Hateland Read Online Free

week. If I came home with a black eye or another mark on me my father would beat me and offer me the only bit of fatherly advice he ever gave any of us: 'Don't let people get away with hitting you. If they're bigger than you, hit them with something.'
        We all started following his advice. My brother Paul got into a fight in a pub car park with a gang from another part of town. He ran at them with two screwdrivers, one in each hand. He stabbed three people before being beaten to a mess. He served two years in Borstal. The eldest, Jerry, took on a group of men in a pub.
        He'd armed himself with a pair of large mechanic's spanners and started clubbing all round him. The police arrived and he clubbed one of them too before being overpowered. He'd given one of the men a fractured skull; a policeman had a shattered knee. Jerry was sent to prison. All of us, under my father's tutoring, had developed a capacity for extreme and awful violence. It set us apart - and set us against the world, especially the world of authority.
        I never felt English growing up, although I suppose I never felt properly Irish either. With everything else that was going on, I didn't spend much time agonising about that aspect of my identity. I knew my roots were in Ireland and I felt comfortable around Irish people. In a sense, I lived in an Irish-Catholic world, although there was no flag-waving paddiness. I was a so-called 'plastic paddy' (the less-than-welcoming Irish term for people born in England of Irish parents).
        At school at first, I encountered some anti-Irish abuse - 'thick paddy', 'Irish drunks' and that sort of stuff. It didn't last long. A good punch in the head tended to discourage repeat offences. I used to hate the superior attitude of some English people and their nauseatingly deluded belief that the whole of the world somehow looked to England. They'd try to make me feel inferior, which infuriated me, because I knew I wasn't inferior to them. I also hated posh English professionals who'd talk down to my mother as if she were stupid.
        'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland began to float on the margins of my awareness. I remember 'Bloody Sunday', the day in January 1972 when paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic men and boys on a civil rights march in Derry. My one clear memory comes from watching television and seeing a priest crouching over one of the victims, waving a blood-stained handkerchief. I can recall this event being met with jubilation by some people in Wolverhampton.
        Around this time, while on holiday in Ireland with my family, an Irish teenager broke my nose with a punch at a youth-club disco, calling me an 'English bastard'. I didn't take his attack personally I seem to remember thinking it was natural for an Irishman to want to punch an Englishman. Despite my 'empathy' for my attacker's motivation, I returned to the disco with a mob of my Irish cousins and we gave him and his mates a good beating outside.
        The first time 'the Troubles' really registered, though, was when the soldier son of a family in our street was shot and wounded by the IRA in Derry. The news caused great shock and excitement in the village, and I remember a ripple of anti-Irish feeling. Around this time, I had a slanging match with some of the wounded soldier's family. I started shouting, 'Up the IRA!', presumably to wind them up, because I can't remember being especially supportive of the Provos or even very aware of what they stood for.
        However, I met the wounded soldier in a pub a few years ago and he remembered me as far more pro-IRA than I remember myself. He told me I'd also thrown stones at him as he recovered and shouted, 'You British Army bastard!'
        I suppose my gut instincts were certainly pro-republican, and I did have a sense of northern Irish Catholics being underdogs, though I can't say I had any real political consciousness. I tended to sympathise with anyone who