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Radio Review: Jude Whyte’s story of forgiveness cuts deep because it is so close to home

Jude Whyte, pictured on the Lower Ormeau Road, shares a powerful story of how the Troubles affected him and his family. Picture by Hugh Russell
Jude Whyte, pictured on the Lower Ormeau Road, shares a powerful story of how the Troubles affected him and his family. Picture by Hugh Russell Jude Whyte, pictured on the Lower Ormeau Road, shares a powerful story of how the Troubles affected him and his family. Picture by Hugh Russell

Forgiveness: Stories from the Front Line: Jude

BBC Sounds

Jude Whyte is one of 10 children who grew up in the closest house to Belfast city centre.

His mother was killed in a bomb when she was just 53 years old.

Before the Troubles, he said he had an “absolutely wonderful” childhood in the 1960s.

The Whyte family were Catholic living in a largely Protestant area.

We were “quite happy to be part of the United Kingdom,” he said.

Then came the Troubles. He was in a bar in the students' union when the first bomb went off – he heard the blast and knew to go home.

The whole back of the house had gone and the bomber was lying outside. His mother told him to get the ambulance and gave him a pillow to put under the injured man’s head.

The sight would never leave him, he said. The bomber had catastrophic injuries – an arm and leg essentially gone – and as he put the pillow under his head, he looked up at Jude and said: “Don’t kill me, mister.”

He could have, he said.

It was his mother’s kindness that saved the bomber and he survived.

And perhaps you think that lightning can’t strike twice, that the Whyte family had had their brush with death, that it was done, finished.

But it wasn’t.

In April 1984, he was awoken at night by his brother thumping at his door.

His mother had discovered a holdall with a bomb on the windowsill of their house.

She rang the police and as the policeman came up to the door, she went to the hall to open it, the bomb went off, killing them both.

Why?

Who would target a 53-year-old grandmother, he asked.

The effect on his life was devastating.

This is one in a series of powerful sound essays about forgiving.

Journalist Marina Cantacuzino became interested in forgiveness at the time of the Iraq war.

Among those she interviews are a woman who survived female genital mutilation and a man who suffered life changing injuries when he was targeted with a letter bomb.

Jude Whyte’s story cuts deep because it is so close to home, because his life was like so many of our lives, because it could have so easily been any of us and was so many times.

The Troubles were about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, he says.

But how do you forgive?