(by C J Miller, Our Town)

It stretched long, silent and gray, along the M-1 highway outside Belfast on that bright Irish morning in February.

"That's it. That's Long Kesh," said my companion, who had a tale about everything. But this was an uncharacteristically sunny winter morning, even he was quiet as we turned off the road and passed the sign which read, "HMP The Maze."

It had two names: Long Kesh, "The Long Swamp," as the Irish republican prisoners called it, and "The Maze," as the British government stubbornly renamed it. Her Majesty's Prison, I thought, gazing at the sign. How could anyone want to put their name on a building like that?

I wasn't afraid - after all, the prison, which was "home" to so many, including hunger striker Bobby Sands and nine others, had been closed nearly two years ago. Prisoners no longer roamed its halls.

I was curious - I had met some of the men who served their sentences there. I wanted to see where they had spent more time than I had spent in school. I was fascinated - and angry. I leaned out the car window and peered down the cracked concrete driveway, trying to see what lay ahead.

My companion didn't share my enthusiasm. He leaned back in his seat and got even quieter. He'd chattered the whole way during the 60-minute drive down from County Tyrone, and I'd barely heard him. As we pulled up to the watchtower and the barbed wire over the front gate that pierced the blue sky, he looked grayer than the six-foot high walls. He'd spent his whole life staying out of Long Kesh, he joked feebly, his hands shaking a bit on the gearshift as we parked. Now, he was going in.

Two men met us outside the makeshift trailer that passed for a guard shack. One, a neatly dressed official in an expensive trench coat, shook my hand and introduced himself in a clipped British accent as head of the Northern Ireland Prison Service. NIPS, I thought silently. The same initials, when inverted, as the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Both bear England's name for the partitioned six counties - and both are still controlled by the British government. I smiled stiffly, nodding hello.

The other, a short, stocky man with small washed-out blue eyes and a black tie knotted tightly at his throat, said he'd been a prison guard at Long Kesh since 1982. A "screw," I thought. That's the wry name the republican prisoners gave the guards that kept a close watch over their locked cells. He gotten there only one year after Bobby Sands died. The screw looked small enough for me to knock him over. I wondered how he kept order in the wards, let alone doled out the brutal beatings that were a daily part of a prisoner's life.

We boarded the blue prison bus and drove a short distance through the rusted metal gate. I was chatting politely with the pair, but it was getting harder to breathe. My companion looked out the window nervously as we passed the barbed wire fence that surrounded prison, where the men had taken their daily walks. To them, being "on the wire" meant circling the courtyard for exercise as guards with dogs patrolled the perimeter. To me, it means reading the news off the Internet.

We rumbled along slowly, surveying miles of concrete broken up by tall light posts and the ever-present watchtowers, which hovered over the football pitch like silent gray sentinels. We passed cracked stone platforms, covered in the soft green moss that grows all over Ireland, where the airline hangars, or "Cages," once stood. I asked the screw to stop the bus where Cage 11 had been. I wanted to see where Sands and his fellow prisoner, Gerry Adams, had done part of their time together.

"It's not called a Cage. That's the republican prisoners' name for them.

"These are compounds," the bearded official reprimanded me sternly.

I ignored him. "Where's Cage 9?" I asked innocently, referring to one of the huts where I knew Brian Pearson had served time.

They gave up correcting me and I jumped out of the bus, carrying my camera. There was one hut still standing - a long metal half-circle with broken glass windows and a corrugated roof. The door stood half-open and for the first time, I felt my stomach ache. The rusty metal hinges groaned as I pried the door open and slipped through.

It was cold inside - I noticed a small electric heater, no longer than two feet, near the front door. I thought about how the men used them to heat their food and make tea in the damp Irish winter. Sometimes, it took six hours for the water to heat up. There wasn't another one in the entire length of the hut.

Broken glass windows with their frames painted blue lined the walls of the Cage as I slowly walked down the hall. I peered in to individual "rooms" - they weren't much bigger than closets - and saw walls lined with wooden paneling and garish metallic wallpaper from the 1970s. Even in a place like this, these men had tried to make a home for themselves.

The damp cold seeped in through the cracks in the walls and into my bones through my thick wool sweater. The freak winter sun had disappeared and a misty rain began to fall. I shivered and wondered how the men who'd lived here kept warm. I couldn't imagine it for ten minutes, and they'd been in here for 12 years, some longer.

Faded linoleum tiles crunched under my feet - I looked furtively over my shoulder and reached down, pocketing a small, multicolored section. Later that day, I would show it to an ex-prisoner, now one of Sinn Fein's political leaders in the north's sprawling white government building at Stormont, just a few short miles away in the city of Belfast. He recognized the piece of floor immediately. "I stared at that for seven years," he'd laughed, sadness in his eyes.

A newspaper fluttered by in the damp breeze - I picked it up and read the date - June 6, 1980. Someone must've left it behind as they hastily gathered up their belongings for the last time.

I asked the screw how many men were kept in each Cage and he said, "About 75 to a hundred." I stared at him in disbelief. "Where did they all sleep?" I asked. There was barely room in the cramped hut for 30. "Oh, we stacked 'em five high," he replied, laughing as he turned away. The trench-coated official smirked.

A pile of moldy, forgotten books lay on the broken tiles beside a blue metal cot that still had ripped sheets on it. I imagined the men who did their sentences and taught themselves Irish, not just to pass the time, but to honor the country they were fighting for.

My own breathing and the click of my camera were the only sounds I heard. My companion said nothing. He knew the many of the men who'd lived here much better than I did.

We boarded the bus again and took a five-minute ride across the campus to another world - the world of the H-blocks. Low beige brick cells crouched close to the ground as we waited for the security guard to buzz us in past the wall that separated the political prisoners from those who had been criminalized by Britain's Special Powers Act in 1976. Had he been jailed one month later, Brian Pearson wouldn't be living in Pearl River right now, I thought. He would have been in here with the hunger strikers and might never have left. The gate slid silently open as the surveillance camera watched us with a baleful electronic eye.

H-5 was as warm as a cell block can be compared to the damp Cages we'd just left, but it wasn't comforting. The long halls smelled sickeningly of disinfectant and our steps echoed as hollowly as the stomachs of the hunger strikers must have felt during their last days.

The H-blocks were as immaculately clean as the Cages had been filthy. Plastic covered the stark metal kitchen counters and the urinals were polished and scrubbed, ready for use. My companion trailed after me silently, now as white as the sheets and pillowcases that neatly made up the black metal beds. The screw and the official laughed and joked down the far end of the hall, ignoring us.

I walked into one of the cells and closed the heavy metal door, leaving it open just enough for a quick escape. My skin crawled. It was smaller than the hut cells and the air closed in around me. A thick black pipe gave off steamy heat as I lay down on the bed and tried to imagine spending more than two seconds in here, alone.

The thick door muffled the voices of the two men, still laughing in the guard station down the hall. I could barely hear them through the tight, enclosed walls. The starched linen scratched my cheek and I thought about the men who'd lain here before me, writing their thoughts on scraps of cigarette paper and praying they'd reach the outside, so that people would read them and understand. Unarmed, they fought back with the only weapons they had - their bodies - with the hope that their sacrifice would bring freedom to those imprisoned in their own country, just beyond these cold brick walls. I thought I heard the echoes of their ghosts as they shouted brave encouragement to each other in the darkness that stretched endlessly across the cement courtyards.

I thought about the men over the wall in the Cages, who, feeling helpless, banged on the tin rooftops in support of their comrades, who were dying inn these beds without food. Ten men who starved themselves to death 21 years ago because they would rather die than live without freedom. Sixty-six days, Bobby Sands had lasted in here without eating. My own stomach was full, and I could bear it no longer.

I flung the door open and ran up the hall, searching for my companion. The ghosts of the hunger strikers followed me. I found him on the other side of the barred metal gate, talking with the two British men. I was relieved to see him, and annoyed because their laughter broke the silence and jarred my nerves.

"What did it sound like in here?" my companion asked the screw, who interrupted his joking long enough to answer, "Oh, it was fine; they had boom boxes and televisions and there was talking all the time." The screw went back to his conversation with the official, who kept glancing pointedly at his watch. It was time to go.

I looked at them from the other side of the heavy metal bars. They were still in the cell block and I was on the outside, near the front door. I took the bars in both my hands and slammed the gate as hard as I could. The sound of clanging metal echoed horribly down the corridor. The three men whirled around and the laughing stopped.

"That's a sound you never want to be on the wrong side of," I said. The two British men gazed at me in mild disdain, their smiles fading. His eyes wild with fear, my companion's white face shone through the bars. "Is it locked?" he whispered. His worst nightmare, come true.

"No, it isn't," I answered. I pushed the gate open and we walked through it to the outside, to freedom. The ghosts bid us a silent goodbye, but we took their message with us. That is something that will never die behind bars.

On May 2, 2002, a few days short of the 21st anniversary of Bobby Sands' death on May 5, 1981, Long Kesh Prison was taken out of "warm storage" and turned over to the Northern Ireland Bureau by the British government.

According to Lorraine Turner of the British Consulate in Manhattan, the prison will be used for "economic development," or will be preserved as a museum.

C J Miller is a journalist who writes about Irish issues in Rockland County, NY. She is also currently writing a book on the lives of ex-Republican prisoners who served time in Long Kesh and the Crumlin Road Jail.

This article appeared in the May 8, 2002 edition of Our Town, a Rockland County newspaper.

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