At the beginning of the movie, Belfast, a caption comes up on the screen with a date: 15th August 1969. That was the day of my 12th birthday. I don’t recall anything as momentous happening as the scene that unfolds for Buddy, the protagonist in Branagh’s story, but I was certainly in Belfast, for that’s where I was born and lived until the age of 20 when I moved to London to go to Art School. I left, like many others, because there was little to stay for. Culturally, Northern Ireland had become a desert and lacked opportunity but, much worse than this, it was a dangerous place to be. In the years between 1969 and 1998, over 3,500 people were killed and many more maimed in the never-ending round of bombings, shootings and tit-for-tat terrorist killings. We never knew where the next atrocity would take place. It was this sheer unpredictability that was the most frightening aspect of The Troubles. The activity had all the hallmarks of guerrilla warfare but what made it terrorism was the fact that, along with fighting each other and the British army, who were stationed in the province, the Republican and Loyalist groups often targeted locations where they knew ordinary civilians would be.
Branagh’s story is set in a working-class area of the city where Catholic and Protestant families live amiably side by side until violent, Loyalist thugs start to force the Catholic families out. I was brought up in a relatively quiet residential street on the outskirts of Belfast that was mostly Protestant and it never experienced the shocking rioting that takes place in Buddy’s street, but none-the-less, many of the Catholic families that lived near us were drummed out when the Troubles first started and violence began to escalate across the city in the early 1970s. My sister and I went to school close by and we socialised in the area too: crossing town at night was unwise and, anyway, we didn’t know people from other areas. To ensure I got home safely, my father used to collect me in the car from dances and parties, despite the fact that he had already gone to bed and had to get up again - poor man - for aside from all the usual worries faced by parents of young adults, those in Northern Ireland had the added concern that their kids might get caught up in the sectarian violence when out late at night. Like any normal teenager, I was mortified by the idea that my dad was taking me home and he was always under strict instruction from me to park round the corner and to NEVER get out of the car, for I knew he would be wearing his pyjamas under his overcoat and I couldn’t bear the embarrassment if anyone saw him!
My family in 1965. Thats me - top left - aged 8
My parents were English and moved to Belfast in 1939 for my father’s work, so they didn’t subscribe to any of the deep-rooted hatred that drove the conflict in Northern Ireland. Indeed, my Father sat on an education committee whose aim was to integrate schools across the religious divide. As a consequence, two Catholic girls, both of whom I became friends with, joined our school for the sixth form. But other than this, I rarely came into contact with Catholics, one simply didn’t mix with ‘the other side’.
WHATS IN A NAME?
There’s a scene in the film, where Buddy and his cousin Moira talk about knowing if someone is Catholic or Protestant by their name. I grew up with this too. If Sean or Mairead, they were a ‘Fenian’, Billy or Margaret, a ‘Prod’, but this theory runs into trouble with less obvious names – Thomas for example. “What’s he?” Buddy asks about someone he knows from another street. “Definitely Catholic” says Moira ‘But he’s not, replies Buddy triumphantly, “he’s a Protestant!” There were also the commonly repeated misconceptions that you could tell Catholics because they “kicked with the left foot” or that their eyes were “too close together”. I don’t know what the Catholics said about us.
A NEW NORMAL
We became used to a life where soldiers crouched on street corners, their guns at the ready in case snipers began shooting. The city centre was ringed with tall security fencing and checkpoints where civilians had their bags and bodies searched before they could pass through and cars were regularly stopped and searched by the military on their journeys through more rural areas. My father’s tailoring shop in the centre of town always had the door locked after he was held up at gunpoint one Saturday and lost the day’s takings to two masked gunmen. Despite all of this, people, as best they could, went about a fairly normal life, trying to ignore the distant “boom” when a random explosion took place somewhere and, shockingly, becoming almost immune to the nightly news listing that day’s death toll.
My Father’s shop in Howard Street, Belfast
July 21st, 1972, became one of the “bloodiest” days in The Troubles when The IRA placed bombs in 22 different locations, to explode within minutes of one another bringing chaos and panic across the city of Belfast as thousands of people tried to flee to safety. I worked at a pet shop in the markets area during the school holidays and was serving a customer that day, when police came running down the street yelling at everyone to “Get Out!”. We just dropped everything and ran. Minutes later a huge explosion rocked the area, blowing out all the windows and blasting our eardrums. As glass rained down along the street, we could do nothing but watch helplessly. Eventually, once it was considered safe by the police, we were allowed back into the street and picked our way back towards the shop where puppies and kittens yelped and mewed in their cages that always sat outside the front of the pet shop. Most seemed unharmed physically although I’m sure they were all completely traumatised. I wept, with many others, as we began to try to clear up and assess the damage. It turned out, we were the lucky ones that day: 139 people were killed or injured. That night my family watched the TV news, transfixed with horror, at the scenes of rescue workers, in the aftermath of a massive explosion at the Ulsterbus station, scraping up the remains of bodies and putting them into black rubbish sacks. It was a particularly dark day in 30 years of dark days that lasted until – and even for a time after, the signing of The Good Friday agreement in 1998.
BEFORE THE TROUBLES
Life was not always so grim. My childhood in Belfast was pretty much like that of any other child living in a British provincial town at the time. The scenes in the movie of hordes of children in the street, playing tig, swinging on lampposts and using dustbin lids as shields in make-believe battles (before the real battles start) all bring back fond memories for me of how simple - and what good fun - our games were then. We would go out after breakfast and not return home until hunger got the better of us. I grew up in a street of mostly girls: seven or eight of us at any one time would play hopscotch, hide and seek, and skipping with a log rope stretched across the street and two ‘enders’. “Car” someone would shout when a rare motor vehicle appeared in the street, and we’d move to one side to let it past and then resume our game. We used to zoom around holding wooden coat hangers with dials drawn on them and making “vroom, vroom” noises to imitate the engines of motorbikes. We had so much freedom then, compared to the children of today.
The films Buddy and his family go to see at the cinema also rang true for me. Young as I was, I can remember that my father could barely contain himself at the sight of Hollywood sex symbol, Raquel Welch wearing her skimpy fur bikini in ‘One Million Years BC’ and we all sang along joyously when watching ‘Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang’.
YOU HAVE TO LAUGH
There was humour too - always humour - as there often is in the blackest of times. Even after the Troubles began and life became difficult, someone was always quick to tell a joke that allowed everyone to exhale, let off steam and pretend, if only for that brief moment that everything was going to be OK. And so it is in the movie – amidst the tension and the terror, there are many laugh-out-loud moments that counteract it. As well as humour, there was singing - in Ireland, everyone loves a sing-song. There’s a lovely scene in the film, of a street party when Buddy’s Aunt Violet has a few too many wines and begins a drunken rendition of “Danny Boy”, the archetypal song of the homesick Irish exile. I remember well an occasion, when one of the Catholic girls I eventually became friends with at school, drove me across the border to the South of Ireland one Sunday, and in the pub we visited, people were taking turns to stand up and sing plaintive Irish ballads. Recalling the millions of their countrymen who emigrated, the Irish, like the Scots, are very prone, especially when drink has been taken, to singing songs about being far away from home – even when they’re there.
DID BRANAGH GET IT RIGHT?
There has been some criticism of Belfast, that it isn’t gritty enough and doesn’t portray the “real” Belfast as it was then: Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe are considered much too glamorous for working class people, the shop fronts too immaculate, the streets too tidy and the Van Morrison soundtrack cliched. Some of this is fair comment - Belfast was pretty run down then and there wasn’t a lot of glamour but, with a certain amount of Vaseline on the lens, Branagh presents his own wistful reminiscence of the time. Any internet search can give you all the depressing detail you need about the misery of The Troubles. It is pleasing, for once, to watch something about Northern Ireland that, along with harsh reality contains a lot of joy and laughter. As for the soundtrack: poet and singer-songwriter Van Morrison is the celebrated son of the city of Belfast and an outstanding musician. The mix of spiritual, soul and R&B in his music provides the perfect and authentic accompaniment to the movie. Who else, I ask you, could have done a better job?
I have seen the movie three times: first with my siblings, then with two friends and most recently with my daughters. Each time I came away with a lump in my throat and the same mixture of emotions, accentuated by the closing caption of the film: pride – that I was one of those who left and was able to follow my dreams, wistful that whilst it’s my homeland I will never live there again and sadness for those whose memories of Belfast can only be sorrowful ones.
I grew up right next door to you - I left Belfast when I was 23, worked in London for a while and after marrying I lived in Boston, USA for a few years. Your comment about accents reminded me of one occasion when I had to ask members of the public not to use the lifts - sorry - elevators! - as there was a fire alarm. On hearing my accent a man asked me where I was from. When I said N Ireland he asked how long I’d been in America. When I replied ‘18 months’ he said “your English is really very good”. Gee thanks mister! I also remember returning to Belfast when I was quite heavily pregnant with my second child. I had gone into the centre of Belfast with my mother and 2 year old daughter. I popped into M&S on Royal Avenue and my mother went off with my daughter arranging to meet me later. A bomb went off without warning - the building shook and the road outside filled with smoke. I stood at the door with the other shoppers - no-one really knew what to do. Then out of the smoke emerged my mother with my daughter in her buggy. “There’s been a bomb” she announced cheerfully and then suggested we go for coffee somewhere. She was obvious still used to how things where but I had forgotten in my few years away. Sorry to go on so long but your post brought back lots of memories!
Thanks for getting in touch Aileen. It all seems so long ago now doesn’t it? And yet some of the memories are just as vivid. Terrifying story about your mum going off with your daughter and then the bomb blast happening. You must have been out of your mind with worry. I hope you continue to enjoy my posts.