Understanding is slow...

As I dig into the books I bought to help me center APoS in Derry, between 1966 and 1972 in the first book, I'm finding how some of them provide minimal information...but even that can be useful. I have a copy of The Brow, the Brothers, and the Bogside by John Ledwidge that is, ostensibly, about an important Catholic boys school in Derry, but it only has a bit more than 5 pages of text devoted to the troubles, covering October 1968 to 1971 in the most superficial of ways. BUT...there is discussion in this section about the appalling living conditions in the Bogside area of Derry (where Brendan lives) and a photo of a woman at a hearth with an iron crane used to hold a pot for cooking over an open turf fire. I need to find out if turf is the same as peat, but that alone made the book worthy of having.

I'm also reading Last Orders, Please! by Macgufin...and it's bizarre. Caricatures of people in more the Belfast area but also Derry and the surrounding countryside, following a functional eejit of a drunk named Brian Arthur, who hasn't a bone of sense in his body. At least, I was thinking they were exaggerations, but in reading Kidnapped by A J Davidson, I wonder. This book deals with real kidnappings between 1971 and into the 1990s...and the way some of these things are, first, planned and plotted and, second, how the Garda and the RUC go about investigating and trying to catch the kidnappers makes me think the Irish really are dumb as bricks.

Of course, a lot of the problem was poor communication and lack of proper training on the cops' side, sometimes with fatal consequences. Another part was bad luck. But overriding all of this is the clan aspect of it all. "I can work with this man's brother because his Da once worked with my grandfather..." and all that shit. On both the Protestant and Catholic side. It's mind-boggling...and I already had a fair idea of how nonsensical things could be in that part of the world.

I'd make this a satire were it not for the nonstop death and destruction that occurred...and yes, I know Irish playwrights work that sort of thing all the time...witness The Hostage by Brendan Behan and the absurdity of what happens to the British soldier taken prisoner by the IRA in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game. I'm not sure enough of my ability in writing humor to pull that off, and I don't want to do the story a disservice.

If my Brendan wants it to happen, it will. He's already leading me down new paths...