When Pink Floyd’s The Wall came out in November 1979, I didn’t like it. Thought it was too disco-like from what little I’d heard on the radio. “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control” were the lyrics to an anthem that was supposed to make me want to run out and buy the album. I didn’t feel I was getting much education, and I refused to bend to the rigid discipline and mind control, and yet the song didn’t resonate with me. Maybe because I already knew it was all for naught. That summer, a grade evaluation at an American high school in Maryland confirmed my suspicions when my average grades became failures. Not that it mattered. I had other things on my mind.
I was in Bethesda, Maryland, when the evening news announced the IRA had blown up 18 soldiers in Warrenpoint, Ireland. A tactician would say it was a brilliant ambush, and it was, helped along by British arrogance and trust. Then mention came of another attack the same day. The IRA had blown up Lord Mountbatten and his family while they were out on a fishing boat. I knew nothing of Mountbatten but the attack had happened in Sligo, where I’d gone to school and where it was supposed to be safe. Yet, I still didn’t pay much attention. I was living there, and such reports were blasted on the television daily. So, when they mentioned a local schoolboy who’d taken a summer job of boatman was also killed in the blast, it didn’t even register. Not consciously.
My mom and I were on our way from Belfast Airport to Enniskillen when the taxi driver asked where in Enniskillen we needed to go, and when Mom said Portora, he cocked his head and said it was such a tarra what they’d done to that poor boy. “What was him name now?” he said almost under his breath. “Paul Maxwell,” I replied. It just had come to me. Somehow, I knew.
Yet none of that was on my mind at that moment as Comfortably Numb, another track from The Wall, played on the radio. I’d just got off the phone with my brother who was in Holywell hospital, in a lockup ward. He was a huge Pink Floyd fan and I’d told him the latest album wasn’t worth spit. I’d felt guilty, too, until I reminded myself he’d not remember what I’d said. He was brain damaged due to asphyxia. He’d been hanged.
My housemaster, passing me on the stairs to my dorm after the call, had asked if everything was alright. “No,” I said. And it wasn’t.
He shrugged, and I hardly noticed.
