Paperboy (19 page)

My big brother led the way, and just managed to land a boot on Les McKeown's backside, leaving a dirty boot print on the lead singer's white parallels. It was then that fate intervened once again in my favour. The last Roller to get out of the car was Woody, and I found myself standing right beside him. So what did I do? Did I ask him for his autograph? No – he was moving much too fast for such niceties. Did I shout, ‘We love you Woody!'? Of course not – my big brother had forbidden such expressions. So I did what I knew best: I kicked him. In the heat of the moment, I abandoned my pacifist principles for the second time that day and expressed my adoration of a pop idol in the only way I knew how. I kicked him in the shins. Yes, I kicked Woody!

Once the Rollers were safely inside the Ulster Hall, we looked at each other in excited silence. We had seen all the Rollers in real life! We had screamed at them, touched them and kicked them. As we rejoined the queue, we relived those precious moments – something we would continue to do for the next six months afterwards.

‘I touched Eric and he smiled at me and I fainted!' said Irene. ‘I'll never wash my hand again!'

‘I touched Les and he knows I love him and I think he loves me back,' said Lynn sadly, looking down in awe at a clump of Les's hair in her hand. ‘I'll never wash my hand again!'

‘I kicked yer man Les!' boasted my big brother. ‘That'll harden him!'

‘I kicked Woody!' I rejoined guiltily. ‘I'll never, er … wash my foot again!'

Titch McCracken looked up at me, stubbed out his cigarette on the pavement and then followed it up by spitting contemptuously and rolling his eyes.

My heart was now beating very quickly with the excitement of it all. For a second I wondered if God was going to let my bad heart kill me before the beginning of the show – as a punishment for using violence on a pop star. But mercifully, He spared me and I got to see the whole concert in its full glory.

Once inside the historic building, the chants of ‘We Love You, Rollers' were deafening. I had never heard so many girls screaming, even after a bomb, and neither had the Ulster Hall, I'm sure. We made our way to our prime seats, up in the balcony. Looking down on the stalls below, teeming with tartan teenagers, I felt slightly dizzy.

It seemed like we had to wait for ever for the concert to begin. The longer we waited, the more the tension grew and the more the screams intensified. I began to get fed up with all this stupid screaming and passed the time by counting the number of pipes on the big organ at the back of the stage.

It felt as if the whole crowd was about to explode, when suddenly the lights went out. At first I thought the Provos had blown up an electricity transformer again, but then I realised that this was what Miss Baron would have called ‘dramatic effect'. One minute there was complete darkness and the next there were five spotlights on five figures. I recognised them of course from
Top of the Pops
and also from up close at the stage door. The Bay City Rollers were here, now. They were live! The screaming reached an even higher pitch. It was so piercing that I had to put my hands over my ears. The concert began. I couldn't actually hear the Rollers, what with all the screaming and with my ears covered. Heather, Irene, Lynn and even Sharon Burgess screamed and cried through the classic ballad ‘Give a Little Love'. I put my arm round Sharon Burgess and she didn't tell me to wise up, but she wouldn't turn her lips towards me either, because that would have meant taking her eyes off Eric Faulkner.

Every so often, if the screams began to calm down, Les would turn his back to the audience and shake his bum. For some reason, this made the girls go wild, but every time he did it, I was sure I could see the boot mark from my big brother's Doc Martens on the backside of Les's white parallels. Philip Ferris watched carefully through every guitar solo, and kept accusing the Rollers of miming. We all sang along to ‘Summer Love Sensation', and I noted that my big brother knew every word – even though he was supposed to be an Alice Cooper fan who hated teenyboppers. Meanwhile, Heather Mateer started to dance up too close to him, but he was playing it cool because he preferred girls who did gymnastics. I noted with some relief that Heather's flirtations with my big brother did not appear to be upsetting Sharon Burgess.

Woody didn't attempt to dance much, so I wasn't able to ascertain whether he had developed a limp due to my recent attack. So I reassured myself that I had done no lasting damage to his shins or his musical career.

As the concert continued, the volume of the screaming and the pitch of the temperature in the Ulster Hall went ever upwards. The hall was full of the smell of the sweat and cigarettes and the spearmint chewing gum of a thousand teenagers. There was a powerful crescendo of hormones, heat and noise. We were happy, we were alive, and, for a few hours, we didn't think or care about homework or gunmen or bomb scares or there being no jobs.

‘The Belfast crowd are the best audience in the world!' proclaimed Les between hits, and we loved him even more.

Of course it couldn't last for ever, and when at last it came to the final encore of ‘Shang-a-Lang', the whole of the Ulster Hall erupted into a new level of frenzy. Unfortunately the crowds on the balcony surged forward so fast that the front panel of the balcony began to give way, as if it might fall on the fans below. There was a serious danger that Rollers fans from above might rain down upon the unsuspecting crowd below in the stalls.

Luckily, the security men noticed the impending disaster immediately and sprang into action. With the assistance of several RUC men with moustaches, they dutifully spent the last verse of ‘Shang-a-Lang' clinging onto the front panel of the balcony with all their might. When the concert finally ended and we began to leave the Ulster Hall in our droves, the security men stayed where they were, holding onto the front of the balcony to stop it collapsing onto the rows below. They were sweating more than us.

Our gang had to walk home in the rain that night because there weren't enough black taxis for everyone – we clearly had overwhelmed the paramilitary public-transport system. We didn't care, though. We sang ‘Shang-a-Lang' as we ran with the gang the whole way home up the Shankill. When I finally got into my bed that night, I kept waking up, trying to figure out what had been real and what had been a dream.

The next day at school, I swapped my usual grammar-school scarf with a tartan scarf, even though this was against the rules and it clearly didn't go with my duffle coat. When I arrived in the playground that morning, I noticed Ian, formerly of the TITS, standing against the wall sullenly reading his
NME
. I couldn't resist deliberately walking past him, whistling ‘Shang-a-Lang' loudly and flaunting my tartan scarf. Ian pretended not to hear or see me, but I knew I had provoked a response when he aggressively turned the pages of the Status Quo feature he was reading and spat on the ground disgustedly. At that moment, Miss Baron was walking past and told him off for spitting in the playground. ‘We are not hooligans at this school!' she scolded. ‘We are civilised here.'

Ian got detention, and stuck a ‘Kick Me' sign on the back of my blazer with chewing gum at lunchtime for revenge. I drifted through every class that day in a daze, retaining even less knowledge than usual, apart from in French when the teacher nipped me under the arm until I got my verbs right.

However, when I picked up my forty-eight
Belfast Telegraphs
from Oul' Mac's van that night, I was shocked by the reports about the Bay City Rollers concert on their pages. Old men were saying that the Rollers fans were uncivilised hooligans, even worse than spitting schoolboys. Instead of rave reviews of the happiest night in Belfast for years, there were angry people claiming that teenagers at the pop-music concert in the Ulster Hall the previous night had vandalised the balcony. There were allegations that the concert had turned into a riot that could have ended in tragedy. There were cross baldy men demanding that there should be no more pop concerts in the Ulster Hall ever again, because we couldn't be trusted not to wreck it. This was unfair! We were being misrepresented. This was what John Hume called injustice.

I delivered my papers reluctantly and angrily that night. It felt like I was personally delivering untruths about myself to my own customers. It was the first time ever that I had hated doing my papers. I began to wonder if there were other career opportunities that I could pursue in the future. As I wandered home that night humming ‘Give a Little Love', I considered my potential for delivering milk or bread, neither of which could tell lies. Or perhaps becoming an international spy like James Bond, or an astronaut who got lost in an anomaly in time and space. I was growing up, so I was.

Chapter 18
Across the Walls

I
hated fences, so I did. They made life very difficult for a paperboy. The more my customers erected fences between each other, the more walking, running and jumping I had to do. This was particularly problematic and painful on a Friday night, when my Doc Martens were concealing coins from hoods and robbers.

There were four main types of fence: wire fences, hedges, wooden fences and walls. Wire fences were the easiest to negotiate, because there was usually a convenient hole in which to stick your foot for support as you clambered over to next door. However, if you weren't careful, this foothold could bend permanently into the shape of your boot. A customer could become suspicious and peek out through their net curtains to try to catch you red-footed and tell you to stop being such a ‘lazy wee hallion' or else they would tell Oul' Mac.

Hedges were the next easiest to get over, because most would usually have sufficiently sturdy inner foliage to support the slight weight of a paperboy as you scaled their heights en route to the house next door. However, if you started to make a noticeable gap in the hedge, there were similar dangers of getting caught as with wire fences. The only difference was that at least with hedges there was the possibility that fresh leaves might eventually grow over your misdemeanours. I found I also had to face certain moral dilemmas with hedges. At some times of the year, stamping on the leaves would risk squashing many caterpillars underfoot – and as the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, I did not want to be responsible for the extermination of any of God's wee creatures.

Wooden fences were more of a hazard for two reasons. First of all, they were generally covered in rough sharp shards of wood that would stab your hands as you gripped on to jump over. You would end up with wee scalps in your fingers that got all infected and swollen so you couldn't practise your violin, and your daddy would have to poke the wee scalps out with a sharp needle, and you would have to try hard not to cry, because you were too big for crying by this time. The second problem was that most wooden fences up the Shankill were very cheap and fragile and couldn't support the weight of even a small paperboy, especially if it had been years since they had been painted to stop them from rotting. After several incidents where I caused damage that I managed to blame on Petra chasing Mrs Grant's pussy, I avoided any further attempts to put boot to wood.

The biggest challenge of all for a paperboy like myself was the brick or concrete wall. If such walls weren't too high, they were quite easy to jump over or sit on and swing over, but if they were very high, you had no other option but to walk around them. However, if they were walls of medium height which you thought might be easily scalable, you might make a serious misjudgement and end up colliding with hard and rough red brick, tearing your parallels, scraping your knees and elbows and maybe even ending up in the Royal for stitches.

Of course some of my customers had no fence at all, or just a little low row of flowers dividing them from their next-door neighbours. They always seemed to be the friendliest or poorest of my customers. They either didn't want to be separated from their neighbours or they couldn't afford to be. On the other hand, I noticed that for some of my customers, fences were very important indeed. They tended to be the rudest or the richest of my clientele or the ones with big snarling dogs. Mr Black from No. 13 had high fences on either side of his house. Of course he had greyhounds, but they couldn't jump that high, so I knew he just didn't want anybody next or near to him. ‘Good fences make good neighbours!' he would proclaim.

I don't think Mr Black was aware that he was quoting from a Robert Frost poem I was studying in my English class. I was certain he had no idea that the line he was quoting was supposed to be what my English teacher called ‘an ironic poetic device'. I began to notice that the people who made comments like ‘good fences make good neighbours' always seemed to be the sort of characters you really wouldn't want to live beside anyway.

Another two such customers of mine, the Morrisons and the Smiths, had a real fence war going on. It started out as just one small wire fence between the two houses. Then the Morrisons put up a new wire fence without consulting the Smiths. So the Smiths put up another, higher wire fence on their property. These fences were starting to look like the ones on Colditz that I used to watch on BBC 1. In response, the Morrisons added a wooden fence that was even taller than their neighbours' higher wire fence. Then the Smiths vengefully erected a six-foot wall with a six-foot wooden fence on top of it. In the end, neither side were getting any sun on their nasturtium borders any more.

All this reminded me again of that poem from English class, which said, ‘Something there is that doesn't love a wall.' Maybe Robert Frost had been a paperboy too. I always enjoyed studying poems about war and walls much more than doing Shakespeare, because at least these poems were about ordinary everyday life that I could relate to.

Of course, there were even bigger walls in the city than those between my customers. In fact, we were brilliant at walls in Belfast – they were going up everywhere, higher and higher, all around me. For every inch that I grew, the walls surrounding me got six foot higher. Ever since the start of the Troubles, they had been putting walls up between Protestant and Catholic streets to stop us killing each other. Of course, it didn't work because ever since they built them we had been slaughtering each other even more. Most people on both sides, however, thought that the walls between us were a good idea, and it wasn't very often Catholics and Protestants agreed on anything. I suppose the walls made me feel safer because they helped me believe that it would be harder for the other side to get at me. When the walls were put up, you couldn't see the other side any more and they couldn't see you, and that was better for everybody. And if you wanted to show the other side how much you hated them, at least you had an obvious place to go to, to throw stones and bricks over at them. You didn't have to look at exactly what damage you had done to the other side, but at least you could be pretty sure you had hurt them.

Everyone called them ‘peace walls', which I thought was funny, but not funny ha-ha. It was very strange, I thought, to call these walls peace walls, because there hadn't been any of them before the Troubles, when we had peace. The parts of Belfast that had the most peace didn't have peace walls. And the places in the city with the biggest peace walls were the streets where Catholics and Protestants had lived together previously, before they started burning each other out – like the Springfield Road, where my father grew up and where my other granny had got out just in time.

Everywhere else in the world that had peace didn't have peace walls. However, in history class I learned about another big wall in another city: the Berlin Wall, which separated the goodies in West Germany from the baddies in East Germany. (Although my granny continued to insist that all Germans were still baddies.) The Berlin Wall was, as far as I could tell, a huge curtain made of iron and apparently it was going to be there for ever. Not like our peace walls in Belfast, which were only going to be here until the Troubles were over.

I wanted the Troubles to be over tomorrow because they were all I could ever remember. I hated all the fighting and killing more than I hated any Catholics or even the IRA. I thought that it probably didn't matter when you got killed whether the ground around your coffin was Irish or British muck. Everyone said you could never trust the other side. Apparently there were actually some good ones, but, generally speaking, you couldn't trust them. Catholics were all supposed to support the IRA and wanted to kill us for a United Ireland. So we had to defend ourselves to stay British, because that was the most important thing in the whole world. I was never quite so sure about all of this. I knew that all the Catholics on the other side of the peace wall had too many children and did Irish dancing, but I couldn't accept that they all wanted me dead. I was curious as to what they were really like over there. I had so many questions. Did they learn at their church too that we were all going to Hell? Did they want to put us all on the Larne–Stranraer ferry back to Scotland? Did they really believe we were all rich? Were their paramilitaries full of wee hard men that liked to boss everyone around, like ours were?

I was curious about everyday life on the other side of our Peace Wall too. I wondered if they had paperboys over there as well, and, if so, did the Provos allow them to deliver the
Ulsters
on a Saturday night? Maybe there were wee lads over there too with bad hearts and braces who were worried that Sinead O'Burgess was falling in love with their big brother (who was brilliant at Gaelic football). Maybe the same mothers that we could hear banging their bin lids every August on the anniversary of Internment also sewed dresses for posh ladies and ordered toys for Christmas from the Great Universal Club Book (even though it was posted from England).

My father questioned divisions between working-class people just as much as he questioned the existence of God. He hated the peace walls as much as I hated the fences between my customers. They had knocked down Lanark Street, where his family came from, and put up a peace wall instead. My Da was definitely in the minority on the Shankill.

One summer evening in July, as I was returning home from finishing a particularly sweaty paper round, I came across my father arguing over the gate with Mrs Piper. She was wearing her usual black cardigan that never quite covered both breasts, even though she was constantly trying to pull either side across them.

‘We need them walls til go up a quare bit higher yet,' Mrs Piper was explaining. ‘Them Fenians is still gettin' petrol bombs over. And we need more gates on the roads too, so we can close them at night so as to keep them out.'

My father looked exasperated. He was never very good at hiding his exasperation, and so I always knew right away when I was in trouble.

‘All I ever hear yousens sayin' is we need more walls put up to keep the other side out. Did you never think that it might be our side that's bein' walled in?' he asked.

Mrs Piper had clearly never thought of it this way before. She vainly attempted to pull her cardigan across her generous bosom once more, only now with great indignation.

‘Well, if you don't agree the walls should go up higher, then you're just supportin' the IRA!' was her predictable reply.

This was always the response when you disagreed with Mrs Piper. My father's questioning the raising of the peace walls would now be added to a long list of errors that would support the suspicion that you sympathised with the IRA, and this was the ultimate sin, of course. An even worse sin than a mum running off with a soldier or a man being a homo. In the past, Mrs Piper had been known to assert that you supported the IRA if you didn't like Paisley or Orange bands, or if you did like Dana or Mother Teresa.

I know my father had stood up to this sort of thing before. He had a mind of his own. In his job as a foreman in the foundry he had once got a death threat wrapped around a bullet that had been placed in his locker, supposedly for giving a Catholic a job, instead of a Protestant. One day, Daddy had a blazing row in the middle of the street with a famous television reporter who he had observed giving money to children to throw stones at the soldiers, for the camera. He never forgave this. Every time the same journalist came on the news, reporting from some other war zone in another part of world, our family knew it was my father's cue to jump out of his chair and shout at the TV, ‘There's that English bastard that paid the kids to throw stones at the soldiers!'

Of course, sometimes Daddy had to cooperate with the powers that be for the greater good. So, on one occasion, he was prepared to enter into negotiations with the UDA to get the Westy Disco gear back when it had been stolen during a heist on the Presbyterian church storeroom. It was the lesser of two evils.

‘Your father's a very clever man,' affirmed my mother when these negotiations proved successful. He managed to get everything back, apart from a few Elvis singles.

One summer's day in 1977, I went up the fields again and looked down on Belfast as usual. I could see the peace walls snaking along the roads between neighbours all over my part of the city. There seemed to be more and more of them, and they seemed to be getting higher and higher by the day.

I thought again about my Robert Frost poem in English: ‘Something there is that doesn't love a wall …' I wondered about who was being walled out and who was being walled in. I speculated as to whether the peace walls would end up being here for ever, like the Berlin Wall. I imagined travelling through time to the future in the TARDIS with the Doctor, and landing up the fields above Belfast in the year 2000. Oul' Mac was being kept alive by a computer and his van was now all silver and space age, and it flew up and down the Shankill. The papers were being delivered by a robot paperboy. The Troubles were over long ago, and Protestants and Catholics went to the same schools together and played football together and lived in the same streets again, and the peace walls had all been torn down for ever. I was a dreamer, so I was.