Love across the divide of Troubles-era Belfast

Though ostensibly written for children, Joan Lingard’s books are unsparing in their approach.

When Kevin Met Sadie
BBC RADIO 4 & BBC SOUNDS

Kevin McCoy and Sadie Jackson play starring roles in five novels by Joan Lingard (1932-2022) set in Troubles era Belfast. The poignancy of the teenage romance that sets the sequence in motion is given an edge by Kevin being a Catholic and Sadie a Protestant. Though ostensibly written for children, the books are unsparing in their approach: Kevin’s father, for instance, dies in a bomb blast; several of his siblings end up in the paramilitaries; and an economic downturn eventually sends the young couple to the mainland.

To the BBC’s Ireland correspondent Chris Page, growing up in Belfast in the early 1990s, The Twelfth Day of July (1970), Across the Barricades (1972) and their three successors were a revelation – descriptions of the locale he inhabited written, or so it seemed, from the inside. In fact, Lingard never lived in Northern Ireland as an adult, having been born in Edinburgh, moving to the province when she was two and returning to Scotland when she was 18. But none of this compromises the novels’ authenticity, and the journalist Ann-Marie Foster remarks of Lingard’s portrayal of Bangor that “she knew exactly what it was like to live here”.

It appears Lingard’s creative blue touch paper was lit by a friend who married an Orangeman. The Twelfth Day of July’s opening scene, with its Unionist catechism (“Who is the Good Man?”, “King Billy” and so on), derives from this source. Yet its author, writing from the perspective of a Christian Scientist, strove for balance. There were also, as Ulster University’s Kevin De Ornellas points out in the programme, shades of Shakespeare: this, essentially, was a version of Romeo and Juliet transferred to the Lagan Valley.

De Ornellas worries about stereotyping – the fictional Kevin’s nine-strong family, the Pope’s picture on the wall – and yet seems to concede that children’s books seldom get very far without combining detail with broad brushstrokes. Elsewhere Lingard wins praise for her realism, for bringing into fiction elements that had previously existed beyond it (the whole Northern Irish setting, for one) and – from the novelist Jan Carson, who takes Page on a tour of Lingard’s manuscripts – for simply offering inspiration.

Lingard’s eldest daughter, Kersten, is also on hand to offer personal reminiscences. But what about today’s young readers; what do they think? The best bits of When Kevin Met Sadie come from Years 9 and 10 pupils at the Integrated College Dungannon, most of them intrigued by these glimpses into a world fast receding from view. To encounter them, one pupil volunteers, is to realise “how lucky you were”. And what would Kevin and Sadie have made of modern Belfast? They would have liked it, someone else maintains, but found it “strange”