Frantic with Fear

In the early nineties, a few years before the Good Friday Agreement brought (a kind of) peace to the north of Ireland, I was teaching in the Women’s Centre on the Shankill Road, a well-known loyalist neighbourhood. The Shankill Road is less than a mile from where I live in West Belfast and can be reached on foot from my house on the Falls Road – a 30-minute walk, I think. Geographically the two neighbourhoods are close, but politically and ideologically they are polar opposites.

Residents of the Shankill Road and its surrounding streets number roughly 22,000. On the other side of the “peace wall” are their nationalist neighbours, Catholics of the Falls Road and surrounding streets, an area where the population is around 70,000. Both sides of the wall are in the same electoral district of West Belfast, but as the Falls Road population vastly outnumbers their protestant neighbours on the Shankill, the latter have had to resign themselves to being represented by republican politicians for as long as anyone can remember. This is the ironic outcome of a first-past-the-post electoral system, based on an electoral map designed to favour what used to be a “built-in” protestant majority.

A brief stroll down the Shankill Road is sufficient to see the contrast between the two neighbourhoods. Unlike the Falls, no international solidarity murals are visible, but there are plenty that reflect loyalist ideology and beliefs. In any comparison of nationalist and loyalist murals, what is most striking is obviously the content and the political message. On the Shankill Road, in this strongly loyalist area, angry faces, some wearing black balaclavas, declare their readiness for peace while stressing their preparedness for war. Black, orange, and, of course, red, white and blue are the colours that predominate - symbolic colours for Protestants - while images of weapons, automatic and otherwise, as well as tightly clenched fists, charge what we see with menace. 

The Shankill Women’s Centre stands near the bottom of the road, which leads down into York Street, not far from the city centre. Its layout suggests that it could have been a shop in the past. One room is dedicated to the classroom/meeting room and this is where I teach the six women who have enrolled in my A level sociology class. With hindsight, it was a job that I probably shouldn’t have taken because of the ongoing danger to a catholic woman living in a catholic area while working in such a strongly loyalist neighbourhood. I never personally felt fear on my own behalf… not until the night of the Gingerbread* fundraising event.

On that night I learned that the event was to be held in the Shankill Supporters’ Club, located about a mile from the Women’s Centre, further up the Shankill Road. Four of my students met me beforehand and walked into the club with me. As I approached the bar, I noticed that tonight’s event was not just a fundraiser for Gingerbread, it was also collecting funds for loyalist prisoners, some of whom were out on leave and were attending tonight’s event. Panic began to work its way up from the pit of my stomach…

The music started, but I wasn’t listening; in silence I began to rehearse my best English accent. No taxi driver would ever ferry me to the Fall’s Road from the Shankill. Too many drivers from both sides had been called out on hoaxes that turned out to be a deadly trap for them. Now, however, I was the one who was trapped. I gulped hard and tried to focus my thinking on identifying a street in the university area where I could pretend to be living. The university area was a good choice because it was such a “mixed” area, populated by students and international residents, as well as a minority of Catholics and Protestants. Such a mix, I hoped, would guarantee my safe pass out of the Shankill Road, a taxi driver would surely agree to collect me from the club and drive me over there. From the university area I could walk or take a bus or another taxi home to the Falls Road.

At that point, one of the men who had been propped up on the bar strolled over and invited me to dance. Now fresh fear flooded into me. What kind of lies could I tell him that sounded credible while slow dancing to the rhythm of the music? I felt sick inside. I mumbled a few benign phrases about being from England and emphasised how much I loved teaching, but how exhausting my job was. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tell any more lies because my dance partner seemed happy to talk about himself and explain how much he was enjoying 10 days leave from a 15-year sentence. What that sentence was for, I never asked because I was too terrified. I didn’t doubt that if this man knew that I was catholic and that my partner was a leading member of Sinn Féin, I would not live to see the morning light.

Foremost in my mind was a hideous crime that had taken place just a few weeks previously. A young catholic woman, a single mother, from a rural area in the north of Ireland had been murdered in Belfast. Her name, Anne Marie, identified her as a catholic. She and her friends had been doing the rounds of a few of the pubs when this woman became separated from her friends. Anne Marie had had a few drinks and her guard was down. At some point soon after losing her friends she fell in with another crowd of young people. They invited her to one of their local pubs. Not familiar with the geography of Belfast and the division of the city into nationalist and loyalist neighbourhoods, she accompanied her new friends to their local pub. From there, she was invited back to a nearby house for “a party”. Her body was found on waste ground the following morning with her throat cut so savagely that she had almost been decapitated. It later emerged that no fewer than eleven people had participated in the murder. That was real, not some imaginary fear. And now I feared that I was teetering on the verge of such horror.

When I sat down, I was becoming frantic with the torment of feeling trapped. Perhaps aware of my dilemma, my favourite student, Betty, leaned over and whispered not to worry. Her husband was a local taxi driver and he would take me home. With that, she disappeared into the foyer to make the phone call. Meanwhile the music continued and I did my best not to make eye contact with “my” dance partner. I absolutely did not want to encourage him. My thoughts were in disarray, convinced I was seconds away from a situation in which he pressured me to take him back to mine.

Betty came back and nodded to me with a smile to indicate that she had arranged my lift home. I must have visibly relaxed because one of my students, Robyn, moved seats to come and talk to me. After a few general sentences about the sociology A level course, she asked if I had a boyfriend or a husband because she had “never seen me with a man”. That was when I became aware she was angling to discover if I were, like her, lesbian. I felt trapped, completely trapped, but I knew I needed to choose my words carefully to disentangle myself from this situation. It was not in my interest to hurt or annoy Robyn, so I chose my words carefully for the inevitable rejection. While I was teetering around, Betty tapped me on the shoulder to let me know that “my taxi” had arrived,

Stepping onto the pavement and into the darkness filled me with a huge sense of relief. My driver, who himself was an ex-loyalist prisoner, drove me as close to my home as he dared. On the journey, he revealed that to escape the grip of paramilitary racketeers, he had stopped working on the Shankill and moved to a city centre firm. Days later, he received a visit at home and ordered to return to the Shankill, “where he belonged”. He was silent for the rest of the journey, perhaps wondering about what might happen if he were discovered helping a catholic or even whether this whole set up was a death trap for a loyalist taxi driver. I don’t know, but when I reached home, I told him how grateful I was (that I had not become Anne Marie number 2..

 

*Gingerbread is a charity that supports single parents.