Myers Watching The Door

A Memoir 1971-1978
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-1-84351-242-4
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

As an Irish Catholic raised in Leicester, fresh from University College Dublin with a first in History, Kevin Myers is sent north to work for the Belfast bureau of RTE News. There he covers the increasingly vicious conflict erupting in the city as the IRA campaign begins. Reporting too for Dublin's Hibernia, the London Observer and NBC Radio for North America, Kevin Myers becomes the eyes and ears for an uncomprehending world, chronicling the collapse of Northern Irish society, from internment to the La Mon bombing. Raw, candid and courageous, Watching the Door documents the deeds of loyalist gangs, provos, paratroopers, politicians, British agents and an indomitable citizenry, forming a remarkable double portrait of a divided society and an emergent self - a witness to humanity, and inhumanity, on both sides of a sectarian faultline. In his wonderfully vivid, trenchant, first-hand account of life on the streets of Belfast during the height of the Troubles, a young Kevin Myers witnesses the blood fueds and chaos of a people on the brink of civil war. His descriptions of violence, counter-violence and emotional free-fall, combine humour with reflection, eros with thanatos; they render history in the making. By interweaving the political and the personal in a tale at once self-deprecating, poignant and sexually buoyant, Watching the Door is a coming-of-age story like no other. It is evocative and passionate, and it records a pivotal time in Ireland's recent past, blending articulacy with savage indignation in a classic of modern reportage.

KEVIN MYERS, writer, broadcaster and novelist (Banks of Green Willow, 2001), is author of the best-selling Kevin Myers (2001), a gathering of his celebrated and provocative Irishman's Diary in The Irish Times, for whom he wrote for over twenty-five years (another collection will appear from The Lilliput Press in 2007). He is now a columnist with the Irish Independent .

Autoren/Hrsg.

Myers, Kevin

Leseproben

Two

Dublin, Saturday morning, 28 February 1971

I AWOKE on the settee in Dublin’s Pembroke Road. On the radio, the Edwin Starr song, ‘War’, reverberated through the flat. ‘War, what is it good for. Absolutely nothing. Say it again …’

The news came on, with the familiar voice of RTÉ’s Northern correspondent Liam Hourican. ‘Belfast this morning is a city of fear,’ he declaimed: but he could get away with both the cliché and the faux-solemnity, for his gravelly gravitas conveyed extraordinary power.

Two RUC detectives had been shot dead during rioting in Ardoyne in north Belfast the previous night. Not long before, the first British soldiers had been killed in Northern Ireland. The campaign for civil rights within the state had been elbowed aside by the emergence of atavistic tribal forces aiming to overthrow that state. In other words, as in every decade since 1916, yet another IRA military campaign to achieve a united Ireland by force of arms was under way, and in the spirit of it’ll be all over by Christmas, I was now desperate to get up to the North before the Troubles ended.

This was the impatience of youth, not the judgment of a young man with a first class honours in History. From that I should have learnt that there is in Irish republicanism an energy and a sense of time that are unlike anything normal organizations can conceive of. Republicanism is an almost autonomous state with an internal folklore that embraces and indoctrinates those admitted to its mysteries. Suffering, either inflicted or endured, is a keynote to its ethos.

So that day, after two months’ semi-training, I impatiently and ignorantly went North with a camera crew as an RTÉ journalist to report on the opening stages of yet another campaign to expel the British from Ireland. And, apart from the prescient Kevin Agnew, no one had the least idea of the decades of sorrow that lay ahead.

Ulster is the runt of the Ice Age. Ireland, like Britain, was once part of the Eurasian land mass, and our common destiny was initially shaped by simple glaciation. First of all, the weight of ice upon the original mountain mass which covered this part of the world pressed the once towering peaks into plains.

Then, the ice withdrew towards the Arctic, retaining a last glacial redoubt in the northern part of Ireland. A generous central plain came into existence in what we now call the province of Leinster, just south of the ice ramparts: but an unyielding ice field lay across most of what is Ulster, for thousands of years.

The world was warming, the ice melting, the seas rising. Britain and Ireland became separate from Europe, the two islands like twins conjoined at nose and toe, enclosing a vast freshwater lake. The twins danced their insular gavotte together before the Atlantic finally broke in and turned the lake into a separating sea. The days of the ice colony in Ireland were coming to an end: the deep frozen garrison in the north was obliged to withdraw from its border ramparts. It did so reluctantly, doing the glaciate equivalent of an army salting the land it is surrendering to the enemy, its bergs gouging deep trenches across the frontier it had defended against the assaults of the new warmth for so long. The result was the creation of a line of hillocks that run across the northern third of the island. They are called drumlins, droim, Irish for ‘ridge’ and lin from the English ling ‘being like’. This etymologically appropriate word, mixing Irish and English, in essence describes where English rule ended and Irish rule began, or vice versa. From that division rose the boundary between northern and southern Ireland.

It is hard for outsiders to exert their authority over such a terrain and its disparate peoples. The Normans had tried and failed. Foreign armies can be endlessly harassed in the clefts running between the myriad array of hills: every high point conquered reveals another half a dozen ahead requiring similar conquest. Each conquered peak requires a garrison; each garrison requires supplies; each supply route is vulnerable to ambush. Moreover, the land is poor. So what outsider would freely choose to try to govern such largely unproductive acres from afar?

My first job in Belfast that Saturday afternoon was to go to RUC headquarters to introduce myself and to collect photographs of the two dead officers. My taxi driver was a cheerful, saturnine man, with a peculiarly Belfast complexion, as if coal dust ran in his veins: his skin was white, but a sub-cutaneous dark resided under it. His name was Tommy McIlroy, and he was the first example of the strange truth-drug relationship that I was to have with so many Belfast people: uninhibitedly, he told me things.

He was overjoyed at the previous night’s killings: overjoyed. He repeatedly addressed me by name.

‘The war’s coming, and it’s going to be serious, Kevin. Very fucking serious, you better believe it,’ he declared happily. ‘The Provies have got fresh gear coming from America, Kevin, and they’re making claymore mines. Claymore mines! Brilliant! Kevin, listen here, there’ll be people dying in this town who’ve never fucking died before.’ His eyes shone at the thought.

As we approached RUC headquarters, he rearranged his facial features into a facsimile of an undertaker’s: grave, expressionless, but touched with a light dusting of grief as if, even in his hard-bitten professional capacity, he found this a deeply saddening occasion.

A round-faced police officer met me in the lobby with photographs of Cecil Patterson and Robert Buckley. His expression was genuinely grave, but his eyes were friendly. His name was Harry McCormack. He shook my hand. It was nice to meet me; any help he could give me, he would. What a friendly city Belfast was turning out to be!

Tommy’s mournful mien was unbroken until we got a reasonable distance from the police headquarters. ‘Give me that there,’ he said, once we were stopped at traffic lights. His eyes once again sparkling, he took the pictures of the two dead officers and gazed at them avidly, almost as if they were a particularly tasty item of pornography. ‘Brilliant,’ he breathed. ‘Fucking brilliant. And just think. There’s loads more where that there come from, so there is. You know who done that? I’d say Martin Meehan done that. Or Paddy McAdorey. Two of the best fucking men in Ardoyne.’

Neither name meant anything to me. But in the course of a single taxi journey, I had learnt a great deal. And so it continued to be throughout my time in Belfast. People kept on telling me things. They even appeared to like me and trust me.

How very strange.

I stayed in the Wellington Park Hotel for a couple of nights, before moving into Miss Cuthbertson’s bed and breakfast nearby. At that time I didn’t drink or smoke and she liked that, but Mabel Cuthbertson liked my English accent even more, as – I was to discover – unionists often would. She twittered and purred as she served me breakfast. She favoured pastel colours and a purple eyeshadow throughout the week. But on Sunday mornings, however, she became an essay in Calvinist beige and Knoxian brown, topped with one of those strange Ulster Protestant felt hats, which sported a small, startled bird on her scalp and a little fencing mask over her face. She would then depart for a couple of hours of dire ecstasy and jubilant terror in a fundamentalist mission hall, before returning, her eyes glowing, her lips slightly parted.

One day I had to do a story about housing conditions in Ballymurphy, in west Belfast, a candidate for the much coveted Le Corbusier Trophy for Vilest Housing Estate in Europe & Possibly the Entire World. Tommy McIlroy drove me through its streets; it was mesmerizingly dreadful.

Ballymurphy was built just after the war and was a miracle of forward thinking. Intended to be a slum from its first day, it had instantly realized this heroic ambition. Although it was outside the city on the side of the Black Mountain, upon whose broad flanks space was almost boundless, it imitated in meanness and misery the conditions in the horrific Victorian slums its new residents had come from: tiny streets, shoe-box rooms, damp walls, wet-rot, scurvy, rickets and impetigo, all as standard Corporation-issue.

That evening, having eaten in the Presbyterian Total Temperance Restaurant – its menu and wine list a model of brevity – I returned to my bed and breakfast. Mabel Cuthbertson asked me how my day had been, and I wandered off into a rant about the horrors of Ballymurphy, and the sins of the unionist government in building it, and the numerous imperfections of the Northern Ireland state. As an exercise in youthful arrogance, it was utter perfection.

‘It’s all very well for outsiders like you to complain,’ she finally said, a long spine of ice connecting her words, ‘but the people up there really don’t want to work. They want to live off the state, have babies and drink. Do you know they chopped up their doors for firewood when they first moved in? And kept coal in their baths?’

I replied initially with a meaningful silence before raising a supercilious eyebrow of disdain. ‘Opinions such as those’, I murmured finally, ‘are precisely the reason why this wretched place is the way it is.’

She did not bid me good night: she could have been forgiven for drawing her sword and running me through....