The terror of the Troubles: when the macabre was mundane

Saturday afternoon, March, 1931. The living room of 498 Donegal Road, Belfast. My mother was 23 months. Her first memories . . . yelps from the pram. Her four-year-old brother shouted to their mother who was upstairs scrubbing clothes. They heard: “Go away!” Wilf came back in snivelling, “Baby sick, baby sick.” As their father puffed on his pipe the pram shook. Their mother returned, dropped her basin, shouted. Father stumbled out the front door. A car arrived. Tubs were filled, baby naked, two big doctors snatched him from hot, to cold . . . Everyone wore black. White box, big pennies on his eyes . . . Her brothers returned to school. For years she backed into the living room corner, shaking as her mother re-enacted lengthy rituals to her eyes only.

“Now, Cecil, we’ll dress you for the last time. Put on your little boots.”

She started school on the Falls Road and was beaten every morning because Gran kept her late, standing at the front door, crazily heaping up four, five layers of ringlets. To help her brothers, she took over Gran’s role. Ever neurotic about Cecil’s death, Wilf trained to be a priest in England. He was found unsuitable, perturbed by the promotion of sex between seminarians. He joined the RAF. Mum trained at the Cooperative Society’s gymnasium near York Street and gave displays of vaulting and club-swinging in Portrush and Portadown parks beneath the Union flag. She dated a soldier during the war. On a holiday to Howth she took a wrong train to Donabate, got chatting to a certain youth called Paddy Moloney, stayed in his sister’s house, but thereafter ignored the love letters, finding him “too wrinkly” (even then). Saturday nights in Belfast, Catholics scurried from the cinema before the National Anthem started. Everyone knew each other then. Despite bitter struggle and inequality, they got along together. Humanity was deeper.

Civil rights

Civil “rights” only dawned as I was born, yet was more powerful than the brute force of bayonets, an idea whose hour had struck. Unionists dreaded inevitable submersion and IRA revival when Nelson’s Pillar was bombed for the Golden Jubilee of 1916. The UVF was established and began shooting Catholic civilians. Half a century ago my mother watched the TV pictures of RUC brutality at Derry’s second civil rights march. She was 39 and at first the Troubles seemed like . . . sorrow as usual.

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One autumn night spruce IRA boys broke through our back hedge, one in cowboy boots and wide-brimmed hat.

“Excuse me, we’re just trying to cut through. Is there a cut-through?”

Most days nervous British troops on foot patrol rested behind her cherry blossom. She chased them

“There’s no cut-through. These are private gardens. You can climb over that bit but you’ll face the same each garden.”

“Where can we go?”

Most days nervous British troops on foot patrol rested behind her cherry blossom. She chased them.

But everything quickly hardened. Unscrupulous Provos had splintered from official “Stickies”. Nearby homes of Protestants stood vacant. Unlike our parents, we were solely Catholicised in a new high-risk neighbourhood we didn’t dare leave. My parents whispered about Jean, nurse, widowed mother of 10, who came out of her Divis flat to comfort a soldier PIRA had shot. She was dragged from her children into a van, abducted across the Border and buried.

Sometimes a four-year-old watched us walk to school from behind the front gate of Crummey’s house on Finaghy Road North. We made it in safely the day Paul was shot by gunmen aiming at passing British troops. The family received a distant, official letter of regret for any suffering caused.

It was too much for our parish priest who later assembled us all in the schoolyard to assure our deaths before the weekend by Comet Kohoutek. He had been sucked into a global cult (derided in a Peanuts cartoon strip), inspiration for Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (recommended by big hippie brothers). I judged my causa mortis more likely to be crossfire on the trudge to St John the Baptist's.

Our ear-pulling teacher had been in the Campaign for Social Justice and interned. He distributed a novel, Snow Cloud Stallion, and retracted into glassy reverie while each boy read aloud and, predictably, mispronounced the name of the main character, Uncle Ira. It made it to my bedroom and in the summer of 1976 my sister explained the meaning of "stallion", that the novel was set in "Vermont" – elsewhere! I got hooked, but only recently did I learn that Snow Cloud was meant to be a reincarnation of Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, Vermont wing of the revolutionary army during the American Revolution. He was, in fact, the Vermont IRA.

August brought thunderstorms. The Vietnam War ended on TV. I wore Bay City Roller trews and avoided kids who vandalised our streets, manned barricades, halted juggernauts. British Land Rovers pursued gunmen in a hijacked Cortina and shot. It veered up the footpath into the railings of our school, injuring Mairead Corrigan’s sister and killing three of Anne’s children. Mark was spared by walking ahead. Mairead consequently channelled the population’s true emotions to an early peace movement and won the Nobel Prize with Betty Williams.

All embracing

To me, Uncle IRA was all-embracing, all-caring PIRA who beat Mairead Corrigan, wilfully deaf to the striking hour of the idea of peace which would later reward them. They ordered us to reject normality, relish the morbid, our only role: combatants. Minutiae was appropriated. The global future of inescapable marketing began with such social propagandists bent on war. Twentyfour-seven, in-your-face chilling tricolors, harps and rifles, fanatical Gaelic. Irishness: terror. Black and blood-red words demanded murder. Somehow, in the furnace of Divis, Jean McConville missed the message that humanity was wrong, we stand for barbarity!

The previous March our tree had shed too much pink confetti to the pavement, for it was set alight by girls I played marlies with, judged a poor symbol of support for communal armed struggle. Provos was painted on our silver gate. Dad yelled at Mum not to repaint at a time of civil disobedience. He hung up her old clubs by the front door.

But at the end of summer I accompanied her to Joe McCann’s paint shop on Andersonstown Road. His scraped saloon was parked on the layby. Business wasn’t great. At the counter he gave her fashion advice: any colour so long as it’s grey. Two long-haired youths in dark jerkins hurried in. One showed his open palm. Joe said, “Not this time.” It seems that, having previously permitted them to take his car, he had reconsidered his possible complicity in gangsterism.

An assistant rushed up the shop to Joe while Mum hurried out with me, empty-handed

“What’s that?” The youth reached to Joe’s lapel pocket, snatched a pen.

Joe leaned forward: “You can’t have it.”

The pen jabbed into Joe’s eye. Blood sparked on my cream jerkin. He staggered back as they ran out. An assistant rushed up the shop to Joe while Mum hurried out with me, empty-handed.

Days later she painted over Provos with our remaining silver. I waited. At night helicopters hovered over the houses, gunshots fired. Brits no longer burst into homes: now Provos did that. We slept poorly. Dad often arrived late for work at the GPO after lengthy detours to avoid barricaded roads. He was paid from clock-in time. Now at Grammar School, I didn’t need to pass the kids’ shrine at the school railings every day. Mum worked in a sub-post office near our house, down a set of steps. With each crisis people brought questions there – a family burnt out, widow’s benefit, shops closed, electricity strike, buses discontinued, roads blocked. I dropped in on my way from school, wanting money for a Beatles record, and was let in behind bullet-proof glass.

Balaclavas

Men burst in wearing black balaclavas with eye holes. One pulled down the blind on the door and stood. Mum ducked beneath the counter, pressed the alarm. The other clerk crouched beside her, trembling. There was no space for me. I scratched my head. The queues dispersed to the walls, all arms by their sides.

“Nobody move!”

One customer was the Green Shield Stamps man who had come to lodge cash after redeeming petrol stamps at the garage. Recognising him, the second hood spread-eagled him against a wall, kicked his feet apart: the treatment Republicans protested that soldiers did to Catholics. An old woman remarked, “It’s a sorry mother that bore you.”

“You bore me.”

“Give me that back, that’s my pension book.”

The high window on the wall behind me had shattered. He'd aimed high

He had snatched it and now his revolver tapped the glass screen.

“Put the money out or you’ll get shot!” I watched it cock. But the pensioner joined his side at the counter to speak to Mum’s protruding backside. “He’s got my pension book. How do I get my pension?” I jumped from the shot. Shards rained to my feet. A crystal web had appeared in the screen, neat hole in the centre. The high window on the wall behind me had shattered. He’d aimed high.

“Up the Provos!” shouted the other from the door. The gunman kicked wooden panels on his way out and slammed it. The clerks stood up. A customer stepped to the screen, hoping to be first served. Voice tremulous, higher pitched, Mum said, “Sorry. Nothing further can be paid. The Post Office is closed now.” She stayed late to count the complete stock of stamps, postal orders, cash. The balance sheet, a statement, then she rang the police and reported two balaclavas dropped on the floor.

“We’ll take a note of it.” But there was no follow-up. Each clerk received a hundred pounds.

The sub-postmaster decided to close his spare ground with the steps behind the office. Mairead’s mother assured Mum, “You’ll not be stuck for a shortcut.” They lived between us and the road and were looking after Mark because Anne was grieving. At the end of Mum’s shift she cut through Mairead’s long back garden when Mark ran to her, thinking she was his mother. Mum lifted and hugged him.

His father took the family to New Zealand but Anne couldn’t put it behind her. They came back, Mark returned to school and was nine in 1980 when he found his mother had taken her own life.

Prescriptions

Over 10 years Mum had 18 raids before her nervous breakdown and long Valium haze. She said doctors had the prescription written out before you arrived. Lilting voices coerced her to step in front of a double-decker. She mashed tablets into my father’s spuds and managed me likewise. Her long nights of vivid nightmares featured pits of corpses, choking babies.

My friend reckoned that “Stickies” living up Slievegallion Drive sneaked up the back of his big garden to rob the post office adjacent. I visited him to write and record various three-chord songs on Saturdays. We arrived together once and noticed a strange car, a grey Ford Anglia, parked in his driveway. On our way to the back, the front door opened and his father called him in. A young long-haired man sat in the living room. He said, “Don’t go upstairs, sit.”

I asked, “Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m a friend.” We assumed they were burglars. We heard foot sounds and click-clicks from above. With his father we gazed at the TV screen. Rugby League, St Helen’s playing Wigan. Every so often the man left the room and went upstairs. He pulled the sleeve of his jumper down over his hand so as not to leave prints on the handle. It was turning to dusk when he returned and called the father to the hall.

“We’ll be seeing you.” He left with another young man and a young woman. Upstairs, they had been in my friend’s bedroom at the rear of the house. The window was wide open and they had taken a towel from the bathroom, perhaps to wipe away prints. The clicks had been some kind of sniper rifle. They had hoped to get a clean shot if the army passed down Slievegallion. No patrol must have passed that day.

The IRA had left guns under the floorboards of the house

A few months later Martin spotted the Anglia parked beside the still functioning burnt-out phone box near his corner house on Slievegallion. The man who had been in the living room talked on the phone. He looked up and they made brief eye contact.

Martin later wondered what became of that group of IRA volunteers. Did they go on hunger strike and die? Were they shot, perhaps by their own side? Or become well-paid politicians in the dysfunctional Assembly with houses in Spain? We built up a fantasy based on that raid. The IRA had left guns under the floorboards of the house. The boy finds them, takes a pistol, visits his ear-pulling teacher’s house, shoots him. The police do forensics on the bullet. It’s a known paramilitary firearm. The boy who kills is under no suspicion. He gets a better teacher, passes his exams and has a respectable life.

My mother said the sub-postmaster knew who carried out some raids. She suspected the brother of another friend, who indeed lived up Slieve Gallion. He later had reason to flee to England. When I became a student, I stayed in this generous, respectable guy’s house.

Hunger strikes

My last days in Belfast were during the hunger strikes. I went for long strolls through the grey area and cackled when I saw black mourning flags, hung from lampposts, now washed white by the rain like flags of surrender to Thatcher. I laughed that Belfast was booming. I missed a McDonalds in the desolated city centre, some cafeteria. The bombing campaign had turned it into a not uninteresting hollow of anti-capitalism. But our suburbs were the Tokyo of messaging.

The suburb was the hyper-real, primitive society of the future

Walls, pavements, bollards, kiosks, clothing, all objects gave themselves up as tabula to be painted over with symbols which replaced them so that the recognisable world receded from memory. The aim of relentless messaging was to brutalise consciousness until it became little more than a slim film, burnt with primal imagery compelling response without comprehension. Experience was crushed of meaning and the ensuing confusion crowded over and over by thick layers of symbols, divorced from experience and referencing only themselves. The consumer of brutality grasped auto-semiotic signs which aimed to minimise the interpretative process and block access to the known, while parodying it. The suburb was the hyper-real, primitive society of the future, while the publicity tyrants were doomed by their emerging global context, which was a babel of dissent. Their day had passed.

After years in Dublin I still eyed green pillar boxes and harps resentfully. Hyper-sceptical, I sensed their potential for violence. Nations? Political constructs of the mind. Nor had all the pity of Belfast developed my humanitarianism. Formed by anarchy, I remained ultra self-critical of any instinct to impose an ideology of belief or care. Was there a refuge in art? Twenty years ago I was deep in a forest in the middle of Finland when I received an email about a Good Friday Agreement. I had no interest in a homogenised Ulster. I shared with both Thatcher and the Provos absence of social identification.

• Philip MacCann wrote about the politics of colour and the semiology of terror in Grey Area, 1992, collected in The Miracle Shed (Faber & Faber)