Paperboy (4 page)

Jeux Sans Frontières
was like the
Eurovision Song Contest
without the songs. It was live by satellite from a football pitch in Belgium. I was astounded at how they beamed the pictures from Europe to Belfast via outer space. It was like when a Klingon from an enemy ship on the other side of a space anomaly was able to speak to Captain Kirk on the big screen on the bridge of the USS
Enterprise
. I was fascinated by the sound of Continental cheers, the whistles and horns and the spectacle of Germans, French and Italians and others in comical costumes, falling over each other as they fought for victory in Europe. I thought it odd that thirty years earlier these nations had been slaughtering one another. My granny still wasn't too keen on Germans. Any mention of Germany evoked a tirade of abuse about ‘that oul' brute, Hitler!' According to her, he was worse than Gerry Adams. Now these former enemies were having ridiculous races in giant clown costumes to the tinny satellite echoes of hysterical laughter from Stuart Hall, the jovial presenter – and all in the name of light-entertainment television. ‘Patience is a virtue', I thought.

I had a small Spanish guitar. It had been my first really grown-up Christmas present – that is, not from Santa. It had cost twenty weeks at 99p from the Club Book. Okay, it wasn't a red star-shaped electric guitar like on
Top of the Pops
, and I couldn't imagine Marc Bolan playing it – but I loved my guitar. It was in many ways like my first girlfriend, Sharon Burgess: it never felt cold when I embraced it or rested my chin on its shoulder.

My guitar was a honeyed yellow colour, with a simple dotted line design around the edges. It retained a lovely smell of wood and fresh varnish. At first, the strings made painful impressions on the fingers of my right hand. I was left-handed – like Paul McCartney – but we couldn't afford an expensive left-handed guitar, so I got a right-handed one, restrung the other way round. Hence I always appeared to be playing my guitar upside down, with my plectrum guard above, rather than below, the blows of my energetic strumming. My big regrets were that I was neither Paul McCartney, nor right-handed, nor rich.

Eventually, just as the Germans were playing their Joker Card to win extra points in a raft race in gorilla suits, my absorption was interrupted by the sound of Pammy Wynette being gently escorted from the premises by an exhausted-looking Mr Rowing. Pammy generally ignored me, ever since we had fallen out at the bonfire one year, when I had said that country and western was for oul' lads and oul' dolls. But on this evening, as she said her apologies and goodbyes to Mr Rowing, she turned back towards me with vital information.

‘It said on Radio Luxembourg last night that the Bay City Rollers is comin' to Belfast,' she pronounced, with the look of superiority that could only come from being the bearer of such exclusive, fresh and earth-shattering information.

‘Brilliant!' I exclaimed. ‘Are yousens goin'?'

‘Aye,' Pamela responded. ‘Are yousens?”

‘Aye,' I replied excitedly.

The word ‘yousens' in this context referred to oneself and all of one's friends. It was clear that most of the teenage population of the Upper Shankill would be going to this great event. Tickets would be like gold dust, and tartan material would be at a premium.

As I entered Mrs Rowing's good room for my lesson, I dreamed of playing guitar on stage with the Rollers. It seemed promising when Mr Rowing said that he would begin to teach me a new, ‘more up-to-date' number. Yet I was once again disappointed: it was ‘Love Me Tender' by the pre-fat Elvis! Yet again, an old-fashioned song from the sixties that only old people liked and that most people would soon forget, instead of a modern classic, like ‘Shang-a-Lang'. However, I got my Cs and Fs and Ds in the right order, and Mr Rowing appreciated my talent so much that I got an extra fifteen minutes. I was his last student of the night, because I had to finish collecting the paper money and avoid hoods and robbers on a Friday night – and so no one was ever waiting through the final minutes of
It's a Knockout
for me to finish. As a result of this fact, and Mr Rowing's good nature and genuine enthusiasm, I often got an extra fifteen minutes for my 20 pence.

After my extended guitar lesson at the Rowings' that windy winter night, I ran the short distance home through the spitting rain, with the tune of ‘Love Me Tender' repeating itself irritatingly in my head. I sped past Titch McCracken, who was desperately trying to light a sly cigarette in the wind behind Mrs Patterson's hydrangea. Overhead droned a noisy British Army helicopter, keeping an eye on West Belfast.

Before the Troubles, I had never seen a real helicopter, apart from the one that
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
on UTV would alert to save a boy who had fallen down an abandoned mine shaft in Australia. But now helicopters were an ever-present whirr, looking down on us, their searchlights shining on targeted streets to illuminate any wrongdoing. This heavenly Super Trouper was in fact one of the more enjoyable experiences of 1970s Belfast – at least for me, and other boys like me. The boom of bombs pummelled the marrow in my growing bones. The deadly staccato sound of gunfire ripped at my tender heart. But the night-time sight of a helicopter searchlight rushing up your street until you were standing in quasi-daylight was as exhilarating as the rollercoaster at Barry's on the Sunday school excursion to Bangor! It was the most exciting thing to go up our street apart from the poke man, the UDA and the Ormo Mini Shop.

On the fateful night in question, coming home from my guitar lesson, I looked up to see the searchlight flicker across the disrespectful blue-black sky. Reaching the rickety front gate of our house, I halted as the light leapt up the street towards me and all at once I was illuminated in its full, stark glare. The rays reflected off the rusty gate I had tried to paint over for 30p for the scouts during Bob-a-Job Week.

‘I hope they don't think my Spanish guitar is a machine gun from up there!' I suddenly thought. For a moment, I imagined a new boy having to take over my paper round the next day, delivering
Belfast Telegraphs
with the headline: ‘12-year-old Terrorist with Suspicious Instrument Shot Dead'. We weren't allowed toy guns or fireworks in case they got us shot, but I had never before considered that carrying a Spanish guitar could transform me into a legitimate target. Blinded by the light and distracted by all of this catastrophising, I was unprepared for the impact.

The malicious wind blew the steel gate into my defenceless wee guitar. I heard the crack; I knew it was serious. The guitar was covered by a soft, blue pretend leather case that my aunt had bought me for my birthday. (The hard guitar cases used by professionals were too dear to be sold in the Club Book, even over sixty weeks.)This soft blue case kept the rain off my Spanish guitar, but it lacked the rigidity required to protect the vulnerable instrument from damage. I couldn't see inside just yet, but I knew already that my precious guitar had been seriously wounded.

When I finally got indoors and saw a big crack in my guitar which ran from head to bridge, I cried. Of course, my father did his ‘fix-it' best with glue he had borrowed from the foundry, but I had to come to terms with the fact that my guitar was permanently fractured. There was nothing I could do: it would always be split. Sadly, just like Belfast would be all my life. I yearned for things to be different, but I couldn't envisage it any other way.

From that night on, there was a new melancholy in my rendition of ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley'. Yet somewhere in my mind I still held on to thoughts of
Jeux Sans Frontières
and Europe and hope. And I remembered that patience is a virtue.

Chapter 4
Secrets in School

B
eing a paperboy had to be a secret once I started Belfast Royal Academy, as I soon learned. Living up the Shankill, having a Ford Escort respray and a father who worked in a foundry near the Falls Road were just a few of the other facts best kept hidden. No one ever said it out loud, but I picked up the cues from the dominant rugger boys that this information was best kept discreetly folded away – like the
Woman's Own
you kept at the bottom of your paperbag for the middle-aged man with dyed hair who still lived with his mammy in No. 91.

I thought I had more secrets to keep than James Bond, until I got to know Thomas O'Hara, another wee boy in my class with something to hide. I had never met any ‘O'' anythings before. It was whispered in the playground that wee Thomas with the curly hair and freckles was, in fact, a real Catholic. This was confirmed when someone overheard him saying ‘Haitch Blocks' instead of ‘H Blocks'. And David Pritchard, who didn't believe in God and rebelliously refused to close his eyes during prayers in Assembly, had spotted Thomas crossing himself at the ‘Amens'. David, evidently a Protestant atheist, was appalled and told everybody.

Wee Thomas was the first Catholic I had ever spoken to, although I had once sung along with Val Doonican's rendition of ‘Paddy McGinty's Goat' from his rocking chair on BBC 1 on a Saturday night after
Doctor Who
. At eleven years old, I was very young to be meeting one of ‘the other sort' for the first time. Most people in Belfast left it until they were at least eighteen, or preferably never did it at all. Titch McCracken said you could tell someone was a Catholic if their eyes were too close together, but I wasn't convinced, because one of the other paperboys, Billy Cooper, was practically cross-eyed, but he played a flute in The Loyal Sons of Ulster Band. And you couldn't get more Protestant than that.

I would get the biggest shock I had had since John Noakes announced he was leaving
Blue Peter
when remarkably – against all the odds and contrary to all that I had heard from both heaven and earth – I realised that wee Thomas O'Hara was in fact dead-on. Before this, my primary experience of Catholics had been limited to cross men on
Scene Around Six
who made my father shout. Of course, Dad also yelled when the Reverend Ian Paisley came on the news, which was baffling because Big Ian was the opposite of a Catholic. And while my granny said Paisley was ‘our saviour', my father called him ‘Bucket Mouth'. All the other paperboys said, like Granny, that without Big Ian we would be ‘sold down the river', but I could never work out where the river was. Maybe it was in Ballymena.

I made friends with wee Thomas on my first day at grammar school. Out of all the boys and girls in my class, he was the only one who wasn't wearing a brand-new school uniform in the first week. He told me he was getting his blazer at the weekend, but when I told my mother, she said,‘God love that poor wee Catholic boy; they can't even afford to buy the crater a uniform!' This seemed to clash with the proud assertion I had often heard, that ‘we're just as poor as them, you know.'

In fact, Thomas proved what I had always suspected, but would never have dared to articulate to either my paperboy peers or my Sunday school teacher: that Catholics were just the same as us! I couldn't understand why such an astounding discovery had never made the front page of any of the
Belfast Telegraphs
I delivered.

Wee Thomas was one of the few people in my class who would have made a good paperboy, and he was certainly much more like me than any of the rugger boys. They made clever jokes in the rugby changing rooms about sheep and masturbation, but they never dropped a single ‘ing'. The rugger boys at school were the first people I ever heard putting a complete ‘ing' onto the end of ‘f**k', and it just didn't work. They thought they were dead hard, eff-ing and blind-ing, but I thought they sounded ridiculous because I knew what real effin' and blindin' was. They were in their element kicking each other in a scrum, but I wondered how they would deal with hoods and robbers on a Friday night up the Shankill.

The only difference between Thomas and me was that he didn't make a secret of who he was or where he lived. Unlike me, he didn't seem to feel the need to keep secrets at school. Maybe my shame at not being prosperous was pure Presbyterian. Once wee Thomas and I became friends, I even learned that he was from Ardoyne, where the IRA lived. Of course, I never asked him if he wanted a United Ireland, worshipped Mary and supported the IRA. I just assumed he must be one of the ‘good ones' who didn't do all that.

However, one thing that I knew for sure was that wee Thomas and I shared an aspiration for something far more important than fighting between Catholics and Protestants. We were both willing to set aside all ancient rivalries for the sake of a common purpose – to dominate the pop-music charts. Along with two other school friends, me and wee Thomas decided to start a rock band. The other members of the band were Ian, who got the
New Musical Express
and sang in an English accent, and Stephen, who played a tambourine like David Cassidy. We wanted to be Status Quo, but we had limited talent and resources. All we had was my split Spanish guitar and an old bodhrán from Thomas's granda's shed. I never told my granny that I was in a band with an Irish drum, as I assumed this might be dangerous territory.

Although we tried very hard, we could never make ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley' sound like Status Quo. We decided to copy ABBA by using the first letter of each of our names to spell out the name of the band. We would be just like Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid. However, this idea proved problematic when we realised we had Thomas on drums, a lead vocalist called Ian, Tony on lead guitar and a tambourine player called Stephen . . .

The TITS were doomed. We split up during rehearsal one day, before playing even one gig at the scout hut, when I mistakenly expressed an interest in the forthcoming Bay City Rollers concert in the Ulster Hall. Ever since Pammy Wynette had told me the Rollers were coming to Belfast, I had been scouring the
Belfast Telegraph
announcements pages every night for news of dates and prices. My customers were even beginning to notice that I was ten minutes late every night. When, at band practice at Ian's house one day, I casually mentioned that I was engaging in this research, the revelation exposed deep and unexpected artistic differences within the TITS. Ian was very angry. He said he was too serious about rock and roll to be in a band with a guitarist who wanted to see ‘them bloody teenybopper sell-outs' in concert.

I didn't know what a ‘teenybopper sell-out' was, because I didn't read the
New Musical Express
, but Ian seemed to take it to heart. I was just innocently hoping that the Rollers concert wouldn't be sold out before I could get a ticket, but Ian said members of the TITS should only go to see serious rock bands, like Status Quo. He accused the Bay City Rollers of not being able to play their own instruments. I thought this was ironic, because we had been experiencing exactly the same difficulties ourselves. Ian sneered that the Scottish superstars should be called the ‘Gay Shitty Fakers', and finally announced with an arrogant flourish that he no longer wanted to be one of the TITS. He threw down the handle of his little sister's skipping rope, which he had been using as an improvised microphone, and walked out of the band practice, slamming the door behind him. (The dramatic effect was spoiled slightly when he had to come back in again because we were in his sitting room and his mammy had wheeled in a hostess trolley with cups of tea she had made for us and an apple tart.)

Ian's walkout left the band without a lead vocalist, and without a vowel. Stephen would soon follow. He said he wanted to concentrate on disco dancing and that he had never been that interested in the TITS anyway. Thomas and I realised that we couldn't go on as a duo, even though we knew it was working well for Donny and Marie Osmond, and so we decided to concentrate on solo projects.

The teachers at BRA occasionally provided us with a clear insight into our place in the world. In my first week at school, we were informed that we were in ‘the top one per cent' in Northern Ireland. This felt good. A few weeks later, the same teacher said,‘God help us, if this is the top one per cent.' This did not feel so good.

The school buildings were an interesting architectural reflection of the history of Belfast. They ranged from eighteenth-century Gothic granite to the 1970s red-brick style peculiar to Belfast, which featured as few breakable windows as possible. There was a swimming pool with no windows that smelt of Domestos and was always too warm. This was where I got my 100-metres front crawl badge and two verrucas, and where I laughed cruelly at Martin Simpson when he still needed armbands in Third Form, which made him cry.

In the most historic part of the school building was the Holy Grail of BRA: the framed charter conveying royal status on the school. The headmaster introduced us to it in our first year, with hushed and reverent tones. I had never seen a royal signature before, although my granny had a mug of Princess Anne's wedding to Captain Mark Phillips. There was nothing in the world more important than being British. It was the opposite of being Irish. It was what you were supposed to kill and die for, although no one ever told me why. And you could hardly get more British than being royal. The Queen and King Billy were both royals, and they were nearly as British as Ian Paisley.

BRA was full of long corridors, which was good when you wanted somewhere quiet to snog a wee girl during lunch break, but bad when you were hurrying to Mr Jackson's maths class, because if you were late, he would rap his knuckles on your head so violently that you would have to try hard not to cry in front of your classmates. Outside the school dining hall, the walls in the corridor were covered with pictures of the glorious First XV rugby team, going back a thousand years. As we queued up for vegetable roll and mash and pink custard, we would examine the pictures from the 1940s, recognising some of our ageing teachers as spotty scrum halves. We debated as to what could possibly have possessed them to come back to teach here.

When it became clear that I would not be following in the studded boot steps of my rugby-playing brother, my form teacher cheerfully informed me that I would therefore be spending the rest of my school years ‘in oblivion'. From that day forward, I found it almost impossible to develop an adequate appetite while queuing up for school dinners due to being surrounded by generations of rugger boys smiling smugly down at me. Of course, it could have been much worse, I reasoned. Apparently, there was a wee lad in Second Form who got free school dinners!

I would go on to make friends with kids from up the Antrim Road who lived in detached houses with flowering pink cherry trees, and whose fathers drove Rovers and read clever newspapers like the
Daily Mail
. No one ever ordered the
Daily Mail
up our way. Not one edition of it had ever graced my paperbag. My new-found friends talked about another world – of discos in the Rugby Club, fondue dinner parties and a glass of wine with Sunday lunch. Most of the other kids' dads came to the school concerts, and I noticed when they clapped that they all had very clean hands. A lot of them had good jobs in the bank. Working as a banker was the ultimate job if you weren't smart enough to be a doctor.

Some of my friends' dads even played golf with the teachers. When I enquired of my father why he did not participate in this particular pastime, he replied with some disdain that it was a ‘middle-class sport', and that ‘no son of his would ever be playing golf'. I added this command to the ever-lengthening list of things that no son of his would ever do, and, interestingly for me this particular forecast turned out to be accurate. ‘You're working class and don't you ever forget it, son,' he would often say.

Much as I resented this edict of my father's, at Belfast Royal Academy it was absolutely impossible to forget it. I soon learned the rules. When friends asked me where I lived, I said something vague like, ‘On the edge of North Belfast.' This sounded more posh and less Catholic than West Belfast. Sometimes I would say ‘Beside the Black Mountain,' as opposed to Divis Mountain, which sounded too much like the notorious Divis Flats. Now and again I would say ‘A couple of miles from school,' which was technically true but sufficiently vague to mask my Shankill shame. On the few occasions that I would get a lift to school in our old Ford Escort, and even after the respray, I made sure I got left off around the corner, where no middle-class mate's eyes would spot my modest mode of transport. I once got a lift with a friend from the Antrim Road whose father was a jeweller who drove a BMW. He left us off at the front gates of the school, and I waved goodbye to him as he drove away, with a certain ‘he's my father, you know' look on my face. Wee Thomas O'Hara had just got off the bus across the road and observed this pretentious behaviour. He said nothing, just looked straight at me and rolled his eyes.

But bigger circumstances conspired against me, again and again. Street unrest, Ulster Workers' strikes and hunger strikes exposed my secrets at school, as well as disrupting my newspaper deliveries. Being late, or not being able to get to and from school at all because of burning barricades was a bit of a giveaway. Worse still, having to walk to school wearing no school uniform – so as to avoid the danger of having your religion written all over you – tended to expose the secret of the area you lived in. The days that half a dozen kids, usually including Thomas and me, were the only ones in class not in uniform were like those bad dreams where you go to school in your pyjamas.

On one such day, I overheard a cocky classmate, Timothy Longsley, whose brother played in the glorious First XV rugby team, whispering conspiratorially in Chemistry to Judy Carlton (who I fancied): ‘He lives in one of those rough areas where the bigots burn the buses, you know.'