Return to Killybegs

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.

But Lawrence refused to leave. In 1923, his parents had held out as they were gradually surrounded by deserted houses with gaping windows. One evening, Mother’s brother spoke more than he intended to. He said that every part of Ireland was our home, from Dublin to Belfast, from Killybegs to 19 Sandy Street. He said that they were the foreigners — the Protestants, the Unionists — those descendents of colonizers who had usurped our houses and lands thanks to Cromwell’s sword. He said that we had the same rights as them, and were due the same consideration. He said it was a question of dignity. And I listened to him. And I heard my father. I loved my father through my uncle’s anger. Lawrence Finnegan, he was Padraig Meehan minus the alcohol and the blows.

My uncle had stopped drinking ten years previously. His car had overturned one evening on his way back from Derry, hit a pole, then a tree and rolled into the ditch. He and Hilda were returning from the doctor’s surgery. The results of his wife’s tests were not good. They would not be having children, ever. Nothing but him and her, every morning, every evening, all the days of their lives. And that’s the way it would be until one of them died and the other followed. On the way home, they drank to forget. They crossed over the border in tears, shouting at the Brits through the open window. Long live the Republic! And there it was again at last! And he lost control on Irish soil. The car turned over. Lawrence lived. Hilda died. Since then, my uncle had replaced drunkenness with silence.

We were in the middle of saying our evening prayers when the Protestants entered Sandy Street on Sunday, 4 January 1942. They smashed through our door with an axe and threw lit torches into the hallway. Lawrence tipped the couch over to protect us. The girls came tearing down from the first floor, screaming. Mother was holding baby Sara by a leg, her head hanging down. Seánie had his hurley in his hand and my uncle roared at him not to move, not to try a thing, to hide with us behind the velvet cushions.

— You clear out of here tomorrow! shouted a man’s voice.

I didn’t see him. I saw nobody. I had my head between my knees and my eyes closed. My sisters, brothers and mother were all around me on the ground, our arms and legs tangled together. They came in. They broke the windows, tearing off the lattice of sticky paper that protected the panes from the German bombs. They broke the soup tureen from Galway. They tore up the photo of Pope Pius XII. They destroyed everything, trampled everything. They went upstairs, avoiding us, running past on either side of our shelter. There were eleven of us, all on top of one another, taking refuge under a sofa upturned against a wall. That is to say naked, exposed and defenceless. They could have killed us, but they didn’t. They stepped over us, ignored us. They didn’t speak. They vandalized everything familiar without a word. They only existed in the noise of their steps and their breathing. They even tore the head off Dodie Dum, baby Sara’s soother. They upset everything, and then they left.

— Tomorrow! the voice shouted again.

Seánie was the first to go outside, stick in hand and tears in his eyes. He was the oldest of the Meehans, the head of the family, and he had failed. He was the only one left to replace our father and he hadn’t done it. He was in the deserted street shouting at the bastards, his wooden stick useless. Lawrence was throwing buckets of water on the flames licking the living-room curtains. The fire was roaring in the girls’ room. We no longer had a choice. It was time. We had held on up until that point, a few months, a few days more. Most of our neighbours had given in. We were the last, or near enough. I can still see my uncle bringing Seánie back into our hostile house, a hand on his neck, telling him that what was needed now was to save what could be saved. And also that he, Seánie, had protected us. That protecting was better than killing. That we all owed him our lives. I remember my brother’s face. He looked at my uncle, trying to grasp what he had just been told. And then he rushed to the first floor to snatch some clothes from the inferno.

Later, while the roof burned, Seánie came back with the last bags. Áine, wee Kevin and Brian slowly circled him. My brother crouched down. He hugged them to himself, all wrapped up together, an armful of frightened children being told, ‘I love you.’

When Lawrence’s truck arrived in Dholpur Lane, the residents came out to meet us.

— The families from Sandy Street! a kid yelled.

It was four in the morning, 6 January. The front doors along the street opened almost simultaneously, as though the neighbourhood had been waiting for us. The women had slipped their coats on over their nightclothes. Men lowered the tailgate to help out a family in tatters. We’d been able to save two mattresses, four chairs, the kitchen table and some clothes.

I was carrying a mattress on my head. It was bending down in front and behind me, threatening to topple at every step and blocking my vision. Brian, Niall and Seánie were carrying the table. Róisín, Mary and Áine were laden with bags of clothes. Wee Kevin was dragging a chair along the street. Mother’s load was baby Sara, and also our plaster Virgin, which she held pressed against her child. A woman wrapped them up in a blanket.

Around twenty young lads rushed towards us with wheelbarrows. They piled up the bags, the table and the chairs. A young man was giving them short orders. They called him Tom. An officer deploying soldiers sprang to mind.

— You want some help?

I looked at Tom without responding. He was a tall, dark-haired lad, not much older than I was. He lifted the mattress off my head and we carried it together as far as number seventeen, a black and red door that had been opened for us.

My uncle was broken. I had never seen him like that. With his back against an orange streetlight, he was staring down at his shadow on the ground. He seemed indifferent to everything. A few men surrounded him. One of them placed a hand on his shoulder. Lawrence had brought us out of the inferno. And now that we were saved, he was trying to pull himself together. He was cold and afraid. His face was covered in grime and soot, like when he came home from work after battling chimneys. He was alone. He had lost everything.

Tom put the mattress down in a corner of the room. He had carried it on his own in the end and I had followed him. I looked at our new street, the neighbours’ faces, the reassuring Virgins against the frozen windows.

— It’s not big, but you’ll be able to breathe here, Tom said.

The guy had his fists on his hips. He was looking everywhere at once, as though surveying the street.

— There’s no need to be afraid of anything here, isn’t that right? my mother asked him.

Tom smiled. Here? Nothing would ever happen to us here. We were at home, in the heart of the ghetto. Protected by our numbers and our anger.

— And also by the IRA, our host added.

The IRA. I shuddered. Lawrence noticed. He shrugged and asked me to help him carry the table instead of standing around with empty hands.

The IRA. No longer three black letters, painted in a hateful smear across our wall. No longer a condemnation heard on the radio. No longer something to be afraid of, an insult, the devil’s other name. Now it was a hope, a promise. It was my father’s flesh, his entire life, his memory and his legend. It was his pain, his loss, the defeated army of our country. I’d never heard those three letters uttered by any lips but his. And here was a strapping young lad daring to smile about them in the middle of a street.

The IRA. Suddenly, I saw them everywhere. In that guy smoking a pipe and carrying blankets. Those women in shawls who wrapped us in their silence. That old man crouching on the pavement repairing our oil lamp. I saw it in the lads who were helping to ease our exile. I saw it behind every window, every curtain pulled to mislead the planes. I saw it in the air that was thick with turf smoke, in the day that was breaking. I felt it within me. In me, Tyrone Meehan, sixteen years old, son of Padraig and of Ireland’s soil. Chased from my village by misery, banished from my neighbourhood by the enemy. The IRA, me.

I offered Tom my hand. Like two men shaking on a deal. He looked at it, looked at me and hesitated.

And then he smiled once more. His palm was freezing, his fingers firm.

— Tyrone Meehan, I said.

We were in the middle of the street. I would have liked to have seen myself at that moment. I felt certain that this outstretched hand was my first manly gesture.

— Tom Williams.

He looked at me for a moment and then added:

— Lieutenant Thomas Joseph Williams, C Company, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade in the Irish Republican Army.

He laughed at my wide eyes.

— I’m nineteen. Just call me Tom.

I joined the IRA on 10 January 1942, four days after we arrived in Dholpur Lane. Actually, not the IRA, not exactly. I was too young. Nobody in the area knew us. Being driven away by Loyalists was not enough to establish confidence. Like Tom before me and numerous IRA volunteers, I first joined Na Fianna Éireann, the Republic’s boy scouts. Since 1939 the Fianna were very diminished. They were forbidden in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, hounded and imprisoned on both sides of the border. Those who had tasted life in British prisons said that men in Irish jails had no reason to be envious.

Every Republican neighbourhood had its own youth unit. The IRA was divided into brigades and battalions. We were gathered into cumainn.

Our local meeting place on Kane Street was tiny and dark. It contained a table, a few chairs and a boxing ring. It looked like a sports hall, not a Republican headquarters. I spent my time between the ropes, fists raised in front of my eyes. We learned to punch without hesitating and to be punched without reacting. The lad in charge of us was called Daniel ‘Danny’ Finley, who showed no feelings or warmth and didn’t utter one word more than was strictly necessary. He was my age. His family had fled the Short Strand area after his twin brother, Declan, was lynched.

Declan was on his way back from secondary school in his Catholic uniform, with its green tie striped with ochre and the St Comgall coat of arms. The pavement was covered in rubble. He hesitated, then crossed the road, stepping over the invisible line that separated the two communities, and walked along the other pavement, on the Protestant side. He wasn’t trying to provoke anyone or start anything. He was making a detour to avoid a crumbling building.

A truck transporting timber drove past. Sitting on top of the stacked planks were a dozen Protestant schoolboys in blue blazers. One of them shouted, ‘Hey! A fucking Taig!’

Taig. Fucking Fenian. Filthy papist. The favourite insult of Loyalists in short pants. Declan raced back across the street and hit the kerb. He fell over, shouting. The blues pounced on him. He tried to protect himself by lying on his side, eyes closed, head between his fists and knees pressed against his chest. A child in his mother’s belly. They hit him with their knees, their fists. One boy jumped with both feet together on his head. Another threw a concrete block on his chest. And then they ran off, catching up with the truck at the crossroads and jumping back on, singing:

— At home! At home! This is our home!

A man cautiously opened his door, others moved towards the victim. A woman came out with a glass of water. All Catholic, all living along this street. Some adults looked on from the other side of the street.

Declan Finley died, his face crushed and his fists clenched. When the emergency services arrived, the boy’s spilled blood was brown, thick, mingled with the dust. With the aid of his walking stick, an old man crouched down. He dipped his right hand in the puddle and crossed the street, palm raised. On the opposite footpath stood a hundred silent figures. They parted. The nationalist carefully smeared the blood on their footpath. A man moved forward, two others held him back. The old man returned, turning his back to them.

The paramedics lifted Declan into an ambulance. On the other side, some kids were rubbing away the martyr’s blood by scraping their shoes on the ground.

That was just before the war. The Finley family left the ghetto to take refuge in west Belfast. Like so many others. Again, and again, and again. Coming from the north and the east of the city, Catholics were arriving in their hundreds and piling up in the brick catacombs.

I respected Daniel, but he frightened me. In the ring he punched like there was nothing to hold him back. One day, his nose bled in a torrent. He took off his gloves, wiped himself with both hands, then smeared the face of the guy who had dealt him the blow, his drenched, sticky fingers covering the terrified face. I was relieved to be on his side, on that of the Irish Republic, James Connolly, Tom Williams, on my father’s side. I sincerely pitied the guys who had to face us.

One Saturday in February 1942 I took part in my first military operation. For several months, the Northern Command had been collecting all available arms hidden in the Republic since the War of Independence. Some volunteers were crossing the border that night to hand the weapons over to the four Belfast battalions. We were children. We didn’t know much about this great countrywide relocation, and it was well after the war that we learned the scale of these clandestine transportations. Under the orders of the Republican Army Council, close to twelve tonnes of arms, munitions and explosives had been moved over fields on foot, in trucks, carts, on the backs of men and women, and without the British or Irish army suspecting anything.

That night, Tom Williams came to headquarters to pick out two Fianna.

— Can you whistle, Tyrone?

I told him yes, of course, since forever.

— Whistle.

I brought my two index fingers to my lips.

My father used to love my whistle, my mother hated it. In Killybegs, it was the Meehan gang’s signal for when we came across Timmy Gormley and his lot. Father Donoghue used to say that only the devil’s call could pierce the human ear in that way.

I whistled.

Tom didn’t look surprised. He simply nodded his head.

— In case of danger, I want them to hear you in Dublin.

Daniel whistled without his fingers. He rolled his upper lip and stuck his tongue to his bared teeth.

— Danny and Tyrone, ordered Lieutenant Williams as he headed out the door.

He and I received a dozen pats on the back. The other boys were pleased for us, and proud, too.

In the street, a woman and a girl were waiting for us to come out. I knew the first one, a fighter from Cumann na mBan, the IRA women’s organization. The girl probably belonged to Cumann na gCailíní, the Republican girl scouts. Tom walked in front, we followed in silence. Five shadows on the street.

— Tyrone.

The OC had whispered. Without stopping, he indicated the corner of O’Neill Street and Clonard Street with a jerk of his chin, tossing me a white sliotar edged in black. I caught it in one hand without thinking. A hurling ball signed by the Armagh team. Why? As a front? Of course, no question about it. You had to understand with a glance or stay back at headquarters. I took up my position and threw the sliotar against the wall so it bounced back into my palm. A kid passing the time.

Tom continued on his way.

— Danny.

Daniel Finley took up his position opposite me, on the other side of the road, facing Odessa Street. A bike was waiting for him, turned upside down against the wall, tyres in the air and the chain hanging off. My comrade knelt down, as though fixing it. The young girl went down as far as the corner of the Falls Road with her officer, and they stood there in a porch, like a mother and daughter.

Everything happened too quickly. Daniel was bent over his bike, the streets were empty. Then two cars pulled up. Eight men got out at a run, their arms weighed down. The IRA. Four turned into Odessa Street, the others passed in front of me.

—’Bout ye, Tyrone, a guy whispered to me.

I didn’t recognize him, didn’t even look at him. I was keeping watch over my corner of Ireland, my brick street, my wee soldier’s patch. I only saw the steel of the guns flashing in the light of a window whose curtains hadn’t been properly closed. Guns. Guns from the war. Republican arms. I’d never seen their metal, never imagined the wood of their butts, and there they were by the armload, flying past me within arm’s reach, wrapped in grey blankets.

Doors were opened. Men entered houses, backyards, tiny gardens. The cars left again. Tom came back alone. He passed right beside me. His face, his lowered eyes, his hurried profile. He was whistling ‘God Save Ireland’. He went back up towards Clonard Street. I was almost disappointed. I had imagined a wink or a word. Across the way, Daniel righted the bicycle and headed off as well. It was his eleventh time being a lookout. He knew how these things finished.

— You can call me Danny, Finley threw at me without turning.

So I left my wall. I put the sliotar in my pocket and went back to Dholpur Lane. I was walking differently. I was someone else. I passed a couple, a woman with her child, a young girl who was carrying her gas mask over her shoulder like a stylish bag. They didn’t notice me, even though I was a Fianna now, an Irish warrior. An IRA soldier, almost. In a few days, at seventeen years of age, I would join Tom Williams and the others. I’d be the one on the street, running through the cold night, weighed down for combat. I’d be brushing past an open-mouthed back-up Fianna in short pants. I’d secretly slip him his name. I’d be the one he watched vanish into our obscurity. It would be me, Tyrone Meehan. And I would be whistling ‘God Save Ireland’.

For the time being, though, either sitting on the ground or with my back against the ropes of the boxing ring, I was studying. I had left school to take up Republican education. Teachers used to move from cumann to cumann educating the Fianna. I had everything to learn about our country’s history. All I knew of our struggle was from my father’s stumbling drunken words and gesticulations. Though I knew the major dates and hallowed names, it was without having grasped their significance. My credo was infantile: ‘Brits out!’ I had inherited that certainty from my father, but nothing else.

One particular day, our class was tense and the group was divided. Our teacher was a woman. For an hour she had been explaining that the war currently devastating Europe was no concern of either our party, our army, or our people, but that perhaps we could gain something from it.

On the makeshift board consisting of some slates attached to a wooden surface, she wrote the phrase delivered in 1916 by James Connolly, the Irish trade unionist, soldier and martyr: ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland!’ On that Easter Monday, while the British were fighting alongside the Americans and the French in the trenches of the Somme, and the Northern Irish Protestants who had joined the king’s army en masse were being cut to pieces in their thousands in the front line, the Irish Republicans were rebelling in the very heart of Dublin. A handful of brave men bearing arms. ‘Treason! You’ve stuck a knife in our back!’ the English had howled.

— Treason? But who had we betrayed? What had we betrayed? the teacher asked.

We weren’t allied with the British but occupied by their soldiers, tortured by their police and imprisoned under their laws. So this war was weakening them and making us stronger.

We listened as she recounted the takeover of the GPO by the insurgents, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed outside it, the savage crackdown, the crushing of the Rising and the execution post for each of our leaders, one by one. This bloody failure that wasn’t a failure. This badly doused flame that would set the entire country alight.

We had the right to ask questions, and it was Danny Finley who raised his hand. He suggested that there was a difference between 1916 and 1942, between an imperialist slaughter and a world war, between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. He asked whether, along with the whole of Ireland, the IRA should reconsider its neutrality. I remember that moment. There were about twenty of us in the Kane Street headquarters.

— You want to lecture the IRA, Finley? asked another Fianna.

And they all started talking at the same time. Our role was not to criticize but to obey. The Army Council, the Northern Command, Sinn Féin’s Ard Chomhairle, all these men knew what was right for Ireland.

I had taken out Tom’s sliotar and was rolling it between my palms. Danny didn’t back off.

— And what will happen if an IRA combatant kills an American by accident? Can you tell me what would happen then?

— Why would the IRA kill an American?

— Because there are thirty million of them, because they’re everywhere, in cities, in the countryside. Can you imagine it? A Republican combatant mistaking his target? An óglach aiming at an English soldier takes down a Yankee who’s handing out chocolate and biscuits to kids?

— You watch too many films, Danny!

I raised my hand. I came to his aid.

— My father was a socialist as well as a Republican and wanted to fight the Francoists in Spain. Now Franco and Hitler are hand in hand, but where are we?

— Do you know who was the leader of the Connolly Column of the International Brigades? the teacher asked.

Of course I knew. My father had never met him but he’d talked about him for a long time as our future leader.

— With Frank Ryan, we’ll crush the Irish fascists, the Blueshirts, all those dirty Brits! my father used to say.

For him, ‘British’ was synonymous with bastard. On the street or in the pub, any guy who wound him up was a Brit.

— Frank Ryan, I replied.

— And do you know where Frank Ryan is today?

No. I didn’t know. I imagined he was probably imprisoned in Spain or dead.

— In Berlin, the teacher continued.

I was flabbergasted. Frank Ryan, the socialist, the internationalist, the red, in Berlin? I sat there with my mouth agape.

— A problem for Great Britain means a solution handed to Ireland, our teacher reiterated.

We were just kids. I looked at my friends’ faces. We wanted to fight for the liberty of our country, to honour her memory, preserve her terrible beauty. Our treaties and alliances mattered little. We were ready to die for one another. Truly. And some amongst us would keep that promise.

I asked no more questions, and Danny kept his to himself.

He and I were going to wage war against the English, as our fathers had done before us. And our grandfathers, too. Asking questions was like laying down our arms.

At the end of February 1942, an IRA man entrusted me with my first pistol.

Tom Williams had posted us all over the quarter. As a sign of recognition, the girls wore green bows in their hair. The boys were all wore the red and white scarf of the Cliftonville Football Club. It was a weekday. The Belfast Solitude stadium was closed.

— There’s no match today, lads! we were told by laughing men when they saw us heading solemnly up the road.

The Republican soldiers could spring up at any moment. We were waiting for them, posted at crossroads. I was standing under a porch, leaning against the wall of an unfamiliar house. When the IRA man arrived, I jumped. He was running, his hand under his coat and his tie flying back over his shoulder. He handed me a gun. He had just wounded a soldier with a bullet in the neck. I took the weapon from him with both hands, stuffed it down my trousers, pressed flat against my belt. I crossed the road. My whole body was quivering. After a few metres a woman I had never met came up to me. She was carrying a football in a willow basket. She handed it to me without a word, then took my hand. I was slightly ashamed. I was a sixteen-year-old Fianna in active service being led along by this woman as though I were her small child.

— Someone will take you in charge. Let yourself be led, Tom had told me.

The armoured cars were surrounding the enclave. At the roadblocks, the police were searching the men, their arms in the air. A soldier beckoned us to come forward, the woman with her basket, me with my ball. In front of him the woman treated me like I was a good-for-nothing. In a very sharp, harsh and unpleasant tone she cursed the heavens aloud for having given birth to such an idiot. The British man hesitated. He threw me a sympathetic look, at once kindly and complicit — an expression of one unfortunate child recognizing another. He waved us through, and I smiled back at him, not to escape him, but to thank him.

This demonstration of humanity has haunted me for a long time. And bothered me for a long time. There couldn’t possibly be a man under that helmet, surely he was only a barbarian. To think the contrary was to falter, to betray. My father had taught me that. Tom used to reiterate it. I walked more quickly, still holding that woman’s hand, my mother in war, her child in combat. And I never spoke of that encounter to anyone, ever. Nor did I describe that look, or admit my smile.

We went to Donegal’s, a pub on the Falls Road. The room was packed. As soon as he saw us, the boss opened the security door that opened on to the backyard where two men were waiting for me, sitting on beer kegs. My arms were dangling. One of them opened my coat. When he saw the butt of the gun, he paled.

— Fucking idiot! he murmured, removing the handgun with care.

The other guy shook his head.

— What did I do?

The first man looked at me. It was as though he’d only just noticed my presence.

— Who? You, Fianna?

— Nothing, me lad, you were perfect, the other replied.

Then he turned back to the gun.

I found myself in the street, stomach bare, without that deadly weight between my skin and my shirt. My teeth were chattering. I’d had time to see the handgun. The IRA man had handed it to me with the hammer raised, ready to shoot. I had taken it from him carelessly, buried it in my trousers like a dirty magazine to show my pals. My finger had hit the deck plate, brushed against the trigger. The slightest pressure and it would have gone off. I had walked like that for fifteen long minutes, its barrel crushed against my member. Death was on the prowl. It had let me off, I must have made it smile.