From the Mixing the Colours collection:
“The Twelfth Day of July” by Joan Lingard (1970) is the first in the “Kevin and Sadie” book series, concerning a group of young people trying to survive during the height of the “troubles” in Belfast during the mid-20th century.
The story opens on the “seventh day of July”, upon the Jackson family, who are Protestant, and focuses on Sadie, a strong-willed girl who is growing increasingly excited about her upcoming majorette performance at the Twelfth of July Orange Parade. There is ongoing talk about “the cause”, and hints are everywhere that feelings are beginning to run strongly in the local area, which is a dense mixture of Catholics and Protestants whose differences begin to become increasingly problematic around this time and random scuffles in the streets become far more common.
Next we are shown the McCoy family, who are Catholic, and who are becoming irritated by all the noise the Protestants are making. Most of the family are shown as being quiet and unfussy, including Brede, a bookish girl who just wants to be left to read in peace, but who is ejected from the house to make the most of a nice summer day. She runs into her brother Kevin, the rebel of the family, who is cooking up a scheme with his friend to spray-paint “Down with King Billy” on the “Protestant side”. They nearly get away with it until Sadie chases them down and catches Kevin, who is taken aback by her passion.
In an act of revenge, Sadie and her friends sneak into the “Catholic side” and spray-paint an anti-Catholic message, and she is in turn caught and interrogated by Kevin. The exchange is caustic but witty and surprisingly articulate, and subtly hints at the possibility that they might even had been friends, had they not been on different sides of a huge religious divide. Eventually they release Sadie. However, this isn’t the end of the graffiti campaign, and the situation only begins to escalate until real violence begins to threaten the community.
Snatches of “Orange” verse and of conflicting Catholic / Protestant history appear throughout the story, which shows how close to the surface the hostile atmosphere was in Belfast around this time. Ultimately, Kevin, Sadie and their friends and family are trying to get on with their lives, and appear to have come to accept the ongoing hostility with the “other side” as a fact of life. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the mutual hostility between the younger generation on either side, other than it’s a part of their history, and as far as they are concerned, that’s the way things have always been.
This is only the first book in a series centring on the story of Kevin and Sadie, and certainly the story ends in a way which suggests that there will be far more to tell of this group of young people later on.
Comments are closed.