Songs of childhood

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Nick Earls

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How do you make a terrorist? I can't pretend to know the definitive answer to that question, and I'm not at all sure that there is just one. But I can see that it's possible that some people who had childhoods not unlike mine could become terrorists when pushed or pulled by the necessary circumstances at the appropriate time.

I was born in Northern Ireland and I kept that out of my first nine books because the fundamentalism at the heart of that society, split as it was by a sectarian divide, stopped making sense almost the moment I arrived in Brisbane aged eight and three quarters. In Northern Ireland, there were normal lives being lived as well – normal for the most part – but both sides of the conflict had some people who would hate and kill and die for their beliefs. These were fundamentalists of a white Christian kind who were citizens of the United Kingdom. They were divided by which branch of Christianity they'd inherited, but also divided by politics, walls, barricades, armed patrols, old seething hatreds, ancient ignorance, imbalances of opportunities and sometimes simple deep-seated frustration that was given an outlet in violence seen by some as legitimate.

No major religion urges its devotees to plant bombs, to strike out and kill people in a way that's random or close to it. There are always other factors at work, too – power imbalances, poverty, anger, views that are held about a cause. But religion is often a marker that becomes attached to these divides. In open wars and civil conflicts in many parts of the world, armies and insurgents on all sides fight with the conviction that God is with them. In lower-level conflicts, it's still sometimes one of the most powerful labels going. Northern Ireland has been one of those places.

I was a Protestant on the Ards Peninsula, and I recently spoke to someone I know who grew up, a few years younger than me, as a Catholic in Belfast. He grew up having heard that Protestants ate their babies. All too easily, we make demons of the people on the other side of the wall. Or, rather, there are people in our communities who make our demons for us and pass them on to us. And you can't know better than that if you're too young to know anything. You take on those views and believe them, if they're part of your world and largely uncontested.

If we don't know this, we don't know fundamentalism. If we don't know it, we don't know where terrorists come from. And if we don't know where terrorists come from, any war against terrorism risks being a lumbering blunt instrument that terrorists will believe confirms the basis of their rage and that they will find ways around.

If we see terrorists as so different that they're almost another species, that allows us to think about exterminating them. If that's to be our answer, its cost will be high and we will see much more terrorism. While we need to track down and deal with people who commit and support terrorist acts, it can only be part of what we do. By itself it may win some victories but it may also create martyrs, entrench prejudices and inadvertently lead to an increase in terrorist recruitment. So it's important to look at what happens in a terrorist's life before terrorism – to look at the forces shaping young lives in societies known to produce terrorists.

 

I REMEMBER DRIVING THROUGH BELFAST ONE DAY and my mother pointing out a Catholic school. I looked out the window for as long as I could as we passed. I wanted to see what Catholics looked like but I couldn't because they were all inside. I can remember now the picture that was in my mind of how Catholics might be. They all had dark eyes and thin faces and short straight black hair with skull caps. It's nonsensical and I can't explain it, but it's what was in my head. To me, perhaps, people who looked like that would be different, and Catholics would be different.

What makes even less sense about it is that, when I was young, we spent at least two summer holidays in Cork, in a part of Ireland that could hardly have been more Catholic. We made friends with the O'Driscolls, who were from there, and my mother remembers me explaining to one of the O'Driscoll girls, who was around my age, that we weren't that different really; that they thought Mary was really important but we knew she was just Jesus's mother.

That's a child's view of the world – a jumble of different rules from different places, all sorted and tried out to determine which combination fits with what we see. Here's the line I drew: the O'Driscolls must be like us because we spent time with them and they were great people and they seemed like us, but Catholics in the north were definitely different because, as far as I was aware, I didn't see them and they lived in different places and I knew people who saw some of them as some kind of enemy.

I expect my Mary line came from my parents, though not quite in the form in which I used it. I can imagine my mother saying it as "they believe" and "we believe" in a careful even-handed way and for me that became "they think" and "we know".

On my second day at Ascot State School in Brisbane, the class divided for religious instruction. If the idea of the class dividing took me by surprise, it was nothing compared with the shock when the teacher asked for the Catholics to stand and the girl next to me turned out to be one of them. My first, instinctive, thought was that I'd let my guard down. How could I not know? How could I not tell?

When my father read the manuscript of The Thompson Gunner – my first book with a character with a Northern Irish childhood – his only suggestion was that I needed to change the name of one character. I had called him Gerard, and my father said that was a Catholic name, and there wouldn't have been a Gerard within 20 miles of my fictional village.

That's why Ascot State School surprised me. That's why I was left knowing that there was much of my former life that I couldn't explain in any sensible way.

I'd grown up with a pretty abnormal definition of normal, but I only worked that out properly when I was writing the novel. Throughout my childhood and adolescence – and beyond – in Australia, my family and I maintained a position that Northern Ireland was more normal than people gave it credit for, that the trouble was mostly in some well-known areas and beyond them, day-to-day life was relatively unaffected. I'm sure that view is partly right – my childhood was no Belfast childhood – but it doesn't acknowledge the dysfunction that was there in other places. Perhaps it crept in in the late '60s and early '70s, and people gave up true normality an inch or two at a time.

Some family friends worked it out once they realised what was happening when they drove their children across Belfast to school. Over time the risk on some parts of the trip increased. They started looking out for trouble, then the parents started making the children get down on the floor if there might be danger ahead. One day they worked out that their children would routinely lie on the floor of the car for certain parts of the trip. They worked out that it had become as regular and as normal as a habit, and it happened without a word needing to be spoken.

We became used to stopping to be searched when we went into shops in the coastal towns near where we lived. We became used to the army setting up roadblocks, then people in our village set up roadblocks, too. People became used to the orderly evacuation of a street when there was a bomb scare and used to real bombs sometimes being the reason for it. The last time I saw a Belfast shopfront fall into the street as the shop burned after a bomb had gone off, almost no one else was watching.

I had a great aunt who bought raspberry sherbets for my sister and me, and we loved them and she knew it. It turned out that she only knew one place to buy them, and she had to cross some of the wrong parts of Belfast to get there. A few times she was pinned down for a while by crossfire on her way there, but she refused to let it stop her. You can't let things like that stop your life being normal.

 

WE ACCOMODATED IT ALL, WHICH IS WHAT YOU DO IF IT'S THERE in your world. We normalised it, because that's what you have to do to live from one day to the next. But try transposing it to Australia. For Belfast, read Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne. For the coastal town read Caloundra or Terrigal or somewhere on the Mornington Peninsula. How normal does it looks now?

In our village in Northern Ireland, the day after John F. Kennedy died, my mother mentioned how terrible she thought it was, only to get the reply, "But, sure, he was only a Catholic".

At our school, instead of singing "I'd like to teach the world to sing", we sang "I'd like to crucify the Pope". A few years later, not far away in a different part of the province, some Catholic children would be singing about the bomb that blew Mountbatten to pieces and that, too, would be a proud, cruel song that would give people a laugh.

I've no idea where songs like that come from, but someone must start them. There was too much politics in ours for any of us eight-year-olds to have written them, but somehow they came our way. And we sang them because it's what we did. Never at home, though, not at our place. Even then I had two worlds that were subtly different, and I knew it.

At school, it was part of belonging. It didn't come from the teachers, it didn't come from anywhere official, it was just there. I can see how such things have consequences. I can see how children can find themselves in childhoods with no moderating views on offer, and where belonging becomes very much about holding the views around them. Most of us do that, until something teaches us to question. Some environments work against people picking up that skill. Fundamentalist environments, I suspect, aren't much about questioning.

So, from an early age, from the time you have language, it starts. And if everyone around you thinks that the people on the other side of the wall might eat their babies, you probably think it, too. If they believe the people on the other side of the wall are their enemies, then they are your enemies, too. And you belong.

In most cases there is no wall, but the way it works there might as well be. You couldn't grow up in a city like Belfast thinking that Christians of another kind must all look dramatically different – surely you would see them. But you wouldn't see what they did in their houses, or after dark, though you'd hear stories and they wouldn't be good.

There's also more to belonging than the beliefs you take on. If you're two or three years old, and the four– and five-year-olds are throwing stones at soldiers, you throw stones, too. If you're 10 and the 12-years-olds you look up to are throwing petrol bombs, chances are you might as well. And the petrol bombs will be in the air and smashing and burning long before you have an adult grasp of consequences. We model behaviours. It's part of being human. That's what we do. And it can be exciting to throw things and burn things and break things. Children test boundaries and if those are the boundaries being tested in the streets where you grow up, it's easy to find yourself involved. And there's no great transition from that to running messages, rioting on command and learning how to handle guns.