Remembering Hunger Strike days on the day that’s in it

This piece was my contribution to Danny Morrison’s collection Hunger strike: Reflections on the 1981 Republican Hunger Strike (2006)

 THE HUNGER STRIKE

When I think of the hunger strikers it’s 1981 again and I’m driving towards a fly-over. The fly-over is across the M2 leading out of Belfast, and on the part of it that meets the grassy bank, in huge letters, someone has painted the words ‘Seven dead saves are led’.  It’s almost certainly the work of young unionists from the nearby Rathcoole estate,  where Bobby Sands grew up, before he and his family were intimidated from that part of Belfast. The sight of that graffito stops me humming along to the car radio and nudges two responses from me. First the teacher part clicks its tongue and wonders how people could go through life believing  that ‘our’ is spelt ‘are’ and ‘lead’ is spelt ‘led.’ Then the human part takes over, indignant. What sort of response is that, to get upset about spelling matters when the message conveyed is so grim? The teacher part slinks back into my subconscious and I turn off for Glengormley, my good mood of a few minutes ago replaced by unease and bafflement. The image of seven young men not ten miles from here, following one another  into the grave, won’t go away.

 As with many people, the hunger strikes began a slow education for me. In 1981 I was recently returned  from Canada.   During the ten years away I’d stayed  interested in events at home, but from a distance.  Detached from the daily pain and rage,  I found myself adopting the commonsense view of the Troubles.  The conflict here was  a clash between two tribes who, deaf to all pleas, refused to stop fighting each other. Other countries had given up  religious wars centuries ago but not us.  Faced with this backwardness, Britain was doing her best  to hold the ring, occasionally losing her temper as on Bloody Sunday but for the most part playing a benign role,  and paying a price in soldiers’ lives for her dedication to fair play.

Well OK, maybe I  knew it was a bit more complicated than that, but  essentially the analysis seemed accurate. The problem came down to a small number of nutters with guns who were holding the rest of the Irish people hostage to their outdated thinking.  And the solution?  That lay with decent people, who must work even harder at getting along with each other, regardless of religion, and so isolate this unhinged minority.   Had a member of the Alliance Party come knocking on my door in Winnipeg,  I’d probably have signed up.

 Then I came home. For the first twelve months or so I was able to consign the Troubles to a space somewhere at the back of my  head. However brutal,  they didn’t impinge on my daily life. But the hunger strikers were different.  They would not stay on the periphery but kept crowding in to centre stage. As the weeks passed and the reports became more frightening,  I ached for someone to talk to. Somebody must have a mental grip on this whole thing that would allow me to control it and put it to the back of  my brain again. But who?  My wife was busy trying to cope with four young children and doing a part-time degree. My colleagues were a mixed work-force whose unwritten rule was that  politics must be avoided. The 95%-unionist neighbourhood I lived in was an equally-unpromising option.

Which left my brothers and sisters. Like most Irish people of my generation, I came from a large family. And like most such families, when we came together our talk  was of children and parents and work  and holidays. Politics? That wasn’t so much forbidden as irrelevant –a backdrop to the real things of life. Except  the hunger-strike wasn’t just politics and it wasn’t a backdrop. This was life and death being played out centre-stage. Every screen and every newspaper was full of it.  Even letters from our Canadian friends spoke of Bobby Sands, how could he do it, what kind of man was he? And so in  the summer of 1981 I gathered with my siblings for a family occasion, and almost immediately the hunger strike came up.

There was almost instant agreement. These men were in prison because they’d killed or been involved in killing, and now they were intent on killing themselves and wanted sympathy. Well, sorry. John Hume had it right – a united Ireland was fine to dream about,   but only a madman would say Irish freedom or even civil rights  was worth a single drop of blood, let alone a precious life. These people were deranged, dangerous and intent on killing themselves. Maggie Thatcher was NOT to blame. They themselves were.

I looked at the heads around the table eating and nodding,  and suddenly realised I didn’t agree with a single word that had been said. I wanted to but I couldn’t.

Because no matter how convenient it might be to cast these men as crazies and criminals, the unavoidable fact was that, unlike criminals, they hadn’t broken the law for personal gain or satisfaction. Like it or lump it, they were political prisoners.  Once you accepted that notion – that their actions were politically motivated – then their case for different prison treatment became unanswerable. True, Catholic bishops and nationalist newspaper editorials preached otherwise, and theologians competed with each other over what was the true definition of suicide, to see if death by hunger strike fell within that definition. But such debate at this point seemed quaint and even silly, in the face of the tolling bell that was the bulletins from prison.

As my brother and sisters talked and reinforced each others’ opinions, I thought briefly of Thatcher. Maybe it was personal distaste for her that was leading me to a position of dissent?  Maybe her nasal intonation, her arrogant certainty  were the things that had pushed me into opposition, not logic at all?  But no. Even  if her voice had been sweeter than a lark’s in the morning,   I would still have reached the unhappy conclusion that was hardening into certainty.

Then someone said “They’re not even dying for Ireland – they’re dying for each other, which is just plain stupid.” That’s when I found myself shouting. Not too smart, agreed:  trying to point out the unreason at the heart of their comments, and doing so by shouting.

And when shouting didn’t work, I tried nostalgia. Our mother used to sing when we were small, as she did the housework and work around the farm. And what were those songs?  Yes,  ‘If I were a blackbird’ and ‘I’ll take you home again Kathleen’, but also ‘Kevin Barry’ and ‘The Manchester Martyrs’ and “All Round My Hat I wear the tri-coloured ribbon-o”.  If  the men she sang about had died in a noble cause,  then wasn’t it obvious that the hunger-strikers were dying for the same cause, and dying more slowly and horribly than any Manchester Martyr or Kevin Barry?   An uproar of voices. Don’t twist things, I was told.  That was completely different  – people like Kevin Barry had belonged to a totally different organisation from these people in the H-blocks. They’d brought it on themselves and wanted to die, whereas Kevin Barry would have been glad of reprieve.

I recognised the argument. It had been on one of the leaflets left on my desk  by one of my students a couple of weeks earlier. A beautiful, warm young Protestant, she’d been visiting me to talk about an essay and had left this pamphlet sitting there – presumably by accident – when she gathered her books. I looked at it. “They had a choice!”  the headline shouted. “Their victims had none! Let them die!”  I thought of the girl,  compassionate in most things, her heart locked now against the men dying in Long Kesh. What had brought her to this place? What had brought the dying men to their terrible position?

And the face of another student came to my mind’s eye. Another young Protestant, a male this time, easily the most thoughtful of the students in his year.  Since he’d decided from the start that  the hunger strikers were right and Thatcher was wrong, when faced with sitting his final examinations or joining the anti-H Block campaign, the decision was simple. He walked away from his studies and never came back.

And I saw – and see now – the face of a third student,  from Poleglass. It’s a week after  Bobby Sands’s funeral and she closes my office door and sits down, her face shining. She wants to tell me about the night Bobby died. “It was the best night of my life – God forgive me!”  she says. “It was that exciting, and sad, and – everybody was out and-“  She throws her hands in the air, and then, still smiling, she starts to cry, and goes on crying until her face is red and swollen.

Like most middle-class, uncommitted people, I experienced the hunger strike at one remove, usually through the experiences of others. But even through the filter of television, it came across with shocking force.

The televised pictures from Bobby Sands’s funeral.   The mass of people walking behind his coffin, seeming to push against the edges of the screen, so tight it was surely  impossible they could all find room to walk. But they did, only their heads visible,  bobbing and rippling like grains of rice.

And I remember – why do I remember this? – Oliver Hughes being interviewed about his brother Francie, whom he’s just come from visiting. The  TV reporters crowd round him, eager for news.  What had he seen, how did he feel, what did Francie look like?  Oliver Hughes stares at them for a minute, his eyes bulging, his face grey. “I’ll tell  youse what he looked like” he says. “He looked like a wee ould man, lying in there. A wee ould man.”

And then days later when Francie Hughes’s coffin is being brought from Foster Green hospital,  I watch  as unionist protestors crowd around the entrance. The coffin comes out  and they clap, they cheer, they shout oaths and insults at the dead man, at the dead man’s relatives, at all that the hunger strike represents.

Twenty-five years later, the images are still sharp, my thoughts jumbled. I still don’t understand how these ten men could do what they did.  How they could have had such unrelenting purpose, to face down their natural instinct for self-preservation, which must have shrieked for them to give up, and kept on shrieking all those hours and days and weeks until they died.

Most events and people and places shrink with the passage of time. Broad childhood streets turn out  to be narrow,  people that were giants turn out to be of average height.

Oddly, I find, with the hunger-strikers the reverse happens.  As time goes by they seem to grow in stature ….No, that’s not quite right. They don’t grow, they stand increasingly alone, sharper and more distinct. It’s as if time had to burn off the trappings and counter-claims of the time, the let-them-die pamphlets and the banging bin lids and the jeering crowds. Those past distractions gone, I’m left with the actions of ten men that are so much above the everyday, so rare and rarified,  they defy comprehension. Yet despite that, or maybe because of it,  twenty-five years after their deaths, they shine a light that is purer than ever and that points a steady beam to our future.

Jude Collins