(3) A plague on both their houses
January 9th 2020
Chinese state media report that a preliminary investigation of viral pneumonia in the city of Wuhan has identified a new type of coronavirus. Local authorities report 59 people with the illness.
ABC News
Although I grew up in the thick of the troubles, as a middle class family living in a well to do terrace off the Malone Road , they touched us less than many in the province. There were moments, like the Lavery’s pub bombing, when they came closer, but on the whole we watched the never ending sectarian violence unfold on the evening news from the comfort of our living room. Occasionally, there would be a soldier crouched down in the garden with his rifle, yes we were evacuated once because a garage across the back of the gardens was found to contain several hundred sticks of very unstable gelignite and as the 70’s turned into the 80’s my sister and her husband had an extraordinary escape one night when a gunman broke in through their front door and ran up the stairs to commit murder when his sidekick yelled up after him “wrong bloody street” before they ran off and found their intended victim in a near identical number 56 in a parallel street along the Lisburn road.
On the whole though, for me, the troubles were something that happened at a distance or on the nightly news. Bloody Friday sums that all up for me. Bloody Friday is the "other" Bloody day in the history of the Irish troubles but one you are probably less familiar with as it is the story of Bloody Sunday that has resonated through the years.
It was 1972, I was seven years old and it was a lovely July day in the school holidays while I was playing outside in the garden, it was not long after 2pm when I heard the first, distant, deep boom as it echoed past the houses. A few minutes passed and then another, less time this time and boom. Was that the end of it? A full quarter of an hour passed in silence and then the boom came from another direction, louder this time. Over the course of the next hour, barely minutes and sometimes only seconds passed between the explosions that came from all directions but were distant enough to not cause a panic. Boom, boom, boom. Twenty bombs, Women and children blown to pieces, hundreds injured, devastation to property on a scene rarely seen since the Belfast Blitz.
A police officer later described the scene that he had come across in the wake of the bombings
The first thing that caught my eye was a torso of a human being lying in the middle of the street. It was recognisable as a torso because the clothes had been blown off and you could actually see parts of the human anatomy. One of the victims was a soldier I knew personally. He'd had his arms and legs blown off and some of his body had been blown through the railings. One of the most horrendous memories for me was seeing a head stuck to the wall. A couple of days later, we found vertebrae and a rib cage on the roof of a nearby building. The reason we found it was because the seagulls were diving onto it. I've tried to put it at the back of my mind for twenty-five years.
When I was older, and working in London, I met some of those who had been much more directly affected by events from my youth. I had the good fortune to meet a very nice Irish film editor and we occasionally met up for a drink in town. One evening she told me a horrific story of how she had been sexually assaulted in the university district less than a mile from where I'd grown up. She'd called the police and had naturally expected them to help, and what she certainly didn't expect was to be dragged half-naked from the house, forced to stand in the rain at gunpoint while soldiers stormed into the house - not looking for her assailant, but for the presumed terrorist who had set a trap with fake news before the phrase had even been invented. It was a sign of the troubled times we lived in that rather than being treated as a victim, she was assumed to be the bait in a trap - purely because she had a Dublin accent in a Belfast Street and was in the wrong place at very much the wrong time.
But this won’t be a tale of the troubles.
Whilst living in the midst of the troubles maybe normalises them to those experiencing it day to day, I can honestly say that I had a happy and fortunate childhood and our family was largely untouched by the tragedies that impacted protestants and catholics alike across the region.
What I will say in terms of how they influenced me as I grew up was that I came to believe that religion itself could be twisted into the root of all evil whether it was the protestant pastor inciting hatred and bigotry amongst his congregation at the weekends or the catholic priest shielding known terrorists and murders from justice.
A plague on both their houses.
Our house was an old victorian terraced house in quiet leafy suburb just a short walk from my school and equally close to Queen’s University. Several houses in the street belonged to my grandmother, she lived in the grandest end of terrace house and owned both the house we lived in a couple of doors down and the house next door where my uncle lived. The source of the family wealth, long since evaporated, was a well known packaging firm in the province that had been family owned and run for generations. This was the family my grandmother had married into, but murky tales of how she had to pay off her often drunk husband's gambling debts and a corrupt solicitor who kept it all quiet by buying multiple properties from the family at knock down prices as well as the sizeable quantity of shares in the business that he owned was a story that we all knew well growing up.
Fact or fiction I have no first hand evidence, but it makes for an intriguing tale.
My bedroom on the 3rd floor overlooked the back yard , so not the greatest of views, but as it faced towards the town centre I often saw the army helicopters hovering around with their searchlight occasionally lighting up the room as they swung it around. If I didn’t see them, I certainly often heard them as the sound of helicopters circling overhead was one of the key soundtracks to my youth.
The house was large enough (and I guess posh enough) to still have remnants of the servant bell system and in the corner of my room there was a brass butlers bell pull with porcelain inserts that I tried in vain to summon a butler with to no-avail. Next door were my parents and on the floor above was my sister Janet and on the floor above, in pride of place in the larger attic room, was my eldest sister Christine. I was the youngest by a decade which meant that I didn’t play much with my sisters growing up, although after Janet stood on and broke my new train set on Christmas day, is it any wonder that I preferred to play alone? The story goes that when Mum brought me back from the hospital, Christine took one look at me and went “Eww, yuk!” and walked off. Thankfully we get on somewhat better today!
Dad was a civil servant in the hospitals department, became a senior civil servant and when he retired was one level down from permanent secretary, which meant he got a really nice clock when he left. There was talk of disappointment that he didn't receive an MBE on retirement, but the fact that the IRA had allegedly been paid sizeable sums to not blow up the new City Hospital as it was being constructed may have had something to do with that.
My vivid memory of a day I spent with Dad at work (presumably some sort of bring your kids to work day) was that he spent all day in a small office drinking filter coffee and it put me off the idea of following in his footsteps for life. I never gave it a second thought. Mum ran the house but when I got older and more independent, she began working at my school in the canteen and was soon managing the catering team. That makes it sound as if I’m defining my parents by their work, and that would be to give the wrong impression, but it seems like the sort of thing you might want to know.
I don’t really remember much about one of the defining moments (for everyone else) of my childhood but it has somewhat gone down in family history. No, not the ketchup incident, that comes later, but rather one that should be entitled “Big O’s and Little O’s”.
It seems that when I was maybe 4 or possibly 5 years old, before I went to primary school, I started drawing letter O’s on a blackboard easel at home. The O’s were of differing sizes, primarily large ones (the Big O’s) and smaller ones (the Little O’s). Nothing strange here, except I then went on to start drawing all over the walls in the house, 24 hours a day, with no sleep, for 5 days. My parents were at their wits end and would take turns sleeping so that someone was with me the whole time. The doctors don’t seem to have been very helpful as they just let me continue and said it would probably pass.
Then I stopped.
No one knows why I started or why I stopped. My hair turned from golden blond to dark brown shortly after.
I blame the hair.
Christmases evolve their routines over time and ours generally began with the grand present opening on Christmas morning in the front room. Some years the boxes seemed to overflow almost out of the room and as the youngest, most of them were for me. I was undoubtedly a beneficiary of improving family fortunes as Dad worked his way up through the civil service and my sisters would occasionally pass comment on the (relative) poverty of their times. I though, wasn’t complaining.
After the present opening, Dad would drive off to fetch his Mum. Granny Moffatt as she was known was a stickler for cleanliness and it was a bit of a running joke that she would manage to run her finger over a radiator or a shelf and find some dust that she would pass comment on. I don’t think Mum liked her much. Christmas lunch would be served at 1pm and was always a feast. Dad would sit at the head of the rectangular table and I would sit at the other end. Janet, Christine, Mum and Granny Moffatt would take their places and in later years we were joined by Janet and Christine’s respective partners and in turn their own children. There was always enough to go around and Mum, like her mother before her, was a great family cook.
I learnt a few valuable life lessons one year when passing the ketchup around. I gave the bottle a shake with cap facing upwards (lesson #1) and probably a little enthusiastically (lesson #2) and without first checking that the cap was actually secure (lesson #3). You can guess what happened next, aerial ketchup moving under the radar at attack velocity. Granny Moffatt didn’t stand a chance and the angry red blob scored a direct hit. It certainly made for a Christmas to remember.
The other lesson I learnt one Christmas was the folly of searching the house for presents in the days before the main event. I duly located a Mamod miniature steam engine that was my main present that year and learnt that I’m not very good at faking surprise. Actually if there is one character trait that has stood me in good stead over the years is that I’m useless at lying as it's written all over my face.
We lived less than a 5 minute walk from one of the two best known grammar schools in the province. Methody as it was known, Methodist College, Belfast in full. MCB was a mixed (girls and boys) school which also had a boarding school attached. The preparatory school - Fullerton House, was also a short walk from home and that's where I found myself attending Kindergarden in the Autumn of 1970 with Miss George as my first teacher in P1 and then Miss Kitson as my second in P2. As political violence exploded in the early 70's, criss-crossed lines of plastic tape appeared over all the windows to minimise flying glass shards should there be a bomb sufficiently close, but aside from that there was no obvious sign that we were being educated in the centre of an unfolding war.
Encouraged by my parents, who provided chemistry sets, electronic project sets, mechanical construction sets and no end of stimulation for a growing brain, I thrived in the academic environment. Methody was quite forward thinking and taught us all French in primary school so by the time I visited Marrakesh some five decades later, my wife thought I was practically fluent. After a clutch of O-Level success, I went on to the sixth form to study physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics and somehow ended up with something like 5 A'Levels in mathematics alone as we did pure maths, applied maths and then combined this across multiple examination boards for a reason I really can't recall. I won a national prize for chemistry and I think something for maths as well, but it's all a little foggy so long ago.
What I do remember quite well though is the small cohort of students who took the further maths exams with me. Timothy, Michael, Elaine, Godfrey, Roger (another one) and myself were part of a small group who were the academic elite of our year. "Precociously talented" was the phrase one of the teachers used to describe us decades afterwards when she commented that we were the most exceptional cohort of students the school had ever taught and we were still remembered decades later. Most of the group went to Oxford or Cambridge and whilst I interviewed with Robinson college Cambridge, unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at things) they questioned me on my only real weakness across my subject area, organic chemistry. The question began "Why are the curtains orange?" and I don't think my initial response of "Because someone has bad taste?" helped my cause any.
Of course I should have aced the entrance exam on mathematics - and indeed I did, with over 98%, but this was the year that Oxbridge lowered the difficulty of the maths paper after so many complaints from the years before and they over-corrected which meant too many people were getting strong grades for it to be an effective discriminator. I didn't mind though. I hadn't ever really wanted to go to either Oxford or Cambridge and indeed when I said to the school that I didn't want to apply, the headmaster himself was dispatched to our home to talk to my parents to persuade me to apply as they had planned. I was happy enough to comply, but for me it wasn't the be all and end all of what I was thinking about for the future.
It's true we were a bit precocious and that gave us a lot of freedom. We could pretty much sit in any class doing what we wanted as long as it was inline with our Oxbridge entrance examination work and so in physics we played around (relatively safely) with lasers and holograms rather than undertaking some of the more boring A'level course work at the time. In chemistry, there was a rather unfortunate (and explosive) accident that blew the windows out of one of the labs and thankfully didn't injure anyone as they had left the fume cupboard while the reaction was just starting to go awry and in mathematics I came up with an unusual and elegant proof to a theorem that was sufficiently novel for the teacher to call the university to see if there was any published precedent for the approach (sadly there was, but it wasn't well known).
Happy days.
I spent my first 18 years growing up in Belfast in this same house and had a happy childhood - so why leave? Indeed as time goes on, and I see how few of my family have chosen to leave the province, I realise that my strengthening desire to go out into the world and do something isn't necessarily a common mindset. My sisters, cousins, nephews and other relations of a similar age have all chosen to remain in Northern Ireland with the exception of a single nephew, who co-incidentally also works for a tech company and also works in North America. I couldn't have done that though, there was never any possibility of my remaining in Northern Ireland.
I felt compelled to leave because my entire world seemed to fit within 2 square miles - our house, my school, the only University in Northern Ireland and my best friend - and I felt a strong desire to go and see much more of it. I did apply to the local University (in 5th place I think) just as a safety net in case no-one else would have me, but I was delighted to be able to turn them down as the other offers came in and I had all the choice I needed.
It was time to put Belfast behind me.
Random fact: 50 odd years on from the 1971 pub bombing I learnt that the acclaimed Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, lived just 5 minutes from our home.