It was still dark and when I woke. I don't think I got more than an hours sleep during the long restless torturous night. The cold was intense, biting at my naked body. For at least the thousandth time I rolled over on my side, hugging the blankets close to my body.
The dawn broke and out of the shadows of the dead night materialised the daily nightmare. The dirt and filth, the scarred walls -the inner confines of my stinking, smelly tomb greeted me once again. I lay listening to my own gentle breathing and to the caws of the crows.
A key clinked against the steel door. Footsteps came charging along the outside corridor breaking the silence. The crows fled in an explosion of chattering caws, my mind fought to register the meaning of the confusion. Panic gripped as the heavy steel door rattled and flew open.
*Right,' screamed the self-appointed tyrant. 'Drop that towel, turn around. Bend down and touch your toes.' I'm not bending, I said.
Within a few seconds, in the midst of the white flashes, I fell to the floor as blows rained upon me from every conceivable angle. I was dragged back up again to my feet and thrown like a side of bacon, face DS MP downwards on the table.
Searching hands pulled at my arms and legs, spreading me like a pelt of leather.
The door slammed shut and I lay on the concrete floor, chest pounding and every nerve in my body strained. Could have been worse, I tried to tell myself as a consolation. But this didn't convince me or my aching body one bit.
cell, an aching black-andblue frozen body, a bunch it isn't even bloody well breakfast time yet!
to yield. If I didn't get a blanket or two soon I'd be in trouble. You don't ask for them either. I learned that a long time ago. Show one weakness and you've there were 43 of my comrades in exactly the same predicament as myself.
scéal (news) could liven the wing up was unbelievable.
Dungannon march when one of the lads brought back an estimate of the turn-out, plus a smuggled photograph.
felt so happy in my life. disturbing ple, I thought. I felt proud to be fighting for them. It brings a lump to my throat even thinking of it now.
my family was comforting. ' It was the highlight and only highlight of each long torof comparative happiness each visit. That's six hours of comparative happiness a year, six hours out of 8,760 per year. Six lousy hours and they harass you and your family for every minute of it.
Every minute of my nightmarish surroundings screamed at me. There was no escaping this nightmare very few - had already given up. They had put on ed. Not that they had wished to do this. They just could not bear the unrelenting burden of torture.
The depression, the beatings, the cold ... look An empty freezing cold of psychopaths beating men to pulp outside the door and The biting cold refused dug your own grave. Besides The way a good bit of Like after the Coalisland to 1 looked at it and never Aren't they grand peoforever?
The thought of seeing turous month. Half an hour unless I gave up! A few — a spirit. prison clothes and conformblankets. out of the window and concentration camp screams at Who among these so-called humanitarians who kept their silence on the H-Blocks, who among them could put a name on this type of humiliation and torture, when men are forced by extreme torture into the position that they had to embark upon a dirty strike to highlight the inhumanity poured upon them.
But I am determined that I shall never give up. They can do what they will with me but I will never bow to them or allow them to criminalise me.
And I thought of my dead comrades again. My friends who had stood beside me one day and were dead the next. Boys and girls just like myself, born and raised in the nationalist ghettos of Belfast to be murdered by foreign soldiers and lecky sectarian thugs.
How many more lives would be lost before the British had decided they had murdered enough and were forced to get out of Ireland • But I survived. I beat them again. The torturous dungeons and the sadists who manned them had destroyed my body but had failed to break my spirit.
It was a skeleton compared to what I used to be but it did not matter. Nothing really mattered except remaining unbroken.
They have nothing in their entire imperial arsenal to break the spirit of one single Republican political prisoner-of-war who refuses to be broken, I thought, and that was very true. They can not or never will break our I rolled over again freezing and the snow came in the window on top of my "Tiocfaidh ár lá' (our day will come) I said to myself. "Tiocfaidh ár lá'.
Socialist Action 6 May 1983
Socialist Action 6 May 1983
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am going to wake up out of this nightmare'