My grandfather died a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on November 8, 1987, he would have been wearing his pressed dark suit with his medals and a poppy attached to the lapels – not for show or to make a political statement – but as a way to honor his dead pals.  My grandfather, who fought in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, would have been proud to join the old men gathered at the Cenotaph in County Fermanagh in 1987, where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. A 12th victim, local school principal, Ronnie Hill, spent the next 13 years in a coma and died in 2020.

Not soldiers. Not combatants or comrades. Just ordinary people – families –  in warm coats over their best Sunday clothes.  Civilians. 

A witness, Pat O’Doherty, told the New York Times

The explosion was followed by ”an unnatural silence.” Three seconds later, all the crying started and people were running in distress, shocked trying to find relatives, trying to search for a reason, trying to search for reality. Reality just didn’t exist here this morning.”

There was no reason.

Indefensible. Unnecessary.

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It is because of my grandfather, that I have always known that “the war to end all wars” ended in 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He told me so many times on our Sunday walks. It is because of him and his harrowing tales of fighting a battle that was not of his making, that I am a pacifist.

At just 25, he had been part of what they called a “template of civic cooperation.” Private James McFadden, No. 15823, he enlisted as a volunteer soldier with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Following his training at Finner Camp in County Donegal, he was promptly shipped off to France, where he fought, frightened yet brave, in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, where half a million German and Commonwealth soldiers were ripped apart. For untold miles, he crept through the muck – weary, thirsty, lost, and far from home. One of too few who survived the battle at Passchendaele, Granda carried to safety another young soldier, Sammy Campbell, who hailed from The Upperlands, a village outside Maghera. Granda told my mother the story many times – lest she would forget. He told her of the raging hunger that drove him to steal chickens from a French farm and of the thirst and the weariness that almost broke him.

My grandfather did not belong in the muck. He belonged in his waders on the banks of the Moyola river,  fishing for trout, or at The Moss, cutting turf.  He belonged in the green and blue spaces of Seamus Heaney’s poems. I know my grandfather would have agreed with Harry Patch, Britain’s last Fighting Tommy, who died in 2009 at the age of 111. Disillusioned and devastated by war, Patch once wrote that

politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.

By the time I was a teenager, studying for my O-level English exams which required me to learn by heart Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” I had already committed to memory my grandfather’s story of  the “war and the pity of war,” and how it had been fought on faraway fields, in particular a story of a dark evening that found him and his brothers in arms, afraid, parched with thirst, their billy cans empty. Crawling on their bellies through a field somewhere in France,  they must have felt something close to euphoria when they came upon the little stream that would slake their thirst, only to be overwhelmed by a horror that would haunt my grandfather into old age.

On his knees by the edge of the stream, he cups the cool water in his hands. As he brings it to his face, he notices its red tinge and without having to look further, he knows. He knows that flowing in the foreign water is the blood of a soldier. Phlegmatic, my grandfather recounted those details for me in a voice I can still hear. I can still see him. His eyes the same blue as mine, his trademark plaid shirt, and the Donegal tweed cap he twirled in the fingers of his left hand. Unloading the story, he pauses to drink tea.

He liked his tea with just a drop of milk – enough to barely color it – and two spoonfuls of sugar.  Increasing the odds that it would be strong, his was always the last cup poured from the pot. Often with two Rich Tea biscuits impossibly balanced upon a saucer, the delicate china cup somehow belonged in his elegant hand. To cool his tea, and to my great amusement, Granda sometimes poured it into the saucer from which he subsequently drank with little slurps. He wore cable-pattern vests my aunt had knit for him pulled over those signature checked shirts – his favorite was red and white. My mother is convinced that wearing those patterns was his way of remembering what he wore and the hope he carried to America as a young immigrant. The timing seems right, given the rise to popularity of Pendleton plaid shirts before World War II. As she remembers my grandmother’s funeral, my mother also tells me that the plain blue shirt he wore to it seemed as out-of-place as he must have felt in a world without her.

Before his world changed, Granda and I spent part of so many Sundays on long walks. At the top of the lane, we always stopped and looked right, looked left, looked right again, before turning left towards the Moss Road, along which gypsies were occasionally encamped. Sometimes, as a treat for me, he gave me one of the barley sugar sweets from deep in his pockets. He taught me to look out for nettles and the big broad docken leaves that were supposed to soothe their sting.

As a girl, my mother had been sent by my grandmother, down this same road, to deliver sandwiches and flasks of milky tea to her father and the other turf cutters. I often wonder what they would have made of young Seamus speeding by on his bicycle, sandy hair blowing in the wind. Could they ever have imagined the smallness of their world enlarged for global audiences through “Digging” and other poems that pulled taut the stuff of life and those who lived it within and beyond the banks of the Moyola River:

“My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf.”

Could they ever have imagined our world as it is today, over a century since the Armistice was signed far away in a French forest, still reeling from atrocities such as that in Enniskillen, still in the grip of a pandemic that has now claimed over a million lives and is not yet finished.

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