A Fortunate Life

by Paddy Ashdown

  For the first time since I had been a boy in Ireland, I felt the joy of putting down roots and having a place of permanence. It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I received the long-anticipated orders to go to Belfast at the end of August of that year.

  I found the process of going back to my home city far more painful than I had ever imagined it would be. The troubles did not come as a surprise. Even from an early age I had known that the discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland would be bound to lead to some reaction. But the ferocity of the violence shocked me, as did the way that it affected my old Northern Ireland friends and acquaintances. I was discovering what I would see in even sharper relief later in Bosnia: that the proximity of violence can transform even the most reasonable and civilised of people, and that the seemingly robust barrier separating civilisation from animal brutality is in fact a wispy, fragile thing which, once torn down, unleashes a bestiality that seems to empower neighbour to do indescribable things to neighbour – and which takes a very long time to put back.

  Each of 42 Commando’s companies was assigned an area of the city to look after. Echo Company was given the Old Park Road and Ardoyne areas in the west of Belfast and was based in an old mill building in Flax Street, just off the Crumlin Road.

  This was an area I knew well as a boy. I had cousins in this part of the city and friends, too. The news reports had prepared me for the physical destruction – though I remember being deeply shocked at the Old Markets area, where, as a seventeen-year-old, I had helped my father sell his lettuces. The thing which really stunned me most, however, was the feeling that the city of my youth was being brutalised by an army of occupation – and we were that army! I knew why we were there, fully supported it and had no doubts about the need for our presence. But none of this diminished the shock that it had come to this. Or the pain of realising that, for my military colleagues, this was just another ‘internal security’ operation, no different from what we had done together in Aden, Malaysia and Brunei.

  But for me it was different. This was my city as well as my theatre of operations. Suddenly I found the Irish jokes increasingly tiresome and the black-and-white certainties of our operational assumptions increasingly inappropriate. For the first time I was beginning to see military operations not just from the viewpoint of the soldier patrolling the street, but from that of the person living in the street as well. And I found it very uncomfortable. A friend with whom I have discussed this since has concluded that this was all because I was beginning to get tired of the profession of soldiering. But I do not think so. I felt just as dedicated to what I was doing, but much less certain that the way we were going about it was right.

  We were all provided with what were called ‘tribal maps’ of Belfast, which showed the Catholic and Protestant estates coloured differently and the mixed areas shaded with both colours. The map showed me what, from boyhood, I already knew: that my patch was divided equally between Catholic and Protestant, with the Ardoyne being predominantly the former, the Old Park area predominantly the latter, and the Bone district fiercely divided between the two.

  My day in Belfast began at 6 a.m. with a debrief of the night’s patrols and receiving the reports of those on guard at fixed points on our patch. During the morning Alan Hooper and I would plan the day’s patrols, trying to ensure that we always kept a stand-by unit ready for emergencies, that we treated Catholic and Protestant areas scrupulously the same, and that every part of our area had at least one visit from one of our patrols in every twenty-four-hour period. The main time for trouble came at the weekend and after darkness fell, so we would always have our operations room fully manned with one or other of us present during these times and at other moments of tension. Our day usually ended at around 2 a.m., when I would take a turn round the area in my Land Rover to make sure the ‘patch’ was quiet before going to bed. I do not normally need very much sleep and at the time did not find it particularly hard to maintain this routine. But when I came home at the end of our three-month tour I suddenly found myself more exhausted by lack of sleep and tension than I can ever remember being before or since.

  At this time the British Army was still regarded by many in the Catholic community as saviours who had come to protect them from Protestant violence. But I could feel the mood changing. In July, shortly before we arrived, a highly unpopular curfew had been imposed on the Catholic Falls Road area, and many Catholic families had been burnt out of their homes in the largely Catholic area of the Ardoyne, where the gutted, burnt-out shells of whole terraces of houses acted as a stark reminder of the security forces’ inability or unwillingness to prevent this from happening. Bloody Sunday and internment, still eighteen months away, would finally and catastrophically lose us the confidence and support of even moderate elements of Northern Ireland’s Catholic community, after which it would take thirty or more years of patient politics before we would finally be able to retrieve the situation and recreate the ingredients from which peace might be built. But at this time I felt that the early confidence in us among the majority of the Catholic population of Belfast was not yet irredeemably lost. The key battle, therefore, was not for order on the streets but for hearts and minds. I started a small youth club for the deprived youth of both religious traditions in my area and took them for a two-day outing to an old fishing haunt I used to visit with my father, the beautiful lake and castle at Castlewellan. Our first trip was a great success. But the numbers then started mysteriously to decline. When I asked one of the mothers why her son had withdrawn, she told me that she had been ‘instructed by the men’ not to let her child go off with the British Army. In retrospect, it was probably rather naive of me to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise, but I remember being really depressed about this at the time.

  Although we all knew (and our intelligence reports confirmed) that the IRA had a presence in Belfast and in the Ardoyne at the time, they appeared to me to be supported by only a relatively small minority of the Catholic population. It was the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (or NICRA) who were the main (and, in my private view, entirely justified) vehicle for Catholic protest. NICRA in my area was run by a remarkable old man called Frank McGlade, who lived in one of the Catholic working-class terraced houses in the Bone district, about a hundred yards from the back gate of the mill in which we were stationed. Frank was around sixty and something of a local legend among the Catholics as a man of principle and courage. He had been an Irish nationalist activist all his life, had spent a considerable amount of time in prison and was a founder member of NICRA. He was also, according to our intelligence, the commander of the local IRA unit. One day – mostly, I have to confess, on a whim – I decided I would call on him. I walked up the street to his house, unannounced, alone and without any arms (but in my uniform) and knocked on his door. My intention at the time was simply to meet him and talk about the local situation and what we could do to make it better. It was, to say the least, a naive hope and a stupid way of going about trying to realise it.

  Frank McGlade’s wife opened the door and, seeing my uniform, naturally believed that I had come to arrest her husband. All hell broke loose and I had to beat a hasty retreat. The next day the Catholic newspapers (including, if I recall, the Irish Times in Dublin) were full of stories of a British Army Captain intimidating an elderly and much respected local citizen. I have since met Frank’s two daughters who remember that incident well and have even asked me to write a piece for a memorial article on their father, a man for whom I had then, and retain now, a considerable respect and admiration.

  But back then it was the articles in the local papers which mattered, not my rather muddled intentions. On my next visit to Commando Headquarters, I was quietly taken to one side by the Intelligence Officer, who told me that I had now been placed on the local IRA death list. That night I jumped into my Land Rover with my two signalmen and driver to begin my usual end-of-the-day tour round the patch, to find that, with typical Marine gal
lows humour, they had chalked on the Land Rover door where my seat was, a big white cross and the words ‘This is the bloke you want, Paddy. We’re innocent. X marks the spot.’

  As our tour in Belfast drew to a close, the temperature on the streets started to rise sharply. In late October 1970 the Catholic/Protestant interface at the upper end of the Shankill Road erupted, and Echo Company were called upon to deal with it.

  Dante conjuring up his inferno in modern times would easily have recognised the scene which greeted me as I parked my Land Rover on the pavement and deployed one of Echo Company’s Troops (about 35 strong) in full riot gear between the two sides, with orders to keep them apart at all costs.

  A great pall of black smoke hung over us, and the cacophony of noise and shouting threatened to drive all rational thought out of the brain. In front of me there was a crowd of about two thousand Catholics who had marched down from Unity Flats in Brown Square, about five hundred yards away. Behind me were about the same number of Protestants coming the other way. Each was determined to get at the other. The crowd in front of me had left a trail of burning cars behind them as they marched down the street, and one enterprising group of young men had even managed to get a lorry laden with straw bales from somewhere, set it alight and rolled it down the hill at us. Fortunately it had stopped about a hundred yards short and was now burning away merrily. Behind me they were launching all sorts of makeshift projectiles over our heads at the opposite side, and, somewhere in front, someone was firing a small calibre weapon (a pistol, I think), but from too far away to be a serious danger.

  The really serious threat came, not from firearms, but from the stones, bits of pavement and, above all, lethally sharp fragments of cast-iron drain covers which both crowds now started to throw at us – having now recognised that we were the common enemy they had to dispose of before they could deal with each other. Several of my Marines had already gone down, one with a very nasty head wound, and I was getting increasingly worried that if I did not pull back, or get reinforcements fast, we would be overrun. I was on the radio asking Alan Hooper to send in our reserve Troop, prepositioned in a quiet side street just round the corner, as fast as he could, when a huge mountain of female Shankill Road Protestant fury came charging up to me, bosoms heaving dangerously and face suffused with anger. ‘You fuckin’ English fuckin’ bastard,’ she screamed above the noise,

  What are you fuckin’ doing here? Why don’t you fuckin’ go back to fuckin’ England and fuckin’ leave us in fuckin’ peace? Can’t youse fuckin’ see you’re not fuckin’ wanted here? And anyway why can’t youse fuckin’ show any fuckin’ respect?

  The tirade rose to a crescendo, ending explosively:

  Can’t youse fuckin’ see? Youse’ve got your fuckin’ Land Rover parked outside our fuckin’ church and it’s a fuckin’ SUNDAY!

  I did not tell her I was a fellow-countryman, or that I would have dearly loved to be back in England at that particular moment, since neither fact seemed very relevant either to my fears about the situation, or to her concerns about our breach of church etiquette.

  A few moments later, the reserve troop arrived. But still our numbers were insufficient to restore the situation. Eventually neighbouring units had to be called in, increasing our numbers to more than a hundred, before the riot subsided, and people went home.

  In the following weeks we had a number of serious riots like this one, and it was after one of these, in the Bone area, that I came down in the morning to find a little tortoise-shell kitten sleeping on the front seat of my Land Rover. I called her Boney, after the riot of the night before, and took her home to Jane and the kids, who immediately adopted her as one of our family. She eventually became very widely travelled for a little Belfast moggie, for four years later we took her with us to Switzerland, where she used to insist on accompanying us on our boat whenever we went sailing on Lake Geneva.

  The crisis came to a peak in early November, just before we went home, when there was another nasty riot on the Crumlin Road, between the Catholics in the Ardoyne and the Protestants on the other side of the road. Once again we were caught in the middle. The rioting lasted all night, and several Marines were badly injured by stones and nail bombs, which, for the first time in Northern Ireland, began to appear in the rioters’ armoury. One of these seriously injured one of my Marines and blew me up against a wall, but left me otherwise unharmed. I was luckier than our much-loved and respected Colonel, Pat Griffiths, who received a near-fatal head wound from a flying rock and was lucky to survive.

  Active service is very often a mixture of the terrifying and the bizarre, and Northern Ireland proved no exception. One day in late October I was summoned to the military intelligence cell in Belfast headquarters. They explained that the Government had received a request from journalists working for the Chinese People’s Daily to visit Belfast with their cameramen. It was clear, they said, that the Chinese were intent on giving the worst possible picture of Northern Ireland (I refrained from saying that I didn’t see how it was possible to give a good one). They wanted me to be part of the ‘facilitation’ team that looked after the Chinese delegation, without letting them know that I could speak Chinese. My job would be to hang around, listen to what they said and report back. It seemed a pretty preposterous piece of espionage to me, but I went along with it, changing into civilian clothes and skulking around trying to catch what the journalists were talking about. The itinerary requested by the Chinese took us to one of my own Company locations, where the sight of their Company Commander trying to disguise his presence while carrying out this clandestine charade caused some initial puzzlement amongst my Marines, followed by open hilarity and much leg-pulling later. As my first foray into espionage, this was hardly successful either, for, though I heard and understood almost all they said, there was precisely nothing of any interest to anyone except themselves.

  Our tour in Belfast ended in mid-November, and we all returned home to a period of leave and a very welcome Christmas with our families. As usual, it was only when I got home that I realised what a burden all this had placed on Jane, who had had to look after Kate and Simon without any help from me, as well as coping with the strains of having a husband away in a battle zone. She told me that the one fixed point she and the children insisted on every night, was watching the Six-o’clock News ‘to see if they could see Daddy’, and the pictures of what was happening had horrified her and caused her sleepless nights, though she had, of course, kept her fears hidden from the children. Kate, aged five, was, however, more angry than horrified, and she developed the habit of accosting strange men in the supermarket and saying in a very loud voice, ‘My Daddy is in Belfast. Why aren’t you?’

  Belfast also made me much more aware of politics. Here is an extract from an article I wrote for the British Army Review in 1971:

  The truth of the matter is that the Services must nowadays be regarded as as much a part of the executive organ of Government as, say, the Tax Office or the Foreign Office or the Department of Trade and Industry. Yet we are singularly ill-equipped to fulfil this role. Ask a junior commander to include ‘Politics’ as one of the factors he should consider in a military appreciation, and he will probably react with horror. And yet I feel certain that this is what we must learn to accept. We are, after all, primarily and fundamentally political animals. By this I mean that both the stimulus for our actions and the results of them are essentially political in nature. This has, of course, probably always been true to a degree, but our increasingly close and obvious involvement in the political scene today makes it a fact we can afford to ignore no longer … we must clearly understand that a greater knowledge of politics and a more easy familiarity with its ways is an essential of modern-day soldiering, and one which we ignore at our peril.*

  In March the following year, I flew my Company up to Scotland to test their endurance and their ability to work in small groups. The exercise began with a night landing on a secluded beach on the Mull of Kintyre, after
which we did a series of night approach marches, lying up during the day, to Campbeltown, where we carried out a raid on nearby RAF Machrihanish. We then broke up into small groups of two or three and, using escape and evasion techniques, made our way to a rendezvous point with fishing vessels on the east coast of the Kintyre peninsula. These took us across the straits to the Isle of Arran, which had to be crossed close to its highest point, Goat Fell, at night in order to make the final dawn pick up on a beach near Lochranza on the north of the island. It was a tough exercise which required both endurance and skill, and I was very proud that, with very few exceptions, all my Marines made it to the final pick-up.

  When I crossed the shoulder of Goat Fell that night the sky was clear and blazing with stars, and a deep frost, sparkling under a full moon, lay over all the land below. As I crested the hill I saw the great shimmering expanse of the Firth of Clyde, pointing like a silver finger towards the loom of Glasgow’s lights in the distance and edged by the dark mass of the Ayrshire coast, spangled with towns and villages spilling down to its water’s edge. I am not a religious person but twice in my life I have had what I think were quasi-religious experiences, in which I felt, almost tangibly, the presence of something far beyond my comprehension and which was both sublime and omnipotent. One was in 1996, when I looked down from the top of Brunelleschi’s dome to see Florence and the Arno laid out at my feet; the other was on that March night on Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran.