1 Comment
Newly Published Memoir Offers an Original Perspective on Life in Newry in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
The author, Stephen Shellard, was born in Newry in 1953 and attended *Windsor Bank School before becoming a pupil at Newry High School where his father was a maths teacher. His memoir Remembered Fragments tells a personal story and also the story of his family who were eventually to relocate to South West Scotland in the late 1980s.
The narrative is set against the background of the growing political turmoil of the 1960s, the failure of Unionism to understand the need for change and the subsequent emergence of both Republican and Loyalist terrorism.
His personal journey takes him to Reading, where he attended University, Ballycastle Co. Antrim, where he worked with young offenders, Berlin where he lived in a squatted house for a period and Dumfries where he was eventually to become a college lecturer. In each of these contexts he turns his narrative back towards his homeland with humorous and affectionate anecdotes which reflect the character of the people and the misfortune of their divided community.
Remembered Fragments is a memoir grounded in the author’s coming of age during the civil and political disintegration in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and early 1970s. It tells the story of his Anglo-Irish family with its roots in Dublin, Limerick and Bandon, Co. Cork, where his parents met, and married in 1945. Following the Second World War, they moved to Belfast and then to Newry, where the author was born in 1953. These relocations did not diminish enduring family affections and interests which crossed all the vexed geographical, political and religious divisions of Ireland.
The author is sharply critical of the failures of unionist politics to respond constructively to the changing world of the 1960s. From the perspective of his wider experience in the 1970s and 1980s the author reflects on the trauma of his homeland in the context of the national and international turmoil of that era. The narrative describes the various challenges which eventually led his entire family to move to southwest Scotland.
Remembered Fragments offers a perspective on the Northern Irish Troubles which reminds us that, amidst the violence which led up to the Good Friday Agreement, many people were unwilling to take a position on either side and were always seeking and hoping for a more agreeable way to live. It is a narrative defined by anecdote and a rich appreciation of human character. It is a political commentary which avoids rancour or invective and is a contribution to the literature and understanding of a period in Irish history which is still a painful memory for many but which the author recalls with a surprising degree of humour and affection.
Remembered Fragments is available from Amazon as a paperback for £12 and as a Kindle ebook, for £5.
Buy the book via www.amazon.co.uk
*Correction 14/8/24: Author attended Windsor Bank PS not Windsor Hill
