Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast by Kevin Myers
Atlantic Books, £14.99

PERHAPS the most astonishing thing about this compelling book is that its author survived long enough to write it. Because Kevin Myers, as a cub reporter, found himself with a front row seat almost from the moment when what has been euphemistically, and misleadingly, referred to as the Troubles in Northern Ireland began.

Shot at, covered in the flesh and blood of others as bombs went off – “a confetti of human flesh all around” – and injured several times, his propensity for being just inches away from the wrong place at the wrong time – surely an essential quality for a reporter of such events – is extraordinary.

But it was his ability to run with both sides, courtesy of his Irish Catholic descent while, having been brought up in Leicester, speaking like an Englishman, that enabled him to go drinking with the likes of IRA leader Seamus Twomey and also to share the confidences of UVF principals. It gave him an insight into the mentality and philosophy of both sides as the violence and bloodshed increased throughout ’70s.

This, together with his refusal to play the blame game, singling out any one of the three protagonists (let’s not forget the role of the British army in all of this) as being responsible for the mounting death toll and the terrible suffering among the largely innocent population, is where this book’s real strength lies. There is no finger pointing here; his message is that all three sides – loyalists, republicans, police and army – have blood on their hands.

It is, of course, a truism that could be applied to all wars. You can almost hear Tony Blair describing the invasion of Iraq as a fair and just war as you turn the pages of this book. All those in Northern Ireland believed their reasons were fair and just, and so the slaughter of people, killed for walking down the wrong street, or for having the wrong girlfriend, or for coming out of the pub at the wrong time, rolled on.

Long Kesh, Crumlin Road, Lisburn Road, Ardoyne, Ballymurphy, the Falls: even all these years, those names still evoke memories of some atrocity – a shooting, a nail bomb, an ambush – that ravaged Belfast in those days.

But Myers does more; whether it’s victim or felon, he names the innocent and the guilty, and he paints a picture of the suffering of the families, of the stench and smell of death: “in part vanilla, in part raw steak, in part anus fresh excrement: the lingering aromatic remains of what had been human beings moments before.”

There are no brave freedom fighters in Myers’ view of the Troubles, only thugs, psychos, bullies and their misguided followers. He recalls a 16-year-old and seemingly timid boy who has just shot and killed a soldier, witnessed by the author. “I didn’t murder no one,” the boy protests. “I’m the member of an army. I obeyed an order to shoot a man. So I shot him. I squeezed the trigger. The IRA killed him, not me. It had nothing to do with me; it was none of my business.”

These were the people Myers spent time with and got drunk with in pubs. Drinking formed an essential part of the daily schedule, which is hardly surprising given the sights he saw first hand, from Bloody Friday in 1972 to six years later when 12 dog lovers were burned to death by an IRA firebomb in an hotel.

Of course, such people are dangerous company to keep, as he was to find out after spending a long night drinking with a couple of paramilitary killers. A friend burst in when he was in the gents: “The guns have arrived, they’re going to nut you.” “Nut” being slang for kill and “tatey-bread” for dead, both references thereby diminishing the seriousness of the actions and thereby diminishing the guilt.

The sense of futility can be no more clearly described than by two nights in the Bogside Inn in the company of a group of Official IRA members. On the first occasion, as he was leaving, a British soldier had fired from the city walls, killing a 15-year-old boy a few feet away. The kid was carrying a bag of chips: “His skull split open like a coconut in a shy, blood pouring out of his ears and mouth.”

Two nights later, he was back in the same pub, chatting to the same group of men. The talk was all about a booby trap that had killed two soldiers. The air was filled with pride. “Word had spread through the Bogside about who was responsible; wherever he went people shook his hand and slapped his back – a good job well done.” Revenge had been extracted.

But while Myers brings alive the sense of horror and fear of those times, his memoir is diminished by his insistence of including the most banal and needlessly detailed instalments of his many sexual conquests. Of course, along with the drinking, it is all part of the madness and the mayhem, but it sits most uncomfortably among so much death and suffering.

This dark journey back through recent history does remind us, though, that if there is one significant legacy of the Blair years, then it must surely be the Good Friday Agreement. However odious the men, like Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, left in charge, it has to be hoped that it is an enduring one.

Simon Kinnersley