cigarettes. But not in December. As Helen got closer to the new flat and saw the people gathered outside, she broke into a run.
6
A vacant house stood on Leeson Street, opposite the short block known as Varna Gap. Such derelict properties pockmarked Belfast’s landscape – burned out, gutted or abandoned, their windows and doors covered in plywood. The people who lived there had simply fled and never come back. Across the street from the vacant house, Brendan Hughes stood with a few of his associates from D Company. It was a Saturday, 2 September 1972.
Looking up, Hughes noticed a green van appear some distance away and begin to approach, along Leeson Street. He watched the van closely, something about it making him uneasy. He usually carried a handgun, but that morning an associate had borrowed it so that he could use it to steal a car. So Hughes found himself unarmed. The van drove right past him, close enough for Hughes to briefly glimpse the driver. It was a man. Not one he recognised. He looked nervous. But the van kept moving, right on down through McDonnell Street and onto the Grosvenor Road. Hughes watched it disappear. Then, just to be on the safe side, he sent one of his runners to fetch a weapon.
At twenty-four, Hughes was small but strong and nimble, with thick black eyebrows and a mop of unruly black hair. He was the officer commanding – ‘the OC’ – for D Company of the Provisional IRA, in charge of this part of West Belfast, which made him a target not just for loyalist paramilitaries, the police and the British Army but for the Stickies (the Official IRA) as well. Eighteen months earlier, Hughes’s cousin Charlie, his predecessor as OC of D Company, had been shot and killed by the Officials. So Hughes was ‘on the run’, in the parlance of the IRA: he was living underground, a man targeted by multiple armed organisations. In rural areas, you could stay on the run for years at a time, but in Belfast, where everybody knew everybody, you would be lucky to stick it out for six months. Someone would get you eventually.
Hughes had joined the Provos in early 1970. It was through his cousin Charlie that he had initially got involved, but he soon established himself in his own right as a shrewd and tenacious soldier. Hughes moved from house to house, seldom sleeping in the same bed on consecutive nights. D Company’s territory embraced the Grosvenor Road, the old Pound Loney area, the Falls Road – the hottest territory in the conflict. Initially, the company had only twelve members, and they became known as the Dogs, or the Dirty Dozen. Hughes adhered to a philosophy, instilled in him at a young age by his father, that if you want to get people to do something for you, you do it with them. So he wasn’t just sending men on operations – he went along on the missions himself. Dolours Price first met Hughes when she joined the IRA, and she was dazzled by him. ‘He seemed to be a hundred places at the one time,’ she recalled, adding, ‘I don’t think he slept.’ Despite his small stature, Hughes struck Price as a ‘giant of a man’. It meant something to her, and to others, that he asked no volunteer to do anything he would not do himself.
D Company was carrying out a dizzying number of operations, often as many as four or five each day. You would rob a bank in the morning, do a ‘float’ in the afternoon – prowling the streets in a car, casting around, like urban hunters, for a British soldier to shoot – stick a bomb in a booby trap before supper, then take part in a gun battle or two that night. They were heady, breakneck days, and Hughes lived from operation to operation – robbing banks, robbing post offices, holding up trains, planting bombs, shooting at soldiers. To Hughes, it seemed like a grand adventure. He thought of going out and getting into gunfights the way other people thought about getting up and going to the office. He liked the fact that there was a momentum to the operations, a relentless tempo, which fuelled and perpetuated the armed struggle, because each successful operation drew new followers to the cause. In the words of one of Hughes’s contemporaries in the IRA, ‘Good operations are the best recruiting sergeant.’
As the legend of Brendan Hughes, the young guerrilla commander, took hold around Belfast, the British became determined to capture him. But there was a problem: they did not know what he looked like. Hughes’s father had destroyed every family photograph in which he appeared, knowing that they could be used to identify him. The soldiers referred to him as ‘Darkie’, or ‘the Dark’, on account of his complexion, and the name stuck, a battlefield sobriquet. But the British did not know what his face looked like, and on many an occasion, Hughes had walked right past the soldiers’ sandbagged posts, just another shaggy-haired Belfast lad. They didn’t give him a second look.
The soldiers would go to his father’s house and rouse him from bed, looking for Hughes. Once, when they hauled his father in for questioning, Hughes was incensed to learn that after two days of interrogation, the old man had been forced to walk home barefoot. The soldiers told his father that they weren’t looking for Brendan in order to arrest him; their intention was to kill him.
This was not an idle threat. The previous April, an Official IRA leader named ‘Big Joe’ McCann had been walking, unarmed, one day when he was stopped by British troops. He tried to flee but was shot. McCann had dyed his hair as a disguise, but they recognised him. He was only wounded by the initial shots, and he staggered away. But rather than call an ambulance, the soldiers fired another volley to finish the job. When they searched his pockets, they found nothing that could plausibly be described as a weapon, just a few stray coins and a comb for his hair.
The runner had not yet returned with a gun for Hughes when the van reappeared. Five minutes had passed, yet here it was once more. Same van. Same driver. Hughes tensed, but again the van drove right past him. It continued on for twenty yards or so. Then the brake lights flared. As Hughes watched, the back doors swung open, and several men burst out. They looked like civilians – tracksuits, trainers. But one had a .45 in each hand, and two others had rifles; as Hughes turned to run, all three of them opened fire. Bullets swished past him, slamming into the façades of the forlorn houses as Hughes tore off and the men gave chase. He sprinted onto Cyprus Street, the men pounding the pavement behind him, still firing. But now Hughes began to zigzag, like a gecko, into the warren of tiny streets.
He knew these streets, the hidden alleys, the fences he could scale. He knew each vacant house and washing line. There was a quote attributed to Mao that Hughes was partial to, about how the guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea. West Belfast was his sea: there was an informal system in place whereby local civilians would assist young paramilitaries like Hughes, allowing their homes to be used as short cuts or hiding places. As Hughes was scrambling over a fence, a back door would suddenly pop open long enough for him to dart inside, then just as quickly close behind him. Some of the residents were intimidated by the Provos and felt they had little choice but to cooperate, while others assisted out of an unforced sense of solidarity. When property was damaged in one of Hughes’s operations, he would pay compensation to the family. He cultivated the community, knowing that without the sea, the fish cannot survive. There was a local invalid who lived on Cyprus Street, ‘Squire’ Maguire, and at the height of the madness, with fires and police raids and riots in the street, residents in the area would occasionally see Brendan Hughes carrying Maguire on his back a few doors down to the pub so that Maguire could have a pint, then dutifully returning to bring him home a short while later. Once, a British soldier in the Lower Falls area caught Hughes in the sights of his rifle. Finger on the trigger, he was ready to open fire when an elderly woman stepped out of some unseen doorway and planted herself in the path of his weapon, then informed him that he would not be shooting anybody on her street on that particular evening. When the soldier looked up, Hughes was gone.
With his pursuers still clomping after him, firing wildly, Hughes veered onto Sultan Street. He had a specific destination in mind: a call house on Sultan Street. Call houses were usually regular homes, occupied by ordinary families, that happened to double as clandestine Provo facilities.
