Sanctuary: I grew up during The Troubles and have been seeking a place of peace ever since
I would lie awake for hours, when I was a little boy, holding out against surrender to sleep, listening to the helicopters drone above our neighbourhood. After the government dismantled the border checkpoints in the late 1990s, including one at the end of our street, the watchtower the last part to go, a curious series of visitations took place. They began as a deviation in the hum of a city night and steadily grew. Even though it was mechanical, it had purpose, intention behind it. As the source of the sound grew closer, a light would grow in the corner of my room, next to a pile of books, beneath the switch, enlarging, then turning wild and tesseract on the ceiling.
It became clear the hum that I was hearing was the sound of pursuit. A hunt was on. Boy racers. Joyriders. Hoods stealing from their own. Paramilitaries on some mission. The cops and the army were hot on their trail, gunsights wavering. If the runners got to the border, the authorities could not follow. I often reached the window just in time to see the red taillights of a car vanishing into the mist of rain, leaving a breach in the night air like water in the wake of a ship. If they made it over that borderline, they were safe, protected by a partition invented by colonists earlier in the century. But the curve leading up to our housing estate and beyond to freedom was elongated and easy to misjudge, especially if you were driving at high speed in the perpetual rain of a continent’s edge. Some did not make it.
On several occasions, I found myself inside those cars, with acquaintances, friends of friends, hitchhiking. Only once had I the naivety to ask, “Jesus, lads, how can you afford a motor like this?” to a howling hyena chorus, betraying my greenness in a town where being streetwise was not just currency, but a matter of self-preservation. I learned to keep my mouth shut and ask no questions.
There was much to deal with. Handbrake turns in industrial estates that sent the entire planet spinning backwards on its axis. The abrupt fairground terror of a chase from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, holding on to the dashboard for leverage. Then the Gforce of the sudden halt at the unlikeliest moment and all four doors open, everyone scrambling in different directions, clearing as much space between here and there as possible, only slowing down when back in the maze of streets, and you were left with no company but your own pounding heartbeat and the blind stars above.
If we reached the border, there would be a long trek back, trying to avoid the police by minimising time on the roads, especially the barricaded ones, passing sleeping farmsteads and bemused cattle and clambering over stone walls and entanglements of barbed wire. The next morning, to suspicious glances from my mother, I’d insist the night was uneventful.
We lived in Derry, in British-controlled
Northern Ireland, not far from the border of the independent Republic of Ireland. I dreaded every time I walked the road’s unlit miles at night, the blazing headlights unveiling a nocturama of watching eyes as they sped by. And yet what it led to, the border, and beyond it the “free state” of the Irish republic, was a relief from the Troubles, even if we always had to return, called back like revenants to our lives. County Donegal, on the other side of the border from Derry, was its own land. Castle ruins. Cults. Beaches, some too dangerous to swim in. Mass rocks in the middle of swamps where secret congregations had once met and priests with bounties on their heads would convert bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
Life was by no means easy there, on the periphery of a periphery, but it was nonetheless a parallel world that showed us how deeply we might breathe without a boot on our collective throat. When Northern Ireland was invented, a century ago, its Irish Catholic citizens were left behind as part of the UK, marooned within a state that did not want them and demonstrated this existential hostility in every way up to and including murder. It was an escape then, however temporarily, to enter Donegal and the Republic. In truth, Donegal, like its wayward twin, Derry, is an edgeland of shifting identities, unreliable narrators, secrets and revelations. We grew up in noir.
You move away by necessity, not will. You live longer elsewhere than you did at home. But you never really leave. The cost of growing up in a lowlevel police state is that you end up, no matter where you go, with the situational awareness of a paranoid lowlevel cop. No one notices that you are always clocking entrances and exits, who comes in and out, or the baseball bat underneath your bed. Few notice that a film of another life is always rolling in your subconscious. My mother called in the early hours, speaking softly as if not to wake the neighbours, who were already down at the crash site. Lit up by the sudden arrival of floodlights, she had stood in the doorway as they cut an injured man from the wreck. They kept repeating the man’s name but at some stage they stopped. If you aim for the border, you have to make it. Until sanctuary, you’re damned.
* * *
We climbed up there, to that concealed world of rooftops, because we had to. We were searching for a space in which to be left alone. For want of the utopia of a free house we hung around on corners, then in alleyways, then construction sites, abandoned buildings, tunnels, condemned warehouses and under the docks, dodging rats on sleekit beams, shimmying across gantries, pushed onwards and onwards by warnings from the RUC, the army, security guards, nightwatchmen, the IRA, all manner of bastards. The further we were edged out of sight, the more nefarious we appeared. You did not look for trouble, it looked for you. Avoiding street fights and riots was like avoiding the weather. If your existence is a transgression, you embrace transgression. The excuses come easily. The desires are harder to explain. We claimed our space in the sky, music and curses and howls echoing off the dome of night. We had nothing in those years, but we owned every one of those sunsets and the stars that followed.
They came for us, of course. But we were ready. We had secret escape routes and ambushes, hollows and unwound fences, long memorised, deliberately designed to taunt and demoralise out-of-shape pursuers. In truth, there was nowhere to go. We were only beginning to understand what it means to be left out of the plans, to be superfluous. Where your presence, even your existence, is a violation, an affront, a sin. We thought that it was a question of delinquency, that we’d eventually outgrow it. The true reason involved a whole byzantine system, perfected over 800 years, designed to make us strangers in our own land, language, culture and so on – a system we could not possibly comprehend back then.
Every aspect of our lives was silently dominated by a word I had thus far not encountered: sanctuary, from the Latin sanctus,meaning “holy”. A place of peace, respite. Visiting homeless alcoholic uncles in wet houses and aunts in battered wives shelters as a boy. These places were treated as exceptions, even aberrations, but I would come to learn that they were in fact the rule, the most explicit forms of a condition that permeated everything. It felt as though the society we lived in was specifically designed to exclude you (Catholic, poor, under suspicion as treasonous, etc) from security or safety. Wherever you chose to be or were forced to be, the authorities could come along and demand to know your whereabouts, identity and intentions. Your presence, even your existence, was an affront.
Of the dozen or so kids I spent my childhood with, only a few would find sanctuary in their lives. Two were exiled forcibly from the city. Two changed their names. There was jail and rehab and psychiatric wards. Some died in their 20s, others almost made it to 40. In my memories, they are vivid, extraordinary even. In my mind, they are still those teenagers wandering high above the busy streets, not yet spotted by those below or by fate. I do not entirely know why I did not follow them. Blind luck. Belligerence. Cowardice, perhaps. Maybe even books, which were for me more than a thread, a lifeline.
I still have stray wandering dreams of that time, decades later. They are always strangely terrifying, dreams of hauling myself bleeding over walls and into back yards to cower, hearing breaths and shrieks in the alleyway, occasionally bursting through someone’s home to shake off our pursuers. Often, I can hear the others being caught; I wake almost 400 miles and 20 years away with the last shout still echoing in the room.
In an old issue of the Paris Review, the novelist Jean Rhys talks about how villagers thought she was a witch when she moved to Devon. Then she says, “A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.” We were young enough to still imagine there were no wolves, not realising they were everywhere, including among our own number, our own selves.
* * *
In Durham, the sun has a lion’s face. Blazing hollow-eyed on the cathedral door, it looks more like a pagan Green Man than anything belonging to Christianity. If, in the north-east of England, hundreds of years ago, you were pursued and managed to reach this church and strike this door knocker, you would be permitted entry and the safety of sanctuary for 37 days. Once inside, no one was allowed to seize you or cut you down, regardless of what crime you may have committed. The refugees would don the protection of the robe of Saint Cuthbert, upon which no blood could be spilt without incurring a lifelong stigma.
The medieval concept of sanctuary, in which the Christian church would provide temporary protection from authorities and individuals seeking revenge, emerged from lives like that of Saint Cuthbert, whose story helped shape the idea. The patron saint of Northumbria, Cuthbert was an aristocrat who became a hermit cave mystic. After his death, his remains were carried in a coffin by monks who were travelling the land to escape marauding Vikings; the pursued could take shelter in the shadow of Cuthbert’s coffin – or so the legend goes. Having reached safety, they could decide to face trial or go into exile. If they chose the latter, they would leave the church sanctuary wearing white garments, carrying a cross aloft to ward off the vengeful, and make their way to the nearest port, where, after dousing themselves ritualistically in the sea, they would board a ship, never to return. Such protections from state and citizen lasted until 1624, at the beginning of the modern age of imperialism.
Even after reading about the history of sanctuary, it was a puzzle to me why the monks would admit, for example, murderers who were being chased by the families or communities of those whose lives they had taken. Paradoxically, these sacred places became filled not only with the persecuted, but also with people running away from their crimes. Gradually, they became seen as havens of sin.
What, I kept wondering, gave rise to the magic of passing a boundary and being instantly protected? Theories abound in academic circles: sanctuary was a way to break costly cycles of killings and to deescalate tribal violence. Others argue that sanctuary emerged much further back, to protect women and girls running away from familial abuse and incest. It may even be a Darwinian or resource imperative. Certainly, sanctuaries have existed in all cultures; there are Celtic, Bedouin, Japanese, Hebrew and Hawaiian equivalents, to name but a few.
You move away because you are compelled to. There is no want involved. An economic migrant, joining a long lineage of uncles, some of whom had lived with us in spare rooms and on spare mattresses, unexpected older brothers. They had gone to London and slept on park benches and found their footing in digs. In Ireland when I was
a child, there was still a pervasive folk memory of the famine that killed 1 million people and sent another million or more to the ends of the Earth, some having to convert to Protestantism to “take the soup” at the docks.
Modernity had its own horrors. It was the 1970s and 80s, the time of the neo-fascist National Front in England, and “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” and “Irish need not apply” signs. The strategies of the Irish who emigrated to England were varied. Some became street fighters. Others adapted, changing accents, becoming Spurs or Arsenal fans overnight. I didn’t fault either approach. They did what they needed to do. They would never be forgiven for reminding London of their otherness, of what the British empire did. The civilised feel civilised only when others are savage.
Long before I ended up in London I felt myself bound for it. The most interesting developments tend to happen on the peripheries of lands and empires, but sooner or later the gravity of the capital pulls those on the extremities in. But the city was no refuge. It was easier to make lovers there than friends, easier to stay awake in nightclubs than sleep in basement flats. I made my haunts in old Irish pubs tucked away on forgotten passages and mews. Scattered pieces of home. I listened to the stories of old men, sentimental, sullen, unreliable at times, never letting the truth get in the way of a good or bad tale. Drunk on nostalgia for a land they could not abide to live in.
These were men who had built colossal skyscrapers; before them were men who built the London tube, that circulatory system. Yet there were no markers or memorials to them. There were no plaques honouring St Giles Rookery, where Irish migrants had lived in the worst conditions London has ever seen, outside war or plague.
I finished up my shift hauling boxes under the streets of Soho and in the spine of a department store, and traipsed to where the Rookery had once stood, south of Centre Point, near the sunburst of Seven Dials. There were ghost signs, but only commerce survived, “B Flegg Estd 1847 Saddler and Harness Maker”, “FW Collins Elastic Glue Manufacturer (Sole Inventor 1857) Leather Grindery & General Ironmongery Warehouse”. Of the Irish who had once struggled to survive here, I could find no trace.
As I pushed on eastwards, the rain soon became a colossal wall of water. I ducked down into the tube, shaking off my coat, and sought out a tube map. I traced a path to the most notorious sanctuary London had known: Alsatia, an area that was a sanctuary for debtors. It also held a motley crew of criminals, brigands, prison escapers, sex workers, the persecuted and sin-eaters. Alsatia had stretched from Blackfriars to Temple and from the Thames to Fleet Street. In current times, the areas bounding what was Alsatia can still feel diabolical. In 1982, under Blackfriars bridge, the Vatican’s banker was found hanging, his pockets full of bricks; in the City of London stand the banks where the world’s blood money was cleansed. Fleet Street still bears the signage of home to the press and its demon imps. Next to them, Alsatia’s sins seem modest, amateurish. What is the robbing of a bank, as Bertold Brecht put it, compared to the founding of a bank?
Alsatia survives in language, the winding streets and byways of etymology. Saints’ names and religious references abound in what still feels, for all the modern buildings, like a medieval warren, the shape somehow surviving the Great Fire and the blitz. Pilgrim Street. St Bride’s Passage. Hood Court. Hanging Sword Alley, formerly Blood-bowl Alley. The world’s first recorded glory hole nearby, they say. When Charles Dickens, a local to the locals, wrote of the area, he populated it with body-snatching “resurrection men” and dying alcoholics. It remained a quarry of stories for writers and a bolthole for at least one, the dissenter Daniel Defoe, who dreamed of plagues and islands when he lived there. Its presence now comes in the form of absence. As I walked through it in the pissing rain, with a head full of whiskey, I attempted to neither condemn or romanticise, but to see what it may have looked like and to whom. What it would be like to occupy a safe space that was also a prison, a citadel of cupidity that was also besieged?
***
Still stunned by grief and the long, brutal, meaningless nature of his dying, I took on the task of going through my father’s belongings. It was a painful process, but I was glad of the pain. Among many newspaper cuttings, mostly of musical performances, I found one from the local paper in the early 1970s, headlined “Their home has been raided 50 times”. It opened, “A family in the Rosemount area of Derry have reported to the police damage caused during an army raid on their home last Monday night.” I recognised my uncle’s name and the address of my father’s childhood home; I had played as a boy in its overgrown back garden, nettles and all, in the shadow of a derelict factory.
The article continued: “Mr William Anderson, who lives at 41 Osbourne St, said his family home has been raided over 50 times by the army, including 20 times by the Staffordshire regiment, who were the regiment involved in last Monday’s raid. Mr Anderson said: ‘At 6:45 they broke in the front door and searched every room in the house. A soldier hit me on the head with his rifle and a crowd gathered outside in the street. The soldiers threatened to bring up a water cannon and use it against the crowd. One soldier went up into the attic and started walking about. He was then handed up two torches and he kicked at the ceiling until his foot finally came through. This is nothing but harassment and I complained to the police about it. I also complained to the police about the 50 other raids, but nothing was done about them. The first time we were raided was two days before Operation Motorman.’”
Given how often the raids must have taken place, what would have been the chance of leading a functioning life? How could one sustain a family amid such a curse? My father’s stories always came to me obliquely. He never said a word directly. Yet I managed down the years to mosaic together shards I’d overheard from his conversations with others. How the internment without trial of hundreds of other young Catholic men had affected them all. How on at least two occasions as a boy, my father narrowly escaped being murdered by the army. And how the family, my grandmother a widow with a multitude of children, had been brutalised. And how this treatment had begun in her a slowmotion, irrevocable downward spiral that, in my father’s opinion, eventually resulted in her death by misadventure/ suicide.
My father signed up with the Provisional IRA the way other kids join the Scouts. After various attempts to take eyes for eyes, he was sent to jail, arrested by other teenagers, the ones who had been sent as fodder from across the sea to terrorise the inhabitants of housing estates not unlike their own.
In prison, despite being a 16-yearold child, he was tortured. This was revealed in another document, from the Historical Institutional Abuse Redress Board, that came to light after his death. An eyewitness said my father was never the same afterward. Discovering that he had been tortured was the answer to many questions I now regret asking. I was old enough to bear witness but young enough to be protected from the worst of the Troubles. My father did everything in his capacity to make sure of that, to the extent of shunning me, lest I become like him. A task which he ultimately failed to do. I feel my likeness to him in many senses, some of which I treasure, but there is a fire in me, too, for vengeance and honour, reading those depraved and lousy accounts, a fire that may incinerate my life if I’m not careful.
After a youth damned to be eventful and then abruptly curtailed, my father became a gardener for the council. I did what he, by his nature, did: as Seamus Heaney put it in his poem Digging, I took up a pen, and I began to dig. Every time I delved, beneath the dusty soil of dogma and faith, I hit the same bedrock. It was housing every time. The most basic needs and rights for shelter for self and family. In my home town, until 1954, a curfew bell would ring and Catholics, banned from owning property within the city walls, had to leave Derry between the hours of nine at night and nine in the morning. They would go back to their dwellings, the tumbledown hovels clinging to the outer wall, which ran down to the barely reclaimed marsh of the Bogside.
When the slum finally gave, my father’s family went wandering with dozens of other families until they came upon a mouldering abandoned American army base. The Northern Irish civil rights movement was born there, led by the mothers of the camp. Demands were modest – the right to shelter that did not ravage their health and that of their children; the right to vote; the right to fair treatment; the chance of a job, to rise out of enforced penury; and the right not to be murdered with impunity. Sit-in protests took place in Tyrone. In 1969, the skies of Belfast were lit up in what were essentially pogroms. The right to a private home remained an issue up until the end of the Troubles. Catholics were hemmed into their neighbourhoods to facilitate Orange marches pounding through. Home invasions occurred on both sides – parents shot in front of their children, children in front of parents. The home was no longer a sanctuary. It was haves and have-nots in the most elemental sense, and the situation became a blood feud.
The secret was that Northern Ireland was not the distant past but rather the future. What they enacted upon us they would one day enact upon their own people and themselves. In exile, I have seen it all slowly begin to unfold again, watching houses fill with mould. Generations who will never own a home, broken by rent and austerity; homelessness enveloping cities; and politics becoming the old familiar issue of division and essentialism and witchhunts and whataboutery.
Between 1969 and 1972 there was one brief reprieve in my home town. An autonomous community space called Free Derry, encompassing the Bogside in the valley and Creggan on the heights. A sanctuary, the last on these islands, that one could flee to, but like all sanctuaries a temporary condition. It lasted three years but the state could not tolerate the treason of its existence. My father stood on the shore and watched, not knowing what was in store for the city, for his family. A military flotilla arrived like an invasion force. They sent in tanks and bulldozers to dismantle Free Derry, backed by 1,300 soldiers. A total of 21,000 soldiers took over Catholic working-class areas to reestablish “order”. There was no justice, either legal or economic, to be found or even attempted. The absence of justice does not result in chaos but in a vacuum that is quickly filled. Paramilitaries thrived. When the authorities who run schools and hospitals also shot their own citizens dead and ran death squads, justice must be sought elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, it has never been found.
* * *
Sanctuary was never really about the characters who sought it out, as colourful as they might be. It was made for those who could confer the status of sanctuary, those who had the power to magic these protective boundaries into existence and then police them. In its earliest guise, it was the priestly who bestowed sanctuary; gatekeeping gave them power. Sanctuary gave the church authority, but the pursued had to forfeit their land and property to the crown. It was a mutually beneficial deal, and justice was not its aim. Sanctuary ended when the empire of capital could no longer tolerate the empire of religion. The king replaced the pope, the state replaced the king.
The state is a jealous god. In its efforts to civilise the Northern Irish in the plantation – the organised colonisation of the region in the 17th century by people from Great Britain – they first cut down the natural refuges of the forests. It would be untrue if it was said they created no sanctuaries. They built homes in garrison towns. In the Scottish borders, they built still visible peel towers. In the army base with its watchtower at the end of my street, the strangers lived in a hostile landscape, a precursor of the Green Zone of Baghdad and so on. Fragments of home from which to usurp others from theirs. The state keeps sanctuary for its own devices, granting it in the form of diplomatic immunity, embassies, gated communities, offshore accounts, private security, property portfolios, laws for the independently wealthy, citizens of the world. For all the managed decline, for all the profitable turbulence, all the organised theft that is austerity, the calm is eerie, like that before a cataclysm.
Borders became the magic line. We read daily in the UK of the small boats sinking in the Channel on their way to our shores. More uncounted dead. The government plans to fly migrants to Rwanda. It constructs prison hulks to house them. They build anything but housing for natives or arrivals alike. One is pitched against the other for votes or virtue, to sell papers or policy. All are pawns. I lived next door to a safe house for migrants. I never saw the same person twice. Different kids every day playing in the garden; different women smoking at the windows. None there the very next day.
With the birth of my son, I slowly realised I no longer needed a sanctuary. Living in city after city, bedsit after bedsit, some barely better than a dosshouse, I’d watched friends and loved ones succumb, in slow motion, to drugs and drink and mental illness and suicide, and I was afraid, deeply afraid. I wanted to be protected, whether by walls or soft comforting lies that everything would be all right. I sought sanctuary the way explorers used to set off for cities of gold or the fountain of eternal youth. What I needed wasn’t the illusion of sanctuary, but to provide it for someone else.
If sanctuary can exist, as temporary or tiny as it may be, it must be built. The church, the crown, the state, the market cannot be trusted with the task. No ideology can supply it. No one else can supply it for you. The task is by no means certain, but there is no other choice. I watch my little boy sleep. I nestle in beside my love. Just one room in tens of millions in this city on the plain but as significant as any other. When my father was dying, when my son was small, I kept watch until dawn, as if on castle battlements in the long night of some lost century. I feel it still, keeping guard against whatever the night contains. The moon through the sliver in the curtains, the sound of speeding traffic through the opened window, baseball bat nestled under the bed.
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