The Price of My Soul (Bernadette Devlin)

The Price of My Soul
Author	Bernadette Devlin
First published	1969

Foreword

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.

Chapter Three

I remember the death of my father very clearly. It was a Monday early in August 1956 and we had just come back from our annual two weeks' holiday in Portrush. My father had taken the seven-o'clock boat from Belfast on Sunday evening to go back to work in England, and my mother, that Monday morning, was feeling a bit down in the dumps about it. To take her mind off her troubles, the woman next door who had a sister visiting from Wales suggested that my mother should go along with them to a linen sale. Earlier in the year, to Cookstown's surprise, a linen factory had managed to get itself burned down in the middle of a rainy weekend, and as a consequence the stock was being sold off. Bargain-hunting wasn't at all the kind of activity my mother enjoyed, but she agreed to go anyway, and left us, cleaned up and running around in the garden, with warnings that if we played indoors we should leave the house tidy, and if we got hungry, there was bread and butter and jam within reach— she didn't want us to go climbing up the shelves. While we were playing in the garden, Father McCrory, the curate from our parish, drove up to the house and he and my Uncle Barney got out of the car. We ran off to tell my mother, who hadn't set out yet but was still talking to her next-door neighbor, that she had visitors. Now my mother had a sort of fatalistic attitude toward life which was rarely proved wrong. As she came up to the visitors, she had already guessed that something was wrong and supposed it concerned my grandmother who was, by now, getting on. "Is it Mum?" she asked, and being a crafty, morbid child, I knew she really meant, "Is Mum dead?" Father McCrory just looked at her and said, "No. Come into the house."

I knew my father was dead. I had understood my mother's question, and from the way Father McCrory had answered it and looked at her, I knew that the truth was more terrible: my father was dead.

Mary, the eldest of the family, was the only one of us children not outside. She was upstairs reading. I sneaked upstairs, called Mary outside, told her what had happened, and suggested we should summon a conference, there in the garden, and prepare the others to be called into the house to hear the news. I was nine and Mary was thirteen. Being older and more sensible than me, Mary wouldn't let me tell the others. "If it's not true, it's an awful thing to say," she said. But neither of us thought of crying. My mother called us in then and I remember Father McCrory saying, "Do you want me to tell them?" My mother didn't need help, however. She took us all up to her bedroom, in which there was scarcely anything but the great big bed and a picture of the Sacred Heart, and sat us all down.

"I've got some bad news which is good news," she said. And Mary and I knew we were right. We just sat there, looking at her. Then John, who was three, began to cry because everything was so heavy and solemn.

"There's no need for crying," said my mother. "Nobody's allowed to cry. your daddy's gone to Heaven, he isn't really dead."

At that Elizabeth and Paddy, who were the best criers in the family, broke down. Paddy could have been Cookstown's chief mourner, she could cry for anybody. You just had to take her into a church where there was a funeral and you would hear her sobbing like an old-time keener, embarrassing the chief mourners because she was doing a better job than they were. But now she had something to cry about; she cried all that day, and she didn't stop crying for about three months— but only when she was at home. Our attitude toward Cookstown prevented her from crying in public.

That Monday, after we heard that our father was dead, we dressed in our lemon-colored frocks with white collars and went down to my grandmother's, and on the way Mary and I broke a family routine. Usually when we went out together, we walked in line: Mary, Marie, Bernadette, Elizabeth, Patricia, with John walking at the back with my father and mother. We would sail down the street like a fleet, and if any of us fell out of formation, a reprimand came from behind— "This isn't Brown's cows!"— and brought us sharply into line again. "Brown's cows," it was understood, ambled all over the road. But that day we broke the formation. Marie walked between Paddy and Biff, and Mary and I walked in front, discussing the situation like two old grannies. Here we were at nine and thirteen: we had just been told our father was dead; the fact had been absorbed and put in the little computers; and we were busily working out what the reaction of our grandmother and our aunts and uncles would be. We were preparing for an unfriendly attitude on the lines of "It's no more than you deserve." But we also thought it possible that after despising him all his life, they would say, "Oh, you poor children! Your father was a great man!" So we were bracing ourselves to observe that it was a pity they couldn't have told him what a great man he was when he was alive.

When we got to the pub, everyone was in tears— everyone, that is, except my mother, who was the only person who was reacting rationally. We, the children, were ushered upstairs, and left to our own devices. Now, when we were on holidays, my father had taught us to play cards. We knew how to play poker, rummy, and whist. So while the adults were sobbing down below, Mary went down, got some money from my mother, and sneaked out to buy a pack of cards, and all afternoon we sat around upstairs playing poker. When the chief mourners came up to deliver the regulation tearful kisses, they were horrified. Back they went to report the scandal to my grandmother, and she came rheumatically up the stairs to try to persuade us to play something more respectable. But my mother wouldn't let her interfere: "Let them play poker," she said, and so we were left for the rest of the day.

My father died in England at the age of forty-six. He had left the boat at Heysham, in Lancashire, and taken a train for Dunstable. The train had gone through Morecambe and shunted back into the station to transfer to the main line. During this maneuver my father was taken ill with a heart attack, and in Morecambe station he was noticed by a porter. The porter wasn't a Catholic, but he had seen lots of Irishmen go through Morecambe and he suspected that my father was a Catholic because of the Pioneer pin he wore in his jacket, the badge of the Catholic total-abstinence association. My father hadn't always been a total abstainer, but one night he got very merry and suffered a bad hangover next morning, which decided him to give up drink. When he hadn't touched drink for a long time, he thought he might as well join the Pioneer Association and so get the spiritual benefits of belonging to it. And as a result he wore a little shield-shaped badge in his lapel, and it was this which the porter noticed. The porter carried him off the train, called an ambulance and, on the assumption that my father was Catholic, telephoned the local priest to say that an Irishman who looked as if he were dying was on his way to the hospital. The priest reached the hospital just as the ambulance arrived there, and he gave my father the last rites of the Church. Fifteen minutes later my father was dead.

During that fifteen minutes a nurse who was also Irish and Catholic asked my father if he wanted her to take any message to his family. He said he had no message to send, he wanted only to talk to the priest. People said he was a hard man to put the interests of his own soul before his wife and children, but my mother thought he had his priorities right. And I agree. What message, after all, is there to send when you have five minutes to live?

The remains were flown over to Belfast and my mother went herself to Nutts Corner, which was the airport at the time, to bring the body home. She always stated that my father's funeral took place in the early hours of that morning because it was only his real friends who went to the airport with her and sat up all night. The church was left open throughout the night, so that my mother, arriving very late from Belfast, could take my father's remains straight there, and avoid having insincere mourners coming to the house merely because it was the respectable thing to do. People who wanted to pay their tribute to my father could come to church. There must have been about six hundred people in the church: from Cookstown, from England, from Portrush— people like Uncle Sammy, who really cared about my father and mother. My mother almost made a witch of herself that night by leading the prayers in church after the priest had gone. To begin with, it was unheard of that anybody but a priest should lead the prayers in a Catholic church, and to have a woman do so only made it worse.

The next day was the funeral, the funeral of the husband of Mrs. Heaney's daughter. And because it was the funeral of the husband of Mrs. Heaney's daughter, my mother would not let any of us children go. Mary and I had been allowed to stay up the night before until the body was brought from the airport, but we could not go to the burial. We both felt it very much: we must have been morbid children. I really wanted to see the coffin put in the ground and the earth put over it, but they wouldn't let me go.

After that, two scenes stand out in my memory.

There is a big gateway beside the pub, which leads into a yard at the back of the building. I was standing at this gateway in a group with my mother and sisters and some of my uncles and aunts. Taking my mother by the hand, Uncle Tom said, "You don't have to worry about anything, Lizzie. We'll look after you."

"Huh!" replied by thirteen-year-old sister, Mary.

The second scene was in our own house, where we were all sitting together with the door closed. It may have been that same evening, or it may have been shortly afterwards. I remember my mother saying, "There are only the six of you, and me. We can depend on nobody else, so we must never let each other down."

And from then on we weren't a family, we were a cooperative society. Every Sunday morning we went to first Mass at half past eight in the morning, came home and made breakfast, then sat among the litter of the breakfast table all morning, discussing the past week and the week to come. At twelve fifteen, when it was time to hurry up and prepare the lunch, we would still be sitting there post-morteming on who had failed in their duties and why the place was in a mess. Before my father died, the house was regularly in a mess because my parents were tolerant about it as long as we tidied up when we finished playing. We could take all the cushions off the chairs and use them for horses if, once the fun was over, we put them back again. Now we began to notice that things got in a mess and stayed in a mess, because my mother was really no longer interested in tidying it up or obliging us to. So Mary decided that action had to be taken: she doled out jobs all round on the principle that since it was we who made the house untidy, it was our responsibility to tidy it up again. Sunday was the day for the job share-out. It was "It's your week on the stairs, and yours on the sitting room, and yours on making the beds." And it was the day for recriminations: "The stairs were only cleaned down twice last week; you'd better pull up your socks."

We did the shopping on Saturdays, so we knew on Saturday mornings how much money there was, and bought the groceries accordingly. Then on Sundays we would go through the accounts: "We only bought a dozen eggs yesterday, because there wasn't enough money for a dozen and a half. We'll have to go through last week's expenses and see what can be cut down on." Virtuously we would decide to cut down on biscuits: for a whole week we would buy no biscuits at all. But our budgeting always failed in the end, because none of us was any better than my mother about saving money. When it came round to Saturday night, if we had some money over, we went out and bought ice cream. So we never got any richer.

After my father's death, my mother became totally unworldly, almost insanely unworldly. She lived because she had six children who needed her. She lived for them. Life for herself held nothing. It must have been two years after my father's death before my mother bought a newspaper. She got up in the morning, and got us up; we all went about our separate business; and at eight o'clock in the evening, when we went to bed, she went to bed too. Sometimes she sat up later, just thinking, or reading, or praying, and on those nights Mary or I would get out of bed again and join her. She never looked on my father as dead in the sense of no longer existing. Because she was a very strong, convinced Christian, she considered he was not dead in the spiritual sense and she could still draw strength from his existence, as it were. She needed strength, because it was quite a struggle bringing us all up without a husband. We lived mostly on welfare benefits— her widowed mother's allowance, family allowance, and supplementary benefits. I used to get very incensed at the attitude of the civil servants whom we had to see about welfare. We were entitled to the money. My father had worked and paid insurance all his life, but they made us feel they were paying out money to the unworthy poor who had the bloody cheek to be orphans. I'm not a socialist because of any high-flown intellectual theorizing: life has made me one.

Our poverty wasn't extreme, but it was a kind of bottom-level poverty, the minimum necessary to support life in decency. It was of the order that my mother could say at teatime, "If you eat up all the bread, there won't be anything for breakfast tomorrow." We got help, both in money and in kind, from my mother's relatives, which was more or less grudgingly given according to their more or less generous characters. Uncle Barney was by far the most kind-hearted of them all— and he was ashamed of it: he wanted to be a businessman, but he couldn't achieve it. He had no head for money and just threw it around him. He would very willingly give us money for nothing. One of us would call in to see him when we were downtown, and he'd throw us ten shillings, saying, "Buy yourselves some sweets." But he always wanted to see what we had bought, so he could be sure that it was properly frivolous. Every time he saw us, he'd ask, "Did you buy those sweets? " and we'd have to put him off: "No, Barney, we're just buying them now." Then a brilliant excuse would occur: "Actually, Barney, it might be better if we bought apples." The point of this was that the fruit shop was on the way home, and Uncle Barney couldn't check up on our purchases, whereas the sweet shop was just next door. So off we went with our ten shillings, didn't buy any apples, and brought the money home.

Another time he might ask: "What are you eating for the tea out there?"

"No, we're not, Barney. We came down to the post office."

"And you don't know what's in the house for the tea?"

"We don't know, Barney."

None of us was ever going to say what we had at home to eat, because we would either get the reaction, "Have you nothing better than that?" or conversely, "You're wasting your money: bread and butter's good enough for you." You couldn't please them, so we adopted the attitude that it was none of their business what we ate for tea. But if at the end of such a dialogue, Barney gave us some money and said, "Well, go and buy some ham for the tea," we would buy something more economical than ham to feed the family with— tomatoes, or something— and bring the change home. He used to send us out fish on Fridays. They were all lords and ladies bountiful in their own way, but Barney was the only one who gave because he liked doing it; only now and again he got ashamed of this generous streak.

What maddened me most was having money thrown at me, and once I threw it back. It was the Christmas before my mother died, Christmas 1966. One of my uncles threw me £5 in pound notes, saying, "Don't squander that; it's for Christmas." He meant to land it on the table, but it slid right across and fell on the floor. I picked it up, threw it on the floor at his feet, said, "It won't be squandered if you spend it," and walked out. While I was walking home, he was round in the car before me, slamming this crumpled £5 down on the table and telling my mother that I might at least be grateful, for he was trying to help. My mother refused it; he wouldn't take it back; so she just literally threw the money in the fire, and they both sat there watching pound notes burning.

There were other people who helped us as well as our relatives. A wee Protestant woman who lived across the road was one of the most genuine friends we ever had, and one of the most discreet givers. If she noticed we were short of something, she would just leave it for us without any fuss. At Christmas she would bake us cakes, and so on. You could say she helped to bring me up. She was a deeply religious woman who thought the world of my mother and respected my mother's religious beliefs, for all that they were different from hers. She even came to the Catholic church for my mother's funeral. But when, in April 1969, I was fighting the Mid-Ulster by-election campaign, she stood in the streets of Cookstown and howled at me, "You Fenian scum!" All because of the Reverend Ian Paisley, and civil rights, and unemployment. Since then she has not spoken to me, but slams the door when she sees me coming.

Chapter Four

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people. Anyone who belongs to the twentieth century, politically or in any other way, is a revolutionary. The attitude of the average Ulsterman can be summed up as "You'll get enough to do you." Everyone knows there are ills in our society, but if you have a job you content yourself with it and mind your own business. No criticism, no urge to go out and make progress can be afforded because these might disturb the delicate balance of the peace. Just how delicate this balance is was proved in 1968 when the civil-rights movement's demand for simple justice sent the country up in flames. Ulster is a country that has really no connections with a modern Europe. It attracts tourists who come in search of "quaint old Northern Ireland," but even in the tourist industry there is no push to make Northern Ireland worth seeing. In spite of its beautiful and fascinating countryside, it has not one top-grade hotel. The main reason for the sluggishness of our tourist industry has been the mentality of the people at the top, who weren't prepared to work in conjunction with the Irish Tourist Board over the border and sell Ireland as a whole. Most foreigners don't even know there is a border: to them Ireland is just a dog-shaped country which is emerald green. But when the Irish Tourist Board sent publicity pamphlets to America on which the border wasn't shown, the Northern Ireland Establishment kicked up hell, demanded that they be brought back, and the thin red line be drawn round the doggie's head.

Before the Treaty of 192 1 put a border between Northern and Southern Ireland, Ulster comprised nine counties and was one of the four ancient kingdoms of Ireland. That treaty cut off three counties— Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan— from the rest, and left us in the other six neither British, nor Irish, nor all of Ulster. But the history that has made us what we are goes back further than 1921. The first date that belongs to us rather than to Ireland as a whole is 1609, when thousands of Scots Presbyterians were brought over for the Plantation of Ulster. The hatred between colonized and colonizer was underlined by the difference in their religions, and the Irish were persecuted not only for being the natives, but for being Catholics as well. From then on they never quite sorted out religion from politics. After the Plantation, there were occasional Catholic rebellions, but Oliver Cromwell, once he had won the civil war in England, put an end to them. Then, in 1689, the Catholic King James II of England fled for protection to his Irish subjects before the Dutch King William of Orange, ultimately to be defeated at the Battle of the Boyne. (According to the unreformed calendar, the Battle of the Boyne was fought on July i, corrected to July 12 when the Gregorian calendar was introduced, and celebrated with much fervor on that day ever since.)

In the next century the system of Protestant landed gentry and oppressed Catholic peasant asserted itself, but the planter population to some extent intermarried with the natives, and there was some breakdown of religious division and the emergence of class-consciousness. Ireland's economy was already declining and vast emigrations beginning, and the Protestants were emigrating along with the Catholics. It was a Protestant, Wolfe Tone, who led the first Great Rebellion of 1798, and his movement included Catholics and Protestants fighting side by side. That rebellion, like every other rebellion in Ireland, was beaten down. The next important date was 1801, when the Act of Union began deliberately to destroy the trade of Ireland in the interests of British capitalism. The Irish linen and wool industries were run down to let the British cotton industry flourish. From then on national feeling grew, and throughout the nineteenth century there was continual struggle, punctuated by famine and emigration, to end British occupation, British imperialism, and British capitalism; and this took place throughout all Ireland.

Then came the national revolution, the Easter Rising of 19 1 6. Now all this time the northern counties were "Orange," because a number of the people living there were descendants of the supporters of William of Orange, though many of them were against British interference and in favor of the national movement. After the failure of the Easter Rising, it was becoming obvious that the English couldn't resist Irish independence much longer, and those people who did support Britain began moving from wherever they were, scattered throughout Ireland, to the more Protestant northern counties. People began finding their own level, as it were.

However, even before the 192 1 treaty created "Northern Ireland," there was a certain amount of ill-feeling between North and South, a certain readiness on the part of the southerners to sacrifice the North, because the northerners hadn't played their part in the 1 9 1 6 Rising. The whole Rising was bungled: instructions were lost; there was confusion about the signal for start; an announcement appeared in a newspaper the day before the Rising saying the whole thing had been called off. It was the biggest bungle of a national revolution that any country had ever seen. And placid Ulstermen said, "Okay, there's no Rising," and stayed at home while men were slaughtered in Cork and Wexford and Dublin. So although there were disagreements about the terms of the treaty between different factions in the South, they were all quite happy to let the North go; but they saw the North as only three counties, the three most Protestant ones-County Antrim, County Down, and County Derry. These three together, along the northeast coast, couldn't have survived as a country. On the other hand, if all nine counties of Ulster had been separated from the rest of Ireland, there would have been enough national feeling in it to complete the revolution: which the pro-Britishers didn't want. So a compromise was reached, seen only as a temporary expedient on the part of the South: the new Ulster would consist of the six counties where the Protestants were the numerical majority, and things were, for a time, stable.

Some of the Protestants then decided that since the boundary had been drawn, such Catholics as remained in the North were on the wrong side of it, and should get out. The Catholics didn't want to go: down there in Eire, the Free State faction and the Republican faction were still fighting it out, and they didn't want to get involved. So here began the persecution of the Catholic working class by the Protestant working class, aided and abetted by the Northern Ireland parliament as soon as it was set up in 192 1. Catholics, particularly in Belfast, were warned not to come to work; when they did come, they were thrown in the docks; Catholic homes were burned out. This immediately led to repercussions in the less Protestant counties— Fermanagh, Armagh, and Tyrone— and right into the 1930's there was religious warfare in Northern Ireland.

There are very few Christians in Northern Ireland. One American said that the most interesting thing about Holy Ireland was that its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And they do! In a country where national mentality arrests growth in every field of development, and where the average man puts up with it, the big annual excitement is July 12, the "kick the Papishes" day. You don't speak to your Catholic neighbors on the twelfth of July, nor do they speak to you. You join all the other bowler-hatted men and do the Calvary Walk.

This is the march of the Orange Order, a supposedly religious body that was founded in 1795 to keep up the traditions of Protestantism in Ulster. In fact it is a semi-religious, semi-political, totally fascist organization. All over Northern Ireland on July 12, branches of the Orange Order march off some three or four miles to a field where a meeting is held. The march signifies Christ's walk to Calvary, which didn't however happen in July, and having done this big Christian stomp, with their Bibles under their arms, they get to the field, where the respectable leaders of the organization start wallowing to the knees in Papish blood. Such is the tone of speech made from the platform. Having blasphemed their fellow Christians, they do another Christian stomp home again, get drunk, sing Orange songs, and take in the Union Jack to be put away till next year. Next day, Protestant speaks to Catholic again and community relations are back to normal. It's the same thing, but in reverse, when it comes round to the 191 6 commemoration day, or to the fifteenth of August. August 15 is the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, and what that has to do with politics nobody knows. But the Nationalists, the Catholic Tories of Northern Ireland, keep it as their day and sing anti-Orange songs, meaning every bitter word they sing.

To the Protestants, the Catholics are heretics, worshipping idols and going in for terrible pagan stuff like that. The ordinary Catholic doesn't match the Protestant in strength of feeling, but has a kind of smug attitude: "We're all Christians, but we are the one true church, and they are poor deluded brethren who will maybe know better some day. Sure the good Lord will let them into Heaven if we pray for them." But they have all forgotten the basic fundamentals of Christianity: Love your enemy?— not at all! They rationalize it by saying the people they disapprove of are the enemies of God, thereby justifying their hatred of people who never did them any harm.

Both the Protestant Unionists and the Catholic Nationalists deny they discriminate against each other, but both use religion to divide and rule the working class. It is only less serious on the Catholic side because there are fewer Catholic bosses and fewer Catholic local authorities in a position to practice discrimination. It is a tactic that has made the ruling minority look like a majority and has kept the Unionist Party in power since Northern Ireland's inception. Polarized by this ploy into their religious sects, and set against each other, the ordinary people have not been able to combine and fight politically for their real interests. At the bottom of the social pyramid with nothing to lose, the Catholic working man doesn't really fear the Protestant; but the Protestant working man, who has very little, feels the need to hang on to his Protestant identity in case he loses what little he has. He fears the Catholic because he knows that any gain made by the Catholic minority will be his loss, for the businessmen and the landowners, Orange or Nationalist, are not going to suffer losses on anybody's behalf. Where discrimination hurts most is in employment and housing. You come to a factory looking for a job and they ask you which school you went to. If its name was "Saint Somebody," they know you are a Catholic and you don't get taken on. Until the civil-rights campaign forced a promise of reform, housing was the burning issue in Northern Ireland, because only householders have a vote in local elections: subtenants, lodgers, and adult children living at home are all without the vote, and thus a quarter of the electorate is disenfranchised (until, as the government now promises, 1971). So it is very important where you build houses and for whom you build them. Too many houses for Catholics could upset the majority on a Protestant council, or vice versa. The policy in both the Protestant-run councils, which are the majority, and the few Catholic-run councils, is to control the way the votes go by having separate housing estates for people of different religions, and by awarding tenancies in the interests of political dominance.

At ground level, this means that you grow up very much within your own circle, not meeting people of the other religion until you have left school and gone to work or university, and not on the whole intermarrying because you only marry those you meet.

I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on the simple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad. At the age of twelve I made my first political protest. I decided to enter a talent competition which for some reason or other was being organized in Cookstown. Most of the members of my family are quite talented. My eldest sister, Mary, now a nun, paints a little, but her main gift is for making something out of nothing. When she was a child our house was coming down with Japanese gardens: there would be clay all over the place, and bits of twig, and an old biscuit tin, and suddenly there was a Japanese garden. I'm useless at that sort of thing. She used to write what I, as a younger sister, thought was excellent poetry, but unfortunately she took it all off with her to the convent. Marie is talented in an entirely different way: she does the ordinary things that everyone does, like sewing and knitting and embroidery, but in half the time and twice as well as anyone else, and she cooks brilliantly. Elizabeth is musically talented; she's a very good pianist. Elizabeth, Paddy, and myself all sing, and I'm considered the best singer because I've got the loudest voice. As children we often used to perform either for visitors or at children's concerts, but we were not encouraged to consider ourselves talented children: my mother squashed any tendencies toward conceit.

When I was in my first year at grammar school, I had a long-playing record, "The Rebel," on which the actor Michael MacLiammoir recited the works of Padraig Pearse, one of the martyrs of 1916. I thought it was great stuff, and played it over and over again, and the more I listened to it the more convinced I became that although MacLiammoir had put it over as a work of art, he had failed to convey the true emotion of a patriot saying what he felt. Anyway I learned three pieces from the record for the three heats of the talent competition, and they were all very militant. "The Rebel" ends:

"I say to the master of my people 'Beware the risen people who will take what you would not give!' "

Another piece I chose was "The Fool," which has this passage:

"But the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead! While Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree will never be at rest."

And my third and final choice was Robert Emmett's speech from the dock before his execution in 1804.

Well, off I went and recited this fighting stuff at the talent competition, and I recited it well, went through the three heats, and won first prize. Cookstown was outraged. During the three weeks of the competition, the horror grew. "Imagine a daughter of Lizzie Devlin having the cheek to go down there and say a thing like that! That comes from her father's side of the family." I believe I won on merit, but the general townspeople said I had blackmailed the judges, who were local businessmen and so forth, into awarding me first prize because I could have accused them of bigotry if they hadn't. Feeling got very high and on the last day I had to have a police escort home to protect me from the people who would otherwise have given me a cuff on the ear for my impudence. My mother was delighted; she was somewhat embarrassed, but secretly glad and proud that at least I had enough of my father in me to go somewhere I was hated and look people straight in the face. This was a gift both my parents had: they never shied away uncomfortably from company they knew rejected them. As well as showing courage and defiance, I had won £10 and this too was welcome at home. To me it was like £ 1oo. I'd got the average weekly wage of a man in Northern Ireland just for standing up and saying a wee bit of prose. A year or two later, from the same feeling of defiance, I wore a tricolor pin in my coat, precisely because the Northern Ireland Flags and Emblems Act forbade it. Only once did a policeman ask me to remove it. "You remove it," I said, but as his hand came out to take the badge, I added: "If you touch me without a warrant, I'll have you in court for assault!" He just laughed and said, "Go on there, you troublemaker! " I trotted on, feeling very proud I had won, but once I'd discovered I could get away with it, I lost interest in the badge.

I went to school from the age of three and a half, to begin with in Miss Murray's nursery school, held in the front parlor of her home in Chapel Street, Cookstown. My primary school was St. Brigid's Convent, Cookstown, a big gray building, with high ceilings and partitioned rooms. A chestnut tree overshadowed the playground, a place I principally remember for having suffered there the torture of organized games. St. Brigid's was run by the Sisters of Mercy and was part primary school, for those going on to grammar school, and part commercial school for the others. The grammar-school potential got special treatment to rush us through examinations, but we were excluded from the music and sewing and cooking classes. As a result we are among the clumsiest, most useless females ever God produced, whereas our non-grammar-school contemporaries from St. Brigid's are some of the handiest.

I went from Miss Murray's into the first grade at St. Brigid's, where I stayed for a year, then straight into the third grade and rapidly into the fourth. There the school inspector found me, not only very small but also very young, and I was kept in the fourth grade another year before I was allowed to take the exam for grammar school. This almost turned out to be the end of my school career. I had always had a bad attendance record, because I was so often ill, and that year, when I was supposed to be absorbing masses of intelligence tests, square roots, and so forth, I was off with asthma every second week. The nuns used to come down to the house: "Get her out of bed! There's an exam to be passed!" I wasn't particularly worried whether I went to grammar school or not, but I passed the examination, to everybody's surprise.

St. Patrick's Academy, Dungannon, where I then went, was a militantly Republican school, and it owed its fiery partisan slant to the vice-principal, Mother Benignus, whom we called Reverend Mother, and who is, among the people who have influenced me, one of those I most respect. To Mother Benignus everything English was bad. She hated the English —and with good reason: her entire family had suffered at the hands of the British forces. Everything we did in school was Irish-oriented. She was a fanatic about Irish culture, which was all right for people like me who were also fanatical about it, but which did drive lots of people away from it who couldn't take Irish culture for breakfast, dinner, and tea. She didn't hate Protestants, but her view was that you couldn't very well put up with them, they weren't Irish, and that clinched the argument. When I was a senior, the school produced a netball team that could have beaten any netball team in the North of Ireland, but Mother Benignus wouldn't let it play Protestant schools on the grounds that we might have to stand for the National Anthem and it would be embarrassing. We told her, "Mother, it wouldn't be embarrassing at all: we would stand. Then we'd invite them over here, and play 'The Soldier's Song' and they would stand too. It would be just a matter of politeness." But she wasn't to be persuaded.

We learned Irish history. People who went to Protestant schools learned British history. We were all learning the same things, the same events, the same period of time, but the interpretations we were given were very different. At the state school they teach that the Act of Union was brought about to help strengthen the trade agreements between England and Ireland. We were taught that it was a malicious attempt to bleed Ireland dry of her linen industry, which was affecting English cotton. We learned our Irish history from Fallon's Irish History Aids, Fallon's being a publishing firm in Southern Ireland. Now the Ministry of Education had issued a memorandum saying that Fallon's Irish History Aids were not to be used in schools, because they were no more than sedition and treason in the name of history. On a point of principle, all our books were published by Fallon's. When the Ministry wrote to complain, Mother Benignus wrote back in Irish, just to make another point clear.

We were a very voluntary voluntary school, under the minimum control of the government, and occasionally offers would come of more financial help in exchange for a greater government say in the school. Officers would come from the Ministry of Education, and argue: "Look, if you come under government control, you'll get another 20 per cent grant." And they would be chased off the premises. Immediately a mass movement would start to raise enough money to produce the necessary facility before the Ministry inspector came back. All our days were spent organizing concerts or raffles or draws or competitions to raise the money to get more equipment for the lab, or a new cooker in the kitchen, or for resurfacing the tennis court. This is where it was a good school. It had a good academic reputation, though socially it wasn't a good school: it did not attract the better class of citizen. There was very little discipline and it didn't produce people who took an active part in the community; but at least in our struggle to do without government help and interference, we ended up appreciating things much better than if they had been forced on us.

I knew no Irish when I went to grammar school, but the class I joined was a class of crude political rebels: we knew nothing about politics except what we were for and against, and we were for Ireland and Mother Benignus was our heroine. In addition to our passion for Ireland, we had a very good teacher of Gaelic, with an enthusiastic approach to the subject, so that at the end of my first year the whole class was way above the standard of Irish-speaking expected of eleven-year-olds. Each year the Gael Linn, an organization which exists to preserve the Irish language, sponsors a school competition in Northern Ireland and awards a shield to the school with the best Irish-conversation standard and a scholarship to the best individual pupil. At the end of my first year, our school won the shield and I won the scholarship, and when the shield was presented, special mention was made of my class, which had been partly responsible for the award. Since I was the best of the best who had helped to win the shield, I became the darling of Mother Benignus's life and a protegee to be sent to the stars ever afterwards. I got away with murder in that school on the basis of my heart being in the right place. Each year an Irish drama festival was held in the locality, and other things being equal we were allowed to go to it on Wednesday afternoon. One particular year the program looked very good: it was getting away from the old Irish kitchen-sink drama and presenting plays in translation, such as those of Chekhov. So three of us organized a large-scale truancy and about twenty pupils sat watching plays for three whole days. With twenty of us missing school, Mother Benignus knew perfectly well where we were. She also knew who was responsible. But when the festival was over and we turned up in school once more, she merely said, "I hope you benefited greatly, and that you will keep your enthusiasm in reasonable bounds in the future."

When I first joined St. Patrick's Academy, I was a very timid, terrified person. The other girls all seemed to be independent toughies. Their general attitude was: "We know you have to wear your berets coming to school in the morning; that's why we carry them in our pockets." I was so scared of them that I asked to leave the room when the teacher left, so I could get away from them. But my success in Gaelic and the prominence this gave me in the school cured me of that. The combined effect of Mother Benignus and my fellow students turned me into a convinced Republican, and a year of absorbing the lesson, "We are Irish. We are proud of our history, our dead, our culture, and our language," groomed me for the talent competition.

Mother Benignus was a very kind-hearted woman. Financially the school was never what it should have been because when it came to the paying of fees, if you didn't have the money, you didn't pay. It was written off, or held over, and she would just say, "Well, we'll work a bit harder and make up for it." She was a good kind of socialist. She imposed a capital fee to cover the school's expenses on all qualified pupils— the ones getting scholarships from the state, that is; it came to one guinea a term, which of course everybody could afford, and so she collected one guinea a term from all the people who didn't have to pay to make up the deficit of the children who had neither scholarships nor the money for fees. When we got into unreasonable debt, we just held another competition.

But she was narrow-minded. She couldn't bear, for instance, to see women in masculine attire: wearing jeans was disgusting, she said. And knocking around with the scruffy boys in the boys' academy next door was just a total disgrace. This was amusing enough when you were young, but as you got older it became tiresome to feel her eagle eye upon you when you wanted to walk to the bus stop with some reasonably handsome male. She never missed anything, and you would be hauled over the coals next morning: "You were seen eating crisps out of a bag in the street! Have you no self-respect?" Sucking lollipops in the street was considered sinking to the depths of degradation, and the punishment for these things was quite severe; they merited lengthy tellings-off. But if you knocked somebody halfway down the stairs, you wouldn't get a blessing on your work; it was very un-Christian; you had better apologize, and that was that.

When I was a senior pupil our group resented the fact that we didn't have a common room to ourselves, so we took over a small library where we studied and made ourselves at home. We smuggled in a kettle and a jar of instant coffee and some cups and hid them in the library cupboard. When the bell rang for break and everybody was supposed to go outside for fresh air, we locked the library door and made coffee. And talked. We didn't gossip about other girls in the school or make cynical remarks about the teachers; instead, we analyzed the situation in Northern Ireland and discussed why most of us were going to leave it. I was one of the few who didn't plan to leave Northern Ireland. But the only possible future the others could see was either to get a university education and leave Northern Ireland or go to a Catholic training college and become a Catholic teacher in a Catholic school. None of us wanted to be Catholic teachers —and none of us wanted to be nuns. This was a big drama in the school: for something like fifteen years they hadn't produced a nun from the school, until my sister went and broke the record— and was I disgraced! They wanted about six of us to enter the convent, and we had to fight them off tooth and nail.

Anyway, one day when we were dissecting Northern Ireland behind the locked doors of the library, a general assembly was called. I was head girl at that time and should have called it, but when we got to the assembly hall things were already in progress. It was a uniform inspection— one of many— held this time because girls' gym tunics were getting disgracefully shorter with every passing day. So there was a crisis on, and we had missed it. When we made our appearance, Mother Benignus demanded: "Where have you been? And what have you been discussing?"

One of my friends, Bernadette O'Neill, who was about the most militant person I knew at school, roared from the back of the hall: "Politics, Mother. We have been discussing politics!''

"And if," said Mother Benignus, standing up, "the senior girls of this school have nothing better to discuss than politics, I suggest they should be working. Politics is a waste of time." And she the most political person in the school!

I was head girl at that time by popular acclaim, and the next year I was elected head girl by the prefects. Mother Benignus didn't want me to be head girl the second year: she thought it was making me swell-headed and that I was taking over the school from under her feet. In fact there were three of us— Aideen Mallon, Sheila O'Farrell, and myself. For two years we made ourselves responsible for behavior in the school and in that time took it from the brink of chaos and made of it a reasonably civilized society. The nuns weren't prepared to cane anybody: their attitude was we should behave ourselves for the greater honor and glory of God. But delinquent juveniles didn't work on those assumptions, and there was very little discipline or respect for one's betters in the school. Aideen, Sheila, and I created our own detention period. We used to make children stay in after school and anyone who broke the silence merely prolonged the detention period by another three minutes. The extra three minutes were totted up on the blackboard, and sometimes we were there for an hour and a half. Another complaint was that girls didn't change from their heavy outdoor shoes into their indoor shoes, and they were damaging the school floors. We put a guard on the cloakroom: any girl who forgot to bring indoor shoes was made to go in her stocking feet. After about three days of that, people generally discovered that it wasn't hard to remember their indoor shoes. So we built up our little syndicate of Stalinism, which only lasted a few weeks, for all that was necessary was to impose discipline in the first place. We made the school something more than an academic machine by producing a debating society and a netball team, and we widened its interests from exclusively Irish culture to English-speaking drama and debates.

Because it was the kind of school it was, the history teacher, Mrs. Bradley, was Stalin in disguise. Outside the classroom, she was a very friendly, enthusiastic kind of person, but inside the classroom her system of teaching was to thump everything down your throat. "That's it! Learn it! Or out against the wall!" You had to stand up without moving until such time as your brain registered that which it should have registered; or, if you hadn't learned it in the first place, until you gave in and admitted it. But anything she taught you, you never forgot. She came to us in the library one day for help. She had a particularly stupid class, and even her thump-on the-head-with-a-book, out-against-the-wall, and stand-till you-drop tactics had failed to get anything into these kids' brains. She decided a bit of the education touch wouldn't do any harm, and so she planned to produce a wall chart and asked us to make it for her. It was to cover the junior history course, which included most of British history from the Stuarts to the Battle of Waterloo.

We got the junior class working to bring us in pictures of all the important British kings and heroes and generals they could find, and we gathered up old encyclopedias and history books, and with all the material we made a good, colorful, lucid chart, showing who was who and what they had done in the fewest words possible. To head it off, we took a page from an educational magazine that showed a picture of Nelson under the caption, "They fought for their country." The chart was put on the wall, Mrs. Bradley was very grateful, the children were most impressed and started reading the facts and learning something.

Mother Benignus walked into the classroom one day and read on the wall at the back of the room: "They fought for their country." Her eyes lit up with their favorite patriotic glow. As she walked down the room, she asked, "Who did this?"

"Oh, Bernadette Devlin and Sheila O'Farrell and the girls in the library did it," said Mrs. Bradley.

"Very good— I'm glad to see the seniors helping the juniors." By which time she had got to the back of the room and old Horatio Nelson caught her eye. In one blinding flash she realized that her patriotic Fenian wall was decorated with British generals and British heroes, and she just tore the chart, from one end to the other, right off the wall. She crumpled it up, stamped on it, and stormed out of the room, threatening to fire Mrs. Bradley on the spot and demanding that Bernadette Devlin be brought to her immediately. A terrified junior came up to the library: "M-m-mother Benignus wants B-b-bernadette Devlin, and she's in an awful temper." So off I trotted to pacify her, and found her back in the classroom. She was white.

"Are you really responsible for this?" she said.

I looked down and saw our weeks of work lying crumpled on the floor, all the kids sitting around shaking, and Airs. Bradley on the point of exploding in the background. "I'm not responsible, Mother," I said, thinking she wanted to know who had torn it down. "Mrs. Bradley knows we made that chart. I don't know who tore it off the wall."

It was the wrong thing to say.

"I tore it off the wall! And I want it in the waste bin immediately!" Whereupon two or three children scuffled down to put it in the waste bin.

"Don't touch that!" roared Mrs. Bradley. "It's going back on the wall the minute it's cleaned up properly."

And a dialogue ensued on the lines of:

"Not on my wall!"

"Then I'm not teaching in your school!"

I was called in to referee. Mother Benignus said, "You agree with me, Bernadette, don't you?"

"No, Mother," I said. "I did most of the work on that chart, and it's not my fault, nor Mrs. Bradley's fault that British history is taught in this school. If you don't like it being taught you should take it up with the Ministry of Education. But as long as it is taught, we have to pass exams. And it doesn't do any harm to learn about those people. They did fight, very bravely, for their country, and have as much right to be considered patriots as Pearse or Connolly or anybody else."

That finished it. "They have no right to be considered patriots." And she went over the litany of all the British people who had tortured the Irish for five hundred years.

"But, Mother," I said, "those people didn't torture the Irish. They have nothing to do with the Irish Question. They fought mostly on the Continent."

"They are British!"

So I said, "Mother, you are a bigot," and left her, shutting the classroom door behind me.

"Come back here! I'll not be called a bigot by a pupil of mine."

I opened the door again, stuck my head round it, and said, "Mother, you are a bigot. I'm very sorry you're a bigot. But you are a bigot." I went back up the stairs with Mother Benignus storming up after me. At the top of the stairs we stopped and the argument began again, with Mother Benignus claiming she wasn't a bigot, but a patriot. My favorite habit at that time was waving my finger, so I waved my finger at her and said, "Mother, you are one of the greatest bigots I have ever met!" She had a ruler in her hand and she practically took my finger off with it. She was beaten. She just said, "Don't wave your finger at the principal of this school!"

I had called her a bigot, I had walked out without being dismissed, I had closed the door in her face, I had forced her to walk up the stairs after me. But she knew I was right, and all she said was, "Don't wave your finger at me." The chart went back up. Mrs. Bradley stayed, and there has been a love-hate relationship between Mother Benignus and myself ever since. Although I have outgrown her politics, Mother Benignus will always have my admiration and affection, because she is the most truly charitable person I have known. Her heart is in the right place.

Chapter Five

Politics for me meant debate, not action, when I joined Queen's University, Belfast, in October 1965. I was perfectly aware of the injustices in Northern Ireland's society, but I had a sort of consciously virtuous attitude to the whole problem: at least it would make no difference to me personally whether someone was a Catholic or a Protestant. This impartiality wasn't difficult to achieve, for I never knew what my friends' religion was, or whether they had any at all. I come from a very strong Catholic background myself, but it was also strongly Christian, and it is the Christian element in my background that keeps me in the Catholic Church. On the principle "Tell me your company and I'll tell you who you are," I might very well reflect that I don't care for the company which the Catholic Church keeps, and clear off. But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody. It doesn't worry me if half the clergy trot off to get married, because that wouldn't alter the essential Church, which is still, for me, the best manifestation of my Christian beliefs. Growing up in Cookstown, however, leads to cynicism about the "good Catholic." "Good Catholic" and "practicing Catholic" are terms I hate: as far as I am concerned they are labels suggesting how good a hypocrite you are, how well you go through the ritual. You are an exemplary Catholic if you go to Mass every day and tear your neighbors asunder on the way home from church, but the really charitable people who don't go to Mass on Sundays are heathen, and you are quite entitled to look down your pious nose at them and say, "Disgrace to their country!" For to be Irish is to be Catholic in the conservative mind. We say the family rosary because in the penal days it was the rosary that saved us from Cromwell. And that's the reason some people have for belonging to a church!

As are many other aspects of Irish society, the Catholic Church there is ultraconservative. To be quite cruel about it, Irish Catholics are more interested in the rosary beads than in the rosary— which, for those not familiar with it, is a series of meditations on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They are not interested in the reasons for doing things. The Church is falling apart at the prospect of its no longer being an obligation to go to Mass on Sundays. It is as important not to eat meat on Fridays as it is to believe in the Holy Trinity. Everything is blindly accepted from the pope down to the parish priest: "That's our orders."

Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism, not on the basis of preserving Catholic doctrine or preventing the corruption of her children, but simply to ward off threats to her own security and influence. The Church indirectly— because of the parish priest and his position in the small town, and what-the-bishop-says-is-law— is very influential. She is more powerful in the South of Ireland than in the North, and there her power more than somewhat tends to corrupt her. You have bishops there who own land, who make a profit out of owning land, and who flog it to others to make a profit out of.

In the Protestant North, the Church is not so obviously a part of the Establishment, but it would never come out and support a clash with the government. In the North the churches, Catholic and Protestant, should have been campaigning for the dignity of the people years and years ago. They never did. They should have been making some effort to break down religious sectarianism in the country. They did nothing. Very few sermons have I heard preached on tolerance of people who have different views from you. Occasionally there is a sermon saying that whether you like it or not, you should honor your father and your mother and your legally appointed boss, and not complain about how they treat you. But when the Church sees the initiative against injustice being taken by somebody else, she becomes afraid that her influence is slipping and condemns the initiative as trouble-making with which no good Catholic should have anything to do.

I went up to university with some vague notion of being able, one day, to improve some aspect of life in Northern Ireland. In my last years at school I had toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher for the gypsies, and later I thought of joining either the Ministry of Health and Social Services or the Ministry of Education, to work from within the citadel. But it seemed a long process, waiting to get into a position where I could have an impact on the system. Without any clear idea of what I planned to do with it, I started an Honours Celtic degree course. It seemed a natural choice: Celtic had been mv best subject at school, and I was very interested in all the Celtic languages— from a cultural, not a political, point of view. I joined the Irish Democratic Club at Queen's, which trotted round the country to festivals and competitions, producing plays in the Irish language. But my main interest was in the Gaelic Society, which held Irish debates. Very soon I became irritated by the Gaelic Society. It was a small, inward-looking group, making very little attempt to reach anybody outside the converted, and boring people like myself to death. We produced an Irish-language newspaper called An Scathan (The Reflection), and there were eternal arguments over articles printed in it, over who was editor, over failures to sell the newspaper, over the fact that pamphlets and papers sent by organizations in the South hadn't been distributed by the society. In my second year at Queen's, when I gave up Celtic Studies in favor of Psychology, I became secretary of the Gaelic Society, and at the end of that year I resigned mv office and mv membership with a disillusioned farewell speech: until such time as they were interested in culture as culture, instead of who was leader of the group, I was bailing out.

However I was still keen on debating and used to attend meetings of the "Literific"— the Literary and Scientific Society—which organized debates just for the fun of debating, not to press any point of view, political or otherwise. In its day the Literific had been a good forum for discussion, but by 1965 it had degenerated into nothing more than student obscenity. You could get up and shout, ''Spit on the Vice-Chancellor!" without any further explanation, and be sure of applause. My friends enjoyed this frivolity but I didn't, and I never spoke at a Queen's debate in mv first year. My second year saw the birth of the Union Debating Society. I had no hand in its formation, but I was one of many who saw in it a chance of discussing something worth talking about. I should have liked serious discussion on such subjects as the university structure, the relations between student and lecturer, or between student and tutor. The most obvious thing about the tutorials I attended was the credibility gap between the idea that this was an informal discussion group and the respectful attitude of the students toward the tutor. The relationship was one of teacher and pupil, there was no equal communication of ideas, and people accepted that what the lecturers said should be reproduced in examinations.

The first debate I spoke at was on the motion: Free love is too expensive. As far as I was concerned, this could be treated with a certain amount of humor, but it was a serious subject of concern to every student present. However, it degenerated into a lot of double-meaning jokes on the comparative cost of prostitutes in Amsterdam and San Francisco and about the price of contraceptives on the black market in Southern Ireland, making it cheaper to conduct your affairs in Ulster. Everybody thought it was just so amusing. Well, I sat through this for about two hours, until I couldn't resist standing up any longer, and then I told them that not only were they ignorant of the basic sexual morality of their own society, but they were also still so much part of their environment that they were incapable of rising above the situation and looking at it without embarrassment: hence all the bravado and the doubtful jokes. My own opinion was, I said, that while society had a double attitude, tolerating free love but not tolerating illegitimate children, free love was too expensive. We should be talking about the moral and social cost of individual independence and we were talking about contraceptives. I proposed that the motion should not be put until every student had gone out and troubled to learn a bit more about the society he or she was living in.

Everybody felt very uncomfortable when I accused them of ignorance of their own sexual morality, but when I used the word "bastard," the tension was broken, and this so-called intellectual gathering came down in an uproar of laughing and giggling. I finished off my speech by saying, "You may find the word bastard amusing. You may find free love is not expensive, if in fact it can be had for two-and-ninepence in Sandy Row [a poor area of Belfast]. But how many people here can stand up without blushing and say without any qualms on the matter, 'I am a bastard'?" Nobody stood up and everything went dead quiet. Then tittering broke out and several people stood up and said, "I am a bastard." Finally a young fellow got up. "It is quite obvious," he said, "that none of those people has ever seriously been called a bastard. I have, and I understand the point you are making." But the debate broke up because people couldn't face serious discussion on it. Such was the mentality of Queen's at the time: people consciously played at being students, carrying briefcases about and looking intellectual.

Over the course of my first two years at university, I attended meetings of all the political parties. I felt I needed some ideology, so off I went on my round of the parties in search of one. There was then at Queen's a Tory Club, the Young Liberals, the Labour group that had risen and fallen over the years, the National Democrats, who were a new group, and the Young Socialists, who weren't actually part of the university at all. They were all little gatherings of initiates, but there was also the New Ireland Society, which was large and loosely structured, attracting people of different tendencies. In none of the political parties could I find anything to believe in. They all had a sort of self-importance, as if their interest in politics raised them above the level of ordinary people, and they all went in for an intellectual type of discussion that had no relevance to any kind of society I knew. They tried to be very sophisticated, working out policies and inviting guest speakers down; but they weren't real. You got the impression that they really didn't care what went on outside the university, so long as they had plenty to talk about. There was more real politics in the Folk Music Society than in any of the parties. They sang black civil-rights songs in the Folk Music Society before anybody else in Queen's was interested in the race problem, and they were singing songs about unemployment in Belfast long before the civil-rights movement took it up. That was a good society. It had a strong American influence in it, but because of this there was another section that was determined to keep Irish influence, so you had the best of both American protest songs and traditional Irish folk music.

What made student politics all the more absurd at that time was that Queen's was basically a nine-to-six university. None of us was the kind of independent, twenty-four-hours-a-day student that you get at colleges in England. We went home for tea. You were a student during the day, but your mother asked you where you were going at eight o'clock at night.

For a moment in my third year, it looked as if there might be some excitement. The Minister of Home Affairs issued an order banning Republican Clubs. These had been allowed to continue throughout Northern Ireland, though the Republican Party itself had always been illegal. Immediately the ban was announced, a Republican Club was formed in Queen's and I joined it. We had a peaceful little demonstration against the ban, carried a coffin to the Minister's house, mourned the death of democracy and so forth, and went back to the university. But then the steam went out of the Republican Club. It didn't seem to have anything other than an existence.

So, disenchanted with Queen's politics, I moved to the do-good organizations. These were Catholic societies who visited the poor, decorated houses for old people, did voluntary work at hospitals, and so on. I stayed with them for a while until I decided they were just perpetuating aspects of the system I didn't like. When we visited old people in their homes, we were letting off the neighbors and relatives who should have done it and who, instead of saying, "Those people are doing it— why don't we?" were saying, "Those people are doing it— we don't need to." By carol-singing at Christmas to collect money for coal for poor families, we were relieving the local authorities of their responsibility. They just budgeted our contribution into what they spent and cut down on their own spending.

For a while after that I wandered about by myself, making terrorist plans. I've often wondered why the IRA is so keen on blowing up bridges, when Northern Ireland offers much greater possibilities for disruption and international publicity. In Derry there is an American communications base that is used as a look-out post for the rest of Europe and whose strategic importance has never been appreciated by people in Northern Ireland. This base, it seemed to me, was custom-built for causing an international crisis and bringing Northern Ireland to the attention of the world, and I developed a very nasty plan for its destruction. The first thing to do was to set fire to Gortin Forest Park in County Tyrone. It always closes in the evening, so nobody would be in it by about nine o'clock at night, and since it is in the middle of the wilderness, you wouldn't endanger any houses. Once Gortin Forest Park was burning nicely, all the fire brigades in Ulster would come storming around to deal with it, blaming the IRA; and while everybody was putting out that fire, you could set fire to Tullamore Forest Park on the other side of the country. With the entire country running around putting out fires it would take no more than half a dozen hand grenades lobbed over the wall of the communications base to create a very nasty diplomatic incident. It would involve the British, because this was British territory and they were supposed to be guarding it. It would involve the Americans, because it belonged to them. And it would raise the question of why the United States had a base in Northern Ireland at all.

I never told anybody this idea because, quite honestly, it terrified me. As theoretical terrorism, it was great, but I couldn't reconcile myself to the thought that maybe, against all the probabilities, someone might be in Gortin Forest Park when it went up in flames. Another idea I had was to send an ultimatum to every fly-by-night foreign firm who invested money in Northern Ireland, giving them a breakdown of the short-term profits to them, and the long-term inefficiency to us, of their operation. Such firms are attracted to Northern Ireland by government building grants and short-term tax concessions. But when the tax concessions run out, so do they, leaving behind an empty factory and another couple of hundred unemployed. I planned to send them a warning: "You have three years to promise you will remain here more than ten years, or we'll blow your little factory out of the ground." Those were my militant Republican days. But I got over these dreams of violence, and told myself it didn't matter if the people who kept us in poverty were called British or not. It wasn't simply getting Britain out of Ireland that mattered: it was the fact that we were economically depressed, and I couldn't see terrorism solving that.

My mother died in January 1967. She was forty-six. I was home on vacation from Belfast when she decided after Christmas that she just couldn't go on and went to bed. Elizabeth and I said she must go to hospital. She was terrified of going. "If I go to hospital, I'll never come out," she said. It was the first time I'd ever seen her afraid, and it frightened me, but I reacted brutally: "Don't lie there feeling sorry for yourself— you'll never get well unless you go to hospital." She went, but she was right all the time.

At the hospital it was discovered that she had cancer and the doctors decided to operate, although her weight, her weak heart, and her general physical condition were against it. When the operation was over, it was generally pronounced a success, and I alone was told by the doctor that in fact the growth had been too far developed to be removed entirely, and my mother had no more than a year to live. Everyone else was in high spirits. Although my mother was only forty-six, she had looked sixty, with her white face and gray hair. In hospital, with all the glucose and the blood transfusions and the medical attention, she looked as she should have done at forty-six. She actually had rosy cheeks and bright eyes, and everybody was feeling optimistic. Meanwhile I was wondering whom, if anybody, I could tell. I couldn't tell Marie or any of the others because they would have just gone mad, and my eldest sister, Mary, who was the natural person to tell, was in the convent in Norfolk at the time. I didn't know if she would be allowed home, if I wrote to her, and I suspected that if she was forbidden to come, she would just come anyway.

While I was in this indecision, I called one afternoon at the hospital, and found my mother very happy and contented and resigned. This alarmed me. We'd recently been having arguments, she and I, about religion and about my attitude to people who came to visit her. "I wonder where the hell they were, all your life," I'd say. "Bloody hypocrites! People like that would drive you out of the Church!" She feared that I was in fact drifting away from the Church, so I thought she would be pleased when I told her that afternoon that I'd called at the Redemptorist Church in Clonard. In this church there is a shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, who was always a favorite patron of the family. But my mother just didn't seem to mind about it any more.

On my way home that evening I went to see my Uncle Tom, who was engaged at this time to the girl nursing my mother, and I asked him if he thought my mother was dying. He blew his top at me for going round making alarmist statements, so I went home and sat up all night thinking, Shall I ring Mary in Norfolk and tell her to come home? Or find someone to take me back to the hospital? Or go back to Tom again? But in the end I just sat there, and I was still in the armchair at eight o'clock next morning when someone knocked on the back door. I unlocked it, and there was Tom. I was very angry with what my relatives did that night. Apparently my mother had taken very ill about eleven o'clock, and the nurse had telephoned Tom. In the course of that night every relative who had ever turned their back on my mother was notified, but no one came out to tell us till my mother told Tom to come. Anyway, here he was at last, with my mother's orders: we were all to get up, go to Mass and Communion, and then to the hospital.

At the hospital everybody was running around organizing who should be told that my mother was very ill. When I said, "Did anyone ring Mary?" the reaction was, "Why ring her? She's in the convent." So / telephoned. Mary had been sitting there waiting for someone to tell her to come home, and she came immediately. By the time she arrived at five o'clock that Sunday evening, my mother had just died. At the moment when she actually died, the only people in the room were a priest, my Aunt Mary, and myself. All the organizers had drifted off to find something else to do.

Then everybody broke down and cried and said, "She was a great woman." And to keep myself from telling them all to clear off to Hell, I set about getting in touch with the undertaker and arranging for the funeral. Then there was the first argument: my mother's remains should be brought home. I said they weren't ever going home— they were going straight from the hospital to the church. But what about all the people who would want to come to the house and pay their respects? "She was alive for forty-six years," I said. "They had ample opportunity to come." It was the same thing all over again as at my father's funeral. Mrs. Heaney's daughter was being buried and the town turned out to do homage. I was very callous about the burying of Mrs. Heaney's daughter, and from my point of view all the wrong people were there. Nobody rang Uncle Sammy. But if I couldn't stop people attending the funeral, I could stop them coming into our home. When they said, "I came to offer you my condolences on the death of your mother," I replied, "Thank you very much, it's very kind of you," and closed the door. And people thought I was a hard bitch.

At my mother's death, our family just paralyzed itself. Quite disgustingly we lived on brandy. We got up in the morning, sat around the house in a daze all day, and couldn't sleep when it came to nighttime. Since none of them drank, it occurred to me that the only thing to do was to feed them brandy and sleeping tablets. This knocked us out and we went to bed and slept till morning, then got up again for another day of sitting about. And that went on for three solid weeks, with Elizabeth breaking the monotony by crying all day and Marie by crying all night, even in her sleep. I don't think I shed one solitary tear for about six weeks after my mother died: somebody had to run the household. And Paddy was quite sane. But John was literally hysterical. He found everything funny. His entire repertoire of dubious Irish jokes was told repeatedly, day in, day out, and such respectable people as got through my guard to come and mourn found themselves sitting around laughing, because the jokes were funny.

People bustled in and out and tried to help, and this was when our Protestant friend and neighbor was especially good to us. By the time I had the breakfast made in the morning, she would have cleaned the whole house: she just did it and disappeared again, because she knew it was neither the time nor the place to start talking. When it was getting near dinnertime, she would come over with a great pot of dinner she had cooked, and simply leave it there for me to serve out. This is why it was so unbelievable to find her standing there in the street, screaming abuse at me later on.

So we struggled on. Mary went back to the convent and Marie began running the house. Elizabeth was doing her A-level examinations that year, to come up to the university in the autumn, and Paddy was doing O-levels. John was at secondary school in Cookstown. I should have gone back to the university, but it never occurred to me that I should explain to my professor that I was taking a couple of months off. Some time at the beginning of March 1967, I reappeared at Queen's and was summoned to the professor's office. "And where have you been since the beginning of term?" he asked. It all seemed such a matter of fact to me that I just said, "My mother died." The professor was all sympathy and concern: he patched up my academic failings for me, told me I needed a week's rest, and suggested I come and see him again in a week's time.

I had a subsidiary English examination to face that summer and should have been studying for it. But I couldn't buckle down to work. I was living then with four other girls in a house in Rugby Avenue, Belfast, and I would waken about six o'clock in the morning and lie there thinking about getting up till eleven o'clock. Then I took my briefcase to the Psychology Department, left it there, and went out again to walk round and round the Botanic Gardens till lunchtime. I met my friends; into the library with them, swearing I would work; out again to the Botanic Gardens or downtown. I must have walked every street in Belfast— not thinking, just plodding round and round. The professor called me in again: "There's really no point in your being only physically present," he said. "If you want time I'll see that you get it." All I really wanted was to get finished with the university: what was the point of an Honours Psychology degree when my only possible future was going back to Cookstown to teach and look after the others?

With the passage of time after my mother's death the family was going more and more to pieces. Marie was like an automaton: if someone told her to cook or shop, she cooked and shopped. If no one drew her attention to the fact it was dinnertime and there was nothing to eat, she just didn't notice. Elizabeth, in her last year at school, was trying to keep things organized and failing completely. She was almost on the point of mental breakdown: the tap dripping was people calling her; she could see my mother coming round corners. Paddy, who was seventeen, had got to the stage of weeping nonstop. John took the same escape route as me— he stayed in bed, but he couldn't accept the idea that what had been his home was now somewhere to get fed and lodged. Then the relatives decided they would sort us out. They suggested that, since no one could take all of us, we should be divided among our aunts and uncles.

This plan brought the family to their senses. We had a little meeting, and I said, "Look, if we don't pull ourselves together, we're going to be sawn apart by well-meaning relatives." We agreed we would struggle on until May when the university year finished, and I would decide over the summer whether to drop the Honours Psychology course and finish as quickly as possible or whether to stay on at the university. We had the summer at home to readjust in and we got into a good working routine.

In October 1967 Elizabeth joined me at Queen's. Marie, John, and Paddy lived at home, and Elizabeth and I traveled back to Cookstown on weekends. This worked out all right— except for John. He still felt he was living in a hotel, and his solution was to leave school and make his own world. He was only fifteen and nobody would allow him to leave school, but he just stopped going: he walked out of the front door on his way to school in the morning, and in the back door five minutes later. Marie knew what was going on, but she felt sorry for him and shielded him. I knew nothing about it until his headmaster wrote to me, as John's legal guardian: "Are you aware that it is three weeks since John appeared at school? Please send a medical certificate if he is ill, or call and see me if he is playing truant. " John would go back to school only on the condition that he was allowed to quit the academic stream and join the technical stream. To his mind, the academic stream led only to further dreary years at school, followed by teacher's training college or university, and he wanted none of it. He wanted to start looking for a decent trade right away. I said fair enough; I'd put it to the headmaster. The headmaster told me he couldn't possibly allow a moment's whim to destroy a career: John was suffering emotional stress at the moment, but he would regret it later. To complicate matters, the headmaster and the entire school had been very lenient with John, letting him get away with enormities because of my mother's death, and he resented this special treatment. He began breaking school rules to force them to forget he was an orphan and start caning him as they would anybody else. Finally these tactics worked. The headmaster took him by the two shoulders and shook him till the teeth rattled in his head, and said: "Look, you can come back here; you can go into the technical stream; but if you put one foot wrong, I'll be waiting for you! If you fail your technical exams, don't think you're getting out of school: you will be back in the grammar stream, you will take the grammar school exams, and you will pass them!"

So that was the school problem solved, but John still found his home too empty, and to make some sort of stabilizing center for him I decided in January 1968 to live in Cookstown and travel daily to the university in Belfast. The worst thing about it was having to get up at half past six. It was winter, it was still dark, and I fell into every puddle in the dark on my way to the other end of town to catch the bus. But at least we had breakfast together in the morning and tea together at night, and John was much happier. It worked pretty well, except that Bernadette was getting gradually grayer with every passing day. Life improved a little when Northern Ireland's first motorway was completed, which made for a faster journey morning and night and allowed me to stay in bed till seven o'clock. But this commuting meant that I had no university life and lived a purely academic existence outside the university system, missing all the debates and any kind of social life. I had to spend the whole day in the Psychology Department because, though I could work in the evenings at home, I didn't have the books there. I had to organize my day so that I could get the books when I needed them, plan what I was going to do in the evening, and go home equipped to do it. This put a bit of discipline in my very undisciplined life and redeemed my department's faith in the possibility of my obtaining a degree.