The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Mint Chocolate Cornetto

The serialisation of Andrew Jamison's prose nonfiction memoir. Subscribe here for his weekly newsletter.

“He let out a huge sigh.” These were the words of a nurse at the inquest into the death of Trelford Withers, the butcher on the high street in Crossgar, who was the last victim of The Troubles. He was shot in broad daylight by a motorcyclist who parked outside, and chased him out the back, before shooting him three times. The murderer ran off and was never caught. There happened to be a nurse in the shop who attended to Trelford there and then, but there was nothing she could do for him. She held him in her hands and said that he simply “let out a huge sigh.”

This ‘huge sigh’ is symbolic. So much is bound up in a sigh: it can be an expression of sadness, but also frustration; disappointment but also acceptance, and it can mean more beyond that. A sigh is a poem in itself yet it’s an utterance beyond language. What was in Trelford Wither’s sigh? Was he thinking about his family, who would run the business, or just the sadness of The Troubles and how it had come to this? All of these things? We’ll never know. Whatever it was, a sigh is what happens when we come to the end of language, when language won’t do. It is our only human response to death. And in many ways, this huge sigh from its last official victim marked the end of The Troubles, and a sigh that will echo through the ages, a sigh of needless death.

I’ll always remember where I was the day it happened. My mother was working in The Post Office with my aunty, and as it was the summer holidays we’d been left with Gaggy, the affectionate term we sued for our Grandmother. We were out in the garden and had been given a mint chocolate Cornetto.  She brought us in and told us, and then told us we weren’t to go outside again that day. And neither we did.

Funnily enough it's the ice cream I remember from that day: unwrapping the paper and lifting its little lid, which always had these little dabs from the tip of the ice cream; I can remember the band of dark chocolate where the cone met the ice-cream. I can remember my grandmother's face, being there with my little sister, how the weather was neither warm nor cold, the sky neither blue nor grey. I remember seeing Crossgar on the news that night and thinking how strange it was to see our village, our anonymous villlage on the television, and how this was the last set of circumstances in which any of us would have wanted it to appear.

Trelford had a wife and three children. His eldest son was a good friend of my eldest brother. Everyone who knew Trelford said he was jovial and light-hearted. He was also a member of the UDR, and like many of the killings, we’ll never know why he was targeted. When I get asked about The Troubles and whether it affected me, I have no right to say that it did. We lived in the countryside where it was quiet and peaceful – if you hadn’t told me there was a conflict in Northern Ireland I would never have known. Yet, The Troubles, I suppose, had a way of affecting everyone, intruding upon everyone’s lives; nobody, it seems, was out of its reach, even an eight-year-old child, minding his own business, at his granny’s house for the afternoon, in the back garden, playing with his sister, eating a mint chocolate Cornetto.

And I can’t help but feel that if Northern Ireland, herself, could make a sound, it would be, like Trelford’s, a huge sigh.