Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Knowing that I went often to the North and was hoping to write something, people at home would ask me how I could turn a blind eye to the criminality of the IRA, an army that brought death and devastation on its own people, an army that got guns and Semtex from Colonel Gadhafi, an army whose deed the Pope of Rome had denounced as “inhuman” when, at a dinner dance of the Irish Collie Club, a device attached to the grille of a window detonated and people were engulfed in a ball of fire, the room literally a furnace, as rescuers pulled the curtains off the rails, trying helplessly to crush the flames. I was not blind to any of it over the years, the escalating woes, allegations of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s withholding incriminating evidence that might be used against loyalist paramilitaries, the macabre and dehumanizing depths of hate, as for instance when Robert Hamill, a Catholic youth, was kicked to death by a loyalist group in Portadown, his sister would afterward be jeered at in the street, sympathizers of his killers jumping up and down asking, “Where is Robert? Where is Robert?” I asked myself then, and I ask myself now, how the province did not descend into anarchy and total madness. How, for instance, could a mother or a wife or a daughter contemplate the reality of one of their own in a solitary cell, sitting on a blanket soaked in urine, maggots on the floor, and with the walls smeared with excrement? This was when republicans, in order to be recognized as political prisoners, began the “Dirty Protest,” while outside in the province prison officers and personnel were being targeted by the IRA.

  Then came the hunger strike, ten men in phased exercise, led by Bobby Sands, an iconic and messianic figure who had been jailed for fourteen years for possession of a handgun. I read his writings, which were full of pity for his own and loathing of the enemy. “I Fought a Monster Today” was the title of one of his pieces, the monster being the inhuman system that put him there, the jailers who taunted and beat him, and his ever-engulfing hatred.

  After sixty-six days of fasting, in May 1981, lying on a water bed in the prison hospital, with a large crucifix in sight, which the Pope’s envoy had given him in a fruitless attempt to mediate with him, Bobby Sands died. I have heard that when the news circulated, one of his warders laughed and one cried. Fierce rioting erupted in the streets, police using plastic bullets, and several Catholics were killed. In north Belfast a Protestant milkman, Eric Guiney, and his son Desmond were stoned to death by a Catholic mob.

  Across Europe there were marches of solidarity for Sands, streets named after him in Paris, Milan, Ghent, and Lisbon, while the Union Jack was burned in Oslo. In New York the Longshoremen’s Association staged a twenty-four-hour boycott of British ships, and Irish bars were closed for two hours. Some papers fulminated at the triumph of terrorism, while the New York Times noted that the British had misjudged the depth of Irish nationalism. But there is no doubt that his death and those of the nine other martyrs who followed him changed forever the perception of the Troubles.

  Some years later I wrote a verse for Bobby Sands:

  In your pigsty with thousands

  Of hours to fill.

  Did you dream—

  Bloodhounds

  The prophet Sirah

  And blackberries ripening in Rathcoole.

  Your mouth a mutiny.

  At the corner of Sebastopol Street,

  You look out from a weatherbeaten mural

  How beautiful it is,

  Such radiance

  Manna it says, fell from Heaven

  Once.

  Visitors catch you on camera

  To take home—

  Leaves blowing up around you

  And rain—

  That mural is sometimes sodden

  History rinsed and rerinsed

  But like you said—

  “You were going the distance”

  with the ghost of a smile.

  It was at home in County Clare that I eventually chanced on the story I would write. I was at lunch in my sister’s house, and the talk was of Tina, poor Tina, numb since the bank raid five days before, arriving early, as she always did, when, as she was having a cup of tea, two masked raiders, bypassing the alarm system and wielding guns, were telling her to hand over the cash bags and be quick. Four minutes in all. Although no one had claimed responsibility, everyone in that kitchen said it had all the hallmarks of the IRA. They cited the case at the post office up the mountain, a few months previously, on the morning when the social-security bags were being dropped off. An armed man with a balaclava surprised the postmistress, who, as she would later tell the guards, “roared like a jackass” so that the desperado fled. For her courage she would come to be named Annie Oakley. The desperado was later shot, just a few miles down the road, in a shoot-out with a local guard. After lunch I went to see the guard, and as it was still bright, he offered to drive me up there, so that I could get “the feel of the thing.” This is how he recalled it, in an urgent, singsong Cork accent:

  A fine sunny morning, I’d say ’twas one of the finest for May and the chaps had made their drops with the welfare money, when over the radio system I hear the sergeant tell me to go up the mountain fast. We are doing well over a hundred miles, belting up there, the siren on when we see their blue car coming toward us. We drive past them. I fire a warning shot to show we mean business. The fella in the passenger seat winds the window down, the balaclava on, holes for his eyes, shouting obscenities at us. We turn round, and the two cars, our white and their blue, face each other and the shootin’ starts. My driver is flat down behind the two front seats when the two fellas let out bursts of fire. I return fire. It’s war now. I hit their driver with three bursts, and I know I’ve got him, because I see him slump over the wheel and the balaclava hanging off. I’ve scored. The second fella is shouting wild feck talk, what he’ll do to me, and he gets out of the car and I get out too. We’re behind our cars, crouched, edging out to shoot, and then back again for the next rounds, bullets flying, and he having the advantage because he has a rifle and a revolver. We’re less than thirty yards from one another and I think it’s me or him, it’s the moment of truth. What happens next, but a timber lorry comes suddenly around the corner, and seeing that he’s boxed in, aiming the rifle, the fella walks across, says a few snappy words to the driver, and hops in, onto the spare seat. As I heard later, the driver was ordered to take him to a disused quarry, where a second car was hidden. His rifle and his paramilitary jacket were found there, and he set out on foot for a godforsaken mountain, ending up in a Gypsy encampment, with no idea of where he was.

  For us at the scene, it was a different story. The guy slumped over the wheel is unconscious, but he’s breathing. He’s not dead. We pull him out and we make a pillow of a fluorescent jacket and lay him down. Shells everywhere. Beautiful morning, birds all gone, the shooting sent them away. The scene has to be preserved until the ambulance and the forensic people arrive. A man from a house not too far away, up an avenue, comes across a bit shaken, says he was giving his children cornflakes, but when it started, he put them down on the floor and they huddled together. He offers us a cup of tea. I’d have given anything for a whiskey. The priest and the doctor are the next to arrive. The priest administers the last sacrament and then reads us a sermon, asking was there a need for this and saying the country had gone pure mad.

  “Oh, it was high profile, I tell you,” he said, slightly abashed as he looked around and noticed that the birds were back.

  “What did you feel?” I asked him.

  “When you’re shootin’ it’s fifty-fifty, but when you’ve shot him it’s a different story, because we’re all Irish under the skin.” He said it with such gravity that it spoke more to me of the complexity and pathos of that war than all the reams and reams of newspaper invective and television coverage. It provided me with the first lines of my novel House of Splendid Isolation: History is everywhere, it seeps into the soil, the subsoil, like rain or hail or snow or blood. A house remembers, an outhouse remembers, a people ruminate, the tale differs with the teller. I
t was the story of an IRA man come South, who billeted himself in a big house where an older woman is bed-bound and disbelieving when he bursts through her door. Gradually, as they came to talk to one another and to argue, finding a sameness and a difference, it was clear that one or the other must inevitably be sacrificed.

  In some quarters there was regret that the virtuosity of the language could not redeem the repugnance of the theme, while David Hare, whom I scarcely knew, wrote me a letter to say that, as an Englishman, it gave him some insight into that war. The crowning moment was the white card, embossed with the gold emblem of an eagle, an invitation from Hillary Clinton to dinner in the White House. When I saw her for the first time in that glittering gathering, as she came through a side door into the throng, she looked shy and tentative, as if she too were a visitor like us, being given a tour and standing to look at Lincoln’s rosewood bed with its vast headboard and draped canopy, the bed which some say he never slept in. It was there I spotted Jack Nicholson, whom I had met in London with Anjelica Huston when he was filming The Shining. I asked if it would be possible for him to give me a lift home, a request which must have surprised him, as he regaled the group with the astounding fact that I had taken a taxi to the White House, something unheard of in those echelons.

  At dinner I was seated with Jack and Hillary, and the talk came round to the delicate matter of when one should turn to the person on one’s other side, however reluctantly. I told them a story, as Ralph Richardson had once told it to me, citing it as an example of social correctness. He was next to the Queen, who he believed was sedulously ignoring him, and was feeling somewhat quashed, when she turned, “mid-chop,” and said, “Sir Ralph, how often have you played in Ibsen?” The words were as welcome as if she was ennobling him anew. “Mid-chop” was the word that Hillary would use in the few letters we exchanged after that.

  Belfast and the “miasma” of blood seemed very far away.

  After dinner we watched a movie in which Nicholson starred; there was popcorn and informality, and now and then, when the President was called out, I could not help but remember the moment in Dr. Strangelove when it was thought that a lunatic general had got his hands on the nuclear button.

  No such cordiality followed upon my writing the profile of Gerry Adams for the New York Times in 1994. There were rumors of a whispered political breakthrough, and also the fact that he might be given a visa to attend a conference about the North of Ireland in New York.

  He was something of a pariah, hated by many north and south of the border; the envoy, it would seem, of every single death, and by writing about him, I too would be implicated. For some years he had been holding secret talks in a monastery with John Hume, both men leaders of nationalist parties, committed men, with totally different ideologies, Hume making no secret of the fact that the IRA (with obvious reference to Nazis) saw themselves as the “master race.” Yet despite their differences they persisted, and it is due to their courage and their perseverance that the first serious, albeit halting, steps toward peace were taken.

  It was in the Sinn Féin press office on the Falls Road in Belfast that I met Adams. A small room, with half-empty tea mugs, bulging ashtrays, and a wedge of cardboard in the window that had not been repaired since the time, years before, when an RUC constable posing as a journalist got himself admitted and shot three people, before escaping through the window and soon after shooting himself.

  There was something bafflingly calm about Adams, that and a lack of invective, which could hardly be said about his Protestant counterparts. Whereas Michael Collins was outgoing and swashbuckling, Adams was thoughtful and reserved, yet the shadow of Collins’s fate cannot have been lost on him: Collins who, when signing the treaty that allowed the partition of Ireland, knew he was signing his own “death warrant,” meeting his end soon after in his native County Cork, in a district tenderly called “The Mouth of the Flowers.” Many in Adams’s Catholic community, tired and battered from twenty-five years of bloodshed, were urging him “to settle, settle,” while elsewhere there were fissures, still others suspecting him of a sellout, their displeasure made clear by the graffiti on a pebble-dashed wall, near the Catholic church.

  He looked exhausted, his eyes dark and vulpine. His hero, as he said with passion, was Nelson Mandela, no doubt seeing the trajectory from the Armalite to the negotiating table. He was putting the finishing touches to a speech he would make that evening in Belfast, asking Prime Minister John Major for clarification of a document that Dublin and London were soon to issue and that was to be a framework for envisaged peace. But the obstacles were many. Major was insisting that the document “be free of the fingerprints of the IRA,” while his Irish counterpart, Albert Reynolds, was imploring him to persevere with it. Meanwhile, in the streets, the killings from both sides escalated. Loyalists, fearing betrayal, became more and more virulent, so as to goad the IRA even further, and James Molyneaux, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, predicted that there was nothing in the document for Catholics, while the UDA published their own document outlining a necessary scenario, which was the “ethnic cleansing of Ulster, an all-out war, using some Catholics as pawns and allowing for a nullification of others, to reduce demands on food supplies.” The entire thing would be finished in one or two weeks, they reckoned. Reverend Ian Paisley was letting it be known that his party were not in the business of getting anyone “to talk to Gerry Adams about anything.” Others proposed that he be put in quarantine, to be decontaminated. Despite all this, he was surprisingly optimistic, saying that the peace process was on an “irreversible thrust.” Since Dr. Paisley, in trying to wreck the possibility of any peace or any joint assembly, was firing his “vintage assaults on the South, the Catholic Church, the IRA, and perfidious Albion,” I asked Adams if, in the unlikely event of its coming about, would he shake hands with Paisley?

  “Why not?” was the answer. It was not cynicism, it was not appeasement, it was the pragmatism of politics.

  But peace, as Yeats said, “comes dropping slow,” and hopes that had burgeoned turned to despair.

  On the Shankill Road on a Saturday in October 1993, when streets were filled with hundreds of shoppers, a bomb exploded. Two IRA men, wearing white coats to give the impression that they were delivery men, carried it hidden under a cover on a plastic tray into a fish shop, where they believed the command staff of the UDA were to meet in a room upstairs. The device detonated prematurely, killing the fishmonger and those inside the shop as the building collapsed, killing others who were passing in the street and were soon buried under it. Police, locals, and ambulance men all converged on the site, using axes, crowbars, and their bare hands to dig out the dead and survivors. As limbs were lifted out, rescuers listened for a groan or a breath, and a doctor, who later wrote about it in a British medical journal, described looking at a young woman whose eyes, when he opened them and shone a pen torch in, had dust on the glistening corneas that had the vague opacity of death. “I do not know if this is human,” he wrote.

  Reprisals were swift. The UDA leader whom they had hoped to kill let it be known that “John Hume, Gerry Adams, and the nationalist electorate will pay a heavy, heavy price for today’s atrocity.”

  Loyalist gunmen went on a spree, killing six Catholics that week, and then in a lounge bar at Greysteel, where Catholics had gathered at Halloween for a country-and-western dance, catastrophe struck. “Trick or treat,” two gunmen called out as they went in, people at first believing it was a Halloween prank, until the gunshots rang out. It was a young boy, Raymond, who had previously driven me on my visits to the North, and who was in that pub but miraculously escaped, who described the scene of carnage, the screams, walls with blood and bloodied limbs, a picture of gore. The doctor who looked into the dying girl’s cornea on the Shankill Road and wondered if it was human would have to ask the same of this massacre.

  It would be fourteen years later, in 2007, after numerous failed initiatives, avowals, and disavowals, that the two mavericks,
putative men of cloth, the Reverend Ian Paisley and the Jesuitical Gerry Adams, came from their lairs of power to sit side by side at a diamond-shaped table and face the cameras to announce that they were ready to work together in a newly formed Irish assembly.

  I was alone in my house in London and watched it with understandable emotion and incredulousness, watched, as David McKittrick put it, “the closest thing to a miracle that Belfast had ever seen.” I remembered that, when my interview with Adams had ended, he had conveyed me downstairs to the bookshop, to give me a gift of a book of Belfast sayings in Belfast parlance. A lonely, iconoclastic figure, yet, despite everything, with that innate certainty which would eventually lead him to the grand staircase of power. I remembered, too, that by having written about him with an openness, for my “silly novelettish mentality,” I would be described in an English newspaper as “the Barbara Cartland of long-distance Republicanism.”

  New York, New York

  I was often invited by some or other American university to teach for a semester, and I welcomed it. It was a respite, a stimulus, and an escape from the doldrums. I taught several times at City College in New York, which is on the corner of 136th Street and Convent Avenue.

  New York was always enlivening, it was as if the air itself had some strange elixir. I could barely contain myself in the customs queue, which was often at a standstill, officials behind desks bent over forms, and then, with a maddening sadism, wandering off, deciding to have us sweat it out and fuel the multiple fear and my own particular fear that my visa might not be in order.

  Then the excitement of a taxi ride in from the airport, usually at dusk, passing the few remembered landmarks, the site of the World’s Fair, with a huge globe of the world perched in a ring of steel, then on past some clapboard houses, all identical, and towering blocks of flats, gray and huddled together, before coming to the bridge and into the purlieu of Manhattan itself. The flutters of impatience became more urgent as we got nearer to my destination, willing the face of the traffic signal to go green, “Go green!” Along Fifth Avenue was a low building in the park set far back, like a keeper’s cottage, that in its quiet and its quaintness seemed a relic of the old New York, the one my mother used to speak of and the one I saw in sepia advertisements for soaps and eau de cologne.