Whether I have achieved my purpose I cannot know. All our lives are but a story, and this is only another. Stories should be a mirror held up to life. Sometimes those mirrors are cracked or opaque. Only those who look into it can truly know; you the reader will decide.
It is always difficult to find a beginning. All good stories have one, no matter how inconclusive or unexpected their end may be. The end of this story has not yet come, so it is particularly difficult to know where to begin. Were I older and had I lived fully the greater part of what life has been given me, then perhaps as in any good autobiography it would be easy to find a starting point, a rationale or a structure for my life: a place from where memory might begin to unfold the full and meaningful pattern of my time and how I have lived it.
But here is a different kind of search for a beginning. I do not wish to tell of a whole life, but only of an incident: an episode in time, a short sequence, yet one that seems dreadfully long and meaningful to me.
I think of the opening lines of the Bible: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.’ Somehow those lines kept ringing back to me in the long captive silences, with a head full of words, a confusion of images, a mind not sane enough to find a rational perspective from which I could understand what was happening to me. Again I recall that ancient prologue to try to convey to you something of that imprisoned time and hopefully to explain something of what it meant and how it continues to have meaning; sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes I don’t know. Those easy definitions of good and bad, right and wrong seem inadequate to my purpose: the same inadequacy that overcomes so many things that we as human beings are forced to deal with and to understand.
So now I try to find a starting point from which I can share with you part of the self that I knew, and to find the self that I may have become as a result of my strange sojourn in the Lebanon. Because ‘myself could never again be an easily defined and well-summed thing. I have been asked so many times ‘Why did you go? What took you to that place?’ In answering, I can at last find my beginning.
The depth or limitation of our understanding of the world about us sometimes faulted in our development by the kind of commitment we make to that world, the people who share it with us and the historical events that touch our lives. I am a product of my city and of this awful period in its history. Before I left Belfast, I had been torn with a desperate kind of love and distaste for my place and my people and even after coming back these scars of anger and of desire still mark me.
A love that cannot find an outlet turns inward, and not being able to reach out and touch the thing it loves, be it a place or the people in that place, turns to anger and becomes confused. I have lived through a terrible time, but seen something of the loveliness that is in a people and a country, and have known people who struggle, who insist on trying to rise above the forces that threaten them. But we all become tired, like a man struggling with a great load: Sisyphus pushing his awful stone only to feel it roll back and topple him down to the bottom of that hill from which again he must begin his upward heave.
When I think of my choice to leave Ireland, I constantly ask myself was it a wearisome walking away? Was it time to find another set of values, breathe another kind of air? One in which I would have to recharge myself with new ideas, new thoughts, new relationships, new feelings? I remember talking to a friend before I made my decision to go. I said to him ‘There comes a time when you get so utterly empty that you’ve got to move somewhere else to satisfy an inner hunger.’
So I sought change, not knowing fully what form that change would take. I suppose it was a kind of inner compulsion that I had not then articulated or understood. As we sat, my friend and I, over a few pints in a local pub, we talked of ageing. We had been friends from school days — one of those few constant friendships that a man or woman has in their lives. I remember remarking how I suddenly felt myself becoming afraid of never going anywhere, afraid of the challenge that life itself presents.
My departure was a way of taking up that challenge. All my friends and professional colleagues in teaching and from community work in Belfast had married, bought homes, started families; settled into a cosy domesticity which I had avoided and had perhaps feared. Lines from W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Choice’ had imprinted themselves on and directed my understanding of life’s trajectory:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
That ‘heavenly mansion,’ domesticity, love, marriage, eluded me for so many reasons, and I was fearful that I was going to be swallowed up in the emptiness that was encroaching upon me. I was gripped by the irresolution of life that seems to drive us to take decisions.
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I was not tempted to take up the cudgels of full-time politics. Politics can only be a small part of what we are. It’s a way of seeing, it’s not all-seeing in itself, and people like me, who were fortunate enough to be born and educated before the start of the tragedy that has engulfed the North of Ireland, found the panacea of politics to be a bitter cul-de-sac. What was happening around us had moved beyond meaningful reality. So it was for me a time to move, to find out if I could remould myself. The energizing effect of politics had dissipated, the vibrant radicalism of our generation had become ghettoized and subterranean; the rival slogans of ‘Ourselves Alone’ and ‘Who Shall Separate Us’ marked political backwaters, stagnating and debilitating. At worst they were full of perverse arrogance, vindictive and malign. At best they were a sheltering place from the long war of attrition: bursting full of community and fellowship, they were a loud testimony to people’s determination not to be subdued.
I think of that decision to move as one which many men must face. I speak of men because I am one and because I understand as a man. I think something happens to us; people looking for a colourful expression call it the male menopause. We come to an age when choice is forced upon us. Some of us choose to change our job, knowing that in our late thirties it will be the last and final change we might comfortably make. Therefore we make it with some urgency, perhaps with fear, certainly with anxiety. Alternatively we decide on a change of house. It will be the last house we will ever be able to buy for we will never be able to increase our income. Some seek out the companionship of a younger partner, a kind of emotional assurance that we can still achieve, that we are still valued.
During my period of incarceration I felt that perhaps this urge to change is not unlike a woman’s in her late thirties or early forties when she decides to have her first or final child. Maybe something in the male psyche wants a child and since we cannot have it we redirect our inner compulsion towards something that vaguely declares itself as a renewing of love, a revitalizing of what is creative in us.
In the grey back streets of Belfast, aware of people’s unresolved desire and need and sensing myself becoming rooted and dead, burdened with a feeling that I had ceased to choose life, I forced myself to change, and consequently to go.
I had a half-formed notion about the effects of change on the personality. We seem to undergo a reactive process before any transition. A person’s initial reaction to change is one of immobiliza tion. We feel overwhelmed, and the more unfamiliar the change, the greater our paralysis. With the growing negative expectations result ing from this paralysis we feel ourselves frozen up. Such was my experience. I felt the debilitating cold of ice-floes gathering about me. I knew that I must find some free water, an open channel through which I might escape before I was trapped. How was I to know that I was to confront the same entrapment in another place? Literally as well as metaphorically, it seemed that islands of ice followed and gathered about me: dry ice, so cold that it burned the skin, melted into it. My resolution to action, as it turned out, simply drove me further into blinding snowfields of the mind.
My personal history is q
uite ordinary. I grew up in a working-class family in Protestant East Belfast, the only male child, the middle of the family. Being the son, I was given advantages over my two sisters.
When I sought out books and education, my family facilitated me.
With scholarships and reasonably good exam results under my belt I was able to continue my education.
But first I left school at fifteen. I was an academically bright lad, who was cajoled by some of his teachers not to leave, but I wanted out, to see life and not to reach beyond the expectations of the mates who left school with me. I worked for a year in a laundry, as a van-boy delivering dry cleaning.
On turning sixteen and feeling destined for an apprenticeship, I applied, and eventually began working my trade as a heating engineer with a medium-sized company in East Belfast. I still remember my first pair of overalls. They were strange, after the black blazer and grey flannels of secondary school. I can’t remember if they made me feel any older or more of a man. I just remember that the bloody things were so baggy. I walked to work every morning and walked home again in the evening, with my ‘piece-box’ snug under my arm.
As with most apprenticeships, those first months were boring. The work was not demanding but I found the environment of a factory tiresome. I remember my first week. I left the factory to meet up with a friend in a pub next door -the usual Friday evening occupation for all workers in Belfast. I realized after having my first drink that I had forgotten to collect my wages. My friend thought I was an idiot.
After many months working in the factory, I was sent off to the ‘Tech’, as it was called, to study for my City & Guilds in Heating Engineering. This different kind of classroom routine became oppressive.
I remember feeling a sense of limitation. Five years of this, to end up a glorified plumber and continue with that for the foreseeable future, was not an enthralling prospect to me.
Although I had left school against the advice of my teachers I had, without telling anyone, tried to continue my studies in literature at night school. It was a tedious walk from one end of the city to the other every Tuesday night, and to sit amongst adults studying for ‘O’ levels was confusing. I was the youngest in the class, so the companionship that I knew at school was absent here. I stuck it for a short period. It was too long a walk on cold winter’s nights, and then to try to concentrate on Shakespeare with wet shoes and soaking trousers, wondering how I was going to get home when the buses stopped. So I persisted in reading books at home, and compensated for the boredom of the days in the factory and the hours studying for my City & Guilds by going away every weekend.
From the age of fourteen I would catch a train or a bus every j weekend to somewhere outside Belfast, and as I got older I would go off youth-hostelling. It was a need simply to go somewhere, anywhere, with a sleeping bag and stay wherever luck would take me for as long as I could. The seeds of the need to travel and to be free of immediate pressures -the home, the family, the streets that I grew up in-sprang up early. Something always nags, especially in the young. I wanted more.
By freak of circumstance, for which I am not sure I am entirely grateful, I won some prizes and literary awards in national competitions.
A young woman from the BBC came to the Tech one day. She told me in the quiet of the corridor that I had won a national poetry award. I stared at her in astonishment and disbelief. She wanted to film a small piece, to which I said: ‘No, I couldn’t do that.’ Not that I had any real excuse. I was just frightened. She eventually persuaded me that I should do it the following day, and it was her good looks, her charm and my sudden rise in the estimation of my friends that made me grudgingly agree.
Offl went to Shaws Bridge, on the outskirts of Belfast. They made a short film piece of me reading one of my poems and I was thence and forever condemned, I think, to a fascination with words. I wondered what I should do after this, and decided some weeks later that I could not bear to weld pipes for the rest of my days in broken-down factories. So coming home one evening from work, I fumblingly told my parents that I wanted to return to school. They were shocked, and!
I think a little afraid. But they never tried to dissuade me. They wanted to know if I was sure; if I knew what it meant; and whether I was aware that if I left my apprenticeship it would be very difficult to get a good job -to
get a trade. But nothing would deflect me, and they pursued the matter no further.
I returned to education and the following year received another national award. My commitment to language was doubly stamped.
And thus alone among my friends in East Belfast I went to university and I suppose to another world, another way of understanding, which set me at a remove from all those things that were familiar to me. This was my first real leave-taking.
The decision to go to university came about because, apart from further study, I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to do. I had toyed for some time with the idea that I might join the merchant navy: always that travel instinct, that need to be going somewhere niggling in the back of my head. However, it was difficult to join the merchant service, unless you had a father or some other relative already in the ships.
Ultimately university seemed a greater prize and I chose to go to Coleraine. When I think back on it, the reason for that choice was the area surrounding the college itself. The university was built only a few miles from the great, majestic coastline of North Antrim. Near the university in the small villages where the students lived, we always had access to that turbulent North Atlantic, those huge stretches of desolate beach and those small provincial pubs. Coleraine also offered the best course in literature, particularly in the contemporary field. I specialized, over my three years, in nineteenth-and twentieth-century British and American literature and of course in the literature of Ireland known then as ‘Anglo-Irish’.
I was not an outstanding student —just about average, but after my first year I became increasingly convinced that teaching literature is an impossibility. To go into a lecture room and listen for an hour to a capable lecturer delivering his assessment of some writer and then to go offand talk about the lecturer’s ideas in a small tutorial group didn’t provide the kind of stimulus I was looking for. I became more and more in the last two years of my university career a communicant of the library, choosing to follow the course on my own, instead of being a passive recipient of the understandings of my lecturers. Still, university provided me with a new set of interests, and more importantly a new set of friendships with people I could never have met had I remained in Belfast working at my apprenticeship.
I have maintained most of these friendships to a greater or lesser degree and each of them I am grateful for. But beyond this, two events during the three years spent on that northern coast stick out in my memory. I suppose they remain so vivid because they weren’t directly related to my studies in that place. They are memorable now because during my first period of incarceration they came back to me so sharply.
I lived in Portstewart, one of the small villages on the coast. I rented a small room at the top of an old dank two-storey Victorian terrace house. The house was the last one in the terrace and from its window I could look out on the grey, ever-restless ocean. I can still remember the view from the window and the constant changes in the sea. The weather in that part of the North of Ireland was never the kindest, though when the summer came the landscape around us, the easy access to Donegal and to the remoter parts of the North gave the area its own particular delight.
An old retired couple who owned the house lived in two rooms on the ground floor. Mr Paul was in his eighties and I remember him going for his nightly walk accompanied by his walking stick and a small mongrel dog. His bent figure would brave even Portstewart’s weather as he walked along the sea front. I never saw the old man at any other time apart from these walks. I heard him occasionally in his own room. His wife, his second, would sit quietly in the kitchen beside the old range constantly knitting and offering us cu
ps of tea as we came in from the pub or back from studying. She never bothered us much, was always friendly and enjoyed a cup of tea with those of us who would sit and chat with her.
Mr Paul became ill very suddenly. We were not surprised, aware even then that age can be cruel. But what moved me most was his rapid decline, the fact that I never again saw him walking bent double against the wind, and the sight of his walking stick always lying in the hall. It became a strange kind of symbol. Late into the night I could hear him coughing and throwing up. The fact that we were only aware of this old man’s illness through his rasping cough and his wife’s ministrations lent the house a kind of ominous gloom.
One evening I came in from the cold and straight to the kitchen to heat myself at the range. Mrs Paul sat alone. There was a silence I couldn’t understand. I recall now that her knitting needles were for once not in evidence. There was no steam coming out of the old kettle normally kept simmering on the hot plate. Her face was very still. It took her some time to look up, to acknowledge me coming into the room. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked. She looked up slowly and I remember her old, lined but still quite beautiful face as she said calmly and without emotion: ‘My husband is dead.’
Although I was in my twenties, it was my first confrontation with death. And with the immediacy of its presence I hurriedly made some tea, and began my naive questioning … ‘When did it happen? …
Have you told anyone?’ He had died in the past half-hour, she was sure, and no-one knew. So it was left to me to be the bearer of grim news to the sons and daughters and the grandchildren of this old man, whom I knew only as someone walking against the wind and the rain in the dark evenings of Portstewart.