Chapter Five
My pain was nearly gone and my injuries mostly healed in the summer of 1992 when John came home even more excited than usual. He’d just been invited to go to Ireland to spend a week with four of his friends sightseeing and visiting some of their relatives. When he asked, “Would you like to come along?” I had my bags packed before he got to the question mark. In keeping with the budget of most of the group, we stayed either in bed-and-breakfasts or, strictly separated by gender, in the narrow twin beds of the boys’ and girls’ bedrooms of the modest homes of the relatives. There would be not the slightest opportunity for sexual congress between unmarried guests in our hosts’ Irish Catholic households.
We spent a staggering amount of time in pubs.* The people we met were unfailingly friendly, humorous, and helpful. In Ireland, when you ask people for directions, they don’t simply tell you how to get there. A man will get in his car and lead you there—never mind that it’s thirty kilometers each way. If you ask a woman for directions, she’ll be equally helpful. She’ll send her brother, husband, or son.
One night John and I met a young woman from Belfast—I’ll call her Dierdre—who was putting herself through law school by working as a waitress at a pub. When she invited us to join her for a visit to her family’s home we were eager to go in spite of the danger, or, for some in our group, because of it.
The conflict known as “the Troubles” between Irish Catholics and Protestants in the six counties of Ulster had been going on since the seventeenth century. This made visiting Belfast a good deal more of an adventure for us than, say, a visit to Ennis in County Clare. The warring factions’ respective names for the six counties sounded almost the same. Catholics considered the six counties in “the north of Ireland” part of the Irish Republic, while Protestants considered the counties a separate entity called “Northern Ireland.” You did not want to use the wrong name with the wrong people.
As we drove north toward the disputed territory we had to pass through several checkpoints. At each checkpoint our rental car was thoroughly searched for bombs and other weapons. There were no exceptions; every vehicle was searched. After being cleared to enter Belfast, we found our way to Dierdre’s house. There we were greeted warmly by a gathering of relatives that included our friend, her mother, her aunt, and, soon after we got there, her father and uncle arriving home from work. We were sitting in the parlor chatting with the family when Dierdre’s twelve-year-old brother came in. Dierdre whispered to us that the lad was several hours late arriving home from school. During our conversation about matters ranging from the price of cotton fabric in America to the optimum amount of dill to put in a salad, you’d never have known how worried his mother had been. Now that he was home, she didn’t berate him or ask questions. She simply told him to wash his hands, then she went into the kitchen with her sister to start serving dinner while Dierdre organized seating around the table.
Almost impossibly, there was enough room and food for all of us. Dierdre’s father led us in saying grace. Then massive plates of stew, mashed potatoes, soda bread, and salad were passed around along with pitchers of lemonade and iced tea. It was only when everyone had a full plate and had begun to eat that the boy told us the reason for his delayed arrival. One of his mates had been killed in a fracas between Catholics and Protestants. When our lad had arrived at school, the authorities had asked him to accompany the adults delivering the news to his friend’s family. Dierdre’s brother gave us the details as matter-of-factly as an American twelve-year-old might have come home and reported to his family at dinner that one of his teammates had broken his ankle during football practice.
I found the boy’s unemotional delivery more frightening than anything I’d seen in the newspaper or on TV. I found it difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that children were speaking about the killing of friends and relatives as if such killing were a matter of course. Even more horrifying, it was a matter of course.
At the end of our week in Ireland we flew home to America, leaving the children of Belfast in Belfast. But I couldn’t leave behind the memory of mothers waking up every morning to see their husbands off to work and their children off to school knowing that there were more than even odds that someone known to each mother, maybe one of her own family, maybe even—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph forbid!—her own child, would be killed that day. How could they ever begin to fix such a problem?
Put the mothers in charge.