A Belfast Child

by John Chambers

  But even as I seemed to be settling down and coming to terms with losing Dad while enjoying living with Uncle Rab and Aunty Jacky, there were fresh storm clouds on the horizon. The adults downstairs were talking again. Whiskey loosened their tongues and I would listen as they talked. The walls of Glencairn’s houses were thin and I could make out much of what they were saying. They were talking about my mother.

  Immediately I tuned in. It wasn’t an argument as such, just an exchange of views. It wouldn’t be right for the we’ans to meet their mammy’s family, said one voice. Another wondered where that mammy was now, and was she still a practising Catholic?

  ‘Aye, a Taig,’ said a male voice.

  ‘OK,’ said a female, ‘no need for that. After all, it’s their mother we’re talking about.’

  My mother? A Catholic? A dirty Taig? A clammy feeling crept up my spine and I felt sick. It couldn’t be right. Surely I’d heard wrong. But no. They were still talking about her, describing her as ‘one of the other lot’.

  ‘Ach, we’ll never see her in Belfast again,’ said one voice. ‘She’s away, and the we’ans are Protestants now. That’s all there is to it. Let sleeping dogs lie.’

  Perhaps the speaker had also nodded towards the ceiling because after that they spoke only in hushed whispers.

  But I’d heard and it rocked my world. I now knew my mother was a Catholic, and I felt revulsion at the very thought of having ‘their’ blood. How could I ever tell anyone I was part-Catholic? Of course I couldn’t tell anyone, ever. I’d seen what happened to people who’d associated with Catholics. I’d also seen what happened to Catholics who’d been brought up to the estate. If the Butchers knew I was part-Catholic, I thought, I’d be dragged from my bed and carved up by knives. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. My throat felt tight and my heart was racing.

  My mother was a Catholic. A dirty Taig. A filthy Fenian.

  A Republican, out to kill every Loyalist and take over Northern Ireland. The enemy, now and forever.

  And the other thing I now knew about my Catholic mother was that she could still be alive. That knowledge scared me to death. I couldn’t discuss it with anyone, because talk like that was dangerous. For the sake of everyone, I would have to bottle up and hide away the truth.

  CHAPTER 7

  E

  ven the river beside the park ran thick with blood. Or at least that’s what we thought when we went to play in it one day and found it running a sticky, sickly bright red. We had been playing up at Robin’s Well, an old well by a derelict cottage at the top of a winding road that ran all the way up the mountains behind the park, and had cut through the fields so we could follow the river downstream when suddenly the river turned red . . .

  ‘Jesus,’ said Wee Sam, appalled. ‘Wonder what happened?’

  ‘There must be bodies up the river,’ Pickle announced finally. ‘I wonder if it’s the Butchers again?’

  ‘Let’s go look.’

  We wandered up the river. The water was still flowing a steady red, but there were no signs of any bloodied victims. Even so, I turned away and walked back towards Uncle Rab and Aunty Jacky’s. Even the word ‘blood’ appalled me, especially now that I knew I had ‘Catholic blood’. I felt unclean, tainted, impure. As discoloured as the once-clear river now flowing past us; a bloody, muddy mess of a thing.

  Aunty Jacky could shed no light on the dramatic change to the colour of the water. ‘I’d keep away from there, boys,’ she said. ‘You never know what’s been tipped in it.’

  She said no more, but I think I understood. Since that first gruesome day in 1976, several more victims of the Shankill Butchers had been dumped up in Glencairn, their battered bodies slashed with knives. Even for the standards of the time these murders were particularly vicious and sectarian and hung like a dark cloud over all of Belfast, especially in Catholic areas. Even some Protestants accidentally became victims of a psychopathic gang bent on killing innocent Catholics. Each time another body was found in Glencairn I felt revulsion and fear – not just because the Butchers were bogeyman who haunted all our dreams, but because they might now somehow find out about me, my brother and sisters, and come to kill us all because of who we were.

  The idea of this frightened me so much that I knew I had to tell someone I truly trusted. In private, I mentioned to Margaret, now fifteen, that I knew we were part-Catholic.

  ‘We are, aren’t we?’ I said. ‘Our mammy was a Catholic. I heard them talking. It’s true, right?’

  Wide-eyed, Margaret nodded back. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I’ve always known. So I asked my granny and she said it was right, and that none of youse should know. John, you have to promise on Daddy’s grave that you’ll never tell anyone. It’s really dangerous. Do you understand? Do you promise?’

  I nodded. I was only eleven or twelve but I knew full well what it meant to be the ‘wrong’ religion in this city. Also, I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was in total denial. I was a Protestant, and proud of it. I didn’t want to be anything else, especially through no fault of my own.

  ‘What was Daddy thinking?’ I asked Margaret. ‘Why did he go wi’ one of them? A Catholic.’ I spat out the word in disgust.

  Margaret shrugged her shoulders. ‘Granny won’t say,’ she said. ‘None of them will. And maybe that’s for the best, John. You just have to forget about it. Forget about her. We’re all Protestant now and that’s what matters. Weren’t you rechristened into the Protestant church at St Andrews?’

  Of course. Now it made sense. David and I had been taken there one Sunday a few years previously, without explanation, and stood feeling sheepish and embarrassed as Reverend Lewis bent our heads over the font and splashed us with water while saying a prayer. I’d wondered why this had happened. Now I understood.

  Margaret was streetwise and smart, and had her head screwed on. She wanted her own home. And when she got it, she said, she’d try to look after us all. I clung on to that idea, hoping that one day we’d all be together again under the same roof.

  ‘I know summin’ else too,’ I said. ‘Me ma’s still alive, so she is.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ demanded Margaret.

  ‘I don’t. Not for sure. But I just think she is. ‘

  Margaret looked at me. ‘Who’s to say?’ she said finally. ‘Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. And if she is, she’s not doing much to look after us, is she?’

  I had a feeling Margaret knew a bit more than she was letting on. But she was my oldest sister and she wouldn’t put up with my line of questioning for too long. ‘Like I said before, John,’ she said, tight-lipped, ‘some things are best forgotten about. Stop asking questions, or you’ll get us all into trouble.’

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t one to forget easily. The pain of losing my dad came back to me in my dreams, night after night. I would hear him gently call my name and after a lengthy search around the house I’d hear that he was in the attic. Climbing the steps, I’d notice a hand coming down and helping me the rest of the way up. In the loft, I’d see that Dad had a camp bed, a gas stove and a kettle. He was hiding out up here, and I smiled with relief that he wasn’t dead at all. In the dream, he’d always talk to me for a while, then ask me not to tell anyone where he was. The dream always ended with me crying and pleading for Dad to come down.

  ‘John, John,’ he’d say, ‘don’t cry, wee man. Everything’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

  I’d wake up out of the dream, crying for real. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ Wee Sam would say. Constantly woken up by my talking, shouting or crying in my sleep, he’d be pissed off with me, I could always tell. We were getting a bit older and were arguing and scrapping more frequently. In truth, we had become as close as brothers, but like brothers our rivalry had deepened. And I had this same dream for about three years after Dad’s death and it always left me feeling sad and utterly depressed.

  A few days later, we headed back to the river to see if it had cleared up and to our astonis
hment, we discovered that the blood-red had now become bruise-purple.

  ‘What’s feckin’ up with this water?’ said Wee Sam. ‘What’s goin’ on with it?’

  ‘I think it’s magic,’ I said. I’d just read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and now I believed in magic. ‘It’s like there’s a rainbow in it. It’s the Rainbow River.’

  ‘You’re a feckin’ eejit,’ observed Wee Sam, and with that we were scuffling and tussling on the riverbank, each trying to shove the other into the mysterious water. The day after we were back. Now it was blue. On subsequent days it was yellow, then green, then back to red. I was right. There was magic in this river and no amount of Wee Sam’s taunting would tell me otherwise.

  Aunty Jacky was so fed up with our bickering that she eventually ordered us out of the house and into the front garden.

  ‘Right, I’m done wi’ youse two!’ she shouted. ‘You’re doing my head in. It’s about time you sorted this out once and for all like men. Into the garden. We’re going to have a boxing match.’ Wee Sam and I had been members of the boxing club up in Highfield and we knew some basic boxing moves due to our training there.

  As ever, word spread like wildfire that the Chambers cousins were going to battle it out. Within minutes, dozens of scruffy kids just like us were gathered at the front gate and some adults drifted over with beer in their hands and fags hanging from their mouths, eager for the show to start. It was a beautiful sunny day and the good folk of Glencairn loved nothing more than a good fair dig.

  Like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier we stripped off our shirts and squared up to each other. Wee Sam was the better fighter, for sure, but everyone knew that I didn’t go under easily. After a few moments prowling around each other Wee Sam lashed out, connected a blow to my cheek and suddenly we were in the thick of it, digging the hell out of each other. While our audience screamed and shouted, roaring their enthusiasm and howling for blood, some of the adults were placing bets on who would win. Sam and I were thrashing it out on the grass, kicking, punching, strangling and biting, fighting Glencairn style, when we became aware of a sudden silence and a pair of black-trousered legs standing over us.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, what are you doing? Stop that now!’ shouted a commanding voice. ‘Don’t you think there’s enough fighting in this country without you two carrying on?’

  Panting and dishevelled, we stopped battling and stared up. Reverend Lewis looked down on us from upon high. ‘Get up, the pair of you,’ he said. ‘This is no way to sort your troubles out.’

  We lifted ourselves from the grass in a state of shame. Reverend Lewis told the crowd to go home. Respectfully, they obeyed his order.

  ‘You two are cousins,’ he said, turning to us. ‘How did you get into this mess?’

  ‘My ma told us to sort it out in the ring,’ replied Sam, ‘and so we did.’

  On cue, Aunty Jacky reappeared at the front door looking shame-faced. Reverend Lewis walked up the path and had a quiet word with her, gesturing over his shoulder towards us a couple of times. Then he walked back the way he came, shaking his head in disappointment.

  ‘There will be no more fighting between you two,’ he said. ‘If you want to go to heaven one day, you’ll behave yourselves. God sees everything. Understood?’

  We nodded and the Reverend walked off towards St Andrew’s Church. I wondered how he always seemed to know when there was trouble brewing. Maybe God told him, I thought, and that night I prayed extra hard that God would forgive me and that I’d earn a place in heaven with Dad and Shep. Before I went to sleep I always knelt at the foot of the bed and asked God to help the poor and unfortunate, and stop the killing of innocent people in Northern Ireland, but most of all that He reunite us as a family once again. Deep down, I knew my prayer would never be answered but still I kept trying, in case miracles did really happen.

  And as for the ‘Rainbow River’ . . . well, the colour change in the water wasn’t ‘magic’, dead bodies or even divine intervention after all. A few months after we witnessed the spectacle, we discovered that a clothing factory somewhere upstream from Glencairn had been illegally tipping its waste materials into the river, which included vast quantities of fabric dye. We were a bit deflated by this mundane explanation but forever after our wee stream was always called the Rainbow River.

  In September 1977, I started my time at Cairnmartin secondary school, a state school that served the communities of Glencairn, Woodvale, Ballygomartin and the upper end of the Shankill. The famous footballer Norman Whiteside (aka the Shankill skinhead) was at the school before going to play for Manchester United, and Wayne McCullough, former world champion boxer, was also a former pupil. As were many future Loyalist leaders, paramilitary members and killers . . .

  It was a huge place, packed full of local kids and very well equipped. It even had its own swimming pool and language lab, courtesy of government money that was being pumped into Northern Ireland at that time in a bid to calm down the violence. There was still plenty of this inside school (and beyond its boundaries, of course) but having a pool went some way at least to cooling off tensions between the hundreds of kids who crammed through its doors every day.

  I’d missed a fair bit of primary school going in and out of hospital and although I loved history and English, a school like Cairnmartin was more a test of survival than a passport to a glittering career. Most kids would just do their time then get a job in the local area, get married, have kids and go straight, while others would sign on to the dole and either waste their lives away or fall into the hands of the paramilitaries. Many of the teachers had no interest in teaching us, trying their best to get through the day until the bell rang and they could escape the madhouse. Miss Walters, the English teacher who all the boys fancied, and Miss Kelly, the drama teacher, were my favourites and always seemed to care more than the others. Mr Wilson, the maths teacher, had a massive lump growing out of the side of his face and was a right bastard. The RE teacher, who we nicknamed ‘Jesus Joe’, couldn’t hide his hatred of us and during his class he would hand out books and told us to copy sections while he sat at the front, reading his Bible and occasionally yelling at us. To come out of school with more than a couple of O levels in an area like ours was bordering on genius.

  A couple of significant things happened in the early years at Cairnmartin. The first was that someone – and I’ve forgotten who – brought in a seven-inch single by an English band I’d never heard of, called The Jam. Even before I’d listened to their music, I knew that this was a band for me. Lean and sharp-suited, the three members stared moodily at the camera while leaning against a wall that sported a spray-paint version of their logo. Immediately this appealed to me – the graffiti, the urban setting, the mean-looking guys in their shades and black ties. Perhaps they looked at bit like the paramilitaries who occasionally paraded on Glencairn. Maybe it was the graffiti – I was so used to seeing ‘UDA’ and ‘UVF’ sprayed up everywhere that ‘The Jam’ was a welcome change.

  But when I heard the music, it spoke to me and my life changed forever. ‘The Modern World’, ‘Down In The Tube Station at Midnight’, ‘Strange Town’ and especially ‘Going Underground’ – three-minute explosions of urban paranoia and anger that fitted exactly with the time and place I was living through. If you lived in Belfast in the late 1970s and you couldn’t understand what The Jam were trying to tell you, in my twelve-year-old opinion there was something wrong with you. And I still feel this way.

  I caught The Jam on Top Of The Pops and I was hooked even deeper. Naturally, I loved the British flags and the red, white and blue target logos atheir colour association with us, the Loyalists. But it wasn’t just that. The Jam were speaking my language; even more so than Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones, homegrown punk bands from Northern Ireland. For me, SLF were too preachy about the Troubles (especially now they were living in London) and The Undertones sang too much about being in love. The Jam struck a course somewhere in between and pulled off masterstroke after
musical masterstroke. I longed for the days that I could have a proper green army parka, a pair of black-and-white bowling shoes and a scooter. For the minute, I was stuck with hand-me-down shirts and flared trousers and a cheap snorkel jacket, complete with fake-fur hood lining. I would have to park the shiny silver Vespa of my dreams firmly in the future, when I would become a full-blown Mod.

  The second thing about school was meeting Billy Smyth. Taller than me – and a bit fatter, maybe – he was a cheery kid with an open, honest face and we hit it off from the moment we met. We were in the same classes and we’d noticed each other doodling the same things on our exercise books – the ‘Jam’ logo and the ‘Walt Jabsco’ ska-man figure used by English two-tone band The Specials, plus various arrows, targets and Union Jacks. We realised we were into the same things and quickly we became best friends and, forty years later, we still are.

  Billy was from the Woodvale area, which we in Glencairn considered ‘posh’. It wasn’t, of course, but the houses were nicer than ours and some people – including Billy’s parents – actually owned their own homes! Hard to believe when so many others, including ourselves, were council tenants, and I guess this is where the ‘posh’ tag came from. In return, the people of Woodvale looked down on us roughnecks and, at first, Billy’s parents were worried that he’d got a mate from the wrong end of West Belfast. When they met me – wee, thin, with a wonky leg but with manners enough – I think they changed their minds and they grew to love me.

  From the off, Billy and I were competitive. We were always scrapping, play-fighting, messing and trying to impress the girls. They’d order us to sketch something in return for a kiss and Billy and I would scribble away furiously to prove who was the best artist. We’d also wind up our teachers something terrible and even at this stage we were probably being written off as no-hopers by those in charge. For now, though, we were having fun – and boy, did I need some fun at that stage of my life, because my domestic circumstances certainly weren’t yielding many laughs.