I fell asleep until 1.30 when she shook me hard.
“My husband gets back from the night shift at two,” she said. “Get your clothes on and get the fuck out of here.”
“Are you serious?”
“He’s a sheet welder, he’ll fucking break you in half, wee man, now get out.”
I had to walk five miles home in the rain.
When I got back to #113 Coronation Road I was shattered. I ripped off my wet clothes, lit the upstairs paraffin heater and put on the Velvet Underground and Nico. I slid the stylus across to “Venus in Furs” and clicked the repeat switch. When John Cale’s crazy viola and Lou Reed’s ostrich guitar kicked in, I went to the bookcase found the
I lay there and let the minutes wash over me. The minutes. The hours. All eternity. I thought of Orpheus searching for his beloved in the realms of Hades. I thought of Laura and Heather. I thought of Tommy and Walter. I looked for meaning. But there was no meaning. It was nonsense. All of it. There was method but no key. They’re all just playing with us, I thought. And then at three o’clock exactly the lights went out again.
12: BITING AT THE GRAVE
If the papers were to be believed there were two things going on in the world: the Royal Wedding and the IRA hunger strikes; one focal point was the baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the other was the middle of a sour, boggy portion of the Lagan Valley just west of Lisburn — the Maze Prison.
The Maze was built in the aftermath of the disastrous Operation Demetrius in 1971 when hundreds of IRA “suspects” had been arrested in a desperate attempt to stop The Troubles from escalating. Initially they were kept in huts at the former RAF base of Long Kesh, but eventually the Maze prison was built around them with its massive perimeter fence and eight concrete “H Blocks”.
Many of the internees had had no links whatsoever to the IRA but that had certainly changed after six months or a year’s detention by the British. The Brits have always been experts at pouring gasoline on every situation in Ireland: The Easter Rising, Bloody Sunday, Internment — all of them excellent recruiting tools for the radicals.
After Internment ended and the prisoners were released it was decided that IRA volunteers would only get jail time if they were actually convicted of a crime: murder, conspiracy to cause explosions, possession of illegal weapons, etc. Initially, however, IRA prisoners had been granted a Special Category Status because their offences were considered to be political in nature. But then in 1976, on a whim, this status had been revoked by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The prisoners had protested in various ways, most famously by refusing to wear prison clothes and smearing excrement on their cell walls.
In 1979 the Tories were returned to power but of course Mrs Thatcher had refused to “give in to terrorists” and would not backtrack on the Special Category Status. The hunger strikes had begun. I’d been sympathetic. Bobby Sands, Frankie Hughes and the others were merely attempting to return things to the status quo ante of 1976.
Bobby Sands’s election to parliament and death after sixty-six days on hunger strike had been the media event of the decade in Ireland and IRA recruiters were now having to turn away hundreds of young men and women. It did my heart no good at all to know that I was working for the same people who had been responsible for such utter incompetence.
Matty drove up to the Maze Prison walls, which were grey and thick and topped with coils of razor wire.
I turned off the tape of Led Zeppelin’s
It was raining hard and the prison officer did not come out of the guard hut to check the warrant card I was holding up.
That too inspired zero confidence.
“All you need is a hijacked police Land Rover and anybody could get into this joint,” I muttered to Matty who was sitting beside me in the front seat. Neither of us were even in uniform. I was wearing a black polo-neck sweater under my leather jacket and he was wearing some kind of white pirate blouse thing that he must have seen Adam Ant sporting on
The thick steel gate slid across on rollers and I drove to a small car park in the lee of a brown concrete watch tower.
“It’s going to be terrible in here, isn’t it?” Matty said.
I nodded grimly. I could only imagine what the hospital wing of the prison looked like with a dozen emaciated men hooked up to drips — dying by heartbreaking degrees while family members wept and priests gave extreme unction.
“Aye, Matty, I think so.”
Fortunately we’d come early. It wasn’t nine so the hacks wouldn’t be out of bed yet and the rain had kept away the demonstrators we’d been told to expect outside the prison gates.
Scowling, a chubby, blue-faced man regarded me through bullet-proof glass.
“Sergeant Duffy of Carrick RUC. I’m here to see Seamus Moore,” I said.
“Sign here,” he replied, passing me a clipboard through a horizontal slit.
I signed and passed the clipboard back.
He did not inspect my ID. I gave Matty a wry look and shook my head. A buzzer sounded and a metal gate opened.
With that we were into the main prison compound.
There were eight H Blocks in separate wings for Republican and Loyalist prisoners — in fact separate wings for the various Republican and Loyalist groups. There was a Provisional IRA wing, an INLA section, a UVF section, a UFF/UDA wing and areas for various other smaller factions.
We parked the Rover and got out.
“Sergeant Duffy?” an aged, grey moustachioed, sad-faced man in a prison officer’s uniform asked me from under a giant black umbrella.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Davey Childers, RUC liaison.”
We shook hands.
“We’ve arranged to have you meet Moore in the visitor’s area.”
“He’s not in the hospital?”
“Oh no, he’s only been on hunger strike for a week. That’s not necessary yet.”
I looked at Matty and we were both relieved.
We went through a series of narrow-fenced easements topped with razor wire until we came to a bunker-like one storey building that was also surrounded by a razor-wire fence.
This place was not like the Victorian prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state; no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking.
We walked through a set of double doors, checked in our weapons, patted an amiable sniffer dog and immediately saw a fairly healthy looking Seamus Moore sitting waiting for us at a long Formica table. He was bearded, long-haired and wearing pyjamas. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking what looked like a mug of tea.
“I didn’t know they were allowed tea,” Matty muttered.
“Don’t comment on it, we don’t want him to take the huff and storm off,” I hissed.
We sat down opposite and I did the introductions. Seamus was a good-looking wee skitter with green cat’s
