I remember the sound as a thud, an enormous, blunt thud, louder and more resonant than anything I ever heard before. My head jerked sideways, then returned to center buffeted by a wave of air. I knew something bad had happened, something irreversible; nothing good makes a sound that big.

We were in a basement theater in downtown Dublin, Ireland, a month before our high school graduation, waiting for a play to begin. I swiveled around in my seat, half expecting one of my classmates in the row behind to know what the sound was. But everyone was shifting, edgy, on the verge of panic. Brigid, my friend, thumped my arm. I scrambled to my feet. She followed. Then all at once, everyone rushed for the stairs. We jostled and bumped against each other in the stairwell, and I thought maybe one of the gasometers in the docklands a few miles away had exploded. Then I thought maybe it was a gas leak in one of the buildings near the theater. The dread in my stomach told me it was neither.

We pushed open the doors onto the street and spread out along the wall of the theater. Before us people rushed everywhere, some toward O’Connell Street, others in the opposite direction toward the train station. Shards of glass protruded from their arms, their legs. Blood trickled down their faces. It seemed like every window in every building as far as I could see had been shattered. Then another huge bang, but further away. People screamed, ran away from the sound. Ambulance sirens shrieked in the distance. I had no idea how many ambulances there were in the city, but I knew there wouldn’t be enough.

I could hear the bangs, and the screaming. I could see the injuries, the blood, the shattered glass, but as I stood with my back to the theater wall, the panic in my chest dissolved, and everything inside me went quiet. I knew the people on the street in front of me were real, but the fact that they were bleeding and terrified seemed like a mirage that would disappear in due course. So, I looked on at the carnage and felt absolutely nothing.

My neighbor hobbled down the middle of the road. Mrs. Dawson. I didn’t know her first name. Mrs. Dawson was my mother’s age, lived a few doors away from us in the suburb where I grew up. She dressed like my mother—a polyester shirtwaist, a lightweight coat, comfortable flat shoes. Her legs were thick like my mother’s and encased in pantyhose of an intense orange-tan shade called Sun Haze. A spike of glass stuck out of Mrs. Dawson’s calf; blood seeped into her black shoe. She looked stunned, like she didn’t yet know there was glass sticking out of her leg. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me, kept hobbling, then disappeared in the crowd.

Then someone said, “We better go home. They’ll hear it on the radio. They’ll be worried,” referring to our parents who were in the suburbs. “We should call the school,” someone else said, possibly because it was 1974 and back then many of our parents didn’t have phones, or because our high school organized the outing. Someone found a payphone. The school principal told us to make our way home as quickly as possible but avoid statues. She obviously though the bombers were targeting monuments to British rule in Ireland.

I walked with Brigid to O’Connell Street. We passed beneath the portico of the General Post Office, its huge Grecian pillars pockmarked with bullet holes from the 1916 rebellion against the British. Further along the street, I stopped to help a woman lying injured in the doorway of the Carlton Cinema, bleeding from her face and arm. I didn’t know what to do except tell her the ambulance would be there soon. Brigid shouted at me—there was nothing we could do; we needed to keep moving. So, I followed her and because there was a bus strike that day, we walked north toward home.

***

That night, May 17, 1974, three bombs were planted in Dublin and detonated at two-minute intervals. The one nearest to the theater was packed into a blue Ford Escort parked in Talbot Street, a shopping thoroughfare that runs parallel to the street we were on. On Talbot Street, twelve people were dead including a woman who was nine months pregnant. Some had limbs blown off, one was decapitated. Further away, on Parnell Street, a green Hillman Avenger killed ten people, two of them infant girls. The third car bomb, the one I heard when we were outside the theater, went off in South Leinster Street, on the other side of the river about a mile away. I don’t remember much about the walk home that night. But as we walked, about sixty miles away in a town called Monaghan, just south of the border with Northern Ireland, a green Hillman Minx exploded, and seven more people died.

***

Ireland was Britain’s oldest colony, predating the thirteen American colonies by hundreds of years. In 1974, the country had been independent for a little more than fifty years and was still clawing its way out of the poverty imperialism leaves in its wake. Northern Ireland, six counties in the northeast of the island, remained a part of the United Kingdom, while the rest of the country became a Republic.

Northern Irish society was divided along religious lines. The Protestant majority, descendants of British settlers, operated a system of discrimination against the Catholic minority who were often denied jobs and housing based on their religion. The right to vote was tied to property, so many Catholics were also disenfranchised. In 1969, peaceful civil rights marches in Northern Ireland came under attack from Protestants and members of the police force. As a result, the conflict between Catholics, who generally wanted to join the Republic, and Protestants who were loyal to the United Kingdom, erupted. The guerilla war that would last nearly thirty years was the source of the bombings that night in Dublin and Monaghan.

The conflict in Northern Ireland was imperfectly contained behind a network of British army watchtowers and fortified border checkpoints, but through TV and radio, every day Northern Ireland invaded our homes. In the morning as I ate my cornflakes before catching the bus for school, and again in the evening, radio and TV brought fresh news of sniper fire, car bombs, taxi drivers forced to use their vehicles for suicide bombings. If reduced to statistics—the number of bullets, the number of bombs, the number of dead bodies and lost limbs—the war in Vietnam made Northern Ireland seem insignificant, but Vietnam wasn’t sixty miles up the road.

To me, this was all the work of the British; they split the country in two and now, half a century later, actively fermented conflict. The bombs that exploded that evening in May were planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant terrorist organization founded by a former British army soldier. In years to come, information would emerge that the terrorists were aided in their mission by members of British Army Intelligence, and the Northern Ireland police force. Back in 1974, I abhorred the British. When an English soldier lost his life in Northern Ireland, I found it difficult to muster sympathy. Taking sides in the conflict wasn’t just easy, it seemed righteous.

***

The next day, Saturday, my mother was up, as usual, at 5 a.m., polishing the linoleum floors, making porridge, and squeezing orange juice for our breakfast. She was the hardest working person I ever met. By late morning, when I finally made my way to the kitchen, she was busy with her weekend masterpiece, her apple pie. She had her own recipe—a handful of this, a pinch of that, nothing precise, or replicable—and between the layers of pastry that crumbled sensuously in the mouth, a couple of inches of Brambly apples. I took up my usual position on a yellow painted kitchen chair wedged close to the table and put my feet up on the side of the gas stove. She sat in the opposite corner on a matching chair, her back to the wall, a silver bowl on her lap. Her hand worked a knife, her movements smooth from years of practice. As I drank the orange juice she had squeezed a couple of hours earlier, I watched ribbons of green apple skin uncurl into the bowl.

She liked to talk, a stream of consciousness commentary on events in the neighborhood, who said what to whom, who got married, who emigrated. I didn’t pay much attention. The radio was on in the background. The announcer gave the latest numbers. The death toll was mounting, more than twenty, maybe more than thirty, as many as three hundred injured. I knew that because I was there when it happened, the numbers should mean something to me, but they didn’t.

As I drained the glass of juice, I told my mother that Mrs. Dawson got injured last night. It felt bizarre to know someone who had been injured in a war. There were implications to that, a line of thought I needed to follow, but for some reason, thinking was difficult, so I asked my mother if I could peel some apples for her. She stood up, handed me the bowl and knife, and busied herself at the kitchen table with flour and eggs. That’s when I noticed her legs. She always wore two pairs of pantyhose to obscure the bandages that covered her varicose ulcers, Sun Haze pantyhose.

I flashed to Mrs. Dawson’s leg, to the blood seeping into her shoe, the screaming, the people running desperately away from where they thought the next bomb might be, the woman lying in the doorway of the cinema. The thoughts I couldn’t quite reach earlier came flooding in. My mother shopped in Talbot Street occasionally. What if she had been standing beside that harmless looking blue Escort yesterday evening? What if my mother had lost her leg, or her arm, or her life? My mother, not somebody else’s mother, not some stranger? My hands began to shake.

I swung my knees around, hiding the bowl beneath the table so my mother couldn’t see my hands, and kept peeling. I peeled too many apples, so she told me to stop, to start cutting them up. She moved her wooden roller across a disc of dough, then lifted a sheet of pastry onto an old enameled pie plate. As I watched her trim the edges, I imagined what it would be like to lose her, and I reached a decision—the reunification of Ireland is not worth my mother’s life. Then I was forced to answer another question. If reunification is not worth my mother’s life, how could it be worth any other person’s life? Even the life of a British soldier?

-Catherine Dowling

Catherine Dowling was born in Ireland and has divided her life between the United States and her home country. She has a Masters in History from the University of Montana, and since then has worked hard to create a checkered resume that includes waitressing, quality assurance, teaching, and psychotherapy, as well as writing. She has published two books: Radical Awareness: Five Practices for a Fully Engaged Life, (Llewellyn Worldwide), and Rebirthing and Breathwork: A Powerful Technique for Personal Transformation. (Piatkus, UK). Her articles have appeared in Oneing, Rkvry, Positive Health, Inside Out, Lowestoft Chronicle, Montana Mouthful, and more, available at www.catherinedowling.com. She has lived in New York, Montana, California, and New Mexico, but currently resides in Ireland.