My father seemed to be all for returning Derry to the mythic arcadia of oak groves that it was once said to have been. He saw himself in the lineage of the Celts, wearing a silver torque on his arm and his hair long, even though it was said there were no such people as the Celts, or at least not people who identified as such. When there is no refuge in the present, it is tempting to make a refuge of a past that may never have been, or a future that may never come. Everyone does it, to some extent. He’d have been happier if he had lived back then, before Christianity, among the trees. Yet it would have been a brutal place as well as bliss—a place of wolves, bearing the name Doire Calgach, or “the oak grove of he who possesses the blade.”
My father did his best, planting as many trees as he could. Births were an excuse. Perhaps the local kids saw it as weakness or just an opportunity, for one day they came down to the front of the house and nailed a crossbar to two of my father’s trees and began to play football, shouting abuse at my mother when she tried to reason with them. They then brought their brothers down and performed a Mexican standoff outside the house. Something was said and a hyena laugh followed and a red mist descended on me, and my father saw it in my face as I passed and he said, “Don’t.” He shouted it again as I broke into a stride and drove my head into the ringleader’s chest, sending him skidding onto his back. He got up, disheveled, claiming I was a dead man; but the others had seen him disoriented, however momentarily, and they backed off.
My father was in another room when I came back. I stormed through the house, throwing the wood from their crossbar into our backyard, jittery with adrenaline and feeling simultaneously sped-up and worn-out. I realized, only much later when my heartbeat settled, that it was perhaps the first time I’d ever heard my father raise his voice.
I couldn’t understand his pacifism. He was a big guy, after years of bodybuilding. His upbringing was rough, yet he was always extolling peace in a place where even peace felt like war, and failure, by another means. Perhaps his size was deterrent enough. I found his pacifism naive, even an insult at times. When I would get roughed up at school, he’d always counsel calm and understanding until it grated on me and I didn’t want to hear it anymore. It seemed to have nothing to do with reality. It felt like a cop-out. His distance added to the feeling. I felt like shouting at him, “What the fuck do you know?” but we didn’t even feel close enough—or were too close—to have a row. Every boy thinks his father is a hero, and no boy forgives him when he turns out to be human.
It happened with politics too. When some atrocity in our community occurred, my father was always careful to say that the British people were not to blame (he was culturally something of an Anglophile, loving the Stones, Frank Sidebottom, Dad’s Army, and so on) and that the loyalist people had believed the lies as much as our side had. He was magnanimous to the point where it stuck in my throat. A typical teenager, I spent as much time as possible outside, coming back for silent, sullen meals and then heading back out again.
It was an odd place, in hindsight; only a few miles from Derry, but it might as well have been in the Appalachians. The local boys kept single-barreled rifles and fierce dogs and listened to shitty metal bands. I couldn’t tell if they were stoners or if they kicked the shit out of stoners, or both. They were yahoos. Border villages have that feel to them, a mix of the Wild West and some postapocalyptic Las Vegas; an unreality, or perhaps a deep reality. The nearest settlement was the unfortunately named Muff, just on the other side of the border. The village was full of petrol stations, making use of the currency and tax differences, and slot machines. A dry cleaner’s sat snugly next to a funeral parlor. There was a bar ominously called the Squealin’ Pig. A gardai station next to a bookmaker’s. It was a quiet liminal space, but other sides would show up semi-regularly. The smuggling had changed since my grandfather’s day but it was still rife, mainly with cigarettes and laundered fuel. Occasionally an entrepreneurial spirit would borrow a tractor or digger and pull up to one of the then brand-new but conveniently isolated ATM machines and wrench it out of the wall and carry it off whole. Crossing the border was a respite from the Troubles. People traveled south and exhaled a breath they didn’t realize they’d been holding in.
The estate was mixed, and a great deal of the bolshiness and suspicion that I encountered came from years of that tense balance. On the morning of the first July 12 we spent there, I lay dreaming and began to hear Pied Piper music, almost carnival-like, but with a pounding war drum growing in the distance. It followed me from dreaming into a waking state, lying staring at the ceiling. The pounding had become so loud that I felt it in my chest. I rose wearily from my bed, just enough to peer out the window. An entire Orange band, complete with police escort, had marched up to the estate and was now paused in front of our row of houses. The triumphal flute fell away until it was just a thumping Lambeg drum as they marched on the spot, reminding us locals whose territory we were unwelcome guests in. Their banner was emblazoned with psychedelic Victorian writing that reminded me of Sgt. Pepper’s, only a bad-trip version. Then, message transmitted, they continued on the Queen’s highway until the music was a distant sound and birdsong gradually replaced it.
Between creepy retired UDR men, whose houses I was told not to be enticed into, and redneck country boys, the dynamics of the estate lent themselves to occasional moments of dark surrealism. There was a guy who’d once been a jockey but had fallen and been trampled by the hooves and was now a sorrowful cliché, “never the same again.” It left him “touched,” as they say. He was Catholic but was pals with the Orangemen, except for one morning per year when they’d march. Then he’d go down, ostensibly walking his dog, and call them all Nazi bastards and so on, while they rolled their eyes before telling him to fuck off home. Later that day he’d be down the local pub, the Magnet, propping up the bar and downing pints of stout with them all.
In the eyes of those who had always been there, the standard of the newcomers was always slipping, always diluting the pure stock. It didn’t matter that the estate had been built only in the sixties; it felt like the roots had been there since time immemorial. In some cases, like a stopped clock telling the correct time, they were right about newcomers. Loners would rent bungalows, designed originally for elderly couples, and unsettling events would accompany them. Curses roared in the dead of night, broken windows, cryptic scrawls of graffiti. The kneejerk reaction among some was to blame nearby Gypsies, but it became clear that the newcomers were exiles from the city, pushed out, having been accused or convicted of sex offenses. The IRA, or a cover group, would pass them a message stating in no uncertain terms that they were to leave the community or be paid a brief and bloody visit. To leave the country was a big ask, so they’d sidle out to the city limits and, for a time, keep their heads down. It added a subliminal air of menace that kids were primed against. We didn’t talk to strangers, unless they were female, and even then, we did so in a guarded manner.
The area was called the Woodlands, conjuring up a bucolic Thomas Hardy setting, but the woods were giving way to farms and an expanding golf course. They still existed on marshy land along the banks of streams, as artificial obstacles around the greens, breaking up boundaries, and as a cove down Hart’s Lane. The old Irish name was even more revealing and relevant: Ballynagard, the “townland of the garrison.” Those soldiers had long been killed or dispersed, but a garrison remained. It was about a mile from the border, which was itself guarded sternly, but idly, by a customs kiosk that would pull in vehicles in an attempt to curb smuggling. A stone’s throw from our house, though, was the real divide in the form of the British Army checkpoint. Ostensibly the border followed the county lines between Derry and Donegal, which felt arbitrary, given that the two slipped into each other genealogically, topographically, and so on. This was merely then a rewrite of an earlier fiction.
I’d often wondered what it was like for the soldiers, to be posted from London or Yorkshire or Glasgow to an obscure corner of their king
dom, here to protect ungrateful bastards in the omnipresent rain, dragging their families to uncanny garrison towns that felt both under siege and like a goldfish bowl. Certainly there were benefits—helicopter rides, firing ranges down in the sand dunes on the other side of the Foyle, the feeling of supremacy that came with a gun and uniform and the ability, the blessing, to dominate a population. To me, even as a kid, it looked like such a wretched position that I wondered what the place they’d left must have been like.
The nature of asymmetric warfare was that the enemy was invisible. He drank in the pubs and walked around the shops with his wife, maybe his kids. He or she melted into the crowd. They were the crowd. Naturally, it bred paranoia. Once upon a time these threats amid the citizenry were called wood-kerne. Then, strangely, tories. Then rapparees. Queen Elizabeth wrote of the need to civilize the Foyle and “do service upon the rebels.” Once upon a time they had vanished into the trees. Now they vanished into the streets. The RUC accompanied the soldiers as a sort of translator with the locals. It was like employing Iago for community relations. Out of shape, semiprofessional, and provincial next to the trained military, they puffed themselves up and were constantly proving themselves, which meant they were insufferable to much of the populace. The people were addressed in the tones of a Calvinist schoolteacher or a perpetually irate manager who, flabby around the gills, fancied himself as still having an edge. The RUC were keen to make examples, to prove themselves.
Our family trips to Donegal, to the beach or the woods, were punctuated with these encounters. Half the time we were waved through and some other sod took the hit. The other half, there were difficulties. We’d be waved into a siding by a cop with a fluorescent baton, the swing of it leaving a momentary arc in the air and in my vision. There we’d be addressed, not always with contempt or a sneer, but consistently with an exaggerated pastiche of authority. It was like a Monty Python re-creation of Oswald Mosley. The aggression, at that point, was passive, but barely. My father’s name, being confrontationally Irish, was a problem. The fact that he answered Derry, and not Londonderry, to their second question was a problem. The time he took getting out of the car and the sigh he gave when opening the boot were a problem. His posture was a problem. His wife and children were a problem. I got the gist of what they were doing even as a very small child; the attempt at protracted humiliation and demoralization. When I got to a certain age as a young man, it was my turn. On the way to receive an award at a school event in the evening, already embarrassed and nervous, we were pulled over. The clock ticked until it wasn’t worth watching it tick any longer, when it had to be let go. We stood in the rain, my mother, sister, and I, as they frisked my father again and made us wait while his details were corroborated.
I had never seen my father’s temper even begin to rise except in these moments. Even then it was through gritted teeth, murmuring under his breath, and by the time we reached home he would be singing again, or telling us about how there once existed a type of penguin that stood more than six feet tall, or how every minute of every day lightning was somewhere hitting the earth, or how in the polar regions at certain times of the year the sun shone at midnight. Yet the feeling of anger and humiliation would not simply have passed but would have fallen and settled into him, as it did me, standing next to my mother and sister in the rain, watching my father insulted and manhandled for saying his own name, and the name of his hometown, to an armed stranger from across the sea.
Sometimes they’d jokingly frisk the children as a friendly gesture and ask us about what they’d find in our coat pockets in a forced amicable way—“Are you good at conkers, mate?”—or flick through football stickers of First Division English football teams and say things like, “Liverpool are shit, mate. You wanna be supporting United.” The entire car was searched, from the glove box to the undercarriage to the engine. The headlights of the slow passing cars, full of eyes, shimmered on the tides of rain.
People evolved quickly. They learned to prime themselves in advance. There was self-preservation in avoidance. Keep your head down. “Whatever you say, say nothing.” At first this seems out of character for a culture that has prized itself on storytellers and raised bullshitting to a high art. Yet it was part of the subterfuge. If we had a hundred tongues in our heads, the saying went, it would not do justice to the real stories, the ones that counted. These, however, were rarely the ones told. Instead the telling of fictions, anecdotes, jokes, and myths were often a way at keeping certain subjects at bay. It was a way of not speaking.
The local shop and pub lay on the wrong side of the checkpoint. It was always a long walk. The signs came first: “Stop. Wait until called forward”; “Headlights off. All ID cards to be shown. Await green light to advance.” Then the cameras and listening devices were noticeable, up on the trees and the lampposts. In a vehicle, we’d invariably be warned, “Watch what you say until we’re through.” There was, surreally, a house inside the checkpoint, detached from but surrounded by the military. The owner had a fraught relationship with the occupiers, taking the Ministry of Defence to court for invasion of privacy, given that it was believed they could hear everything he said or did. The base itself was surrounded by high tin walls and lumbering concrete blocks, around which cars would have to slow and wind to prevent sudden accelerating attacks. Up in the watchtower were snipers and lookouts. We’d no idea if we were in the sights at any given moment. I saw barrel tips protruding occasionally. And at nighttime the green glow of night sights turned the landscape into oceanic depths.
The men holding the rifles were not that much older than I was. They’d been kids when I’d been a toddler. Now they were Roman soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall and I was one of the savages.
Some soldiers spent their shifts alert, scanning the landscape intensely from their vantage point. Others were glad for an hour or two alone, away from ball-busting, public-school prick superiors complaining about dirty kits or ordering them on patrol for dozens of miles across godforsaken moors. Some took a porno mag for company or a sneaky drink. There was usually a grille around the lookout slots to deflect incoming mortars. From our estate we’d watched it go up, factory-made sheets and poured concrete. What it reminded me of changed as time passed—a fort in the early days of the Wild West, a terraforming outpost on a hostile planet. It was a place that set itself up for a siege and therefore was under siege. Even the faces said it. I couldn’t see how young the grunts were, for all the marks of camouflage. Sixty shades of tarmac painted on them. A permanent studied grimace.
I tried various techniques to walk through the checkpoint unimpeded—attempting to look distracted, happy; avoiding eye contact, making eye contact; acting natural, acting strange. The result was invariably the same: I was always stopped and questioned, sometimes searched, sometimes hassled. I wasn’t all that different from them, hiding my fear and trying a bit too hard to appear like a hard man, unconvincingly arrogant. The difference being that I had no weapon. They kept their rifles very much on show, even when huddled in the doorway of their corrugated tower. Occasionally a disembodied voice would emerge from the slots, high up in the structures. The messages shouted down were always insults, usually some variation of “Fenian,” “paddy,” or “faggot,” but occasionally showing wit (“Oi, mate, lend us your walk”), which made me laugh despite myself. I’d respond to the foulmouthed gargoyles with hand gestures from a safe distance, not knowing if they were still watching.
Now and then, the soldiers on ground level would call me over and produce an English banknote from a jacket pocket and tell me to go buy them smokes, even though I was way underage. I’d seen other kids getting a slap or being lifted off the ground with the swing of a boot, so I didn’t flat-out refuse. To avoid what I thought of as collaboration—the walls had more than one set of eyes, after all—I’d tell them I wasn’t returning for several hours and they’d wait for the next sap to come along.
Not far from the checkpoint, a large picket-gate estate was being built, and
when the work had died down, the local kids would go up and hang out in these huge half-formed shells and tunnels, smoking and flirting and all the tentative furtive things that come with that age. Sian was older and cool. She had a Louise Brooks bob, with the attitude of a punk. “You’re doing it all wrong,” she said, exhaling smoke. “You take their money, ask them all if they need anything. Act real helpful, then you walk away and you just keep it. Then you come back up via the fields out at the back road or down by the shore. Then you leave it a while and make sure you wear something else next time you walk through. Easy. Think of it as a tax.” So I adopted that strategy and it worked, until one day I absentmindedly came back the way I’d arrived, having spent the money on ice cream and comics. It was only on seeing the soldier that I remembered. I tried turning back quickly but was grabbed by the throat and earned a punch in the ear for my insolence. It put a shame in me, a shame that would turn bitter, to wishing terrible violence upon them. I knew not to tell my parents.
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