In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day and it is also still impossible to visit my mother and the place that made her. A phone call later will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily back into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it won’t be the same as surprising her the way I used to do with a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. Even if I were able to fly to Belfast, I would still have to stay away from her, COVID restrictions in place for the foreseeable future hoping to tame the pandemic that has changed everything for all of us over the past twelve months. As my brother reminded me yesterday “this thing makes a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”
She has been on my mind lately, especially when I am cleaning up after the well-meaning and hard-working Mexican men who show up every day around 8am to work on the house I recently bought. It’s an older house, the kind that needs more care and cleaning and patience than I anticipated. Home renovation is a bit like childbirth – you forget the pain – which is probably why people do it more than once – people like my parents. And, I suppose, people like me.
Before YouTube videos and apps for that, my father taught himself how to make things – and how to fix them. And, my mother was always close by, ready to hand him whatever tool he needed and to clean up after him. I remember one particular spate of home improvement when he single-handedly gutted the ground floor of our house in Antrim to create a new kitchen and dining room and then he added a laundry room outside, doing all the wiring and plumbing himself. He added a glasshouse in which he grew tomatoes and other exotic plants that didn’t really belong in Northern Ireland but they were right at home with him. He painstakingly decorated the outside of the glasshouse with dozens of scallop shells that he and my mother collected from a beach in County Donegal.
I’ve said it before and I mean it. Daddy belongs in a Heaney poem – he has the “Midas touch” of the poet’s thatcherand the grasp of the diviner. Frugal and a fixer, his is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike as a young man in the early 1960s. Ever the pragmatist, he reminds me that this began as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. His first project was a guitar for my uncle. The family lacked the means to buy an instrument for the boy who loved to sing, so my father – at 10 – figured out how to make it.
A man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, forever sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. If you’re going to do it, do it right. He obsesses about such things, and I understand now his sense of urgency over them. understand now because the truth – I think – is that we want to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. But sometimes we are no match for the things that cannot be fixed.
My mother knows this, having lost too much sleep since that November evening a decade ago when her phone rang too late to bring anything good. I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on the telly, so she can hear me deliver the blow. “What? What’s this? What’s this anyway?” she cries into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And again, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone once more, unable to fix my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from us.
Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands and wear my mask and get vaccinated and stay home.
And, I’m home again.
There is a clothesline in my garden, and every time I look at it, I am immediately transported to my childhood home on the Dublin Road in Antrim. One day, shortly after I bought the house, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over cobbled streets that would not be out of place in County Clare, to a little shop in the village. “Si amiga,” and she handed me a bag of pastel colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to my sunny kitchen and while the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and then I turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “there’s great drying out there today.”
Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother is with me. She is rescuing a great armful of sheets and towels and daddy’s shirts from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Soon there will be the folding, a precise ritual, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s remodeled kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon.
Facing each other, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped towards me, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we met to make the final fold, while unbeknownst to us, her father took our pictures and wrote our names in the sand, knowing the tide would wash them away. Forever.
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“
When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. Perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused, I’m supposing, with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .“
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on Great Victoria Street, the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in Good Vibrations, I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie would always know what I would like, and if I asked, he would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who ever bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from The Europa, the most bombed hotel in Europe, and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I cried for all that my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I somehow forget all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast-to-Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. I wonder now what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when musicians were afraid to come because of the terrible thing that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, forty five years later, the shock and revulsion returns, the fear we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings.
Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
Almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. He was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978. They sang about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to one. My school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the right groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
With vinyl, it was also important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983. Feeling flush with my university grant check, I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with a little red strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record than with all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first syllable is sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked which meant he knew what else I would like. One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And, he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably have found it during the week in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me.
I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was Ray Millar,the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf,” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” spin around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. A labor of love, there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into an iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) Then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he writes in this “Ode“
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes. CD burners, iPods, and iTunes Have taken the place Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon Enough, clever introverts will create Quicker point-and-click ways to declare One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor. But I miss the labor Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song At a time. It sometimes took days To play, choose, pause, Ponder, record, replay, erase, And replace. But there was no magic wand. It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape Was sculpture designed to seduce And let the hounds loose. A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave, A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,” Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye. The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” or something by Hank. But O, the last track Was the vessel that contained The most devotion and pain And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I had discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto it. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, I cannot. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.
Ken would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. How I would have liked just one more spin. For the good times.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
Having worked in education for over thirty years, it is not uncommon for me to encounter – in real life or the virtual version – my former students, all grown-up, some of them married with careers and children. Surreal to find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with these adults who, just a twinkling ago, were scribbling in composition books about who they might become. They are often incredulous to discover I am now the mother of a daughter who is over a decade older than they were when they sat in my classroom. Equally perturbed by this scenario and its implications is my daughter. It amuses me to watch my students confront the truth that I had a life outside their classroom, and my daughter acknowledge again that once upon a time I was not her mother and other people’s children took up most of my time and even considered me cool with great taste in clothes and music.
And, before that, there was another time when I was younger than she, bored and adolescent, rolling my eyes as my mother told me from behind the ironing board, “Daughter dear, the world is your oyster,” and maybe to charm me out of my ennui, she would add, “you have the heart of a lion.” Non-plussed, I probably dismissed her as someone who had no life before I came along, someone who could never have been a hopeful teenager or somebody’s BFF or the one with the great sense of style. What a fool I was. My mother was all of these . . .
She is far away today, in the place that made her, South Derry, the distance between there and here stretched taut on Mothering Sunday. A phone call or a visit on Facetime will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it will not be the same as handing her a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table or spotting a suitably showy Mother’s Day card on the mantelpiece. Even if I were there, I would still have to stay away, adhering to the rules of social distancing that are in place all over the globe to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the crisis that has only begun to unfold.
When we spoke by phone earlier today, she sounded vexed and resigned as she relayed the ways in which her ways of living have changed in recent weeks. She and my father have been warned not to go out – the village supermarket now presents a threat to them. So too does the church that has always been their refuge, and it is to that space I am drawn today, to an enduring memory of my brother and me.
It is perhaps 1975, and we are scrubbed clean and uncomfortable in our Sunday best. We join a crooked line with all the other children, and make our way to the front of the aisle of Antrim’s All Saints Parish Church, where each of us collects from a beaming Reverend Thornton a single fresh flower to give to our mother.
Fresh flowers.
My mother is wholly responsible for my appreciation – and expectation still – of flowers as apology, get-well wish, gratitude, birthday greeting, or a just-because (like the asters and tulips da used to pull from our garden and hastily wrap in newspaper as a present for my primary school teachers). Before all the shops shut down, before we were warned about the ease with which this virus can spread, I had planned again to send flowers this year along with gourmet chocolate brownies from a company in the Cotswolds. I knew the latter would remind her of a Christmas night in Phoenix, when I baked a pan of chocolate fudge brownies while she and my dad napped. More than that, the appeal of the chocolate brownie company is in its packaging. The product arrives in a brown paper package tied up with string, the kind of package that for years has traveled across the sea from my mother’s address to mine.
Since the late 1980s my mother has sent such packages – boxes filled with Antrim Guardian newspaper clippings about people I used to know but might not immediately remember, chocolate for my daughter, the obligatory three or four packets of Tayto cheese and onion crisps, teabags, and something for me to wear. This last is typically something for which she paid too much, and something I never need, but she always dismisses it as “just-something-to-throw-on”. My late husband was always intrigued by the brown wrapping paper and the string, unaware – as was I – that, by all accounts, consumer demand for my mother’s type of handiwork would become mainstream. Ordinarily, I am but a few clicks away from artisanal gift-wrapping, jam-making and even the knitting of very complicated Aaran sweaters, all of which she has practiced and perfected since she was a girl – not because it was organic or trendy, but out of necessity. But this is an extraordinary time.
My mother’s first job was in Crawford’s shop in Castledawson. Behind the counter, she learned, among other things, to wrap a tidy parcel in brown paper and string. In the same way she had learned to bake and sew by watching her mother, she watched proprietor, Jim Crawford, skillfully wrap parcels for the customers. Soon she was expertly packaging sweets and biscuits – Rich Tea or Arrowroot – that would deliver a taste of home to neighbors further afield, like Mrs O’Connor’s daughter across the water in England. Always efficient, Mr. Crawford had even devised a method of tying newspapers with string so news could travel easily to his relatives in America or Australia. My mother still has the knack for it, quick to remind me that all this wrapping and knot-tying was long before there was any such thing as Scotch tape, and instead she carefully poured hot sealing wax over the knotted string. There is heart and craft in such an activity, so much that I cannot bring myself to open these Mid-Ulster dispatches. They remain in a drawer in my Phoenix kitchen – preserved ordinariness, a tribute to the way things used to be, the way they might be again.
I have no idea how the ”Mothering Sunday” tradition began; it may, like a lot of things, have its origins in mythology. It is certainly a red-letter day for the greeting card companies with people like me handing over a fistful of dollars for a folded piece of card-stock emblazoned with a generic message and a stock photograph. In truth, my mother’s day card purchases may have been less about making ma’s day and more about assuaging my guilt over having put down roots so far away from home.
Thus, it is a marked day, Mothering Sunday, and I wonder about its impact on a day that also belongs to adult children without mothers and to mothers with sick children, to women who ache to be biological mothers but are unable, to mothers whose children no longer speak to them and to children whose mothers have disowned them perhaps over a grudge or because the Alzheimer’s has rendered them strangers. What of them?
My mother was the first and best woman I will ever know. As those former students remind my daughter, I remind myself again that my mother has always been the woman who would be my best friend. I just didn’t always know it.
The truth is that greeting cards and cheery bouquets mean little to this woman who has tossed and turned too many nights since November 11th 2011, when the phone rang too late to bring good news. I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on telly, so she could hear me deliver the news that broke her heart. “What’s this anyway?” she cries into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And then too soon, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone again, unable to mend my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from me.
Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands, that I will stay away.
So thank you, ma. On Mother’s Day and every day. I love you.
Any atrocity reported in isolation can be used to beat the other “side,” but together with stories from both communities, it is clear that no “side” has a monopoly on suffering or loss.
~Stephen Travers, July 30, 2018
On July 30, 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, the final details were being planned for what would happen the next day in Claudy, a sleepy little village in County Derry. Three car bombs would be strategically placed in a town center bustling with Monday morning shoppers. Carefully choreographed, the plan would include telephone warnings and code words to alert authorities before the bombs detonated.
The warnings never came. In nearby Feeney, the public telephone box was out of order; in Dungiven, the telephones were out of order following an earlier bomb attack on the local telephone exchange; and, by the time shop clerks were asked to tell the police in Dungiven that three bombs were about to explode in Claudy, it was too late. The first bomb had already detonated at 10.15am, outside McElhinney’s shop and bar on the village main street, killing instantly Joseph McCloskey, Elizabeth McElhinney, and Kathryn Eakin.
The other two followed in rapid succession, injuring thirty people and killing nine – five Catholics and four Protestants. Three of those killed in the assault were children, memorialized by poet, James Simmons:
An explosion too loud for your eardrums to bear, Young children squealing like pigs in the square All faces chalk-white or streaked with bright red And the glass, and the dust, and the terrible dead.
Kathryn, a little girl on a step-ladder cleaning her mother’s grocery shop window, was the youngest victim, just eight years old, a year younger than me. Innocent, hopeful, unguarded.
Gone.
In my mind’s eye, I see her tiny body on the ground, the devastation around her. And, all these years later, haunted and helpless, I still see on our tiny black and white TV screen, the platform boot among the wreckage on the side of the road at Buskill, County Down.
It wasn’t until I read a book about Northern Ireland that I realized I was probably a Child of The Troubles, even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time. It would be from a safe distance, that I would learn to recognize the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen window in its wake, and the stench of days-old smoke from rubble that used to be a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant, a favorite pub.
Physically untouched and far away in America, I cannot escape a calendar marked with anniversaries of atrocities in the country that shaped me and scared me – Bloody Sunday, the bombings of Omagh and Enniskillen, La Mon, Kingsmill,The Wayside Halt, Loughinisland,Greysteel, Warrenpoint – and too many more. Rewinding my mental tapes, I also recall black and white news reports from the place across the water that some of us referred to as “the mainland” – of Aldershot, of cars packed tightly with explosives that blew up outside The Old Bailey and in Whitehall; The M62; bars in Guildford, then Birmingham; and, Warrington, Canary Wharf, and Brighton. And, I remember, following one of these atrocities, hearing a man on the radio remark that it “would give the Brits a taste of The Troubles.” He really said that.
Stephen Travers wouldn’t say that. He would say that “no community has a monopoly on suffering and loss.”
Were it not for the Netflix documentary, ReMastered – The Miami Showband Massacre – millions of people would not know about Stephen Travers and his support for all victims of the Troubles or of his unflagging quest for the truth about what was being planned for the last day of July, 44 years ago. They would not know that the final details of his execution were being planned for the next day at 2:30am. They would not know that the blame for this atrocity was to be placed squarely on the shoulders of his band members, Ireland’s most beloved showband, the “Irish Beatles” – The Miami. They would not know that the diabolical plan would go horribly wrong, that Stephen would survive and spend the next 44 years fighting every day for the truth about it, for justice for himself, his murdered friends, for victims and families on all sides, for Kathryn.
In the wee hours of July 31st 1975, Stephen and the other members of The Miami Showband, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to my hometown, Antrim, to stay with his family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us at the time, I imagine they were only mildly inconvenienced by it. They probably expected it, until they were ordered to get out of their van and stand by the roadside with their hands on their heads. Facing a ditch with their backs to the vehicle, The Miami Showband would wait while the men in uniform checked inside the van.
I don’t know when it was that The Miami Showband realized this was not a routine army checkpoint, that they were instead the unwitting victims of a vicious ambush. As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – were hiding a bomb under the driver’s seat, while the others rummaged in the back of the band’s van. The plan had been to send the innocent musicians on their way, with a bomb timed to explode ten minutes later, killing all of them and consigning them to history as terrorists transporting explosives. But, the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing both men to bits, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy as he begged for his life. Trumpet player, Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Lead guitarist, Tony Geraghty, was shot in the back – five times – and in the back of the head twice. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen was seriously wounded and survived only because he pretended to be dead. Face down in the grass and motionless, he would later recall that one of the gunmen kicked the body of his friend, Brian, just feet away, to ensure he was dead.
It was wash day, and I was at home and bored. My mother was ironing, and the quiet of our kitchen was interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us about what had happened in the wee hours of the morning, that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including heartthrob lead singer, Fran O’Toole.
Our David Cassidy was dead.
Sitting here at a computer in my Arizona kitchen, the shock and revulsion returns, the sorrow and fear as details of the massacre unfolded. My mother kept ironing one of my father’s shirts, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else. “No community has a monopoly on suffering and loss.”
A favorite photo from Stephen: (Tony, Fran, Ray, Des, Brian & Stephen)
When I asked him how we should remember his friends on the anniversary of the massacre, Stephen had a simple request, that musicians of the world take a moment to remember their fellow music makers in The Miami Showband, to maybe mention their names at gigs or play a piece in solidarity, to sing a song.
How long must we sing this song, I wonder?
I think Stephen would tell me we must sing it until the testimony of every victim has been heard, until the truth is told, until peace has a chance.
We who have felt and continue to feel the consequences of violence are determined to use our experiences to build bridges by publicly illustrating that no side has a monopoly on suffering and loss. We earnestly believe that acknowledging this unassailable truth is an important step towards effective healing and lasting reconciliation. If stories of empty chairs, empty beds, empty cradles, and empty hearts serve no purpose other than to stay the hand of violence and give peace a chance, such testimonies are surely a precious gift to humanity.
Stephen Travers, 2016
Note: Stephen Travers co-founder and Chairman of Truth and Reconciliation Platform (TaRP) will be speaking in Phoenix Arizona on October 11, 2019. Click here to purchase tickets.
In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day and it is also still impossible to visit my mother and the place that made her. A phone call later will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily back into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it won’t be the same as surprising her the way I used to do with a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. Even if I were able to fly to Belfast, I would still have to stay away from her, COVID restrictions in place for the foreseeable future hoping to tame the pandemic that has changed everything for all of us over the past twelve months. As my brother reminded me yesterday “this thing makes a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”
Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands and wear my mask and get vaccinated and stay home.
