Soldier Of The Queen (27 page)

Elizabeth told me that my possessions had been put at her parents' house for safe-keeping. I was planning to pick them up myself eventually. When I saw Elizabeth in England about six months later I mentioned I would have to get my stuff back from her parents' house urgently: I was missing my records and

I needed my clothing and personal effects. I had mentioned the subject several times before and she had behaved oddly, as if she were trying to change the subject. This time, however, she could tell I wanted to make firm arrangements for the return of what was mine. She looked a bit embarrassed. Then she said her parents had destroyed everything. I was stunned. I asked her why. She said they didn't think I was coming back. I wanted to know why she or they hadn't contacted me before doing something so drastic. Again she couldn't, or wouldn't, give me a satisfactory explanation.

I felt angry and upset. I had lost almost all my most personal possessions. Not just records and clothes, but photos and letters - things that were irreplaceable. It confirmed to me that her family had discovered that I'd been lying to them about my background. I imagined how shocked her poor mother must have been to discover she had been trying to marry her daughter off to a Fenian. I thought of her falling to her knees and praying to God or the Reverend Ian Paisley, or both, in abject apology for her wickedness. I could imagine her, too, piling up my possessions in her garden, dousing them with petrol and, in an act of cathartic cleansing, flicking a lighted match onto the heap.

In the future my journey would take me to some strange and violent places where I would mix with some strange and violent people, yet nothing would compare with the dangerous peculiarity of that truncated corner of Ulster. With my Irish blood and my British upbringing I should have felt at home there. But I had never felt, and would never feel, so alien. As I imagined my possessions going up in flames my anger was tempered by a sense of relief. I would never return there. They were welcome to their bonfires.

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