When I was 9 years old, my mother locked me with my two younger siblings into the back bedroom of my grandmother’s tiny terraced house in North Belfast with grim instructions to stay there and not to move an inch until she or my grandmother came for us. She also made me repeat her admonishment not to go near the window, no matter what I heard.
It was 1969, and before being unceremoniously dump-ed in the little room, I had been staring in wide-eyed confusion and excitement at the pillars of smoke drifting over the city. In the street, my mother and grandmother had huddled anxiously with other neighbours whispering; some of the women cried. Something was very different. Something was very wrong.
And so it began.
One day in my early teens I made my way home along the main road to the same little house in which my grandmother lived. It was my daily routine. My grandmother was the family’s childminder while my mother worked until early evening. As I walked it was the smell that hit me first, acrid and thick.
The shouts and chaos came next as I approached the junction of the street with the main road. I could not recognise that street corner which was as familiar to me as my own face. It had collapsed, all broken glass and great gaping holes where there was once the wall of the local pub. Men scrambled over the debris, calling out names, pushing manically at wooden beams lying diagonally across the opening where the door had been.
I saw my friend standing in the middle of the road, shaking convulsively, sobbing and choking out the word “Mammy” as ambulancemen picked their way out of the rubble carrying her mothers’s bleeding body on a stretcher.
I ran in terror to my grandmother’s house a few feet away, the windows reduced to one or two angry shards of glass hanging tentatively to their broken frames.
Panic – the sensation that grips your head in a bellowing, silent scream and pumps fear all through your body. But my grandmother stood in the kitchen clasping my six-month-old sister to her chest, rocking her tiny, wailing body. She saw me and with one arm pulled me to her, squeezing me into a triptych of comfort and safety.
Fear can be an immediate thing, rising up suddenly in expectation of injury or the unknown threat. More often in the North, it was a daily acid-rain drip eroding normality. The rules of abnormality were learned early and often: Never take the same route to work two days in a row. When looking for a place to sit in the pub, do not sit with your back to the door. Do not call out the Irish name of your companion when visiting somewhere outside your own community. When meeting strangers always be general about the area you live in and the school you attended. Do not expect things to change. Do not expect fairness. Despite how things appear, you are not inferior.
I never knew it could hurt more than it already had done. In 2001 I stumbled hand-in-hand with a 9-year-old girl – whose nose looks just like mine – through a phalanx of rabid men and women baying for her and my blood.
This little girl, the daughter of the little brother who cowered with me in my grandmother’s bedroom over 30 years before, just a child trying to get to school and hated for her very existence.
There have been so many times when despair and fear have bitten deep, but as I held on to her small hand that day on the way to Holy Cross School in Ardoyne, I thought my heart would shatter.
On 8 May I watched and listened to the startling events taking place at Stormont as polar opposites pledged themselves to work together, peaceably, democratically, consensually. There have been so many losses, not least the loss of almost 4,000 lives.
But there are the other losses rarely mentioned, the absences with which life has been lived in the North for almost 40 years. The years of living without hope, without confidence in the future, living without acceptance, without understanding from others, without justice, living with the loss of opportunities, living without expectations of anything better. Living with the knowledge that so few cared.
On Tuesday 8 May, we finally promised to care for one another.
And so it began.
One day in my early teens I made my way home along the main road to the same little house in which my grandmother lived. It was my daily routine. My grandmother was the family’s childminder while my mother worked until early evening. As I walked it was the smell that hit me first, acrid and thick.
The shouts and chaos came next as I approached the junction of the street with the main road. I could not recognise that street corner which was as familiar to me as my own face. It had collapsed, all broken glass and great gaping holes where there was once the wall of the local pub. Men scrambled over the debris, calling out names, pushing manically at wooden beams lying diagonally across the opening where the door had been.
I saw my friend standing in the middle of the road, shaking convulsively, sobbing and choking out the word “Mammy” as ambulancemen picked their way out of the rubble carrying her mothers’s bleeding body on a stretcher.
I ran in terror to my grandmother’s house a few feet away, the windows reduced to one or two angry shards of glass hanging tentatively to their broken frames.
Panic – the sensation that grips your head in a bellowing, silent scream and pumps fear all through your body. But my grandmother stood in the kitchen clasping my six-month-old sister to her chest, rocking her tiny, wailing body. She saw me and with one arm pulled me to her, squeezing me into a triptych of comfort and safety.
Fear can be an immediate thing, rising up suddenly in expectation of injury or the unknown threat. More often in the North, it was a daily acid-rain drip eroding normality. The rules of abnormality were learned early and often: Never take the same route to work two days in a row. When looking for a place to sit in the pub, do not sit with your back to the door. Do not call out the Irish name of your companion when visiting somewhere outside your own community. When meeting strangers always be general about the area you live in and the school you attended. Do not expect things to change. Do not expect fairness. Despite how things appear, you are not inferior.
I never knew it could hurt more than it already had done. In 2001 I stumbled hand-in-hand with a 9-year-old girl – whose nose looks just like mine – through a phalanx of rabid men and women baying for her and my blood.
This little girl, the daughter of the little brother who cowered with me in my grandmother’s bedroom over 30 years before, just a child trying to get to school and hated for her very existence.
There have been so many times when despair and fear have bitten deep, but as I held on to her small hand that day on the way to Holy Cross School in Ardoyne, I thought my heart would shatter.
On 8 May I watched and listened to the startling events taking place at Stormont as polar opposites pledged themselves to work together, peaceably, democratically, consensually. There have been so many losses, not least the loss of almost 4,000 lives.
But there are the other losses rarely mentioned, the absences with which life has been lived in the North for almost 40 years. The years of living without hope, without confidence in the future, living without acceptance, without understanding from others, without justice, living with the loss of opportunities, living without expectations of anything better. Living with the knowledge that so few cared.
On Tuesday 8 May, we finally promised to care for one another.
