The Mark of the Hydra

Kevin looked across the darkening room, at his father, snoring in the light of the living room fire. He would watch the news when it started, because everyone watched the news, to hear the latest on the hunger strike. He would wake his father to see it too. His mother was in the kitchen; he could hear her singing to herself as she wiped  the counters and finished putting the dishes away, some country song playing on the radio. She had a nice voice, his mother, and often sang as she worked, sweet and lilty.

Winning hearts and minds was never a strong suit of the Brits, no matter where they held the power. In Derry that strategy, if it ever came into play at all, went out the window in the destruction of an afternoon in January 1972. After that, It was impossible, for any teenage boy to ignore the presence of the army on the streets, or to deny the possibility that death at the end of a bullet’s trajectory could happen at any time and be explained away as a response to terrorism.

All those angry boys, filling the streets, gathering in the shadow of the shops, around dark corners and alleyways, gathering confidence from each other, as they tried to respond to the threat of an army who could, would, kill. Hundreds of boys Kevin’s age, joining the Fianna in search of revenge, and action. 

Kevin and his friend Ciaran were less keen than most. They held back for a long time. What really interested them were girls, music and clothes, football -  normal teenage stuff that occupied hours of lazing in their bedrooms. They listened to the radio and they grew their hair and wore their denim and chatted up the girls from the other school.

But lack of interest didn’t shield them from the stifling effects of oppression. Stopped over and over by the same soldiers each time they left the house, constantly questioned and searched in the street; eventually, the idea dawned that they might as well do the thing that they were being accused of. And all their friends were doing the same. 

Recruitment happened in fits and starts and you had to wait your turn. By the time they got up the courage to ask, they were told that it wouldn’t happen for two months. The weeks passed. Kevin got a start in the packing room of a factory in the town, his first job. He started early in the morning and came home after five o’clock each evening, tired and hungry. After the first week, he had money in his pocket. When the call did come, he was working and he missed his chance. Ciaran had no job, so it happened that he joined the Fianna without his friend. 

Ciaran, handsome and funny, and at 17 a bit of a heart throb, had enough of being at home, where there were arguments and no money and too much drink. He itched to get away and it felt great to be involved in something serious and important. He threw himself into action, taking on anything that the older guys would ask him to do; hijack a van, keep ‘stag’ for the guys who were going out to have a go at a foot patrol, help to construct a homemade bomb… two weeks he lasted, two weeks and then the carefully built bomb took him when it exploded prematurely.

Kevin had joined up the week before, hadn’t done anything more than hold a card, recite an oath in some stranger’s back bedroom. He was walking home from work when someone stopped him in the street to tell him that his friend was gone. He remembered afterwards, how he had turned round and round in the street, caught in a vortex of shock. He held himself together through the wake, and, like a good volunteer, he took his part in the salute over the draped coffin, it’s lid closed to conceal the devastation a bomb can inflict upon a beautiful teenage boy. It was only afterwards that his nerve went and Kevin fell apart, not quickly or dramatically, but a little bit at a time. 

The army kept records on everyone, information gathered on the streets through stop and search - ‘What’s your address, where do you work, who’s your best friend?’ Ciaran was dead, and now Kevin was a target. A week after Ciaran’s death, the arrests began. 

Ammunition doesn’t come more powerful - to force a human being to stare at the bloodied remains of his friend, to force his head down so that he can have a really close look at the details. And then to beat him and terrorise him, drag him from his bed, throw him for hours from one end of a room to another. Kevin was broken, by grief, by fear, by exhaustion. His friends were arrested and convicted, but he never was. He became isolated, his life more dysfunctional and unreal. He went to work and he came home and he stayed there, waiting for the bang on the door from the army, ignored by the organisation he had briefly joined; he was seen as damaged goods, with his newly acquired stammer. As far as they were concerned he’d lost his bottle, and he certainly didn’t turn up at the shops to make himself available.

That was 1975.

He had always loved music, since hearing T Rex for the first time, blasting from a transistor radio someone had brought in on the last day of school in ‘71. He was walking down a corridor, passed an open classroom door and the song made him stop. Marc Bolan’s sultry vocal and that great riff... ‘Get It on, bang a gong, get it on....’  

He got a better job in the factory, had money to spend and drifted from one friend to another, leaving them behind as they got engaged and married and he didn’t. He had the money to buy drink and records, didn’t get the whole thing about the charts and began trawling the local record shops for the music he heard late at night on the radio. On one of these searches he picked out an album by an American band called the New York Dolls, recognised them from Peel and desperately wanted to buy it, but he couldn’t get passed the front cover; jesus, the makeup, the women’s clothes. The makeup didn’t bother him so much - Bolan and Bowie had put that to bed long before - but the blouses, the heels, the back combed hair? He looked at the photo and put the record back in the pile, week after week. 

Then, one summer’s evening, he lay on his bed listening to Peel, and listened to New Rose for the first time. The surge of joy and sexual energy from it flowed through him and out the other side and a punk was born in Derry.

A lot of people got into punk in 1976.

Some went to art school or university and found it in the release of being away from home, the partying and the challenge to be new, intellectual, to know better than the people you left at home. The universities where the places the bands toured, and the music was live and real, the sweat of punk running down the walls of countless Student Unions. But to find punk on your own, in a council house in Derry in ‘76, and then to be a punk on your own - that was a different experience. It didn’t come with a gang, wasn’t inherited from your older brother, wasn’t part of being cool with all your arty friends. But it was authentic.

In ‘76, punk was working class, created by people with no way out; no education, no option, no money. It was a thrash of a battered guitar, a gut wrench, a laughing don’t give a fuck. To Kevin it was release, and a signpost to something else, the way forward. The hair was cut and so were the jeans, cut straight and tight. There was no room for subtlety, no time. Some things were just obligatory, like buying all the music press you could get your hands on, the New Musical Express, Sounds, Hot Press. If you couldn’t see the bands, you could read about the gigs, you could buy the clothes by postal order, you could see what was coming out, read what was crap and what to buy next,. And that was how you met others, if they too were taking the time to walk up the town, to the one shop where this sort of paper could be bought, if they had an earring or their jeans were tight, if they had attempted to bleach their hair with Domestos, with better or worse results.

 
He joined with that tight group, who came together as individuals in Derry, because they needed music, needed change, needed each other. New haunts replaced old. New friend’s parents had to develop deaf ears, and endless patience. Their kitchens and bedrooms were taken over, by lounging youths listening to music, played really loud on the record player that used to be an ornament in the living room, rarely used apart from the occasional Perry Como record or Jim Reeves LP. That was commandeered, disappeared, into the son or daughter’s bedroom - it had a more important job now, it was theirs’ now. 

The town was mapped differently, and the tatty, hippy record shops were the centre of it all, for the records, to hang around in, arrange to meet up in, to talk to the staff in. Your mate got a job there, and the old hippy owner suddenly had a new clientele, whether he wanted one or not. 
From the river, to the edge of the walled city, rose a wedge of streets, houses and factories, from Foyle Street up to Carlisle Road. Once it had been a prosperous area, a remnant of a time of tall ships and steamers, when the port thronged with migrants and sailors, and industries flourished. In the 70’s, it was the butt end of a town in the grip of war and poverty, and it’s buildings were largely deserted.

Orchard Street, dark and narrow, a steeply ascending road, with a sweeping curve and decayed, empty, three storey tenements on either side. Bridge Street, equally steep, narrow and desolate, completing the triangle as the two converged in a point, at the junction with Carlisle Road. At the top of Orchard Street, stood the Casbah on the left and, on the right, the Cave. At the foot of Bridge Street squatted the Rock Bar. This was where the music lived. Punks converged with hippies, rockers and prostitutes - no one asked what age you were, or what religion. It was where you went to see The Undertones.

The Casbah, a converted portacabin, plastered and stuccoed with Arabian Nights windows and a crater in the floor for a toilet. The Rock Bar, bigger, with a stage suspended above the bar where drinks were served. Other bands formed, played, broke up. Tiny rooms struggled to hold the heaving, sweating, bouncing crowds,

Eventually the Casbah and the Rock Bar closed, were demolished and vanished. Only the Cave remained. The Undertones got their record deal, the Seventies became the Eighties, recession bit, factories closed and Kevin was made redundant, but that was ok, because he got a redundancy payout. He went for a drink with some of the guys from the factory on the day they were laid off, and they ended up in the nearest bar, the one where Kevin used to drink. It had been three years since he had stepped across the threshold of the place. 

The pub looked like a dozen others in the area. Dark wood panelling on the lower walls, red velvet fleur de lis above, dim windows and heavy brown curtains.There were two round bays, group seating, beneath the windows, and Individual tables scattered the floor, each with three chairs and an ashtray at its centre, and a long bar that stretched the length of the wall. Three men sat in one of the bays near the back of the long room.

Standing at the bar, waiting to order a round, Kevin felt someone beside him and he turned to find a man called Harkin looking at him. He knew him from school, and briefly had hung around in the same crowd, Kevin and Ciaran, this guy and several others. He had an idea that Harkin was in some way involved still with the Provos, and had done some time inside, for membership or the like, but Kevin looked at him today and thought ‘barfly’.

After a few seconds, Harkin spoke. 

“What’s the crack hi? Haven’t seen you for a while? Where’ve you been?”

“Nowhere - just not in here, that’s all” said Kevin, hoping the barman would make an appearance soon.

“Is that right? What have you been doing with yourself?” said Harkin.

Kevin was really not interested in this, he just wanted to get the drinks and sit down. 

“What are you dressed like that for?”

What the fuck is this, Kevin thought, trying not to get annoyed. He looked at Harkin.

“What do you mean?” 

Kevin had on a long overcoat, a tee shirt and tight jeans. He had one ear pierced and his hair very short and dye blonde, not his natural brown. Harkin was still wearing the same denim jacket he had on the last time Kevin saw him, the obligatory ‘wrangs’ of the Derry man. Harkin stepped closer, just an inch, but enough. He spoke slowly, sarcastically.

"I mean, why are you dressed like that for? What are ye, a punk rocker? What’s the crack with the earring - is there something wrong with you or what, hi?"

The man was drunk. Kevin turned away and sat down with his workmates. He wasn’t here for an argument. Harkin went back to his seat, to the two others that Kevin didn’t know; he could see the conversation between them and knew he was it’s subject. Christ; he looked around the grubby bar and knew that,in his mind as well as his clothes, he had moved on from this place, these people and he wouldn’t be able to go back, even if he wanted to. This wasn’t him. 

A few hours later and Harkin was back, more drunk. He made a point of sitting on a stool close to Kevin, and tapped him on the arm to get his attention. 

“Hi, sorry hi, what about ye? What ye doing with yourself? You’re not around here much anymore?”

Kevin didn’t want to talk but couldn’t see any way out of this.

“I just don’t drink in here anymore, but I’m still around”.

“What’s wrong with in here? This is a good bar - can I tap a fag?” He lifted one, not waiting for an answer.

“Do you remember years ago, at the Shantallow hop, you and Ciaran and me, the three of us? Great crack!”

Kevin didn’t recall a ‘three of us’, but he said nothing. He didn’t need all this ‘good old days’ crap and wished this guy would just go away.

“Buy us a pint, hi.”

“Why?” said Kevin. “Your full anyway, buy your own drink.” . 

“You funkin’ think your better than us, don’t ye. Fuckin’ queer bastard.”

Kevin turned away.

“Fuck off Harkin and leave me alone”.

He felt the punch on the back of his head and fell forward, his forehead just missing the pint glass, in front of him on the table, and the cigarette left his hand and flew across the room. Immediately, the three men with him were on their feet, pushing Harkin back and Harkin’s two friends were over, dragging him away. Kevin got up and left the bar.

He stood outside, in shock, leaning his back against the wall. His head spun from the force of the blow and he touched the back of his neck. There was no swelling and he wasn’t bleeding. The idiot was too drunk to put real force into his punch. But when he took out his cigarettes and drew one out of the pack, he realised  his hands were shaking, and suddenly he felt sick in his stomach. It was time to go home.

That had been the year before. He watched the news and the news was the hunger strike - the violence that surrounded it, the marches in support of it, the hijackings, shootings. Sands on death row, standing for election, everyone thinking that even Thatcher couldn’t sit back and allow an elected MP to starve to death. The very air in the city felt tense and poised, waiting for something to break. 

This fucking country. He had spent the past five years actively ignoring the war and the ridiculous wankers who ran it. Yesterday someone had stopped him in the street and asked him would he think about getting involved again.

“We need everyone to do his bit." 

Kevin had told him to fuck off.

This suffocating town. He had to get away. Soon he would have saved enough for the fare, by bus and boat, to England. The irony was not lost on him. He had tried to let the past go, but still he could feel uncertainty bubbling, somewhere in the bottom of his stomach. And anger.

His mother came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands. She sat beside Kevin, perching herself on the edge of the sofa. 

“His poor mother - she must be going through hell. I don’t want you getting involved in any of this, Kevin. You won’t, won’t you not?” 

He looked at her.
“Don't worry Ma, it’s not my fight”, he said.