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By Liz Trainor
Liz Trainor spent the day with an Ardoyne family
LITTLE Gemma McCabe fidgeted nervously while her mother plaited her long hair. She pulled up her long socks, rolled them fashionably around her ankles, hitched up her grey skirt and patiently waited while her mother tied red bows in her hair.
Then, as she was told to get her school bag, the eight year-old stared towards the window, whispering: “I don’t want to go to school today.”
It was a gut-wrenching moment for her parents: this was only the second day of the new September term.
But for Gemma, a Catholic at the besieged Holy Cross primary school in Ardoyne, it was a day of dread and fear.
Having run a gauntlet of hatred the previous day, dodging missiles and vicious abuse from Protestant protesters in the Glenbryn estate, the little girl instead forced a smile as her parents reassured her of her safety.
Her mother Sharon, with four other children and a grandson at home, admitted that the others of school age had been neglected on their first day back.
“Our Patrick, who’s at the boys’ (Holy Cross) primary, had to go on his own yesterday – we were so caught up with this. It’s not on,” she said.
With the upheaval and fear, Mrs McCabe confessed she did not sleep on Monday night.
“I was up drinking coffee at four o’clock this morning,” she said. “Coffee at that time! But then, I didn’t know what to do. Our nerves were wrecked after yesterday. This is a nightmare situation we’re in.”
At 8.35am, Gemma stepped outside into the sunshine, grasping her father Gerard’s hand before making her way nervously to the top of her street, where parents and children had gathered at the Ardoyne shops.
The little girl scanned the crowd for some familiar faces.
“There were only five or six in my class yesterday,” Gemma said.
“A whole lot of girls didn’t go but I stayed in all day and my teacher was very good.”
Tensions, which were rising as the minutes ticked away towards the nine o’clock start, eased when it emerged that the security operation had been tightened.
The perspex wall, which barely held protesters back the day before as children walked the footpaths, had been replaced by a wall of Land Rovers.
Instead, they were told, they would make their path along the centre of the road shielded by the police lines.
Many said they were determined to walk their children the 400 yard flashpoint route to school.
Others, wavering as they watched the security line in the distance, did not rule out taking the longer Crumlin Road route.
At around 8.50am, some 100 parents and children braced themselves, bunching together closely, for the final leg of the journey.
As they approached police lines, trouble flared between the security forces and loyalists, who were hemmed into side streets and gardens.
An angry mob was held back by baton-wielding police, who charged them into a side street.
Hecklers came to their front doors, faces pinched with anger and hatred, hurling abuse as stones and bricks flew through the air.
Against this background, parents’ spokesman Brendan Mailey, surveying the hecklers hanging out from upstairs windows, repeatedly demanded of an RUC commander: “Can you guarantee our children their safety if we cross these lines?”
But as the officer said measures were in place, a moment of blind panic ensued.
As the children were escorted through the man-made corridor of police lines, there was a media frenzy. Photographers, reporters, television crews and observers squeezed through the tight gap, tripping over each other. Then bricks began to fly.
At that moment, Gemma McCabe, like many other children, turned to her father and pleaded: “I can’t go, daddy. I want to go home.”
Others pushed on with the school in their sights, amid the barrage of abuse and obscenities.
“Where’s Kelly the bomber?”, jeered one man in a vest from his front door.
“Fenian scum, the lot of you,” screamed another.
Parents shielded their children’s ears as they walked, at an even pace, towards the school gates.
But with the end in sight, many began to cry – with both relief and fear.
Principal Ann Tanney said she was sickened by the day’s events as tearful children streamed into the school.
Meanwhile, back at their Ardoyne home, Gerard and Sharon McCabe said their main aim was to protect their daughter.
“She was just too frightened,” her father explained.
“She seemed willing enough earlier to go, and did make it yesterday, but who knows how these things affect a child?”
“They shouldn’t have to suffer this. It’s a sad day when they target children. How can you really deal with people who can do this sort of thing?”
Gemma, clinging to her dad, said she became “afraid” and didn’t want to go.
“I told her I would drive her up the Crumlin Road and even called the school, but they understand,” he said.
“We’ll try again tomorrow....”
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