Wounds that won't heal

Amid the violence in Northern Ireland the sweat of terror could visit anyone. In Susan McKay'snew book, families of victims tell their harrowing stories.

IN HIS GREAT meditation on history and memory, Austerlitz, the writer WG Sebald considers the possibility that "the border between life and death is less impermeable that we commonly think". This is a story that Gerard McGurk told me.

Gerard was 15 when loyalist paramilitaries put a bomb in his father's small pub in Belfast in 1971. His mother, Philomena, and his only sister, 14-year-old Maria, were killed, along with 13 other people, among them Gerard's uncle and his schoolfriend.

Gerard was injured, as were many others, including his brothers. The pub and the family home above it were reduced to a heap of rubble.

Thirty-five years later, in 2006, Gerard brought his 13-year-old daughter, Emma, to visit his father. Patsy McGurk was by then living in a Belfast nursing home. When he saw Emma coming, the old man's face lit up. "Och, Maria," he said. "Where have you been all these years?"

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For my generation, the end of childhood coincided with the start of the Troubles. Like many of my peers, I couldn't wait to get away. But it isn't so easy to leave a war behind, and I returned in 1981. The IRA hunger strike had just ended, and the sign for Belfast on the platform in Central Station had been smashed, so that it now read, "Fast Central". I felt compelled to get involved politically, and I helped to set up, and then worked in, a Rape Crisis Centre. The political violence masked a shocking level of violence against women.

I lived for a time with a man whose name and garrulous ways obviously revealed him to be a Catholic from the Republic. We lived on the edge of a hard-line loyalist area, the flat having been chosen for its view across the park to the mountains. An old man in the local pub warned us about "bad boys", a euphemism for paramilitaries. One morning, "Taigs out" had been painted across the road outside the house. We didn't move.

I think there was also a collective sense that if things were too horrific to contemplate they had better be ignored. No wonder Northerners, when they ventured outside of Northern Ireland in those times, often appeared manic to others. I visited Mostar in Bosnia not long after the second war ended there in 1994 and felt the same demented energy as I'd known in Belfast in the 1980s.

The African writer Alexandra Fuller compares people who grow up in war with clay pots fired in an oven that is over-hot. "Confusingly shaped like the rest of humanity, we nevertheless contain fatal cracks that we spend the rest of our lives itching to fill." People were always looking for transformations and miracles. The pubs were full. There were queues for days along the Falls Road outside the house of a woman who claimed she'd seen the face of Christ in the stone of her fireplace.

By the time I left Belfast in the mid-1980s, I had got scared and depressed by the violence. I'd glance up an alleyway and see a body dumped against the wall, then realise it was a black bag full of rubbish. In the days before I left, I walked for miles through the city.

I passed an empty house that had been daubed with "Get out or burn out". I moved south to Sligo, which was only an hour's drive from the Border but which kept a wary silence about the killings.

I moved back north to Enniskillen not long after the IRA's bombing at the cenotaph there in 1987. The bomb site was screened by plywood and the phone box which had been on the wall of the old reading rooms where the bomb exploded had been restored. I walked past it nearly every day.

The phone seemed a potent and sad symbol in a place where so many voices had been brutally silenced.

My job was to work with rural community groups on the border. One woman who became a friend took me to see the lovely stone house she was going to move into when her son got married and took over the family farm. It had been empty since her late husband's cousin, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), was murdered there, along with his wife, by the IRA. After I left Fermanagh, I learnt that another woman I was friendly with there had lost her husband years before I knew her. He was an IRA man, and after he was murdered, by loyalists, his body was put into the fridge in his butcher's shop. These two women later became good friends.

Republicans, mainly the IRA, killed more than half of those who died in the Troubles. Loyalists killed about a third. The rest were mostly killed by the security forces. Well over half of the dead were civilians, and almost twice as many Catholics were killed as Protestants. North and West Belfast were the most dangerous places, along with the "murder triangle" in Armagh and Down.

But no one was really safe, and the sweat of terror could visit anyone.

Most people tried to live normal lives, and to keep their families safe.

Some were "involved", as paramilitaries, policemen, prison officers.

Their silences were the deepest. Others were exposed to the realities of Troubles deaths by their work, among them firefighters, doctors, priests and journalists.

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In some places, such as North and West Belfast and South Armagh and East Tyrone, the killing was intense and nearly everyone lost family, friends, colleagues or neighbours. However, many people who lived in Northern Ireland through the Troubles suffered very little beyond the inconvenience of bomb scares and roadblocks and bad news on the radio.

Many in the Republic were oblivious, and many in Britain seem to have seen what was happening in Ireland, if they thought about it at all, as some sort of tribal feud into which their soldiers had inexplicably been flung.

A few years ago, a Dublin editor responded to my suggestion that I write a report on a commemorative event in Derry with an impatient, "These bloody Northerners. The Troubles are finished. Will they never just get over it?" I went to the meeting anyway, and was moved to hear an elderly man quoting from a poem by Maya Angelou: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but, if faced with courage, need not be lived again." He was, I learnt afterwards, a doctor who had tended some of those who were lying dying or injured on the street after the British army went on the rampage on Bloody Sunday in 1972, killing 14 civilians.

John Hewitt called it "our ghost-haunted land". The past refuses to go away, however we try to banish it. Every journey through the North brings you past places where atrocities were committed. Sometimes you see a withered wreath in a ditch, sometimes a monument, sometimes nothing at all marking the spot where blood was spilt, for Ireland or for Ulster or for pure hatred dressed up as politics.

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The magnificent Lost Livesincludes the stories of all those who died in the Troubles. It is a huge book, but of necessity the stories are told only briefly. In this book I have chosen to tell a far smaller number of stories more fully and to concentrate on the experiences and thoughts of people who survived the deaths of their loved ones and of some who were almost killed themselves.

Listening to the brave, hurt voices, I often thought of the bleak, humane wisdom implied in Samuel Beckett's lines: "I can't go on. I must go on. I'll go on." People put themselves through considerable anguish to tell me their terrible memories and thoughts. One man said he and his family had decided to talk to me because a book would be a sort of memorial to his murdered brother. I hope that I have done justice to his and all the other stories.

The above extracts are fromBear in Mind These Dead by Susan McKay, which is published by Faber and Faber on June 5