As I read through my two-page introduction to the diary, its sometimes precocious tone and language embarrassed me. The memories, though, disturbed me. Belfast in 1972 was a dangerous place, where blending into the background and keeping out of harm’s way were the order of the day. Sectarian violence meant that no one, from either of our two communities, wanted to run the risk of being singled out for being different. If that meant that 16-year-olds like my friends and me kept to our own tiny patch in predominantly Catholic, nationalist Andersonstown – seldom venturing far beyond school, each other’s homes or occasionally the city centre – then so be it. The world we inhabited was, by necessity, small and familiar. But it provided us with relative safety.
The Fruithill Park home that I shared with my parents and four brothers was happy, loving and secure. During weekends and summer evenings, our long back garden, enclosed by hedges and trees, made a perfect playground, football pitch or battleground, depending on which and how many of my brothers and their friends were gathered there.
On Saturday afternoons, the smell of the home baking that my mother and I produced, working side by side, regularly filled our kitchen. The hammering or drilling from my father’s enthusiastic DIY efforts often competed with the racket made by the boys and our crazy mongrel dog, Tito. Homework routines were rigorously enforced around the kitchen and living room tables, despite protests from my brothers, and I willingly retreated to my bedroom to escape the happy mayhem.
My parents worked hard and were rightly proud of the comfortable, 1930s, semi-detached house they had saved for and bought when I was finishing primary school and Paul, the youngest, had just turned two. My father, who started his working life as a boy messenger with the Post Office many decades earlier, was well versed in Belfast’s unique religious and political geography and knew the areas where his young family was always likely to be safest. Even when the immediate and terrible consequences of internment were first inflicted on nationalist, working-class areas, our lives in quiet, residential Fruithill were initially normal and untroubled.
When I started to record the events of 1972, Paul was just seven and was inseparable from Jim who was three years older. Full of boyish devilment, they operated as a pair – ‘partners in crime’ – as did the two older boys, Aidan who was twelve and John, fourteen. All of them were still children when the ‘excitement’ of the Troubles exploded into our lives.
As the eldest of the five and an only girl, I enjoyed the privilege of having one of our four bedrooms to myself. I would spend hours holed up in that small room. My parents, Maura and Jim, would rap on my door to tell me I couldn’t possibly be studying properly, as my precious transistor blared out Radio 1 chart hits: Donny Osmond, all hair and American teeth, singing ‘Puppy Love’; David Cassidy asking ‘Could It Be Forever’; and ‘Telegram Sam’, ‘Jeepster’ and ‘Metal Guru’. What a great year that was for my favourites – the exotic, glam rockers, T Rex. At night, snuggled up in my narrow single bed, I would try to fall asleep as Radio Luxembourg DJs, with their trans-Atlantic twangs, whispered to me from the radio hidden underneath my blankets.
Outside, on the streets of Belfast, the IRA carried out deadly attacks on British Army patrols with increasing regularity and detonated bombs in the city centre with devastating consequences; soldiers killed members of IRA ‘active service units’, as well as innocent, unarmed civilians and people allegedly ‘acting suspiciously’; sectarian threats and attacks drove families out of their homes, while loyalists abducted and killed random workmen, students and late-night drinkers, just because they were Catholics.
Closeted in my bedroom at the back of the house, I took refuge in music, books and in the pages of the teenage magazine, Jackie, with its insights into make-up, fashion, celebrity and, of course, boys. I treasured the pull-out posters of idols like David Cassidy and Marc Bolan, while problem pages opened up a fascinating, new, forbidden world: ‘Dear Cathy and Claire, I think my boyfriend ...’; ‘Dear Cathy and Claire, what should I do ...’.
A sharp crack of gunfire or the sickening thud of a distant explosion would jolt me back to the reality of West Belfast. And so the depressing, anxious litany of questions and prayers would resume: ‘What was that?’ – ‘Where was it?’ – ‘Please God, don’t let anybody be killed.’ – ‘Please God don’t let it be anybody we know.’ The incessant ‘chuddering’ drone of army helicopters, circling above the rooftops, kept me awake at night. Their powerful, prying searchlights flooded my bedroom with light, casting distorted, ghostly shadows on the walls. Piercing whistles and the racket of metal bin-lids being banged on pavements alerted neighbourhoods to imminent army raids.
Again and again I wondered what it would be like to live in a ‘normal’ place – going out to discos and shopping with friends, free from the fear of bombs exploding; being able to rely on public transport for going to school – doing the things that ordinary teenagers did. The unexpected discovery of my long-forgotten diary, with its opening grim reminder of the autumn and winter of 1971, prompted me to revisit my ironically named ‘Happy Days’ scrapbook.
There, in black and white, were appalling images from the streets of Belfast: bare-handed rescuers searching in the dark, through the debris of McGurk’s bar after it was bombed by loyalists in December. A schoolgirl, two years younger than me, and a boy – who was even younger – were killed with thirteen other Catholics when the no-warning device exploded. Page after page carried photographs of buildings in flames, army machine-gun posts, bewildered business owners staring in disbelief at the ruins of their livelihoods, and soldiers uncoiling huge rolls of barbed wire to cordon off streets and keep neighbours apart.
I had collected accounts of interrogation and torture written by men interned in Long Kesh since August 1971, as well as a selection of the simple black-and-white Christmas cards they made for their families and friends on ‘the outside’. I covered two full pages with a black-and-white photograph that I cut out of the Belfast Telegraph, showing 173 tiny white crosses planted in a wintry field, under the grim heading ‘And So Ends ‘71’.
At Midnight Mass in 1971, and for nearly thirty years afterwards, priests asked us to pray for everyone who had been killed in the violence of the previous twelve months and for everyone who was separated from their families at Christmas. We all bowed our heads and said our prayers; but secretly, year after year, I prayed selfishly and most fervently that my family and friends would stay safe, and that it would all be over soon. The last lines of my ‘Notes from 1971‘ entry reminded me of the bleakness of that Christmas:
This Christmas Day was celebrated by the internees with a hunger-strike, by people in Andersonstown keeping a 24-hour fast outside the church, by 4,000 people who gave up their homes on Christmas Day to defy the army and to walk 10 miles to Long Kesh – and by 14,000 British soldiers, separated from their families to keep a riot-torn city at peace, for as long as is possible here.
Not long after my sixteenth birthday, and within weeks of internment being introduced, I made up my mind that I was going to ‘break out of it all’ and get a taste – if only for a month or so – of the world I glimpsed through the pages of Jackie. I wanted to go somewhere bright, sunny and normal; somewhere with no explosions, no bomb scares and no one getting shot. Neither I nor anyone in my family had ever been on a plane or gone to a country where English wasn’t the first language but that didn’t deter me; if anything, it encouraged and excited me.
When my friend Suzette, who was a student nurse and lived nearby, presented me with a new diary for Christmas, I resolved to be faithful to it. I looked forward to 1972 being my year: I would turn 17, get a part-time job, be transformed from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan and finally find romance, travel and a promising new future.
End-of-year news programmes reminded us sombrely that 150 people had died violently since internment was introduced five months earlier. Naïvely, though, and with the optimism of a schoolgirl who had nobody belonging to her killed or in jail, I was convinced that Northern Ireland would soon settle down and the bloodshed stop.
Even in the bleakest moments of the autumn and winter of 1971, I could not have envisaged the violent depths into which our society was about to plunge headlong. I could not have foreseen