Postcards From My Kitchen Table

Last night like many across the UK, and probably the wider world, I watched the news in shock and horror, appalled by the senseless violence inflicted on young people and their parents in Manchester.

As a mum of three small children I felt intense fear. Fear for their freedom and safety,  fear for them growing up in such a violent and hate-filled world. I listened to Theresa May announce the increase of the current UK threat level to ‘critical’. I listened to her explain that this would see the armed forces deployed to our streets, to significant places, to large public events. It sent a shiver through me and I couldn’t help but think about my own childhood.

I was born in the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast in April 1977, a year in which an act of terror and violence occurred almost every week in Northern Ireland. The hospital where I took my first breath still stands, as it did those forty years ago, at the foot of the Falls Road – a road that gained infamy as a fierce battleground and Republican heartland.

I grew up pre-official government ‘threat’ levels but I have no doubt that my entire childhood was lived in what would have been classed as ‘critical’. Although I grew up in an affluent area of South Belfast and attended a Miss Jean Brodie-esque all girls school, my life was still very much shaped by The Troubles, albeit they thankfully did not affect me or my family directly.

I have a vivid memory of visiting one of my grandparents in hospital as a child, that same hospital where I was born. I remember walking down the famous long corridor with my parents and siblings and turning off to enter a ward. As we pushed through the heavy swinging rubber doors, I remember my Mum stopping stock still. She turned to Dad and said that it was here, in that exact spot that she had seen a Paratrooper lying on the floor ‘with half his brain hanging out’.  She had been a nurse there in the late 1960s and early 1970s  – her young eyes exposed to horrors I don’t even want to think about. I don’t remember how old I was on that hospital visit but her words have never left me. I remember trying to conure up what a man like that might have looked like. I remember wondering what a ‘Para’ was. Should she have said those words within my earshot? I don’t know but clearly the memory was too overwhelmingly visceral and painful to hold inside.

Much has been made of inherited trauma of Holocaust survivors but I would suggest it is also a very real thing for a generation of children born in Northern Ireland. I grew up in a world where words like ‘punishment beating’, kneecapping’ ,’mortar’, ‘cemtex’, ‘coded warning’, ‘Border patrol’ where all common parlance. Seeping into my vocabulary at a young age like rising damp.

Being evacuated from buildings during bomb scares and watching the subsequent controlled explosion,  road blocks, watching my Mum open her bag to be searched every time we entered a shop, waving at the army as they drove along with the back doors of their Land Rovers wide open to let their machine guns peak out and allow for a quick exit. This was normal life to me but this is not normal. It wasn’t until I left Northern Ireland at 18 in 1995 to go to university in Scotland that I realised how different my life had been compared to my contemporaries from others parts of the UK.

I don’t want this for my three children. I don’t want them to grow up in a society where terrorism becomes ‘normal’. I don’t want them to lie in bed at night listening to search helicopters overhead. I don’t want their vocabulary to be peppered with words associated with death and violence.

As a teenager I often felt frustrated at what I saw as my parent’s over protection of me and my siblings. The carnage witnessed in Manchester brought it home to me how terrifying it must have been for them to let us go out in a pre-Good Friday Agreement Belfast. Like any parents of teenagers they must have anxiously waited at home for us to return from our evening of merrymaking but for them there was an added element of potential terror. I don’t want to walk in their shoes. I don’t want to be that parent terrified to let my kids out, terrified to let my kids fly the nest.

But this is not a time for blame or recrimination. I know only too well what it feels like to be blamed and ostracised. Back in 1998 just after the Omagh bomb, I was living in London for the summer. Whilst in a newsagent I engaged the shopkeeper in conversation, only to have a fellow customer turn on me saying ‘You people should be ashamed of yourselves’. To her my accent was enough to condemn me. I don’t think I replied. I remember my face flushing hot and red, I grabbed my shopping, bowed my head and left.

Back in the 1980s and 90s Northern Irish people were all treated with suspicion. If anyone was to be pulled aside and searched at an airport it was someone from Northern Ireland. In airports our departure gates were not just at the far end of the terminal but in  separate rooms where we were corralled together like cattle, all regarded as deeply suspicious.

Acts of terrorism are committed by murderers. Murderers who do not speak on behalf of entire communities, religions or nationalities. We must not turn against our neighbours and our friends. Although we hurt, we must not blame.

It wasn’t hard for me today to remember a man named Gordon Wilson – the father of Marie, a nurse killed in the Enniskillen bomb in 1987 – an event I wrote about in my diary of that year as then a ten year old. Mr Wilson’s name is seared on my memory like many of the other victims and perpetrators of those dark times. Even as a young child I knew he spoke sense, I knew he wasn’t angry like so many others were. He famously spoke of how he bore no ‘ill will’ ‘no grudge’ to his daughter’s killers. ‘Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life’ he said. ‘I will pray for these men tonight and every night’.

Children who grow up in Northern Ireland today do so in peace, a peace brought about by the strength and forgiveness of men like Gordon Wilson. Today I am choosing to remember his words. I am choosing to believe in the good of humanity. I am choosing to believe that my children will not grow up at a permanently ‘critical’ level because the alternative is just too terrifying to contemplate.