Remembering Bloody Sunday

as told to

Skadi meic Beorh

by Brian Johnston

________

There is no gloomier place in Ireland than Doire Hostel, its rooms looking like college dorms built during the height of the Bauhaus architecture era. I stayed there only three nights, finding that the citizens feared being lorded over by shadow-men with guns trained from their black razor towers overlooking the town. Border town. Typical border town.

Walking along the famous city wall one grey, windy day, and overlooking the nationalist Bogside district of Derry, I spied a piece of razor wire broken off and lying in a shadowy crevice. I walked over and kicked at it, and then picked it up, laughing. It was made of plastic. Decoy razor wire? Did the installers wear protective gloves to complete the illusion? Were Loyalist Derrymen hired by the UK to whisper tales of people being cut to the bone on the “wire” while trying to escape British soldiers?

Summer is now coming in.

The soldiers eyes are tripwires now.

Children playing yesterday

on their knees are heard to pray,

and the soldiers smile,

remembering their mothers’ guile.

_

O, Death, where is thy deadly sting?

O, Grave, where is thy victory?

_

The soldiers eyes are tripwires now;

the children love them still,

bring them daisy chains of freedom…

simple gifts and simpler thoughts…

_

On November 15, 1997, in the foyer of the Doire Hostel, I met Brian Johnston, a youngish man aged terribly by whisky and grief. He told me that he had been recently divorced from his wife, and that he had taken up residence at the hostel indefinitely. He asked me what I was doing in Ireland. I told him that I was a writer, but that I had no plans of ever going back to my home in America.

“Really?” he asked. “Why?”

“I don’t like the urban culture which has become predominant there.”

“What’s it like?”

“Angry young people with chips on their shoulders who have forgotten the spirit of the Civil Rights.”

“A deadly combination,” said Brian. “So, where will you go?”

I was frightened. I had no idea what I was going to do in Ireland. I knew no one, and was already running out of money. I said none of this out loud.

“How will you survive?” he asked me, his frail alcoholic frame adjusting forward a little, as if he were slightly hard of hearing.

“I have survival skills,” I said, doing a really good job of lying, I could see, by the look on Brian’s face which was a mixture of admiration and concern. That’s when he told me about an abandoned farmhouse in the Gweedore, in Donegal. As he spoke, I wrote down how to get there in my little green notebook—which I threw away the following May at a farmhouse near Bantry Bay, deciding to write my experiences on pure memory… which I realize now was a huge mistake.

“Just don’t kill the red deer living there on the reserve,” Brian said. “They’re protected, and you’ll go to prison, and be deported I reckon.”

Images of Robin Hood and his Band of Merry Men flooded my mind, and then, because I was in Ireland after all, the rough and ready Red Branch warriors appeared before me in all of their lusty glory. But the solidity of Brian sitting there bent over on that old green loveseat across from me, and the draft of the hostel lobby, brought me back to a more sullen reality.

“Will you join me at the pub tonight, boyo?”

“I wouldn’t miss that for the world, Brian,” I replied.

“In the mean time,” he said, “I want to tell you a story.”

Though Brian Johnston’s eye witness account of Bloody Sunday is hard to take, it needs to be told.

***

“The day is now called ‘Bloody Sunday.’ But on January 30, 1972 we were doing a peaceful protest that day, and Bernadette Devlin was there. We were all very excited and all of us, Catholic and Protestant, were proud to be part of the Civil Rights Movement. Then the B-Specials showed up, parachuted in and started to strong-arm everybody. I was twenty-three at the time, and I knew everybody there. We were all friends, and we were having a good time before the British soldiers came. I was raised protestant, but nobody minded. there were a lot of us Protestants there that day, supporting the Catholics from the Bogside. Supporting everyone who wanted civil rights.

________

“People from other places don’t often realize that Protestants not affiliated with the Church of England have been treated very badly here in the North, especially after the Penal Laws were put into effect. Anyway, the Specials started pushing us all along, trying to get us off of Waterloo Street and back into the Bogside, where they thought we belonged. they were corralling us, like animals. and so naturally we started to buck them, like animals. After all, we were there for civil rights. As far as we could see, they were playing right into our hands, really. But they had guns, and none of us had brought weapons. it went against what we were there for, which was peace.

________

“The next thing I knew, there was like a gauntlet set up that that the police behind us pushed us all through two lines of police, who were the gauntlet. We had to go through this trap, and as we were corralled through, each of us was hit in the head by the butt of a B-special gun. Some of us were being knocked out cold, others were escaping within inches of being seriously hurt or killed.

________

“I was with my friend Jack Duddy at that moment. All I remember is thinking, Now, if I reach down and pick up that orange soda can and toss it at the soldier that I know is going to try and hit me, maybe he’ll flinch and the gun butt will miss me. Well, that’s what I did and the plan worked. The soldier, who looked younger than me, did flinch away as he saw the can coming at his face, and I ducked and ran under his rifle. Jack was to my right, and as we reached the end of the gauntlet, out of the corner of my right eye I saw him fall. I thought, He must have gotten hit with a gun butt!, and so I ran over to him to pick him up and help him get out of there. I was the first one over to him, and when I picked him up by his shoulders, his insides poured out all over the pavement. I took a quick look and didn’t see a hole in his back or anywhere, and I knew then that he had been hit by a hollow-point bullet. And the soldiers there were supposed to only be using rubber bullets.

________

“I ran in a panic, and when I got onto the wall which surrounds Derry out there, there were lots of us running along it, crouching down. The word spread quickly that a hundred of more of us had been killed, and so we hid behind the wall for what seemed hours, and finally the word came that only a handful of us had been killed, all boys. They were all friends of mine, and Jack Duddy, a dear friend, was one of them. All these years I have asked, Why not me? Why didn’t I get shot and die that day?

________

“Every Summer, when the Orange Marches begin, I go out to them just like everybody else does, Protestant and Catholic. And I always speak across the street to my Catholic friends, and sometimes a certain woman friend of mine who is Catholic will meet me in the middle of the street to talk, and I’ll either go over to her side of the street, or she will come over to mine. I hope every time that someone will see us doing this, and will get the message we are trying to give.”

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