Living under a cloud of bomb threats and extrajudicial murder doesn’t necessarily leave you in a state of constant fear. What can break your spirit is the deadening trudge of small humiliations and the steady expectation of petty inconvenience. It’s life being interrupted by a hundred things outside your control. These were things that parents – our parents – tried to hurry past without mentioning to us. Subjects were changed and plans for the day amended. Everyone in my class had a story of their mum rapidly abandoning some expedition and being really nice all of a sudden. Yes, they’d say, we were supposed to be going to the swimming baths. Yes, we’re going a different way now. Yes, we can stop for a treat on the way. Certainly, these ‘incidents’ increased immeasurably the prospect of us getting ice cream or a Lucky Bag for no reason. For those sugary treats and cheap plastic toys, we all had the Provisional IRA to thank.
There were other things about that time which I don’t think my parents could have known were wrinkling my little brain, and certainly weren’t countered with restorative balms of junk food or Lucky Bags. The news my father listened to each morning, with its daily metronome of murder announcements, terror attacks and notable explosions, was all the more horrifying for the blankness with which they were issued. Its delineations of Northern Ireland’s communities, too, were less black and white than those of Ron Duddy, but not by much. They still reflected and endorsed the same separation, the cataloguing of people by tribe. Any death reported was tagged with the victim’s religious affiliation, in a manner that was doubtless ethnographically useful but also diminutive and absurd.
‘Samuel Marshall, Catholic’, ‘James and Ellen Sefton, both Protestant’.
Again, it’s hard to think of another way they could have done it, since this was a time when tit-for-tat killings were commonplace and entirely innocent people all over Northern Ireland were being murdered by paramilitaries simply because an opposing faction had murdered one of ‘their’ side the day before. These people were not targeted for their involvement in politics or activism, but merely to spread terror through the enemy: that any of ‘you’ could be got, no matter your actual beliefs or political activity. This was the motive for hundreds of murders, meaning it was, in a real sense, relevant that things be recorded in this manner, while simultaneously being oddly impersonal and dehumanising when they were. Leaving aside the sense it gave of some great big score card in the sky, it reduced the sole piece of identifying information to the religion foisted upon the victims by their parents, which, odds were, meant little to them other than the fact it was reason enough to be killed by the roaming death cults that blighted Northern Ireland at the time. If you’d never been to church in your life and were murdered in your home, your birth religion would be mentioned before your name in the headlines, especially if you had the indignity to be killed as part of a group.
‘4 Catholics Shot Dead on the Ormeau Road’ or ‘The RUC are appealing for information, regarding the murders of 3 Protestant men near the Glenshane Pass this morning’.
You could have spent your life curing polio or inventing the Harrier jet, but as long as you were a non-famous Northern Irish person murdered by paramilitaries, your childhood attendance of a Church of Ireland school was paramount. Only in other cases – weird cases, involving non-Northern Irish casualties – would something like normal reportage prevail. When the IRA killed two Australian lawyers in the Netherlands, in the mistaken belief that they were off-duty British soldiers, it made no sense to report those people’s religions; unlike me and my family, they hadn’t been stupid enough to be born in Northern Ireland and thus had not, at birth, been signed up for the whole bizarre charade.
Robert was a good friend to us, even those of us who weren’t gifted young farmers. When my mother died, he came to the funeral even though the rules of his organisation expressly forbade attendance at any Catholic event. This sounds like a commonplace act of decency, but my father was immeasurably touched by it, and touched too by the work friends and neighbours of that persuasion who, though refusing to enter the church itself, stood vigil outside the building for the duration and re-joined the cortège thereafter. Their friendship naturally extended to Robert’s being at my father’s bedside in hospital, just in time to tell him about the goings-on in Reservoir Meats.
My father’s diabetes should have been spotted earlier, since his diet had been pretty bad for a while. Never particularly keen to begin with, he’d started swearing off vegetables entirely, declaring that he’d only ever eaten them so that we would. To this day he can’t say the word broccoli without mock retching. Brussels sprouts he calls ‘wee green round bastards’. Throughout my childhood, he insisted on a forensic examination of Christmas puddings every year, eating a different one each Sunday in the weeks and months running up to the big day, recording his findings and debating their qualities with us, so that through this exacting process we could crown a winner. We eventually noticed that this tournament was starting earlier and earlier each year, with preliminary rounds beginning in September and even August. By the time of my brother Shane’s wedding, he’d taken to keeping a stash of fizzy drinks in his bedroom, hidden in a wardrobe as if they were heroin or plastic explosives. He had, paradoxically, lost a lot of weight, and his circulation had clearly deteriorated. At the ceremony I noticed a cut on his hand from fixing a mower at home. By the time Shane and Becky had returned from honeymoon several weeks later it hadn’t healed.
Things progressed from there. I was at university in Dublin when I heard a cut on his foot had become severely infected and the toe would need to be removed, then several toes, then the whole foot and then further and further up. The entire saga was obviously a huge shock to my dad, who had not been aware of the seriousness of his condition, but, losing time to the spread of infection, it was he who said he was prepared to get ahead of the problem by having the surgeons cut just below his right knee. There would be a long hard road from there on out, with the physical and emotional strains of recovery, rehab and adaptation to his prosthesis, but he attacked it with the same unshowy stoicism with which he’d tackled everything else, barring broccoli, the death of Joe Dolan or the four out of ten I once gave a Tesco Finest Melt-in-the-Middle Chocolate and Salted Caramel Christmas Pudding for Six.
In the immediate aftermath of the surgery he was bullish and confident, although a lot of that might have been the effects of shock and/or morphine. There was also the sense of what could have gone wrong, since the amputation had, after all, averted possible death. When I came home to see him I was a complete wreck, and quizzed my brother Shane through nervy tears.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s grand,’ breezed Shane, before adding with a beam, ‘He wants the other leg off!’
This was the first time I had laughed since hearing the news, but it took Robert to get the first laugh out of Daddy. For the most part, people were extremely nervous around him, scared of how serious the problem had been, and perhaps of the physical horror of amputation. My dad had hated pity as a widower and now hated it as an amputee, and so insisted on thrusting his stump out of the sheets and into full view of any person who walked in with their sheepish mouth and trembling hands. Once you’d been through it, it was fun to watch others be subjected to the same. This was his own version of slaughterhouse wit, the gallows humour that kept the horror at bay.