place had affected him most, he said Omagh and recounted in detail the scenes of carnage that he had witnessed.
There were moments of absurdity amidst it all. For the first year or so, my family and I lived up the road from a village called Muff. I did not think to question this extraordinary name until many decades later when my friend Cormac howled with laughter when I mentioned it.
‘Muff?’ he guffawed. ‘You might as well have lived somewhere called Vagina.’
The village was a few minutes’ drive away from our house in the north of Ireland, and yet it was across the border in County Donegal, which was part of the south. My mother used to drive me and my sister to Muff for our Irish dancing lessons (all part of an effort to help us belong) and it baffled me that an entirely different country existed down the road from us. It seemed so arbitrary and, of course, it was. I couldn’t fathom, aged four, that it was all because of this map-drawn border that people were killing each other.
The Irish dancing wasn’t the only way our family tried to fit in. When we moved from near Muff deeper into the countryside around Claudy, my father bought a donkey, a red-and-blue-painted cart and four sheep to keep in the raised hillock at the back of our house which we called, without my knowing why, ‘The Rath’.
The donkey, Bessie, soon spawned a foal, christened with dazzling imagination Little Bess. We were better at naming the sheep, who we called things like Lamborghini and Lambada. Each summer, my parents would heroically attempt to shear the sheep by hand using what looked to me like a huge pair of scissors. My sister and I were required to act as sheepdogs in order to round up the bleating animals, and we had varying degrees of success.
For breeding season, rams would be borrowed from local farmers to impregnate our ladies. One of them dropped dead while on the job. We notified the farmer and then my father dug a pit to bury the ram. The ram was heavy and the only way my father could manoeuvre it into place was on its back, with its legs facing up to the sky. Mysteriously, when it came to replacing the earth, there was no longer enough of it to cover the ram in the pit, and his legs stuck out of the ground. For months, those legs poked out of the grass like spooky totem poles and I learned to avoid that particular area.
Periodically, the lambs too would disappear and I never thought to question these sudden absences. It was only some time later that I put two and two together and realised that every time a lamb was removed from The Rath, more bags of meat would appear in the freezer.
‘Is … this … Lambkin?’ I would stutter at the Sunday lunch table, looking at a roast joint served up with potatoes and a jar of mint sauce.
After a while, my parents started giving the sheep numbers so that I became less emotionally attached to them. I’m not sure it worked. To this day, I far prefer roast chicken.
Since this was the pre-internet, pre-Netflix era, when we weren’t herding sheep, my sister and I had to make our own entertainment. My idea of a good time was disappearing into the vast network of rhododendron bushes in our garden to read a Nancy Drew mystery or playing by the River Faughan which ran parallel to our house and which when uttered in a Northern Irish accent, sounded like an expletive. I papered the attic with cut-out magazine pages because I’d read somewhere that Anne Frank had done the same thing while hiding from the Nazis. I was oddly obsessed with the Second World War. Possibly, now that I think about it, it’s because I was living in a place shaped by political conflict.
For the most part, the terrorist attacks happened outside my immediate world. My primary school was a nice place, with good teachers and children who seemed to accept me as I was. The Troubles impinged on our consciousness in a way that was simultaneously familiar and abstract. Everyone seemed inured. In the 70s, when bombs and booby-traps and gun battles were an almost daily occurrence in parts of the Province, local doctors took to prescribing ‘nerve tablets’ and tranquilliser use was higher here than anywhere else in the UK. According to Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, Say Nothing, ‘Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.’
By the time I arrived, this traumatised numbness had evolved into a culture of silence. Words were used sparingly and often carried symbolic, historic importance. The closest city to where we lived was referred to as Londonderry on the road signs, but to use its full name in conversation was to make a political statement that you were pro-British. You had to refer to it as Derry or risk the consequences. No one told me this directly but I absorbed the knowledge without it having to be said.
Sometimes the silence was particularly acute. When the shopkeeper father of a boy in the class below me was machine-gunned to death for selling his goods to the British Army, I can’t remember any of us even mentioning it. I was aware of my parents speaking to each other in hushed, serious tones and I became used to listening for what wasn’t being said as much as I listened for what was. Mostly I just got on with it and tried not to think too much of the things that scared me.
But when I went to secondary school in Belfast, I became more aware of my difference. I was a weekly boarder there and one weekend, as I walked to the coach stop to catch the bus home, my route took me through the aftermath of a bomb attack the previous night. I passed the hulk of a blasted car, the metal warped beyond recognition. Every single window of the Europa Hotel had been blasted out. A confetti scattering of glass crunched under my feet.
In those days, to speak with an English accent was, in certain quarters, to be marked out as the hated occupier. I was aware of this, and tried not to talk too much when meeting new people or when I found myself in unfamiliar locations. But at school, I had to talk. At school, there was nowhere to hide.
I had no notion of my own alien nerdishness until, shatteringly, at the beginning of my second year in secondary school, I was told a boy in my year didn’t fancy me ‘because she’s English’. He wasn’t even a particularly attractive specimen. I didn’t fancy him because he had a ruddy complexion and always smelled vaguely of uncooked sausages.
Still, his rejection cut me to the core. Overnight, I started seeing myself through other people’s eyes: my fluorescent orange rucksack which I wore on both shoulders was not the last word in style; corduroy trousers had never been cool; my accent was so noticeably foreign as to be actively off-putting to boys who smelled of sausage-meat; my hair was flat rather than curly like Charlene’s in Neighbours and I didn’t own crimpers and my mother wouldn’t let me get a perm. In fact, my mother still cut my hair, which wasn’t exactly helpful either.
To add insult to injury, I had also been put up a year, which meant I was the youngest in my class by a considerable margin. But worst of all – I was English.
I began to notice that the girls I thought of as my friends were talking about me rather than with me. They would make plans that didn’t involve me to go to nightclubs with fake laminated IDs. I would hear them in groups laughing loudly and when I approached, the laughter would mysteriously stop like wind dropping from a sail but because I was so accustomed to the constant shifting tension between said and unsaid, I didn’t think to question it. I simply accepted it. I became used to not belonging.
It all came to a head in the week we had our school photographs taken – those embarrassingly awkward portraits that are all blazers, uneasy forced smiles and wary adolescent eyes.
My photograph was a particularly good example. I had wonky teeth, ears that stuck out through the limp shoulder-length hair that my mother still cut. I was grinning dementedly at the camera, sitting with one shoulder angled towards the lens as the photographer had demanded. My blazer sleeves were too long for me and hung over my hands because my mother, as well as believing I should always have short
