Transitions

I finished off reading The Occult. It’s a good book. I should write down some notes as in six months time it’ll be as if I haven’t read it.

I also watched Part II of Zefferelli’s Jesus of Nazareth and, in the evening, Jesus - The Evidence, which raised the interesting possibility—unthinkable to Dad—that Jesus might never even have existed. He could be an invention of Paul of Tarsus, a convenient embodiment of Old Testament myths and propaganda for the new faith.

Today the IRA shot and seriously injured a magistrate as he left church with his family. His 22-year old daughter was killed. There’s a conflict and a paradox to be resolved here, because I have a gut revulsion at such killings but . . . but . . . I support the IRA because I do believe their cause to be a just one—the British Army is an army of occupation and is supported by the prejudiced apparatus of the six county Loyalist state. But, as Grant said last night, the sloppy frame of mind that regards the deaths of innocents as an unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect of war is to be hated. He’s right. Those who supposedly abhor Reagan’s machinations in Central America and Thatcher’s Falklands campaign yet cheer and clap when the IRA explode a bomb and people die are hypocrites.

But would anyone have shed a tear for Heydrich when he was killed? This is an uncomfortable point for me to think about. The anger and bitterness of the magistrate’s family can’t be avoided. Does one innocent death negate justice of a cause? How would I feel?

I’m trying to resolve this point, and there’s no resolution . . . I have sympathy for the Republican cause, but often I feel IRA killings can’t be justified by this or any argument.

This is terribly written. I can’t free my mind from preconceptions. This transitional period has existed for a year now and gives no hint of a way forward or up. . . .

Minions of the state

Robert drove over from Dearnelow and he, Dad and I went to see Athletic play Hatherseats. The kick off was delayed fifteen minutes to allow the crowds to get into the ground. Hatherseats were easily the better team in the first half and outplayed Easterby completely: Ben Tester scored from a deflected long-range shot three minutes before half-time.

The seats in the Three Locks Road side were filled with Hatherseats fans and when Tester scored they erupted into cheers and clapping; as they did, the half-dozen Athletic thugs in front of us snarled with rage and swore and shouted at them, pointing at selected victims with clenched fists, telling them that they were “dead” afterwards. They spent the remainder of the game infiltrating the stand and drawing closer and closer to one unfortunate, their faces black with anger, their eyes blazing with murderous intent.

I felt separate from them.

It seemed certain that Easterby were going to lose, but after halftime they came out and took Hatherseats apart. Four goals in the last twenty minutes silenced the massed ranks of red on the Kop and I was glad.

Grant rang later and said he had just got back that teatime, so I arranged to meet him in the Woodhead Hotel at Lockley. He spent a lot of time telling me about a play he took part in last term at Gloucester in which he played the role of Moors Murderer Ian Brady. It involved a lot of direct interplay between audience and cast, and he said the former were transfixed in their seats, not daring to move. I should think he made a good Ian Brady.

We walked up to the Magpie and I felt oddly weary amd unable to pursue lines of conversation with any thoroughness. I couldn’t reach across the gulf between us with my words. I told him everything was the same since this time last year and I didn’t know what path to pursue, and he admits to being in a similar position to me. We talked about political violence as an escape from the numb passivity of life, the IRA . . . He said they are after power: “In a role reversal they’d act just like minions of the State. They all desire Power.”

I sensed the gulf between us once more.

We left the pub, bought a curry, then I caught the bus home, my head full of all the old things.

Filthy code

Jeremy rang tonight: it was the first contact I’ve had with him since Christmas Eve. I haven’t seen Lee since we came back from Barry’s on Sunday. Jeremy is seriously contemplating making a change of University. Ms Hirst has been encouraging him to do so.

After Mum and Dad had gone to bed I wrote a letter to the Echo in answer to one that accused the IRA of “indiscriminate murder.” I pointed out that most of the IRA and INLA victims in 1983 were soldiers, policemen and other security personnel.

Writing to the ‘papers is a fairly futile exercise, valuable only to provoke the sanctimonious millions into their cries of scandalised indignation. What made me to write was my anger at the sickening lies and hypocrisy peddled by the media and State in its dealings with N. Ireland. War and Murder amount to much the same thing in the long run I admit, yet the official line on this is inconsistent. What is a glorious and heroic thing for the British Army and Navy to do in the South Atlantic is, in the eyes of the Press, barbaric, senseless and cold-blooded if perpetrated by the IRA and INLA in N. Ireland.

Where were the shrill cries of “blood-thirsty psychopaths” after the massacre on “Bloody Sunday” in 1972? A filthy code of double-standards operates where “Our Boys” are concerned.

Christ almighty

About my earlier comments about the Harrods bomb: I still don’t see any logical reason for doing what the IRA did. I can’t see how maiming and murder in London achieve anything. They need to win the support of the British masses, not to alienate them. Dad sees the Irish War as a crude “race war” and even said it had “nothing to do with the IRA.” Mum, Dad and Robert all have prejudiced views about the Irish question, but I suppose its understandable never having been exposed to opinions other than those peddled by the newspapers and on television.

Today Mum condemned the violence of the ‘peace women’ at Greenham Common, who perhaps are expressing their frustration at the blatant failure of their ‘Ghandian’ methods at preventing the deployment of Cruise missiles and realising—all too late—that if all you do is sing songs and hold hands and paint peace symbols on your face no-one listens and no-one cares.

MLK only succeeded when the police started beating his marchers with clubs and setting dogs on them. Confrontation got things moving. It seems naïve to fight ruthless regimes with toothless actions. If the police in Mississippi and Alabama had been able to control the racist mobs and curbed their own racist tempers, then the Freedom Marches and protests would have failed to budge things one inch. Kennedy only acted because he was afraid of adverse world opinion at police violence, not because he was responding imaginatively or emotionally to King’s “Dream.”

As long as the Greenham women sit tight and not do anything then they remain a topic of mild ridicule throughout Britain (sexism seems a typical reaction). But as soon as they respond by pulling down perimeter fences and injuring policemen then public sympathy instantly shifts behind the forces guarding the base. The only way for them to win is by an orchestrated, nationwide campaign of massive strike action and popular rebellion.

More rain today. It has drizzled non-stop since I got back to Easterby and this afternoon the skies began to darken by quarter-past three. I went with Mum and Dad to visit Nanna P. who was in muscular form, interspersing her monologues with heartfelt Christ Almightys.

War on Christmas

Today the IRA detonated a bomb outside Harrods in London, killing nine people and injuring seventy five others. Four policemen and one WPC were among the dead. A thirty six minute warning was given, but for some so far unexplained reason, Harrods was not evacuated.

I felt a cold shock when I heard the news; Mum was upset and full of despair.

How can the RCP uncritically support the IRA when the latter detonate devices clearly aimed at civilian targets? Of what military use is the killing of Christmas shoppers? It seems fair enough to fight fire with fire and wage war on the Army and state apparatus in N. Ireland, but. . . .

Robert thought the bombers “sick” and could see no political excuses for the IRA’s operation. But people too readily dismiss the excesses of the Army, the RUC and Loyalist paramilitaries in the six counties as IRA lies and propaganda—example: the petty and spiteful seizure of an IRA man’s beret from his coffin as it was being taken for burial.

The RCP will have a near impossible task mobilising working class support for the IRA in the light of such attacks; it can only do their cause harm. But there is a war going on in N. Ireland between a large section of the Irish people and the British Army.

Robert and I went to see Athletic play Cross End. He hasn’t changed, and only asked me about my appearance, and whether it was the “urban vagrant” look (whatever that is). We got to the virtually deserted ground and stood shivering as the meager crowd trickled in.

Cross End looked much better in the first twenty minutes, but Athletic scored first, a Hubbard corner, dropped right in on the goal-line which the ‘keeper could only palm weakly away, giving Highmore an easy job to score. In the second half Athletic scored again and Tidemore got the third. Newlands scored a brilliant goal with fifteen minutes left. Highmore sent Scarborough tearing up the field; he passed it to the wing where Wicks crossed it perfectly for Newlands, who ran in at full tilt to head it into the back of the net.

As we leaped into the air a middle-aged man standing next to us shouted “Text book stuff!” amid the cheering. It really was a brilliant goal. With two minutes left Highmore scored again and Cross End had been run ragged. 5-0!

I went to Lee’s in the evening and played chess. He showed me the ciné film he took at school in autumn 1980 and we cringed at the way we were then: such a set of tasteless people! It was strange looking at those silent images passing on the screen, locked forever in that day, that Common Room that turgid afternoon three years ago. I was sixteen then and I hope I’ve changed since that day.

It was also a little odd seeing a vision of Ian on Lee’s film, a glimpse from last term. He sat nonchalantly smoking a fag in Room 312 at the Art College, wearing his forage cap, silhouetted against the window, his face in darkness. He seemed utterly out of place there in Lee’s tiny room. How quickly you can forget the feel of certain things after only a few days absence.

I walked home through the fog.

Night country

I’m now virtually fully recovered. My throat hardly hurts at all and I can swallow as normal and I’m relieved it was only tonsillitis and nothing more serious.

Today another day like all the rest.

I sit inside watching the light change from dull to bright and dull again, while the clock ticks on and on and Dad lays prostrate in sleep on the settee next to me, snorting from time to time. Next door in the dining room Mum is sewing; upstairs, Andrew moves about and whistles while the sounds of Return To Forever drift down the stairs.

He’s moving to London next week. When I think of what a huge step it is I can appreciate in a small way how scared he must be. My days however are empty. I keep promising myself “tomorrow, tomorrow,” but tomorrow always finds me sitting about in a limbo of inaction, scheming for the future: “The evolutionary wound we bear has been the creation of a thing abstracted out of time yet trapped within it: the mind, by chance distorted, locked into a white-ribbed cage which effervesces into air the moment it approaches wisdom.”

The big trial of IRA men has just ended in London and they’ve been convicted on the evidence of IRA “supergrass” Christopher Black. Three of them have gone down for life. I’m infuriated by the blaze of British propaganda. What is murder to one is assassination to another and vice versa; the IRA are described as murderous psychopaths, while the British Army (themselves no innocents at terrorizing civilians) are the heroic boys in khaki, defending the Glorious name of the British State. Although ‘imperialism’ sounds too sloganistic a word to use, it’s the one that springs to mind. “It’s a pity they can’t pull a plug and let Ireland sink into the sea,” says Dad, self-assuredly.

Last night, as we watched scenes of Iranian Imperial Guards gunning down protestors, Andrew said, “If I thought the British would do a thing like that I think I’d leave now.” Peterloo? Bloody Sunday? Stinking hypocrisy! A select few strut and shout and wield their power for Money and Self, or is it Flag and Country? I end up ranting in some sort of naïve New Puritan rage that “all leaders are criminals and bastards.”

There, I’ve exorcised my demons for the day.

I’ve been reading Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country which, oddly enough, is full of none of the things I’ve just been gibbering on about. According to Eiseley, the half page above springs from the beast within; it’s my animal-side struggling to the surface. I’ve nearly finished it and it’s enthralling stuff, similar in style to Ray Bradbury, all about the night things, what they’ve meant to him and his recollections of a life hunting fossils in America.

Red hands

Andrew and I went for a curry at the Bahawal and then took the train to go see the new Imax theatre in Whincliffe; we watched To Fly! on the giant 45 x 60 ft screen.

The first scenes of a balloon ascent were deceptively filmed on a standard sized cinema frame and Andrew and I both looked at each other, as if to say ‘pathetic,’ but at that moment the balloon soared up and the entire screen exploded into colour and sharp, vivid detail. The clarity and the immensity took my breath away. It really was as if we were perched there on the lip of an enormous window.

I went to HMV, took my Joy Division album back and bought Paris au Printemps by P.I.L. and Dread Beat an’ Blood by Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The hanging debate was in full swing on Radio 4 when I got home and everyone was rooted to the radio until well into the evening. Dad occasionally erupted bitterly, condemning the IRA as “evil psychopaths” and fixing me with an intense glare when ever I dared to counter him. But he’s wrong, and history will prove him so.

The IRA are not psychopaths. They're just soldiers who consider the ‘troubles’ a war; four UDR men were blown up yesterday in a land mine explosion. “Murder!” screamed Dad. “Those bastards should hang!” His eyes gleamed with murderous fire.

I felt like reminding him of Bloody Sunday, reminding him that the Loyalists in Northern Ireland go out with the sole intention of killing Catholic civilians, that the sectarian violence often comes from the side that stands proud beneath the Union Jack and the red-hand of Ulster. But I kept my mouth shut and allowed him to carry the day, but I felt a knot of anger at the hypocrisy Mum, Dad and Andrew were all coming out with.

I wonder if my exposure to the RCP makes me feel this way? But I bridle at RCP politics. Their Preparing for Power conference begins on Saturday and I honestly can’t afford to go, even though I have a ticket. But in a way I’d like to, especially to attend the Irish talks.

The vote on five amendments and then the vote on the general motion of hanging for murderers itself finally came at ten o’clock. I heard the first two amendments convincingly defeated. In one sort of perverse way I half-wanted to see hanging for ‘terrorism’ come back, because it would be the biggest mistake the British State could make in Ireland, and it would be the easiest way for the IRA to win support among the mass of Irish people under the hand of the British. But this was a perverse twist to my general abhorrence at the barbarity of hanging, and the barbarity of shooting and killing in general.

Dad doesn’t ‘approve’ of my association with Lee and feels he’s “skating on thin ice” with his plundering of old buildings. He sees him as a bad influence on me, which rankles. A great tide of dissatisfaction with my lot wells up within me as a reaction against the stagnation of home and family.

Opportunities slip by.