HOW HUME GAVE HOPE TO THE PEOPLE OF DERRY WHEN THERE WAS NONE
IT felt strange but I couldn’t help but weep. Lighting a candle on Tuesday night in Dublin, I’ve never felt further away from home, even though I’ve lived here for longer than I care to remember.
And so many of my friends felt the same – we wanted to do something but there was little we could do, other than offer some light in memory of my city’s bravest son.
The ripples were felt all over the North as those who grew up in my generation for once remembered all the other things we had buried as the seconds of peace turned into hours, days, years.
On these pages this week I mentioned a few things that happened to me and in my family when the Troubles were raging – but not everything.
What took me by surprise was the shock that those details created among my friends who grew up elsewhere.
We were a lucky family who grew up in a middle-class area but the Troubles touched every single child who grew up in my generation.
And we had mechanisms for coping, we still do. Nobody asks so we don’t tell.
We gloss over the details, we don’t talk about all the things that happened because once you started, you would never stop. And, to be honest, nobody really wants to hear.
So when that piece was published, I felt guilty for picking out incidents, guilty for reminding people of who they lost and what happened, guilty for opening my mouth because I might trigger someone else’s grief.
Tightrope
But I now realise that grief belongs to me, too, and those things had to be said because no one can overestimate what John Hume did for people like me and those coming after me.
No one can imagine how far he went, how he put himself and his family on the line on a daily basis, walking a tightrope every single day in an attempt to bring about a better life for his children, for his community, for Derry and the wider population in Northern Ireland.
In an interview with Jack Holland in 2011, Pat Hume told how their house in Westend Park at the top of the Bogside was often targeted by the youth wing of the Provisional IRA, recalling how in 1987 bullets had been fired at the windows before petrol bombs were lobbed at the house. The reinforced glass kept the fire out of the house but the front door was ablaze so Pat, who was at home with one of the couple’s daughters, had to escape out the back. But like the rest of us, the Hume children just got on with things, too. Nobody asked, they didn’t tell.
Our families were very similar. My father grew up not too far away from where Hume did, the youngest child of nine in a four-room terrace house with a dock worker dad, my mother the daughter of a Strabane bus conductor.
Being clever was the thing that mobilised them from the working classes to the middle-class upbringing I was afforded, due to various scholarships, with both ending up in teacher training college before meeting and falling in love when they taught at the same primary school.
When I was clearing out our family home, there were some surprising discoveries. Not the civil-rights movement badge or the rubber bullet that is typically stored somewhere in pretty much every Derry home, but the letters. The ones written by my mild-mannered, soft-spoken mother to the then-Northern
Ireland prime minister Terence O’Neill, the fury still burning off the pages as Derry – the bigger city – was bypassed as the site of the new university in favour of the predominately Protestant Coleraine. Hume was actively involved in pushing for Derry to be elevated to a university city.
My aunt wrote letters, too – one in particular to a BBC show called Tonight after watching Alan Whicker talk about apartheid in South Africa. There was, she told them, apartheid in Derry too as Catholic families were constantly overlooked for social housing in favour of Protestants. She was afraid to sign the letter as she said she would never get a house then, and her husband would never find work should her name be discovered by the unionist majority who effectively ran the city.
The TV cameras came and recorded a piece which Alan Whicker announced had been confiscated at the airport as they left.
‘All we wanted was a house and to work,’ she tells me. ‘We shouldn’t have had to battle for that but we did.’
She said she had realised that no matter what she did or how hard she worked, her life was never going to get better and she found that incredibly frustrating.
But Hume was one of those who changed that, instrumental in the setting up of the credit union in Derry, the thing that gave her – ‘just a wee factory girl’ – the optimism to move forward, the positivity to believe she, too, could run a business of her own.
It was this same credit union that allowed The Undertones to record Teenage Kicks, £400 borrowed to record an anthem that is as much a tune about Derry as Danny Boy and The Town I Loved So Well.
And those were the light moments that went with the shade, the daily death tolls, the bombed-out businesses, the parents who had to bring up children in a place where it was never guaranteed that you were all going to come home from a simple shopping trip to buy school shoes.
He was the one person we could all rely on to speak the truth, to renounce any violent action no matter where it came from, unlike many other politicians who spoke out of both sides of their mouths, preaching one message then washing their hands of the blood of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised who had believed their hate speech.
Humour
And by constant engagement with both sides of the conflict, John Hume brought us to a place that my 17-year-old self never thought I would see.
As Fr Paul Farren remarked, there are so many of us who wouldn’t be alive today if John Hume’s determination hadn’t paved that path to peace.
And when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, his share of the money went to St Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army, the Omagh Fund and the Victim Memorial Trust.
So it was only fitting that, as he went to his final resting place, Hume was surrounded by those he loved and some of Derry’s most talented sons and daughters, brought out of St Eugene’s Church as his school pal Phil Coulter sang The Town I Loved So Well.
We had previously heard of the statesman but as the Hume family mourned their husband, father and grandfather we heard of the chocolate lover, the man who was happiest by the Donegal sea, the father and grandfather who loved nothing more than giving a blast of a song because, like all Derry people, he had a fine singing voice.
We also have a sharp and sarcastic sense of humour which a friend reminded me of in a post yesterday.
After meeting John in a doctor’s surgery, the medic said: ‘Alright, John?’
‘Would I be in a doctor’s surgery if I was alright?’ came the reply.
Another friend remarked that John Hume was the heart of Derry and that is true.
But it also must be said that this giant of man, who changed so many thousands of lives, was also a husband and a father with Derry at his heart.