A Belfast Child

by John Chambers

  The funfair at Millisle was always a highlight of our time away. In terms of size it was hardly Blackpool Pleasure Beach, but to us it was a mecca. Sometimes we’d walk the two miles there from Ballyferris along the strand and as it came into view Wee Sam, Pickle, David and I would race over the sand dunes in a bid to get there first. We wanted to go on everything, all at once, and Dad always had to calm us down by reminding us that we had hours there. For me, the best part was the dodgem cars and I drove like a suicide pilot as I crashed into everyone. Dad spent time trying to win us presents from the stall and when we’d all got something we knew he’d exhausted his money and it was time to go. Again, we’d hit the beach for a picnic while Dad and his brothers visited Millisle’s various pubs, talking to people they knew from Glencairn, the Shankill and beyond.

  I never wanted these holidays to end and I was in despair when the final day eventually arrived. I hated packing my scruffy little suitcase with the clothes I knew I wouldn’t see much of until the same time the following year. I pressed my T-shirt to my face and inhaled the mixture of sun cream, sea water and fried breakfasts. It was a smell I wanted to remember forever. Then, as the hours ticked down to departure, I’d take a walk along the beach, hoping that our bus or train would break down. I’d even consider hiding until everyone had left, then I could find an empty caravan and live in it undetected. We often hid in the old bomb shelter by the side of the caravan park, hoping not to be discovered.

  Such plans came to nothing, of course, and soon we were trudging to the station, our only possessions being a case of dirty clothes and wonderful memories. As the bus pulled away towards Belfast I’d shed a few silent tears as I said goodbye to Ballyferris and the funfair at Millisle until next year, consoling myself with the thought it would only be 364 days until I was here again.

  It didn’t take long to adjust to life back in Glencairn. After a day or so wishing I was still down on the beach I was soon into the swing of playing down by the river, in Fernhill House, which was derelict at the time, or in the fields. Even the inevitable crawl back to school wasn’t so bad because I loved my primary, Fernhill. History was my favourite subject, followed by English. By this time I was starting to take an interest in God – the Protestant version, of course – and as well as praying very hard in school assembly (my personal prayers were for the IRA to be defeated, and all Catholics assigned to hell with the Antichrist in Rome) I also attended Sunday School and eventually became a member of the Boys’ Brigade.

  The singing of hymns in assembly became the focus for our growing sectarian attitudes towards Catholics. As I headed towards my tenth birthday my views about the ‘Fenians’ were definitely hardening. Now I see how intolerant I was, but back then everything seemed to be dominated by the conflict going on all around us and it engulfed every aspect of our daily lives. To us it was simply black and white: they hated us, we hated them and never the twain should meet. The daily news seemed a never-ending nightmare of IRA murder and slaughter, while Loyalist anger and outrage fed the hatred and paranoia between our two warring tribes.

  Kids growing up in wars tend to be marked for life by the experience, and in Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant kids who lived close to the violence were no exception. When the hymn ‘Sing Hosanna’ was sung at school, a gaggle of us would quietly mutter an alternative version that someone had heard somewhere, and had passed on to the rest of us:

  Give me bullets in my gun, keep it firing

  Give me bullets in my gun I pray

  Give me bullets in my gun and we’ll shoot them everyone

  The members of the IRA

  Sing Hosanna, Sing Hosanna, etc

  If the headmaster, Mr Wilson, heard us singing this version he would throw us a hard look but wouldn’t stop the service. He was a timid man and possibly didn’t want to stir up any problems between him and the local paramilitaries who were now acting as a vigilante force across the estate. There were also dark rumours he was a Catholic, or had Catholic blood of some description. No wonder he looked so nervous . . .

  To hear such words come out of the mouths of young children now would rightly be shocking, but they were simply a reflection of the times and the place I lived in. I’ve no doubt that kids on the Falls Road probably sang something similar, except they’d replace ‘IRA’ with ‘UDA’. All of us, Catholic and Protestant, were caught up in the terrible events that were happening in Belfast and beyond. We weren’t ordinary kids who could play together in the same street without considering what religion we belonged to, as children in England or Wales could. In Northern Ireland we were all part of one tribe or the other, and we had no business in each other’s lives.

  In 1974, when I was eight, the Ulster Workers’ Council called a strike in protest about a power-sharing agreement proposed by the British and Irish governments. Loyalists saw this as a complete sell-out to the IRA and, after a series of national strikes and bombings, managed to bring down the Northern Ireland Assembly before it had even really got going. You could almost taste the anger on Glencairn and the Shankill as the paramilitaries came out of the shadows, parading in uniform while carrying weapons. People started panic-buying after a few days and shops ran out of bread, milk and other essentials that weren’t being delivered due to the strike. We were bracing ourselves for all out civil war. There were bombings, shootings and intimidation, and I remember standing on the hill above our house while watching plumes of smoke rise into the air as bombs exploded in Belfast city centre. The whole skyline seemed to be on fire and it reminded me of the hell Reverend Lewis was always banging on about in church. We really thought we would be invaded by Republicans and Free Staters (Northern Ireland slang for Southern Irish people) and that our lives would change forever. From then on I hated Catholics with a passion for their passive support of the IRA and other Republican terrorists, and would celebrate if I heard that an IRA man had been killed by the army or one of ours.

  Trouble came very close to home on many occasions. I recall a neighbour, a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), who discovered an IRA bomb under his car one morning as he prepared to go to work. We were all evacuated to the local community centre and forbidden from going to school. That itself was exciting enough, but this was on another scale: the guy in question lived a few doors down from us. Every morning he would drive his kids to school and we would walk past his car. It was lucky that he checked the vehicle before getting in that morning or he and his kids, and anyone else passing by, could have been killed. This reinforced our hatred of the IRA and showed their total disregard for the lives of innocent people, including children.

  And yet, try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate the deaths of innocent Catholics. Even as a wee boy I knew there was something deeply wrong about such killings. It frightened me that you could be walking along the street, minding your own business, and next you could be dead, the victim of a gun or a bomb. Somehow, that seemed against the ‘rules’. When a Republican or Loyalist member was killed I viewed this as a by-product of the ongoing war and I understood that if you live by the sword then there’s a chance you will die by the sword, and that was perfectly acceptable in my world.

  As I lay in bed, listening to the ‘thud’ of explosions across the city I imagined how I’d feel if my sisters or brother, or any of my cousins, were killed by armed men. And I knew instinctively that there were other kids in this city – kids with different surnames to mine, kids who attended other churches, yet kids nonetheless – who felt the same way.

  So I continued praying; praying that the IRA would be defeated, but also that no one I knew – or no more innocent people – would be killed as a result. At church, Reverend Lewis always preached peace and at Sunday School afterwards he would tolerate no talk of ‘Taigs’, ‘Fenians’ or whatever. As the pastor on a Loyalist estate, he walked a very fine line indeed but he approached everything from a deeply Christian perspective and was respected by the whole community as a result. ‘We’re all the sam
e in God’s eyes, John,’ he’d say to me. ‘We’re all God’s children.’ While I considered that God was a Loyalist, his words stuck with me.

  My growing interest in Christianity didn’t seem to prevent me becoming, at times, a ‘wee little shit’. Granny and Aunty Jacky were in the habit of sending me and David down to the local shop for the ‘messages’, i.e., that day’s shopping for our tea. At first, we took the list, loaded up the basket and paid for everything religiously. After a while, however, we noticed that the shopkeeper wasn’t always paying attention to us the way he maybe should’ve done. It seemed easy to slip a chocolate bar or a small packet of sweets into a jeans pocket, smiling all the while at the oblivious shopkeeper. From there, we graduated to bigger and better stuff, though once we were away and looking at our haul, we’d wonder how to open a tin of baked beans without having to go back to lift a tin opener. The shopkeeper himself was a member of the church and a devotee of the Reverend Lewis, and none of us kids really liked him. We would collect all the empty bottles from Grouchos, line them up against the shop wall and throw stones at them, which pissed him off mightily.

  Inevitably, there was payback for this thievery. One day, in my haste to get out of the shop with my swag, a packet of sausages fell out of the folds of my jumper and slithered slowly and shamelessly on to the shop floor. The shopkeeper looked at me and David, then quickly moved towards the door to block any sign of escape. There were other customers in the shop and one of these was dispatched to find the Reverend Lewis. He arrived, and frowned deeply when he recognised the pair of sobbing shoplifters in front of him.

  ‘I find this hard to believe of you, John Chambers,’ he said. ‘Have you listened to anything I’ve said at Sunday School?’

  Miserably, I nodded. ‘I know it’s wrong to steal, Reverend Lewis,’ I sniffed.

  ‘Then why did you do it, might I ask?’

  I couldn’t say, ‘because it’s easy’. I couldn’t admit to the fact that I enjoyed the thrill of it.

  ‘It’s cos we’re hungry, Reverend Lewis. We’ve no food in the house.’

  For a second, Reverend Lewis looked at us pityingly. Then his eyes narrowed. ‘So you’re saying your grandmother is not feeding you?’ he said.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, because I knew what would come next.

  ‘In that case,’ said Reverend Lewis, ‘I think we’ll all take a walk up the road to your granny’s and see what’s going on.’ I felt like a condemned man walking to the gas chamber. It was the longest journey of my life.

  Predictably, Granny was mortified when she was questioned about our behaviour. Reverend Lewis had barely put a foot out of her door when the thrashing started. We were thumped all round her living room as Granny pursued us with the energy of someone half her age. That was the last time we stole from the local shop, but it certainly wasn’t the last time I got into trouble.

  Then there was the fighting. I wasn’t a naturally violent child and I’d probably missed my graduation from the school of hard knocks due to being in hospital so much, but despite problems with my leg I could look after myself when necessary. On Glencairn there were always enemies from elsewhere in the estate to cause problems; you had to learn to fight and stand up for yourself otherwise your life could be hell. I once clobbered someone outside church who’d been picking on our David and again, Reverend Lewis was called to intervene. Another time, Wee Sam accidentally knocked into a boy nicknamed Jimbo at school. He was a good fighter and didn’t take kindly to Wee Sam’s clumsiness. There was a scuffle and at some stage Wee Sam managed to catch Jimbo a blow to the face. He was not happy, to put it mildly, and Wee Sam was warned this wasn’t the end of the matter. There would be a re-match after school and within seconds every pupil knew what would happen as soon as the bell went.

  I was excited by the fixture and took on the role of Wee Sam’s manager, informing his opponent that our Sam was more than happy to have a fair dig in the park after school was out. Sam was silent and seemed unenthusiastic, which I somehow took to be a sign of strength. A poor assumption on my part, because when the hordes of kids arrived at the park as soon as 3.15 p.m. arrived Wee Sam was nowhere to be seen. Jimbo was psyching himself up to do his worst and I was beginning to run out of excuses for my cousin, who showed no sign of turning up.

  Now they were here the crowd expected something. Then someone shouted, ‘If yer Sam isn’t here, maybe you could fight Jimbo, Chambers, so you could?’

  I could have thumped the fool who suggested this, a skinny little runt who loved to stir things up but would run a mile if you said boo to him.

  ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ rang out from the crowd and with a heavy heart I realised there was to be no escape.

  I hadn’t anticipated this unfortunate turn of events, but the crowd drew nearer and I knew I couldn’t escape without shaming myself forever in their eyes. They wanted blood, and they didn’t care whose it was. Suddenly, I felt a blow to my face like a rock had been hurled against it, followed by a gut-wrenching punch to the stomach. All Jimbo’s pent-up energy was now directed solely at me. I was down on the ground as Jimbo knocked lumps out of me, cheered on by the bloodthirsty, enthusiastic crowd. The initial shock paralysed me for a few seconds but quickly recovering my composure I started to fight back. I ducked and dived and generally avoided the worst of Jimbo’s rage. He was a dirty fighter, pulling my hair, nipping my neck, pushing his fingers in my eyes and squeezing the hell out of my balls. This made me very mad indeed and soon I was getting the upper hand as I pinned him down and pummelled him, banging his head on the ground.

  The pair of us were quickly spent and some amateur referee in the crowd declared a draw. Jimbo and I were happy with that; we’d both given as good as we’d got without losing face. Jimbo was still one of the school’s best fighters and hard men and my reputation went up considerably. My new-found respect won me a few friends, including Jimbo himself.

  As for Wee Sam, the jammy git, it transpired that our teacher Miss Curry had got wind of the fight and had detained Sam in detention as a means of avoiding it. Sam was delighted: his reputation was intact and he walked home unbloodied.

  CHAPTER 5

  T

  oday, when I see news reports from war zones across the world I tend not to concentrate on what the journalist is saying or what the armed men behind them are doing. I don’t look at the battered buildings, the broken-down cars, the shattered landscape. Instead, I watch the children. I notice their expressions as they play in the rubble, aware of and yet almost indifferent to the violence all around them. This is their ‘normal’, just as the killing zone of West Belfast in the 1970s was mine.

  Right across Northern Ireland, especially in the paramilitary-dominated ghettos of Belfast and Londonderry, kids like us played around burned-out buildings, torched cars, teased soldiers, threw stones at police vehicles and generally ran feral across a wild, broken country. By the age of ten I’d grown used to seeing news reports filled with death, violence and division, but unlike other kids in mainland UK watching the same reports, I got up in the morning to go to school and stepped out of my front door into this very same landscape – like walking on to the set of a war film, day after day.

  By this age I’d heard shots ring out and seen the injuries caused by bullets and beatings. But nothing could’ve prepared me for the scene outside Glencairn’s community centre on Forthriver Road on an overcast morning in October 1976. Before heading to school I polished off my cornflakes and, kicking and protesting as ever, had my face wiped by Granny, who spat on a handkerchief and assaulted my grubby mush with it. ‘Come here, ye dirty wee hallion!’ she shouted as she grabbed me for the unwanted daily routine. Struggle over, I let myself out of the front door and walked the few doors to Uncle Rab’s to call for Wee Sam.

  He too had succumbed to the humiliating last-minute face scrub from Aunty Jacky and as we trudged down his garden path and on to the main road through the est
ate we muttered darkly about our so-called elders and betters.

  We’d only walked a few yards when up ahead we noticed a gathering of green and grey Land Rovers and Saracen armoured cars, which we nicknamed ‘Pigs’. That meant only one thing: that the RUC and the army were out in force. To the side stood a small knot of onlookers, mostly women on their way to school, the wee ones holding their hands. This group had turned away from the scene and were speaking together. As we approached, we heard murmurs from the women and the occasional shaking of a scarfed head.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ said Wee Sam, wide-eyed, ‘somebody musta gotten kilt up there. Look at all the peelers around.’

  A knot of fear tightened in my stomach as we approached the scene. Despite being on supposedly ‘safe’ Loyalist territory, grim-faced soldiers gripped their SLRs tightly while uniformed police from the RUC spoke into radios and plain-clothes detectives huddled in a group. Judging by the mood hanging over the community centre on this cold, grey morning, we were about to see something unprecedented.

  Maybe we should’ve walked on by. But we were just wee boys. Filled with childish curiosity we rubbernecked all the time. ‘C’mon,’ said Sam, grabbing me by the sleeve of my snorkel jacket, ‘let’s see what’s going on!’

  We ducked past the group of clucking housewives and right up to a tall soldier in full battledress. ‘Hey mister, what’s happenin’?’ I asked. ‘Is somebody dead?’

  The soldier looked down on us, not unkindly. We weren’t his enemy. Maybe he viewed similar-aged boys from the Catholic areas of Ardoyne and Andersonstown in a different way, but up here we were the good guys. Supposedly.

  ‘If I were you two I’d bugger off to school pronto,’ he said, in a northern English voice. ‘There’s nowt to look at here.’