Robert was interned on suspicion of being a member of the Official IRA – the Stickies. Jean McConville, who had been delicate by temperament to begin with, fell into a heavy depression after her husband’s death. ‘She had sort of given up,’ her daughter Helen later recalled. Jean did not want to get out of bed and seemed to subsist on cigarettes and pills. Doctors in Belfast had taken to prescribing ‘nerve tablets’ – sedatives and tranquillisers – to their patients, many of whom found that they were either catatonically numb or crying uncontrollably, unable to get a handle on their emotions. Tranquilliser use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would probably be described as post-traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it ‘the Belfast syndrome’, a malady that was said to result from ‘living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary’. 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. At night, through the thin walls of their flat in Divis Flats, the McConville children would hear their mother crying.
Increasingly, Jean became a recluse. Some weeks, she would leave the house only to buy groceries or to visit Robert in prison. It might have simply felt unsafe to venture out. There was a discomfiting sense in Belfast that there was no place where you were truly secure: you would run inside to get away from a gun battle, only to run outside again for fear of a bomb. The army was patrolling Divis, and paramilitaries were dug in throughout the complex. The year 1972 marked the high point for violence during the entirety of the Troubles – the so-called bloodiest year, when nearly five hundred people lost their lives. Jean made several attempts at suicide, according to her children, overdosing on pills on a number of occasions. Eventually, she was admitted to Purdysburn, the local psychiatric hospital.
Nights were especially eerie in Divis. People would turn out all their lights, so the whole vast edifice was swathed in darkness. To the McConville children, one night in particular would forever stand out. Jean had recently returned from the hospital, and there was a protracted gun battle outside the door. Then the shooting stopped and they heard a voice. ‘Help me!’ It was a man’s voice. Not local.
‘Please, God, I don’t want to die.’ It was a soldier. A British soldier. ‘Help me!’ he cried.
As her children watched, Jean McConville rose from the floor, where they had been cowering, and moved to the door. Peeking outside, she saw the soldier. He was wounded, lying in the gallery out in front. The children remember her re-entering the flat and retrieving a pillow, which she brought to the soldier. Then she comforted him, murmuring a prayer and cradling his head, before eventually creeping back into the flat. Archie – who, with Robert in prison, was the oldest child there – admonished his mother for intervening. ‘You’re only asking for trouble,’ he said.
‘That was somebody’s son,’ she replied.
The McConvilles never saw the soldier again, and to this day the children cannot say what became of him. But when they left the flat the next morning, they found fresh graffiti daubed across their door: BRIT LOVER.
This was a poisonous allegation. In the febrile atmosphere of wartime Belfast, for a local woman to be seen consorting with a British soldier could be a dangerous thing. Some women who were suspected of such transgressions were subjected to an antique mode of ritual humiliation: tarring and feathering. A mob would accost such women, forcibly shave their heads, anoint them with warm and sticky black tar, then shower a pillowcaseful of dirty feathers over their heads and chain them by the neck to a lamppost, like a dog, so that the whole community could observe the spectacle of their indignity. ‘Soldier lover!’ the mob would bray. ‘Soldier’s doll!’
In an environment where many married men were being locked up for long stretches, leaving their wives alone, and where cocky young British soldiers were patrolling the neighbourhoods, deep-seated fears of infidelity, both marital and ideological, took hold. Tarring and feathering became an official policy of the Provisional IRA, which the leadership publicly defended as a necessary protocol of social control. When the first few cases turned up at local hospitals, the befuddled medical personnel had to consult with the maintenance crews who took care of their buildings about the best method for removing black tar.
It felt to Michael McConville as if he and his family were strangers in a strange land. Expelled from East Belfast for being too Catholic, they were outsiders in West Belfast for being too Protestant. After their home was marked with the graffiti, what few local friends they had no longer wanted anything to do with them. Everywhere they turned, they found themselves in an adversarial situation. Archie was badly beaten by the youth wing of the Provos and had his arm broken for refusing to join the organisation. Helen and a friend were harassed by a regiment of soldiers. Helen would later suggest that her mother may have further alienated the family from their neighbours by declining to take part in ‘the chain’, the hand-to-hand system for hiding weapons during police searches of the complex; Jean feared that if she was caught with a gun in the house, she might lose another child to prison. At a certain point, the family dogs, Provo and Sticky vanished. Someone had shoved the animals down a rubbish chute, where they died.
Michael had asthma, and Jean worried that the gas heating in the flat was aggravating it. She requested a transfer, and the family was granted a new flat, in another section of Divis Flats called St Jude’s Walk. They packed their belongings and made the short move into the new space. It was slightly larger than the previous one, but otherwise not much different.
Christmas was coming, but the city was hardly festive. Many shops were boarded up and closed, because they had been bombed. Jean McConville’s only indulgence in those days was a regular excursion to play bingo at a local social club. Whenever she won anything, she would give the children twenty pence each. Occasionally, she would bring home enough to buy one of them a new pair of shoes. One night after the family had moved into the new flat, Jean went with a friend to play bingo. But on that particular evening, she did not come home.
Shortly after 2 a.m., there was a knock at the door. It was a British soldier, who informed the McConville kids that their mother was at a barracks nearby. Helen raced to the barracks and found Jean, bedraggled and shoeless, her hair all over the place. Jean said that she had been at the bingo hall when someone came in and told her that one of the children had been hit by a car, and that someone was waiting outside to take her to the hospital. Alarmed, she left the bingo hall and got into the car. But it was a trap: when the door opened, Jean was pushed onto the floor and a hood was placed over her head. She was taken to a derelict building, she said, where she was tied to a chair, beaten and interrogated. After she was released, some army officers found her wandering the streets, distressed, and brought her to the barracks.
Jean couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say who it was that had abducted her. When Helen wondered what kinds of questions they had been asking, Jean was dismissive. ‘A load of nonsense,’ she said. ‘Stuff I knew nothing about.’ Jean could not sleep that night. Instead she sat up, her face bruised, her eyes black and blue, and lit one cigarette after another. She told Helen that she missed Arthur.
The children would later recall that it was the following evening that Jean sent Helen out to fetch fish and chips for dinner. She filled a bath, to try to soothe the pain of the beating she had taken the night before. As Helen was leaving, she said, ‘Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke.’
Helen made her way through the labyrinthine passages of Divis to a local takeaway where she ordered dinner and waited for it. When the food was ready, she paid, took the greasy bag, and started to walk back. As she entered the complex, she noticed something strange. People were loitering on the balconies outside their flats. This was the sort of thing that local residents did in the summertime. There were so few places for recreation in Divis that kids would play ball on the balconies and
