The Stories our Streets tell

Yesterday I sat at my window watching my grandchildren illustrate the pavements with coloured chalk. I was caught off guard as I sat and watched them splash colours carefree on the grey gravel canvas. I almost didn't recognise the same pavements I grew up on. It was like I blinked and one world vanished into another and for the first time in a while yesterday; I remembered. I remembered a time when I sat watching out the same window and witnessed my city in flames. I remembered a time, colours meant territories. I remembered a time, those very same pavements were illustrated differently. 

I have always had a dysfunctional relationship with my home, yet my love for it remains true. My love for it was why I had stayed here when so many during the years of turmoil fled. Even in its darkest days, I could still envision a future where the pavements spoke not of blood, hatred or division. When I watched my grandchildren yesterday, I was reminded that they were my inspiration as a young man; before even knowing their names. When you are born into a world of chaos, division and hatred, you are forced to make choices quickly. As a young man, I had a choice about what part I wanted to play in history. I asked myself one night as a young man, walking these pavements, "What role would you be proud to tell your grandkids you played?" That question acted as a catalyst, and it was not long after I posed it to myself, I found myself enrolled as an ambulance driver for the streets of Belfast.

My grandchildren may never read my name in a history book, but my attempts to heal Northern Ireland's streets are evident if they walked these pavements. During the years of the conflicts, I witnessed how rubble and destruction would litter this city's streets, and it was always irrespective of the colour the pavements were painted. Both sides required my ambulance, and both sides would end up smeared with blood. I never regarded individual tragedies as points scored to the opposing side. Every time I had to uncover a body or reassemble a blown off leg, I considered it a loss to both sides' humanity. I watched men on opposing sides cry the same, bleed the same and die the same. I found it hard to find any justifiable cause for the continuing of division and strife when I stood amidst a bomb site. I often thought about the leaders of the Northern Ireland conflict. I wondered if they had stood alongside me at every one of those scenes would they have made the journey to peace so long and tedious. 

The streets of Belfast were often the frontline of conflict. They were noisy places. They cried of justice during the Civil Rights marches. They rang with the shrill of bin lids, hitting against pavements during the Hunger Strikes. They howled with destruction at every bomb, riot and ambush. The noise the streets emitted during the years of conflict often made many people numb. I watched as the conflict dragged and the death count piled, how people started to jump less at the sound of gunshots. Babies could sleep through nights of sirens. The sound of broken glass became as commonplace as the sound of rain. 

As an ambulance driver, I was more than accustomed to these penetrating noises. However, it is not the sound of bombs, bullets and bangs that follow me still; fifty years on from the start of my country's turmoil. The sound that still has the reach to startle me was the sound of silence. It was a particular silence that could be heard when I shut the doors of my ambulance. The bomb site's chaos often disguised the sound of individual lives changing forever, but in the back of my ambulance, a platform was created for that very realisation. That realisation came with the sound of harrowing silence. The sound was the same, no matter the tragedy. No matter the victim. No matter the cause. It was this sound of silence that used to follow us all the way to the hospital and then persisted in following me all the way home. 

Sometimes I can still hear that same sound of silence whispering in the streets of my city. After a city goes to war with itself, the emotional remnants left behind are much harder to remove than the rubble from shop windows and burnt-out cars. I sometimes find myself driving past the Peace Walls and watch tourists emerge from black taxis to take pictures and sign their names. I often envy their outsider's eyes. I look at those same walls, and I can still see the bloodstains haemorrhaging from both sides, and I remember all those people I met in the back of my ambulance, who never got the chance to see their city being rebuilt.

As a people, we have tried to learn from our darkest days, and we still have more to learn. A whole generation in this country has grown up without the fear of bombs interrupting their Saturday morning shopping. More and more communities are no longer defined by what type of church they attend on a Sunday or what colour of flag they fly outside their house. I know we have more rebuilding to do. I want to hear our streets in chorus with a new song. A song of redemption. A song of pride for this city and all the people who chose to call it home.

I will always be proud that I was found during this city's time of need healing others on these same streets that my grandchildren are free to draw pictures of smiling suns and tall trees. Northern Ireland streets may speak of a complicated past, they may always bear the stains of conflict and division, but peace has started to be rewritten in the walls and streets. When I walk these pavements now, I see hope illustrated, and finally, I can rest.