On Derry's walls

Roy Kerridge

Alarge yellow noticeboard greets the visitor to Londonderry. Expecting a Message of welcome, I was disconcerted to read instead that information on Murders and Explosions would be treated confiden- tially if a certain number were dialled. The bus rattled on, away from the army bar- racks and Protestant terraces, over the Foyle bridge and into the walled city itself. Clutching my plastic bagful of belongings, I disembarked and wandered uncertainly

towards the Guildhall. Already I had been unnerved by a glimpse from the window of a truckload of soldiers, whose defiant, angry expressions differed greatly from the good-humoured or calmly resolute features Of soldiers I had seen in Belfast.

Bars and metal shutters covered every shop front, and before the fenced-off Guildhall, an imposing Victorian pile with a tall clock tower, more soldiers stamped about, waving guns wildly. One stood near a bus queue, and the passengers averted their eyes as he clapped loudly. Perhaps he Was applauding the ghosts of the Wall, Where cannons presented by Elizabeth I and the London companies who had financed the city still pointed their barrels at friend and foe alike. Away from the bus stop, 1 found the city to be empty and ominous. Where was I to go?

'The hotels have all been blown up long ago,' a woman told me briskly. 'Some houses do bed and breakfast, but they have no signs up. Just ask the children playing in the street.'

There were no children in sight, and the

city coat of arms, shown on such civic buildings as were still standing, seemed to mock me. It consisted, very aptly, of a skeleton sitting down and resting its skull on one bony hand in a fed-up attitude, as if to say: 'That's another fine mess you've got me into.'

An hour later, I knew how the skeleton felt. By now I had found plenty of children, all very polite, who directed me here and there to houses where nobody answered the door. My bag had burst, and was spilling souvenirs of Belfast's Orange Parade, King Billy rosettes and postcards showing Dr Paisley at home, onto streets covered in bloodcurdling IRA slogans. Evidently this Was the notorious Bogside. I retraced my steps to a door marked 'Samaritans. Open 10 am to 10pm', and threw myself on their mercy. My Good Samaritan was a middle- aged man who seemed surprised at my English accent. He sat me down in an easy chair, made a telephone call and then drove Me straight to Logan's Lodging House.

On the way, I noted that Bogside had been rebuilt along the main road. A ruined house with the neatly painted sign 'You Are Now Entering Free Derry' remained as a memento of the brave old days of the early Seventies. High above us, the city wall lined the crest of a hill, covered in slogans about H Block and hunger strikers.

'Have you any advice for an Englishman in Derry?' I asked my benefactor.

'Stay out of Bogside,' he replied, and delivered me to Mrs Logan.

A spirited 72-year-old, Mrs Logan welcomed me with a mischievous smile and a curtsey-like bob. The lodging house was musty and Victorian, and resembled board- ing houses for migrant labourers I had known 20 years before. 'You won't even have to share a room!' she announced proudly. At midnight I was disturbed by a young man holding two bottles of Guin- ness, but I found his proper room for him, declined one of the bottles and went to bed. Outside I could hear soldiers shouting fiercely.

'Good morning, sirree!' Mrs Logan greeted me next day. 'A beautiful morning it is, surely, surely! Those soldiers! Och, they were shouting at each other, as they keep falling asleep! They wouldn't dare shout at anyone else. In this town you must not talk to the soldiers. Informers here have come to a very sad end. But sure, the soldiers are only poor boys who've been driven into it by sheer want. So what I do, I bid them the time of day and good weather, but don't get into conversation.'

Other lodgers came downstairs, and soon we were animatedly discussing the pubs on Kilburn High Road. It was a Catholic house, and while murders were deplored, the Provos were referred to affectionately as 'the boys'. This ambivalence seemed to pervade Derry as a whole, for it is now a Catholic-dominated city. In Belfast, the soldiers had the good will and cooperation of the majority of citizens: hence their high morale and exemplary behaviour. Here it was different. I saw few older officers but plenty of young boys in uniform, in what must be as popular a posting as 'was Hadrian's Wall in a previous era.

'While you're here, you must visit the Bogside!' Mrs Logan urged me, heaping bacon on to my plate. 'Such nice poeple, and St Eugene's Cathedral up on the hill is beautiful. They're all good musicianers on Bogside, and they'll be practising now for Our Lady's Day on 15 August. You've no need to fear anyone. It's only the men in hats, police or soldiers, the boys are after.' Encouraged by good Mrs Logan, I felt myself warming to Londonderry. By the end of my five-day stay there, I felt a strong affection for the city. I began by visiting St Columb's, the Church of Ireland cathedral. While I was inside, the roof of the court- house opposite fell in and killed a man. This was not directly due to a bomb. As the building had suffered an explosion before, the fabric may have been weakened. Not realising the extent of the tragedy I left the police, ambulance men and firemen at their work, and went to the bank. It had very ob- viously been bombed recently, but business was as usual.

'It's the third time we've been bombed, but we never let it get us down,' the manager told me as he let me out and lock- ed several doors after me.

Unlike Belfast, there were no security checks or friskings in the streets or shops. Perhaps the public would not have stood for them. Nevertheless, the Derry men and women seemed, on the whole, as kindly a bunch as you'd meet anywhere.

Beautiful wall paintings of the Boyne and the Siege of Derry decorated the council-flat gateway to the Fountain, the only Protestant estate on the city side of the river, I was told that isolation meant feroci- ty in Northern Ireland, and certainly the menacing air of the Fountain approached that of the Falls Road Catholic enclave in Protestant Belfast. Perhaps some people are happier when they do not have to mix, and never have to consider another point of view. A single Gothic tower, remnant of the

old city jail, towered above the new flats of the Fountain.

`This tower is an affront to the Catholics,' one of that faith told me later. `The patriots at the time of the rising were imprisoned here, and the Protestants treasure the tower so as to gloat over their sufferings.'

Londonderry's walls resemble those of mediaeval England, with ramparts on top and gateways below. They were made, however, in 1618 or thereabouts, shortly after the city was built as an English base in a wilderness beside the crumbling ruins of St Columb's monastery. As Christopher Booker has pointed out, Ulster Protestants are settlers, akin in character to the pioneers of New England and Canada. Like Americans, who feel they 'began' in 1776, Protestants feel that their proud history commenced in 1688 with the Siege of Derry. If the Protestants are somewhat two- dimensional through denying their mediaeval heritage, the 'original Irish' suf- fer from a lack of Imperial Roman dis- cipline. So honours are even.

Thus I mused as I walked along the wall and looked down on the Fountain estate. As well as advertisements for the proscribed Ulster Volunteer Force and the National Front, a coalition which worried me, the wall messages read: 'Build More H BLocks. May the Hunger Strikers Rot in Hell.' This seemed uncharitable, but at least it was a change. Just then a stone flew over the wall and narrowly missed my head. I backed away in alarm as further missiles followed, and was about to leave the wall when I saw a stone hit a five-year-old boy who began to cry. I took him to his mother's door in a tiny wallside cottage, but he didn't seem to be badly hurt. His injury was partly my fault, as I had provoked the Fountain skinheads by looking over the wall at their estate.

`They're rough, that lot!' the boy's mother told me. 'See, that's the house they bombed, and the lady is still in hospital.'

A corrugated iron wall with a small door in it fenced the Fountain estate off from its Catholic neighbours. Here the battlements were barred to visitors, and I rejoined the wall a few streets away, where it towered over the deep valley of the Bogside.

Imagine yourself on the walls of Conway in Wales, and finding the ramparts looped about with barbed wire, and the camps of Welsh chieftains outside equipped with modern weapons. Then you will realise how strange I felt along this stretch of Derry's walls. Not long ago, this too was a tourist attraction. Now I looked down over the Bogside and saw the Irish Republican flag flying from the roof of the highest block of new council flats, above the slogan 'This is Provoland'. Nearby, on the wall, stood the stump of a blown-up statue, surrounded by barbed wire. From a school below, I could hear the 'musicianers' playing martial airs on drums and flutes, very similar to Orange' music.

Outside one of the shirt and collar manufacturers that once made Derry famous, girl machinists sat lazily in the sun enjoying their lunch break. They greeted me in the cheeky manner of factory girls everywhere, but ignored the scattered party of five armed soldiers who prowled below them on the city side of the wall. The soldiers obviously resented their mission, and spat and looked surly. Ruined and blown-up houses and narrow alleyways of- fered perfect cover for snipers, and the men's lives were at great risk.

Near Hangman's Bastion, at Butcher's Gate, the historic entrance had been walled up, but a small door had been let in- to one side, to allow Bogsiders through one at a time. Although I more properly belong- ed at Coward's Bastion, another ancient site, I stepped through the doorway and in- to the council estates and Victorian terraces of Bogside. Wall paintings were everywhere, mostly in flat orange and green colours, their messages spelling doom to British soldiers. Names of the 'Bloody Sun- day' victims were commemorated as if on a war memorial, but religious messages were lacking. Nevertheless, St Eugene's Cathedral, which towered above the far side of the valley, facing the walls on the opposite bank, was full of worshippers. Some splashed holy water on their foreheads as they left, others knelt on the gravel path outside, before the Virgin's grotto. I presume that a marshy bog once lay between the two hills, where now an ug- ly new road shimmered in the sun.

Traversing the Bogside had been no ordeal, but a pleasant journey through streets of playing children and gossiping neighbours. Mindful of the Samaritan's ad- vice, I asked no controversial questions, but instead inquired the way to a variety of destinations, and met with great helpfulness wherever I went. Talking to soldiers was out of the question, as there weren't any. Although 'Operation Motorman' sup- posedly opened the `no go areas', the Bogside was patrolled from the sky, helicopters rising vertically from the river-

side barracks and buzzing slowly over the valley. On my fifth day in the city I saw one armoured vehicle, sealed so tightly I wondered how the driver could see his waY, passing swiftly along the new road.

Only one corner gave me cause for unease, the house whose message proclaim' ed the entrance to 'Free Derry'. Here a tall flagpole and Tricolour had been planted, and shaggy-haired youths, stripped to the waist, sat glaring on the low walls. An official-looking sign over a garage read `Provisional IRA Arms Depot'. 'A trick!' I reasoned to myself. '1 bet the arms are real- ly hidden somewhere else.' Perhaps this was what they wanted me to think. This unpleasant spot apparently represented the Ireland the Provos were fighting for. Nothing further from the easy- going South could be imagined. Here were no jolly nuns, no shops opening whenever the proprietors felt like it and no drinks going downwards or prayers upwards in the familiar leisurely sequence. Much of the blame could be attached to the council ar- chitects, of course. A Bogsider told me that Direct Rule had improved Northern Ire- land's housing policy, and the newest buildings were in the agreeable 'two- vernacular' gabled style. The same man spoke of the 'sheer hell' of Free Derry when gunmen ruled the streets and all services and deliveries from outside came to an end.

`Thanks to gerrymandering, all the coun- cil jobs in those days belonged to Pro- testants,' he explained. 'We had no dustmen or street sweepers until Motorman opened the area. A united Ireland is bound to come, but I don't approve of the Provo methods. You see, I'm not only a Catholic but a Christian, and so I oppose the taking of life.'

When I told him that hippies and fun" revolutionaries in England had hailed Free Derry as a New Jerusalem, he was in• credulous.

Back in the city centre, I suddenly notic- ed the five soldiers emerging from a dark valley and looking beside themselves with terror. Their exaggerated caution seemed comical when contrasted with the relaxed mood of the shoppers around them. I was reminded of the inconsequential humour of a television sketch, of the kind where big game hunters emerge from the palms in a hotel foyer. But there was nothing funny about a soldier's life in Derry.

At dusk I returned to Mrs Logan' through streets patrolled by police officers with rifles. 'Oh, it's yourself,' said Mrs Logan, letting me in. 'Yes, it's myself,' I replied. 'Hear that noise? It's the helicopter. There's trouble on the Bogside tonight,' she remarked sagely.

Next day I met a doctor and his wife who invited me in for tea. We were interrupted by a house-call, and my host dashed off to the Bogside in his car.

`I was worried when I first moved here,' his wife told me, passing the home-made cakes. 'The boys have a way of waving down cars and taking them for their owll purposes, either to transport arms or to Plant bombs in and park somewhere. When they do this, they wear black hoods on their heads. But my husband has lived here all his life, and even with the hoods on he could recognise their voices from when he'd treated them.

'Twice he was waved down and each time he'd say, "Is that you in there, Willy? Oh, and hullo, Pat, I nearly didn't recognise You."

"Sure, Doctor, we didn't know that was you," they'd reply, and stop the next car instead.

`Once he was called out during a riot, and the boys waved him through to the patient's door, waited outside and waved him back. Mind you, when Free Derry was declared,' all the doctors said at once that if they were interfered with they would stop going into Bogside altogether. One doctor did have his .ear taken, so he went straight up to the IRA neadquarters and kicked up such a fuss that they gave it back again. Some money he had left in it was missing, so he went back

to the IRA and shouted at them until they returned it.'

`Wait a minute!' I broke in. 'Do you mean to say that you can call on the IRA at a known address, as if they had an office?'

`Of course,' she replied. 'It used to be over a row of shops in the Creggan, but I don't know where it is now.'

She gave me an address in Bogside of a man said to be a friend of both the IRA and the Catholic bishop. However, when I saw him he denied the former charge and welcomed the latter one. When I suggested calling on the IRA he turned pale and told me what would probably be the result. Whereupon I turned pale too.

Before I left kindly Mrs Logan, giving her a small box of chocolates in farewell, I had walked far out into the countryside in search of peasant wisdom. At last I had found an old man scything. He proved to be a Catholic, and at once turned the con- versation from the weather to a recent kill- ing in Derry, the case of a supposed burglar who was convicted by an IRA kangaroo court and shot in the legs.

`Imagine bleeding to death in that way!' the greybeard exclaimed. 'Sure, that's go- ing entirely too far! They should have just shot him in the knee.'