Spoken Stories: A Life in Twelve Parts by Carlo Gébler

Thinking about this theme, Carlo Gébler recalled his experience of working as a prison teacher in the north for many years, meeting many paramilitaries. He says "they would express regret but that it was caveated; they hadn’t done that they’d done freely. Circumstances had made them act as they had".

His story A Life in Twelve Parts, voiced by Ciarán McMenamin, is about one such individual. Gébler says, "We need to hear stories about men like Malachy because in the Ireland coming down the tracks, he will be your and my neighbour. We can’t have the Ireland we want, only the one that’s given us. That will be the true state of us."

A Life in Twelve Parts is presented in twelve episodes of varying lengths. The first one sets the scene for what will follow.

Here is how it opens:

Malachi wakes to rain thrumming on the corrugated roof and whispering as it falls in the field behind. This is Mr Smyth’s field though Smyth’s home farm is two miles off. Once upon a time their cottage was Smyth’s too; then someone threatened to tell the Housing Executive the cottage was unfit for human habitation and Smyth panicked and sold it to Peter Tierney who went on renting it out in the same condition. Tierney, red-faced, red-nosed, brash and insolent, calls weekly to collect the rent from Malachi’s mother. He drives a brown Austin Maxi and he always has Lorcan his son with him. Tierney’s a gangster says Malachi’s mother and as bad if not worse than them ones, meaning someone like Mr Smyth, sometime B-man, present-time Orangeman, and the rest.

His mother has never once let Tierney in the front door when he comes. She makes him wait outside while she gets the money. A source of pride that. A dismal clanking in the walls. His mother’s stirring the embers in the fireplace. His father says these noises are like those he heard below deck in the war. He was in the merchant marine, the Liverpool to Murmansk route. Malachi, never having been on a ship, has to take his word for it. His father has already left for work. Weekday mornings he cycles to Cassidy’s Cross, parks his bicycle behind the disused forge and gets a lift to Enniskillen. He’s a stitcher in the seat belt factory. Weekends his father returns to the factory as security. There are twelve of them in the cottage between the parents and children, and there’s never enough money.