Armed Struggle

"This made a big impact on me. Such a big impact, in fact, that I went to Queen’s University, Belfast to meet Richard English and delve further. His penetrating analysis of the IRA was particularly helpful to me because I was writing a book about the healing I needed to do with regard to my dead twin. After his murder, almost everything about Ireland seemed to me to be about emotion. Before I could get to the heart of my own story I needed to clamber back on to a platform of rationality, fact, analysis and historical detail, and this is what his book helped me do. It gave me a grounding in the history of the IRA, ripping out the wishy-washy emotional stuff and providing a brilliantly calm and sane analysis. He was explicit about this. He wrote that because of Ulster’s bloody past, it was necessary to take a sane and measured approach and he hoped that his book would pass that test. I admired the mission he had set himself and the way in which he accomplished it. He wrote with integrity and authority, the sort of authority that comes from dogged, unbiased research. I realised I needed to apply the same test to my own writing. Richard English focuses on events since the Easter Rising of 1916 and explains how the organisation evolved in response to internal and external pressures. He wasn’t frightened of saying, look, this is a very complicated process. His response to that was just to take it on full frontal. He layers and sets it out very methodically. As a result it is quite a difficult read because you have to analyse it in the way that he does, slowly and carefully. It was just what I needed. But I haven’t forgotten your question: why was it necessary for me to put aside emotion, at least for a time, when I was writing a book that was so grounded in emotional and mental issues? I can explain that. Five Books has asked me to talk about the Troubles, but really my own book is not about the Troubles in the narrow sense, and it certainly is not a political book , although my training is in political science. I went back to Ireland because I’d left when I was a boy, having been very badly injured in an attack, and I needed to heal myself. But I could not do that through emotion alone. I needed a full range of tools, historical, political, cultural. English’s book was a boon. I was 14, almost 15 and I had an identical twin. He was Nicholas Timothy and I am Timothy Nicholas. Few people could reliably say which of us was which. We had spent only about five days apart in our lives. We were incredibly close. And one moment we had this idyllic, happy childhood and this lovely Irish holiday, and the next moment he was dead. I was very badly wounded, as were my mother and father. We were the only survivors of the seven people who had been on this lovely little, rather smelly, old fishing boat, Shadow Five, which my grandfather kept in the West of Ireland. We were so badly wounded that none of us were able to go to the funerals in England for my 79-year-old grandfather, Grandpapa, as we called him, my 83-year-old grandmother, Granny, as we knew her, and my beloved Nicky. No. We were lying, critically injured, in Sligo Hospital in Ireland. I was in intensive care. On the other side of the intensive care unit lay my mum, connected to a life-support machine. She had 117 stitches in her face, 20 in each eyeball. She wasn’t expected to live. My father had similar injuries but there wasn’t a bed available for him in intensive care so he was in a ward nearby. The bomb was on Monday, 27 August 1979. The bodies of Grandpapa, Granny and Nick were removed from Ireland after two days but I didn’t even know they were dead. Their coffins were shown on live television as they were driven from the morgue on their way to three Royal Navy helicopters. Having landed on Irish soil and waiting for the coffins to arrive, the helicopters kept their rotors running, expecting to be attacked at any minute. This great drama was unfolding and I still didn’t know Nicky was dead. So I came away with this deep underlying mental and emotional wound which came to the surface over the years. I was taken out of intensive care three days after the attack, and told that Nicky and my grandparents were dead, and so was our 15-year-old Irish friend Paul Maxwell. He had been earning pocket money in his summer holidays, helping us run this little boat. And I wasn’t able to go to any of their funerals because of my wounds. So I never had any goodbyes and I left Ireland with all these terrible unresolved emotional wounds. The physical wounds I got over. And I got on with life. But the emotional wounds I didn’t really face up to until later: 2003. By then I was married, and deeply in love with Isabella, my wife. We had two children at that stage. And I wanted to heal myself. I knew I could be a better dad if I did. So I decided I would go back to the West of Ireland, to the place of the murders for a week. It was the 24th anniversary of the murders. I had set foot there a number of times, but each time I had been so overcome that I just had this terrible numbness, and I didn’t feel that I was doing any good to me or anyone else. So in 2003 I felt I absolutely needed to confront and deal with the great unresolved issue of my life, my dead twin, Nicky. I needed to go back and do something but I didn’t know what, so I decided that I would just start by going back, very quietly and privately, and spending a week there on my own and seeing what happened. I gave myself 12 months and said I’d go back for a few days each month until the 25 anniversary and by then I would be either healed or bust. Well, I had developed a sort of addiction to work. But when all was quiet and I was on my own I felt strangely alone, often sad, sometimes very low. Three months after the attack I started having a strange symptom – I started hearing a bang in my head and I couldn’t work out what it was. Only in June 1980 did I accept that I was hearing the bomb. It would come to me sometimes half a dozen times a day – a bizarre sensation of an explosion in my head. I started seeing a therapist in my late 20s, a bereavement counsellor. I went for about six months and he got me to admit something that I hadn’t admitted before – that there was something wrong. That hearing the sound of a bomb in my head wasn’t normal and wasn’t healthy. Beyond that I didn’t make much progress. Later I started seeing a therapist, Berenice Krikler, whose style of therapy suited me very well. I saw her once a week. Over 18 months I learnt that staying fit, mentally and emotionally, was something I had to commit to and work at. Emotional cogs started to turn inside me that had been seized up before. And in 1996 I fell deeply in love with the woman that I was later to marry, Isabella Norman, a teacher who lived near me. And I don’t think I would have fallen in love so deeply if it hadn’t been for freeing myself up with Berenice. At my last meeting with Berenice before moving to America, she came out of her house and said: ‘There’s still something holding you back, isn’t there?’ I knew what she meant but I couldn’t put my finger on it. A number of years later I was married with two tiny children and I knew I needed to go and address this issue. I knew I had to address this hole at the back of mind: my unresolved grief over Nicky. And that meant returning to Ireland. To do that I knew I had to gain a proper understanding of the Troubles, and the IRA. This brings us back to Richard English’s book. It was a vitally helpful tool in helping me analyse the organisation, where it came from, how it evolved, and how it operated. The book’s methodology was the opposite of the freewheeling emotional journey I needed to go through, but it was a vital tool to keep my emotional processes in check with my rational ones. It was a counterpoint. I went back to talk quietly to people without any agenda. It was an overpowering experience. As a journalist my habit was to take a recorder with me and put it down in front of people and let them talk. Later, when the emotion had subsided, I was left with their words. As a film-maker I thought I might one day make a documentary about it. I soon scrapped that idea. I was all over the place, emotionally. Only much later did I realise that what I had gathered lent itself to a book. At the end of the year of visiting Ireland I came back feeling like a completely changed man. I had stopped hearing the sound of the bomb. Because of being there and the profound effect it had on me, a catharsis, flushing stuff away and giving me what I had missed as a kid – a goodbye. A belated goodbye, which I re-engineered for myself in a painstaking way over a period of time and in a rather bizarre way. I found the man who did Nicky’s post-mortem report and I sat with him and he pulled out the file he hadn’t opened for 25 years. He cut the tape and out spilled photographs and blood-stained pages from the night of the autopsies in 1979 and I could read the report and look at the photographs. Well, what I put in the book was very raw. At the height of my emotional storm, I went to pieces. After I’d been going to Ireland for a couple of months there came a point one morning when I went off the edge. I went doolally. I lost my reason. Completely unexpectedly I started talking to my dead twin as if he was sitting in a chair opposite me. As I was doing it, blubbing my eyes out, heaving sobs, I scratched out words as they came into my head. I found I was saying goodbye to Nick. I put that in the book, almost verbatim. It was far from articulate, it was a mass of goo. I had this enormous force that needed to come out. I had suspected I needed to rail and scream and kick and bash things to bits. But I was wrong. What I needed was to speak with him one last time. And as I did so a torrent of emotion spilled out. Afterwards I was completely exhausted, but also relieved and happy. I went back to England at the end of the year as a much better daddy to my kids and a better practitioner of work…and life… Understanding the IRA was not what I went back to Ireland to do, but I needed to understand something about the IRA in order to have any chance of understanding the men and women who had so meticulously put together this vicious attack. It was mounted so carefully, so cleverly. They watched us all that August, until the moment they detonated the bomb by remote control. They almost certainly tipped off a professional photographer to be in the harbour to cover the carnage as the bodies were brought in. They wanted the images on the front page of every English-speaking newspaper in the world. It was chilling, calculated, clever, disgusting. And I wanted to understand this organisation. I had grown up thinking of it as sinister, evil even. But of course for others it is wonderful, brilliant. What Richard English gives is an understanding of how the old IRA were succeeded by the Provisional IRA, and how much later the Provisionals were able to agree a peace agreement. The book proved to be a critically useful analytic tool."