As news started breaking this week of the attacks on Iran by the US, and the ensuing chaos, I wondered how that news was possibly landing to small children. Where were they getting their information from? Would they understand any of it? Or was it passing them all by?
As a child, one of my jobs was to go to the local shop each morning to get the newspapers. We took The Irish Times and The Irish Press each day; The Sunday Press, The Observer and The Sunday Times on the weekend; and various regional papers on a weekly basis. My parents also listened to the news bulletins on RTÉ and BBC Radio 4 throughout the day, and always watched both the 6pm and 9pm RTÉ news. At night, the radio in their bedroom was permanently tuned to the BBC World Service. I guess it was as close as you could get back then to the infinite news scroll.
My experience of world events as a child primarily came via these newspapers I carried home from the shop on a near-daily basis. I tuned out the radio news, and the television news was far too dull to engage me. But I liked the cartoons in the back of the papers, so turned their pages most days.
One morning when I was six years old, when I went across the road to collect the papers as usual, they were folded differently. The shop was as old-fashioned as it came for a shop on the edge of town. Eggs were sold individually, usually with small pieces of straw adhering to them. There were glass-fronted Jacob’s biscuit boxes, with loose biscuits inside. Boxes of Major and Sweet Afton and Woodbine cigarettes were sold from another, much smaller, glass-fronted cabinet atop the wooden counter. Customers, including us, had accounts.
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The wooden counter itself was far taller than me, and for years I only ever saw the kind lady of the shop from her torso up. On that day when the papers were folded over so that the front pages were hidden, she told me not to look at them, but to bring them straight home to my parents. Instead of the front page, I was looking down at the death notices on the back page of The Irish Times.
As soon as I had crossed the road, and was hidden from view among the trees that lined the avenue to our house, I flipped open the two papers that had been folded together. I did not understand what I was looking at. The photograph on the front of each paper was identical, which also confused me. Usually, they were different.
The photograph was of a young woman who looked traumatised, although that was not a word I then knew. All I knew was that she looked very, very upset. She was covered in something black, and also something white and fluffy. I read the caption. She had been found with her head shaved; tarred and feathered and tied to a pole. I had seen men tarmacing roads, the heat steaming from shovels as the glossy black grains fell. Was this what had happened to her? Why had this happened? Who was she?
The woman in the photograph was a Catholic who was engaged to a British solider, and was publicly punished. I now know this young woman was 19. Her name was Martha Doherty, and the “punishment” had been perpetrated on her by other women, in Derry. Aged six, I could not stop staring at the photograph. It filled me with an almost violent sensation; a combination of revulsion and sympathy.
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That Sunday, all the newspapers carried the same photograph on their front pages, even the British ones. Bloody Sunday occurred less than three months later.
I asked questions of my parents about the photograph I had seen. My father tried to explain what was happening, but I couldn’t understand what he said. I understood in the vaguest terms that there was something bad happening in Northern Ireland; a place my parents no longer visited. I was familiar with the map of Ireland, and asked my father why the section containing the six counties could not simply be cut away somehow and left to drift off into the North Atlantic, and then the problems there would all go away. He listened gravely, and then told me this was not possible.
[ ‘My 14-year-old son is really worried that world war three will break out’Opens in new window ]
At one point shortly after Bloody Sunday, I watched the evening RTÉ news with my parents. A man on the television, to loud cheering, stated that there would now be “Bloody Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday”. I left the room and went upstairs. Our shower in the bathroom was temporarily not working, and had various bits and pieces stored in it. I took a bath towel, closed the door of the shower cabinet, covered myself with the towel, and curled up with the other things in there. It felt safe in there; safe from all the forthcoming bloody days of the week.
I don’t know how small children nowadays deal with the news they see coming at them from screens all around them. They must see it somehow, no matter how vigilant the adults around them are. All these years later, I see Martha Doherty still. What will they remember of this time when they are adults?
