It never occurred to me that I was a child of The Troubles until I stumbled upon a scholarly dissertation about Northern Ireland. As a child, I was usually at a safe distance from “The Troubles,” I saw at 6 o’clock every evening  when we turned on the news or the odd time our kitchen window rattled when a bomb had exploded somewhere close. There was the time the car-bomb exploded outside Halls Hotel, and then the time my  brother, a freshly minted journalist, had to interview the grandmother of three little boys murdered, burned to death on July 12, 1998.  Richard, Mark and Jason, just eleven, nine, and seven years old, had been asleep when a petrol bomb was thrown through the window of their home. Then there was the otherwise typical Saturday night out on the town in Belfast. Made up to the nines in my big 80’s hair, I was planning to stay with a college friend, but when we returned to her brother’s house, we found out her car had been stolen and set ablaze to serve as a barricade across town. So it was from a safe distance that we learned to recognize the dull thunderclap of a bomb.

My friend Steve Cross, also from Northern Ireland and now living in the same Mexican village I call home, also recalls being at a safe distance most of the time. Except on November 8, 1987 when he and a bunch of his pals from school were gathered at the Cenotaph in Enniskillen for a Remembrance Day ceremony.  That year, Remembrance Day fell on a Sunday. Steve typically didn’t attend, but that morning was different, because one of his friends had been assigned the task of laying a wreath at the event. So Steve was there when, at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded in a building nearby, killing eleven and wounding 68.

I will never forget the sound of the blast or the 10 seconds of silence that followed it, broken by the screams of realization that we had been bombed and people were crushed in the rubble when the building fell on them.  A friend of mine said later, “We were supposed to be there to remember the dead, we were not there to be pulling them out from the rubble.” Those words have stayed with me.

The dead included a girl he knew from primary school, Marie Wilson, and the parents of several of his friends. As she lay dying, her father, Gordon Wilson, held her hand and shortly  thereafter told the entire world in the gentle voice of a peacemaker that he forgave those who killed her. There was a 12th victim, Steve’s school headmaster, Ronnie Hill, who would spend the next 13 years in a coma as a result of his injuries and died in 2000. He tells me one of his prized possessions back home is an old school report where Mr. Hill had written,”Stephen is a bright pupil, who unfortunately seems to garner as much pleasure from irritating me as he does in trying to please me!”

Remembered for his kindness and his sense of humor, Mr. Hill was not a soldier. Nor were the others killed that morning. Nor were those forever affected by this atrocity – not soldiers or combatants or comrades. Just ordinary people – families –  in their good warm coats over their best Sunday clothes with poppies pinned to the lapels of their jackets.  Civilians. All changed.

Steve tells me that one weekend, he stopped for a drink and a bite to eat in a bar here in the village. There, he encountered an old man, a Canadian ex-pat, selling poppies and completely unaware of the ‘poppy day massacre.’  Steve shared the story of the Enniskillen bombing, bought a poppy, and left.

But on the way home, for the first time in the 35 years since that harrowing morning, Steve pulled over, and sat in his car and cried.

You know what it’s like. When you grow up in it, it’s just a way of life. It’s just life. But now, with an outside perspective, you realize it is not life.

A child of The Troubles – physically untouched but forever scarred by the terrorist’s bomb.

What happened in Enniskillen – and all the other places on the mental map we share of Northern Ireland’s Troubles – was indefensible and unnecessary. The pain of all that was lost is magnified by the fact that no-one has ever been charged with the murders.

My grandfather is also on my mind on this anniversary of the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive that morning,  he would also have been at a Remembrance service,  proud and stoic in his pressed dark suit with a row of 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.

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. He 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.

It is because of him 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.

By the time I was a teenager, studying for my 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 and wondering, as the United States braces itself for the 2024 election; as children of war lie dead this very morning in the rubble under Gaza; if our bitterly divided America might once gain be on the brink of civil war.

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