Meet Aidan and Iona: Derry’s Romeo and Juliet, a post-Troubles Kevin and Sadie

“I’d have been a bloody brilliant rioter if I’d been born in the Troubles.” Aidan

“I could’ve been orange as King Billy with fake-tan trauma and he wouldn’t have noticed me…” Iona

Two teenagers, Aidan and Iona, both born on the day of the Good Friday peace deal. Guard Your Heart is a YA/crossover Romeo and Juliet set in Derry in summer 2016. It’s not about the Troubles, it’s about their legacy for a generation that never lived a day during them. What if peace is harder than war, or at the very least, more complex?

I’m not sure how many people stumble into writing from similar routes to my own (the Derry literary phrase would be “arse about face”). The not-so-literary reason I wrote Guard Your Heart is “boredom”. Envisage evenings on repeat as follows: child sleeping, single parent, tatty armchair, no babysitter, every night, after work, day after week, month after year... Somewhere around year two the TV lost its appeal, I got an idea for a story and started typing. Characters turned into company and walls turned into opportunity.

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The more professional-sounding answer relates to my day job. For over 15 years I’ve worked in peace and reconciliation in Derry. In 2016 much of the peacebuilding focus was on the Decade of Centenaries. 100 years on from the Somme and the Easter Rising, community relations workers were asking how can we ethically explore history, whilst also remembering our future? Home in the tatty armchair after work each evening, my brain was asking: who is telling today’s story?

It seems apt the novel is published in another centenary year – the creation of Northern Ireland and the partition of Ireland. Just like what’s happened recently on the streets, Guard Your Heart goes beyond just the “Catholic-Protestant thing”. Religion has always just been the easiest labelling. The issues in the legacy of conflict are webbed and varied – sometimes in your face; sometimes subtle and insidious. Identity, justice, rights, hope, grief, alienation, prejudice – similar issues are found in communities and countries worldwide.

I’m hoping that even when readers come to Guard Your Heart with no prior knowledge of this part of the world, something universal will still resonate. Can teenagers escape identity conflicts inherited from their parents? How do poverty and marginalisation impact a teenager’s life choices? What empowers a new generation to move forward into a shared society?

“The attitudes hadn’t changed, just the tools. We fought with culture now, not guns.” Iona

“Were we building peace only knowing half the war story? In our charity-shop jigsaws as kids, there’d always been pieces missing, we never got the whole picture. Key bits were brushed under someone else’s carpet.” Aidan

Being published still feels miraculous. January 2018 was the first time I’d ever attended a creative writing course. When I booked, I’d already written a complete first draft of Guard Your Heart without telling a soul, and I was clueless as to how I’d manage to get a babysitter for the first session, never mind six consecutive Thursday nights. There was a “wile” determination in me, something akin to a sense of purpose, about getting Guard Your Heart out of my laptop and into the world. Thankfully, I’d also a blissful ignorance about the competitiveness of submissions and the height of slushpiles.

What also helped was signposting from and networking with the wider literary scene. If 2016/’17 was when I wrote the novel, 2018 was a valuable but steep learning curve focused on self-editing and connecting. In 2019, breakthrough came via the competition route – a shortlisting in the Caledonia Novel Award and jointly winning the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair. That’s where I met my now agent, Laura Williams of Greene and Heaton. That’s what confirmed that the story had reach beyond the confines of Northern Ireland.

“What’s the point in peace if you still think like we’re at war? At least let me think for myself.” Iona

“I remembered wincing at Ma putting antiseptic on my grazed knees – If you don’t clean a wound it won’t heal.” Aidan

Why do I write? Is treise an peann ná an claíomh. I like to make people think. I hope that Guard Your Heart will do that. It’s fiction, but the context is real. Conflict dehumanises the “other”. Stories connect us to the “other”. I write because fiction is a powerful tool for creating empathy, and empathy is a powerful tool for creating peace. In life, just as in my writing, I believe that hope happens because of risk takers.

It has been an honour that some people have made a comparison with Joan Lingard’s Across the Barricades. Is Guard Your Heart that story, but for the “next” generation? Perhaps – if you add shed loads of adrenalin, grit and a dose of wry Derry humour. The saga of Kevin and Sadie was first published in 1972. I wasn’t born then, never mind my now teenage son, so it’s actually two generations ago. The closest in “feel” I found to my own book was The Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd (2008).

The YA writing I love today is edgy and hard hitting. In more recent years, local authors like Sheena Wilkinson, Kelly McCaughrain and Shirley Anne McMillan have published fantastic YA novels putting different perspectives on Northern Ireland into the hands of teenage readers. Novels like Toffee, Wonder, Noughts and Crosses and The Hate U Give reach well beyond a young adult audience with their message.

That said, in terms of Guard Your Heart, it was probably adult novels with young protagonists – the likes of Paul McVeigh’s Mickey, in The Good Son, or Lisa McInerney’s Ryan, in The Glorious Heresies – that helped me in the editing phase of Guard Your Heart. It was like I suddenly imbibed what writing voice was about and gained a freedom to let my characters express themselves better.

What influenced me in my own teenage years in terms of reading, was Wilbur Smith. My Dad owned practically every novel of his African sagas. I remember reading about five novels before realising that actually, what I was reading was history blended with fiction. The political history of South Africa and the injustices of apartheid struck a chord with me. I read Cry Freedom and Cry the Beloved Country, lapped up films like Biko and The Power of One, listened to Graceland on loop and later read Mandela’s biography.

That era in my life was a dawning that writing can tell something real. Writing can teach, but not like a textbook. Fiction reaches beyond the mind, into the heart. Ultimately, that’s where Aidan and Iona find their connection too. I hope it will also be what connects Guard Your Heart with readers.

“We cut a ragged path through the foam of the shallow breakers, shifting back towards the shore if a larger wave pulled at the shingle, toppling the pebbles over in the drift. Neither of us changed course as our shoulders touched…” Iona

Guard Your Heart is published by Macmillan. Sue Divin is working on a second novel with the working title Truth Be Told. A thankful recipient of an Arts Council NI SIAP award, Sue tweets @absolutelywrite