I should make this point. In between that time — before I was building treehouses and collecting tyres — about 16 months after leaving Belfast, daddy was killed.
Alan Brecknell, 2019
Alan Brecknell’s interview
Alan:
I was born on the 15th of September 1968, had my 50th birthday last year. At that stage mummy and daddy were just over two years married. They got married in Belfast, daddy was originally from Birmingham, England. He met my mother on a blind date in Birmingham in the 60s when she was over visiting her sister, whose husband was daddy’s best friend. That’s how they met, they had a long-distance relationship for a number of years. And, as I say, got married in the August 67 — just over a year after, I was born.
We lived in the Stranmillis area of Belfast until 1974. My memories of Belfast, I have some. I can remember the street we lived in, very narrow with small terraced houses and I remember going to nursery, Saint Brides. I walked it last Sunday (while on a visit to Belfast), it’s about a 15 minute walk for an adult… We had a nanny at the time, because daddy worked, firstly in the Rolls-Royce factory, then as a postman, mummy was a nurse, she worked in Claremont Street hospital, which wasn’t far from where we lived… I remember being pushed in a pram in the Botanic Gardens.
I suppose the next big memory in my life would’ve been the summer of 1974. We had hired a sky blue transit van, a large amount of furniture from the house was in it, mummy and daddy, my brother and meself and the cat and the dog were all in it. We left Belfast. As it turns out, we left Belfast because we were not so politely asked to leave. We were one of a small number of Catholic families in the area. I now speak to people who have never heard of anybody being put out in the Stranmillis area of Belfast, but I can assure you it happened.
Philip:
Do you recall the atmosphere of that time?
A
There was a family who used to collect me to walk to school with, they had children a wee bit older than we were, and they had a pipe bomb left on the windowsill. I remember that being discussed in the house, and that was the instigation for us to leave. I remember there being stuff being said, that this particular family had been threatened. I’m not sure if I heard that when it happened or after we left Belfast…
How much do we know, how much has been filled in, how much is a memory of the time? My memories of Belfast are very very scant and they are of walking to school and first days at school, which is for children (as it) should have been, fun memories. And about the enjoyable, happy things that you did in school. That’s to be honest with you.
Then after, we moved to new housing executive houses in Cullyhanna. That was the summer of 74, that was a new beginning, a new part of my life. There was another couple of families into the same development and it was that summer he started to make friends with who your neighbours were. Funny, I can remember one of the friends we made very quickly was the local headmaster’s son, he lived across the fields about 500 yards away from us. So you would’ve been back and forth across the field and would’ve got to know the headmaster, who was a proper headmaster in the sense of a community school, one of the respected people in the community. On the first day of term we walked to school down a wee narrow road single file, his car passed and I put my hand up. Everyone said, “You can’t do that to the headmaster!” I didn’t know that, we were in and out of his house the whole summer and he was just another father.
I started in P2 in the primary school, so everyone else had been there for a year. I don’t remember having a Belfast accent and not being able to be understood, but I do remember being asked to repeat things a number of times by the teacher.
P
Did it feel really different? You grew up in an urban environment…
A
The house in Belfast with wee narrow streets, you would’ve been out on the streets but not often. Whereas, you come to this village, there is a play park at the front of the village, there’s swings there’s slides, there’s an area to play football. The level of freedom increases. It’s a couple of hundred yards across the fields to one of your new friends houses. I wouldn’t’ve walked a couple of hundred yards down the street in Belfast, then you were onto the main road. It was a main road. Speaking of that main road, I can remember the Agricultural Show parade passing at the bottom of the street and the big white Michelin Man coming up the street and shaking hands with everyone…
Coming back to first days in school, you’re in a classroom where everybody knows each other. Getting to know each other there, there was definitely a sense this was different… There was a sense that we had moved, but this wasn’t a choice. How could I articulate that at this age? The feeling that this was a quick move… I can still picture the sky blue transit in my mind. It obviously had an impact, that journey. That was a finality, you never went back to Belfast. Oh, I can picture that sky blue van… There was something unnatural about the move, you weren’t really told, but there was something unnatural.
P
But how do you put that into words?
A
… I couldn’t, to be honest. If I did it would be my 50-year-old analysis.
P
Do you think you hold it in your body?
A
I think there has to be something, somewhere. The move was unnatural, if that’s the right word. It was forced upon you, it was something that happened overnight, very quickly. I’m sure it didn’t, because you can’t leave one house and find another one the next day. But in my mind it was. You were here and then you were gone. At the end of June you were at this school in Belfast and then in September you were at another school. Where you were one of the youngest children who knew the headmaster’s name!
P
Good to have that contact, kinda handy! Can you describe an iconic place for you, a field, or a place?
A
One of the things that sticks out of my memory at that time is building treehouses. I can still picture where one of them was. There was the housing development, there was a field, the Head aster’s house was over here. At the bottom of that field there was a big tree and we build a treehouse on it and you could see out around the whole village and out into the countryside.
P
Can you describe the treehouse?
A
Oh yes, I can completely describe the treehouse! (Laughter) The houses that we were living in were the first part of a housing executive development, so there was a phase 2, so there was always bits of timber and bits of plywood and stuff like this lying about the other building site next door to us. We would’ve had small offcuts of plywood that formed the floor… it had three branches that branched up from the stump, that allowed us then to sit this piece of timber into it and nail it in. I’m sure it was quite crudely nailed! And then there were other shorter pieces of timber to go between the branches, to form sides.
P
You had sides? That’s a serious treehouse.
R
Yep.
P
I don’t think we ever had sides.
A
Oh yes. You could’ve got three people into it, but it was a tight squeeze. Also you would’ve taken bits of branches and used them for cover on top. It was serious construction! Well, we thought it was.
One of the other big memories that’s iconic was Halloween. That was a big thing, a bonfire at Halloween. We spent the summers — this is maybe a bit later, age 8 or 9 — collecting tyres for the bonfires. Which of course we wouldn’t be allowed to do now, but we didn’t know that at the time. Cutting down whin(gorse) bushes to make a bonfire. Again, round the back of the Master’s house there was a ditch, a sheugh (shuck) as we would call it, an open ditch that was dried up, and that’s where we stored the tyres that we collected during the summer. When I say collected, we were taking them from farmers silage pits, they were using them to hold down the covers on the silage. Jump up onto them and take one and move the rest of them around a wee bit so that it didn’t look as if they’ve been moved.
That’s what we spent our summers doing… We were scrambling around the fields and up-and-down ditches and the army were everywhere and the IRA were everywhere. In hindsight, maybe not the best thing to be doing, but nothing happened to us… it was glorious, it was glorious.
P
Classic childhood stuff. And yet you just dropped in to new elements there, the IRA and the army.
A
I should make this point. In between that time — before I was building treehouses and collecting tyres — about 16 months after leaving Belfast, daddy was killed.
He was killed in a Loyalist gun and bomb attack on a bar in Silverbridge. So that’s the next big memory of my life, obviously. Those other memories, glorious as they are, are in the context of that. But I suppose the point is, even though that horrendous event happened, we still got on and lived our lives. You still went running around the fields, you still had your friends. I don’t remember the relationships changing in anyway because of what’d happened. Do you want me to talk about what happened to my daddy?
P
Only if you’re happy to do that.
A
Roisín my sister was born on 17 December 1975 and Daddy was killed on the 19th of December. He had gone to the hospital to visit mummy and Roisín. The 19th of December that year was the last Friday before Christmas, he was breaking up for the Christmas holidays, as was everyone else in the local factorie he worked in. He was making aluminium windows and doors and he’d arranged to go with his workmates to celebrate Roisín‘s birth. In most instances, the men in the factorie got paid by cheques which they cashed in on the Friday evening in the local bar with a couple of drinks. He would’ve been there most Friday evenings, but this particular Friday my aunt, mummy’s sister, was with him. She had been in to visit mummy, she was helping daddy look after us, she’d come from Belfast after mummy went into hospital.
The two of them had just got into the bar, her husband had come from Belfast and arrived at the exact same time as the people who attacked the bar. They shot him outside, five times. He survived, thankfully. Shot another man who was getting petrol at the petrol pumps and he died instantly. Shot after the 14-year-old boy whose parents owned the bar and shop and petrol station. He ran into the bar and hid in behind the door. Then the attackers came in. Machine-gun. Threw in a bomb, shouted, “Happy Christmas.” The bomb exploded and as a result of that attack, three people died. Patsy Donnelly, Michael Donnelly the son of the people who owned the bar, daddy. My aunt and her husband were severely injured and eight other people were seriously injured in the attack.
That’s really my next big memory… I remember mummy going into hospital remember the evening that she went into hospital. Waiting for Roisín to be born and daddy telling us we had a new sister and the euphoria and all of that. Two boys eleven months apart, before all of that. He (Mark) was born 69, I was born 68. Six years later Roisín comes along. I remember getting up the next morning, going into mummy and daddy’s room and it not being slept in. And then realising that there were a lot of people in the house. And then the parish priest come, sat us down at the bottom of the stairs and told us that daddy had been killed the night before. Then we were whisked away with friends of the family at Crossmaglen. Going back in the house at some stage and seeing mummy in bed. Don’t remember the funeral at all. I was there, I’ve been told I was there, but I just don’t remember it.
And then really the next thing that I do remember, it was the next May, May 76, when I did my first holy communion. I can remember I did one of the readings, after that learning this reading so I could get it off by heart. It was The Lord is My Shepherd, I can still quote it back to you and I’m not an awfully religious person anymore.
P
That changes everything.
A
Yes it does. Of course it does, because my aunt and uncle were both severely injured, spent a lot of time in hospital. I can remember being in the hospital in Dundonald to see my uncle John, who had been shot across the face, so he had his whole jaw retired, reworked. Whenever my aunt and uncle came out of the hospital, they lived with us. So mummy then had a seven-year-old, six-year-old, the new baby, and two people who were severely injured in the house along with her.
There is also a memory of that Christmas, of us all sitting in the sitting room and mummy individually handing presents out, as she does now, “There is one present for you, one for you, one for you…” Once they’re all opened, then you can get the next. She still does that to this day. And we have to call in on every Christmas morning to ensure that the tradition is kept on. I actually like it. I can remember there was a friend of mummy’s and her husband come to stay over Christmas and he got given daddy’s Christmas presents. You wonder now how he felt, being given daddy’s Christmas presents. I’ve never talked to the man about it and he’s long since dead. Again, it’s that start of the reality. You have to move on, not to move on that’s the wrong word, get on with your life. I suppose from mummy’s perspective, this had to be done because she got three young children who all still believed in Santy Claus, so you have to keep that semblance of normality.
Aunt and uncle came out of hospital, I remember they were living with us, then they got one of the new houses that had been built, just down the way from us. We were one of the first houses in the village to have a telephone, I don’t know why. I think it was possibly something to do with the injuries they had, if emergency care was ever needed. The telephone number was Crossmaglen 645, always remember that.
Then the next real thing was making holy communion, me making my confirmation. The sorts of things all kids will remember, the seminal points of their lives.
P
Did you still feel like a kid?
A
Yes, oh aye yes, yeah yeah. I think probably that is to do with mummy trying to ensure that we didn’t lose our childhood. We still went out and did the same things that all the other kids did. We went on holiday every summer, only to the west of Ireland, but lots of the other children in the village didn’t get any holidays. We went to the west of Ireland, we went to Cork, we went over to Galway, Mayo, Sligo. My aunt and uncle would’ve come with us as well, by this stage John could drive again. As much as possible, we had what you would class as a normal childhood.
P
It sounds like your mum worked hard to make that happen.
A
She worked very hard, physically worked very hard, she was a nurse and she went back to work, she learned to drive because she needed to get to work but probably for us to have a life as well. Every summer, holidays. Some of them would’ve been based on going to Our Lady’s Shrine in Knock, that was her faith, that’s probably what kept her going. Yes, we did have a childhood, even though daddy was not there, we had a childhood. We had aunt and uncle beside us and John would’ve fulfilled that father role. He never tried to be your father, but fulfilled that role and was always there, went to teacher meetings, all of that. He took the same level of pride in us as if we had been his own children. Also, when you needed to be told off, he was quite capable of doing that as well. Although it didn’t happen that often, if mummy told us to do something that was normally it!
P
What was the feeling in the family then? For some people that might generate a lot of anger, for some sadness…
A
She always talked about daddy, so he was always there. I’ve spoken to other people across the years where somebody who has gone is never talked about, but she did and encouraged us to as well. It was important, because I started to get a sense of the kind of person he was, the character he was. To an extent, I have to live up to that individual. He’d come to South Armagh from Birmingham. As soon as he got there, he got involved in the local youth club. To me, he was saying I want to be part of this community and how do I do that? He’d been in the boys brigade when he was in England. He got involved in the local Credit Union… This was someone who wanted to be involved. To this day, I meet people who talk about his influence, who were young then and are now in their 60s. The influence he had on their lives as teenagers, the 12 to 14 months he lived there…
I remember mummy saying — often — “You know what it is like to lose your father. Don’t do this to anyone else.” It was said so many times. Growing up in South Armagh, there were plenty of opportunities for getting involved in the IRA if you’d have wanted to. People would say, “You have every right and every legitimate reason for getting involved. To take revenge.” It never entered my mind in relation to my father’s murder. Very close friend was killed by the British Army in later years and, personally, you were pushed[1] an awful lot closer to getting involved in stuff, but I never did. Always at the back of my mind was that reminder, “You know what it’s like, so don’t do it to someone else.”
Different circumstances instil different emotions, different thoughts. That was much later, I was 19 or 20 at that stage.
When we were talking about running round the fields, duking round hedges and diving into ditches and crawling around fields and stuff, it never felt dangerous. There was never that sense to me as a child. Even though you were very well aware of the army being all around the place.
P
How would that awareness manifest itself?
A
Whenever we moved into the house in Cullyhanna first, the first six weeks every Saturday morning the army come and searched every house in the new housing development. It was there, it was ever present. I remember one day we went to shop in Dundalk. Sometimes it was cheaper to shop in Newry, but at that stage it was cheaper in Dundalk. He (daddy) worked every Saturday morning, he’d come home then we went to do the shopping. For whatever reason, we were away early this particular Saturday morning and we arrived back in the middle of the afternoon. We were stopped just outside the school by the army. Everyone was taken out of the car, daddy was searched, mummy was searched, there was a female officer there. The car was searched. I can remember saying something to Mark, “Are we not gonna be searched?” And the soldier saying, “We are not allowed to search children.” It’s a really vivid memory. We got into the house and a couple of minutes later all of the neighbouring women arrived in. Daddy was actually the only man still in the village, because every other man had been arrested. They were lifted that morning if they hadn’t been away to work. He was the only man in the village at 3 o’clock in the afternoon… it was always in the background. You would’ve seen foot patrols up in the housing development, through the village.
P
…in Belfast they seemed unbelievably tense. You’d see these hunched guys across a street.
A
A lot of sudden darting movements. But I didn’t take it in as tension on their behalf, or fear on their behalf. It was something that happened, they walked through. You were always told not to talk to them. Even if a soldier did try to engage you, you just ignored them. That came from home and I don’t know if it was, “Don’t talk to them because it might be dangerous and you’re standing beside them,” or “don’t talk to them because they shouldn’t be here.”
P
Was that quite unsettling?
A
Not when you’re 7, 8, 9. But by the time I am a teenager and you start to become a bit more politically aware and by that stage the hunger strikes are on, then it becomes a completely different thing. I become more politically aware at that stage.
P
How did that happen? Your treehouse that you looked out of is no longer looking out onto fields, it’s looking out onto something else.
I went to school at Saint Joseph‘s in Crossmaglen. The layout of Crossmaglen is that there is a big square in the middle of it, the Dundalk Road runs out of the village and the police barracks was here, then a big housing development, then the school next to it. Helicopters come across the school and the housing development to get into the barracks… it was obviously calculated, because that’s the safest route in. The very first day at school was just horrendous because of the noise of a helicopter coming across the school. Your teacher is trying to teach you English, which I was pretty poor at the best of times. After about a month you block them out, the helicopters could be back and forward all day and you never made any remarks on it. But that first month, it was a real intrusion into your education. Some people would say what 11 or 12-year-old is going to worry about that? But I enjoyed school and that impacts. That sense that this is not normal.
And then at some stage in the early 80s, Crossmaglen as a village was basically closed off when they were doing work to the police barracks. Buses were searched, and then they searched them on the way back out again… why are you searching a school bus on the way out of the village? I understand it coming in, I don’t agree with it but I understand it. That sort of stuff is the move from primary school to secondary school. I don’t want to say a loss of innocence, but life has changed. You’re not the big boy in the wee school, you’re the wee boy in the big school. It does impact on you, you start to make new friends and new people influence your thinking.
1981, the hunger strikes start. I’ve become very aware that all of that is going on, probably reading newspapers that you wouldn’t have read before. All that starts to change…
P
Did anybody crystallise a position at that time?
A
Not a child, but an adult does. One of our neighbours would’ve taken Mark and myself fishing. Taught us how to fish. Taught us how to play chess. Got me interested in reading, even though I wouldn’t of been great at English I didn’t read a lot. He was the one who told me, “You have to read, it’s really important to read because then you can educate yourself. It’s not someone funnelling stuff at you. You choose what you want.” It was massive, so it was.
P
He is handing you the keys to the kingdom.
A
Later, it turned out, he became a member of the assembly here for Sinn Fein in 1982. It wasn’t that he was handing me those sorts of books, he was saying, “Read, read whatever you want to read. Just read.” I don’t want to use the word father figure, because he wasn’t a father figure, but it was something that your father would do for you. And I said to my children, “You need to read, you need to be reading books. I don’t care if you read a book I don’t agree with, the philosophy of it or whatever. Read it and then talk to me about it…”
You want to go to university, you want to do anything like that, you have to have the ability to read. That’s what he instilled into me at 12, around about that age. I’m an ardent reader now… He obviously was an influence in your thinking, your politics as well. Where do you live, you start to become very aware that this is abnormal, to have this level of militarisation around you.
P
Earlier on you used the word unnatural…
A
Oppressive is the word that I would associate with it. It was very difficult to go anywhere. You were going to be stopped in the car and taken out of the car. That increased when I started to drive myself. You couldn’t have gone out in the evening without being stopped and taken out of the car and the car searched. And the same coming home at two or three o’clock in the morning stranded and a soldier or a policeman standing over you. You can’t leave because they have your licence. You could be sitting there for half an hour on a country road and you don’t know who’s around you or what’s around you, or what’s going on. I can remember one night, leaving my car in at the side of the road at a roadblock and walking home. A soldier shouted after me, “Where are you going?”
“ if you’re not going to get my license back, I’m just proving to you that I’m not doing anything wrong. I’ll come and get my license in the barracks tomorrow morning.“And he come running after me and gave me the license and I got in the car and drove away.
But what’s the point of that? What was the point of that exercise, other than to annoy me, hassle me, harass me? Maybe there was a point to it, but that’s what I took out of it.
P
As a kid, you hit up against the boundaries. You’re like a little bagatelle ball, there’s lots of energy there…
A
When I was a child, the only time I remember like that was on Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday in Cullyhanna always would’ve been a parade. There was a football match always on before. We would of went to the football match and then walked to the memorial. There’s a massive memorial in Cullyhanna. And every so often a masked man would appear with a gun and read out the Republican statement for the next 12 months. You weren’t aware that there was this other body of people, but you were aware things were going on. You would hear explosions, shooting incidents. But until you went to school in Crossmaglen, not that it was Crossmaglen’s fault, it is a political awakening. I started to read Nelson Mandela‘s autobiography when I was in my early teens, started to read about socialist politics, social justice, that sort of stuff. Is this normal?
P
More than that, is this right?
A
I didn’t see myself physically or intellectually fighting against that state, that oppression. I use the word oppression because that’s how I felt. “Why are you allowed to do this to me, why are you allowed to take me out of the car, why are you allowed to take my mother out of the car, take her shopping out on the side of the road and mess with it?” I have to admit that sometimes I thought: is this happening because my name is Brecknell and you’re expecting is going to be a reaction from 16 or 17-year-old after what happened to his father? I don’t know. You wondered whether that was there or not. Do they expect that you’re going to get involved in the IRA, because that’s what the 17-year-old boys in the area have always done? …You have a lot of angst against everyone, even the community from which you come. I think that’s natural for any 16 or 17-year-old to want to rebel in a small way. Maybe it made it easier, to rebel against the army rather than your community and your own family. You had somewhere to funnel that natural rebellion. Which maybe saved our family in the long run.
P
You have to leave the nest…
A
Whenever I did go, I went to Liverpool. I went to Liverpool for five years, studied in Liverpool for five years. It was really important for me because it got me away from all that. Uncle John took me over on the ferry, he was in the Merchant Navy, so any excuse to go over to Liverpool. I didn’t see him the whole time I was there! He was there for a week and I saw him once. He was supposed to be helping me settle in. (Laughter)
The morning I was leaving, I got an offer from Jordanstown (outside Belfast) to go and do civil engineering… I’ve already changed to do quantity surveying at Liverpool and I thought no I’m not going to change again. It was probably the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. It gave you the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life, different countries from all over the world, different parts of England, Scotland. And even people from here who you would never have an opportunity to talk to here, because we would’ve all been in our wee silos. It took me away from what South Armagh was at that time and when I came back five years later the early threads of the Peace Process were starting to work their way through, the Hume-Adams talks were there in the background.
P
How amazing to get away from all that heaviness bearing down on you. Sound like that was the point of growing up.
A
You also have had that five years of experience outside of here. There is a world outside of here, outside of what has happened here, even a world outside of what happened to my own father and my own family. I’m not saying you can change it in anyway, but it changed how I viewed what happened. I worked as a quantity surveyor for awhile, sales rep, then at the Pat Finucane Centre. That was in response to my son asking why he didn’t have a grandfather. And I couldn’t give a definitive answer. Not that you can give a three-year-old a definitive answer, apart from bad men killed his grandfather. I started to question then, what does that actually mean? Well into my 20s by this stage, before you started to revisit all of that…
P
You’ve brought it right back to childhood again and your three-year-old.
A
There’s just something enquiring in my own mind. If he’d asked 5 years earlier, I probably wouldn’t, I wouldn’t’ve felt safe to put your head up above the parapet and ask those questions. But because you had the peace process at this stage and because the levels of the violence were low in comparison to what they had been, I was able to ask questions. And that started a journey I didn’t expect still to be on. I’m happy in my own mind that I know what happened that night and I know who was involved and what role people played and I don’t want to see any of them go to jail for it. But in doing that work, it then spread out into a whole bigger piece of work with probably 60 other families who have lost people. It’s not about me and my family anymore, it’s about help and support and advocacy for those families.
That’s not to say it doesn’t still impact on your life sometimes… But it isn’t what defines me. That’s why I can leave the (work) phone switched off. It can’t be what defines me. If it wasn’t for the other families, I would probably be doing something else, because I have found out as much as I can about what happened that night. The only other thing that would be outstanding would be the why? And the only people who can answer that are the people who attacked the bar that night. They haven’t come forward and I haven’t come looking for them. I know who they are, but I haven’t come looking for them. Is that somewhere I would want to go? I’m not sure, I’m not sure. Maybe someday.
Alan Brecknell was interviewed by Philip Davenport, at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, 2019
Not pushed by others in the community but personally.