(6 of 9)
That's all right. It means I'm a Prod. But if I had said hatch, I'd have been a Taig." She laughs mockingly. "Still, most of the time it's not the children who are the bigots. It's the parents." She adds that she feels a lot closer to Catholics in Belfast than she does to Protestants in England: "You see, we have shared an experience here—a life."
It is the closeness of the lives that makes the war intense for the children, like a terrible, endless family fight, but it also confuses their feelings. Each side is carefully taught to be suspicious of the other, yet there is an unspoken affinity between the two sides as well, an affinity that does not exist between the Protestant Northern Irish and the English, or even between the Catholics in the north and south. The connections show up in indirect ways. Teen-age girls in Belfast adore the romantic novels of Joan Lingard, especially Across the Barricades ("when Catholic Kevin and Protestant Sadie are old enough for their hitherto un acknowledged attraction to flower into love"). It is not wishful thinking, exactly; Bernadette admits she would never date a Prod, because "nothing could come of it." But the possibility exists, nonetheless—a fact that infuriates the gunmen at the doors.
What the terrorists do to keep the children in line is to use them in their battles, and the children recognize this. Here, as in Lebanon and elsewhere, children are often deliberately placed at the head of demonstrations, marches and funeral processions. Their mere presence gives moral authority to the cause. A booklet under the prosaic title Rubber & Plastic Bullets Kill & Maim contains pictures and stories of child victims; the more brutal the better. Such devices work especially well in Belfast, where everyone gives the impression of knowing everyone else, where people like Paul and Bernadette achieve a dubious celebrity for having had their lives shot out from under them. ut the stories of those two are not nearly as famous as Elizabeth Crawford's. Elizabeth, 16, like Bernadette, goes to Cross and Passion, but even across town in Stella Maris they know all about the Crawfords. A girl in Stella Maris recalled how beautiful Patrick Crawford was—then blushes to think that she is flirting with the dead. Patrick was 15. He was very tall, wore his hair cut short and resembled a policeman. They say that is how he was shot by mistake. Dead too is Elizabeth's grandfather, who was run down by a car in what appeared to be a sectarian killing. And then there was Elizabeth's mother, killed mistakenly in a crossfire between the I.R.A. and the army.