Our Road

This is the road I grew up on. On the right hand side are the fields that belonged to my father's family and on the left are the fields that he himself bought in the 1960s.

Our family has lived in this part of Northern Ireland for generations. I went to the same primary school as my father and grandfather. My grandmother first came to the parish to work as a pupil monitor in that school. She would have been in her early teens and her job was to assist the teacher, looking after the younger children and helping teach them to read.  Eventually she might have became a teacher herself. My great uncle, Father Joe, was a priest in her parish in the glens of Antrim and I guess he must have had something to do with her coming to work in that school. She ended up marrying his brother before she was out of her teens.

Her family must  have thought she had made a good match marrying into a family that had a small farm and a pub/shop and, importantly apparently more money than most people.  They lived in the biggest house in the parish and there were only three brothers; the priest, the trainee doctor and my grandfather who was a farmer and a publican.  There were no sisters or grandchildren.  Indeed as one brother was a priest and the other died before he had time to qualify only Jeannie and Johnny had children.  Jeannie got pregnant a lot.  A number of her children died in infancy but 11 of them survived into adulthood.  While they appeared to be better off than other people and in many ways they were money was a constant issue with my grandmother frequently trying to find the money to pay bills.

Johnny was by all accounts a charming and funny man, well educated although unlike his brothers he  didn't go to university.  He was witty and had a way with words, making up stories and laughing at the the neighbours, enshrining them in ditties that his children could still quote 50 years later.  He was a troubled man, his own father had died young and by all accounts his mother was a bit too fond of the drink.  He followed in her footsteps. He died in the 1950s.

Both of my grandparents opposed partition and in the 1920s my grandfather was arrested and interned on a prison boat.  I know very little about it as it was never talked about in our house.  My father's generation, perhaps in a spirit of rebellion against their parents' views,  were not overly republican or perhaps they were just pragmatic, knowing that if living in a Protestant area and running a business where the majority of customers were not Catholics overt republicanism would not have gone down very well.

People have long memories though and there was always some talk about the family and their connections with the IRA.  I did ask my father about it not long before he died and he told me that when he was young there would  occasionally have been people on the run staying in the house. This would have been long before the second world war.

In May 1974 I was preparing for my O Levels.  I have to say I was doing it in a very half hearted way.  I was reasonably good at school and as this predated the the kind of horrific competitiveness there is now around exams I wasn't really that bothered.  I sort of expected to pass whatever I did.  LS was also doing her A levels and was taking it a lot more seriously as she was planning to escape to university so needed to do well enough to get her place.

This day 40 years ago was a Friday.  Part of our problems about revising was that it was being speculated everywhere that the exams were going to be cancelled due to the Ulster Workers' Strike which had started a few days earlier.  While we opposed the strike and everything it stood for not having to do our exams would have been a bit of a silver lining. 

The strike was miserable because the electricity kept going off and it was cold and damp and everyone was really tense and bad tempered.   On one of the days when we had gone to school a decision was taken that the school had to close at lunchtime as it wasn't safe for us to be in town and identifiable as Catholics by our school uniforms. My father and youngest brother came to collect us.  I was mortified in case anyone saw Daddy in his work clothes.  It is quite likely there was a bale of hay in the car. This bothered me more than the fear of anything happening to us.

A few days before this the first person who any of us knew who died as a result of the Troubles was found dumped on the outskirts of Belfast.  He had gone to school with my cousins and my sister knew him and my parents knew his parents my mother having grown up in the same part of the country.  For years we heard rumours about what had happened to him.  Whatever it was his immediate family were not allowed to identify his body as it was was deemed too traumatic for them.  Afterwards it was said that some of his siblings were really angry  about this. They had wanted to see him one last time. He was 20 and a student at Queen's University in Belfast.

The Dublin and Monaghan bombing had also happened earlier that month, the biggest death toll on any one day of the Troubles and apparently almost completely forgotten by everyone today - one of the most shameful incidents of the troubles on a par with Bloody Sunday.

It's hard looking back on all of this  to remember that at the time we were just as interested in normal teenage stuff as anyone  else of our ages growing up would have been.  The strike meant we missed Top of The Pops!  We couldn't go out to the Deerpark where there was a dance or disco on a Thursday night.  There was nothing to do and it was boring.  At some level we must have been frightened but I don't really remember that.  I do remember, rather shamefully, finding some aspects of it exciting.

That Friday night though we were all fed up.  My parents had gone to visit my aunt and the electricity was once again off.  In the absence of anything better to do we had all gone to bed.  Our phone was in the hall which meant when it rang someone had to get out of bed and go downstairs.  The person on the phone was related to one of my aunts.  He had heard that there had been trouble in the pub and wanted to know if we had heard anything.  I can't remember the details but I was the person who phoned the pub to find out.  They had a really old-fashioned pay phone with Button A and Button B for customers to use.  A man answered and asked who I was.  I told him my name and he told me to hold on and I could hear someone in the background explain that I was one of Seamus's ones.  The man came back on the phone and asked where my parents were and I told him they were out and he told me it was very important that I get a message to my father to come to the pub but even more important was that we  stay inside and not answer the door to anyone.  The man was an RUC officer but he didn't tell me that.

Moments later a Protestant neighbour drove into the yard and of course we answered the door.  He wanted one of us to come with him to take him to find my parents.  We weren't sure if they were visiting my granny or my aunt who both lived about three miles away.  My brother went with him. Our neighbour had told us there had been some shooting but not what had happened.

Another person then turned up who we knew really well.  One of us asked if anyone was hurt and he looked at us incredulously:

"Hurt? They're dead not hurt."

I don't think we understood exactly what had happened that night for some time.  A mob of men, most of whom were involved in Protestat paramilitary groups, had descended on the pub and piled into the bar and the back kitchen.  Three of my aunts were in the kitchen and they escaped by climbing out the window.  One of  them, the wife of Brendan, hid in the shed where empty bottles were stored.  A long time after the noise stopped she came back into the house  and saw Brendan slumped on the floor.  There was dark  fluid on the floor next to him and she told my sister recently that she remembered thinking to herself: 'Brendan has spilled his Guinness - that's what it is, Guinness.'  Sean and Brendan had both been shot.

All of this is such a long time ago but it is all the tiny details you remember.  My mother in shock was given something to drink after  she had been told the news but the only alcohol in my aunt's house was poteen which even a hardened drinker would have found hard to swallow.  My mother didn't drink but she knocked it back.

Another uncle immediately threw up on being told the news.

One of my cousins was brought to our house and three of us slept in a double bed that night.  She was distraught. The rest of the kids were farmed out to various relatives.  Apart from the cousin who ended up in our house they had all been upstairs when it happened.

All through the night people kept coming to the house and someone almost set the chimney on fire not understanding the vagaries of our Raeburn.

My youngest brother slept through the entire thing and he was really upset that no-one had thought to wake him us and tell him what had happened.  He must have been really shocked when he came trailing downstairs in the morning to find the house full of people.  He was ten at the time, a year older than the youngest of my cousins who had lost their father.

Just over a week later we began our exams.  I passed all of mine as did my sister but one of my cousins who was in my year at school failed most of her O levels.   She had to resit the whole year. 

For a long time there was a Wikipedia entry on this incident which seems to have disappeared now.   It started off by describing my uncle as a 'publican' except that someone kept editing it and changing it to 'republican'.  I guess that people still do have long memories. 

Comments

[ruthless]

the telling of this seems to get even more unbearable as the years pass. Thinking of you, today

[Fresh Blade]

Dreadful, dreadful evil deeds; you and all your family are in my thoughts.

[Jo]

Am thinking of you and your family today.

[Doris McGreary]

So sorry this happened. Terrible times for everyone. Wasn't far away studying for O levels too and remember what it was like then.

[carolbaby]

This is so unbelievably horrible, I can't even begin to imagine how dreadful it must have been (and still be) for you and your family.

[ganching]

I sometimes think considering the circumstances in which many of us grew up we haven't done too badly. It was, and is, still terrible for my cousins.

A reminder too of how so many people in NI have been affected and how for every person killed there were probably dozens and dozens more who suffered as a result. Makes it all the more frightening that there appears to be a growing number of people who openly express racist and sectarian views in our wee country currently.

[Martin]

Yes it is very sad how often the past gets wiped for many people over time , but for others they are left with the pain which can not be taken away. Growing up in London we had the bombs but it still felt so distant to a degree, and now it is like old grainy film footage, very much another time, but all I have to do is to think of our old next door neighbours as they are related to one of 'the disappeared' to be reminded of the human cost.

[anon]

This was beautifully written, as only the things that touch most deeply can be written. I imagine it must have been painful to put it into words, although I hope carthartic to some extent.
I'm very sorry for what happened to your family. It's important to remember that however distant the Troubles may feel to those of us who only experienced them on the TV, with the numbing effect of the screen filter, they caused horrific pain to the people that were directly affected by them in their everyday lives.
Very moving and very wonderful writing.

[Susannah]

I am so sorry. thank you for writing this post.

[Roy]

Sorry

[marie crossey]

They were my Dad Malachy's cousins.