Martin Doyle's 'Dirty Linen'
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
The late Milan Kundera’s famous statement has been the impulse for so much writing. Words can reanimate the past and rescue lives from oblivion. By contrast, violence is power at its most destructive, too often visited upon people by those who assume for themselves the right to end lives. What monstrous egotism that is.
Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: the Troubles in my Home Place restores to our attention the lives of some of those who died by violence in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. I had heard of few of them, but all deserve the attention of our time. In the words of Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman,
Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.
And in the words of her husband Willy, A man is not a piece of fruit, to be discarded and forgotten. Doyle never writes about any of his subjects with less than tender care and a sense of responsibility, both as a journalist and a neighbour.
Of course, for the families of the murder victims in Dirty Linen no-one has been forgotten. They suffer forever from the ‘long tail’ of grief and trauma, all the more so as peace has taken root since the Good Friday Agreement. They are unable fully to live their lives, ghost-like compared to the people they could have been, as the rest of society has moved on.
For his subject Martin Doyle settled on his home parish of Tullylish, the Linen Triangle between Banbridge, Craigavon and Lurgan that transmuted into the Murder Triangle. For a Southern Protestant like me growing up through these years, that part of the world was totally unknown, the Troubles generally a feature of the RTÉ News headlines rather than something that affected our daily lives.
At the start of the book there is a map, numbered with the deaths of men, women and children from 1972 to 1997, which shows just how dense and interconnected this horror was (and this was just one parish). Chapter after chapter reveals the network of links between so many victims, often from different sides. In the chapter ‘Protecting a Killer’ on the murder of Pat Campbell, we read
There are many threads that connect Donna [his daughter] to other local victims’ families.
To continue the appropriate metaphor which runs through this book with ‘linen’ in its title, the Troubles ripped to shreds the ‘fabric’ of an ordinary rural community, all the more so because:
This social fabric, the friendships that bind individuals and communities together, is purer and more precious than linen.
The O’Dowd family that is central to the narrative, and which Martin Doyle wrote about in an illustrated piece for the Irish Times in January 2022, gather at Mass shortly after the murderous catastrophe visited upon then, and
Memories were all they had left, the connective tissue that would in time help bind those wounds.
The idea of fabric connects other stories too. A widow
identified fragments of torn material taken from the scene as belonging to a pair of her husband’s trousers: she recognised the material and her stitching where she had turned the trousers up.
Three pages later Mary Casey, daughter of Jack McCann, says
‘Daddy was identified by the braces of his trousers’.
Larry McCartan, who died of a heart attack following a hoax bomb warning, is remembered by his daughter Vivienne: entering the living-room where her father lies, the paramedics working on him, what she see first is the grey Fair Isle sweater he always wore, the same garment her own 3-year old daughter recognised when her granddad was acting as Santa.
That sort of small domestic detail is so often what catches the heart in the torrent of tragedy. Richard Beattie, whose father of the same name was murdered, remembers how house-proud his mother was:
‘She was the only woman I ever seen who polished the copper pipes to her radiators, and in the hot press. They were gleaming,’ he says, laughing. ‘I don’t know what it was.’
But now, writes Doyle,
There could hardly be a greater contrast between the image I have of Richard’s mum’s immaculate home and the way once-proud Gilford is today, with its general air of dilapidation,
following the closure of its linen mill and the dark years of the Troubles.
Another story which moved me particularly is, near the end of the book, the coming together in friendship of Jennifer McNern and Margaret Yeaman, two women from different communities, both with terrible injuries. In their relationship there is
Strength from coming together as part of a victims’ forum, leaving anger behind to focus on their right to proper support.
But Jennifer is concerned that
A new generation is growing up nostalgic for the excitement of the street violence that characterised the Troubles.
And this is an important impulse behind the book, which is not just concerned with the past but looks forward too. It is all too easy to be complacent when you are used to peace. For the Dublin teenagers I teach the Troubles might as well have been the Crimean War, and we have seen in the last year how quickly extreme violence and disorder can descend on parts of the world. As William Golding put it in commenting on Lord of the Flies, ‘Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.’
Such evil is seen memorably in Shakespeare’s King Lear, which I was teaching again at the same time as reading this book, and which provides the title for Chapter 9, ‘They kill us for their sport’, at the end of which the author quotes the character Gloucester (as he did at a Dublin Book Festival event with Joe Duffy):
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ Gods,
They kill us for their sport.
These words are said in anguish and despair a few lines after perhaps the most sickening scene in all Shakespeare, when Cornwall and his vicious wife Regan trap and torture Gloucester. Cornwall says,
Bind fast his corky arms,
And then he gouges him, plunging the old man into agonising blindness with the words ‘Out, vile jelly’. It is a scene which truly justifies Kent’s statement at the end of the play,
All’s cheerless, dark and deadly.
But that is not the whole story. Just afterwards, a nameless servant, appalled by the cruelty of the man he has served since he was a child, heroically challenges Cornwall, wounds him, and loses his life as a result. His act was not in vain: we hear shortly later of Cornwall’s death. And right at the end of the scene two other nameless servants join up to help Gloucester. The Third Servant, perhaps the lowliest character in the play, says that he will
Fetch some flax and whites of eggs
To apply to his bleeding face.
Flax is, of course, linen, a material used for medicinal bandages for centuries, all the way back to Ancient Egypt, and now shown by modern science to have indeed been effective. Later, healed by the acts of his son Edgar, Gloucester regains a sense of faith in life, dying ‘smilingly’ following their reunion. Right at the end of this book, Martin Doyle describes how flax had been taken from a hole in a farm years before, and it ‘was as good as if it had been last year’s crop’:
It feels like a more optimistic metaphor somehow, of promise and goodness that have been submerged and forgotten but not drowned or destroyed.
Though it can be hard to hold on to such hesitant optimism, and though we have reason to despair at times, the world continues to have people like those servants in Shakespeare.
Martin Doyle writes that
When we remember loved ones we have lost, we reanimate them, put flesh on their bones, make them come alive even for those who never knew them.
Honouring the stories of the people in this book and restoring them to our attention, however painful this is at times to read, is the necessary task Dirty Linen does so powerfully.