A Year in My Life - Alexander McCall Smith

The following article first appeared in the Observer in 2010

There are a couple of lines from a poem about Belfast that has stuck in my mind since I first read it over thirty years ago. We could all be saved, the poet says, simply by looking up at the hill at the end of the street, yet there is a perverse pride in being on the side of the fallen angels.

That hill is the Black Mountain that rises behind West Belfast. I saw it when I first went there in 1973 to take up a job – my first paid employment – as a junior lecturer at the Queen’s University. I travelled from Scotland on The Lion, the large car ferry that sailed between Ardrossan in Scotland and Belfast itself. As the ship made its way up Belfast Lough the Black Mountain was to be seen, as often as not through shifting veils of rain, brooding over the city. It was beautiful, I thought, as was the city itself, with its meandering rows of red-brick houses. I had been living in Edinburgh, which was classical and cold by comparison: this was a passionate, dangerous place – a place to which nobody could be indifferent. I was to spend a little over a year there – and although I had no inkling of this at the time of my arrival, it was to be the most important year of my life.

It seemed entirely reasonable that I should have misgivings about going to Belfast at that particular time. The latest set of Troubles, which had flared up so dramatically after the tragic events of Bloody Sunday only the year before, were in full spate. The British Army was locked in a deathly battle with the Provisional IRA and murderous paramilitary organizations of various hues were adding their contribution to the slaughter. The centre of Belfast looked like a city under military occupation, which, in a sense, it was. At night the streets were deserted, with army patrols and road-blocks at every turn. It was bleak.

The University had provided me with accommodation in a shared staff house in College Gardens, opposite the Methodist College. I had a flat on the top floor, no more than a couple of sparsely-furnished rooms, with an inadequate electric heater in each. I was in my mid-twenties and still single – it was good enough for my needs. I bought a couple of pot plants, a rug, and a bookcase of sorts: the sort of things that every young person buys on setting up for the first time. It was enough.
Shortly after I arrived, I heard my first bomb go off. It was not far away – a dull thud followed by silence. There were no sirens; it was as if the explosion was part of the day’s normal business. There were to be more bombs – and, like everybody else, I became used to them. I also heard gunfire – that was rare, but I remember sitting in my room one day drinking a cup of coffee when there was machine gun fire somewhere near, or what sounded like it. It echoed over the city, knocked back by the mountain.

I explored the city – or as much of it as it was safe to do. Not far from my flat was Sandy Row, an area of strong loyalist sympathies. The folk art paintings – King Billy on his charger or the large Red Hand of Ulster made it clear to anybody entering the precincts that this was no surrender territory. And everywhere one was given a date to remember – 1690.

My explorations were cautious – you quickly learned the rules of social geography in that divided city – but on one occasion I made the mistake of walking too far and found myself on the famous Falls Road, the epicentre of republican opposition to the British state and all its works. That might have been moderately unwise in normal circumstances – strangers were quickly spotted by watchful eyes – but on this particular day it was more than that; it was positively dangerous. The danger lay in the fact that more or less at the moment that I arrived on the Falls Road, a procession came round the corner. Marching in the middle of the road was a crowd of people with banners, while on the pavements, keeping level with the front of the crowd, were various young men with their hands tucked up their jackets. It was clear to me that they were holding guns.

The wisest course of action would have been to sneak away. Unfortunately, at the head of the crowd was a man with a large megaphone. As he approached he shouted out, his amplified voice booming out: If you consider yourselves true Irishmen, get of the pavement and into the road. I did not think that I was imagining things when I decided that he was looking at me.

There was only one thing for it: I left the pavement and became an Irishman. Now a member of the crowd and unable to detach myself without looking suspicious, I walked with my new companions into the city centre. We turned a corner and there was the army, soldiers strung out across the road, rifles pointed in our direction, preventing further progress. The crowd halted and people looked around for stones to throw towards the soldiers. I was stuck. I had no desire to throw anything, but if I just stood there my situation might become awkward. So I took a deep breath, detached myself from the crowd, and walked towards the line of soldiers … and through them. I passed between two soldiers who took no notice at all of me. Once through, I was able to walk swiftly down the road and to safety.

It was impossible to live in Northern Ireland at that time and to be indifferent to the weight of history that made the conflict what it was. For me it was a time of rapid political education: I had a sketchy knowledge of Irish history – now I began to learn rather more. I was determined to be as objective as possible, which I thought was the right thing to do in so deeply polarised a place. And it was easier, of course, for an outsider to see both sides of the argument. I had friends in both camps – I knew people of strong loyalist persuasion who saw the republican campaign as nothing but terrorism that had to be resisted at all costs. They pointed to what they saw as a priest-ridden theocracy to the south and shuddered. In an entirely different camp, I had close friends who were republican to the core. They had felt excluded by the protestant state and considered themselves Irish first and foremost. Their resentment over what they saw as unforgivable discrimination was palpable. One of my acquaintances of that persuasion said to me: I would not like to shoot a British soldier, but I would never, never inform on anybody who did. Loyalties to one’s community lay very deep and most people I knew seemed to restrict their friendships to those of the same faith. Indeed, one of my students told me that he had never really known anybody from the other community.

Each morning, before I went in to work at the Faculty of Law, I walked round to a small café nearby where I met a colleague for a cup of coffee. This colleague was David Trimble, who was then a rising unionist politician, and, of course, a subsequent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I liked and admired David for his quick mind and his interesting and entertaining stories. Each morning he gave me his take on the situation, and I listened without being in a position to say very much. Then, at lunchtime I met up with another colleague of completely different political leanings from David Trimble. This colleague became a close friend and he and his wife took me under their wing for the period I lived in Belfast. He gave me his views, which did not exactly accord with those I had heard from David Trimble earlier in the day.

But behind what were at one level mere political disagreements was a hinterland of tragedy and raw suffering. I remember one day being visited by one of my students who came to explain why he had been absent from tutorials. His brother, he explained, had been a bank clerk in a bank that became the object of IRA attentions. He had been shot and had died from his wounds. I listened to this story in silence – there was little that I could say other than to express my sympathy. But he seemed to want to talk, and he did so. “I don’t feel any anger towards the people who killed him,” he said. “What’s the point? Rather, I feel sorry for them.” I am sure that he meant it. Even at that stage, while the Troubles were in what proved to be their infancy, people seemed weary of violence.

My time in Ulster co-incided with a brief period of optimism. The Sunningdale Agreement led to the setting up of a power-sharing executive, and for a short time it seemed that this wretched conflict was going to be settled in a way that gave both sets of aspirations some recognition. It was not to be. I remember very clearly the sheer despair that many people felt as they saw the Ulster Workers’ Council strike bring the new dispensation to its knees. It was a time of complete gloom and bleakness.

While all this was going on, I made several discoveries. One was that I did not have the first idea of what things looked like from the other side so to speak. I learned a lesson in seeing both sides of a situation – a long-overdue lesson, of course, but one from which I hope I benefitted. Then I discovered Irish culture, of which I had been largely ignorant. A friend introduced me to the work of Irish short-story writers such as Frank O’Connor; another introduced me to Ulster poets such as Michael Longley and novelists such as Brian Moore. I have remained enthusiastic about these writers since then, and their work still reminds me to this day of that strange year in my life. A final discovery I made had nothing to do with Ireland but took place there. I remember the precise moment when, while browsing through the shelves of the University Library, I took down a copy of W.H. Auden’s Shorter Poems. I borrowed the book and dipped into it that evening, starting with his poem on the death of Sigmund Freud. It was a moment of revelation for me, and I have remained a devotee of Auden’s work since that day.

None of us knows in advance when we are going finally to grow up, but we can usually say, in retrospect, just when that occurred. For me, it was in Belfast, in a city torn by conflict, in a wounded but immensely rich culture, that I took those steps. I became a different person, I think, as most of us become when maturity and responsibility knock at the door. I have never been able to thank the people who helped me to make that transition – it would be embarrassing for all of us if I tried. I do, though, have a strong sense of being in their debt, and being in the debt of a city that at the end of the year I could say that I loved.

I have gone back several times, most recently to be given an honorary doctorate by Queen’s. At that ceremony I looked out from the platform, over the faces of the graduating students. They looked very like my students of all those years ago. But there was something quite different about the atmosphere. There was no unhappiness. There was no distrust. It was an occasion of smiles and harmony – these young people did not belong to rival groups – they were one. I wanted to cry, but obviously could not. Nobody would have known why. Some tears are destined to be private.

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