already seated. Gumboot was the last to get in. When he did so, one of the RUC guards slid the door shut and the driver took off, heading out into the mean streets of Belfast.
‘Can we talk at last?’ Gumboot asked. ‘I can’t stand this silence.’
‘Gumboot wants to talk,’ Jock McGregor said. ‘God help us all.’
‘He’s talking already,’ Ricketts said. ‘I distinctly heard him. Like a little mouse squeaking.’
‘Ha, ha. Merely attempting to break the silence, boss,’ retorted Gumboot, ‘and keep us awake until we basha down. That boat journey seemed endless.’
‘You won’t get to basha down until tonight, so you better keep talking.’
‘Don’t encourage him,’ Jock said. ‘It’s too early to have to listen to his bullshit. I’ve got a headache already.’
‘It’s the strain of trying to think,’ Gumboot informed him. ‘You’re not used to it, Jock.’
His gaze moved to the window and the dismal streets beyond, where signs saying NO SURRENDER! and SMASH SINN FEIN! fought for attention with enormous, angry paintings on the walls of buildings, showing the customary propaganda of civil war: clenched fists, hooded men clasping weapons, the various insignia of the paramilitary groups on both sides of the divide, those in Shankill, the Falls Road, and the grim, ghettoized housing estates of West Belfast.
‘How anyone can imagine this place worth all the slaughter,’ Taff Burgess said, studying the grim, wet, barricaded streets, ‘I just can’t imagine.’
‘They don’t think it’s worth it.’ Jock said. ‘They’re just a bunch of thick Paddies and murderous bastards using any excuse.’
‘Not quite true,’ Martin said. Brought up by strictly methodist parents in Swindon, not religious himself, but highly conscious of right and wrong, he had carefully read up on Ireland before coming here and was shocked by what he had learnt. ‘These people have hatreds that go back to 1601,’ he explained, ‘when the Catholic barons were defeated and Protestants from England arrived by boat to begin colonization and genocide.’
‘1601!’ Gumboot said in disgust. ‘The Paddies sure have fucking long memories.’
The Catholics were thrown out of their own land,’ Martin continued, feeling a little self-conscious. ‘When they returned to attack the Protestants with pitchforks and stones, the British hanged and beheaded thousands of them. Some were tarred with pitch and dynamite, then set on fire.’
‘Ouch!’ Taff exclaimed.
‘When the Catholics were broken completely,’ Martin continued in a trance of historical recollection, ‘their religion was outlawed, their language was forbidden, and they became untouchables who lived in the bogs below the Protestant towns. They endured that for a couple of hundred years.’
‘You’re still talking about centuries ago,’ Gumboot said. ‘That’s a long time to hold those old grudges. Might as well go back to the garden of Eden and complain that you weren’t given a bite of the fucking apple.’
‘It’s not the same thing,’ Martin insisted, feeling embarrassed that he was talking so much, but determined to get his point across. ‘We’re not talking about something that happened just once, centuries ago, but about something that’s never really stopped.’
‘So the poor buggers were thrown out of their homes and into the bogs,’ Taff Burgess said with genuine sympathy, his brown gaze focused inward. ‘So what happened next, then?’
‘Over the centuries, Belfast became a wealthy industrial centre, dominated entirely by Protestants. But the Catholics started returning to the city about 1800, and naturally, as they were still being treated like scum, they were resentful and struck back.’
‘Nothing like a bit of the old “ultra-violence” to get out your frustrations,’ said Gumboot, grinning wickedly. ‘Remember that film, A Clockwork Orange? Fucking good, that was.’
‘Race riots and pogroms became commonplace,’ Martin continued, now getting into his stride. ‘It burst out every five or six years, eventually leading to the formation of Catholic and Protestant militia. Civil war erupted in 1920. In 1921 the country was partitioned, with the six provinces of the North becoming a British statelet, ruled by its Protestant majority.’
‘Big fucking deal,’ Gumboot said as the minibus passed through a street of small terraced houses, many with their windows and doorways bricked up. Here the signs said: PROVOS RULE! and BRITS OUT! Even at this early hour of the morning there were gangs of scruffy youths on the street corners, looking for trouble. ‘What was so bad about that?’
‘Well, Catholics couldn’t get jobs and their slums became worse,’ Martin explained. ‘The electoral laws were manipulated to favour owners of property, who were mostly Protestants. Even after more riots in the thirties and forties, nothing changed. Finally, in 1969, the Catholics took to the streets again, where they were attacked by Protestant police and vigilantes. This time they refused to lie down and the whole city went up in flames.’
‘I remember that well,’ Jock said. ‘I saw it on TV. Mobs all over the place, thousands fleeing from their homes, and Army tanks in the streets. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. A civil war on British soil!’
‘Right,’ Ricketts chipped in. ‘And by the time they were done, you had Catholics on one side, Protestants on the other, and the British equivalent of the Berlin Wall between.’
He pointed out of the window of the van, where they could see the actual ‘Peace Line’: a fifteen-foot-high wall topped with iron spikes, cutting across roads, through rows of houses, and, as they had all been informed, right across the city.
‘Which led,’ Sergeant Lampton added laconically, ‘to the birth of the masked IRA terrorist and his opposite number, the loyalist terrorist in balaclava.’
‘And here we are, caught in the middle,’ Ricketts said, ‘trying to keep the peace.’
‘Trying to stay alive,’ Gumboot corrected him, ‘which is all it comes down to. I’ve only got one aim in this piss-hole – to make sure that none of the bastards on either side puts one in my back. Fuck all the rest of it.’
The minibus was now leaving the city to travel along the M1, through rolling hills which, Martin noticed, were dotted with British Army observation posts. Even as he saw the distant OPs, an AH-7 Lynx helicopter was hovering over one of them to insert replacements and take off the men already there. The OPs, Martin knew, were resupplied with men and equipment only by air – never by road.
‘Hard to believe that’s a killing ground out there,’ Sergeant Lampton said. ‘If it wasn’t for the OPs on the hills, it would all seem so peaceful.’
‘It looked peaceful in Oman as well,’ Ricketts said, ‘until the Adoo appeared. It’s the same with those hills – except instead of Adoo snipers, you have the terrorists. They look pretty serene from down here, but you’re right – those are killing fields.’
Martin felt an odd disbelief as he looked at the lush, serene hills and thought of how many times they had been used to hide torture and murder. That feeling remained with him when the minibus turned off the motorway and made its way along a winding narrow lane to the
