(8 of 9)
"If I find one nice enough. [A graceful laugh.] But if I ever did get married, I'd end up emigratin'. I would not want to live here, bringin' my own children up in the Troubles. 'Cause I was hurt. And I wouldn't want that to happen to them."
It is easy to picture Elizabeth as a parent because she seems a parent already. Like Bernadette, she has been rushed into adulthood. Now she must take care of her father as if she were his parent—he who does not like to talk about the Troubles, or about the past, and who seems to have settled, quite justifiably, for a life of determined peace and quiet. He may never change. A grownup parent sees life in stages, knows fairly well when a child will outgrow or overcome this and that. But how does a child-parent know the same about grownups? In a sense, more patience and understanding are asked of these children than of any real parent.
You wonder, in fact, if they begin to love their parents a little less for the multitude of responsibilities imposed on them. Or, for that matter, if they love them less for the danger they all are in. In primitive worlds the high infant mortality rate is said to have inured parents against caring for their children too much. Does the same obtain in places where there is a high parent mortality rate? Perhaps the children begin to withhold some of their love from their parents as a pre-emptive strike against the assassins. It would be reasonable. It would be reasonable too if they loved them less simply for being grownups, for being partly responsible for the weeping in the streets. Yet they seem to love their parents more, not less. They only love them with greater caution. Everything these children touch may explode or disappear.
"Do you think that one side in the Troubles is more right than the other?"
"No," says Elizabeth, "neither is wrong. But they need somethin' to bring them together. I really don't know where fightin' gets anybody. It's only goin' to bring more dead, more sadness to the families."
She is told the story of Paul and Joseph.
"Don't you want revenge?"
"Against whom?" she says.
Like many Belfast children, Elizabeth enjoys getting out to the countryside as often as possible "for a bit of peace." On Sundays the parents of Belfast can put the city at their backs for a while and drive south to the Mournes, where the hill sheep flock like gulls, or north to the coast of Antrim, to stare across at Scotland. You don't see much of the army in the countryside, except around the Maze; and even that place, 13 miles from town, is partly hidden from view by a pasture and a golf course. Otherwise it is all peace and greenery: swans preening on the lake shores; hedges that make quilts of the fields; grass so rich and various you can tell the county by its milk.