When your dad get’s shot, it sticks with you
There is an abundance of parenting clichés, which seem at first to be unimaginable, which gradually becomes unavoidable. One such sketch I regularly find myself playing out is the ‘I remember when I was your age…’.
As my eldest enters his last year at primary school in Bristol I remember this was the year that my own dad left his uninspiring job as a warehouseman and trained to became a policeman. It was Belfast, in the early 1980s.
I sometimes mute the car radio when the news comes on to avoid upsetting the kids with unhappy stories but when my own dad joined the Police, my younger sister and I knew full well that to be a policeman was to be at a high risk of death and injury. In the early 1980s, joining the police was a decision to join the front-line in a paramilitary conflict. Every evening the news was filled with stories of police and soldiers being killed, bombs being placed under their cars outside their houses, emotional funerals with wives and children following a coffin, draped in the flag.
For me, childhood memories exist, as very clear, but seemingly quite random moments of absolute clarity. One of these was the day mum and dad gathered us in the sitting room to tell us what was happening, and asked how we felt about it. In truth, mum was someone who liked to hype up the drama, my sister and I weren’t really of an age to have any meaningful input, but she liked the idea of the ‘family meeting’.
When he eventually passed training and started going to work, I found myself becoming a lot more aware of the news. He had been posted to West Belfast, one of the most troubled areas, in fact one of the most dangerous areas in Western Europe. Sometimes when dad was on night duty we’d watch the news and hear “…a policeman has been shot in West Belfast, more news to follow…” the house would fall silent and mum would sometimes phone the station to see if dad was OK, he always was of course, and over a few years we stopped worrying. He was briefly seen on TV and had to appear in court as the arresting officer of a Sinn Fein leader. It was very exciting, and the way he told the story the arrest him was very funny.
Things which in retrospect were bizarrely scary became the routine. Checking under the car every morning, just in case the friendly neighbourhood freedom fighter had decided to blow us to bits by planting a bomb under the family Vauxhall Caviller and of course that there was always a gun in the house. I knew were dad kept it, and from the age of about 15 I’d started to think a bit more about what I would do, if as it were, it all kicked off. Maybe I’d watched a few too many A-Team episodes but I fancied that if someone entered the house, and if dad couldn’t get to the gun, then it was up to me, the other man of the house. Dunno what the heck I was thinking!
Through the years there were ebbs and flows in the conflict, and moments, which brought the whole thing home to us, and upped the ante. Mum got a phone call on a random Tuesday, and then every other day for a week, from a man saying, ‘we know where you live and we’re going to kill your husband’. As you’d imagine, this was very upsetting — I think mum took to reading parts of the bible to him when he called. It was a big deal for a while but we changed our phone number and the phone calls stopped, and life got back to normal. Then there was a period when the trend was to throw petrol bombs through the windows of policemen’s houses. It was happening a lot and people we knew had been affected, people who lived near us. I remember going to bed and hearing noises outside on the street, deciding to myself that ‘this was it’, so I ran in to my sisters room and got her up, ran downstairs to wake my mum and tell her there were people outside. In retrospect, it’s a bit embarrassing, because there was no one there at all — I was probably dreaming. By the time I was ready to go off to university, dad’s job was just part of life. I had enrolled in Dundee Uni, and was planning a trip there to look for student digs. It was a time of great change, little did I know.
I was in bed sleeping, at about 3am, I think it was a Thursday evening, and I’d been round at a friend’s house the night before watching a video with some other mates. I can remember it photographically; the light went on in the bedroom, my sister walked in in her pyjamas, followed by a tall man i didn’t know. I had no idea what was going on, but for some reason my reaction was to be completely nonchalant. ‘Yeah, OK I’m up, I’ll be down in a moment’ even before I’d been told what had happened. I could hear another man downstairs with mum, and I knew right away that they were friendly, but there was something wrong. The man in my room was trying to tell me something, but I bizarrely acted like I already knew — it was like I didn’t want to admit that, mum and my wee sister knew what had happened and I didn’t. Then I heard it. “He’s gonna be OK, but he’s been shot”.
What I actually heard was. He’s been killed. I had no doubt in my mind that he’d been killed, I thought that “He’s gonna be ok” is just what they told you, to keep you calm. I started to try and take some sort of control of the situation, ask questions about what we should do. Where do we go now? Should i get a shower, or is there no time? Mum, why don’t you put the kettle on. Sis, go and put some clothes on. I felt completely fine, but the policeman took one look at me, and went to get me a glass of water, and got me a seat. Mum switched on BBC NI news, and they were talking about it. “There has been a gun attack on a police checkpoint in West Belfast”. Now I was awake.
The next thing I remember was being in the back of the police car on route to dad’s station, we arrived just as it was getting light, and we could see that the road was still cordoned off. The police station was like a fort, with gun turrets and 20ft high walls to stop mortar attacks. It was a very military environment and it felt strange to think that this was where dad worked. He was such a big softy at home, I was a grumpy teenager who thought that parents were naff and didn’t know what it was like at school, and how rough it was when in fact he worked everyday in a place like this. Being in the police station, behind the security cordon made me feel like a little kid in a man’s world.
By this time we’d heard the full story. Dad was manning a checkpoint out side the station to warn off car bombers and murder gangs. A car had driven past, a man was hanging out the sunroof with a machine gun and strafed the checkpoint with bullets, dad ran for cover but was hit twice in the leg (On the wall behind where he fell were bullet holes at head height — so in retrospect he was lucky he fell). The car then turned round for another pass, but when they saw dad on the ground they got out and walked over to him to finish him off. He got out his handgun, terrified I’m sure, to defend himself, but he must have known he was going to die. At that moment one of the policemen in the station lookout tower realised what was happening and opened fire on the car. The Republican gunmen fled. Dad doesn’t remember much about getting to the hospital, but he was haunted for a long while by those last moments.
For us, getting to the hospital wasn’t as easy as you’d think. Let me get this right. Dad was being kept in a secure wing, so when we visited him there, we could be identified as his family by unfriendlies, so we couldn’t go in our own car, because we could be followed home. So we had to be driven there in a police car. Because we’d arrive in a police car, we could be identified right away as police family and might be a target on route to the hospital, therefore we travelled in convoy of one army Landover, followed by an armoured police Landover, followed by us in the car (or sometimes in a Landover, if mum wasn’t with us), followed by another army Landover. When we got to the hospital, because we’d arrived in a massive military convoy we could easily be identified, so we had to be escorted up to the ward by half a battalion of Gurkhas, or so it seemed. It was as terrifying as it was comforting. This was the palaver every day we went to visit him, which was every day for about a month. Bizarrely, even this started to seem normal.
When we first arrived at the hospital on that Friday morning, dad was just about to go into surgery, to save his leg. Mum, sis and me went into the room where he was and gathered round the bed. I held his hand, something I hadn’t done since I was a little boy and he burst out crying, something I’d never seen him do before but would see a lot more of. He looked terrified, but I was overjoyed. It sounds melodramatic, but I think up until I saw him, I still thought that “He’s gonna be OK” is just what they told you, to keep you calm.