‘I’m fine thanks, I fancied a bit of a walk.’
‘What’s that you’ve got?’ He nodded at my puny fistful of twigs.
‘I’m collecting sticks for the fire.’
He looked at me amazed. ‘But there’s fire lighters in the bucket by the door.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I like collecting sticks, it seems like a nice country thing to do.’
I knew by the way he looked at me the story would be all round the cousins before lunchtime. As soon as I said it, I realized I sounded like Penelope Keith in The Good Life and knew I had no idea what country life was really like in a hard-farmed place like Cavan. It didn’t matter any more if I was black, green or plastic – the cousin had discovered the real truth about me. I was, as they said in the North and the South, an eejit.
11. What People Really Want
‘So you’re flying in to Derry?’ Uncle Joe asked when I was on my way back to Northern Ireland at a better time for reunions and grand tours than early July. ‘Well, I suppose it’ll be no worse in February than it always is.’
‘What’s wrong with Derry?’
He laughed. ‘Now your aunt, your mother and all sorts of people will tell you I’ve borne a grudge against the place since my schooldays there. But it seems to me it’s always raining in Derry and the people are terrible whiners.’
It was raining. But the guest-house landlady who greeted me seemed an exuberant sort of person, rather than a whiner. As she swooped about with armfuls of clean white towels, she wanted to check I was only staying three nights because they had a party of fishermen booked in for the weekend.
‘We’re unbelievably busy for February. I mean, February in Derry? In fact this is the first quiet week we’ve had in a year. It’s been astonishing this year.’ Then she smiled confidentially. ‘You know I was saying to a friend of mine that we’re not used to this sort of success in Derry. Usually, things go all right for a while, then something happens and you’re back to nought or below. But this last couple of years, nothing. Not even the Apprentice Boys’ march turned nasty. Nothing has happened to annoy us at all and we can’t handle it. I was thinking of setting up a self-help course for people in Derry called “Coping With Success” – because it’s coming as a bit of a shock to us.’
Another success, although he seemed to be coping with it, was Martin McCrossan, a one-man Derry tourist development bureau. I wondered if Martin had been taller before he’d started his enterprises, because I saw his stocky, always smartly suited form, all day and long into the evening, pounding round the city walls with groups of visitors listening to his synopsis of the history.
A city-centre newsagent, Martin had noticed that foreign visitors were coming to Derry long before anyone else in town seemed aware of the gathering clumps of curious Italians, Americans… He met with scepticism and occasional derision when he insisted to Derry businessmen, councillors and central government officials that tourism was the future for the city. Martin went ahead, working on deals with hotels, coach-tour operators and travel agencies abroad. Despite setbacks – ‘too many and too depressing to talk about’ – he made his new business work. Tour groups used Derry as a base to explore the whole north-west and they were coming in from Europe, America, even Japan. The most surprising groups were the ones from the South of Ireland: ‘People who live only forty miles over the border were on a tour with me last week, and it was the first time they’d ever been in the North.’
Enthusiasm was definitely one of his personal assets as a businessman. He raced out at a moment’s notice to take me on a walking tour in freezing sleet. His talk was energetic, animated, as if the hundreds of years of history he recounted were something that had just happened to him that morning…
The walls of Derry, an exciting twenty-five foot high and thirty foot wide, were built in the seventeenth century to keep the Irish from marauding the city while it was being developed as a lucrative trading centre and seaport by a consortium of the Liverymen of London. Hence the London added to the original name Derry.
Derry derived from the Gaelic Doire, meaning ‘Place of Oaks’, because, presumably, there had been oaks. Martin pointed to a straggly one near a churchyard. ‘I mean presumably a lot,’ he said.
Martin stamped his feet and rubbed his cold hands as he told me that the arrival of the London Liverymen had been the real start of Derry’s troubles. ‘When people visit who don’t know much about the history, I can honestly say to them that it started with English businessmen and English kings hundreds of years ago, not the civil rights movement in the sixties.’
Kings William and James had one of their big seventeenth-century run-ins around Derry. In hopes that he was en route to reclaim the British throne, Catholic King James joined with the Irish to take the city. City Governor Lundy had made up his mind to surrender, but the 30,000 Protestant residents inside the city walls thought surrender meant certain massacre. Thirteen boys apprenticed to tradesmen seized the city keys and locked the gates. A long siege began, with escalating starvation and disease inside the walls. An estimated 7,000 people died while waiting for King William’s troops to save them. The siege kept James occupied and gave William time to organize an army efficient enough to win the Battle of the Boyne, securing his position as King of England. Eventually the city was relieved by Protestant forces.
The ‘no surrender’ slogan of the siege, which helped enable a Protestant king to rule Britain, was on Loyalist murals all over Northern Ireland. And Lundy, the governor who’d have let the Catholics in, was burnt in effigy every year.
The Apprentice Boys of today, an organization of local Protestant businessmen, paraded in August to commemorate their seventeenth-century suffering and the subsequent defeat of the Catholics. This parade was always an occasion that provoked riot and rampage at the height of the Troubles. But now, after constant negotiation, the annual Apprentice Boys’ march was held ‘tactfully’.
‘Oh, it’s all been negotiated in the minutest detail,’ Martin told me. ‘They don’t wave the British flags in certain places, they don’t play certain tunes in certain places, they don’t bang the drums when they’re passing along the walls that overlook the Catholic estates of the Bogside. It’s been minutely negotiated.’
We overlooked the Bogside, and he pointed out ‘Free Derry Corner’, where there remained the gable end of a house that had marked the temporary end of British jurisdiction when the barricades went up in the 1960s. A picture of the wall reading ‘You are now entering Free Derry’ was a favourite on postcards of the city.
Free Derry Corner wasn’t the mural that interested Martin the most. He pointed out a mauve and purple affair on the side of a house facing the city walls. It featured a little girl who’d been shot dead in cross-fire.
‘Everything in the picture is symbolic. There’s a lot of purple to symbolize mourning. And there’s a picture of a rifle pointing down as if to say all people in Ireland should put down the gun. And there, beside the little girl, is a butterfly. You might ask why is it plain purple and not all the beautiful colours a butterfly should be? The artist says it’s because when there is peace and people can flourish in their true beauty, then he’ll come back and paint in the true butterfly colours.’
Just as I was thinking the mural was the most mawkish, saccharine monstrosity, I was shifted towards a thought that I might not be a very nice person. Martin pointed to where the father of the little girl still came to stand every day, the corner where his child was killed. ‘He stands, prays and hopes to remind people of the need to put down the gun.’
The girl would have been about the same age as me now. Her father had been mourning her for decades. My snobbery about the artistic quality of the girl’s memorial turned sour inside me.
To a large extent the gun had been put down in Derry. There were no more scuttling manoeuvres of armed men across the bridge, no more barricades in the Bogside and no reason why a family cavalcade would be reluctant to drive through the streets o
n their way to a seaside holiday.
Derry was really the size of a market town, not a city, so the surprise was that there was a building left standing after decades of close-fought battles. And after centuries of determined domination, the other surprise was that the Protestant community had largely abandoned the city. Most Protestants now lived on the other side of the river Foyle, in a district known as Waterside. Always a better end of town than Bogside, Waterside had expanded and the significant Protestant population in central Derry had shrunk down to what my guest-house landlady described as ‘their sad little Fountain estate’.
There were Protestants who were more than sad about their eventual surrender of Derry to Catholic control. As soon as the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ became available, some used it to describe what had happened in Derry. Then the term was bandied about all over Northern Ireland, by both sides, to describe the way people were violently driven out of their homes during the Troubles because they were the wrong religion for the area. But even at the most murderous times in the last thirty years Northern Ireland hadn’t really let go of sanity and set out to massacre the other side. When the British army was in the country, there were arguments that there would be a bloodbath without them. It didn’t happen; for all the people full of hate there must always have been enough people trying to keep life possible in the country.
Martin and I could look down on the Fountain estate from the high city walls. Soulless, hurried architecture, as on most of the estates that ringed the city. Unlike most, this flew tattered Union Jacks, and had red, white and blue kerbstones.
‘It looks very tired,’ I said, Very bashed about.’
‘Oh, it is bashed about,’ Martin said, ‘but the majority of the people in there are old now. Lived in there all their lives. Why should they cross the river?’
To make his point, a bent old lady shuffled up a street with her shopping in a string bag.
‘They just want to be left alone,’ Martin said. Then he pointed further along, to a high wire fence running all down one side of the Fountain estate, separating it from the Catholic estates.
‘That’s the peace wall. You’ll see the improvement, it’s wire, it’s transparent. A few years ago that was solid metal sheets, but now they can manage to look at each other.’ He sighed. ‘But I don’t know if you saw a local paper today. Petrol bombs were thrown over from the Fountain last night. No one was hurt, but it’s so stupid, and it probably won’t have been anyone actually from the Fountain.’
‘What, there are flying pickets of petrol bombers now?’
‘God, I hope not.’ Martin smiled and held up his hand as he took a brief call on his mobile phone. I’d first spoken to him on his mobile and thought he might be a bit scary he was so abrupt. But he was just a man in a hurry, running golfing tours, coach tours and executive excursion packages to the beauty spots of the north-west – while personally conducting his walking tours, and keeping an eye on the newsagents.
Whatever fast-talking dealing he had to do on the phone was soon over and he was back to looking at the wire-mesh peace line with me.
‘You get youngsters from the Catholic side pestering and throwing petrol bombs too, as if they need to bother with one wee estate left behind. Last night, though… What I think is it’s youngsters from over the Waterside. Youngsters who know nothing about what people on the Fountain have been through but they get a few beers in them and think all this is a sport. It’s a local equivalent of football hooliganism.’
Because the city walls hadn’t been breached in the siege, Derry had been nicknamed the Maiden City. But Martin suggested there were other reasons: ‘Can you see that big building over there? That’s one of the last of Derry’s shirt factories. Because of the linen industry in Ireland and because it had the port for export, Derry was the place for shirt-making. Women would come from all round to Derry for work. Consequently there are at least ten women for every man in Derry.’ He beamed. ‘Which was great when I was young because no matter how ugly you were, you could always get a girlfriend.’
I said I’d heard Derry men could be quite mollycoddled, with all this excessive female attention for the very least of them.
‘Excessive female attention?’ He laughed. ‘Don’t we all wish. Have you seen how the women go around in this city? In packs, talking to each other nineteen to the dozen and God help a man who tried to interrupt. They’ve always had the money and they’ve no time to be coddling any fool of a man.’
It was true. Derry women of all ages bustled around the shops in gangs. All with determinedly styled hair and all seeming to talk at once, as they converged ravening on sales or teashops. Men ambled alone, wary; men waited in cars to collect their wives, or stood shuffling and smoking outside dress shops – and any complaining about the length of their wait was ignored as their finally emerging wife would wave to a friend across the road and engage in hectic talk about whatever it was the women of Derry were always talking about.
Derry was full of brand new shopping complexes; work in them had replaced shirt-making for younger women. There were building jobs for the men putting these things up, but then what, I wondered.
‘There’s still a lot of unemployment,’ Martin said. ‘Derry’s developing, but we still need our own IT industries, that kind of thing. And more tourism of course.’
New fancy hotels in the city and cheap flights to Derry City airport from London were making him hopeful.
‘Although the airport does need to expand. There’s opposition because it would expand only by disturbing farmers who’ve been on the land round there for generations, but, well, you saw it, it’s just tiny at the moment, but developing it right could really open up the west of Ireland. Hopefully we’ll find a compromise with the farmers.’
The landlady had told me she loved the new cheap flight busyness at the airport. ‘We’ve always felt very cut off here in Derry. Psychologically cut off as well as physically. Cut off from the rest of Northern Ireland as well as the mainland.’
Derry was full of people from Donegal, particularly youngsters from the countryside. They came over in the evenings to roar up and down the new clubs and bars of the Strand Road. There was a hope of a further boom in this cross-border socializing, as the ban on smoking in Southern Irish bars was enforced.
‘Who knows,’ the landlady said, with a glint of hope, ‘we could become a den of iniquity.’
‘A sort of tobacco Amsterdam?’
‘It would be better than some of the things we’ve been.’
A freezing rain was coming down on Martin and me. We seemed to have circled the walls but he was still telling me something about them and my ears were too cold to listen properly any more. I was wrapped in all kinds of layers but I worried that Martin, in just his smart suit, was going to have to put all his enterprises on hold as he recovered from pneumonia.
‘Shall we have a coffee break?’ I suggested.
‘Good timing.’ Martin set off at a pace I had to skip to keep up with. ‘We can warm up and have a good chat before my next tour.’
We passed the front of the Guildhall. This housed the city council and currently the Saville Inquiry, or as it was known locally, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
When the Troubles had erupted in the late sixties and civil rights marches were suppressed by the predominantly Protestant police forces, it was the subsequent rioting and barricading that led to the arrival of the British army. There were further civil rights protests, ending on a Sunday when British troops shot dead thirteen demonstrators. The four-year-long Saville Inquiry into the events of that Sunday was ending the week I was in Derry.
‘You should pop in there,’ Martin suggested briskly as we passed. ‘I’d like to have had more time for it myself but they say it’s very interesting.’
As we went into the welcome steam and smoke of the coffee bar, Martin gestured to a burly man at the counter.
‘Well, there now, you’ve missed nothing by coming in here. There’s one of Derry’s
most famous monuments getting his breakfast.’
It was Ivan Cooper, the civil rights leader who’d led the march on Bloody Sunday. Ivan Cooper, who had recently been the central character in a television drama about Bloody Sunday.
‘I saw him on telly last month,’ I said as Martin and I took our seats, accepting Ivan’s offer to buy our coffees.
‘With Nesbitt playing him? He’s not a bad actor, Nesbitt, is he, but do you see any resemblance?’
Ivan didn’t look at all like the actor James Nesbitt who’d played his younger self.
‘She was saying Nesbitt’s better looking,’ Martin teased, as Ivan joined us with the tray.
‘Old age creeps up on you,’ Ivan said. ‘I’m sure I looked just like him only a couple of weeks ago.’
I didn’t know what sort of presence the actor James Nesbitt had, but Ivan had waves of it. He wore broad, bold pinstripe and braces – a big George Melly style of a man, visible down a crowded street for hundreds of yards around. He was a successful businessman and politician. The sort of man you’d imagine would be seen comfortably through life by sheer force of personality, but…
‘Have they done you at the inquiry?’ Martin asked.
‘They’ve done me. I was crucified,’ Ivan said, acceptingly.
Ivan, in case you didn’t see him on television, played by Nesbitt, or as himself in the news thirty years ago, was a Protestant. He had attempted, as SDLP member for Mid Derry, to argue with the governing Protestant Unionists for reforms to help Catholics have equal rights to a say in local government and a chance at access to public housing. Arguing didn’t work.
Along with fellow SDLP men John Hume and Hugh Logue, Ivan had joined a sit-down protest to prevent British army vehicles heading into the Bogside. They’d been arrested and on their subsequent release there was further rioting, with the army attempting to quell the violence. The little girl in the mural Martin had shown me, Annette McGavigan, was shot during these riots, caught in cross-fire by a British soldier’s bullet. More violence erupted in the Bogside and Creggan estates; the army tried to break down barricades. Internment of Catholics increased. A soldier was shot as he fired CS gas into the Creggan. More army incursions, more street violence.
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry Page 20
