How a beautiful water rat helped save this tribeless victim of the Troubles
Thin Places Kerri ní Dochartaigh Canongate £14.99
Derry/ Londonderry – where even t he choice of name reflects ‘which foot you kick with’ – has a compelling and fractious history. It has often been synonymous with sectarian tensions, not least at the violent onset of the Troubles in the early 1970s, during which large numbers of Protestants moved to the Waterside, while Catholics stayed on the Cityside.
The writer Kerri ní Dochart a i gh not o nl y gr e w up amid these divisions in the 1980s, but, with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, she embodied them. If religious identity was not an issue at home, it certainly was outside. The family was living in a working-class Protestant housing estate when their father left, and the thuggish enforcers of tribal purity soon came after those who remained. Their message to leave arrived in the form of a petrol bomb through the window – ‘We were not Protestant, now that Dad had left. We were not Catholic either, though… we were nothing other than other – indefinable, unnameable, fallen down the gaps in between.’
At their next house, this time in a workingclass Catholic housing estate on the Cityside, they were yet again identified as outsiders. A youth club minibus from her grandmother’s church arrived to pick up the young Kerri, bearing the telltale words ‘ Clooney Hall Methodist Church Londonderry’. This went down badly: in the view of the ‘lad in the house opposite’, shared by others, they were ‘dirty orange bastards’ who needed to be put out.
Many people outside Northern Ireland will have encountered Derry recently through Lisa McGee’s hit television show Derry Girls, a portrait of four Catholic schoolgirls characterised by quick-fire humour and group resilience. If that series told certain truths about Northern Ireland, then this book – also by a Derry girl, now a woman – reflects different, darker ones, and is in many ways the TV series’ opposite. There’s very little levity here, but much poignant intensity: ní Dochartaigh’s story is of an identity in crisis, recurrent exile and a returning, deep-rooted anxiety whose presence she characterises as a ‘human-sized crow’. These things, too, are abiding legacies of the Troubles for many, manifesting themselves in high levels of substance addiction and suicide. Politics, place and her personal life all knit together in the book, and for a long time none offers any sense of safety. Ground keeps giving way beneath her feet. A stretch of happiness that begins with a move beyond Derry, to the village of Ballykelly – where Protestants and Catholics mix harmoniously – is eroded by her stepfather’s descent into heavy drinking and the appalling murder of her ‘gorgeous, kind, funny’ closest male friend at only 18 years old. ‘He made me laugh, so very much,’ the author recalls, but the laughter died with him. ‘It broke something in us, that murder of one of the best people we knew.’ A neighbour served jail time for helping to dispose of the body, but the murder itself remains unsolved.
In adulthood she finds it difficult to trust others and uses an excess of alcohol to numb her feelings. Two things bring solace: the wisdom of her beloved paternal grandfather, an instinctive storyteller, and the natural world, including the ‘thin places’ of the title. These are places, whether in Ireland or elsewhere, ‘that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds’. When the author leaves Ireland she finds them in ancient sites such as Treshnish on the Isle of Mull, and Mwnt cove on Wales’s Ceredigion coast.
Ní Dochartaigh’s delight in wild things weaves a thread of light through her childhood, adulthood and the book itself. For her they are both comforters and spiritual signifiers: she fondly recalls a ‘beautiful, warm water rat’ that her younger brother brought
home, and a dream in which her lost B Ballykelly ll k ll fi friend d appears as a white hit egret. t
When she returns to Ireland, eventually settling, now sober, with her partner in ‘an old stone railway cottage in the very heart of Ireland’, she finds a growing rootedness in those things that offer both mystery and constancy: a discovery of the Irish language and the seasons, light and birds that exist beyond strident human arguments.
The acutely personal writing is often wonderfully evocative: on a drive down the Wild Atlantic Way, for example, ‘the storm threw horizontal sheets of rain down onto the grey, swollen world’. There are, howeve ever, stray passages in whi which the lyricism tips into a kind of incantatory, quasi- quas mystical assertion that might have been better reine reined in. What, the author asks, k is ‘ That thing that means we still rise, we still rise, we still and we always rise?’ and answers: ‘ We are women.’ But women can also slide, as we know.
Politics has already partly resolved the author’s palpable concern over the possibility of a post-Brexit hard land border in Ireland (instead, the customs border is in the Irish Sea, which may bring its own problems). Yet another global worry has sprung up alongside it: the Covid-19 pandemic, which has rendered the outdoors a place of relative safety from the virus. Many more of us are now seeking and finding consolation in our own ‘ thin places’, even if we never named them as such. This heartfelt memoir, with its message on the saving grace of nature, may speak to an even wider audience than it first imagined.