A Fortunate Life (25 page)

Frank McGlade’s wife opened the door and, seeing my uniform, naturally believed that I had come to arrest her husband. All hell broke loose and I had to beat a hasty retreat. The next day the Catholic newspapers (including, if I recall, the
Irish Times
in Dublin) were full of stories of a British Army Captain intimidating an elderly and much respected local citizen. I have since met Frank’s two daughters who remember that incident well and have even asked me to write a piece for a memorial article on their father, a man for whom I had then, and retain now, a considerable respect and admiration.

But back then it was the articles in the local papers which mattered, not my rather muddled intentions. On my next visit to Commando Headquarters, I was quietly taken to one side by the Intelligence Officer, who told me that I had now been placed on the local IRA death list. That night I jumped into my Land Rover with my two signalmen and driver to begin my usual end-of-the-day tour round the patch, to find that, with typical Marine gallows humour, they had chalked on the Land Rover door where my seat was, a big white cross and the words ‘This is the bloke you want, Paddy. We’re innocent. X marks the spot.’

As our tour in Belfast drew to a close, the temperature on the streets started to rise sharply. In late October 1970 the Catholic/Protestant interface at the upper end of the Shankill Road erupted, and Echo Company were called upon to deal with it.

Dante conjuring up his inferno in modern times would easily have recognised the scene which greeted me as I parked my Land Rover on the pavement and deployed one of Echo Company’s Troops (about 35 strong) in full riot gear between the two sides, with orders to keep them apart at all costs.

A great pall of black smoke hung over us, and the cacophony of noise and shouting threatened to drive all rational thought out of the brain. In front of me there was a crowd of about two thousand Catholics who had marched down from Unity Flats in Brown Square, about five hundred yards away. Behind me were about the same number of Protestants coming the other way. Each was determined to get at the other. The crowd in front of me had left a trail of burning cars behind them as they marched down the street, and one enterprising group of young men had even managed to get a lorry laden with straw bales from somewhere, set it alight and rolled it down the hill at us.
Fortunately it had stopped about a hundred yards short and was now burning away merrily. Behind me they were launching all sorts of makeshift projectiles over our heads at the opposite side, and, somewhere in front, someone was firing a small calibre weapon (a pistol, I think), but from too far away to be a serious danger.

The really serious threat came, not from firearms, but from the stones, bits of pavement and, above all, lethally sharp fragments of cast-iron drain covers which both crowds now started to throw at us – having now recognised that we were the common enemy they had to dispose of before they could deal with each other. Several of my Marines had already gone down, one with a very nasty head wound, and I was getting increasingly worried that if I did not pull back, or get reinforcements fast, we would be overrun. I was on the radio asking Alan Hooper to send in our reserve Troop, prepositioned in a quiet side street just round the corner, as fast as he could, when a huge mountain of female Shankill Road Protestant fury came charging up to me, bosoms heaving dangerously and face suffused with anger. ‘You fuckin’ English fuckin’ bastard,’ she screamed above the noise,

The tirade rose to a crescendo, ending explosively:

I did not tell her I was a fellow-countryman, or that I would have dearly loved to be back in England at that particular moment, since neither fact seemed very relevant either to my fears about the situation, or to her concerns about our breach of church etiquette.

A few moments later, the reserve troop arrived. But still our numbers were insufficient to restore the situation. Eventually neighbouring units had to be called in, increasing our numbers to more than a hundred, before the riot subsided, and people went home.

In the following weeks we had a number of serious riots like this one, and it was after one of these, in the Bone area, that I came down in the morning to find a little tortoise-shell kitten sleeping on the front seat of my Land Rover. I called her Boney, after the riot of the
night before, and took her home to Jane and the kids, who immediately adopted her as one of our family. She eventually became very widely travelled for a little Belfast moggie, for four years later we took her with us to Switzerland, where she used to insist on accompanying us on our boat whenever we went sailing on Lake Geneva.

The crisis came to a peak in early November, just before we went home, when there was another nasty riot on the Crumlin Road, between the Catholics in the Ardoyne and the Protestants on the other side of the road. Once again we were caught in the middle. The rioting lasted all night, and several Marines were badly injured by stones and nail bombs, which, for the first time in Northern Ireland, began to appear in the rioters’ armoury. One of these seriously injured one of my Marines and blew me up against a wall, but left me otherwise unharmed. I was luckier than our much-loved and respected Colonel, Pat Griffiths, who received a near-fatal head wound from a flying rock and was lucky to survive.

Active service is very often a mixture of the terrifying and the bizarre, and Northern Ireland proved no exception. One day in late October I was summoned to the military intelligence cell in Belfast headquarters. They explained that the Government had received a request from journalists working for the Chinese
People’s Daily
to visit Belfast with their cameramen. It was clear, they said, that the Chinese were intent on giving the worst possible picture of Northern Ireland (I refrained from saying that I didn’t see how it was possible to give a good one). They wanted me to be part of the ‘facilitation’ team that looked after the Chinese delegation, without letting them know that I could speak Chinese. My job would be to hang around, listen to what they said and report back. It seemed a pretty preposterous piece of espionage to me, but I went along with it, changing into civilian clothes and skulking around trying to catch what the journalists were talking about. The itinerary requested by the Chinese took us to one of my own Company locations, where the sight of their Company Commander trying to disguise his presence while carrying out this clandestine charade caused some initial puzzlement amongst my Marines, followed by open hilarity and much leg-pulling later. As my first foray into espionage, this was hardly successful either, for, though I heard and understood almost all they said, there was precisely nothing of any interest to anyone except themselves.

Our tour in Belfast ended in mid-November, and we all returned home to a period of leave and a very welcome Christmas with our families. As usual, it was only when I got home that I realised what a burden all this had placed on Jane, who had had to look after Kate and Simon without any help from me, as well as coping with the strains of having a husband away in a battle zone. She told me that the one fixed point she and the children insisted on every night, was watching the Six-o’clock News ‘to see if they could see Daddy’, and the pictures of what was happening had horrified her and caused her sleepless nights, though she had, of course, kept her fears hidden from the children. Kate, aged five, was, however, more angry than horrified, and she developed the habit of accosting strange men in the supermarket and saying in a very loud voice, ‘My Daddy is in Belfast. Why aren’t you?’

Belfast also made me much more aware of politics. Here is an extract from an article I wrote for the
British Army Review
in 1971:

In March the following year, I flew my Company up to Scotland to test their endurance and their ability to work in small groups. The exercise began with a night landing on a secluded beach on the Mull of Kintyre, after which we did a series of night approach marches, lying up during the day, to Campbeltown, where we carried out a raid on nearby RAF Machrihanish. We then broke up into small groups of two or three and, using escape and evasion techniques, made our way to a rendezvous point with fishing vessels on the east coast of the Kintyre peninsula. These took us across the straits to the Isle of Arran, which had to be crossed close to its highest point, Goat Fell, at night in order to make the final dawn pick up on a beach near Lochranza on the north of the island. It was a tough exercise which required both endurance and skill, and I was very proud that, with very few exceptions, all my Marines made it to the final pick-up.

When I crossed the shoulder of Goat Fell that night the sky was clear and blazing with stars, and a deep frost, sparkling under a full moon, lay over all the land below. As I crested the hill I saw the great shimmering expanse of the Firth of Clyde, pointing like a silver finger towards the loom of Glasgow’s lights in the distance and edged by the dark mass of the Ayrshire coast, spangled with towns and villages spilling down to its water’s edge. I am not a religious person but twice in my life I have had what I think were quasi-religious experiences, in which I felt, almost tangibly, the presence of something far beyond my comprehension and which was both sublime and omnipotent. One was in 1996, when I looked down from the top of Brunelleschi’s dome to see Florence and the Arno laid out at my feet; the other was on that March night on Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran.