‘You’re the bravest or stupidest man in all of Ireland’

The photographic club who said they would be happy to put us up and offer assistance turned out to be a Sinn Fein front for collecting grant money, and the family who ran it were as close to being IRA as you could be without having shamrocks tattooed on your forehead.

It was an uncountable number of brothers; I was never quite sure how many because some of them were in prison and some on the run, and there was a mother who was a head-splitting, gobby woman forbidden from entering the mainland and a poor father who was a silent, mousy postman. The sons all had lists of convictions for all sorts of political violence, including attempted murder of a policeman. But apart from all that they were warm, funny, hospitable, garrulous and catastrophically terrifying.

They showed us round the city, pointing out martyrs on every street corner, and it was all fine until Sunday night, when I said, let’s go get a drink.

And the boys said, “No, we’ll stay in,” and I said, No, no, we’ll go get a drink, and as none of them had a job, I said, I’m paying. Actually, Wendy was paying. And they said, it wasn’t that, it was that you couldn’t get a drink on Sunday — this was like Scotland, teetotal for the Lord . . . and I can still taste the rising cold panic. I couldn’t . . . simply couldn’t . . . go a whole night without a drink.

I never had, not for years. I organised my intake, I knew what I needed, I couldn’t sit in this tiny terraced house with the hit-squad boyos watching Val Doonican, slowly getting the shakes and swallowing panic.

No, no, we’ve got to be able to get a drink somewhere? I said. How close is the border? Now they were embarrassed and dogmatic, and then one of them said, “Oh for pity’s sake, there’s the club”, and the others said, “No, no . . . there’s no club . . .”, but I was on the club like a terrier with a duck in a canary cage. Yes, the club . . . let’s do the club. A club would be just the thing. And I went on and on like a child who has forgotten his Ritalin. Finally they said, “OK, we’ll see if the club’s open, but it’s not a good idea. Keep your mouth shut.”

And with as much ill grace as they could muster and the brazen embarrassment of Wendy, we walked through the jolly evening drizzle of Derry. It was as if there was a voluntary curfew — no one was out. We traipsed across an emetically lit wasteland of ruin and finally, through a deserted, crepuscular alley, out of an unmarked doorway, a man, or rather the barely defined silhouette of a man with a turned-up collar and a broad-brimmed hat, appeared. It was exactly the cover of a noir novel about the Troubles and I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so desperate.

The brothers mumbled something and the man stood aside and the door let out a secret smear of light. We trooped upstairs to an empty room of trestle tables, chairs and a hatch in the wall that served as a bar, and I went to get in the pint of Guinness and the shots and I necked a couple as I waited for the barman to pour the beer — and I can still taste the relief. The cauterising of the panic with the stinging spirit. It is as pleasurable as any feeling I can directly attribute to alcohol.

We sat at the long table and the room began to fill up with hard men. I’ve been in rooms with tough bastards all over the world: mercenaries, military, terrorists, religious maniacs — but this was special. Everyone got a brief whispered biography: five years in Long Kesh on remand; suspect; bomb-making; GBH — you don’t want to go crossing him, he’s banned . . . and you never saw him.

I’d be introduced, or rather explained, and I’d get the stare from under those bony, hirsute brows and they’d sit with their pint and polish their ancient grievances and they’d start telling stories and pretty soon they were singing them . . . and I’d get up and get in more drinks and listen as they chatted over blood and earth and chant those Paddy ballads of sentiment, vengeance and unrequited nationhood with the verses that start in the Pale and end at a roadblock last week.

The drink warmed my veins and relaxed my shoulders and I sat and listened and smiled and tapped my foot because I didn’t know any of the words. And then one of the boys said, “Come on, Englishman, give us a song. We’ve been doing all the work here, you sing us something from your public school.”

There is a moment in the chemistry of drink and the sociology of alcoholics where you reach optimum dosage. You never quite know where that is; it’s a movable dram that peaks in the feeling that you’re completely in control and that your control is balletic; you are a pilot capable of great sinuous acrobatics.

Normally, this moment passes without consequence as you’re standing at the urinal or queuing for the bar or caught in a circular conversation on the best way to get to Chalk Farm. But once in a blue moon, peak inebriation meets its moment, and this was one of those times. I pushed my chair back. Wendy grabbed my thigh and gave me a look of extreme caution and fear, but I was oblivious. I was untouchable, this was my moment . . . and I stood.

Outside of church and “Happy Birthday” I have never, ever, sung in public — but I was golden. And I opened my mouth and out came a song I’d learnt in junior school, Mr Osborne waving a ruler like a bandmaster’s baton. I suppose what made me think of it was the rising whiskey-fuelled sense of ire and all the Saxon murder and mocking banter that was swilling around the room.

I’d had summer and Saturday jobs on Kensington Church Street, where every other week we had bomb threats. And there’d been enough real bombs in London. I heard the one that killed Gordon Hamilton Fairley, the cancer specialist whose dog set off a car bomb that was meant for Sir Hugh Fraser, so there was a rising bat squeak of “f*** you all” in my stance.

I can’t pretend that what came out of my mouth was political or committed, it was just a moment of omnipotent, golden, untouchable, witty brilliance. “Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules, of Hector and Lysander and such great names as these,” I swelled to a Sunday baritone, the Fenian faces watching with a stony blankness, “but of all the world’s great heroes, there is none that can compare with a tow, row, row, row, row, row to the British Grenadiers.”

If you haven’t heard this before and you’re an active, hands-on member of an Irish republican paramilitary group, then the surprise, the punchline, is right at the end. I sat down. The bated moment hung in the tarry air. No one moved. There was a shrill silence, and then the man opposite me who had said little, the man I’d been told I should forget having ever seen, reached forward with remarkable speed and a big, practised hand, grasped the back of my neck and pulled my head across the table until his face was an inch from mine and I was staring into his pale, unreadable eyes.

“You,” he said quietly, but loud enough for his voice to shiver the furniture, “you are either the bravest or the stupidest man in all Ireland tonight.” There was a beat. He let go of my neck, rocked back in his seat and breathed out a great guffawing laugh. The room erupted in Hibernian hilarity. My head was slapped, the pints lined up. I was so full of retrospective adrenalin that I drank the lot of them under the table.

© AA Gill 2015

Extracted from Pour Me: A Life by AA Gill, published by Orion in paperback at £8.99 and also available as an ebook