Day One of The Troubles from ‘Lost in the Reptile House’

But as for trouble, there was more on the last day of the Chelsea Flower Show and by lunchtime I’d gone through three rolls which wouldn’t make the Derry Journal on a slow news day.

Then around two thirty, one of the sullen Catholics watching the March file through Waterloo Place threw something – maybe a stone, may be a marble – and the Protestants retaliated. It was the watershed, the flashpoint. The shit had finally hit the fan.

Not that I knew – exhausted after seven hours traipsing the streets, I was napping on a balding settee in the City Hotel’s lounge as history unfolded a hundred yards away, when the porter shook me awake.

“You a photographer, then? They say it’s all happening, then.”

“What is?”

“The Troubles, it’s all started, then. Petrol bombs ‘n all. In William Street.”

“Oh, fuck!”

I ran out in panic towards the noise but the waiter caught me up.

“Mr. Lampkin, will you be paying for the coffee now, then?”

I fumbled through my pockets and stuck two crumpled notes in his hand, one for the coffee and the other for saving my career.

Rounding the corner of Waterloo Place, I ran into a line of RUC trying to dodge the hail of rocks, bricks and petrol bombs as the Catholics screamed the hatred you’d read about but hadn’t believed. In twenty minutes I’d gone through six rolls, re-stocked with ten more at a chemist who said it may not be enough, and I was ready to believe him.

But it was the hatred of the police that hit you hardest, their obscenities and religious tauntings matching those of the Catholics – and all this coming from a peace-keeping force within the United Kingdom. Three weeks before we’d watched Man landing on the Moon and now we were watching them throwing stones at each other, but such musings were rudely interrupted when I was arrested by an RUC officer for impeding the path of a police vehicle, though it was hard to catch the details as they were delivered with a muffled alien accent inside a gas mask and regularly interrupted as his colleagues were felled by missiles and dragged away with their studded boots scraping the tarmac.

What I did hear him say was I’d be taken to the local station but the thought of spending the rest of this historic day banged up with six rolls of undeveloped film was too much and, taking advantage of a retaliatory charge, I did a runner to join the Catholic rioters at the corner of William Street and Rossville Street, a junction of tatty terraced slums that became known as Aggro Corner, and struggled up a wall for better elevation.

“Unbeleevable,” said a voice beside me. “So unbeleeevable.” It was Gilles Caron, a photographer from the French Gamma agency, and he was right – both sides were oblivious to us as the fighting flowed beneath our feet; we were viewed as neutrals and could ask no more.

When the Police made their first baton charge into the Bogside, screaming as they went through the Catholics like Kerrygold, I was visualising the shot across two pages with a rugged picture byline when a dozen Protestants – following up for the kill – broke away and began stoning Gilles and I, presumably for standing amongst the rioters.

A brick felled Gilles and I jumped down beside him as they formed a half-circle around us, maybe ten feet away, stoning and screaming. I put one hand around my head, the other around the Nikons – so much for the bloody neutrality I’d been blessing ten minutes ago.

For a moment I was conscious of the dull thud as the stones hit the old wall behind us but, realising my good luck and their bad aim would not last, I bolted through them in that gates-of-hell overdrive lying dormant in us all, dodged past an old woman at the door of a terraced house, and lay panting in her easy chair.

When the shaking stopped I checked for damage which amounted to no more than a sole missing from the right shoe, revealing a bloody sock. Through her lace curtains we watched the police beaten back by a shower of petrol bombs from the top of the Rossville Flats, as she kept asking when was it all going to end. Little did we know it was in its first hour of its first day and would see out the century.

Nine months later Gilles Caron went missing in Vietnam and was never seen again.