A City Dreaming

I was born in Derry/Londonderry

on the northwest coast of Ireland.

The city beyond my window was awash with adventure, past, present

and a future that was about to be revealed to me.

For the past few months that I had been ill,

and spared going to school...

..I moved and lived in an adult's world.

Our house seethed with life and laughter.

I was surrounded by special people.

In many ways, those were the happiest of days.

I felt blessed.

But not by Jesus or by his flaming sacred heart.

That was just...er, furniture.

Furniture that seemed to be waiting for me to die.

But I had no intention of dying. I was far too busy.

Too busy listening to the girls singing

in the shirt factory sweatshop across the street.

# And their womenfolk wave their goodbyes... #

The factory windows were left open to let the steam out.

The girls sang along with the tunes playing on the radio.

# While the Lou'siana moon floats on high... #

They always lapsed into three-part harmony.

It was an almost African choral sound.

They sang, "Shrimp boats is a-comin', their sails are in sight.

"Shrimp boats is a-comin', there'll be dancing tonight."

# Shrimp boats is a-comin'

# Their sails are in sight

# Shrimp boats is a-comin'

# There's dancin' tonight

# Why don't you hurry, hurry, hurry home?

# Why don't you hurry, hurry, hurry home?

# Look here, the shrimp boats is a-comin'

# There's dancin' tonight

# Shrimps boats is a-comin'

# There's dancin' tonight

# Happy the days while they're mending the nets

# Till once more they ride high out to sea... #

I pictured them swaying home after work, arms innocently linked,

giggling at the grey, wasted boys gathered at the street corners,

sucking dog-ends and spitting on the pavement.

Girls with happy smiles and strong, gleaming, white teeth.

Because these were strong, independent women.

I loved their vitality, in spite of the fact

that their lives were tough outside the factory gates.

They showed no sign of it, though.

Never seemed down, depressed or even a hair less than jolly.

I was aware of the cramped conditions

they had to endure at home.

Often too-large families

crammed into a crumbling, small-scale two-up-two-down.

Husbands, of course, were generally unemployed and sensitive about it.

No housework for the men.

Dignity must be preserved at all costs.

As 1,500 girls poured out onto the pavement beneath me,

I remembered thinking, "Those girls are too good for those boys."

Even though I was one of those boys myself.

Because of its colourful past and centuries of unresolved disputes,

the city of Derry has gathered a minimum of two names -

Derry, favoured by Catholics,

and Londonderry, which is easier on the Protestant ear.

The end result is a mysterious town,

guarded and furtive about its history.

The spires of two great rival cathedrals stage a Mexican stand-off

across the deserted river Foyle.

Each morning, I would stand on the bottom of my bed,

peering out the open sky-light window...

..at the serried ranks of clustered buildings

seemingly waiting for the great clang of the Guildhall Clock

to call them to attention.

This morning world belonged to me only.

The poet Philip Larkin said that sex wasn't invented until 1963.

As far as I was concerned, neither was colour.

This was a grey city.

Granted, there were different shades of grey,

each one duller than the next.

Appropriate shades of grey were selected for people's complexions,

men's overcoats, women's shoes, children's prams,

municipal and private buildings, ships and dockers' caps.

Cars were grey too, but, unaccountably,

some of them were white.

I once had a charcoal-grey suit with yellow lining.

Quite the dandy.

To get my hands on the type of red shirt worn by Elvis,

I would have to fly to Naples.

There was as much chance of flying to the moon.

There was no such thing as casual clothing.

We wore cheap suits until they disintegrated.

We didn't have denims, jeans or T-shirts.

We couldn't even get a torn T-shirt like Marlon Brando's.

We strove to look respectable, because this was the natural order.

The city had been falling apart since I was born.

Faded Victorian ruins, stripped of splendour.

But that was fine by me. I loved it.

It felt homely.

Dickensian and desolate though it may have looked to outsiders,

I saw little wrong with the place at the time.

It felt lived-in.

And the people who lived in it were warm, poor, friendly, funny,

deprived, neglected and cheerful.

I thought everybody was like that.

We belonged only to the street from which we came.

Most people were working class

and felt that the city didn't belong to them.

That it was owned by somebody else.

It was an uncomfortable feeling.

There was no pressure to succeed in life,

because it was taken as given that it didn't matter.

The odds were against us.

Many of the older, smarter people

weren't educated as they should have been...

..some of whom became tortured souls,

who'd long ago been left behind

by an inadequate education system.

Tortured souls who would seek each other out

and gather around a dwindling fire...

..in late-night huckster shops,

to talk about matters that they deemed intellectual.

Such as, what was the thinking

behind Einstein's theory of relativity?

Or why sticks seemed to bend in the water.

Or why dogs can hear high-pitched sounds that we can't.

The questions and hypotheses carried on late into the night.

The street where I lived was teeming with life and incident.

A jumble of Victorian housing

and ramshackle tenements filled to overflowing.

Small dwellings which were often occupied by two or three families.

Plus the outhouse dwellers.

Menageries of donkeys, pigs, chickens

and other varieties of fowl co-existed in the back yards.

As if there weren't enough animals running free,

my neighbour, Greta, owned a pet shop.

She'd taught her parrot to greet unwelcome visitors to the street

by screaming, "Fuck off!"

The police eventually confiscated the bird

in the interests of public order.

DOGS BARK

This area was one of the gateways from the docks

and a main city thoroughfare to the Bogside.

It would much later be called Checkpoint Charlie -

the last point of control from which the British Army

launched their patrols into what became known as Free Derry.

But that was all in the future.

And we never paid much heed to what the future held.

Life was the here and now, with little chance of change.

BOYS SHOUT AND CHATTER

Every Wednesday, cattle were bundled off boats from Scotland

and herded through the city streets past my house

on their way to the abattoir, to the left, on William Street.

When they passed my house,

they usually picked up the fatal whiff of the slaughterhouse

and were not best pleased at their immediate prospects.

They would then usually bolt in the opposite direction,

to the right, pursued by loud men with sticks.

MEN SHOUT

The cattle would often come face-to-face with a number of horses

that were tethered outside my friend's door.

HORSE WHINNIES

Also present would be a number of small electric vans

belonging to the adjacent Brewster's Bakery, buzzing about the vicinity.

The stampeding cattle, the rearing and neighing of large horses,

the peeps of the electrical beeps from the battered vans,

created a wonderful confusion that was a joy to witness.

Later on, my mates and I would climb into Brewster's yards

to unplug the vans from their electric chargers.

We would drive them about inside the large garage

and then carefully reconnect them to the electricity supply.

And so to bed,

dreaming of drovers, cattle, mad horses,

frenzied vans and no harm done.

BICYCLE BELL RINGS

Outside my front door was, for all to see,

a life force and a vitality to be reckoned with.

But a person had to be open to appreciate it.

Our future tragedy, just about to unfold, was that all this richness

was trampled over and regarded as worthless.

As a people, we roamed freely between Derry

and neighbouring County Donegal.

But with the division of Ireland under partition,

Donegal was now, technically, part of another country.

This didn't feel right.

Many people had long-standing family and spiritual connections

to what was generally, romantically thought of as a magical place,

a place of high kings, fleeing earls,

banshees and buttermilk.

Fondly though it was regarded in the hearts of dreamers,

the reality of everyday life

often stood in stark contrast to the fairytale.

My mother, born in Donegal, had her first taste of white slavery

when she was sold at the Hiring Fair in Derry in the early '20s.

It was called "the rabbles" and endured until the '30s.

To get there, she walked barefoot 14 miles,

carrying a small bundle, which contained her earthly possessions.

She took her place in line after threading her way

through a crowded square within Derry's walls, called the Diamond.

She was there examined by potential employers,

mostly fat, ruddy-faced farmers.

Once accepted, her bundle was confiscated

and she was told to stand beside a particular horse and cart.

This she did for seven hours until her new mentor returned drunk,

heaved her aboard and set off for a destination

that he did not think worthwhile to reveal to her.

She was worked hard under brutal conditions.

She wasn't permitted to sit down between the hours of 6am and 8pm,

except when milking cows and even ate standing up.

All her life, she harboured an acquired resentment

of all forms of authority, not a particularly bitter resentment,

but a knowing mild resentment that she took with her to her grave.

I remember walking with her, hand in hand,

when we came across the sight

of grown men dropping to one knee in the street

to kiss the ring of the portly and haughty Catholic Bishop of Derry,

who often took the air of an evening,

patrolling the hovels of the faithful.

She bent down and whispered in my ear.

"Look at those fools!" she said.

My father ran away to war when he was 16 years old.

He was on Eamon de Valera's side

and fought with the anti-treaty forces during the Irish Civil War.

De Valera was a romantic figure to some,

but aloof and guarded to others.

Hero of the Irish Revolution, New York-born and Cuban-Irish,

my father idolised him and could barely believe it

when he heard that De Valera was coming to Derry.

He was so excited that, when the day dawned,

he washed me himself.

He spoke of him in hushed tones.

"There he is now! (There he is!)"

The people were ecstatic and it's hard now to figure out why.

Everybody turned out wearing their finest.

Fancy schoolgirls' bows were orchestrated by the nuns.

Normally sensible men marched in formation,

probably for the first time in their lives.

There was a Walter Mitty air about the occasion.

It was an over-appropriate welcome

for someone whom we felt should like us

and we so wanted to be liked.

Although there were flurries of republicanism during the '50s,

the general feeling was that the die was cast.

We were ruled by a Unionist government that openly despised us.

Nothing was going to change that.

Nor did most people identify with the South,

already sinking under the weight of Church rule and economic inertia.

De Valera was a hero all right,

but one who was fast asleep on the job.

I suppose it was a day of what might have been.

The cold reality was that

Derry people didn't identify with Northern Ireland,

nor was the Republic attractive,

because most of the women working in the shirt factories

had willingly fled from it.

Derry was, in many ways, an independent statelet.

Like Monaco, without the money.

So why not have a day out to pay homage

to a stumbling relic of what might have been?

My father grinned non-stop.

He'd earned his day in the sun.

MUSIC: Mambo No 5 by Perez Prado

We usually had five or six factory girls

from the surrounding countryside lodging in our house.

There was no keeping them down on the farm

when the dance halls were jumping every night.

SONG CONTINUES

My mother fed and looked after the girls.

I regarded them almost as sisters.

Nor was there any hanky-panky under our roof.

None of their transient boyfriends

got as much as a toe across the threshold.

Not that rules had been laid down,

it just never seemed to have occurred to the girls.

In total, in our house lived six or seven young girls,

an elderly lady named Rose,

who covered everything she owned with brown paper,

two spinster sisters from Fermanagh

and a uniformed serving petty officer of the British Navy,

whom I used to salute when we passed on the stairs.

There was usually no place for me at the first sitting for dinner,

but I loved it.

We also kept two bus drivers called Fred and Ernie.

Names that don't seem to be used much any more.

These two quiet single men in their thirties

had slicked-back short hair and were enthusiastic chain smokers.

They wore long, heavy, double-breasted, belted overcoats,

overcoats with big, roomy pockets that jingled with loose change,

a penny or two for the likes of me, a rogue bar of chocolate

and a handful of boiled sweets.

I always thought of them as the kind of men

who were the first to be killed in wars.

There was an innocence, solidness and a decency about them.

It was within Fred and Ernie's nature

to always do the decent thing. Their instinct was

to look after one another in small ways on a daily basis.

That seems to happen less these days.

Out on the street, sex was for sale, but only the ugly took part.

A number of ladies of the night

serviced the sailors and the misfits.

They took advantage of the natural shelter provided

by a building outcrop at the top of our street.

I was often sent out with a Delft bowl to the local chipper.

The journey back and forth revealed the wild side of life.

On the short journey back from the chipper, I would chat with

the hookers and felt obliged to distribute a chip or two.

I liked the girls and appreciated the rigours of their work.

Returning home with far fewer chips than I should have,

I would hear from my mother's sainted mouth

words that probably few children hear during their childhood years.

"Have you been feeding those prostitutes again?!"

But when daylight and the working day came,

the hookers and the sailors were gone.

200 yards from our front door was the Guildhall Square.

A selection of the great and good were paraded through the streets.

They all seemed to come from a life

that was a million miles away from our existence.

There was a resentment there.

Not that we envied them.

They weren't our type of people.

And indeed, it didn't seem like much fun.

But, for me, the most interesting visitor

was someone who hadn't planned on visiting us at all.

Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland

in a scarlet Lockheed Vega

in a bid to accomplish what no woman had managed before -

a solo flight from America to Europe.

In a man's world, she was a leader.

Little did she know that she was about to land in a place

where women were in charge.

She endured the sight of flames licking from her engine

and, when she felt aviation fuel dripping down her neck,

she wisely sought somewhere to land, and quick.

Thus, Amelia Earhart dropped from the sky

and landed in a field on the outskirts of an unsuspecting Derry.

When Amelia landed, she was approached by a local.

"Where am I?" she naturally inquired.

"You're in Gallagher's field!" replied the local

in a tone that indicated that Miss Earhart should've known that.

It's hard to imagine what an equivalent surprise would be today.

Perhaps the arrival of an alien spacecraft

piloted by an exotic creature.

Exotic was just what Amelia Earhart was

to the crowds who flocked to greet her.

Tall, slim, healthy, athletic, photogenic

and beautiful in a tomboyish way.

Out of the blue she had dropped.

A specimen of what women in Ireland would not dare to even aspire to

for at least another 30 to 40 years.

And she alone, with her own aeroplane.

AIR RAID SIREN

I was a baby when the Luftwaffe came to bomb Derry.

I was too young to stop it.

When the sirens sounded, I lay helpless in my cot.

SIREN BLARES

People in the immediate vicinity seldom used the air raid shelter

at the bottom of our street, mainly because they didn't want

to disturb the young lovers who occupied it on a regular basis.

The long, hard battle for the Atlantic

was supplied from Derry's port

and it was to here that the lethal North Atlantic German U-boat fleet

silently filed in to surrender.

The man in the street was allowed

to board these submarines and savour the victory,

but most were there mainly to nick themselves a souvenir.

For 26 years, a magnificent bronze German eagle

with a swastika emblazoned on its wooden base

proudly stood on top of a piano in our front room.

There it remained until the IRA decided to blow up our house.

EXPLOSION

The bomb was duly placed on the ground floor.

Directly above was our front room containing the eagle and my mother.

The subsequent blast sent the eagle through the roof.

My mother was uninjured apart from a temporary loss of hearing,

but for the rest of her life I noticed

that she no longer appreciated surprises.

The IRA blew up our house by mistake.

At least, when Hitler bombed Derry, he knew what he was doing.

Imagine what went through these young boys' heads...

..as they trained on the banks of our own River Foyle,

on the very beach where I now walk my dog.

It was a long way from the open farmlands of the Midwest

to the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima.

1940s MUSIC PLAYS

Later, as a teenager, I lived in fear of a NATO fleet

taking their annual break from exercises in the North Atlantic.

Thousands of marauding sailors of many nationalities

roamed the streets, hungry for strong drink, blood and women,

usually in that order.

By then, we had our own American base

in which lived what we called the local Americans.

Yanks who spent their time monitoring nuclear submarines

in the North Atlantic.

They had constructed for themselves an in-house micro-America.

Here, my eyes first fell upon automatic lawn sprinklers,

coffee that didn't make you want to puke,

beer that didn't come down your nose,

pizzas, high-fives, real hamburgers, soda fountains

and women wearing stretch pants.

And all this while,

outside the starred-and-striped gates of their base

lay a dull, sluggish city,

awash with spindly-legged undernourished males,

dreaming of a job, gathering at crumbling street corners,

spitting on the pavement,

sucking on almost invisible dog ends of Woodbine cigarettes

and subsisting on a hearty diet of spuds, mincemeat,

pigs feet, baps and sticky buns.

We quietly observed the Yanks roaring past us

in imported Chryslers and mightily-finned Thunderbirds.

We thought it all very unfair.

Even though they introduced us to things we liked,

such as real guitars and American pop records,

and, even though we liked the Yanks, we still thought, "Those bastards!"

CHORAL SINGING

Where I lived was overwhelmingly Catholic.

People were eagerly groomed by a Catholic Church

on the hunt for souls and influence.

The annual retreat was the Catholic Nuremberg Rally.

Redemptorist fathers, Ecumenical gunslingers

fired off bloodthirsty tales

full of pain, fire and, of course, brimstone,

reminding us of the extreme pain to be endured in Hell

should we buck the system.

We were not encouraged to doubt or question.

We were too busy anyway confessing our sins in wooden boxes

and dozing off during the interminable high masses

conducted in Latin.

But we knew that Jesus loved us.

MUSIC: Ecce Sacerdos Magnus, Wab 13

I eventually ended up in the cathedral choir.

On certain ceremonial occasions,

the Bishop of Derry was required to make a grand entrance

accompanied by the choir belting out the chorale Ecce Sacerdos.

This was his signature tune.

The choir stood poised in the balcony,

the Bishop entered directly below us.

A priest planted on the altar would signal the choirmaster

when the Bishop was about to enter.

The choirmaster, his back to the altar,

would receive the signal through wing mirrors

thoughtfully provided on the sides of the church organ.

Hand signals executed, organ pumped,

choir screeching the Bishop's signature tune,

the puffed-up prelate would stride confidently

through the gathered faithful,

allowing a selected few to lightly touch his garments.

I thought to myself...

"This isn't religion!

"This is show business!"

HYMN CONTINUES

I believed I was the only person who thought that way, although I'm sure

there were one or two other heretics putting a brave face on it.

The Bogside was probably

the most Irish neighbourhood in Northern Ireland,

a veritable land that time forgot.

A chunk of Thackeray's Ireland that somehow clung on.

Originally occupied by the poor from Donegal,

who came to the city in search of any kind of work,

until the Troubles, the area retained a unique identity.

Things were always on the boil, and no wonder.

Within 400 yards of any given spot were 40 bars, six band sheds,

boxing clubs, four doss-houses,

rag stores and an assortment of boys' clubs, a distillery,

not to mention a population of pigs, sheep, a slaughterhouse

and six football teams.

Most Irish of all was the fact that everybody had nicknames.

This was part of the last traces of an Irish oral tradition,

lingering from ancestral days in Donegal,

a tradition that the coming Troubles would inevitably see off.

The likes of Ned the Chronicle, Dan the Blinker, Stucco Virgin

and Scriffin-tail McDermott gone forever.

At the cruder end of the scale resided Cock Coyle, Mickey No Arse,

Fart McDade and a man who the women referred to as Hughie Bad Word,

so-called because of his lack of vocabulary.

His name, of course, was Hughie Fuck.

GULLS CALL

Nicknames survived amongst the dockers,

who used them in their pay books.

Since many of them shared the same family name,

it helped ease the confusion.

Well, almost.

I can testify to this,

as I once had the dangerous job of calculating their wages.

Money for working in the rain, money for early starts,

late starts, night working, double shifts.

I was 18 years old and invariably got their wages wrong.

Payday came Thursday lunchtime, followed by pub time,

followed by angry dockers short on their wages

patrolling the streets and bars looking for the pay clerk

who'd got it wrong again.

That was me.

I learnt to make myself scarce.

Thursday afternoon, I retired to the local cinema for my own safety.

Tough men didn't like me for it.

As they unloaded the ship's cargo, they never missed an opportunity,

often swinging the crane hook at me

when I patrolled the deck of the ship.

Then would come a sudden warning shout

which prompted me to duck sharply.

I complained about this to my boss -

"Those fuckers are trying to kill me."

He looked over his glasses. "Do they warn you?" he said.

"Well, yes," I reluctantly replied.

He turned back to his newspaper and said, "Worry when they don't."

The streets were occupied by urgent marching feet,

Laurel and Hardy bowler hats, ceremonial swords and lurid sashes.

Banners fluttering from lofty poles

commemorated centuries-old deeds that I knew nothing about.

Although it was an unrelenting affirmation

of superiority and supremacy,

I could look past the posturing because I liked the music.

But the marching musicians were a mixed bag.

Some seemed joyless, others appeared angry,

and yet others in a kind of frenzy.

It was a stern kind of fun.

One of the sword carriers struck me forcibly

on my exposed short-trousered leg

for momentarily stepping off the footpath.

This affected me greatly, causing my resignation from parade watching.

I retreated to the cinema, where I found real heroes.

GUNFIRE

Heroes like Burt Lancaster.

Men who did what men had to do.

Lone plains drifters who sought to escape a troubled past.

Men who knew no other way than to be true to themselves.

-Where's Owen?

-Went with Lee over to the telegraph.

GUNFIRE

-You hear that? Somebody's in trouble.

-Take some men and go see.

And these cowboys sounded vaguely familiar too,

sounded like my elderly uncles in Donegal,

who called their horses "hosses"

and talked of "vittles" and "critters" too.

Go around the other side. Try to sneak up behind him. I'll cover you.

It took some time for me to realise that my uncles spoke that way

because their people before them had been weaned off the Irish language

and had learned their English mostly from Ulster Scots planters.

Imagine how surprised I was

when I learnt that Burt Lancaster was an Ulster Scot.

You can hear the hard-clipped cadences of a Belfast accent.

He had spent his childhood in New York,

surrounded by his Belfast-born extended family.

I finally realised that

the very qualities I admired in the likes of Burt Lancaster -

the unwillingness to compromise, the iron determination

and the unyielding conviction - those were the same engines

that fired the marchers outside on the streets.

These were the same people.

I always could outdraw you, Owen.

I'll spot you, then. But it won't change anything.

Come on out.

Or do I have to come in and get you?

No wonder the cowboys and Indians didn't get along.

St Patrick's Day, 1952.

Just to the right of this photograph, above the spectators,

I am a seven-year-old boy staring out of my upstairs window.

Until recently, when I was shown this photograph,

I wasn't sure if I had actually witnessed this or not.

It's a photo of a friend of mine being attacked by the police.

She's 13 years old.

I wasn't sure if I'd seen this or not

because I didn't believe it at the time

and the shock seemed to partially erase it from my mind.

Why would the police attack children with such force

for no apparent reason?

Only years later did it become clear

that the raised baton was the accepted method of keeping in line

the poorly educated and the naive young.

But how would police handle educated people?

Time would tell.

CHORAL MUSIC

This scene was a harbinger of things to come.

And 1969 simmered in the distance.

We will be able to feed up that day with all of God's children,

black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics

will be able to join hands and sing

-in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at last."

-Yes!

"Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

CHEERING

Hallelujah!

These were interesting times.

The tectonic plates were shifting.

Mr Burt Lancaster.

And here he is again, the Belfast cowboy,

this time seeming to speak directly to us.

We recognise that it is not only in America

that the battle for freedom and dignity of peoples is being waged.

The struggle toward freedom on the part of the previously subjugated

is occurring in capitals and villages all over the world.

It is on our awareness of what this struggle means

and in the degree of our dedication to it

that our futures and the future of the world depend.

APPLAUSE

John Fitzgerald Kennedy - in our eyes, practically an Irishman -

was President of the United States. Doors seemed to be opening.

For the first time,

people felt they had access to the means of achieving their dreams.

But for all that, the assassination of Kennedy later that year

brought home to us that wherever there was light,

darkness wasn't far behind.

Because these were also ugly times.

Nevertheless, people felt that power was drifting their way,

that they had a say.

Dramatic pictures crashed in from the outside world.

People doing stuff on the newsreels and on the TV set

that I watched through the window of the local electrical shop.

People rocking the boat!

And then we had a TV of our own.

Soon I recognised some of the people on the screen.

Young local firebrands had more in common with Martin Luther King

than with Eamon de Valera.

People of my own age were on the streets, led by others,

who were brighter, who had been to university and come back pissed off

by what they had found out about the country they lived in.

The total unionist vote in Londonderry is 9,000.

And these votes put a total of 12 members in the City Council.

The total nationalist vote is 14,000

and these folks put in eight members.

Now, note the curious situation.

I didn't hit the streets. I was too scared.

But I knew those who did and admired their pluck.

It all seemed glorious, just and right.

Nothing short of a people's revolution in the streets,

involving, crucially, a number of Protestants

who realised that something had to be done.

I would certainly hope that in conducting this march

that we will act in a responsible manner.

I even saw my neighbours in their good suits,

being reasonable with the authorities.

But authority hit back

and something had started that was never going to stop.

The reasonable approach didn't seem to work.

Those who didn't want any trouble were the first to get it.

Firstly, bloodied heads, with worse to come.

It happened very quickly.

All too soon, it turned rotten.

Unlike in Washington, where President Kennedy listened to

and encouraged those who sought their civil rights,

the powers that be here were mainly blind to the legitimacy

of what was going on in the streets, creating a dangerous vacuum.

Old sores were opened, old arguments revived.

Aspirations that had been thought long dead had life in them still.

The well-meaning and the just slipped quietly away.

Streets emptied after dark and the nightmare began.

Severe measures were called for.

The British Army consulted the Empire manual

and decided to do what had always been done,

but they forgot that we were British too.

They forgot about the all-seeing eye of television.

Shadows lengthened and the descent into darkness began.

All the fine words were left blowing in the wind.

I didn't care much for what I saw

and decided to defect to Canada.

From 3,000 miles away,

I saw that my people, and the streets, were still on television

but the streets were on fire.

# Cool wind blowing on the street tonight

# Trying to turn a wrong to a right

# I listen now but the words are gone

# All the songs have been sung

# Close your eyes

# Close your eyes

# And dream

# When the flag goes down

# There's no turning back for this town

# Close your eyes

# Close your eyes

# And dream

# Out on the streets

# A city's dreaming

# Out on the streets

# A city's dreaming

# Dreaming

# Even in this darkest place

# I close my eyes and see your face

# Even in this darkest night

# I'm reaching out and I'm searching for the light

# Close your eyes

# Close your eyes

# And dream

# Out on the streets

# A city's dreaming

# Out on the streets

# A city's dreaming

# Dreaming

# Dreaming

# Close your eyes

# And dream. #

As a child by the window, I couldn't have imagined what lay ahead.

Today, I'm that same child...

..looking out that same window

upon a city that has often been declared down and out.

Now I see a people with hope, energy and positivity in their hearts.

I hope they're right.

The past is behind us and the future holds out a helping hand.

A fellow Derryman put it like this.

"Human beings suffer, they torture one another,

"they get hurt and get hard.

"No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured."

History says, don't hope on this side of the grave

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea change on the far side of revenge

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.