Storytime with Houdi – Broken Land…

It was the Monday of St. Patrick’s week 1988. I was driving to my work in Newcastle Co. Down having just got my girlfriend’s father’s blessing for our marriage, making me the happiest man in Ireland. I turned the radio on.

These rivers run too deep

With schemes of men for days that lay ahead

They sell their souls so cheap

That breed distrust and fill my heart with dread

Just released this week that’s the new single Broken Land from Belfast band The Adventures’ forthcoming album The Sea of Love with the brilliant Terry Sharpe on vocals. I think this one will do it for them” said Ivan Martin co-host of First Edition breakfast programme on Downtown Radio. That’s a great song I thought as the lyrics were germane to the madhouse that was Northern Ireland/ the North. Distrust just about summed it up, captured the zeitgeist. Later in the week I discovered just how prescient the song lyrics were.

In 1988 I was the man. The dog’s testicles. Well, in my head I was. Only twenty six, with my own  house in  a popular seaside resort. I had a reasonably well paid job in the town as a department store manager with a lot of responsibility. Driving a brand new Ford Sierra, engaged to a beautiful girl from the North Coast of Antrim. Not bad for a lad from Clones who just about scraped through a repeated Leaving Cert, but harboured ambitions to be a journalist, an actor or both. Later that day I bought Broken Land and played it on the loop. I was captivated by how relevant the lyrics were to this divided land. A trainee manager who worked in the shop told me that all the band’s songs were written by Pat Gribben, but Terry Sharpe was the lead singer. I’d never heard of either of them.

Broken Land was never off the radio that week even on BBC Radio one (it became the broadcaster’s most played song that year). I was on my day off on Saturday for a day out in Belfast.

In a hairdressers in Botanic Avenue I heard Terry Sharpe “from where I stand, I see a broken land”.

The two hairdressers were discussing how gorgeous Terry was when a customer came in exclaiming ‘oh God there’s murder at the funerals’. I learned later that this was a reference to the funeral of Caoimhín Mac Brádaigh, one of three people killed by Loyalist Michael Stone at previous funerals in Milltown Cemetery on the Falls Road just three days earlier. Mac Brádaigh had attended the funerals of IRA members Mairéad Farrell, Sean Savage and Daniel McCann, who were shot dead, whilst unarmed, by the SAS in Gibraltar. For the funerals there was a tacit agreement with the authorities that for a low profile security force presence, the IRA would demonstrate reciprocity by not carrying out the de rigueur volley of shots over the coffins. Stone took full advantage of the lighter security.

Although Belfast is by European standards a small city, this madness might as well have been happening in Dublin, Paris or Madrid as people carried on as normal, despite the fact Botanic Avenue is only about three miles from Milltown Cemetery. Nevertheless, I was, like the hairdressers, in a state of shock. They stopped working and served strong coffee to everyone in the studio. I didn’t utter a word until I was leaving the building to drive home.  As I cruised through serene Dundrum toward Newcastle, the Falls Road might as well have been in Kazakhstan.

While eating a takeaway for tea in front of my new TV which had an extended news programme I was frozen. Not because I ran out of oil but because I was watching swarms of people envelop a car. It was surreal. I probably knew some of them. Some of them were likely my customers in the Park Centre shopping complex that I worked in the previous year as it is literally a three minute walk from the cemetery. This was the President Kennedy moment my mother used to talk about. The programme broadcast real time footage taken from a British Army helicopter showing people tearing a car asunder with their bare hands. The security forces seemed incapable of helping two men being dragged from the car. I found it difficult to breathe as I watched a man on top of the car waving a tyre iron like Leonard Bernstein, celebrating as its two occupants were bundled into a black taxi for further punishment. I don’t know how long I sat staring at the screen, but I do remember asking myself later: what have we become?

The next day at dinner break I was practically catatonic. The hairs on my neck and shoulders, stood, literally, erect as porcupine quills. I was reading an early edition of the Belfast Telegraph. That moment will forever stay with me. It was a photo of Fr Alec Reid staring direct to camera as he administered the last rites on a blood splattered corpulent topless man named as Corporal David Howes. What a Godly man Fr. Reid is I thought. Such bravery to carry out this function in all that mayhem. What mental strength. Such faith in his God—my God. That scene is etched in my memory deeper than the faces of both my parents in their coffins.

Later in the day I was receiving a delivery in the stockroom. The driver said ‘did you see the craic on the telly last night?’ My silence and facial response invited further explanation. He expressed with a smirk ‘those two boys getting a doing at the funerals’. My bowels nearly opened, my tongue might have been stung by a wasp, I was that shocked. My response brooked no further discussion. He looked at me like I told him his baby son was an albino gorilla, snapping the delivery docket receipt from my hand and jumped into his cab. Sometime later I took the short journey home. Terry Sharpe was at it again

Comfort me through this stormy weather

From where I stand, I see a broken land

How appropriate were these words I thought. How sentient. How judicious. Did Pat Gribben think when he wrote those lyrics that such horrors would forever be embedded in our consciousness? Perhaps he did.

A decade later we saw the green shoots of that hope take root. We can never go back. We have to demonstrate the fortitude and faith of Fr. Alec Reid.

Editor’s Note: I know many of you will point out the people who attacked the car thought it was another ambush given what happened a few days before with Michael Stone. It’s still unclear why British Army corporals Derek Wood and David Howes where even in the area. This is not to excuse the murders but to give context. Houdi’s posts are normally light hearted but I know this one is likely to set some of you off as it was one of our bleakest moments. It would be good if you could read this post as a personal memory of that time rather than an historical examination of the events. Brian

Houdi McCabe

Originally from Clones Co. Monaghan, Houdi McCabe is a legend in his own mind. He worked as a Branch Manager with Dunnes Stores all over Northern Ireland for 42 years. Retired, he now writes and acts on a full time basis, with over thirty films/plays within his oeuvre. Some of his stories have been adapted for short films, by himself and with other collaborators. He is a regular performer at literary events TENX9, Soundwaves Portrush, Pub Poetry Causeway Coast, First Drams NI and Flash Fiction Armagh. Resident in Portrush Co. Antrim he is married to local girl Carole Robinson.
They have three adult children and one grandchild, Genevieve. Houdi doesn’t have any pets as he loves himself too much.