Alphonse & Mirabelle; RIP

Catholic Carrickfergus, like the town itself, held no surprises. Every week the families of the parish took to the same pews they had taken to from time immemorial, when their parents and grandparents sat a layer of paint or two closer to the cold naked stone. It was impossible to lose friends in the healthy but dwindling crowd. Old Paddy McGuire sat at the back casually and noisily clearing his throat and then spitting the contents of his mouth behind the radiator below the eighth Station of The Cross, Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem. With his walking cane, old clothes, jar-bottom glasses and white hairs in odd places on his face he was maybe too old and maybe too stubborn or maybe too set in his ways for the tortured women of the parish - who did the work for the Lord in His house, without thanks or payment or smiles for dirty-faced children - to admonish.   

We sat near the middle, in the pews to the right, but only if Mum got the four of her children fed, watered, washed, dressed and down the road in time: the mile walk down Woodburn Avenue on to Woodburn Road and Ellis Street took us twenty minutes on a good day. If we were late we took to the back seats - always on the right - far from God and the splendour of the Tabernacle of The Holy Plaster Shower, and a long walk to the communion rail, which we came to know as The Finish Line. Once there it was all nearly over. If we were really late we had to stand in the polished porch, disgraced and even further from Him, His treacherous tabernacle and the communion rail. 

Regardless of where we stood or sat we knew where to see the Hall family on our left, or the Deignan sisters - all as tall and quiet and dignified as the stained-glass windows themselves - sitting a row or two in front of us, their youngest daughter’s swarthy skin and tight black hair an indication of their dedication to the cause of the poor: not every family could afford to adopt a Black Baby from a famished country, but they had. The Deignan parents looked perpetually proud and strong, but those are, perhaps, the only qualities a child can discern from faces that remained unsmiling and tight-jawed and provincially Catholic. They used the tight faces to maintain a certain serenity for themselves and an unspoken rein over the girls, even if I thought oftentimes that it looked just too good to be anywhere near to perfect, on either score. The Foley’s were there every day we were, and Mr. Foley would sing and sing and sing to all the hymns, until, one day, his hair turned pure white from the effort of his praise, and he was elevated, thereupon, to lead singer with the band. I only ever heard and saw him and him alone from then on. In saying that, one particular woman was a touch too operatic of an occasion, poorly so, and I was sure even the deaf noticed her.  

With mass ended we could go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Our parents would stop in the porch to buy the Catholic magazines and booklets to which they subscribed, papers that every good Irish Catholic family should have. Mrs. Armstrong smiled and laughed heartily in the repository as she doled out The Little Messenger or the Ireland’s Own or The Universe, or when she would sell your Mum a plastic water font from Lourdes or Knock, or a leather-bound bible for a special occasion. Sometimes she would sell you a First Holy Communion prayer book, decorated - seldom with variation - with a puffed-velvet pair of hands joined in prayer, with - again without much variation - a ruche of lace around the cuff if the prayer book was a gift for a girl. Two weeks later, Mrs. Armstrong would be raffling the same bibles for 10p a ticket, or five for 40p. Dad always bought raffle tickets, as did our Mum, because even the poor felt compelled to give to the church in every way they could. The red personal identification number emblazoned on the collection envelopes was enough of an inducement to make the contents always somewhere near respectable, and that meant that the envelope should never jingle with the sound of lower-denomination coins, whether they be British, Irish or just-been-to-Spain-on-holiday coins. We had to give what we had, whether we had or not, like the woman in the bible who washed the feet of Jesus with ointment because that was all she had. We had no jars of ointment at home worth more than the speedier recovery of a skinned knee, so we gave nothing but the food from our mouths.

In time, our house began to look like the church, adorned as it was with pictures and fonts and Holy Family shrines and memorabilia that Mum and Dad had bought or had won in the weekly raffles. I thought often of selling some of it back to Mrs. Armstrong because if Jesus ever returned and visited the good Irish Catholic people of Carrickfergus he would go straight to our house, mistaking it for the church and us as cousins because we had so many family snapshots of Him and His sacred friends and family, all glowing and serene and looking skywards, like any one of the Deignan sisters, with the exception of the black one because she was too young and too unruly to obey the stern faces of her parents. We had pictures of our holy mother, Mary; the earthly father of our lord Jesus, Saint Joseph, the carpenter; the lick of flame that we knew as The Holy Spirit; dedications to all the saints - and all the dead martyrs and holies that would be saints soon enough, sure enough - above us and around us. We lived in the holiest place in Carrickfergus outside of the church grounds. We lived in the Vatican, the Vatican of The Hollies.

But if Jesus did visit we could have chatted to Him over tea in the nice cups that Mum kept for special occasions, and we could eat some nice biscuits bought special that day. But Jesus, I was sure, would politely have eaten our yellow-pack Digestives, Rich Tea or Ginger Nuts, perhaps a Custard Cream, and he would not, I was sure, embarrass us by telling us that He came from a place awash with ice cream, the finest biscuits and cakes, and every other kind of goodness known to God alone. Jesus, I was sure, knew poverty, knew that a yellow-pack Digestive was as good as a Wagon Wheel on any given day.

“Some rabbit, Lord? Or maybe a nice piece of trout?”

“Don’t mind if I do there, Annie. Thanks. Ah, I see you got yourselves nice haircuts there too, lads.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Just killed one of my rabbits then, eh?”

“Yes, Lord. Sorry.”

“His name was Alphonse, did you know? And that fish last week?”

“Yes?”

“Mirabelle.”

“Sorry, Lord.”

“Oh, for fuck sake, boys! I’m kidding! Jesus… Do you think I have time to name every fucking rabbit? Holy sh… You two need to lighten up, you know that?”

“Yes, Lord.”

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Watch

By that summer of 1982 I had been through one year of Saint Malachy’s and I knew the pressure that teachers placed on your shoulders. We had to learn by heart every word in every textbook, and we had to learn it well. There was little room for contemplating getting just the basics, just scraping by. The academic record was the cornerstone on which the glory from within stood mighty, just as the old master informed us that past August. We had to analyse and parse Latin text word perfectly, and verb declensions we had to know by heart or the imposing figure of Mr. Crummey would stand above you and chill your heart hard as backroom butcher’s meat. That deathly, silent stare. Half my class, Junior 1B, attended Mr. Crummey’s all too frequently ordered detentions, so strict was he.

Before one particular Irish class even started, as irritatingly late on Friday afternoons as any class could be, we were made to say the Hail Mary perfectly in our land’s mother tongue or the teacher would walk to the nearest desk and throw it across the room with one hand. He was still a young man; he could do it easily, one hand underneath the desk, sending it crashing into a far wall, and him all in a fit. Teachers in neighbouring classrooms failed to come investigate the noise, and I found that strange for they castigated us pupils for talking an inch above a whisper should we find ourselves alone in a classroom awaiting a teacher. Those times, breathing was deemed a damned distraction from the good work.

One Friday Francis Hughes struggled to bless himself in the mother tongue, and as he concentrated on the foreign words in his head he lost control of his hands. The master twitched with rage, more so than he did on any given Friday. He pointed to Francis Hughes and his teeth sparked.

“Boy, I’m leaving here for one minute, one fucking minute. By the fucking time I get back here you’d better be able to bless yerself like any good fucking Catholic your age.” He slammed his hands on the desk, locked his elbows, and he bawled. “How the fuck old are you?” he exclaimed, spit misting the air. “And you can’t fucking bless yourself?” Francis stood bolt upright, his shoulders back, his fingers playing with each other, wetly I was sure. He dared not move his gaze until the teacher slammed his open hands on the desk once again before storming out, screaming. “Fucking learn it boy, and learn it fast! This is fucking ridiculous…” He slammed the door behind him, puffing air under maps along the nearest wall. They came to rest again as all eyes rested on Francis.

For the next minute the class desperately whispered instructions to Francis, Shugsy as he was known.

“It’s your forehead, stomach, left shoulder, right shoulder! Got that?” Francis tried, failed, then tried again, then failed again.

“Shugsy! For fuck’s sake! Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch! Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch! You better get it fucking right or we’re all here till late on, you fucking wanker!” 

“Yeah, get it right Shugsy, or we’re all fucked. I’m not staying here just because some wanker can’t fucking bless his self, ya fuckwit.”

The teacher returned just too quickly for the instructions to be of any use, and he made us stand for an entire class, until Francis could bless himself while reciting a blessing in some foreign tongue.

“Are you fucking stupid, boy? Are you? Are you fucking stupid?” The master stormed around the room, the tails of his grey suit-jacket flailing behind him, a wreck of desks and the concomitant cacophony spreading. Still, no teacher came to investigate.

“I don’t care if it is a fucking Friday because we’ll stay here until you know how to bless yourself boy, you stupid fucking idiot!” He bawled an inch from Francis’s nose, wagging a stiffened finger in his scarlet face. “I’m going fucking nowhere boy, and if I’m not, you’re not, and neither are any of these fuckers. Got that?” He quieted. “Now, again. Bless your fucking self again, you fucking idiot.”

There never was room for the basics in Saint Malachy’s College, not when it came to blessing yourself, not when speaking Irish or French or declining past imperfect verbs in too many dead languages thought still too important to be ignored by Irish Catholic educators.

Brimstone and Spittle

By the summer of 1983, Mum decided that her sons could still get back from the Catholic church some of Dad’s hard-earned money, and she asked Father McGarry if there was anything he would like done in the grounds around the beautiful new church that he had brought to the parish, all new and lovely and inspiring as it was. She had two fit young men, ready and willing and able, she said, offering up our precious free time, our Saturdays and Sundays, all for the glory of god. Father McGarry, the Parish Priest, the PP, lived in the grand Parochial House beside the new church. There was his gleaming new car in the driveway for all to see, a monument to the good life being a holy man could afford those broken down and pieced back together in the seminaries up and down Irish Catholic Ireland. He was tall, broad, smoked a moderately priced cigarette, and he slicked his grey hair back like an aged but perpetually handsome Brylcreem model. His was a look that belied a youthful gorgeousness, a precociousness, some ethereal knowledge. Looking calm and wise, said Dad, was the result of anyone being calm and wise with the money the PP was making, “And doesn’t he go off to Florida to play golf bloody well ten times a year, and sure that would make anyone calm and wise, now wouldn’t it?”

 

Taking our money and taking himself off to Florida left us with a gamble every Sunday. Would we get Father O’Hagan or would we get Father Patton treading the boards in his place those Sunday mornings? From Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen, came Father O’Hagan, to us youth a grumpy old priest with a ruddy and unforgiving full face, the merciless priest who threw Martina out of the confessional, at the ripe age of nine years, for not being syllable perfect with her Act of Contrition. Would we get another of his sermons that continued until members of the congregation glanced furtively upon their watches, shanks of roast beef in the oven at home getting a little drier with every admonishment? Father O’Hagan’s ferocity imbued us with the sense that we would never be saved, that we would burn in Hell fire for all eternity unless we changed our ways, and even then the odds were against us, we incorrigible bloody sinners. Despite His murderous and merciless record, what God was too timid to say and do in the Bible he gave Father O’Hagan the breath in his body to take forward. In his fleeting gentle demeanours he could make the parable of the lost sheep sound more fiery, more violent, more destructive than ten Sodoms and ten Gomorrahs, atop ten of the greatest earth-rending floods. We walked away those Sundays weaving our ways past pillars of salt in the foyer, the heat of Hell’s fires burning the soles of our feet as we crossed the foyer entrances.

And, ladies and gentlemen, from Greenisland came Father Patton, or Father Gerry as he let himself be called by those who liked others to think that they actually did know him. Father Patton once was the curate at the nearby university, and he was young and exciting and bushy-haired, a man who took great pleasure in a pipe full of sweet-smelling tobacco and some good craic. He looked like good craic, this busy-haired fellow. He was what the Elders referred to as “the new breed,” and he would walk in the congregation like a pop star, asking questions of the bleary-eyed Sunday morning faithful, questions they answered nervously into the microphone he carried with him, the respondents preceding their every answer with a “Well, yes Father, I think that what this means - what Our Lord means - is...," accompanied by a brief clearing of a dry throat at least a half-hour silent. The pious and the self-righteous fortune of cleaning ladies with their dusters and Mr. Sheen failed to take to him and his new-fangled microphone-flaunting ways, and they made sure to go to the good, the proper, the respectful eviscerations conducted by Father O’Hagan, his masses with sermons that would light the church in red and yellow and searing white as the mirage of Hell appeared to and embraced warmly the huddled mass parched by the eating of the dry fruit from the now stripped-bare Tree of Sin from which Eve had tempted Adam before turning to God and with a cackle asking, “Tell me, O Lord, where is this place called Carrickfergus?” The Catholic parish of Carrickfergus had eaten from the tree and relished it, charged Father O’Hagan. We had come back for seconds, he said. Then dessert. We took home a doggy bag of cold dead sin, hot lust, bubbling greed, he said. 

In the Old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower his fire would make the Crayola air bubble and spit and scald. But the fortune of cleaning ladies feared more that the beautifully gentle Father Gerry would stick a microphone in their half-hairy faces and they would see the priestly spittle and feel compelled to Mr. Sheen the microphone to a good and proper Catholic gleam right there and then. Cleaning priestly spittle must surely have been like getting the very key to Heaven itself. And they lived for that. They continued to live for that. Damn them. Damn priestly spittle.

Like a Wagon Wheel

My feet hit Brendan’s head as we jumped from our beds - we had been sleeping like foxes for only a few hours. Something hit a window downstairs and the bang had everyone in the house up and standing by their bedroom doors, struggling with some kind of clothing. Dad came running from his room in his vest and pyjama bottoms, his gun in hand, loaded, safety off. 

Mum begged him to take it easy, to be careful with that bloody gun because you’ll bloody well hurt yourself or someone else, then where would we be?

“Will you let me past, Annie?”

Please.

There was a second bang, and someone shouted, “Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph!” Someone else just shouted “Jesus!” That might have been me. The second bang was a big one, and we knew that a window was left dying on the living room floor. A second later and we heard glass fall from the window into the window-sill, the metal blinds twist and buckle in the air before falling back against the windows, one side then the other. The dog barked and glass fell, and in the quiet noise our faces filled with fear, we started downstairs, running quickly and silently, followed by Mum’s pleas for us to be careful down those bloody stairs, you don’t know what’s waiting, sure you don’t. Dad made it downstairs first, and out he went with his shotgun in his hands, with a fowl cartridge in the breech, with the gun cocked, with the safety off. Definitely. The safety was definitely off this time. He opened the door without thought, without pause, without care, without once looking behind him.

“Right boys! You two come with me! Come on.” He motioned us to follow him by bringing his hand up behind his head, then he pointed quickly up and down the street with a discreet, almost invisible motion of his finger.

I wanted us upstairs and out of the way, but Dad was in the street driving his Shredded Wheat truck, and he had one fowl cartridge in the barrel of his gun and one hundred whiskeys and one hundred beers in his fiery fenian blood. There was no way we could stay up there; we needed to go down to stop Dad fucking this up for all of us by blowing someone’s head off or getting slain himself in the middle of the street, making a martyr of himself, elevating himself to the status of the hero in the many songs that The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones and The Pogues would surely write about him. The Carrick Martyr they would label him, and in “The Ballad of Arthur McKay” they would rhyme his name with “died that day” and “a brighter day,” and there would be some mention of how we all will pray for some better way. No surprises.

We followed, knowing we had no choice but to. There were no souls walking the street, and the orange lights barely lit up the first few feet of the entrances to the alleys and entries. Whoever did this could have been hiding anywhere, and there were many dark alleys and only one gun. It was never a fair fight. Anne-Marie, Una and Mum stayed inside. Martina took a solitary step out the front door. I could tell she was scared: she had her hands to her mouth; her dressing gown she had only half on, tied loosely and quickly at the front, in a knot that betrayed her alarm, and one so loose as to have little utility. She had tears in her eyes. The bottom of her pink nightie with the cartoon character on flapped in the breeze, and she stood stiffly on the cold top step of the garden path of number 43. The grass between the cracks in the steps made her jump when she first felt it prickly on the soles of her feet. She looked like someone who should have been somewhere else, somewhere noisy, like a busy street, asking for directions because she was lost and had forgotten who she was, or where she was, or what she was doing there. She looked like someone somewhere frantic, someone trying to understand and keep control, but knowing all the while that she could let go at any time. She looked out of place in her pink nightie and no slippers, because all was quiet and calm out there on that street: barely a sound rose, only distant cars and the rustle of anything the wind could move. In those quiet moments we heard everything. It was peaceful out there as we walked like astronauts or swimmers under water, aware of our movements and any other. We crept. We stared something in the face, and came to accept that we had to stare at it. Whatever it was it would greet us in its own time.

Martina carried her fear from the house and presented it to the street, telling the watchers the truth. No matter how brave Dad was, or how brave he made his sons, Martina told the Proud Protestants that they had won.

I came to. Martina should be the last of my worries, I thought. The sound of distant cars on Woodburn Avenue was comforting because it meant that the world was continuing, that there was life out there, maybe someone who could come to help us if we needed them. We were not dead yet. We were just cold, frightened of what could be lurking in the alleys, in the garages, or behind the sub-station. We had one gun between us, and Dad held it at the ready, guarding the front of the house, pointing here and pointing there, a thumb used to get us into the dark alleys and entries behind him, the alleys that ran from the front to the back of our row of houses. He watched as Brendan and I went into them as far as the orange light faded into shadow. We would go no further: the blackness that hid ten skinny bodies in our youths could hide four grown men. 

We each looked for ourselves and everyone else, and we talked in hand signals and nods and shrugs, all of which helped maintain the completeness and the bizarreness of a silence broken only by cars and leaves and plastic bags. 

Maybe they were clever, thought Dad. Did they smash the windows on the front of the house and run to the back of the house, down our own alleyway, into our very own garden? We checked our alley last, guided there by a thumb and the barrel of a gun: it was too dark so we came back through the house, switching on the kitchen and dining room lights. It was still too dark, so we opened the back door. A giddiness of moths fluttered in as we edged out: they craved the light as much as we did. There was the apple tree. The gooseberry bush leaves fluttered gently. The small carpet of strawberries. There was nothing behind the shed but its own broken and boarded window, clinging as it was limply to the white-with-a-little-brown. Everything rustled an eerie rustle or whistled an eerie whistle as the wind passed through on its way to the lough. Nothing else. There was not one soul behind the house, in front of the house or down any alley nearby. The stillness and aloneness in that moment is eerie, but comforting.

Having checked everywhere we wanted Dad back in the house, and we broke our silences only to report in.

“Nah. There’s nobody. They’ve gone. We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Did youse go to the top of the street?”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“They didn’t get that much of a head start, boys.”

“Yeah, but they could be anywhere. It’s just useless. It’s pitch black.”

“Hear anything?”

“Nope. It’s quiet.”

“Waddabout back there?” He took his finger from the trigger and with the thumb of that hand indicated the back of the house.

“Not a thing. Unless they jumped the fences back there or got into a shed, or…”

“There’s nothing.” We shrugged in unison and exasperation.

“Alright, alright. Just youse get yerselves back in.” With another sweeping hand he herded us back inside, him keeping rear point guard. For a few moments we stood on the pavement, our backs to the house, looking around ourselves one last time. As we moved back we looked up at windows in houses to see if anyone was looking out. Often people were, spectators. Maybe it was the person who did this, or a witness? But nobody came forward to own up to the act or own up to witnessing the act. We knew it was impossible not to have heard the bang as our windows came in. Nobody gave a damn about what was happening to us. I felt that nerve-sweat trickle again. Strange, I was so cold.

Inside the house Mum had brought the embers back from the dead and a fire was crackling in the hearth. She had coaxed the embers back to life using the vacuum created by a newspaper held over the fireplace. The wind roared in the chimney, sucking the newspaper tight to the hearth, the fire rebirthing noisily behind yesterday’s headlines detailing the gruesome deaths of fine Proud Catholic volunteers and bloodthirsty Proud Protestant thugs. The day started early. The fire started early. The kettle went on the stove. It would soon be time for breakfast, and the great bra hunt, Anne-Marie’s quest for her underwear taking her back to The Last Place You’d Ever Look. In their laments, I presumed, The Wolfe Tones would rhyme "bra" with "Tiocfaidh ár lá," the IRA’S notorious rallying call.

The police came, the police went.

“Tea, officer?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“A biscuit?”

“Thank you, sir, but no. Now... You say you were asleep at the time of the incident?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you see anything?”

“So...? Wagon Wheel?”

We covered the raggedy hole in the window with thick corrugated cardboard cut from a box taken from Crazy Prices, a box with a simple blue whale on. Soon we would go upstairs, wash our faces and get ready for the first of the morning’s scaldings. Then there was the walk down the garden path to our heavy car - watched by that smiling blue whale, which, I recall, was upside down - all the while readying ourselves for the second of the morning’s scaldings.

The year 1982 saw the start of a campaign by the Proud Protestants of Woodburn to get the fenians living in The Vatican of The Hollies to leave their home. By then we knew that the people we once called friends now felt little but hatred for us. Soon the adult friends of Mum and Dad stopped visiting The Vatican out of fear: it was not a place anybody wanted to be seen going into or coming out of. There seemed a sense of guilt - worse, conspiracy, treachery by the bucketload in this British land - by association. Only the insurance man and the milkman dared visit. But they had to.

Young Frankenstein

Monday through Friday, and on the occasional Saturday, while Dad was an honest working man, he would try to stay off the drink in the evenings because he had to have a clear head to count his money against his tickets and do the tallying-up, using the basic maths he said every man should know. His temperance during the working week permitted him to make up for it at the weekends, and on the Friday or the Saturday night he would arrive home already half-drunk, having driven to a pub he had found close to the Markets, a couple of streets distant from where he worked. It is possible that it was the same establishment he walked to the evening he took my brother and me to the Saint Malachy’s College production of Young Frankenstein. Once the curtain fell we jumped into the Hillman Hunter, and on our way home he parked up in the Markets, in a dead carpark, in the dead of night.

“I’ll just be a wee while, boys,” he said as he opened the door. “Keep the windows and doors closed. And make sure not to speak to anybody.” With that he walked across the carpark, turned a corner and disappeared. We knew we were somewhere we should not have been.

“Where the hell are we?” asked my brother.

“The Markets, I think. Jesus. I hope he’s not long.”

“E, we shouldn’t be here.”

“I know.”

Our time in the car we spent in silence, watching as cars passed us by. We were wary of cars that slowed down, wary of passengers taking a little too much interest. It was late though, so for the most part it was quiet. Very quiet. Then, suddenly, they were on top of us, the British Army. A Saracen screeched to a halt in front of the car, and from the back jumped five or six British soldiers. Some jumped out and crouched behind the wheels of their vehicle; others fell flat to the ground or onto one knee before scanning the darkness along the barrels of their guns. All had their weapons at the ready, and many of those weapons were aimed directly at us.

“Jesus, E!”

“I know!”

“Where the fuck is he?”

“I wish I fucking knew!”

As more gun sights found the car, and soldiers continued to pour from the vehicle, I jumped out, and with my hands in the air shouted, “Stop! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I stood with my hands up for some moments before one soldier broke rank and stood up, his gun pointed right at me. Static voices crackled over wireless packs in the vehicle and on one or two of the soldiers. He approached slowly, his Armalite rifle steady, level with my chest.

“You. Stay there. Don’t move.” As he came closer to the car he peered inside - with his eyes and with his gun - seeing my brother in the back seat. A few feet away from me, gripping me fast with his eyes, he signaled to the others to ease up.

“What’s the problem then, lads? Why are you out here?” Such a terrifying accent. A British accent.

“We’re with our Dad, and he went across the carpark, over there. We think he’s in the pub.” My voice cracked with nerves, and sweat broke all over. I didn’t know what was worse, being face-to-face with a Brit carrying a gun or getting my Dad in trouble.

“We’re just waiting here on him coming back,” shouted my brother.

“Okay. Take it easy, lads. You, stay there. You, back in.”

The soldier returned to the Saracen and spoke to another soldier up front. Returning to us he walked backwards, checking roofs along the darkened streets, always following the barrel of his gun.

“How long has your Dad been gone then?”

“Maybe half an hour. I don’t know. He said he wouldn’t be long. An hour?”

“What bar did he go to?”

“We’ve no idea.”

“Live round here do you, lads?”

“No, Carrick.”

“Alright then. Stay where you are. Hold on, hold on... Is this your Dad?”

We looked over our shoulders and recognised instantly the figure in the distance, shuffling through the shadows.

“Yes, that’s him.”

Our father approached slowly, almost casually, his head down, and he was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, the magic hanky obviously, the one that sobered you up, made your breath minty fresh. He spoke with the soldiers for a few brief moments, but that conversation is lost on the wind. Dad opened the car door, settled into his seat, paused a moment, then drove us home. We drove the twelve miles in silence.

“Do me a wee favour, will youse boys?” he asked as we came within sight of The Vatican. “Don’t tell your mammy what happened tonight. Okay, boys?”

On many a night, he would have a few in the Markets before getting back in the car and heading for The Brown Cow, his favourite Carrick bar. On Saturdays he would drink all day if he didn't have to work, and if he was going fishing he would pack a flask of whiskey and put it in his bag with his lines, bait, and the small animal cartridges destined for the faces of the stubborn Proud Protestant who dared get back up, or if there was more than one of the bastards. Brown Cow, Pheasant Inn, fishing, Pheasant Inn, Brown Cow. He rarely strayed from that order.

On Sunday mornings he went to mass reeking of alcohol, and we knew that people could tell in the church because his small talk was cursory - often, almost rude in his haste - and he would slur the responses occasionally, disguising his sloppiness with a cough and his magic handkerchief. And afterwards, outside, he might light a cigarette for distraction. When he left us home after mass he stayed in the car, telling Mum he would be back soon, when the dinner was cooked and ready. “I’m just going out for a wee while.” 

H-Block, D-Block

It was a sign of some respectability to have a son attending St. Malachy’s College, and my parents let me know that they thought it wonderful for me to be going to such a prestigious college, a college where the priests and brothers and teachers could break down any good man and have the joiners and repairmen fashion a fine priest out of the shattered pieces. It mattered not a jot to them that I had barely scraped a pass in my exam to get into this prestigious college. I passed, and that is all that mattered, they said, and I was to be thankful to God above I was going to the place where they fashioned the good priests that would supply the whole of Ireland and the suffering Catholic countries filled with Black Babies. That was cause enough for a great deal of pride, they said. My sister had passed her 11-Plus exam also, and had made it into Dominican College, also in north Belfast, where nuns taught the good and the pure Catholic girls, photographs of whom would never appear on page three of any mass media publication, with the exception perhaps of The Universe, on bended knee kissing a Pontifical ring or accepting the Cleaner of The Year Award for doing good women’s work in the House of The Lord, and just you be happy with that, woman.

Catholics living in Carrickfergus really had only four choices when it came to going to a school that continued the teaching of the other supposed one true faith: you could go to Saint Malachy’s in Belfast, if you were a boy; Dominican College, if you were a girl; Saint Comgall’s in Larne or Saint Nicholas’s in Carrickfergus itself. There remained the possibility of going to Garron Tower, but of all the descriptions I ever heard of that place, I pictured it as remote and filled with the toughest priests and brothers in the land. And you had to board there, so you would be attending school without your brother and you knew you would miss the madness and the fun that filled your time together. No-one I knew had ever gone there, at least not a soul that had come back alive to tell the tales. Father McGarry had taught there once also, and he felt a great affinity with the place, and if a priest said it was good then it was good and that was that. No matter, I barely scraped a pass and my primary school friends Paul McKay, Robbie McKeown and Mark Reel persuaded me to go join them at the prestigious college at 36 Antrim Road, Belfast.

Mum spent the summer of 1981 trying to pull together the money to buy the Saint Malachy’s uniform: shirt; black trousers; grey or white socks; a white, green and black school tie; black, tie-up shoes. The whole ensemble was to be topped off with a black blazer, and on the blazer pocket on the upper left there was to be sewn the patch with the college coat of arms and its motto, Gloria Ab Intus. 

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Gloria Ab Intus, glory from within, glory from within,” said the grey-haired old master conducting the introductory pre-term lecture in the school’s main lecture theatre. He dallied on his first “glory,” waiting to exhale as his pointed finger came from the back of his head to end pointing straight into the audience. “Glory, ladies and gentlemen, young men.” It was mid-August, and the time between school years, but he took the parents and pupils gathered that day on a tour of the grounds and gave his lecture dressed in his black schoolmaster’s cloak. The cloak left me in no doubt that the business of learning never ended for the teachers of Saint Malachy’s College. Summers in Saint Malachy’s were for learning too, not for boyish fun and games and rites of passage.

“Glory from within the self, you young men, and glory from within the walls that surround this school, this place of learning,” he declared haughtily, his wizened face puckering under the weight of glasses thick in frame and heavy on correction. His lower lip disappeared under his nose, as if he had no teeth, and his pointed chin projected unnaturally beyond the furthest extent of the rest of his face. He stood in what I would come to know as the Learned Man’s Stance, his hands behind his back, swinging heel-to-toe, toe-to-heel, chest out, his hands swung occasionally to aid balance, and the ubiquitous scholar’s stare into nothingness to aid in the search for truth, knowledge, meaning, and wisdom. Mum sat beside me, a respectable distance from the front and from the back, just as we sat in church, a distance safe enough to ask questions in her quiet manner, or to blend into the air if necessary, if anyone dared seek answers. 

That day, in that lecture theatre, the old master told us about the history of the school; its rules and its punishments; the proud sporting history and academic record that were the very cornerstones of the glory that came from within the walls; how to dress, how not to dress, and the punishments meted out for contravening the dress code; the importance of religion in the school’s life; the buildings within the school grounds. 

“Saint Malachy’s is divided into blocks, and we, ladies and gentlemen…” The old master paused for effect and to allow a thin, almost imperceptible grin to develop over his face, “we are currently in D Block.” At that, a polite laugh went up, laughter of the type we heard in the old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower when the priests made jokes as the drums of Protestant pride beat loudly outside, and The Sash filled the holy air. 

“I know, I know,” said the old master, laughing now, and, in doing so, convincing me that he did in fact have teeth, upper ones, at least. “But we go only as far as E Block in here, you’ll be glad to know.” Another polite laugh.

Within the college walls over one thousand spotty boys dressed in black and sporting bad haircuts scurrying between Blocks A through E produced the Gloria Ab Intus. Outside the walls, on the streets of Northern Ireland, the only blocks that really mattered were the H Blocks, the impenetrable H-shaped accommodation used to house prisoners in Northern Ireland’s largest prisons. Since 1971 prisoners convicted of, or suspected of committing or planning, terrorist-related offences, languished behind the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, just outside of the town of Lisburn, ten miles south of Belfast. The government built the prison hurriedly in the early seventies to detain the suspicious men they removed from the streets of Northern Ireland, mostly Catholics as they were the enemies of Ulster, innocent or not, guilty or not, and guilt by association was often deemed guilt enough. They held suspects without trial, a tactic known as Internment, or so Radio Ulster and Downtown Radio told us anyway. The prisoners did their languishing in blocks of cells built in the shape of a giant H, when seen from above, with four wings in each block and an administration area connecting them all, the bar of the H. Since its construction HMP Maze had become a place of fervent Republican and Loyalist politics and thinking and thuggery and deals, and the men could reach out from behind its high walls to affect everyone in the country. In 1981 the prison was in the news again. Republican prisoners had gone on hunger strike as a campaign to win back special category status, a status that allowed them additional freedoms because, under that status, they were considered political prisoners, or prisoners of war. On the first day of March 1976 the British government abolished the special category status, and on the first day of March 1981 – exactly five years later - the leader of the IRA in the jail, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, refused food for the first time. Sixty-six days later, on 05 May, he died, making a martyr of himself and bringing the world’s attention to his Republican ideals. His funeral two days later attracted almost one hundred thousand mourners, a sign of the support his Republican ideals attracted in the fervently British colony. The streets of the country blew up in the face of the security forces and the rioting continued for many days after the funeral.

As we sat in the lecture theatre that day, learning of the mighty glory all around us, the hunger strike and the H-Blocks were alive and real in the minds of everyone sitting there, and in all Britain and Ireland. Ten days before I started school proper, on the first Tuesday in September 1981, the tenth hunger striker - twenty-seven year old Michael Devine - died. Other hunger strikers were ready to lay down their lives for God, Catholicism, the Pope and a reunified thirty-two county Ireland, but none did so before the strike ended on 03 October that year, broken as it was by Margaret Thatcher’s tough stance on everything from prisoners, to free school milk, to striking miners, to just how sharp her pencil must be. From the day the strike started to the day it ended, sixty-two men, women and children would die horrific deaths on the streets of Northern Ireland, not counting the ten who died in the hospital wing in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze. Of those deaths on the streets twenty-eight were Protestant, eight were British soldiers – as good a kill as any Protestant, even if Jew or Catholic - and twenty-six were Catholic. During my first three months in school, before the IRA called its annual Christmas ceasefire, there would be thirty-seven deaths in Northern Ireland, many near the rusty blue gates enclosing Saint Malachy’s College. The hallowed main gates of the college were on the Antrim Road, a road that formed one edge of the area that we would all eventually know as the Murder Mile.