Doherty The Skelper and Me

A memoir of making history in Derry
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78117-674-0
Verlag: Mercier Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'As I grew older I often asked myself whether history has made me who I am, and will I, in turn, make history with that?'  Tony Doherty has lived in the shadow of his father's execution on Bloody Sunday. At 18 he found himself facing long-term imprisonment, yet the soldier who shot his father was a free man. The Skelper and Me is no ordinary memoir. It is a triumph of working class resolve and resilience over the last bastion of Empire. Epitomising the old adage that 'if you didn't laugh you'd cry,' it sallies forth as a fascinating and compelling story of prison life, making a willing inmate of the reader, weaving a tapestry of the lives of his young cellmates, who never deserved such a life, but whose very existence played out, often hilariously, sometimes painfully, and at close quarter behind the steel door of Cell 5, Crumlin Road. Upon returning to a war-torn Derry in 1985, freedom had a more liberating effect on him and others than he had anticipated. As his family saw qualities in him that he hadn't realised, he began to pick up the pieces of his battered but unbroken home town, locked in bitter stalemate. At his father's cross on Creggan Hill, he promised to make right out of the wrong. The epic struggle that followed changed the course of history.

Tony Doherty was instrumental in setting up the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign in 1992, which led in 2010 to the exoneration of his father and the others killed and wounded on Bloody Sunday, and to a public apology from the British Prime Minister in the House of Commons. He has worked extensively in community regeneration in Derry, is a member of the Big Lottery Fund's NI Committee and is currently Regional Coordinator for Northern Ireland's Healthy Living Centre Alliance.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Doherty, Tony

Leseproben

1

Threshold

My story doesn’t begin here. But here is where history put me. When I was a young boy I believed I was the sole subject of a secret but widespread experiment with the human form, and that everyone and everything around me was a part of it. Had I heard of and understood the words sociological or anthropological at that time, it would have been that type of study. I’d lie awake sometimes at night, convinced that, even then, at that moment, in the street-lit darkness of the bedroom that I shared with our Karen, Patrick and Paul, someone was observing me through the slate roof and making notes on a clipboard. Of course, for such a grand conspiracy, characters like our Paul, Dooter McKinney and Gutsy McGonagle would be part of it. Even the dogs in the street. And so would me granny and granda Quigley. And me ma and da. Everyone. I’d close my eyes, dearly hoping and wishing it wasn’t true.

In the weeks after me da was suddenly taken from us, I believed even more that this whole life thing just had to be a weird experiment beyond my knowing or control, and that, someday soon, someone would bring him safely home, letting me in on the conspiracy. Those forlorn thoughts were in the darkest of February nights when I pined for him to come back. I’d close my eyes and, before eventually drifting off to sleep, hope against hope that the study of me was actually true, that his killing, his waxy face, the wake, the hollow, hungry feeling inside me were just elements of the experiment.

After growing up and getting sense, I still wondered why it was me, or us, that this thing happened to. Was there something special about the Dohertys from Hamilton Street? Were we cursed? Did someone put the blight on us? Growing up knowing you’ve been part of a hugely tragic event marks you. You become known for it. It makes you a part of history, no matter how terrible the story. Are we marked forever by our history? As I grew older I often asked myself whether history had made me who I was, and would I, in turn, make history with that?

In January 1972 a young British Army marksman executed my unarmed father. He died along the same stretch of Derry road where he was born in September 1939, and where he was reared until he left his native Derry for England in search of work twenty years later. He was picked off by the sniper, casually utilising his well-honed rifle skills from a range of fifty yards. A single, crack shot. A ‘Texas Star shot’, as it was later described in a courtroom in London. Some say he cried out that he didn’t want to die on his own, but the medical evidence suggests death was much more rapid, the SLR bullet traversing the full length of his trunk, severing the muscles protecting his heart.

Paddy Walsh, roughly the same age, crawled out from the protective concrete pillars of Joseph Place, eyes glassy with terror, and whispered the Act of Contrition into my father’s dead ear. A bullet from the same sniper sliced through the collar of Paddy’s corduroy jacket as he spoke the hallowed words. Two Paddys: one dead and the other alive by a quarter inch because his head was low in almost silent prayer. Paddy Walsh was a fierce brave man. But he got no medals or commendations for his bravery. The sniper did, though, being cited in despatches, a huge accolade for the young soldier.

Hundreds of Irish heads stooped to the gutter as the bodies of men and boys slumped around them. In fear and panic the survivors dashed up the hill to Creggan, loud shots ringing in their ears, bounding the hard steps in twos and threes, and tramping the frozen ground to their homes in Malin Gardens, Dunmore Gardens and Iniscarn Road. All Donegal place names.

Doherty is a Donegal name too. It was originally Ó Dochartaigh but had been anglicised to Doherty centuries before I came into being in January 1963. I had just turned nine when news of my father’s death filtered along the cold road, beginning in Rossville Street, passing the place of his birth on the Lecky Road, towards our house in Hamilton Street, that he had met his fate at the far end, over in the Bogside. A number of those who hurtled up the hill homewards, heads down, were soon to find out that their younger or older brothers had been killed too and were now piling up on the slabs in Altnagelvin Hospital in the Waterside. Thirteen of them: a butcher’s dozen. A city in chaos, left to bury its thirteen sons, labelled by their killers, and then by the highest judicial office in Britain, as gunmen and bombers. What a day for the Empire.

During me da’s wake I swore revenge many times against the British. However, vengeance was not my only thought as my tear-filled eyes scanned the row of coffins stretching the full width of the altar of St Mary’s Chapel. Can we not just have him back? I also pleaded. I could almost see him stepping through the door with his curled-lip smile and his speckled coat with the black fur collar. It was all happening so suddenly it just couldn’t be true. But no, this nightmare was actually true. There would be no waking up in a cold sweat, breathing relief that it was only a bad dream. He was gone. I felt his loss each morning for long afterwards, in the gap between blissful sleep and awakening to the new dawn, knowing that he was gone for ever.

Eight years later, I took my oath to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in a house only a few yards from where my father was born. The long war had already created its probabilities and certainties for those volunteering to take part in it. As I faced the Irish tricolour I was duly warned that my prospects were imprisonment, life on the run, or death.

A few months later, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) arrested me – the same police force that didn’t think my father’s death was significant enough to merit a criminal investigation. I was interrogated and admitted my part in an attempted bombing raid on a furniture shop in Derry city centre.

***

The metal door of Cell 5 clanged heavily behind me. I instantly realised I was in someone else’s space as I eyed the resident prisoner for the first time. In effect, I had just moved into his bedsit. It was 1 March 1981. Anto had not journeyed more than a few hundred yards since the summer of 1979, when he had been taken from his home in County Tyrone, interrogated by the RUC in Derry and transported to prison in Belfast.

‘Aye, it’s a brave while OK. A bad year for Strabane town, ye know!’ grinned Anto through his bushy sandy moustache, his kind, smiling eyes making light of the sheer length of time he had spent in this cell. It was almost two years! But he seemed at perfect peace with himself as he sat in his turned-up flared jeans on a single bed with his back against the cell wall. I stood rooted to the floor with my brown paper bag of possessions in hand. Standing up was all I could do to stall or challenge what was happening to me. It was far too early to sit down and accept where I was.

‘Jesus! August ’79! That’s more than a year and a half!’ was all I could say. It was truly hard to take in. I felt as if I had entered an alternate reality.

The year 1979 was when we got served pints of beer at the Rock Bar across the border on a Sunday, that I started doing a steady line with Maire, and that our Patrick came out and headed off to London to live the gay life. That summer we thumbed up to Malin Head with the Shantallow boys to Dessie Doherty’s ma’s caravan, where we ran mad around Five Finger Strand as the golden sands lit up the blackest of moonless nights. And that was the year my best friend, Eddie O’Donnell, died so tragically young in an accident.

‘Ye can sit down, ye know,’ Anto gestured towards the bottom bunk. I sat down and contemplated my new surroundings. The cell was about 8 feet across and 16 feet long from the door to the high Perspex window that arched in tandem with the gentle curve of the brickwork ceiling, its mortared ruts blanketed and shadowed by more than a century of smoke and whitewash. A single bare bulb hung from a yard of flex. There were three black, high-gloss, metal-framed beds: Anto had the single bed, the pillow-end just next to the red metal door, and mine was one of the bunk beds, set at the back end of the cell, just below the window. Along the wall opposite Anto’s bed stood a small table displaying an open brown bag of fruit, a stack of books, a bottle of Robinson’s Orange Barley Water and two white plastic mugs. Could I be here, in this one place, until 1983? I thought. Two whole years? Is that even possible?

‘Ye fancy a wee cordial?’ he asked, getting up from the bed. He proceeded to pour water from a plastic water container, known as a ‘water gallon’, into the mugs, before pouring in a drop of the Barley Water.

‘Ye want a wee custard cream?’

‘Aye, surely. A wee custard cream would be grand.’

‘What did they charge ye with?’ he asked, handing me a brown bag of assorted biscuits, mostly custard creams and ginger nuts.

‘Causing an explosion, possession of a gun and IRA membership.’

‘Did ye sign a statement?’

‘Aye, I did. And I’m a stupid fucker for doing so.’

Anto went quiet for a while as he sat sipping his drink. The custard creams tasted pleasantly sweet with the cordial. In our house, I’d eat a full packet of them with a mug of tea.

Voices, footsteps and the slide of buckets out in the wing echoed around our silence. This was C Wing swinging into action on the first day of the week. A key rattled in the door and Mr Kyle, a screw in his thirties with jet-black hair and a black moustache, said, ‘You’re to see the MO.’ I looked over at Anto, who gave me a thumbs up and said, ‘The MO is...