Over the past few weeks, the BBC documentary Once Upon a Time In Northern Ireland has aired. The five-part series, directed by James Bluemel, eschews the words of pundits and politicians, instead sharing the viewpoints of ordinary people whose lives were caught in the various conflicts of the Troubles. It’s proven a surprisingly big hit with British viewers, people who perhaps had never thought much about the war that raged on their doorstep for decades. And now, when friends here where I live in England ask me about some detail or other, I’ll do my best to provide context from my own perspective.
At some point in all such conversations, I realise I can’t remember the last time I talked about this stuff, for so long and with such free rein, with Irish people. Among my Northern friends, there’s not much to tell and always the sense that, since we all had the same experiences – or worse – none of us would profit much by comparing them. And among my friends from the South, well, back when I lived there, I developed a sense that I mustn’t mention the war.
When I was in my 20s and living in Dublin, I attended a course on TV writing. It was given by a respected writer of TV and film. He was funny, generous with his time, and full of advice, anecdotes and encouragement for those of us – ie all of us – who wanted to write the long-form stories that had recently become fashionable on TV.
We were a mixed bunch, a dozen or so, with wildly different stories we thought needed 50 hours to tell; kitchen sink dramas, knockabout farces and at least one sprawling space opera that spanned multiple planets and was drawn loosely from the Táin.
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I was deeply insecure. I was the youngest person in the class, the only one from Northern Ireland, and almost certainly the one with the least writing experience. My classmates’ offerings intimidated. Their plots and characters were fully formed and real, whereas mine were hollow, paltry and banal. I did, however, have what I thought was a good idea.
I wince now to recall the details – and, thankfully, find I can’t – but my page-long premise was a drama following the lives of people released under the terms of the Belfast Agreement. While I can’t remember too much of how I expected this hypothetical show to play out, I do remember the class, and our teacher, being appreciative and complimentary. What I remember most from that day, however, was what the teacher said in summing-up. The fact he liked the idea was particularly impressive, he remarked, because “anything about the Troubles tends to give me food poisoning”.
By the time I was writing full time, I only touched on the topic of the Troubles when absolutely necessary, like when English newspapers would pay me because they didn’t know any other Northern Irish people
The rest of the class chuckled in that way you’d recognise from someone griping about airport waiting times, or Dublin house prices. It was a knowing laugh, for he had spoken aloud the thought that filled the room. I laughed, too, quite outside myself, a laugh borne by that strange mental vapour I succumb to whenever an insult is smuggled inside an affirmation; those micro-seconds when taking on any amount of bathwater is worth the baby being saved.
Later, I told friends in my Rathmines flat. They decried his wording but quite a few acquaintances insisted, under the duress of a slowly emptying jar, “youse do go on about it a lot, though”.
“Not you,” they corrected, for I was one of the good ones, “but some of you.”
[ ‘What did you do in The Troubles, Daddy?’Opens in new window ]
This surprised me, since none of these acquaintances appeared to know very much about the Troubles, so their hazardous over-exposure to Northern Irish people had clearly left them educationally unscathed. What I took from this was that they found the topic a bit depressing and self-indulgent and, fearful of coming off like a paramilitary interrogator, I dropped such queries. I spoke of it little and wrote of it less. By the time I was writing full time, I only touched on the topic when absolutely necessary, like when English newspapers would pay me because they didn’t know any other Northern Irish people, or at the very least none who could write jokes. When my childhood memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? came out two years ago, I discovered, with mild amusement, that English reviews saluted its open-eyed view of the conflict, whereas Irish ones were more likely to praise it for not getting too mired in such details.
My English friends, by contrast, perhaps after watching a documentary such as Once Upon a Time, or reading books such as Anna Burns’s Milkman, or Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, now ask me quite candidly about such details. They presage every question with a plea of ignorance for which they profusely apologise, and I begin my answers with the same preamble, very nearly off rote. Yes, I was young enough to have missed much of the worst of it. No, I didn’t live in any of the built-up areas you’d have seen on the news. And, yes, the IRA did once blow up a customs hut near our house, which propelled its rear wall, with sink attached, into a smouldering heap in the middle of our garden.
I give dates, and names, and all the real, fully formed plots and characters that any stab at fiction could never turn up. While doing so, I hope I could do the same now back home, now that I remember so much I’d forgotten all those years I never mentioned the war.