tore up the carpet and threw my clothes all over the floor. I would stand holding my mother’s hand as she told the soldiers to get out of the house and to stop scaring innocent young children.

  Sometimes I would be pulled from the bed, pushed to the other side of the room and told to stand still. Other soldiers would walk into my room, tear off the bedclothes and throw the mattress on to the floor. Sometimes they would turn over the bed, ripping away the carpet, before pulling up some of the floorboards to see whether anything was hidden beneath.

  They would occasionally remain in the house for three or four hours, not letting anyone go back to bed, forbidding us to leave the one room where they had ordered us to remain until they had cleared the entire street.

  Usually the soldiers would pile into the house and leave their rifles downstairs, lined up against the wall in the hallway under the guard of one soldier, while the others fanned out searching every nook and cranny. I would hate them for doing that, for making us all cry and hurting my mother, wrecking her house.

  Once I retaliated, going up to one of the soldiers and hitting him on his legs as hard as I could. But my mother rushed forward and took me away from him.

  After their visits my mother would be angry, cursing the soldiers, as she looked around her home at the wreckage the Army had left behind, which she would have to repair, tidy and clean.

  As I grew a little older and began to understand more, I would also become angry with the soldiers waking us at 4.30am, ordering us about and treating us like dirt. Following my mother’s example, I, too, would shout ‘Go away! Get out of our house!’

  Occasionally, some of them would try to scare me, deliberately nudging me as they brushed past, telling me to shut up and mind my own business or threatening me with a clip around the ear.

  My mother would try to ease my anger, telling me that it would be OK and that we had nothing to hide from the British soldiers. But I could not be so easily quietened and would constantly follow them around the house, telling them to stop ripping our home apart, cheekily ordering them to put things back as they had found them. Generally, the soldiers simply ignored my demands, which frustrated me and made me even angrier.

  I had learned a new word, ‘respect’, and I would tell them that as soldiers they should ‘respect’ other peoples’ property. They would laugh at me on those occasions and I hated them for treating me like a kid.

  During one of their last searches of our house, when I was about eight years old, I picked up a large pot of paint which mother had been using to decorate the sitting-room. As soon as the soldiers had left, I poured the paint into two milk bottles and waited for the Army to drive away in their Saracens and Land Rovers. As they drove past our house, I ran out and threw the milk bottles at the dark green army jeeps, splattering paint over one of them. When I went to school later that day I felt ten feet tall, telling all my pals what I had done to the British Army. For a while, I became a hero. It felt good.

  ‘I just want to grow up quickly,’ I would tell my mother, ‘so that I can help get rid of the soldiers. I don’t like them coming into our house, wrecking the place and making you cry.’

  I began to join the older boys in stone-throwing – the ‘sport’, as we saw it, of tantalising and needling the British Army. More important, though, were the battles we young Catholic lads fought with the Protestant boys, mostly teenagers, throwing stones at each other. I don’t know if I ever hit anyone, and I don’t think anyone ever hit me, but those battles made the adrenaline flow and I could not wait to grow up so that I could become part of the republican movement.

  My mother would tell me that I was hyperactive, unable to sleep more than a few hours a night and, as a result, I would frequently get into mischief.

  About this time, I decided it was time to find a job and, as I always woke shortly after dawn, I decided to find a paper round. Leaving home at 6.00am, I would walk to a man’s house a few hundred yards from my home and the papers I had to deliver would be piled high in the hall of his house. I would distribute 50 newspapers a day and be back home by 8.00am, in time for my cornflakes before leaving for school. I delivered those papers for 18 months, earning £5 a week – a handsome sum, as far as I was concerned.

  Early one summer’s morning in 1980, I witnessed, for the first time, a robbery in progress as I was running to fetch my newspapers. I had seen a static mobile shop, which had been parked for years near the New Barnsley RUC station off the Springfield Road. But on this particular day, I saw two teenagers whom I recognised as Catholics from the Ballymurphy estate taking food, confectionary and money out of the mobile shop and putting it in cardboard boxes in full view of the police station. As I walked past the vehicle, one of them called at me to come over.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re just nicking some stuff from this store,’ he said. ‘Do you want something?’

  ‘No, I don’t want anything,’ I replied. ‘If the RUC found me with stuff, they’ll think I broke into the mobile. I don’t want anything to do with it.’ And I ran off.

  Later that day, the same lad came to see me as I was playing outside our house. He was laughing at me, telling me that my face had gone white when I had realised that the two of them were robbing the mobile.

  ‘Did you do that van?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, of course we did,’ he replied, ‘what else do you think we would be doing at six in the morning?’

  ‘Jesus, you could have got me into trouble,’ I protested.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said, handing me a few bars of chocolate. ‘Tell nobody what you’ve seen.’ I didn’t want to know if they had come from the robbery and I didn’t ask. I was learning.

  Confidence in my own ability, however, received a nasty set-back when I decided to change jobs, jacking in the paper round and starting to work for our local milkman, Paddy Brady, a massive man in his thirties who must have weighed over 20 stone. He would sit in the milk float reading a paper, while somehow steering it with his big fat belly and barking his orders at us.

  His band of three young helpers, including me, officially earned £20 a week, but Paddy would occasionally decide to pay us nothing, saying that we hadn’t worked hard enough. And if we ever misbehaved, Paddy would punish us by inviting the miscreant into the cab of the float and then twisting his arm around the steering wheel, causing severe bruising to the upper arm. He would only stop when the boy screamed. On a number of occasions I went to school with huge blue and yellow bruises on my arm.

  And yet, because the money was good, we stayed with him. Every morning, Paddy would order one of us to find him a newspaper, which meant stealing one from the letterbox of a house. One morning, I had delivered a couple of pints of milk to a house and removed the newspaper when I turned and saw a 20-year-old youth come rushing across the road. I recognised him as working for the paper shop. He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and began kicking my backside as hard as he could while pushing me down the path.

  ‘Now I know who’s been stealing the papers,’ he yelled at me. ‘Do that again, you little bastard, and I’ll break your arms.’

  On that occasion, however, Paddy came to my rescue, rushing at the young man and telling him to leave me alone. ‘I heard you threaten young Marty,’ he said. ‘You touch a hair of his head again and I’ll break your legs. Do you understand?’ he shouted, pushing the young man away and kicking him hard. ‘Now go and get me another paper,’ Paddy said, turning to me. ‘This one’s ruined.’ And I had to sneak up to another house and steal a second paper for him.

  I would sometimes find myself in trouble wit
h Paddy for arriving late for my milk round and he would, of course, usually give me a clip around the ear, a hard clip, for arriving late. I had my reasons, though, but I would never tell Paddy or the other lads for fear they would tease me and make me feel silly.

  Early one morning, while running towards the rendezvous where I met Paddy each day, I noticed an old man, a tramp, in dirty old clothes slowly walking out of a derelict cinema off the Falls Road. I saw him again the following day and he looked a pitiful figure. The next week I saw him I stopped to speak to him. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. There was no reply; the man just looked blankly at me. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked, shouting louder this time. ‘Where do you live?’ He pointed with his blackened, dirty thumb to the picture house behind him. ‘You live there!’ I said amazed that anyone could live in such an abandoned, derelict place which had been shut up for decades.

  Again I asked him if he was alright and this time he nodded. ‘Are you hungry?’ I said, realising from his hollow cheeks and filthy appearance that he probably hadn’t eaten for days.

  ‘Yes, I’m hungry,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ve nothing with me,’ I told him, ‘but I’ll bring you something tomorrow,’ and I ran off.

  The following day, I took him a small carton of milk, some biscuits and a sandwich I had made myself with butter and two pieces of ham. He was there waiting for me that day. ‘Here you are,’ I said, and before I ran off he was already wolfing down the sandwich.

  During the following weeks, we would become friends. Every day I would give him food I had taken from my mother’s kitchen; at other times I would buy him food with the money I earned each week from Paddy. And each morning, after handing over the food, we would talk. I found out that his name was Oliver and that he had been living in the picture house for a year or more. He seemed nearly 70 but, in fact, he told he was only 55. I would look at him and wonder if he was telling me the truth, for he seemed so old with his pale, whiskered face, his blackened, broken teeth and his thick, matted hair. He wore a dirty sweater and trousers which were too big for him, held up with two boot laces tied together and, whatever the weather, a dark, bottle-green overcoat with one pocket half ripped off.