Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Two Happy Years Spent in a War-Torn TownAuthor(s): Robert JohnstoneSource: Fortnight, No. 216 (Mar. 18 - 31, 1985), pp. 11-12Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25547748 .

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The old Bogside with St Kugene's Cathedral.

TWO HAPPY YEARS SPENT IN A WAR-TORN TOWN

In a postscript to the special feature on Derry in the last issue, ROBERT JOHNSTONE gives his impressions, as a visiting Belfast student from a Protestant background, of two years spent in the city in the early seventies.

I WENT to Derry from Belfast in 1970 some sort of vague republican. Theobald

Wolfe Tone sounded such a grand, misty name. Two years later, when I left Derry, I

don't know what I was, but I wasn't a

republican. When I started at Magee College, such

things seemed a lot simpler. The civil

rights movement was analogous to Martin

Luther King's campaign. Progress was in

evitable, the Troubles only the last heave

of the process -

after all, King had been

murdered before the struggle was over. If

the British Army would cool down and

treat everyone fairly, the Catholics would

get their rights and the Unionists would

have to accept civilisation at last.

I also had a romantic view of the Repub lic. One of the first things the Students'

Union laid on was a trip to the Griannan of

Aileach, that spectacular ring-fort in Don

egal. If I thought about a united Ireland, it

would come about by negotiation, in a

dawn of generosity, detente and optim ism, and I hoped it would be secular, soc

ialist, diverse. What seemed more impor tant was that the civil rights movement was

the first time nationalist Catholics had at

tempted to work within the context of

Northern Ireland. Such generosity is, I still

believe, a prerequisite for improvement. I fell in love for the first (and nearly the

last) time with a Scots girl, Jo Burns. She

told me that her mate Fran had been talk

ing about us to her boyfriend, a local

Derry lad also studying at Magee. His re

action to me was, 'If there's one thing I

hate, its Belfast Protestants.' Thus I was

disabused of the notions that university students would be above that sort of thing, and that Catholics, who suffered bigotry themselves, would be free of it.

But he overcame his misgivings, and we

became friends. I think he found it awk

ward to go to Magee and live at home in

Derry, just as he seemed to be puzzling out

his attitude to all that was going on. He

used to escape out the window of his mo

ther's home when the priest came to call, and he told me how much more skilful he

thought soccer was than Gaelic football, which he resented having to play at school.

You could almost set your watch by the

start of the afternoon riots, when a bunch

of boys would begin throwing stones at the

soldiers from the top of one of the steep streets that ran down from the city centre.

He told me he'd happened to be in that crowd one day and started to throw stones

like everyone else. It took him a few min

utes before he stopped and asked himself, 'What are you doing?'

There was grim glamour in all that for us -

maybe for the stonethrowers too, if not

my friend. I bought a huge book called Battle of the Bogside, containing photo

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i^HBHHHBHi^HHHHHHH^HHHHIMMHIHHHI derry A war-torn city continued from page 11

graphs by Clive Limpkin, a Fleet Street

photographer. Those boys were media

stars.

Of course we were privileged, not only insulated by the university, our options

and our futures, but positively welcomed

by the Derry people. The 240 undergrad uates in that little appendix of the New

University of Ulster (soon to suffer appe

ndectomy) were the concession their pro tests and motorcades had wrung from a

Stormont government determined to put the university in Protestant Coleraine.

So, treated with generosity, most of us

responded. I liked Derry a lot. It was like a

foreign country to me, in which everyone seemed colourful and eccentric, exotic, extreme. Although it was a city, you got to

know people quickly, you recognised

people you passed in the street a couple of

times. The citizens might have inhabited a

great hothouse, steamy and enclosed,

growing so close together they might all

have been related. Their tendrils entang led with each other's: everyone was living

on their nerves.

The first time I walked through the Bog side I found the old houses, alongside the horrible new blocks of flats, worse than

the London slums I'd envisaged from

Dickens. They had two storeys, but you felt you could reach up and tap the upper

windows, they looked so small. It was al

most like Ulster's own little Third World a tangible illustration of what discriminat

ion can do. There was the romance of the

siege, Derry's walls, about which songs were sung, and the curiously neat imagery of the maiden city, the Mountjoy breaking the boom, the Foyle's hymen.

For Burns Night, my Scottish girlfriend discovered a butcher who could supply haggis. And my Rhodesian friend, John, found a Rhodesian butcher. John's tastes,

however, had refined somewhat since he'd

left the African plains, and he had to dis

courage the butcher from plying him with

huge, colonial-style steaks. There were

those cul-de-sacs of imperialism, and a

certain cosmopolitan air, for Derry was

also a port. But we noticed the numbers of

ships coming up the Foyle diminish drast

ically in our two years.

Derry then felt like the most exciting place in the world. It was full of journal ists. We took advantage of their ludicrous

expense accounts when we met them in

the hotels. The people of the Bogside were

very astute politically, and could see off

any of our radical students in arguments about Marxism.

I think most of my friends in the largely non-Irish campus were broadly sympa

thetic to the anti-Unionist struggle, some

more so than others. It was rather chic at

that time to be an urban guerrilla, like the

Baader-Meinhof group. One pretty Eng lish girl disappeared with her very own

Stickie or Provo, according to the talk. I

stayed at a distance from that, and as time

when on began to feel more of an outsider.

I'd never felt part of any society, certainly not the Protestant, Unionist Ulster, but I

might have suffered some sort of culture

shock about Derry, for the closer you got to it, the further away it was.

Jo and I lived for a time in Pump Street, near the Diamond, in a damp flat in a

terrace I thought had been there when

Lundy was mayor. There was a convent

across the way and the Protestant Cathed

ral at the end of the street. We went to a

launderette in the Bogside, like normal

citizens. Somehow, every time we went, we encountered a terrifying matron who

couldn t accept her ignorance about us.

She would say to Jo, T saw your husband

the other day.' When she talked about my

'wife in interrogative tones, I smiled and

nodded. I might even have moved my ring to my third finger on washdays, though I

never invested in a St Christopher. When we lived in Donegal a woman

from the Bogside came for a weekend to

escape the pressures of her life there. Her

husband and father were on the run or

interned, she lived like a magpie on Val

ium. She told of how soldiers' bullets had

raked her block of flats. She brought three children with her. The baby cried every

waking hour, till its larynx sounded

doomed. Her little girl, of four or five,

seemed catatonic: she never spoke one

word. The little boy was hyperactive, dis

turbed. Yet the woman told us with some

pride how his granny would give him bot

tles full of paint and encourage him to

throw them at the Saracens. An apprent ice rioter of six.

I began to sense something Pyrrhic in

this glorious struggle. When a bomb ex

ploded in town and the fire engines came

out, drivers would actively get in their way to prevent them extinguishing the fire.

One time a soldier was killed by a sniper, children dipped their fingers in his blood and wrote a message for the Brits on a

wall. 1 wondered what sort of new Ireland

was being fought for by that Bogside fam

ily, all of them already casualties, on

medication.

A characteristic word in the Derry dia

lect is 'wild', meaning 'very", 'extremely'. There was an hysteria in that entangled,

claustrophobic little world that was turn

ing savage. A bargain had been struck with

suffering and destruction, but the human

terms of the contract were not favourable.

We heard about Bloody Sunday over the radio in Donegal. One of the people

who shared our house had been on the

march. I thought then that the British had made their ultimate blunder, that blood

would be answered by blood. Next day we

took our German visitor, Gunter, into

Derry. It was cold and clear, the last day of

January 1972. Incredibly, the cinema on

Strand Road, although closed in mourn

ing, still displayed the title of its current

film: Sunday, Bloody Sunday, starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. Gunter

said, "The Irish are very strange people.'

Magee was closed that summer as an

undergraduate college and we transferred,

much against our will and after sit-ins and

protests, to Coleraine. I left Derry feeling it was a very strange place, and that Irish

politics were stranger and more intract

able than I'd thought in 1970. If politics look as murky now, I've come to under

stand something about Ireland that people like John Hewitt and Ciaran Carson have

pointed out to me in their different ways.

Ulster, or Northern Ireland, is not simply a region but, like the island as a whole, has

a number of distinct regions of its own.

Ireland is not an entity, except on the map. It consists of a host of ideas of Treland'.

The view from Belfast is very different

from the view from Derrv, Galway or

Dublin. It s been suggested, lor example, that

Derry's superstar politician, John Hume, has an attitude to the North tempered by

living in a place where Catholics are in the

majority, an attitude which contrasts with

his erstwhile SDLP colleagues from Bel

fast. In Derry the border is patently absurd

and gerrymandered. The Republic begins a few fields away. In Belfast, the nearest

border is beyond Newry. 1 returned to Derry for a few days in, I

think, 1976. I was shocked by the sudden

gaps in the buildings - it looked much

worse than the centre, at least, of Belfast.

My friends were gone, and the place felt

empty and dead. Of course it wasn't, but

that's how I felt. Despite two years on the

banks of the Foyle, it was suddenly incon

ceivable that one had once half-imagined, like certain of its citizens, that Derry was

the centre of the world. But it was still

possible to hope that, under some new

dispensation, Derry could be Derry, and

Belfast could be Belfast, that they could

flourish in their diversity without fighting to belong to the 'real* Ireland/Northern

Ireland. I have a feeling states aren't real

at all, only places. Derry could be a world

on its own. I loved it -

those were two of

the happiest years of my life.

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12 Fortnight 18th March 1985

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