I remember a bitterly cold winter's night back in early 1979 when I shared a cell with Seanna Walsh in H6.
Our cell window had a view of the exercise yard and we caught sight of a few flakes of snow which began to drift down from the black skies. As we watched they quickly became a flurry swirling in the wind. We moved closer to the window with our blankets wrapped tightly around us and glazed out upon the barbed wire fences and the orange lights which had briefly been transformed into a winter wonderland.
I escaped from that hellish place and returned to Carnhill. Walking through a winter's night lit only by the street lights, my collar was turned up and the cold nipped my cheeks as the snow swirled in the wind and I cursed it. The crisp snow crunched under my boots and left a trail back to where I had come from.
But I hadn't been anywhere. I was still in that dank cell with my cell-mate, staring out through the concrete bars in the window, as the snow swirled in the wind and clung to the barbed wire. The winter's night was still lit, but only by those damned orange lights.
* This story was inspired by a post by Thadd Mc Gill about a street light reminding him of the orange lights in the H Blocks.
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Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman. Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie |
A memory jogging piece Dixie - the winter prior to that, flu spread around the wing. I looked out the window one morning in the direction of H5 and the crows were circling the orange lights, It was eerie and in the horrors of the flu I thought if there is a hell we are in it.
ReplyDelete' I had read that German Wehrmacht troops from the sixth army, when they had been encircled by Soviet forces at Stalingrad in early January 1943, had urinated on their frozen hands to keep warm, so I tried it and it worked ... The snow fell here about five days ago and I've never been so cold in all my life . . . I've got the towel wrapped around my head like a scarf, ha. I think we're a lot like the German Wehrmacht troops in Russia during the Second World War, all wrapped up like corpses'.
ReplyDeleteExtract from the Memoirs of Seamus Kearney - No Greater Love.
"As we walked on, leaving the football pitch behind, i said back to him :" You said earlier that i looked terrible, and i feel terrible too. I am a soldier and i want to be recognised as such, and if that means losing all of those privileges that you talk about, then so be it, because i don't really care anymore. All i care about now is to be recognised for what i am, a soldier, not a common criminal ".
ReplyDeleteThe screw then shook his head in despair...... In my head i thought, only time would tell if i was wrong, or if history would remember us, only time".
From the extracts of the Memoirs of Seamus Kearney - No Greater Love.