Memoir: Walter Ellis, brought up in a Protestant home in east Belfast, writes that although he may not have been abused as a child, the entire society in which he grew up was abused, "causing me, like everyone else there, to see life through a jagged and peculiar prism".
Life in Northern Ireland, he recalls, was like "an abandoned play in which the lines of the script were written alternatively by Kafka, Pinter and Beckett, edited by Frank Carson". The first drafts of that script were of course typed out by newspaper reporters, of whom Walter was one of the finest and funniest. My memories are of a droll, languid, young fellow with long hair who would wander into the Irish Times office in Belfast and produce elegant prose for the next day's paper.
That was back in the early 1970s, the "golden period" of the Irish Times's Northern coverage, as he calls it.
There are many names here from that era in Irish journalism, some fading, such as my own, others still in lights, such as David McKittrick, Walter's close friend whom I hired for The Irish Times on his recommendation and who is now the revered London Independent correspondent in Belfast. Walter describes McKittrick as a reporter unmatched for "shrewd judgment, even-handedness and probity" (and McKittrick repays the compliment with a blurb on the jacket describing the book as a "minor masterpiece"). Young master Ellis is much harsher on others, including Henry Kelly, who appointed him to the Irish Times Belfast office, and Fergus Pyle, who as editor gave him the plum Brussels job: each is rewarded with an acid character sketch depicting them as idiots.
By contrast, Walter much admired David Blundy, a member of the Sunday Times Insight team who covered Belfast. He and Blundy (never "David") became close friends and remained so after they both left Northern Ireland, despite Blundy's habit of stealing his girlfriends. Years later, when Walter stayed briefly in Blundy's apartment in Washington, he found him somewhat distant.
Probably, like so many journalists, Blundy "chose his friends from among those who were readily available". Just before a trip to El Salvador, Blundy telephoned Walter to explain why he had not called or written, saying that he valued their friendship but it was difficult with 3,000 miles of ocean in between. He seemed to Walter depressed and unsettled. Ten days later Blundy was shot dead in San Salvador.
Blundy's restless, laconic side clearly appealed to Walter, an unconventional soul who came from an east Belfast Protestant background but favoured the nationalist cause. Just after Bloody Sunday, Martin McGuinness told him in Derry that if he truly supported Irish unity then he must support the armed struggle. Walter begged to differ. "You're a strange boy, Walter," said McGuinness.
Walter's schoolmasters at Orangefield also regarded him as out of step. This was in no small part due to his friendship with Ronnie Bunting, a second cousin once removed, who was a "malign version of myself", but also a dreamer and a thinker. He egged Walter on to acts of revolutionary vandalism, such as setting alight the prefects' room, which got Walter expelled.
Ronnie, in an act of defiance of his loyalist father, Maj Ronald Bunting, later joined the Official IRA and then the INLA, while his school pal stumbled into journalism. He once got Walter unwittingly to look after a case containing the proceeds of an armed robbery. He tricked Walter's mother into sheltering IRA man Joe McCann, just after he had shot a British soldier. Bunting, a killer with a Pol Pot-like desire to see the bodies pile up, once even asked Walter to let him hide out in the Irish Times Brussels apartment, but his former school pal had had a bellyful by then and declined, even when a tearful Maj Bunting pleaded his son's case over the phone. Bunting went on to blow up Airey Neave in the House of Commons before being shot dead in Turf Lodge by persons unknown. Where Blundy's death caused Walter a poignant sense of loss, the killing of Bunting exorcised the demon who tormented him.
The Beginning of the End contains some interesting introspection about the difficulty of writing a memoir. Memory plays tricks on us, Walter admits. He recalls a steamy episode in his youth when he "groped with adolescent passion" at a girl's knickers. Only when putting it down on paper did he realise it was a fantasy that he had entertained for years and had come to accept as fact.
WHEN WORKING AS a raw recruit for the Cork Examiner in Cork, he recalls an editor telling him: "You must make up your mind, Walter. Are you a journalist or a newspaperman?" A "journalist", he said, was someone not adverse to using "I" in copy, something in which Walter excelled, and a "newspaperman" presumably paid more attention to facts. Walter concedes he is still working on the answer.
Judging by his treatment of "facts" in the book, he is more of a "journalist" than a "newspaperman". In the space of one paragraph I noted three errors: he writes that I was from Castlewellan (I am from Newcastle), that I had worked in the civil service for about five years (it was eight years) and that up to the point when I became Northern editor of The Irish Times in 1973 I was a sub-editor in head office (I was a reporter). He also gets my age wrong (though he is right about my ego!). All could have been corrected with a phone call. Later he notes that I saw the first plane go into the World Trade Center. I didn't. Nor did I ever report that the back-draught "nearly put out" my windows, because it didn't. Nor did I have a "grandstand view of history" for the week after 9/11, as I was an evacuee for that week.
He also quotes sample headlines on An Irishman's Diary, which is distinguished among newspaper columns by the fact that it never carries a headline. Will everyone written about find the same sloppiness, I wonder?
Conor O'Clery is a former Northern editor of The Irish Times
The Beginning of the End: The Crippling Disadvantage of a Happy Irish Childhood. By Walter Ellis, Mainstream Publishing, 256pp. £9.99