Oh, Danny Boy

I am in love. With a man. His name is Danny Morrison, the author. I will get over it, because he is already betrothed. Passionately and with total devotion. Also he likes her. I know this because I have just read his book When The Walls Come Down, a stunning journal of his years in jail, based on letters he wrote to people outside. The woman he loves kept all of them, hence the basis of this marvellous book.
If Danny ever writes fiction as well as he writes letters about life, he will be a major author. If he doesn t make it, and breaks up with his woman, he can come live with me any time. It would be like having Zorba the Greek in your house.
Danny loves life, and music and books and food and his family, with a vengeance. I have seldom been so enthralled with a book as I was with this one. I couldn t leave it alone, curbing work, phone calls, meals, sleep, daily woes and joys to get back to his company.
I have to tell you, I was surprised. I went dutifully to the book launch, out of loyalty to a former member of Sinn Fiin, who risked his life for his beliefs. And anyway, he s good company, full of beans and curiosity. And I have never forgotten him telling me once that he loves books so much he often can t wait for the paperback edition and splashes out on a hardback. We were going round and round the Dail footpath at the time, picketing the place for a reason I now no longer remember.
When he went into jail yet again in 1990, facing a seven years sentence, one of his first reactions was relief. Now he d have time to read and to write. If people take time to read this result, they will feel, quite simply, better. Apart from anything else, it s a beautiful one-sided love story we only see one letter from the woman to whom he wrote I get so much pleasure from floating in the currents you have set up in my life.
The currents included loads of adventures in the rain. He recalls in detail all the times they got wet together naked in the sea in County Sligo, dancing down a street in Belfast and when it rained in Long Kesh prison camp, he liked nothing better than to plough around alone, in the yard, getting soaked, thinking of her. He played tennis in the downpour in the Kesh, poising as he threw the ball into the air to gaze at the waiting room where she would soon arrive on a visit.
Every letter he wrote included a request for yet another book, and a brief commentary on the one he had just read Proust, Kundera, de Coetzee, Mann, Ondaatje, Flaubert and reprises of music he had just listened to Schubert, Mahler, Siniad O Connor, Fleetwood Mac, jazz singers you ve never heard of.
It s never heavy. He is full of wonderment at the range and depth of human genius. You get anxious for him, in case the book he has ordered from the library doesn t arrive. Tired on his behalf at the amount of work he has to do washing his clothes, writing for Republican News, doing literary reviews, studying for the Open University, seeing lawyers, going into lock-up with a fellow prisoner who needs to talk.
Lock-up is the hour and a half during the day when prisoners are confined to their cells, and though each man has a cell to himself, a prisoner can choose to go into lock-up with another for private conversation. Danny reports these conversations to his woman and they are an enthralling, moving insight into the worries that male prisoners have about family, marriage, separation, divorce, sex, love, children. Though the prison story in the North is now 30 years old, this is the first time we have been given real sight, feel and taste of what it was like in there on a human level.
There are honestly acknowledged Mandela-like relationships with some of the warders (Morrison went into his cell and cried after seeing Mandela on television walk out to freedom), reactions to news of murder and bombs, vignettes of relationships with loyalists. The book of virtually daily letters is unexpectedly paced like a thriller, as it had to be, you realise, given the pace of the war in the North. Unexpected also is the level of revulsion, pity and criticism of that war written in the years leading up to the ceasefire, Morrison anticipates the need to switch entirely to politics, which is what he meant when he originally made his famous armalite and ballot-box speech.
We know now what it felt like to be in jail, hear a news flash about death, and have to wait awful hours until visitors came in to say if the person killed was a relative of a prisoner. Often it was; sometimes it was the relative of prison staff. Morrison describes the apprehension of prisoners going out on parole for the first time, wondering if they ll be assassinated. I never thought about that; never knew about that.
The oft-quoted term Republican family , to describe those active in both Sinn Fiin and the IRA, takes on a ferocious resonance here. Fathers and sons were in jail together; brothers; sisters; husbands and wives; lovers and partners; and their relatives died on the outside, or were harassed, or lived in fear. Morrison s mother suffered a brain haemorrhage and permanent loss of memory when the soldiers came looking for her son; he recalls how she used to lie down in the hall, trying to stop him going out to fight, forcing him to step over her body. At that, he writes, he and his family were lucky, given what others had to endure. Some of the stories are horrific.
The book is terribly funny. Perhaps they laughed that they might not go mad. The anecdotes related here bring grins unbidden to the face. The politics are gripping. The love is well, as I said at the beginning, I am lost to Danny Morrison. I hope I end up shipwrecked with him and have him all to myself. Naturally, he can cook too. What a man. What a letter-writer. Switch off your e-mail and go for a roller-coaster ride with Ireland s Zorba. n