It was built, the story goes, before the official U.S. entry into the war, as an American military base (others were scattered around the city at Creevagh, Lisahally, and Holcomb, the last taking over the mansion Beech Hill). It had long Nissen huts of corrugated tin for the troops to bunk in. There was a barbershop, a laundromat, a sick bay, and a cinema. The library stocked Zane Grey westerns and Dashiell Hammett pulp novels, maybe Pearl Buck and a Hemingway or two. There were pinups above beds, some real, some fantasy, hometown girls and Hollywood icons in suggestive poses. The canteen had a soda fountain and a milkshake machine. You could get American beer and genuine Coca-Cola. They’d play cards for matchsticks, checkers, chess, acey-deucey, bitch about the omnipresent East Atlantic rain. Paths on the parade ground led to, and encircled, a raised U.S. flag with forty-eight stars (Alaska and Hawaii would follow later). The noise of synchronized boots and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” would trace the paths in sound waves. They were here to save the locals, first from the Nazis, second from themselves.
They had marched off their ships, from Hoboken, Brightmoor, Metairie, and into a world where priests organized the official entertainment. They trod carefully, initially. Local girls would be invited for tea dances and glee clubs. The Church, knowing that absolute power was arbitrary, forbade riding buses to dances, but the dances themselves, though immoral, were permitted as a necessary evil. They knew betterment when they saw it. The dreaded military police would drive around in jeeps, patrolling for commotions and misadventures. The mail back home was censored. Words, places, names, and plans lost behind those redacted blocks of ink. When they left, many with local wives, they took their machinery with them, the loudspeakers and projectors and generators, and left the camp as an empty carapace, waiting to be filled.
Springtown was beyond the pale. The corporation, as the council was known then, offered them little, as it was dominated by rich unionists and had gerrymandered the vote to keep it that way. The families were forced out beyond the official city boundaries, where the distasteful things that made the city function were located—rubbish dumps, the slaughterhouse, soap boilers, charcoal burners, saltworks, tanners, the hanging tree. Rendered nameless by history, the only woman I came across who had been executed in Derry (outside of the Troubles) was burned alive as a witch outside the city walls on what is now Bishop Street Outer. The details did not state if she’d undergone a trial by drowning, in which if you float, you burn, but burn her they did. Her child had inexplicably died, in what would probably now be diagnosed as cot death, and she followed, undocumented, exiting a cruel world. The authorities pushed their crimes, their guilty secrets, outside and nursed their myths within.
The families moved in, climbing through the fences, in the summer of 1946. Hitler was still regarded as missing. Traitors were still being executed; the wheelchair-using former prime minister of the Slovak Republic, Vojtech “Béla” Tuka, was hanged. The suddenly aged former prime minister of Hungary, Döme Sztójay, was tied to a wooden post in front of sandbags in the courtyard of the Academy of Music of Budapest and riddled with bullets. Rioting in India killed ten thousand people in a single day. On August 22 a column of families moving into the 302 rusting arcs of tin was understandably subsumed. A footnote in a local paper. Yet everywhere is local.
Everything was recycled back then. There was no scrap. Rubbish was unlucky. Only objects cursed were thrown away. Anything that could not be put to use was remarkable in itself and was avoided. It’s hard to imagine now, so deeply immersed in a culture of convenience and disposability, that things were retained and endlessly repaired. In photographs, taken by visitors, the camp looks one hundred years older than it was. Isosceles of washing lines. A bonfire. A pet goat. A rag-and-bone man, whose very existence was predicated on reinvigorating broken things.
You choose what to remember to some extent, at least until trauma. And times of stability, even when you’re near destitute, might seem like a golden age before uncertainty comes. My father remembered pulling his coat over his head trying to catch encircling bats at twilight, to inspect them or try to keep them as pets. He remembered continual walks over Sheriff’s Mountain, exploring the woods, playing “Last of the Mohicans” in the oaks and pines, climbing up onto the ramparts of Grianán, the “rocky place,” playing blissfully alone as boys, with a view of granite mountains and four counties of Ireland on a clear day, where chieftains had earlier stood and divided the island between them—the terrible contingencies of power that still reach us, regardless of whether we know or not.
From behind the Collon Bar, my father collected discarded bottle tops as a boy, because of the colors and designs. A burn ran past the rear of the building, all the way from Bridge End to Pennyburn, named after the amount once paid to cross the toll bridge. The stream had, at one stage, built up enough force to power a watermill, but had died down by my father’s youth. It passed, within sight of the camp, the remains of an old railway bridge. The boys, aged eight or nine, would dam the burn in the summer to create a small lake. They’d dive in or spend hours catching little fish, hypnotizing them by tickling their bellies, then flinging them onto dry land. My father swam in it from the age of three. “Nobody drowned.” It is mostly underground now, emerging in sputters from a pipe into the river.
The place I had gone underground as a boy was the burn that my father and his friends had swum in, redirected and driven underground, flowing every second of every day since into the Foyle, below unwitting roads and buildings and people.
“Was it difficult there?” I asked. “Springtown? As a place to live?”
“You didn’t know any better. It was a continual adventure, being out at the edge of the city and the beginning of the wilderness. Why would you go home?”
Da always avoided the word I, using we and you instead. I couldn’t tell if it was an act of including or distancing. I was a little skeptical of my father’s idealism, seeing it as too romantic, celebrating a bygone era of solidarity when no one had a pot to piss in. Yet it was hard to remain cynical. Da told me a story that when his uncle had dropped dead and they had no options, his neighbors had said, “Put him in with our relatives.” That was real solidarity. No performance. No bullshit. That was the loss he lamented.
As my father and his friends scrambled around hills they’d conquered, the radiographer’s van would pull into Springtown, to x-ray the lungs of the children in the camp during breakouts of TB, as much to protect the city populace from infection down the line. It was a slum essentially, known to people in town as “Greenhell” or “Hutland.” “Tintown” lay nearby. The authorities sent out a party to examine the site: 304 huts in various states of disrepair, 90 percent of them corrugated tin, 10 percent wooden. Sending in the police to clear them was deemed counterproductive, so instead they left it as it was and posted out rent books, charging them to squat. Five shillings a week was due up front, per hut. There was one door per hut, and though they were potentially death traps in the event of a fire (especially given the use of braziers indoors), it was the damp and cold that carried off the infants who died there, as well as being surrounded by swampy land full of miasmas. Eventually stoves were added for heat. Outside there was a toilet and tap for two hundred people, a firepit, a coal house, and a sink they referred to as the “jaw box,” as people would gather round it, chatting as they washed. The corporation made slight improvements, but no attempt to rehouse them. It did not go unnoticed, time and again, that single people and childless couples of Protestant backgrounds were getting houses elsewhere. Questions raised at council meetings were greeted with silence. When the mothers of the camp spoke up from the public gallery, the RUC were called in. Occasionally there would be a heartwarming story, like when the Hollywood star Jane Russell jetted in and back to the United States with a newly adopted Springtown son. These were largely distractions.
The camp went on for twenty years, lasting well past “You never had it so good” and well into the days of Swinging London. Aliena
tion brings conspiratorial thinking. So, too, do conspiracies. A protest march of two hundred residents dressed in their Sunday best, or the best they could muster, had signs reading, “We Are Nobody’s Baby,” “No Future in Tin,” “Springtown—Derry’s Little Rock,” “I’m Good Enough to Serve in the Army but Not Good Enough to Have a Home for My Children.” They joined up with other civil rights marchers and protesters and the stream became a torrent. Though there was no single origin for the Troubles that followed, this was certainly one early tributary, especially when it was blocked. They tied their struggle to the black civil rights movement under Martin Luther King, borrowing the same tactics, singing the same songs. In response, all hell was unleashed on them. “We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it,” declared the activist Bernadette Devlin, elected an MP at twenty-one. She was right. Many didn’t grow old. Justice would be sought before peace. For a long time, neither would exist.
The study light glowed on the window, replicating itself off on a bend into infinity. The photographs show a landscape that would have been unrecognizable today. A sepia army base on a flat plain of scrub, with mountains that could just as well be the Atlas or the Caucasus in the distance. Dirty-faced children and proud adults, posing for perhaps their first or last portraits. I flicked through the records until a spark of recognition came with their names. Margaret and Joseph H. Their hut had been allocated an address, 128 Springtown Camp. Next door, or perhaps next to them in the same hut, were my father’s cousins, the Scanlans and the McBrides. Sheets hung between them for privacy. In the next entry, Margaret and Joseph H. are listed again. By the 1964 register, it’s just Margaret.
She was still there in ’67, with her brother James staying with them. By that stage, the camp was in collapse. Many families had finally been evacuated elsewhere. The streetlights had died one by one, and the roads were riven with deep potholes. The rent nevertheless increased. Looking at the photos, I thought of the old military bases at Dunree and the ghost towns farther south that we’d explored as teenagers, attracted to the captured time in decaying rooms. The attraction lay partly in the fact that you got to leave at the end of the day. Romance exists only with the prospect, or certainty, of escape.
The huts were green and black, with gray walls inside. The windows were small. The floor was stone. Those—the vast majority—in the tin huts envied those in huts of felt and wood, given the rust, though the wood, too, would eventually rot in the rain-sodden climate. The rain fell metallic on the dome, running down the ridges. Panels would blow off in storms. Shocks from deteriorating wires were not uncommon. Wind and rodents, nocturnally flitting at the corner of vision, made it through corroded holes that would be closed off with whatever was at hand. There was a bus stop at the gate and a phone box beside it. People would call it at prearranged times.
The children, right down to the youngest, were born in the huts. They were bathed in a tin bucket. There was no hot running water or washing machine, so women spent interminable hours constantly cleaning, while their husbands absented themselves under the guise of seeking work. Six of my father’s siblings were in nappies at more or less the same time, given the twins and the rapidity of their births. A child every year for a decade was not uncommon, happening on both sides of his family. There were always bands of children hanging around, but they’d soon be scattered away like pigeons or would venture off themselves into the landscape. The deprivations for my father were balanced by access to a rough pastoral arcadia, and doubtless his later occupation as a gardener sprang from his immersion in nature then. Da learned a love of the earth the hard way. They raided orchards and watched weather fronts coming in over the land from the ocean, being the first in Europe at times to see them. All the fallow fields were named after now-forgotten owners. There was even a Priest’s Lane, where a minister had once been hanged. You still found Mass rocks in hidden places around Donegal, where priests surreptitiously celebrated the Eucharist on tables of natural stone when banned at the point of death from doing so.
Home was grim then, but it’s easy to forget it came as a desperate temporary measure for those dwelling there. Slums are not an absence of planning, but rather an improvisation of it by citizens when the authorities have abdicated responsibility. They were hated and looked down on, naturally, because they reminded people of this failure. Rather than face the guilt behind it and those who profited from the status quo, it was easier to blame those who barely scratched out a living in the consequences. Their very existence and their visibility were affronts. You did well not to make people feel guilty.
Handkerchief (Bloodstained)
“What did you do when you were young?” I asked my father.
“We threw stones at the police. Then petrol bombs.”
“What about when you were really young?”
“That was when we were really young.”
The day before Bloody Sunday, an army sniper shot two young men huddled on the corner of Abbey Street, one in the shoulder and the other in the back. My father was there, right next to them. He was fourteen and was cornered, too, and thought, “This is it,” but it wasn’t. Not for him. Not yet.
At two o’clock, twenty thousand people marched from Creggan to the city center in protest against internment without trial and non-jury Diplock courts, demanding a return to the rule of law. They reached the army barricades at William Street. A water cannon with purple dye was employed at the burned-out cinema. Plumes of CS gas emerged from canisters, kicked back to army lines. Barricades of burned-out cars at St. Columb’s Wells. Rolls of barbed wire. The Parachute Regiment, with their maroon berets, badges with wings—the best of the best—who marched to “Ride of the Valkyries” and “Pomp and Circumstance” from their base in the Presbyterian church, were let loose on the protesters and bystanders. The shootings began at four. They lasted half an hour. They’ve lasted more than forty years. A sixteen-year-old boy was the first. He was standing in the courtyard at Rossville Flats, laughing at the sight of a running priest. He suddenly keeled over. The priest, the future Bishop Daly, knelt over him. “Am I going to die?” “No,” the priest replied and gave him the last rites. The priest will be filmed leading the way for the men, who look like they’ve come from a greyhound race, only dazed, carrying the sheer weight of a dying boy, waving a bloodstained handkerchief. A young man was shot in the spine crawling along the ground at Rossville Flats. A young man cried, “I’m hit,” dashing from the flats to rubble. A middle-aged father waved a white handkerchief on his way to help a screaming injured man lying on the Fahan Street steps. His last words were “Don’t shoot,” before the bullet entered his eye. A young man was executed on the ground of Glenfada Park. A young man was shot there in the stomach; a girl from the Knights of Malta trying to help him was shot at. Fourteen dead in all. Two young men ran for the doors of the flats together: one made it and turned to find the other was not there. Fourteen dead. The coroner would recall how the dead had Sunday dinners undigested in their stomachs at their autopsies.
The killings occurred in a meticulous vertical spread from the bottom of the now-demolished Rossville Flats along a four-foot rubble barricade across Rossville Street, to the alleys turned kill zones of Glenfada Park. “We’ve had a pretty good bloodbath here this evening,” a republican spying device in the army base recorded. The aim was shock and awe. To knock the wind out of the civil rights and civil disobedience movement. To make an example of “ringleaders”—mass murder on the streets of a British city. In the old days they’d do it with dead bodies in public places. There was the local case of Brisland, a peasant who talked too loudly about making a stand against landlords and the authorities. His body was hung in a gibbet at the quay, having “brought on his destruction by his own folly.” Little had changed.
My father, and boys like him, reeling, were lucky to return home. The world before that event was still visible, just hours or days in the past, but it was gone forever.
PART THREE
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br /> Ma’s Folks
Lighthouse Bulb
A quarter mile off the coast of Moville, a fishing village north of Derry along the river and over the border, there is a pile lighthouse forty-three feet high on stilts. Its lights can be seen for four miles. It’s unmanned and automated now, but back then a lighthouse keeper would row out at night and spend the hours, often battered by the elements, in the watch room.
The last time I saw my maternal grandfather, Anthony, he was confined to a sallow box room that had the feel of a renovated bunker. There was a bed with white plastic handrails, a flat-screen television permanently tuned to football, and a toilet annex. From the windows, nothing but a view of a wooden fence, a clothesline, angles of telegraph wires. It was a waiting room, not uncomfortable or ill equipped, for the afterlife. Death and the Miser double-glazed.
The river was now treated as just a backdrop to the city, but Anthony had known it when it was a living, dangerous thing, and he was one of the few who knew that it quietly remained that way.
Bedridden, he still loomed large, despite hitting eighty. Generations of hard-living Donegal peasants had put granite in his DNA. Lantern-jawed. Barrel-chested. He had hands like shovels and commanded his bed like a throne, the remote control his scepter. The weather used to perpetuate from this place: storms would formulate above my grandfather’s house and radiate outward, great cumulonimbus towers, an Ian Paisley–esque voice that boomed now only over telephone lines. His power dissipated as he got older and his children, the focus of his force, became parents themselves.
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