"Where do you want us?" one of the women asked in a broad Belfast accent, a smile in her eyes. She pointed a revolver straight at me. I quickly concentrated on the job in hand.
"Jesus, I'm going to die here." That was all I could think. "Oh my God I am very sorry for having sinned against Thee." Even though I'm not particularly religious, in my terror I found myself murmuring a very imperfect Act of Contrition. Around me lay people with guns. They were scared, no doubt. I knew if one of them squeezed too hard on the trigger we were all dead.
This was an hour spent at an IRA training camp. I thought it would be my last.
Weeks earlier I'd put out the word. That's how I'd have described it then and I'd still describe it now. I wanted to photograph the IRA. They were a weird organisation in 1975 – on the one hand clandestine and secretive, yet on the other everyone in working-class districts seemed to know who they were.
Before the Troubles, the only brushes I'd had with republicans were literal. On a Saturday night a young lad would come into the bar selling The United Irishman, a republican paper. Most people bought it but, as it was written in Irish, few could actually read any of its stories. They would wait until the lad left, then surreptitiously discard the paper. By the end of the night I'd have to sweep it off the floor, along with the cigarette packets, butts and pigs' feet that had been brought in to supplement the nourishment of stout. That seemed to me the extent of republicanism in the lower Falls, but the Troubles changed everything. By 1975, the Provisional IRA were a force to be reckoned with and, more importantly for a struggling photographer, pictures of them training would sell.
So I put the word out, mentioning here and there that I'd like to get a few pictures.
Three weeks later, on the fringe of a rally, I was told to be at a certain spot at a certain time the following day – the kind of offer that only came once. Refusing wasn't an option. The following day I stood there on the Andersonstown Road, trying my best not to make the camera obvious, trying my best not to look suspicious.
I waited for an hour before deciding it was not to be. As I walked away, a man came out of an alley behind me. "Get in the back of that car," he ordered, pointing to a motor in a street across the road. I got in. Two others were already in the front. "Keep your head down," one of them shouted. "Look at the floor," said the other. It wasn't comfortable. I half lay across the back seat, discovering to my surprise that I was breathing hard.
Lying there, I thought about what film to use and worried about the light. Driving south to a training camp would take some time. I was worried too about getting stopped at the border, but assumed that these men would know a back road or two. In any case, it was unlikely they were armed. I stretched out for a long journey.
Within ten or fifteen minutes there seemed to be a lot more bends in the road than I'd remembered. We turned onto what had to be a country lane. I was becoming more alarmed with every pothole. Suddenly the car stopped. "Get out."
We were obviously still in the north. In fact, we were not far out of the city. Worse still, by my reckoning, depending on which turn we had taken, we had to be within a couple of miles of one of two big army bases. This was clearly a bad joke and I didn't find it funny. I looked around, squinting against the light. We were next to an almost derelict farmhouse. When I turned to ask the men what they were playing at, the joke turned serious. They had donned balaclavas. More startling was the emergence from the house of three women, also masked. More worrying still, each carried a very large Armalite rifle. I felt the odd one out.
I was relieved to see another man who wasn't wearing a balaclava. I hadn't time to concentrate on his face, but he seemed to be an instructor. I was told in no uncertain terms that he wasn't to be pictured. I remember thinking: "How under God did I get into this?" I was getting very jumpy.
"Where do you want us?" one of the women asked in a broad Belfast accent, a smile in her eyes. She pointed a revolver straight at me. I quickly concentrated on the job in hand. They posed for about half-a-dozen pictures – aiming the rifles, holding the guns, rolling out a wire drum that wasn't actually connected to anything. Then it happened. The army helicopter arrived.
There was no order – there didn't need to be. Everyone dived into bushes. We hadn't heard the rotors from a distance; they abruptly crashed overhead. I lay flat in a ditch, water trickling unpleasantly along my leg. I hoped it was just water in the ditch. The chopper was perhaps just forty feet above us and the downdraft was incredible. Bushes all around shook violently to and fro, as if caught in a hurricane. Here, at the eye of the storm, all was not calm. One woman lay near me. I could see fear in her eyes and noticed her finger was on the rifle's trigger. I almost went into cardiac arrest. People say, 'My heart was in my mouth' and now I knew exactly what it meant. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't talk.
Whether the army had spied something suspicious or not, I don't know. It lasted all of thirty seconds. Now, nearly thirty years later, just thinking about it produces a cold sweat. When the helicopter pulled away everyone scattered. The men shoved me in the back of the car again and drove off.
En route they weren't happy; they argued about whether it had been worth the risk to bring me there. I was thinking the same thing myself. I also wondered if male IRA members could have held their nerve in the same way as those women. By not firing, I've no doubt they saved all our lives.
I was dropped off where I'd been picked up. After a little while, I noticed I could breathe again and took a gulp of air. For a long time afterwards I was in a state of anxiety. It was a week before I developed the film, and the images appeared a month later in a European magazine. They say every picture tells a story. Sometimes I'm not so sure.
