In June 1994 I’d just finished my first-year exams at Trinity College Dublin. Many of my peers were jetting off to the USA on J1 visas. But my parents helped me pack my books, bedding, clothes and CDs into their car before driving me back to the North. We were stopped at the Border crossing in Aughnacloy where Aidan McAnespie had been shot dead in 1988 by a soldier who said that his finger “slipped” on the trigger of his weapon.
A soldier diverted our car off the road and into a large shed. My father was instructed to drive our car on to a ramp over a void so soldiers could inspect the undercarriage. Then he was told to park further down in the search facility and we were ordered out of the car. As the soldiers took my possessions out of the car and picked meticulously through them, we adopted a familiar stance — blank faces, reluctant co-operation, doing our best not to antagonise the armed fellas in uniform. After we were released we drove home, and I spent a gruesomely long summer in Tyrone. Although I’d advertised my IT, typing and babysitting skills widely, I had zero job offers.
I knocked around at home, trying to avoid hearing Love is All Around on the radio, reading books and magazines, obsessing over Riverdance and the newly opened Channel Tunnel, cheering Ireland on in the World Cup, and numbly watching a series of murder reports as peace talks ground slowly on behind the scenes. When the IRA announced their first ceasefire at the end of August, friends and relatives from England, Ireland and the US wrote and rang, offering congratulations. But where they saw Peace At Last, I could only see a temporary cessation of hostilities. Eighteen years of living in the north had not taught me to hope or trust.
I was introduced to my Protestant counterparts by armed police officers in the back of a bullet-and-blast-proofed police car
I grew up in Castlederg — a small border town that for a few decades was infamous for being the most bombed small town in western Europe after the second World War. When I lived there, the population was almost evenly balanced between Catholics and Protestants. But the town was so deeply segregated that I first met a Protestant my own age when I was selected to participate in a cross-community quiz at the age of ten years old. I was introduced to my Protestant counterparts by armed police officers in the back of a bullet-and-blast-proofed police car.
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Encounters like this continued until I left school: adults sporadically threw Protestant and Catholic teens into close contact on residential weekends or trips abroad, expecting us to form bonds strong enough to neutralise the effects of the separate schools, churches, shops and housing estates that previous generations had designed for us. These trips didn’t result in long-lasting cross-community friendships for me: I spent the summer of 1994 hanging out with my childhood friends and our relatives, in a social circle of Catholics that no cross-community initiative had breached for centuries.
I loved being at home. I hated being at home. When I learned that I’d passed my first-year exams and could return to Dublin, I felt relief: I could leave home all over again. But the following summer, bruised by my second year in Trinity, I returned to Tyrone. The IRA ceasefire was holding and the subsequent ceasefire called by the Combined Loyalist Military Command was also in place. But there was still a sense among the people I knew that this was not peace. At least not what we’d dreamed of. Guns had been laid down and there was talk about decommissioning, but this was the summer that Gerry Adams remarked that the IRA ‘haven’t gone away, you know.’ Oh we knew. We all knew.
But I hoped the summer of 1995 would be different from 1994: the ceasefire had reduced the murder rate and my best friends had swung me a job interview in the shirt factory where they worked. I sweated my way through an interview with the boss, well aware that my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon poetry and medieval literature wasn’t going to get me far. But he hired me. I earned the princely sum of £70 in return for working 8am-6pm four days a week. I had to iron 70 shirts an hour to hit my ‘basic’ rate — after that, I got a 2.5p bonus for every extra shirt I pressed. The set-up sounds hideously exploitative now, but this job allowed me to taste the freedom that comes from having a small disposable income. I went to the pub, bought clothes, bus tickets and books without borrowing money. Yet I still felt trapped. I had no car. It would be years before mobile phones and the internet would penetrate our community.
At my first interview I was advised to remove the ‘embarrassing’ factory stint from my CV: my potential employer deemed unemployment preferable to the factory job
The house I lived in was crammed with my parents and five siblings and our possessions, worries, dreams and obsessions. My peer group amounted to about one hundred people — I was related to some of them, and had little in common with most. Castlederg was so small that it was impossible to avoid the people you knew when shopping or socialising, but when I started in the factory I realised that despite years of cross-community activities, I’d never met most people from the “other side” of the town: they went to different schools, pubs and churches. Now I was thrown into a “neutral” workplace with the Protestants I’d lived side-by-side with, yet apart from, and we had to work together to manufacture shirts. It was the twilight of the British textile industry: we knew well the sight of Derry’s world-famous shirt factories standing dead as tombstones along the Foyle. We understood we were working in the shadow of super-modern Asian factories with cheap labour and less rigorous employment rules. So we put most of our small differences aside to earn money, have a bit of craic, and get on with our wee lives.
As a freshly-minted university graduate, I proudly listed my factory job on my CV. But at my first interview I was advised to remove the ‘embarrassing’ factory stint from my CV: my potential employer deemed unemployment preferable to the factory job that had taught me much more about teamwork, optimisation, negotiation, bullying, tribalism, sexism and capitalism than the summer I’d spent photocopying and filing in a genteel Dublin publishing office. I resentfully deleted my factory job from my CV. But I couldn’t erase it from my brain.
Eight years later I wrote my first novel, Big Girl Small Town while living in the North, steeped in the atmosphere and accents of our community ten years after the Ceasefire. I tried to capture the feeling of abandonment I was drowning in: generations used to conflict and media attention left alone to get on with the unglamorous, difficult business of conflict resolution and healing. But when I started writing Factory Girls in 2015, my life was very different. I was living in London watching the UK tear itself apart over the Brexit campaign. Though I was still in touch with my schoolfriends, my social circle included people from all over the world. I was an atheist and had married a French-Moroccan from a Catholic-Muslim background. Our sons were unbaptised, (a fact that meant we were struggling to secure Irish school places as Catholic and Protestant schools prioritised Christian applications).
It was not easy to dive back into the atmosphere of those summers I spent in Tyrone during a pandemic, while trauma and death were once again in the headlines
Somehow these conditions encouraged the character Maeve Murray to march into my brain, and I used my factory experience and the terrible but ultimately hopeful summer of 1994 as a backdrop for Factory Girls. It’s a darkly funny story about three friends working in a factory to save money so they can escape from their dead-end town, messy love lives and the Troubles. But after moving to Dublin, I ran out of maternity leave and writing energy. I reluctantly shelved Factory Girls until 2020, when the Arts Council awarded me the financial support I needed to put my tech career on hold.
Writing conditions were far from ideal: Covid had taken hold and Brexit had dragged the Irish border back into the headlines and I worried for my family and friends up North and fretted over the possibility of a hard border. I was homeschooling two children who were isolated from their family and friends. For months, my only company was the characters I’d created in Factory Girls and my husband and kids, who accused me of “speaking like Nana” when I resurfaced each day after hours of writing.
It was not easy to dive back into the atmosphere of those summers I spent in Tyrone during a pandemic, while trauma and death were once again in the headlines. I found it hard to revisit the violence of those days before the ceasefires whose consequences — such as the ongoing trial of the soldier who shot Aidan McAnespie — are never far from the surface of my life. Given the times, it feels like a bit of a feat to have written a book that has been described as ‘seriously funny’.
Tyrone might not yet be a tourist hotspot, but my hometown is a much more colourful, cheerful place now, with residents and restaurants from various countries and cultures. Trip Advisor recommends visiting attractions like the castle ruins, pine forests, the holy well and local library. But what lures me back home time and again (apart from the chippers — we have such good chippers) is wit and resilience of the tough but kind people I grew up around.
Factory Girls is published by John Murray
