Introduction: Exile & Homecoming
Derek Poole

From the Ardoyne Road...
Norman Hamilton

From the Director
David Porter

Exile and Homecoming
David McMillan

Be Careful What You Wish For
Gareth Higgins

Bonfire Reflections
Alwyn Thomson

Rights, Relationships and Responsibilities
Kelvin McCracken

Wilson On Suffering
Alan Wilson

Poems

Faith and Practice - Debbie Watters
Ruth Hutchinson

Forgiveness
Janet Morris

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BONFIRE REFLECTIONS
I remember my friend, my Catholic friend, Jim, sitting on the kerb outside his house on the street where we both lived. It was the eleventh night. “There’s another one up,” he would call out sarcastically, mocking our excitement as we scanned the darkening sky, me and my Protestant friends, searching for the tell-tale signs of rising smoke and flying sparks that revealed another bonfire flickering, then surging, into life. “There’s another one up,” we would cry out.

Jim mocked us, but in his voice there was something else – anger, disappointment, envy. After all, we were no more than ten or eleven years old. Our parents told us, “Don’t play with matches!” “Get away from the fire!” Yet here we were – on the one day of the year when we got to play with fire, got to stand close in the darkness, daring one another to edge closer to this immense crackling, sucking, shifting, searing pyre, this monochrome rainbow. It dried our skin, burned our eyes, sucked the breath from us, and as we fought to reclaim the air we tasted the smoke in our mouths and sensed the heat in our lungs.

We walked off to find the bonfires and left Jim sitting on his kerb. Those were primary school days. Not long after we moved up to secondary level. He went to his school, we went to ours. We didn’t see much of each other after that.

I had another Catholic friend, Daniel. We were thirteen or fourteen years old now. Daniel didn’t sit on the kerb on the eleventh night mocking us in disappointment and anger. Daniel came with us. I remember a bonfire being built at Whitehall on the Ormeau Road. Daniel was there. He was dragging a white wooden panel door on his back. Trailing over the ground, bouncing off the kerbs, it made a fearful racket.
When we had had enough of Whitehall, we walked – with Daniel – down to the bonfire at Somerset Street, then to Walmer Street, then to Annadale Embankment. Everyone knew Daniel was a Catholic, but nobody seemed to mind – even though there were plenty of ‘hard-men’ on the streets we walked along. Perhaps it was his innocence, perhaps it was his enthusiasm, perhaps it was that Daniel had a slightly strange appearance – a head that seemed too big for his body. Maybe the hard edge of hatred was softened.

Walmer Street was the best bonfire in the area I grew up in. Squeezed into a tiny street between two gable walls, it seemed as tall as the little terrace houses packed around it. Almost every year the fire-brigade was called out as the bricks on the gables became hotter and hotter. The performers knew their lines: “Mister, don’t put out our fire” – maybe a threat, maybe a plea. “We’re not going to put out your fire love. We like bonfires too” – a word of assurance, a peace offering.

The hoses were unrolled and a stream of water played on the gable walls, now so hot the water at first turned to steam. We watched the stage before us, enthralled at the performance. The walls glistened as the water rolled down them, the billows of steam were sucked into the flames of the fire. A solitary flute played the sash somewhere on the far side.

We watched the streetlights melt, the plastic covers starting to twist and then to flow. We listened for the pop as the bulbs exploded. Sometimes we weren’t expecting it and it took us by surprise. It was exciting to imagine that we were under attack. Cowboys and Indians in Walmer Street – we were the good guys.

Some of those who stood round the bonfire with us on those nights exchanged the imaginary gunshots for the real in later years, becoming involved with loyalist paramilitaries. One, suspected of murder, became a victim himself, shot dead on the Ormeau Road. For another, his greatest enemy proved to be his own friends: beaten to death, they found his body outside a pub. What malice there was in their hearts as fourteen-year-old boys standing by the bonfire in Walmer Street I don’t know, but in their adult years, it seems, there was malice aplenty.

They grew up in the same streets I did, went to the same primary school I did - Ulidia Primary School – stood by the same bonfires I did. But our lives turned out very differently.

At some point – I can’t remember when exactly, maybe when I was sixteen or seventeen – I stopped going to the bonfires, stopped watching the bands. I don’t know why. Perhaps friends drifted away, perhaps it just stopped seeming like innocent childhood fun. But I remember going back again a few years ago. We went to Sandy Row. I was bemused, horrified, disgusted, embarrassed. It was pitiful, it was pathetic – it was surreal. Here a band of Christian evangelists conducting an open-air meeting in their finery. There an unruly crowd of young men in Rangers tops, bottles in hand bellowing our Protestant songs. In the background an open-air disco: boom, boom, boom – it is old but it is beautiful – boom, boom, boom. People pushed prams, weaving along the road. The prams carried the babies and propped up the parents. Everywhere Tennents and Harp.

In the same way that the eleventh night I knew as a child was not the eleventh night my parents knew in their childhood, so the eleventh night I experienced as a thirty something adult was not the eleventh night I knew as a child. But then they lit the fire.

Slowly at first, then taking a hold, the heat rising, edging further back. The smoke billowing. The dryness of the air. The crackling of the wood. The skin stretching tight across my face. Wondering how much hotter my clothes could get without bursting into flames or melting.

Fire has always been a powerful symbol – sometimes a symbol of warning, sometimes a symbol of rejoicing, sometimes just a symbol. I found myself drawn by the fire, to the exclusion of the raucous scenes around me. What it symbolises for me I do not know – childhood, perhaps, times that seemed more innocent. Or maybe it is just the fire itself.

Some years ago I edited a book called Faith in Ulster. We asked people to comment on the phrase ‘For God and Ulster’. One of our contributors was the political scientist Arthur Aughey. In his piece he wrote of the effect a passing band parade had on him: “The sound of a loyalist band can stir emotions and identifications which are not simply momentary, not simply illusory, but real. ‘The accent of one’s birthplace,’ as La Rochefoucauld said, ‘persists in the mind and heart as much as in speech.’”

As with bands, so with bonfires.

Alwyn Thomson is Research Officer with ECONI.