Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ Barracks on many occasions, so you must be a spy!” I said to him, “My dear fellow, you’re completely and absolutely crazy! These are my friends. These people were at school with me. Of course I’m going to go and see them and have them to my house. Do you think they’re going to tell me secrets about you? You’d have to be joking – they just don’t do that sort of thing!” Eventually he got fed up talking to me, and I stayed with these fellows guarding me for several hours. There was absolutely no brutality whatsoever, no question.

      ‘Eventually somebody else came in, and said, “OK, you. We’ll give you back your car” and I was led outside, and there was the car, engine running. The man who had been interrogating me was in an absolute fury. His eyes were just full of fury. He drew his pistol, cocked it, put it beside my head, and this other fellow said, “Oh no! Don’t kill him! We’ve checked him out with the boys in Ardmore, and he and his family have always been decent to people like us. He’s OK.” I remember those words very well; one tends to listen if you think you’re about to be killed. The man was absolutely livid. He put his pistol back in his belt and said, “Fuck off!” So I got in the car and drove away. But I had to ask, “Could you please show me the way out? I’ve never been here before.” And they did – they got into another car and they drove in front of me! They also pinched my cigarettes, which I really objected to. I still didn’t have any cigarettes after the whole bloody night.’

      Many years later Beresford-Ash came across his interrogator again. ‘We were in a pizza restaurant one day, eating our nice pizzas, and as I walked through to have a pee, I walked past him. His table had a screen in front, with a bit of ivy on it, and as I went past, I put my fist through the screen, just to annoy him. I don’t know if he saw my face, but he could have seen my fist, all right.’

      Thirty years after his experience in the Creggan, Beresford-Ash was again fortunate to escape with his life; between August 1997 and June 1998 his house was fire-bombed three times. He explains, ‘On the feast of the Assumption in August – the “Catholic Twelfth” as it’s called over here – they have a bonfire. People from the local council estate cut down an awful lot of our trees to make the bonfire, and this particularly annoyed me because there is so much dead wood lying about in our woods, all you’ve got to do is go and pick it up. I’d actually help them pick it up and make their bonfire with them – not a hope – they must go and cut down young trees instead. I got fed up with this, and I remonstrated with them.’ He was told, ‘We’ll get you for this!’

      One night shortly afterwards Beresford-Ash and his wife were asleep in bed, when ‘there was a crash. It was the hall windows coming in, and petrol bombs landing. I was a damn sight fitter in those days, and I was down in a few seconds. My daughter also came down and, between us, we put the fires out.’

      Six months later the house was attacked again. ‘This time it was much more dangerous, because they bust a hole through a window, and put a can of petrol on the window seat. They sprayed paraffin all round it, and set it alight; the idea was that when I came down to put the fire out, it would explode and blow me up, and the house as well. But someone – “the man upstairs” – was looking after me because the petrol can leaked. So when I came downstairs I saw a terrific ball of fire. There were fumes, and smoke, and flames, but I could see the white faces of my ancestors on the walls, and I remember saying to them, “It’s all right, chaps! I’ll save you!” And by God, I bloody well did! I still get quite emotional about that. I went over to pick up the water fire-extinguisher, and my bloody hip dislocated. Agnès was ringing up the fire brigade in the kitchen, and she heard me yelping, and she thought I’d caught fire, so she came in with a bucket of water. “Darling, don’t throw it over me,” I said, “throw it on the fire!” Then the fire brigade arrived, and they were absolutely superb.’

      A few months later Beresford-Ash had a sixtieth-birthday party. ‘The local paper took a picture of Agnès, myself, and our three daughters outside the house, which they published, and we had a nice birthday lunch. Very soon after that, there was a hell of a thumping on the windows. By this stage we’d got bulletproof security windows, so they couldn’t fire-bomb the house. Instead they lit five fires on the gravel at the front, which represented myself, my wife, and our three children being burned.’

      Beresford-Ash is convinced that he knows the identity of the chief culprit: ‘It was all done by the same people, led by the same man, and everybody knew it, the police knew it, it was the joke of the local pub.’ He later met a barrister, and told him the whole story: ‘I said, “For you, in the legal profession, how do you feel about this?” He said, “We know, and our judges know, who has done these things over the years, who these people have killed, and when and how they killed them.” I said, “Look, mate, point of it is, you’re prepared to say that, but then you’re prepared to go back on Monday morning and draw the old pay?” And he said, “Yes. Why not? Because if I didn’t, somebody else worse than me certainly would.” What can you say to that?’

      I asked Beresford-Ash whether he considered moving away from Ashbrook after the attacks. ‘What? Leave here? Good God no! My dear Josh! This house has woodworm and dry rot, but, my God, I’m fond of it, and nobody’s going to kick me out of here! My daughter summed it up: after the second petrol bombing, Agnès was fed up and said we ought to go, but my daughter said, “Come on, Mum! We were here before these people, and we’ll be here after them!”’

      Beresford-Ash is a man of great charm, who has made efforts over the years to foster good local relations, and this fact probably saved his life in the Creggan. Nevertheless, his attitude hardens as he discusses the peace process. ‘When the process started, I would wake up in the morning and listen to the news on Radio 4, and think to myself, thank God another soldier or policeman hasn’t been killed. But that has been the only real benefit. Otherwise I consider it the most disgraceful and despicable surrender by the British politicians, the judiciary, the legal profession, and it should have been stopped immediately it started. Because the Queen’s enemies were attacking the Crown forces. They should still be hanged – they’ve done it. And that’s my instinct.’

      In Killyleagh I met another man whose family arrived in Ulster four centuries ago. Denys Rowan Hamilton is a man of precise military bearing beneath which lies a charming streak of mischief who, after coming to live in Northern Ireland in 1967, quickly became infuriated by much of what he saw. Born and raised in Scotland, Rowan Hamilton spent his childhood holidays in Ireland, and on leaving the army in his late forties he moved to County Down. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle, a fairy-tale fortress of towers and dogtooth walls that stands above the town. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans shortly their arrival. In 1604 the castle was taken over by Sir James Hamilton, an Anglican from Ayrshire, who was granted extensive lands in Ulster during the first plantation. It has remained in the family ever since. In 2000 Rowan Hamilton passed it on to his son and now lives in a house outside the town, where I kept him from his lunch, urging him to tell of his experiences.

      ‘When I made up my mind to come here,’ he says, ‘I was wondering what the hell I was going to do. I was going to start a new life. It’s quite a thing to do at 47.’ He was immediately fêted by well-to-do society: ‘They were saying, “We’ve got to have him!” and it was because I was the young Hamilton of Killyleagh. It really makes me laugh. They didn’t know me at all. I might have been the most ghastly shit.’

      Killyleagh Castle, into which the ‘young Hamilton’ was moving, had been requisitioned by the army during the war, and had suffered from years of neglect: ‘My great uncle was clever, he wrote Latin poems and that sort of thing, but he was a useless fellow, and never did a stroke of work. Not much happened when he was in the castle. He sold a farm a year to pay his servants. When I finally took over, there were only twenty-seven acres left out of an estate that once ran up to Bangor. If we hadn’t come along, the castle would never have survived. Now it’s in better nick than it’s been for 150 years. And my son, the first Hamilton in four hundred years to make a penny, has redecorated it very nicely.’

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