Bono: Ali would have been happier with a simpler life than the one we’ve ended up with

The walls of the Martello tower were made of granite and seven feet thick. It was a fort containing three circular rooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen built into the walls. The livingroom was like a granite igloo with a proud hollow for a fireplace, another opening on to a solid-stone winding staircase leading to what can only be described as the lookout we slept in. A lighthouse. A glass room from which we could look out over the promenade of the seaside town of Bray.

I’m not sure you would call it a house, but it was the first dwelling Ali and I owned and lived in, and it felt wildly romantic after having previously been holed up in the band’s rehearsal room on the beach in Sutton.

In their day Martello towers like this were serious military technology, a line of 19th-century defence against Napoleon, who was always expected to invade England through Ireland. The idea was that each watchtower could see the next one down the coast and, if an enemy was spotted, raise the alarm by lighting a fire in the battlement we had turned into our bedroom. There had previously been a large cannon where the bed was, some humour here for the honeymooners.

Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl

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The sweetest thing.

— Sweetest Thing

Being kindly and graceful, my brown-eyed girl surprises people with her forthrightness and humour; polite, but absent of politesse, you might not be prepared for her tough-minded reading of the world or the people around her.

Inscrutable but not unknowable, Ali will let her soul be searched only if you reciprocate and she is ready for the long dive. Best to arrive at her fort defenceless to have half a chance at challenging her own almost unbroachable defence system. It’s the only way over that drawbridge.

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Ali would have been happier with a life that was simpler than the one we’ve ended up with, and it wasn’t long into our marriage that I began to sense she was becoming distant from the life we were living.

Though not demanding in any selfish way, Ali had never been “just” my girlfriend, and now she was never going to be “just” my wife. Neither of us knew what the word “wife” meant anyhow, nor had any sense of how valuable this relationship was going to be for each of us. We were equal partners in an adventure we hadn’t figured out. Our path.

Naïve but kinda not. When we promised “till death do us part,” we understood both its literality and its poetics, that this marriage thing was a grand madness: jumping off a cliff believing you can fly. Only in the air to discover you might actually be able to do this. We flaunted the odds, made ourselves dependent on the miraculous, and didn’t have far to look to see that though marriage is a great analgesic, it can also be the source of the pain.

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We were up for the ride, but there were air pockets from the beginning, like, say, my immaturity. Married at 22 going on 18.

The thought was dawning that one of us would take longer than the other to work out how to be married and that the one of us was not Ali. She was also realising that there were three other men in her marriage. Men whom she was more than fond of, but men who were taking her man away, not just in his wild imaginings, but physically, all over the world.

Home and away

“If you want a friend, get a dog,” as the 33rd president of the United States, Harry Truman, famously didn’t say on his arrival into Washington, DC. Returning home after another tour, I wasn’t laughing at that old nugget on discovering Ali had actually got a dog and I hadn’t been involved in the decision. She looked longingly into the eyes of this border collie called Joe, and I was left wondering why I wasn’t a woman’s best friend taken on long walks to yap at her heels.

Incident 1. Ali was a vegetarian, so I was moved to arrive home one evening to a kitchen scented with Irish stew. She explained it was not for me; it was bones she’d picked up at the butcher’s. For Joe. The dog. I muted a laugh and ate the dog’s dinner.

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It wasn’t two years into our married life together, and I could see Ali in prolonged moments returning to the vast silence she holds inside her. Our weekly walks along the promenade could be tinged with melancholy.

There is anyway a kind of off-colour romance to a deserted seaside town in the winter, your heart’s opera scored by the sound of the tide crashing over a stony beach, shushing everything as the waves try to make up their mind whether they’re leaving or staying. White waves kissing black stones, shushing all around them.

Shhh ... shhh.

We would heed the invitation of the waves to silence and reverie, allowing ourselves to get lost in adoration of this old Victorian lady of a promenade, watch her before our very eyes slipping into the sea. A remnant from another age of romance, Victorian England might have held many hypocrisies, but the marriage of Victoria and Albert wasn’t one of them. She spent 40 years dressed in black after his death, the two of them inseparable across time. Had she come to Bray, she would have found a perfect rhyme for English seaside towns in Bournemouth or Blackpool.

Holiday capitals of courting. But the glory days of promenading were long gone, because the Irish, like the English, discovered the hot climes and cheap cold beer of the sandy beaches of Spain. The dances and tea-houses of early Victorian flirtation now replaced by the more salt and sugar pleasures of fish and chips, Mr Whippy ice cream, and trips with the kids to the dodgems and one-armed bandits. In mid-1980s Bray the only couples promenading in their finery were ghosts from another time. If we didn’t want to join them, we’d have to reinvent our own romance, lest our love go the way of these boarded-up grande dame hotels.

Ali was also having to live with Keats, Shelley, and Byron, the romantic poets I was reading, who might not have been the best company. I’d read The Tower by WB Yeats, and now we were living in one. Spare us the furrowed brow of earnest men reading and writing poetry.

We were beginning to understand how complex is the search for home, especially if you have pain hiding there. And that the small things are often the big things

It was on one walk around Bray Head to Greystones that, considering her loneliness, I started to understand something about my own. Ali was moving behind the battlements to protect herself from me. She saw that the writer’s life was not just one of mental wanderlust but physical too. She would rather not be there at all than me not be there when I was home.

With the band taking off, she would fight for her independence, enrolling in University College Dublin to study social science and politics and — having always wanted to fly planes — heading out regularly to Weston Airport in Lucan. We were beginning to understand how complex is the search for home, especially if you have pain hiding there. And that the small things are often the big things.

Incident 2. In March 1986, working on The Joshua Tree at Danesmoate, I noticed Ali wasn’t speaking to me. This observation was followed by some sign language in which it emerged that I had forgotten her birthday. Oh, dear. This was not good for any young couple, but for a man applying for the job of romantic and living in a round tower, it was deaf and dumb.

My apology — and belated birthday gift — came in the form of a song, Sweetest Thing, and one weekend I slipped into the studio to record it when the only other person around was Pat McCarthy, our studio-tape-op-cum-assistant-engineer who would go on to mix Madonna and produce R.E.M.

Baby’s got blue skies up ahead

But in this, I’m a rain-cloud,

Ours is a stormy kind of love.

(Oh, the sweetest thing.)

I’m losin’ you, I’m losin’ you

Ain’t love the sweetest thing?

All sour irony was accepted, and Sweetest Thing went down like a spoonful of sugar, but Ali was not as convinced by another gift, of a painting, called Easter. I’d tried to capture Jesus in the style of a religious icon with a load of scratching of paint and canvas contributing to the feel of an old relic.

“You’ve even worn Jesus out.”

Unimpressed, she forgave me my sins, of which forgetting her birthday was only an emblem, and I was let out of purdah. Neither of us wanted to lose what we had, even if we weren’t quite sure what that was.

“If the song is a gift, then I presume I actually own it and can do what I like with the proceeds, right?”

“Of course,” I replied. “But I’ll need to clear that with the band.”

“Why?” she chided. “Is it not yours to give? I thought it was a gift from you?”

She was messing with me but not about the proceeds, which to this day continue to be directed to Chernobyl Children International.

Read: Bono talks exclusively to Simon Carswell about his long marriage to Ali, the brother he didn’t know he had, and U2′s complex relationship with Ireland

Extracted from Surrender by Bono, published by Hutchinson Heinemann on November 1st, €25.00. Copyright © Bono 2022