Selected Writings of a Trauma Survivor

“A savage land, yielding neither water enough to drown a man, nor tree to hang him, nor soil to bury him .” (Edmund Ludlow, Oliver Cromwell’s Chief of Command in Ireland). Sinewy rock, battle-scarred shrubs, a heavy sky and a groaning wind that buffets and mutes the cries of a single wheatear, the only other living creature on this solitary landscape. This is Mullaughmore Mountain in the Burren, County Clare, perhaps even the very location where Edmund Ludlow spoke his historic words.  Before me is his “savage land,” a place of paradox and anachronism. It is hostile and yet welcoming and gentle. At my feet, where the grass looks as if it has had the soul sucked out of it, the frailest of exuberantly coloured flowers bloom. Sub alpine flora, orchids, are nestled into the limestone rock, where they flourish year upon year in defiance of the desert grey wilderness that is their home. Orchids, blue gentian and early purple, smile sweetly in the face of each gust, Mountain aven exte...

Rafael has just acquired a new clutch of guinea fowl. The first lot didn’t last long because Dinky, the overexcitable rottweiler, loved to play with them. The louder their squeaking and chirping, the more excited he got. That’s how the first clutch died. The second lot didn’t last long either. This time the culprit is not Dinky, it is Charley, Hurricane Charley. This is not my first experience of a hurricane in Cuba, but it is the worst. Others have threatened Havana, but have lost momentum or changed course as they approached, usually veering north and west, up to Florida. Charley, however, is steadfast. He comes up from the Caribbean, devastating the Isle of Youth, and then moves inland, crossing Havana with winds of 150 kilometres per hour or more. Evacuations are taking place throughout the city; buses are commandeered to move the elderly, the young and those in particularly unsafe buildings, to more secure locations.   In the hours prior to Charley’s arrival, I watch the peopl...

This year, for the first time since I was a small child, I’ve succumbed to the Christmas spirit. Usually, I’m a reluctant participant in the jolly goings on, and while I don’t actually say “Bah Humbug”, I think it. That was all in the past. In recent weeks I’ve discovered that threading my way through throngs of shoppers under the glow of Christmas lights no longer exasperates me. I even hum along to a few lines of the carols played to enhance our consumer experience in this, the festive season. So, when I’m queuing in the Continental Market and glance up at the domed silhouette of Belfast City Council – minus its Union flag - I find myself wondering whether the festive tunes have dulled the war cries of the loyalist mob that attempted and partially succeeded, in forcing its way into the Council chambers two weeks ago. Furious loyalists were either intending to lynch whomsoever they came upon first or scale the dome and restore their beloved flag to its place. * They failed on both cou...

After three years at a secondary education school in my town, pupils and their families were asked to choose subjects from the school curriculum that would likely determine the exams we would take, the jobs we would apply for and the careers we would develop, if any. Now I see that the choices we were given were both limited and limiting – a menu dished up to the offspring of the working class.   Back then I didn’t have the advantage of a degree in sociology to understand how limiting CSE subjects could be and the extent to which they would influence the course of my life; all I knew was that I did not want to end up in the typing pool of some business or other. That was why I refused to join the other girls in my class and learn how to type. At some level I sensed that being assigned to the typing pool of a business would not get me where I needed to go, although I did not know where that was at that time. I was 14 then and unaware of the ways in which social class can determine...

  “Fingers on the lips. Fingers on the lips. NOW!” Thirteen little voices echo my words back at me and thirteen tiny forefingers obediently press into a line of pursed lips. My five-year-old class is silent … momentarily, so finally we can move. Off we march in an orderly fashion  through the double doors leading away from the playground and up the stairs toward the classroom. On the second flight of stairs, I hit a blind spot and the cannier members of the group take advantage of it to break ranks and charge screaming along the corridor and into the classroom. Our four-year-old neighbours, lined up obediently and still waiting for orders to proceed, glance up at their teacher seeking some explanation for the human hurricane that has just torn past them. I too glance at her and her regiment. She doesn’t approve but I have no time to wallow in shame, hell has broken loose in my classroom and I wade in there feeling decidedly unhopeful about restoring calm. The children like...

  What do I know about Kazakhstan, I ask myself. Nothing, nothing at all. I keep probing. There had to be something, and there was … a few vague scraps, the sum total of my knowledge of a country I was about to spend two months living and working in. Scrap Number One: Kazakhstan is a small Central Asian Republic. Two: its people are in the grip of Islamic fundamentalism. Three: Kazakhs are famous for their thigh fortifying dance. And Four: they love horses … to eat. At that stage I hadn’t heard of Borat,* so I was puzzled when a number of friends laughed and clapped me on the back with a smirk, “You’re going to Borat land, ha ha!”   I lacked the courage to admit my ignorance, so I sneakily turned to Google and asked, “What is Borat?” Failing to get a satisfactory reply, it occurred to me to ask “Who is Borat?” From what I could make out, whoever this Borat person was, he’d clearly done something to upset the Kazakhs. Just as well I had no time then to pursue the matter b...

One evening at the beginning of June, while I was enjoying a cup of tea in the company of some friends, one of them mentioned that he’d discovered an ancient cemetery belonging to a community that had emigrated en masse to the United States almost two hundred and fifty years ago. Some of the graves, he said, were around three hundred years old and bore family names that have since died out in this area. My ears pricked up immediately, “Where is this place?” I asked, reaching for my notepad and pen. So, here I am, back again in a cemetery, wandering its solitary paths in search of the oldest headstone. This time it’s Vow Graveyard, the small burial ground that my friend came across in the countryside of north Antrim, about 20 kilometres from Ballymoney. I’ve come with Brenda, who knows the back roads of this locality well and found the isolated spot almost effortlessly. I did some prior research about the location, but only scant information is available on the Internet; the best I c...

Late one Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1992, I made my way through crowds of shoppers who had stopped off for drinks after bustling their way through Belfast city centre shops in search of Christmas bargains. We were in Kelly’s Cellars, a popular catholic bar just a few metres off the main thoroughfare. My partner had his usual, while I opted for a rum and coke, aka as Cuba Libre . I chose it to remind me of the life I’d once enjoyed in Cuba, a few years before I’d made the decision to return to my freezing cold patria , my home city of Belfast. Now, one year after that decision, I was missing the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, more precisely, the warmth of the sun. But even though I was mostly cold here in the north of Ireland, I’d no regrets about having chosen to live in Belfast, none at all. I’ve always followed political developments nationally and internationally, as closely as I could and, not surprisingly, I found the atmosphere in Belfast dynamic and vibrant. Threat...

  Looking back on the memory of the dance we shared, ‘neath the stars above, For a moment, all the world was right, But how could I have known, that you’d ever say goodbye, And now I’m glad I didn’t know, The way it all would end, the way it all would go, Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain, But I’d have had to miss the dance. (Arata Antony M, sung by Garth Brooks). How can I grasp the image I have of you as a kitten bravely squaring up to the vacuum cleaner with the image of your small body lying lifeless by the side of the road, just a few steps away where we lay sleeping? I can’t do it. And in that gap between life and death resides all the pain of grief. My dearest darling Hector, my tiny wee baby Siamese kitten, we miss you very very much. Your beautiful little soul left this life on earth far too soon, leaving your mum and dada bereft, choking back our pain at your loss because it threatens to overwhelm us. How unfair life is. You hadn’t even ...

In 2009, I had a significant breakthrough in my life, although some may have chosen to call it a breakdown. Back then my employer decided that, as a teacher working on a zero-hours contract, I was worthless, not even worth a proper temporary contract, so in an on-the-spot decision, I left my job teaching at the university. Luckily there were two of us in this bind, so I didn’t have to follow that long and lonely path leading to an employment tribunal on my own. Ruth, my colleague, joined me and we walked away together… in the direction of a solicitor’s office. For two years I had given a lot of my time and energy to my university job and to my wonderful students. I enjoyed the classes and hoped that they did too. Indeed, while I saw many of my students as decent and hardworking human beings I didn’t feel the same about the university management. From their positions of power, they had shown themselves to be obtuse in the face of our requests to become temporary members of staff at th...