Fifty Dead Men Walking

by McGartland, Martin

  ‘Do you ever have a bath?’ I asked him. He shook his head.

  ‘Do you ever was?’ Again he shook his head.

  I never asked him whether he drank, though, because he always smelt of alcohol. And although I realised he was an old drunk, I felt sorry for him, wondering how a man could live in those conditions night and day, year in, year out. Sometimes I would lie awake at night wondering whether I should bring him back home so that he could sleep and bathe and wash in a house for just one night. But I didn’t, because instinct told me that my mother would never permit such a man in her house.

  My meetings with Oliver continued for months and I would make sure I gave him something to eat every day. Once a week, and sometimes more, I would give him a £1 note – I did so because throughout all the months I knew him, Oliver never asked me for anything.

  Then, one day, I ran to see him and he had gone. I looked inside the picture house and saw his filthy old blanket on the floor beside the pathetic remains of a fire he would light each night to keep himself warm. But he had vanished without a word. For weeks I checked each morning but he never returned and I never knew whether Oliver had died in the night and his body had been taken away, or whether he had just moved on without saying a word to me.

  I discovered that a woman living a few doors down from us in Moyard Parade kept chickens at the bottom of her garden and I decided that, as my mother liked fresh boiled eggs, I would make it my duty to get up early each day and take one from the neighbour’s hens.

  Shortly after dawn, I would climb over two sets of fences and sit outside the wooden hutch waiting for the hens to lay. I became so proficient at this that, after a while, I would time my arrival to within a few minutes of the hen laying and I would sometimes actually catch the egg before it hit the ground. However, the treats didn’t last long for the hens suddenly stopped laying, no doubt due to my constant visits.

  One day, the woman told my mother, ‘Those hens of mine are useless. I’m thinking of killing and eating them because they hardly lay any eggs.’

  My mother had no idea that I was responsible, neither did I tell her, and shortly after the hens stopped laying I lost interest in the idea. My mother never discovered the truth of my early morning adventures, neither, it seemed, did she ever realise during those weeks that her supply of eggs in the kitchen cupboard never diminished.

  I did, however, get into trouble for my next adventure. Once again I would leave the house early before my mother or the neighbours awoke, and set off to the fields leading to the Black Mountains where herds of cattle grazed. Armed with a stick, I would drive half a dozen or more cattle down to the streets below, making sure they ended up in the front gardens of the houses.

  They would be driven through the narrow gates into the front gardens and left munching away at the grass, leaving their cow pats all over the lawns. I found this prank so amusing that I repeated it a number of times before one man leaned out of his bedroom window at 6.00am one morning and saw me chasing the cows.

  ‘Martin McGartland,’ he yelled at the top of his voice, ‘You’re the little dickhead causing all this shit. Wait till I get hold of you.’

  I did not wait more than a second, however, as he slammed the window shut. I left the cows munching and splattering the gardens and ran home. I didn’t risk his wrath again because I feared he would have given me a real hiding. I was also well aware of the possible repercussions from another quarter – my mother.

  Although I was prepared to challenge my mother in my early teens, as a child I never dreamed of disobeying her.

  My mother had become a single parent, solely responsible for two young sons and a daughter, and she determined that we would learn what the word ‘discipline’ meant. She had been brought up in a large family of four boys and four girls and her father had been just as strict.

  As a child, she earned a reputation for taking on and beating up boys older that herself, and even her own brothers would take care not to upset their wild, strong-willed sister.

  I never disobeyed my mother for I had learned at a very young age that the consequences would be severe. Whenever my mother told me to stop doing something, I would stop immediately, not daring to risk the lash of her tongue or the crack of her hand across my head.

  When I was 12 years old, I had been recruited by an older teenager to sell cigarettes which I knew had been stolen. I would go around the estate and the building sites, selling them to anyone. I would make perhaps £30 to £40 a day, an absolute fortune for me.

  A few weeks after starting to sell the cigarettes, I was upstairs in my bedroom one Saturday night when I heard the front door bang shut and my mother’s voice downstairs. ‘Martin!’ she yelled. ‘Come down here.’

  I knew from the tone of her voice that I was in deep trouble and I feared the worst. But I obeyed immediately.

  As I stood in the hall, my mother, who was about my height and size at that time, wagged her finger in my face. ‘Listen,’ she said, a sting in her voice, ‘tell me the truth, my boy, or it will be the worse for you. Have you been selling fags?’

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  I didn’t see the punch that cracked me on the jaw, sending me sprawling on the floor.

  ‘You little liar,’ she screamed. ‘Now tell me again. Have you been selling fags?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said and began to explain that I had never stolen them but was only selling them for a friend to make some pocket money.

  Her fist landed on my head as I struggled to my feet and I tried to ward off the barrage as she continued to beat me with her fist around my head and shoulders. She must have hit me a dozen times and then ordered me upstairs to bed. I never forgot my mother’s anger, I never sold another stolen cigarette and I vowed always to tell her the truth.

  On another occasion, my mates and I were sitting in the ruined fifteenth-century castle nestling in the Black Mountain, all playing truant from school and inhaling glue, passing the bag from one to another. I was out of my mind, hardly aware of what we were doing, when one of the lads said he was hungry. We decided to go to a shop owned by a distant relative on my mother’s side. It was closed so we broke in through a rear window and stole cigarettes and chocolates before making our way back to the castle.

  A man had followed us back and when he saw all of us sniffing glue and acting as if we were drunk, he decided to return to the estate and inform our mothers. One woman arrived shortly afterwards and I found I could not even speak, so affected was I by the glue. Stumbling about we eventually arrived back at the woman’s house and I sat down in a stupor, hardly aware of what was going on around me.

  Suddenly, however, I sensed my mother standing over me, her hands on her hips, looking down at me on the floor.

  ‘Get up! Get up!’ she ordered, pulling me to my feet, although I could hardly stand. ‘Now start running and don’t stop till you get home.’

  I didn’t need any further encouragement and, like an automaton, I ran the few hundred yards back home while my mother walked briskly behind me. Within seconds of closing the door, my mother started to batter me. I could see the anger in her face and her fists cracking me around the head over and over again. And yet I could feel nothing and I wondered if it was all a bad dream.

  She kept yelling at me but I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and when the battering was over I went upstairs to bed. I had been lying there only a few minutes when she came into my bedroom, dragged me out of bed and took me to the bathroom. She had filled the bath with cold water and, without ceremony, pushed my head into the bath, holding me with her hands around my neck, forcing my head under water. I struggled and fought to escape but without success, and the more I struggled the more she kept me under. I thought she was trying to drown me.

  When she finally let me up I could barely breathe, gulping madly for air.

  She walked out and down the stairs and I went to my bed, still trying to catch my breath. The ducking, however, had done the trick and my head cleared. I suddenly
felt hungry and went downstairs for something to eat.

  I grabbed a couple of cream crackers and stuffed them into my mouth as I walked into the living-room where my mother was sitting. Our eyes met and I knew I should never have looked at her because the sight of me inflamed her fury once more. She jumped to her feet, took an old first world war sword from the wall where it had been placed as an ornament years before, and began lashing out at my legs, thrashing me over both thighs with all her might.

  ‘Glue, my boy,’ she yelled as she hit me, ‘I’ll fucking glue you.’

  I tried to evade the sword, which must have been about two feet long, and ran around the room while she continued to yell and scream at me as she struck out. And the more she yelled and screamed obscenities at me, the more she hit me.

  The following morning before dressing, I inspected the damage. It looked as though I had been given a real whipping – my thighs were bruised black and blue, and some of the skin was broken. I thanked God that the sword had been blunt. But I learned my lesson; I would never sniff glue again.

  As the troubles escalated and riots raged between the Republicans and the ‘enemy’ – the British Army and the RUC – my friends and I enjoyed every moment of the excitement and chaos. Each night seemed to bring new adventures. Our home on the Ballymurphy Estate became the epicentre of the troubles and the action seemed to continue most nights throughout the spring, summer and autumn.

  So many disturbances took place that, most evenings, the local Protestant families from the neighbouring Springmartin Estate would come to the nearest vantage point to watch the action. Barricades would be thrown up and burning buses, lorries, cars and vans would light the night sky, the air filled with sparks and the stench of burning rubber thrown on to the barricades, providing a focus of attention for us and the hundreds who came to watch.

  We would learn later that after we had been sent to bed the air would be filled with tear gas from the grenades that the RUC and the Army would rain down on the rioting Republicans. In the morning we would race from our beds back into the streets, sometimes still in pyjamas, to collect the used gas canisters and take them as prized souvenirs to show our friends at school.

  Television news teams from around the world would descend on the estate and most days we would be asked to find plastic bullets that the TV crews could take back home as souvenirs. Some would offer as much as US$20 for a bullet but the average was just US$10. It became a lucrative investment for me and my mates and we would carry them home and hide them in our bedrooms, ready to sell to the next TV crew that came along.

  Despite the stern warnings and pleading of our parents, we would hide behind walls near the action and rush out to pick up the plastic bullets after the Army had fired each volley.

  Most nights, one or two people would be hit by the plastic bullets and when they hit their target, they hurt like hell, half crippling victims for days, at other times breaking and chipping ankle bones which then required hospital treatment. Most victims, however, would refuse to go to hospital for treatment for they knew that they would immediately be picked up by the RUC, arrested and charged with rioting. So most of those hit would retire home and rest for a few days, hoping that the pain would ease and they would be able to walk again.

  One young Ballymurphy lad called Mick, who loved to boast that he had no fear of the Army, would dance around provocatively in front of the troops until, one night he was hit squarely in the cheek by a bullet, smashing his teeth. He received little sympathy from any of us, however, despite his bravado. From then on he would be called ‘Hamburger’, because it looked for weeks as though he had a large piece of burger stuffed in his mouth. But the injury cured him of his recklessness for he would never again be seen prancing in front of the British soldiers. Most of the incidents, however, were no laughing matter but deadly serious affairs. One Ballymurphy man was cheered by the Republicans and acclaimed a hero after he scored a direct hit with a petrol bomb on a police line. The petrol bomber, caught live by a TV cameraman, threw the bomb over the lines of Land Rovers in front of him, the bottle exploding on the roof of a vehicle and splashing the fireball over a policeman’s head and face. TV pictures the following night showed other officers trying to beat out the flames, but the officer received serious burns.

  During these weeks and months, the IRA became increasingly powerful, claiming a higher profile within the community, dictating tactics, ordering young men around as if they were troops and instilling their own brand of discipline.

  In the early hours of most mornings when the rioters turned in for the night, the Army would return equipped with huge cranes and tractors to remove all the burned-out vehicles hijacked and torched the previous night. By dusk, however, more lorries would have been hijacked and brought on to the estate, driven into position by armed IRA members and then torched, providing new barricades for that night’s rioting.

  My young friends and I would occasionally fall foul of IRA discipline, even though we were not yet ten years old. One evening we decided to raid the back of a refrigerated ice-cream lorry which had been hijacked and had had a petrol bomb thrown into the cab. We opened the back while the lorry blazed and began taking out boxes of ice cream. When the IRA men saw what we were doing they quickly intervened, throwing the boxes back inside the vehicle and giving us a good slap on the head.

  ‘Don’t take anything from the back of that van,’ one said, ‘or you’ll get a clip. Now fuck off home.’

  Others were more brutal, slapping and kicking the kids who tried to steal from the burning vans. Most of the women, our mothers, were of course on our side and they would berate the IRA hard men. ‘Let the kids take the things’, they would shout at the armed men, ‘you’re only going to burn it.’

  Matters came to a head when Republicans began hijacking trucks containing TVs, videos and fridges, for most families on the estate longed for brand new electrical goods. Most of the families, all working class, were renting their TVs for a few pounds a week, a lot of money for people with several children surviving on unemployment pay. But once again the men of violence would have none of it, refusing to listen to the pleas of the womenfolk to permit the goods to be taken out of the vehicles and offered to anyone on the estate.

  ‘That’s looting’, the IRA men would argue. ‘We are a disciplined military organisation, not a bunch of criminals thieving anything we can lay our hands on.’

  The few people who did succeed in looting a TV or video would not get away with their booty for long, for the IRA would go from house to house searching for stolen gear. When they found a stolen machine they would rip it from the wall and throw it out into the street, deliberately smashing it to pieces. I would watch all this with a certain envy and admiration, but also with fear. I had no intention of crossing these strong men who would brook no argument, demanding that their orders be obeyed without question.

  The army ‘snatch squads’ would create even more excitement and tension for all of us. The burning barricades kept the Army and police vehicles out of the estate most nights, so the Army changed tactics, sending in heavily armed snatch squads to pick up men they targeted as ring-leaders.

  At first, the snatch squads were successful in picking up some men because of the speed of their unexpected raids. But soon after, IRA look-outs, mostly keen young teenagers, would be posted to shout whenever they saw a snatch squad preparing to make a dash against the republican lines.

  ‘Run, run, the fuckers are coming!’ a look-out would scream and the hundreds of people out on the streets would disperse, the IRA men racing away to safety, often sprinting through people’s homes whose doors had been deliberately left open for such an eventuality. As soon as the ring-leaders had darted through a house the doors would be closed, the republican leaders would be away and the Army squads thwarted once again. On those occasions, we young lads would simply stand aside and watch as 20 or 30 heavily armed soldiers would rush past us chasing their intended victim. At such times, I wondered if I
dared try to trip a soldier, to send him sprawling but, because I feared the repercussions, I could never summon up enough courage to do so.

  Sometimes, of course, the deadly serious business of rioting and arson would be tinged with humour, though these occasions were few and far between. Roy, a skinny teenager with freckles, would occasionally provide such a release from the intensity of the moment because he suffered from a stammer which became worse the more agitated he became. Without thinking, we gave him the job of look-out, waiting for the Army ‘Pigs’ (heavily armoured vehicles), to drive through the estate. For sport we would find vantage points where we could not be seen, but were close enough to the road for us to hurl milk bottles filled with white paint, in the hope of smashing them on the camouflaged vehicles. Roy would be stationed 50 yards away around a corner and his task would be to shout ‘Saracen’ at the top of his voice when he saw a convoy of Pigs driving towards us from the local RUC base.

  Thirty minutes later we heard the familiar swoosh of Saracens racing past us at high speed and we had no time to leave our hiding place to throw our bottles. As we looked down at Roy we could see him pointing to the flying Saracens, still desperately trying to stammer out ‘Saracens’.

  We gave him hell on that occasion for missing a golden opportunity and, for ever after, the wretched Roy was called ‘Saracen’ by all his school mates. Fifteen years later, his pals still call him Saracen, even though he has completely lost his stammer. The army Saracens became the focal point of our hate for these powerful vehicles, with strong steel grids on the front, would be used for smashing down road blocks we had built for our own defence. It didn’t matter whether these barricades were constructed of burning buses or trucks for the Saracens would crash into them at speed and, more often than not, would succeed in breaking through.