Timothy Knatchbull on The Troubles

Let’s start with Armed Struggle, Richard English.

This made a big impact on me. Such a big impact, in fact, that I went to Queen’s University, Belfast to meet Richard English and delve further. His penetrating analysis of the IRA was particularly helpful to me because I was writing a book about the healing I needed to do with regard to my dead twin. After his murder, almost everything about Ireland seemed to me to be about emotion. Before I could get to the heart of my own story I needed to clamber back on to a platform of rationality, fact, analysis and historical detail, and this is what his book helped me do. It gave me a grounding in the history of the IRA, ripping out the wishy-washy emotional stuff and providing a brilliantly calm and sane analysis. He was explicit about this. He wrote that because of Ulster’s bloody past, it was necessary to take a sane and measured approach and he hoped that his book would pass that test. I admired the mission he had set himself and the way in which he accomplished it. He wrote with integrity and authority, the sort of authority that comes from dogged, unbiased research. I realised I needed to apply the same test to my own writing.

I am interested that you are putting emotion aside as ‘wishy-washy’ but I’ll come back to that in a minute. Can you give me a brief history of the IRA?

Richard English focuses on events since the Easter Rising of 1916 and explains how the organisation evolved in response to internal and external pressures. He wasn’t frightened of saying, look, this is a very complicated process. His response to that was just to take it on full frontal. He layers and sets it out very methodically. As a result it is quite a difficult read because you have to analyse it in the way that he does, slowly and carefully. It was just what I needed. But I haven’t forgotten your question: why was it necessary for me to put aside emotion, at least for a time, when I was writing a book that was so grounded in emotional and mental issues? I can explain that.

Go on then.

FiveBooks has asked me to talk about the Troubles, but really my own book is not about the Troubles in the narrow sense, and it certainly is not a political book, although my training is in political science. I went back to Ireland because I’d left when I was a boy, having been very badly injured in an attack, and I needed to heal myself. But I could not do that through emotion alone. I needed a full range of tools, historical, political, cultural. English’s book was a boon.

How old were you when you were injured?

I was 14, almost 15 and I had an identical twin. He was Nicholas Timothy and I am Timothy Nicholas. Few people could reliably say which of us was which. We had spent only about five days apart in our lives. We were incredibly close. And one moment we had this idyllic, happy childhood and this lovely Irish holiday, and the next moment he was dead. I was very badly wounded, as were my mother and father. We were the only survivors of the seven people who had been on this lovely little, rather smelly, old fishing boat, Shadow Five, which my grandfather kept in the West of Ireland. We were so badly wounded that none of us were able to go to the funerals in England for my 79-year-old grandfather, Grandpapa, as we called him, my 83-year-old grandmother, Granny, as we knew her, and my beloved Nicky.

Your parents didn’t go to his funeral?

No. We were lying, critically injured, in Sligo Hospital in Ireland. I was in intensive care. On the other side of the intensive care unit lay my mum, connected to a life-support machine. She had 117 stitches in her face, 20 in each eyeball. She wasn’t expected to live. My father had similar injuries but there wasn’t a bed available for him in intensive care so he was in a ward nearby. The bomb was on Monday, 27 August 1979. The bodies of Grandpapa, Granny and Nick were removed from Ireland after two days but I didn’t even know they were dead. Their coffins were shown on live television as they were driven from the morgue on their way to three Royal Navy helicopters. Having landed on Irish soil and waiting for the coffins to arrive, the helicopters kept their rotors running, expecting to be attacked at any minute. This great drama was unfolding and I still didn’t know Nicky was dead. So I came away with this deep underlying mental and emotional wound which came to the surface over the years.

I was taken out of intensive care three days after the attack, and told that Nicky and my grandparents were dead, and so was our 15-year-old Irish friend Paul Maxwell. He had been earning pocket money in his summer holidays, helping us run this little boat. And I wasn’t able to go to any of their funerals because of my wounds. So I never had any goodbyes and I left Ireland with all these terrible unresolved emotional wounds. The physical wounds I got over. And I got on with life. But the emotional wounds I didn’t really face up to until later: 2003. By then I was married, and deeply in love with Isabella, my wife. We had two children at that stage. And I wanted to heal myself. I knew I could be a better dad if I did. So I decided I would go back to the West of Ireland, to the place of the murders for a week. It was the 24 anniversary of the murders.

And you hadn’t been back since?

I had set foot there a number of times, but each time I had been so overcome that I just had this terrible numbness, and I didn’t feel that I was doing any good to me or anyone else.