“Your da’s been shot, hi.”
Tony Doherty was nine years old when his father, Paddy, was shot and killed by the British army on Bloody Sunday as he tried to crawl to safety. More than 40 years on, he still finds it almost impossible to talk about his father’s death.
“I feel it in the way it happened at the time, it’s as simple as that. When you delve into it you feel the emotions of a nine-year-old child, and it brings it right back.”
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Instead, he’s channelled that voice into an emotive memoir of his childhood in the Brandywell area of Derry in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The initial image is of a poor but happy life, playing on the street with instruments improvised from biscuit tin lids, scanning the sky for an American moon rocket, and hunting rats with Dandy the dog – all narrated with a keen ear for the idioms of the city.
Doherty vividly reconstructs a time that many will remember with nostalgia, when babies could be left outside the front door in their prams, when four-year-olds walked home from school on their own, and when he and his friends enjoyed a freedom that today’s children would envy.
“Our street’s in Free Derry.”
From a child’s point of view, it meant “men wearing white armbands stood guard at the foot of the street” while the British army adds a sangar; sandbags; and soldiers with accents “like Blue Peter”.
The strength of these accounts lies in the authenticity of their nine-year-old narrator whose perceptions – unclouded by adult interpretation or reflection – retain all the innocence and excitement of a child experiencing something for the first time.
Hence the army becomes a source of fascination – and of money to be earned running “messages” for the soldiers – while local reaction to their arrival is summed up in an argument between his mother and father over her taking them sandwiches (she wins).
Their childhood quickly takes on the contours of the Troubles. A rubber bullet is proudly brought in to show the teacher; a hut built by Tony’s gang is mistaken for an IRA observation post; and the army is observed on patrol in the school playground.
There is also a darker side – waking at night to bin lids “sounding their warning” and in the morning finding the street “littered with stones and broken glass, and there was the smell of burning in the air”.
In a poignant passage, Doherty describes lying on the living-room floor in darkness, watching the sky lit by army tracers, waiting for the firing to stop so the family could have their tea.
His skill is to make us identify not just with his own family, but with the many characters that make up the fabric of his childhood and, as the years progress and the riots worsen, we fear for them all.
A blood-soaked car near Tony’s house marks the death of Seamus Cusack and George Beattie, shot by soldiers in Derry in 1971; Mrs Thompson, who Tony sees sweeping the street, will be killed later that year by an army bullet in the garden of her home in Creggan, leaving six children; Tony’s classmate Damien Harkin is knocked down and killed by an army lorry.
It is both a stark reminder of the extent to which blood spilled during the Troubles seeped through not just families, but whole communities, as well as a valuable social history of the realities of everyday life in Troubles Derry.
“Even as a teenager I did sense that what I was remembering about the period was rich and valuable,” says Doherty.
A re-reading of Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark – set in a part of Derry a stone’s throw from his own childhood home – convinced him to begin writing.
“When I looked at the way Deane wrote it, using the language and the streets to transport you back in time, I realised that the memories I had were worth doing something about.”
As Doherty began “excavating” his family’s past, he discovered not just stories, but a great-grandfather he didn’t know he had.
Joseph McFrederick, a Presbyterian from CoDonegal, was killed in the first World War and is commemorated on the city’s war memorial – a place that Tony visited for the first time earlier this year.
“It felt almost as if this connection was being held back until a moment which was significant enough to reveal itself, but it’s a part of my history and it’s something I’m very comfortable with.
“It’s also thrown up the obvious paradox whereby my great-grandfather served in the British army and my father was killed by the same army – but those are the sort of twists and turns that make up families.”
Amid all of this, the central figure is always “me da”, Paddy Doherty.
A handsome man, a stubborn man, a man who sang to his wife and was a steward at civil rights marches, Doherty feels the writing process has helped him recover memories of his father that he had almost forgotten.
“I didn’t really think I knew my father that well, because I was only nine when he was killed. The more I started to think back, and see him and meet him, it was like getting to know him again.”
In one of those memories, Doherty remembers how his father confronted a soldier at their front door.
“I can still remember hearing the noises of the British army machinery up the street, pulling girders, and you could hear the steel shrieking as it was being pulled apart … I can smell his Park Drive, I can feel the fog on my face, and I swore that day he was going to be shot.”
When Tony’s classmate, Damien Harkin, is killed, it is his father who takes him to the church to light a candle for him.
Doherty recounts not just the memory, but the sounds, smells and sensations that make it come alive, from the cool of the chapel and the flickering of the candles to the smell of his father’s cigarettes.
Nowhere is this stronger than in the final chapter: the taste of the chewing gum in his mouth, the pattern of the stair carpet beneath his feet, the silence in the house as his mother tells him “your Daddy’s dead. He was shot by the army.”
Doherty was among those who began the campaign, more than 20 years ago, which eventually led to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. In 2010, he stood on the steps of Derry’s Guildhall as the dead and wounded were exonerated, and as the British prime minister apologised.
On that day, as on every other, he was still “this man’s wee boy”, the child playing marbles on the street who learns that his father has been shot.
“It’s not a Bloody Sunday book,” explains Doherty. “It’s a book of my childhood memories and experiences up until the point where I lost my father. That’s a marker or a turning point from which you can never go back.”
Doherty has never re-read the final chapter – and says he never will. Rather, he hopes that it will stand as a tribute to his father and all those whose lives were lost or irrevocably changed by the tragedy that was the Troubles.
Freya McClements is a writer and arts journalist based in Derry
