FROM THE ARCHIVES:Sam McAughtry, in his Plain Speaking column, described how one mixed-religion couple survived the sectarian tensions of Belfast during the early days of the Troubles.
From top to toe, Tommy was the Southerner’s picture of a Belfast Prod. He parted his hair in the middle and he tended to go in for pointy-toed shoes.
As well as that his nose was sharp and he didn’t have any superfluous talk. He managed his finances in a common-sense kind of way and he didn’t go much on criticising other people.
He was a low-ranking Orangeman, given to nipping across the Border for a bit of fishing on the Twelfth Day, instead of marching.
But he was still an archetypal Prod, and that’s why I was so surprised when he took up with, and in a short time, married Joan, who, believe me, was every Prod’s idea of the Southern Catholic woman.
She had black hair that was all in waves and tumbles, her skin was olive where it wasn’t creamy, her eyes were brown, and it wasn’t surprising that she had a barmaid’s bosom, for she was a barmaid – the final, clinching evidence to your average Belfast Prod that Joan was from the South [. . .]
They couldn’t live in Tommy’s area, because the civil rights disturbances were making the district edgy. Joan’s Monaghan tongue would provoke less comment on the Republican side, so that’s where they went to live, since rented housing in neutral Belfast was at a premium. And that’s where they were when the events of 1969 broke on a suspecting province.
One night Tommy’s door was knocked. The local men told him that they had placed his name on a roster. He had to take his turn patrolling the streets to protect them from Loyalist raiding squads.
On his first patrol he made the surprising discovery that his neighbours on the beat habitually referred to the enemy as Protestant. Not Orange, or Loyalist, or Unionist, but Protestant. “Any sign of Protestants?” he would be asked on handing over his shift. It made him feel funny, he said. Threatened, funny.
It was 12 years before I met Tommy again. “No bother with the freedom fighters?” I asked, after reminding him where I had left off with the story.
“Actually, it was the army saved me,” he said. “They landed in on me one night, half-wrecked the house and pulled me in for questioning. I was let out the next morning, but it was all ‘Good morning, Tommy’, from both young and old the whole way up and down the street after that.”
“I wonder just exactly who it was told the army to call,” I said.
“Aye,” said Tommy, “I just wonder.”
He kept his face straight as he said it.
As we said cheerio I was laying 100 to eight on that the army’s informant was female, with a warm voice, and an accent that would put you in mind of Monaghan. As well as tooth and claw, it takes a woman to have brains to fight beside her man.
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