Changing all utterly

Byron Rogers

WATCHING THE DOOR by Kevin Myers Atlantic Books, £14.99, pp. 274, ISBN 9781843547280 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a book so remarkable that after finishing it you will find yourself casting the film that will surely get made. Kevin Myers, a young freelance Irish journalist — James Nesbitt, he of the Yellow Pages and Pontius Pilate; Pastor Oliver Cromwell Whiteside, a Protestant fundamentalist preacher who speaks throughout in the accents of the American South — Strother Martin ; assorted IRA and UVF men, their randy wives and girlfriends — the entire repertory cast of the Carry On films. For Myers, whose memoir this is, has succeeded in something you would have thought impossible. He has reduced the Northern Irish Troubles to murderous black farce while convincing you this is how it really was.

Not as visiting British journalists or television teams saw these events from the cocktail lounge of the Europa hotel, with the fishnet buttocks of the waitresses wobbling to and fro. And certainly not as American and Southern Irish journalists, brought up on phrases like ‘a terrible beauty’, saw them. These are the Troubles as seen by someone who knew the killers and the killed, and watched from the streets, the bars, and also the bedrooms, of Belfast.

The result is a humour of a sort so edgy you will only have come on it previously in the crime fiction of the great Elmore Leonard. You are introduced to the prim young killers of the IRA who never swear, and call themselves ‘lieutenants’ in an organisation without non-commissioned ranks; also to the garrulous gunmen of the UVF who do nothing but swear, and call themselves ‘lootenant colonels’ in an organisation where everyone is of field rank. And you meet their women. For to the subtitle of this book, ‘Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast’, should be added two words, ‘Also Shagging’.

Take a scene that cries out to be filmed. Myers meets two Catholic sisters in a pub. One, he has been warned, is married to an IRA man, but the three get smashed and he ends up in bed with the married woman, who assures him her husband is away. With her sister snoring drunkenly next door, he notices nervously as they get stripped off that the bedroom is full of chest expanders and barbells. Not only is he going to bed with the wife of an IRA man, he is going to bed with the wife of a weight-lifting IRA man, who in the midst of their transports comes home.

A naked Myers under the bed listens as the behemoth gets undressed and into bed before his quick-witted wife persuades him to go downstairs and make some tea. In a flash he gathers up his clothes and leaps into bed next door with the sister, who — now what twist would you introduce? Exactly: the sister wakes up and, though still in a stupor, is suddenly very interested in the naked man in her bed, who is obliged to respond in case she wakes up fully. Jumping into his clothes in the garden, the much-used Myers finally makes off into the night.

But it is the sequel which is so wonderful. Next morning he finds that in his hurry he has made off with the wrong clothes, and is wearing the IRA man’s underpants, and one of his socks. More to the point, he realises that somewhere in Belfast another man, a weight-lifting killer, must at that moment be tugging bemusedly at his crotch and staring at his feet. It is a sequence worthy of Elmore Leonard at his best.

There are others. Pissed up again, he wakes to find an appalled police inspector staring down at him, someone who in the course of his duties has seen the most awful sights but never anything that comes close to this, a man in bed with two naked girls, one of whom, feeling a bit left out in the proceedings, has done what any reasonable Irish girl would do, and in pique phoned the RUC. Sex and booze are a sort of frame to this memoir; the rest is disgust.

For, having said that Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, this is not the full story. He is an Irishman, brought up in England, educated at an English boarding school, who came back. This provided him with a detachment, out of which came his conviction that the Troubles were a farce, the main players murderous lunatics. He makes a point of naming their victims, some of whom he knew, and the effect is remarkable. Suddenly they are not statistics any more.

Remember Countess Markiewicz, that ‘heroine’ of the Easter Rising, she whose beauty Yeats saw, and celebrated, in the long windows at Lissadell? During the Rising, when the gods walked through the Post Office, she ‘murdered an unarmed and helpless police officer, a working class Irishman called Constable Lahiffe.’ There is a statue to the Countess (whose Polish husband had left her ‘for the serenity of war’ on the Russian Front ), none to Lahiffe. But myth underwrote, and continues to underwrite, the killing.

It was not just the poets and the fanatics; historians also conspired to shovel the murdered into the footnotes of history. By reaching into the footnotes and giving back to the dead all they had, their names and their lives, Myers changes everything, changes it utterly. For then it is not a terrible beauty which is born, it is a terrible indignation.

And he directs this not just at the IRA but to the killers of the UVF as well, and, which will be startling to those this side of the water, at the Parachute Regiment of the British Army which he saw in action and at close range. I have never read a book like this.

Kevin Myers could have done with a good editor to prune the odd paragraph, as in this description of Bernadette Devlin:

She was a a strangely attractive women [sic] and though plain-featured she exuded an incredible sexual energy and an extraordinary room-filling presence, which she reinforced with a wickedly witty tongue.

As the barmaid said to the young Dylan Thomas, ‘There’s words.’ But his version of events rings true, particularly in the terrifying details he throws in so casually: that bodies blown apart smell like dissected rabbits in school labs, that the Troubles lasted as long as they did because the killers on both sides had all the free time in the world, being on (British) state benefits. And what came of all these events in the end? Those who had directed them, and were left standing, got rich.

This is not a book the smiling men with pasts who now sit in Stormont would want to read, or the British and Irish governments, come to that. But the fact that Kevin Myers is still alive is the most hopeful single fact to come out of Northern Ireland.