lf in a brightly lit bar with a high ceiling and stained-glass windows.
I was introduced to Brendan’s brother Tommy and his mate Scottie who invited us to join them. Tommy had already picked up my bag from the bookshop and stuffed it in his car. Brendan told me I would be put up at Tommy and Scottie’s for the night. When we parted, I thanked him for acting as chaperone during my first day in Belfast.
We drove west, and after a few minutes, Tommy parked in front of a line of row housing surrounded by vacant land. At the entrance to his flat, he pointed to several black smudges above the doorknob and asked if I could guess what they were. I shook my head. “They’re tread marks from the boot of a British soldier,” he said and explained the door had been kicked in the week before.
I spent the night in a sleeping bag on the floor and the next morning discovered there was no hot water, so shaved and washed as best I could. After some tea and a bun, I headed off with Tommy, who was driving to the Royal Victoria Hospital where he worked as an orderly. He dropped me by the bookshop with my bag, and I headed down the road to a small hotel I’d noticed. It seemed to be the only one in the area. I took a room and discovered it too lacked hot water. But I had a bed to sleep in, and breakfast was included.
The only other guest I ran into was an American. In the midst of the hunger strike, West Belfast was not the place to be if you were looking for a relaxing vacation. Exactly the opposite. Throughout the time I was there, you could never escape the tension, a foreboding feeling that something was about to happen over which you had no control.
One time I was walking along the Falls Road towards the city centre when I glanced to my left and was startled to see a British soldier squatting in an alley with his weapon pointed in my direction. On another occasion, I watched as several children suddenly emerged from a narrow laneway and hurled stones at a passing British armoured vehicle. The driver swerved towards the youngsters who retreated and escaped.
Early one morning, I came upon the charred ruins of a car that must have been highjacked the night before. Later that day, while I was at the home of one of the city councillors from People’s Democracy, there was a loud explosion nearby. We raced outside and discovered that the Irish Republican Army had fired a mortar at a Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks a few streets away.
From the window of my hotel room, I could see the letters “FTQ” in white paint on a red brick wall that ran alongside the roadway. I found that perplexing because those were the initials of the largest trade union federation in Québec. I knew the hunger strike had generated a great deal of international solidarity in the preceding months, including from some labour organizations in Québec. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see the FTQ’s initials on a wall in West Belfast. One day I mentioned this to someone. When the laughter subsided, I was told, “FTQ stands for Fuck the Queen.”
During my stay, the local H-Block committee that was campaigning in support of the prisoners’ demands decided to stage a demonstration in front of Belfast city hall. Any such action was likely to meet with swift repression. The demonstrators chose not to march down the Falls Road towards city hall because they would be stopped before they got there by the police or British soldiers. Instead, people entered the city centre in small groups, and then at the appointed hour, emerged in front of the city hall for a rally where a sound system suddenly appeared.
I arrived just as people converged on city hall. Fergus O’Hare, one of the PD councillors and a spokesperson for the national H-Block committee, approached the microphone. Before he said more than a couple of sentences, police emerged from all directions. He was grabbed and tossed in the back of an armoured police van. Someone else began to speak and he, too, was nabbed. O’Hare tried to escape from the rear of the vehicle but was roughed up and pushed back inside.
I had borrowed a friend’s came