Ian Paisley, the Northern Ireland politician and religious leader who died last Friday, haunted my childhood.
A ferocious figure spreading hate in the 1960s, when the so-called Troubles began, he inspired palpable fear. "They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin," he roared at a rally in 1969. He was talking about Catholics like me and my family. He was always on TV in those days, a mighty witchdoctor, waving his Bible, the spittle flying from his mouth as his loathing of Catholics was cheered and applauded by eager supporters.
At that time we lived a few miles from the border with Northern Ireland. Daily, the television news delivered images of riots and burning buildings, people fleeing their homes in the Catholic areas of Belfast. Paisley's booming, sneering voice echoed through it all.
I had a nightmare about Paisley and his followers coming south to burn us out of our house. My dad explained to me that Paisley was like Peter Cushing, who played Dr. Frankenstein or some other madman on television. He seemed evil incarnate but was only acting. It reassured me but even as I write this now, I can see Paisley on TV, in black and white, the rage and hatred emanating from him.
What is astonishing is that on Paisley's passing, Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, deputy first minister of Northern Ireland and former senior figure in the Irish Republican Army, said: "This is a very sad day for me. I have lost a very good friend."
What seems emphatically fixed, bolstered by indelible images, can change. That's what we can take away from the occasion of Paisley's death.
It is both bewildering and encouraging to brood on how things unfolded. At one time, McGuinness was a man on the run, branded a terrorist. The BBC and Irish public broadcaster RTE were barred from airing the voices or opinions of McGuinness or any other Sinn Fein member. For a period, the BBC got around the ban by using actors' voices to speak the words of Sinn Fein leaders. At that time, to a lot of people, that subversion of freedom of speech and reporting was justified.
And then, one day, Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party sat down with the British government and Sinn Fein, and agreed to form a partnership to govern Northern Ireland. Paisley had famously said, in a speech broadcast and meant to chill hearts, "I am not going to sit down with bloodthirsty monsters who have been killing and terrifying my people." But he did. And on the day Paisley died, the dominant image used on TV and in the press was not of that ferocious witchdoctor spewing hate, but of Paisley and McGuinness, side by side, grinning.
I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. The TV images of riots, burned-out homes in the little streets of Belfast, bodies strewn across the streets of Derry, bombed-out buildings in English cities, the ceaseless count of the dead and innocent, seemed immovable as indicators of the way things would always be.
During this year's summer of global savagery, I was reminded of those times of terrible viciousness. In the part of Ukraine now claimed by pro-Russian forces, a woman was tied to a post on the sidewalk, wearing a sign claiming she was a spy for Ukraine, while passers-by beat her and spat on her. They used to do that in Northern Ireland – a woman tarred and feathered and tethered to a lamppost to be taunted and beaten because somebody believed she had consorted with British soldiers. The appalling, ritual iconography of tribal hatred. You think these things will never change, that hatreds among people will last until death.
And yet, when Paisley's obituary was written, the narrative was one of a hardline, sectarian demagogue whose hatred wilted and whose heart and head saw peace and reconciliation as the only way forward. For decades he opposed compromise just as, for decades, Sinn Fein opposed it, too.
The figure that haunted my childhood, that colossus of local politics and loathing, the one who always said "no!" and "not an inch," is remembered in death as a decent person who changed his mind and helped bring peace where he had sown hate.
In an age of seemingly fleeting images, crises and controversies, some images seem locked, rigid in their meaning. And they are not. Even from inside bitter hatred something benign can grow, and that is what we should remember as we look at our screens and watch today's horrors unfold.