The Street and other stories (4 page)

Tommy got out of jail after his six months but was interned a year later in the big swoops. The British army took his father as well but he was released after a few days. Margaret was up to her neck looking after refugees, taking part in protests: she didn’t get to bed for three nights.

When she awoke after fourteen hours solid sleep, her husband brought her dinner to her on a tray.

“You never did that before,” she smiled in pleased surprise. “Even when I was sick, even when I had our babies. The neighbours or our ones did it.”

“I’m not the only one who’s doing things they never did before,” he replied awkwardly. “There’s been a queue of people here for you. There’s a list of messages. And there’s a meeting in St Paul’s, Mrs Sharpe says.”

“What was on the news?” Margaret propped herself up on the pillows and settled the tray on her lap.

“The whole place has gone mad,” he replied morosely. “More shooting last night: two killed, more arrests, bombs in the town, people hurt. Will I go on?”

She looked at him quietly. “No, you’re okay.”

“Where did you get the food?” he asked her, watching as she devoured the sausages and potatoes he’d prepared.

“That’s for me to know,” she teased him, “and for you to find out. You oul’ fellas are all the same; youse need to know everything. Well, for nearly thirty years you’ve been feeding us and for the last three days I’ve been feeding us, and I feel good about it.”

He looked at her in amazement.

“Ach, love, I’m only joking,” she laughed. “You never could take a slagging. I got the food down in St Paul’s. We set up a coordinating committee in the school to look after the refugees and to distribute food, especially baby food and the like. That’s what happens when you get arrested, you see. I go mad for the want of you.”

She put down her tray and lunged towards him in mock attack. He retreated to the door in embarrassment.

“The whole place has gone mad,” he said again. “It’s time you were up, woman.”

She chuckled at his discomfiture. “I wonder how he gave me all those children,” she thought cheerfully.

“My oul’ fella never worked,” Mrs Sharpe said to Margaret. “You’re lucky. Yours is never idle. I used to say my man put on his working clothes when he was going to bed.”

They were sitting together after the meeting.

“It’s funny about men,” Margaret said; “they are all bound up in wee images of themselves. You know: they’re the providers, they take the decisions. They decide everything.”

“Or they think they do,” Mrs Sharpe said.

“I know, I know,”Margaret agreed, “and as long as we let them think that it’s fine and dandy. But as soon as we start to let them see that we can take decisions, too, and, make choices, then their worlds become shaky and their images get tarnished. They, even the best of them, like to keep us in our places.”

“Blame their mothers.”

“Nawh, that’s too simple.”

“But it’s true.”

“I don’t know. Young ones nowadays have a better notion of things. I’m no different from my mother, but our ones are different from me.”

“You’re no different from your mother?”Mrs Sharpe looked at her. “Who’re you kidding? Could you see your mother round here doin’ what we’re doing?”

“No,” Margaret replied. “But then she never got the chance: a year ago I couldn’t even see myself doing what we’re doing.”

She got slowly to her feet. “And now I suppose we better get back to our oul’ lads. Mine’s only started to get used to being married to me. And,” she looked at Mrs Sharpe with a smile in her eyes, “he ain’t seen nothing yet.”

They laughed together as they locked up the school for the night. Outside, people were gathered at barricades and street corners. They all greeted Margaret and Mrs Sharpe as they passed.
At Mrs Sharpe’s the two women parted and Margaret walked slowly up the street. She was tired, middle-aged and cheerful as she made her way home to liberate her husband.

Geordie Mayne lived in Urney Street, one of a network of narrow streets which stretched from Cupar Street, in the shadow of Clonard Monastery, to the Shankill Road. I don’t know where Geordie is now or even if he’s living or dead, but I think of him often. Though I knew him only for a short time many years ago, Geordie is one of those characters who might come into your life briefly but never really leave you afterwards.

Urney Street is probably gone now. I haven’t been there in twenty years, and all that side of the Shankill has disappeared since then as part of the redevelopment of the area. Part of the infamous Peace Line follows the route that Cupar Street used to take. Before the Peace Line was erected, Lawnbrook Avenue joined Cupar Street to the Shankill Road. Cupar Street used to run from the Falls Road up until it met Lawnbrook Avenue, then it swung left and ran on to the Springfield Road. Only as I try to place the old streets do I realise how much the place has changed this last twenty years, and how little distance there really is between the Falls and the Shankill. For all that closeness there might as well be a thousand miles between them.

When we were kids we used to take short cuts up Cupar Street from the Falls to the Springfield Road. Catholics lived in the bottom end of Cupar Street nearest the Falls; there were one or two in the middle of Cupar Street, too, but the rest were mainly Protestants
till you got up past Lawnbrook Avenue; and from there to the Springfield Road was all Catholic again. The streets going up the Springfield Road on the righthand side were Protestant and the ones on the lefthand side up as far as the Flush were Catholic. After that both sides were nearly all Protestant until you got to Ballymurphy.

When we were kids we paid no heed to these territorial niceties, though once or twice during the Orange marching season we’d get chased. Around about the Twelfth of July and at other appropriate dates, the Orangemen marched through many of those streets, Catholic and Protestant alike. The Catholic ones got special attention, as did individual Catholic houses, with the marching bands and their followers, sometimes the worse for drink, exciting themselves with enthusiastic renderings of Orange tunes as they passed by. The Mackie’s workers also passed that way twice daily, an especially large contingent making its way from the Shankill along Cupar Street to Mackie’s Foundry. The largest engineering works in the city was surrounded by Catholic streets, but it employed very few Catholics.

Often bemused by expressions such as Catholic street and Protestant area, I find myself nonetheless using the very same expressions. How could a house be Catholic or Protestant? Yet when it comes to writing about the reality it’s hard to find other words. Though loath to do so, I use the terms Catholic and Protestant here to encompass the various elements who make up the Unionist and non-Unionist citizens of this state.

It wasn’t my intention to tell you all this. I could write a book about the
craic
I had as a child making my way in and out of all those wee streets on the way back and forth to school or the Boys’ Confraternity in Clonard or even down at the Springfield Road dam fishing for spricks, but that’s not what I set out to tell you about. I set out to tell you about Geordie Mayne of Urney Street. Geordie was an Orangeman, nominally at least. He never talked about it to me except on the occasion when he told me that he was one. His lodge was The Pride of the Shankill Loyal Orange Lodge, I think, though it’s hard to be sure after all this time.

I only knew Geordie for a couple of weeks, but even though that may seem too short a time to make a judgement I could never imagine him as a zealot or a bigot. You get so that you can tell, and by my reckoning Geordie wasn’t the worst. He was a driver for a big drinks firm: that’s how I met him. I was on the run at the time. It was almost Christmas 1969, and I had been running about like a blue-arsed fly since early summer. I hadn’t worked since July, we weren’t getting any money except a few bob every so often for smokes, so things were pretty rough. But it was an exciting time: I was only twenty-one and I was one of a dozen young men and women who were up to their necks in trying to sort things out.

To say that I was on the run is to exaggerate a little. I wasn’t wanted for anything, but I wasn’t taking any chances either. I hadn’t slept at home since the end of May when the RUC had invaded Hooker Street in Ardoyne and there had been a night or two of sporadic rioting. Most of us who were politically active started to take precautions at that time. We were expecting internment or worse as the civil rights agitation and the reaction against it continued to escalate. Everything came to a head in August, including internment, and in Belfast the conflict had been particularly sharp around Cupar Street. This abated a little, but we thought it was only a temporary respite: with the British army on the streets it couldn’t be long till things hotted up again. In the meantime we were not making ourselves too available.

Conway Street, Cupar Street at the Falls Road end and all of Norfolk Street had been completely burned out on the first night of the August pogrom; further up, near the monastery, Bombay Street was gutted on the following night. These were all Catholic streets. Urney Street was just a stone’s throw from Bombay Street; that is, if you were a stone thrower.

The drinks company Geordie worked for was taking on extra help to cope with the Christmas rush, and a few of us went up to the head office on the Glen Road on spec one morning; as luck would have it I got a start, together with big Eamonn and two
others. I was told to report to the store down in Cullingtree Road the next morning and it was there that I met Geordie.

He saw me before I saw him. I was standing in the big yard among all the vans and lorries and I heard this voice shouting: “Joe…Joe Moody.”

I paid no attention.

“Hi, boy! Is your name Joe Moody?” the voice repeated.

With a start I realised that that was indeed my name, or at least it was the bum name I’d given when I’d applied for the job.

“Sorry,” I stammered.

“I thought you were corned beef. C’mon over here.”

I did as instructed and found myself beside a well-built, red-haired man in his late thirties. He was standing at the back of a large empty van.

“Let’s go, our kid. My name’s Geordie Mayne. We’ll be working together. We’re late. Have you clocked in? Do it over there and then let’s get this thing loaded up.”

He handed me a sheaf of dockets.

“Pack them in that order. Start from the back. I’ll only be a minute.”

He disappeared into the back of the store. I had hardly started to load the van when he arrived back. Between the two of us we weren’t long packing in the cartons and crates of wines and spirits and then we were off, Geordie cheerfully saluting the men on barricade duty at the end of the street as they waved us out of the Falls area and into the rest of the world.

Geordie and I spent most of our first day together delivering our load to off-licences and public houses in the city centre. I was nervous of being recognised because I had worked in a bar there, but luckily it got its deliveries from a different firm. It was the first day I had been in the city centre since August; except for the one trip to Dublin and one up to Derry, I had spent all my time behind the barricades. It was disconcerting to find that, apart from the unusual sight of British soldiers with their cheerful, arrogant voices, life in the centre of Belfast, or at least its licenced
premises, appeared unaffected by the upheavals of the past few months. It was also strange as we made our deliveries to catch glimpses on television of news coverage about the very areas and issues I was so involved in and familiar with. Looked at from outside through the television screen, the familiar scenes might as well have been in another country.

Geordie and I said nothing of any of this to one another. That was a strange experience for me, too. My life had been so full of the cut-and-thrust of analysis, argument and counter-argument about everything that affected the political situation that I found it difficult to restrain myself from commenting on events to this stranger. Indeed, emerging from the close camaraderie of my closed world, as I had done only that morning, I found it unusual even to be with a stranger. Over a lunch of soup and bread rolls in the Harp Bar in High Street, I listened to the midday news on the BBC’s Radio Ulster while all the time pretending indifference. The lead item was a story about an IRA convention and media speculation about a republican split. It would be nightfall before I would be able to check this out for myself, though a few times during the day I almost left Geordie in his world of cheerful pubs and publicans for the security of the ghettos.

The next few days followed a similar pattern. Each morning started with Geordie absenting himself for a few minutes to the back of the store while I started loading up the van. Then we were off from within the no-go areas and into the city centre. By the end of the first week the two of us were like old friends. Our avoidance of political topics, even of the most pressing nature, that unspoken and much-used form of political protection and survival developed through expediency, had in its own way been a political indicator, a signal, that we came from “different sides”.

In the middle of the second week Geordie broke our mutual and instinctive silence on this issue when with a laugh he handed me that morning’s dockets. “Well, our kid, this is your lucky day. You’re going to see how the other half lives. We’re for the Shankill.”

My obvious alarm fueled his amusement.

“Oh, aye,” he guffawed. “It’s all right for me to traipse up and down the Falls every day, but my wee Fenian friend doesn’t want to return the favour.”

I was going to tell him that nobody from the Falls went up the Shankill burning down houses but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I didn’t want to go up the Shankill either. I was in a quandary and set about loading up our deliveries with a heavy heart. After I had only two of the cartons loaded I went to the back of the store to tell Geordie that I was jacking it in. He was in the wee office with oul’ Harry the storeman. Each of them had a glass of spirits in his hand. Geordie saw me coming and offered his to me.

“Here, our kid, it’s best Jamaicay rum. A bit of Dutch courage never did anyone any harm.”

“Nawh, thanks, Geordie, I don’t drink spirits. I need to talk to you for a minute…”

“If it’s about today’s deliveries, you’ve nothing to worry about. We’ve only one delivery up the Shankill, and don’t be thinking of not going ’cos you’ll end up out on your arse. It’s company policy that mixed crews deliver all over the town. Isn’t that right, Harry?”

Harry nodded in agreement.

“C’mon, our kid. I’ll do the delivery for you. Okay? You can sit in the van. How’s that grab you? Can’t be fairer than that, can I, Harry?”

“Nope,” Harry grunted. They drained their glasses.

“I’ll take a few beers for the child, Harry,” Geordie said over his shoulder as he and I walked back to the van.

“You know where they are,” said Harry.

“Let’s go,” said Geordie to me. “It’s not every day a wee Fenian like you gets on to the best road in Belfast…” he grabbed me around the neck “… and off it again in one piece. Hahaha.”

That’s how I ended up on the Shankill. It wasn’t so bad, but before I tell you about that, in case I forget, from then on, each
morning when Geordie returned from the back of the store after getting his “wee drop of starting fuel”, he always had a few bottles of beer for me.

Anyway, back to the job in hand. As Geordie said, we only had the one order on the Shankill. It was to the Long Bar. We drove up by Unity Flats and on to Peter’s Hill. There were no signs of barricades like the ones on the Falls, and apart from a patrolling RUC Land-Rover and two British army jeeps, the road was the same as it had always seemed to me. Busy and prosperous and coming awake in the early winter morning sunshine.

A few months earlier, in October, the place had erupted in protest at the news that the B-Specials were to be disbanded. The protesters had killed one RUC man and wounded three others; thirteen British soldiers had been injured. In a night of heavy gun-fighting along the Shankill Road, the British had killed two civilians and wounded twenty others. Since then there had been frequent protests here against the existence of no-go areas in Catholic parts of Belfast and Derry.

Mindful of all this, I perched uneasily in the front of the van, ready at a second’s notice to spring into Geordie’s seat and drive like the blazes back whence I came. I needn’t have worried. Geordie was back in moments. As he climbed into the driver’s seat he threw me a packet of cigarettes.

“There’s your Christmas box, our kid. I told them I had a wee Fenian out here and that you were dying for a smoke.”

Then he took me completely by surprise.

“Do y’ fancy a fish supper? It’s all right! We eat fish on Friday as well. Hold on!”

And before I could say anything he had left me again as he sprinted from the van into the Eagle Supper Saloon.

“I never got any breakfast,” he explained on his return. “We’ll go ’round to my house. There’s nobody in.”

I said nothing as we turned into Westmoreland Street and in through a myriad of backstreets till we arrived in Urney Street. Here the tension was palpable, for me at least. Geordie’s house
was no different from ours. A two-bedroomed house with a toilet in the backyard and a modernised scullery. Only for the picture of the British queen, I could have been in my own street. I buttered rounds of plain white bread and we wolfed down our fish suppers with lashings of Geordie’s tea.

Afterwards, my confidence restored slightly, while Geordie was turning the van in the narrow street I walked down to the corner and gazed along the desolation of Cupar Street up towards what remained of Bombay Street. A British soldier in a sandbagged emplacement greeted me in a John Lennon accent.

“’Lo, moite. How’s about you?”

I ignored him and stood momentarily immersed in the bleak pitifulness of it all, from the charred remains of the small houses to where the world-weary slopes of Divis Mountain gazed benignly in their winter greenness down on us where we slunk, blighted, below the wise steeples of Clonard. It was Geordie’s impatient honking of the horn that shook me out of my reverie. I nodded to the British soldier as I departed. This time he ignored me.