29.03.2018

Truth in fiction

Dave Douglass reviews Aly Renwick Gangrene Merlin Press, 2017, pp256, £9.99

The author was born in the same post-war period as me; I have written a trilogy of this period (Stardust and coaldust) from the perspective of a participant rather than some ‘objective’ historian, and in this novel I discover a sort of literal pictogram. It paints a similar picture - but through the eyes of a man who, at least initially, had rather different perspectives.

Written by a former serving soldier in the British army, this fact-based novel glows with authenticity and a deep knowledge of the sharp end of British army operations. The book begins with the description of an Irish Republican Army semtex bomb strapped underneath the storyteller’s car and exploding as he hit a hill, sending fragments of the vehicle through his lower back and spinal column - the mercury tilt switch is a very clever device.

Many on the British left - ‘right on’ and revelling in the glory of the armed struggle - probably never gave a thought for the sharp end of the human suffering that was endured by our friends and foes. Some of that, in a non-emotional, non-hysterical, reflective narrative, comes alive right from the early pages of this book. The story, through the memories of this former squaddie in the intelligence unit, takes him to distant theatres of war, which in rapid succession included Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and the streets of Ulster - but then also to the coalfields. The hero of the book and in all probability its author had been born in the Nottingham coalfield - next to Blidsworth colliery, which becomes ‘Bloodworth’ in the book. To dodge the often irresistible draw down the mine following in the footsteps of dad and granddad, he and his mate had joined the army - a common story amongst generations of pitmen’s sons.

And this lad’s story is not one of distant beaches and dark-eyed maidens, as the adverts had shown - he had been recruited into the intelligence unit by a Geordie sergeant, whose formative years had been in boys’ homes on Tyneside. Even the initiating exposure to the brutality of interrogations, with fellow soldiers suffering real torture in mock war games, had not deterred him - but caused him to reflect, if this was their ‘mates’, how would the real enemy be treated?

I really like the way the book reflects the antagonism and hostility felt by your average soldier to the kids of their own generation, with whom they are now totally out of step. Peace, free love, revolution, doing your own thing - the devil had all the best tunes. The mismatch was personal and soul-searching.

Striking

Some of the brutal and demonic violence described in this book against the enemies ‘of the empire’ or the British state will be too incredulous for some who get to read it - they will doubtless point to it being mere fiction. But those who have read the history of these so-called ‘theatres of war’ and literal British terrorist resistance to folk in their own lands rising for freedom, will know that it strikes a chord too finely tuned to be false.

The book might well be describing actual events. In Ireland, for example, when they set up the intelligence unit in conjunction with army regiments on the ground to monitor ‘both sides’, “it was clear that in the last resort the green team boys [undercover intelligence units] would back the unionist status quo” . As in real life, most of the units in the novel were pro-loyalist, soon abandoning any ‘neutral’, ‘peace-keeping’ role. Then by 1970 the orders had come in to move in heavy: “we’ll wipe out the IRA before they’ve even got off the ground” . They were given the go-ahead “to set up a Q squad in Belfast”, made up of plain-clothes undercover soldiers posing as locals to gather information and strategy against “the insurgents”.

In the book the characters are engaged in active surveillance of loyalist paramilitaries - but only in order to understand their internal political and tactical divides: who was on the ground and in the field. Their idea was to use this knowledge for what was now becoming the clear objective: repression of the republican resurgence. The unionists were pushing for heavy action against the republican groups, and so the no-holds-barred invasion of the communities started. Smashing down doors, wrecking houses, searching for arms and imposing a curfew, recruiting vulnerable informers who could be bribed and blackmailed.

A decade later, as the miners’ strike rages through the coalfields, and as a native of another civil war on the streets of Blidsworth, the author is well placed to play out the same role among his former neighbours, family and friends.

He has his characters reflect on their ‘service’ in Kenya, including the systematic murder of “commies” and trade unionists: “We done as we were told, and at the time we were all up for it ... laughing and joking, as we threw the rag-heads over the parapet into the water”.

And in Ireland internment represented the abandonment of any guise of normality: concentration camps ringed with barbed wire and nightly raids on the republican areas. Men and youths were dragged off and detained without trial. But the internment camps were only the beginning, with methods of interrogation soon becoming notorious. The techniques had been developed over decades in far-off places and now they were coming home:

The Micks were to be hooded ... stripped and put into loose boiler suits; deprived of sleep, food and toilet facilities; made to stand for extended periods in a fixed position against a wall; and subjected to a loud and constant whining background noise.

This ‘fiction’ is in fact straight fact:

We all had a good laugh ... because the prisoners came in by helicopter and the major had ordered them to be kicked out, just a couple of yards before landing. With the Micks not being able to see, and thinking they were still high above the earth, they’d be shitting themselves - till they hit the ground. So they were well fucked in the head before we even got to them.

In fact the truth was somewhat worse: some men were thrown out while flying at height, but had one leg tethered to the helicopter, so they would fall freely until being jerked painfully to a halt.

The worst page in the fiction is the fact of Bloody Sunday. The truth was, the mass political protests against internment, for civil rights, for justice were echoing around the world. It was getting under the skin of the political establishment and the army in particular - individual soldiers were being questioned and confronted at home over their actions in Ireland. This demonstration would be given a lesson the uppity Micks would never forget.

For the paras that day it was personal: they would leave such a mark, the protestors would think long and hard before coming back (something on a smaller far less violent and lethal scale would later be unleashed at Orgreave for exactly the same reasons). However, the book records how the day after the massacre the queue of men and boys queuing to join the IRA was half a mile long. The fact is, the slogan, ‘Support the IRA’ was now replaced by a chorus of ‘Join the IRA’. The author puts it this way:

... after internment, Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman the conflict intensified and [the Provisional IRA] grew and grew. Why did they do it? Search me, but I know that if anyone asked me who built the PIRA I’d say the Micks, but their recruiting sergeant was the British army.

The book tells of army recruitment of certain PIRA men, who gave a lot of information. And there was the Four Square laundry service, whose mobile collection service mounted a surveillance system and checked all incoming clothes for traces of explosives and powder discharges. The truth is, the IRA had been deeply penetrated from its inception by ‘deep sleepers’, who took key positions in both wings of the movement - with the duel aim of deflecting the armed struggle and diverting its republican socialist direction. That story, however, is a book yet to be written, but its main characters are - remarkably, given the depth of the betrayal - still with us.

The book shifts back and forth between now and the past, and also touches on the struggles within the national health service, as the now ex-soldier and his wife are employed by the NHS. In the midst of that struggle and their reflections, they ask: “So how is the country run? Who really rules us? How are we ruled?”

Very cleverly a soldier injured in a bomb blast, and now in the care of the health service, is linked to the hospital’s own problems, at a time when the NHS was incrementally moving down the road of privatisations, ‘private finance initiatives’, decentralisation and cost-cutting.

Barbaric

Some of the inhuman and truly barbaric treatment meted out to the enemies of the empire, as described here, are deeply disturbing: they are not portrayed as cold, objective facts, but such treatment doubtless occurred. The dehumanisation of the army torturers - many of them actually getting some fun from it all, enjoying the humiliation of the prisoner together with the lads - ranks alongside anything Franco, Hitler or Pinochet presided over. Indeed the story overlaps with other theatres of imperialism’s anti-insurgency and counterrevolution: the state’s special ‘armed bodies of men’ were professionals, capable of moving in very different countries. The book has a former repressor of the Mau Mau and IRA joining US special undercover assassins in Chile.

Many of us on the left see this global struggle as one: one war in different theatres. The other side too knows that is the case and views it with as much ‘internationalism’ as we do - perhaps more. Moves to bring Chile here were seen in the suddenly very visible presence of armed troops engaged in ‘security manoeuvres’ on the streets in the 70s, as miners and the working class en masse came together in an objective, though unplanned, pincer movement with the Irish rebellion. The book hints at the ‘secret state’, linked cheek by jowl to counterinsurgency forces in Ireland, planning dirty tricks to remove ‘soft’ or ‘unhelpful’ political leaders - even prime ministers - by any means necessary. The ‘anti-establishment’ establishment knows the ‘game’ is not played like cricket.

It is this thread which leads from Ireland through the miners’ strike, through the coming and going of suddenly discredited politicians and PMs, to unexpected and all-embracing moral panics, thanks to the special forces in the various anti-insurgency movements. This is the real governmental form they planned would rule over us after the nuclear destruction they anticipated during the so-called ‘cold war’. Apparently unconnected events - wars, murders, government changes, playing both sides against the middle, publicly backing one side while running the other - actually add up to a coherent game plan. In this connection one cannot help but reflect on the warmongering jingoism and abandonment of diplomacy in relation to the mysterious Russian spy poisoning.

The book more than hints at the secret state covering its tracks, including through the elimination of witnesses, even at the top, such as when a “willy wonker” (military helicopter) got “splattered” all over a hill: “My RUC source said that the radio beacon had been moved, an’ nearly all the top brass of our undercover war were taken out in one go” . In the novel the victims include a colonel, three lieutenant colonels and five majors, together with the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s special branch chief.

I am not generally a fiction man, I find too much of reality fascinating, but we all speculate on what is going on and what has gone on - we have seen it, but what did we see? We all reflect on the history of our own lives and the massive events which have shaped it, and wonder how much of it we have really understood. This book is ‘what if’ - but with facts and real situations by the bucketful mixed with speculation, within the framework of fiction.

So in a sense this is a true story - and a fascinating one that many of us have been involved in. The scenes described here, together with the machinations of the state, its secret wing and soulless agents, are dreadfully real. It is a terrific and disturbing book l