Guard Your Heart – Writing the complexity of peace

Did growing up in the Troubles impact me? Is that why I wrote Guard Your Heart? In the North, there is an unwritten convention about the ‘Troubles’ that bears striking similarity to how we speak of the impact of Covid. This is it: caveat suffering with disclaimers. What happened to me, well it wasn’t as bad as what happened to others… Convention defines ‘real’ suffering as bereavement, traumatisation or severe health impact. Convention is not always right. With the Troubles however, it is ingrained. It is why I feel a deep unease writing anything about how growing up in the Troubles might have any connection with why I wrote Guard Your Heart. It is why I feel the need to state ‘But I wasn’t impacted. Not really…’ Like convention, I could be wrong.

Guard Your Heart (Macmillan) is a YA / Crossover novel set in Derry (Londonderry… Doire…) in 2016. It’s a Romeo and Juliet, with two eighteen-year-old protagonists, Aidan and Iona, both born on the day of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement. Different communities. Different lives. An incident brings them together. And so what? It’s not the Troubles. But what if peace is harder than war?

It’s a rhetorical question, and provocative, but worth considering. The Troubles lasted thirty years – why would we expect peace could reverse the damage in twenty? Guard Your Heart isn’t about the Troubles, it’s about their legacy. Aidan puts it like this, ‘So maybe I couldn’t blag like the oul’ farts about growing up in the Troubles, but I’d have needed to be tapping a white stick to not see their shadow, especially in a family like mine.’ Iona says, ‘The attitudes hadn’t changed, just the tools. We fought with culture now, not guns.’

2021 is the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland and the Partition of Ireland. A party or a wake depending on your perspective. 2016, the year I began writing, and the year in which the novel is set, was also a centenary year – the Somme and the Easter Rising. My day job for the last sixteen years has been in peace building in Derry. That year, one of the big community relations conversations focused on ethical and shared remembrance - how, in remembering the past, we didn’t forget the future. It also happens that I’m a single parent. I had years of virtual lockdown curfew simply for want of a babysitter well before Covid imposed restrictions. Home, curtailed in the tatty armchair after work each evening, my brain was asking who is telling today’s story? Aidan and Iona in Guard Your Heart were birthed out of that process. I wanted to tell the story of two teenagers who had never lived a single day during the Troubles, yet who were still suffering from their impact. I wanted to write the complexity of peace.

That complexity is in the novel. Peace building isn’t Kum-by-ya, it’s courage. Leadership. The story goes way beyond Aidan is Catholic, Iona is Protestant. Religion may be the most convenient labelling for simplistic understanding of the North, but it’s reductionist. It makes the conflict (and difficulties building peace) look petty. It makes people look bigoted and stupid for not ‘getting over it’. Flash back to that comparison with Covid and the convention around who has suffered. Somehow, we ‘get it’ for Covid – that the impact is more than the catastrophic numbers in the headlines. That the legacy will endure for years. That mental health support and economic regeneration will be needed on a massive scale. That addiction support and domestic violence services will be more in demand than ever. Covid has devastated families, communities and societies in so many ways, especially those in poverty, marginalised, border areas… Do we really ‘get it’ for the legacy of the Troubles?

The flare up of tension around the Protocol and the impact of Brexit on identity, ongoing so-called punishment attacks, viewpoints on potential border polls - sometimes we don’t even realise we are seeing Northern Ireland through a lens. Not just orange or green. Privilege. Class. Northern. Southern. British. Irish. Political. Ignorance. Sectarianism. Prejudice. Colonialism. In Guard Your Heart, Aidan reflects ‘Were we building peace only knowing half the war story? In our charity-shop jigsaws as kids, there’d always been pieces missing, we never got the whole picture. Key bits were brushed under someone else’s carpet.’

If we don’t know, or refuse to consider, that our lens, our perspective, might be clouded, then our empathy is damaged. If we’re just aiming for tolerance in the north of Ireland, we’re aiming too low. In sixteen years of community relations work, I’ve learnt that empathy is a powerful tool for building peace. I started to write when it dawned that one of the most powerful tools for building empathy was fiction. Guard Your Heart is a Young Adult romance laced with a dose of dry Derry humour, but it’s also a gritty, fast paced plot set in the context of Northern Ireland today. I wrote it for empathy. I wrote it to make people think.

Though I’ve lived in Derry over twenty years, I’m from Armagh. The estate I grew up on was possibly unusual. The houses told different stories – a Union Jack, a first holy communion dress, an INLA shooting, different school uniforms, an Orangeman, a ‘mixed’ marriage, an IRA car bomb. There were no painted kerbs. We played together. Blessed with amazing parents, I learned that bridges could be crossed and that all people mattered. I attended the Royal School Armagh in a white shirt and blue blazer with red trim yet learned tin whistle with Armagh Pipers’ Club in the GAA.

Did the Troubles impact me? Add all the caveats, but yes. Here’s how - they taught me to stay quiet. To listen. To an extent, they took my voice. So does working in peace and reconciliation for local government. It’s something akin to a blend of mediator/punch bag/facilitator/bureaucrat /listener/ project designer/community worker. For me, it feels like acquiring both an overview and an on the ground perspective of what’s going on across diverse communities and identities, helping to formulate or co-design solutions and programmes, yet never actually giving voice to my own perspective – at least not on anything political, religious or contentious. You lose your voice for the ‘common good’. Perhaps that’s also why I write. Fiction restores my voice. Whether or how people choose to listen, is entirely at their own discretion.