100 miles

This is a short piece I wrote and read at the John Hewitt International Summer School in Armagh in July 2023. I was one of three participants in the Memoir workshop, led by poet/memoirist Maureen Boyle, invited to read at the Creative Writing Showcase on the final day. I will write a post later about this fabulous festival but here we go. I might add it was a difficult piece to read in a room full of Northerners. I was very nervous, not helped by the stone-cold faces I met when I looked up from the lectern but I think I atoned by the end and captured what they already knew about their Southern Brethren.

100 Miles

The dark wet mornings of my adolescence were punctuated by the beep beep beep of What it says in the Papers on RTE Radio 1 that always opened with the latest casualty count – bombings, shootings, punishment beatings. In the busyness of serving breakfast to our family of eight, my mother often stopped to steady herself on the counter; no doubt thinking of some other mother’s son. I’d be thinking will my latest forged signature on the letter home for my bad behaviour pass the Principal or Teacher just one more time? 

I was 12 when I first met a Protestant, we were segregated too. The Protestants that attended our convent were from families who couldn’t afford boarding school yet they always found the funds for their sons. Perhaps they knew that the Protestant Christian Brothers’ experience would entail a whole new level of horror. The girls would sit quietly reading or doing homework during Religion class, sit out Holy Communion at the many Masses and such was my ignorance that I was shocked to see they too studied Irish because we’d been conditioned into thinking they were not like us. It would be some years later when my brother ditched our native sports in favour of Rugby, that our home would be full of Gordons, Blakes, Stuarts, and Spensers because sport, like illness, is a great leveler. 

In the early 90s at college parties in Dubin, there was always a Buzz Kill Norherner —usually reading History in Trinity, an expression we’d never say in the south and only heard on University Challenge — that everyone avoided because nobody wanted to hear the woe is me stories of your troubles at a party.

A few years later studying in Belgium, a professor asked me if it was a relief to get away from the war and I said but that’s 100 miles away, there’s no trouble in the South. Doubting me, I asked, can you hear a riot in Brugges or Leuven? 

Living in Madrid in the Summer of 1994, my French roommate tells me of a ceasefire and I immediately dismiss it saying it won’t last and it doesn’t. 

In 1998, I’m pregnant with my first son. Maybe it’s the hormones or a need to hope for a better world and I think maybe, just maybe, it’ll work.

In 2019, I’m sitting in this audience listening to Judith Thompson’s opening address as she documents your collective trauma and it lands. All I’m left with is the grief, guilt, and shame of my selfish ignorant youth, for not caring about any of you. We can’t go back in time but if I could, I’d go back to any one of those college parties and stop and listen to a Northener wanting to talk about home.