It was perfectly possible to live in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s and never really see 'The Troubles' first hand. Riots, bus-burnings, punishment beatings, shootings with homemade guns, all these things happened no more than a mile away from where I grew up, but, like most people, I only saw it on the news. There were times, though, when the Troubles came to our part of town, and, once, to my own doorstep.
I was maybe nine or ten years old. Coming home from school, I noticed a white BMW parked across the road from our house. We lived on a very busy main road, and the car was parked near a small row of shops, so it shouldn't really have stood out. But Northern Ireland was still sufficiently economically blighted that a nice car was something that turned heads.
I went to sleep in my parents' bed that night - I can't remember why. What I do remember is being plucked out of my bed by a soldier. He carried me out of the house and down the street to where my mother was waiting for me with a pair of shoes and my coat. The next thing I remember is being put back to bed at a friends' house - their son was off at boarding school, so I got his bed. Somewhere between these two events, I overheard enough to understand what was going on: a car bomb had been planted outside our house.
We lived in a large (but decrepit) semi-detached Victorian house. The other side of the house (which was in much better order) was occupied by a very nice, quiet, older couple. They kept themselves to themselves, but were very kind. I once spent an afternoon in their kitchen when my mother went out and forgot to leave the back door open for me. The lady of the house gave me chocolate biscuits and orange squash, and told me to feel free to use the connecting gate as a short cut (there was a little gate linking our two gardens. Rumour had it the houses were built by brothers who shared the gardens). It was the only time I was ever in their house. What no one told me, because it wasn't the sort of thing you wanted to go spreading around, was that the tall, quiet grey-haired man who lived next door was a judge.
Hence the car bomb which was, you've guessed it, in the white BMW. The white BMW that I can still see in my mind's eye. The white BMW that sat opposite our house all afternoon, as I did my homework, watched TV, ate my tea, had a bath. Sat there, full of explosives. In the end, the army performed a controlled explosion and the only damage to our house was to the windows. I returned home the next morning to find the windows already boarded and my mother grimly sweeping the broken glass into green-tinted shimmering piles. She promptly sent me off to school, which seemed very unfair to me at the time.
We had a lucky escape. How lucky? A few years later, a Catholic judge was shot and killed at point blank range in front of his family and hundreds of churchgoers as he left Mass at our local church. We rarely saw our neighbours after the car bomb incident. The little gate was closed, the short cut decreed out of bounds. Their new security lights were so sensitive they flared up at every passing pigeon. But we didn't dwell on it, because close as we came to disaster, we were still very lucky compared to the people who lived in fear, day-in and day-out. As the politicians fight over the final details of devolved government in Northern Ireland, they would do well to remember the bad old days, to remember what it was really like to live with fear, oppression and economic deprivation, and get themselves back around that table.
