Trespasses fired readers\u2019 imaginations because it gave an already complex love story a terrifying, high-stakes backdrop; Michael and Cushla\u2019s relationship wasn\u2019t simply clandestine because it was extramarital, but because they came from communities pitted against\u00a0one another in an occupied country. And to recreate the detail, texture and jeopardy of Belfast at the time, Kennedy had to look no further than her own\u00a0upbringing.<\/p>\n
A scene from the TV adaptation of Trespasses. Photograph: Peter Marley\/Channel 4double quotation markIt was a complicated location shoot because a lot of\u00a0the\u00a0place was\u00a0wrecked<\/p>\n
She relates it so vividly and, at times, so humorously, that you have to remind yourself how intensely difficult it must have been. Kennedy\u2019s Catholic family ran pubs in Belfast. One day, her grandmother was on her way to bank the takings when a bomb exploded in a building she was walking past and a chunk of glass pierced her jugular vein. \u201cSome off-duty British soldier, a young fella who was down the town, held her neck together to stop her from bleeding to death until the ambulance came,\u201d Kennedy recalls, before adding that her grandmother\u2019s life was saved by the fur coat she\u2019d been wearing. Throughout the ordeal, she wouldn\u2019t let go of the handbag full of money, nor stop insisting she had to go and fetch her daughter from school.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of scarring on her face because she\u2019d been cut by glass, but already, even in 71, the plastic surgeons in the north were just brilliant at patching people up. She just had very fine lines where the scarring was. She was really lucky.\u201d What about psychologically? \u201cShe was a complete walking trauma case. She never talked about that. She wouldn\u2019t even have known the word trauma. But if there was a loud noise, she\u2019d go to\u00a0pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markIn Northern\u00a0Ireland, you just had to go on about your business, or you\u2019d be freaking out left, right and centre<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Kennedy\u2019s father had experienced intimidation at work, in a factory in East Belfast where he was the only Catholic. He had been followed home, and one of their Catholic neighbours had been killed in a loyalist \u201cromper room\u201d \u2013 essentially, an interrogation and murder site, the slang taken from a children\u2019s TV programme. Now, her father was training to become an accountant through evening correspondence courses, simultaneously studying and minding the children while his wife went to work in the pub. One night, Kennedy\u2019s mother, grandmother, two uncles and a policeman found themselves standing in a tunnel opposite the building when it was blown up, an attack that found its way into Trespasses. \u201cIt was a crazy thing to happen. And I think that that was the thing about the north: you know it\u2019s not normal, you know it\u2019s mental, but yet it is normal because this is how you have to live. You just have to go on about your business, because otherwise you\u2019re going to be freaking out left, right, and centre. \u201d<\/p>\n
Kennedy\u2019s skill at conjuring the past without succumbing to the shorthand of nostalgia was one of the qualities that made for the success of the adaptation of Trespasses, which was written by Ailbhe Keogan, who also worked on Bad Sisters. \u201cAilbhe is not from the north, she\u2019s from Kerry, and she was very open to me. I wanted the dialogue to be authentic to the north, but not just to the north. It also had to sound like 1975, and that\u2019s quite easy for me to remember: the voice in my head is of a child in the north of Ireland in the 70s. And people don\u2019t speak the same now as they did then. The place is really different. It was quite a complicated location shoot for that reason, because a lot of the place was wrecked and a lot of rebuilding has been done since that. It was pretty tricky to try and find a bar that hasn\u2019t changed at all. The book is set in Holywood, County Down, where I grew up, but Holywood doesn\u2019t look like it did in the 70s, so it was filmed in Portaferry, a village in County Down.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1979, life changed again. Kennedy was 12, and in her first year at grammar school, when her parents decided they\u2019d had enough and uprooted the family to Naas, then a small town not far south of Dublin. She hated it. \u201cFrom my point of view, it was really crap.\u201d She lost her pals, it took two years to get the phone connected, and even worse, there was only one television station, \u201cso all of my cultural references had been wiped out\u201d. Six weeks later, they went back to Belfast for a visit, and Kennedy was shocked to find how strange a friend\u2019s accent sounded to her. \u201cI just thought \u2018Oh my God! I don\u2019t belong anywhere.\u2019 I didn\u2019t belong to either place, and I still feel that now. When you leave a place, it goes on about its business, but for me it\u2019s frozen in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back then, though, she didn\u2019t have that perspective. \u201cI was an atrocious adolescent. I was really angry that we\u2019d had to leave and move to a place where there was one TV channel.\u201d And it\u2019s this dislocation that she\u2019s mined for her new novel, Stations, in which two misfit teenage protagonists, R\u00f3is\u00edn and Red, cleave together to create some version of belonging. But as the story progresses from the early 1980s to this century, moving from Ireland to London, it becomes apparent that only one of them will thrive.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a portrait not only of teenage alienation, displacement and small-town Ireland, but of one of the waves of Irish emigration that have characterised its history. Remembering her own time in London, Kennedy says that you could walk into a pub on Sunday mornings in the 1980s and 90s and feel like you were at mass. And you could also feel that you were in flight: \u201cWe left because there wasn\u2019t work, but we also left because it was a closed, judgmental, shithole theocracy that we were living in, and we wanted to get the hell away.\u201d It\u2019s that historical precision that has led Anne Enright to say of Stations that \u201cit holds a national sorrow\u201d, describing it as a \u201cwork of mourning and reclamation\u201d.<\/p>\n
And in R\u00f3is\u00edn, Kennedy gave herself permission to write a \u201cpain in the arse\u201d character, unpopular, temperamental, self-centred, in contrast to Cushla whom, she says, readers found so likable. \u201cI ran into a friend of mine recently who was in school with me. She was asking what the book is about and I said a character who moved from the north, and everybody in school hates her. She was like, is it a memoir?\u201d<\/p>\n
Back to that wild pivot from cooking to writing. How did all this happen? Put simply, Kennedy was still trying to keep her ailing restaurant on its legs back in 2014 when she found herself ambushed into going along to a new creative writing group set up by the writer Una Mannion. \u201cWhy would I be doing that?\u201d she asked the friend doing the persuading, visual artist Niamh Mac Cabe, whereupon Mac Cabe just turned up and plonked her in the car. \u201cI thought it was the most hilarious thing I\u2019d ever heard in my life,\u201d Kennedy remembers. But at that first meeting of eight or so people, Kennedy found herself committing to writing a piece over the next few weeks. \u201cFrom the minute that I started trying to write this mad little short story \u2013 I didn\u2019t even know what a short story was really \u2013 I just thought: I don\u2019t really care what happens as long as I can find a way to keep doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n
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