As an admirer of Seamus Heaney’s work, I have visited the HomePlace centre in the village of Bellaghy and relished the intimate way in which it tells the story of the poet within his local context. Yet what always obsesses me throughout my visit is the fact that HomePlace stands on the former site of an RUC station.
This obsession relates to the fact that I was born in 1955 and grew up as the Troubles unfolded. Due to the swift militarisation of the Protestant community, I witnessed the tiny rural Baptist church which my father pastored become the spiritual home for young prison officers, policemen and part-time members of the Ulster Defence Regiment.
These brutal years impacted on the young men I knew, just as they did on countless others in Northern Ireland. The legacy was made clear to me once more when I began to undertake work for a charity which attends to the needs of scores of former security force members whose lives have been profoundly damaged.
I conducted oral history sessions and I was given permission to lead a creative writing group for members of the organisation. Their poems and prose filled the pages of a book which they entitled Breaking the Silence. I also wrote two plays based on experiences of the men and women I met, then I produced these with the help of professional actors in venues where a small audience of former colleagues felt safe enough to gather and engage in post-show discussion. Many veterans still live in fear.
So, I hope it is understandable that I find the precise situation of HomePlace in Bellaghy village to be rich with ironies. When I visit, I am delighted to be in a place that celebrates the articulate, generous self-confidence of a remarkable poet, but I cannot help listening out for the unheard voices of the RUC men who once served on this site, in a heavily fortified barracks in a divided community.
It was this awareness that led me to try to keep on “breaking the silence” by writing a poem that vocalises what a former police officer might possibly feel about the HomePlace project, which has replaced his perilous workplace. I wanted to explore the degree to which any unhappiness he felt about the transition might bleed into a deeper sense of loss within a post-Troubles world in which the dismantling of numerous police stations across Northern Ireland speaks to him not just of peace but of regime change.
I wondered if HomePlace might also kindle a sense which often surfaces within the pro-Union community of being linguistically and vocally stumped, in a world of Irish language signage, untrustworthy Tory rhetoric and, in this man’s case, a sublime edifice to the power of poetry in a place where he once filled in the station’s terse daily record known as the occurrence book.
I considered whether the voice which emerges in a poem such as this might be constricted in its own utterance by an inherited history of religious conflict in which a dogma of othering, suspicion and enmity had long occupied space better occupied by careful self-reflection and innovative verbal craft.
HOME PLACE
I've crossed the famous Bridge of Toome,
And driven past the Lough Beg whooper swans
And now I've sensed what colleagues say is lost and gone.
The roadway's signage told me all – our planted land's
Lar Uladh now, the local council's comhairle too.
It's through the language that a war is won.
And what's the sacrilege my comrades note?
They've turned our former station to a poet's shrine.
Five million pounds to knock our law and order down
And house a duffle coat, a schoolboy's bag
And one old fountain pen. That's mockery alright.
(Home Place means home for who and what and when?)
I met the writer once. He seemed, like many here,
A decent man. I'm told he loved the natural things –
The Sperrins in the west, the shoreline of the lough.
But while they loved their images we had to think in lists,
The genealogies the Good Book holds, the valiant dead
Upon the plaque beside the dark blue Presbyterian pulpit-fall.
And boy, we know that words can count – without them
There'd be pages blank inside a police occurrence book,
No record of the duties done, time in, time out.
I shared my nights with men of courage here,
Our Lugers snug inside our holsters, watching the street,
The turret of Bellaghy Bawn, those suspect headlights on the hill.
Perhaps I ought to name them "stations of the cross" –
Those former barracks found at Fivemiletown,
And Claudy, Coagh, Loughgall and Newtown Stewart,
Rathfriland, Kesh, Greyabbey and Kilrea
And then I'd get my chance to rhyme them off
Then propagate them in a poem one day.
As someone who has written about the Irish experience of the Great War and was fortunate to interview Irishmen who had survived the hell of the trenches, I have been interested ever since in the silence of all too many former soldiers who cannot bring themselves to speak of their war. When I came to think of a collection of prose and poetry into which my Bellaghy poem might fit, and which spoke of the young men who once shared a pew with me in church, I composed a poem about a Great War veteran who
"came home from the war
With a wound in his throat where his voice should be"
A range of other poems emerged in which I sought to offer a voice to those who, like my former Bellaghy police officer or my Great War veteran, struggled to share a narrative of their experiences and were in danger of suffering the corrosive sense of inauthenticity that comes from not having one’s story articulated, recorded and thus potentially understood.
In one of several other poems in which I sought to break the silence, I tried to give voice to the bereaved son of a RUC officer. This young man speaks of his boyhood strategy for coping with violent loss. I imagined that as a traumatised child he kept reading a book entitled The Illustrated History of Flight which his father gave him just before his death and how from this he constructed a fantasy in which his father fought as a valiant airman and was shot down over the English Channel during the second World War.
The title of that book gave me a title for my collection. The theme of flight came increasingly to signify something crucial as I reflected on my own hasty departure from Northern Ireland in 1973, unlike so many from my background who stayed on, often joining the security forces, risking life and courting controversy on a regular basis. But flight is also a classic response to trauma, involving withdrawal from the source of pain and quite possibly a disabling reluctance to speak of what has happened. Silence, in fact.
In the final poem of The Illustrated History of Flight, I came back to the Protestant religious heritage of my childhood and wrote about the silencing which the radical reformation sect known as the Anabaptists had quite literally experienced, as depicted in a historic record of their persecution known as The Martyr’s Mirror.
The tongue-screw which is described in that book was a weapon of torture used by the religious establishments of the day to silence dissent. Modern-day Anabaptists still recount stories of the tongue-screws which were fitted into their ancestors’ mouths to prevent them from singing hymns and witnessing to their faith, even as they were being carted to the stake.
I see much of my work as an expression of the acute pain which has afflicted all too many in the pro-Union community of Northern Ireland. Retrieval and vocalisation of that pain can be a writer’s task.
ANABAPTIST
The four imperial prison guards
Who pinned her struggling to the floor,
Spent twenty minutes tightening
A tongue-screw to her mouth
Which stopped the hymn that through
Her week-long wait for sentencing
Had merited those lashes on her back.
A silent death, tied tightly to a stake,
Would bring conclusion to this bout of heresy,
A metal thong would force her lips
To yield up blood not exhortatory words
While being carted towards the stake
Where heretics must perish in the square,
Their faith as tinder to the Spanish torch.
There is a Martyr's Mirror copperplate
Engraving of that 16th century afternoon
Where, with the crowds all gone and justice done,
Beneath an Antwerp sky devoid of cloud,
Her son is scrambling in the embers
Of her slumped and blackened corpse
To find her tongue-screw gleaming in the ash.
