January 1988, the appeal of the Birmingham Six was turned down, and Hill was returned to prison to serve out his life sentence. In prison, character is the cement that holds a person together, and Paddy Hill had character to give away. If he was entertaining pangs of despair, Hill soon fought them off, convincing himself that he could see a ‘light shining at the end of the tunnel more brightly than ever before’.22 He was right inasmuch as there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but it would shine, first, on the Guildford Four, not on the Birmingham Six.
‘It was on the 16 October 1989. I’ll never forget it,’ Paddy Hill said in Belfast in 2015. ‘After Long Lartin, Gerry and me was moved to Gartree, and we’d been knocking about together for nearly two years. Now, we were sitting in the workshop and a screw says to Gerry that he has to go back to his cell immediately. I went with him, and when we got to the wing, the Principal Officer told him, “There’s a van waiting to take you to London immediately.”’23After helping Conlon to pack up his meagre belongings, Hill walked him over to the prison reception. ‘He was nearly crying,’ Hill recalled, ‘but I said to him, “Never fucking mind that. Just do what you have to do.” And fair play to him, when he got out, he did the business.’
While Gerry Conlon no doubt pondered his fate in the back of a prison van as it made its way to London’s Brixton Prison, his family in Belfast was unaware that anything was afoot. The next day, however, a phone call from Gerry’s solicitor in London, Gareth Peirce, would change everything.
Ann and Joe McKernan had been buying wallpaper in Belfast city centre and on their way home they stopped at a shop in Church Lane which sold religious items. For Ann it was a weekly chore: ‘My mother had been buying her candles out of the holy shop every Tuesday for fifteen years, ’cause Tuesday was St Martha’s day, and St Martha’s was the patron saint of servants and cooks, and for my mammy coming out of work, we had to have her candles there.’24
It was 11.05 a.m. and the McKernans had just got into their family home at 52 Albert Street in the Lower Falls area when the phone rang. Joe answered it. He listened carefully, put down the phone and turned to Ann: ‘That was Gareth Peirce. She says Gerry’s getting out on Thursday.’ At Ann’s insistence, Joe rang Gareth back and she reiterated her message, saying to Joe, ‘Go tell Mrs Conlon.’
The McKernans got a taxi up to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where Sarah Conlon had worked as a catering assistant for sixteen years. ‘I cried all the way there,’ Ann said. ‘When I told her, she collapsed against the wall. She couldn’t believe it. It was such a shock.’ If Sarah Conlon’s faith in the power of prayer had been challenged during those lonely, desolate years, she never showed it and now it seemed as if her prayers had been answered. But sometimes good news can be too good and, like a geyser, a degree of scepticism now burst forth, with Sarah casting doubt on the veracity of what Ann and Joe were telling her. Eventually Ann persuaded her mother that Gerry was about to be released, and Sarah left work to the cheers and applause of her workmates.
Money was tight and times were hard. Flying to London was an expensive business for a working-class Belfast family. Sarah was troubled, Ann remembers. ‘She kept repeating, “How am I going to get over to London for our Gerry’s appeal?”’ Trying to come to terms with one miracle – the imminent release of her son – was hard enough, even for someone as immersed in the Catholic faith as Sarah Conlon, but what happened next must surely have convinced her that prayer had no master. The house-phone rang. Again Joe answered it. This time, instead of Gareth Peirce, it was a reporter from the British television news station ITN, who offered to fly the Conlon family over to London in a private jet for the appeal, in the expectation that the station’s helpfulness to the family would see them rewarded with that exclusive first interview with Gerry Conlon upon his release. The offer was gratefully accepted.
That night, after flying to London, with almost empty purses, the Conlon family – Sarah, Gerry’s two younger sisters, Bridie and Ann, and two relatives – put their heads down in a one-bedroom flat in Westbourne Terrace Road, Maida Vale. The flat was occupied by Sarah’s brother, Hughie Maguire, and his wife, Kate. The Conlons slept on ‘the floors, the settee and chairs’.
The next day, Sarah, Bridie and Ann visited Gerry in Brixton Prison. He was as baffled as they were about the speed of events, but he had enough of a grasp of the situation to put in an order for new jeans and a shirt – in case he had to stand in front of the television cameras. His mother protested, saying that she did not have the money to buy him new clothes. But, as mothers often do, she found it. Sarah’s brother, Hughie, on hearing of Gerry’s request, put his hand into his pocket and handed his sister enough money to buy the jeans and shirt.
On 19 October 1989, two black London taxis brought the extended Conlon family to the Old Bailey. At a side entrance, they were met by a court official who led them up a set of back stairs and into the upper gallery of Court Number Two, the court where the original verdicts had been pronounced fifteen years earlier. At the same time as Sarah and her family were entering the court, the Guildford Four walked up the stairs from the cells below and stood in the dock. Before long, they heard evidence that at their original trial in 1975, the police had deleted, and added to, parts of Paddy Armstrong’s original interview notes. This could be viewed only as an attempt by police to enhance their case against him. The case was then declared unsafe and the verdicts quashed.
Finally, having emerged from the underbelly of the Trojan horse, Gerry Conlon, in a cyclone of righteous fury, stormed out of the Old Bailey and told the world’s press: ‘I’ve been in prison for fifteen years for something I didn’t do. For something I didn’t know anything about. A totally innocent man. I watched my father die in prison for something he didn’t do. He is innocent. The Maguires are innocent. Let’s hope the Birmingham Six are freed.’
It is not hard to imagine old men in long wigs and ermine groaning and gnashing their teeth as they watched Conlon on television. Never one to hold his tongue, Lord Denning said publicly what many of his fellow law lords would, no doubt, have been saying in private: ‘British justice is in ruins.’
Later, in an interview with ITN, Conlon said of his Old Bailey pronouncement: ‘That wasn’t me speaking. That was my dad. That was my dad.’
Gerry’s mother was not a lady who courted the limelight. While Gerry and his sisters Ann and Bridie were driven in a limousine to the Holiday Inn, near Swiss Cottage (where ITN had organised a champagne reception), Sarah and other family members took a taxi to the hotel. On the way across London, Gerry was full of verve. Ann McKernan recalled: ‘He couldn’t sit for a second. There was a sunroof in the limo, and he opened it and stuck his head out the top of the car, and he was waving the whole way to the hotel, and people were shouting at him as if they knew what had happened and who he was.’25
When Conlon was led into the reception room in the Holiday Inn, the first person he saw was his mother, whom he lifted off her feet, whirled around and kissed. For Sarah Conlon, it must have been a bittersweet moment; she had finally been reunited with her son, but her husband would never be coming home.
Also present was Diana St. James, Gerry’s pretty American girlfriend. Diana, with whom he had been corresponding while in prison, would travel back to Belfast with him.
The mood was light for the rest of the evening, but Gerry felt uneasy about the pervasive attention. Strangers were coming up to him and shaking his hand, asking him to relate his experiences of prison. Later that night, as he was going up in the lift to his room, he noticed that two burly men had walked into the elevator with him. When he proceeded down the corridor to his room, they followed him. He turned and asked them what they were doing and they told him they had been hired as bodyguards by ITN to ensure his safety. As the bodyguards stood on either side of his bedroom door, Conlon felt that they represented a life experience he wanted to put behind him: ‘To my mind the only difference between these two and a couple of screws were the clothes.’26
There
