An Evil Cradling (3 page)

As with most apprenticeships, those first months were boring. The work was not demanding but I found the environment of a factory tiresome. I remember my first week. I left the factory to meet up with a friend in a pub next door -the usual Friday evening occupation for all workers in Belfast. I realized after having my first drink that I had forgotten to collect my wages. My friend thought I was an idiot.

After many months working in the factory, I was sent off to the ‘Tech’, as it was called, to study for my City & Guilds in Heating Engineering. This different kind of classroom routine became oppressive.

I remember feeling a sense of limitation. Five years of this, to end up a glorified plumber and continue with that for the foreseeable future, was not an enthralling prospect to me.

Although I had left school against the advice of my teachers I had, without telling anyone, tried to continue my studies in literature at night school. It was a tedious walk from one end of the city to the other every Tuesday night, and to sit amongst adults studying for ‘O’ levels was confusing. I was the youngest in the class, so the companionship that I knew at school was absent here. I stuck it for a ™short period. It was too long a walk on cold winter’s nights, and then to try to concentrate on Shakespeare with wet shoes and soaking trousers, wondering how I was going to get home when the buses stopped. So I persisted in reading books at home, and compensated for the boredom of the days in the factory and the hours studying for my City & Guilds by going away every weekend.

From the age of fourteen I would catch a train or a bus every j weekend to somewhere outside Belfast, and as I got older I would go off youth-hostelling. It was a need simply to go somewhere, anywhere, with a sleeping bag and stay wherever luck would take me for as long as I could. The seeds of the need to travel and to be free of immediate pressures -the home, the family, the streets that I grew up in-sprang up early. Something always nags, especially in the young. I wanted more.

By freak of circumstance, for which I am not sure I am entirely grateful, I won some prizes and literary awards in national competitions.

A young woman from the BBC came to the Tech one day. She told me in the quiet of the corridor that I had won a national poetry award. I stared at her in astonishment and disbelief. She wanted to film a small piece, to which I said: ‘No, I couldn’t do that.’ Not that I had any real excuse. I was just frightened. She eventually persuaded me that I should do it the following day, and it was her good looks, her charm and my sudden rise in the estimation of my friends that made me grudgingly agree.

Offl went to Shaws Bridge, on the outskirts of Belfast. They made a short film piece of me reading one of my poems and I was thence and forever condemned, I think, to a fascination with words. I wondered what I should do after this, and decided some weeks later that I could not bear to weld pipes for the rest of my days in broken-down factories. So coming home one evening from work, I fumblingly told my parents that I wanted to return to school. They were shocked, and!

I think a little afraid. But they never tried to dissuade me. They wanted to know if I was sure; if I knew what it meant; and whether I was aware that if I left my apprenticeship it would be very difficult to get a good job -to

get a trade. But nothing would deflect me, and they pursued the matter no further.

I returned to education and the following year received another national award. My commitment to language was doubly stamped.

And thus alone among my friends in East Belfast I went to university and I suppose to another world, another way of understanding, which set me at a remove from all those things that were familiar to me. This was my first real leave-taking.

The decision to go to university came about because, apart from further study, I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to do. I had toyed for some time with the idea that I might join the merchant navy: always that travel instinct, that need to be going somewhere niggling in the back of my head. However, it was difficult to join the merchant service, unless you had a father or some other relative already in the ships.

Ultimately university seemed a greater prize and I chose to go to Coleraine. When I think back on it, the reason for that choice was the area surrounding the college itself. The university was built only a few miles from the great, majestic coastline of North Antrim. Near the university in the small villages where the students lived, we always had access to that turbulent North Atlantic, those huge stretches of desolate beach and those small provincial pubs. Coleraine also offered the best course in literature, particularly in the contemporary field. I specialized, over my three years, in nineteenth-and twentieth-century British and American literature and of course in the literature of Ireland known then as ‘Anglo-Irish’.

I was not an outstanding student —just about average, but after my first year I became increasingly convinced that teaching literature is an impossibility. To go into a lecture room and listen for an hour to a capable lecturer delivering his assessment of some writer and then to go offand talk about the lecturer’s ideas in a small tutorial group didn’t provide the kind of stimulus I was looking for. I became more and more in the last two years of my university career a communicant of the library, choosing to follow the course on my own, instead of being a passive recipient of the understandings of my lecturers. Still, university provided me with a new set of interests, and more importantly a new set of friendships with people I could never have met had I remained in Belfast working at my apprenticeship.

I have maintained most of these friendships to a greater or lesser degree and each of them I am grateful for. But beyond this, two events during the three years spent on that northern coast stick out in my memory. I suppose they remain so vivid because they weren’t directly related to my studies in that place. They are memorable now because during my first period of incarceration they came back to me so sharply.

I lived in Portstewart, one of the small villages on the coast. I rented a small room at the top of an old dank two-storey Victorian terrace house. The house was the last one in the terrace and from its window I could look out on the grey, ever-restless ocean. I can still remember the view from the window and the constant changes in the sea. The weather in that part of the North of Ireland was never the kindest, though when the summer came the landscape around us, the easy access to Donegal and to the remoter parts of the North gave the area its own particular delight.

An old retired couple who owned the house lived in two rooms on the ground floor. Mr Paul was in his eighties and I remember him going for his nightly walk accompanied by his walking stick and a small mongrel dog. His bent figure would brave even Portstewart’s weather as he walked along the sea front. I never saw the old man at any other time apart from these walks. I heard him occasionally in his own room. His wife, his second, would sit quietly in the kitchen beside the old range constantly knitting and offering us cups of tea as we came in from the pub or back from studying. She never bothered us much, was always friendly and enjoyed a cup of tea with those of us who would sit and chat with her.

Mr Paul became ill very suddenly. We were not surprised, aware even then that age can be cruel. But what moved me most was his rapid decline, the fact that I never again saw him walking bent double against the wind, and the sight of his walking stick always lying in the hall. It became a strange kind of symbol. Late into the night I could hear him coughing and throwing up. The fact that we were only aware of this old man’s illness through his rasping cough and his wife’s ministrations lent the house a kind of ominous gloom.

One evening I came in from the cold and straight to the kitchen to heat myself at the range. Mrs Paul sat alone. There was a silence I couldn’t understand. I recall now that her knitting needles were for once not in evidence. There was no steam coming out of the old kettle normally kept simmering on the hot plate. Her face was very still. It took her some time to look up, to acknowledge me coming into the room. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked. She looked up slowly and I remember her old, lined but still quite beautiful face as she said calmly and without emotion: ‘My husband is dead.’

Although I was in my twenties, it was my first confrontation with death. And with the immediacy of its presence I hurriedly made some tea, and began my naive questioning … ‘When did it happen? …

Have you told anyone?’ He had died in the past half-hour, she was sure, and no-one knew. So it was left to me to be the bearer of grim news to the sons and daughters and the grandchildren of this old man, whom I knew only as someone walking against the wind and the rain in the dark evenings of Portstewart.

This incident is one of two from my student days that came back to me in my solitude while I was in Lebanon: a situation in which there was a dead man lying in his room and me trying to cope with my own loneliness and fear. I remember striving to recall some poetry I had written back then. This attempt to remember became for me a mental exercise to overcome my own pathetic and frightening condition, reaching back to what I had originally written as a memorial to this old stranger and to my first confrontation with death.

The second event that so affected me was a moment in our history that many Irish people, particularly in the North, cannot forget or come to terms with. ‘Bloody Sunday’, the carnage in Derry city when w paratroopers shot dead thirteen unarmed demonstrators, has become ™

a fixed symbol of horror in most Irish minds. I remember the news of the killings suddenly being broadcast on television. The news-flashes seemed to cause a kind of seizure of the whole of the university campus, among students and teaching staff alike.

There was much urgent activity. The student body met with teachers and administration staff to discuss the traumatic news. Among the student radicals, there was much talk of protest and of organization. Everyone was angry and everyone felt they must do something. But I sat with the kind of stunned amazement that I had recognized in Mrs Paul as she told me her husband was dead. Here I was at this second confrontation with death, feeling something of what I assume she must have felt with years still in front of her without her husband. What could I do… ? How could I understand this… ? And why was there such mass frenzy amongst the students, perhaps too enthusiastic to believe the sentiments I heard at that mass meeting.

A decision was taken to stop work: a strike by the lecturing staff and the students united in one voice of protest against the massacre. I remember leaving the university that day long before lunchtime, and going home to my room which had become my eyrie up above the waves that beat outside my window. I sat hoping that some friend would call. No one did. So many people were engaged in demonstrating or had gone to the pub to pick over the highlights of that incandescent mass meeting. The following day, the first day of the strike and of the protest, I found myself-not quite believing what I was doing -packing a bag, putting on my coat and heading into university. I had never broken a strike in my life.

My politics were always of that working-class kind which believed in the necessity of trade unions and of such actions as unions can take.

And here I was breaking faith with everything that I had so long supported. I remember entering the main door of the university, which was picketed by three of my closest friends. They were amazed and embarrassed to see me going into the building against all the recommendations of the students’ union, a stand supported by ninety per cent of the students and teaching faculty. I heard the voice of a friend, who stared me coldly in the eye, and asked without emotion or anger: ‘You are going to break the strike, Brian… ?’, and some pent up anger in me, something resilient, something that did not want to be broken by this event returned his cold stare and said ‘Yes, I am. Get out of my way.’

As I thought back on that moment, from confinement in Beirut, I wondered was my action another kind of leave-taking, and how much was it a kind of self-sustaining arrogance, and how much was it that inner compulsion to do something. I entered the university, and keeping clear of the strikers as much as I could, I went to the library. I did no work for my course but sat down with the few other students who for whatever reasons had decided to break the strike, and tried very hard to understand what I was feeling, and how I could understand an event like Bloody Sunday. These lines from a poem that I wrote soon after the event give some insight into what I was trying to cope with:

Conflict is elemental

A challenge of opposing minds

Identities shift, man-fish, fish-man

Primal passion takes its form r, ..Patience, pause then …

?.:’ Strike!

And play.

The line takes life

Taking life away.

A matter of matching bait and play

Like causation and effect

Coupling ideas with certain minds.

The net is cast

The fish are caught

Only the gutting remains.

I relate these moments of my personal history and quote this youthful poem in all its morbid immaturity because it gives some sort of colour or shape to the young man I then was, and because those two incidents came hammering back at me in Lebanon. In that lonely place I suppose I was trying to exercise my mind out of that same morbidity and edge myself away from that precipice of insanity which was a constant threat, and to which time after time so many of us who lived that experience were drawn so terribly near.

I spoke earlier about the inner compulsion to change, to remould or remake myself in some other situation as part of the explanation for my going to Lebanon in the first place.

This critical sense of stagnation took me there, and into captivity and another kind of frozen state. The ice of indecision and the ice of captivity met and fused. The breaking down of that icy immobility that afflicts the hostage, deprived of any but the most degraded human contact, that feeling of total constriction in which the normal faculty of reason seems stunted, demands of us some kind of survival strategy. We must look within to find it. For there is nothing in four concrete walls that can supply the needs we have as human beings. We turn back on memory. Or rather our memory comes to us, to give the mind some sort of positive means of egress out of that immobility.