The Price of my Soul by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

Life was poor, the streets were tough, and young Darran was an inquisitive child, a habitual reader who later described this compulsion as ‘a dangerous curiosity’, earning him the sobriquet from his mother, ‘Professor Anderson’.īeyond the door were patrolling British soldiers and the family would secretly tune into their radio frequencies to plot the movement of raiding parties. His mother was pregnant with him when she and his father were living in Cork but returned to Derry to get married, her father disapproving of the union and ostracising her. Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes. Inventory by Darran Anderson, as well as being a coming-of-age memoir set in Derry, opening in 1984, is a study of innocence and guilt, culture and history, war and peace, hearth and home versus his personal odyssey (into the underworld and the horrors and false solace of those two crooks, alcohol and drugs), and ultimately finding liberation and redemption through self-exile and the expressive power of the written word.Ī Russian proverb prefacing the book, paraphrased, reads – Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye. One of the greatest and ongoing insults is to have politicians and commentators consciously refer to the Republic of Ireland (which stops at the border) as ‘Ireland’, perpetuating the very partition (and mindset) they sometimes claim to decry.

For almost a century, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and earlier incarnations, and for two decades RTE’s Section 31’s censorship, politically and deliberately distanced the state and the people from the northern nationalist community, a community sacrificed to partition so that Twenty-Six Counties could be free. What historians – with their attention to the ‘big picture’, their fixation with dates, statistics, conferences, legislation and (usually) ‘great’ men at war – rarely capture is the psyche of ordinary people, the raw communal experience and reaction to critical events (which also drives and determines history), the multi-layered humanity of a community, which the memoir can crucially make up for.Ĭolin Broderick’s astonishment and sense of abandonment ( That’s That, 2013) discovering on a London building-site in the late1980s that many of his fellow labourers, hailing from Cork and Kerry, couldn’t give a damn about the punishment his people in Tyrone were going through at the hands of the British army, was an emotional reaction to an attitude coldly fostered by the Irish establishment. Among the best are Bernadette Devlin McAliskey’s The Price Of My Soul, Dennis Donoghue’s Warrenpoint, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, and Tony Doherty’s tender and moving This Man’s Wee Boy.

THERE have been many excellent memoirs written from the northern nationalist perspective. My review in The Irish Examiner, 3 October, 2020 Inventory – A Family Portrait of Derry’s Troubled Past By Darran Anderson, Vintage, £8.99, 320pp

The Price of my Soul by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey