The bus taking me to the Donegal Gaeltacht when I was 11 took the quickest route, cutting across Northern Ireland and in and out of two Border checkpoints on its way. Armed British soldiers boarded and patrolled the aisle, possibly convinced a bus full of tweens and teens was maybe also carrying paramilitaries and/or their weapons, but equally possibly doing it to put the frighteners up this load of softies from Kildare.
I wasn’t afraid, I was buzzing. This rigmarole was one I was well used to, having crossed the Border countless times during my young life. My mother is from Fermanagh, and my grandmother lived there until her death in the early 2000s. We visited the tiny village of Belcoo often, itself just spitting distance from the Border with Cavan, and lobbing distance from Donegal. I was like Billy Big Balls once the soldiers had departed, blase and jaded by the fuss. You’d have sworn I’d grown up up to my neck in the Troubles, rather than as a grandchild of the North.
All those strange experiences have stayed with me: the soldiers casually strolling through Granny’s little back garden, the sometime foot traffic checkpoint at the top of her little road and the quizzing you’d get from grown men while you were just on your way to the shop with an excitingly heavy pound coin in your hand. At the top of the main road was a heavily barricaded RUC station, so fortified that I thought it was a full-blown prison.
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Granny used to buy Start cereal when we were there, a great treat somewhat offset by the Sacred Heart pictures glowing in every room of the house. The red light bulb threatened my sleep every single night I stayed there. Granny would whistle through her false teeth in her heavy Fermanagh accent, not unlike Reverend Ian Paisley, a great villain of my childhood. She’d curse the soldiers and the carry on but was largely legitimately jaded by it all.
Watching Derry Girls, I felt a kinship with Erin and co, but tinged with fraud. I didn’t grow up surrounded by fear and violence like they did, I was just a visitor. One of my earliest memories is learning of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing. Enniskillen was a place where we spent a good deal of time. I’d go with my parents and then later on my own on the bus with Granny, visiting exotic shops including Woolworths and Etam.
What if I was mistaken for a gun-runner or caught up in an attack? What if the checkpoint soldiers wouldn’t let me through?
The IRA claimed the bombing was carried out in an attempt to kill British soldiers at a Remembrance Sunday event. It killed 11 people – 10 civilians and an RUC police officer. (A 12th person died years later.) Thirteen children were injured. Many of those killed were older, and I remember becoming slightly obsessed with the fact that Granny could have been an innocent bystander. She would definitely have been at Mass on a Sunday morning, but that fact didn’t dissuade my imagination.
My summers and Easters and midterms in Fermanagh were not all without anxiety then. The first time I took the bus up by myself, probably at aged about 12, I was anxious about disembarking in Enniskillen and getting a second bus to Belcoo. What if I was mistaken for a gun-runner or caught up in an attack? What if the checkpoint soldiers wouldn’t let me through? What if I couldn’t get home?
Once I reached Granny’s, I loved reconnecting with the children who lived on her road. They thought I was exotic, and I thought the same of them. I thought the naming system for their school year groups was daft and they thought the same of mine.
Reading Louise Kennedy’s stunning novel Trespasses, about a young Catholic woman in Belfast in the 1970s, reminded me how fleeting my Northern Ireland experiences have been really. My mother grew up in the midst of the Troubles, and trained to be a teacher in Belfast in the late 1960s. Whenever I’ve talked to her about her earlier life she’s again legitimately blase, much like the Derry Girls who have more important things than checkpoints and bomb scares to worry about.
The Northern Irish edge to our family has always been rich with language and relative exoticism. Phrases like “Gee whizz” and “Aye surely” were part of our lexicon, and a woman of a certain age is usually an “Aul doll” when my mother and her sister converse. Potato farls were the food of the gods and nothing will ever feel quite like the weight of that pound coin, heading to the shop to buy some Ormo soda bread and “something nice” for myself. As long as I made it through the checkpoint.