naked. The prisoners were all separated, but at one point Dolours and Marian crossed paths briefly in an interview room, and Dolours hissed at her sister, ‘Don’t say a word.’
12
The Belfast Ten
Thomas Valliday was a prisoner at Long Kesh, where he held a job as an orderly. This required him to ride around in the rubbish lorry, picking up refuse from different corners of the prison camp and loading it into the truck. Life inside any prison tends to boil down to the deadening repetition of a daily routine, and Valliday’s job was no exception: you made your rounds, you picked up the rubbish, you threw it in the lorry. Sometimes, in addition to the standard rubbish, Valliday would find an old mattress that had been discarded because it was soiled or damaged. The prisoners would leave them, alongside the rubbish, outside the barbed-wire ‘cages’ surrounding the half-cylinder Nissen huts where they lived. One Saturday morning in December 1973, the truck stopped outside a cage where a rolled-up mattress had been left. When Valliday went to pick up the mattress, it was considerably heavier than usual. But he got his arms around it and heaved it up onto the bed of the truck. If Valliday evinced no sign of suspicion that what appeared to be just a mattress might weigh as much as a small man, it was because he knew that nestled inside, wrapped up like a sausage in a bun, was Brendan Hughes.
Hughes had informed the police, upon his capture, that he intended to escape from prison, and he was being entirely sincere. Within thirty-six hours of arriving at Long Kesh the previous summer, he had begun to scheme with comrades about how best to get out. Gerry Adams felt that, given the importance of operations to the current phase of the struggle, and the instrumental role that Hughes played in spearheading such operations, it should be Hughes who escaped first, before even Adams. But only two people had ever managed to break out of Long Kesh, which was ringed with barbed wire and surrounded by troops, and neither of them had ‘broken out’, per se. The first was Dolours Price’s childhood friend Francie McGuigan, the former ‘Hooded Man’ who had been tortured at the secret army facility. One day in February 1972, McGuigan donned a set of borrowed black robes and, mingling with a visiting delegation of priests, walked right out of the front door. Eighteen months later, another man, John Francis Green, managed to escape using exactly the same ruse. (Green’s brother, who actually was a priest, came for a visit, and the two of them switched clothes.)
It seemed prudent to assume that any further holy men seeking to depart Long Kesh might be subjected to a heightened degree of scrutiny, so if Hughes was going to escape, he would have to find another method. Somebody came up with the idea of leaving the camp by hitching a ride on the underside of one of the refuse lorries. As a stratagem, this was reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his men escape the cave of the Cyclops by clinging to the bellies of his sheep. The prisoners constructed a special harness for Hughes to wear so that he could attach himself to the chassis of the lorry. He rehearsed on one of the bunk beds in the cages, gripping the underside of the top bunk. But Hughes was still weak from the beating he had taken during his interrogation, and it was not certain that he would have the strength to cling to the lorry until it had cleared the outer fence. So eventually they abandoned that plan. This may have been disappointing for Hughes at the time, but it would turn out to be a stroke of exceptionally good luck: when another prisoner, Mark Graham, tried to escape using a similar method some months later, the lorry went over a ramp and snapped his spine, leaving him paralysed for life.
In late October, the Provos had engineered perhaps their most audacious escape to date. The IRA leader Seamus Twomey was being held at Mountjoy Prison, in Dublin, when a hijacked helicopter suddenly appeared in the sky and touched down in the prison yard just long enough for Twomey and a couple of his associates to hop aboard. This sort of precedent emboldened Hughes and his fellow prisoners, but it also meant that security was tight. The Provos knew that the refuse lorry made its