Free One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden Page B

father got tarred with the same brush as your man, they made no distinction between them. As far as the papers were concerned, they were two terrorists, they got what they deserved, nobody was going to waste any sympathy on people like that. It really upset my father’s brother, and it really upset me. I was only a child, but I knew that it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair. My uncle wanted to make some sort of complaint, but my mother told him to forget about it. “Who’s going to care about the likes of us,” she said, “that hasn’t two cold pennies to rub together? Do you think the people that write things in the paper care what we think or feel? I have enough to be doing, left sitting with a houseful of children, without wasting my time making complaints that they’ll only be laughing at behind my back.” So I decided that when I grew up, I was going to be a journalist, that there was going to be at least one person who was telling the truth.’ He laughed. ‘Hell, I was only twelve, after all!’
    ‘One thing I hadn’t properly thought through until my father was killed was how hard it is for the emergency services. No matter what training they have, or how well suited they are to their jobs, it must grind them down, the things they have to face.’
    ‘You’re telling me,’ David said. ‘People don’t know the half of it.’
    It was a priest who had broken the news to Helen’s mother and Sally. After Brian, he’d been the first person to arrive at the house. He was a curate, in his early twenties, who had only beenordained in the spring of that year; a banker’s son who had grown up in a comfortable home in County Down, who had won a gold medal for Greek at university and spent a year in Rome. He was gentle and idealistic and kind-hearted, and he had never in his life seen anything like what he found in Brian’s and Lucy’s kitchen that night in late October. Sally told Helen afterwards how sorry they’d felt for him, his voice breaking as he tried to comfort them; his own serenity and peace clearly having been shattered by what he had seen.
    ‘I suppose that’s one thing I was lucky in from the start,’ David went on, ‘if you can call it lucky. I knew from the first that what was going on here wasn’t exciting or glamorous. In fairness, I don’t think any of the local reporters think that. They mostly grew up here, so they know the score. You get a lot of foreign journalists over here for a while when things get particularly bad, but as conflicts go, it’s never been fashionable. Maybe in the sixties, early seventies, it was different, when there was a lot of street fighting, riots, but as far as the rest of the world, and the world media are concerned, it’s too localised. The background isn’t exotic enough, and anyway, it’s never been a full-blown war. There’s nothing to get gung-ho about in a body being found in a wet lane somewhere in, say, Tyrone, on a cold, bad night.’ He admitted that you got cynical working there. When the number of people who had been killed was one off a round figure, you found yourself thinking about what you would say in a day or two, when the figure was reached. A photographer friend to whom he had said this remarked, ‘Well, touch wood always that it won’t be you.’
    ‘But there’s something about the whole nature of it,’ Helen argued, ‘about taking things and making stories about them, and that’s all it amounts to: making up stories out of a few facts, and presenting them as though that interpretation was the absolute truth. That’s what I can’t stand.’
    ‘But what do you want instead? Do you want nothing to be known? Would you really have preferred it if your father’s death had been ignored? All news journalists are aware of the problems inherent in journalism, believe me. Trying to get the right balance, in cases like the one you’re talking about, between reporting accurately and honestly on the one hand, and