Paperboy (14 page)

I was relieved. It wasn't to be instant dismissal after all. This was my final verbal warning. It knocked the complacency out of me and reduced my swagger considerably. I delivered my papers with eyes facing down for the next few weeks, until both customers and line manager forgot all. I paid for all forty-eight newspapers out of my weekly wages, and I donated the batch of Wednesday night editions to the church wastepaper scheme to raise money for the Biafran babies. It was a sort of penance. I had learned the hard way, so I had.

Chapter 13
Sharing Streets with Soldiers

V
ery few people tramped the streets of the Upper Shankill as much as a paperboy. Compared to me, even Orangemen were half-hearted and seasonal part-timers. My fellow professionals, those who also marched the streets on a daily basis, were postmen, milkmen, bread men and soldiers. The postman delivered bills from the Great Universal Club Book, letters from your pen pal in New Zealand, sea-monkey eggs and your Eleven Plus results. The milkman woke you up very early – even before
Farming Roundup
on Downtown Radio – with the comforting hum of his electric milk float. These early-morning sounds once triggered a dream that I was Wilfred Owen from English class, writing a poem about ‘the clink of giggling glass bottles as yet blissfully unaware of their impending metamorphosis into petrol bombs'. The bread men delivered delicious barmbrack loaf for butter smothering, as well as soda and potato bread for the mammoth Ulster fry your father cooked on a Saturday morning. The soldiers were different, though. They weren't delivering anything, and they were usually the only ones with guns.

The soldiers had been a constant presence on our street for as long as I could remember. Apart from Thomas O'Hara from BRA and Patrick Walsh from the School of Music, they were the only people I had ever met who weren't the same as me. Nearly everyone else was white and Protestant and British. When I was younger, I used to think everyone in the whole world was white and Protestant and British – even Doctor Who, and he was from the planet Gallifrey.

The soldiers brought the outside world to our well-scrubbed doorsteps. They usually had English accents like people on TV, except not as posh. Sometimes the soldiers on our street had Scottish accents, and sometimes they were black. I soon learned that there were different regiments that came and went, but the only ones I could ever distinguish were the Scotchies, because they talked like the Bay City Rollers, and the Paras, because Catholics hated them the most because of Bloody Sunday, and so we had to like them the best.

If you asked the soldiers to show you their guns, they would say things like, ‘All right, mate!' just like Norman Wisdom in a black-and-white movie. I was fascinated by all the stuff they carried. The gear they had was heavier than a paperbag on a Friday night. They had berets, bullet proof vests and radios, and they had the most impressive big boots that I was sure would be able to accommodate an absolute fortune of coins.

All the women in our street loved the soldiers. Especially Mrs Piper, who adored them. ‘Och, God love the wee craters, they're awful young and they don't even know what they're doin' over here, and them dirty IRA brutes is trying till kill them!' she would say.

Mrs Piper talked about the soldiers as if they were children, which I thought was strange, because children weren't allowed guns.

The soldiers were here to protect us from the IRA, so during the day when the men were out at work, all the women in our street would invite them in for a cup of tea. I noticed that they never asked the soldiers to come in when their own men were around, and I realised that this must have been something to do with male rivalry. Perhaps it would have been like Sharon Burgess inviting Donny Osmond into the Westy Disco for a packet of Tayto Cheese & Onion crisps and brown lemonade while I was there. I don't know in fact how the soldiers ever made it up our street in a single day, because everyone wanted to give them tea and buns. I for one was jealous. No one ever offered a paperboy a cup of tea. Not even Mrs Grant ever asked me into her scullery for so much as a piece and jam, although actually she never asked the soldiers in either, because her Richard was always off work and at home with his chest.

Aware of the preferential treatment given to soldiers compared to paperboys, I was sufficiently irked to ask my big brother one time,‘How would they stop the IRA invadin' our street if they're always halfway through a gravy ring and balancin' a cup and saucer on their khaki knees?'

‘Wise a bap, wee lad!' was my brother's thoughtful reply.

This tradition of making tea for the soldiers soon became something of a competition in our street, as the women vied for position, each hoping to establish their home as the premier tea house. My mother played her part in the contest admirably, with an apple tart that was particularly popular with the Paras, but she and the other women in the street soon realised that they could never compete with Auntie Mabel's amazing baking skills, and so eventually they graciously allowed her to claim the crown. The secret of her success was the allure of her tray bakes. All the women knew how to make an excellent tray bake, but Auntie Mabel's were the toast of the Town Women's Guild. For all its might, the British Army was defenceless to battle against the seduction of her caramel squares. And so, every day, Auntie Mabel's small sitting room would be packed with English accents and scones and uniforms and rifles and buttered wheaten slices with homemade blackberry jam from up the fields. The Paras would put their rifles in the umbrella stand and get extra butterfly cakes.

The soldiers were usually very nice in our street. When they spoke to me, it made me think of when the British explorers with pith helmets talked to the natives in the jungle in Tarzan movies: they were very polite, but they didn't seem to understand our ways very well. Though, of course, you had to be careful when the soldiers were around. If you were out playing with a toy gun in the dark, they might shoot you. We weren't allowed toy guns for Christmas any more, which was no big sacrifice for me, as I was, after all, the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast and I hated guns, apart from ray guns for killing aliens, of course.

I noticed from my cross-community conversations with Patrick Walsh, between a mauling of Mozart movements at the School of Music, that while Protestants called the British Army ‘the soldiers', Catholics preferred to call them ‘the Brits' and that while Protestants seemed to like the soldiers, Catholics would not give a Brit so much as a crumb of a caramel square. Patrick told me stories of how the Brits stopped you and searched you, beat you up and raided your house, and then shot your cousin in the face with a plastic bullet – but Mrs Piper always said they only did that to Provo sympathisers that wanted to kill them. While I thought Patrick was telling the truth, it still hurt when he wrote ‘Brits Out' in the boys' toilets, because I thought that meant me too.

One of my most prized possessions was a bit of bomb, so it was. This was a heavy and jagged piece of shrapnel from a German bomb that my father had found as a boy up the Glencairn on the slopes of Divis Mountain after an air raid during the Blitz on Belfast in the 1940s. You could still see the shape of the crater in the field where the stray bomb had landed thirty years earlier. Dad had kept the shrapnel safe ever since and had even painted it with some silvery anti-corrosion paint he had borrowed from the foundry. I knew I could have picked up a piece of shrapnel around Belfast any day at that time, but this relic from the Second World War fascinated me. I imagined a German bomber called Fritz flying over Belfast in a fighter plane and sneezing, accidentally pressing the bomb button before reaching the shipyard. And the bomb falling down on Glencairn before the new estate was built and the paramilitaries took over, and it exploding in a farmer's field and scaring the cows and all.

I had taken the shrapnel into BRA for a history project on the Second World War, and, once the history teacher had been reassured that it was a vintage rather than a more contemporary bomb fragment, he was very impressed indeed. And so the shrapnel sat until the end of term on the artefact table at the back of the classroom, alongside ration books and gas masks.

My bit of bomb had always achieved a positive reaction, and so when my father casually suggested I should show it to the soldiers some day, ‘because they would like that sort of thing', I resolved to share my shrapnel with them the very next time they were in our street. The following day, just as I was finishing the papers, I spotted an army patrol at the bottom of the street getting out of a tank and being barked at by Petra. ‘Brilliant! I'm gonna show the soldiers my bomb,' I said to myself, delightedly.

I ran to the house, hurled my empty, pitch-black paperbag under the stairs (where it would hang on a hook beside the hoover and the strap), and quickly shot upstairs to my bedroom to retrieve my striking museum piece. By the time I had bounded down the stairs again and was back out into the street, the army patrol had already successfully executed a pincer movement up the street towards Auntie Mabel's house, with two soldiers already marching past her nasturtium borders en route to her front door. I followed behind, eagerly clutching my shrapnel so close to my Bay City Rollers T-shirt that the silver paint rubbed off on Woody's nose.

‘Och, come on in, love,' called Auntie Mabel, who was always as warm as her freshest scones. ‘I'll make you a juice and a wee biccie,' she added, predictably. ‘Do ye wanna talk to the soldiers, love?' she then asked.

I nodded, and, as she headed for the scullery to boil the kettle and pile up the tray bakes and sugar lumps, I was left alone in the sitting room with many china ornaments, four lace doilies, two soldiers and two guns.

‘All right, mate?' said one soldier, who looked like he hadn't started shaving yet.

‘All right mate?' echoed the other one, who had a scar on his trigger finger.

‘I've got a bomb to show ye!' the quiet Belfast boy with ink-dirtied fingers announced.

The two looked a little startled and moved back very quickly when I suddenly thrust the metal object towards them. The one who had never shaved jumped back so sharply in fact that he dropped his rifle on Auntie Mabel's hearth and knocked over her china dog. Thankfully the dog wasn't broken and the gun didn't go off.

‘Jesus Christ, what the hell is that?' asked the one with the scar. I assumed from the profanity that he wasn't a wee good livin' soldier.

‘It's a bit of German bomb that Hitler dropped on Belfast during the war, so he did, and my daddy found it up the fields and kept it and said I should show it to yousens because he says yousens would like that sort of thing, so youse would,' I replied.

The soldier with the scar took the shrapnel and inspected it briefly. He then handed it back to me, saying, ‘Pull the other one, mate!' and his colleague joined him in a mocking laugh.

I was affronted. It had never occurred to me that anyone would doubt the authenticity of my artefact, least of all two professionals in the field of war.

‘But it is from a real bomb, my Daddy found it and says it is from a German bomber from the Blitz and sure, feel how heavy it is …'

I attempted to explain, as I once again offered the fragment for further investigation to the fresh-faced one.

He refused to take it and turned to his mate and said, sniggering, ‘This is what they're all like, mate. You can't trust them. They're always trying to pull the wool over your eyes.'

I was confused and upset. The only wool in the room was in Auntie Mabel's knitting basket behind the pouffe, and I wasn't trying to pull it anywhere near their eyes. Although I could see a knitting needle sticking out of the basket, and I had a sudden urge to utilise it as weapon against my mockers, except they had guns and I was the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, and … Why were they talking about me as ‘they' and as if I wasn't even there?!

Then the one with the scar on his trigger finger said, ‘Do you fink we is f**kin' fick, mate?'

I dared not answer truthfully. Now I was angry. I had never before heard the ‘f' word in Auntie Mabel's sitting room – this was disrespectful. This was outrageous, like saying ‘shite' in church.

The tirade of arrogant ignorance continued: ‘What would the Germans have been doin' bombin' Belfast, anyway? They wasn't even interested in bleedin' Ireland!'

I tried to explain that the Germans had bombed Belfast because our shipyard built lots of ships for the war and that we were part of Britain, but my protectors just laughed. I was clearly wasting my time trying to educate them. Maybe they didn't do history in English schools, or maybe these two hadn't got their Eleven Plus.

‘Leave it out, mate, you is talking fairy stories, and we ain't bitin'!' said the stubbleless one. All of this sounded so much more insulting when delivered with the added authority of an English accent. It was like being told you were officially wrong by Angela Rippon herself on BBC News.

I stormed out of Auntie Mabel's sitting room cradling my rejected shimmering artefact. It had lost some of its lustre, and not just because some of the silver paint had rubbed off on Woody's nose.

As I ran out the front door, I could hear Auntie Mabel calling after me, ‘What about your juice and Jammie Dodgers, love?'

I was disappointed, humiliated and very angry. I knew the soldiers were here to stop the IRA from killing me, and that I should be grateful, but I couldn't help wishing those two would choke on one of Auntie Mabel's caramel squares. Maybe Patrick Walsh was right.

‘Brits!' I thought, crossly.

A few weeks later, my relationship with the British Army would deteriorate still further. I was staying late after school for drama practice. It was the dress rehearsal for
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
. For weeks, I had stayed late every Wednesday, risking not being on time for my papers, to dutifully fulfil my limited obligations as supporting actor to Thomas O'Hara, who, I had to admit, had turned out to be a very good Tom Sawyer. Patricia Thompson was still a girl with breasts playing Huck, which should of course have been my part. Now that we were at the dress-rehearsal stage, it was more obvious than ever that Huckleberry Finn had breasts. However, the more I looked at Patricia's chest to check out that this was indeed a visible travesty, the less angry I felt towards her, somehow. It was strange.