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The Price of My Soul | |
|---|---|
| Author | Bernadette Devlin |
| First published | 1969 |
Foreward
The Price of My Soul is not a work of art, an autobiography, or a political manifesto. Readers who expect one or other of these things will no doubt class it as a failure. Let them. I'm not basically concerned with its success, financial or literary.
I have written this book in an attempt to explain how the complex of economic, social, and political problems of Northern Ireland threw up the phenomenon of Bernadette Devlin.
I also want to tell the story of the protest movement which wrote Northern Ireland across the world's headlines in 1968 and 1969. Because it is an account of my own impressions, it may not always be objectively accurate. If I have misinterpreted the civil-rights movement at any point, I apologize to my friends for it. In this movement, which is still struggling to free our people from the bonds of economic slavery, I am only one among hundreds of my generation. We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.
Finally, before I get submerged in all the Joans of Arc and Cassandras and the other fancy labels people stick on me, I want to put the real flesh-and-blood Bernadette Devlin on record.
The title has a family significance. My mother— whose life story was much more worthy of being recorded than mine—planned to write her autobiography under this title. Since she more than anyone was responsible for my attitude toward life and its misery, I have taken the title of her unwritten book. For this I apologize only to the members of my family.
The Price of My Soul refers not to the price for which I would be prepared to sell out, but rather to the price we all must pay in life to preserve our own integrity.
To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Chapter One
Socially my father was the bottom Cookstown could produce. He was the road sweeper's son. My grandfather had served with the British Army in the Boer War, got a bullet in his knee, and was rewarded with a job as a road sweeper. He also got the tenancy of one of St. Jane's Cottages, a row of cottages in Cookstown reserved for veteran soldiers, and that was where my father and the rest of his large family grew up.
My father, John James Devlin, was born in 1910 at Farnamullen, in County Fermanagh, but when he was two or three years old, the family came back to Tyrone, their county of origin. Cookstown, in North Tyrone, is a planter town, one of several built in the seventeenth century for the Scots Presbyterians who were imported into Ireland to keep the natives in order. The structure of Cookstown hasn't changed in the three hundred years of its existence. At one end is the Old Town, the original settlement, which is Protestant to this day. At the other, where the rebels once camped, now stands the Catholic area. And the street which in the seventeenth century joined the two ends, and where merchants of both creeds met, still caters for commerce, whether Catholic or Protestant.
Cookstown is a Devlin area. For miles around everybody is called either Devlin or Quinn and they are all related to each other. This makes for problems in knowing whom you are talking about, and one way out of the difficulty is to call a man by his father's name as well as his own: John Pat Devlin, meaning John-Devlin-son-of-Pat. But the main way of differentiating between one Devlin and another is by the clan he belongs to, and there are dozens. My mother's name was Devlin even before she married. She came from the Ban Devlin clan, the "fair-haired Devlins." Another set was the Dubh, meaning "dark-eyed," Devlins. In recent generations, my father's clan was known as the "Fighting Devlins"— because that's all they ever did— but their earlier name was the "Delphy Devlins" or the "Hawker Devlins," because for years they had been travelers selling china and delft pottery and so forth. This was another bad mark for the family: not only were they working class, but they had a tinker background. The good respectable people in my mother's clan were very free with the "Hawker Devlin" insult.
Because of his family's poverty, my father left school when he was eleven and became a messenger boy, an unpaid messenger boy. Or at least, he was paid in kind: instead of a wage he earned some of the family's weekly groceries. But he was clever enough to see there was no future in this and when he was fourteen or so he apprenticed himself to a carpenter and got himself a trade. Over the years he worked on and off in Northern Ireland, but mostly he had to go to England to find work. To begin with this was merely because there was no work in the North of Ireland, but later— when I was already at school— he was forced to go to England because his insurance card was stamped with the words "political suspect" and nobody in Northern Ireland would employ him.
He never found out why he was politically suspect. He had never been convicted of anything, but, though he tried from the bottom to the top of the civil service, he could not discover who had stamped his card in the first place, or why. His employer just produced his card one day with the "political suspect" allegation superimposed on it and told him he would have to leave the job. So thereafter he worked in England and came home to see us when he could.
I don't know whether my father ever belonged to a political party. If he had, he would have been a Republican. The Republican Party is another name for Sinn Fein ("Ourselves Alone") which was founded in the early years of this century to work for the political and economic freedom of the Irish people. It is the only political party that exists throughout Ireland, in both the six counties of the "British" North (where it is illegal) and in the twenty-six counties of the Free State South. Since the Treaty of 192 1, which freed the South from British rule but severed the North from the rest of the country, the Republican target has been a reunited, socialist Ireland— an aim which for one reason or another puts the movement in conflict with the Establishment in both North and South. Part of the Establishment in the North, and deadly rival of the Republicans, is the Nationalist Party, the party of middle-class Catholics, who want an end to a separate Northern Ireland but are in favor of no further tinkering with the social system. The Republican movement has always consisted of two parts— the political side and the Irish Republican Army— and from time to time one of these wings has dominated the other. Ten years ago the IRA was the stronger, campaigning explosively to "free the Six Counties" from English overlordship, and planning to work for socialism when the link with Britain had been cut. Today the political side has the upper hand and tries to preach a peaceful, political path to reunification through socialism.
Whether or not my father was a member of the Republican Party or of its armed wing, the IRA, his ideals were strongly Republican. He was the kind of man who would know lots of people in the movement and very likely he had helped some of them out when they were in difficulties. It was probably for some such reason that he was politically suspect. He got his Republican sympathies from his blind grandmother and, although his own father was once a British soldier, he himself had no love for England. He didn't hate the English, but he hated England and he hated the Northern Ireland system, both on historical and economic grounds. One thing of political significance that I remember from my childhood was my father wearing a lily in his buttonhole on Easter Mondays. We all knew what this meant: he was commemorating the Easter Rising of 191 6. Officially it was illegal to commemorate the Rising, but being Irish the authorities tolerated what they had banned and lots of people wore Easter lilies. My mother, however, objected. Her attitude was that 19 16 was over and done with, and Easter lilies were a pointless provocation to our Protestant neighbors; with our Easter Monday gesture, she said, we were just as bad as the Orangemen flaunting their banners in the name of past history on the twelfth of July. She was a very Christian woman. So every Easter Monday there was a disagreement: my father wore the lily, and my mother protested. But after his death she always put lilies on his grave on Easter Mondays— the significance being that this was the biggest argument they ever had.
My mother's background was entirely different from my father's. Both her parents came of good farming stock. According to family tradition, her father, John Ban Devlin, drove his horse and trap into Cookstown one day to look for a wife, met my grandmother's parents, and the marriage was arranged between them. My grandmother, Mary Jane McKeever, was twenty years younger than him, but it was a good farming match: he had the right breed of cows and she had the right number of pigs, and so on. So they were married, their land was amalgamated, and they came into town and started the pub that still exists. At that time it had stables and a forge attached to it, and with the business as well as the farm, John Ban Devlin and his wife were really well off.
John Ban Devlin didn't stay in the story long. He was a fine character but he had the family weakness of not knowing when he'd had enough to drink, so he sat in his pub, Devlin's, all day and drank the business into debt. He died when my mother was about two, leaving his wife four children and the debt-ridden pub that she could do with what she liked if she could redeem it. Subsequently, my grandmother remarried. Her second husband, Dan Heaney, had been in America and had amassed some small fortune there, and this was used to build up the pub, now named Heaney's, again.
The fortunes of the pub ruled my mother's early life. Because she spent most of her waking hours trying to work the pub into solvency, my grandmother hadn't time to be a full-time mother, and when my mother was old enough to leave school it fell to her to run the home. My grandmother was said to be a beautiful woman when she was young, a very stately, straight person, with a sculptured, well-structured face and red hair. She was well liked and much respected in Cookstown, but to her own family she was a businesswoman: everyone had a moral duty to see that the work was done; there were no birthday parties for her children —parties were frivolous nonsense. Respectability and the business were the things that mattered.
My mother's name was Elizabeth Bernadette Devlin, but she was known all her life as Lizzie Devlin. She was born on June 13, 1920, the second daughter and fourth child of the family. She grew up to be the sort of stubborn, awkward child who doesn't behave like good, well-bred, main-street children should. She was always getting into trouble for not observing the rituals of Cookstown's bourgeoisie, which at that time had a lot of influence.
Her education came to an end when she was fourteen— as soon as it legally could— and she was forced, very much against her will, to leave school. Her eldest brother had been sent to secondary school, the plan being that he should either become a teacher or a priest. He decided he didn't want to do either: he wanted to go to university. But the university was, from a good Catholic viewpoint in those days, a den of iniquity, and my grandmother refused to sign the form permitting him to go. After that, although he was an extremely intelligent person, he just drifted from one thing to another and ended up joining and deserting the British Army in two days flat. Then he cleared off to Dublin, where he would be safe from the army authorities, and has been there ever since. The next child in the family, my mother's eldest sister, was sent to school and training college and became a teacher as my grandmother intended. But no such plan was made for my mother. My grandmother's attitude was: Why pay for somebody to look after the younger children when I've got a perfectly healthy, capable daughter? My mother had a good deal of fighting spirit then, which mellowed somewhat over the years, and she refused to leave school. She had won a scholarship that would take her to secondary school, and the entire staff of the primary school was on her side. They were on her side, that is, until my grandmother arrived on the scene, making good businesslike, Catholic, strong-pillar-of-the-Church noises, at which the religious section of the teachers' support fell away from my mother. She was told she was proud and arrogant, that it was her duty to go home and help her mother who had such a struggle, and so on. And she caved in.
In line with her middle-class status, she had been given various "accomplishments," among which were lessons on the piano and violin. For a while after she left school, her music lessons continued, but at some stage they were taken from her for being the nasty, ungrateful wretch she was. But she wasn't a nasty, ungrateful wretch— just a peculiarly human creature born into an inhuman circle. However, she was an obstacle to family harmony, regularly disgracing her relatives by making disloyal remarks about them in public.
When she was sixteen or so, the people who lived next door to the pub invited her to spend a holiday with them at Portrush, on the north coast. And in Portrush she fell for a Protestant. Sammy was then a laundryman in Coleraine: he was a Protestant, he was an Orangeman, he was later to serve in the British Army. From a respectable Catholic viewpoint, he couldn't have been less suitable. (Next to my own father, I personally respected Sammy more than any man I've known, and would have been proud to be the child of such a marriage.) Before the romance had time to develop, however, my mother went home again to Cookstown, and there began the saga of the fallen arches to which, in the end, I owe my existence. It was, in fact, only one fallen arch, and it started as a pain in my mother's foot.
Now at this time my mother resented her position in the family and she wasn't prepared to ask any of them for sympathy or advice about her foot. She wasn't a Cinderella: they didn't overwork her, but she was there to serve the others. When her elder sister came home on holiday from college, for instance, she brought a suitcase of dirty clothes for my mother to wash. My mother's position had degenerated from being the second, but equal, daughter to being everybody's kitchen maid. So she kept quiet about her aching foot and, as the days passed, a limp developed. This didn't help. The family's reaction was that my mother was limping out of sheer awkwardness; if the pain was as bad as she was making out, she would have said something. After a couple of months of limping, she was horrified to discover that she couldn't put her heel back on the ground and decided, rather late in the day, that there were such things as doctors. The local doctor was called in, diagnosed a fallen arch, and said he would strap up the foot into its proper position and keep it that way until it grew normal again. The unbandaging and rebandaging sessions, when the foot relapsed from its proper shape into its deformed shape, were, it seems, extremely painful, and one afternoon when she was sitting in the kitchen with the doctor working on her foot, it got more than my mother could bear. She said it was hurting. The doctor claimed it wasn't and went on to say that she was getting neurotic about it and if she wasn't careful she would go mad. Whereupon my mother lifted her good foot and landed the honorable practitioner at the other side of the room.
This was the end: she was now behaving like the working-class kids whom she had insisted on playing with as a child. All hell was loosed on her by her scandalized mother, but she didn't answer back. Although she was by now seventeen, she still had a kind of Victorian attitude to answering back her mother or arguing with her. Not until she was twenty-four and had been two years married did she say, "No, you listen for a change." But that day, anyway, she was saved by the doctor: it was his belief that things were getting too much for her and she should go away for a holiday. As soon as she heard this, my mother hobbled round to the friendly neighbors and suggested they should take her again to Portrush— and to Sammy.
This time, she stayed for several months, still limping, taking seaweed baths for her foot regularly but getting no better. Finally Sammy decided that the Cookstown doctor didn't know what he was talking about and it was time to see a specialist. He took her to Belfast and the specialist there, a Dr. Wright, told her he would have to operate. The months of neglect had not just misplaced the bone: they had worn it out of shape so that it would no longer fit its socket. However, he would break the bone, try to repair the damage and smooth the bone back into its socket as well as he could. At least she would be able to put her heel on the ground again, but she would probably have a limp for the rest of her life. At the prospect of surgery, my mother was up and out of the hospital and off: she would rather hobble than go through that procedure. But Sammy was firm: he dumped her back into the hospital, Dr. Wright operated and sent her home on crutches.
Back in Cookstown, life was just about as miserable as it could be. Here she was on crutches, perhaps for good, and the man she wanted to marry was a Protestant. She started going every day to church and she struck up a bargain with the Sacred Heart: if her limp went away, she would behave herself and renounce her Orangeman, Sammy. Sammy was a decent chap. He didn't believe in her Sacred Heart or her promises: the good God was an Orangeman, and he was well aware of the fact. But he said if that was the way she wanted it, fair enough, they would see whether the Orangeman or the Sacred Heart would win. The Sacred Heart won in the end. Dr. Wright had done a good job and her limp was getting slighter. Soon the crutches were exchanged for a walking stick, but my mother still hobbled to church at seven o'clock every evening to sit there and snivel and cry and feel sorry for herself.
Now at this time my father used also to spend an hour in church every evening, praying for help and guidance. He had two things on his mind: he was just finishing his job with the carpenter he had been apprenticed to and he was praying for some kind of outlet, because he didn't want to become, like so many people at that time, a skilled unemployed worker. And secondly, he was in a very similar situation to my mother, in that he had a lady friend in Belfast, Peggy Neely, who was not of Mother Church. Nobody in his family cared who she was, but he cared. He was at that time a much more religious Catholic than my mother, and he believed that if you prayed, things would turn out all right in the end, or at least you would be able to tolerate what you couldn't change. My mother was not at all religious in her youth. Religion to her then was the ritual of what was respectable, and she didn't like it and kicked against it. It wasn't until she was badly in need of a miracle for her foot that she discovered the benefits of going to church.
Anyway, here they both were in church, and, as my father used to tell the story, it was like the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in the New Testament. Like the good, main-street Christian she was, my mother hobbled in on her walking stick, right to the front of the church, plopped herself down in the front seat, and began to cry and sob aloud, with absolutely no consideration for anybody else. The only other person in the church was my father, in the back seat like the Publican, kneeling very quietly and annoying nobody; and my mother never even noticed he was there. Finally he lost patience with her exhibitions and one evening he waited for her and said, "Look, I know it's none of my business, but do you think if you were to tell somebody what you have to cry about, you wouldn't cry about it so loudly? Then I could get on with my praying undisturbed." When my mother saw who it was standing arrogantly on the church steps as if he owned them, telling her not to annoy him, she was greatly angered. For all his low origins, my father had some prominence in the town. He was a very talented man, and he and some other young people were responsible for whatever social life Cookstown had. They organized dancing classes, they organized folk dances and concerts and hikes— ordinary, simple pastimes, but which wouldn't have happened without them. My father was a beautiful singer and he knew it. All round, he was, in my mother's view, an upstart.
But after that bad beginning, they got on better terms, for at least they had a common problem to discuss. One day my father took my mother's walking stick away from her and disposed of it, and she found she could walk perfectly well. Through no miracle, but through human and psychological factors, her limp disappeared, and thereafter she walked perfectly naturally except when she was extremely annoyed or extremely tired.
So they decided to get married. Sammy and Peggy were not lost sight of: although they married other people in the end, they were always part of our family. As children we used to call Sammy "Uncle Sammy/' and I must have been twelve before I reflected how odd it was that I had a Protestant Orangeman uncle.
My father set off for England to earn enough money to get married. It took him three years. He left Northern Ireland in 1939, when he was twenty-nine and my mother nineteen, but they did not marry until 1942. He, his brother, and another young man had work waiting for them in Coventry, but the night they arrived, August 25, 1939, there was an IRA attack in the city: a time bomb in the carrier of a bicycle left parked in a busy street exploded and killed several people. And because my father and the others were Irish, no one would give them lodgings. After wandering around for hours, they were given beds in a Salvation Army hostel, and from then until the end of her life, my mother was very kind to the Salvation Army.
While my father was earning and saving, at first in England and later, when he had refused to join the British forces, in the wartime Land Army in Northern Ireland, my mother was doing battle with her family. When they discovered that she planned to marry the road sweeper's son— a Fighting Devlin, a Hawker Devlin, just the bottom of the bottom of Cookstown— they set out to prevent it. They tried everything. They cajoled, they persuaded, they threatened, and they bribed. Since my grandmother's influence hadn't been effective, they called in the parish priest, Canon Hurson. He, of course, was supposed to take the part of the Establishment and put the weight of the Church's authority behind my grandmother's wishes, but being a priest of a rare caliber, he turned the tables on her. He took my mother by the hand and my grandmother by the hand, and said to my grandmother: "Mary Jane, yours was a made marriage. You know, and I know, that if you'd had your way, you wouldn't have married him. Be kinder to your daughter." And he produced a little homily for her about the true value of humanity and what really mattered in life. If, he said, she got another son-in-law half as good as the one my mother was planning to give her, she would be very lucky. (Years later, just a few months before my father died, my grandmother said to him: "Canon Hurson was never far wrong as a man, and he was definitely right about the kind of sons-in-law I would have." She was the sort of woman who couldn't say she was sorry, but this was her acknowledgment, after ten years, that my father was as good as anybody else.)
When even the Church failed her, my grandmother decided to use bribery to try to change my mother's mind; it was her last hope. Her first husband had left her the pub, burdened with debt as it was, to do with what she wished if she could redeem it. If she couldn't redeem it, it was to be dumped on the eldest son to see what he could make of it. But my grandmother had redeemed it, so she could now, if she wished, give it away. My mother was summoned, the family solicitor was summoned, my grandmother arrived and made her announcement: everything was to go to my mother— what was left of the farm, the house, the pub— everything would be hers when my grandmother died if she would wise up and leave the road sweeper's son. As she grew older my mother was surprisingly gentle-tempered, but in those days she was not. She just swept all the papers off the table and said they could keep the lot; she would rather have nothing. And the family resigned itself to the fact that nothing could be done to stop the marriage from taking place. But they still wanted no part in it, and as the wedding day came nearer, my mother and all her belongings were pitched out, bodily, into the street. She lifted up her cases, brought them all back in again, and said: "Right! Throw them out again! Every time you throw them out, I'm bringing them back in. I'm not leaving here until the day I marry, and I'm walking to my wedding out of my own house!" Well, they couldn't suffer the shame of it much longer: they couldn't keep throwing her out, it was attracting public attention.
The one thing that really hurt my mother in all this was my grandmother's refusal, even at the very last, to give her the traditional blessing. Hardly anybody turned up at the wedding. Naturally, given her views on the subject, my grandmother didn't go, and because she didn't, my father's parents also stayed away. Their attitude was: If our son isn't good enough for Mary Jane Heaney's daughter, then her daughter isn't good enough for our son. Altogether there were no more than six or seven people at the ceremony. So my just-married parents left all this family feuding behind them and set off for a honeymoon in Dublin, where they stayed with my mother's brother, Patrick, the brother who had scandalized the family by recruiting himself into the British Army one day and deserting it the next.
When they got back to Cookstown, they had nowhere to live. No one would take them in because no one was prepared to offend Mrs. Heaney by succoring her disobedient and ungrateful daughter. "We're very sorry," they said. "And, yes, it's terrible; but we can't afford to offend Mrs. Heaney." Once again Canon Hurson came to the rescue. Off he went to the town's exemplary Catholic, the leader of the Legion of Mary, the lady who went every morning to Mass and tore her neighbors apart on the way home, who charged exorbitant rents for poky little holes of lodgings, and he put it to her: "I know you're a good Christian woman. How about forking out one of your rooms for these two young people?" The town's exemplary Catholic was in a spot: Did you offend the Church or did you offend the merchants, when the merchants and the Church were in disagreement? She decided that you couldn't offend the Church, and begrudgingly she produced a room.
That was in 1942. In 1943 my eldest sister, Mary, was born. When my mother became pregnant, my father determined that he wasn't going to ask anybody in Cookstown to look after her. Cookstown had steered clear of him— not from personal animosity, but from fear of getting involved in Mrs. Heaney's quarrels— and he wasn't going to go crawling for any favors. On the other hand, he couldn't stop working and look after my mother himself: he couldn't afford not to work. He was working in Ireland then, on the emergency airstrip at Ardboe, and for months before the baby was due he worked all the hours God sent to make enough money to put my mother in a nursing home in Belfast. She stayed there for some time before the child was born, and for a couple of weeks after. And in Cookstown, where everybody's kids were born at home, this was regarded as the impertinence of the century— a carpenter, for Heaven's sake, with airs and graces! So Alary was born in a Belfast nursing home, far from the squabbles of Cookstown. Her sponsor, when she was baptized, was the midwife. The people my mother would have liked as godparents couldn't be invited because of Mrs. Heaney, and my father wasn't prepared to have anything to do with any of them. He was prepared to leave the child unbaptized till it was fit to pick its own godparents rather than impose someone from Cookstown on it.
A couple of weeks after Mary was born, my father went to Belfast to bring his wife and baby home. They got back to their lodgings to find all their possessions neatly ranged on the doorstep and, pinned on the door, a note saying in effect: "Children not welcome." Their so-exemplary landlady hadn't warned my father before he set off for Belfast; she didn't so much as tell him, "Don't come back." She waited till he had gone, then turfed out all their belongings and barred the door. So there they were, sitting on the doorstep like the Holy Family on its way into Egypt: one father, one mother, one child a couple of weeks old, and a town of Christians. They took a good look at their Christian town, and they didn't know what to do.
There was only one thing for it— my father had to swallow his pride and go to my mother's mother for help. But he only managed to half-swallow his pride. He asked my grandmother to take in his wife and child for one week and said that he himself would prefer to sleep in the street. At this point my mother introduced a complication: she wasn't going anywhere unless he went too, and before this ultimatum my grandmother gave in. My mother didn't deserve any favors, she said, and she knew the good Lord would punish her for her wickedness— in fact they were already seeing the punishment in operation. But she didn't dislike my father on his own account. Simply she could never accept his background. However, in the Christian charity of her heart, she would take in all three of them.
There they stayed, living with my grandmother, for about a year, and my mother's function in the household was precisely what it had been before she married: she did everybody's work for them. My father was tolerated. Although he lived in the house, he was never served a glass of beer in the kitchen as the other men in the house and even favored customers were. My father was an unfavored customer and he bought his beer at the bar. But he didn't care: his attitude was, since he paid for his beer, he could buy it where he liked, and at any rate Mary Jane Heaney served good Guinness.
Sometime before my second sister, Marie, was born in 1945, my parents got back their independence by renting two rooms above a milk bar in Molesworth Street. By no standards could you call it a desirable property. It was damp. It was falling apart. And it had rats. To get to the lavatory shared by all the lodgers, you had to pick your way through rotting boards on the landing, and my father spent all his spare time patching the place up. He put a gate at the top of the stairs to prevent us tumbling down into the street. The winter coat that my mother lost in that house has become part of the family mythology. She folded her coat away in the wardrobe one spring, and when she went to take it out next winter she found the rats had eaten all of it but the buttons. Or so she claimed, anyway, but we never quite knew whether to believe the story. However, rats or no rats, both my parents preferred living in independence and privacy to the comfort and servitude of my grandmother's house. At least the Molesworth Street rooms belonged to them. They paid the rent. My mother's favorite expression in life was: At least we can lock the door. As long as they could lock the door with everybody else on the outside of it, they didn't mind where they lived.
And then I was born. It was April 23, 1947, the feast of St. George, the patron saint of England, which I suppose has some sort of ironic meaning, though the anniversary I prefer to think my birth celebrated was April 23, 191 6, the date of the Easter Rising. I managed to get myself born in the damp Molesworth Street house and promptly developed bronchial pneumonia and lumbar pneumonia and this and that and the other chest complaint. At six weeks old I almost decided I'd had enough of living, but survived that crisis to be shipped in and out of the hospital for some years to come. When the next child in the family was on the way, my father decided that we had outgrown the rooms above the milk bar, and off he went on his personal civil-rights action to the local council, demanding that they furnish him with a council house. We had been on the council-house waiting list all this time, but the local authority still wouldn't do anything for us. However, there was another possibility. The Northern Ireland Housing Trust, set up by the government at the end of the war to make some sort of impression on the country's chronic housing shortage, worked independently of local authorities in those days. So my father applied to them. To get a housing trust tenancy, you needed certain minimum qualifications: you had to prove you could pay the rent and would be a reasonably good tenant, and you had to have a reference. And here again we came up against the problem of the good charitable Christians of Cookstown. Everybody knew there was no reason why my father shouldn't have a reference: he was hard-working, he could always pay his bills, he was never in debt. He was an ordinary, tidy, good-living creature, quite fit to live in a decent house with a bathroom. But nobody could be found to sign the reference. Everyone was afraid, all over again, that they would offend Mrs. Heaney if they assisted the renegades. One reason why I haven't grown up with the traditional Catholic idea of sticking to one's own is that at that time the only people who stuck to my parents in Cookstown were the good puritan Protestant Presbyterians. Two Protestant councilors signed the reference for my mother and father, and in August 1948 we moved into Rathbeg, the housing trust estate in Cookstown where we still live.
A whole house, all to ourselves— to begin with my mother didn't know what to do with all the space. But coming to Rathbeg solved the worst of our problems. My father went on working, sometimes in Northern Ireland, mostly in England, and the younger half of the family was born— Elizabeth in 1948, Patricia in 1950, and my only brother, John, in 1953. We had come up in the world. Where we lived the houses had whole floorboards and good doors and windows. If she had wanted, my mother could have got back some of the social acceptance that her scandalous marriage had cost her. But she wasn't interested. Lots of people who would never come to see her in the rooms in Molesworth Street now turned up to say how glad they were she had got a house; but they came when my father was out at work. My mother would say, "I'm very busy just now, but do come back this evening and have tea with us when John gets home." However, that was no part of their plan: they didn't like coming when John was at home. "Well, listen, my dear," my mother would say, "I don't want us to fall out, but if my home's not good enough for you when my husband's in it, you're not welcome in it when he's not." And that didn't gain her much sympathy.
Chapter Two
If it hadn't been for the fact that I had an essentially Christian background from my mother, poverty would have made me bitter rather than socialist, and what I knew of politics would have made me mad Republican. This is the common situation in Northern Ireland: if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness. My mother was, from my point of view, despairingly Christian. You could have kicked her fifty times a day and she would still have turned the other cheek— and not just in a passive way; if you had tripped in the action of kicking her, she would have lifted you up, knowing that as soon as you got on your own two feet, you were going to kick her again. Her life— the conflicts with her family, the loss of my father, the struggle to bring up six children on welfare benefits— gave her two choices: she could either become bitter and reject everything, or she could accept that none of this really mattered because the world, after all, was only a stopping place. She chose the second. She had a kind of martyr complex, which to some extent has rubbed off on me. She had plenty of moral courage. Her attitude was: if in your own conscience you know you are right, it doesn't matter how many people think you are wrong. Just plough on. Nobody will appreciate it, but you're not doing it for anybody's appreciation. You do it because it's right, and if it's right it's worth doing, and if it's worth doing, it's worth doing properly.
Her talk was full of these sayings from popular wisdom, such as "A thing worth doing is worth doing well." If you objected, "But I can't do it," she would say, "If there's a will, there's a way; the fact that you can't do it and give up means that you don't really want to do it hard enough." My father's philosophy of life was less reducible to proverbs, but I do remember two sayings he had. One was: "Your teeth are for keeping your tongue behind," and the other: "If you put your foot in dirt, it spreads. Just walk round it." And there was one observation my parents shared, and that was: "There'll be days when you're dead." When this phrase was used, it meant that we were going to do something rash, something we either couldn't afford to do or didn't have the time to do but that we were going to do anyway.
On this days-when-you're-dead principle, we used to spend two weeks at the seaside every summer— at Portrush, scene of my mother's early romance. When my father, being politically suspect, was obliged to work in England, we saw him only at Christmas and Easter and occasional weekends in between— he blamed and hated the English for that, and so did we all. But the big reunion of the year was the holiday at Portrush. As soon as Christmas was over and paid for, we started saving up. Tins of food to be taken on the holiday began to fill the top shelf of the larder. My father started cutting down on his weekends at home— these were expensive, not only because of the fares, but also because to make the journey worth while he had to travel on working days and so lose pay. As well as coming home fewer weekends, he would send home slightly less money, and save it up in England instead. My mother's one failing was that she couldn't save money: if she had spare cash and someone came to the door collecting for charity, or begging, she would give it away; if we had run up against our relatives and needed a morale booster, she would blow the housekeeping on something like strawberries and ice cream, and then we would be poverty-stricken for a week!
So my father did the saving, and when Portrush-time came around, we set off with enough supplies to last the family for a fortnight. Hardly any of the money went for food; most of it was spent on the rent of a house for two weeks, and on extravagances and pleasures. Not that we did anything very exciting. The older half of the family got up at seven o'clock to go to Mass with my mother and on the way back stopped at the harbor to buy fish and at the home bakery to buy bread; then they came home and we had breakfast. After this, all the swimming costumes, towels, and so forth were piled onto the push chair— there was always a push chair in use in our family, because there was always one of us of push-chair age— and we all set off together for the day, to spend the family savings on shows and cotton candy.
Because he died when I was young, my memories of my father are idealized. He didn't live long enough for me to start appreciating him critically, and I still have the impression that he knew an awful lot. It seems to me— and evidence from photographs bears me out here— that he was quite a handsome man. He was fairly tall, well-built, athletic: not at all the sort of person you would expect to die, as he did, of thrombosis. He had dark hair and a very firm jaw structure, which would have given him a stern face, but the effect was ruined by a large dimple in his chin— and by his eyes. Both my parents had the same sort of eyes, but my father's were more beautiful. They were pale blue, very calm, and honest, eyes that made it impossible for him to tell lies because they always gave him away. My mother, however, had eyes that made other people tell the truth: they were gray-blue and, like my own, rather round and staring. They were mystical eyes, looking through you rather than at you and dragging the truth out of you.
In her teens and twenties, my mother was a slight person. She must have had a large bone structure, but in those days she looked very thin and frail. Probably because she had six children she became in her thirties big and stout, and later she got very fat. She was in the end a great big moving bus of a woman. She was never healthy: her heart was weak and in her later years she suffered from angina and so she was obliged to walk slowly. She didn't look as if she was struggling along under the burdens of her weight and a weak heart, but rather as if she was walking serenely because life was much too good to be enjoyed at any quicker pace. When she got to the top of a hill, she would stop— simply because she had to stop to get the strength to walk on— but even then she looked as if she was pausing at the top of every urban hill to view the beauty of the surrounding smoke and chimneys.
In spite of working in England, my father played a part in the family that was unusual for an Irish father— or at least wasn't common in the circle we lived in. Other people's fathers' role was, it appeared, to earn the money, punish the children— lt You wait till your father comes home!"— and let the wife get on with the housework. My father was a better cook than my mother and in fact taught her to cook all the things worth cooking, like fudge and toffee apples and pancakes. She had learned a mundane, square-meal kind of cookery when she lived with my grandmother, so when it came to Shrove Tuesday, it was my father who made the pancakes; at Halloween, he made the apple tarts and apple fritters and all sorts of sticky, gooey stuff for putting apples in. But he didn't just keep his talents for special occasions. If mv mother had been pretty busv during the day, he would cook the supper— and we preferred it when he did, for he served us weird things that it was bad to send children to bed on. He thought nothing of doing the housework on a Saturday if he wasn't working, and was totally unashamed of hanging washing on the line— a thing most men in Cookstown wouldn't be seen dead doing. Cookstown in general thought he was round the bend: he had no masculine self-respect at all and was quite happy going shopping or pushing the baby's pram or buying clothes for his children. Other men waited for their wives outside the shop, looked uncomfortable, and carried the parcels. But Cookstown learned to admire mv father because, although he was from the bottom, he walked with his head up.
My father was essentially a very gentle person. When he working on the airstrip at Ardboe he noticed that the fellow beside him never brought any lunch, so mv father used to bring double rations, share it out, and complain that his wife always gave him more than he wanted. After my father died. I remember this fellow coming to the house and telling us how gentle a man he had been. But along with his gentleness, he had authority. At work he was always the one chosen by the men to talk to the management, and he was much more keen on discipline than my mother. He wasn't hard, but he believed very firmly that right and wrong existed: you should do the right thing for the right reasons, but until such time as you were prepared to accept the right reasons, you would have to do the right thing because you were told to. He had a fondness for the civilities of life, which was perhaps surprising in a working-class man. Since my mother came from the middle class, she could have been expected to insist on formalities, but instead she reacted against them. She didn't care whether or not we washed our hands before we came to the table, because she had been made to do it as a child, but my father cared very much, and he cared about how we treated the food we were given. Once when I was seven or eight I came in late to tea, to discover that my sisters had eaten up all but one of the square ends of the slices of bread, which I— and they— preferred to the round ends. The one remaining square end was at the bottom of the plate, and I began flicking through the bread like the pages of a book in search of the piece I wanted. Whereupon my father slapped my hand from the table, looked at me, and said, "What have you done?" "Nothing," I said, big tears standing in my eyes. "Do you expect any other human being to eat the food you have rejected as not fit for your consumption?" "But Daddy," I said, horror dawning, "I can't eat five slices of bread— not with my tea as well." My father removed my meal, set down one empty plate, put the Rvt slices of bread on it, and said, "You can have butter on them, you can have jam on them, you can have anything you like on them, but nobody is going to eat that bread but you. And if you can't eat it tonight, don't make yourself sick; it will be there for your breakfast tomorrow."
And I ate every one of those slices of bread. My father didn't put on this performance just to impress on me that one did what one was told: the important point was that I had not shown consideration for others, expecting them to eat what I had cast aside.
He was very strict about basic civil behavior. He was much stricter than my mother about people who raised their voices. Shouting, kicking, and biting were forms of combat not to be tolerated. We very seldom fought among ourselves, but neither of my parents minded if we did— so long as we fought it out and ended up as friends. But when a fight developed into a kicking and biting match, whoever was involved got the wooden spoon. The wooden spoon— an ordinary kitchen spoon— was my mother's punishment tool and the terror of our lives. It was kept in the knife drawer and once you heard the drawer open, you knew you were in danger. I don't ever remember my mother beating any one of us in a temper. She would sit there quite serenely, while things were getting out of hand, and say, "I'm warning you once— stop it! I'm warning you twice— stop it, or you will get the wooden spoon!" The third time, the knife drawer opened and the wooden spoon actually made its appearance, and my mother stood over the culprit: "Now, do you actually want me to use this, for this is your last warning." Usually we were smart enough to stop whatever we were doing at that point. If we were not, she very calmly led us away by the ear and spanked our backsides with the wooden spoon.
When we got slapped, it was always on the bottom, except for kicking, which merited a slap on the legs. But once I got a more unusual sort of punishment. In our kitchen we had a long couch, like a bench, which we sat along for meals in order of age: Mary, Marie, Bernadette, Elizabeth, Paddy, John— our place at table matched our place in the family. One day a fight developed on the bench, during which Paddy took a great bite out of Biff (the family's name for Elizabeth), unnoticed by anyone but me. Ever-valiant in the cause of justice, I came to Biff's defense and bit Paddy. And I was seen. Calmly my mother called me to her and said, "Roll up your sleeve." I looked at her, wondering where on earth the wooden spoon was going to fall, but I rolled up my sleeve. Still calmly, my mother lifted my arm and bit me as hard as she could— amid screams and roars and "No, Mummy, that hurts!" "Now that you know what it feels like," she said, "you'll not do it again in a hurry, will you?" It was against all the family traditions that I should say, "But Paddy bit Elizabeth first." Telling tales was forbidden: sisters should stand loyally by each other. If my mother caught someone doing wrong, she punished the malefactor, but if one of the others came in whining, "Mummy, do you know what she did . . . ?" it was the tale-teller who got the punishment: not only had she failed to prevent her sister from erring, but she had maliciously come telling tales as well. It was this curious discipline that made us all the peculiar characters we are.
Although, like me, my mother was careless of her own appearance, she made a point of dressing us well, and she dressed us all alike. Partly this was for economy. She was very handy with the sewing machine, and she used to buy material in vast quantities and make half a dozen dresses, identical in every respect except that each was a size smaller than the next one. So there we were growing up, and the frocks just moved along the line. But we were dressed alike for another reason as well: my mother had once seen this American Easter Parade photograph of an idiotic-looking family of about a dozen boys and a dozen girls— perhaps that's an exaggeration, but there was a massive row of children, and they were all dressed exactly alike. My mother fell for this photograph. I do believe at the back of her mind she cherished the idea that one day she might have five daughters and five sons, all dressed in uniform. It was a thought to horrify my poor father. "Just one boy will do me, honestly," he would say. "If we had that number of kids, we'd have nothing to put on them, never mind dress them all alike!" Occasionally my father would bring five frocks from England. The ones I remember best were blue and white with big, detachable white collars. Because they were prim and proper, they were English, and because of the collars, they were sailor; so we called them our "English sailor frocks" and we thought they were great. I can't think of another father who would have had the courage to go into a shop and buy five identical dresses, but it never cost my father a thought.
My parents' marriage was, I believe, more or less ideal: no one was boss; everything they did was worked out between the two of them, though I would say my father's word would have been final. There was a kind of mental telepathy between them that let each know what the other was doing and thinking and feeling, even when one was in England and the other at home. My mother used to ride a bicycle in those days and she was always falling off it. Once she had a worse fall than usual and that night when she telephoned my father— she used to ring him up about every other evening, just for three minutes— he said as soon as he lifted the phone, "I've told you to stay off that bicycle! "
Our family was a very democratic assembly: we were not a family in which there was a father who did a job, a mother who did a job, and the kids who did what they were told. As each one of us came to the use of reason, as it were, we were included in the family decisions. Once we knew how to count, we were involved in the family expenditure. We never had regular pocket money as children, but if we needed money for something, we got it. As long as the money was there, we could have it, even for frivolous and unnecessary purchases. But we were brought up to reflect that since we could get what we asked for, we ought to be pretty responsible about asking. If you wanted something only because someone else had it, you were forced to think, "Well, that's not much of a reason; I don't really need it," and reconcile yourself to doing without it. After my father died, this training paid dividends. We all took sick that winter— and this was another area where family solidarity showed itself: we all fell sick together. Once any sort of germ got into the house, we all came down with it at twoweekly intervals. And the only two people left on their feet on this occasion were Elizabeth and myself. Paddy, fretting for her father, had developed pneumonia; everybody else had the measles; Asian flu was hovering about; and the budgerigar died. And this house of mourning and sickness was run by seven-year-old Elizabeth and myself, aged nine. I couldn't cook— still can't— but she could, so I did the shopping, peeled the potatoes and did the humble unskilled work, and she cooked the dinner. "Well, she's got a good family," neighbors said of my mother, but they didn't interfere. We had lived independently of the entire town— not in isolation, exactly, but in a sort of unforthcoming friendliness. Now, instead of staying away from us because they didn't wish to offend the Establishment, people stayed away and hesitated to offer their assistance because they were afraid they might offend us.
We were brought up to ignore Cookstown, on the principle that it didn't care about us and we didn't care about it. Of course there was contact with our relatives. Sunday was walking and visiting day, and after Sunday dinner we used to set off in one direction to visit our wealthy grandmother, Mrs. Heaney; then five or six miles in another direction to visit our poor grandmother; and finally back home for tea. (My father used to turn these walks into educational sessions, teaching us about the rhythm of the farming year and to identify birds and trees. We weren't aware we were learning "natural history": it was just part of Sunday afternoons.) My rich grandmother helped us financially all our lives, but in a stern moral fashion that made it difficult to be grateful. She would send us a box of groceries and make sure we knew how much hard-earned money it represented, or she would give my mother money to buy us shoes, with the comment, "Don't say I didn't warn you!" But the contact with relatives didn't extend to their visiting us. Very few people came to our house, and I particularly remember one fellow who came for the first time after my father's death. He looked round at the books and the piano and the general air of comfort and civilized activity, and said, "My God, you wouldn't think this was a working man's home!" Remarks like that made me a socialist.
Because we were more or less related to half of Cookstown, we had simply dozens of cousins, and they all hated us. It could be pretty nasty in school. When they were feeling particularly spiteful, they would roar insults across the street at us, but on the whole we didn't carry our wounded spirits home. For one thing, we weren't really bothered, and, for another, we didn't want to upset my mother more than necessary. Mary, my eldest sister, and I— the two most precocious members of the family— would select and edit the version of the day's happenings to be told to my mother. However, if some stupid busybody of an adult had overheard the exchange of insults and could be expected to pass it on at home, then we had to tell.
There is no doubt that I owe the dawn of political feeling to my father. One way in which he was more involved in family life than most Irish fathers was in telling us bedtime stories. When I was quite little and he was working in Northern Ireland, and later, on his brief visits from England, he would put us to bed while my mother washed up the supper dishes. The stories he told us then were not about fairies and pixies, but the whole parade of Irish history from its beginnings with the Firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danain, the supposedly magical people of Irish mythology. He told us bedtime stories from recorded history as well— the battles and invasions, the English oppression and the risings, the English-Irish trade agreement that crippled the country's economy. Naturally he didn't attempt to be objective about all this: this was Ireland's story, told by an Irishman, with an Irishman's feelings. It wasn't until I went to grammar school that it occurred to me there were people who believed the Act of Union, making Ireland part of England in 1801, had not been brought about by perjury. To me it was accepted fact that Pitt and Castlereagh had conspired together and by every treacherous means under the sun had fooled everybody into signing the Act of Union. For that matter, I was surprised when I went to school that you had to learn about the Battle of Vinegar Hill or the decline of the Irish linen industry in formal history lessons. I hadn't realized this was history: it was something I had always known, from hearing it over and over again as a bedtime story.
Perhaps children do begin to develop a social consciousness from listening to stories about bad children being tortured by bad fairies and good children getting birthday cakes. In our family we developed an unconscious political consciousness from listening to the story of our country. The first nursery rhyme I remember learning was:
Where is the flag of England?
Where is she to be found?
Wherever there's blood and plunder
They're under the British ground.
My father taught me that jingle, and I used to say it as another child would say "Jack and Jill went up the hill," not relating it to England or feeling frustration or bitterness, but all the same acquiring a partisan outlook. "Don't say things like that," my mother used to protest, but my father would intervene: "Ah, it's good for them," he would say. And it was good for us. The songs we practiced to sing at children's concerts were never the "I had a bonnet tied with blue" variety, but "All around my hat I'll wear the tricolored ribbon." When I was about seven I could sing "The Croppie Boy" right through, and it has something like fifteen verses, each containing ten lines. At that age I suffered badly from asthma, and it was a battle of will power and a challenge to my physical failings just to get through fifteen verses, for I had to stop to draw breath halfway through each line. "The Croppie Boy" is about a young lad who goes to the priest's house for confession, but after he has made his confession the "priest" jumps up, announces that he is a Yeoman Guard in disguise and that he holds the house for his lord, the king. The priest has been beheaded and is floating down the river. The Guard then kills the young boy. I don't remember singing this song with any feeling of bitterness: I was taught it for its beauty and because it was part of Irish culture, and it came naturally to me.
But such political lessons as I learned as a child came in indirect ways, through poetry and history, until I went at the age of ten to a madly Republican grammar school. If my father had any real involvement in politics, I never knew about it, but one circumstance suggests that maybe he had. He died in August 1956, just at the beginning of what the Unionists called "the IRA terrorist campaign," which lasted five or six years, with sporadic outbursts of violence and attempts at sabotage and so forth. At that time it was quite common to hear the sirens beginning to wail at night, up and down, up and down, as it must have been for air-raid alerts during the war. As soon as the sirens started, doors in our neighborhood would open and our neighbors would appear, pulling on their heavy coats and shouldering their Sten guns. Most of the Protestant men in our district were B men, or Specials— members of the civilian militia in Northern Ireland that was formed to fight the IRA. So while some of my friends' daddies were disappearing into their houses to lie low, other people's daddies were setting out armed after them. At times like those, the tragic division in Northern Ireland split even wider to set the Protestant working class against the Catholic working class, while the Church and the Catholic middle-class Nationalists threw up their hands in horror at the freedom fighters, and stood solidly behind the government. The B men were pretty busy in those days: not in Cookstown itself, but beyond it on the way toward South Derry, where the land is poorer and the people, naturally enough, more Republican.
Just outside Cookstown, and lying between it and Omagh, there is an expanse of useless bog land known as the Black Bog. Invariably the IRA seemed to head for it, and none of them was ever caught there. Yet there was no cover: the Black Bog is like heath. If a man were to run across it, he could easily be seen. Perhaps they had a dugout in it, or perhaps they lay flat in the bog for a whole day; but for whatever reason, though the authorities put searchlights on it by night and sent helicopters over it by day, the Black Bog never gave up an IRA man. From our front bedroom window you could see, between two houses opposite, the beam of the searchlights traveling over the bog, and my mother used to stand there on alarm nights, looking across at the bog, and she would say, "At least they'll never get your father now." And even if we didn't know quite what she meant, we could guess.