Hateland (9 page)

    Then a few things happened which disturbed me and Elizabeth. Outside the college, I noticed two young men on a motorbike seemingly keeping an eye on me. Then our dog Jagger started barking a lot at night as if someone were outside. We wouldn't open the door to check, because even Elizabeth didn't have a personal firearm. It wouldn't have been worth her while applying for one so long as she was living with me.

    One night, a car drove up to our front door. Someone got out and knocked loudly. We didn't answer. A few weeks later, we came home to find someone had painted the word 'SCUM' in large capital letters on the front door. All of this put a tremendous strain on us. The relationship began deteriorating rapidly.

    Ironically, her mother, who thought I was still based at St Angelo - she'd have had a heart attack if she'd known we were living together 'in sin' - started dropping hints about our getting married. She'd say things like, 'Oh, you and Elizabeth are getting on well. I'll introduce you to the minister,' or, 'I hope you're not going to wear your army boots to the wedding. Ha! Ha! Ha!'

    I thought, 'Wedding? What wedding?'

    But everything came to a sudden end. I came out of college one day to find two green RUC Cortinas with bullet-proof windows parked outside. Elizabeth was standing in the road between them talking to two policemen. A UDR friend was with her. She was crying. I thought something drastic had happened. I ran to her and said, 'What's wrong?'

    She said, 'You've got to go. You've just got to go.'

    I asked her what she meant. One of the policemen said it was best that we didn't go back to the house. I asked him why. He said things had been happening and they were advising me to go. I said, 'Go where?' He said it had been arranged that I'd go back to England for a few weeks. Elizabeth would join me later. Everything would be fine.

    I said, 'I'm not going anywhere.'

    But he was firmly insistent: 'It's for your own good. We're going to drive you to the ferry now.'

    I could hardly believe what was happening. I said, 'What about my gear?' He said they'd put all my possessions in the boot. I just caved in. I felt I had no choice in the matter. The fact was I didn't have any choice in the matter.

    Elizabeth was still crying. I kissed her goodbye. She said she'd come over to England to see me soon. I got in one of the police cars and we drove off. They brought me to Larne and put me on the ferry to Stranraer in Scotland. I only discovered then that they hadn't brought all my possessions. They'd filled three cases, but most of the stuff I'd brought from England had been left behind: around 600 LPs and singles, all my photos and books, my army reserve kit, a lot of my clothes and other personal bits and pieces. I was too dazed to complain. I just got on the ferry. It set sail. For the whole journey, I stood on the deck watching the shores of Northern Ireland slowly disappear.

    Elizabeth did come over to England a few times. I tried to get to the bottom of what had happened, but she'd say either she didn't know or she didn't want to talk about it. Her first and most detailed explanation was that she'd kept her policeman brother informed of everything - the men on the motorbike, the bang on the door, the graffiti on the house - and he'd told his superiors, who thought I needed to be moved back to England immediately for my own safety.

    At first, I chose to believe that explanation, but over time it became more implausible. I came to feel that what had probably happened was that her parents had found out about my Catholic background and the fact we were living in sin - and they'd wanted me out of her life. The apparent danger I was putting her in with my occasional foolish behaviour, as well as the other incidents, would merely have added to their determination to have me physically removed from Fermanagh. I knew the family's RUC connections would easily have supplied the clout to have me put on a boat.

    I couldn't help feeling Elizabeth had played a part. At the very least, she'd been complicit. The relationship, based as it was on a multitude of falsehoods, had become greatly strained. It wouldn't have lasted, but at the same time I hadn't wanted it to end the way it did. Elizabeth told me my possessions had been put at her parents' bungalow for safe-keeping. I was planning to pick them up myself eventually.

    During one of her visits to England, I mentioned I'd have to get my stuff back urgently. I was missing my records and I needed my clothing and personal effects. She looked a bit embarrassed. Then she said her parents had destroyed everything. I was stunned. I asked her why. She said they didn't think I was coming back. I wanted to know why she, or they, hadn't contacted me before doing something so drastic. Again, she couldn't, or wouldn't, give a satisfactory explanation.

    I felt angry and upset. I'd lost almost all my most personal possessions. Not just records and clothes, but photos and letters - the irreplaceable. There was no innocent explanation. It was a malicious and hostile act. It confirmed to me that her parents had discovered the horrifying truth that they'd allowed an Irish-Catholic (albeit with an English accent) into their front room. I imagined how shocked her poor mother must have been to discover she'd been trying to marry her daughter off to a Fenian. I thought of her falling to her knees and praying to God or the Reverend Ian Paisley, or both, in abject apology for her wickedness. I could imagine her, too, piling up my possessions in her garden, dousing them with petrol and, in an act of cathartic cleansing, flicking a lighted match onto the heap. The incinerated maharajah had finally had his revenge.

    With my Irish blood, and my English upbringing, I should have felt at home in that truncated corner of Ulster. But I'd never felt, and would never feel, so alien. As I imagined my possessions going up in flames, my anger was tempered by a sense of relief. I'd never return there. They were welcome to their bonfires.

    The only bit of my Wolverhampton past that had remained intact in Northern Ireland was my former MP, Enoch Powell. Sacked immediately from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet for his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, he later resigned from the Tories altogether - and joined the Ulster Unionists. He was elected MP for South Down, which he served from 1974 to 1987.

    The army later awarded me a General Service Medal for my Northern Ireland tour of duty. For many years, my experiences there troubled me. Hated by republicans for being a soldier - and hated by some Unionists for being a Catholic. To me, my medal signified nothing but hatred and bigotry. On a drinking trip to Dublin some years later, I decided to give my British medal to the Irish. In an act of cathartic cleansing similar to that of Elizabeth's mother, I walked onto O'Connell Bridge and threw my piece of offical tin in the River Liffey. It plopped into the water and disappeared. No doubt it remains there to this day. The Irish people are welcome to it.

CHAPTER 5

MY MATE ADOLF

Back in England, I drifted into a job normally held by the sort of professional I used to hate. I became a bailiff, repossessing goods and evicting my fellow men and women from their homes and businesses. It wasn't an easy job and it didn't do much for my self-esteem. I felt like the rent man from whom my mother and I used to hide, someone trying to squeeze something out of people who had nothing.

    I didn't mind descending on the affluent, but having to evict single mothers and other ordinary people made my task unpleasant and, at times, genuinely distressing. I soon became hopeless at the job. If I felt sorry for people - and quite often I did - I'd advise them about the best way to avoid payment. Then I began to lie to my employers. I'd say people hadn't been in or had moved. But when they sent another bailiff to the same address, and he 'succeeded' where I'd repeatedly failed, they realised I wasn't employee-of-the-month material. Eventually, they sacked me for incompetence. I didn't sue for wrongful dismissal.

    My brother Paul invited me to live with him in Surrey. He'd moved into a house in Coulsdon with his new girlfriend, Linda. He told me not to mention our surname in front of her. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask why. In our family, it's always been the case that if one of us says something has to be, then the others accept it as such without question. In this case, he only told me the reason when he announced he was going to marry her.

    Paul, forever suspicious of, and cautious about, 'new faces', had given Linda a false surname when he first met her. He hadn't envisaged a long-term romance. He'd given her a friend's surname instead of his own. Then, as the relationship developed and she'd got to know him under the other name, he hadn't had the heart to tell her who he really was. He feared the belated revelation of his true identity might undermine the bond of trust upon which a solid relationship is based.

    Paul now planned to get married using his friend's surname. He asked me to be his best man. His only instruction was, 'Whatever's said during the service, keep your mouth shut.'

    On the morning of the wedding, Paul took me for a drink with the friend whose surname he'd borrowed. He introduced him as 'Adolf'. And that's how I renewed my contact with Britain's Nazis.

    They'd met after Paul's release from Borstal. The probation service had found my brother a job assisting nuns dishing out soup to the homeless in London's West End. Paul knocked the job on the head after a couple of weeks and started working on a building site. There he met Adolf, who was employed as a bricklayer's labourer - a job which he said boosted his fitness in readiness for the coming race war.

    Adolf was a very angry young man, bursting with rage and resentment, ranting rather than conversing, but in a way I often found extremely funny. He viewed everything from what I then thought was merely an extreme right-wing perspective, but which I later discovered was in fact genuinely National Socialist.

    He didn't tend to tell jokes or clown around; he just maintained a state of permanent rant, like a young Alf Garnett, talking about 'bloody women', 'bloody northerners' and, of course, 'bloody coons'. At that first meeting, as I've said, Adolf spent much of his time expressing disgust at my 'northern' roots and mocking my accent. I wasn't sure what to make of him. Was being rude his way of making friends? Or was he just a lunatic? My brother tended to associate only with lunatics, so I assumed the latter and didn't take his insults personally.

    By the time we left for the registry office, we were all extremely drunk. Paul presented Adolf's birth certificate to the registrar and the ceremony got under way. About 30 guests had crammed into the room. I sniggered every time Paul's pseudonym was used. I couldn't stop myself. In the end, I was crying with laughter. The bride turned round and said, 'If he doesn't stop, I'm going home.' That made me even worse and I had to go outside. The formalities passed off without me.

    Six months later, the marriage had ended. I don't know if Paul's wife ever found out about his false name. Even if she did, I suspect that, after six months living with him, she accepted it as one of his more minor shortcomings.

    I returned to Codsall to spend the Christmas period with my mother. On New Year's Eve, I went drinking with a few of my old friends. Each year, the locals follow the same pattern: they walk from one pub to the next - there are only three - having a drink in each to see who's 'come home' and what's happening. I wasn't interested in doing the rounds, so my friends left me drinking alone in The Crown. The older members of a rival clique stood at the bar. They suffered from 'village mentality' - a delusional state of mind that causes the sufferer to believe he must be harder or somehow superior merely because he's older.

    A girl called Diane walked past on her way to the loos. She looked upset. Her brother was my brother Jerry's best friend. I asked her what was wrong. She said she'd gone out for the evening with one of the rival clique. They'd fallen out over something and now he'd turned nasty. She went back to the group. Diane kept saying she wanted to go home, but he wouldn't let her. I thought he was taking the piss out of her. His friends were doing nothing about it.

    I walked over and asked her 'boyfriend' what the fuck he thought he was doing. He grabbed me by the throat and tried to push me against a wall. I had a pint glass in my hand. I shoved it as hard as I could into his neck. The glass smashed. Blood poured down his shirt. He fell to the floor and started screaming. Other people joined the chorus of screams. I stood over him, called him a wanker and left the pub. I regretted the incident immediately, because the glass had cut one of my own fingers to the bone. I was now bleeding heavily.

    Within five minutes, the police had turned up. Someone grassed me and they arrested me nearby. Reluctantly, they took me to hospital, where a doctor sewed up my fingers while I stood handcuffed to a gloating policeman. The New Year dawned for me in the cells of Wombourne police station. I'd been in and out of these cells since I was a boy. I knew I'd broken the law, but I also knew I'd received little justice during my encounters with the justice system. I regarded most of the police who'd dealt with me as petty-minded, power-crazed bullies. The only thing we had in common was our mutual hatred.

    As the bells chimed in the New Year, I could hear people cheering in the street outside. Alone in the cells, I felt my morale sag under the weight of other people's jubilation. Then I heard footsteps clicking on the cell-block's polished floor. A police officer was striding towards me. The thought of being in the company of another human being - albeit a policeman - at such a time of communal celebration lifted my deflated spirits. Glowing in the warmth of the moment, I found my ice-cold hatred of the police beginning to thaw. I told myself they weren't all bad. Indeed, some could pass for human. The footsteps stopped outside my door.

    The uniformed bringer of festive cheer flung open the narrow steel hatch. A pair of eyes peered in at me. I found my lips forming themselves into a smile of friendship and gratitude. A voice said, 'O'Mahoney? Happy New Year, you fucking animal. Start the year as you mean to go on.' He then passed me a Jaffa Cake biscuit with a small candle stuck in it.