About two years ago, I stood on a street in Belfast waiting for the light to change. I was on my way to interview a detective, a senior counter-terrorism officer, for research; I had a notebook in my bag with a list of questions for him, but my heart was still a few roads away, where minutes before I’d been nursing my baby.
I remember walking towards the café for the interview, trying to gather myself, to become someone slightly different. Being a mother, it turns out, is excellent training for writing about spies.
Northern Spy is about two sisters, Tessa and Marian, and their entanglement with the IRA. Their survival depends on their ability to switch identities, to balance two roles, to juggle a huge amount of information.
After this past year, many of us have a new sense of what that means. As daycares and schools have shut down, the mothers I know have been, basically, trying to be two people at once. I recently watched a friend of mine take an important business call, her voice crisp and competent, the phone clamped to her ear, while desperately trying not to let on that she was at a playground with her toddler. Working mothers have always led double lives, but this year the stakes have been higher than ever.
For me, the lockdown has heightened the old questions—can one work and raise children, and if so, how, and when does one sleep? In Belfast, I remember thinking that it had been crazy to bring an eight-month-old baby on a research trip. But, somehow, we managed. I put him in his carrier and we walked around the city. He discovered the apple-strawberry flavor of the local baby-food pouches. When he woke in the middle of the night, I held him and looked out at the row of streetlamps and dark terraced houses. While I was out interviewing a source, he and his father went to the Indian restaurant on our corner for dinner, completely wrecking the ambiance for the couples around them.
He was still so small that being away from him made me feel untethered, like I’d forgotten something, sort of like that sensation of walking around a city with your phone about to die. And that unsettled sensation, I think, made me see Belfast differently, brought it into sharper focus.
I was also, to be honest, slightly uneasy. I was interviewing former IRA members, security journalists, and BBC reporters who had covered the Troubles. I was learning about the shadowy cat-and-mouse game fought between the IRA and the British spy agencies, about double crosses and foiled terror plots. A small, illogical part of me was nervous that the line between my research and my reality might start to blur, that we might not be safe. And that fear became central to the book, driving Tessa’s urge to fight tooth and nail to protect her son.
Towards the end of the trip, we left Belfast and drove to the north coast, with its dramatic cliffs and sea caves. It was a damp, drizzling day, and I held my baby in his carrier, zipped under my raincoat. We walked out along a spit of land, past the ruins of a castle, with the titanium sea sweeping around us. I remember laughing out loud, at how beautiful it was, at how we’d made it all the way here.
The book is a love letter to him and to my younger son. But it’s also a love letter to all the women, with and without children, who have ever had to shape shift to survive.
