much as she wanted to return to Derry even she would never have agreed with what I was about to do. I had just given up a brilliant career, and here I was driving my wife, my 4-year-old son Mark, and a 3-day-old baby to Derry and into real danger. Worse still, all I had was a phone number in London and the word of someone I didn’t even know. I was supposedly a paid employee of the Ministry of Defence, but in some nebulous, unspecified secret role.
In early May 1974, Mary and I were allocated a house at Rose Court in Gobnascale, a small nationalist housing estate in the mainly Protestant Waterside. Compared to nearby Irish Street it was a fairly newish estate with about 500 families. I’ve read that ‘Gobnascale’ is an old Irish word for ‘Hill of Stories’, and during my time living there on that hill there would be many stories to tell. It was a bit scary at first, as night after night the republican youth of the estate rioted at the junction of our street and the Trench Road just a few yards from the house. On two separate occasions we had our main window shot in by plastic bullets when the RUC fired at rioters, who often took refuge in our garden. I was living next door to the Breens, a republican family, and four doors away from the very same Paul Fleming who had given my sister the green light, presumably from the IRA, that I was safe to return.
Things were mostly quiet on the little housing estate of Gobnascale, but that all changed one morning just a few weeks after we arrived. ‘Dolly’ Shotter, as she is still known, was a young woman in her twenties married to a local man. She was known as Dolly because of her good looks, her long blonde hair, and her love of country music and Dolly Parton. She lived at the time with her husband and her father-in-law, Alfie, in a little bungalow at the edge of Strabane Old Road and Corrody Road. The Nash family and the Shotters gave support to the local IRA volunteers, more out of fear than any belief in what they claimed to represent. Unlike the Derry side there were no senior IRA men in the area, and most of the volunteers on the Waterside were still in their mid-teens. With access to guns and explosives they were dangerous to be around, with no telling what they would get up to or who they would hurt in the process.
Two such volunteers were Paul Fleming (the young man who Alan Rees-Morgan had spoken about back at Clouds Hill), who lived adjacent to me in Rose Court, and young Liam Duffy, whose father was a member of the Peace Movement. Liam’s father would have erupted in anger had he known that his schoolboy son was a ‘would be’ volunteer. Both of them could often be seen running across the open space behind Anderson Crescent. My sister Doreen and Paul were still good friends; like a lot of young girls, she had joined Cumann na mBan (the IRA’s female armed section) and she helped Paul Fleming and other volunteers when she could. Paul would often drop into my mother’s in Anderson Crescent to see her. On the face of it, he appeared to be a nice young man who I remember being well mannered. He had a lot of time for my mother and father, as they had for him, though I noticed on more than one occasion that he would no sooner sit down in their house than a foot patrol would pass by. He’d obviously spot them on his way somewhere and didn’t want to be stopped so he would just drop in to my mother’s so as not to be seen. He would stay awhile and then leave when the coast was clear.
I was at my mother’s one morning when the RUC and the army arrived to raid the house. It was that day that I saw first-hand what it was like to be raided by the British Army. Two young soldiers wrecked my mother’s living room, smashing her little china cabinet as they searched for weapons or explosives. Upstairs they threw my brother’s CB radio against the wall, smashing it as they went through his room. In my parent’s room, one soldier pulled out all the drawers in my mother’s dressing table and, finding my father’s Second World War medals, threw them out of the window into the garden below. To me that was tantamount to a blasphemous act.
They took Doreen’s room to pieces, ripping up her jeans and holding up her underwear and laughing at one another. They violently overturned her little dressing table, smashing the glass plate that sat on top of it. They had a sniffer dog with them, which peed on the landing before they left. After finding nothing in the two hours they were there, they issued my father with a ‘Confirmation of Damage’ certificate so that he could claim compensation from the State. It took us hours to calm my father down as he cursed the English pigs for the chaos in his home.
Later that afternoon, as I helped Doreen put her room back together, she laughed as she sat on the floor lifting the bits and pieces that had earlier been neatly laid out on her dressing table. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I asked.
‘Bloody stupid cunts. They wouldn’t know a safe house if it jumped out in front of them!’ Asking her what she meant, she lifted a container of Avon talcum powder and tipped it out on the floor. I nearly died when I saw several rounds of 9 mm ammunition lying amidst the fragrant white powder.
‘Jesus Christ, Doreen. Are you mad?’ I exclaimed. ‘You could have been caught. Do you not realise that if the army had found these you and everyone in this house would have been arrested and you would probably have gone to jail for years?’
‘Listen Willie, those fuckers would need to get up early in the morning to catch me and they would need a better sniffer dog than that thing they had with them.’
I didn’t know whether to laugh at her daring and cunning or be angry over her recklessness. Later that night, Paul Fleming called in to see my father and hear all about the raid. Of course, he nipped up to Doreen’s room to see her and presumably took his little ‘arsenal’ with him when he left.
On this particular day in May 1974, Paul and Liam spent most of the afternoon in Paul’s garden. I saw them once or twice as I looked out of the kitchen window and they were obviously up to something, because they would stop talking when anyone walked past the garden, which was next to the park. I never saw either of them again, but a few days later as I was passing Strabane Old Road there was an almighty bang and everyone ran out into the street. Smoke could be seen rising above Dolly Shotter’s bungalow. People began to run towards the scene of the explosion and I could hear someone in the distance calling for help. Within minutes it was emerging that Dolly and her father-in-law had been blown up and it was being said that Mr Shotter was dead. This was clearly a bomb that had gone wrong, it couldn’t be anything else. Someone ran past me and shouted, ‘It was that wee fucker Fleming!’
By the next afternoon, even the dogs in the street seemed to be barking Paul Fleming’s name. Apparently, Dolly had spotted Paul and Liam out of her kitchen window putting something into her dustbin. She never said anything but became anxious after they hopped over her fence and left. Dolly guessed there might be something ‘stashed’ there and assumed that they would come back later and lift whatever it was. Like most people, she knew that the IRA moved weapons and explosive devices around when foot patrols were in the area. Alfie Shotter, a frail man in his fifties, had no time for republicans, especially Paul and Liam, whom he’d often chased from his yard. Unlike Dolly, he was not afraid of them and had often rebuked her for putting up with them. Dolly made her way out of the kitchen, only to be met by Alfie, who walked past her, opened the back door and stepped out into the yard. Dolly froze, hoping he wouldn’t go near the bin. As he approached the bin she ran out and shouted at him, ‘Alfie! Don’t go near that bin!’ As he started to lift the lid she grabbed him by the arm, struggling with him as she did so, but it was too late. The bomb exploded as soon as he lifted the lid. Alfie Shotter was killed outright and Dolly was flung across the yard, losing a leg in the blast and sustaining horrific facial injuries. The Army and the RUC, who regularly patrolled Gobnascale on foot, had a habit of checking back yards, hedges, outhouses and sometimes even dustbins, something that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Paul and Liam.
I was due to meet Alan a week or so later and I thought he would want to know about the bomb – not to act on my information but more out of establishing the facts. But such was the talk round the estate that there was no need. Within seventy-two hours, Paul Fleming and Liam Duffy were arrested and held at the RUC’s interrogation centre at Castlereagh for seven days. Both of them were eventually charged with Alfie Shotter’s murder. At just eighteen years of age, Paul Fleming was sent to jail for twenty
