Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (4 page)

…
there was no secondary school at that period for people like me.
We got minimal education – I went only to primary school, St Comgall’s
– and it was why I refer to it as ‘training you for the building
sites’, training you for labouring jobs. The best thing that could have
happened to you was that you got a job that got you out of the
country, away somewhere else, and you made it … somewhere
abroad. When I say ‘abroad’, I mean England, America or Australia.
Actually two of my brothers emigrated to Australia. It was the only
way that people could make it. In 1963 I left school and was employed
in the abattoir, the slaughterhouse, as a tripe-dresser. After
that, I drifted from job to job [and] eventually joined the Merchant
Navy and I went to sea for over two years until 1969
.

Most Catholics from the Lower Falls area were looking for a way
out. I mean, if you stayed in Belfast, you were on the building sites
or in a factory – on the building sites, labouring jobs, bricklaying
jobs, plastering jobs were all done by Catholics. Even to this day you
will not find many tradesmen in the building industry like plasterers,
bricklayers, who are not Catholic. So, most people wanted out, and
the way out was to join the Merchant Navy or to go and work in
England, and many, many, many people from the Lower Falls did
that. In fact, I don’t know a family that hadn’t got one member
working in England or in the Merchant Navy. The Merchant Navy
was a very common, very popular job in the Falls area. I had an
uncle, my Uncle Bobbie, who was a chief mate in the Merchant
Navy, and he had been promising me for years to get me on the
boats. Eventually, I got fed up waiting, and I went myself and
applied to the sea school and this meant going to England, to a place
called Sharpness. I went when I was sixteen, and it was like a British
Army camp … it was based on military training, long hours, up in
the morning, big Nissen huts. I was the only Belfast man there at the
time; most were Welshmen or Englishmen. So we did our training
there for three months. You wore a uniform, a navy-blue uniform
with beret and boots and all the rest. You drilled, but mostly it was
navigational training, how to tie knots. So, I served three months
there and I remember being really glad to get the hell out of it
…
you were instructed on leaving the camp that you must arrive at
your home with your uniform on. And I remember getting off the
boat, getting the bus up to the Grosvenor Road and rushing like hell
to my own house to get that bloody uniform off. I refused to wear
the beret … on the side of it was stamped ‘Merchant Navy’, but to
me it was a uniform, and a British uniform at that
…

My mother died when she was very young; she was thirty-one years
of age. My father was left with six children, five boys and one girl.
He was a tile-carrier, a hodsman, and he brought us all up; he made
sure that the family was never broken up and kept us all together.
He worked very, very hard, and he was a Republican; he was
interned in the 1940s. After my mother died he lapsed from the
Republican Movement to concentrate on his family … my father
was a Republican, but I think, foremost, he was a socialist. At that
period in the 1960s, up to 1969, Republican socialists did not have a
great deal going for them, and so my father was a constant British
Labour voter. He was always voting for the Labour Party because
there wasn’t any alternative, but, when we talk about socialism and
socialists and the ideology of socialism, I think Catholic Nationalist
people at that time were largely socialists at heart. They could not,
did not, read Marx; could not quote Marx or Engels or anyone else,
but by and large they were working-class socialists. There was a
socialist mentality about at that period. My father’s great hero was
a Republican called Liam Mellows, but again, my father would
never have read Liam Mellows’s writings – it was just through the
influences of other people, being in prison and so forth, that and the
natural working-class socialism that was there
.

During that time in Belfast, you were either Protestant or Catholic
and the alternatives weren’t great. That’s how my father finished up
voting for the Labour Party. But the breakdown of the six-county
state at that time meant that Catholics were largely discriminated
against. The old adage of ‘a Protestant country for a Protestant
people’ was very much in vogue and I remember the job adverts in
the
Belfast Telegraph
at night were quite blatant: ‘Catholics need
not apply.’ And if you went for a job interview you were asked what
school you went to. Catholics were identified by what school they
went to and by their names. I mean, you never heard of a Protestant
in the North of Ireland called Brendan or Kevin, Barry or Seamus,
so you were identified by your name and your school and, Belfast at
that time, as it is today, was made up of ghettos, Catholic ghettos,
Protestant ghettos, and the Protestant people at that time were made
to feel superior. They weren’t any better off than most working-class
Catholics; they lived in the same type of accommodation, terraced
houses … the better jobs, certainly, went to the Protestant people.
And there was an exclusive Protestant middle class, and, by 1969–70,
a developing Catholic middle class. But, I was brought up in a
Protestant area. My father – my grandmother was pretty well off,
she and my grandfather had been dealers, and my grandmother
actually owned the house that I was born in, Blackwater Street on
the Grosvenor Road, which was exclusively Protestant. When we
moved in my father was constantly fighting. The neighbours used
to put an Orange arch up, celebrating the Twelfth of July and my
father was in constant fights with the Orange Order who would
insist every year on putting the arch up outside our house, the only
Catholic house in the street, and on one occasion my father actually
pulled the whole thing down and we were all evacuated out of the
house over to the other side of the road which was the Catholic
enclave. Over the years, we kids were in constant fights with our
Protestant neighbours. Eventually we were accepted, until the
marching season would come round, the July period. I never had
any friends during that period, no Protestant friends. They would
all go off to beat the Orange drums and so forth. So reluctantly we
were accepted, but, it wasn’t easy. I remember one particular day
having to fight this person three times on the one day – he was the
local Protestant hard man and his mother just could not accept the
fact that he was beaten by a Taig and kept sending him back. There
was one old woman, she was in her nineties, Mrs McKissick, and
every time I walked past her door she would spit on me; every
Sunday she would shout – this is a woman sitting outside her front
door, bigoted old woman – ‘Did you bless yourself with the Pope’s
piss this morning?’ But around the July period that got worse.
There was always a real tension, not so much in the lead-up to it –
actually, I used to collect wood for the bonfire on the Eleventh night –
they would celebrate the victory of King William over King James
and put an effigy of the Pope on top of the bonfire … But the next
morning that was it. The Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, all my
Protestant friends disappeared; the bigotry really got bad, but up
until the Eleventh night, it was OK
.

I remember my father, after a hard day’s work; carrying tiles on his
head was very hard work, and … I remember him at night putting
us all to bed and we only had an old tiled floor. My father was a
very proud man; if he had wanted to, he could have asked [for]
money from my grandmother, or my grandfather or my Uncle Joe,
but he never did. The only thing he ever asked my Uncle Joe for were
caps, because carrying tiles on your head meant the caps wore out
pretty quickly. My father used to get down on his knees twice a week
and scrub the floor with the scrubbing brush and a bucket of soapy
water. We didn’t have much furniture, there was one soft chair in
the house which was my father’s chair. Because my mother died we
had to take our turns at household work. One week it would be my
turn to light the fire and make the dinner when my father was at
work. The next week it was my turn to make the beds and someone
else’s turn to light the fire and make the dinner … we had a rota
system. We had two bedrooms, a sitting room downstairs and what
we called the parlour, where my mother actually died. But we had
the most basic of facilities, the most basic. I remember my father
every Friday night, he would come in and put the wage packet on
the mantelpiece and it was £11 and my job every Friday night was
to go round and get what we called the ‘rations’. I remember it as
well, three-quarter pound of tea, three pound of butter, a pound
and a half of margarine, a bottle of HP sauce, six pound of sugar,
and two shillings’ worth of broken biscuits, and that was my job
every Friday. Every Friday we had our choice of what to eat for
supper. In the summer we always got a bit of fruit, or fish out of
Fusco’s,
*
but during the week, you took what was going. I remember
one midweek, we had no money whatsoever; we hadn’t even a loaf
of bread. We had an outside toilet with a lead pipe coming from the
cistern and my father got a hacksaw and went out and sawed the
lead pipe off the cistern in the toilet and sent me over to the scrap
yard and we got enough money for two shillings’ worth of chips, a
loaf and a block of margarine, and we had chips and bread for our
tea that night. I had an uncle who worked in the slaughterhouse,
and every Friday, he used to leave us meat from the butcher’s; there
would be a liver, an oxtail, sometimes sweetbreads and bits and
pieces of other meats, what you called ‘skirting’, which you made
stew with. But even if you were starving on a Friday, you weren’t
allowed to eat that meat, because my father was a practising
Catholic and Friday was a fast day. No matter how hungry you
were, you did not eat meat on a Friday! But, most of that meat my
father would give away, and one of my chores on a Friday night was
to bring some of this meat to other people in the street who were just
as bad off as us. There was actually one family at the bottom of the
street, it was a mixed family, the father was a Protestant and the
mother a Catholic, and the kids were never practising Catholics. But
there were twenty-one people in that house, a two-bedroom house –
twenty-one people living in it at the one time, twenty-one people.
Often the meat would have gone down to them. It was unbelievable,
I mean, when I think back on it now … there were three of us in
one bed, four of us sometimes. My father had his own room, and my
young sister was in a cot. She was only a child, eighteen months old
when my mother died. Initially she slept in my father’s room, in the
cot. Looking back on it now, I mean, one soft chair! All the rest were
bamboo chairs or just wooden chairs. But – now this is the major
contradiction – my grandmother was pretty well off; she was one of
the few people I knew on the Falls Road who had an indoor toilet,
an indoor bathroom, with a bath. For us to get a bath we went to
the Falls Road public baths, sometimes once a week, maybe once a
fortnight, where we could have a bath. But my grandmother had all
the facilities, she had a bath, a shower, everything indoors, and she
owned the house that we lived in. As I say, we had the most basic of
furniture. My grandmother decided one time that the outside of the
house needed done up and she employed this builder to put in French
doors and French windows. They were the ‘in thing’ at the time. We
were the only house on the street with French doors and French
windows! That was an image thing. It didn’t matter what was going
on inside the house, it was the appearance from the outside that
mattered. She’s putting French doors and French windows in and
we’re cutting the drainpipe off the toilet to get food. When she died
most of her money went to the Catholic Church. She went to
Lourdes every year, religiously every year, and I don’t know to this
day just how much money was left to the Catholic Church. But
certainly none of it was left to my father … my father and his
mother did not get on very well together
.

I think all my life, my father has been my hero … if you look at the
life that my father had after my mother died. He was only a young
man himself, and yet he gave up everything. He devoted his whole
life to bringing his children up as best he could. And I believe he
did a pretty good job. When we all began to leave, for instance to
England or Australia, I had a great desire to do something to pay
back all the years that my father spent in bringing us up. He never
had another woman in his life. He could easily have sorted us out,
or separated us, which was suggested at one time by an aunt of mine
and my father threw her out of the house! … So, there was a great
strength there, a great love, a bond there with his kids. And right up
until the day he died. I remember when I was on hunger strike, my
father and Tim Pat Coogan
†
came to me [on a prison visit] and
Tim Pat Coogan asked the question, as a journalist would, a direct
question to me: did I think I was going to die? And I felt the tension
in the visiting box at that moment. My father just froze and it
seemed like an eternity before I could answer, and by that time my
father had broken down, had got up and walked out of the visiting
box, crying. Crying! I think it was the first time in my life I ever saw
my father crying except for the time when my mother died. It must
have been like a knife piercing his heart and I felt it for him. I
remember thinking, during the hunger strike, the love I had for my
father was great, and the love he had for me was great. I remember
feeling totally confused at one period [during the hunger strike]
when I feared for my father’s life and I remember thinking that ‘I
hope I die before my father does’, because I couldn’t bear to see him
die. And then the thought occurred to me that ‘I hope that does not
happen, I hope my father dies before I do’, because if I died before
my father did then it would break his heart
.