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Home is where the heart is
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This weeks feature
Thomas Wolfe may have argued that "you can't go home again", but in her new book, scriptwriter, author and playwright Annie Caulfield tries to do just that.
Having been born in Northern Ireland, Annie returned, as an adult, to see what mark The Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement had left on the province. The result is 'Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry', an honest, insightful view of 30 years of conflict, murder and, ultimately, a peace of sorts, through the eyes of someone seeking to come to terms with their past.
Annie's family moved from Ireland to London in the early Sixties, and this sense of displacement permeates her book. The family went back most years for family holidays, so Annie saw at first hand how the conflict impinged on people's lives. "We were there the summer the Troubles broke out," she recalls. "Where we were staying was very rural and idyllic, and it was quite baffling as a child to see all the soldiers arrive. |
Annie Caulfield |
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"Terrible things were happening, but people adapted. We would be going in the car to see a cousin who had just had a baby, and we would be stopped twice by soldiers. But people just got on with their lives and made allowances - you'd allow an extra 15 minutes for your journey because of road blocks."
With one branch of her family Protestant and the other Catholic, Annie was able to see the conflict from both sides. "The Catholic branch of the family lived near Portadown, a very Orange area. There was indiscriminate killing of Catholics at one stage, and my uncle would keep his car on the drive full of petrol in case he had to make a quick getaway. There was always the fear they might come for you in the middle of the night."
As a student in London in the Seventies, Annie felt detached from the violence. "I didn't say my family lived in Northern Ireland because I would have been expected to be involved with Troops Out, which was strong at the time in colleges. It wasn't that I didn't have political sympathy with them, but I didn't want to have to deal with it, I didn't want to be defined by my family.
"My mother never watched the news. She used to flee the room when it came on and my father would filter to her what had happened in Northern Ireland that day. She didn't want to be confronted directly with something and think 'that's my brother's house', which could have happened, though thankfully nothing really terrible happened to anybody in our family."
Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry
by Annie Caulfield
(Viking, ISBN 0670914452) |
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