Soldier Of The Queen (2 page)

Most of the crowd had already fallen back by this point, so a lot of people witnessed the hammering we dished out. Their anger brought them surging forward again. They threw missiles and tried to force us back down the road. We were heavily outnumbered and I thought we might be overwhelmed. I had visions of being hacked to death; I really thought one or more of us would be killed. For the first time since arriving at the VCP I experienced a feeling of real fear. However, my awareness of my willingness to kill gave me strength: if I was going to die, I had no intention of dying alone. I knew if I felt I was about to be overwhelmed I'd just start shooting. I thought that, even if I ended up being done for murder or manslaughter, a few years in an English prison would still be preferable to an early death. Someone shouted a warning and then I heard the crack of a plastic bullet being fired. The crowd fell back immediately. Suddenly it was all over - the fight had gone out of them. As we regained control I could see several people lying face down on the side of the road. Two civilians had to be taken to hospital; two policemen had also been injured. The police arrested four protesters.

We flew back to base, subdued and shaken. We all had difficulty sleeping. The incident seemed to typify our experience in Northern Ireland: one minute all was quiet, the next minute something blew up in our faces. We knew we would be facing something like that again before long. We also knew that next time we mightn't escape so unscathed.

The next edition of the local newspaper,
The Fermanagh Herald,
described what had happened as "The battle of Cassidy's Cross... the most serious of any checkpoint incident in the Fermanagh area for a long time." The local Irish Independence Party councillor Patrick McCaffrey was quoted describing the security forces' manner as "threatening and menacing". He said: "It was the Twelfth of July and it appears that the Orange blood was rushing through their veins and they decided they would teach the nationalist people of Kinawley a lesson ... I am calling it an ambush, attempted murder. Rubber bullets were fired. I saw one man being taken to the side of the road and then made lie down. He was then kicked and the blood was spewing out of his head. I believe he was one of the ones taken to the hospital." Mr Cassidy said his children had been greatly upset by the incident and could not be consoled. The army denied firing plastic bullets. The denial made us laugh. Technically the army was telling the truth in the sense that they had accounted for all the rounds that had been officially issued, so none could therefore have been fired. However, outgoing regiments pass on "extra"

rounds to incoming regiments, which means that after such incidents soldiers can usually produce all the rounds they were issued with and so can "prove" they didn't open fire.

Ten days later the army dismantled the checkpoint at Cassidy's Cross. The local paper applauded the decision: "The quickness of the Army's reaction in dealing with their case -indeed the fact they reacted at all - showed a genuine concern by the Regiment based here at present, the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards." I do not suppose the Cassidy family or the hospitalised protesters thought we had shown them much concern. And I know that many of the people I encountered in the name of the Queen during that violent summer of 1981 did not think I showed them any concern. But at that time I could not have cared less. To me I was in a war and they were all the enemy. The only concern I had was for myself and a handful of my fellow soldiers. I had no intention of becoming a casualty in someone else's war.

The protesters and the other nationalists I battered during our four and a half month tour of duty must have regarded me as just another vicious Brit in uniform. They might have been surprised to know that, despite my English accent, my parents were Irish Catholics - and that some of my relations lived just over the border.

I hadn't wanted to be a soldier, but I hadn't wanted to go to prison either. However, at the time I joined the army those had been the alternatives I faced. I doubt whether I was the British Army's most unlikely recruit, but I must have been in the running for that accolade.

Beware the Ides of March, they say, only bad things happen on that day.

My mother didn't know the 15th of March had ancient links with impending danger, although she did know something was up when I started kicking my way out of her womb as she did her shopping. The year was 1960 and the place was Dunstable in the English county of Bedfordshire. My mother collapsed in the street with the first contractions, then picked herself up and staggered home to our council maisonette. She sent my four-year-old brother out to summon help, but he went to play in the garden instead. So, as always, she just got on with it. Apparently - it's not one of my memories - I made my way out easy enough and emerged

onto the front-room floor. My mother broke the umbilical cord with her hands and I started screaming. Perhaps I knew what was coming; perhaps I'd picked up in the womb that I was about to move into the domestic equivalent of what the army would call a hostile environment.

My mother came from Sligo town, one of 13 children raised in a four-bedroom council house. I was her third child: there were two boys before me, Jerry and Paul. I was christened Patrick Bernard, taking the first name from my father and the second from my uncle. As soon as I could exercise any choice in the matter I stopped using my father's name. He came from Dungarvan in County Waterford, but never told me anything about his background. In fact he never told me anything about anything: there was no such thing as a normal conversation in our home. Over the years I have pieced together fragments of his story and, although I'll probably never stop hating him, I have come to understand better why he became such a vicious bastard. Things started going wrong for him at birth: he was born illegitimate at a time when, and in a place where, illegitimacy stamped you with the mark of the beast. Hate the sin, but love the sinner, Christians sometimes say, but at that time in Catholic Ireland I think they must have hated the sin, the sinner and the product of the sin. The experiences of his childhood killed any decency within him and convinced him that only by suppressing any normal human emotion could he hope to survive. That was what life had taught him and it was the only lesson he wanted to pass on to his children. He hated to see us showing emotion. Even as infants he expected us to behave like grown men, or, rather, like the man he had grown into - cold, hard and ruthless.

But still those first few years in Dunstable were relatively happy - at least compared to what came later. My mother has quite fond memories of the time: going for walks on the downs, visiting nearby Whipsnade Zoo and getting money regularly from my father, who worked on the production line at the nearby Vauxhall car factory. However, for some reason when I was four he decided he wanted to move to Bilbrook, near Wolverhampton. Almost as soon as we arrived things changed for the worse. My father, who had always drunk, began to drink excessively. He also became extremely violent towards all of us, my mother especially. He would come home barely able to stand, spitting obscenities at my mother before beating her senseless and slouching off to bed. Memories of my mother screaming as she was beaten still haunt me. She would be screaming for him to stop and we the children would be screaming with fear. Other nights, even without much drink taken, he would just turn off the television and sit there slandering her family, humiliating her, degrading her, even questioning the point of her existence. His most decent act would be to send us to bed. Then I would lie awake in the darkness listening to her sobbing downstairs, pleading with him to stop. As I got older I would sometimes overcome my fear and shout out: "Leave her alone, you bastard." And he would come running up the stairs to beat me.

My father had his drinking to finance, so for our upkeep he gave my mother either no money or very little money. I hid in the front room with her when creditors came knocking. My mother took on three jobs to feed us: cleaning in the very early morning, working on a factory production line during the day and cleaning again at night. Sometimes my father would even manage to take off her the little she earned. I grew very close to my mother and only felt secure when she was near. For this reason one of the most traumatic days in my life was my first day at school. I remember the pain and sadness I felt as I left her at the cast-iron railings of St Peter's and St Paul's in the centre of Wolverhampton. She was crying and I was crying. She told me to hang on to the red toy petrol-tanker she had given me. The next thing I remember is standing in a queue with the other boys. An older boy grabbed hold of my toy and said toys were not allowed. He tried to pull it off me; I pulled it back. A struggle developed and the other boys started shouting: "Fight! Fight!" A nun swooped down and separated us. She asked me my name.

"
Bernard O'Mahoney," I said.

She said I had to call her "sister" whenever I spoke to her. "You're going to be trouble, aren't you, O'Mahoney?"

I said yes.

She screamed: "Yes, what?"

I said: "Yes, I am going to be trouble."

She put her hands on my shoulders and shook me: "What did I just tell you? You must call me 'sister'! You must always call me 'sister'! Do you understand?"

I can still smell the smells of that day, especially the lunchtime ones. I did not like liver, hated the smell and never ate it at home, so of course the first school meal had to be liver. I sat at the dinner table hardly able to touch anything: the smell of the liver had contaminated everything on the plate. Another nun spotted me. She came over, lectured me about the world's starving children, then force-fed me through my tears. Finally I swallowed the last revolting mouthful, then ran to the toilet and vomited up everything. When the final bell went that day I was a ball of emotion: I couldn't wait to get out of that hellish place. I ran to the gates where my mother was waiting and hurled myself into her arms. As we travelled home on the bus I felt secure once again. I prayed for the bus to keep on going and going, away and away from the school and on past the house of my bastard father.

My mother was religious, my father pretended to be. My mother acted in a Christian spirit, my father acted out the Christian rituals. Like all God-fearing Irish-Catholic families, we had that picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging above the fireplace in our front room. Even to this day I hate it. Before we went to bed my father would make us kneel before it and say our prayers out loud. He would shout and swear at us drunkenly if we had not prayed to his satisfaction. His God looked from the picture, arms open, bleeding nail wounds in his hands, a bleeding open heart and a pitiful look on his face. My brothers and I would gaze back, terrified and crying. If my father had known what my infant mind was asking of God, he might have stopped me praying, because I used to pray with all my heart that he would drop down dead. On Sundays we had to go to church, although my father rarely went himself. He would mess us about so much making sure our Sunday best looked right that we would always be running late. This would lead to violence. On the times he accompanied us he would usually stop us in the church porch, near the two bowls of holy water, and punch, prod or kick us for making him late. He would threaten to give us an even bigger beating at home if we misbehaved inside.

My father had another notion to move, this time to Codsall, a small town quite close to Wolverhampton. He had found us a three-bedroom terraced house there which backed onto the main railway line. At night I felt the house was going to fall in on us as coal trains thundered past at the end of the garden. In 1967 my youngest brother, Michael, was born prematurely and went into intensive care. Following the birth my mother became extremely ill and had to stay in hospital. Michael grew stronger, but my mother got weaker. One night my father -at my mother's insistence - took us to see her in hospital. She waved and smiled at us from behind a glass screen, but she looked so ill. I was terrified she would never come home. My father showed no concern either for my mother or for the new baby: he would not let anything interfere with his drinking. At one point we didn't see him for three days. There was no money and no food in the house. We survived on school dinners. Our local GP even called on my father and appealed to him to take better care of us, but my father ignored him. In the end my mother was so worried about us that she discharged herself from hospital.

As I grew older I didn't try to hide my hatred for my father. I forced myself to endure his violence stoically: I didn't want him to know he was hurting me. His dislike for me seemed to grow in response to my defiance. His physical violence only ended up hardening me, but his verbal violence had a more disturbing effect. He would grip me by the throat or hair, shouting obscenities in my face while prodding or punching me in the head or body. His favourite insult to me was a reference to the circumstances of my birth.

"
You were born in the gutter," he would say, "and you'll die in the gutter." He would tell my brother Paul that our mother had tried to kill him by pushing him in front of a bus when he was in his pushchair: "She didn't want you, son," he would scream.

When we came in from school we had to go straight to the small utility room where the coal was kept and clean our shoes until they shone. Then we had to take them to my father in the front room for inspection. He would check the soles for dirt and if they were not to his liking — and they never were - he would throw them back at us. If he had to do this more than once he would follow us into the utility room and stand over us while we cleaned, slapping and punching us. But this was nothing compared to what he saved for our mother. She would never spend anything on herself: she never owned a coat and her other clothes tended to come from jumble sales. She never smoked, drank or even went out socially. Yet he treated her like a dog. In fact, if she had been a dog he would probably have been arrested for cruelty, but because she was his wife the police and others felt there was nothing they could do. It was, they said, a domestic.