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I offered Tom my hand. Like two men shaking on a deal. He looked at it, looked at me and hesitated.

And then he smiled once more. His palm was freezing, his fingers firm.

—Tyrone Meehan, I said.

We were in the middle of the street. I would have liked to have seen myself at that moment. I felt certain that this outstretched hand was my first manly gesture.

—Tom Williams.

He looked at me for a moment and then added:

—Lieutenant Thomas Joseph Williams, C Company, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade in the Irish Republican Army.

He laughed at my wide eyes.

—I’m nineteen. Just call me Tom.

I joined the IRA on 10 January 1942, four days after we arrived in Dholpur Lane. Actually, not the IRA, not exactly. I was too young. Nobody in the area knew us. Being driven away by Loyalists was not enough to establish confidence. Like Tom before me and numerous IRA volunteers, I first joined Na Fianna Éireann, the Republic’s boy scouts. Since 1939 the Fianna were very diminished. They were forbidden in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, hounded and imprisoned on both sides of the border. Those who had tasted life in British prisons said that men in Irish jails had no reason to be envious.

Every Republican neighbourhood had its own youth unit. The IRA was divided into brigades and battalions. We were gathered into
cumainn
.

Our local meeting place on Kane Street was tiny and dark. It contained a table, a few chairs and a boxing ring. It looked like a sports hall, not a Republican headquarters. I spent my time between the ropes, fists raised in front of my eyes. We learned to punch without hesitating and to be punched without reacting. The lad in charge of us was called Daniel ‘Danny’ Finley, who showed no feelings or warmth and didn’t utter one word more than was strictly necessary. He was my age. His family had fled the Short Strand area after his twin brother, Declan, was lynched.

Declan was on his way back from secondary school in his Catholic uniform, with its green tie striped with ochre and the St Comgall coat of arms. The pavement was covered in rubble. He hesitated, then crossed the road, stepping over the invisible line that separated the two communities, and walked along the other pavement, on the Protestant side. He wasn’t trying to provoke anyone or start anything. He was making a detour to avoid a crumbling building.

A truck transporting timber drove past. Sitting on top of the stacked planks were a dozen Protestant schoolboys in blue blazers. One of them shouted, ‘Hey! A fucking Taig!’

Taig. Fucking Fenian. Filthy papist. The favourite insult of Loyalists in short pants. Declan raced back across the street and hit the kerb. He fell over, shouting. The blues pounced on him. He tried to protect himself by lying on his side, eyes closed, head between his fists and knees pressed against his chest. A child in his mother’s belly. They hit him with their knees, their fists. One boy jumped with both feet together on his head. Another threw a concrete block on his chest. And then they ran off, catching up with the truck at the crossroads and jumping back on, singing:

—At home! At home! This is our home!

A man cautiously opened his door, others moved towards the victim. A woman came out with a glass of water. All Catholic, all living along this street. Some adults looked on from the other side of the street.

Declan Finley died, his face crushed and his fists clenched. When the emergency services arrived, the boy’s spilled blood was brown, thick, mingled with the dust. With the aid of his walking stick, an old man crouched down. He dipped his right hand in the puddle and crossed the street, palm raised. On the opposite footpath stood a hundred silent figures. They parted. The nationalist carefully smeared the blood on their footpath. A man moved forward, two others held him back. The old man returned, turning his back to them.

The paramedics lifted Declan into an ambulance. On the other side, some kids were rubbing away the martyr’s blood by scraping their shoes on the ground.

That was just before the war. The Finley family left the ghetto to take refuge in west Belfast. Like so many others. Again, and again, and again. Coming from the north and the east of the city, Catholics were arriving in their hundreds and piling up in the brick catacombs.

I respected Daniel, but he frightened me. In the ring he punched like there was nothing to hold him back. One day, his nose bled in a torrent. He took off his gloves, wiped himself with both hands, then smeared the face of the guy who had dealt him the blow, his drenched, sticky fingers covering the terrified face. I was relieved to be on his side, on that of the Irish Republic, James Connolly, Tom Williams, on my father’s side. I sincerely pitied the guys who had to face us.

One Saturday in February 1942 I took part in my first military operation. For several months, the Northern Command had been collecting all available arms hidden in the Republic since the War of Independence. Some volunteers were crossing the border that night to hand the weapons over to the four Belfast battalions. We were children. We didn’t know much about this great countrywide relocation, and it was well after the war that we learned the scale of these clandestine transportations. Under the orders of the Republican Army Council, close to twelve tonnes of arms, munitions and explosives had been moved over fields on foot, in trucks, carts, on the backs of men and women, and without the British or Irish army suspecting anything.

That night, Tom Williams came to headquarters to pick out two Fianna.

—Can you whistle, Tyrone?

I told him yes, of course, since forever.

—Whistle.

I brought my two index fingers to my lips.

My father used to love my whistle, my mother hated it. In Killybegs, it was the Meehan gang’s signal for when we came across Timmy Gormley and his lot. Father Donoghue used to say that only the devil’s call could pierce the human ear in that way.

I whistled.

Tom didn’t look surprised. He simply nodded his head.

—In case of danger, I want them to hear you in Dublin.

Daniel whistled without his fingers. He rolled his upper lip and stuck his tongue to his bared teeth.

—Danny and Tyrone, ordered Lieutenant Williams as he headed out the door.

He and I received a dozen pats on the back. The other boys were pleased for us, and proud, too.

In the street, a woman and a girl were waiting for us to come out. I knew the first one, a fighter from Cumann na mBan, the IRA women’s organization. The girl probably belonged to Cumann na gCailíní, the Republican girl scouts. Tom walked in front, we followed in silence. Five shadows on the street.

—Tyrone.

The OC had whispered. Without stopping, he indicated the corner of O’Neill Street and Clonard Street with a jerk of his chin, tossing me a white
sliotar
edged in black. I caught it in one hand without thinking. A hurling ball signed by the Armagh team. Why? As a front? Of course, no question about it. You had to understand with a glance or stay back at headquarters. I took up my position and threw the
sliotar
against the wall so it bounced back into my palm. A kid passing the time.

Tom continued on his way.

—Danny.

Daniel Finley took up his position opposite me, on the other side of the road, facing Odessa Street. A bike was waiting for him, turned upside down against the wall, tyres in the air and the chain hanging off. My comrade knelt down, as though fixing it. The young girl went down as far as the corner of the Falls Road with her officer, and they stood there in a porch, like a mother and daughter.

Everything happened too quickly. Daniel was bent over his bike, the streets were empty. Then two cars pulled up. Eight men got out at a run, their arms weighed down. The IRA. Four turned into Odessa Street, the others passed in front of me.

—’Bout ye, Tyrone, a guy whispered to me.

I didn’t recognize him, didn’t even look at him. I was keeping watch over my corner of Ireland, my brick street, my wee soldier’s patch. I only saw the steel of the guns flashing in the light of a window whose curtains hadn’t been properly closed. Guns. Guns from the war. Republican arms. I’d never seen their metal, never imagined the wood of their butts, and there they were by the armload, flying past me within arm’s reach, wrapped in grey blankets.

Doors were opened. Men entered houses, backyards, tiny gardens. The cars left again. Tom came back alone. He passed right beside me. His face, his lowered eyes, his hurried profile. He was whistling ‘God Save Ireland’. He went back up towards Clonard Street. I was almost disappointed. I had imagined a wink or a word. Across the way, Daniel righted the bicycle and headed off as well. It was his eleventh time being a lookout. He knew how these things finished.

—You can call me Danny, Finley threw at me without turning.

So I left my wall. I put the
sliotar
in my pocket and went back to Dholpur Lane. I was walking differently. I was someone else. I passed a couple, a woman with her child, a young girl who was carrying her gas mask over her shoulder like a stylish bag. They didn’t notice me, even though I was a Fianna now, an Irish warrior. An IRA soldier, almost. In a few days, at seventeen years of age, I would join Tom Williams and the others. I’d be the one on the street, running through the cold night, weighed down for combat. I’d be brushing past an open-mouthed back-up Fianna in short pants. I’d secretly slip him his name. I’d be the one he watched vanish into our obscurity. It would be me, Tyrone Meehan. And I would be whistling ‘God Save Ireland’.

For the time being, though, either sitting on the ground or with my back against the ropes of the boxing ring, I was studying. I had left school to take up Republican education. Teachers used to move from
cumann
to
cumann
educating the Fianna. I had everything to learn about our country’s history. All I knew of our struggle was from my father’s stumbling drunken words and gesticulations. Though I knew the major dates and hallowed names, it was without having grasped their significance. My credo was infantile: ‘Brits out!’ I had inherited that certainty from my father, but nothing else.