I REMEMBER SEAMUS RUDDY
Ian Monk
I remember Seamus Ruddy.
I remember him in Paris, just after I’d fished up there in 1984.
I remember him saying ‘I am a teacher of English, not an English teacher’.
I remember that when he said it he had a beer in his hand and we were talking after an Irish lesson at the Mission Bretonne in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris.
I remember, being a ‘budding poet’ and being asked to take part in the English-language magazine for the Irish community in Paris.
I remember discovering for the first time how someone can have profound convictions but without confusing the proverbial ‘enemy’ with the individual person (the budding English poet in my case) standing in front of them.
I remember being struck how clear the difference was between his attitude (and some others’ too) and that of the knee-jerk anti-Brit reactions of other Irish people, who were in fact far less politically involved.
I remember discovering how serious political commitment can make some people less blind and prejudiced, oddly enough.
I remember the first time I was invited to an editorial meeting at Seamus’s flat, porte de Bagnolet.
I remember ringing up to his flat and being let in.
I remember the person who let me in being balled out by Seamus because they hadn’t checked out my identity first.
I remember finding that a bit paranoid, at the time.
I remember how indifferent he seemed to my obvious incapacities and awkwardness in his company and with the rest of the crowd.
I remember arriving early for another editorial meeting of the magazine and Liz and Seamus looking at me and saying ‘you’re hungry aren’t you?’ and Liz making me scrambled eggs on toast.
I remember the eggs being as perfectly scrambled as eggs can be. And yes, I hadn’t eaten for over a day.
I remember Steve Shorrock then sitting down like some kind of star on the settee with his guitar on his leather-trousered lap.
I remember how the others arrived later and we manually cut and pasted our magazine. As you did at the time.
I remember working on an article in French about the frustrated wait of the Irish during and just after the French Revolution and thinking how seriously out of depth I was.
I remember us all going down for a “demi” in one of those lousy French bars in working class neighbourhoods.
I remember probably (because there have been so many of them since) its shiny zinc bar and almost aggressively drab off-brown formica furnishings.
I remember being still so fresh from England that the halves of Euro fizz in our hands still looked exotic to me.
I remember how the half of euro fizz did not look in fact that out of place in Seamus’s fist as he held it while chatting, elbow on the gleaming zinc.
I remember how a subsequent meeting was cancelled.
I remember wondering why. Then finding out quite quickly probably why.
I remember after his disappearance being asked to write the editorial for the magazine in order to explain the situation and call for a real investigation.
I remember doing it because no one else seemed able or capable or willing to do it.
I remember applying myself to each word as if it were a poem because each and every one had to be exactly right.
I remember most of those words to this day, even though I made no conscious attempt to memorise them.
I remember not signing the piece in a moment of un-suicidal lucidity.
I remember from this point on the mood in the Irish community in Paris, the paranoia, the panic, being probed by various members of various groups of Irish exiles, and how when certain people talked to me they looked at me with a strange respect, while others were so scared they avoided me, and also how, whenever I went back to England at the time (which I did frequently, my father being very ill) I was always stopped and questioned by the special branch boys who lurk in the shadows behind passport control, and so on, and so on, but that’s about me…
I remember understanding better the world in which Seamus lived, fought and died.
I remember at last being told about the circumstances of his murder. They haunt me to this day.
I remember Seamus Ruddy.
