OPINION:Bloody Sunday inflicted trauma far beyond its immediate killing field – as this recently found diary of a young girl reveals, writes EIMEAR O'CALLAGHAN
“THE PARATROOPERS shot twenty-eight people. Thirteen dead, including young boys.The army came on the six o’clock news and told lie after lie and accused the people of being bombers and gunmen. Terrible pictures on tv. Army bending down to take aim at men and boys fleeing from the shooting, then shooting them dead in the backs. An Italian reporter called them murderers. A father and son fleeing, hands above their heads, killed. A boy and his girlfriend – they shot the girl, the boy went to help her and they killed him. I’ve never felt so heartbroken and hopeless in my whole life. Everyone is full of hate for the army. I’m sure therell be serious trouble . . .”
No, not an extract from the 2½ thousand witness statements garnered for the Saville Inquiry; rather, the diary entry of a precocious but traumatised 16-year-old schoolgirl on the evening of Sunday, January 30th, 1972. I was that schoolgirl; that was the day I came of age and realised there was one law for us and another one for them.
I came across the diary a few months ago when rummaging through a pile of boxes accumulated over a lifetime of changes in address, marital status and employment. Poring over random pages in recent weeks is the nearest I have ever come to an out-of-body experience: I have no recollection of keeping the diary during the savagely gruesome days of my 17th year.
I no longer recognise that “nerdish” schoolgirl, who assiduously completed a day-by-day tally of who had been killed and what building had been blown up. I do not recall her delight in being given free ice-cream which had been “liberated” from a hijacked van, just before it was set on fire. But I do – like every right-thinking person on this island – recognise the boiling anger she tried to express at the almighty wrong visited on the people of Derry on January 30th, and in the ensuing years.
Politically precocious the diary may make me appear but, 38 years on, a collection of stick-on butterflies – with which I was fascinated at that time – still adorns its battered, red cover and reassures me of my erstwhile naivety. These were the musings of a 16 year old who wrote in one entry:
“Thurs Jan 27: Bitterly cold wet day, arrived at school with my hair blown all over the place and a drip on the end of my nose. Didn’t get half day so I’ve no Maths revision done. Two policemen killed in Derry and sixteen explosions during the night . . .”
Such juxtaposition of the mundane and the horrific serves to remind me that I was an innocent abroad in the violent, sectarian cesspit that was Northern Ireland in the 1970s. At 16, I was familiar with the Troubles – but not with Derry. I had been born and was living, after all, in the capital city Belfast. Derry was more than 70 miles – and at that time a day’s journey and a world away – from Andersonstown.
I knew that Derry was “the place where the Troubles started”. I knew from photographs that it had a fine river and a sombre-looking, double-decker steel bridge named after Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, Lord Craigavon. It was famous for its walls; and from these walls every August, my late father used to tell us, Protestant marchers – known as the Apprentice Boys – contemptuously pitched pennies at the Catholics who lived beneath in an impoverished place called the Bogside. I didn’t know the difference between the Waterside and the Cityside, between the East Bank and the West Bank.
Within hours of that six o’clock news bulletin on January 30th though, I was – as a young nationalist – subsumed by the grief and the loss of the people living in those previously unheard of places: Rossville Street, William Street, Glenfada Park, Westland Street. These were the days before 24-hour news, before the internet and Twitter, before mobile phones. My parents had gone to visit my grandparents at their home in Cooley, an idyllic setting near the shores of Carlingford Lough. As a 16 year old, I needed them home to make sense of the Dantean horror unfolding on the television screen.
Six of those gunned down were just months older than I was, taking part in a peaceful, albeit illegal, march. With a chilling clarity and a maturity of vision that belied my years, I knew that given another time and another place I too could as easily have been among the list of the dead – as could my parents, my brothers, my friends and any member of the North’s nationalist community.
“Wed, Feb 2: Went to 10 Mass, the church was packed . . . Afterwards, listened to the funerals of the thirteen dead on the radio and couldn’t restrain myself from weeping continuously as the thirteen names were read out . . . giving their ages – as young as 16, as old as 41, a father of seven children. The weather suited the atmosphere – torrential rain all day, dark and stormy. On the radio, the reporter – who was also in tears – commented on how the sun broke through the clouds as the coffins were placed in the earth . . .”
Lives were changed beyond recognition that day. Families were torn asunder. Young men joined the IRA and some took lives as well as giving their lives. The people who mourned sons, brothers and fathers continue to do so. A schoolgirl like myself, whose previous diary entries included lines such as “ . . . went to see Soldier Blue – cost 25p, bought a new bra 95p, bought make-up 18p . . . no money left . . .”, suddenly found herself in the grip of a fear for the future, the likes of which no child should ever experience.
Today, Lord Saville has it in his gift to ensure no child ever again has to fear such excesses from an arm of the British state.
“Sun, Dec 31: The worst New Year’s Eve I’ve ever experienced in my life . . . The IRA truce (or at least, temporary ceasefire) ends today. Waited for midnight, then went outside to hear if any horns were blowing as was the tradition. Not a cat stirring. Absolute silence. I couldn’t bear it and started to cry. Everyone is too afraid to go out now. I hate Belfast! I went to bed and cried myself to sleep. The thought of another year like this one is too unbearable to contemplate. All I can do is dread 1973 . . . I just hope that I and the rest of the family are still here, this time next year.”
The Bloody Sunday families have seen 38 New Years’ Eves come and go and must have shared that same sentiment – hoping their families would remain intact for another year. Sadly though, hundreds of those thousands who crammed into and around St Mary’s Chapel in Creggan on that February morning have mourned at funerals since: funerals of parents and siblings who have died waiting for the names of their loved ones to be cleared before the court of public and world opinion.
Hopefully for them, and all others who bear the emotional and psychological scars of that day, 2010 will mark the end of the waiting.
Eimear O’Callaghan became a journalist for, among others, RTÉ and BBC Radio Foyle. She was an acting editor but has now set up a communications business