The last of chapter one...

This is the last of Chapter One of A Place of Safety, to finish what I'd already posted on October 5th and 6th. Today was one of those busy days where you think you're doing a lot but look back and wonder what exactly you accomplished. Anyway...this image is of the promenade atop the walls that overlooked Nailors Row, Brendan's neighborhood. That line of smokestacks are to the ramshackle buildings people lived in.

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Aunt Mari also spoke to the press, consistently emphasizing that the widow had five children with another soon due, was living in a maisonette that was close to collapse, and had no prospects for better. She actually shamed the Protestant bastards -- who ran the Catholic town like their bloody fiefdom -- into promising new lodgings once the last of the Rossville Flats was completed. 

If there were room still available on the queue, of course. Can’t make promises one might have to keep. 

But as with most catastrophic events, soon all was over and done with, and life began its return to normal as the confusion surrounding us all drifted away...except for one small detail. 

My father lived and died in Derry, in the North of Ireland -- Londonderry for those who cannot be bothered to learn the city’s true name. First known as Doire Calgach, then Anglicized to Derry when Elizabeth the first started up her plantation of Ireland with Scottish thieves, and finally was deliberately linked to the empire's capital at the beginning of the 17th Century, as if it were a new settlement. But that's how it is with the English. When they take something, it's theirs, alone, and did not exist prior. And never mind that kings of Ireland had been living here for millennia, or that St. Colmcille had built his monastery a thousand years before; if one did not agree with what the English wanted for the town, they were either killed or run off at the point of a sword...if not hanged. 

Protestants took hold of Derry as an abusive man might take hold of his woman, refusing to let her go even if it meant her destruction. This was proven during partition, when she was even cut off from the lands that most belonged to her so as to keep her in the fold. Then for fifty years she had been little more than thought of as their prize. If the majority in town hadn't been Catholic, I'm sure she would have fared much better. 

Yet Catholic we were. Raised on the blood of Jesus, Mary, and the ten thousand Martyrs and saints we prayed to. And when it was learned that yet another Catholic man had been killed by two drunk Protestants -- who swore to heaven and earth they’d only meant to have some fun with the Taig which , naturally, was accepted as the most reasonable explanation by the powers that be despite his injuries -- the martyrdom of Eamonn Kinsella to Mother Ireland was carved in stone and his trek to sainthood begun as the truth of his violent existence vanished like a ghost into the salacious gossip of his final condition. 

Added to other Catholics being killed and several Catholic schools being attacked, that year, the move to civil rights that had begun but recently became even stronger. Which I doubt was the intention of the Loyalists who did it all. Those glorious mental defectives -- called themselves the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, they did -- had noticed the growing restlessness of the oppressed so had stupidly decided to prove their ownership of the land. That their ancestors had lived here not even four-hundred years, while ours stretched back for millennia, was immaterial. Everyone would see the righteousness of their cause for Queen and country and would happily join them! 

Instead, they wound up banned and imprisoned at Long Kesh. 

But to be honest, their terrorism was not completely in vain. For in honor of it, the Catholic population was held to blame for the discrimination against it, which meant no one would be relocated from their uninhabitable homes in the Bogside...that lovely, crumbling, stinking area crammed up against the city's western wall...until it was time to redevelop their street. Meaning we kept to that hovel for three years more. Ma, the new wain and the girls in the front bed, me and the lads in the back. And we counted ourselves lucky to have even that much room for us, alone. 

So that was my new beginning at the ripe old age of ten. Unaware of the quiet brutality that was slowly building to an explosion of hatred and cruelty made only the worse by it happening in a supposedly civilized part of the fast-dwindling British Empire. 

But what child can see the growth of history around him when even few adults can? Events occur, and you either rejoice when all ends well or weep when it doesn’t. Thus, my father's death held resonance for me in but the most selfish of ways -- the belief that I could now live my life in the manner I chose, that of a boy filled with hopes and dreams and prayers and promises, thinking himself to be in a place of safety.