Only Wounded--Stories of the Irish Troubles

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been written without the faith and guidance of:

  Jack Whyte, a Dreamer of Eagles, who showed me how to dream and keep the dream alive.

  George Payerle, author of Unknown Soldier, and Carolyn Bateman, who edited the manuscript with consummate skill and patience. Bless you, both.

  Jim Scott, who read the drafts and from his own depths gave me new insight into my own work.

  Adrian and Olga Stein, without whose support the book would not have seen the light of day.

  Todd McEwen, author of Fisher’s Hornpipe and MacX, mercy-killer of superfluous modifiers.

  To them I offer my deepest gratitude for their professionalism and, more important, their friendship.

  The book is theirs as much as mine.

  INTRODUCTION

  Flames devouring Isaac Agnew’s Volkswagen dealership on the Falls Road in Belfast were the first television images I ever saw in colour. Much of the city of Belfast was burning. The pictures rocked me like none before or after. At the time, in the summer of 1969, I had just arrived in Alliston, Ontario, as a locum general practitioner. Canada had colour television. Back home in Northern Ireland we still had black and white, and a citizenry that was equally polarized.

  The horrifying pictures were not my first experience of sectarian warfare. Two men and the car in which they were riding were totally destroyed by an explosion outside the wall of Campbell College, Belfast. On that mid-fifties day, I was a schoolboy playing cricket on the other side of the wall.

  On October 1, 1964, riots broke out on Divis Street, a Catholic neighbourhood of Belfast, when the police tried to remove a flag of the Republic of Ireland being flown in defiance of Northern Ireland laws. I was a casualty officer at the Royal Victoria Hospital and worked round the clock with my colleagues treating the large number of people injured in the fracas.

  These and other episodes of caring for the human wreckage of internecine warfare, while living in Belfast until late 1970 were the extent of my personal involvement with the Troubles.

  But I grew up in Bangor, County Down, eleven miles away from the city and have always loved my part of the island of Ireland. I have loved her loughs and mountains, lakes and little fields, small towns, and ugly, careworn, raggedy old Belfast.

  The demands of a career led me to Canada in 1970, shortly after the beginning of the Troubles that form the background to the stories in Only Wounded. It would be presumptuous of me now, at such distance, to attempt to disentangle the rights and wrongs of the civil war that raged with such ferocity from 1969 until 1994. I simply note with deep sadness that during those years there were more than 35,000 shooting incidents, more than 14,500 explosions, and 3,268 people killed.

  In this book you will see events of those years through the eyes of committed Loyalists and Republicans—Protestant and Catholic—and those without strong political views who, like the majority of the citizens of the six counties, were simply trapped in the middle of the war.

  The counties, cities, towns, streets, and places like Strangford Lough, Ballysallagh, the Club Bar, and the Crown Liquor Saloon are real, and although the characters in the stories are mine and the events portrayed are fictional, they reflect the reality of men and women caught up in circumstances over which they had little or no control.

  The short sections between stories are only too horribly real and are matters of record. They are by no means an exhaustive history of the Troubles and were selected in an arbitrary fashion to give context to the fiction from an endless catalogue of similar episodes. No attempt has been made to explain the political background to these matters in detail, nor, I hope, to take sides.

  What is so chilling is that all these violent acts did happen. The atrocities were committed by a relatively small number of people from both sides of the sectarian divide. The rest suffered the grinding civil war with dignity and courage. It was with them in mind, the ordinary folk, that these stories were written.

  * * *

  Some readers who are unfamiliar with Irish history may wish to know a little more about the background to the events in Northern Ireland. To you I offer a few short paragraphs of explanation.

  Until 1922 Ireland was one country of four provinces, Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and Connaught, and thirty-two counties. The old Ireland was ruled from Westminster. Today, twenty-six counties belong to a sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland, which was recognized in the Ireland Act of June 1949. Six of the original nine counties of Ulster remain a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

  There are those who wish for reunion of the six counties with the Republic of Ireland. They insist the province be known as “Northern Ireland.” Those who wish to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom are proud to call their home “Ulster.” When men can disagree so vehemently over even the name of such a small piece of land, it is little wonder that passions run high.

  King Henry II took possession of Ireland in 1155. Since then the fates of Ireland and England have been inextricably entwined. The native Irish race has always wanted the English to leave.

  In the early seventeenth century, Scottish artisans and farmers were deliberately settled in the northeast corner of the island, in the province of Ulster. The native Irish were Catholic, the settlers Protestant. While the Protestants were the dominant culture in the one province, Ulster, they were in a minority in the whole of Ireland.

  So were sown the seeds of the troubles of Ireland. Two threads run through a history reaching back eight hundred years: the desire of the Irish for independence from England and the fear of the Protestant minority in the north that they might be overwhelmed by the Catholic majority in the rest of the country if such independence were to come to pass.

  Modern Irish history can be traced from 1914 with the enactment of a home rule bill granting Ireland dominion status patterned along the lines of that already possessed by Canada and Australia. The act was not to become law until the cessation of the First World War.

  While welcomed by many, the bill was bitterly opposed by the Protestants of the north. They raised 90,000 armed men to resist home rule.

  The legislation did not satisfy those Republicans who would settle for nothing but total independence. Two thousand Irish Nationalists rose at Easter 1916 believing they could secure Irish independence by force. They were crushed. Four hundred and fifty lives were lost and 2,614 people were wounded.

  In 1918, as the details of the political settlement that would result in the partition of Ireland were being hamm
ered out in London and Dublin, hard-line Republicans who would accept nothing short of a thirty-two-county Ireland, independent entirely from Great Britain, began military action. The rebel military force of the south was the Irish Republican Army. A truce was signed on July 11, 1921. The treaty establishing the twenty-six-county Irish Free State and a six-county British Northern Ireland was ratified on January 7, 1922.

  The treaty was anathema to those who wanted complete independence. Civil war broke out pitting the new government of the Irish Free State against the IRA. Irishman against Irishman. The new dominion was born in bloodshed until a cease-fire was declared on May 24, 1923.

  The IRA, while defeated politically and militarily, did not vanish. It formed an Army Council, with no ties to the Irish government, to direct army activities aimed always at reunion of the thirty-two counties and complete independence from Great Britain.

  An abortive IRA bombing campaign was mounted on the British mainland in 1939 but failed to produce any political results. Military activity was suspended until 1951, when a series of arms raids was carried out on British military establishments.

  “Operation Harvest,” IRA attacks on targets in the north, began at midnight December 11, 1956, and ended on February 26, 1962. It was during this campaign that I had my first encounter with the bombers.

  It must not be thought that all Catholics were Republicans nor all Protestants Loyalists. There were moderates on both sides. Many moderates. In the late sixties, a growing, non-denominational civil rights movement began to demand equal treatment for the Catholics of Northern Ireland. The civil rights activities provoked a Protestant backlash. By August 1969, the situation had deteriorated so badly that the Royal Ulster Constabulary could no longer cope. On August 14, a company of the First Battalion of the Prince of Wales Regiment was inserted to quell a demonstration in the Catholic Bogside area of Londonderry.

  The sectarian rioting in Belfast and Derry worsened, and the population of the Catholic areas turned to the IRA for the protection it was unable to provide. A schism developed and grew among the leadership of the IRA. A few days before Christmas 1969, a Provisional Executive and Provisional Army Council were established. This group divorced itself from the traditional or “Official” IRA, and became the Provisional IRA, The Provos. Their initial priority was to establish effective defence of the Catholic neighbourhoods. Their ultimate goal was to go on the offensive, using force of arms to remove finally what they perceived as the British forces of occupation and at last realize the dream of a united Ireland.

  Loyalists in Ulster were not prepared to let this happen and such paramilitary groups as the Ulster Defence Force and the Ulster Freedom Fighters were formed.

  So was the scene set for the events of the last thirty years, events that with the explosion of an IRA bomb in the Canary Wharf district of London on February 9, 1996, again filled the headlines. In that explosion, two people were killed and more than 100 wounded.

  It is in those thirty years that the stories in Only Wounded are set.

  Again, for those who may find some nuances of Northern Irish idiom and some historical figures unfamiliar, and all aspects of Ulster politics confusing, a short glossary has been provided at the end of the book. Paramilitary and political organizations and the Security Forces are described, and some general information is provided. Readers may find a preliminary consultation of this information to be of value.

  For anyone who wishes to learn more, a short list of suggested reading is supplied.

  PROLOGUE

  STRANGFORD LOUGH 1964

  “Keep your head down,” Neill whispered urgently from where he huddled in the angle between two rough stone walls. He glanced away from the target to make sure Pat’s balaclava no longer broke the skyline. In the near-dark, the white of the skin around his eyes peering through the slit in the woollen helmet would be enough to betray his position. Not much point taking cover if you let your head stick out like a sore thumb. Still keeping his voice low, Neill said, “I’ll watch them. I’ll tell you when.” He stared back into the half-light of the false dawn. For a moment he could see nothing. Had they turned away? His eyes caught a flicker of movement. They were closer now. Still coming. He tightened his grip on the frigid barrels of his shotgun. God, it was cold out here, the wind howling in from the south like a stepmother’s breath. “Come on. Come on.” He crouched lower and lifted the twelve-bore, tucking the butt into his shoulder. “Come on.” Almost in range. Six of them. He held his breath. Ten more yards. Five.

  “Now.”

  Neill uncoiled, aimed, and fired. He heard Pat’s shot, then almost as one the crashes as both guns fired again.

  Four ducks flared wildly, wings beating frantically as the birds turned, climbed, and hurtled downwind. The lead mallard and a bird to his left folded in mid-flight and plummeted earthward, one falling on the land, the other into the sea, thirty yards out.

  He heard Pat whoop. The silly bugger always cheered when he had a bird down. “Good shot, Pat.”

  “Good shot, yourself.” Pat propped his now empty shotgun against the wall of the old ruined sheep pen. “Let’s get the birds.”

  “Come on, then.” Neill tucked his gun into the crook of his left arm, barrels pointing down, and led the way. Grouse, his big, black Labrador at his heels, sniffing the wind, tail going twenty to the dozen.

  “God,” said Pat, “there’s no happier animal than a retriever in the shooting season.”

  Neill smiled and thought, Except you and me, Pat, back here again on the Long Island.

  Neill watched Pat walk over the tussocks, striding easily, head turning from side to side as he sought the place where his bird had crashed.

  The gravel of the foreshore crunched underfoot as Neill took Grouse to the water’s edge. “Hi lost, Grouse.” The dog needed no second bidding. He charged into the water. Head high, he swam strongly through the dark sea, only visible because of the white wake of his passage.

  Neill hunched his shoulders into the collar of his heavy coat and tried to ignore the biting rawness of the wind that tugged at him. He shivered. It was probably true, he thought, leaning into a gust, that all wildfowlers are mad. But the cold was a small price to pay for the sheer pleasure of being on Strangford Lough, away from work, in his own universe, shared only with Pat, a day’s fowling ahead.

  Neill looked out across the stretch of water between the island and the shore. The light was better now. He could see that Grouse had taken the duck in his mouth and had turned back. Behind the dog the distant shoreline was becoming visible. A small flock of ducks flew low over the water, lifting to clear Gransha Point, bent like a dog’s hind leg and stretching for more than a mile into the choppy waters.

  Gransha. Neill remembered the day there last season when Pat had shot a goose. Why had Grouse not been with them? Was that the time he had a torn pad? The bird had fallen in the water and Pat had stripped down to the buff and swum out to make the retrieve. The image of Pat, clutching the greylag, his white skin pimply like a freshly plucked bird, brought a smile to Neill’s cold lips. Daft bugger.

  He ran his gaze along the familiar coastline from Gransha, round a deep bay to the bulk of the Castle Hill, dark and brooding against the lightening sky. The sycamores at the hill’s crest had always been a good spot for wood-pigeons. Perhaps, he thought, we should give it a try next weekend.

  Grouse was closer now. He was swimming in on a line from John Dunlop’s farmhouse. Its red roof stood out against the paleness of the surrounding fields. The house itself was set in a sheltered hollow. Neill stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. It would be warm over there, someone putting on the kettle, stoking up the range. Still, he’d rather be here.

  The big Labrador waded through the shallows, his tail thrashing the water in joy. He landed, politely gave the duck to Neill, and shook himself, sending a spray of water droplets into the just-risen sun. Grouse in his element, proud and wet.

  “Good boy.” Neill thumped the dog’s fl
ank and headed back to the hide where Pat waited, leaning against the wall. In his left hand he held a drake, its chestnut throat, metal-green head, and yellow beak bright against the speckled breast feathers. Only two dark spots in the grey showed where the pellets had smashed through.

  “Right,” said Pat, “one each.”

  “And no more if we don’t get out of sight. Go on in, Grouse.”

  Grouse slipped through the entrance and curled up in a corner out of the wind. Neill followed Pat inside, frowned, and wished that his friend wouldn’t be so careless, leaving his gun propped up unattended like that. Neill reloaded and made sure the safety catch was on. Pat had done the same. Good.

  Neill went back into his niche between the walls. “Right. You keep an eye out towards Gransha. I’ll watch the other side.”

  He listened to the wind battering like a wild thing against the stones, howling through the cracks. No wonder folks round here still believed in the banshee. He blew on his hands, tucked himself behind the shelter of the wall, and peered over the top. He watched with pleasure as the sun turned the waters of the lough to grey-green flecked with small whitecaps. The undersides of the clouds were painted with pinks and posies of red and maroon. Far in the distance the indigo line of the Mourne Mountains stood against the morning sky, with Slieve Donard, the highest, solid as a boxer’s fist, punching the clouds away.

  He hummed a snatch of an old Percy French Ballad: “… but for all of their jewels I’d far rather be, where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.” By God, he would. He’d been born and had grown up in Ulster. Born Catholic, true enough, but in Bangor, a town where sectarian matters played little part in his life. This rough, cold, windy corner of Ireland was home.

  “My side. Teal.”

  Neill dropped lower and turned to look where Pat pointed. Fleeing down the wind a ball of teal rushed on like little rockets. Neill fired twice, and missed. He stole a surreptitious glance to see how Pat had fared. He’d missed, too. Grouse had risen and was looking up, head cocked, ears pricked.