Play It Again Sam

TRAIN THUNDERS

# I was born by the river... #

My name is Sam McAughtry.

I live in Comber. I am five feet ten and a half inches tall,

with these shoes on!

#..Ever since It's been a long

# It's been a long time coming But I know

# The train's gonna come. #

I work writing books and writing plays and writing short pieces for the newspapers.

Also, writing insulting things on the computer and then deleting it!

I also write sexy things on the computer

and then delete it like the clappers before the wife comes up!

# Beyond the sky It's been a long...

# A long time coming But I know

# The train's gonna come

# Oh, yes, it will

# I go... #

Sam McAughtry may be one of Northern Ireland's

most successful writers and storytellers,

but his journey to success has been one inspired by family tragedy and personal redemption.

# It's been a long... #

This is the untold story of Sam McAughtry.

# But I know The train's gonna come

# Oh, yes, it will. #

Sam McAughtry has led a colourful and contradictory life.

He has been a trade unionist, a civil servant,

an RAF navigator and an Irish senator.

ANNOUNCEMENT PLAYS OVER TANNOY

But throughout his 85 years, his driving passion

has been his love of writing and his joy of performing.

# It takes an Irish heart to sing an Irish song

# In the good old Irish way

# It takes the real McCoy

# To fill your heart with joy

# There's nary a song so gay

# If you come from Dublin, Bantry Bay or County Cork

# If you come from London, Timbuktu or from New York

# It takes an Irish heart to sing an Irish song

# In a good old Irish way. #

Just with that, the Prince of Storytellers spoke.

"Do you want to hear a poem?" he said. He certainly did. Bo Kennedy smiled.

"It's a lovely one," he said.

"It's about daffodils.

"It was wrote by the man that owns the big shops.

"He is called Woolworth".

-Thank you.

-LAUGHTER

There is wine there for those that like it!

I like that caveat.

CONVERSATION BUZZES

I was bumming about it everywhere.

I was accidentally dropping the paper in front of people, you know?

It is a clever play on words.

But Sam McAughtry has not always been centre stage

and not always content with his life.

In the tension of the summer of 1971,

disillusioned by the failure of politics

and the sectarian violence that was tearing his native city of Belfast apart,

Sam McAughtry would also have to face his own, very personal, demons.

I last sat here on this seat 30 years ago

at just about the most depressing period of my life.

I had been suffering for months from a deep depression in which drink was playing too much a part.

I was sitting here and I had really had enough.

Instead of going to work, I would just come up here to sit.

Nothing was happening inside my head except that I knew I was useless.

I could not handle the depression at all.

# I just keep on drinking

# Drinking just like a fool

# Keep on drinking

# Ooh... #

It is very hard to recover the feelings that I had then.

I am sitting here today and I can enjoy the view and think back

to beyond the depression to the days when I brought my children up.

I would be more inclined to look on that hopeful side of it than to think too much about the black days.

I just sit here now and think how lucky I am to be sitting in this lovely park.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

If you read enough books you get the impression

that alcoholism is something that is always with you

and that you have to be very careful all the time.

That is not the point at all.

The battle was won when I walked through the front door

of Shaftesbury Square. They did a lovely job on me.

Sam McAughtry had been admitted to Shaftesbury Square Hospital

in Belfast suffering from chronic alcoholism.

He was temporarily homeless

and separated from his wife and young family.

It is an odd sort of a feeling to come back.

I feel enormous gratitude to them.

I have paid tribute to them in articles I've written and so on.

I feel enormous gratitude to them.

I can't recall that awful feeling when I first came here,

that feeling of total disgrace.

I went in there at a very low ebb indeed.

I thought to myself,

as most people do going in there, that there was a tinge of disgrace about it.

The notices on the walls and various

Alcoholics Anonymous posters and so on.

I thought to myself, "This is not too good."

I don't think I am playing a blinder here, at all.

I was thinking of what my family would think coming to visit me with all this...

stuff around the place about alcoholism.

I think I would have just degenerated into one of those guys

that you see around that you don't want to see.

I don't think I would have hit the slums,

but I would have degenerated into somebody who wasn't much in the line of company.

That's for sure.

When I finally left this place, I walked out onto this pavement

and began to walk down here.

Belfast was in an awful state in those days.

Belfast was bombed

and smoke was everywhere and all that sort of thing.

The only mood I can say, is that I was thinking to myself, "It is over now."

Whatever they've told me to do I am certainly going to do it.

Whenever I came out of the hospital, it was at a time when the house

I had lived in at Dundonald had been sold. We had no home to go to.

My daughters were farmed out to friends, my three daughters.

I thought I had better go out and look around and get another house.

I came into Comber.

That was our first port of call.

The very place we looked at was my house. It had only just been built.

It was brand new. From the day and hour I went over the threshold of that house,

everything worked out for me. My life changed completely.

Hopes and dreams that I had all started to come true.

I was full of energy.

Full of the need to make up for lost time.

I certainly did it from that household.

I wouldn't leave it if I won the lottery and that is a fact.

That house is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

I put my foot over that door and never did a thing wrong after it.

God bless it and all who live there!

It's not much, but we call it home!

Recovering from his alcoholic low, Sam McAughtry set out

to rebuild his life by dedicating himself to his writing.

35 years after his last drink of alcohol,

Sam McAughtry is diligently working on his latest novel.

I am at 15,377 words.

It is beginning to settle. I know where I am going.

The only thing is that I have to keep it at a certain level, readable.

My writing is plain and readable.

It's not fancy.

Whenever people say that to me...

A solicitor friend of mine - my last book - he sent me a nice wee note.

He said, "I got your book.

"I got home, I had my tea over at seven

"and I had your book read at half past eight."

That's what I want.

They don't have to stop and say,

"That is wonderful phraseology that reminds me of Beckett!"

None of that stuff!

That is the way I write and the way I always did.

Sam McAughtry's unique writing style began when he was just a young boy.

A boy who wrote letters to a father who was far away at sea.

# Every letter I write... #

When my father went to sea, my mother sat us all down

and she'd say, "You have to write a letter to your father."

I'd be saying, "Dear Daddy, I did notice

"that you brought something home for Jim

"and you brought something home for Jack, but you brought nothing home for me."

New paragraph.

In other words,

as I tell youngsters in the schools, I was talking to him.

I wasn't writing a letter to him.

I was addressing him. He was across the table from me.

I never walked away from that situation of writing to my father

thinking that I was a writer.

If I thought about it at all, I just thought,

"I wonder where that letter will end up?

"What is it like anyway when the letters arrive?

"Does a boat go out carrying a sack full of letters for the sailors, or what?"

I never regarded myself as a writer.

# In every word that I spell In every tale that I tell

# Every wish... #

Sam McAughtry's father and older brother, Mart,

were once merchant seaman on the same ship, the Dunaff Head.

A young Sam, filled with the romance of the sea,

dreamt of one day joining them.

I would have been down here an hour before the ship was due in.

Over the horizon, just at the mouth of the river,

I would have seen the Dunaff Head, my father's ship.

The berthing master would have it tied up.

The first man on board was a customs officer.

The second on board was Sam McAughtry.

When war broke out, my father said to my brother,

"We'll have to split up because if we're both lost

"on the convoys to Canada and back it'll kill your mother."

"We'll have to split up."

My brother, Mart, said, "OK, there is a ship coming in and I'll sign on."

He had signed on the Kenbane Head.

I went away to the Air Force.

Before I went, the Kenbane Head came in here, to this dock.

I ran up the gangway.

The first thing Mart said to me when he came up on deck

and saw me was, "I've got a job for you.

"You always wanted to go to sea.

"I've got a job for you as a deck boy on the Kenbane Head."

I nearly broke down. I said, " Mart, I have joined the Air Force."

He said, "Well, there you are, maybe it is just as well."

He described what it was like when ships were blowing up

all around him on the convoy and the submarines were after them.

The decision not to sail with his brother, Mart, on the Kenbane Head

would be a defining moment in the young Sam McAughtry's life.

For the Kenbane Head and its crew, along with Mart McAughtry,

would be lost at sea in the fierce battle for the North Atlantic.

66 years on, Sam McAughtry returns once again to the family grave

outside Belfast where his brother Mart is commemorated.

Mart. It just says MN in small letters...

Merchant Navy.

Lost at sea, fifth November 1940 in a sea action

in which the German cruiser got into the British convoy lanes.

He was lost with 19 other men.

I was shattered. Of all the family, he and I were the closest.

I was in South Wales, training to be a flight mechanic,

when I got word that he had been lost at sea.

I got it from Jack.

I knew from the first line of the letter.

The letter read, "Dear Sam, you and Marriott were always close."

I threw the letter down onto my bed and burst out crying.

It completely finished and shattered me.

Up until then, life was a lark.

Life was just a lark. That's all it was.

My mother died just after I came back from the Royal Air Force.

Only two days after I got back,

after being away from home for two and a half years.

She died then.

My mother had a terrible time of it. She brought up ten children

with her husband at sea, sending her a pittance.

Four of the children died, one of them in tragic circumstances,

hanged on the end of the bed at 11 months old trying to walk down the bed.

The nightdress caught on the bed.

The others, I remember four-year-old Betty.

I remember mother taking us by the hand

and bringing us upstairs to kiss Betty goodbye.

When the war was over,

and when we were all coming back home

and we would have been bringing a wage into the house,

she would have had a house full of laughter and everything.

That's when she died.

She had a rotten life.

She was a happy woman,

but I should say she had a rotten death.

She was a very happy woman in her lifetime.

The family tragedies would have a profound effect on the young Sam McAughtry.

But most profoundly, he would never forget his older brother Mart,

lost at sea and without a proper burial.

So when Sam McAughtry began to write many years later,

there was only one story for him to tell.

He was the inspiration for my first book.

I have always thought that he, in a kind of way,

had a bit of a say in everything that has happened to me since that.

People have lucky charms, that is what I have in Mart.

After the huge success of his first book, The Sinking of the Kenbane Head, and the many books

that followed, Sam McAughtry became one of Ireland's most celebrated storytellers and recognised faces.

His appeal as a writer, then as a broadcaster on television and radio,

crossed all religious and political divides as he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland.

A constant traveller, Sam McAughtry began a long-term love affair with the Belfast to Dublin railway line.

When I was a child at home, my father used to talk about the Dublin train.

My father thought Dublin was a wonderful city.

He used to say, "Dublin has the greatest zoological gardens in the world".

Every time, without exception,

and this is not sickening sentiment or anything,

but every time I go up the stone steps in Connolly station

coming home, I think to myself, these steps have never been changed.

My old dad ran up these steps coming home to meet my mother.

My old dad falsified his age on board ship.

He was actually touching 70 and he was telling everybody

in the Shipping Union and everywhere else that he was 63.

He used to say to me, "What use would I be if I came ashore, if they retire me at 65?

"What could I do? People like me..." He worked in the engine room,

and he'd say, "People like me are absolutely useless ashore.

"I'm going to tell them I'm not 65 for a few years yet."

Well, he did. At just under 70,

he was taken ill on board his ship.

The ship happened to be near Cuba.

Mart McAughtry was suffering from severe stomach pains when his shipmates left him ashore in Cuba.

He never recovered and died alone in a strange place, far away from his home and family.

I was over visiting a friend.

My brother Jim came over to see me to tell me that my father had died.

A telegram had arrived.

A letter arrived afterwards to say that he was one of the old-school seamen that had almost disappeared.

That is how I learned about it.

I was terribly sad because

the two seafarers in our family

that I had loved so much, gone.

Thousands of miles away, dead.

Mart was at the foot of the mid-Atlantic.

And my father there died a very painful death

and there was no-one near him to comfort him or say goodbye or anything else.

Of all Sam McAughtry's heartbreaking short stories,

one stands out for its intimacy and universal resonance.

Cuban Journey was about his determined quest

to find his father's lost grave of the other side of the world.

"I was in Cuba to visit my father's grave, the first member of my family

"to go looking for it, in 1984, 33 years after his death.

"He'd been taken off his ship to a small sugar port near Santa Cruz del Sur in 1951,

"where he was to die of peritonitis the same day.

"I wanted to know if they could actually pinpoint my father's grave.

"Their embassy in London had been vague, while still giving me press accreditation.

"Well, young Albaholder told me that she knew

"where the grave was and in three days' time she would take me there.

"She and her Cuban colleagues all laughed at the way I lifted her and swung her around on hearing this.

"In Amancio, a sleepy, dusty town straight out of a Sergio Leone film,

"I was entertained by local party officials and given cool orange juice.

"Then we all went out and walked, almost ceremonially,

"down the Main Street for 100 yards

"until we came to a small brick building beside a pair of gates.

"It was the cementario, the graveyard.

"I was motioned inside the building.

"On a table, a large book lay open.

"A chair stood ready beside it.

"My hosts stood back, deeply respectful.

"I studied the list of names entered in copperplate writing.

"I had found him easily, halfway down the page.

"Mart McAughtry.

"It stood out amongst the names of the Cuban dead.

"He had passed away at 10.30am on 6th October, 1951.

"The committee turned away

"as I placed flowers on the grave, stood silent above my father's remains.

"He was 54 years at sea in the engine room and survived being torpedoed in two world wars,

"but he could not live at home after Mother died

"so he falsified his age to stay at sea.

"He was 69 when he died.

"Now I knew where he lay."

Of all our family, and there were ten in my family,

four of them died when they were young.

We were a big family and had a huge extended family.

Not one of them had ever thought of going to see my father's grave in Cuba.

I was the one who wanted to go and see him.

The sea held enormous romance for me, so his life was romantic to me.

Nobody else in the family felt like that.

They thought the sea was a hard, rough old job.

When I was standing over my father's grave, I was remembering him.

I didn't say anything, but my thoughts were directed to him.

I love you.

You are my dad. I think you're great.

I think you're smashing. I remember you when you came home from sea, picking me up as a toddler.

I remember your grisly chin needing a shave,

the smell of the whisky that you had just had in the bar outside...

outside the, um...the docks.

Here I am, now, paying tribute to you

for a lovely, lovely father and the lovely thoughts that you give me.

Although he had never

reciprocated any of the curiosity or warmth that I wanted from him.

He was just a hard-working man, unread more or less.

He had only read one book. He used to talk about it... Sorrell and Son by Warwick Deeping.

But he was an unread man.

I was letting him know what I was like and how much I loved him at the graveside.

# You must leave now

# Take what you need

# You think will last

# But whatever you keep... #

I did feel an enormous feeling of relief.

They use this word "closure" all over the place these days,

but, er...it was an enormous feeling of a job done.

Of a long journey ended.

# Crying

# Like a fire in the sun

# Look out, baby

# The saints are comin' through

# And it's all over now

# Baby Blue... #

Sam McAughtry's journey as a writer has been one of constant discovery and evolution,

beginning with the young man who grew up in Protestant, working-class north Belfast.

My early years... I recall my early years

as living among people in a Unionist constituency, a very strongly loyalist constituency.

The curious thing, and a thing that people are surprised to learn, in the South particularly,

is that we were very, very Irish.

Don't forget that my mother and father had come out of an all-Ireland, albeit under the Crown.

They would have seen nothing wrong in those days with being described as Irish, not a thing wrong.

It has been hemmed in now by all sorts of dark shadows around the word Irish.

I'm Irish.

And I mean, I pronounce that, that I'm Irish.

The thing I don't say is that I want to go into an all-Ireland.

They're not ready for me yet. I'll tell them whenever they're ready!

In the 1980s, Sam McAughtry WAS ready.

Ready to take centre-stage,

to become world news by leading a symbolic peace movement

and protect his beloved Belfast to Dublin rail connection.

-Are you all right, Sam?

-Yes. It's nice to be here.

-You made it in one piece?

-One piece.

The Peace Train committee is concerned with the Belfast-Dublin rail link

and the symbolic retention of that rail link.

That is all we're concerned with.

We're delighted with the response we've had.

Round about 1988, I was very friendly with Paddy Devlin.

The notion came up that something should be done about the frequent bombing of the Belfast-Dublin line.

It was being carried out largely by the IRA, but occasionally by loyalist dissidents.

Paddy volunteered me to be chairman of a new body that was to be formed,

called the Peace Train Organisation.

As the recognised figurehead of the Peace Train Organisation, Sam McAughtry was instantly able

to galvanise the movement and rally support behind him.

The South came in with a vengeance.

They sent senators and senior journalists up for the first Peace Train. It was an absolute delight.

The Church weighed in, both sides.

Bishops and so on from both sides.

Politicians came... heavy politicians. Excellent.

When we got off the train there was such a phalanx of people behind me.

We were marching down to the strains

of the Trade Union Band at Connolly Station echoing all over the place.

Immediately I thought, "God, I look like a politician here,

"out here...out trying to get elected to something or other!"

It was an amusing thought because it was something I would never have done. So anyway,

whenever we got onto the station, I just spoke from the heart.

I bring you greetings, in peace, from the City of Belfast!

I convey those greetings along the railway line from Belfast to Dublin, which belongs to us!

We didn't expect the Peace Train to bring peace. In fact,

the expert view on the Peace Train

is that it didn't make a lot of difference to the bombing of the line.

I wasn't surprised at this.

The IRA bombed the line anyway.

What it did make a difference to was to activate a lot of people

who normally would have been working quietly in the background. It brought them to the foreground.

As far as I was concerned, what we had done was worthwhile.

For Sam McAughtry, the fight to save the Belfast-Dublin line had been important,

not only politically and culturally, but also personally,

since, as a novelist, he had found a creative home from home in Dublin.

This is the flat in which I wrote my novel Touch and Go,

in 1992.

This would have been the bedroom here.

Here is the office.

My goodness gracious me!

There is a computer in position!

I sat here.

The reason why I like to leave... I still like to leave home

if I'm going to do serious writing is that at home I simply can't concentrate.

I can do short pieces for the radio at home, but for a serious book, I have to get away.

When I was writing articles for the newspapers, I used to call myself a writer then.

It was always in me. I was always conscious that it was in me.

An overheard conversation would trigger me off and I would lose my whole concentration

on the conversation that was going on in the company I was with.

I might overhear it from behind me, hear somebody say something.

A sort of a click would come into my mind.

When this click came into my mind, I was thinking there is a good wee story there.

You could run a good few paragraphs on that one.

In the early days I was a newspaper thinker, nothing else.

There is something about particularly fiction writing

that releases you from a lot of inhibitions.

It has taken a lot of the fizz out of me.

In my lifetime I have been a touchy character.

Very touchy.

I was a guy, at one time, who would look for a fight

where there never was one just to keep the brain going.

It has given me enormous inner calm and comfort.

The life of the writer has allowed Sam McAughtry to revisit his past

and to find inspiration in the retelling of his story.

# Don't look for me in fields of clover

# I won't be there I won't get older

# I must wait here Holed up in my time... #

You have to be deadly honest.

Honesty is thrust upon you when you begin to write.

In telling a story, you are revealing a good deal about yourself, for a start.

What you consider to be strange,

what you consider to be sad or funny.

You are reading yourself

with the stories that you write down.

# I won't be there I won't get older

# I'll hover like a frozen bird in time

# Don't reach for me The stars are cold

# My race is run My story's told... #

I enjoy every day that I live.

I mean, I'm...well,

halfway into my nineties... 85.

It feels just the bloody same as it was when I was 25.

I have still got a day to put in and I am going to put it in.

I am going to see what I can pick up from the day

and from the things that I see and hear and do.

# Yes, I'm wading through the waters of my time... #

The proudest thing is that my name, McAughtry,

has become well-known for good reasons.

I think that's the proudest thing.

I never say that when I'm in among my family or they would say I'm a big head,

but that's the proudest thing.

If I went down to Offaly or Cork or Galway or anywhere else,

somebody would know the name McAughtry.

# Don't search for me... #

For Sam McAughtry, the man who, at the age of 50, found himself a chronic alcoholic

and facing a very uncertain future, his success since then has been his greatest story.

# Cos I'm wading through the waters of my time... #

I just go through life with a plan for the day, that's all I do.

I don't think about anything else.

Really there's nothing else. I just try...

If I can do something positive every day, positive from my point of view...

maybe not to somebody else's point of view...

that's the way I run my life.

It is the way I get by.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2006

E-mail [email protected]