We had just gone to bed. Sheila’s image was flashing behind my eyelids when I closed my eyes. She said I had a ‘country’ accent. I wanted to try my best to imitate hers. I was sinking into my night, Seánie’s back against mine, pushing away his cold leg. Suddenly everything shook. There was an unholy din, a crash of steel, of smashed metal, very low above the houses.
—Fuck, those are planes! my brother said.
He got up, looked at the ceiling. He switched on the light. We could hear the screech of sirens. Panic on the stairs. A terrified rabble. Mother was grey, baby Sara in tears, my sisters in their night faces. Wee Kevin’s mouth hung open, Niall had a crazed look. Uncle Lawrence came in and asked us to get dressed quickly. The first bomb knocked Brian to the floor, just the noise. My brother fell flat on his back, his eyes rolled back in his head. Lawrence gathered him up in his arms. He spoke loudly and rapidly. He said we had nothing to fear. That the German planes had already come but that they didn’t bomb our neighbourhoods, that they attacked the city centre, the port, the stations, the barracks, the rich but not the destitute.
—Not the poor! Don’t kill the poor! my mother prayed, going out to the street.
We had reformed our pathetic caterpillar, each of us clinging to the other by the corner of a garment. Lawrence was at the head of the line. Families were spilling out, leaving their doors open. Fear distorted their faces. It was almost midnight. The moon was full, the clear sky had stripped the city. The planes were above us, below us, overwhelming our senses, roaring right inside our bellies. We didn’t dare look at them. We lowered our heads for fear of being struck by their wings. The city was burning in the distance, but none of our houses was alight.
—Lord spare us! my mother cried, pressing her cheek against baby Sara’s.
At the end of the street there was a huge explosion, a white burst of flame flowered in the chapel where we were going to take shelter. The sound of war. Real, staggering. The storm of men. The crowd was in chaos, suddenly on the ground, thrown, knocked down, heaped in screaming disorder along the walls. Some of them died where they stood, open-mouthed. Others collapsed helplessly.
We formed a ring of fear, our backs to the danger. Lawrence knelt down, Mother and the wee ones in the centre. Seánie, Róisín, Mary, my uncle and I were protecting them. We were wrapped around one another, heads pressed together and eyes closed.
—Don’t look at the flashes, they’ll blind you! screamed a woman.
We repeated the Hail Mary, faster and faster, tearing through the words. We were repenting. Mother was no longer praying, she had abandoned that familiar peace. Rosary wrapped around her wrist, a bracelet of beads, she was screaming at Mary the way you howl at the moon. She was calling out for her to protect us in the middle of the inferno.
We were never able to reach the O’Neill factory with its enormous basement. We stayed where we were until the war grew weary. The planes went away, disappeared behind the black mountains. And we returned amid the rubble. Our street was intact. Houses were burning just behind it. The entire northern section of the city had been demolished.
—The Protestants got what they deserved, growled a guy as he looked at the red and black sky above York Street.
—You think the Jerries can tell the difference? a neighbour asked.
The guy looked at him angrily.
—What’s bad for the Brits is good for us!
It was four in the morning. Everything stank of acrid fire. With the help of the Blessed Virgin, Mother put her wee ones to bed. She was speaking to her, thanking her in a low voice. My mother’s face: dreadful tears, smeared with snot and foamy saliva, hair tumbling. She pleaded with her. She should no longer turn away from our family. She needed to be there, always. Okay? Promise? Promise me, Mary! Promise me!
Lawrence took his trembling sister by the shoulders and folded her into his chest.
In the morning, I walked with Seánie and my uncle through Belfast for the first time in my life. The silence was shattered, the city turned upside down. All around you could hear the sound of glass, of shifting steel, fallen rubble. We stumbled amongst the blocks, the piles of bricks, the wood ripped away from timber structures. Beams blocked off avenues, lying between electricity poles and tram cables. The post-catastrophe dust lay over everything. White and grey smoke, fire flickering beneath the ruins. At the centre of vacant lots, bombs had hollowed out craters that were now filled with muddy water. We came across a car engulfed by a fountain of street. Men were wandering around, hands black, sooty faces, trousers and coats covered in ash. Others were standing at crossroads, beyond alone, speechless, their gaze devastated. There were very few women about. We heard the occasional uneven clopping of a horse passing, or a wheelbarrow. The locals clattered along on bicycles, matching the rhythm of the surrounding cacophony. Some students were standing in front of a building whose facade was missing, shovels in their hands. Four of them in medical-faculty uniform were carrying a wounded person.
And then I saw my first casualty of war, a few feet away. One arm was sticking out from under a blanket on a stretcher that lay on the ground. A woman’s arm, her nightdress melted onto her flesh. Seánie put a hand over my eyes. I shook him off.
—Let him look, my uncle told him.
I looked. The arm of the woman, her hand with its painted nails, skin hanging from the elbow to the wrist like a torn sleeve. We passed very close to her. The shape of the head underneath the fabric, her chest and then nothing, the blanket sagged from around the level of her waist. No legs left. In the street a newspaper vendor was selling the Belfast Telegraph. He was yelling about the hundreds dead, the thousand wounded. As for me, I saw an arm. I didn’t cry. I did the same as everyone else who passed. I touched my index and middle fingers to my forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. In the name of the Father and all the others. I decided to no longer be a child.
On Jennymount Street there was a man playing the piano, sitting on a wooden chair. The instrument had been rescued from the blaze and pulled outside, with its film of ash and debris. A few children had drawn near, their mothers with them, and some soldiers, too. I knew that song. I’d often heard it on Irish radio. ‘Guilty’, a love song.
If it’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you ...
The musician was making faces. Winking. He was imitating Al Bowlly, the Killybegs girls’ favourite singer.
—Pity he isn’t Irish, my mother had said one day.
—Good job he isn’t, my father had responded.
And he would turn the dial on the radio that sat on the counter of Mullin’s. It was a game they played. My father would have challenged Bowlly at singing if he could, him with his gravelly voice, Bowlly with his honey.
—The voice of a eunuch, Padraig Meehan used to say.
He was wrong, and he knew it. But nothing British was allowed to offend our ears. Neither order nor song.
London was bombed two days after Belfast, on 17 April. Al Bowlly died in his home, blown up by a parachute mine. His ballad was aired on the BBC as a funeral hymn.
In front of a gutted house on the Crumlin Road, a crowd was gathered around several firemen. They weren’t wearing firemen shoes and their coats were drenched by the fire hoses.
—Those are Irishmen from Ireland! a man shouted.
Their captain was giving curt orders. I immediately recognized an accent from my country. I saw the Dublin Fire Brigade truck. Irishmen. Thirteen fire brigades had crossed the border in the morning, from Dundalk and Drogheda, too. The residents were offering them coffee and bread. Irishmen. I went closer. I wanted everyone to know that they were from my country. Each time a passer-by joined the crowd I would tell them the good news. The Irish had come to help. I could see the border soldier with his blond moustache and his thin lips. I replayed the scene.
—Have you come to fight the Jerries?
—You bet!
An old woman arrived with her arms in the air like a prisoner. She had mistaken the
Dublin accent for a German one. She was removing debris from her house. She was groggy, covered in soot and bits of plaster. When people pointed out the Irish fire engine she sat down on the pavement, shaking her head, convinced now that the blast of the bombs had thrown her to the other end of the country.
The crowd was spilling into the street. A few soldiers broke it up. They pushed a journalist from the Belfast Telegraph away and confiscated his camera. Ireland was neutral and its presence here, assisting a combatant country, even just fighting fires, could embarrass the Irish government. Our firemen went back across the border the same day.
Our sadness turned to anger. I listened to the crushed city, the fragmented discourse. ‘I never did like washing the windows. Now I’ve a good reason not to do it any more,’ a shopkeeper had written on his cracked shop window. At the corner of Victoria Street and Ann Street, perched on a breeze block, a man was shouting that Northern Ireland was unprotected. That even the least important English town had shelters, anti-aircraft defences, troops, real fire services.
—Do you know how many anti-aircraft guns we have here, do you? shouted the man.
He was waiting for a response, but most people continued on their way, ashamed to lend him an ear.
—Twenty-odd in the whole of Ulster! And anti-aircraft shelters? Four! Only four, counting the public toilets on Victoria Street! And spotlights? How many? Eh? How many beams for tracking the planes? A dozen! There were over two hundred bombers last night, Fritz’s best, eh? Junkers! Dorniers! And as for us, what did we have?
—Damned papist! a guy passing yelled without turning.
The speaker shook his fist at him.
—Imbecile! I’m a loyal Protestant! British like you! A member of Coleraine’s Orange Order, so spare me your lecture!
And then he got down from his breeze block. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and put his limp hat back on while muttering once more:
—Imbecile!
A Protestant. It was the first time in my life I’d seen one.
3
Killybegs, Sunday, 24 December 2006
I have often come back to Killybegs, to my father’s house. Even now there is still no electricity or running water. I left the cottage as it was. In memory of my mother, crouched before the fireplace, rekindling the embers, hands cupped around her lips, and of my father, sitting at the table, fists under his chin, waiting for the rain to stop.
My wife Sheila never liked coming here with me. She used to say that the house was a tomb. That Padraig Meehan’s evil shadow flickered across my face when I was under his roof. My brothers and sisters never came back. United States, England, Australia, New Zealand. Apart from baby Sara, they all opted for exile. So I kept the key. I alone. I kept it as though protecting some scrap of memory. Since the Sixties it’s here I have always come to take refuge. To escape Belfast, the city, the fear, the British. To cross the border, find the Ireland that still belongs to our flag. I come from time to time, for a few days or a few weeks, to draw the water from the well, to shiver in front of the black hearth. To walk in the forest and gather the armful of wood for the night. To be startled by nothing but the crackling of the fire. I put a new coat of whitewash on the thick walls. I repaired the slate roof. I chopped down the old diseased elm tree, but kept the huge fir. Over all these years, with nothing to hurry me, fearing nobody, I came here on retreat. A hermit, a monk from our monasteries, a recluse.
I have often come back to my father’s house, but when I arrived here four days ago, I came to die. Without my wife, without my son. Alone, off a bus from Dublin. Sheila joined me two days later, for an hour. She brought me supplies, beer, vodka, Seánie’s hurley, and then she left again to go back to Belfast. I didn’t want her to stay. Too dangerous. Jack should be coming to see me in early January.
On the kitchen wall I drew a rough calendar in black pencil, similar to the ones we used to make in prison so as not to lose track of time: 24 December 2006. One stroke per day and a cross through each week. For the first three days I managed to stay inside. The cottage had become my den. I barricaded the door from the inside, blocking the handle with a plank. Sheila had sewn me some dark curtains. At night, I drew them carefully before lighting my candles.
My wife and son had begged me to avoid Mullin’s. They feared for my life. They were right, no doubt. After three days shut away in my father’s house, though, I gave up hiding.
That morning, I walked into the village to buy a notebook and some pens. I have the urge to write. Not to confess, and certainly not to offer explanations, but to recount, to leave a trace. Then I walked along the harbour, the bog, along the edge of the wintery forest. I was just an old man, cap down over my eyes and wearing a jacket that has seen better days. Nobody would recognize me as Meehan the traitor. Not even that bastard Timmy Gormley, who had never budged from the street he grew up on, and who would surely die one day crossing it with shuffling footsteps.
—Someone will recognize you. Go back to the cottage, my wife begged.
She wanted to live with me here, in spite of everything. But I refused. Too risky. Belfast had become stifling for her, so she had gone to Strabane to stay with a friend.
—They’ll come, she whispered.
Of course, they will come. They had already come, for that matter. When I arrived here, I cleaned off the word ‘Traitor!’ that was smeared in black tar over the whitewashed wall. But what am I meant to do? Wait in Belfast, or here, behind the curtains of the house or in front of my pint in the pub, what difference will it make? They will come, I know that.
I had decided. Every evening, I’ll walk through the door of Mullin’s, drink the Guinness my father drank, sit at his round table against the wall, between the dartboard and the jacks. My father’s window, his doorway, his drunken front steps. Today, even my first pint was for him. I drank it with my eyes closed. And then I looked around the pub. Everything had changed; nothing had changed. It was smaller than in my schoolboy’s memory. The smells had lost their intensity. Posters had replaced the framed drawings on the walls. The voices were softer, the laughter absent. But on the floor, close to the table, you could see the mark from the old stove that used to be crammed with turf. The wooden floor still bore the scuffs of old footfalls, spilled drinks, cigarette burns. Shards of our past were everywhere.
I felt good. I took the sliotar out of my pocket, the hurling ball Tom Williams had given me sixty years previously. When he threw it to me one night in the middle of the street it was white, almost new. He had used it once, in a friendly match against an Armagh team. The captain from the opposing team was fifteen years old. He and his lads had hammered Belfast. As a tribute to the losing team they had signed the sliotar and given it to Tom as a gift. Today the names were worn away. The ball was the colour of slate after rain. The leather was flaking and the seams were split, like the wrinkled skin of an old man. Inside, the cork was black and hard as a peat briquette. It wasn’t even round any more, or smooth, or even a ball at that. A burst prune. The talisman of a condemned man.
I placed the notebook on the round table. It was a schoolchild’s copybook with an emerald-green cover. I stroked it with the flat of my hand for a long time before even opening it. I hesitated. I wanted to write ‘Tyrone Meehan’s Journal’ on the cover, but that sounded too pretentious. ‘Confessions’ didn’t have the right ring to my ear, either. Nor ‘Revelations’. So I wrote nothing at all on the front. I opened the copybook, pressing the central fold flat with my fist.
On my sixth pint, I wrote a few words on the first page:
Now that everything is out in the open, they will all speak in my place – the IRA, the British, my family, my close friends, journalists I’ve never even met. Some of them will go so far as to explain how and why I ended up a traitor. It incenses me that books may well be written about me. Do not listen to any of their claims. Do not trust my enemies, and even less my friends. Ignore those who will say they
knew me. Nobody has ever walked in my shoes, nobody. The only reason I am speaking out now is because I am the only one who can tell the truth. Because after I’m gone, I hope for silence.
I dated it: Killybegs, 24 December 2006. I signed my name and then I left to go home.
I went back up the street, passed the village limit. I went back to the damp and pitch-black house, Tom’s sliotar gripped in my hand, inside my pocket. I wasn’t drunk, I was dizzy, relieved, uneasy. I had just started my journal.
4
With Great Britain at war, we knew that living in north Belfast would become difficult. It began in August 1941 with a few rocks being hurled at our door. ‘Irish bastards’ was scrawled in black graffiti across Lawrence’s workshop. One night in September, we doused a petrol bomb thrown through the living-room window. Farther up along Sandy Street, a Catholic family decided to leave for the Republic. And then two others followed them from Mills Terrace. Every night Protestants used to creep into our neighbourhood and smear insults across the fronts of our houses. ‘Papist traitors out!’ ‘Catholic = IRA’. Lawrence kept a club next to his bed. Seánie would slip his hurley under the mattress. But we weren’t prepared for battle.
The Costello family retreated to the Beechmount neighbourhood just after Christmas. They did it in three trips, taking their time. I kissed Sheila again. Their house burned the same night.
The Loyalists were cleaning their streets. They were Protestant, British and at war. We were Catholic, Irish and neutral. Cowards or spies. They used to say that in the Republic of Ireland the towns left their lights on all night to show the Luftwaffe the way to Belfast. They used to say that in Northern Ireland we were the fifth column, the craftsmen of the German invasion. We were accused of preparing secret landing fields for their planes and paratroopers. We were foreigners, enemies. All they wanted was for us to cross back over the border or stay in our ghettos.