army frequently fought each other in gun battles. Gerry never hid the fact that he had inherited his father’s pacifist views, and his forthright rejection of war and political violence was interpreted by some within his own community as somehow being anti-IRA. He was anti-IRA, but he was also anti-British army and anti-loyalist paramilitaries. Given the myopia and cataclysmic social upheaval that had infected Belfast and its citizens for over two decades at that time, it was hardly surprising that Conlon opted to get away from it all and live in cosmopolitan London.
He liked London and found the English generally endearing: ‘There is not a lot of bitterness in my heart. I feel bitter towards the judiciary, towards the police who framed me, who fabricated evidence, but I have nothing but time and respect for all the English people who helped, and there have been so, so many of them.’14 Later he would say, ‘English people are brilliant people.’15And so it was that Gerry moved into the detached Victorian house of Gareth Peirce and her husband, Bill, in London’s Kentish Town in December 1989. This was one of his better decisions because Peirce provided a degree of stability and good judgement that he badly needed. She understood him and had a feel for the mountains that all the miscarriage of justice victims would have to climb if they were ever to readjust back into society: ‘They [the Guildford Four] came out with no money and no counselling,’ she said. ‘They had no references. It’s difficult to open a bank account; you can’t get a mortgage. They have no GP. They don’t belong.’16
Gerry Conlon never professed to be a saint nor, in numerous subsequent press interviews, did he hide his failings and transgressions. Speaking bluntly of the time before he was arrested for the Guildford bombings, he said: ‘We [Paul Hill and he] were working on building sites. We were getting drunk; we were known to the community [a euphemism for being petty criminals]. We were fucking arseholes.’17 But that was then. Now he wanted a new beginning. He wanted to travel and to savour humanity in all its majesty. He was still only thirty-five years old, and he wanted to catch up with a life that had zipped passed him fifteen years earlier. Perhaps he saw Gareth Peirce as a bridgehead of sensibility, a sobering influence who, to some extent, cramped his style, but by the start of 1990 he was looking for his own accommodation.
Jeremy Corbyn, the future British Labour Party leader and the MP for Islington North, had highlighted the case of the Guildford Four, and he secured Conlon a small one-bedroom council flat in the Holloway Road area of north London. After buying a sofa-bed, Martin Loughran moved in with Gerry. It was a claustrophobic existence, far removed from the home comforts of Gareth and Bill’s house, but crucially, the name Conlon was on the rent book. Before long, further compensation began to filter through, and Gerry was able to buy a two-bedroom basement flat in Tufnell Park, north London. Now he was, for the first time in fifteen years, the architect and builder of his own world.
‘When we moved into Tufnell Park, I went back to my work on the building sites,’ Martin Loughran says. ‘Gerry was a whirlwind. He was still very active on the Birmingham Six front – I remember he went to a big conference in Copenhagen – but he was also meeting people and partying. Y’see, Gerry made friends easily. And he was a party-animal. I didn’t like parties; I preferred a quiet pint in my local pub.’ Loughran has no recollection of Conlon taking any drugs other than marijuana:
I would say his biggest vice in those days was his gambling. He had no appreciation of money. He just saw money as a means to get him where he wanted to go and then just rake it up. I saw me sitting in the flat in Tufnell Park and there was a bookies way down the street, and he’d say to me, ‘There’s a grand. Away and put it on such and such a horse.’ And maybe it was beat. Broke my heart, like. But, then again, I’ve seen me walk into the bookies and take thousands from them and bring it back to him. Y’see, Gerry was a lucky gambler. He’d sit in the house and smoke a bit of blow, and his head would’ve been buried in the paper, studying the form; he knew when a horse was right and when it wasn’t. And he’d never have stood all day in a bookies like a lot of gamblers. And another thing, people have said he was an alcoholic. He wasn’t. No way. Certainly not when I was with him.18
David Pallister also felt the rush of Conlon’s personality. A reporter with The Guardian since 1974, Pallister had extensively covered the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. He had also been in both Guildford and Birmingham on the day after the explosions had occurred and had reported on both sets of appeals. Moreover, he had written copiously about miscarriages of justice. With these qualifications, it is little wonder that Gareth Peirce judged him to be the writer best suited to bring to life the Gerry Conlon story in a book.
At the solicitor’s invitation, Pallister first met Gerry in Gareth’s home in early 1990, where they collectively discussed the mechanics of the journalist ghostwriting Gerry’s biography. The reporter liked Gerry: ‘He was good company and we got on well. He remarked approvingly of my gait, “Just like you’d see on the Falls Road.”’19
From the outset, it was agreed that in order to give Gerry and David the best possible chance to concentrate on the task in hand, they had to get away from the many distractions of London. David’s suggestion of two weeks in sunny Tunisia went down exceedingly well with Gerry, but tying down the bon vivant to a strict work regime would prove problematic: ‘Even though he was tremendously engaging, very articulate, thoughtful and funny at the same time, it was sometimes hard getting him to stick to the bigger picture we were after,’ Pallister said. ‘But after the damage of fifteen years in prison I was content to be indulgent about his indiscipline and self-indulgence. The poor guy had been through hell and he was understandably angry and bitter.’
Pallister’s idea of going to Tunisia in the first place had been to find anonymity because Gerry had already attained a considerable media profile. While the idea was sound, it was only as foolproof as Gerry wanted it to be – and playing the role of the perennial bore did not come naturally to him. He was Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four, after all, and where was the harm in telling his fellow tourists that he was the man who had ridden out of the Old Bailey on a chariot of righteous indignation?
Even though it was always going to be a difficult commission for Pallister, the two men did manage to get through a substantial amount of work as they sat on the balcony of the journalist’s room every morning with a tape recorder. And every evening Pallister sent the tape of that day’s work back to London to be transcribed. A significant portion of what had been recorded pertained to Gerry’s survival exploits while in prison. Pallister said: ‘He had some highly amusing and graphic tales, which he recounted with relish. He also had stories of financial scams. He smoked dope all day. He had brought it in, he explained, wrapped in film between his buttocks.’
When they got back to London, Pallister was confronted by Gareth Peirce, who had had access to the recordings made in Tunisia. She was less than enthusiastic. ‘Gareth was unhappy about the stories of his exploits,’ Pallister said. ‘She wanted something more about the grief and the pain and his relationship with his father. There was pressure from the knowledge that Ronan [Bennett] was doing Paul Hill’s book [Stolen Years: Before and After Guildford],’ Pallister said. ‘Before I could progress, I was summarily taken off the project and paid off. I had a final highly emotional meeting with Gerry in a café on Kentish Town Road, close to Gareth’s house, where he laid out his true feelings.’
Robin Blake, another journalist, finished the book with Gerry. Tellingly, Pallister was not invited to the launch of Conlon’s book, Proved Innocent, in the House of Commons on 11 June 1990. He professed that he was ‘not bitter about all of this … but I was annoyed that the book turned out to be so dishonest.’20 No amount of coaxing would persuade Pallister to elaborate on what exactly had driven him to question the book’s honesty, or to give an account of his final meeting with Gerry in Kentish Town. Perhaps he believed that some things were better left unsaid.
Leaving things unsaid was not the way of the next set of characters to enter Gerry Conlon’s convoluted life. For Joey Cashman and Shane MacGowan, of the Irish punk rock band The Pogues, Gerry’s devil-may-care attitude to life paralleled their own laissez-faire philosophy. For the more circumspect Hollywood superstar Johnny Depp, Gerry was the ‘friend’ with whom he got drunk and raked about, while the two men and the Conlon family toured Ireland.
The lad was on the rocky road to somewhere