Me and Martin, the boy next door
Our legendary writer, who grew up yards from the McGuinness home, gives her own amazing insights into a remarkable man
THERE was a stonethrowing riot against the British Army going on in Derry in 1970. I stood watching it with the late Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist Jimmy Breslin, who coincidentally died on Sunday. I explained to him that Martin McGuinness, who we were watching, had told me that rioting with his pals made him feel normal during time off from IRA activities.
After chatting with Martin, Mr Breslin said to me: ‘Put that guy in a white tuxedo, send him to the West Coast, and your war is over.’ Ah, sure what would Breslin from New York know about our war?
Some 44 years later, in 2014, the North’s Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, dined in white tie and tails with the Queen, in England, in Windsor Castle. It was not a bother on him. His mother Peggy had reared him to be courteous.
Martin was always amiable, never raucous. There were times in his youth when we all thought that this quiet youngster had the makings of a priest.
Indeed, the nightly family rosary was a feature of his childhood with his daily Mass-going parents. Martin himself was always a practising Catholic.
All the same, it’s far from tails he was reared on as one of six children, five boys and a girl, in a twobedroom house on Elmwood Street in Derry, with an outside toilet, and a scullery, and no separate kitchen.
My own family, with six children, lived one street along in a threebedroom house in Beechwood Street. When I last spoke to Martin, just before Christmas, he said that he had been looking up his family history and discovered that his father had lived as a boy in our house, back in 1911.
The question was, had his father been evicted by the arrival in Derry in 1916 of my maternal grandmother, a Protestant from the Shankill Road, with her husband Sergeant Duffy of the Royal Irish Constabulary?
Well, just this week, the day before Martin died, a genealogist told me that Martin’s father had left Beechwood Street long before that. I didn’t get a chance to tell him that.
I never knew the first name of Mr McGuinness, a welder. He died in 1973 while Martin was on the run, and had to be buried across the border, in the maternal place in Donegal, the Illies, near Buncrana, where Peggy McGuinness, Martin’s mother, was reared.
Once I reached adulthood, I was allowed to call her Peggy because of our family ties. When Peggy immigrated into Derry to work in a shirt factory, she lodged four to a bed with the three daughters of my father’s sister, Dottie. And when Martin left his trainee job as an apprentice butcher to Derry’s biggest Catholic employer, James Doherty Meats, joined the IRA and went on the run, my late sister Nuala, secretary to James Doherty, quietly paid his trade union dues until it was clear that he was not coming back to work.
Peggy fretted that Martin now had no trade, like all his brothers had. She found out that he had joined the IRA when, changing the bed sheets, she discovered a Sam Browne belt and a beret under the mattress. She waited for him under the lamp-post at the foot of the street, produced them out of her apron pocket, and beat him home. He could not keep his promise to her to stay out of the IRA, and went on the run a few months after the Battle of Bogside in 1969.
Occasionally he returned to his home via the back lane.
Internment was introduced in 1970. One dinner time, which was in the middle of the day back then, his father, who was eating at the table, glanced out the window and said to Peggy, ‘Here comes Patrick Pearse.’
When Martin was arrested in 1973, I happened to be in court as a reporter. I phoned Peggy and she gave me – someone who had never shopped for a man – a list of underclothes Martin would need, complete with sizes, and the sizes also of jumpers for him. He favoured big woolly jumpers.
Peggy also climbed scaffolding at the Guildhall, which the IRA had just bombed, demanding her son’s release. Martin had been given six months in prison.
PEGGY McGuinness, now dead, used to visit my late mother every Sunday night in our house. One night, she left early because Martin was due to assume his new job as Minister of Education in Stormont, and he didn’t have a suit. So she had to make alterations to a pair of trousers and a jacket snatched from his two taller brothers.
As she and my mother, Lily, watched the Minister walk down the Stormont steps the next day, Peggy said, ‘Ah mother of God, Lily, I let one hem down longer than the other.’ My mother laughed. ‘Isn’t he the Minister of Education, him that left school at 15, and there’s our Nell with her degree that couldn’t get a job teaching in Derry. She’s stuck down there in Dublin.’
They were bemused with how life had turned out – Martin had announced that he was abolishing the 11-plus, which he had failed while I had graduated from university.
I had the front cover of The Economist framed, with its headline of ‘Yes, Minister’ above a photo of Minister Martin McGuinness pushing open a heavy door in Stormont. Peggy put it up on her sitting room wall, but cautioned with a grin that this didn’t mean Martin could wangle me a job back in Catholic Derry.
When Peggy and Lily talked on a Sunday night, I was always sent to make the tea in the scullery and ordered to close the door, while the women discussed Martin.
After one candid, truthful interview with him in 1972, Martin never talked to me again about the IRA. He told me how his heart had sunk when he read that there was a basement bedroom beneath a draper’s shop, and that a planted bomb had injured the foot of a man sleeping there, and that the man had been a cyclist.
I do know that when recruits were being drilled once in a Catholic parish hall, Martin arrived and went into a fury. Some of the females, bored stomping around, had linked raised hands with the boys, started humming, and danced the Walls Of Limerick. Martin expelled the females, then days later let them back, in the hope that they could bring British soldiers into the Bogside from dance halls.
I also know that he court-martialled Brendan Duddy, the famed intermediary between Martin and the British during ceasefire discussions.
Mr Duddy had put his own shorthand spin on a message from Martin to the British government, which declared: ‘Our war is over. We need your help to end it.’ With his gun on the table between them, in Duddy’s home, Martin listened grimly and forgave.
The fast-food diner in William Street, in the Bogside, with which Duddy started his rise to hotelier and restaurateur, was bought in the 1980s by Martin’s wife, Bernie – somebody had to earn money for the family while Martin lost several election contests – and for reasons I don’t understand, the media never reported it.
Though Martin was a teetotaller, Bernie’s party rendition of Pearl’s A Swinger is renowned.
Then there was the soup story, with Tony Blair’s puzzled repetition of, ‘soup, what soup?’ in 10 Downing Street when Martin and Gerry Adams met him along with the deputy chief constable of Northern Ireland, Peter Sheridan, to discuss policing in the North. This is what happened. Peggy used to make soup for my then bed-ridden mother every Friday night. One Saturday afternoon, Peter Sheridan arrived into our house to have me sign copies of my autobiography, Nell. My mother asked him to fix her broken buzzer. When he’d finished, my mother asked me to bring him
There was the soup story in Number 10, which left Tony Blair totally bewildered
in a bowl of soup. He relished it.
‘Aye, sure, Martin’s mother Peggy made that. Now you’ve taken the soup!’ How Lily laughed.
Peter whipped out his business card, wrote thanks to Peggy and left it on the bed. Peggy got it on Sunday, but Martin was in London.
During a difficult, stilted gathering in Downing Street that Monday, Peter Sheridan broke the ice by complimenting Martin on his mother’s soup. Martin and Adams went out to the pavement of Number 10 and Martin rang Peggy.
‘Sure you didn’t ring me last night,’ said Peggy, who was used to a daily phone call from her son.
‘Peggy,’ interjected a stiff Gerry Adams, ‘will you and Lily please leave negotiations with the PSNI to me and Martin?’
Mr Blair, incidentally, sent many notes to Peggy, commiserating on their mutual problem of irregular heartbeats.
When Paddy Ashdown, later the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was leaving the Bogside after a military tour of duty there, he knocked on the door of every house he’d raided to bid residents goodbye. My mother told him how she was always glad that he was there when his soldiers raided our house, because he put manners on them. Peggy reluctantly accepted his handshake. ‘Well, God bless you anyway. I’m glad you’re getting out alive, and I only hope that my son Martin also survives.’
He saluted, and said: ‘Madam, your son is an officer and a gentleman.’
I last spoke to Martin on December 17, the 12th anniversary of my mother’s death.
‘What happened to the Chuckle Brothers?’ I scolded him.
‘Look at who I’m working with,’ he said, unusually short-tempered.
‘Would ye get rid of that dowager’s hump on your back,’ I responded in kind. ‘Take a look at EastEnders tonight – Arlene’s a huge fan – and then go into her office tomorrow and tell her that you wish to God that Phil Mitchell would get his liver transplant. That’ll break the ice.’
‘I watch sport, not soaps,’ he retorted. He was impatient. ‘And you haven’t a clue,’ he said.
On that day, just three short months ago, neither had he.