It was the second time I’d tried to find his grave.
Having travelled twelve thousand miles to sit with him and reflect on how our ‘lives’ had crossed I wasn’t going to give up and go home with this ambition unfulfilled, with just some solo, dangling conversation to reflect on.
Twelve months before I had been granted the Inaugural Westpac Arts Excellence Award and with it came sufficient money to enable me to travel for the first time and visiting Milltown cemetery and the grave of Bobby Sands was high on my list of symbolic pilgrimages I intended to make.
Once I finally accepted that I did have to leave town, that is.
Bobby Sands .
Not everyone’s cup of tea.
But to me he was a hero, will always be a hero. A person of honour and integrity, a ‘man of soul’, a man who did what, had I been in his situation, I suspect I would have done.
Gender exceptional, of course.
Starved to death on hunger strike for a cause he believed in, and him an MP at Westminster!
There but for the Grace of God …
But we all get called out in our own way, the trick seems to have to do with growth – grow sufficiently to ensure that, when it comes your turn, you have your ears tuned to hear it. And tuning the ears is an holistic exercise – spiritual and emotional as well as physical.
I wrote a play based on Sands’ writings while in the notorious H Block of Long Kesh Prison and exoerienced, in some small way, the level of hatred the Provisional IRA generated even far away in that most English of New Zealand cities, Christchurch.
I didn’t care. I simply didn’t care.
After one performance three ex-Mancunians came backstage with the serious intention of beating me up. Fortunately I had a late night performance of another show to do, so, by the time they got backstage, they met ‘Angel’, a particularly aggressive and unpleasant bouffon character I had created replete with wig and 6 inch heels which made me appear about six foot six! It didn’t stop one of them trying to punch me once he realized who I was (maybe the pink mini dress with the blue spots antagonised him). His mates dragged him away before he could do any real damage … to my nailpolish!
The truth of that is plain: you can’t bash a bouffon.
Belfast was an extraordinary and life-changing experience.
I found that most travelers (those who bother to go to Belfast at all) usually ‘do’ Dublin first – and then travel to the North. I did it the other way around, my primary interest being Belfast and ‘the troubles’. I was still nominally an Anglican then but with a Catholic heart and mind, a republican soul and socialist politics, so …
I suspect it’s a different perception if you travel to Dublin first, since Dublin is Europe’s party city – still celebrating independence from Britain in 1921 and commemorating the events of 1916 with endless toasts, faces tear-stained and mouths moist with golden Guinness foam as Yeat’s paean to Easter ricochets, like lead from an Armalite, up, down and across O’Connell Street from the vacant lot that was once Nelson’s Pillar all the way West to the blood-spattered chambers of historic Kilmainham Jail:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
It tends to make me lyrical (or maudlin perhaps), does this land of happy wars and sad love songs.
But then again, maybe it’s just the brew.
Belfast is different.
My pilgrimage began with a bus ride from Glasgow to Stranraer, a small village on the West Coast of Scotland that boasts being the ‘gateway to Ireland’ but should brag about having the best fast ferry in the world!
Arrival at Port Belfast was deeply moving, watching the late afternoon post-Christmas lights get closer, then the short bus ride to the city past a fabulous new complex next to the water which immediately gave the lie to the city being a landscape pitted with bomb craters, peopled by shady characters in cloth caps each ready to put your kneecaps on the endangered list.
Only in Ireland would you find a $50m performing arts complex called the Waterfront Hall – they call a spade a spade in Ireland, at least when naming buildings, everything else is lyricism personified. Had I arrived earlier in the afternoon I would have been able to attend the world premier of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet which opened the complex, but instead I saw, the next day, the first ever live theatre production in the main auditorium, an Irish language performance of J.M.Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
I suspect it wasn’t that great.
But I was in Belfast, and that was all that mattered.
By then I’d been in the UK, alone and away from home, for well over a month and the changes that have marked the last few years of my life had already begun. For almost twenty years I had created ‘art’ – theatre experience after theatre experience, each over-lapping the one before, with no time to reflect – and now I found myself in quite a different place. For perhaps the first time in my life I valued my own company. I realized, again for the first time, that I was an independent person, capable of getting from A to B, capable of functioning adequately in a country where I was not known, where the language was alien and where, horror of all horrors, I had to just be me with no reliance on the super-structure of reputation and achievement to support me.
And I found I could do it – and do it well.
The result was that the people I met took an interest in me, asked me about myself and unexpected doors opened.
Better still, I felt comfortable and happy about myself. My skin fitted. In all possible ways. It was as if I were unscarred.
My first day in Belfast I tried to find Bobby Sands’ grave.
I located the railway track, crossed it, and found the beginning of the famous Falls Road, entrance to the catholic area of West Belfast that leads to the Andersonstown Road and the Milltown Cemetery where Sands and many of his republican comrades lie.
A short detour behind the notorious Divas Flats with its British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary lookout on the roof, and there was St Peter’s Cathedral.
A feature of my adventures so far had been a quite unexpected obsession with catholic (and other) churches.
My dear friend Fr Bruce Goodman had been instrumental in my actually traveling – he had forced me into his car and taken me to his travel agent and made me book my tickets after I chickened out and wanted to give the award back (simple fear of the unknown and a belief that I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own) – and he was ill back in New Zealand so everywhere I went I lit a candle for him and said the odd inarticulate word to some almighty or other who I had then yet to come to terms with, belief never having been my strong suit, but who I knew would be on first name terms with my beloved Marist friend.
Ever one to see beauty and romance in the silliest things, I was astonished, when I stood in front of the Cathedral and looked back over the black macadam forecourt to find the tar seal glittering in the sun like a thousand fairy lights. It surely had to be God shining in this otherwise desolate place. I said as much to the only person I met who brought me down to earth: ‘To be sure no’ he said, ‘that’s small shards of broken glass from when the armaments go of and all the windows are shattered. It’s years worth. Mind you,’ he said, ‘it’s been a few weeks now.’ This, as it transpired, was less than a year before the signing of the Easter accord.
Further on up the road, having passed countless streets with their identifying signs adorned with the word ‘saoirse’ – a term I had seen but had no idea what it meant – and many murals, I finally saw a landmark I knew: the Bobby Sands mural I had grown to love. Unanticipated tears were followed by shock as I realized the roadway ahead was jam-packed with military and quasi-military personnel and vehicles, all armed to the teeth.
I knew my allegiances would be obvious and waited to be searched, questioned, thrown in jail and beaten but, when nothing happened, I watched how the locals behaved and did the same: eyes down, briskly walking, aware of the leveled firearms and the hard eyes in the very young English faces.
I read in An Phoblacht the following day that troops and RUC were hunting for a republican escapee with supposed drug connections but … who knows.
I had simply fallen in step with a young mother pushing a pram and did as she did, a silent friend in the moment. A friend in need who never questioned my motives.
That first afternoon I found a cemetery at the top of the Falls Road.
I found it by following a funeral that stopped the traffic in this busy road. The coffin was carried on foot to the cemetery and I followed the mourners, never thinking that one road could be gateway to two catholic cemeteries. There must have been over 200 people following the coffin and just before reaching the gates of the graveyard I broke away and entered by a side gate.
The midwinter afternoon was clean, clear and bright and the cemetery exactly the same. Lawns were trimmed, graves beautifully kept and, contrary to New Zealand where vandals seem to delight in the nocturnal wrecking of memorial stones, here there was none: no graffiti, no broken monuments, no overgrown plots. Some as old as 150 years had fresh flowers left on them. Family clearly mattered in this rough, blue collar, working class community. I recall looking up at an angel on a plinth and marveling at how scrubbed it looked, recall wondering (it felt like for the first time) whether it was worth being remembered like that and surprising myself with my affirmative response. Still modified with a ‘but not for me’, it would be worth it all the same, I thought.
I wandered the graveyard increasingly aware of my lack of planning. I knew Bobby Sands was buried up here – I’d been told so by Gerry Adams in a late night 1993 telephone call (but that’s another story) – but now I was here, and realized the size of the place, I knew my search would be futile.
My obsession with things random was unlikely to help me here.
After two hours of searching it began to escalate to dusk and, despite my new-found confidence, there were ample reasons not to be found in a West Belfast graveyard after dark so I left. In doing so I managed to exit via a gate that opened onto the Andersonstown Road which headed away from the city and I walked this for some way, looking for a pub and a Guinness and the hope of some republican craic. This never eventuated for when I did find a pub it was full of normal everyday people, not a ‘hardman’ in sight, and the topics were familiar in another way: family, racing and football.
A salutary lesson, indeed.
What I did find, as the evening slid in ‘like a patient etherised upon a table’, was Milltown Cemetery.
As the gates were closing for the night I moseyed around for awhile and then left and walked the Falls Road again and back to my backpackers in the protestant east. I won’t deny a mild fear that the place might be bombed as, while I didn’t so much mind the idea of dying or even dying so far from home, I did object to the idea that I might be killed by those I supported, my own people! A few beers with the non-threatening manager of the backpackers – a young man from Timaru – helped allay my fears.
The next day I walked the Falls Road again, this time straight to the Milltown Cemetery, a far more sombre place than that of the day before which I now knew to be the City Cemetery.
Milltown has more trees, old trees not unlike the pines that edge many New Zealand graveyards. The stones were older, the verges less kempt, but still there was no evidence of vandalism even at the far reaches of the graveyard where the terrain edged its way to the top of a ridge over-looking the city.
Again I was lost in a wilderness of marble and seemingly endless paths. How many times I returned to the main gates and lurked there as I considered what to do next I have no idea but it was often enough for me to eventually look over the road from the gates to a large stone and steel building with a draw-bridge type entrance and razor wire across the roof. As I watched two military armoured personnel carriers and a police car drove at speed up to the drawbridge which lowered and they sped inside – the Milltown Police Station. On the exterior of the gates was ample evidence of Molotov cocktail attacks and, to my horror, a closer inspection revealed three moving cameras above the gate, cameras that were caressing my every move. I immediately had a flashback of my own behaviour, beginning the evening before: a long-haired, denim clad person hovering suspiciously at the gates of the cemetery and going through the same rigmarole again and again and again.
I fled shamelessly back into the pine trees awaiting my imminent arrest – which of course never came.
On recovering I found a rather ancient and rickety shed and looked in through the dirty window. What I at first took to be my reflection – the window was very grimy – turned out to be the caretaker of the graveyard and he opened his door and asked me if I wanted something.
Of course I bloody did, and I was sufficiently annoyed with my pathetic self to tell him exactly what I’d come for.
He responded by telling me exactly what I wanted to know.
A few minutes and some wobbly directions later I found a row of simple headstones no higher than six inches from the surrounding white marble chips and engraved on them were the names of the hunger-strikers who were buried there. I felt numb for some time and sat on a bench and looked out over the city. No tears, just an aching wonderment at what I’d brought to an end in arriving at this point in time and at this place in my life, the twin questions: what am I actually doing here, alive in this place of the dead, and what was the point after all – all this, and an edgy realisation that some of the most profound moments in one’s life have a banality about them that is both reassuring and uplifting. The late afternoon sky was ragged: high cloud with plenty of red and gold. Unromantic. Somewhat wild, but unthreatening. Just a day really.
I sat by Sands’ grave and spoke to him, listened, spoke some more, said thanks for the play, for his life, for being like a brother. He didn’t object when I took some of the white marble chips to, I’d hoped, make a rosary. In fact I gave them to friends and family and now have none left. A good reason to go again.
He wasn’t there, yet he was everywhere – in my replies to my own questions some of which were unasked, he was there in the slow musky dusk, in the prayers I said, the forgiveness I asked, in the taste of frangipani in my nostrils, and the respectful distance that my new friend the sexton kept while forever keeping me in his sights for, sure enough, when I finally rose to leave, he was suddenly by my side and we walked in silence towards the gates.
A churning, moribund, waning, failing of my spirit that, from time to time and unbidden, had haunted me all my life left me that day and I know why – yet I have no words to put to it because I choose not to name it. The outcome was that, for the first time in my life, I realized that I could take myself seriously, see myself in heroic terms if I wanted to, talk to angels and specks of dust if I so wished and not give a tinker’s cuss what anyone else thought.
An hour later it was dark and I was sitting in the sexton’s hut finishing a mug of luke warm tea and listening to stories from the ‘70’s, some I’d heard – the dirty protest, the blanket men – and some I hadn’t heard but which had a ring of truth to them for this was the guardian of the republican graves who I had found and who had sought me out, a true ‘hardman’, yet nothing like I expected he would be, rough like my father but gentle like my father too.
I left and don’t remember saying goodbye. There were no tears this time. Just a one finger gesture towards the steel door under cover of my jacket.
Oh, yes, I’m not that brave.
And the message (there always has to be a message): Seek, and ye shall find.
I sought ~ but what I found was far from what I anticipated.
It wasn’t supposed to be contemplative, this pilgrimage.
I thought it would be … confused, angry, impassioned … it wasn’t.
It was simply right.
And, mercifully, I became like them: changed, changed utterly.
A terrible beauty was born.
You’re gone, you’re gone but you’ll live on in my memory,
You’re gone, you’re gone but you’ll live on in my memory.
E noho ra, Bobby.
We will remember you.
As I left, the sun sank from the russet evening sky.
The word saoirse means, roughly translated, freedom and liberty.
These absolute human rights ~ the right to be free and the right to liberty ~ are so at risk in today’s world that my spouse and I named our son, now age 8, Saoirse as a reminder to him, and to us all, how easily totalitarian governments ~ and I include the US in that list ~ can wittingly degrade these rights until we become simply cyphers and our human potential is minimised to no worthy end.
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
dykiegirl 