For Geoffey Beattie, born an Ulsterman, views like these were one of the triggers for this moving and beautifully written memoir on which he tries to trace the processes which shaped him and his family’s history. His Cambridge contemporaries spoke authoritatively of a Protestant Ascendancy, the elite (Protestants), and persecution and deprivation (Catholics). They had no understanding of the loyalist position, or even a pretence at understanding. Bad guys were bad guys and that was all there was to it.

The trouble was that Beattie didn’t feel like a bad guy,or ascendant, or part of an elite. He grew up in what was to become Belfast’s Murder Triangle, in a house running with damp, among the poorest of the poor. His Cambridge friends got him thinking about that and this book is the result. This isn’t in any sense a political defence or attack, only a kind of investigation into a mindset, and an exploration of his own ambiguities. For Beattie is simultaneously appalled by events in Northern Ireland, at trendy intellectual acceptance of Irish Nationalism and rejection of loyalist views in their entirety, edgy about extremist loyalism, and sometimes full of love and pride for his own.

During his Cambridge years, contact with Belfast was maintained through his mother, a grimly humorous figure prone to’ guilt tripping’ her anglicised son about her loneliness, hard life, and his neglect. She is the other trigger for this book – she it is who wants him to explore the family’s past and his Ulster roots. His visits are a purgatory of nylon sheets and blankets which bring him out in a rash, and a horrified recognition of what has been happening in Belfast in his tears away. A boy he went to school with is just getting out of jail for loyalist activities and full of wonder at the duvet and valance on his bed at home. He thought they were curtains because he;d been inside so long Other childhood acquaintances are dead: one killed during a snowball fight outside his house; an elderly spinster pitchforked to death on her own floor. The list is apparently endless, recounted to him with a dry stoicism by his mother. And there are the Loyalist atrocities to be absorbed as well: the Protestant gunman who rushed into the pub, lined up Catholics on one side and Catholics on the other and opened fire. Net result: three dead Catholics and two dead Protestants . As his mother says, ‘Our lot can be just as bad as theirs and a lot stupider.’

Mrs. Beattie does come away with some good one liners. My favourite was to Brian Keenan, whom she went to see get an award for his book. She sympathised with his trials, knowing what he’d been through ‘”because she doesn’t get out much either.”

Beattie’s investigation into his family is a potted history of Northern Ireland and why Loyalists feel they have a right to be British. Always they have fought for the crown against invaders and usurpers: an ancestor of Beattie’s fought in the Inniskillings, Queen Victoria’s ‘brave Irish’, in the Boer War; old men in the neighbourhood were survivors of the famous Ulster Division at the Somme, the battle which has near iconic status among Loyalists and been appropriated as a symbol of Loyalism. Beattie remembers some of the old men – they never spoke of the War. Sometimes they never spoke at all. As a psychologist, Beattie is interested in this phenomenon. In one of the most moving sections of the book, he recalls the treatment meted out to shell shocked survivors. Ulstermen were at the Normandy landings too. One veteran of the landings weeps at the sight of razor wire stretched across a Belfast Street as it reminds him of that time. In short, the Ulstermen feel they have a right to some loyalty from the Crown after centuries of loyal service. Beattie neither defends nor attacks this view: he merely explains.

There is another interesting digression in the book: the use of language in promoting victimhood. An account of a murder expedition into ‘enemy’ territory makes it seem as if the aggressors are actually the victims. They use language to justify themselves, to show how they were ‘forced’ into action; to reveal themselves as heroes on a mission. Both sides of the divide use the same linguistic tactic. It is as good an explanation as I’ve seen for how people can bring themselves to do such terrible things.

The memoir is full of edgy encounters. The Twelfth of July parade (where the razor wire was stretched across the street) is a classic of grim humour as Beattie, suspected of being a Fenian journalist, presents his credentials as an inhabitant of the Murder triangle, known to some famous names, to get himself out of a tight spot.

In the end, he can come to no conclusions, has no solution to the Irish question, but there is a feeling of hopelessness in those run down slums, a feeling of being trapped in the past and overtaken by history. I think it was Brendan Behan who commented on the impact of the past on present day Ireland: “Poor bloody Ireland, living in the past, got no bloody future, for living in the past.”

But what else can they do when the past seems to offer them a status and a purpose they no longer have? Beattie presents a portrait of his exasperating, narrow minded, ferocious, beloved Ulsterman that is both thought provoking and poignant, repellent, and sympathetic. And that is no mean feat.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.