Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

It was a typical Derry murder, the Derry men said: A phone call reported a cache of stolen goods; the policemen arrived and examined the stuff — a television, a fur coat, clocks, radios. One man lifted the television, and it blew up. It had been booby-trapped — the policeman was torn apart. "They was pieces of the bugger all over the place." Two other policemen were badly injured, one blinded. Then a mob gathered. The mob was hostile. They howled at the injured men, they jeered at the corpse. They obstructed the ambulance and booed when it broke through. And while the men were put onto stretchers, the screams were "Let the bastards die!"

Two men described this to me with approval — it was not an atrocity story to them; it was a success story. Their attitude was "Look at the horrible things they make us do to them — sure, it's tragic, but it's their fault. Won't they ever learn?"

Those same men, Tim Cronin and Denny McGaw, urged me to go to Donegal.

"Ah, Donegal's a lovely place, like," Cronin said. He was seventy-five years old, as white-faced as Yeats and with the same black-rimmed glasses. And he boasted, "Sure, I've been there almost a dozen times."

He was speaking of County Donegal, four miles from where we stood.

"So it's not violent, like Derry?" I said. Call it Londonderry and they thump you for being English.

"Derry's not violent," Mr. McGaw said. "Belfast — that's the violent place. They fight each other there. Aw, Derry's a lovely old town. Have you seen the fine walls?"

"But the police," I started to say.

McGaw pointed behind me. "A policeman was killed as he stood right there, not two weeks ago. Two men in a van came up that hill and shot him and rode on."

"So people do get killed?"

"Policemen and soldiers get shot, no doubt about it," Cronin said. "But we don't shoot each other. Ah, sure, stay out of Belfast — that's a bad place!"

Many people called Eire "the Free State," but they were not particularly sentimental about it. The IRA was of course banned in Eire, and Irish soldiers at the border post had a reputation for harassing Ulstermen, getting them to empty their pockets and turn out their suitcases. But that was not the main grievance Ulstermen had with Eire: the main grievance was money.

In a high-pitched voice of complaint, Paddy Dineen said, "Do you know what a beer costs in the Free State? Twenty-two shillings in the old money. Twenty-two shillings for a pint of beer!"

I said, "Is that an argument for staying British?"

"It is!" he said. "You can get a beer for half of that in Derry."

So much for Irish unity. But the notion of unity was very blurred by all the contending groups. In fact, the most nationalistic ones, like the IRA and the INLA, seemed to want to sweep both the British government and the Irish government away, and start all over again with the People's Republic of Ireland.

***

The hatred for British soldiers in Derry was extraordinary. Soldiers raided houses and, searching for guns, tore up floors and broke cupboards — they were vandals. Soldiers took money and personal effects, and did not give them back — they were thieves. Soldiers drove through the streets in Land-Rovers, shouting abuse at women and children — they were brutes. Soldiers timed their visits to Catholic areas to coincide with children getting out of school, in order to coax them into starting riots — they were criminal-minded. Soldiers shot innocent men — they were murderers.

This was how the Derry Journal portrayed the soldiers. And one day the paper announced, "The Army are now adopting Cromwellian tactics — destroying Catholic homes."

I stayed in a boarding house in Derry that was the Catholic counterpart to Mrs. Fraser Wheeney's pokerwork paradise in Lame. Instead of Bible mottos, Mrs. McCreadie had portraits of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and statuettes, too, the shape and size of Oscars. "Mothera God," Mrs. McCreadie was always saying while Joe, her only other lodger, told her what terrible things he had seen the night before in the Bogside.

They were great readers of the newspaper, these two. It was not the Falklands news. They were ignorant of the fact that British soldiers seemed about to recapture Port Stanley; but they knew every bit of the Ulster news, because the Ulster newspapers printed everything — rumors, hearsay, gossip, "witnesses saw," "it is believed," and sentences like "He alleged that the soldiers called him a 'Fenian bastard.'"

The most popular page at Mrs. McCreadie's was the one — or sometimes two — that contained the In Memoriams. It made me think that there was a sort of cult of death in Ulster. There certainly was one in Derry. It was not merely a list of obituaries, saying "So-and-so died yesterday"; it was a sheaf of tributes to people who had died years ago. "nth Anniversary," one read, and another, "15th Anniversary," and I saw one that commemorated the twenty-second anniversary of a parent's death. And with each tribute was a poem:

The mother is someone special, patient, kind and true,

No other friend in all the world will be the same as you.

Or,

Sweet are those memories, silently kept,

Of a mother I loved and will never forget.

Or,

We never fail to think of you

We never cease to care

We only wish we could go home

And find you sitting there.

There were hundreds of these in the paper every day, often a dozen or so to the same person, invoking the prayers of St. Columba — the sixth-century Irish missionary — and "Mary, Queen of Ireland." The Virgin Mary had been elevated to the Irish throne. Mothera God, as Mrs. McCreadie said.

There were always tributes to men who had been killed in the Irish cause. This one was typical:

4th Anniversary

Vol. Dennis Heaney

Shot dead by'S.A.S. on 10th June, 1978

"Life springs from death; and from the graves

of patriot men and women spring living nations."

Proudly remembered by [a long list of names]

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him

St. Columba, pray for him

Mary Queen of Ireland, pray for us

One day I left Mrs. McCreadie's and kept walking. It was a lovely morning — clear skies and warm sunshine. I walked on a boggy path along the River Mourne, which was the border between Eire and Ulster — though you would never have known it. The grass was just as spectacularly green on this bank as on that one. I walked ten miles, and the weather changed. The rain came down, flattening the buttercups in the fields. So I caught a bus into Strabane.

Strabane was said to be the poorest town in Europe — it had the highest murder rate for its size, and the highest unemployment rate, and the fewest pigs, and the dimmest prospects. It was smack on the border, and it had the curiously unfinished look of a frontier town — like a house with one wall missing. It was sorry-looking, with men propped against storefronts, whistling, and a number of cracked windows. But it was not noticeably more decrepit than other towns I had seen in Ulster. I considered staying the night, but the Control Zone and all the soldiers and police complicated the mildest stroll. And when I thought it over, I decided that I had seen few places on earth more depressing than Strabane in the rain.

The day after I left Strabane a man walked out of a motor accessory shop where he worked. He was thirty-nine, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment — a hated paramilitary force that had come into existence when the Protestant B-Specials were disbanded. A car drew up; the man was shot four times; the car sped away. The man died immediately. He was the one hundred and twenty-third UDR man to be gunned down since the regiment was formed ten years before.

Every town and village was deserted by six or six-thirty, and it was eerie, because the summer evenings were often sunlit and long, and the desertion was obvious.